Pint-sized Pioneering

The longest shortest day

2012-01-19T12:24:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to write about Kaelen's birth day to preserve the memory of it, as well as to share the story with friends who don't know how it all transpired. I debated between writing it up on my personal facebook page or posing it here. You can guess my decision.

December 21, 2011 was the winter solstice, the day with the fewest hours of daylight of the year. It was the longest shortest day of my life.

5:45 a.m.
The alarm started beeping shortly before 6. I was scheduled for an induction and had been instructed to call the hospital at 6 a.m. to find out what time to arrive. We were thinking, oh, 10. The answer: 7:00 a.m. Yikes! We leapt out of bed - OK, I moved as quickly as a pregnant woman a week past her due date could - took showers, ate breakfast, and put my bag into the car. Thank goodness we only live about 3 miles from the hospital and that it's a straight shot. At most it's a 15-minute drive.

7:00 a.m.
The game of "Hurry up and Wait" began. Upon our arrival at the hospital, we were directed to the business office to complete paperwork. And wait. That task complete, we headed to the 14th floor. Again, we waited.

While we were waiting to be seen by the nurse and settled into a room, we sat in the waiting room and listened to a woman screaming through the final stages of her labor. I don't mean moaning. I mean full on screaming at the top of her lungs. I tried hard to ignore it but instead felt discouraged, especially since I had decided that I wanted to see how far into my labor I could make it before asking for drugs. Would that be me? Could I handle the pain? People talk about labor pain being the most awful thing they've ever experienced. I wasn't feeling very confident at that moment.

8:00 a.m.
We finally got into a room on the Labor & Delivery floor. And waited some more. The nurse eventually come to see us. She explained that she had been assigned to monitor my progress and that of the woman being induced in the next room. Then she started to get down to brass tacks: explaining how the day would progress, hooking me up to a fetal monitor, checking my cervix, completing yet more paperwork, and taking my vital signs.

9:00 a.m.
I took my first dose of Cytotek, the medication to help induce labor.

Each round of the medication is preceded by 30 minutes of fetal monitoring and followed by an hour of monitoring. After I was "released", I was told to walk laps around the hospital for an hour, and then return for the next bit of monitoring and medication.

12:00 p.m.
My second dose of Cytotek.

3:00 p.m.
My third and final dose.

Hospitals were not made for walking laps. It was a very boring and tiring day.

6:00 p.m.
The fetal monitoring showed that I was having some contractions. Honestly, though, I didn't really feel them. After checking my cervix and finding that it was the same at 6:00 as it had been 10 hours earlier in the day, the doctor suggested I return on December 23, two days later, to finish the induction. He wanted me to come back in the evening, take additional doses of the Cytotek overnight (no walking required), be able to sleep through the monitoring and labor, and have my son after the medication had had more time to do its work in my body.

As you might imagine, Gene and I were disappointed. We'd told everyone that the induction was going to happen and we'd gotten emotionally ready help me go through the labor. We were tired. I was sick of being pregnant and eager to meet our son.

We checked out of the hospital and it was about 6:30 p.m. by the time we got to our empty home. Rosemary had been sent to my folks' house until after we returned from the hospital with a new baby. I missed her and wished she were there so I could snuggle with her.

8:00 p.m.
The combination of not having slept well the night before, having shuffled countless laps around the mind-numbingly boring corridors of the hospital, and the disappointment of the failed induction caught up with me. I was exhausted and went to bed.

There was one small problem, however: frequent, but not painful, contractions prevented me from sleeping. I used Gene's phone app to time them, dozing off in between, and by 9:00 they averaged 4-5 minutes apart.

9:00 p.m.
Gene called the hospital to ask if we should return. The nurses, after being told I had described my contractions as "feeling like hard menstrual cramps", told him I should drink some water and take a bath to see if that helped alleviate the contractions. I did both, and both actions seemed to help.

10:00 p.m.
The frequency and intensity of my contractions had both increased significantly, though the pain was not intolerable by any means. Each contraction, now ranging from 2-3 minutes apart, brought with it a wave of heat. I laid on our bed with the ceiling fan on me and when the contraction ended I would huddle under the covers to warm myself. I was still trying to get some sleep.

Gene checked on me every 10 minutes or so and ask if I wanted to go to the hospital. I felt listless and indecisive, distracted by my contractions. I didn't really want to go anywhere and didn't think I was in heavy labor yet.

10:30 p.m.
Gene came into the bedroom to check on me and made an executive decision: he was taking me to the hospital. I relented, but reluctantly. Despie my contractions being minutes apart, I wasn't in much pain and doubted that my labor had progressed. I had, after all, been discharged from the hospital a mere 4 hours earlier, dilated to just 2cm. A typical labor progresses at about a centimeter an hour: I couldn't be much beyond 6-7cm.

The short ride to the hospital was very uncomfortable because of the position of the baby. As we drove the 3 miles, it got even more uncomfortable, even painful. I was having contractions constantly with very little time to rest in between.

I distinctly remember saying 2 things to Gene:
1. "When we get to the hospital I think I would like to get some drugs."
2. (A couple of blocks and at least a contraction later...) "I think I'm in stage 2 of labor."

We arrived at the hospital ER and Gene drove the wrong way through the one-way parking lot. A hospital security guard ran out to stop us and Gene yelled, "my wife is in labor!". Wow, those magic words really get people hopping. The guard got me settled into a wheelchair and pushed me into the building while Gene parked the car. I remember noticing that the night was cold and clear, with slick ice crystals on the parking lot's surface.

11:00 p.m.
According to the ER paperwork, which I gritted my teeth and signed between contractions, I was admitted at 23:00. I had a doozy of a contraction in the office and said to the woman, "it feels like I'm sititng on the baby's head" as I braced myself on the arms of the wheelchair in an attempt to take the weight off my pelvis.

Paperwork signed, the hospital admission staff then directed Gene to wheel me into the hallway and wait for a nurse from the 14th floor to retrieve us. It took forever and I practiced breathing through my labor pains. By this point, they were definitely "pains".

It took a while for a nursing aide to get me from the ER. By the time she did I spent much of the trip to the 14th floor panting and blowing. I felt and winced at every bump the wheelchair hit.

11:20 p.m.
We arrived in the labor room. I was still wearing my fleece pajama pants and a t-shrt, my normal sleeping gear. The nurse came into the room and said that I could put on a robe if I wanted. I said to Gene that I should probably get out of my pajama bottoms while I still could but I left on my t-shirt.

The nurse returned to the room to examine me. She asked me to rate my pain on a scale of 1-10. I told her that if 10 was full on labor and that because I still had a ways to go, I was probably around a 6 or 7. Then I added that my back muscles hurt like I'd worked them too hard. Her response: "I bet, sweetie".

She performed the exam and I asked how dilated I was. I was expecting to hear her respond 6 or 7cm. Instead, she said, "you're 10cm and complete, and presenting your bag of waters. You're going to have this baby!"

My first thought: Oh shit. It's too late. I'm not going to get any dugs.

At that, the nurse turned on her heel and walked out of the room to have my doctor paged and the delivery room prepped. As soon as she reached the doorway I felt a huge gush, just like in the movies. I loudly declared, "my water just broke!" I hadn't realized how loudly I said that until Gene told me later that I'd practically yelled it.

The urge to push was overwhelming. With each contraction I threw my head back and breathed hard in order to avoid the temptation to curl forward and push. I felt Gene's hand on my ankles and realized that I had braced my feet on the bed's footboard in an effort to help my body push. It was just the two of us in the room at that point and I had no choice but to avoid pushing to the best of my ability.

11:34 p.m.
My rushed transfer to the delivery room was complete and I had one final challenge before I could give birth. The nurse was urging me to slide over into the room's bed, which seemed an impossible task! Somehow I managed to scoot my girth to the new bed between contractions, but it wasn't easy.

The bed was brand new and the nurses had not yet been trained on how to adjust it. They couldn't get the sides down, nor would the mattress on the drop-down foot section stay put. Every time I put my weight on it, it threatened to shoot out from under my feet.

The room was a hive of activity. The doctor had arrived and was settling into place on a stool at the foot of the bed. A friend had told me that her eyeglasses got all fogged up during her son's delivery, so I handed Gene my glasses for him to hold. I assumed that we'd be there for some time yet as I worked to push out the baby.

Everyone was in position and the nurse then said what were arguably the most wonderful words I'd ever heard: "OK, Jenn, with the next contraction you get to push". After having resisted pushing for at least the previous 30 minutes, I was so relieved to get her permission.

A contraction hit me hard and I went for it. As I pushed I could hear my own moans escalate. I briefly recalled the screams of the woman early that morning and wondered, for a split second, who could hear me.

The contraction went on forever and I push-push-push-pushed with everything I had. Everyone was urging me to keep pushing. I felt like I was nearly at my rope's end and in my frustration I started to yell the mother of all swear words:

FFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU...

I never got to say my full swear word.

11:40 pm.
Suddenly I felt the doctor put something on my stomach. I am tremendously nearsighted and all I could perceive was a squalling purple blob. Seconds later my son peed all over me, confirming his presence in the world. I had to ask Gene to return my glasses to me so I could see our son for the first time.

With that single, giant push, Gene and I became the parents of our beautiful son, Kaelen.

During the post-delivery monitoring a nurse said, "I've seen some women push out their babies with 6 pushes, and even as few as 2. But I've never seen a woman do it in just a single push."

I'm a Virgo. We're efficient.

The next day
I was a mini-celebrity on the delivery floor, the One Push Wonder. The nurse who'd been assigned to me for my induction stopped by to see us and express her shock that I'd not only returned mere hours after being discharged but had also delivered within 6 minutes of entering the delivery room. Every nurse who checked on either Kaelen or me during our entire hospital stay knew of our fast delivery. Even the couple who'd shared our induction nurse heard of my feat.

I can't quite believe I did it without drugs, and am thankful Gene forced me to leave for the hospital when he did. I'm convinced that had we waited another 20 minutes, we would have had a home birth (not to mention very messy sheets).

I'm also thankful that the elevators didn't get stuck when I was at the hospital. (And yes, this happened at the hosptal where I gave birth.)

Gene crashed on the cot in my room around 3. It was 4:00 a.m. before I finally got that elusive sleep, Kaelen sleeping next to me in his hospital cart.

How to tell good eggs from bad

2012-01-18T13:40:00.000-08:00

Our hens stopped laying in the fall when they molted. It's so annoying to buy eggs when there's a coop full of chickens in the yard.

When one of the girls started laying again about a week ago I was pretty psyched. Yesterday Gene brought a second egg into the kitchen and we were both happy because it meant the girls are starting to produce again.

Eggs, of course, mean spring can't be too far off (ironically I'm writing this post in the middle of a snowstorm).

After I put the new egg with the others Gene confessed that he had found it behind the nesting box, rather than inside of it. He had no idea how long it had been there. It could have been laid last summer or yesterday.

There is only one good way to determine an egg's freshness without cracking it open: put it into a glass of water.

Because the membrane and shell of an egg are porous, moisture inside an egg gradually evaporates. Bad eggs, having lost much of their liquid content, will float. Good eggs will sink, and eggs in between will stand on end of the water.

Or so conventional wisdom says. I'd never tried this before but the rationale behind it seemed valid.

Here's the questionable egg:

And here's an egg we knew for certain had been laid that day:

We threw that egg away faster than you can say "pee-yew".

Strawberry oatmeal bars

2012-01-11T12:47:00.000-08:00

A post about strawberries in January has probably got you thinking, "seriously, Jenn?!? That's about as out-of-season as it gets.".

Unless you're me, in which case you freeze a ton of strawberries every summer, then were not able to eat them this year because of gestational diabetes. Generally we use the strawberries in lieu of ice in smoothies because they add fiber, flavor, and color. Gene makes such delicious smoothies. I really missed them this year.

My freezer remains well stocked with frozen strawberries. Other than smoothies and French toast topping, I've been hard-pressed to find a good use for them. Frozen strawberries turn to mush when defrosted, making them nearly impossible to use in baked goods. I'm not a fantastic baker and everything I've ever made with strawberries, frozen or fresh, winds up gooey and unsatisfactory.

I'm inordinately stubborn, however, so crossed my fingers and hoped for the best with this substitution. The original version calls for frozen blueberries, which I unknowingly ran out of a few days ago. You whir the frozen berries with cornstarch and sugar in a food processor, then layer the fruit with an oatmeal dough. The blueberry version, which I've made many times, is like a homemade Nutrigrain bar, only way yummier. The end result is nutritious, packed with filling fiber, and tasty. The bars freeze well, thaw quickly, and can be eaten one-handed.

As a new parent I have a fresh appreciation of the importance of this last item. I can't tell you how many recent meals I've wolfed down without chewing, hoping to get some sustenance before Kaelen starts screwing up his angry, feed-me-Seymour face. Feeding time has been complicated due to my low milk supply (yes, I'm seeing a lactation consultant) and subsequent requirement to supplement. I feed Kaelen for 30 minutes, give him a bottle for 10, pump for 10 if I have the energy, and then start the process over again in an hour. Sometimes less, sometimes more.

Good thing he's so cute.

yaaaaaawn

Since Gene doesn't love blueberries the way I do, I'd been thinking of making a version with strawberries for a while. The strawberries set up perfectly and the end result is, if I may say so myself, delectable. I'm betting that this can be made with any type of frozen berry with similar results. Perhaps even frozen peaches...??

BERRY OAT BARS (from Spring 2010 "Real Food" magazine distributed by Metropolitan Market)

2 cups rolled oats

2 cups whole wheat flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

6 tbsp very cold butter (frozen is fine)

3/4 cup milk

1 tbsp lemon juice

2 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup white sugar

1 tbsp cornstarch

2 cups frozen berries

1. Preheat oven to 350. Oil 9x13 baking dish.

2. In a large bowl, combine oats through brown sugar. Using large holes of a cheese grater, shred butter into mixture and work in until the size of grains of rice.

(As an aside, this is my new favorite way to incorporate butter into a dough when not using the food processor. Use your hands to make quick work of mixing in the butter.)

3. In another container (I use the measuring cup), combine the milk, lemon juice, and vanilla, then stir into the oat mixture. Press a little more than half of the dough into the bottom of the prepared dish.

4. In a food processor, combine the sugar and cornstarch, then add the berries and process until the mix looks grainy nad well minced. (If using blueberries, reserve half of the berries and combine with the processed berries at this point.) Dollop the remaining batter evenly over the fruit. Bake for 50-55 minutes (40-45 in convection oven) until the top layer is deep golden and the fruit is bubbling.

5. Remove the bars from the oven and allow to cool in the baking dish on a rack. When cool, cut into 18 3x6" bars.

You can wrap them individually in plastic and store in a zip-top bag in the freezer for an easy breakfast or snack that will thaw on the counter in about an hour. Thirty seconds in the microwave will also do the trick.

Rick Steves & me

2012-01-08T09:39:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity at work to host an event featuring Rick Steves. He had just debuted his show about Iran, so was available to do public showings and talks about his experiences.

Photo: luggageonline.com

Of course, it being a college audience, there were quite a few questions about Rick's stance on pot.

I found Rick to be rather stand-offish. I suppose that, as a celebrity, he gets annoying people pulling on his shirt-sleeves all the time. Or maybe he's just shy. He's a bit of an odd duck, that's for certain.

After the event several people and I helped him carry the boxes of books he was selling back to his car. He had parked in an underground parking garage and couldn't remember which floor his car was on. After walking around three floors, my arms stretched to their limit, I finally turned to him & joked, "I hope you're better finding your way around with a map than you are in a parking garage".

Except I was was only half-joking. Seriously, man, I'm carrying a massive box of BOOKS!

I think of that encounter any time I hear Rick on NPR, as I did yesterday. He was chatting with a caller, a housewife from Oklahoma, about not being able to travel as much in adulthood as had been possible during the woman's youth. The woman mentioned her website and I was intrigued: http://globaltableadventure.com/.

Photo: www.globaltableadventure.com

She - Sasha - is making a dish from every country in the world each week. 195 countries, 195 meals, 195 weeks. It's a brilliant idea, and one I will try myself. I travelled quite a bit in my 20s, even living in France for a year, and miss globetrotting immensely. What a fantastic way to incorporate new cultures and new cuisine into our everyday lives. I love it!

Gene and I have talked a lot about how we want to influence Kaelen's attitudes toward food. I went to lunch with a friend a while back and she bemoaned the fact that the restaurant "didn't have any kid food, like chicken nuggets". Why is processed chicken-type meat considered "kid food"? We want - perhaps naively - for Kaelen to grow up eating the same foods we eat. I won't be a short-order chef, cooking different things for different members of our family, nor will we use drive-throughs as a regular means of getting sustenance.

OK, I will cop to a weakness for Wendy's, to which I succombed more than once during my pregnancy (pre-gestational diabetes diagnosis). Damn those fries!

If you're interested in introducing your kid to new cuisine, read the book "Hungry Monkey". A friend recommended it to me and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's funny, contains interesting recipes, and, for those local to Seattle, mentions many places locals will recognize.

We look forward to introducing Kaelen to farming and teaching him how food grows. He'll grow up with a backyard flock of chickens and a yard full of edibles. I can't wait to see him chase a chicken around to catch it, as our neighbors' kid does.

How do you introduce your kids to new cuisines? What advice do you have?

I'm a mommy!

2011-12-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

We are thrilled to share with you the joyous news of our son's arrival.

KAELEN ADRIEN SEYMOUR

8 pounds, 1 ounce

20.5 inches

About his name...

Kaelen is a Gaellic name meaning strong, fair-skinned, and slender. Some sources add "mighty warrior" to the list, but we won't tell him that. It is pronounced KAY-lin.

He is, through my side, a 14th-generation descendant of Louis Lamoureux, one of the original founders of Quebec. Louis had 2 sons: Jean Baptiste and Adrien. The descendants of Adrien eventually changed their family name to "Adrien dit Lamoureux" and later generations dropped the longer bits. It's my last name and I wanted him to have both of our names. Seymour, as you may have guessed, is Gene's last name.

The cats were unimpressed by his homecoming. Rudy, our tabby, sat on my lap often during my pregnancy. This afternoon he did again, this time competing for space with Kaelen. As soon as Rudy started to purr, Kaelen fell fast asleep. It makes me wonder what Rudy's purring sounded like to him when he was in utero. My parents are bringing Rosemary home this afternoon and we're looking forward to her reaction.

We're so excited to share the news of our precious boy's arrival with you. He has forever changed our lives, and will likely become a regular on the blog as I look for ways to incoporate living sustainably, frugally, and purposefully with having a child.

The blog may quiet down (even more) for a little while as we find our footing but I promise: I'll be back!

Update on molting hens

2011-12-20T08:10:00.000-08:00

I posted earlier this month about our girls going through a hard molt. Here are a couple of pics of them.

Front to back: Animal (standard blue cochin), Dozer (barred Plymouth Rock), and Nugget (Rhode Island Red).

The girls are so pretty, soft, and fluffy after a molt. Animal's lacing (the appearance of an edge around her feathers) is quite striking. We've noticed that the girls' colors change slightly with each molt. Nugget's head and tail are considerably darker than they've ever been.

Curry's tail is still rather stubby but she's so soft right now. Her head, too, is darker than ever.

Croquette, on the other hand, looks like dookie. She holds up one leg to conserve heat. She wouldn't let me near her to take any decent pics.

Scooter, the top of whose crest you see below, was proud to show off her new white plumage. Polish cresteds are the dorkiest birds, I swear.

The australorps are, hands-down, the softest things I've ever touched. Once Croquette's new feathers are fully grown, she'll be black and green and gorgeous. Until then, however... not so much.

Instead of a tree

2011-12-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

Taking down a Christmas tree is never one of my favorite activities. The thought of doing it with a (yet-to-arrive) newborn made it even less appealing. Instead of dragging the artifical tree and ornaments out of their corner in the attic, this year we decided to decorate our mantel. The entire process took less than 20 minutes, if you exclude the provisioning of the greens.

I even dusted.

Don't ya love the rabbit ears? We don't have cable.

I work down the street from a tree stand. One day during lunch I walked over to ask if they had boughs or garlands. They had a sign that said "Boughs: FREE". Awesome! But when I inquired about the boughs, the guy at the stand looked at me blankly. He didn't know what "boughs" are.

How do you work for a tree stand that gives away free boughs (branches) and you don't know what they are? It's not like the menu of offerings at the tree stand had more then 6-7 items on it in the first place. I was dying to eat lunch and my preggo patience was worn thin. His coworker told me that they'd have boughs later in the day but didn't have any at that moment. Being nine months pregnant and facing an uphill hike to employee parking alone after dark, I decided against returning later in the day.

The following weekend Gene and I ventured out to a nursery in town that sells cedar garland by the foot. We bought 8' of fresh, lovely smelling garland and headed home.

My mom and her sister had recently divided up my grandmother's ornaments and I was able to procure a few, including a handful of handmade blown glass ornaments from Romania and a couple of strings of antique beads.

I've tucked a glass ornament engraved with Bean's name into the garland, ready to pull it out when he comes home with us from the hospital in the next few days. (I'm scheduled for an induction on 12/21 if he hasn't decided for himself to arrive.) I can't wait to display that particular ornament.

In my attic there were a few Santa figures. I like them because they're tall and narrow. OK, the smallest one is technically a nutcracker ornament... close enough. Decorators like things in odd numbers so three of these guys get to spend a couple of weeks on the mantel with the African violet.

I think I got rid of my string lights during last summer's attic purge. But I had a ton of the IKEA tea lights and several juice glasses. Mason jars would work fine, too. I tucked five of these behind the garland, being careful to make certain that no part of the greenery was above the glass.

When lit, the candles emit a lovely flicker because of the vertical lines in the glass. It's much prettier than string lights anyway.

Finally, I hung our stockings. The snow scene on the right is mine, which my mom made for my own first Christmas. I found the Santa stocking at left hanging on the back porch of my house, which I bought the summer before Gene and I met. The Santa has a very pretty petit point face. Who could have known that just a few months later I'd meet the man I'd later marry? Good thing I kept that stocking.

The mitten in the middle will have to make due for Bean's "stocking" until he gets his own. I think that my mom wants to make one for him but is waiting to learn what his name is before she starts it. Besides, stocking kits will be on killer discounts in about two weeks!

Since putting up the greens our antenna reception has improved, allowing us to receive an additional channel.

