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I don’t know what it is about me and death hikes.  I keep finding them.  I forget that many places that are beautiful to go are

• wet
• high up in the air
• made by scrabbling a barely flat surface into a cliff wall

I was pondering why we always end up like this, a white-knuckle death grip on each kid as we inch along a rock face, hissing at our dear children with each clumsy step.  (I swear that Zephyr starts tripping every third or fourth step when we are up 100 feet in the air clinging to a metal cable.  Swear.)  Why does this always happen to us?  Then it occurred to me… it is the terrain dummy.  We keep hiking to these waterfalls in the gorge.  Gorge + waterfalls = rock walls with just a cable to cling to.  If I were in Death Valley say, this wouldn’t be happening to me.

Anyway, we had a break in the rain this last weekend and we raced for the outdoors.  I feel like such a caged animal these days, eager to get out be RUN around.  I am coming to terms with my true nature.  The truth is that I like exercise.

So why not get it here?

This was Eagle Creek Trail.  William Sullivan, Northwest hike guru has this to say about this particular trail:

The Eagle Creek Trail is one of Oregon’s most spectacular paths, passing half a dozen major waterfalls. The trail is also an engineering marvel. To maintain an easy grade through this rugged canyon, the builders blasted ledges out of sheer cliffs, bridged a colossal gorge and even chipped a tunnel through solid rock behind 120-foot Tunnel Falls.

Yes siree.  It was high up there.

We did this particular hike with our friends Jason and Angela and their two boys Soren and Anders.  It is fun to have a whole family of friends.  Everyone has someone to love!  That is definitely how we feel about these guys, so we were certainly open to risking our lives with them.

Brad is such a good sport.  I have yet to decide if he really likes hiking but pretends not to or if he really does not like hiking but thinks he should or if he just doesn’t like it and… you get the picture.  For him, the best thing about hiking in the gorge is that Edgefield is between us and Portland when we are done.  The kids, (all five of them), were so exhausted that they were really pretty mellow at dinner.  Who can resist?

7 Comments | In: My super freakin' cute kids, family, food, on the road again | | #

I like Squash.  By popular demand (thanks Laura!), I am re-posting this “recommendation” for Stuffed Squash.  I wish I could tell you that it is super, super healthy, but as the key ingredient is sausage, I am not sure I could stand by that claim.  Maybe if you eat more squash per bite than sausage…  I did make this vegetarian once.  Note that this is all I will say about that.  I did it.  It wasn’t terrible.

Stuffed Squash

Cut squash in half.  Scrape out seeds.

Place halves in a baking dish with 1/2″ water in the bottom.  Bake at 375 for about 30 minutes or until the squash is softened.

Meanwhile, raid your fridge for random things to stuff that beauty with.  Start by saute-ing chopped onions and garlic in olive oil.  Throw in a bit of soy sauce, maybe some celery, chunks of mushrooms, bits of kale or any other greens that you might find down there.  Huck in some amazing sausage… like the breakfast kind or the stuff you can buy from the real, live meat counter.  When all of this is an amazing, bubbling mess, add torn up bread chunks or crumbled crackers.  Stir it all up and throw in a bit of shredded cheese (just enough to help all this stick together).  Weirdo variations that I have tried: nuts, raisins, grated carrots, grated zucchini, blue cheese, dried out parmesan, swiss chard (good!), beets (not so good!).

Pour off the water that you cooked the squash halves in, and flip them over so that they look like little boats.  Pack each half of squash with the stuffing mixture, pressing down to fill the fruit and then firmly mounding the additional stuffing.  Cook it all another 15-20 minutes or until it smells awesome.

1 Comment | In: food | | #

I’m getting organized.  Scientific even.  I bought a white board at SCRAP and nailed it to the wall in the chicken coop to keep track of number of eggs per day.  I am even sort of trying to track who is laying what.  So far the results are dismal.  It seems that we are getting three eggs a day from the same three chickens–Rita, Hasty, and Evelyn.  Hmmmm.  That would mean that Agnes and Rosey aren’t laying at all (old ladies), Hildy is on sabbatical (I don’t know what her excuse is as she is only 1 1/2, Bella is molting, and Frankie is just a lazy, good-for-nothing chicken, eating a lot and not pulling her weight, sort of like Inez except that Inez is not a chicken.  (I don’t know when I decided that it was funny to joke about babies not doing their part, but it still cracks me up.  It seems to be the only acceptable way to talk trash about a baby.)  Frankie, like Inez, might just be too young as she was hatched at the end of June last year.  It is hard to tell with chickens who reach laying age right as the days are short and the rest of the flock is not laying anyway.

