Taking a short break for a mid-day Sunday recap
Processed market applications and payments, plus did the books from yesterday’s first outdoor market (what a fantastic turnout!).
Walked for an hour with Bowie.
Transplanted a bunch of Comfrey and Bergamot from the beds near the house/driveway to the outside fence row around the big garden bed.
Harvested stinging nettles and young green garlic to make nettle ravioli with nettle pasta dough for supper. Realizing I don’t really want to be inside cooking, however. Oops.
Transplanted half of the nettles from the driveway edge (what a dumbass spot to plant a stinging plant that spreads like wildfire) to a nice dappled sun spot in the wooded area on the north side of the house.
Boiled the nettles just in case I get my cooking mojo.
Pondered how to dig holes big enough to transplant a bunch of Hostas around the base of the big Buckeye at the foot of the drive to try to make things look a little more intentional around here. Man, it’s hard to dig around tree roots. Might need to build up a raised bed around it instead. Or just forget it entirely.
Reworking a poem I wrote 12 years ago at my new desk in my own office. #sunday
Sunday slow start
Chris and Lila got up at 7:00, but in a tiptoes and whispers way that let me know I could stay in bed. I dozed, then read for a half hour, enjoying the silence in the neighborhood – no leaf blowers, lawn mowers, nail guns, or earth moving equipment eternally beep beep beeping. When I came down for coffee and to do a bit of writing, I found them snuggled under a blanket on the couch watching The Creature From The Black Lagoon and eating cereal.
The rush of the day waits on the other side of the curtains still closed to the morning light, and I know already that there won’t be enough hours in this day to capture all of the quiet I need, or to accomplish the tasks I must. I’ll be gone for four hours for the art and yoga class right smack in the most productive part of the day.
Will the lawn get mowed? It must before it becomes a pasture. Will the garden get put to bed, and the rest of the garlic planted? It must before it snows. Will all of the extra furniture and piles of stuff get relocated to upstairs, the basement, the porch, or the barn? They must before the guys come to install our new wide-plank laminate cherry flooring in the entire downstairs. Will the mural, market, and EBT budgets get completed? They must before the board meeting next week.
So this should be an interesting next few days. I intend to do what I can and let the rest go because I know the list is impossible to achieve easily on top of everything else the normal day requires. We will do our best and then we will rest.
Making notes to myself. (Taken with instagram)
Exhausted. Happily, so
in spite of the fact that the day started off with Chris and Lila’s discovery that the chicken tractor was breached in the night and three of the six hens were dead and the other three injured. Effing raccoons are such wasteful bastards. Perfectly delicious chicken and all they do is tear the throats out and leave them to die. Raccoons are the Early Grayce of the four-footed world. Fuckers.
So after cleanup and tractor shoring up, I made the kitchen my bitch.
Things accomplished in my kitchen today:
- two quarts of Korean kimchee now doing their lacto-fermentation thing on the counter.
- decanted the ginger kombucha and started a new batch.
- a pint jar of preserved Meyer lemon quarters (preserved in kosher salt and their own juice), plus a half pint of Meyer lemon juice for the fridge, and a quart of Meyer lemon infused vodka. Two bags of the lemons for $3 at Kreiger’s market. I might need to go back for more of those tomorrow.
- portabello mushrooms sliced, marinated in olive oil, tamari, and balsamic vinegar now dehydrating - just enough to make them taste like they’ve been lightly sautéed, but they still have nutrients intact.
- two sheets of a raw flat bread dehydrating. I’m really excited about this one because I made it up out of my own imagination. It has ground raw almonds, flax meal, toasted sesame seeds, carrot, zucchini, celery, orange bell pepper, parsley, and scallions - all held together with a few Madjool dates, dried currents, olive oil, and tamari that was blended high speed. I will have sandwiches for work this week and they won’t make me itchy and swollen and stabby.