Do you ever take a break from holiday decorating? Do you do any sort of alternative decoration?

Under pressure

2011-12-16T14:17:00.000-08:00

The title to this post is a little double entendre.

First, I'm officially overdue. My due date of 12/14/11 has come and gone without "Bean" sprouting. I open facebook every morning to a slew of messages from friends around the globe asking if the baby has arrived. The notes usually are along the lines of "haven't see a post from you in 8 hours - the baby here yet?". These crack me up as I tend to sleep for about 8 hours daily. Maybe I need to post at 3a when I heave my bulk out of bed to pee?

I've begun maternity leave. I decided that I wasn't going to get any sort of medal for sitting around at work wasting time until my due date. So now I'm at home and have my days free to... well... I'm still figuring out what to do with myself.

Yesterday I went with a girlfriend and her 3-year-old daughter to Watson's, a nearby nursery that had 2 reindeer on site. Here is Bean with the oh-so-curious Donner. Blitzen is the brown reindeer in the background.

"Your belly looks like Santa's."

After our visit with the reindeer, my girlfriend fed me a delicious beef stew made with the last of the veggies from her incredibly prolific garden. My own veggie garden suffered badly from neglect and I spent much of the summer green with envy of her gorgeous vegetables.

The beef stew gave me a hunkering for more. But with a doctor appointment that went from 2-4 yesterday afternoon and no ingredients in the house for stew, I'd have to wait until today to create that simmered-all-day flavor.

... or would I?

Pressure cooker to the rescue!

I stopped by the grocery store on the way home and picked up stew meat, bagged carrots, baby red potatoes, and bagged green beans. In my pantry there were home-canned tomatoes, broth, and corn, plus onions, garlic, and all the requisite seasonings.

The great thing about beef stew is that you don't really need a recipe. It lends itself fabulously to what I call "method cooking". Once you have the general method of how to make it, you can repeat and create new variations based on what's in your own pantry.

Make sure veggies are bite-sized.

I made this in my pressure cooker but you could easily make it in a slow cooker or on your stovetop.

Here's what went into my beef stew. Change up the veggies in your own version based on what's available to you.

INGREDIENTS
2 lbs beef stew meat
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic
2 bay leaves
1 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp dried rosemary
1 quart home-canned tomatoes
1 pint home-canned corn
1 lb baby carrots, cut in half
1.5 baby red potatoes, cut in quarters
1 pint chicken or beef broth
1 lb green beans, cut into bite-sized pieces
salt & pepper to taste
enough cornstarch to thicken the mix

METHOD
1. Brown meat in the oil. Add chopped onion, whole garlic cloves, and tomatoes. Close the pressure cooker, vent according to directions, and cook on the highest pressure for 25 minutes.

2. When time is up, open the pressure cooker (safely!), add the corn, carrots, potatoes, broth, and enough water to cover everything. Bring to a boil and close the cooker again. Cook for 10 more minutes under highest pressure.

3. Next, add green beans to the stew and cook without the lid until crisp-tender (approx 4-5 minutes). The prevents the green beans from getting mushy, over-cooked, and turning grey.

4. Add salt and pepper to taste, and thicken with cornstarch if desired. If you've never thickened hot liquid with cornstarch, be sure to stir it into some cold water then add to the hot soup to avoid clumps.

Start to finish, this stew took about an hour in the pressure cooker. It was the first time I'd used my cooker in stages, meaning that I'd cook, then open, the cook, then open again. It worked well. I served the stew with toasted, buttered asiago cheese bread. It was hearty and perfect for a cold December evening... and tasted like it had been simmering all day.

Enjoy!

Gluhwein

2011-12-08T18:35:00.000-08:00

More years ago than I should admit, I spent Christmas in Europe with friends. The days leading up to Christmas were in Bavaria, possibly the most Christmas-y place on Earth, and afterwards I continued to stay with friends in the Grenoble area of France. Not technically the Alpes, but close enough.
My German friends lived in and around Munich and took me to a variety of Christmas markets (Christkindlmarkt), both the enormous one in Munich's famous Marienplatz as well as a small one in a neighboring town called Aichach.

photo: Borderless Adventures

My mother's family has roots in Northern Germany and I suspect that's part of the reason I so dearly loved Christmas in Bavaria. It's Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker wrapped up in a living, lovely package. The sights and smells of a Christkindlmarkt bring to mind everything that is wonderful and magical about Christmas: sweet pastries filled with nuts and raisins, nutcrackers ranging from elaborately decorative to utilitarian, pine trees weighed down with hundreds of white lights, hand-painted tin ornaments, cedar wreaths, sweet treats like lebkuchen and pfeffernüsse. I always crave marzipan stollen this time of year, too. Here's the stollen I made last year:

And glühwein (pronounced gloo-vine). Oh, good heavens, don't forget the glühwein!

Glühwein is soul-warming, spiced, sweetened wine served hot. The name literally means "glow wine", and for good reason. It's red wine steeped with cloves, cinnamon, and orange slices. Some recipes call for extra alcohol to be added, such as brandy or amaretto. "Glow" indeed!

At the Christkindlmarkt in Munich, paper cups of steaming glühwein are sold at booths around the market. But in Aichach, the glühwein was served in ceramic mugs loaned to the market by the townspeople. You pay a small deposit for the ceramic mug. When you had glugged your glühwein, you returned your mug to the stand so that it could be washed and reused. It keeps the liquid warmer for a longer period, too. Talk about reducing your environmental impact!

Bavaria in December is cold. And Ido mean cold! A warm mug of glühwein warms both your hands and your belly. The spiced scent of it tickles your nose as you sip it on a freezing, perhaps snowy, winter night and allows you extra time to browse the market's booths. It's an ideal beverage après-ski, for cuddling by the fire, for decorating the Christmas tree, or for accompanying a book or movie. However you enjoy glühwein, do so in the company of loved ones. And tipple slowly: its effects sneak up on you faster than that creepy coworker who is determined to catch you under the mistletoe.

Photo: Beautifulwomendating.com

Resources:

Hot wine drinks (note the differences between glühwein and glogg)
Recipe for glühwein (I haven't made this one yet, but will try it Christmas day). This blogger also has some festive pics of different markets around Europe.

My suggestions for making glühwein:

Use whole spices rather than ground. Ground spices will cloud the liquid.
Buy the spices in the bulk section of your supermarket to avoid having to mortgage your home for a few sticks of cinnamon and a whole nutmeg.
If you want, make a sachet of cheesecloth to contain the spices, or use a tea ball.
Allow the wine to steep, not boil.
If you use honey, reduce the amount you add by half because honey is twice as sweet as sugar.
Taste the resulting beverage before serving to make sure it's sweet enough for you.

I'm dying for some glühwein. I can't wait to make a pot of it and take it to my parents' house for Christmas Day. Bean is making us wait for his arrival, however, so there won't be any glühwein for me until he's here. My doctor told me today that he'll pencil me in for an induction on 12/21, which is a week after my due date and nearly two weeks from now. I wanted to cry: I want this baby to be born!

Enjoy some glühwein for me.

Photo: grabbingthegusto.files.wordpress.com

Eggs in winter

2011-12-03T07:57:00.000-08:00

I used up the last of our girls' eggs this morning. We're officially relegated to store-bought eggs until the ladies kick into gear again.

Last year we got no eggs from December until sometime in April. This year some of the girls starting molting in August, which was very early for them. I took it as a signal that our La Nina winter was to be very cold but thus far it's been fairly mild. I suppose we still have several months to go.

The cochin & Polish cresteds molted first, followed in close succession by the production birds. As was the case last year, the australorps (black hens) were the last to go. Also like last year, they look miserable: they're ratty and have broad swathes of bare skin in 40-degree weather. We've found, too, that our normally friendly birds shy away from being touched when they molt. It's got to be an uncomfortable process for them.

This is a pic I took of Croquette about this time last year (click link for more pics). She and Miss Piggy, our other australorp, look like this again now. Croquette has taken to standing in the middle of the yard, one leg pulled up to conserve heat, looking cranky. There's nothing we can do for her but offer our sympathy.

When Gene and I first got chickens a few years ago, we made the decision not to force them to lay during the winter. I'm rethinking that choice now, especially since they eat 50 pounds of feed each month at a cost of about $17. Freeloaders. Frankly, it's annoying to buy eggs at the grocery store when you know there's a flock of hens in your own yard.

So how come hens don't lay in the winter? If you think about it from a biological perspective, it makes perfect sense: it takes warmth and ample food to raise chicks. Neither of these things is available during the winter months so when the hours of daylight dwindle to less than 12 hours, hens' laying tapers off until it stops completely. As the hours increase in the spring, the production of eggs follows.

Modern chickens have been bred into two categories: ornamental and production. Ornamental birds, like our cochin and two Polish, tend to lay less frequently, go broody (i.e. desire to hatch eggs), and "switch off" for a longer period during the winter. Production birds, as the name implies, lay more eggs per week for more months of the year. Our nine-hen flock has six production birds: buff orpington, black star, Rhode Island Red, barred Plymouth Rock, and two australorps. They're the workhorses of the group. Other common ornamentals include "silkies" and others. Most of the birds you find in feed stores are production birds, though ornamentals are increasingly more common.

We've definitely seen the difference between our breeds. Beaker, one of our Polish cresteds, spent much of the summer trying to hatch the other girls' eggs or even sitting in an empty nesting box. When she finally quit being broody, she laid a half-dozen eggs, then molted. We'd get another standard cochin in a heartbeat - they're sweet, gentle, curious birds who don't mind being handled by children - but probably won't get any more Polish. The Polish are noisy, neurotic, and poor layers. That said, they're easy to catch because they can't see anything!

As an aside, we used to have a bantam cochin, who was also gentle with kids. Tribble's short legs, feathered feet, and our rainy climate meant that moisture wicked up onto her body all winter. She hated the rain and we constantly struggled with mite infestations on her.

Getting back to my point about laying cycles: it is possible to get the hens to lay during the winter. We've decided that the girls will get a much-needed break through December. They laid well last summer and we believe it's important to give their bodies a rest. Come the New Year, we're going to put lights in their coop to encourage production. Twelve to fourteen hours of light are needed to get them to lay. The sun sets around 4:30 p.m. here in January, so we'll turn on the light in the coop from 3:30 until 7:00 a.m., then allow the natural daylight to take over for the rest of the day. It's best to have the light in the morning to avoid the coop going dark before the girls have had a chance to get onto the roost.

Have you used supplemental lighting to encourage egg production in your backyard flock? How were your results?

Thanksgiving 2011

2011-11-22T16:50:00.000-08:00

Last April, not long after discovering I was pregnant, Gene and I had a choice to make: when and how would we tell my parents? My mom was getting ready to leave for a trip to visit family in the mid-west, and was planning to be gone for about 3+ months.

Our options:

Wait until she returned in August to tell my family... and everyone else.
Tell my dad and brother but forbid them from telling Mom until her return.
Allow my 1st trimester to pass without incident and tell Mom over the phone.
Assemble the three of them and tell them prior to Mom's departure, even though I was just a month along.

We chose door #4. Having never been pregnant, and being nearly 37 years old, this was a tough decision. What if something, anything, went wrong? Not only would we deal with the heartbreak of losing a pregnancy, but we'd have to break others' hearts after getting hopes up. It was a gamble but one that paid off.

Gene and I had fun figuring out how to tell my family about Bean's existence. My mom had been grousing about a broken travel mug, so we bought one at Starbucks for which you can customize the insert. Gene typed my due date - which is my mom's birthday - in a small font on the insert. Inside the mug we put a bib that said something about going to Grandma's house. It was tricky to assemble the 5 of us before Mom left without raising suspicion. But we managed somehow.

In mid-April we all sat down and watched Mom open her going-away gift. She didn't notice the date on the mug & simply thanked us for it. I knew that she'd open the mug in a few minutes and watched her like a hawk while the family chatted. Sure enough, about 5 minutes later she popped the lid off and saw the Carter's tag on the bib. That possibility hadn't occurred to clueless-about-babies me but she got the message loud and clear: we were there not to say good-bye but with Big Important News.

She looked over at me, mouth agape. Gene, knowing what was happening, watched quietly. Mom couldn't speak. She blinked at me and I nodded, then she and I both started to cry.

My dad and brother were utterly perplexed by the weird female telepathic scene unfolding before them.

I don't remember quite what went down next but I do recall my brother, upon figuring out our message of an expected baby, pushing his chair back and saying, "Whoa. What just happened here?!?"

Dad broke out the champagne and everyone (except me) had some. I think that my parents each had 2 or more glasses, to be honest! They were thrilled, having pretty much given up on ever becoming grandparents because of my advanced years and my brother's lack of interest in committed relationships.

After the initial shock started to wear off, my dad asked me the due date. I responded "12/15". He thought for a minute, then issued this proclamation:

"This year, we're going out to dinner for Thanksgiving."

You have to understand that my dad is known for non-sequitors. Half of the time I wonder if he can't hear, the rest of the time I suspect he's simply not paying attention to the conversation or is so uninterested in it that he randomly changes the subject to whatever appeals to him more. For him to have declared 7 months ago that we would eat out for Thanksgiving is surprising but not entirely out of character. I halfway think he'd been looking for a reason to do this anyway.

Dad called Shenanigan's the next day, only to be told that they weren't taking reservations until September. I bet that those were some of the longest months of my dad's life!

So this year, instead of doing all the typical Thanksgiving meal preparations, my parents, brother, husband and I will be headed to a buffet at a nice restaurant on Tacoma's waterfront. I plan to eat as much crab and shrimp as possible, especially since many of the traditional Thanksgiving side dishes and desserts are off-limits with my gestational diabetes.

Don't tell anyone, but I've ordered a fresh turkey and it's being delivered today. I'm going to roast it on Friday, when Gene and I will have a mini-Thanksgiving dinner at home. Whatever's left on Sunday will get made up into heat-n-eat meals for after Bean gets here. I'm considering trying my hand at pasties (like Hot Pockets, only homemade).

Have yourselves a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. From our family to yours, may you spend the day in the company of loved ones and with a spirit of gratitude for the many blessings we all enjoy.

Five weeks and grateful

2011-11-10T22:26:00.000-08:00

Bean's movements have definitely changed in the past week. I can tell that he's bigger, stronger. So much so, that I've started doing the pregnant lady grimace. You know the one: a woman in her last trimester will suddenly contort her face like a gargoyle's when an elbow pushes too far into some organ or tests the limits of his confinement with an outstretched limb. Sometimes it's so unexpected to get a massive kick or a long, slow push outward that I gasp and stop mid-sentence to get through it.

My shower on 11/5 with my mom & girlfriends. Wow... belly!

As my brother likes to say: "whoa, sh*t just got real!" The change in movements has really made me realize that yes, there is a little person in there and he's growing impatient with his cramped quarters.

That said, I've acquired the new hobby of watching my tummy bounce and roll in the evenings. Hey, it's cheap entertainment and we don't have cable!

My due date is now less than 5 weeks away. Tomorrow is Veterans Day and I'm going to spend it organizing the nursery. My hope is that by the time Gene comes home from work, the transformation from what used to be our office (and, frankly, junk room) to our son's room will be complete. Heck, maybe I'll even get some pics to show you.

My pregnancy has made me realize that I've much for which to be thankful.

As much as gestational diabetes sucks, and as much as I desperately miss grains and fruits, it has kept me honest. No more chocolate chip cookies, cupcakes, or sweets for me. I eat an apple every few days, and guiltily at that: testing my blood sugar 5x/day and faxing the results to the doctor weekly has a way of keeping one on track. The silver lining is that I have gained just 15 pounds overall, and not an ounce in the past 3 months. I fully expect that my baby weight will come home in the car seat, not on my butt.

The new low carb lifestyle has, however, forced me to explore the wonderful world of fiber supplements. Nothing makes you feel like an old fart quite like waddling through the grocery store in search of Metamucil.

Friends and relatives at my shower. Oh, and my poor, swollen cankles.

My nearly 94-year-old grandmother, mom, and me.

How often do you assemble all your friends and loved ones in a single room and spend a day with them? The answer is probably "rarely". Good friends threw my shower last weekend. I was surrounded by people I love and admire from all periods and areas of my life, who support and care for Gene and me in turn. I was - and continue to be - so grateful for their generosity and the wonderful, thoughtful gifts they bestowed upon Bean. Our son has more clothes, better books, cozier blankets, and more promises of cuddly date nights than Gene and me put together!

A blanket knitted by my dad's mom for Bean. Bean is the 1st great-grandbaby on that side, and eagerly awaited.

One of the baby shower hosts, Margaret, had a spectacular dahlia garden last summer. She was able to save the last of her dahlias for the shower decorations before the frost got them. The blooms were gorgeous. Another girlfriend made this incredible cake. I felt so loved, and grateful for all the people in my life who made the shower a special day I'll remember forever. And yes, I threw caution to the wind for a single day and said "diabetes be damned, let me eat cake".

Gorgeous cake, beautiful flowers, beloved friends!

I'm thankful for a relatively healthy and easy pregnancy. Despite being 36 when deciding to try to get pregnant, I had no challenges getting and staying pregnant (fertility in my family is, shall we say, not an issue). I experienced virtually no morning sickness, have had swelling only in my cankles and feet, and I feel good overall. I did have a couple of weeks of significant pain when my pelvis started to separate but that's mostly gone now.

Another thing I'm grateful for, which has surprised me, is a new appreciation for and acceptance of my body. After a lifetime of struggling with a waistline I'd always hated, I never imagined sitting in my living room with my belly exposed so that I could watch it. I couldn't have fathomed welcoming people to feel my stomach move (and I hope I haven't dismayed some of my students!). In the past I envisioned myself in loose, tent-like maternity clothes rather than the form-fitting ones that I've been preferring of late. It wouldn't have occurred to me to draw attention to my bulging belly rather than try to hide it. It's been a freeing time to trade my negative body hangups for a deep awe of what my body is doing: creating and sustaining a new life.

And finally, I'm grateful that I can count the weeks left in my pregnancy on one hand. In a few weeks I'll be grateful to lie on my stomach again.

Six weeks and counting

2011-10-30T18:23:00.000-07:00

As you can imagine, Gene and I have been busy getting ready for Bean. Last weekend we went to Bellingham, WA, for a "babymoon". We bought a Groupon for a "romance package" at the Chrysalis Inn back in March... as it turns out, I was 1 week pregnant at the time. The special was for a gorgeous corner suite with a massive jetted tub. Each of us took 2 baths in rose-scented water overlooking the lovely harbor. We watched cable, which we don't have at home, lounged around, and took naps. It was glorious.

While in Bellingham we had dinner at the home of friends, Jenn and Matt. They have 2 charming boys and Jenn writes another locavore blog. Jenn, a fantastic cook, prepared butternut squash soup, roasted lamb shanks, and polenta. We contributed a bottle of red from our wine collection and enjoyed a wonderful evening with their family.

Yesterday we were in a childbirth preparation class for 9 hours. Whew. I'm glad that item on our to-do list is done. Next weekend we're going on a tour of the hospital in the morning, and my baby shower is later that afternoon. On Sunday, I'm doing nothing. NOTHING!! We've been so scheduled lately that we both need a break. Besides, I have a feeling that I'll spend part of Sunday organizing Bean's nursery.

My dad's birthday was just last week. It was a big one: 64. Why is that big? Just listen to this Beatle's song.

In his 65th year my dad will finally become a grandfather. In fact, he'll be a grandfather in, at most, 6 weeks. Just look at my tummy!! Bean is clearly growing well, despite my own weight loss and super low carb diet.

My bump, my bump, my lovely baby bump

My dad loves trains. I mean, he loves trains. People who work on real trains call people like my dad "foamers" because of rainfans' tendency to foam at the mouth about train operations.

My brother and I grew up counting train cars and knowing the correct names of each type of car. We knew that any time we were in a car ans saw a train, Dad would pull over and we were to watch it. There was always a model train going around the Christmas tree. My dad built a 20' diorama in the basement, complete with handmade trees and tufts of grass. He's in the process of building another one in his bedroom. His collection of train books and DVDs (imagine a mind-numbingly boring narrated 50-minute video of a train going up a maintain pass) is massive. Heck, during the summer months Dad sits on his back deck, his scanner tuned to the frequency used by the engineers on the nearby rail lines so that he can listen to their conversations.

Despite Dad's love of trains, he's really really hard to shop for. Model trains are expensive - all of his locomotives are made of brass and each costs a small fortune - and it's impossible to know if he has a particular book or not. I don't like knick-knacks, so I prefer not to give them to others.

What to do for his birthday?!?

As it turns out, the father of Gene's coworker is a train fanatic like my dad. This man has even written a number of books about trains in Southern California. The best part, though, is that he owns his own locomotive. Yes, folks, a real, honest-to-god locomotive sits in this man's backyard, and he invited us over to let my dad ~~foam over~~ see it.

We didn't tell Dad where we were going. And when we got there, you couldn't see the locomotive from the house or the road. Ken took us around a corner a BAM! Dad's jaw dropped. He'd had no idea why we were at this house tucked way back in a valley. But there it was: a locomotive he could climb on, touch, and talk shop about with a fellow foamer. Dad was in heaven!

Dad, Rosemary, Ken Johnson, me with baby bump

This locomotive was built in Davenport, IA, and was used at the Tacoma ASARCO Smelter from 1936-1957. I grew up practically in the shadow of the smokestack, and can remember the steam whistle signalling the shift changes. The smokestack was pulled down sometime in the mid-1990s and the smelter's Super Fund site has undergone a complete transformation. It's no longer an ecological disaster and is in the process of becoming the euphemistically named Point Ruston.

After Dad had had his fill of the locomotive, Gene and I took him to lunch at the Black Diamond Cafe, which bakes all of its goods in a wood-fired oven. They're known for spectacular breads, pies, and cakes. The cookies didn't look too bad, either. On the drive to lunch, we passed some rail lines and Dad excitedly gave us a history of the Stevens Pass railroad tunnels, the role of railroads in the region, and more.

It was fun to give this gift of time and local history to my dad. Thanks so much to Ken Johnson for allowing us to visit his locomotive!

As for his Christmas present, we're still working on it and promise that he'll be delivered just in time for the holiday.

Saag

2011-10-19T06:54:00.000-07:00

Let me start this post with 3 confessions:

I don't know jack - Jitendara? - about Indian food, other than that it's delicious.
I don't know diddly about babies.
I can't stand low-carb diets.