Evelyn might well be my hardest worker around here.

She is laying almost every day.  This last week she popped out this MASSIVE egg.  It was the second of its kind to be presented by this lady.  When I told Brad that it was a double yoker, he was unduly surprised.  ”Those are real?” he said.  Of course they are real!  Even though he had heard about them all his life, because he had never seen one, he didn’t really believe they were real.  Weird denial of reality is what I call that.  I hear that the sun is made of gas, and you know what?  I believe it.

This is a comparison photo:  normal egg from Hasty, giHUGIC egg from Evelyn.  This worries me a bit actually.  It is fairly common for chickens who produce these huge suckers to get egg bind, a condition where the egg literally gets STUCK inside them.  A friend on our street lost a chicken to egg bind lately.  I am freaked out that I might have to reach up in a chicken and break an egg to get it out if this were to occur with one of our hens.  Here is hoping it doesn’t.  A friend of a friend also told me that she gave her hen a warm bath when she had egg bind.  The egg came right out.  Hmmm.  I guess I like baths.  I’ve never had one with a chicken though.

More photos to impress and (in the case of Anne) disgust?

Ahh yes!  Look at those old lady hands!  (It was because I was working with clay all day; I got a lot of terra cotta stuck in the cracks in my hands.)

We need to hurry up and come up with a use for this egg as it does not fit in the carton.  Really.

4 Comments | In: How strange, chickens, food | | #

I hate to admit it, but I have become sort of house-wifey in some ways.  Cooking is one example.  In general, I love to cook, and get all sorts of ideas from wandering the aisles of the grocery store.  I also LOVE to grocery shop (and I mean that!), because I like food and feel creative looking at the endless possibilities of things to make.  It is fun to go out to eat, but only because I like to taste things and think about what is in them in the hopes of replicating that recipe at home.

As much as I love to cook, I don’t care for following recipes.  I am distressed by food waste,(hence the compost, hence the chickens, hence the less packaging), and I try to manage our household to make the most use out of what we have.  I am not the type to go out and shop for specific things for just one recipe.  I struggle with recipes that tell you to use a quarter cup of onions when you are going to end up cutting the whole onion.  And no way am I using just half the can of tomatoes!  What will happen to the other half of that can?  In general, I make vast quantities of food, often freezing the left overs for another day or tweaking the ingredients.  In our house you find squash and chard for dinner day one, beef burritos day two, and squash, beef & chard enchiladas day three.

Here is a good website on trying to avoid food waste.

The truth is that I sort of hate following directions anyway, so recipes and cookbooks are used mostly as loose recommendations around here.  Even so, I still occasionally need a loose recommendation just to keep cooking foods that are interesting and to break out of my cuisine rut.  Here is a “loose recommendation” that turned out SOOOOO GOOD, even with me making it sort of following the recipe!  The kids loved it, it is pretty healthy, and I had most of the ingredients (and the ones that I didn’t have were easily substituted out).  I recommend it highly, especially served with rice.  Super good.

West African Peanut Soup

Ingredients:

1 cup cooked, skinless, chicken breast, diced

2/3 cup onion, diced

1 1/2 teaspoons garlic, minced

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

3 cups reduced sodium, fat free chicken broth

1 6-ounce can tomato paste

1 (14 1/2-ounce) can stewed tomatoes

1/2 cup reduced-fat peanut butter

Directions:

1. In a large pot, sauté onion in sesame oil until translucent; add garlic

and chicken and stir to heat through.

2. Add seasonings and sauté 1 minute longer.

3. Add broth, paste, tomatoes, and peanut butter.  Stir until well

combined.

4. Heat over medium heat until hot but not boiling.

5. Serve immediately.

6. Refrigerate leftovers within 2-3 hours.

7 Comments | In: Awesome!, food | | #

I know it has been a long time.  Believe it or not, I am nearly done with ONE of my two classes.  Right on target.  I was going to give myself all of October and here we are with a week to spare!

Even though I have not been writing here, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been doing anything.  That is, I am mostly working on my classes, but I have managed to squeeze in some fun little projects here and there.  Here is an update:

I canned.  A lot.

The kids love tomato soup, and as I felt sort of weird about the amount of soup boxes we go through and I grew a LOAD of tomatoes this year, I thought I would try canning it.  My mother in law hooked me up with a new pressure cooker and good directions and I kicked out these puppies.

