"Those are the chemicals!!"

No code today. Instead, I spent the day at Hudson River Park, volunteering with my team as part of GoogleServe. (That link is from last year, since I guess this year's blog post isn't ready to be written yet.) We spent the morning seeking out and destroying mugworts, slaughtering them and their children, and piling their leafy corpses on wheelbarrows and in a dumpster.

Umm. Sorry. I think I got a little too caught up in the mugwort genocide narrative that I was spinning in my head all morning. The contents of my brain are sometimes strange. This shocks no one.

Anyways, we weeded all morning, and after lunch, planted some non-invasive plants to replace the ones we had torn up. Here's a picture of some of my teammates with a pile of mugworts.

But food is much more interesting. Here are the things I've made so far with the CSA vegetables:

This is soup. It looks pretty much like a bowl of soup. To make it, I chopped up two small onions and four red potatoes that had been sitting around the refrigerator for a while, and sauteed them in a little olive oil. Then, I dumped in most of a box of arugula, the radish greens from the CSA, and a few leaves of sage. I covered it all with water, salt, pepper, and let it cook until mushy. Then I zzuzzed it with my soup zzuzzer. It didn't taste like much of anything until I topped it with parmesan cheese, and then it tasted delicious.

This is exactly the chicken salad that I planned in my last blog post. Phredward broiled two chicken breasts in the oven, and we put them on a salad with buttercrunch and red sail lettuces, radishes, red pepper, green grapes, and sage blossoms. Honey-mustard dressing was made by mixing honey and mustard.

And finally, rhubarb-streusel muffins:

Now, here's the problem with me and baking. I don't like to measure things. Like, I'm fine with scooping flour by the half-cup measure, but when it comes down to the difference between a half and a quarter teaspoon, or 3/4 of a cup of sour cream versus a small container of greek yogurt.. I just can't bring myself to care. Phredward freaked out a little when he saw me measuring baking soda in the palm of my hand. "Those are the chemicals!!" he said, "They're what make it react properly!!"

Also, since I used greek yogurt instead of sour cream, when I got done mixing the wet and dry ingredients, the batter looked way too dry to me. It looked like a very sticky bread dough, and not anything like a muffin batter. I thought for sure I had forgotten something, like oil or a second egg, but no, the recipe really calls for what seems like too little wet ingredients. I added milk until it looked better to me -- probably about 3/4 of a cup.

The muffins turned out perfect.