Bread, Butter and Beans

Well the other thing that kept us all busy this weekend was cleaning up the yard and the garden after a mammoth storm we had on Thursday. Storm doesn't even seem to be the right word for what we had in fact. The weather people are calling it a "micro burst" but let's just call a spade a spade, this thing was basically a tornado. As my neighbor said, it was five minutes of sheer terror. The kids and I were at a bouncy castle play gym (which is a whole other thing I can visit later, or not, who knew there were bouncy castle gyms?) when the storm hit. The windows of the car were down since it had been hotter than hot that day and there was NO RAIN in the forecast. Suddenly the lights went out (and with it the power keeping the bouncy castles up - there was a lot of screaming) and the windows of the place started to shake. It was seriously crazy. When it was over we drove our dripping - literally - car home past uprooted and snapped in half trees toppled onto houses. We were lucky and our ancient cherry tree, the best part of our yard, escaped with just one large limb broken, so I can't really complain, but we also lost a lot of the garden.

Saturday we set to work trying to salvage things, picking the beans from the ripped up vines, pulling off the ears of immature corn (My corn!! Wahhhh!) and digging up the onions and shallots whose stems had simply snapped off. I need to dig the potatoes tonight, I thought that the plants might make a come back but it seems they are done for as well.

The problem is that I'm not ready for food storage. Oh sure, I have a little room in the jam cupboard, but other than that I'm just not ready for it. I had planned to have a big space in the basement cleared away and set up for hanging braids of onions and jars of pickles and bags of Potatoes. And a freezer. I was going to get a freezer. That was going to be my "I used to be cool and ask for clothes but now I want a chest freezer for my birthday" request. But oh well, you gotta do what you gotta do.

So in the afternoon I made some net bags for the onions and shallots (most were stemless hence the bag instead of braided stalks, I did get a few bunches braided) which are hanging inside the basement staircase. And then I made more pickles. When I was cleaning up the garden I pulled out three more giant cucumbers and since I had no room to freeze all the beans that went down in the storm, I pickled both.

I brined the cucumbers the same way I did before, but this time I added a cup of sugar to the vinegar mix, nixed the dill and chopped up a shallot and one of the peppers from our (miraculously ok) pepper plant. The result is something like a bread and butter pickle, except spicy. In a good way. I also packed the beans into jars with some dill, garlic and another pepper and used the original vinegar solution on them, also very good, and slightly spicy.

I'm running out of room in the fridge but still haven't progressed to processing the pickles. Mostly because I've been collecting these Kilner style jars and have to wait for the new rubber rings to arrive in the mail (Amazon has everything!) before I feel like it's safe to process using them. I could just stick with jars, but these are so fun, and pretty! And since I've been picking them up at second hand stores, cheap!

Tonight - potatoes. Which means I should probably look up how to store a big pile of potatoes. I also suspect there are another couple of cucumbers ready to go. Hopefully those rings arrive quickly.

Accidental Goodness

So I'm sure I'm not the only one that this happens to, but sometimes my baking projects just plain go wrong. Things don't rise or I leave them in too long or whatever. Hey, it happens, right? And unlike cooking, where you can more often than not just deal with things as they are, add a little more of this or that and go ahead and dig in, I find that baking gone bad more often than not just needs to be binned. I mean, who wants to eat a dry cookie right? Or worse, a dry cake? But occasionally the going wrong leads to something better than what you intended. And honestly, it's for those times that I love baking.

This weekend the kids and I decided to make a batch of graham crackers, something I've been meaning to try for a while, they seem to pop up on a lot of the blogs and cookbooks I like. I read through a few recipes and settled on a variation of Alton Brown's. The variation being that I didn't have graham flour. But I'd seen a lot of versions that called for whole wheat flour instead and that I had.

The other variation was that it called for a food processor and I don't have a food processor. I know, I hear you, what in the world am I doing without a food processor? Well, tell it to my husband. I've been saying it for years. The problem is that I do actually have one, it's teeny, and I mean teeny. It holds just one cup of whatever needs to be chopped. Which is perfect for nuts or onions or a small batch of babyfood in the days that I made babyfood, but for baking, it's crap. Still, it works, after 13 years, it works. It's held up better than my Stand Mixer, and I think it cost me all of $7. So until the thing dies, I have to live without. Which is normally no big deal (although, Will, if you are reading this, I would really like a food processor because, come on! I cook!) But I think it may have been the downfall of this recipe. Or maybe I should say the saving grace.

