Author: eponine3

Sixty-Four and One-Quarter

/ eponine3 / 4 Comments

Sometimes, when we have no clue how to do a thing or no clue how it works, we pass it by.

Eh. There it is.

It’s just a thing. We don’t and can’t appreciate what goes into it or what went into it.

Phones come to mind. The electronic inner workings and technological wonders of smartphones aside, even pre-smartphones were a thing we just used. There was no need to understand them – what components were assembled in what manner to produce a device that allowed me to talk to Claudia on the other side of the big pond. We just talked on the phone when we could – and it was wonderful! (Even if it cost a dollar a minute back then!)

Maybe it’s when you have the tiniest bit of know-how or even curiosity that appreciation begins. Maybe the more you know and the more your knowledge grows over time, the more you look in awe at those who have mastered a craft or a skill. The more I learn about bread (and we have been experimenting with a bread that beats anything I’ve ever made!) the more I marvel at bakers. The more time I spend in the garden, the more I admire those who make plants grow beautifully and productively. And the more I measure, cut, level, plumb, square, hold, hammer and saw, the more I stand in awe of builders.

Lincoln comes to mind. On a recent visit, he gifted me with some of his time and expertise. We are putting a roof over the new front porch and, well, most people are fairly clueless about how to do this, myself included. I caught him staring at it on the first day. Can you see his wheels turning?

June 11 Lincoln.2mp.jpg

Sandy and Joe and Samuel and I had poured the footers and put the posts up (hopefully placed correctly because there would be no moving them!) and laid enough decking boards to be able to stand on.

This is the front view of what it looked like just before he started.

6.6.2019.2mp.jpg

And here’s beautiful Willow (and another angle) the day they arrived. The siding is still up, the old, upper, single-pane triangular windows still in, even the gutter and fascia boards still attached.

pre Lincoln and Willow.2mp.jpg

First Lincoln pulled down the fascia board that had hung over the old porch and took out the old windows…

June 12 Lincoln removing glass.2mp.jpg

…then he secured the first horizontal 6×6 connecting the house to the new porch. If you look carefully you can see him staring again. All that staring is not for nothing.

June 11 Lincoln staring.2mp.jpg

At one point he took a break for a Coco-hug, and Eppie and Sandy looked on, so I snapped a photo showing some siding down, windows out (and just sheetrock on the inside), roof rafters in over the old porch and some upper horizontals secured in their notched places.

mid way.2mp.jpg

Within a day or so, all of the upper horizontals were secured and plywood covered the old window openings.

horizontals in place2.2mp.jpg

I thought it a lovely (if sun-splotched) image: the framework framing cutie-pie Rise and Eppie dancing/posing on their last day here. Maybe it’s just lovely to me because I love these girls so much!

girls on porch.2mp.jpg

But I still didn’t see the thing that made me gasp in awe a couple weeks later. Sandy and I kept going after Lincoln left. I laid the rest of the decking boards with some help from Joe and removed the remaining siding and got myself a shiner in the process! (Damn cat’s paw tool came back at me just a bit too fast…)

cat's paw.2mp (2).jpg

Sandy finished the roof over the old porch, prepped/shored up all the soffit boxes and mounted the ledger board and angled (principle?) rafters for the front roof (they attach to the house). We used house wrap as a moisture barrier (not that it had any under that old cedar siding for the last 45 years, but hey, moving forward in a better way…) and tidied up a bit. I began laying out possibilities for half-round steps to soften all these straight lines everywhere.

Just prior to beginning the forward-pointing front roof rafters, Sandy and I were staring at the house from a ways back. In particular, we were checking to make sure that everything (ignoring the windows that will go away) looked centered and correct. We were doing the every-now-and-then long view, an ostensibly purposeful way to pause when it is hot and you need to do something else.

pre rafters2.2mp.jpg

My eye caught the place where the two outer horizontal boards meet in the center. It might be hard to see, but trust me, there’s a line there.

pre rafters2_LI (4).jpg

 

 

Up a little closer now. See?

pre rafters2_LI (3).jpg

That horizontal “board” (singular) is actually two boards (plural) “married” to each other, double thickness for strength (in case you were wondering how two boards could just meet end-to-end like that). The outer one consists of two boards meeting end-to-end in the middle; the inner one spans the joint.

“Just curious,” I said to Sandy. “Is that the exact middle of that span?” I had to measure.

What do you think? Yup! From where the two outer boards join together, moving left to the next post, is 64 ¼” and from where the two boards join together, moving right to the next post, is 64 ¼”. Both lengths are sixty-four and one-quarter inches. Exactly.

pre rafters2_LI (5).jpg

And NOT ONLY THAT. We took a level, laid it across to the ledger board that’s secured against the house behind the horizontal married board(s) (and it was level of course, which is part of why you can’t see it at all), squared it up to the house, made a mark, squared that up vertically toward the peak of the roof and made a line. See that thin vertical line? Lo and behold, dead on! Perfectly centered. Perfectly vertical. Perfectly square.

pre rafters2 (2)_LI.jpg

Maybe this is normal. Maybe it’s just what builders do and maybe they are equally astounded when perfect bread comes out of the oven. I allow for that. But I applaud Lincoln! You don’t learn how to do this overnight. You don’t reach this skill level without putting in a lot of hours, making some mistakes, figuring out how to do it right the first time or how to fix it when you mess up. I am sooooo impressed!

On Saturday Lincoln sent me a photo. “One year ago today,” was all the caption said. A year ago he had just started building his pentagonal, straw bale house in Vermont. From the pile of dirt he was standing on, this is what he saw on July 6, 2018.

Lincoln's house July 6 2018.2mp.jpeg

On the same date in 2019, from the same angle, a house stands, a house he built almost single-handedly. It’s not finished because of the many unconventionalities they wanted to incorporate – e.g. most people put up regular siding and a composite shingle roof, and Lincoln has yet to “mud” the outside of the bales and skin the roof with diamond-shaped metal shingles, to say nothing of building his own windows – but they are happily living in it.

Lincoln's house July 6 2019 (2).jpeg

I never have been (and never will be) the Queen of Exactitude when it comes to cooking but my, oh my, you don’t build porch roofs or pentagonal houses or anything else without respect for numbers and the knowledge of how to use them.  To Sandy, to Ernie, to Joe, to Bradley, to Billy, to Mark and in this case to Lincoln especially – to all you guys who build things – WOW! You have my eternal admiration!

The Oddfellow Bench Comes Out

/ eponine3 / 7 Comments

Eight years it sat in my basement. Eight years not seeing the light of day. It had fit in the old house, but not in this one, so when we moved here, it waited for the outdoor roof now over the old part of the porch. Finally, my bench has a home. Finally, it serves a useful purpose again – a place for Coco the Queen to survey her domain apparently! Between that and my granddaughters’ sweet welcome messages plastered in their style on the door, the entrance to my house evolves more and more to my liking. (Next comes a window above the bench…)

bench and Coco.2mp.jpg

In my mind and in my everyday trot, people are more important than things. But sometimes things tie us to people. Easily more than 200 moons ago, sometime in the 90s, maybe even 80s when we still lived in Vermont, several times a year we would go visit my Aunt Judy and Uncle Richard in southern New Hampshire. They were always warm and welcoming, always made us feel special. They brought out the water toys at the lake or took us all out in the boat or made special meals that I didn’t make at home. Lobster comes to mind, especially Richard saying to my wide-eyed kids, almost in a whisper, just as he was about to plunge them in the boiling water: “If you listen closely, you can almost hear them scream.”

