A MEMORY BOARD FOR SID

As a child my very favorite things were art and craft supplies, journals and photo albums. This was, of course, in the era prior to our current scrapbooking culture (which I, supringly, never had any interest in. But I digress…). In an effort to instill the love for creative documentation of a young life into my daughter, we created a memory board for her today.

She would have enjoyed the project more, I suspect, had she been able to help. A pile of nails and tacks and a hammer and mommy’s overwhelming need to have the fabric stretched perfectly evenly was not conducive to a group project with a four year old. But she was a great couchside cheerleader!

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SUMMER PASTA

Sometimes a series of images just needs no explanation. I’ll give a little anyway. This was my first foray into homemade pasta. No machine. Just me, my hands, a rolling pin and a pizza cutter. To say that I felt like a handcrafting, homegrown, goddess-filled genius would be an understatement for sure.

The dish was amazing. Sidney didn’t help. She played Plants vs. Zombies the whole time.

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CORNBREAD – NOT JUST FOR SKILLETS

Inspired by an ice cream parlor visit on The Travel Channel’s Bizzare Foods, Sidney and I made cornbread ice cream! I went simple for this recipe, choosing a Jiffy cornbread mix instead of going at it completely from scratch.

We first mixed up a batch of cornbread batter. We separated the batter in half, and cooked one half of it on the stovetop like a giant pancake, breaking it apart at the very end till it resembled scrambled eggs more than a pancake. The other half of the batter we mixed with a little bit of yogurt butter and cream and then added it to a basic vanilla ice cream recipe.

Once the ice cream was nearing completion, we dumped the cooked cornbread pieces through the open top of the ice cream machine.

Can a mother and teacher of young children say “Fuckin’ yum”?

I think I just did.

Next up on the ice cream docket: sesame!

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SUPER SLOPPY CHOCOLATE PRETZELS

Our first Summer project was a yummy one! Chocolate covered pretzels!

We did have one mishap and a totally unexpected one at that! After successfully melting dark and white chocolate over a double-boiler, my dumb ass thought that adding a little heavy cream would create a beautiful, creamy and delectably smooth mixture. For reasons unknown to this unexperienced candy maker, the whole chocolate concoction became this thick, matte, unmeltable blob incapable of coating the pan itself, let alone our little pretzels.

So, with great regret…we got to do it again! Sans cream.

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LOVE IN THE SUMMER OF KINDERGARTEN

I plan to do great things with my daughter this Summer. She begins Kindergarten next year and this is the last Summer before she is officially in the Education Rat Race! Lots of garden and kitchen and art project are in our three month future. I plan to chronicle our adventures here under a new section, The Summer of Kindergarten.

Below, my daughter, Sidney, rocking out at her preschool “graduation”.

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UPDATE! – CHICKENS

Though my garden season didn’t begin so smoothly, I can honestly say that the chickens have been fantastic. They are big girls now! I haven’t seen any eggs yet, though the alpha seems to be so advanced that we keep checking every day, even though they aren’t due for egg production for another month or so.

No, I haven’t painted the coop yet (but we bought the paint!). Yes, I’ve been lazy (the summers in Florida are a bitch!). But I don’t hear any complaints from the girls. They love rice spinach and have pretty much snubbed their nose at chicken feed. They wait patiently (ok, not too patiently) for our meal scraps and I don’t think they enjoy anything more in the world than a little rainstorm. They get in the mud and bathe in it. They look like little stealth ninjas when they are done.

Though my garden season didn’t begin so smoothly, I can honestly say that the chickens have been fantastic. They are big girls now! I haven’t seen any eggs yet, though the alpha seems to be so advanced that we keep checking every day, even though they aren’t due for egg production for another month or so.
No, I haven’t painted the coop yet (but we bought the paint!). Yes, I’ve been lazy (the summers in Florida are a bitch!). But I don’t hear any complaints from the girls. They love rice spinach and have pretty much snubbed their nose at chicken feed. They wait patiently (ok, not too patiently) for our meal scraps and I don’t think they enjoy anything more in the world than a little rainstorm. They get in the mud and bathe in it. They look like little stealth ninjas when they are done.

