Chicken Tractor

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by Lisa

We put together a chicken tractor to give our chicks to keep them where they’re supposed to be. We’ll put a tarp over one half of the tractor so they’ll have somewhere to hide when the eagle come about (and a place to hide from the rain). And it’s got a low-motion swing!

We used a 1×4 for the swing and mounted the rope to both the top and bottom of the tractor. This approach leaves the swing move a few inches each way, but it doesn’t swing when they hop on and off. They seem to like it — I’ve seen each chicken hanging out on the swing today.

High Density Apple Pie

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by Lisa

I have been following the “roast apple slices before putting into pie crust” approach from Bon Appétit when making apple pies. The Thanksgiving pie this year was about five pounds of sliced apples, mixed with about a cup of maple syrup, and roasted at 350 F for 25 minutes. They should be tender but not dehydrated (a big *no* on the convection oven). The roasted apples are mixed with 2-3 tablespoons of flour and drizzled with more maple syrup. They are then added to a walnut pie crust and baked for another 20-30 minutes.

Maple Cranberry Sauce

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by Lisa

I made a maple cranberry sauce tonight — add about a cup of water and a cup of maple syrup to a saucepan and stir. Rinse a bag (12 oz) of cranberries and add them to the pot. Bring to a boil, then lower the temp and simmer for twenty minutes or so until the cranberries break up. It’s really good warm and cold.

Shiitake Mushroom Jerky

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by Lisa

We saw jerky-style shiitake mushrooms on Shark Tank a few days ago, and their SEO isn’t awesome because searching for “shiitake mushroom jerky” doesn’t show their company’s site in the first page. And, since I didn’t remember the company’s name … that makes ordering it difficult. The first page of results does, however, provide a lot of recipes. So I picked up a pound of shiitake mushrooms at the grocery store (a.k.a. every not-dodgy-looking shiitake they had in the bulk mushroom section). I marinated them for 24 hours in a combination of 1/4 c soy sauce, 1/4 c low-sodium soy sauce, 1/4 c apple vinegar, a clove of garlic (diced into small pieces), and a sprinkle of crushed red pepper (ground). I roasted them at 200 F for a LONG time. The recipes said 90 minutes to two hours, but it was after midnight when I turned off the oven, and I had started cooking the things at 7PM. So that’s at least five hours. A food dehydrator would be a good investment if we’re going to keep making mushroom jerky!

End result — it’s way too salty. Possibly using 1/2 c of low sodium soy would have been OK … but thinking of using veggie stock for some of the soy. And possibly making one with a few tablespoons of maple syrup instead of garlic.

VSCode Search/Replace Using Regex Capture Groups

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by Lisa

Regex adds a lot of flexibility to search/replace operations. Capture groups allow you to manipulate the found data in the replacement text. As an example, I have simple mathematical equations that are not spaced out reasonably. I could replace “+” with ” + “, “-” with ” – “, “*” with ” * “, “/” with ” / “, and “=” with ” = “, but using a capture group to identify non-whitespace characters and the range of operators allows a single search/replace operation to add spaces to my equations.

Selecting the regex option (in blue below), I can use the regular expression (\S+)([\+,\-,\*,\/])(\S+)=(\S+) as my search string. This means the first capture group is one or more non-whitespace characters, the second capture group is one of the characters +,-,*,/, the third capture group is one or more non-whitespace characters, there’s an equal sign (which I could make into a fourth capture group), and the fourth capture group is one or more non-whitespace characters.

An alternate regex finds zero or more whitespace characters — (\S*)([\+,\-,\*,\/])(\S*)=(\S*)

The replacement text then uses each capture group — $1 $2 $3 = $4 — to add spaces around the operators and around the equal sign.

 

Impossible Meatball Sub

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by Lisa

Our power went out last week, and we were discussing where to pick up dinner for the night. I kind of wanted to get sandwich-makings, but it was cold. While I could easily have sold warm sandwiches … cold sandwich makings from the store had limited appeal. And, unfortunately, there’s nowhere around here to get a veggie meatball sub. We ended up getting pizzas from Pizza Hut because they now offer Beyond’s Italian sausage as a topping. It was really good (good enough we ordered another pizza the next night of our power outage), but I was still hungry for a meatball sub.

Now that we’ve got power again, I picked up a package of Impossible’s ground-beef-style stuff. It looked pretty dodgy — a grainy lump of red stuff. I added panko, salt, shredded Parmesan cheese, ground pepper, an egg, and Italian herbs. Mixed it all up and rolled them into balls. Fried them until crispy. For a comparison, I used the same basic recipe with mushed cannellini beans. I should have made the cannellini balls smaller so they’d have been crispier.

The Impossible meatballs were awesome. Not exactly a meatball — they were a little dry, but that would have been solved by simmering them in the sauce (something I intentionally didn’t do because I wanted them to be crispy). I think rolling the meatball around a little bit of mozzarella cheese might work too.

Either way, we had really good meatball subs. And between the can of cannellini beans and the pack of Impossible ground-beef-style stuff, it was enough for dinner yesterday and lunch again today.

Chicken Tractor

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by Lisa

Scott started putting together a mobile chicken tractor. The metal tube is repurposed from one of those canvas covered pavilion things that came with the house. Massive wind storm, years ago, took it out. It’s been a hop arbor and now a chicken tractor. Since it articulates a little bit, it fits the contours of the ground. We still need to mount some fencing … well, sand it down a bit and repaint it too! But it’s a large, portable space for the chickens to roam when we’re not hanging out in the yard keeping an eye on them.

Musing on Pardons

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by Lisa
 
Trump’s potentially got exposure in issuing pardons if he’s covering up crimes in which he was involved. Bit of a legal stretch (and proving corrupt intent would be difficult). No point *now* with the OLC policy against indicting a sitting president, and we’ll probably get another “for the sake of unity, put the past in the past” administration. But it seems feasible.
 
And I’m curious how pardons impact 5th amendment protection. If you’ve got a pardon for *your* part in the crime, you’re not being ‘compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself’ and I expect could be compelled to testify against others (including Trump) who were involved. Or be charged for failing to provide honest testimony.