Ironically, I've made Indian food twice this week, am 7 months pregnant, and am on a low-carb diet due to gestational diabetes.

Life is weird that way.

Friends of mine had a baby boy last month. They've been incredibly kind and supportive as I've progressed through my own pregnancy, so I offered to take them dinner and a gift for the baby. They gladly accepted. Then the wife drops this bomb: she's allergic to tomatoes.

I started going through my mental recipe repertoire & excluding the things that have tomatoes in them. Crap, that's like everything that I make this time of year. Chili, pot roast, many soups... all out. And because I can only have very limited amounts of carbs, no pastas either.

I remembered having seen a Veena's Market saag spice packet in my cupboard. I bought a few of them last year around Christmas and this was the last package. I called my friends and asked if they like Indian food and, if so, could she eat spicy food while breastfeeding. The answer to both questions was a resounding "yes". Saag it was!

What, exactly, is "saag"? According to this website:

Saag, or palak, dishes are spiced purees of spinach or other greens common in northern India. They often contain additional ingredients such as potatos, fresh cheese, chicken or chickpeas to make a more substantial dish.

Gene, who doesn't like cooked spinach, loves this dish. If you're not a cooked spinach fan, try this recipe once before dismissing it.

I wanted to make my saag with chicken. I started out with cutting up 2 chicken breasts and cooking them in oil. Then I just put them aside while I made the spinach puree.

Veena's instructions are to saute the spices in oil, then add chopped onions. You have to be very careful about this because it's shockingly easy to burn the spices and ruin your dish. Her packets are numbered for you. (BTW, Veena is a friend of mine but I bought these packets.)

Next, you add the spinach and let it wilt - this takes about a minute. Don't be shy about how much spinach you're using; it will reduce significantly.

From there, you put the spinach into a blender with some water and puree it. Return it to the saucepan with the chicken to reheat, salt to your taste, and stir in a dollop of plain yogurt. Serve the saag over rice or...

... can you guess what this is? It's not rice. Nor is it couscous.

This, my friends, is cauliflower! Run raw cauliflower through a food processor until it looks like couscous. Out it into a microwave-safe bowl and cook without water until it's done, perhaps 3-4 minutes. Voila: low-carb rice alternative.

Because I was travelling with this dish, I simply layered the ingredients in a covered Pyrex dish and reheated it once I arrived at my friends' house.

They asked to keep the leftovers.

As for the gift for their son, a little pair of light green merino wool booties, I completely forgot to take pictures! The booties fit him perfectly and both parents were appreciative. They've promised pictures, which I'll post upon receipt.

I still have so much to learn about babies. The first time I held my friends' new son I experienced a panicked feeling of "ok, now what do I do with this little guy?". I haven't changed a diaper since the early 1990s, if then. I just bought some nursing bras and laughed at the sight of my boobs in holsters. Gene, who has children from his first marriage, looks at my boobs & apologizes "for what's going to happen to them in the next few months". Yikes.

I'll figure it out.

When to censor a blog

2011-10-17T22:32:00.000-07:00

Nearly a year ago I wrote a carefully worded open letter to The Pioneer Woman after outgrowing her blog & finding others that were more interesting and/or relevant to our lifestyle. A blog that is single-mindedly devoted to disliking her picked it up & linked to it. To be honest, I don't even read that blog because I found that it could be really mean-spirited at times.

As a result of being linked from that other blog, my one post about the Pioneer Woman gets more hits & comments than all my others combined. Some comments are supportive of my post, whose point was that I no longer found her relevant to my life and was moving on to blogs written by people I could identify with, while some comments are downright nasty.

The irony is that people have to go looking for the post to find it. My blog isn't exactly set up with SEO terms, nor is it in the top 100 search results.

Lately some of the negative comments have gotten ugly and personal. Commenters, many of them anonymous, have called me catty, jealous, insecure, a bully, a "hater", and more. Most of the time I just roll my eyes and wonder if they actually even read the damn post.

Today I went back and read it. I hadn't revisited it for quite a while. A year later, I still agree with what I wrote. I also believe that my opinion was carefully written without making any low blows at a fellow blogger.

Just this past weekend someone called me mean & accused my children of being bullies... how ironic given that the opening paragraph clearly stated I was childless. That commenter had on her personal profile that she works in education. I'm guessing that she didn't read my post, her reading comprehension must not be very high, or that she was so angry by the time she started reading that she could do little more than skim it.

Truth be told, the snarky, bitchy comments get to me sometimes. All comments are sent to my in-box, which helps me monitor them, and this morning I got a handful of Monday morning notifications about what a meanie head I am. It was (sarcasm) an awesome way to start my work week.

I'm debating taking the post down. I try hard to never "feed the trolls". I've allowed all the negative comments to remain on the thread and have never responded. Blogs are free speech both for me as the blogger, and for you as the reader, n'est-ce pas?

Maybe I should ask that other blog to remove the link from their site.

Maybe I should expound upon the caveat at the opening of the post (which starts "fans of the Pioneer Woman should stop reading now").

What advice do you have?

Beans, the magical fruit

2011-10-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

I got some crummy news last month: I have gestational diabetes. Before I got pregnant I'd been working on losing weight to reduce my risk: both of my parents and one of my grandparents are diabetics. Being over 35 while pregnant is another risk factor, though not one I could change.

While I initially took the diagnosis in stride, the past few weeks have been tough as I learn which foods spike my blood sugar and which don't. Frustratingly, even whole wheat breads, fruit, and sugar in any form are out. Forget the sterotype of the pregnant woman chowing down on ice cream: I'm lucky if I get a sugar-free fudgesicle. On the bright side, I haven't gained a pound in 2 months!

Meat, nuts, cheese, and vegetables are all in. I feel like I'm on South Beach or Atkins. I met with a dietician to explore meal options and determine how I can best control my blood sugar levels in order to keep both baby and me in good health for the next 3 months. I suspect that she learned more from me about sustainable foods than I learned from her about meal plans. What a waste of a $30 co-pay.

By the way, have I told you it's a boy? We're not telling his first name until he's here but I can say it is unusual and starts with "K". He'll have my last name as his middle name, and share Gene's last name. The baby - we've been calling him "Bean" - is due 2 months from today! I feel like I've been pregnant forever.

Anyway, as I've been researching various diabetic-friendly foods and recipes I found that many of them contain beans. Beans are a very healthy choice for people living with diabetes.

Dried beans are a staple in my pantry but canned beans are a rarity. The problem this creates is that I either have to make a special trip to the store or remember to soak my beans the night before I plan to use them. This doesn't work in a spontaneous kitchen!

My solution was to can some dried beans. I'd been meaning to do this for a while anyway and just had never gotten around to it. I looked up instructions and found them on one of my favorite canning how-to websites, www.pickyourown.org. I did some kidney beans and some black beans.

A shelf from my canning pantry: pickles, black beans, kidney beans, stocks, & corn

Why can your own beans?

It's shockingly economical. A one-pound bag of dried beans cost me $1.19 and generated about 4.5 pints of canned beans. The equivalent amount of generic canned beans costs at least $0.69 per pint, and $1/pint or more for name brands. In all I canned 18 pints of beans for about $4.
It's stunningly easy. If you have a pressure canner, this is about the easiest thing you can stuff into a jar and preserve: no peeling, no coring, no dicing, no measuring, and minimal preparation.
It's a time-saver. I don't have to soak or pre-cook any more beans. I just pop open a jar and VOILA: ready-to-eat beans.
The cats don't come running when I open a home-canned jar. They twirl around my feet incessantly any time they hear the can-opener.
Reduced exposure to bisphenol A. While there is BPA in the lining of standard Ball canning lids, the food in the jars is not in direct contact with the lids that way it is in a steel can from the manufacturer. Tattler lids are BPA-free but I've yet to make the transition to them.

In addition to canning the beans today, I made a batch of hummus. Making my own hummus allows me to control the ingredients, especially the salt. Here's the recipe I used. It's simple and you can customize the flavors easily. Add basil and pine nuts, sun-dried tomatoes, or roasted bell peppers for variation.

Total cost was about $2.50. I did use canned beans to make the hummus. Did you know they are cheaper in the Hispanic foods aisle than in the canned beans aisle? Go figure. Dried garbanzo beans are pricey around here: the only ones I can find are either Bob's Red Mill or from the farmers market.

Things I've learned from canning tomatoes

2011-09-23T22:28:00.000-07:00

1. If Gene takes the camera to work, I won't see it again for at least a week.

2. Rosemary loves to clean up the tomato squirts.

3. It takes 2 minutes in boiling water to get the skin on 4 tomatoes perfect for peeling.

4. It takes me 2 minutes to peel and core 4 tomatoes.

5. Pull the tomatoes from the boiling water with a ladle in your right hand. Grab the hot tomato with your left hand using a dishwashing glove to protect from the heat. Take 2 steps backwards across the kitchen to drop the hot tomato into the cold water in the sink. It's an inelegant but efficient dance.

6. Canning whole tomatoes in their own juice works great for me. I literally stuff them into a jar and squish the bejeebies out of them to get as many as possible in a single jar.

7. My hand will fit into a widemouth jar but not a regular one.

8. My hand won't fit into my mouth. Ergo, my mouth is smaller than a widemouth jar opening.

9. It's possible to learn how to can tomatoes from the internet. That's how I got started. The resources for recipes and problem-solving are ever-expanding.

10. Unexpectedly, tomato jam is one of my favorite things. It makes a fabulous and unusual gift. I gifted so many that I have just a single jar remaining.

Photo from foodinjars.com

11. Because pressure canning tomatoes takes just 20 minutes whereas the boiling water bath method requires 90, I always pull out my pressure canner for tomatoes. Bonus: no need to monitor the water level.

12. There's always one jar that doesn't seal. I have to figure out what to do with that jar this weekend.

13. It's possible to can 20 pounds of tomatoes in a mid-week evening. (see #11 above)

14. Twenty pounds of tomatoes costs around $20 in my area, unless you hit the fruit stand late in the day and the owner unexpectedly gives you a $5 discount. Growing tomatoes for home canning in Western Washington is always a risky business due to unreliable summers.

15. It's surprising how many things you can throw a jar of canned tomatoes into: braised meats; sausage and chickpea soup; shakshuka; chili; and more.

16. No matter how carefully I mete out my supply or how many jars I can, I always run out of tomatoes.

17. Twenty pounds of tomatoes equals about ~~twelve~~ eleven quarts. (see #12 above)

18. After you've been canning your own tomatoes for a few years, store-bought canned tomatoes look weird.

19. The cats come running when they hear the can-opener but completely ignore the sound of a home-canned jar being opened. These same cats haven't had canned cat food in nearly a decade.

20. The "ping!" sound that cooling jars makes as they seal is intensely gratifying.

Signals of fall

2011-08-30T17:25:00.000-07:00

I've started to notice something over the past few days.

First, I saw it in the coop.

I had my suspicions of what was happening but I was in denial.

Today I came home to this, and I must now face the facts.

Can you see what's weird? Not quite? Here's another angle.

How about now?

This morning there were no feathers on the ground.

Every single feather has a yellowish tinge on the tip, meaning they all came from the same hen. This hen.

Our Buff Orpington, Curry, is molting. I think that Croquette may be molting as well. She went through a really hard, ugly molt last winter. That's her on the far right:

This means 3 things.

First, Curry and Croquette probably won't lay another egg until spring. Hens need about 2 months to recover from a molt. As a full, hard molt - as it appears Curry is experiencing - takes a month or more. Three months from now it'll be December. Our girls took the winter off last year (arg). Therefore Curry & Croquette are out of operation until April or so. Bummer.

Second, I'm going to stop selling eggs. Our hens went through really hard molts last autumn and we had a long, cold winter. We got exactly zero eggs from December until perhaps April.

Third, and most importantly, falling feathers signal autumn's arrival.

Fall is here.

My last birthday as Jenn

2011-08-29T21:11:00.000-07:00

I turned 37 yesterday.

Up until then I could tell people that I was going to be 37 when Bean is born. No longer. Eeek. My late 30s are here. When you're 36 you're in the mid-30s... but 37. Wow. On top of that, I'm nearly done with my second trimester. Bean is due to be here in just over 3 months.

It was my final birthday as "Jenn". This time next year I'll be some variation of "Mom". I'm trying to savor my independence, spontaneity, and leisure to focus on a single task as long as I want - knitting, cooking, talking on the phone, chilling with Rosemary, etc. - while I still can. Once Bean is here, I expect that my idea of "free time" will drastically change.

I also know that in a year I'll have a hard time imagining our life without Bean.

It being my birthday, I started inviting people over. The next thing I knew, the dinner guest list was up to 10 people for dinner and another 4-6 for cake & ice cream.

I had most of the ingredients for a Spanish paella (pie-AY-ya). I couldn't find the recipe a friend once gave me so I looked up a few variations online and winged it. This same friend, a former co-worker, used to loan me her paella pan. As I rarely see her since leaving that job - and my commute to Seattle - I had to make due with my Le Creuset wannabe (seriously - the Martha Stewart stuff is OK, but it's no Le Creuset).

The great thing about paella is that if you need to stretch it, add more rice. Paella suits my cooking sensibilities really well: you use what's on hand and call it good. I do it in a slightly different order than many recipes but the end result is about the same.

This is more of a method for making paella and not so much a recipe. Putting together a paella is not excessively time-consuming or difficult but it does take some prep and fore-thought.

Chop the ingredients for a sofrito. Everything should be about the same size.
1 onion
1-2 red or green bell peppers
1-2 tomatoes
4 cloves of garlic

Put the chopped stuff aside.

Brown the meat.
Heat about 2T olive oil in the largest pot or pan you have. Brown the meat in batches and put it into a bowl to set aside for later.

My freezer contained 8 chicken thighs, 2 thigh quarters, 2 pork chops, and chorizo. So that's what went into my paella. There are no hard and fast rules about which meats can go into a paella. One recipe I found called for a rabbit and a chicken. Do what you want.

This was the first time I'd put pork into my paella. I cut it into slices the seasoned it with paprika, salt, pepper, and oregano. I wanted it to taste distinct from the chicken, which is why I treated it this way.

If you have or can borrow a traditional paella pan, go for it. I used an enameled cast iron pot with the most surface area I could muster. Paella is traditionally cooked outside in the grill but we were out of propane. It was inside on the gas flame for me.

Cook the sofrito.
Next you prepare the sofrito. Simply throw all the chopped sofrito ingredients into the pan (drained of extra fat if necessary) and cook them down until you gat a thick paste. This should take about 15-20 minutes and does not need constant monitoring.

After the sofrito is done you can either continue to the last stage or put it aside and wait to start up again about 30 minutes before you want to eat.

Season the sofrito and cook the rice.
All paellas, no matter their other ingredients, seem to agree on the sofrito as one of the mandatory components. The others are saffron, which gives the paella the traditional yellow color, and rice. Use a short-grain rice such as arborio.

At this point I added the seasonings:
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes (not traditional but it gave the meal a little kick)
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp salt
2 T oregano
generous pinch of saffron (Trader Joe's has one for around $6 per bottle)

Here's something I haven't done in a while:

Add your rice - I used 2 cups - and 4 cups of chicken broth. I added about 2 cups of a dry white wine at this stage as well. The end result was soupier than I'd meant it to be but the rice did eventually absorb the extra liquid. If you want less rice, adjust this quantity accordingly. Keep in mind that I was planning to feed 10 people with leftovers for lunch on Monday.

Stir this sofrito-rice mix well and bring it to a simmer. Tuck your browned meats into the rice, cover tightly, and cook on low for 20 minutes or until the liquid is absorbed.

Add seafood if wanted.
It seems that every photo you see of paella includes mussels. You can also add squid, scallops, shrimp, or cod at the last minute for other seafood flavors.

We bought a pound of mussels for something like $3.50. About 10 minutes before the rice was finished cooking I tossed them on top of the paella and replaced the lid.

Not my pic... I got busy & forgot to take a photo of the finished dish.

Serve and enjoy. Offer wedges of lemon to squeeze over the plates.

We served the paella with a beautiful spinach salad a friend had made. We ate outside, crammed around a little table but enjoying the company. Gene told me that nearly everyone went back for seconds. There was a handful of little kids, all of whom quite enjoyed feeding their leftovers to the girls, one forkful at a time. The chickens, as you may imagine, did not object.

Paella goes well with beer or dry white wine. We all had lemonade and blueberry shrub (which was shockingly popular!).

Here are some paella recipes that are less fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants and have specific quantities
http://spanishfood.about.com/od/maincourses/r/seafoodpaella.htm
http://www.alicante-spain.com/paella.html

Earthquake memories

2011-08-24T20:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's earthquake on the east coast brought back memories of the shakers I've experienced in my lifetime.

Washington (State) has had its fair share of rattles over the years. I was 5 when Mt. St. Helens blew her lid, and I remember the ash dustings we got in Tacoma: they looked like frost and the gardens had a particularly good year as a result of the extra nutrients. There were plenty of rumbling earthquakes in the months before and after the blast, most small.

Having grown up in Western WA, I've gone through countless earthquake drills from the time I was in grade school. My most recent one was just a few months ago at work.

The biggest earthquake I ever experienced was the Nisqually Earthquake in February 2001. Nisqually is an area between Tacoma and Olympia, our state capitol, and was the epicenter. I was living and working in Tacoma, as I still do, though at a different university.

It was a beautiful February morning, and unseasonably warm and sunny. I had gone to a monthly all-unit meeting in another building across campus, leaving my coat and purse in my office.

The building where we had the meeting was constructed in the 1940s. It had some funny characteristics to it, one of which was that the terrazzo floors would bounce in certain spots if even the smallest college girl walked past you. It's a handsome brick building with lots of masonry.

The meeting was over and my co-worker - we'll call him Ted - and I had just left the meeting room. Ted was, and still is, a tall, athletic man's man. He's funny and smart, and harbors a deep love for white-water kayaking and mountain biking.

As Ted and I rounded the corner I noticed that the floor was bouncing. I slowed down and looked around for the wee sorority girl who was making the floor seem so unstable.

No sooner had I stopped in my tracks did Ted squeal "earthquake!". Being from the northeast and probably never having been an earthquake, real or drilled, Ted freaked the eff out. He shoved me aside and ran from the building, just like you saw people doing on the news yesterday. He later told me that once outside, he saw the ground swell and heave like the ocean. He nearly heaved himself!

I'd been through several earthquakes, though none this strong. Later on we would find out that it was a 6.8. As Ted ran away, I walked to the archway that was just 5 feet away and waited out the earthquake. There was a table nearby but it was right next to a large glass window. I was safer next to an interior wall anyway.

The building's restrooms were right next to me. I chuckled to myself as college students ran out of the bathroom, tugging up their jeans and begging to be told what to do. "Stay where you are and hold on," I told them.

The shaking went on for some 25-30 seconds, which seems an eternity when you're wondering if the building will fall down around your ears. It didn't. Tacoma is on a foundation of granite. Even though we were 30 miles closer to the epicenter than Seattle, Seattle experienced a great deal of shaking and damage due to its foundation of glacial deposits.

After the shaking subsided I found a phone and tried to call my grandma, who lived about 1.5 miles from my office. I couldn't get a local line and was quickly shooed outside by security staff anyway.

Do you know how weird it is to see a university's population outside all at once? You rarely think about how many people are there - students, faculty, and staff - and it's shocking to see everyone together at once.

I had left my coat and purse in my office when going to my meeting. Facilities would not permit people into the buildings until inspections had occurred: without my purse I was stuck on campus without any way to contact loved ones. Cell phones weren't as ubiquitous a decade ago as they are now. Thank goodness the weather was warm.

I'm still terrible about leaving my purse, and even my cell phone, in my office when I leave the building. It's been a difficult habit to change, though I suppose I should try harder.

When I finally got home later that afternoon, I found my 2 cats unharmed but skittish. Quite a few items had "walked" to the edges of shelves in my apartment but nothing was broken. I was very lucky.

It's been on my to-do list ever since to create an earthquake kit. I think of it each time I hear of one occurring. I put it off for another time and rationalize that we've got so many jars of food at home that we'd be fine. But what about the animals? What about water? What about our son?

Are you ready for a disaster? I certainly don't feel prepared.

Here's a website to help us all get started: http://www.ready.gov/.

I drink vinegar

2011-08-18T21:12:00.000-07:00

I've been drinking vinegar lately.

And no, this isn't a weird pregnancy thing.

Granted, my expanding belly & swollen ankles have made it pretty clear that my condition is nothing short of "delicate". I've not been inclined towatrd any bizarre cravings. In fact I haven't even been that hungry for about the past month since Bean's last growth spurt left him pressed beneath my stomach, significantly reducing the "eat, and eat NOW" signals to my brain.

No, "drinking vinegar" (as a noun) is an old-fashioned beverage called a "shrub".

OK, get it out of your system...

Done?

NPR recently did a story about shrubs, or drinking vinegars. Then a friend of mine who'd heard the same story posted pictures of her concoctions on her facebook page. Being pregnant, unable to partake of my nightly glass of wine, and highly susceptible to edible suggestions, I was game to try it for myself.

A little internet research on the topic revealed that I'm perhaps a little behind the trend:

NYT wrote about them 4 years ago.
Epicurious posted a recipe for a blueberry shrub in 2010.
Marisa of FoodinJars included a shrub in a beverage theme week earlier this summer.

Granted, perhaps it's not a "trend", per se, if drinking vinegars have been around since Roman times. This is the best resource I found on shrubs, both on their history but also on their preparation.

There are two methods to make a shrub: hot and cold. Both are simple. Hot is fast, cold is slow. I happened to have blackberries that were rapidly deteriorating, and blueberries that I bought (unknowingly) past their prime. Both are ideal for shrubs - save the perfect fruit for preserves. I used raspberry vinegar that I'd made 2 years ago and had no idea what to do with... until now!

Blackberry Shrub (hot/fast method)
1 cup blackberries
1 cup cider vinegar
1 cup sugar

Heat berries & vinegar in a saucepan until boiling, boil for 10 minutes. Strain out the berries and add the sugar. Allow to cool. Store in fridge. Mix 1 part shrub syrup to 4 parts water or club soda (or make ratio to your taste).

Blueberry Shrub (cold/slow method), recipe from Epicurious
I recommend mashing the berries before macerating them in the vinegar for a few days. Otherwise you don't get as much flavor from the berries in the syrup. You will have to strain the mixture but the extra effort is worthwhile.