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UPDATE! – GARDEN

I’ve been gardening! I have! I swear! But I’ve been a terrible blogger. Okay, I haven’t been a real great gardener either. Here’s the story:

I planted the seeds in little sprout cups. I had placed these inside of a large aquarium with a screen lid. The aquarium? To hold a steady 1/2 inch of water or so to keep the seeds moisturized. The screen? To keep out pesky bugs and curious kitties (I can’t tell you how many times one of my cats have thought sprout cups were the best ball game in the world). The seeds? Everything I could have ever wanted to plant, including carrots, basil, tomatoes, bell peppers, peas, leeks, green onions, spinach, watermelon, sunflowers as well as black hollyhock.

(I must add, at this point, the black hollyhock story. I purchased these seeds a couple years ago and was very excited to plant them. They never grew. I tried again. No cigar. It got to a point where every time I planted seeds of ANY kind, I would throw in a couple black hollyhock seeds and hope for the best. It became a bit of a personal joke. Moving on…)

Would you believe I had sprouts on nearly everything? (Even the hollyhock!)My aquarium looked like a mini greenhouse. It was beautiful. One morning I go out to check on the little sprouts and find that a few had been nipped off at the stem. In retrospect this should have been a big clue that something was amiss. In fact, I’m still not really sure why I didn’t get it. Of course, you guessed it, the very next day every sprout had been descimated. Even the very first black hollyhock seed that I ever got to sprout. I open the screen to assess the damage and find one fat and very satisfied caterpillar.

My guess is that he entered through the screen as a tiny little thing and grew up dining on the very best gourmet greens in the neighborhood. At least he can’t complain about a rough childhood.

It’s been a very caterpillar-heavy season this year. My thriving brussel sprouts plants in the garden look like they’ve been screenprinted with polkadots. Or like they’ve been through a machine gun stand off. Your choice.

Sidney and I plucked all the caterpillars we found and put them inside a makeshift butterfly house to watch them change. As of this day, we have 3 cocoons in the midst of change and we have already released 2 very shaggy brownish moths and one tiny little green butterfly.

Garden Status? Pretty damn empty.

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THE COOP FOUND IT’S WAY HOME

My dear Daddy delivered the coop! This beautiful creation weighed a shit-ton but was deposited, no serious injuries involved, into our backyard this very weekend. I will have to wait until mid-March (after my last art show of the season) before I can paint and mural it, but it looks amazing already!

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MY FIRST HARVEST!

Small but beautiful! They went into a rice and chicken dish that very night!

Strangely enough, it felt unnatural to dig something out of the ground and eat it. As if I may accidentally ingest something poisonous or hallucinogenic; as if the earth could have tainted something I planted with my very hands! I am, I suppose, the product of a grocery store generation. I have forgotten where such treasures come from. I am reeducating myself and teaching my daughter along the way.

The green onions I planted and harvested are Onion Lilia.

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BECAUSE WE’RE A LITTLE DIFFERENT HERE…

I wanted to put a mural on the front door of the coop. Something cute, coy, “chickeny” and….us! And yes, I’ve been called a little strange. But I guaran-goddamn-tee we’ll have the swankiest little coop in town! Below is the first sketch of:

The Coop Door Mural!

(In case you’re wondering – my dad, the person building our beautiful coop for us, is “Paw-Paw”. The chicken tattoo is paying homage to the coop creator.)

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NEW COOP PICS!

Though not quite done in time for Xmas, the coop is looking AMAZING. Behold, the latest photos:

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A DECISION HAS BEEN MADE: GOURDS!

And to the victor go the spoils!  In this case, the victor is the almighty gourd and, well, let’s hope none spoil.

It seems like a match made in heaven, me and my gourds. As an artist, this is a resource I could certainly use. There are many crafts that involve gourds, from very functional bowls and drums to merely decorative gourd art. I’m sure that I (in all my spare time) can find a use for a few, at least. The rest I can sell to my fellow artists and craftspeople. Maybe donate some to a local high school arts program.

I’ve already purchased my seeds. I have large bottle gourds (the kind most people are used to), snake gourds (which, as the name implies, snake around on the ground into really fluid fruits), large dipper gourds (which are shaped, for lack of a better analogy, like polite penguins) and goblin egg gourds (think large poultry eggs – but green).

I have the perfect spot in the yard for them. It’s cut off from the rest of the yard by a gate and it gets the first sun in the morning. It’s a mess right now (because no one ever sees it and I couldn’t come up with a plan for it until now) but my project before the end of Winter is to have it groomed and waiting for multiple gourd transplants come Spring. It’s 10×30’. Time will tell if that is big enough for a small backyard gourd farm. (Please keep in mind that I use “farm” in the humble, most ironic, sense of the word. Perhaps gourd “nook” is more appropriate, but it lacks a certain vision and pizzazz.)

