summery things

We had a brief respite from the heat this weekend, windows flung wide-open, the fans still working overtime. I slept with the sheet, the blanket, and the duvet because the nighttime temperature fell to the low 60s. It was glorious.

The temperature swing is brutal, though. I woke up bathed in sweat and threw off a few layers, rolled back over and tried to sink back down into sleep.

We're looking at an absolutely brutal stretch, now, for the next as-long-as-my-weather-app-can-predict. The nighttime temperatures look good, but I have this fear that as we get closer, they will creep up to the mid-70s nightmare where you just can't gain enough traction to cool down the inside of the apartment.

I dunno, man. It might be enough to make me give in and buy an AC window unit.

Last night, Kate and Ben went out for dinner together, and I stayed back, slapping a flank steak into a fajita marinade for dinner tonight - it will have to do with pico de gallo and maybe some smashed avocado, if mine are ripe, rather than classic fajitas - and then eventually hardboiling a couple of eggs. I had a lot of water, a peach, and two hardboiled eggs for dinner last night.

Although I ran the eggs under cool tap water for a minute or so prior to eating them, they still practically blistered my fingers as I peeled them, impatiently. Sprinkled with salt and riding the too-hot-for-my-mouth line, I wolfed them down. I would like to submit hot, freshly hardboiled eggs as perhaps the easiest-to-prepare ultimate comfort food.

Think about it, though. Even macaroni and cheese from a box requires you to boil water, then drain the pasta and cake on the powdered cheese mix. I suppose mashed potatoes from a box are easier, but there's something less homey about them. I think I can appreciate instant mashed potatoes for their general palatability and ease, but they lose their comforting edge when you take the shortcut.

Eggs, you just pop into a pot with water, bring it to a boil, snap off the heat and let them sit for however long you can wait. Or forget about them until later.

Then I ate a peach that I sliced into eight mostly-even slices. It was a little mealy, but the flavor was still there.

Speaking of. We're having some serious fruit fly problems with the trashcan, of all things. Maybe it is actually very common for flies to multiply in great numbers in the kitchen trash, but I don't know what the solution is. When I lifted the bag out this morning, I was pretty revolted by the great fruit fly exodus of July 27, 2015.

I mean, what do I do? Do I waste trash bags and take the trash out more frequently? Do I have to bag up all of my produce waste and take it out separately, like I sometimes do with chicken waste if the can is still pretty empty? We have traps everywhere and they work, but I don't understand why we can't just eradicate them.

This is all Stop and Shop's fault. Ben and Kate use Peapod, which is their delivery service, because they hate going to the grocery store. As a weekly grocery-store-goer myself, this sounds better and better every time I trip over a small child or wait ten minutes for someone who is texting to get out of the way of the milk.

Anyway, a couple of months ago (yes, it's been that long), they ordered a pineapple and ended up with a questionably overripe monster that carried the pests in with it. The produce conundrum is my main complaint with delivery groceries. I like to pick out my fruits and vegetables myself. Since then, we have not been able to get rid of the fruit flies, and there are just a couple of mass fruit fly graves in the kitchen and pantry.

I think I will clean out the red wine trap this evening and refill with fresh wine plus just a dash of dish soap. Then again, the presence of hundreds of dead fruit flies doesn't seem to stop any of the rest of them from diving in to their vinegary demise.

On a happier note, we made ice cream on Saturday. Kate found a recipe for maple bacon crunch ice cream. She is a bit of a maple syrup aficionado, hailing from Vermont, apparently land of the maple syrup festival. I kind of wanted to go to that sometime, but neither of us have cars, so it may never happen. Her parents have supplied her with what I believe is a half-gallon of maple syrup, and it's lasted close to a year now.

Side note: today marks the one-year anniversary of our living in our apartment here. July 27.

Anyway, this recipe was kind of a weird one, I thought. Half as many egg yolks in the custard, a full cup of maple syrup, no other flavoring, just milk and cream, and all of the cream was reserved so the custard was made with just whole milk, sugar, a little salt and some egg yolks. Then stir in the syrup. I strained it afterward, nervous about having scrambled some egg yolks. My fine mesh strainers get a lot of work in the ice cream process.

After it cooled, I stirred in heavy cream and dumped it into the ice cream attachment for Kate's Kitchenaid. It took 10-15 minutes longer to freeze appropriately than I had expected, and that made me nervous, but it got there eventually.

I also made bacon brittle with sugar melted down to caramelized amber, a little butter, some baking soda (? I don't know either, maybe for texture because I suspect it releases carbon dioxide bubbles to help make the sugar brittle instead of hard-as-diamond?), then stirred in the crumbled bacon bits and a generous couple of shakes of cayenne pepper, and poured it out onto a buttered cookie sheet to set.

The brittle is interesting. Ben likes it a lot. Kate thinks it tastes a little like burnt popcorn, but not in a bad way, and I don't think she's too far off. I like it too, for the record, but it's a hard flavor to describe. Ben likes it plain, but I like it the way I swirled it into the ice cream. It adds texture and crunch, smashed up into shards, and the creamy almost-vanilla maple flavor with a dark little peppery crunch...

I don't know how to explain it, but I like it. One little scoop at a time.

Maybe someday we'll try some plain chocolate ice cream. Then again, maybe we won't. I think this is one of the prettier ice creams we've made, in a purely aesthetic sense.

