Weekend Edition: Lost Weekend and California Recap

I got back from California on Thursday, and I was as sick as a dog!  I was feverish, achy, and coughing like I had the croup.  I spent Thursday afternoon, and most of Friday asleep on my couch with my dog looking worriedly after me.  By Saturday I felt well enough to accompany my mom out to finish our Christmas shopping, in part because I was buoyed by the Chicken Curry Stew at this restaurant.   Then back to the couch and early to bed.  On Sunday I felt a lot better, and I was back to baking my weekly loaf of sourdough, and making braised short ribs with sauerkraut for dinner, as well as catching up on a week-plus loads of laundry. Pretty dull stuff.  Since I planned to do a trip wrap-up on Friday for my Friday Fun post and felt too sick to get online, I'm just going to do it now instead.  Lost weekend, over and forgotten.

I didn't take a whole lot of pictures while in California, well I did, but they were mostly of Tawny opening every gift that she received at her shower, and the items that we wanted to remember for later at IKEA.  Won't bore you with those!  Here is a quick pictorial view of the trip and some of the things we did.

Oceanside, California.

Tawny's belly, I guess that was about 33 weeks.

The next morning I made this flower arrangement for the baby shower from the things growing in Tawny and Jack's front yard.  Tea roses, camellias, bird-of-paradise, kangaroo paws, and oranges in your yard and blooming in December?  Yeah, that's the draw of California, in case you've never felt it before.

One of the buntings that I made her last shower was recycled for this shower. Yay fabric!

Tawny and her friend Annie.  They've been friends since middle school.   Tawny's mom is an amazing seamstress and she made that blouse as well as several others.  The details were really beautiful.

Present time!  

Tawny has that giant smile throughout all the photos from the shower.  Good job party organizers, you made her really happy.  I think everyone was laughing here because we all agreed that Jack was going to want a matching set of lion pajamas.

The baby shower was on Saturday, and on Sunday our focus switched to home improvement projects.  These are some of the bamboo flooring samples that Tawny was pricing.  She and Jack have only been in their current house for a little over a month, and their landlady has agreed that she'll pay for new laminate or bamboo flooring if Jack will install it.  Tawny is leaning heavily towards the bamboo option, and these pale colors were the simplest and cheapest options.  She's hoping that if costs are low enough they'll get to do the whole house, and not just the living room and kitchen.

Next we hit up IKEA looking for bedding, rugs, and decor items for the nursery/guest room.  This rug fit the color scheme perfectly, but in the end was rejected because it was synthetic, and Tawny wants a wool rug.

We both liked this poster, and again it fit the color scheme and has an educational component, but it too was left behind.  I'll do a separate nursery post update later in the week.

This is one of many citrus trees that adorn Tawny and Jack's yard.  This is an orange, but there is also a pomelo, a grapefruit, a lemon, a lime, and several tangerines.  Also a peach, an apple, a guava, a strawberry guava and two pomegranates.  Right now the citrus is just starting to ripen in quantity and Tawny doesn't know how to use it up fast enough.  She needs a juicer stat!

I suggested we make marmalade, which was fun.  We ended up with 17 jars of marmalade and really didn't use that much citrus, considering.  Oh well, she's got Christmas gifts at the ready, which is good considering the next paragraph's news.  It was her first time canning anything, and this was her leaning over the jars giggling as the lids popped down after they came out of the water bath.

Tawny's due date was supposed to be January 24th, but on Saturday her water broke and she's currently in the hospital getting ready to have Baby Boy six weeks early.  Everything seems healthy with mother and son, he just wants out early.  Good luck baby and mama!

Rainy Day

Its raining. Seems to be letting up, but it came down with a vengeance, including hail! Brr, its giving me a chill just thinking about it. I've been drinking tea non-stop all afternoon, which really isn't much of a departure from a normal day, but it seems particularly appropriate today. A photo taken a few minutes ago once it let up a little. Looks a lot like this photo, but with more yellow leaves, particularly on the ground.

I've been photographing meals, cooking projects, garden updates and a home project here and there, but am way behind in posting them. In the spirit of the gloomy weather today I'll focus on the cooking projects. First up the result of all of those apples I showed a few weeks ago.

Applesauce! Our recipe is about as simple as possible, core and quarter the apples (and peel if you don't have a food mill). Fill a large heavy bottomed pan with apples. Add about a cup of water, cover and cook until apples are soft, stirring occasionally. Once soft, mill to remove skins and grind into sauce form. Return to large pan, sugar and spice to taste. We usually use very little sugar, because good ripe apples hardly need it, and a little cinnamon. Then process as your canning manual instructs. Leaving the skins on during the initial cooking makes for a slightly pink sauce, which is lovely. (Assuming you used red apples, ours were McIntosh). Yum!

Next up a meal from a week or so ago. I'm not a vegetarian, but this TLT Sandwich, from 101 Cookbooks, is so good that I make it every couple of months. I think it would be a great recipe to try when you are having friends over for a barbeque and want an option for your vegetarian friends. Wish I had one right now, the spicy tempeh would really help beat the chill.

