My range/oven is dead. After never giving me a minute’s grief in 27 years, it has given up the ghost. The technician came today; two of the three needed parts are no longer made. I can send the board to be “rebuilt” but it’s only a 50/50 chance that it can be fixed and I’ll be without my oven for at least a month.
Got any good appliance shopping advice?
You all knew that you weren’t going to get through the summer without me waxing rhapsodic about my garden at least once. Wait no longer; today is the day.
The flowers are wild in the front… just about any color you can imagine but it’s my straw bales that are bringing me joy right now. Everything is flourishing beyond expectations. The basil has exploded (pesto, here we come) and all the tomatoes are growing out of their tomato cages, with green tomatoes starting on all five plants. Even the jalapeño is breaking all records for us.
And thanks to Linda, I have raspberry canes that are starting to pop. Today was the first day I picked enough to carry into the house (the last couple of days, raspberries went straight from cane to mouth). Looks like there will be plenty of berries in the weeks to come.
As a city girl who never gardened growing up, all this generosity on the part of Mother Nature makes me absurdly happy. Every day I pinch the little flowers off the basil, pull the stray tomato stalks up through the tomato cage, water all the floral baskets, sigh deeply. And then I think about Nathanial Hawthorne and his thoughts on gardening.
“I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.”
~Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse
What should I do with all my basil? Extra points if you can do it with a haiku.
Yesterday morning YA got up earlier than her Sunday usual so we decided to go out to breakfast, choosing Blackbird as we hadn’t actually been since they re-located. I couldn’t decide between sourdough flapjacks or the huevos rancheros.
We talked about being picky eaters last week and I had to fess up that I have an issue with how foods feel in my mouth. Mushrooms and eggplant are the biggies on my “ick” list but I also have to say I’m not crazy about cooked raisins and cooked zucchini. I like the flavor of all these things but just don’t like how they feel. Corn tortillas fall into a third category, where sometimes I can like them and sometimes I don’t like the “chewiness”.
This is what I was thinking about while I mulled over huevos rancheros this morning. I was in a good mood so figure I might as well give it a go. After all, if I’m not happy about the corn tortilla, I can always eat all around it.
It looked fabulous as it came to the table and as I took my first bite I knew that the chefs at Blackbird had outdone themselves. Instead of just heating the tortilla, they fried it so it was crispy! I’ve had huevos rancheros in many restaurants and have never before encountered one with a crispy tortilla.
When was the last time YOU were surprised by something different?
We drove yesterday for about 9 hours on our trip to Rochester. We stopped in Fargo for lunch at our favorite Indian restaurant, and proceeded to Rochester without any other food stops. Our only other major stop was in Freeport, where we bought 20 lbs. of specialty flours at the Swany White flour mill. It seems our travel patterns preclude leisurely noshing at interesting roadside eateries. We usually have an agenda or deadline to meet, and we drive and drive until we get to our destination.
How do you eat when you travel? Tell about some memorable road food.
Our son told us that last week a friend of his went foraging in the rural ditches around Brookings, SD, and came home with 75 pounds of asparagus. My mother loved asparagus, and said they used to find it in the ditches and along the fence lines in Pipestone County when she was a girl. She was saddened when spraying and mowing of ditches eliminated it. I bet she would be really happy to know that, with reduced used of herbicides and ditch mowing, the asparagus is back. She was reduced to buying canned asparagus when I was a child, fresh asparagus an unheard of commodity in the Luverne grocery store. She lived to be 92. All her aunts and uncles lived into their 90’s, too. She said it was because of all the dark, homemade bread they ate. I bet they ate asparagus from the Pipestone County ditches, since that is where they lived.
My paternal grandmother was a very picky eater who would only eat pork and sweets. She hated vegetables. She wouldn’t eat asparagus if her life depended on it. She lived to be 91. My dad didn’t like vegetables, but he loved strong coffee and really spicy food. He lived to be 93. I guess spice and sweets and pork and asparagus are aids to longevity.
Our Italian landlords in Winnipeg were avid mushroom hunters and found loads of mushrooms to eat in the middle of Winnipeg. We attended a mushroom dinner at the Dante Alighieri Cultural Society to which they belonged, and the food was incredible. All the mushrooms were foraged from Winnipeg and surrounding environs. One of the members had married a non-Italian University of Manitoba biologist who vetted all the mushrooms for safety. Imagine every pasta and Italian meat dish you can think of filled with mushrooms.
I spent last weekend at our grandson’s baptism with a bunch of our son’s in-laws who are picky eaters, people who wouldn’t touch asparagus or mushrooms or anything spicy. They love fast food. It makes me sad.
How would you define your eating habits? Do you forage? Know any picky eaters?
I picked strawberries last night after work. The task usually falls to husband, but he was still driving back from the reservation and it looked like it might storm before he got home.
It was quite still while I picked, and I could hear the outdoor sounds in the neighborhood quite well. I heard the harsh sounds of distant lawnmowers getting the grass cut before a possible rain. I heard some birds, and the occasional car driving past. I also heard a sound that I thought was a true summer sound-the distinctive, quiet, sucking snap of a plump strawberry as it is picked from its stem. What a lovely sound!
What sounds do you associate with the seasons?
Today’s post comes to us from Steve.
It is always interesting, after the fact, to remember the decisions you made that caused some bad thing to happen. Looking back, you can see the errors. But at the time, you were doing things that made sense.