Richard and I used to go garage-saling together on Saturday mornings. As was evident from the wonderful hodge-podge of interesting objects in their house, he liked finding something unique, something you don’t see everywhere. I liked being with him. Richard was funny and respectful and curious and unpretentious. You know how you can be yourself more with some people than with others? Yeah. That’s the way it was with Richard. I miss him so much.

One Saturday, in the days before your GPS told you how to get there, we were tooling around, going from one sale to another. Some people set up their stuff on tables on their front lawn. There were lots of old kitchen items usually – I remember getting a perfect, cake-size, cut glass plate for 10 cents (which unfortunately broke when I stupidly put a hot macaroni pie on it right out of the pan) and a brand-new-in-the-box Atlas pasta maker for $5 that I still have and use. Some people say, “Just go poke around in the garage – you’ll find stuff in there.” Old tools maybe, rusty or obsolete, cracked leather cases, lots of dusty books. This one farmer said, “C’mon with me out t’ the barn.”

On your walk out to the barn, traipsing through grass he probably should have cut some time ago, you wonder what you’ll find in the old barn of an old farmer in southern New Hampshire. This farmer had a barnful of benches – stacks of them. If there was one, there were fifty, maybe more. “From an Oddfellows Hall,” he said.

I should have known. Right then and there, I should have known that a ten-foot-long, solid oak bench in my possession henceforth would have to have come from a place with “ODD” as the main descriptor. It is not a far cry, not even a stone’s throw, hardly a long shot from “odd” to “unboring”!

He wanted $10 for the bench. Thus my association with Oddfellows began. Richard bought one too. We somehow strapped them to the top of the car. He turned around and sold his the following week for $75. I spent time zip-stripping mine, sanding, refinishing, putting a new cover on the seat. We used it in the dining room for years. The navy blue fabric above is second generation under me already, and will change again soon.

For the uninitiated, Oddfellows date back to 18th century England when the major trades like weaving and stonecutting had guilds, kind of an early form of unions. Enter rivalry, pomp and snobbery. The “Masters,” having established successful businesses, wanted/needed to protect themselves from “the lower orders” and set about enforcing new rules about what you had to wear to the meetings – expensive outfits that wage-earning “Fellows” could not afford. Among these Fellows, the more minor trades, the miscellaneous “odd” trades that didn’t have enough people to form a guild of their own, banded together. According to “The Oddfellows: Making Friends, Helping People,” a UK-based website, “In smaller towns and villages Fellows from all trades in a town banded together to form one Guild. The Guildsmen could be called ‘Odd Fellows’ because they were fellow tradesmen from an odd assortment of trades.” Today they call themselves “one of the largest friendly societies in the UK.”

Clearly, Odd Fellows use “odd” in the sense of “varied” rather than in the sense of “weird,” or at least they did back in the day. I have to think that the odder folks among them chuckled at (or even took pride in?) the secondary meaning. Weird works for me!

Who knew? I love that the group of them is not called just “Odd Fellows” but alternatively (no, not Odd Balls!) they use the term “Oddfellowship.” I’m not kidding – this is great stuff! What’s more, its internationally recognized triple-link symbol represents Friendship, Love and Truth. Who can object to that?

Three_linksOdd_Fellows'_emblem.jpg

I should probably look into membership. Last night I found out that there’s even a chapter in my area. Let’s hope I can bypass at least one of the undoubtedly rigorous entry criteria on account of having lovingly refinished that bench years ago, enjoyed and protected it all this time and now proudly display and use it once again. That has to count for something.

According to [citation needed] Wikipedia, “To this day, beyond recreational activities, Odd Fellows promote philanthropy, the ethic of reciprocity and charity,” (totally admirable) “albeit with some grand lodges implying Judeo-Christian affiliation.” (fine with me) “Still largest, the American-seated Independent Order of Odd Fellows enrolls some 600,000 members…” (holy cow!) “…divided approximately 10,000 lodges in 30 countries, inter-fraternally recognized by the second-largest, the British-seated Independent Order of Oddfellows Manchester Unity. In total members of all international branches combined are estimated in the millions worldwide.” (millions!) 

Come join us for some oddfellowship, won’t you? Ha! We do an odd assortment of things in my little world. We come from an odd variety of backgrounds, find odd things amusing and interesting, make odd things to eat, have odd experiences continually, wear our hair in odd ways – not that I wear a flag in my hair every day.

flag in hair.2mp.jpg

Yes, there is a flag stuck in my ponytail! A barbeque at Westminster on July 4th calls for silly oddity, don’t you think? Anyway it might help me qualify. Right??

Umpteen Salad Dressings

/ eponine3 / 13 Comments

I haven’t bought a jar of salad dressing in years. The reasons for this include 1. Cheap runs deep – I can make my own for so much less cost, 2. Fear of the Unknown – I worry about ingredient lists on labels that are too long, lists that contain words I cannot pronounce (and therefore are mystery ingredients, though I am not a nut about this, see below*) and 3. Culinary Whimsy – I like to play with food, making my own concoctions on a whim.

(BTW, Hats off to Robin at Haphazard Homemaker for her recent Berry Vinaigrette Salad Dressing post and the inspiration she gave me to share my own method.)

Salad dressing for me starts with a jar. Pick a jar, any jar. No, not any jar. Pick a jar that fits nicely in your hand. A pint-size mason jar works well. My jar, as you might guess, is not a jar I purchased as a jar but is a jar that was left over from something else, I forget what. Use a jar that came with pickles or capers or jam (or something like that) after you have finished up the pickles or capers or jam. This is my jar. It lives in a specific corner of my cabinet that is just to the right of the stove, where other, handy, easy-to-access things like salt and pepper and (in the non-blazing-hot months) butter also live.

I will explain the ruler.

jar.2mp.jpg

Not including salt and pepper, a given for me, salad dressing includes four components. I will call them the base, the sour, the sweet and the embellishments. I do not always embellish. Like a balloon ride, if you took one every weekend, what would be the fun after a while? I take that back. It’s true that I do not always embellish, but in fact I almost always embellish, somehow or other. Go ahead – embellish to your heart’s content – life is short!! Also, sweet is optional, but allow me to say again: Life is short!! A little sweet cuts the sour, tempers the sour, makes more palatable the sour – that’s how I see it. (Oh, and I would love to take a balloon ride someday!)

You start with a base, meaning your first decision is whether you want your dressing creamy or not. (Possibilities for each of the components are listed in a chart below.) Creamy bases start with yogurt, sour cream or mayo; non-creamy starts with the best oil you can get (at the hotel we called it EVO or EVOO for Extra Virgin Olive Oil). Before we start combining, a word about measuring. I am not the Queen of Measuring – understatement of the year right there – when it comes to salad dressing (or some other things not presently at hand). I do, however, have eyes that see reasonably well. They, combined with the jar, have proven a perfectly adequate measuring tool for me. Thus the ruler, just to demonstrate.

Imagine there are lines on the jar. Does anyone remember the bottles that people had for Wish-Bone dressings back in the day? I think it was Wish-Bone, but the company history on their web page doesn’t note this development, so I am perhaps wrong. In any case, they had little lines/marks on the side: Pour oil up to this line, then vinegar up to the next line, then pour in the packet of seasonings, put the cap on, shake it up and dress your salad. That’s what I do: I pour in the base, then the sour, then the sweet up to the lines on the jar that I “see” because I have done this often enough. Feel free to mark your jar with colored tape or whatever works for you. You can of course buy a “salad dressing jar” with markings already on it, but maybe their markings don’t represent the proportions you prefer, and proportions are different for different dressings. Your call.