Still feeling adventurous? Here are a few more recipes, these taken from cookbooks dating to the 1800s.

By now you're surely thinking: "Jenn, get to the point: what does it taste like". I think that the flavor profile is a lot like a lemonade: sour and sweet at the same time. It smells faintly like vinegar but not overpoweringly so. It is, as reported elsewhere, very refreshing and addictive. One person wrote that it they felt they'd found their first "true non-alcoholic beverage for adults". I like it because it's not cloyingly sweet.

You can use it as a mixer for cocktails but be mindful of the acid. Imagine a blended blackberry shrub margarita. Oh yum. Blueberry shrub muddled with rum and mint? Yes, please. Raspberry shrub and vodka over ice? Yes yes yes!

The second time I had a glass - and I find myself drinking 2 glasses at a time - I poured more of the syrup than I thought I'd want. It was better with more syrup! It was sweeter and less tart. Strange but good.

If you're looking for something new (but old), want to offer unique non-alcoholic beverages to your guests, or even are searching for a new cocktail mixer, try making a shrub.

Besides, it's kinda fun to see the look on people's faces when you tell them you drink vinegar.

Meditations on love

2011-08-17T17:22:00.000-07:00

I stumbled upon a tragic story quite by accident this past week: food blogger Jennie lost her husband suddenly and unexpectedly. In her 30s, she now finds herself a young widow and single mother of two girls. Jennie recently posted about how she and her husband had made time for a date after he'd finished a busy work project. She talked about the peanut butter pie - his favorite - she'd been meaning to make for him. She talked about how important it is to tell our loved ones how special they are to us because you never know when tomorrow won't come.

Several years ago a friend loaned me the book The 5 Love Languages. In reading it I realized that my love language is "acts of service". In fact, my favorite act of service is cooking. Spending the day in my kitchen to concoct a variety of delicious things is both my idea of entertainment and a way to show others that I care enough to do something special just for them. Besides, cooking is a gift that we can all enjoy.

The challenge comes when people speak different love languages. If one person values physical touch over acts of service, the time I devote to a locally sourced, homemade, multi-course meal will matter less than the accompanying hugs and kisses. The opposite is true: an embrace is more enjoyable if preceded by some choreplay.

When I cook for someone, I spend the time thinking about them, reflecting upon what they mean to me and making sure that what I'm making will be a treat that takes into consideration their favorites. For me, cooking is more than assembling food: it's about translating the love I feel for someone into a tangible, if fleeting, gift.

As I assembled the ingredients for this pie it dawned on me how many of the items in our home came into our possession due to love. Just on my kitchen countertop you see a small colander of new potatoes from my garden, squash from a friend, the battery charger for the camera I gave Gene when we were dating, my grandmother's cookie jar, an orchid a friend gave me for my birthday, and the food processor my mom gave me. Each of these items represents a gift of love.

I suspect that many cooks are acts-of-service people.

Jennie requested that readers make a peanut butter pie to share with their loved ones:

For those asking what they can do to help my healing process, make a peanut butter pie and share it with someone you love. Then hug them like there's no tomorrow because today is the only guarantee we can count on.

I used her recipe, changing it slightly to swap lower fat ingredients where possible (reduced fat peanut butter, no peanuts, graham crackers, neufchatel cheese). You can find the recipe on Jennie's blog linked above, as well as more recipes and tribute blog posts on the Food Network blog.

To the people in my life for whom I cook: every bite is my way of telling you that I love you.

---------------------

p.s. When I took the springform sides off the pie it slowly oozed onto the countertop. What a mess. I slid the whole thing into a deep dish pie plate and froze it. This made for a very tasty frozen pie.

Despite the lower fat ingredients, it's really quite rich. Don't be gluttonous with your first piece as I was: I couldn't even finish it. Me... the pregnant chick... couldn't eat a whole piece of pie. I'm a shame to my kind.

Blackberry-sour cream muffins

2011-08-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

On weekend mornings I arise before Gene by at least 2 hours. I'm enjoying these quiet mornings while I have them, knowing that once our little boy arrives I may well lose the morning solitude for, oh, a decade or more.

My favorite way to pass the morning hours is to brew a pot of tea, make a pastry of some kind, and read the paper with the dog snuggled on my legs. I make some kick ass scones and considered it this morning but ruled them out in lieu of muffins. Last weekend we bought a half-flat of mixed raspberries & blackberries at the farmers market. There was still a half pint of blackberries left and I thought they'd mix into a muffin batter better than into a scone dough.

I started out with my favorite muffin recipe, and tweaked it just a bit to accomodate for ingredients I had in the house and to make them a little sweeter. If you have some lemon zest, throw that into this recipe to make it even better.

BLACKBERRY-SOUR CREAM MUFFINS

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
1/2 t cinnamon
1/4 t salt
1/4 c lemonade
2 T vegetable oil
1 t vanilla extract
1 cup low-fat sour cream
1/8 c milk
1 large egg
1 cup fresh blackberries

Cooking spray

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. Combine all dry ingredients in a large bowl and mix with a fork.
3. Combine all wet ingredients in a measuring cup and mix with a fork.
4. Dump wet into dry and stir until just barely incorporated. Do not overmix.
5. Fold in berries.
6. Spoon batter into muffin tins.
7. Bake for 18 mins or until wooden pick comes out clean.
8. Remove muffins immediately & cool on a rack

By the way, if you're wondering why muffins should be removed from the tin ASAP, it's because they'll steam themselves soft if left in the tins. Nobody likes a gooey muffin (except chickens, which aren't known for having discerning tastebuds).

Cherry soda

2011-07-27T06:57:00.000-07:00

In saying hello to pregnancy, I've had to bid adieu to my daily glass of red wine. I've had a small tipple of wine here and there, but nothing like what my regular routine used to include. I went through a cranberry spritzer phase until learning that the quinine in diet tonic water is not recommended for preggos.

Great. There's only so much water and lemonade you can drink before you're sick and tired of both.

One thing I committed myself to this summer was trying a variety of homemade, non-alcoholic, summer beverages. Being that our summer has been less than warm, I hadn't had much inspiration. I did make the lime syrup a while back and only recently finished it - it was divine with soda water!

Our local paper ran a feature on homemade sodas. One of the recipes was for cherry basil soda. I had a quart of bing cherries in the fridge. It was perfect!

I altered the recipe and method just slightly. First off, I didn't have any basil. Secondly, I was not in the mood to pit a quart of cherries.

I started off by putting a quart of cherries, a half cup of water, and a half cup of turbinado sugar into a saucepan. I used turbinado because I was out of white sugar amd thought honey would overpower the cherries' flavor.

I cooked this for about 5 minutes, pushing on the cherries with a wooden spoon to help break their skins.

I pulled out my food mill and put in the finest strainer attachment. This is because I hadn't pitted the cherries.

The food mill made quick work of the cherries.

Because I wasn't happy with the amount of juice that had been extracted, I pulled out a sieve and worked the rest of the pulp through that. I'm not sure if it was worth the extra dirty dish.

I added the juice of a half a lemon, then put the mixture into a jar to cool and store.

Mix this with cold soda water to your taste. The recipe suggested a ratio of 1:1, which I found overpowering. I liked 1 part cherry syrup to about 3 parts water better.

The recipe also suggests using this syrup immediately. There's a reason for this: the cherries have a very high pectin content. Once they cool and are refridgerated, the syrup becomes a jelly. Try mixing cherry jelly into soda water and you'll find that it looks like blood clots. Ew gross. Just don't.... or stir it really well with a fork to break it up first.

A little yeast inspection

2011-07-24T08:57:00.000-07:00

I wrote not too long ago about cooking with yeast. In talking with people I had found out that many are intimidated by yeast.

The fact is, if you screw it it, you can throw it away and start over. Flour and yeast are relatively cheap.

Here are some photos of an in-progress bread to help you understand what's happening and why.

In the USA yeast is most commonly available in granules. Each granule contains a tiny cluster of living bacteria. I buy jars of yeast because I use it often enough to justify the quantity. If you're just starting out with yeast, I suggest you try the packets before committing to a whole jar.

When hydrated with milk or water (see above photo at right), the granules will dissolve and expose the living bacteria, allowing them to start digesting the sugars in the mix and doing their yeast thing: creating gas.

Frankly, it's the nicest and most pleasant burping you'll ever encounter!

Most recipes will begin with having you "proof" your yeast. This is when you put the yeast and sugar into the liquid to rehydrate it. The mixture should get foamy after about 10 minutes. I only proof my yeast when using a new jar. It's not a necessary step if you are certain that your yeast is good. Be sure to store your yeast in the fridge.

Yeast needs sugar in some form in order to do its thing. I use honey in my breads because, well, I have a half gallon of it. Note that when you cook with honey, you use half the amount of sugar called for in a recipe. This is because honey is twice as dense and sweet as granulated sugar.

When you're ready to start mixing the dough, let your mixer do all the work for you. I just dump the rest of my ingredients into the bowl, attach the dough hook, and let it crank away. It won't look like it's going to come together, but I promise that it will. Keep an eye on it to make sure that the dough isn't sticking to the side of the bowl. It should be wound up around the hook like in the last pic.

After you've kneaded the dough (using the mixer), you need to let it rise. If you want to freeze some or all of it, don't allow it to rise yet. I often make several batches of pizza dough and this is the step where I freeze it in baggies. The morning I want to make a pizza, I pull out a baggie and leave it on the counter. When I come home from work, the dough has thawed and risen on its own.

Before you put the dough somewhere to rise, be sure to lube up the bowl. Pull out the dough and either spray it with cooking oil or pour a little puddle of oil into the bowl. Turn the dough over a few times to make sure that it's well coated. If you don't do this, the dough will stick to the bowl and make removal an impossibility.

This is my secret weapon to a reliable rise every time, even during the winter. It's a baking dish filled with boiling water. The heat from the water warms up the oven to a perfect temp for the yeast to work quickly, and the humidity prevents a crust from forming on the bread. You can even leave the water in the oven when you go to cook the bread.

That said, yeast will make a dough rise even in the fridge, albeit quite slowly. The Mother Earth News no-knead bread that I linked from my last yeast post works on this very principle, as does the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. My beef with the latter is that you have a ton of batter hanging out in the fridge. Gene and I couldn't get through it all.

Check your dough after about an hour to see if it has doubled in size. My risen dough looks rather smug, doesn't it?

I've been on a grilled flat bread kick lately. It's a great summer recipe and is easy to transport. Try it and you'll never look at your grill quite the same way again! In fact, I need to go make some right now.

I hate my attic a little less

2011-07-23T23:12:00.000-07:00

When I bought my house, I was single and had 2 cats. I had recently broken up with the last of a string of Michaels (4 in a row, if you count the weird Brit who surprised me by sucking my toes on our 2nd date when my roommate left the room). I was glad to be on my own.

Eight years later I still have the same 2 cats. I'm also married (and NOT to a man named Michael), and have a dog and 9 chickens. Gene and I are expecting a baby to join our merry little household in December.

On our first Valentine's Day together, Gene and I were watching "The Blues Brothers", which I'd never seen. His cell phone rang and he left the room. He was gone for over a half an hour. When he returned, he was sobbing: his mother had suffered what would be a fatal heart attack. As the only child of a single parent, he was responsible for decisions about her health care. He flew from Seattle to Sacramento the next morning and ultimately made the difficult choice - alone - to remove her from life support.

It was a pivotal time in our relationship and clarified what we meant to one another.
He returned to Seattle after the funeral, then drove with his best friend back to Sacramento to pack his mother's apartment and bring back her possessions.

Those boxes sat in the garage of his rental house then migrated to my attic when we decided to cohabitate some time later.

Gene didn't have the heart to go through the boxes. His mom, whom I never met, collected a variety of things. Blue glass and anything with butterflies were her favorites. Sorting through her prized possessions, even years later, was too difficult. Over the years I've gone through some of her things and taken much of it to the Goodwill. The only things Gene wanted preserved were his military gear, photos, and a couple of heirlooms.

Before Gene moved in, the only things I had in the attic were my wrapping paper supplies, Christmas decorations, luggage, and my spare dining room chairs.

In the years since Gene and I have lived in the same home, the attic has become a dumping ground. First, there was all of his mom's stuff. Then Gene's computer paraphernalia moved in and somehow started having babies. One cable begat a dozen more; a replacement video card left behind detritus of foil pouches, cardboard boxes, tiny screws, CDs, bubble wrap. and mystery cords. None of these items ever was discarded. Hidden amongst all this were military gear, every paper and exam he ever produced in college, books, geeky gamer rules, and about half of our household screwdrivers (WTF?). All of these items were carelessly strewn about on the floor.

My once neat attic looked like something from Hoarders, only without the dead animals, rat nests, or nagging adult children:

(I am really, really embarassed to show it to you, and can only do so because it no longer looks like this.)

The mere thought of the attic threw me into a sour, pissy, resentful mood. In order to set up the nursery, the attic had to be cleaned so that the things from the spare bedroom/office could be sorted and moved to new locations. Gene's out of town and I got rid of nearly everything. I did save a teddy bear from Gene's mom's things for the baby.

After a day of toiling away - thank goodness temps were only in the 70s today - my attic now is respectable. I wouldn't mind of you walked into it at this very moment.

Midway:

About 99% done:

Those boxes in the middle of the floor are all empty and waiting to be recycled. I'll let Gene take care of that - I climbed the stairs to the attic at least a dozen times, which was utterly exhausting at 19 weeks pregnant. Better now than at 29 weeks, I suppose.

My gift-wrapping things are now fully accessible. The rolls are on an old wine rack I wasn't using.

(Don't you loooove the crappy paneling?)

Luggage, miltary gear, and various computer parts are now grouped, visible, and accessible. I've gotta find a bin for the motorcycle gear.

Extra seating for our dining room table is - say it with me now - "accessible". In the nooks behind them are all the photos, as well as most of the Christmas stuff.

I have no idea what's in the trunks.

Here's the view looking back toward the stairs. And yes, this ceiling is quite low. I'm 5'8" and my head hits the flat part of the ceiling. It's not exactly the "third bedroom" the listing agent had promised.

And finally, all my preserving things are stored up here as well: canning jars, kettles, pressure canner, pickling crock, dehydrator, etc. It's not as bad as it looks in the photo. I should be able to sort, arrange, and organize all of this, plus what's piled in the corner you can't see, in less than an hour.

Here's what my kitchen looked like after I'd finished the attic:

My car was so full with donations that I couldn't see out the side or rear windows! I didn't even try to take the recycling or trash: there was simply no more space.

Thank god it's all done. I'm exhausted... but no longer pissy or resentful.

For Norway

2011-07-22T20:05:00.000-07:00

To our Norwegian brethern we give our hearts to share the pain of loss, our tears to cry for your loved ones, and our shoulders to help bear the burden of your grief.

A scary story with a surprise ending

2011-07-19T19:16:00.000-07:00

This story has nothing to do with sustainability, green-living, or raising local food. In fact, the key players are men in their 50s who like to drive enormous gas-guzzling trucks up the sides of mountains. It could have had a tragic ending but it didn't, thank goodness. I'm sharing it because the prologue was so shockingly unexpected that I literally threw up when I heard it.

And that's a good thing.

Last Saturday Gene and I were are having dinner with friends in Redmond. Their home is easily 45 miles north of us, so we don't get up to see them as often as we'd like. They have a lovely yard, an incredible vegetable garden, and are fantastic hosts. We adore them.

Around 8:15p Gene got a phone call from his boss, R. R explained that he and his buddies has been out in the sticks with their massive trucks and jeeps, 4x-ing in the woods outside of Enumclaw (about 40 miles southeast of Redmond). One of the guys, J, attempted a slope that was too steep and didn't make it. His truck had subsquently rolled eight times and he was evacuated to a nearby hospital.

J's friends split up after the wreck. Some went with him to the hospital while others stayed behind to extricate his truck. One guy, C, exhausted himself getting his friend out of the truck, then getting the truck out of the woods. He collapsed and was also evacuated to the hospital.

R was frantic: he needed us to come to Enumclaw because there were still some vehicles up in the woods and he needed help getting things back to town.

We left right away and arrived at the Enumclaw hospital near 10p. Did I mention that Rosemary was with us? Good thing that dog is good in the car!

Gene met up with R, whom we took to a grocery store for something to eat. He's diabetic and in the frenzy of the day hadn't eaten or drank anything. After that, we headed to the logging access road up in the mountains, about a half-hour's drive outside of Enumclaw, to fetch R's rig. It was an uneventful ride and allowed R to come back to Earth after a harrowing day. We dropped him off, made sure he was following us back to the road, and headed home. We arrived at our house near midnight.

It was a long, tiring night, but one that was relatively unremarkable.

PROLOGUE

On Monday evening Gene came home from work with updates on the guys who had been hospitalized. J, whose truck rolled, got a number of staples to close a head wound and had been discharged fairly quickly. C had been kept overnight for observation because the doctors weren't immediately sure what was the cause of his collapse.

Gene: "So.... they figured out what was wrong with C."

Me: "Isn't he diabetic? Is he OK?"

G: "Yes, he's also a cancer survivor."

Me: "Oh no! Did he have a heart attack or something?"

(dramatic pause from Gene)

G: "No, nothing like that. He's fine actually. After he made sure J was on the way to the hospital and had gotten J's truck out of the woods, he realized that his blood sugar was getting really low. He didn't have anything to eat with him but he had noticed that J's truck had a crushed baggie of snacks in it. So he ate it."

Me: (I'm terrible about trying to guess a story's end) "Oh crap, did he get food poisoning or have an allergic reaction to something??"

G: "Well, sorta. C found J's brownies, about 3-4 of them, and ate all of them because he was so hungry..."

Me: (realization dawning...) "... nuh uh..."

G: "Sooo... yeah. C collapsed because J has a medical dispensation to take marijuana to treat chronic back pain."

Me: (starting to chuckel)

G: "Not only that, but when J eats a brownie to relieve his pain, he only eats about a quarter of one. C got about 12 or more doses of medical grade weed when he scarfed down all those brownies. When he called my boss today, 48 hours after having eaten the brownies, he was still flying as high as a kite."

At this point, I was laughing so hard that I couldn't see straight. I started to cough, a fun remnant of the cold I had back in May & June. My coughing turned to hysterical hacking and wheezing. I even threw up a little - sort of a "vurp" (vomit burp) - during one particularly bad coughing/laughing fit. Our neighbors even heard me laughing and coughing!

Lesson learned: do not ever, EVER eat brownies that you find in your buddy's recently rolled truck.

And if you do, for God's sake don't be a glutton.

It's the yeast of your worries

2011-07-10T21:37:00.000-07:00

One of my coworkers is getting married in October. We threw her an early bridal shower, chipping in and getting her a KitchenAid. I procrastinated and didn't get my money into the collection quickly enough, so instead bought her a Beater Blade to go with the mixer. Friends of ours, Rejoyce and Hawley, suggested one to me when I got my own KitchenAid and they were absolutely right in their advice - those things are awesome!

Over a lunchtime conversation recently, I found out that the bride-to-be has never made a yeast bread. Several of our other colleagues agreed: "yeast is scary". I'd never thought about it before. This morning Gene and I were over at friends' house for breakfast and my girlfriend was asking me about the flatbread I'd made for them last weekend. Turns out that she'd never made a yeast bread, either.

In all the times I've made bread with yeast, I've only screwed it up once. That was my fault, not the yeast's fault, and happened because I tried to freeze dough after allowing it to rise. If you freeze it pre-rise, it'll be fine and will behave normally once thawed.

Do not be afraid of yeast. Here are a few pointers for you yeast virgins:

BUYING:

Get the kind that comes in envelopes. Yes, it's more expensive than the jarred kind but by getting just what you need for the first time, you won't waste any if you decide never do make yeast dough again.
Purchase active dry yeast.
Check the expiration date on the packet. Yeast is a living organism - expired yeast is ineffective (read: dead) yeast.

USING

Heat kills yeast but cold does not. If the water feels warm to your skin, it's probably too warm for the yeast. You can always check with a thermometer to be sure: between 100-110 degrees is a good environment for the yeast to proof but don't go any higher.
Here's a video on how to "proof" your yeast. Proofing ensures that the yeast is still alive and that it will be able to do its job later.
Yeast needs sugar in some form to do its work. Honey and sugar are usually interchangeable in many bread recipes, though you'll want to use 1/2 the amount of honey if substituting it for sugar because honey is twice as sweet (by measure) as sugar. I prefer to use honey because I think it adds a depth of flavor, plus it allows me to keep my ingredients local.
Salt slows down the yeast's progress so don't add any during the proofing process. Salt, however, is necessary for tasty bread. Do not - DO NOT - make saltless bread. I forgot the salt once and the bread sucked... bad. It was unpalatable.

If you're ready to dive into baking bread with yeast, check out Alton Brown's recipe for "A Very Basic Bread." It's my favorite go-to bread recipe. I like to add chopped rosemary to the dough and coat the shaped loaf with kosher salt before baking.

Mother Earth News has a recipe for a no-knead yeast bread. It gives different (less firm) results than Alton's but is nice because, well, you don't have to knead it.

In my next post I'll walk you through the steps to make the flatbread I talked about last weekend. We liked it so much that I made it again today and took it to another friend's house - instant hit.

Letter to Oak Park in support of front yard veggie garden

2011-07-08T12:02:00.000-07:00

Some of you know that I grow vegetables in my front yard. Within 100 yards of my house there are 2 other homes that have front-yard veggie gardens, a friend of mine across town has her veggies in front, and I pass at least 2 front-yard veggie gardens on my 3-mile drive to work each day. Preventing someone from growing vegetables in their front yard, as Oak Park is trying to do to the Bass family, is unconscionable.

Why are flowers, grass, or shrubs better than vegetables? Why is a carefully tended organic garden consisting of five raised beds less "suitable" than a lawn that requires high amounts of water and chemicals to maintain?

Photo credit Julie Bass

City Planner Kevin Rulkowski has the Webster definition of suitable wrong. It doesn't mean "common;" it means "satisfying propriety". Follow "proper" in the dictionary and you'll find that it means "marked by rightness or appropriateness". Suitable has nothing to do with "common". In fact, one of the definitions of "common" is "falling below ordinary standards". [raised eyebrow]

You can show your support of the Bass family by joining Take Back Urban-Homesteading's letter-writing campaign. Below is the contact information for the various players in Oak Park who are pursuing this action against the Bass family, as well as a sample letter you can email to them.