I don’t want to be a braggart, but damn this stuff is good.  It really is awesome.  My complaint about tomato soup from the stores is always that it is too salty, even the reduced stuff.  Mine is perfectly tangy, tastes like real tomatoes and has these lovely little chunks in it.  Now if we don’t get botulism, all is well.

My friend Lindsey worked (like a galley slave) one Friday helping me make applesauce.  We made a ton of it.  It is pretty lovely too.

Here is the complete list of canned stuff this summer:

• 14 pints strawberry jam
• 6 pints raspberry jam
• 22 quarts applesauce
• 14 quarts pears
• 8 pints pear chutney
• 5 half pints pear plum chutney
• 24 pints tomato soup
• 7 pints blueberry syrup/jam

I had a funny experience with the blueberry syrup.  This whole canning thing is pretty new to me and I am just making whatever I can get my hands on for free or think we might use.  A few weekends ago, my mother in law, preserving goddess, serves us some blueberry syrup with our pancakes.  ”It didn’t turn out” she said.  She had tried to make blueberry jam.  She then said that she didn’t know why but her blueberry jam never turns out.  I loved the stuff just the runny way it was.  Of course, I go home and try to make blueberry syrup, but it sets up all firm… like jam.  Shoot.  Maybe she will trade with me?

And here are our tomatoes.  Yes, there are more of them.  Maybe I will have fresh tomatoes until December, but I am not convinced.  For now, we have to duck these in the kitchen, which is goofy.  It will make the room seem so big when they are gone!

I had a rough day with the kids today, and instead of my first instinct which was to put them in front of a movie, we pulled out the art supplies and made a royal mess.  It was exactly what I needed.  We made these fun skulls for Dia de los Muertos, and most thrilling to the kids, we got everything hung up and looking awesome by the time Brad got home from work.  He was suitably enthusiastic and the kids were super happy.  In addition to the skulls we made today there is

• pumpkin by Zephyr from preschool,
• candle holders from Mexico from Kendall
• mariachi skeletons in paper mache by Brad (!)
• precious paper skeletons from Italy that my parents carried back
• Virgen de Guadalupe candle
• Good Shepherd holy cards
• Sacred Heart metal pendant
• crucifix
• a picture of my cousin Maria who is dancing in heaven.  She liked Latin American culture, so I know she would like to be part of this scene.  And all my canning stuff was from her, so I have been thinking about her a lot lately.

And the front door:

Zephyr’s skulls are so funny!  HE did the one on top and the one on the lower right with blue eyes (it looks sort of like a decrepit lizard).  I took these pictures in the dark, and I know that was not a fantastic idea, but hey, the kids are asleep, so it IS dark.  I don’t see an alternative really.

I’ll post again soon.  Maybe I will include a picture of my chickens.  They are all molting and look awful.  I think they are cold as they are barely coming out of the henhouse!

Good thoughts!  Happy October!

6 Comments | In: Awesome!, food, projects, urban farming | | #

I felt accomplished this year that I had such a successful summer garden.  It is still sort of successful, if those 13 tomato plants ever decide to ripen.  They are ripening, just not all at once like I imagined.  It is somewhat inconvenient as I intended to can those tomatoes.  I’m not going to be able to can one at a time though.  Ripen, ripen, ripen!

The weather is weird around here.  The season is changing.  The mornings are cold, but then midway through the day, you are sweating in your wool socks.  I put on a sweater, take off the sweater, contemplate turning the furnace on but then see that it is still 67 degrees.  Fall is here, but it is sauntering in.  We’re having showers in the morning, heavy clouds and then bursts of sun.

In the garden, the snow peas and beets gave way to lettuce, chard, and cauliflower.  We’ll see what makes it.  The napa cabbage is looking troubled.  I see that maybe I do have slugs after all.  If you can believe it, I have seen very few slugs on our property here in Portland.  I don’t actually think that is a good thing.  I think the soil is just so dry and poor that it doesn’t support egg growth.  So even though I don’t miss the suckers, I do sort of mourn their absence.  I think our soil sucks so much that even the slugs don’t like it, but anywhere I put down chicken manure, straw, leaves and mulch there are now signs of tiny little slugs.  That’s okay.  There is enough to share for now.