Lest you think I measure minimally or haphazardly (no offense, Robin!), please understand I did not invent the eyeballing of salad dressing ingredients and I don’t hold a candle to Claudia or my mom when it comes to winging it. Claudia puts her various ingredients one at a time into a coffee cup, then stirs it up with a spoon. Mom does not use a cup or a jar (to this day, far as I know). She just puts the lettuce, cukes, whatever into the bowl, opens the bottle of oil and pours some – in a zigzag manner – over the top, the same with the vinegar, and then takes the salt canister (the big one with the spout) and again zigzags over the top of the bowl, shakes some pepper in and tosses it up. She never uses a sweet element but I always love her salads (and Claudia’s too – oh, you want to drink the dressing that’s leftover with hers, that’s how good it always is!). It’s all good.

As with many things that are both spectacular and inexact, when you are tempted to think about the quantities, think instead about proportion. I use about the same amount of base as sour, almost always. And again that much sweet when the sweet is maple syrup (probably because I like/love(!) the flavor it adds). When the sweet is honey, I use less. When it is straight-up sugar, I don’t use much at all, a teaspoon or so. You don’t need much. But to me, a little bit of sweet cuts the sourness/ sharpness of the vinegar just enough to bring the whole salad to another level. Same as a bit of salt can make all the difference.

Some people, some recipes, suggest more base proportional to the sour, some have no sweet at all (love you, Mom!!) or just a touch of sweet, some just a hint of salt or absolutely-must-be freshly ground pepper. The point here is that you will make your own salad dressing, and it will be exactly the way you like, with the components you like, in the proportions you like.

You just have to play around a little to figure out what that is. And then practice. It might be best to consider the chart below, decide what sounds good to you, try it, try it again, try it till you feel comfortable playing with a slightly different combination or proportion. Experiment, play, practice, practice, play, experiment…

For an example (and only an example), I will show a basic dressing, one that I use quite often. Assuming a salad that will serve three or four people, and using olive oil as the base, apple cider vinegar as the sour and maple syrup as the sweet, I start with pouring the oil into my jar up to a level I know to be about right for that amount of salad. Then I add about the same amount of sour, then about the same amount of sweet (a little less, it usually turns out to be, but again, inexact here!). More or less of any ingredient changes the result slightly – play around and figure out what you like.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Once I put in the oil, vinegar and syrup in the jar, I add salt and pepper, put the cap on the jar, shake it up, pour it over my salad and toss. Voila! Quick and simple and yummy.

If you use base or sweet components that are non-liquid (like sour cream, yogurt, mayo, sugar or jam), spoon it into the jar. Then add the rest and shake like mad. Note: if/when you use jam, you might want to break it up a little (with a fork or the back of a spoon) before you start shaking so it will end up evenly distributed in the dressing.

All right, I tried making a chart and then converting it to the right format so I could insert it here, plain and simple, but these things are not plain and simple for me so, forgive me if this is less pretty, but here are lists instead.

To dress a basic salad of lettuce, tomato, red onion, cucumber, sweet pepper (and whatever you put in it), consider the following choices:

BASE
(extra virgin) olive oil (EVO)
other oils (grapeseed, canola, etc)
(plain, unsweetened) yogurt
sour cream
mayonnaise

SOUR
vinegar (cider, red, white, balsamic, rice, etc)
lemon juice

SWEET
maple syrup
honey
jam (any berry, fig, etc)
sugar (brown or white)
boiled (reduced) apple cider

EMBELLISHMENTS
pickled cucumbers or pickled anything else (mushrooms, artichokes, okra, beets, asparagus, beans, etc)
capers
dried fruit (raisins, craisins, dried cherries, etc)
herbs (endless possibilities: basil, oregano, thyme, etc)
grapes (cut in half) or other fresh fruit like apples or strawberries
olives
cheese
ham or salami
pepperoncini

Some good combinations (and don’t forget salt and pepper):

  • EVO, cider vinegar, maple syrup (on a leafy green salad)
  • Sour cream/plain yogurt, lemon juice, bit of sugar (on shredded cucumbers)
  • EVO, cider vinegar, oregano (on cooked, peeled and shredded beets)
  • Sour cream/plain yogurt, cider vinegar, sugar or honey, embellished with raisins (on broccoli salad or shredded carrots)
  • EVO, red wine vinegar (on leafy green salad embellished with olives)
  • Mayo, cider vinegar, bit of sugar, embellished with celery seed
  • EVO, balsamic vinegar, embellished with basil
  • EVO, rice vinegar, any herbs you like…

My guess is (my hope is!) that for some of you, making your own salad dressing becomes normal, commonplace, routine. You pick a jar, use the jar, find a special place for the jar. You buy your olive oil and vinegar in large bottles (way cheaper that way), transferring portions at a time to smaller bottles that are easier to pour from. You figure out over time which combination(s) you like best and make a habit of reaching for your jar when the time comes to dress the salad.

Have fun! Good luck! Enjoy every bite!

_______________

*Re: I am not a nut about mystery ingredients: It has always seemed impracticable on my end and surely must irritating on the other end when a “diet” is so restrictive that I/you/anyone can’t even go to a neighborhood barbeque because the food there would no way be within the scope of what’s currently allowable/ fashionable/ desirable. My son Lincoln recently gave his own version of Anthony Bourdain’s enjoy-food-and-don’t-impose-your-inane-restrictions-on-everyone-else: “Nothing wrong with having your own preferences or boundaries, but I follow the 80/20 rule on that. 80% of the time (or more) I can control what I eat but I allow for 20% to be determined by the people I’m with or the social situation.” No one likes a fanatic. So as much as I can, within reason, I eat what I feel good about, what seems reasonable to me, but if I am out and about in a restaurant or someone’s home, and they didn’t make that bread with the best flour or there’s some ingredient I wish weren’t there, it’s probably not going to kill me.

Glorified Onion Soup

/ eponine3 / 2 Comments

It all started with a pork roast. I had a small one in the freezer last week and needed something easy on a day of porch-building. Pork roast is easy: Thaw, top with chopped fresh garlic and salt and pepper and bake at 400F until just done (between 145F and 160F depending on how done you like it). Bake a few Yukon gold potatoes at the same time, make a simple gravy and serve with a salad. Done!

Except for the four slices leftover.

I put them in a small container along with the leftover gravy. Saturday came along. Mom and Jerry were coming for dinner and I had yummy, somewhat special (on account of being less often served) “rouladen,” which I realize now I intended to post the recipe for – half a year ago in my post about Mom’s bracciole! – but forgot! I promise to show you how to make them soon. The eleven yummy (but little) rouladen I made, even with spaetzle and salad on the side, seemed tight for five people. So what else can I make??

When you have onions like this growing in the garden…

garden onions (2).2mp.jpg

…you should be thinking of onion soup – but I didn’t. I was thinking of the rouladen and that I didn’t have enough. That was the problem!

In such situations I would sometimes just add a baguette or another salad, but somehow soup came to mind. Not onion soup, just soup. Starting a meal with soup is lovely, even in the summer. I took out a marvelous SOUPS & STEWS* cookbook my daughter gave me a few years ago (she particularly likes the Greek Lamb Stew on page 125). I leafed through the book but nothing jumped at me. This is possibly because I was determined to use that bit of leftover pork roast and none of the recipes I saw asked for four slices of leftover pork roast with gravy. Imagine!

soup cookbook (2).2mp.jpg

Onions. For me it often comes back to onions and this time was no exception.  Onions you have on hand (or in the garden). Onions are so amazingly delicious in so many ways. Looking through a book of great soups I couldn’t help but remember the onion soup I had at Mt. Vernon at the end of last summer – the day it rained almost the whole day and my feet were wet through and oh, how good that soup tasted! Hey, why not just finely chop the leftover pork roast and add it (along with the gravy) to onion soup? The gravy will act as the bit of thickener that made the Mt. Vernon soup so marvelous.