I sat out on the porch last night at dusk, because it was kind of sweltery in the apartment and because I'd forgotten to water the plants in the morning. I sat by them and slowly tipped water into each pot, watching it sink into the soil. They are fragrant now, the mint especially, and thriving. I hope the hot weather will be good for them. I will be vigilant about getting them enough water.

There was a breeze last night, and the sky was blue until it wasn't, the moon a bright constant in the sky. I sat and didn't think. I sat and I was, until the air grew cold enough to prickle my arms with goosebumps. It was quiet except for some small noises from the surrounding apartments with open windows, one playing some Bruno Mars song. It was a moment where I wondered if I'd remember it because it seemed so inconsequential, but kind of heavy at the same time.

When I went back in, Kate and Ben had returned from dinner and were watching something on television, but I didn't join. I took a shower and washed the sweat and grease out of my hair, and eventually I went to sleep.

it's too hot.

It was 79 degrees at 8:30 this morning. Outside of my apartment. I think the inside maintained at a balmy 82, while every fan we own is desperately trying to circulate the heavy, wet air that blankets everything, thwarting our every attempt at relief.

I didn't have coffee this morning. I could have. Ben bought a Kona blend at Trader Joe's this past weekend, apparently struck by a crisis of conscience when he realized

1. he really likes cold brew, and
2. I make all the cold brew that he drinks.

It's a source of some quiet pride to me even though the process is simple. He orders cold brew from Starbucks sometimes on Wednesdays, when we wander down to the farmer's market in Kendall Square and contemplate produce.

So the Kona has been steeping away in the French press in the refrigerator, and it's the best $10-20 price range item I've bought in a long time, in terms of the usage it gets. Hot coffee from it in the winter, cold brew from it in the summer.

Cold brew is nice. I know I've talked about it before, but it's more mellow, less acidic. More suitable for those hot mornings when you wake up and all you want to do is bathe in ice cubes, because you can water it down with coffee or with milk and it doesn't taste heavy. We go through a lot more heavy cream in the winter, but it's just too much in the summer.

The Kona smells nice. I haven't tried it yet. I pressed it last night and poured it off into a ball jar, started a new round so that we'll have plenty come the weekend. This weekend is supposed to hit 88/90 and I'm thinking I might go in to work just so that I don't spend the entire 48 hours lying limply on the futon watching the fans oscillate. Breeze, still, breeze, still.

I mean, I'm still making the cold brew. I just didn't buy this particular set of beans-ground-coarse. But there's no real work to cold brew coffee. I weigh the grounds out, just because we have a food scale. 120g, usually, or thereabouts, then I dump them into the French press and pour in cold water from the pitcher we keep in the fridge. Stir to wet the grounds, let them steep. Stir once more several hours later when the grounds are saturated. Then wait.

Ben broke that pitcher a couple of weekends ago, the pitcher I used to keep orange juice in, sometimes, in my old apartment in New Haven. Water is a much better candidate for it, because it never goes moldy. I'm fairly cyclical about what I like and what I don't. Hot and cold. Inevitably, orange juice would just kind of fall out of favor and then months later I'd pull the pitcher out of the back of the fridge (nothing nice lurks at the back of the fridge) and try not to gag as I disposed of the juice that maybe wasn't very orange anymore. This doesn't happen with water.

Anyway, it's so hot that condensation is a constant these days, and he was lifting it up to take it out of the fridge and it slipped from his fingers and broke, spilling cold water and glass shards across the linoleum. He felt bad about it and ordered us a new one. This one is exactly the same, but it has a red stopper in it. "Cherry red." I picked glass shards out of my toe pads with tweezers all through the following week even though I vacuumed relentlessly. Glass shards and one single deep splinter from the back porch.

We keep our tiny herb garden on the back porch, basil and rosemary and now mint, and they're all growing like weeds except, oddly, for the mint which is supposed to basically be a literal weed. I think it's just not used to its pot yet. The others took some time to cultivate, too, anyway. The leaves smell good when you rub them between your fingers.

Work before noon is a quiet place. I don't know if it's scientists in general or scientists here, but no one seems quite on top of things until after lunch. We wander the hallways, frequent the Keurigs, cradle hot cups in our hands and murmur greetings sotto voce to each other. I'm pretty sure everyone is just doing variations on "morning", but for all I know, we could all be saying things like "I hate your guts" with tired smiles.

Doubt it, though.

My MBTA card is apparently dying. I'm unreasonably (well, I don't think it's unreasonable) irritated that the RFID is giving up one week into the month, because I don't know if I should try to ride this out and then replace the card so I don't have to revisit the MBTA DMV to have the pass transferred, or just give in and make the trip. I mean, I paid $75 for this pass and shouldn't have to sketchily jump turnstiles to get to work.

The hot weather is apparently phenomenal for fruit flies, and I'm fighting a losing battle with them, trying to keep all the fruit in the refrigerators or in closed containers, a couple of ball jars converted to mass graves with apple cider vinegar or red wine as lures. They work well, but even one or two flies is a tremendous annoyance to me. Bugs make me feel itchy and dirty.

I am not enjoying summer. I'm not longing for winter, either, with blankets and shivers. I just want some of that in-between weather. We didn't ever get any real spring weather. You'd think we were far enough north to not have miserable summers, but you would be wrong. I'm just not cut out for this climate.