Good luck to the Bass family. We're here to support you!

Mayor Gerald Naftaly's e-mail: gnaftaly@att.net
Director/City Planner Kevin Rulkowski: krulkowski@ci.oak-park.mi.us
Council Person Angela Diggs Jackson: adjack@comcast.net
Council Person Paul Levine: paul4oakpark@yahoo.com
Council Person Emile Duplessis: duplessis2@aol.com

You can also sign the online petition at: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/oak-park-hates-veggies/

SUBJECT: Stop persecuting the Bass family for growing vegetables

BODY:

Dear _________,

I am requesting that the City of Oak Park, MI cease its prosecution against its residents, Julie Bass and her family, for the supposed crime of growing vegetables in their front yard.

The bylaw you are citing to pursue legal action against the Bass family - that lawns "shall be planted with grass or ground cover or shrubbery or other 'suitable' live plant material" - excludes neither vegetable gardens nor raised beds. Nor does it provide an adequate definition of the term "suitable". According to the dictionary the word 'suitable' can be taken to mean 'appropriate'. The Bass family's carefully tended garden is certainly more appropriate than any overgrown lawn or weed-filled flower bed.

If Oak Park is successful in prosecuting Julie Bass of growing vegetables, the associated charge carries a maximum sentence of 93 days in jail. It would be a travesty for this mother of six to be sentenced to even a single day in jail for the simple act of growing organic food for her family in her front yard.

By signing this letter of petition I am hereby showing my support for the Bass family, and demonstrating my belief that the City of Oak Park is wrong in its actions against Ms. Bass and the entire Bass family.

Sincerely,

Jenn A.
Tacoma, WA

Storm windows

2011-07-06T06:08:00.000-07:00

Our house was built in 1924, which is on the old side for the Pacific Northwest. It's a Craftsmen style bungalow. When I first started looking at homes my realtor talked about how great vinyl windows are, and many of the listing took pains (hehe... panes) to point out that the windows had been replaced.

Vinyl replacement windows are not all that, and here's why:

You will never, ever recuperate the cost of replacing original windows through reduced energy costs.
Windows today are built as modular units and are meant to be installed as a single piece. If a part of the window fails, you have to replace the entire thing.
The lifespan of replacement vinyl windows is proving to be relatively short, with many vinyl windows installed in the 1980s already requiring replacement of their own.
The average homeowner can't work on a vinyl window without highly specialized tools & know-how.

My house has the original windows, those that were installed in 1924. The glass has bubbles and ripples in it, and it's perfectly lovely. We adore them. In the 8 years since I moved in (Gene moved in with me about 2 years after I bought the house), I've done quite a bit of work on the windows. I'm a pro at reglazing a window, having done it probably half a dozen times. The nice thing with old windows is that they're easy to work on and replacement parts are still readily available.

Despite having single-paned, old windows, our house is not drafty in the winters. Our secret? We have storm windows on all but one of the windows (and hope to get one made for that last window this summer). People always ask me if storm windows are hard to manage.

In short: no.

Our house is a single story and I can reach any window with a plain old 6' ladder. The only tool I need to install or remove the windows, besides the ladder, is a phillips head screwdriver.

(And yes, I detest this color for this house.)

Just use the screwdriver to loosen the wing doohickey. Then you can use the screwdriver, if necessary, to pry the window gently out of the frame. I've got weatherstripping around the edges of the windows, which helps prevent drafts.

Sometimes a chicken will come to supervise.

It helps to label to windows, especially since we only handle them twice per year.

Store the storms somewhere where they'll be safe until the fall. We used to take the storms down in mid-May and install them in mid-October, but with the cold springs we've had these past few years we haven't taken them down until June or even July.

I didn't even break any of my gorgeous pregnant-lady nails.

New England pics - lots of them

2011-07-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

Since I was too lazy to track down the camera cord for the post about our trip, and only later discovered that there was already one hooked up to the computer, here are some belated photos from our vacation. Enjoy!

One of the few kitchen gardens we saw anywhere in New England. This one was right in the heart of historic Salem, MA. In the background you can see the mast of the ship in this next pic.

The Friendship. Salem, MA

This made me giggle. Because I'm 12. (I think it was a liquor store.) Salem, MA

On our way to Vermont I saw these 2 banty hens with 5 chicks. They were so cute that I woke Gene up (he was so sick from a cold & hadn't been sleeping well), who made me turn the car around so he could take pics. What a softie my guy is for chickens.

One of 4 covered bridges we saw in Vermont. This one still allows traffic over it.

Inside of a different covered bridge; the Scott Bridge is foot-traffic only. It was so serene and peaceful.

Weathervane in Providence, RI. We had gorgeous weather that day! But Providence...? Meh, skip it.

The Mayflower II. Plymouth, MA

Tail end of the Bruins Stanley Cup parade in Boston. This is near the Boston Gardens. In all the times I've been to Boston, I've never seen so many people and so few cars. It was a terrific day to go into the city. Right after I took this picture, the team captain for the Bruins rode past us on his bicycle. He's 6'9" - anyone that tall looks funny on a bike!

Interior of Old North Church. You know, where historical stuff happened. (If only she'd read the giant plaque on the exterior of the building, which can be seen from quite a distance... sigh.)

Courtyard outside of the restaurant in Little Italy (North Boston) where we had lunch. Note the puddles - this was in the middle of a torrential downpour that only hit Boston. It was so muggy afterwards!

Faneuil Hall, Boston (what a tourist trap - skip it).

This was overlooking Boston Common, along the Stanley Cup parade route. Note the TP hanging off the window ledges.

Candidate for ugliest building ever (though this one from my undergrad alma mater is also a contender).

My cousin is a pastry chef for a restaurant called Oleana. She brought a whole bunch of delicacies from the bakery owned by the same people. To. Die. For. Above are the chocolate-hazelnut baklava and almond cakes with rose petal jam.

What vacation in New England would be complete without Maine ~~lobster~~ lobstah?

Saw this in an old-fashioned farm store somewhere in New Hampshire. This store was known for its cider donuts, a New England food we don't have in the Pacific Northwest.

Nice milk jugs! Me in Newburyport, MA

Summer BBQ

2011-07-03T10:36:00.000-07:00

After not having felt that cooking bug for quite some time, I awoke this morning with the urge - nay, the NEED - to cook up a storm.

Hrm, could this have something to do with our plans to clean the attic, which is necessary to do in order to clean the back office and turn it into a nursery? This is procrastination at its finest - what better way to avoid work than by cooking? It's doing something that is both productive AND yummy!

As an aside, I really REALLY hate the attic. It's filled with junk, looks like a bomb went off up there, and makes me resentful because it used to be neat and tidy.

So there. I'm going to cook some stuff today. Maybe I can convince Gene to get a start on the attic while I'm preparing various things for dinner.

When we were in Massachusetts an online friend of Gene's invited us to his house for a BBQ. We'd never met him before - which my aunt and uncle thought was bizarre - but accepted their invitation gladly. We had an awesome time! Ted and Teresa are marvelous hosts: funny, casual, gracious, warm, and inviting. We felt like we'd known them for years and it made us regret the 3,000 miles that separate us.

Teresa had spent the day cooking, and that woman is a kick-ass griller. One of the things she made was grilled flatbread, for which she had made 2 toppings: a garlicy bruschetta and a tzatziki. She smoked up a huge batch of ribs and a gorgeous chicken that was the juiciest and most tender chicken I'd ever had. Her secret: brining before smoking. Holy moly it was delish.

Inspired by Teresa, I'm going to make grilled flatbread. Here's the recipe I'm going to use.

Also on the docket is fresh strawberry ice cream. I've bought 2 flats of local berries in the past week and just can't keep up with them, especially since it seems that I'm the only one eating them. I'll probably double the custard in the recipe and also make a chocolate-cherry ice cream. I recently bought a quart of deep red cherries and they'll be perfect in ice cream, along with slivers of shaved chocolate.

Doesn't the Fourth of July just beg for homemade ice cream? I remember making peach ice cream in a noisy, giant ice cream maker as a kid. Do you remember the ones that looked like they had wooden sides (maybe it did), and required constant monitoring of the ice and rock salt? I'm so glad that modern ice cream makers came into being.

Are you making any special treats for this holiday weekend?

-----------
Happy belated Canada Day to our friends to the north! We hope you enjoyed your holiday and visit from the newlywed royals.

New England recap

2011-06-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

Gene and I had a marvelous time in New England. He loved the family, and they loved him. I knew before we ever got tickets that that would be the case. My New England family is so funny, so gregarious, and so different from my (mostly) reserved Washington relatives. It was a complete novelty to Gene and me that they get together because - get this - they like each other, not because some date on the calendar says "gather the family to the communal table because it's a holiday and that's what you're supposed to do".

We jam-packed so much into our 10 days in New England that I'll just give you a few highlights of the trip.

The first and foremost, of course, was telling my family that I'm expecting. They were suprised and delighted, I think because they'd given up on me ever having kids. Gene and I are no spring chickens. My gram and I looked through her genealogical records trying to get ideas for a boy name (no news on the gender until July). The names were pretty awful but at least the history was interesting. Gram surprised us with a baby sweater she'd made and saved for just such an occasion. I'll post pics when the box we shipped home arrives. Gramp told stories about my father when he was little. These are the things you miss with a bi-coastal family.

We took a day trip to Brattleboro, Vermont to meet Allyson. She's a friend of a friend here in Tacoma. Allyson introduced us to her husband and their young son, an adorable toe-headed toddler. Along with their multitude of responsibilities, she and her husband run a shop that sells items to make cheese and beer. I was really pleased by how conservation-minded Brattleboro is - that wasn't the case across much of the region. After we said our good-byes in Brattleboro, Gene and I headed north. We visited the Green Mountain Spinnery where I bought 2 skeins of a luscious grey yarn, which I intend to craft into a stuffed animal of some kind for the baby. The staff graciously gave us a tour of the factory, which was busily spinning wool into a custom job of some kind. It was cool... and numbingly loud. From there we headed north and stumbled upon a covered bridge, the first of four we would see. We eventually wound up in Grafton, where we visited the store for Grafton Village Cheese. I bought a hunk of a yummy year-old cheddar and have since given to our friends who watched Rosemary during our vacation. We ended our trip by crossing back into New Hampshire and driving east through the southern part of that state. It was a long day but one that we enjoyed immensely.

Thank you, Allyson, for suggesting we visit you. Our day in Vermont was definitely my favorite!

Another day, Gene and I drove north along the coast into Maine. We stopped at the outlet malls in Kittery because, hey, that's what tourists do. I wanted to hit the Carter outlet: we took two steps into the store before I was so overwhelmed that we left. So much for that. Other destinations included the Nubble Lighthouse, the most-photographed lighthouse in the world, and Kennebunkport. We oogled all the rich people's houses, including the first President Bush's home (we think he was there, as security was out in force that day). We ate size "small" ice cream cones that were as big as two adult fists put together. We got taffy in a seaside town and laughed about the ubiquitous "lobstah".

We drove to Providence, Rhode Island another day. What a waste of time/gas. At least Gene can now say he's been to RI. We decided to go to Plymouth to see its famous rock (meh) and boat. I wish we'd had time to go to Plimouth Plantation but at $28 per person, that's pretty steep. Instead we sat on a patch of grass, watched the tourists, and basked in the sea breeze. It was lovely. That evening we were invited to a BBQ hosted by a man named Ted, and his wife, Teresa. Gene has known Ted for about a year through the electric vehicle online community but they'd never met. This gracious couple hosted an amazing BBQ for us. Teresa is a fantastic cook who wowed us with her culinary creativity and skill. Everything she made was pretty damn great: smoked chicken, ribs, grilled flatbread, salad, blueberry pie. My mouth just watered at the memory of the garlicy tomato topping for the flatbread. Holy food coma, Batman! We reluctantly said goodbye to this fun couple and hope our paths will cross again.

We did and saw so much. We're already talking about when we can take the baby out to introduce him/her to our family.

New England, here we come

2011-06-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow morning at 12:59 a.m. we're leeeeeeaving on a jet plane!

I'm not sure if I'll get to post while we're gone. We'll be staying with relatives in Georgetown, MA and going on day trips from there. We're planning on trips to Vermont, Maine, and Boston. In fact, we're going to connect with a reader of this blog in Vermont. She's a college friend of a friend of mine here in Tacoma. She and her husband run a cheesemaking and homebrewing supply store in Brattleboro, VT.

The world is so small!

We'll be there over Fathers Day, when there's a big New England clam bake and family gathering planned.

Repeat after me: "lobstah". Laaawb-stah. You got it! Can't wait for Gene to hear my family's accents. Of course, I grew up with them saying that I'm the one with the accent.

In Boston I'd really like to walk the Freedom Trail if the weather cooperates.

It's something I've always wanted to do. As I read about the trail last week I realized that I've seen most of its sights at various points in my life. Because this is Gene's first trip to Boston, it'll be the perfect introduction to all those places: Fanueil Hall, Old North Church (you know... where Paul Revere rang the bell to warn the British that they can't take away our arms), Quincy Market, Little Italy, the U.S.S. Constitution.

I'll have to find the picture of myself on the U.S.S. Constitution when I was 9 and share it with you. If I do, be kind: it was the 1980s.

There might be a BoSox game in the works, also depending upon weather.

We're going to hang out, enjoy time with loved ones, and eat good, local food. Can't wait to show you some of our finds!

Strawberry streusel muffins

2011-06-04T11:19:00.000-07:00

After enduring a long, dreary, grey, and exceedingly wet winter, today's high is expected to be in the mid- to high 70s. It will be the warmest day since last October.

It's one of those glorious days in the Pacific Northwest that will showcase the quirkiness of the people here. Out will come the shorts, tank tops, and glaringly white skin, a shade of which can only be cultivated in this climate. Gene and I will go for a drive in our convertible in typical Washington style: top down, heat on. Fair weather gardeners will wither by mid-day in the heat, then succumb to dreadful sunburns. Our facebook feeds will be clogged with posts from jubilant friends about how gorgeous the weather is.

As for me, I started the morning coughing and hacking. I'm slowly recovering from a cold that's had me in its grips for about a week. It got so bad yesterday that I actually went to the doctor, where I paid a $30 co-pay to be told that I have a cold but can't take anything for it since I'm pregnant. Clearly that was money well spent.

A good friend gave me excellent advice for next time: go to a pharmacy and ask the pharmacist for what I can safely take to soothe what ails me. In the meantime, it's the neti pot and cough drops for me. The consulting nurse told me to make a saline solution, snort it up my nose, and spit it out my mouth to help alleviate post-nasal drip. I tried it and believe me - it's DIY water boarding.

When I let the girls out of the coop this morning I realized that the temp is perfect for a breakfast al fresco, something I haven't enjoyed since last summer. With a fridge we're trying to empty prior to going to New England next week, I realized that the languishing strawberries needed to be used. I vaguely remembered a strawberry muffin recipe from a blog - but arg, which one?? I spent the next half-hour tracking it down.

I finally remembered that I'd seen it on http://www.crumblycookie.net/ (a very good cooking blog, by the way). Her strawberry muffins are made with ricotta, of which I had none, so I replaced it with Greek yogurt and omitted the lemon juice. I wanted the muffins to be streusel-like - hey, I'm pregnant so bear with me - and decided to adapt the topping from Smitten Kitchen's Big Crumb Coffee Cake, which I made last weekend.

Frankly, I'm disappointed with these muffins. In fact, I've yet to find a strawberry muffin that really blew my skirt up. The strawberries sank to the bottom, meaning that the batter was too thin to suspend the berries. If I ever make them again (not likely), I'd replace some of the flour with whole wheat flour to give them more body.

The batter also made 16 muffins instead of 12. I really should have made 18 because they rose and spread across the top of the muffin tin, making them very hard to get out of the tins cleanly.

Criticisms aside, they were tasty. They're not going to last long with the now gooey berries inside of them, and will have to go into the fridge for storage. They'll be very good with some of the lime curd I made tucked inside. I enjoyed mine with some yogurt and a pot of tea in the backyard. The chickens were out, the dog dozed at my feet in the sun, and even the geriatric cats made an appearance for a while. It was very peaceful.

Do you have a good strawberry muffin recipe? This morning's attempt reminded me of why I rarely bake with strawberries. I think they're far better raw anyway. We're leaving for New England in a week and I'm hoping that we don't miss the local berry season while we're gone.

My next project

2011-06-03T06:29:00.000-07:00

There's a reason I haven't done much lately. I've hardly cooked, barely done housework, and knitted only reluctantly. I've felt so listless.

It's been hard to think about much other than this:

It's easier to envision the baby if you imagine an upside down gummy bear.

Gene and I are thrilled to announce that I'm expecting a baby in mid-December. This week marks the start of my 2nd trimester. Because we're not going to share the baby's name until s/he arrives, we'll call it "Bean" while it's in utero.

We've known since early April and it's been excruciating not to say anything. I suspected that I was pregnant right after conception because I felt weird... different... but it wasn't confirmed for a couple weeks. We've been waiting for the first ultrasound before we said anything. We're also trying to keep the news under wraps so that we can break the news in person to my grandparents in New England next week. I even went so far as to temporarily block my cousins on facebook and am praying that they don't read this blog (I don't think they do). I was the first grandchild on my dad's side and this baby will be the first great-grandchild. It's such exciting news to share!

As restless as I've been feeling, I also feel 100% normal. Not a touch of morning sickness, no queasiness, no weird cravings, no freaky mood swings. I was grossed out by raw meat for a week or so, but that's about it. I'm one of those lucky women whose - knock on wood - early pregnancy is easy. Keep your fingers crossed for me. It wasn't until the first ultrasound when we saw the blurry image on the screen bouncing around like an Olympic swimmer that it really hit home: I am having a baby.

Whoa.

My mom is the last of her siblings to become a grandparent, and my dad is among the last of his generation to become a grandparent. Dad is already issuing mandates with the reason of "because I'm the grandpa" behind them. Such as, "we're eating out in a restaurant for Thanksgiving, and we're going to have a private room". At that point I'll be 3 weeks from my due date and I doubt that I'd fit into a booth, so I'm rather relieved about the private room thing. When my mom asked why we're getting a private room for 5 people rather than just eat in the main dining room, he declared: "because I'm the grandpa".

Alrighty then!

I find myself feeling an enormous sense of anticipation, mingled with terror, hope, and excitement. I suppose many expectant parents feel that way. This summer we'll be converting our 2nd bedroom - now an office and storage room - into a nursery. As soon as we find out the baby's gender, we'll start picking colors. We're not going to do a theme room: no arks, dinosaurs, race cars, Disney characters, cartoons, or wallpaper borders. It'll be a simple room that the baby can grow into and develop as s/he develops their own taste in a few years.

The cool thing is that my parents have saved my crib, high chair, and bassinet. We'll pull them out of my folks' attic sometime soon to check their condition and clean them up. That'll save us a few dollars.

What piece of wisdom do you wish someone had shared with you when you were a new parent? If you don't have children, have you heard sage advice that sounded good shared to others?

Has My Pet Chicken gone mad?

2011-06-01T11:40:00.000-07:00

The most recent newsletter from My Pet Chicken mentioned something about a neighbor of Oprah's getting eggs from her. Strangely, I can't relocate the article on the MPC website, nor is there anything on the interwebz about it.

So Oprah has chickens. That's nice. Lots of people have chickens named Oprah. That's nice, too, and ranks just as highly in my top 100 (that is, not at all) daily news bits.

What caught my attention, more than the Oprah mention, was the newest slate of MPC offerings. Has the Oprah association gone to their heads??

Let me tell you how much I love MPC. I ordered some chicks from them two years ago. With just one exception the chicks arrived healthy, the customer service was top-notch, and the adult hens are healthy and beautiful. All in all, I've had great experiences with them. Even their goof of accidentally sending a box of 14 chicks to my office in Seattle was handled well on their side. I did have to ride the bus home - an hour-long trip - with a box of peeping chicks on my lap that day, though.

OK, so back to Oprah and My Pet Chicken. Are they crazy?? Their new product line has two things that seem completely beyond the reach of your normal, middle-income chicken owner. Sure, a bajillionaire like Oprah can drop money on a hobby like it's nothing but what about the rest of us? Will there actually be a market for these items?

First, they're offering an automatic chicken coop door. Anyone who has trudged twice daily to a coop to open it in the morning and lock it at night knows how tedious this chore is. And anyone who has lost birds to predation knows how critical it is. I get all that. But seriously... this product costs $215, or $350 if you want the solar-powered one.

As much as I get sick and tired of this twice-daily chicken chore, I'll keep my $350 thankyouveddymuch.

Their second new product is a solar-powered self-propelled chicken tractor. For the uninitiated, a "chicken tractor" is essentially a portable chicken coop, which allows you to change the chickens' location on your property regularly while keeping them confined.

Just how much does it cost? $2,000. Seriously, two GRAND for a chicken coop that holds just 6 birds. So much for chickens being an inexpensive hobby. I couldn't find shipping costs but I imagine those are extra. Your chickens are going to need to lay a ton of eggs to repay you for this extravagance.

Finally, there's this stuff.

$20 for "chicken caviar". Maybe I'm going through a stingy, cheap-ass stage in my life (probably the case) but chickens don't need this stuff. They might "go berserk" for the chicken caviar, but they'll also go berserk for moldy cheese, a beetle, or a snail. If you want to spend $20 + S&H, go for it. But not me.

The way to a chicken's heart is through its stomach. If you want a "friendlier flock" go to the pet store and buy a few dozen crickets. Or chop up some cheese to dole out. Give them lunchmeat, cheap cat food (it has more grains in it and is pretty good for them), cut up cooked beef kidney or crushed hard-boiled eggs, shells & all. They'll go crazy for anything that's high fat and high protein. They also love breads in any form, leftover pizza, cold onion rings, cereal, chips, berries, melons, and grapes. Don't bother buying treats for chickens unless you have an extra $25 hanging around that you just have to spend.

Learn a second language

2011-05-31T09:21:00.000-07:00

Any time Gene and I watch a movie and there are chickens in the background, we always chuckle about how noisy the movie chickens are. It's such a cliche. Watch any western or medieval movie/tv show and invariably there's a loud clucking flock of chickens somewhere, bawk bawking like the entire flock is laying eggs at the same time: buck buck baw-KAWK!

