I’ve been trying so hard to get to work on time every day, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m getting close. As I was running out the door today I knew I would be a few minutes late, but should have been no worse than that. Then I started my car. It was shaking and didn’t feel right, and as soon as I threw it in reverse, the check engine light started flashing. I knew that was not good news.
So after sitting for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do, I ended up calling into work for a personal day, then calling the garage, then AAA for a tow (never drive a VW with the check engine light flashing). AAA was incredibly slow, getting my car late to the garage. This all makes my anxiety level go sky high.
So now I’m stuck at home, carless, and using one of my personal days, which I really don’t want to do, knowing all the while it’s just going to make going back to work the following day worse, because then there will be more to do, that being how it goes. All this meant also having to reschedule patients from this evening to Thursday evening- and I was supposed to have the whole day off on Thursday- which I was planning to spend the whole day making my own tempeh.
Ah, so now the food part.
This week is a short week at work, due to Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah. I had been looking forward to the semi-vacation without the vacation time for months, and planning to do a whole lot of food crafting- preserving, fermenting, canning. Some of the things I had been planning on- like tempeh- are pretty finicky about timing, so I was planning for a day when I would not be leaving the house. Now I have to leave the house at least twice Thursday, so what to do?
Tricked out dehydrator!
A while back I had bought a small, hard-sided cooler, thinking I could use it as an incubator. Then I realized that it was way too small even for a very small batch, and just wasn’t going to work. I kept thinking my dehydrator would be perfect in terms of size, but I’d tried it before for tempeh with poor result. Incubating tempeh needs humidity.
Then it dawned on me- why not turn the dehydrator into an incubator?
So I did, as above. I tested it for a couple of hours- it holds them temp right around 90-95F, which is perfect. I don’t think that I could leave it for long unattended, but I think I’ll be okay for the couple of hours I’ll need to go out on Thursday.
No harm came to the dehydrator- everything I did is removable, with no holes drilled.
I got several other things done as well, but sadly, I got side tracked and completely forgot about VeganMoFo this evening! So, you got this post instead of the really awesome one I had planned. Another day!
And hopefully, there will be more news to report on the tempeh front by next week. 🙂
