Keeping warm in the kitchen

You may have heard: it's kinda cold out. Like schools-closed, work-canceled cold. Perfect for some baking.

The children (and the husband) all napped at the same time this afternoon, and I found some peace in the kitchen.



Sipping some warm cider while making bread dough, to the sound of nothing, was pretty much heaven.

Pumpkin muffins were also on the agenda, made with some homemade pumpkin puree.



I used a slightly different pumpkin-cooking method than in the past (this one). It was awesome--not at all watery, which is often an issue for me. I think the key is to roast it dry rather than steam it.

I had a helper for pumpkin prep yesterday. She's a pretty cool buddy to have.

Black beans

Believe it or not, picking and shelling the beans was her idea of a good time. Mine too.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Potato harvest

Well, it's not much, but it's better than last year's.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Finally!

Much, much later than I had planned, we are finally getting some gardening done around here. Uncooperative weather coupled with insanely busy weekends had kept things on hold for far too long. But after perfect weather and a productive gardening-into-the-dark session yesterday evening, I believe we may be on a roll!

 

Posted with Blogsy

Lots of thoughts, no pictures

Well, once again I've gone longer than planned without posting.

The thing is: busy. Of course, everyone is busy, so that's not really much of an excuse, is it? So let me try again ... The thing is: I'm in one of those phases where my head is buzzing with plans and ideas, but I'm a bit short on results so far. I have so many things spinning through my brain at a million miles an hour lately that I feel like I'm insanely busy and rushed, but in reality I'm mostly just busy in my head right now (and on Pinterest, of course). Very, very busy in my head.

On the docket:

SEWING
I've actually been doing much more than usual sewing-wise, but nothing is at the show-and-tell stage yet. I'm working on a top for Made By Rae's Spring Top Sew-Along, though I don't think I'm going to finish it up in time. And then it'll be Kids Clothes Week, and I definitely have some plans for that (though, as usual, it'll be a miracle if I finish more than one piece in that time span).

(Psssst: You should totally join in on the sew-along and KCW.)

GARDENING
Oh the plans! I have been heavily mentally invested in gardening projects since January, but it's been so chilly and wet here so far this spring that, other than starting a few seeds, nothing's happening yet. Aside from just salivating over all the things I want to grow this year, there are plans for improved rabbit protection (the little stinkers ate so many baby plants last year) and hopes for a nicer, less mud-pit-esque layout.

ASSORTED
We've also got some hopes for house-related improvements in the nearish future. And I've got more homemade body product ideas swirling around. And Adelaide is going to need some big-kid-bedroom adjustments this summer (because my baby is going to turn 2! who is allowing her to grow up so fast?). And, and, and...

Is there a point in here somewhere? Maybe just that I'm still here and plan to have actual things to talk about and show you in the nearish future. Yes, let's go with that, shall we? We shall.

Ready

I like living in a place with "seasons." But I also like for those seasons to know their place. I mean, really. It is the last week in March. It is spring now, so let's make that happen. Please?

We are all ready to get outside. Without taking twenty minutes to bundle up. Alas, this morning there was fresh snow on the ground.

But we've started some seeds, and that helps alleviate the itch a little bit. Too cold for the yard or even the garage, we spread out some plastic on the kitchen floor last week and got to work. Adelaide was happy to help, proudly wielding her very own shovel and only eating a couple of the seeds (!) before getting the "it's not yummy food yet" lecture.

And now we excitedly check on our little seedlings each day, waiting patiently (well, as patiently as we are able) for the gardening season to start in earnest.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Can it

Holy crap, you guys, I canned applesauce! This is, as far as I am concerned, the kind of thing that should be breathlessly exclaimed to anyone who might be willing to listen to me speak for more than a couple of seconds. Because, and maybe you missed this the first time, I CANNED APPLESAUCE! Now that I've internet-yelled it at you, I'm sure you understand the majorness of the situation.



Seriously, though, I am pretty excited about this, as it is my first foray into the world of canning.* It made me feel all self sufficient, which is, of course, awesome. I have yet to put the jars away on the pantry shelves because looking at them reminds me that I am now a canning rockstar finally got up the courage to try this thing I've been wanting to try for ages. And that it (so far...I think...we haven't eaten it yet...) worked out pretty well.



It was both easier and harder than I thought it would be. Easier because it is actually fairly uncomplicated...just heating and boiling and such. Harder because it took forever for anything to boil, putting things into and out of big pots of boiling water is kinda scary, and I'm still a little bit (irrationally) afraid that I'll botulize** my family.



I used about 40 pounds of apples, canned 7 quarts of sauce and froze the rest (about another 6 quarts, I'd say, but the containers are of varying sizes so it's hard to be precise). Not exactly enough to satisfy our applesauce needs for the year--Adelaide loves her some applesauce--but it still feels like quite the accomplishment!




*Well, aside from "helping" my dad can stuff from our garden. I remember very little other than that canning pickles made the house hot and smelly like vinegar.