And what is this?  Peeking around the side of a tomato plant, these buggers looked me in the eye.  Begone deadly nightshade!  I love that it has “deadly” in its name.  Makes you think, “Now wait, should I eat this?”.  I think I should have deadly in my name.

I had an ill-fated couple weeks for all things coffee and tea.  Just when the weather changed and I wanted more of both, I broke my coffee pot (knocked it on the sink), broke the spout of my teapot (dropped it while washing it), and suffered the loss of my milk frother (Zephyr swept it off the counter and then imbedded a piece in his foot for good measure).  Sigh.  Ill-fated.  This tea pot was so cute and useful.  Brad’s aunt gave it to me along with this excellent little tea cozy.  I couldn’t part with it,even though the spout is broken down the back in a quite irreparable way.  You can’t see the break from the front, especially with the plant in it.  I’m going to keep it on the front porch to announce my priorities to the world.  I planted a corsican mint in it.

Yes, at the big purple house, things are indeed growing well.

7 Comments | In: My super freakin' cute kids, food, projects, urban farming | | #

Friendless.  See, that’s a joke.  Get it?  Get it?

The other night the ladies of my gospel choir were discussing zucchini.  Specifically, they were comparing notes on how to best use it and trying to pawn some off on me.  I didn’t fall for it!  I HAVE my own one zucchini plant that produces about 5 lbs more zucchini than I need, thank you very much.

I did take some notes though.  Here are the top 4 uses of zucchini:

• Grate it up and sneak it into everything:  gumbo, lasagna, manicotti
• Grate it up and make sweet good stuff:  zucchini bread, muffins, chocolate zucchini cake (which everyone agrees is super good)
• Lightly saute it with olive oil and toss with pasta, basil, fresh tomatoes from the garden
• Beat grated zucchini in with potatoes and fry in a hash of sorts.  Mix with eggs and scramble.

Number One Clever Idea for Zucchini was something that I had done sort of before, but leaving out a key element. This smart woman suggested that extra zucchini be grated and frozen, but not just randomly.  She said to check the recipe that you always use for zucchini bread and freeze the grated, wrung out zucchini in that exact amount, so that you can easily make zucchini bread in the winter without defrosting more or less than you need.  Ye Gods!  How clever!

And what a great job for a 6 year old!  I cut the zucchini up into the right size and let ‘er rip with the food processor.  I also showed her how to measure 2 cups of fruit, pour off the excess liquid, and shake the whole lot into bags for freezing.  Good work, kitchen wench!

7 Comments | In: food, urban farming | | #

Did I mention that we have a lot of pears around here?

After making the chutney, I still had a good million metric tons of pears hanging around.  Brad was good enough to slave away until almost midnight peeling pears.  And good thing he did too, or I would still not be done.  We had a lot of pears you see.

Pears are all now canned up and ready for us to enjoy all winter long.  Care for a pear?

4 Comments | In: food, projects | | #

I’ve had a whole lot of projects going lately, and I’ve felt a bit fractured running from one thing to the next.  On the whole, however, I feel like I’ve gotten a lot done.

Here is the update:

Remember the plastic reduction action plan?  I targeted three sources of continuing plastic production in our house, shampoo bottles, plastic bags around bread, and the plastic bags inside the cereal boxes.  I wanted to reduce the plastic that comes into our house in order to create less garbage and have the garbage that we do create serve multiple purposes.  We already RECYCLE, but I wanted to work on the REDUCE and REUSE part.

