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....if my dogs are trying to send me a message.
(Yes, those are feet that were chewed off a squeaky toy and left on the porch in a somewhat threatening manner. Does it mean I'm next? Or is it just meant to scare the tennis ball into not rolling under the hostas again?)
1. Our new, pretty little birds-on-a-wire painting courtesy of Enrouge. In addition to being a talented artist, she did not make fun of me when I asked her if she could make me a special one with the birds on the right side of the wire. (So that it wouldn't throw the balance of my whole room out of whack--yes, I'm getting OCD with age.) It's not a photography trick, the colors really are that fabulous.
2. The easiest chocolate mousse recipe ever. Part of what makes it easy? Very basic ingredients. Nine days out of ten I have all of them in my house. (And if you don't have cardamon, throw in something else--I'm thinking of experimenting with ground up lavender or rosemary, but I'll bet cinnamon would be awesome too.)
3. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I finally started reading it for-reals on Friday night and have spent the weekend devouring it. Definitely going to be read a million times, and one that I'll be recommending to everyone! (So go read it!)
This month's second Barefoot Bloggers recipe is the Contessa's White Pizza with Arugula, chosen by Andrea of Nummy Kitchen.
Two observations:
1. Food eaten with friends is kinda magical. My very best friend from high school recently moved back to Kansas from Hawaii. I hadn't seen him in a few years, so we had him over and made this for his welcome back dinner. Oh, the stories!
2. All pizzas should be drizzled with garlic-chili oil before they are baked. It should be a law. A squeeze of lemon vinaigrette on top doesn't hurt either.
So, I don't know if y'all have noticed, but I'm kind of on a food preserving kick here. It's kind of like being crafty for me, except with food instead of yarn and fabric and things. I've canned, I've roasted, I've frozen...this newest bit is just the next step.
Yes, that is a food dehydrator. If you love me you won't laugh, because I already feel like kind of an infomercial host.
But really, you should see all the cool stuff it can do! Since it got here last weekend, Sweet Husband and I have been constantly experimenting with one thing or another. First it was, "I'm going to try some tomatoes!" Then, "Let's do apples next!" Then, "Oh, hey, don't forget the peaches!" And the results have actually been really good--I could eat these dried tomatoes 'till the cows come home. (Which would be awhile as we do not, in fact, own cows.) The only thing that's a little tricky is figuring out when the food is actually dried enough, but for now we're just watching it closely.
Alright...you can tease me about being Ron Popeil if you want to...as long as I get to munch on dried apple sticks while you do it!
There's a line from an Ingird Michaelson song that goes, "Let's get rich and give everybody nice sweaters and teach them how to dance." While that is an admirable thought, I think I'd give out pesto instead.
I honestly hadn't even thought much about it yet this year until I saw that SouleMama was making some the other day. "Mmmmm!" said my tummy, so I picked up some basil and garlic at the farmer's market, some walnuts at the store, and some olive oil and salt from my cupboard.
You really do have to just mix-a-little, taste-a-little to get the proportions right, but as a starting point, I had about,
Once everything is mixed together, you can pack it in jars and store it in the freezer. Be sure to get rid of the air bubbles--run a knife around the edge of the jar--as much as possible, as air will make the pesto turn brown. You can still eat it if it's a little brown, it's just not as pretty.
But what really puts the pesto over the top--as opposed to nice sweaters and dance lessons--is that it's actually super cheap. With the ingredients above, I made about seven four-ounce jars. Grand total per jar? $1.40--which even includes the price of the jar. Let's give everybody pesto, indeed--and a little more gnocchi in the world wouldn't hurt either!
It is now....10:05 p.m. I am still in my pajamas. (No not, "In my pajamas ready for bed," but "Still in my pajamas from this morning.") This is in large part due to this:
Yup, it's the Love Quilt and it is ever-so-much closer to being finished than it was this morning. I have it in blocks now. Nine of them. I ended up making 12 X 12 squares, which actually took care of most of the truly usable fabric. The plan is to find some turquoise-y, solid fabric to connect the blocks together, then probably take it to a professional to have it quilted. (Unless I just get crazy ambitious and decide to try myself, but I'm kind of thinking not.)
The remains:
Not really good for much...or are they??? ;)
A few weeks ago I got an email from Marx Foods asking if I wanted to review some of their dried chili peppers. I thought to myself, "I like getting free stuff in the mail, and peppers would be fun to take pictures of too," so I said, "Sure".
I opted for the "organic" sampler, which included the following varieties: Chipotle, Aji Amarillo, Aji Cereza Chilies, Aji Limo Rojo Chilies, New Mexico Chilies, and Aji Panca. Almost all of these were labeled as "hot" or "very hot", and that was not a lie! So I used them in small doses.