That’ll work. In the morning I chopped enough onions to make about 1 ½ cups and sautéed it slowly in 6 tablespoons of butter in my Dutch oven pot. When I say slowly I mean this took about an hour, at least an hour, maybe a little more than an hour. S – l – o – w – l – y. Anyway I got busy working on the porch. Shortly after lunchtime, as we were cutting the last of the decking boards – the edge pieces that require the jigsaw and more precision and measuring than the rest – I asked Samuel to finish the rest. I couldn’t switch gears at that point and come in and make food.

“Add enough water to fill the pot about halfway,” I told him. “Get some rosemary and thyme from the garden. I don’t have any chicken broth in the freezer so just add three each of the chicken bouillon cubes and three of the beef. Oh, and a splash of sherry. And chop up that leftover pork roast real fine and throw that in there too.”

The vagueness of my instructions was not clear to me. Some rosemary and thyme? Let’s see, the leaves from two 6” lengths of rosemary and enough thyme to fill in the balled-up palm of your hand. Chop up the pork real fine? Smaller than bite-size. I suspected it would break up smaller than that as it cooked (it did). A splash of sherry? Say about two tablespoons. Uh, Mom, I don’t see sherry… Right, well you’ll have to use that good port. It had been perfect in the Mt. Vernon soup…

port.2mp.jpg

Now don’t forget that the pork had been cooked with fresh garlic, so that flavor was in there too. This concoction simmered away s – l – o – w – l – y all afternoon while I was outside trying not to be afraid of the chop saw. By the time I came in at 4 or so, the soup had reduced some, though I can’t tell you how much. Oh, also, I had had corn on the cob this past week and one ear was leftover. I had sliced off the kernels into a small container. Saw those in the fridge and said Sure, why not? and added them to the soup as well. Salt and pepper to taste of course.

It wasn’t the prettiest soup, but oh, Onion Soup with Pork and Corn (and those spectacular fresh herbs) is soooooo tasty!!

onion soup with pork and corn.2mp.jpg

If I had been smarter, if I had had more time, if I did not still have half of my brain thinking about soffit boxes and decking boards, etc, etc, I might have thought to make some cheesy croutons and sprinkle them on the soup before serving it when Mom and Jerry came to dinner. Oh well!

Wouldn’t you know, when I took out the SOUPS & STEWS cookbook to take a picture of it for this post, I said to myself, I bet there’s a recipe in there for onion soup. Sure thing, and not one but four recipes, including one that includes beef! Okay, not leftover pork roast with gravy, but still! You might want to try it.

recipe for beef and onion soup (2).2mp.jpg

Oh and by the way, after the meal with Mom and Jerry, I had leftovers of everything except salad. As my mother would say, at least I knew I had enough food!

_____________________________________

*Big Book of Soups & Stews by Maryana Vollstedt, Chronicle Books, 2001.

Best Brownies Ever

/ eponine3 / 5 Comments

After making such a fuss about chocolate the other day, I thought it only right to post my favorite brownie recipe. To me they are the best brownies ever because they are not straight-up brownies. They combine the best, richest, most-perfect-brownie-texture brownie part with two other elements that set them apart: dried cranberries, with their sweetness/zing and oatmeal cookie, with its delicate crunch and isn’t-it-kind-of-good-for-you draw.

stacked.2mp.jpg

Basically you make what seems like a very small amount of oatmeal cookie dough, press it into the bottom of the pan, bake that for ten minutes while (in the meantime) preparing the chocolate part, to which you add the cranberries, pour it over the now-baked-for-ten-minutes cookie base, and bake for another 40 minutes. Done! Chocolate heaven awaits!

This is now the third blog post that expounds on a recipe found in my Williams Sonoma Cookies & Biscotti cookbook,* clearly a favorite from my library.book (2).2mp.jpg

I am old enough to have actual cookbooks on a shelf, and they are dear to me! I copied the recipe into my loose-leaf recipe binder at some point, possibly afraid I’d loan the cookbook to someone and then – horrors!! – not have the recipe on hand when nothing in the world will due except these brownies.

My version, slightly simplified (i.e. this is the way I do it). Note the five stars at the bottom!

recipe2 (2).2mp.jpg

And the book’s version (with metric equivalents, which I know is much appreciated by some of you and I’m sorry I don’t always convert…):

recipe (2).2mp.jpg

As noted above, the combined oats, brown sugar, flour, baking soda, salt and melted butter doesn’t seem like much, certainly not in the bowl, and even when you transfer it from the bowl to your buttered, foil-lined pan…

oats in pan.2mp.jpg

…but with your fingers you can spread this out to all corners. My pan, by the way, is a wonderful Kaiser springform pan that Claudia gave me years ago and is also perfect for my chocolate cheesecake. But I have not always made this recipe in this pan. An 8” or 9” square pan works just as well. The wonder of the foil lining is that you can just lift the entire thing out when it has finished baking and cooled slightly.

So here is the oat mixture spread out…

oats spread.2mp.jpg

… and here it is after the ten minutes in the oven.

browned oat base.2mp.jpg

During the ten minutes that the base is baking, you wouldn’t want to be idle of course, so that’s when you make the chocolate part. A better idea is to melt the ½ cup (one stick) of butter and the two ounces/half package unsweetened chocolate (I use this Baker’s brand) …

chocolate (3).2mp.jpg

…before you even start with the oatmeal part.

choc in pot2.2mp.jpg

Do get it all the way melted before you let it cool a bit, and then add it to the rest of the other ingredients. BTW I do not use the espresso powder as the original (note not my copied version) suggests, though you are welcome to.

The combined eggs, sugar, flour, vanilla and salt will cream together beautifully with a whisk – is there anything more basic in baking, anything more sublime? (I do this in the same bowl I mixed up the oatmeal cookie dough in. If a stray, left-behind oat happens to mix with the chocolate part, it is not the end of the world.) Then you add the melted-and-slightly-cooled chocolate/butter followed by the cranberries and bake it 40 minutes longer until it looks about like this.

baked.2mp.jpg

After ten minutes or so of cooling, I unhinged/took away the side part of the pan (or you can lift it out holding the foil) and peeled the foil back from the sides like this.

foil pulled down.2mp.jpg

I cut through it right then and there because I wanted you to see the side view.

inside layer.2mp.jpg

And then I cut it into 36 little squares. I am playing with numbers for my own benefit here, you see. If the brownies are smaller, I can have two, but if they are bigger, I will tell myself that one is enough. And you know how it is (or trust me that this is how it will be with these brownies) – you will want more!

cut.2mp.jpg

Voila! I hope you like them. And even if you don’t, for some reason I cannot fathom, your friends and family will! Being as rich and moist as they are, these brownies also travel well – I sent them on a Thursday a few weeks ago to my friend Fred in Kentucky; they arrived on Saturday and he waited till Sunday to eat them – how a person could wait, I have no idea, but that is another conversation.… He ate them with his coffee for breakfast and called them delicious 😊.

______________________________

*Some of you might recall the Lemon-Anise-Almond Biscotti and the Chocolate Chip Walnut Biscotti.

