Category Archives: home

Food, gardening, home, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized, Weather

Freeze Warning

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The earliest 28° frost/freeze where we live can occur any time between late August to late September. Last Friday, the National Weather Service warned us that a killing freeze/frost could occur Monday and Tuesday nights, September 7 and 8. That is pretty early,  and all the signs were indicative of this calamity.

On Sunday, Husband and I harvested all the chard, green and red New Mexico peppers, red sweet peppers, and  any tomato that showed any inclination of ripening indoors. (Tomatoes that have been subjected to a frost when they are still on the vine should not be canned. It produces some enzyme that is contrary to safe canning.) That meant a trip to several  local liquor stores to get boxes for ripening tomatoes, as well as a search for canning jars. (There are no canning jars to be had in our town now, as everyone was scrambling to save their garden produce, too. )

We spent Monday figuring out how to maximize the canning jars and lids we still had, and to cook up  a couple dozen chili peppers for enchilada sauce. We covered bean poles with comforters and blankets, and also covered  pepper plants  and  cantelopes with old table cloths and a large tarp. So much for a restful Labor Day Weekend.

Tuesday morning dawned with frost covered roofs and droopy tomato plants. Similar cold temperatures are predicted for Tuesday evening, so we will leave everything covered until Wednesday. By then, warmer evening temperatures are predicted.

When has the weather changed your plans?

 

Business, Food, Health, home, Mysteries, Uncategorized

The New Toilet Paper?

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Hand sanitizer, toilet paper, bleach…. I was lucky enough to have these items already in the house when shelter-in-place hit and people started to hoard.  I was surprised by the flour/yeast panic and the run on King Arthur bread mixes, but again, I had enough on hand to get through.  I was also surprised to not find garlic in the stores for a couple of weeks; the produce guy at Cub was stumped.   Garlic salt isn’t the greatest substitute for fresh garlic, but we managed.

But pectic?  This one brought me up short.  I headed out early one morning and picked a big flat of raspberries and as is my custom, I stopped at Kowalski’s on the way home.  There on the shelf where the pectin usually lives was a big hole.  I asked an employee… they said that they haven’t been able to keep canning supplies and pectin in stock.  Same story for a few other places I quickly called.

Unfortunately you can’t just keep fresh raspberries sitting around forever, so I kept calling and did find pectin at my local hardware store, although it was a different brand than I usually use to cook my jam.  Since beggars can’t be choosers, I bought it and headed home. (The hardware store shelves in the canning section were basically bare; I actually got the last jar of pectin!)  After a long search on the internet, I finally found a comparable low-sugar recipe that I could use.  Presumably the jam will be fine when I thaw the first jar – you wouldn’t think you could mess up berries and sugar with a different kind of pectin, right?

Have you run out of anything lately?

Family, home, Uncategorized

Bye Bye Bicarbonate

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I needed baking soda for a project.  I wasn’t sure how much I needed for the entire project and I wasn’t sure how much I actually had in the house.  YA and I were at Costco and I thought maybe I would get it there and not have to make another trip.  Of course, being Costco, the baking soda came in a 13.5 pound bag.

I waffled and waffled about whether to get it.  The project SHOULD work – I’d seen it with my own eyes on the internet – and I would need a bit but 13.5 pounds of baking soda is a LOT of baking soda.  As I stood in the aisle I thought… what family needs that much baking soda?  Eventually I caved and sent YA back to the baking aisle to retrieve it.

I’ll give you one guess.  That’s right, the project did NOT work out the way it shows on the internet.  AND it turns out I had enough baking soda in the cabinet to do the test run.  Sigh.  So now I have a 13.5 pound bag of baking soda sitting on the counter making me feel like a fool every time I walk into the kitchen.  It wasn’t that much money, but I really should have known better.

If any baboons in the Twin Cities area need a cup or two of baking soda, I’ll be happy to bring it by.  Hopefully I won’t get stopped by the police with a bunch of baggies of white powder in the car!