Because I couldn't really get the butter and flours worked together in that magic pea sized crumble, the dough didn't come together quite enough to roll it out thinly. So half of it we rolled out as best we could, to about 1/4 inch, and the rest we made into squeeze cookies, something I read about last year on Chocolate and Zucchini. The "crackers" puffed up quite a bit and ended up with a soft, chewy, almost gingerbread like consistency (real gingerbread, not cookies) and the squeeze cookies had a little crunch on the outside while still being soft on the inside.

We blew through them.

Today we made another batch and this time we grated the butter, which helped, but it was still pretty crumbly. I even added an extra 1/2 ounce of honey (I cut the molasses down to 2 ounces and added honey to make up the difference, which also could have had something to do with the dryness of the dough I guess) but since the kids declared they wanted them to be "squeezy" again, well, I wasn't too concerned.

We're almost out again. I kid you not. Better than Oreos though.

So here they are, "Not Graham Crackers"


"Not Graham Crackers"
adapted from Alton Brown

• 8 ounces whole wheat flour
• 2 ounces all-purpose flour
• 3 ounces dark brown sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 3 ounces unsalted butter, chilled and grated
  
• 2 ounces molasses
• 1 ounce honey
  
• 1 1/2 ounces milk
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Sift the dry ingredients in a medium bowl and blend in the butter with a fork or your fingertips until it is as incorporated as you can get (or if you are lucky and have a food processor, use that!) Make a well in the center and add the rest of the ingredients, folding them in until combined. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and chill for 30 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 350.

Roll out the dough to a thickness of 1/4 inch on parchment, transfer to a baking sheet and score into rectangles without separating them. OR, pull 2 tablespoons of dough out into your hand and squeeze it into a ridged oblong shape. Space them two inches apart on parchment. Bake either (or both) for 15 minutes.

Knitting Again

The Summer Solstice really gets the shaft in our family. We have a lot of traditions surrounding Winter Solstice, with more added each year it seems, but when the longest day of the year rolls around we have a bad habit of letting it slip by us.

It's not intentional. I love the thought of celebrating the beginning summer, it's just that it generally falls within days of both Will's birthday and Father's Day, so by the time the Solstice comes, well, we're a little celebrated out . Oh well, there's always next year. Or the year after.

Actually, I've decided that starting this winter (since, obviously, we didn't get it done for summer) we'll start a new tradition of giving handmade gifts for the Solstice. Or at least I will. OK, maybe it's just an excuse to plan on knitting something for everyone in our family.

Despite the nasty heat, the crazy lightening storms and the fact we spend half our life outside these days, I've been a knitting nutball. I finished the second shell for my slippers and am on to the last piece, which hopefully will go quickly because for some crazy reason I'm dying to knit sweaters. Sweaters! Seriously, it's an OVEN outside and I have sweaters on the brain. I blame Ravelry. Seriously, have you been there? It's like cool knitting projects exploded all over the place, too much inspiration! Too many must-do patterns. Maybe it's some kind of psychological reaction to the heat. My brain is so sick of the hot weather that it's just moved on to winter, regardless of the calender. So now my goal is to knit a sweater or other larger project for everyone by the Winter Solstice. That's a lot of knitting for someone who, a few months ago, was never going to knit again. By hey, a girl's allowed to change her mind, right?

Up until recently I've always thought of knitting as something I should do one project at a time. I'm not sure why, since I'm the queen of doing multiple projects all at once. I'm not even content to be reading one book at a time. But now that I've almost finished this long and, frankly kind of monotonous project with the slippers, I can see how having something else to switch to when i need a break from knitting 70 rows in the round without a change would be a good thing. I have this fantasy of sewing some white cotton drawstring bags and filling each with a different project that is mid construction. I know, I know, it's a little strange that the concept of organizing my knitting projects gets me all bubbly, what can I say, we all know I'm a little weird that way.

So, now I've got four patterns picked out (until I get on Ravelry again and find something different that I MUST MAKE) time to go hunt down some yarn, and maybe pick up some of that white cotton, because, you know, you can never be too organized, right?

What Kind of World

I'm usually a pretty upbeat person, glass half full and all that. But today I can't stop thinking about something I read this morning. A blog that I have, very occasionally, remembered to go read about a busy mother of four, Home/Work is one of the blogs on Babble.com. I remember reading some time ago of her revelation that her oldest child was addicted to drugs, today I read that he had recently died. That, coupled with the fact that my bookclub discussed Methland last night and all the horrors that go with that have me thinking of all the worst "what-if's" a parent can think.

I remember my father once told me that he and my mom thought long and hard about having children at all. About what kind of world their kids would have to grow up in, and whether it was right to bring more kids into such a messed up time. Thankfully they decided to take that risk, and probably because they were so concerned about things in the first place, I was sheltered in all the right ways and haven't really been exposed to many of the problems that my parents so feared.