**Totally a word. Not at all made up. Also, I followed all the instructions and know that everything should be fine, so I'm not AFRAID afraid, but I am a worrier and can't quite shake it completely. You know how it goes.

Highs and lows (and tomatoes)

The garden this year had it's ups and downs.

The bad: The corn was ravaged by squirrels. The cucumbers gave us a couple of good weeks of production before dying a mysterious death. Rabbits (we think) ate the broccoli, though it may still give us a little something. And the wildlife ate 5 of our 10 tomato plants at the seedling stage. I still don't seem able to grow onions. The potatoes were almost a total bust (worse than last year, even). And the carrots are strangely stunted and have bad spots (huh? this has never happened to us before).

The good: Beans! The green beans were awesome again. The black beans rock my world. Fresh lettuce from the garden is the best thing ever. The basil went bonkers. We have four good-sized pumpkins growing! And we're getting a pretty decent crop of tomatoes from our surviving plants.



To hold on to some of the tomatoey goodness, I oven roasted them and put them away in the freezer to use for pasta sauce some dreary winter day. I used the method in The Homemade Pantry. It was easy and smelled good, but I won't be able to report on the tasty (I hope!) results for a few months.



Remarkably, even though the "bad" list looks longer than the "good" list, it still feels like victory. We grew some food; we got to eat it; it was yummy. I mean, can you honestly look at those roasted tomatoes and tell me it's not a win?

Beans, beans...

I know I have gone on about this at length before but I'm going to just go ahead and say it again: Gardening! It is so cool!



These are some midnight black turtle beans that we grew this year.*

I cannot get over it. I am, perhaps, a bit overly excited. Because we grew black beans! The kind that sit all dry in a jar on the pantry shelf waiting to be cooked for chili! It is amazing! (Perhaps I should rein in the enthusiasm just a little bit so I don't scare you away?)

I don't know why the possibility of growing dried beans seemed to surprise me so. I suppose I had just never really thought about it, about what it took to get them to my kitchen. But I was flipping through the seed catalogs this past winter and saw seeds for a few sorts of meant-to-be-dried beans, and of course you can grow them at home. Why not? And it turns out to be rather simple. Plant, tend (my "tending" is very minimal indeed, more like "ignore") and grow just like the green beans, but don't harvest the beans so soon. Let them turn a funny shade of blackish-purple. Continue to leave them alone. Then let them dry and turn a light, papery brown. You can pluck the pods a basketful at a time as they dry, or you can pull the plants up and hang them upside down for awhile to make sure the pods are all as dry as can be.



Chili season just got about a million times more exciting around here.

*This isn't the whole harvest; there are more beans waiting for me. These are just the first ones we've shelled. A cool Sunday afternoon was spent sitting on the patio by a fire, shelling beans, chatting and sipping wine while the kiddo took an extra-long nap (inside but within earshot). Not a bad way to spend a lazy afternoon, I think!

Out in it

Every year I am reminded that growing food is an amazing thing. To put seeds into the bare ground and be rewarded with the makings of meal -- I will never cease to be awed by it, at least I hope that is the case.



This year we expanded the garden and added some new things, once again just trying to figure it all out as we roll along.




This year we also have a sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes clingy little helper, of course, which is a lot of fun (though it does tend to slow things down a bit!). This girl just adores being outside. Always. She doesn't always want to do anything out here -- sometimes she just wants to stand in the yard and be held -- but she's always itching to get out here just the same. Which, of course, I love. And I hope her enjoyment of the outdoors sticks with her as she grows. I want her to love and respect nature. I want her to continue to wonder at the birds and the plants. I want her to grow up knowing good, healthy food and valuing the work it takes to get it to the table.



She's enjoying this little pail and tool set from Green Toys (and I'm enjoying that it's BPA-, pthlate-, and PVC-free and made in the USA from recycled plastic!). Digging in the garden soil myself while she digs happily in the soil nearby, having her look up from time to time to offer me a precious chunk of earth, is one of the times I feel like maybe we're getting things right.

Sun and soil

Thanks to the (somewhat unsettling?) summerish weather, this Sunday was all about being out in the yard.





 

I mixed up some potting soil, planted some seeds, messed around with the compost, and got nice and muddy in general. Adam worked on digging the giant, unstoppable weeds out of the new, larger garden space. And Adelaide had lots of good, outdoorsy fun and ate some mud (on my watch...mama needs to work on keeping up with this new on-the-move version of her baby!).

How do you like them, uh, potatoes?

Remember how I decided to plant potatoes in a sack this year? No? See the beginning here. And the end here:





We harvested the potatoes a couple weekends ago, and the results were somewhat mixed. On the one hand, the potatoes look good! On the other hand, there were precious few of them. That photo is the entire potato harvest, my friends. Judging by where the potatoes were in the potato bag, it looks like only one, maybe two, of the five seed potato chunks actually made potatoes despite the fact that all five appeared to produce healthy greenery. Hmmm. So, factor in seed potatoes, a couple bags of dirt/compost, landscape fabric, thread, and my time, and you have possibly the most expensive potatoes ever.

