Nine New Things Learned in March

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Each month I wonder if I have learned anything. I seem to forget much of what I post in these monthly learned lists and wonder if anyone else does too. If you are curious, and if your screen shows Categories with searching capabilities, you can click on Learned List and see as many of the 71 past lists (I began doing this in 2017) as you care to waste, umm, no, spend time reading. Here is March’s tidbits for you to mull over (and then forget).

1. Masonite can only be ordered in 100 sheet bundles so local builder supply stores don’t stock it; you must go to one of those dreaded big box stores.
2. Three Rivers Drug Store closed. They’ve been in our town since 1963, and it will be quite an inconvenience for many residents.
3. Making ricotta cheese looks easy when one reads the recipes; in reality, it’s a different story.I ended up with about 1/2 cup of very squishy cheese and a whole lot of whey to use in baking bread. It might make sense to make ricotta if one owned a cow and had a tremendous amount of milk to use up. I’ll stick to making yogurt.
4. People need to keep their culverts cleaned out, even in dry years. If they don’t, they will lose parts of their driveways in wet years.
5. The Mineral King road is wrecked; it will get fixed. (That is Tulare County’s problem).
6. The East Fork flume is wrecked; it might get fixed. (That is SCE’s problem).
7. Chocolate navels are very peculiar in appearance, and mild in flavor. They do NOT taste like chocolate; the name comes from the brownish color. I wonder how they’ll do in the markets.
8. Ringing the bell is something that cancer patients do when they complete chemotherapy. I learned this from a blog I follow, called The Frugal Girl. Someone in the comments mentioned that she “rang the bell”, and many of the other commenters congratulated her, so I looked it up.
9. The liquid surrounding canned beans is called “aquafaba” and can be used as a substitute for eggs in baking. It can also be whipped up like egg whites. Isn’t that bizarre?? I regret all the gallons I have wasted when making hummus: “drain the beans”. . . NO!! DON’T DRAIN THEM!! THINK OF THE COST OF EGGS!

P.S. I added the word “new” to the title because the search engines give me a higher rating with that word there. . . sometimes I find myself caving to such nonsense. If I learned it, then it must be new, eh?