I have to confess that those kind of thoughts didn't trouble me when Will and I decided to have kids. We were blissfully ignorant of most of the worlds troubles, I think in many ways we still are. Which is why, hearing a story like the one on Home/Work seems doubly devastating to me. An ordinary family, a child who was loved and raised in a happy, seemingly so from what I've read, home, and yet... I can't stop thinking about it. And wanting to hug the kids. Wanting to tell them all the things they should not do. And also not wanting to tell them, because I don't want them to know yet, all the horrible things out there. I want them to be ignorant. But I want them to be prepared. I suppose it's a dilemma that we all face. And to be frank, I'm no where near knowing what to take away from this, this horrible thing. Or what I want to tell them, and not tell them, to keep them safe.

Anyway, this is not my usual thing but, if you feel compelled, please keep this family in your thoughts. And hug your kids a little tighter. Because, well, just because.

Steak and Bok Choy

So I mentioned that we've had a bumper crop of bok choy out in the garden and I thought I'd pass on a recipe that we love to eat, either winter or summer, whenever we get our hands on a good looking bunch.

The first time I made this, we were living in Dublin and I was on a Jamie Oliver kick. I must have seen him on TV, although I can't remember that part, perhaps I just stumbled on his books in one of the four bookstores (oh heaven!) that were within walking distance of our flat. In any case, I loved reading his books. He was so cheerful, and unstuffy. And, unlike the cookbooks I'd brought from the US, the ingredients in the book were almost always easily found in both the larger chains (and by large, I mean small, because even the "big" stores were tiny compared with their US counterparts) and in the teeny corner shop grocery stores in our neighborhood. They were also nice and hearty, which helped us get over the fact that it never got above 65 degrees the entire time we lived there. (Actually, given that it has been in the high nineties here for days, that sounds pretty darn lovely!)

Of the recipes, this was our favorite. Briton, Will and I all love it - since it's not beige, it's not Evelyn's thing - and, to be honest, it's totally the reason I grew bok choy in the garden in the first place. The only change I make is to replace a whole chili - I hate cutting chili's - with a 1/4 tsp of sweet chili sauce. It give it a little kick without being too spicy for Briton. Ok, for me. I'm a whimp. Oh, and we use Strip Steak, not Sirloin, because we like it better.

Steak with Bok Choy and Ginger
adapted from Happy Days with the Naked Chef

2 thickish New York Strip Steaks
salt and pepper
large bunch of bok choy
8 T soy sauce
1 small garlic clove
1 thumb sized piece of ginger
1/4 tsp sweet chili sauce
juice of 1 lime
2 T olive oil


Season the steaks with salt and pepper. Grill until they are as done as you like (we prefer medium) and bring them inside. While they are grilling, set a pot of salted water on the stove to boil and pop in the bok choy when it's bubbling. In a small bowl mix the remaining ingredients (I like to grate both the garlic and the ginger with a microplane). Pour this sauce over the meat as soon as it comes off the grill and let it sit on the meat for a few minutes. When the bok choy is tender, drain and divide evenly between the plates. Slice up the meat and set on top of the greens, drizzle with the sauce.

Pickles!

The summer that I was pregnant with Briton, I went preserving crazy. I made strawberry jam and mint jelly and rose jelly and crazy I don't even remember what went in there chutney. I dried and bottled tomatoes and froze corn. And I made pickles. Actually, I should say I tried to make pickles. After reading through my preserving book I took myself down to the farmers market to stock up on pickling cucumbers. While I was there I chatted with the sweet little old ladies that ran the OSU Extension Office stand about the ins and outs of pickle making and went home, I thought, totally prepared. And to be honest, I'm not sure where things went wrong. They looked like pickles, they smelled like pickles, but they tasted, blah. Just really, really, blah. No crunch, no bite, no taste. It sucked.

So I've never gone down the pickle route again. Until I was poking around in the garden this weekend and discovered that my cucumber plant had exploded. No really. Last week I went poking through all the vines and leaves of my whole garden looking for signs of something, but didn't find much other than some good looking bok choy. Yesterday I thought I spotted a bean from the window and went out to investigate. I found, not a bean, but TONS of beans. And three enormous cucumbers. And corn! Still to small to eat but still, CORN! Feeling around under the potato plants revealed that the soil is packed with two inch diameter spuds. The carrots are starting to look like carrots. Not that I expected anything else, but still, it was exiting. But back to the cucumbers.

