which_chick | (no subject)

Happy New Year!

We had a good crowd, mostly congenial and good company. I probably talked too much about finance and the economy and retirement planning and the housing market (I'm a total riot at parties), but they are my friends and listen tolerantly to me.

I took the Joe-N-Stacey dip with the NYT bread, which was a resounding success. I promised a couple of people the dip recipe, so here it is.

Dip Ingredients:
Something between 3/4 and 1 lb of swiss cheese. I bought the Weis store brand, .86 lbs. Cut this into small cubes.

1 packet of chopped, frozen spinach. Just thaw this out. You don't need to drain it or anything, just thaw it. The juice goes in there, too. It won't hurt anything.

1 packet of Philadelphia Cream Cheese, the regular kind, cut into hunks.

3 real cloves of garlic, mashed with a garlic press.

Dip instructions: Combine ingredients. Apply heat, stir, apply heat, stir, repeat until you have a fairly well-mixed dip of dippable texture and the swiss and cream cheese is all melty and not in cubes or hunks anymore. You can use a stovetop and pan or a microwave to apply heat. It doesn't matter. If microwaving, stop and stir every minute or so. When dip is dippish (it's served warm and kind of stiffens up if you let it get cold), put it in a hollowed out loaf of bread. You can buy nice artisan-style loaves at the bakery or you can make your own NYT no-knead breads and use those. If going the NYT-bread route, you need two loaves for to use up all the dip. The hollowed-out part, that you cut into hunks for people to use in the dipping. Also the second loaf, that you cut up for more hunks to dip in the dipping part.

I wish this were more technical and I wish it relied less on heat-n-serve cooking, but it's damn fine dip despite being mouth-breather easy. Bon dippetite!

When I stopped by brother-the-younger's (on the way home, see), he showed me his two cut-down trees, a massive ash and a somewhat smaller black walnut that had been in a dysfunctional relationship with the nearby power lines for rather a long time and was, as a result, deformed and unattractive and vindictively dropping black walnuts all over the fscking yard. The wood from the ash was not all that impressive, but I'd made it a point to tell brother-the-younger that he should save the trunk parts of the black walnut for his own splitting pleasure because they would be fun. (He recently learned how to split wood by hand, see post here.) As a result of my lobbying, he had the tree people break the walnut into halves and quarters. Since it was a pretty big tree, halves and quarters were still large enough to allow for plenty of hand-splitting entertainment while taking away the really tough part of starting with big rounds. I got to try out one of the pieces of black walnut. Yowza! Boy, do I feel smart for telling him to keep the trunk pieces large enough to do himself. They split like magic. You just let the maul drop and the wood falls apart. It's amazing. It's fun. Verily, I am a sage sisterly advisor. :) (I would have been very egg-on-face if this had not been the case. I lobbied pretty hard to get him to keep the black walnut trunk pieces to do his own self.) Yes, we realize that black walnut is a valuable tree but this wasn't veneer size and it's damn tough to get the timber people to come collect up one twelve-foot trunk, even if it is like two feet thick. It's easier and more fun to use it as absolutely primo firewood that splits like a lumberjack's wet dream. I also got two pieces of the walnut to take home and play with at my house. Yay!