But it was a fun experiment. And we'll probably do it again next year. After all, I do still have most of a roll of that landscape fabric.

Blueberries and other things

I came home from the farmers market Saturday with a whole lot of blueberries. So we had blueberry pancakes for dinner on Sunday. And Monday night I made Blueberry Boy Bait. This leaves me with plenty of blueberries to make something else, but what? Muffins? Too many blueberries is an excellent problem to have.



But back to the Blueberry Boy Bait. I had heard of this a few years ago, somewhere out there in blogland, but I made it for the first time last night using the recipe from The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book. (This version at Smitten Kitchen appears to be pretty much the same deal. Also read the cute little story about the recipe's name/origin.) Verdict: Yum! Adam has requested that it make further appearances. So that's a winner.



Also, looking at the photos above reminds me that being back at work full time leads to nearly all photos being taken with totally crap lighting. This will only get worse as fall and winter come. Sigh.

For some reason my radishes have all been scraggly and tough and often inedible this year, which is extra lame because aren't they supposed to be like the easiest thing ever to grow? Boo. I've been getting plenty of carrots at least, but lots of them are a bit on the mutant side. Isn't that an odd-looking carrot? Still tasty, though.



And this is was the biggest, most bright-green caterpillar I've ever seen. It was just hanging out by the front door one evening.



The end.

In the kitchen

Using up some end-of-the-carton strawberries in some strawberry lemonade (inspired by this post).



Enjoying the harvest.



Especially the fresh green beans with a little butter - soooo good.

And the salads.



And enjoying some of the neighbor's harvest too. Some sage passed across the backyard fence made its way into a very, very yummy (and easy!) pasta dish.



My version is a mashup of this recipe and one in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

Pasta with Brown Butter, Parmesan, and Sage

Ingredients
1 pound pasta
10 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1/2 cup chopped fresh sage
1/4 cup grated parmesan

Directions
Cook pasta.

Meanwhile, heat butter in a frying pan over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Add salt and sugar and stir to combine. Continue cooking and stirring occasionally until butter is a light caramel color, about 10 minutes. Add the sage and wait for the bubbling to subside, then cook another minute or two.

Toss pasta, butter and sage, and parmesan.

A couple of food things

Tried making these veggie burgers a couple of nights ago. They were not really a success. I thought they tasted ok, not great, but they fell apart all over the place and did not hold their patty shape at all. Adam: "What is in these that's different from your other veggie burgers?" Me: "Beets." Adam: "Oh. [pause] I don't think I like beets." It was a bummer because when we were in Columbus last fall, I tried the inspiration burger at Northstar Cafe and really, really liked it.



In a fit of...something, I also tried cooking up the beet greens (you can see them lurking behind the burger there). Again, not a raging success.

In better news: carrots from the garden! Woohoo! I did not thin them very well, so these two grew so close to each other that I couldn't pull one up alone because they were entwined. Like little carrots in love. So cute!

Um, a picture of some lettuce

Yeah, that's what I've got for you. A picture of some lettuce. I haven't been sewing. I've just started to get back to cooking (pizza! pancakes! both in one weekend! it's a miracle!). But gardening, that I've been doing.



We've been eating plenty of salad from the garden. It's just so cool to be able to walk out into the yard and come back with food for dinner. And the lettuce is so good! It's so tender! Love! As I was sitting in the dirt a few days ago, planting radish seeds where I'd already harvested radishes, I was really struck by how amazing it is that I can put a tiny little pellet in the dirt one day and it turns into food. It's really quite magical.

Harvest!

Radishes always grow. That's why I like them.



And our new chairs finally came today! Hooray! Now the dining room is pretty much complete! Well, except for the curtains I still need to sew. But that's quite a way down the to-do list these days.

The state of things

Well, Adam is back to work and I'm home with the kiddo. So far, so good, though I really miss having Adam around to take care of us both! Loving wearing Adelaide in the Moby wrap, though - she seems to love it, and it's the only way I was able to eat any food today! We're still trying to mostly take it easy around here, not doing too very much. And I'm trying to catch up with the internet (blog reading, flickr, and such), but golly it seems like I've been away for ages!



I hope to slowly get back to some sewing. My project list is still huge, filled with things I'd hoped to accomplish pre-baby with a few new tasks added post-Adelaide. And cooking. Eventually I'll get back to that too! So far we've been living off the things I made and froze and the kindness of family and neighbors who have stocked our kitchen pretty well lately. Lucky us!

And the garden...Some of the seeds are growing, some things are waiting to be planted (including my favorite: tomatoes! soon!). We are trying potatoes in a sack. I read about it somewhere and it seemed a lot easier to dump them out at harvest time rather than dig them up, so we're giving that a go. I sewed up the sack out of some landscape fabric from the hardware store. It looks like the potatoes are starting to grow a little finally, so that's good. If it looks like our method is working out, I'll put together a little post about how we did it.