- five sheets of fruit leather dehydrating. Yes, I have a nine-tray dehydrator! Oh, how I love this thing, except for the high-level white noise it creates. The fruit leather is organic pink lady apples, organic kale, and blueberries from my brother in-law’s BB patch with a bit of lemon juice and local maple syrup. Lila will never even notice the kale! I’m such a sneaky mama.
- a batch of peanut butter-oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies made with some almond meal swapped out for some of the flour, and toasted sesame seeds. Good gravy, these cookies smell so good, but they have wheat flour, so they’ll just be for the kids.
- shrimp and scallop posole for dinner, topped with fresh avacado and cilantro, with a scrumptious green salad on the side. Lila is currently bitching about being forced to eat the salad, but you know? Who the hell doesn’t like SALAD?! Besides, there are amazing homemade cookies on the other side of that salad, so whatever, kid. Suck it up.
- four loads of laundry.
- five phone calls with family folk.
What I did not accomplish:
- taking down the Christmas tree. Mauddammit.
Maybe tomorrow.
Happy disparate thoughts Sunday.
The house is no longer quiet, but I had nearly an hour to myself until Lila just got up. She’s eating a bowl of cereal and watching Scooby-Doo. Chris is in bed, massively hungover. Never a good thing to see men in their late 40s playing beer pong with the eyball ping pong balls that were meant for the kid’s game that never even happened, and then not drinking beer, but doing shots of The Kraken dark rum. This on top of ginger vodka and a LOT of red wine, followed by lots and lots and lots more red wine. I had to laugh at finding myself in the annoyed wives contingent last night - all threatening to lock our boob-headed husbands out to sleep in their cars if they didn’t get their shit under control. So his head is cracking open this morning, and we’re out of ibuprofen. I don’t feel much like getting in the car, but I’ll make him a fried egg sandwich on one of Baron’s bacon cheddar scones from the market (made with Baron’s homemade bacon from the hog he raised and slaughtered). I only had a drink and a half and am feeling just fine except for the sinus headache that I’ve had for almost a week now.
Tyler is snoring in his room, which is off the dining room where I’ve been sitting mapping out the concept and theme of my novel in an attempt to reign in the hot mess before it gets too out of control. I’m working with the book Story Engineering, and it’s really helping. I won’t be doing NaNoWriMo, but my goal for November is to complete an outline even though I’m already 30,000 words into this thing. I might do another half hour or so, but the sun is shining on the frost-covered ground and I have a to-do list ten miles long. Plus, it’s trick-or-treat day from 3-5 and I have to do the witch face makeup for the girl. I’m resisting the temptation to invite the trick-or-treat crew back to our house for soup and salad and bread after because that would mean I’d need to spend a bunch of time cooking instead of the other things that need my attention, like toilet cleaning, sorting, vacuuming, laundry, and maybe a little harvesting. (kale, collards, chard, peppers). I just looked at the forecast for the week and Wednesday will be sunny and close to 60º, so I think I’ll take the day off and spend some time getting the gardens put to bed and planting my garlic. It’s time to stock up on straw bales for the chickens over winter, and to build a big compost bin down by the new garden before I pull out all of the spent plants. I can layer those with the leaves that are coming down everywhere, and hopefully have a bit of compost to spread in the spring - although with the bug infestations we had this summer, I’m almost inclined to burn the surface of the beds. Unfortunately it’s so wet, I doubt anything would burn. At least it’s not raining again today.
I also need to get the winter market map and instructions made up and circulated today because tomorrow I have my mother in-law, and can’t have her at my house because she gets very agitated and wants to go home to her mostly empty house next door. Hopefully that gets sold over the next year.
I also have five grocery bags full of different types of peppers from one of the farmers that need to get delivered to the Campus Kitchen because their volunteer never showed up for the end-of-market pickup yesterday. And I want to collect some blankets, coats, hats, gloves, scarves, and food to give to the homeless people who are still living under the overpass behind the market. They’ve been there for more than a year - all of the area shelters are over capacity. A few weeks ago a media outfit was down there taking photos and video of their encampment just as we were packing up the market, but I haven’t seen a story on them yet. I know a lot of the vendors have passed along food, but now the market’s done for the season. Anyway, I had a conversation with one of the women yesterday and the feeling she emanated of being trapped in a cycle with no way out is heavy on my mind this morning. How fragile, the threads that bind us to the fabric of society.