First, I made these slow-cooked pork tacos, substituting three dried peppers for the six fresh peppers called for. I will not lie to you, when I added these guys to the hot pan I cried like a baby. They smelled amazing, but wow--goggles next time, I think!
Fortunately, some of the hotness cooked-off (I don't know if that's really possible, but that's what it seemed like) leaving all of the flavor and none of the pain...and some pretty freaking awesome pork tacos!
Next, I decided to make chili pepper flakes so I could use them in eggplant pasta sauce. I basically followed this method (roasting them, then grinding them up), except that I used my food processor and only ground the peppers up until I had flakes, rather than powder. (If you do this, please use gloves...and hold your breath when you open the food processor, trust me.)
The thing that's actually kind of cool about this is that, by grinding the peppers yourself, you could make your pepper flakes as hot (or not) as you wanted. (Yeah, if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm kind of a wuss about hot-hot peppers.) I'm planning to mix these leftover hotties with some little mole peppers from my garden for a nice medium-ish blend.
The downside? Marx only sells in bulk quantities, so you have to buy at least a pound at a time.
However, that being said, even with shipping, the prices are comparable to my local grocery store, and I think--just from the smell and texture--these were quite a bit fresher. (I think my store has low turn-over.) Even my fairly well-stocked store only has about three kinds of dried pepper; Marx has about twenty-five, so if you're a pepper lover it's definitely worth a looksie.
(And while you're there check out the crab too--I am so ordering some crab from them soon! Would it be evil to order a whole ten pounds, lock my doors, and lay in my pajamas and eat crab for a week?)
This month's first Barefoot Bloggers recipe--picked by Veronica of Supermarket Serenade--was the Contessa's Mango Banana Daiquiris.
Now, the Contessa, she's a classy lady. She makes her drinks in blenders. She puts them in highball glasses with little mango wedges on the rim. Heck, she probably serves them on silver platters, and she certainly doesn't make them while she's still sweaty and grimy from doing yard work.
Me, on the other hand, not so much. 'Cause y'all heard the story about the blender, and just off-hand, without stopping to google it, I'm not a hundred percent sure what a highball glass even is. (Yeah, I would've been wrong--I thought they were the short ones.) I made these with my trusty stick blender, and poured them into the first glasses I could grab hold of, which happened to be a couple of mason jars. A sprig of mint stolen from the plant on the way to my chair, and these were pretty nearly the perfect still stinky, post-yard work drink.
Read on for the recipe (with my modifications in italics, like this).
Continue reading "Barefoot Bloggers: Mango Banana Daiquiris" »
I generally hate basements. I believe it stems from a time in childhood when I had a string of nightmares about being buried alive. Yeah, I know, it's weird...Nice Mom let me watch too many scary moves, or something.
Um, despite that, however, after last weekend's massive clean-up, our new basement is starting to grow on me. It's still a bit dusty, and the stairs are still incredibly steep, as Moe has attested. But, we now have a little "root cellar" cool-dark-type storage for maturing homebrew and canned goods...Sweet Husband has a cozy little work space for making pretty jewelery (and unlike his old space in the spare bedroom, here he can make as much of a mess as he wants!)...and the laundry area has been ridded of spiders and miscellaneous junk. Yay for less-scary basements!
From this spot, I can....
Look out the window at passers-by, guard the house from intruders, check on the neighbors....
Sleep, snooze, snore. And occasionally (but not necessarily today, because she is watching) have a good rumple in Mom's pillows....
Ponder life and my purpose in it....think about questions like, "Why are tennis balls round?" That's really important, ya know....
(Note from Meryl: The pillows--which Moe and Porter both love to rumple in whenever I turn my back--came from etsy seller Leslie Janson. Love them!)
Crafty, tech-savvy buggers that they are, those darn Pendleton's sent out an email the other day advertising tomato "seconds" for fifty cents a pound. Now I don't know what it's like where you all live, but here, organic (or even almost organic) tomatoes are more like three dollars a pound. So, even if they were a little banged up, I was still like, "OK, OK, twist my freaking arm--I'll take some!"
When I called ahead (as directed by the email), the Nice Lady asked me, "How many pounds would you like?"
How many pounds would I like? Crap, I didn't realize there were going to be hard questions....
"Ummm, how many do people usually get?"
"Well...." I had obviously revealed myself as a novice tomato buyer. "...that depends on how many you want....Some people just get ten or twenty pounds, some people get eighty, so....."
"OK, well I'll take twenty then."
I tried to sound sure of myself. Like I knew what to do with twenty pounds of tomatoes. Like I knew what twenty pounds of tomatoes would even look like....
"Great, we'll have them ready for you later today then."
She sweetly hid the fact that she knew I was a great big faker.
