Jobless in Seattle

Being jobless, I thought I would come to Seattle and get a little bored or restless looking for work and moving in to our new place. But as a friend at OHSU told me before I left, "it's a beautiful time to be moving to Seattle!" All the cherry blossoms are out in full popcorn puffs, and just as Lynn advised me to do, I've been going on walks around town. Tuesday, I went to meet Phil at his work so we could run errands when he was done for the day. It's about five miles from our house to his work. I am trying to familiarize myself with the bicycle friendly streets and intersections, so that walk helped a lot.

Our place is still not quite "settled in" but we're slowly getting everything in it's place. Cooking helps. Soup helps. Eating helps everything. The market had chicken back marked way down so I bought a few pounds and made 6 quarts of stock yesterday. I read and re-read all the literature on stocks we had in the house. The Joy of Cooking suggests blending the vegetables before cooking to extract more flavor. I put them in the Cuisinart and the results were quite satisfying. This morning I scooped all the fat off of the chilled broth. Don't worry - I didn't throw it away. I tried a matzo ball recipe from Bon Appetit that called for schmaltz. The results were quite impressive. Phil and I had three matzo balls each, situated in my homemade broth, and accompanied by a large arugula salad and mashed celeriac and russet potatoes. I'm going to go roll myself over the couch now and watch a movie...