We'll be fine. Japan and Hawaii on the other hand...
I thought I should come up with some encouragement, so I present this:
It's a great read, and also a timely view into the current state of the legal job market and the workings of the housing crisis.Despite being equipped with some—some—knowledge, I shared the quintessential trait of all young attorneys: unrelenting, paralyzing fear. It overwhelms everything we do and contaminates the first two to three years of our law jobs. The thought process goes something like this: "I know nothing. How the hell did I get this degree? How the hell did I pass the bar? Law school didn't teach me anything. Do my employers know I'm incompetent? How long can I fake this before they figure it out? Are my peers like this? How come everyone else knows what they're doing? What if I never learn? What happens if I get fired or fail? Will I get disbarred? I bet I'll get disbarred! Damn, I'm getting disbarred! Please, God, don't let me get disbarred."
I had all these thoughts as the Lipkin family sat on my friend's office couch and told me that they were about to lose their home. These people trusted me more than I trusted myself. God help us both.
So I divided up the dough into four balls and got to rolling. 
Back to the drawing board. Total failure. The #6 setting just shredded the leaves up, though it did press them into the dough. So it wasn't a total loss.
Once the pasta had been rolled out onto a floured work surface, I folded the long sheets of pasta over on themselves lengthwise, then trimmed off the ends to square things up. 
Using a brush I put a little water around all the edges and between the fillings, then carefully laid the other half of the sheet over the top.
I had some wild mushrooms around, Hedgehogs and Black Trumpets, and they needed to be used ASAP. So I made a Brown Butter sauce similar to this one.
Kvass. Russian Kvass. For like a $1.50 a liter. Look! It's got a fat and happy little monk. And yet it's only 73 calories a serving.
It’s been an unusual Winter here in Seattle. In fact, it’s turned out to be the nicest Winter I can remember. El Niño has kept temperatures high, and lessened the otherwise constant rain. In fact, this last January was the warmest ever recorded in Seattle. As I sit here it is sunny and 60 degrees out. In February! Outrageous!With the warm weather another perennial pain in the ass is also sprouting: Stinging Nettles (Urtica dioica). But this year I resolved to put the hurt on them for a change. I am going to eat them.
For all their stinging obnoxiousness, nettles are actually one of the most nutritious plants you can eat. Loaded with iron, vitamins, and other medicinal goodies they’ve been recognized as a folk cure for ages. You can make tea, beer, pasta, soup, pretty much anything with them. So I packed some scissors, a glove, and a plastic bag and set out to a local park to see if they were sprouting yet.
They were.
The trick is to pick them when they are no more than 8” or so tall. At that stage, you can go ahead and eat the whole thing. Later on in the season, the stalks get woody and unpleasant, forcing you to either harvest just the tips, or pick just the leaves.
There is a way to pick them using just your fingers and a quick, firm grasp. No thank you. I opted for scissors and a yard glove. In no time I'd picked a grocery bag full and set off home.
From this point you you have to remove the sting, caused by tiny silica needles that inject you with a cocktail of itchy, obnoxious chemicals. You can either lay them out on a rack to dry for several days, which will remove the sting and which I might try later this week. Or you can blanch them for 20-30 seconds in boiling water, then plunge them into some icewater to shock them and set the vibrant green color. Which is what I did with this batch.
As the season unfolds I'll post a couple things that I'm going to try with them. It is so nice I out right now I'm thinking I may go pick some more this afternoon, soon as this brewday is finished.
The hatsuzoe wasn't a problem. The night before, I took out the now completed moto, and added a cup of koji to it. Left it upstairs to warm up overnight. The next day I soaked 2.5 cups of my rice in water for an hour and a half or so, then steamed it in two layers using my bamboo steamer. The steaming took 45 minutes. While that was going on I mixed 1.25 teaspoons of Morton Salt Substitute (potassium chloride) into 2.75 cups of water and stuck in the fridge to chill. When the rice was done I moved it to a large clean pot, added the water, and mixed until it was chilled to below 85. Then I mixed it into the moto. 
I also took this opportunity to drill a hole in my bucket lid to accommodate an airlock. Isn't the vinyl in my kitchen lovely? I call it The Gong Show Kitchen. At least it doesn't show dirt. I had white tile in my last one. Never again.
Then it hit me: my couscousiere! It's basically a big aluminum pot, with an even bigger lid that has a bunch of holes in it. In Moroccan couscous cooking the idea is that you make a big stew in the bottom and use the steam generated by it to cook the couscous. This sucker will make couscous for a village. Seriously, the smallest amount I've ever made in it fed twelve. And it was about $30 at a Middle Eastern market in Miami. But it doesn't have a lid, and I worried that the rice on top wouldn't cook as fast as that on the bottom. So I used my wok lid. Fit perfectly. Sweet.