Caught in the Good Sense, Caught in the Bad

/ eponine3 / 1 Comment

I didn’t think my iron had a flashing light. You know, the kind that is meant to warn you it’s still on and you haven’t used it for a while and it’s about to automatically shut off. Anyway I was sure I had unplugged it. But as I got into bed last night, I saw the unmistakably repeating on-off-on-off of a small light in the far corner of my room.

Normally the iron lives in my closet in its own place. Telling this story forces me to admit that I didn’t put it away when I was finished with it yesterday. (I wasn’t feeling well, truth be told, and spent a good deal of the afternoon on the couch, blah, blah, blah…) Anyone who’s been here knows I am far from an OCD housekeeper, but I do like things in their place, and I do – 99% of the time – put the iron away. At the very least, I unplug it. You’ll have to take my word on that. Yes, it was still out (wet noodle!), but no way did I leave it plugged in.

What was the light then? I live in the woods and it’s pretty dark outside at night unless there’s a bright moon. No one sees well in the dark, and I see even less well on account of having no glasses on or contacts in at bedtime. But I can see a flashing light, even if it’s very small. My laptop flashes, visible only when the rest of the room is very dark. It’s so incessant and annoying that I will usually put a pillow over it if it’s in my room at night. But my laptop was not in my room last night.

An airplane, I fleetingly thought. Airplanes have small flashing lights, right? But they are not stationary. An airplane would be 1. Much higher in the sky and 2. Moving. Airplane idea quickly dismissed.

I was tired. It was after midnight and I needed to get some sleep. I closed my eyes and tried to forget about the light. But I saw it inside my head. And I saw it when I opened my eyes again to check if it was still there. On. Off. On. Off.

A silent cry for help? A tiny UFO?

I know: A fairy trying to get my attention! Yoo-hoo! Over here! (This is apparently what happens when you are not feeling well and end up on the couch a good part of the day watching a show that’s set in 18th century Scotland! Outlander, do you see what you are doing to me?!)

Finally I couldn’t stand it any more and got out of bed to investigate. I followed the weak but steady flashing light and my heart dropped when I got to it. Some might say it’s ridiculous to feel emotion at seeing a firefly caught in a spider web, still alive, still trying, but I confess – I felt emotion! I wanted to put the poor, struggling thing out of its misery. Alas, this was not in my power. The web was outside and I was inside. I would need a tall ladder and more energy than I had in me at that hour. I had to let it go. A silent cry for help indeed!

My phone camera has a time delay. It doesn’t take the photo the very moment you tap the white dot, so I knew my chances of catching the momentary light of the poor, trapped firefly were super slim. But somehow this worked! I caught it! You can see the light. I caught it on film, we used to say (when film was a thing) – the good sense of caught. The spider caught it in the bad sense.

firefly caught_LI.2mp.jpg

Funny how this happened the very day the men came to take down the truncated red oak. It stands about 40 feet up, stripped of all limbs, and has that gaping, splintery wound down its lower half on the side that faces the woods. The climber put on his cleats and used ropes to shimmy up the trunk, intending to buzz-buzz it piece by piece in log length from the top, and lower them one by one to the ground.

19 (2).2mp_LI.jpg

The gaping wound we knew about, but it was not the only weakness. Higher up, he found holes filled with tree fluff, an indication of rot and disease. And the lean was not insignificant. The 140-pound climber with his gear was enough weight to cause considerable swaying. He made the decision that this work was too dangerous and came down.

Is the tree safe enough for now? I asked him. “For at least a year, maybe up to five,” he said. “Without branches, in its present state, it can’t catch wind and likely won’t fall on its own.”

It’s pathetic. Poor tree.

“But it will sprout branches,” he told me. “It wants to save itself and knows it needs the nourishment it gets from having leaves. It will do what it can to maintain its necessary internal circulation. Over time though, the new branches might form a kind of sail. By then the fungus that’s growing on the backside will have weakened it more. Between the sail that could take it down and the fungus that could eat it up, it’s going to die.”

Wouldn’t it be better to put it out of its misery? I asked.

“Yes, that would be better than a slow death.”

Taking the red oak the rest of the way down will require a bucket truck again, he said. This time, I knew, it would be on my nickel, a bigger nickel than the climber would have cost. I’ll have to think about this.

Twice yesterday I wanted to put a living thing out of its misery. Twice it was not within my power. Twice I was reminded that some things we can do, and some things we…just…can’t.

Sunshine Blogger Award

/ eponine3 / 19 Comments

Monday was a milestone day for me, celebrated (in my dreams) with a new pint of Ben & Jerry’s Pfish Food – oh, how wonderful some of that would be right now. It was a good day for a milestone (despite the ice cream remaining a dream) because I was sacked out on the couch most of the day on account of the army of ants that grossed me out on Saturday and made me move all those oak clapboards in the hot sun on Monday. Yes, my heat exhaustion was definitely their fault and the milestone perked me up in a way only Pfish Food would also have had the power to do.

silkie9.18.2mp

The milestone I celebrated was that the number of views on my blog on June 24, 2019, exceeded the total number in all of 2018, setting me up for a 100% increase by the end of the year. This is more than a little bit surprising to me because I know I’m all over the map with this blog, which I expect is not the smartest way to build and/or keep a following.

But unboring means I can’t write about one thing only, like only chickens or only cooking. Instead I jump all around and have fun with things like skinks, mums, brisket, pink boots, creepy garden statues, silly dogs, puzzles, biscotti, Aquaman (and other superheros), chocolate cheesecake (n.b. chocolate cheesecake), museums, meatloaf, spiders, screwdrivers, monkey bread, quilts, beet salad, girls and aprons, prickles, spaetzle and people who are 100+ years old (“At 100” being my most popular post so far by far, btw! Who would have ever guessed that??). My blog is kind of like coming to dinner at my house – you never know what you’re going to get! A prize to anyone who can tell me which posts all the images in this post come from.

gnome cr

I mention the milestone only because the exceeding joy of it was today exceeded by Mona of Wayward Sparkles  who nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award, which blew my mind. Thank you, Mona!! I am shocked, honored and utterly discombobulated by this news. Mona’s blog is so fun, so real, so interesting, so hilarious – I don’t hold a candle to her! She has a big heart and big talent and I know she, also a recipient of this award, will be hugely, monumentally successful in all of her writing endeavors.

SUNSHINE-BLOGGER-AWARD.jpg

Receiving this nomination comes with some rules (which look more like requirements to me, but what do I know?). No free lunch in blogger-world apparently. I need to

  1. Thank the blogger who nominated me. I already have and evermore will thank Mona. Thank you, Mona!!
  2. Figure out how “Answer the questions” (technically the second requirement) and “Nominate new blogs to receive the award and in this case, ask them to list 5 to 10 random facts about themselves” (technically the third) are two separate things and then do these two things. Writers write, right? They are generally pretty good at it. This is not totally clear writing, just saying. I know Mona didn’t come up with the list of rules, but since she sees these as essentially one rule/requirement, I guess I will too. See my random facts below.
  3. (which is technically 4. but you know how these word programs know better than you do and put the numbers in automatically – it would not let me make this #4) List the rules (which still look like requirements to me) and display the Sunshine Blogger Award. Can do.
  4. (technically 5.) Notify the nominees about it by commenting on their blog post. This I can do too, though if I were in a quabbling mood I would I would make that “… by commenting about their blog post.” Whatever. Good thing I’m not in a quabbling mood.