• Shampoo bottles-  I made shampoo bars a couple weeks ago.  The key ingredients are castor oil, jojoba, coconut oil, olive oil, hemp oil, lemon juice, lemon tea, and apple cider vinegar.  It was sort of an interesting recipe, much like normal soap, but softer and with nicer oils in it.  It also took forever to harden up (which the recipe said would happen).  I wasn’t quite prepared for just how long it would take, but it is now nice and firm with a pungent smell.  I’ve used it a bit and I like this stuff a lot!  I have super tangley hair, so with liquid shampoo, I have always needed conditioner, and yet I have pretty oily hair too, so if I use conditioner, I need to wash my hair more often.  With three kids running wild around the house, I really don’t have time to wash my hair more than a couple times a week, (I actually bathe more than twice a week, but I have Inez with me, so I have to hold on to her rather than wash the hair.  Just so you know….).  This shampoo is working great though.  My hair feels super good, but isn’t too tangley or oily after a couple days.  I made the bars small so that if a kid left it in the bottom of the bath to dissolve completely, I wouldn’t feel that it was too much of a waste.  And is it my imagination, or does this shampoo bar bring out the reddish tones in my hair?
• Bread-  I bought bread at Grand Central Bakery this week.  The guy behind the counter was really nice.  He put all my loaves in the same large paper bag, then I took them home and froze them in the plastic bags that I already have.  One bummer was that he said that I should freeze bread uncut, so I guess I will become good friends with a big knife when it is time to thaw out those suckers.  He did cut one loaf for me and then we needed to put it in a plastic bag, but I felt okay about that as that one bag can be reused better as it is unprinted and doesn’t have barcodes on it.  That, by the way, was one issue I had with reusing bread bags from Franz, for example.  If you take it to the store and put a bunch of broccoli in it, when the cashier rings it up, the computer automatically scans the bread barcode, which is a pain in the butt for everyone.  The other issue is that store bought bread is DOUBLE wrapped.  The inner wrapper can’t be reused even for carrying dirty diapers home when we are out and about.  How is the bread?  Amazing.  It is a million times better than what I bought in the store, and it didn’t cost more at all.
• Cereal in a box-  I took care of this problem as quickly as I could, buying these great, reuseable containers.  They fit well in the cupboard, hold a lot of bulk cereal, and are nice to pull down.  One side is sort of indented to fit your hand, so the kids can hold on to the bins really well.  Drawback here is that bulk cereals are largely granola.  The cereal-eating in this house has reduced dramatically since I got these, probably because the kids don’t love granola and “cheerios” type cereals as much as the stuff that came in colorful boxes.  I think that is okay though as most cereal is sugary crap anyway, even if it is labeled to look healthy and “natural”.

I feel good about this little experiment and can see that I can keep it going.  As long as I use a little forethought, I can keep this family in bread, shampoo, and cereal as much as we might like.

I’ve got other stuff I made this week, but I might need to keep that to another post.  It is too long!  Tally ho!

2 Comments | In: food, projects | | #

The neighbor has pears coming out her ears.  Poor lady is 5 months pregnant with her third kid, (hey, I remember that!), and has pears to pick up off her lawn.  Her nights are punctuated with the loud “plop!” of falling pears followed by the rustle of raccoons seeking a midnight snack.  The pears keep coming down without much stop, so Brad and I tried to help her catch up (at least for one day) and picked a bunch of pears.

I had thought that I would can these suckers, but midway into peeling them, realized that they are a bit bruised and spotty to make that job any fun.  It is a pain in the ass to peel pears.  I think that is the case for any fruit, but these soft suckers were particularly bad.  So I made chutney.

Brad’s mom made chutney about 4 or 5 years ago.  It was delicious!  We loved the stuff, but despite many a blatant hint,(“Hey, if you EVER make chutney again, can we have some?”  ”Wow, we LOVED that chutney!”), chutney was not forthcoming.  The rest of Brad’s local family are not really adventurous eaters, so chutney did not appeal to them.  I finally buckled down and decided to make it myself.  After this experience, I can see why Brad’s mom didn’t immediately embark on making it just for us.  It’s a lot of work!

I peeled and peeled and peeled and peeled.  I had, (okay, so I still have them!), so many pears that I decided to double the recipe.  Did I mention that I have a hard time following recipes?  It is true.  I have a hard time not changing something, and as I am 36 years old, it is time to accept myself.  So change I did.  I added more garlic.  It just didn’t seem like enough!  And I put in some orange peel, because I had it left over from my soap and don’t know what I will do with it.  And some powdered ginger in addition to the fresh ginger.  You can’t have too much ginger can you?  And some sprinkles of chili peppers because they came with the pizza we got last week.  And a pound of plums.

Hey, that picture really was like that!  I didn’t move the bowl or anything!  That bouquet was right there…. really!  That is because I would rather go outside and pick a bouquet to put in my messy kitchen rather than clean it.  Amy Sederis, in her hospitality book, I Like You, has a hilarious picture of her test kitchen.  It is cluttered and chaotic, messy, and her baking sheets and pots are all stained and somewhat rusty.  I think of this picture all the time.  It looks just like my kitchen.

ANYWAY, after several hours and the invariable confusion involved in cooking chutney, starting up the canning stuff, trying to make a lasagna and lunch mid-canning job, I made chutney!  It is beautiful and will be delicious I am sure.  The only problem is that I now need to find out how to go kill a hog, to go with our chutney.

4 Comments | In: food, projects | | #