When was the last time you over-indulged?

books, home, Media, Stories, Uncategorized

Bathroom Reading

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Last week I was coming to the end of Travels with a Tangerine by Tim Mackintosh-Smith (a travelog in the footsteps of a famous Middle-Eastern traveler, Ibn Battutah) and I came across a passage that made me laugh out loud.  The author has found a battered copy of a reference book that had been in his home when he was a child:

“I checked.  It was the same edition as my father’s – Nelson’s Encyclopedia of 1913 – and had the same slightly animal odor that clings to reference books long thumbed.  People had often hinted to my father that it was out of date…but he remained loyal to those tatty maroon volumes, his contemporary.  I ran my hand along the spines.  I too was fond of Nelson’s, companion of many happy hours on the loo. (How deprived are the squatting nations!  Defecation and ingestion of knowledge are such complementary activities.)”

I laughed because, as an adult, I am also a bathroom reader.  My most ambitious bathroom choice was back when I was still at the bookstore.  In those days, when we did returns to publishers, we stripped the front cover off the mass market paperbacks and sent just the covers back; it was cheaper to publish a new paperback if needed than to pay return postage on a whole book.  One of the perks of working at the bookstore was that we could help ourselves to the coverless books (called “strips”) on the understanding that it was for our own reading pleasure and not for profit.  So it was that War and Peace ended up at my house without a cover.  I figured that if the book were in the bathroom I would actually read it, since I wasn’t sure I would pick it up off the nightstand!   Every couple of weeks, I would rip off the pages that I had already read and toss them.  It wasn’t like I was going to keep a strip on any of my bookshelves (with my real books).  Over the course of the next year, War and Peace got skinnier and skinnier until I was down to about 25 pages and I took it to the bedroom to finish off.

For several years it has just been National Geographic, Smithsonian and Scientific American in the bathroom, but now that I’m furloughed, I’m caught up with my magazines, so have a book in the basket as well — Lost in the Arctic by Lawrence Millman.  I think I may have gotten this book from Clyde or Bill or maybe Steve; I rarely buy books so it had to come from somewhere!

Are you a bathroom reader?  Willing to share your current bathroom tome?  Or your most ambitious read (bathroom or no)?

Family, home, Uncategorized, Words, work

Words To Live By

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Husband stopped working  on the Reservation in March,  and he became increasingly agitated and scattered as the weeks passed as he adjusted to retirement.  He was running around doing all sorts of things at home and around town, and was so exhausted by noon he had to take a nap every day. He talked of getting a part time job at the local butcher shop.  It finally dawned on me that he thought that even though he was retired, he had to be as busy as I was working full time. When I mentioned to him that retirement meant he should be doing less than I was doing, he got quiet, sat down, thought for a long time, and then started writing.  He wrote:

When you are retired, how much you do matters far less than how well and how lovingly you do it.

I told him those were pretty good words for him  to live by right now.  He still is busy, but I don’t think he worries so much now about needing to work like he is still working full time.

What are your words to live by for right now?

Fantasy, Food, Gatherings, home, Seasons, The Baboon Congress, Uncategorized

Dinner For Twelve

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Last weekend was a real scramble dealing with all the garden produce that chose to ripen at the same time. We made our tried and true Minestrone ala Milanese recipe from Anna Thomas’ Vegitarian Epicure. It makes twelve or more servings, and I thought what a good thing to have on hand if a Congress of Baboons showed up at the door!

That really got me imagining how I would go about feeding a mixed bunch of vegetarians and omnivores at the same time. I think it could be quite fun. I haven’t settled on a menu yet, but it is fun to think about.

What would you serve at a dinner party for twelve people of differing food preferences?

Automotive, Family, Food, home, Science, Technology, Uncategorized

New Toys

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Husband’s new smoker/grill arrived on Tuesday. You can see it in the header photo.  It is quite the machine, something my dad would have called a “delicate piece of equipment” given all the complexity involved in using it. It is iron, true. It took two trips to the hardware store just to unpack it. We needed a tin snips to cut the thick, wire strapping that secured its protective wrappings. Then we found it was firmly attached to a heavy wooden pallet by screws that had odd heads needing  a bit with a square head for the electric screwdriver.  I am thankful I managed to remove the screws without stripping them.  What would we have done then?!