Coco ingognito (2)

Nothing is said about the order in which these things must be done. Therefore allow me to say Thank you, Mona!! again and create an mildly unboring path here by ignoring the given order and jumping to 4/5, i.e. the nomination of other great blogs which I will do in the order in which I started following them. I will return to 2/3, the random tidbits part.

Lisa’s Favorite Places “My Love of…” Lisa loves to travel and has made me aware of so many places in the U.S. that I knew nothing about like naval yards and memorials and wineries and parks and small museums off the beaten track. Her photography is excellent too – how the sky and the water can be that blue or the wooded pathway through the park that serene, I don’t know! Thank you, Lisa!

Fresh Hell Sarah has a way with words that sets her apart and will very likely bring her great fame as a writer. She is not afraid of any topic, even darker ones that are harder to express. In both poems and prose, she hits the nail on the head, leaving me contemplative or assured or intrigued or hysterically laughing! She has also written a wonderful fantasy novel called The Turning (check it out on amazon). Thank you, Sarah!

London Life with Liz Liz takes you on a tour of London: museums, restaurants and tea houses, famous historical sites, etc, making me see what’s special about each one, making me want to go to each one! I have never been to London but when I go there I will follow all of her recommendations. She makes every place sound so interesting. Thank you, Liz!

Rachel Mankowitz Rachel write about her life: her adorable dogs, her clearly terrific mom, her aspirations as a writer, her struggles resulting from a difficult childhood, her career path, etc. She puts gentle and wise words to things like child abuse and drug addiction, helping many readers I’m sure understand these things better than they otherwise would. She has also written a novel called Yeshiva Girl (also amazon), a great read I in turn shared with my fellow CASA volunteers. Thank you, Rachel!

Rob Gradens Rob impresses me with his honesty. Life sucks sometimes and Rob has been dealt some sucky cards. Nonetheless he is embarking not only on a gigantic reconstruction of his house (after a fire) but is also just as determined to reconstruct the rest of his world. He is not afraid to discuss what doesn’t make sense to him, what irritates him, confuses him, helps him. Thank you, Rob!

Mona, I would nominate you too if I could! But River beat me to it…

laying shingles2 cropped

Some random things about me:

  1. If there are 31 or 45 or any number of ice cream flavors to choose from, and chocolate is one of the flavors (which it better be, otherwise something is wrong with this picture), I will choose chocolate or something chocolate-based, like Pfish Food. (When I asked Samuel to name a random thing about me, his mother, he said the first thing that came to mind was how I choose chocolate ice cream above all others. Yes! Then I read him this part.)
  2. I find ironing both relaxing and satisfying. I know, I know, most people consider it a chore and avoid it at all costs, including setting multiple timers so they can get to the dryer at the exact right time to be able to take their clothes out in perfect shape. Give me soft and pure cotton, even linen (did you say linen? you never get all the wrinkles out of that stuff!) ANY DAY. I iron my pillowcases.
  3. I remember the first poem I wrote. I was in third grade and my mother read it and handed it back to me and said: You wrote this? (which was the end of any praise on the matter and led me to think it was not a good plan for me to continue along the poetry track, and now you all can agree I was wise to stop at one poem!)

On Turkey Day we eat a lot
Our tummies get so puffed
I thought it was supposed to be
The turkey who got stuffed!

  1. I didn’t like kids when I was a teenager. I found them annoying and un-fun. I babysat only for the money. Then I had five of my own and found more love in my heart than I ever knew was humanly possible. Go figure.
  2. I forget stuff sometimes. Once I forgot that I had placed the most recently dead hamster (probably the one my son Bradley tried to give a bath to), all wrapped up in a paper towel, on the mantle above the wood stove in the winter (when the stove is going constantly), and was puzzled about what that horrible smell was a few days later…
  3. I pronounce marry different than merry and Mary. Do you?
  4. I wrote a book called The Story of Keswick Hall, a hardbound, dust-jacketed, glossy-paged, full color 100-year-old history of a local private home/mansion that became a country club and then, after being practically pulled from the scrap heap, a world-class resort (currently closed for renovations). I am almost completely sold out of the second printing. I also published Vanishing History: Ruins in Virginia and My Dog is a WHAT?
  5. I homeschooled my kids for fifteen years. Our adventures included skinning a raccoon, traveling to national parks in the U.S. and castles and cathedrals in Europe, performing Charlotte’s Web and several Shakespeare plays, skiing and ice skating weekly (Oct-Mar) and building trenches in the backyard snow to simulate WWI battles. We had a blast! I want to write a book about this someday.
  6. I run an Airbnb cottage on my property called Golden Hill. In Virginia people name their properties. It’s a thing. I have 366 reviews so far.

By the way my frozen blueberry/milk/maple syrup concoction stood in nicely for the Pfish Food tonight!

And again, Thank you, Mona!!

mums gigantus (2)

Too Hot, Too Much, Too Oblivious

/ eponine3 / 8 Comments

I did it again. I forgot how strong the sun is. I forgot its power, my own limits, the bigger picture. In my mind was one thing only: Get those clapboards under the tent before it rains.

As if rain was imminent. As if a little rain would have hurt the wood. As if one more day would matter.

I don’t even remember for sure who said it – Lincoln, it had to be, when he was here recently being an amazing porch-roof-framework-builder. It was his first visit since we completed the chicken coop last year.

coop June 24 2019.2mp.jpg

We took a little walk one morning to look at it. I must have mentioned that we had been so excited to side the new coop with clapboards made from the oak timbers that his brother Bradley, also an expert builder, had milled with his Alaska saw mill seven or eight years ago, how well they matched the siding of the original coop (on the right), how like a fortress/palace the whole chicken compound is – no predator will get my birds!

We walked around to the back and I offhandedly mentioned that the leftover oak clapboards were resting under that tarp, and yeah, I really needed to move them one of these days. You don’t want to leave them there, Lincoln said. They need to be where they can be stacked right and get air.

See the tarp behind the coop? The clapboards are under it, neatly stacked. I was sure everything was just as we had left it last summer. Unsightly it is anyway though, look at that. Yes, moving those boards moved up the list. Air or no air.

oak still behind the coop_LI.2mp.jpg

Air, yes. What happens when there is not much air? In my experience, things either suffocate or thrive. Sometimes, of course, not enough air is deadly. Sometimes, there’s just enough to hold in the moisture and create a fabulous, perfect, life-enhancing environment. Fabulous depending on who or what you are, of course. Hold that thought.

So Lincoln and the girls came and went, and my sister Lynn and her husband Billy came and went, and that’s when you turn your attention to the things you can’t do when you have company. Like moving oak clapboards. Saturday was the day.

I’m the grunt around here. I can screw down the decking boards and occasionally cut one on the chop saw. I can go get things, clean up, hold something in place, ask questions, decide if some element is worth our time or not, and make sure everyone has water to drink. I can also move stuff. I am a happy grunt! Somebody has to move stuff and it might as well be the person who is not so good with heights or has a bum shoulder or doesn’t feel so comfortable with the skillsaw. Or all of the above.

I uncovered the boards (turned out there were three tarps!) and discovered that the thin plastic that was between the boards and the tarp (for some reason I can’t remember) had greatly disintegrated. Shredded is maybe a better word. It was gross but nothing like what was coming. I picked all the plastic off and kept going. We had a trailer full of other construction materials to move as well, so I figured I’d add these boards to the load.

Two or three layers down I saw some ants. Pesky, big black things busy about their business. I kept going. They were not worth a photo. The more boards I uncovered, though, the more ants I saw. And not only ants. Ant eggs! Eight or nine layers down, I’m talking easily thousands! Ugh!!!