We planted Asian cucumbers this year from seeds bought from the Southern State Seed Exchange. From the descriptions, they were similar to the English variety that we love, but grow better in this hotter climate. I kid you not when I say that last week they were less than two inches long so it was kind of a shock to find them over a foot just seven days later. And while we love cucumbers on sandwiches and in salads, three huge cucumbers seemed a little excessive. Which got me thinking about pickles.

I dug through my big Stocking Up book, weighing a few different recipes (I can't remember which I used last time) read a few others I found in books on my shelf, and ended up winging it a little since none called for such a small amount of cucumbers. This makes, in fact, just one, tightly packed mason jar. Which is just the right amount for us. Or maybe not. Because these turned out great. Crunchy and a little spicy and just right. I'm still a little in awe. I didn't really think it would work. But I can see them disappearing faster than pickles usually do in this house, which has led me to do a little fantasizing about all sorts of things I can pickle. Maybe some of those beans. Or watermelon rind which I've never had but always wanted to try. Or Jerusalem artichokes. Can you pickle Jerusalem artichokes? Because I've got a bunch of them growing in the flower garden.

Anyway, if you have a spare pound or so of cucumbers hanging around the house, give it a whirl.

Fresh Packed Dill Pickles
Adapted from Stocking Up


1000 g of water
50 g of kosher salt
1 1/4 pounds of cucumbers, freshly picked and cut in spears
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 cups water
1 T kosher salt
1 tsp pickling spices
1 T mustard seed
1 small bunch of fresh dill

Make a brine out of the first two ingredients and soak the cucumber spears in it over night in the fridge. The next morning drain the cucumbers and pack them tightly into a sterilized, hot jar with the mustard seeds and the bunch of dill. In a saucepan, bring the vinegar, water, salt and pickling spices to a boil and pour into the jar until it's almost full. Cap with a lid and set it in the fridge to chill. Since these aren't processed, you have to keep them in the fridge. But I would guess that you can put the jar in a pot of boiling water and process for 15 minutes or so. That's part of the next adventure. Along with the beans and the artichokes.

Oh yeah, and happy solstice everyone. Nothing says the first day of summer like pickles, right?

not exactly the kind of pink i was thinking of

Ahh children. They change our lives, don't they. They come into this world ready to turn ours upside down. They teach us what it is to love instantly and unconditionally. They say funny, and touching, and amazing things. They figure out how to fix flashlights that you thought were broken after playing with circuitry kids and figure out how to write your name, all by themselves. They sneak into bed with you even after you've put them back in their own twice already. They snuggle up with you on the couch and tell you the love you. And they give you pinkeye.

Oh yes. Pinkeye.

I deal with a lot of pink in my life. In fact, on of my most often said phrases these days seems to be "Just because it's pink doesn't mean it's yours." which, funnily enough, reminds me a little of the phrase we chanted every day when Briton was four "Wild is funny, wild is just wild." But this isn't exactly the kind of pink I was expecting.

I woke up in the middle of the night Monday with a really itchy eye. Not terribly alarming since I've had terrible allergies this spring. But in the morning, once I'd gotten my eye ungunked and open I looked in the mirror and knew that this was no allergy. This, was pinkeye. When I went to see my doctor she walked in and said "Oh your poor eye!" and then smiled and said "Kids, eh?"

Kids eh is right. They don't even have the decency to get it themselves! Not that I'd wish it on them, I mean, come on, I'd much rather suffer through it myself than have them comedown with it. First of all, I don't want to see them in any kind of pain, but also - there is nothing worse than a kid who is contagious, but not really sick. Especially in the summer.

Before we had kids, Will and I used to laugh at the scene in the movie "One Fine Day" where her boss looks at her son and says "Do you know what I think when I see him? Carrier Monkey." But you know what? They are! What with the nose wiping, bottom wiping, force feeding (kidding, sort of) hugging, loving, licking (they lick me, not the other way around. And we're working on stopping that one), it's no wonder mom's are always sick. In fact, it's kind of amazing we survive motherhood.

So this morning I'd like to raise my half coffee, half hot water and milk (because, as it turns out, I also have the beginnings of an ulcer, so now I'm forbidden alcohol of any sort and am on half rations of coffee. So I suppose the pinkeye was a blessing in disguise. What if I'd waited until I had a real ulcer and couldn't have coffee at all? We know how that turns out around here!) to all the mothers out there who are snotted on, peed on, licked (surely I'm not the only one) and infected with colds and stomach bugs and pinkeye and still kiss boo-boos and hug fever ridden kids and healthy ones alike. We're one tough bunch my friends.