We got our first batch of three chicks Memorial Day weekend in 2008. Coincidentally, that's also when I met my good friend, Dena. The law in our county states that you must buy a minimum of six chicks at once from feed stores. It's meant to prevent people from buying cute baby animals they can't care for and will eventually kill due to neglect. Dena was advertising on Craigslist to split a 6-pack of chicks. I responded and we've been friends ever since, both of our flocks growing as well. Though Tacoma has about 200,000 residents, Dena and I have found over the years that we know a number of people in common. Small town, indeed.

I digress.

Of that starter flock, Gwen and Nugget are still with us. We now have nine hens and I can tell you that hens are fairly low on the noise spectrum, making far less noise than the neighbor's dogs that never stop barking. Ever. The exception in our flock is the screechy Polish Crested named Beaker. That neurotic bird can make a ton of noise when she's feeling insecure or the others are picking on her.

Last weekend I headed for the front yard to do some weeding and get my veggie garden started. I took the dog - who at some point rolled in something horrific and later required a bath - and allowed the hens to come with us. It takes them a while to build up enough confidence to stray very far from the bushes against the house but invariably a few always do. This time I looked up and saw Gwen and Croquette scratching in the dirt where I'd just weeded. Later in the day Miss Piggy, Curry, and even Dozer joined the dog and me on the parking strip.

I enjoyed the company of the animals while I weeded. The dog kept watch (when she wasn't rolling in stinky compost somewhere) while the hens aerated the soil and did their best to reduce the various bug populations. As I worked I listened to them and realized that I can recognize each individual just by her unique "voice". It reminded me ot an article I'd read some time back that a researcher had discovered that chickens make about 24 different vocalizations.

Without seeing the girls, I can tell you when Animal is getting picked on, when Croquette has found a black beetle (she's the only bird of the whole flock who makes that particular noise for that particular bug), when a broody Beaker has ventured out of the nest, when Dozer is watching the others, when Curry wants to be picked up, when Nugget is alarmed by the dog, and when Gwen is frustrated that I'm moving her away from where I'm swinging a hand tool.

From inside the house we know when an egg has been laid and when the girls are stressed or scared, such as when a falcon is parked on the telephone wire above the yard. In the morning we can hear them in the coop, softly clucking their discontent at being locked up while daylight's burning.

Not only does each situation have a unique sound assigned to it, but each bird has a distinct voice. When Curry wanders into the house we always know when it's her because of her deep "braaaaawkk". Croquette is our little chatty Cathy, constantly cooing and blucking to us. Dozer is also chatty but in slightly different situations.

If you have chickens, spend some time learning their language. You'll come to understand them better and enjoy them that much more. Besides, it's fun to listen to them and know what they're doing just by the sounds they make. I'm not sure I could identify the 24 unique sounds, but I could probably come close.

As I was wrapping up my yardwork chores, my neighbor drove up, rolled down his window, and started to chuckle. I looked up to see what was going on when he said, "you look like Doctor Doolittle with all those animals in the yard with you."

I looked up to see Rosemary at the top of the little slope, surveying the domain. Five hens were tilling the soil of the slope right beneath Rosemary, fluffy butts on full display. And Mira, my 14-year-old black cat, was sitting primly on the stairs, eyeing the hens warily (she hates the chickens with a passion).

The sight warmed my heart and me chuckle, too.

Here are some sample chicken noises:
A broody hen
Hen showing her chicks where food is
The "egg song"
Content hens (eating)
Dust-bathing hens (and this, my friends, is what destroys your yard)

Rhubarb coffee cake

2011-05-28T06:57:00.000-07:00

I love the Smitten Kitchen. A girlfriend turned me onto the blog right before I got married when she offered to bring a Blueberry Boy Bait to our wedding.

It was such a hit that I never got to try it. I've since made - and enjoyed - it.

Ever since I've been a devoted SK follower. Her recipes are seasonal and flavorful. Her posts are not as frequent as they used to be because a) she has a toddler and b) she's writing a cookbook. I'm not sure which takes up more time and energy.

About a week ago I found a baggie of chopped rhubarb in my freezer. Since my recently transplanted rhubarb isn't mature enough to harvest yet, it was a little godsend to discover. As I drifted off to sleep last Saturday night, I had visions of coffee cake fairies dancing in my head.

Since I now get up at the buttcrack of down, easily an hour or two before Gene, I was raring to go and dying to make the Smitten Kitchen crumbcake I'd dreamed about the night before. I had made it once before and undercooked it. It turned out as a disappointingly gooey mess of unmet promises.

This time, it would be different. And different it was.

If you have the patience, this cake gets better with age. Let it sit overnight, if you can, and the next morning you'll have a moist and crumbly cake that's the perfect accompaniment to your caffeinated morning beverage of choice.

Check out Smitten Kitchen's website for the Rhubarb Coffee Cake recipe (which she calls the "Big Crumb Coffee Cake").

Be the way, this is a great recipe to make when you feel like dirtying every dish or bowl in your kitchen. It's a messy thing to make. And don't undercook it!

B-limey!

2011-05-25T06:40:00.000-07:00

The mountain-o-limes I got a couple of weeks ago was not destined in its entirety for lime syrup or the disasterous burnt lime caramel.

With a crap-ton of limes, you can be creative. Yes, I'm bummed about the lime syrup reduction fiasco - that took me a long time to juice - but it's not like I lost a huge amount of money. Oh well.

One thing I made that was quite yummy was a lime sauce for salmon burgers.

Simply add the zest and juice of 1 lime to equal parts mayo and sour cream. Mix well, then spread it on the patty or use as a dipping sauce for fries.

Yummy.

I also made lime curd, using Marisa's (Food in Jars) recipe and instructions for Meyer Lemon Curd. Lime curd, I've discovered, looks and tastes a lot like lemon curd. We happen to have a few eggs these days, so it didn't break my heart to use only the yolks from 6 eggs. The girls happily devoured the leftover whites.

I preserved a half pint og curd to make it shelf-stable. The rest went into a plastic tub in the fridge, destined for breakfast and snacky goodness in the coming weeks.

I still have a couple of limes and plan to use their juice in this Orzo Salad with Spicy Buttermilk Dressing sometime in the next week.

What would you have done with 2 dozen free limes?

When life gives you limes

2011-05-22T17:34:00.000-07:00

A friend at work recently was responsible for a fancy award dinner. She decided to make the 28 centerpieces and that they'd look like this:

They looked pretty good, though toward about arrangement number 15 we realized we were going to run short on the limes. I discovered a hidden talent of stacking limes into pyramids that were hollow. Who knew I could do that?

The next day at work there appeared in mailroom two ginormous boxes of limes. We're talking well over 200 limes. I took home 9 limes that night, and probably another 20 the next day. Here in the Pacific Northwest, citrus fruits do not grow on trees and such a windfall is exceptionally rare.

On a side note, have you ever remarked how shockingly fast anything marked "FREE" disappears from an office?

Once home with my horde of limes, I didn't quite know what to do with them. You see, limes and I have a difficult history. Tempted by their bright green color I often buy 1-2 only to watch them shrivel on the countertop.

I ruled out lime marmalade: too much work, I probably wouldn't eat it, we already have a cupboard filled with jams and jellies, and Gene definitely wouldn't eat it. I finally decided to make a lime syrup and a lime curd.

The lime curd seems a pretty obvious choice, and I'll show you how to make it in another post, but why lime syrup? Making my own syrup was an efficient way to use and preserve all these limes as well as create something practical that I'd actually use. See below the recipe for some suggestions on ways to eat and drink it.

LIME SYRUP
2/3 cup water
1 1/2 cup sugar
2/3 cup lime juice
Zest from 1 lime (optional)

Combine the water and sugar in a pot and bring to a boil. Boil gently for 2-3 minutes, or until the mixture has reduced slightly. It will be rather thick. Remove from the heat and add the lime juice.

Allow to cool, then add the lime zest. If refrigerated, the syrup will keep indefinitely due to its high sugar and acid contents. But just use it, ok? Makes about 1 pint.

Could be made with lemons or oranges, as well.

In France it's common to flavor drinking water with a sweetened syrup. This is mostly for children but adults sometimes do it as well. The lime syrup looks and tastes a lot like lemonade... in fact, I'm having a glass right now!

The syrup can be used as a mixer for a cocktail - imagine it with gin, vodka, or tequila - or stirred into sparklling water and served over ice for a summery beverage. You could use it for sno-cone flavorings, granita, to sweeten a smoothie or a fruit salad, or shaken with some vinegar and oil to create a unique vinaigrette.

----------

A word of caution... The French recipes I found for "sirop aux citrons verts" (lime syrup) instructed me to boil the water-juice-sugar mixture down for 20-30 minutes. I set my timer for 15 minutes. During that time a friend stopped by and we chatted in the living room while the syrup merrily boiled away in the kitchen.

When the timer went off and I went to check on my syrup, I discovered that I had instead made burnt lime caramel. It was not tasty and it went into the trash. What a waste of time and effort to have juiced all those damn limes.

Moral of the story: Content yourself with making a simple (sugar) syrup and don't bother trying to reduce it. In fact, if you want a thicker syrup, start out with less water and... VOILA! Reduced.

My most embarassing moment

2011-05-17T20:09:00.000-07:00

There's a restaurant in town called Infinite Soups. Every day they make some 30 varieties of soup. Last summer I took this pic at the farmers market of their stand:

"Sold out"

Ah, the irony!

In all honesty, their soups are delicious, and the menu has something for everyone, vegans and carnivores alike. The only thing they don't have is a place to sit: this is take-n-slurp only with no dining area whatsoever.

This evening their facebook status read: ""Due to some minor gas issues we will be closing at 7pm Tonight."

Being a twelve-year-old at heart, my brain instantly went there. Haven't we all wished we could leave work early due a a "gas incident"?

In fact, that status reminded me of a "gas incident" I had quite a few years ago. Because I know it'll make you laugh, I'm going to share it with you.

I'd been dating a guy named Mike. Mike's was a tight family comprised of his mom, sister, brother-in-law, and the cat Mike and his mom co-owned. They did virtually everything together and knew everything about one another. They'd accepted me as one of their own and I really liked them all.

Mike was living with his mother while he saved money to buy a house, which he ultimately did toward the end of our relationship. One day around Christmas, we all decided to go out to dinner. We convened at his & his mom's house for pre-dinner drinks.

(Llittle did I realize at that time that they were all raging alcoholics. My alcohol tolerance, normally pretty low, skyrocketed during this relationship.)

The time for our reservation was approaching and it was time to leave. The house-leaving routine was always the same: everyone went out to the rambler's garage while Mike checked that doors were locked then set the alarm.

(I later realized, after he bought his own house, that Mike was not only an alcoholic, but one who struggled with OCD. Part of his unseen house-leaving routine was to check every window 5 times, push the fridge and freezer doors 5 times, turn the oven on/off 5 times, etc. It was pretty debilitating at times.)

I'd had an intestinal gas bubble building for a while and was rather... ahem... anxious to get outside. Mike's sister and BIL were going to take their own car, giving me a brief moment to myself in the garage. The double garage door was wide open and I stood in the entrance and released that painful gas bubble while Mike and his mom closed up the house.

The house locked and the alarm set, Mike and his mother walked into the garage and strode to the car. Suddenly, Mike stopped dead in his tracks, right where I'd farted.

He started sniffing. First a little, then more and more intensely. I watched, wondering what the hell he was doing.

Then Mike called out to his sis & BIL: "Shannon, John! Get over here and smell this!" Their mom got in on the action. I stood a small distance away and watched helplessly while these four people standing in my ass gas, actively and deeply inhaling it.

I heard Mike say to Shannon, "Smell that stink? That mechanic didn't fix your catalytic converter after all. You need to go back and make sure he gets it right. C'mere... smell it right here!" The four of them wandered around the garage as my noxious cloud disapated, trying to get one last whiff of it.

Collectively they agreed that Shannon had, indeed, been taken by a greedy mechanic, and that the only course of action was to go read him the riot act.

Meanwhile, I stood in the frosty evening, silently wondering what to do... besides run far far away. The group turned and looked at me.

In that split second I had a decision to make: I could let Shannon spend the money on an unnecesary mechanic visit - it wasn't her catalytic converter but mine that stunk - or I could fess up. I've always been a terrible liar, besides, the truth of the source of the stench was all but emblazoned across my scarlet cheeks.

I burst out laughing, tears streaming down my bright red face. Gulping huge breaths of air and fairly choking with laughter, I worked hard to regain my composure. I finally was able to sputter that they had been inhaling and examining my own exhaust, not a car's.

How to muck out a chicken coop

2011-05-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

Hey there. Yeah, I'm still around. I've been taking a breather lately and deciding what - if anything - I wanted to do with this blog. After a highly flattering kick in the butt from Karen over at The Art of Doing Stuff, I'm getting back on the horse again.

To be honest, I haven't felt like doing much of anything lately. I've barely cooked, haven't knitted in weeks, and haven't worked in the garden beyond last month's work spree. With the rain we've been having, that last one is kind of a given. This is a busy season at work, with multiple evening events each week. I've had nights where I've dashed home, let the dog out long enough to do her busines, then gone back to work.

(more after the jump)
As for Gene, he's started working at the TTXGP (electric motorcycle) races again. As I type this, he's at the Infineon Raceway outside of San Francisco. This summer he's going to staff races in So California, Oregon, New Hampshire, and Virginia.

The NH race is just 56 miles from my grandparents' home. In the 7.5 years that we've been together, Gene's never met a single person from my dad's side of the family. My dad generously bought me a plane ticket to accompany Gene and we're going to make a vacation of it. I haven't seen my grandparents since 2003, and it's been longer than that since I last visited New England. I'm really excited to visit everyone, and for my husband and family to finally meet each other.

With Gene gone so much, many of the household chores fall to me. I've taken care of the chicken coop pretty much since we first got the little buggers. It's not a hard job but the time of year definitely changes the working conditions. It seems like we've had nothing but rain rain rain lately. The poor hens are stuck in a run that's goopy with mud. We're no longer allowing them into the rest of the yard and it's slowly recovering from the damage they'd wrought over the winter.

OK, that last sentence made me a liar. I let the hens out into the yard while I cleaned the coop because things like garden tools, buckets, and bags of shavings scare the girls. "Scary," they screech as they freak out and popcorn all over the run. It's safer for them to be out of the way, even if it means that they can dig up things they shouldn't for a little while.

Rosemary is starting to enjoy having more grass. In the mornings she gets all worked up and runs around in circles until I offer her breakfast. She's too adorable.

The newly seeded area is starting to fill in nicely. Rosemary's butt is barely visible at right.

The coop was starting to get a tad smelly and was clearly in need of a cleaning. I probably clean out the coop every 4-6 weeks. Here's what it looked like. The shavings were wet, dirty, and matted down.

Animal watches me warily as I prepare to clean out the coop.

Like I said, it's not a hard job, especially with the right tools. Critical to the job are a flat shovel for scraping up the litter that has adhered to the floor, boots, and gloves. I also use a small rake to move the shavings into a big pile. Other than a means to dispose of the crap-filled litter, you don't need much more than that.

I've gotten rid of litter in various places over the years. I've learned through trial and error not to put it into the run: it just cakes up and gets really disgusting. Sometimes I put it into the yard waste bin for the city to take. During the winter I often put it into the garden beds to rot over the rainy months and provide fertilizer in the spring. It must rot, however, and can't be put straight into beds in the summer months because the high levels of nitrogen in the litter will burn or kill plants. I recently created a spot for a small compost bin, which is where this litter will go later. Today, I put it into the yard waste bin because it was raining and I didn't feel like setting up the new compost bin in the downpour.

Scooter really wanted to lay her egg but wasn't happy with all my activity. She eventually got frustrated with me and left the nesting box.

After scraping up the old litter I laid down a fresh batch of pine (never cedar - it's bad for birds' respiratory systems) shavings. I concentrate it under the roost and in front of the door. The girls will kick it around quite a bit so it's not really necessary to be neat or precise. Some people, like my boss, use straw but I've found that it's not only slippery, it makes a huge mess in my car whereas shavings come bagged. The advantages of straw are that you can just dump a pile on the floor and let the hens spread it for you; it's very cheap; and its lower acidity level than pine shavings means it's quicker to compost and put into the garden.

Chickens are surprisingly clean in their nesting boxes, rarely soiling their nest. I only change that litter a few times a year. We use cheap concrete mixing boxes as the liners for the nesting boxes, making clean-up very simple.

Once all was said & done, I put some stepping stones through the run. The run has gotten very goopy so the stepping stones will give us humans a clean(ish) pathway to the coop. Our neighborhood is called "Spring Hill" and you can imagine that with such a high water table, drainage is a bit of an issue even though we're at the peak of the hill.

My final act in the coop was to sling a bag of layer pellets over my shoulder and carry it to the coop.

We love that this feed is manufactured just a few miles from our home!

Nothing makes you feel like a bad ass quite like carrying a 50# bag over your shoulder.

My final final act was to bathe the muddy dog, who'd gotten filthy in the yard while I'd cleaned the coop. A woman's work is never done.

Crying uncle

2011-04-10T18:11:00.000-07:00

I spent much of the weekend doing much-needed gardening, even taking Friday afternoon off work because the rainy weather had given way to a day of relative sunniness. I put in 3 days of exhausting labor but am proud of the results.

Two of the three parking strip raised beds are prepped and ready for spring. The dirt in all three beds settled quite a bit in the past year so I sacrificed one bed to fill the others. I'm pleased to see how healthy the dirt has become: it's filled with wriggling earthworms.

In one of the beds I planted new asparagus roots, potatoes, and green onions. As soon as I get my hands on some strawberry starts, those will go in with the asparagus. Last year I planted asparagus on my front right slope in the hopes that it would be a good fit for that spot.

It wasn't. In fact, not a single shoot has appeared this spring. "Uncle!"

I'm going to just give up on that section of the yard. It's never been a good spot for a garden and is subject to winter erosion. It won't be hard to let it return to grass - it's nearly there. (OK, truth be told I'm only going to give up on the left half of this slope; the right half will host my artichokes, more rhubarb, blueberries, and whatever else I feel like planting there.)

Front yard, right slope

Getting back to the raised veggie garden: the second bed contains over-wintered leeks and celery. To them I added some lettuce, spinach, and bush peas this weekend. I'll do successive plantings in the coming weeks to stretch out the harvests of each. After I get more dirt for the third bed I'll plant tomatoes and tomatillos in it. I'm hoping we'll put in 2 additional beds on the parking strip this spring as well. Likely plantings include parsnips, basil, carrots, squash, eggplants, and other stuff yet-to-be-decided.

Veggie beds on the parking strip

The left slope in the front yard, which is a combo of herbs and flowers, is newly weeded and even got an infusion of plant starts from my grandma's yard.

Front yard, left slope

The backyard, after a winter of being ravaged by chickens, got my full attention on Sunday. Unfortunately my work made me feel like the movie "Groundhog's Day": didn't I just go through this? A year ago I rototilled the large chicken run, planted grass, and put fences around the more vulnerable plants. By fall the grass was gone and many of the plants were barely clinging to life. The hens' larger run was a disgusting mud pit and we still haven't dealt with the drainage issue.

View from back porch

On Sunday I did what I could to make the yard better. I again tilled the soil, this time by hand, raked, and replanted grass. I transplanted the remaining plants to other parts of the yard and left only the shrubs and raspberry plants. The rest will be grass. It'll be good for Rosemary to have a little more room to crap and run. The chickens are relegated henceforth to their smaller run, which is probably 7'x15'. They've been bitching to be let out ever since.

View of backyard from garage toward coop (out of view)

I've officially given up on having a vegetable garden in the backyard. Last summer did me in and I just can't handle the disappointment of it. I tried for several years, years that included some very nice summers, to grow things like artichokes, peas, and green onions. Every attempt was mostly a failure. Last summer was unusually cool and yet the parking strip garden out-performed the backyard's best years. "Uncle!"

View of new cut garden

My former veggie garden has yielded way to a cut flower garden containing mostly things from Grandma's yard. I even got a start from her rhubarb, which I believe was itself a start from rhubarb on my great-grandparents' farm on Fox Island (my great-grandfather gave WA State the 40' of waterfront property where the bridge lands, and if you know Fox Island, the flag pole you can see from that spot was erected by my ancestors). Keep your fingers crossed that it survives. It's always been a prolific plant and I'm hopeful it'll do well at my house.

Has this rhubarb lasted 4 generations?

The new cut flower garden is joined by a birdfeeder from Grandma's yard, and will be bordered by more grass. I had gotten rid of over half of the grass since buying this house nearly 8 years ago, during which time my life has changed dramatically. I hadn't even met Gene when I moved in, and hosted just 2 of the dozen animals that now live here with us. Having a little more grass will make our itty bitty yard seem more open and make it more welcoming to our friends' young children.

I still feel kinda bad about planting grass, though. But sometimes you've just gotta cry "uncle".

Moroccan Food Fest - Seasonings

2011-04-05T20:15:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I heard the new Adele CD on NPR and was hooked: I had to have it. I wanted it so badly that I even put a reminder on my calender for its release date.

When it came time to buy it I decided to go to Amazon.com instead of driving to the Borders near my house. It was one of those penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions that cost me $25 to get free-shipping for a $10 CD instead of paying $15 for it at Borders. Days later I even saw it at Starbucks.

Oh well. I needed a new dog leash, having crunched the latch of Rosemary's old one in the car door a while back. Still not to the $25 free shipping threshold, I threw a mortar & pestle into my cart and checked out. I'd been wanting a mortar & pestle for a long time but this... this is a weird order.

There's a point to this story, I swear.

In this post I'm going to introduce you to three distinct seasonings found in Moroccan cuisine:

Harissa
Ras el hanout
Preserved lemons

When I was researching this blog I got into a discussion with a French friend about harissa and ras el hanout. She insisted they're the same thing. I insisted they're not. The conversation devolved into the equivalent of "nuh-uh" "uh huh", so we agreed to disagree.

But I'm right.

Harissa Paste (from http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Harissa)

1 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp caraway seeds
1 tsp red pepper flakes
.5 tsp salt
4 cloves garlic
1 tbsp paprika

1/4 cup olive oil

cayenne pepper

Toast seeds in a dry skillet until fragrant, roughly 1 minute or less.
Crush toasted seeds and red pepper with a mortar & pestle until powdered.
Crush garlic with salt and spices until this is a thick paste, then add the paprika and olive oil.
Mix in cayenne pepper to achieve the spiciness you desire.