Husband has waited years for this grill with the same anticipation as a child waiting for a long hoped-for special toy at Christmas. His first smoked sausage and country style pork ribs turned just as he wanted.  We are truly blessed with good cooking equipment.

What is the most complex piece of equipment you ever had to operate? What is your favorite cooking vessel or utensil. 

 

education, Family, Food, gardening, home, Nature, Uncategorized

84 Pounds of Pickles

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I have never been able to do math in my head. Husband is far better at it, but last week he failed at basic math hilariously while using a calculator.

Husband found some lovely vegetables at an Adventist farm  stand.  (Adventists are supposed to be vegetarian,  but I find it humorous that some of our most prominent local  Adventists are big time cattle ranchers.) We decided to make German  refrigerator pickles with them.  The recipe called for four quarts of brine and one cauliflower,  one carrot, twelve pearl onions, two cucumbers, and two bell peppers. It all had to sit in the brine in a steel pot in the refrigerator for a week.

We have a refrigerator in the basement just for this purpose,  but we are always concerned about the weight on the shelves. Husband calculated the weight of everything and worriedly told me that we couldn’t possibly put the brine pot in the fridge because it weighed 84 pounds.

Well, that just didn’t make sense to me, and after some sturm und drang, Husband recalculated and determined it all weighed 8 pounds. The veggies are brining  away in the pot in the fridge.  Now I can finally tease him about his math skills.

How are your Math skills?  What kinds of Math are easiest for you? When have you miscalculated?

animals, Family, Health, home, Seasons, Uncategorized

Keeping House

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Today’s post comes from Linda.

One of the projects I have been putting off way too long, and finally got to this summer, was to re-roof an old birdhouse I’d gotten from one of my gardening clients. It’s a very old weathered wood house that had been chewed on by a critter of some sort, and I had put it aside when the old roof fell apart.

I rounded up the wood scraps, saw, hammer, nails, ruler and pencil necessary to play Norm Abram for an hour, and hung the completed project on a panel of the old gazebo out back.

I felt rather pleased to be able to check it off my to-do list, but even more pleased when two days later I spotted some nesting material poking out of the opening.

After consulting a local wild bird store, I invested in some live mealworms to help provide a steady food supply for the parents and the offspring that were likely to follow soon. One of the parent birds became quite bold when s/he realized what I was delivering, and would come perch on the feeder while I sprinkled the mealworms from the container. The birds became a bit shy when I tried to film them, but I captured a few short videos of feeding time.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/l17jw3bbm3u7vjw/wren2.mov?dl=0

The activity intensified when the little ones hatched out. They were hungry, and talked about it a lot. The bold little wren actually brushed a wing against my hand one morning in its eagerness to get breakfast started. I was a little concerned that it was becoming too tame for its own good!

Do you cut corners on safety when you’re in a hurry? Do you worry about your family and friends who do?

animals, Art, Family, Food, home, Kids, pets, Uncategorized

Birthday Art

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Last week was my birthday.  I learned a long time ago that I don’t want to wait around to have friends/family bring celebration to me; if I want a particular celebration, then I just make it happen.  I came to this revelation after wasband #1 and I split up.  It was Valentine’s Day and I was feeling sorry for myself so I went out and bought myself a small bouquet of flowers, some heart-shaped balloons and a couple of pink frosted donuts with sprinkles (one for me, one for the dog).  I had also scored a big box from the new tv of the neighbors (Katy Scarlett loved to sit in big boxes and then eventually destroy them) which I decorated with red and pink markers for her.  Turned out to be a great day and a great lesson for myself.

This is not to say that I don’t love what friends/family do for me – I think when folks think of me it means MORE to me because I am self-sufficient in the “celebrate me” arena.  This year I had an especially nice surprise.  While I was out walking the dog that morning, the little girls next door (Margot and Matilda) came over and did chalk decorations all over my sidewalk.  I’m sure they had help from their parents, but the rainbows and butterflies were clearly Margot’s inspiration.  It was so touching – it’s still there a week later although getting a little faded from folks walking on it and the couple of rain sprinkles.  It was the best birthday wish I got this year!

Do you have a favorite neighbor?  Or a not-favorite one?