Best use of leftover Christmas brisket achievement unlocked in my kitchen this morning.
Christmas Roast Hash
2 cups finely chopped leftover beef
3 potatoes, peeled and diced
1 onion, diced
1 celery stalk, finely chopped
1/2 yellow bell pepper, diced
1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp dried thyme
cracked pepper
salt if your roast wasn’t done with a dry rub (mine was, so already v salty)
2/3 cup beef stock or leftover au jus
Preheat oven to 375º. Toss all ingredients well in a bowl, then pour into greased cookie sheet with sides or low-sided roasting pan. Cover with tin foil and bake for 45 minutes. Uncover and broil until all top edges are crispy and most of the liquid is absorbed. Serve hot with 2 poached eggs on top, and toast on the side (otherwise you’ll end up licking your plate like a pre-teen).
No photo because it wasn’t exactly pretty, but Lord love a duck, was it delicious.
Karma’s a bitch
Chris was making some hillbilly garage sale shelf racks presentable enough to put on the wall above my desk this afternoon. He took them to the paint booth at work and came back about four hours later, walked to my desk, held them up against the wall, walked back out the door, got in the truck, and disappeared. He came back a couple of hours later, said hi, that smells good (ratatouille), then disappeared. Came back a half hour later to refill his wine glass from the box, and when I asked him where he was going said, I’m hanging out next door with our hot neighbors.
“Oh, so never mind about the shelves?” (and never mind about me hanging out in here with a kid who has a fever but is in denial about said fever).
“I’ll DO THEM. Jeeeeeeeeeeze.”
door slam
Oooohkaaaaay.
About an hour later, he comes back in. I’m still working in the kitchen. This time stirring the squash seeds (Delicata, Kuri, and Acorn) in the cast iron skillet with butter, EVOO, sea salt, pepper, garlic, chili, & onion powder. Oh, and making fucking crepes. Do you mind.
“Do you mind if I go out with Joe (the hot neighbor) and Zeb?”
And you know, of course I don’t mind. I mean, I mind a little only because I want to go out with Hot Neighbor Joe. So I don’t mind.
But I also don’t mind letting the teenager and his lovely girlfriend eat dinner in his bedroom even though it’s against the rules.
(See: dining room table covered in my piles of crap.)
(See: finna keep working on that fiction if fever girl takes another nap.)
Do. I. Mind.
So tired. Canned 14 quarts of tomato, garlic & basil soup. Made a batch of killer ratatouille and some herbed sourdough flat bread. Plus a small batch of roasted salsa verde. My feet hurt from standing in the kitchen for 11 hours and this wine isn’t doing anything but giving me acid tummy on top of all the tomato today. Ty and his girlfriend are in the basement blowing up zombies on the X-box. Lila’s getting ready for bed. Chris and I are heading up early, both of us feeling highly accomplished and worn out. My kitchen is a bit of a disaster even though I cleaned as I worked. Not sure how the sink ended up full of dishes, but I’m hopeful that Chris will knock a few of them down before he leaves the house in the morning.
G’nite all. Hope you had a fruitful Sunday, too.
xo
Current Status: humid hair and thunderstorms and happy that I’m getting a trim tomorrow for the first time in over a year.
Krikey those are some big ass bags under my eyes. Let’s blame them on the five hours of copyediting I did today. My just reward is a Stella in the freezer with my name on it.
Oh, and lookit the bare dirt spot behind my left shoulder! That’s where the pizza oven’s going, and the instruction book arrived yesterday so my mind is joyfully distracted with a ridiculous amount of plotzing and planning.
You guys have to come here for a pizza party this summer, OK?
I’ll show you my cornicione.
