alexpgp | Cooking and verbs...

It was a day without hurry, and I managed to line up a bunch of oven-related tasks so as to make efficient use of the appliance.

The first had to do with baking spaghetti squash until the fruit was soft enough to spoon its delicious meat into a pan with garlic and spices. Meanwhile, I tried making a different style of bread (using the same basic dough recipe), which turned out acceptably with some lessons learned for next time.

I had next planned to use the warm oven to encourage the proliferation of yogurt culture, but Galina was interested in roasting the squash seeds, as she really likes to nibble on them. (In the meantime, I got sidetracked with French verbs, so the yogurt will have to wait for another day.)

On top of the stove, we made some of Natalie's four-bean taco soup, next to a pot of cat food that we whipped up from a recipe Galina found on the Internet. The recipe called for kelp powder, and when I stopped by our local health food store to pick some up, I was told that there had been a run on kelp supplements, as some folks have felt compelled to hedge their bets on the likelihood of being exposed to radioactive iodine. (I bought some dried kelp instead, where it was suggested that one serving (1/3 cup) contained 2110% of one's daily iodine requirement. Yikes!)

As far as the verbs were concerned, I managed to reinvent the wheel yet again (silly me, I don't like the way tenses are arranged on my mother's "verb charts") and found a way to display—on one 8x11 page—eight tenses and two participles for all four conjugations of regular verbs. That's right: four conjugations.

I don't know if things have changed since I was in high school, but back in the day, I was taught there were three basic types of verbs: those ending in "er," those ending in "ir," and those ending in "re." However, one of my late mother's books, A Complete Treatise on the Conjugation of French Verbs, by J. Castaréde, speaks of four conjugations ("er," "ir," "evoir," and "re"), and after spending a little time with this book, I'm wondering why anyone would try to teach three conjugations instead of four, as I found four to be easier to understand.

In any event, taking a crack at the regular verbs was okay, but the real challenge lies with the irregular so-and-sos, which just also happen to be the ones in most common use (and hence, says theory, the reason why they are irregular). Ah, well... One step at a time is the ticket!

Cheers...