My advice here is to make it spicier than you think you'd want because it's typically diluted in the cooking process. Oh, and read the directions before you start: I didn't and you might notice from the pics above that I started crushing the garlic with the spices then removed the cloves after realizing my attempts at crushing the spices would be futile with the garlic in the way. Oops!

This was my first use of the new mortar & pestle. There's a reason why you never see this tool on "30-Minute Meals". It takes forever. Anytime you see someone using one in a movie, they're FAKING IT. Gosh dangit this take a long time.

Ras el hanout

This is a spice blend which, like herbes de provence or curry, varies in its ingredients and ratios thereof. I found mine at Cost Plus World Market or a few bucks. It won't make or break your meals but lends a new flavor profile worth trying.

Preserved Lemons

I saw so many "recipes" for preserved lemons this winter. It seemed that every food blogger had one. It's less a recipe than a technique. Here you go:

Get 5-10 lemons and a box of kosher salt.
Wash the lemons well, then cut them almost into quarters, leaving the wedges attached at one end.
Fill the lemon with as much salt as it will hold.
Stuff as many lemons as you can fit into a jar. Go ahead: stuff them in there. It'l help release the juice and cover them with their own juice.
Shake the lemons upside down daily for a week or so.
Lemons will be ready to use in about 3-4 weeks.

They're simple to make and last for a long time, Toby gets a little fancier with his recipe than I do - here's his how-to. Marissa from Food in Jars suggests eating them with a spinach salad.

When you're ready to use the lemons, pull one out from the jar, rinse it off, scrape out and discard the pulp, then chop the remaining bits. Throw that into your bubbling pot and enjoy the yumminess they bring to your cooking. We'll use them in many of the stew-like meals I'll feature for the Moroccan theme, like the beef and lamb dishes. I also like to put a whole lemon (rinsed) in the cavity of a roasting chicken.

Oh, and my Adele CD? Gene took it to work and I haven't seen or heard it since (boo).

A Moroccan Feast

2011-04-04T17:27:00.000-07:00

Way back in January Toby from Plate Fodder surprised the bejeebies out of me by asking me if I'd like to write a guest post on his blog. I was honored - I've never met Toby but know his cousin, whom I've met once and maintained a friendship with on facebook - and kinda intimidated.

What would I write about?

January is a good time for citrus recipes but Toby had already covered that. Drat.

There's not much to can in January, save citrus. Dangit.

Ever gardened in January in the Pacific Northwest? It's about as fun and interesting as a cold shower in the dark. Dammit.

My chickens weren't laying in January. Besides, Toby had been there, done that with eggs galore. Doh!

Around that time, my favorite magazine published a recipe for Beef Tagine with Butternut Squash. I tried it, mentioned it in passing to Toby, and the deal was set. I'd write about Moroccan food! Yes, that's it, Moroccan food!

Wait... whu... what? You know: Moroccan food with stuff like couscous and tagines... and, um... couscous.

Oh man, whatever did I get myself into?

To cut to the punchline, here's the final blog post as it appears on Toby's blog.

I intend to elaborate on the post I wrote for Toby and publish a series of posts here. Watch for those this week. It was a delicious journey and I hope you'll explore some of these yummy meals and ingredients.

Imperfect

2011-04-03T16:25:00.000-07:00

Last week Gene worked until 10 or later just about every night. The house got lonely after a few days and I started having weird things for dinner: scrambled eggs with capers and a microwaved potato; a bagel; jalapenos and cheese on Wheat Thins. The problem was that these odd dinners failed to provide a lunch for me the following day and were rather boring.

To rescue myself from boredom, I invited a girlfriend and her daughter over for dinner. We made pizzas with homemade dough. As we pulled her daughter's pizza from the oven, we discovered that I'd made the crust too thin (Gene normally does the crust tossing when he's home). Not only did it stick to the pizza screen, it was undercooked.

As we did our best to resuscitate the little pizza, my friend joked that she was glad to see that I, too, had kitchen failures. "You make things look so great on your blog," she added.

Well, yes, that's true. I don't typically blog about the nuked potato I had for dinner, the weeds run rampant in the yard, or my recent attempt to bake not-risen-enough bread dough with my new convection oven and wound up instead with a hard lumps of crusty dough.

Except that's what pissed me off about other blogs, and was part of the impetus of this blog: the imperfections, the mistakes, the annoyances, the gaps of knowledge. I wanted to write about discovery and share that with you. There are enough blogs out there that make their lives seem perfect, written by people who seem to squeeze 45 1/2 hours out of every 24-hour period. That's not me.

So here goes. Here are some of the nonsexy things I haven't blogged about:

The tumbleweed-sized wads of dog hair lurking under the furniture. The breeder wasn't joking when she said, "A corgi's first job is to shed." For that matter, I haven't told you that my winter coat is hopelessly covered in dog hair. I gave up on that battle and wear my dog hair like an "I love my corgi" bumper sticker.
The fact that my back yard hasn't a single blade of grass in it due to the nine chickens who have eaten, dug up, trompled, or crapped on just about any plant that's vulnerable to their destructive tendencies.
I get tired of cooking and cleaning up all the time. Sometimes if the house has been messy for too long I'll go on strike and refuse to cook until it's better. Those are the nights I call Gene in a pissy mood and tell him I'm not cooking, so he needs to pick up dinner. Were I to blog about those nights, the blog title would read: "Takeout for the passive-aggressive wife".
Knitting is way more gratifying than yard- or housework. Strangers at the grocery store never tell me that my yard looks great but anytime I'm wearing something I've knitted, the compliments flow. Hell, just yesterday I was wearing my new shawl on its maiden outing and a woman stopped me to admire it. Screw the fake humilty: it's gorgeous and I know it. It had better be after I worked on it for 3 weeks.
I have cooking failures:. I burn things, especially since getting the gas oven with its high heat. I suck at making Jello from a box but can make marshmallows from scratch (it's one of life's mysteries). Uninspired or lazy, sometimes I make things that are so boring and/or bland that even a monk would ask for salt.
I'm a fair-weather gardener. Putting on rubber boots and weeding in the rain is not for me. Bleh. And we've had a very rainy winter this year.
We don't have cable but that doesn't stop me from watching too much tv (see the above about knitting and rain).
I crave fast food at times. Wendy's is my favorite because they have the best fries.
We have three rainbarrels, not a single one of which has been set up yet. Don't ask how long two of them have been sitting on the side of the house: I'm embarassed to say but will admit that Gene brought them when he moved in with me. The third one has only been sitting out there for a couple of weeks.

I'm not perfect and don't claim to be. If ever I give a hoity toity impression in this blog, someone call me out on it.

What a crock of crap

2011-03-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

My mom gave me a Hamilton Beach slow cooker a couple of years ago. Sometime last year I noticed that the glaze had crazed. I've seen crazed pottery in the past and so I didn't think anything about it.

However, the next time I took it out to use it, I opened it to discover mold. The mold was growing from between the teeny cracks caused by the crazing. It was white and powdery. So weird.

I filled the moldy crock with hot water, added a splash of bleach, and left it to sit overnight. The next day I cleaned it thoroughly with hot, sudsy water, and left it to air dry for a few days on the counter. Then I put it away.

A while later, I took it out of the cupboard to find that the mold had grown back.

Stupid ass mold.

I bitched and moaned a lot to my mom about that moldy crock.

Then I put the crock aside, meaning to write to Hamilton Beach. My good intentions stretched out over several weeks, which became months.

Christmas came and went, leaving behind a Crock*Pot from my mother.

About two weeks ago, I got it in my craw one day to email Hamilton Beach to complain. I took a ton of photos of the mold, submitted my complaint online, readied myself for a fight, and waited.

The next day there was an email from Customer Service: "We're sending you a new crock. It should arrive in a few weeks." Days later I found a large box on my front porch.

Moral of the story: complain to customer service before complaining to Mom. Kudos to Hamilton Beach for taking care of me!

The old slow cooker is going to a friend of mine. As soon as I remember to put it in my car and take it to work, that is.

Once Upon a Time

2011-03-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a set of copper pots and pans. They had been lovingly acquired, one each Christmas over a period of several years, from an upscale grocery store called "Queen Anne Thriftway". Each one bore the mark of its homeland - "Made in France" - and of the store that had imported them.

For the first few years of their lives, their mistress lovingly polished them. They were proud and shiny.

Slowly, their lives changed. Their mistress decided that it was more important to do something called "commuting" than to maintain their luster. After a few years, they looked like a handful of old pennies.

They continued to slave away in the hope that one day their mistress would be reminded of how beautiful they could be. They had been, after all, the inspiration for the orange-y wall color in the kitchen.

One day a fire-breathing dragon came to reside next to their nest on the wall. They knew that their time would soon be at hand.

They teamed up with the dragon to prove themselves and to remind theiir mistress of why she had purchased them in the first place those many years ago. They distributied heat evenly, simmered easily, and seared new foods while showing that their years working with the electric dragon had left them with solid, flat bottoms.

And so it came to pass that their mistress, while avoiding real cleaning one day, decided to scrub them and return them to their former glory.

The pans and lids and pots rejoiced!

But not the cranky saute pans. They dug in their heels and were kind of jerks about the whole affair.

This pair ganged up in the mistress when she was at her most tired and sore from scrubbing the others. They decided that they had worked too hard to get dirty. They weren't ready to be shiny again quite yet.

She vowed she'd return for them one day soon.

The end.

A tale of eggs & banana bread

2011-03-11T06:44:00.000-08:00

We got a ginormous egg about a week ago. It weighed about 100 grams, which is about 50% larger than our normal eggs.

Here it is next to a medium egg from one of our Polish hens (btw, who says Polish hens can't lay big eggs?).

Some people insisted it was a double-yolker. We don't get those very frequently, so I cracked it open to see what was inside.

That has got to be the biggest yolk I've ever seen. The yolk next to it is a normal size. The big one was probably 1.5 inches across. Massive!

It did, however, make some pretty awesome banana bread.

BANANA BREAD (adapted slightly from CookingLight.com)
1 1/2 cups mashed ripe banana
1/3 cup lowfat sour cream
5 tablespoons butter, melted
2 large eggs
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
3.75 ounces all-purpose flour
3 ounces whole wheat flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Cooking spray
Chocolate chips - optional

1. Preheat oven to 350°.
2. Combine first 4 ingredients in a large bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed. Add granulated and brown sugars; beat until combined.
3. Combine flours and next 3 ingredients. Add flour mixture to banana mixture; beat just until blended. Pour batter into a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan coated with cooking spray. Bake at 350° for 55 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Remove from oven; cool 10 minutes in pan on a wire rack. Remove bread from pan; cool completely.

This is a bread plate I bought for my grandma in Bavaria some years ago. I recently retrieved it when she moved into assisted living. Perfect for a small loaf of bread while paying a visit to friends!

Pancetta and bacon update

2011-03-09T06:24:00.000-08:00

My pancetta started out on February 19 at 1043 grams, or a little over 2 1/4 pounds. I'm glad I wrote down the dates.

As you can see, it's just 868 as of last weekend whereas it should be closer to 730.

Our weather went through a very dry and cold spell. According to what I've read, the meat may have developed a crust on it, which isn't allowing the moisture to escape any longer.

The remedy is to wrap the meat in plastic, put it in the fridge for a few days to allow the moisture in the meat to redistribute, then hang it back up again. And that's what I've done.

My bacon, on the other hand, is a whole other delicious story. Last weekend I cut off a few slices and cooked them on the griddle. The meat is much leaner than store bacon. Nicely done, Lisa!

Gene and I had that bacon with fresh eggs from our girls, Poulsbo bread toast, and blueberry citrus conserves I canned (they're my favorite).

Corned beef & Irish soda bread

2011-03-07T10:21:00.000-08:00

March's Charcutepalooza challenge was to brine something. With a cabinet full of pickled cukes, squash, beans, and cabbage, and Saint Patrick's Day not far off, I wanted to try corned beef.

I concocted the brining mixture a week ago and set my locally sourced brisket for a soak. The recipe called for a five-pound slab but that's a LOT of meat. I settled on one that was a little under three.

BTW, one of the Charcutepalooza rules was to not include the recipes because they're in a copyrighted book. Check out Alton Brown's corned beef, which you could do in five days. Change out Alton's herbs & spices for pickling spice available in the bulk spices section of the grocery store.

If you start yours next Saturday, it'll be perfect for a Saint Patrick's evening meal. Go on, do it! The brining takes just five minutes to get going.

After the requisite five-day period of brining the meat, I rinsed it and put it unceremoniously into the crockpot with some fresh water and about a tablespoon of this vegetable bouillion. Gene and I had a million errands to run, not one of which was in the same part of town. The corned beef was left on its own for a few hours. When we came back it smelled good but was rather tough. I cranked up the heat in the hopes of breaking down the connective tissues before we left for our friends' house.

While that was cooking I whipped up a batch of Irish soda bread, adapted from this recipe. I was completely out of white flour and made it instead with whole wheat. I increased the leavening agents to lift the heavier whole wheat flour. It turned out really well and I'll definitely make it again. This is a bread you could make the night before and reheat.

As soon as it came out of the oven I wrapped it in a linen towel and we dashed to our friends house, bread and beef in hand.

I am relieved to report that the corned beef did tenderize and was quite good. The flavor of the pickling spices had permeated the meat. Our friends, parents of two young children, welcomed us - and the culinary offerings - with open arms. They had made boiled potatoes, carrots, and cabbage. With spicy brown mustard and a local red wine, this was a warming meal shared with good friends.

I regret that I have no photos of our completed dinner. We were enjoying our evening and completely forgot. I can say, though, that the corned beef retained a nice pink color and had great flavor. The kids loved the bread, too!

IRISH SODA BREAD WITH CURRANTS
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 cups whole wheat flour
1.5 tablespoons baking powder
1/3 cup white sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 cups milk + 1 tablespoon vinegar (or use buttermilk if you have it - I didn't)
3 tablespoons butter, melted
1/2 cup dried currants, such as Zante

1.Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Grease a 9x5 inch loaf pan.
2.Combine dry ingredients. Blend wet ingredients together, and add all at once to the flour mixture. Mix just until moistened. Add currants gently. Pour into prepared pan.
3.Bake for 65 to 70 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the bread comes out clean.

Note for convection ovens - my loaf was done at 55 minutes.

The original recipe says to let this cool & wrap overnight. Blah blah blah. Screw waiting for it to cool down. It's utterly delicious served piping hot with butter.

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A year ago today I started this little blog. Thank you so much for reading.

Sausage and chickpea soup

2011-03-02T06:31:00.000-08:00

This is one of the best soups I've made in a long while. It's an interesting combination of flavors that I wouldn't have come up with on my own. The result is a hearty dish that's spicy and fresh at the same time. We liked it a lot.

I'd like to make a vegetarian version at some point, as the sausage adds a lot of calories to this soup. I think that replacing the sausage with carrots, parsnips, and sausage-esque seasonings (think: fennel, red pepper flakes, paprika, parsley) would be delicious.

From Dinner with Julie

Sausage & Chickpea Soup

1 lb. hot Italian sausage
1 head garlic, cloves separated, peeled and chopped
1 pickled jalapeño pepper, finely chopped
1 tsp. cumin
1 quart canned tomatoes
1 cup dried chickpeas, soaked overnight, rinsed and drained
1 quart chicken stock
a squeeze of fresh lime juice
fresh cilantro
1 avocado, peeled and chopped

In a large saucepan or Dutch oven, cook sausage and garlic and sauté until the sausage is golden brown and cooked through, breaking up with your spoon. Add the jalapeño and cumin and cook for another minute or two.

Add the tomatoes, chickpeas and stock and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook for 30 minutes, until everything is cooked through and the broth has thickened slightly. Add a squeeze of lime, season with salt and pepper and serve hot, topped with fresh cilantro, chopped avocado, and extra lime wedges alongside. Serves 4.

LOCAL: chicken broth, tomatoes, pickled jalapenos from my garden, garlic, sausage
NOT LOCAL: Bob's Red Mill garbanzo beans, cilantro, avocado, lime

As an aside, this is a great use for pickled jalapenos. I grew 2 plants on my parking strip and didn't know how hot they would be as I'd never had luck with jalapenos before and it was a cold summer. I gifted a jar to a girlfriend at work for her birthday and she later told me that even her heat-loving son thought that they were really hot! I'm thinking of giving a jar to our department head who was raised in India. Last fall he brought a viciously hot pepper puree of some kind, which made me cough and sputter when a seed affixed itself to my esophagus, much to his amusement.

Poached eggs on toast

2011-02-28T08:54:00.000-08:00

Poached eggs on toast have long been one of my favorite meals. Our hens are laying again after a 6-week period of no eggs. Some of our girls stopped laying in late October or November, meaning that they took over 3 months of vacation. It's about time they started paying their rent again. Not only are we eating our own eggs instead of storebought ones, I'm able to sell eggs again.

Hint... hint... if any of my Tacoma readers want naturally nested, cage-free, free-range, humanely raised eggs from hens with names, let me know. At $4/dozen they're less than at the closed-for-the-season Broadlway farmers market.

And to you midwesterners selling your eggs for $2/dozen, shush. This is the city.

Anyway, poached eggs are simple and quick to make. You can go from conceptualization to digestion in maybe 8 minutes. With the egg already perched on top of the toast, there's no chance of that delicious, runny yolk going to waste. Just a little salt and pepper makes this the perfect meal.

Poached eggs
Eggs
Toast

Bring water to a low boil (hot enough so that it bubbles but isn't violently boiling) in a saucepan. Crack your eggs into a small bowl or cup. Slowly tip your cup into the water and allow the egg to slide in. Since the water is on a low boil, the egg shouldn't go far.

Some people swear by the swirling water method, which I think is pretty silly. Don't bother.

Cook your egg to the desired doneness. For me this took maybe 3-4 minutes. I've always loved runny, goopy egg yolks.

Scoop the egg out of the water with a slotted spoon and serve on hot toast with salt, pepper, and/or hot sauce. Heck, go crazy and dump some hollandaise on there if you need the extra calories in your diet.

Bread: Poulsbo Bread
Eggs: from our yard, I think Beaker & Dozer laid these

UPDATED around 5:20 p.m. - Friends have been asking me on my personal Facebook page how I did this. [shrug] I've never had poached eggs go wrong so it never occurred to me that they could. I think that the key lies in a low cooking temperature. Don't let your water come to a full boil. See this link for pictures of water at various cooking temps.

Something my dad always does, which I never do anymore, is to submerge the entire egg (in shell) into a pot of boiling water for roughly 30 seconds. His eggs always turned out well. In retrospect I think it may function to coagulate the egg white a bit, helping it stay together in the water while being poached.

Ugly soup

2011-02-27T20:45:00.000-08:00

In January, as part of my 2011 resolutions, I was cleaning and ran the oven through a self-cleaning cycle. Little did I know that would be its swan song. It never worked right after that, unable to reach temperatures much above "lukewarm".

Gene and I soon went out and picked a new gas oven to replace the old electric one. The problem is that while we have natural gas in the house for heat and hot water, the kitchen isn't plumbed for gas. In addition, the delivery date for the oven was a couple of weeks out. We've been hobbling along without a functional oven for over a month. As someone who blogs about, among other things, food, that has been a particularly disheartening turn of events. I have bacon to make, dagnabbit!

On the bright side, yours truly is getting a gas stove. I haven't cooked on gas since I lived in France over 15 years ago and I cannot wait.

The other bright side is that this is a convection oven. Yippee! Though, truth be told, I have no idea what that means in terms of how it'll affect my cooking.

Other upgrades include a newish stainless steel over-the-range microwave we got on Craigslist for $40 and a pot-filler faucet to be installed in the near future above the stove.

All in all the dead oven wasn't such a bad thing, though I'm not excited about the cost. Alas.

With no oven we've been grilling on the BBQ and cooking on the stove top. It sucks to BBQ when you can see your breath.

I used up a variety of withering ingredients for this soup and, as the title suggests, it's not going to win any beauty contests but it makes up for it in tastiness and healthiness.

Ugly soup
1 cup dried black beans, soaked and rinsed (ugly ingredient #1)
Olive oil
1/2 onion, diced
3 diced parsnips
4-6 diced carrots
1 cup corn
broth or bouillon of your choice (I used a homemade veggie bouillon, which meant I needed no additional salt)
handful of dehydrated tomatoes (ugly ingredient #2)
1 tbsp cumin
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
3 ounces salt pork (or use any flavorful meat, such as sausage)
Salt & pepper to taste

In a large stockpot, cook onion in ~1 tablespoon olive oil over medium heat until translucent. Toss in the root veggies and cook another few minutes to caramelize and get flavor.

Add the corn, tomatoes, meat, and seasonings, then cover everything with your liquid of choice. Simmer for an hour or longer, depending upon how much time you have.

Serve with a crusty bread to sop up the brothy goodness.

Why is this ugly? First, the black beans turn everything else a murky brown, like the white parsnips and corn. The rehydrated tomatoes swell up and look like rusty-brown globs. They're not sexy, but they are tasty.

Most of my ingredients were locally sourced, with the exceptions being the beans, seasoning, and olive oil. The salt pork is a byproduct of the February Charcutepalooza Challenge, bacon and/or pancetta, and comes from Lucky Pig Farm.

Look what was waiting for me when I got home today (pardon the cruddy cell phone picture).

I plan to break it in tomorrow.

Why to freeze your yarn

2011-02-25T10:59:00.000-08:00

My knitting habit started humbly. I commuted to Seattle by bus for four years, where I became friends with the other riders. Several of them were knitters. I'd wanted to learn how for a long time and one day a woman brought some spare yarn and needles to teach me how to knit.

About a week later I taught myself how to purl. Then purl and knit. Then k1 p1. I started conversations with strangers who were knitting. People chatted me up when they saw me knit. Even a seemingly scary gangbanger type once started talking to me about knitting on a cross-city bus. A whole community had just opened up to me.

I was addicted.

Soon thereafter I was buying books, making scarves, logging onto http://www.ravelry.com/ (find me there: I'm frenchiejenn), and cranking out some major yarn yardage. As any knitter or crocheter knows, the next step is to start building a stash.