We all have triggers, right? Sensors that perk up at different things? Sensitivities that evoke feelings of tenderness or competitiveness or sympathy or DISGUST!!!!! I cannot possibly put into words how my disgust sensors went into overdrive – thus no photos I’m afraid! I had one thought and one thought only: Break up the ant colony or they will destroy the wood! Clearly the moist, safe, climate-controlled environment under the tarp(s) was ant heaven, and these were surely building up their forces and conspiring to eventually eat up my precious boards!

I know, I know, they’re just ants, just going about their business doing what ants do – multiplying copiously! I am sure there are countless similar colonies in my woods, countless such heavenly environments among all the fallen logs out there. These ants had been at it for almost a year — surely a few more minutes (such as a calmer person would have taken) would affect nothing significantly, but they were just too numerous (far too numerous and far too gross!) and too close to my home. They had to go, and they had to go now.

Furiously I moved the boards, uncovering ever more ants. The chickens! I thought. The chickens would have a feast! I went around the front of the coop and opened their door, but no, these chickens who have never been outside the confines of their run/coop were unwilling to come out! Fools – there’s a feast out here!! Sandy (otherwise occupied in skillful work on the porch) had come by this time to help, and together we cornered three of them (one at a time!) and plunked them on the boards among the ants. Away they scampered! Pressed themselves against the outside of the fence as if they could ghost their way back in! Eeks! What are we doing out here?? I guess I have homebody chickens – they just wanted to go home!

(In retrospect I do see that the frenetic activity at that time was hardly conducive for enjoying a feast, but at the time all I could think was: Idiot birds!)

Finally all of the boards were laid out on the mulch surrounding the coops and snow-shovelfuls of ants and ant eggs were brought to the happy, home-again and thank-God-we-avoided-the-scary-outside-world chickens I call my own. Then they feasted, and the boards and I rested. Here are some of them, ant-free, breathing, drying, relieved!

clapboards.2mp.jpg

All well and good through the rest of Saturday (my disgust sensitivities calmed down) and through sunny Sunday (one more day in the sun won’t hurt them), all well and good until it’s going to rain on Monday (today). Gotta get those boards under the tent.

Yeah, that’s when I forgot the sun and its power. I forgot that the high 80s (maybe even low 90s it was?) can do a number on you. Before noon the air was still as a stone, not a lick of breeze, no clouds. But the forecast called for rain later. I got my grubby clothes on and determined to get this task done lickity split. I tried loading them on a smallish tarp so I could pull a batch at a time the 50 yards or so to the gigantic tent that serves as a simple shelter for such things (really it’s just a huge tarp stretched over a strong A-shape frame – has served well for years!).

The tarp-pulling method was too heavy for me. One batch at a time then, five or six boards stacked upon each other cradled in my arms, and I walked them down to their new home. At one point during the process, I remember being grateful that a few of the boards were in the shade, wishing I was done already, feeling like it was a bigger job than I had anticipated, oblivious to the effect it all was having on me, but I told myself One armful at a time, and it’ll all be done soon. As you stack the boards, you have to put slats between the layers to allow air movement (if you want to prevent ant colonies), which I can only hope I did correctly. This is what they looked like from inside the tent…

in tent.2mp.jpg

… and like this from outside – you can see the layers. Clearly I did not take time to make it pretty.

from the side.2mp.jpg

Doesn’t seem like that much when I look at the photos. How I even got these photos I don’t know because by the time I was done, I didn’t care so much about anything except getting inside. I could barely stand up. I got myself into the house, breathing way too heavy, feeling unsteady, weak, quivery, all manner of unwell. Clearly I had needed someone, sooner, to say Hey, that’s enough, go sit down. I didn’t realize I was pushing too hard in the hot sun.

There’s a name for this I’m sure, maybe heat exhaustion? Whatever it’s called, it took me almost two hours to feel normal again and I accomplished little more the rest of the afternoon. This happened once last summer too when I was raking leaves. Set my goal too high. Raked too many. The sun was too hot and I successfully ignored the increasing danger. Same basic symptoms I think, though maybe it was even worse. How did I let this happen again? At least it wasn’t as bad this time – or maybe I only stopped because there weren’t more boards …

As the afternoon hours passed (and I sat on the couch immobile, grateful for Netflix which I never watch during the day unless I’m like this, unable to do anything else), the wind kicked up, the sky darkened, the rain threatened, the dogs got anxious/nervous – oh, why did the word antsy have to come into my head!!??

The storm passed by. Not a drop fell. The area behind the coop is tidy and uninfested (I hope!). And I am fine.

empty spot.2mp.jpg

 

Zucchini Surprise Pie

/ eponine3 / 11 Comments

It’s been busy around here: building an extension to the front porch (and dealing with the accompanying mess), preparing for company (another good reason to deal with the construction mess) and enjoying company (how nice to have cleaned up that mess!). With all of this activity, I go inevitably in and out through the front door a lot, meaning recently that I get to see certain precious images over and over – this is one of the notes of greeting that 6-year-old Rise made last week and taped to my front door. How can you see this and not smile??

Rise door greeting.2mp.jpg

When it’s busy I forget about things, but routine is handy for calling us back. I have a garden. I planted stuff. But it’s been so busy I’ve hardly been out there except for a quick oregano-snipping or weed-lamenting visit.

Anyone who has grown zucchini knows what a zucchini surprise is. For those who are unfamiliar with this fast-growing vegetable, it’s when you are casually checking under the leaves of your various, viney garden plants to see what’s hiding, and come upon – Oh, look at that! – a baseball bat of a zucchini that you didn’t see when you were in said garden two days earlier (!). Such a surprise was mine last week when giving a mini-tour of the garden to some recent Airbnb guests.

Carrots, beets, onions, melons, cabbages and almost all herbs will reach their optimal point of harvesting and nicely wait for you to come along and take them to the kitchen. Not zucchini. It is among the most impatient of vegetables. You don’t care enough to look for me when I am in my tender prime? Fine. I will grow bigger, bigger, bigger, past my prime, and you will have a baseball bat on your hands before long!

So, yeah, past their perfect prime were those first two zucchinis, though you couldn’t call them bats yet. I gave the smaller of the two to my guests and put the other in my fridge, after checking to make sure there were no babies hiding there too, looking to expand into zucchini monsters if I were negligent again. I gave them a few days, did remember to go check, and there found four new ones, only one of which was still prime (i.e. three were already bigger than that!).

Guess it’s time to do something with zucchini! Right about then, Claudia sent me a new zucchini pie recipe called Schafskäse Zucchini Quiche. (It’s the zucchini time of year apparently!) I was intrigued by the parmesan in the crust and the goat cheese and sunflower seeds in the mixture. (Never mind that Schafskäse means sheep’s milk cheese, not goat’s milk cheese – this is unimportant.) I asked Mom if she had sunflower seeds; she didn’t, and I didn’t want to go to the store. So in the end the recipe was simply inspiration and I created my own Zucchini Surprise Pie.