The next morning: the tomezoe. Mixed in the remainder of the koji, a whole 20 ounce container. Stirred a couple times during the day. By now the airlock was bubbling away and fermentation was clearly rocking.
When the rice was done it went into my 4 gallon pot, set in a sink full of ice water. Added a gallon plus a cup of cold water and got to work with the whisk. Whisked till it was 70 degrees. Given the volume of rice, I figure this is important. If say, you only cooled to 90 it would take hours, maybe even a day or more, to drop to ambient 70. But in the ice-water bath it took maybe 15 minutes to whisk it down to 7o. Then into the mash it went, along with some good whisking to mix everything up a bit.
After 9 days gravity was 1.012 and I decided to bottle it. Got a good 19 22's and 25 12's out of it. It's like I laid 40 delicious little alcohol eggs.
First up: milk. Goat milk can be tricky to find, particularly if you're planning on making cheese with it. The reason is that, while most grocery stores stock some kind of goat milk, it's almost always Ultra Pasteurized. Which means, it's useless. The higher temperature of the Ultra pasteurization process allows the product to have a longer shelf life (which is good for broad distribution/low turnover products like goat milk). However, the high heat denatures many of the milk's proteins, meaning that it will no longer form a "clean break" when the rennet is added.
Stick a two gallon pot on the stove. Put a half cup or so of water in, heat to boiling, slap the lid on, turn the heat down and steam clean everything for about 10 minutes. Take it off the heat, ditch the water, pour the milk in. Put it back on the heat, on medium to medium low, and slowly raise it up to 145 degrees. Hold it there, as best you can, for a half hour. It's not that easy (it works better if you can rig a double boiler of some kind), and I went a bit colder at times, but so long as you don't go way too hot it's ok. Useful tools include a sanitized spoon to stir (no scorching the bottom!) and a laser thermometer or sterilized probe thermometer to check the temp.
Cheesemaking is a lot like brewing: it's all about temperature. Cool temps and mesophilic (read: "Moderate loving") starter bacteria produce a softer, creamier cheese like Chevre, Cream Cheese, etc. Warmer temps and thermophyllic (read: "Heat loving") bacteria produce firmer, dryer cheeses like Parmesan. Go beyond that to the point where enzymes are deactivated, proteins denatured, and you get Mozzarella.
One thing I should mention: in most kinds of cheese there is a step where you 'Cut The Curd', which is basically a way to dice it up so that the whey drains properly. The chevre packet doesn't tell you to do this, but I'd recommend it. I took a long, thin sanitized knife blade and diced up the curd, at an angle, into 1/2"-3/4" dice.
Leave the cheeses to drain for about 18 hours. At this point, you can start to flip them over every six hours or so. With very clean hands, pop the crottins out, flip them over, and carefully reinsert them into the molds. This helps them maintain that familiar cylindrical shape.
After a about a day and a half they were almost dry enough. So I gave the top a light sprinkling of kosher salt, flipped, and then sprinkled the other side. Left to drain another six hours or so and they were ready.
One tasty thing you can do with goat cheese is marinate it. This creates a pretty-near instant appetizer, ready to go whenever you need it. So I went with two recipes off Epicurious. The first would be a Wild Mushroom Marinade. I followed the recipe, except that I subbed in an ounce of Foraged And Found's Wild Mix instead of pure dried Porcini's. This meant there were also Morels, Chanterelles, Lobsters, and other wild mushrooms on top of the Porcini's that were in there. The second cheese was a Lemon, Rosemary, Fennel and Red Pepper Marinade. These little olive oil filled jars will last much longer than the plain cheese would.
...as a Catholic Indulgence. Pretty much sums it up.
During my time in Miami I learned many things.
Guava paste usually comes in either blocks or tins. I found this round tin from Goya at our local Asian/Mexican/Russian grocery store. It's a sticky thick paste. If you melt it on the stove it makes hallucinatorily good barbecue sauce. As for the cheese: Queso Fresco. A light, crumbly cheese you can find almost anywhere nowadays.
We recently bought a pizza peel ($14. Go Seattle Restaurant Supply!) which has greatly improved our ability to get bread and pizzas on and off our oven stone. And I've been messing about with Artisan Breadmaking in 5-minutes a Day, so we've had plenty of ready-to-go dough just sitting in the fridge. It was pizza time!
Pop it in the oven. 10-ish minutes on the pizza stone at 500 degrees should do it. YMMV.