One of the staple foods I have in my kitchen cabinets is honey. I grew up eating peanut butter and honey sandwiches. In the poverty of my first year of graduate school, I sometimes had peanut butter and honey sandwiches three times a day. I couldn’t afford anything else.
But honey has a nasty habit of crystallizing. The honey gets dull and solid until it will no longer come out of a squeeze dispenser. That just happened to me. But I had an inspiration for melting the crystallized goo back into liquid honey. I popped my honey dispenser in the microwave and nuked it for just 20 seconds. The photo shows what happened. The dispenser will never be the same, and I had to mop up honey from all over the microwave.
That’s one dumb stunt I’ll never do again, for I learned that lesson the hard way.
In the summer of 1970 my erstwife (let’s call her Carol in this story) and I lived along the Saint Croix River. We discovered a wonderful fishing hole north of us, just upstream of Osceola, Wisconsin. Night after night we’d go upriver to our fishing spot at the foot of an island and—quite literally—catch fish until our arms got tired.
Then Carol got busy, and I began fishing alone. The canoe wasn’t stable without a person in the front end, so I found a large boulder that I called “Carol.” I put the rock in the front of the canoe to keep everything steady while I fished. The rock worked so well that I safely walked around the canoe standing up, which is not something the experts recommend.
One afternoon in September I enjoyed what I knew would be my last evening of fishing for that season. Grad school and work were about to start up, so I’d not fish there again until next year. I canoed back downstream to the Osceola bridge where my car was parked. I realized I no longer needed my boulder. With the canoe close to shore, I walked to the front of the canoe, grabbed “Carol” (the rock) and chucked her overboard.
In cartoons when Wile E. Coyote has just made a fatal error there is a terrifying pause. Time stops as he processes what he has done and what is going to happen to him. The cartoon is absolutely true to life. On the river I had my Wile E. Coyote moment. For several seconds I contemplated the fact that I was standing upright in an unstabilized canoe. Then the thing spun like a birling log under a lumberjack. I went sailing, my fishing rod flew even further, and soon we were both in the river. I survived. The fishing rod was never seen again.
And I never walked upright in a canoe again. Well, you don’t forget a lesson you learn the hard way.
What have you learned the hard way?
Photo credit: Associated Press
The news out of Poland last week included an item about a tanker truck that crashed and dumped its contents all over the highway. Its contents? Liquid chocolate.
Luckily it happened pretty early in the morning and no one was injured in the accident. But that wasn’t really the end of the story. The fire brigade sent to clean it up needed to bring in hot water because the chocolate was solidifying too fast to be able to scrap it up easily. And then the story went viral, hitting so many news feeds that people began to think it was a hoax. It’s even listed (and verified) on Snopes.com.
What unusual thing have you spilled?
My daughter is attracted by Name Brands. She would almost always prefer a Name Brand if possible. I’m not sure how this happened as I’m the opposite (although having just typed these words, I may have answered my own question!) With very few exceptions, I go with generic and cheap. I do buy Prell shampoo because I love the smell and Birkenstocks because how can you argue with sandals that you wear constantly and after 10 years, they are still OK. But that’s about it.
Except Kitchenaid. I had one of the earlier Kitchenaid stand mixers – the ones made back in the day when the company was still an offshoot of Hobart, the big commercial baking mixer company. Because I loved this mixer and never had a moment’s trouble with it, I bought several other Kitchenaid products over the years – all because of the name.
I think most of you have heard my sad story about my old Kitchenaid finally giving up the ghost and the new Kitchenaid not being as durable. I did eventually talk Kitchenaid into sending me a check for half of the amount that I spent on the repair, but considering the initial expense of the machine and the expense of the repair (not to mention my angst), I would not call myself satisfied. Not satisfied as to the durability of the machine, the length of the warranty on such an expensive appliance, the way my complaint was initially handled and the difficulty of finding someone to repair the machine.
So now I have to say that my love affair with Kitchenaid is over. No more appliances in my house based solely on the Kitchenaid name. And unfortunately I no longer believe that the new stand mixer will be the last one I own (something I thought at the time I purchased it). What this means is that my next stand mixer won’t be a Kitchenaid.
What brands are you loyal to?
Photo Credit: Very Vanilla Baking Book by Sarah Kieffer
I’m a cookbook reader. When I see a cookbook (usually online) that looks interesting, I ask for it from the library and can spend a lazy Saturday afternoon or an evening flipping through the pages, reading through the ingredients, looking at all the photos. Every now and then I see a recipe that I want, then I mark it with a post-it note and make a copy. And rarely I will decide that I really need to have this cookbook in my collection. (This is a hard decision, because my current cookbook shelves are full, so if a new cookbook comes into the house, an old cookbook has to go!)
Yesterday I picked up Vanilla Bean Baking Book by Sarah Kieffer. Some very nice looking recipes and I did have a couple of post-it notes, but wasn’t really thinking this was something I needed to purchase… until I got to the back of the book. There, on page 323 was “Music to Bake to”. She even had two columns, one for Morning Tunes and one for Night Grooves. A lot of jazz as well as some Joni Mitchell and Peggy Lee. Even some Over the Rhine!
Here’s one of her morning tunes – a wonderful song, although I would probably never have come up with it on my own for baking background music!
Now I’m re-thinking whether I need to get myself a copy of this cookbook.
Any cooking tunes of your own?
Trail Baboon 