For the crust I cut ½ cup cold butter into 1/3 cup finely grated romano cheese mixed with 1 ½ cups flour and ¼ tsp salt (with my pastry blender). It looked like typical pie crust crumbs, but I knew it would have an extra special taste on account of the cheese in there.

crust crumbs.2mp.jpg

I added ¼ cup of ice cold water (you can make it cold by adding ice cubes to the water, or use water from the fridge, or take your chances that the water coming out of your faucet is cold enough). Mix this quickly (don’t overmix) till it pulls from the sides of the bowl; make a nice ball. Roll this out on a floured surface, big enough to fit your dish – I used an oval dish that’s 12×8 inches. Best way to see if the dough is the right size is by placing your dish on top, as I did (see below). If there is enough to fit in there and come up the sides, you are good to go!

crust laid out with dish on top.2mp.jpg

Fold the dough in half and gently lift it up and into the dish; unfold and drape the edges over the sides. This keeps them out of the way for now. Later, you can be fancy with a scalloped edge or just flop the excess on top.

For the mixture, start by grating your zucchini (not the smallest holes you have on your grater, and not the largest). I used about 2 ½ cups in this recipe, but if you have a little more or a little less, I don’t think it would matter. To this I added 4 eggs, 8 deli slices of genoa salami (cut up), 4 oz crumbled up (by hand) goat cheese…

goat cheese.2mp.jpg

… as well as 1 cup grated Jarlsberg (swiss) cheese, ¼ cup flour, 1 tsp salt, a few shakes of pepper, 3 fresh sage leaves (chopped) and the leaves off 2 stems of fresh thyme (which would amount to 2 teaspoons probably, hard to tell when it’s so fresh and not pressed down – again a little more or less won’t hurt anything). These are the herbs I used because they seemed good to me, and you know that Simon and Garfunkel song:

Are you going to Scarborough fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.
Remember me to one who lives there.
She once was a true love of mine.

What parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme have to do with the fair and the love I haven’t a clue (never did). But because of that song I always thought that any/all of these herbs could be used in a recipe that calls for one or another, that they go well together and that various combinations are acceptable. See what you learn from music?? Anyway, the fresher, the better, and mine came straight from the garden into the bowl and that makes me smile. 😊

ingredients in bowl with herbs.2mp.jpg

Right about at this point I turned on my oven so it would get hot while I finished up. I set it to 375F, then mixed all of this up and poured it into my crust. Normally you put milk or cream in a quiche but the goat cheese is so creamy, you don’t need it.

mixture in.2mp.jpg

I was not in the mood to be fancy with the edges (chomping at the bit, one might say, to go lay more deck boards on the new porch) so I flopped them over and popped it in the oven. Ovens are different and people like different levels of golden-brownness; my pie stayed in my oven about 40 minutes and looked like this.

baked.2mp.jpg

It smelled so good!! My sister was coming and I knew she would love this, but we had decided to go out to dinner – enjoyed Rhett’s River Grill which, it turns out, is relocating by the end of the year and will be waaaay closer to my house!!

So I let the zucchini pie cool, covered it with plastic before refrigerating it, and reheated it the next day at 300F for half an hour. Delish! I love the cheese in the crust too. Taking leftovers as part of a picnic lunch to the Science Museum in Richmond the next day gave us a chance to try it cold – just as good!!

Not bad for an experiment, I’d say. Thank you, Claudia, for the inspiration! Now whoever among you has too many zucchinis…

A Mighty Oak Meets the Earth

/ eponine3 / 4 Comments

Imagine being a very big tree, a mighty red oak. You have been standing in your same spot on a Virginia hillside for a very long time, say, at least a hundred years. You are part of a forest, not a national park or anything so grand, just a peaceful forest not terribly far from the Blue Ridge Mountains. You grew strong over the years, pushed your way ever higher toward the sun.

Ah, the sun, the seasons. Bask. Bask.

When you were about 50, some humans came to the site to build a house, but you survived this possible demise because of being just far enough away from the spot they decided was best. They put a utility pole fairly near you, but its inanimate state was uninteresting, and you said Paugh, who cares about that?

When you were about 90 and towering proudly among your adjacent tree-fellows, another risk came along, another building project, a cottage this time, but your majestic canopy and the glorious shade it provided these new humans saved you. You said to the young beech trying to grow right next to you, I’m feeling a mite weak in the joints, little fella, but don’t get any ideas about taking this spot. I’ve been here a long time. No offense, but it’s mine.

Aerial A cottage.2mp_LI.jpg

Wind. It comes, it blows.

The sound of a tree-fellow nearby crashing to the ground during a storm always adds to the drama of the day, always causes you to ponder your own strength and good fortune. You tell yourself that if you were not meant to become the mightiest grandfather in this neck of the woods, you would have fallen already. Some tree has to become the giant among giants – it might as well be you. Then one spring day that blasting wind comes again, and in one super painful stroke, your hugest north-pointing limb lets go at the joint, its weight bringing it instantly to the forest floor below and leaving a massive, open, splintery wound on your side.

Crap.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The humans come and inspect. They bring other humans to come and inspect. They all shake their heads and use words like risky, problem and electrocution. Electrocution? They point to that inanimate pole that’s closer than it used to be… or, oh, maybe you’re just bigger than you used to be. No! you want to say to them. Don’t worry! I am still strong! I can stand another fifty years! You are a little like Mike Mulligan, who used to say about Mary Anne (his steam shovel) that “she could dig as much in a day as a hundred men could dig in a week.” In this classic children’s book, Mike’s assertion is always followed by “but he had never been quite sure that this was true.”

You are not quite sure that you will not fall one day and hit the cable coming off that pole. You cannot be sure. The humans cannot be sure. As they walk away, you want to believe it will all be okay. You settle into your new life, feeling somewhat off balance, slightly less steady, especially when the wind kicks up, now that you have no huge branch on the north side counterweighting all the other branches. Weeks go by. The humans seem to have lost interest. What a relief.

Then one day some big vehicles arrive. They stare and say, “See how it leans?” They curiously turn their attention to a perfectly nice (younger, smaller) oak that stands between you and the biggest vehicle.

1_LI (2).2mp.jpg

Odd.

You watch. A man sits in the bucket attached to the vehicle, starts at the top, lops off branch after branch, then sections off the main part of the trunk one piece at a time, letting each one crash. Huh. They cut that poor little fellow down to earth-level for no seemingly good reason. Then they move the truck in closer.

Oh.

It’s your turn. They start on the side closest to that damn pole. They work carefully to make sure nothing falls near the cable. The 75’ reach of the bucket is barely high enough to get them to the best position. But they manage. Bit by bit, they buzz their tool and drop your limbs. Parts of you that only ever knew sky meet the earth.

5.2mp_LI.jpg

Then they move on to the side that hangs over the little cottage. Yeah, you knew that lowest one was perhaps your weakest limb. Maybe they had reason to worry about that one. It didn’t take much for it to break. They were careful on that side, using a rope around it to make sure that when it swung down, it would avoid the cottage roof and land where they wanted.

8.2mp.jpg

This is it, you realize. You reached, you grew, you survived. You gave beauty to the forest, shade to the humans, home sites and abundant food to forest creatures for many years. Now you will give warmth by way of firewood. Lots of yourself is already on the ground, the danger of hitting the pole now a thing of the past, but they left some for the next guy to come and fell.

19 (2).2mp.jpg

“Sad,” you hear the lady of the house saying. “Reminds me of The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein,” she says, “a book that’s been called ‘a touching interpretation of the gift of giving.’ Maybe that’s what this tree did. It gave. For many years it gave. As with all of us, its days were numbered – even if none of us ever know the number! But chapters do close….”

…

Since Micah’s death, there have been two more people that I knew for years, two more I talked with, played with, greatly admired, two more who gave to those around them, who added depth, joy, love, fun and substantial contributions to the circle they walked in, two more whose chapters have closed. To the families of C. Wayne Callaway and Ken Brown, I offer my deepest condolences.