Maybe your yarn stash is relatively modest, as is mine. My stash consists of at most 30 skeins of assorted yarns tucked into baskets and cloth boxes like this one. Everything was confined to a single bookcase in our office. Well, mostly.

Photo from kaboodle.com

Last weekend a girlfriend and fellow knitter came over and I was showing her some of my fav yarns. She picked up one of the skeins and held out a tiny white cylinder that was perhaps a quarter inch long.

Photo from evergreenpestcontrol.com

"Jenn," she whispered, "you have moths".

Photo from whatsthatbug.com

As it turns out, I have casemaking clothes moths, as pictured above. Ugh. Left to their own devices, they can destroy a yarn stash.

A freezing-heating-freezing cycle will kill all stages of moth development. Luckily for me, the discovery of moths in my stash has coincided with a deep freeze in Western Washington.

I carefully examined my stash yarns to remove any additional casings I could find. My entire stash got moved outside last weekend and it has stayed there for several days. This evening I'll bring all the yarn into the house for a few hours to warm them up, then return them to the carport overnight to re-freeze.

When I bring the yarn back into the house I'm going to put it in airtight zipper bags in my cedar chest. There's some debate about whether cedar actually repels moths or their larvae but it certainly won't hurt and puts my beautiful Lane cedar chest - a high school graduation gift - to good use.

I've learned a valuable lesson about how to care for my stash. Yarn costs money and regardless of how much you've spent, anything eaten by insects is just really expensive bug food.

On that note, here's my next project yarn. "It's Native" is grown, spun, and hand-dyed entirely in the USA, which I didn't realize until after I bought it. I debated between a delicious apple green and this teal, which ultimately came home with me. At $38 for the skein it's the most expensive yarn I've ever bought. Good thing it's 1000 yards, which will be enough for a lace shawl.

Photo from yarn.com

I'm having a hard time selecting the exact shawl this yarn will become. I'll post pics when I decide.

I'm nearly done with these mittens. I have to proctor an exam today and may be able to finish them during that timeframe.

I knit my name into the lining should I ever lose one, God forbid. My last name is unusual, making me a quick google search away.

How many of you yarn hoarders are shoving your yarn into the freezer after reading this post?

Bringing home babies

2011-02-24T08:46:00.000-08:00

This, my friends, is the time of year when many people start thinking about bringing home a box of peeping babies. In fact, one friend (hi, Steph!) is getting chicks THIS WEEK and another is considering it (Arin - do it!). The local feed stores are starting to advertise chick availability. I love going to the feed stores and watching the massive bins of feisty chicks.

Photo from http://reneefinberg.blogspot.com/

Because we've already done this several times, G-man and I have agreed that we won't get any more chickens until our flock of nine has diminished somewhat. Combine the facts that we we don't plan on killing our hens as their productivity declines and that we carefully protect the girls from predators, and it's going to be a while before we have any babies running around on the kitchen floor.

I miss having baby chicks. We had three batches of them over two summers and they're so much fun. The're sweet and inquisitive, fearless and easily exhausted. They run around chasing each other and then fall asleep standing up only to tip over or splay out. They are, in a word, adorable.

To be fully prepared for having chicks, you'll need a few things:
1. chick feeder and chick feed
2. chick waterer
3. heat lamp with red bulb (Why red? First, the red light is less glaring and since it'll be on 24/7, this is a good thing for the babies. Secondly it helps prevent the chicks from picking at each other because they will pick at blood and feathers, potentially harming weaker chicks.)
4. pine (never ever use cedar with birds) shavings
5. A large box. If you can get a watermelon box from the grocery store, use that. It'll seem too big at first but we found that our chicks could fly up over a foot after a week, and to nearly 2.5' just a week later. We used a massive plastic tote with a screen over the top.
6. Paper towels. Those little buggers crap everywhere. The poops are small but powerfully stinky.
7. a perch of some sort, even if it's just a block of wood
8. a pie tin and parakeet grit - introduce this around a week and the babies will gobble it like mad

My Pet Chicken has an excellent resource for how to take care of your chicks. Read it!

After having raised three batches of chicks here's some of my advice:

Frequent handling of babies will ensure friendlier adults. One of our favorite things was to allow the chicks to fall asleep in our hands and then just hold them. If you're up for it, wrap a towel around your neck and let the babies burrow into it. Keep paper towels close!

Monitor household animals closely. Our geriatric cats liked watching the chicks but weren't interested in hunting them. The same can't be said for younger cats or dogs. A friend's dog killed her chicks in just moments.

If there are chicks running around on the floor, shuffle your feet or don't walk around at all. Curry ran and slid under my foot when she was maybe two weeks old. I was wearing slippers but still injured her foot. The sound she made when it happened was horrifying. Luckily I only lifted a couple of scales and didn't break the bone, but it bled quite a bit and swelled up enormously. She favored her foot for a few days and I felt like a giant lumbering asshole.

Before you give the chicks any non-feed food, present them grit for a day or two. After that, introduce them to grass, lettuce, fruits, berries, tomatoes, scraps of cheese or meat, and anything else you can imagine. If you want to laugh your head off, get a few crickets at the pet store and watch the babies play chicken rugby once they realize it's food. The downside of this is that my chickens now see any plastic bag as a potential source of crickets.

The cute phase lasts only about three weeks. Then one day you'll come home from work and find that your fast-growing baby chickens have turned into Skeksis.

Image from http://www.onlyforever.com/d_KiraPics.html

They grow so quickly that you can literally see differences over the course of just a few hours. Leave in the morning for work and they have just two feathers. In the evening they'll have four. It's weird.

Having chickens can be very rewarding but they are a large responsibility. They're highly amusing and will eventually present you with a regular supply of eggs.

Do you plan on getting chicks this spring?

Bacon and Pancetta

2011-02-21T10:08:00.000-08:00

Charcutepalooza is in full swing. It took me a while to get my hands on pink salt, meaning that I'm a bit behind schedule.

A while back I bought a slab of pork belly from my friend and favorite pig farmer, Lisa. My intent was to cure some pancetta - this was pre-Charcutepalooza - but I was intimidated by the prospect of taking a $20-slab of meat and hanging it up. The pork belly languished in the freezer for a couple of months.

Luckily for me, Charcutepalooza came along, and with it the February challenge to make either fresh bacon or pancetta. It was time for the pork belly to awaken from its deep slumber.

Not knowing what I would do with several pounds of pancetta, I opted to make both the fresh bacon AND the pancetta. As you can see here, I've trimmed the meat to make it rectangular (more important for the pancetta than the bacon). The scraps got cut into chunks and made into salt pork.

For the pancetta I made up the meat rub, a combination of pink salt, pepper, juniper berries, bay leaves, nutmeg, and a few other things. Since freshly ground nutmeg can be a pain to weigh, I put the entire grater into the bowl and zero-ed out the scale. Then I grated my nutmeg and periodically weighed it. When it hit the correct weight, I opened up the grater and dumped its contents into the bowl. This was much easier than grating the nutmeg directly into the bowl.

Wish you could have smelled this.

The fresh bacon called just for the "Basic Dry Cure". It contains sugar, kosher salt, and pink salt. I've found it's helpful to write down the page number & source book so that I can replicate it at a future date. If not, Sharpie comes off with rubbing alcohol.

Here are the meats in their respective cures, bacon on the left, pancetta on the right.

These went into a pyrex dish and into the fridge for a week to cure. I flipped them daily and was really grateful for that dish after about day 2 - baggies will leak. Yuck.

I'm now in phase two of curing these meats. The bacon has to get baked at 200 degrees until its internal temp reaches 150. Unfortunately, I am sans oven until at least 2/23 when our new one gets here. It's gas and the old one is electric so we have some plumbing work to do between now and then. Back into the freezer the bacon went... sigh.

The pancetta, however, is another story. When its week of wet curing was over, I trussed that sucker up. To do this, you rinse off the meat, pat it dry, then sprinkle it with pepper. You roll it up from the short end and then secure it with cotton butcher's twine. The goal is to get it as tight as possible with no air pockets trapped inside. It was kind of fun, actually.

I had this image in my head the whole time. I relate to Mammy in a whole new way now!

The stairwell to our attic goes up from our kitchen. Many people don't notice it because I've hung all my pots and pans on the door. A few years ago I hung wire shelving in the stairwell and call it "the pantry". Since our attic isn't insulated (OK, much of the house isn't), the pantry is the perfect place to hang my pancetta. It's cool, dry, and out-of-reach of our 2 cats and 1 dog.

The meat weighed 1043 grams when I trussed it. The goal is for it to lose 30% of its weight (730 grams). I'll weigh it in a few days to see how it's doing.

In the meantime, I'll be looking up recipes that use pancetta. Let me know if you have a must-try recipe!

I am an urban homesteader

2011-02-20T21:31:00.000-08:00

I used to read the blog put out by the Dervaes family in Pasadena, California. Over time I found that I couldn't relate to them: their garden is the size of my entire lot; they don't have office jobs (or so it appears); they live in a warmer climate where gardening seasons are longer and central heating is not as necessary as it is in the Pacific Northwest; they're vegetarians; the adult children live with their father. They do a lot of cool things but many were not accessible to your average working professional.

I started my own blog, in fact, in response to what I saw as a dearth of information for people like me: people want to live as sustainably as possible without wearing scavenged burlap sacks, quitting their jobs to free up time to make biodiesel, and hooking up their decorative whirly-gig collection to generators to power their ration of 20 minutes of electricity each day.

I don't necessarily think of myself as an "urban homesteader" - the image conjures up (at least for me) something far more organic-carob-eating-hippie than I am - but I recognize that the phrase easily describes my lifestyle. When I talk about my blog and hobbies, I do tend to use that term to describe my values and activities. People know what "urban" means, and they can readily imagine what "homestead" activities are.

Recently the Dervaes family of Pasadena, CA laid claim to the "urban homestead" term by trademarking it. To protect "their" property they have sent 18 "normal and professional" letters to public libraries teaching classes about urban homesteading, a farmers market doing sustainability outreach to city-dwellers, a school, bloggers, business, publishers, and even a radio station. Each of these was shocked to get what is essentially a cease-and-desist letter.

The family claims that the cease-and-desist phrase has been made up to demonize them. If that's the case, why did they get Facebook to block pages that mention or promote urban homesteading on the grounds of trademark infringement? If that's not ceasing & desisting, I must be in need of a dictionary. A quick google search shows that the term and lifestyle has been around since at least the 1970s, despite the Dervaes' claim to be the "Original Modern Urban Homestead".

To the Dervaes family I say this: the community of urban homesteaders is vast and diverse. We have much to learn from and teach one another. Keep teaching your classes, raising food sustainably, and doing good works in your community. You've done a lot of good but in this regard, you're wrong. "Urban homestead", in all its trademarked variations, is not your sole intellectual property, nor should it be. It is a general term that describes a specific type of lifestyle and core beliefs. That you were able to convince the trademark office of your right to the term is shocking. No wonder there's been so much backlash.

Sustainability is still fledgling in many parts of the country. On the West Coast we've been lulled into a false sense of security, believing that everyone recycles, everyone drives fuel-efficient vehicles, and everyone shops at farmers markets. It's not the case. Your actions against those who share your passion for urban solutions to food supply issues have made the hurdles to sustainability that much higher. Rather than encourage us - your fellow urban homesteaders - to forge onward in our efforts, your linguistic land grab has alienated entire communities of people who would otherwise share your ideals.

Keep your trademarks on Path to Freedom (R) and the other phrases that are clearly and obviously specific to the Dervaes Institute activities and outreach. But "urban homestead" is too general a term to call your own: it belongs to all of us, and therefore none of us.

When pink salt is not pink salt

2011-02-18T18:11:00.000-08:00

A couple we know loves salt. They love salt so much that they would get salt licks if it were possible. They collect different salts: smoked salt, truffle salt, flavored salt, etc. They even bought a block of Himalayan pink salt a while back.

It kinda looks like this:

You serve food on it. Supposedly you can cook on it but it causes the slab to degrade faster. They served sliced fresh mozzarella on it, a tasty treat indeed!

Last summer when I decided that I was ready to test making up a batch o' bacon I looked up recipes online and found that many of them called for "pink salt". That stuff is what came to mind. A short trip to a local store and I'd procured a bottle of Himilayan Pink Salt.

Himilayan pink salt is mined and gets its color from the minerals it contains naturally. The color varies from a pale rose to nearly coral. In ground or flaked form it's used just like any other type of table salt. If you buy a slab of it you can serve food on it, as our friends do, or even cook on it.

For some reason I never used it and opted for regular salt, instead. As it turns out, I'd gotten the wrong kind of pink salt.

"Pink salt" (sometimes called Prague Powder #1) is a whole other thing. It's used for curing meats and is a mixture of 93.75% sodium and 6.25% sodium nitrate. It's dyed bright pink so that you don't mistake it for regular salt and accidently poison yourself. Oops!

Pink (curing) salt is more difficult to find, which is why my February Charcutepalooza post is behind schedule. You can find pink salt online but I'm cheap and didn't want to pay $8 to ship a $5 item. I called a local butcher and asked for pink salt. They didn't have it but referred me to a butcher in a nearby town. After choking when they heard how much I wanted - "Is a pound OK?" - they agreed to sell it to me for $5. I guess a pound is kinda a lot but Charcutepalooza does go all year long.

This stuff is screaming, cotton candy p-i-n-k. Here's a side-by-side.

Tomorrow we make pancetta, bacon, and salt pork. It's not as much work as it sounds.

A drawback of urban farming

2011-02-15T09:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday evening I was sitting in my warm, cozy home. It was peaceful and the resident quadripeds were all snoozing. I was working intently on my newest knitting project, Fiddlehead Mittens. I've never done colorwork before and there's a fairly steep learning curve. Hubbie wasn't home from work yet.

The weather forecast was dreary: high winds, heavy rain, and chilly temps. But I was snug as a bug in a rug! The storm hadn't hit the area yet but wasn't far.

All of a sudden the storm arrived with much fury. I could hear the wind howling and could see the boughs of the giant fir tree across the street whip around.

I called G-man to warn him of the weather because he was driving home. He told me later that the car doors felt like they were going to get ripped open as he drove across the Narrows Bridge.

Tangent... maybe you've heard of this bridge? It fell down quite famously in 1940, just four months after its completion. The video is chilling. Check out 1:31... can you imagine the noise that must have made?

According to family lore, my grandfather drove across it that morning. At the time he was a brand new father of a 2-week-old son and weeks shy of his 23rd birthday. After the bridge fell he was stuck on the Key Peninsula and had to drive back to Tacoma via Olympia - a long way.

I digress. After calling the hubster, it dawned on me: I hadn't closed up the chicken coop yet for the night. Our neighbors lost 8 hens to noctural critters this fall and we've been doubly careful about the safety of our girls.

I pulled on a pair of boots, slogged out to the coop, counted heads, filled the feeder, collected the eggs (yay: 3!!) and locked them up tight for the night. The whole time I was thinking: my friends without chickens are at home, warm and cozy in their houses but silly me, I'm out in this awful storm locking up the stupid birds, all for the sake of fresh eggs.

We love having chickens, we really do. And I've talked about the downsides before. But... bluuuurgggg... fresh eggs don't make it suck any less when you're tramping through mud and the rain to shut a chicken coop.

Gnocchi with greens, sausage, and tomatoes

2011-02-14T09:23:00.000-08:00

We ate a LOT of gnocchi after that massive batch. Here's one variation on a theme:

I whipped up a batch of gnocchi and served it with spinach, sundried tomatoes I made last summer, Lucky Pig Farm spicy Italian sausage, and a little bit of home-canned chicken broth to give it a sauce. Lisa's sausage is so flavorful that I didn't even add salt. Get the best sausage you can and give this a go.

This was super fast to make:

1. Boil a big pot of water (the bigger the better because the frozen gnocchi will cool the water down).

2. While the water is heating up, cook up the sausage. Add chopped sundried tomatoes. Garlic and diced onions would be good, too! Stir in a little broth to make a sauce.

3. Once the water boils, throw in a handful of frozen gnocchi per person. When they float, scoop them out with a slotted spoon and drop them right into the sausage mixture.

4. Toss with some greens - any would be good - until the greens are wilted and serve.

You have nommies for me?

Rosemary is like any dog: always underfoot and hoping for scraps to fall. That's how I discovered that she loves frozen blueberries, by the way. Silly dog.

The only non-local ingredient was the spinach. We need our greens! This is a hearty, delicious meal and a little goes a long way. I made it quite a few times, including once for my brother. Serve with a robust wine and ignore the torrential rains outside.

Gnocchi... OH!

2011-02-11T20:27:00.000-08:00

On a recent weekend I got it into my head that I needed to make gnocchi from scratch. I still had some potatoes from my garden and this would be a good way to use some of them. Besides, the gnocchi you buy in the grocery store can be pretty gummy and I knew I could improve on it.

I did some research on recipes and figured that Mario Batali probably knew what he was doing. Besides, his parents have a deli in Seattle and he used to live in Italy - his recipes carry street cred. I decided to use this basic gnocchi recipe, which you can find here.

After skimming the recipe I decided to increase the potatoes from 3 pounds to 4. My reasoning was that 3 pounds of baked or mashed potatoes doesn't go very far and since I was going through the effort of making gnocchi, dammit, I'd make the hell out of some gnocchi.

Fast forward about a half hour... I've peeled, cut up, boiled, drained...

and riced the potatoes.

And then I realized... that's a LOT of potatoes. To give you some scale, these tiles are 4"x4".

I ran back to the computer and checked out Mario's serving size. Double crap: his recipe served 12 but with my additions, it would serve more like 16. Gnocchi dough? More like gnocchi... DOH!

I had to split the potatoes in half in order to work with them.

Seriously, I must have had my head up my butt that day. The recipe clearly calls for oil, which you may notice is absent from the above photo. I made the gnocchi without oil and they were fine but still: it was obviously amateur day in my kitchen.

By the way, that ceramic thing on the right that looks like a motorcycle helmet is a French main a sel (salt pig/cellar), which I bought in Brittany in 2000. I love it and the memories it evokes. When I bought it I also bought 2 kilos (nearly 5 pounds) of French grey salt for some piddly amount like $3. Do you have or use a salt cellar? Once you get used to it you'll never go back.

Back to the gnocchi... The mixing & kneading portion of this program is brought to you by... NOBODY! It's too sticky and goopy and messy, so no photos.

After kneading the dough I separated it into balls and used this plastic thingy to cut it into smaller sections. I rolled them out into snakes and cut those into the final dumplings.

At this point you can leave them as-is or run them over the tines of a fork to give them the characteristic lines of gnocchi.

Here's the best video I could find of the shaping process:

Start to finish the entire process of making gnocchi took roughly 2 hours.

Did I mention this makes a lot of gnocchi?

This made so many gnocchi that I placed them on silpats & froze them on cookie sheets. After they were frozen I threw them into a zip-top bag and returned them to the freezer. We ate gnocchi for quite a few meals, quite possibly more than 16. These are very filling and hearty. I think they'd last a couple of months in the freezer but no longer.

To cook these gnocchi, simply bring a large pot of water to a boil and add the desired amount. When the gnocchi flloat - about a minute - scoop them out with a slotted spoon. Top with your favorite pasta sauce and VOILA gnocchi!

Why did I make gnocchi?

First, I was curious. Could I do it? Would they taste good?

Second, they were cheap to make. The potatoes were from my garden, as were the eggs. Flour and salt are both cheap. And since I forgot the oil they were even cheaper! Gnocchi are kinda pricey at the store.

Finally, they provided a starch that was local. Many of the dark days challenge dishes I've wanted to make were better with pasta. With homemade gnocchi I could confidently say that yes, this starch was local.

I'll definitely make gnocchi again. Like I said, we ate them for a long time and they were delicious and filling. Next time I think I'll enlist the hubbie to help with shaping the pasta, which was the longest part of the process.

I'll post next about how we ate the gnocchi!

It ain't over until the preserved lemons sing

2011-02-08T21:14:00.000-08:00

I was recently invited to write a guest post on a blog I enjoy very much. I focus so much on local cuisine and canning that finding interesting topics this time of year can be frustrating. The only things in season are citrus fruits imported from Florida and Califorina. My 9 chickens have collectively laid a grand total of just 6 eggs in 2011, all of which came in the past week. Toby did a series on eggs a while back anyway.

I chatted with Toby and mentioned some of the tagine dishes I've been trying lately. He encouraged me to blog about Moroccan food,.

The problem is, I know next to nothing about Moroccan food.

It uses lots of herbs & spices, specifically those that North Americans tend to associate with sweet: cinnamon, cloves, and mint.
It often features lamb or chickpeas as the primary protein, though chicken and rabbit are also found. Apparently beef appears in many dishes as well.
Citrus is a common ingredient, especially lemon. The cuisine also relies heavily on dried fruits, almonds, olives, and honey for flavor.
Dairy is rare.
Couscous is a regular side dish.
Many dishes are traditionally cooked in a tagine like this one:
Lamb tagine, photo from wholefoods.com

It seems to have much in common with Greek and Arab cuisines, which makes sense given its location and history.

And now you know as much as I do about Moroccan cuisine.

When Hubbie and I were first dating we went to a Moroccan restaurant in Seattle with some of his coworkers. We all sat on pillows and gorged ourselves on the delicious dishes, which came one after another seemingly without end. I deeply regretted having worn jeans and really wished for a pair of sweats! Food is eaten without utensils, which left me with fingers that smelled of spices for quite a few days.

Just last night I started a batch of preserved lemons. If you don't know what these are but want to try some Moroccan meals with me in the coming weeks, go grab a few lemons, some salt, and a jar to make a batch for yourself. They're shockingly easy to make and the end result is nothing short of incredible.

There are instructions over at Food in Jars for preserving lemons.

Tonight for dinner I tested a chickpea dish for the future guest post on Toby's blog. It was good but I didn't have some key ingredients: cilantro, mint, and lemon zest. Strangely I did have the ras el hanout, a random jar of which I found some time ago at World Market on clearance. Supposedly you can make your own.

The chickpeas, while still tasty, fell a little flat. I can't wait for my preserved lemons to be ready because those will be what makes this dish sing-a-zing-zing, providing a bright, high note that is unmistakeable in any dish supposedly from Morocco.

If you're ready for a culinary trip into the unchartered waters of Morocco, freshen up your spice supply, make up some preserved lemons and get your taste buds' passport updated: we'll be headed to Africa soon!