---
Later that afternoon, there were, not twenty, but almost thirty pounds of tomatoes waiting for me. I used about ten pounds to make canned salsa, and roasted and froze the rest. However, with the combination of strawberry jam, green beans, pumpkin, and now this big infusion of tomatoes--my freezer is officially done. (Really, it told me itself, "NO MORE!")
One day I'm going to open it up and everything is going to crash out on me. I'll be one big vegetable stew--with strawberries. (Don't worry, I'll have Sweet Husband take a picture.) This all leads me to the conclusion that, maybe not this year, but certainly sometime soon, it's going to be time to get a deep freeze.
...there were lots of animals. The sheep to the left was a doll, and very much enjoyed me scratching her behind the ears. The two at the right looked so cozy together. And the chicken was extremely suspicious of my camera!
...and so many exhibits too. According to Nice Friend (an entomology champ several times over) the beautiful, greenish moth in the center above is a fairly common "Luna Moth". And, of course, I could spend hours looking at dahlias as big as my head, as well as all kinds of produce.
...some of my very own photography. No winners this year, but with everything else that's been going on, I consider just getting them there a pretty big accomplishment!
I was surfing over at Apartment Therapy the other day, when I saw this pretty house with rounded doors and writing on the walls. I thought to myself, "I have a pretty house with rounded doors--maybe I should write on my walls too?"
And thus began a quest for what to write. Although it shouldn't have been a quest really, because I should have known from the beginning what I would end up with, as it's practically my life's motto. Nonetheless, I searched through Heinlein and Tolkien and many other wise-speaking people....I was about to give up when it finally hit me--perhaps the greatest song lyric ever sung, from "The Fall" by the Avett Brothers: "Only good things can come/To those who practice reason/And recognize good fun." And so that was it.
Then, how to get it on the wall. After researching, I decided the best method would be to print the lyrics on plain paper, tape them to the wall with graphite paper underneath, then trace the letters. This left "penciled-in" letters on the wall, which I then could paint over with a paint pen.
Just FYI for anyone who might consider trying this, your level and ruler are your bestest friends. Use them. Love them. Also mandatory? A friend, significant other, or Sweet Husband who--after you do those first few letters and are freaking out that you've just written on your wall and it looks like crap--will force you to keep going. Because it's gonna look funky at first, but once it's all finished and touched up and stuff....not too bad, right?
To the left, pretties from the flea market. I think I'm officially collecting old handkerchiefs these days, they're so soft on my nose. And the jar? Not sure what it's going to be used for yet, but it was five bucks and gorgeous so hey, why not!
At the top right, as one of this weekend's little projects we put up a clothesline. With two dirty dogs and quilts and rugs that take hours in the dryer, it was a necessity.
And to the bottom, yummy local goat cheese on tiny tomatoes....heaven for a while-we're-making dinner snack!
Here in Lawrence we are spoiled--spoiled I tell you! In addition to having dozens of yummy restaurants to eat at, a good number of those restaurants just happen to make their own ketchup.
Once you've had the good stuff, the high-fructose-corn-syrup laden Heinz just doesn't cut it anymore. So last weekend I decided to have a go at making my own ketchup. I used this recipe from Jamie Oliver, and while it's still a titch too sweet for my tastes, it definitely beats the store-bought stuff.
The only downside? The cost. That's two pounds of tomatoes folks, plus all kinds of other veggies and spices. And when it all cooked down, I was left with a mere pint of ketchup. :( At that rate, I should really just go buy it from The Burger Stand or Teller's--even if they charged me by the tiny plastic thimble-like container-full, I'd probably come out ahead....
Does anyone know of a better way to make your own ketchup? Or is there a different brand out there that I should try instead?
It's been unseasonably wonderful here these past few weeks. Eighty degrees with a nice breeze during the day, chilly enough for a light sweater at night--so not like normal end-of-July, beginning-of-August, melt-you-into-puddles Kansas weather.
And then, the one little pumpkin I've been able to save from the squash bugs finally ripened up enough to pick. I'm not quite ready for pumpkin risotto, so into the freezer he went. But the smell as I was cutting him up, and the squishiness of pumpkin goo in my fingers, brought on thoughts of Fall and leaves and popcorn balls like nobody's business!
I thought about roasting his seeds as a pre-pre-Halloween treat, but I decided that--as the only pumpkin to survive the squash bugs--his genes are too valuable for that. I saved them for next year's planting instead.
If I can't wipe the squash bugs out, I'll breed them out!
Saturday morning, we were up and at 'em early for some green bean picking at Pendleton's.
They are such smarties out there! When they have more veggies ready than they can pick, they start paying pickers in produce--you get to take half of whatever you can pick, for free! Sweet Husband, myself, and Nice Friend Moxie picked something like nine pounds between the three of us.
Our's went straight to the freezer, but I don't think Moxie's made it that far!
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