The recipe calls for roasting cherry tomatoes, but while fresh garden tomatoes are on-hand, I never bother.

Assembled and served with a salad from the Fall garden-- lettuce, lots of herbs, carrots and tomatoes.

The kitchen garden wasn't affected by our frost a few weeks ago, so the herbs are all still going strong. For this salad it was a selection of tarragon, italian parsley, thai basil, and garlic chives.

As I wrote this I realized the perfect thing to listen to would be The Splendid Table podcasts, that I'm also way behind on. For anyone not already listening to it, but anticipating missing Gourmet Magazine, you'll love it. It even has Jane and Michael Stern, so you won't miss out on any of that super fattening food they recommend, as you travel around our lovely country.

Now I'm off to feed the dogs, and maybe feed myself some of that applesauce.

Weekend (Pickle) Edition

I started out the weekend by making raspberry ginger tea cakes, based on this recipe from Design*Sponge. I followed the recipe exactly the first time I made these, and it was delicious with apricots and almond flour, however this time I didn't have either ingredient, so I improvised. I used a cup of regular flour and added powdered ginger (instead of lemon zest) to flavor the batter. I substituted several still frozen raspberries as the fruit. I also made them a bit smaller, using muffin tins instead of small tart pans. The larger size was a bit more cake than I wanted with afternoon tea the last time. I have a winter version in mind using orange zest and dollops of marmalade. Yum. Might have to go eat the last one while I write the rest of this.

Saturday was spent gathering supplies for our first canning project of the year-- bread and butter pickles, and taking a scenic drive south through the farms that stretch down the Rio Grande through Isleta, Peralta, Tome, and Belen. Very verdant, but I didn't take any photos, so I can not share.

On Sunday I stopped by to see the extensive home renovation being done by two of my friends from architecture school. They bought a little shotgun house in Barelas a couple years ago, and it was promptly damaged by severe flooding during a series of torrential rain storms. It was in need of serious work before the flooding, but afterward they had to rip out all the wood floors, stabilize the adobe, and re-grade the yard in addition to building an addition and upgrading the old structure. I think the project is about a year and a half over-schedule now. They've accomplished a ton of work, but still have a lot to do. It made me feel a bit better about my own house to see others who have even bigger and more extensive projects on tap.

Then it was back to the house for pickles! My maternal grandmother always used to make bread & butter pickles, but neither my mom nor I had made them before. For those that don't know, bread & butter pickles are sliced sweet pickles that are generally put on sandwiches or served as a condiment with dinner. (My eastern-european-heritage-mid-western-raised grandma ALWAYS put pickles out on the table with dinner, no matter what was being served. Often more than one variety).

We spent a few days looking through grandma's old recipe cards and cookbooks for her exact recipe, but couldn't find one-- turns out they all looked fairly similar though, so we just choose the version in my mom's old Joy of Cooking. We had about three gallons of cucumbers, but failed to factor in enough red pepper or onions, so our version is a little shy of that. We also added a little hot pepper for a bit of spice. Initial tastings proved it to be a successful venture. The whole process was pretty easy, but totally time-consuming and hot! Once we find a pickling crock we'll probably try some dill pickles.

Pickling used up a lot of the cucumbers we had in the refrigerator, but they just keep coming, as evidenced by the seven I picked this morning. Also picked some beets, thai basil, arugula, and garlic chives and one tiny carrot, which was just to see how big they had actually grown. I plan to dice and roast the beets along with a sweet potato, and throw together a salad tonight using them plus the arugula and herbs. Might add a hard boiled egg too.

Meanwhile for lunch I made my favorite cucumber salad.

Favorite Cucumber Salad:

1 large or 2-3 small cucumbers

1-2 Tbsp. fresh mint leaves, chopped

1/4 cup crumbled blue cheese

1/4 cup pine nuts

1/4 cup finely sliced onion (red or vidalia are nice)

2 Tbsp. rice wine vinegar

1 Tbsp. olive oil

salt & pepper to taste

Peel, seed and slice cucumbers. (If small enough I usually skip the peeling and seeding). Toss in the blue cheese, pine nuts, and herbs and toss with the vinegar and oil. (You can adjust the dressing as necessary depending on how big your cucumbers are). I've tried other vinegars but with the blue cheese the mild acidity of the rice wine is the best, its sweetness just works. Apple cider would be fine, but not as good. Balsamic was not good. Dill is also good in place of, or in addition to the mint, and dried works almost as well as fresh. I substituted a bunch of garlic chives for the onions in the picture above because I had used up all the onions for the pickles this weekend and haven't been back to the store to replenish.

And now a couple of random photos from the last week:

Corn from the garden. The ears are small, but the kernels are mature and we've had to pick en-masse because worms are eating them. We are adamantly organic, but really lazy about buying organic pest controls. Last year we swore we'd get the BT powder for our corn, but voila here it is mid-August and we still haven't bothered. For certain next year we will have it on hand.

And finally, the artichoke I picked last week that had gone too far towards blooming is now doing so in my mom's kitchen window. Soo beautiful.