Behold, my vision:

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LET’S CONSIDER: SPICES AND PEPPERS

I am arriving at similar conclusions when considering both spices and exotic pepper blends: lack of passion.

Though I find lined baskets of colorful ground spices intoxicatingly beautiful, aside from an occasional fresh basil leaf in my omelet I don’t really use spices! I subscribe to the theory that spices serve only to disguise the taste of already tasty food!

Though I love the mystery behind growing rare peppers and peppercorns for my very own custom blends, which I see as a way to stretch my creative muscles, I’m not a big fan of peppers either! I always order my Tai mild. I growl when my husband covers my delicious dinners with Tabasco sauce.

Hmpf.

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LET’S CONSIDER: VANILLA

As a woman and a lover of all things sweet, vanilla appeals to me greatly.

While doing a bit of research on the allusive Vanilla planifolia variegata (the vanilla orchid), I am discovering two things. A beautiful flat-leafed vine, which would be stunning hugging rows of trellises in my yard…and a daunting introduction to an intensely laborious hobby.

There are the years of growing (daily watering, weekly weeding and debugging, monthly organic fertilization) before the first pods even appear, delicate hand-pollination, not to mention a lengthy fermentation process to obtain those sticky black vanilla beans we all know and love.

Still not entirely discouraged by the prospect, I have been searching the internet for plants. I have found one supplier. ONE.  With shipping, I am looking at a total of $30.00. Per plant. Not exactly the kind of startup financial obligation I had in mind. How many plants would be needed to fill my “plot”? Approximately 15? Yowza.

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VANILLA OR PEPPERS; A DECISION TO MAKE

I don’t have a very large backyard. Especially for one who has hobby farming on the brain. I do have a very roomy/average yard for my little city-town, luckily.

I don’t have any illusions that I will be living a self-sustaining lifestyle, or making a living selling organic tomatoes at our Saturday’s Farmer Market. I would, however, like to grow something back there. Something different, a road less traveled – something that I might be able to sell small batches of, just for fun.

I have pondered and researched and bounced ideas off of my very patient and supportive husband. I have narrowed my plans to four possible farming ventures:

-vanilla beans
-specialty peppercorn blends
-gourds
-spices

Much more pondering ahead, lots more research, perhaps chucking them at Dear Husband a bit more forcibly. I will probably post some logs in the coming weeks exploring each in more detail. I wonder which will come out on top…

…Perhaps I’ll try a little of it all.

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ZELDA OR ASTRID, WHAT’S IN A NAME?

In choosing names for my future pet chickens, I feel like I can really let my Freak Flag fly!

I’ve never been a fan of the stereotypical pet names. Fluffy, Rex, Oreo, Snowball, Midnight. All those can hit the road, Jack.  I’ve never swung the other way and named my pets Martha or Isobel or Jonathan either.

My pets have simple names with a little bit of quirk that err on the “humanish” side: Mango, Tatum, Fig, Whale, Bayou, Lola, Potem, Blue and Nine.

With my chickens, I think I will have some serious fun! Zelda is high on my list. As is Astrid. Maybe Xena. Jezebel, perhaps. Is there a guide book called “The Wacked-Out Woman’s Guide to Crazy Chicken Names”? I should Google it.

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COOP PIC – THE SEQUEL!

Daddy just sent me a new pic of my Xmas present! I’m so excited. This thing is a monster! A gorgeous, wooden, 28 square foot beast! My palm reader says she sees a Xmas day U-Haul in my future. Where does she get this shit?

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UM, YUM?

Below is a pic from a rogue watermelon patch that popped up in our yard! I did a bit of research on harvest time, but was apparently a bit off!

The inside should be pink
The outside should be green
Behold, the most unripe watermelon I have ever seen

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GONNA FINISH IT DAMMIT!

I am that person who has twelve half-finished knitting projects in every corner of the house and only one finished beanie. At least six of those unfinished projects are for my daughter. She had ONE finished sweater from me when she was a year old. Is she not the cutest?:

 

Now, only a mere four years later, I am working on a new sweater for the poor child of store bought winter wear! Needless to say, she has grown out of the one above. The new one will be a sweater vest with hood. I thought I’d crochet this one. It’s been a while since I’ve picked up the hooks!

My progress!:

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FIRST PICS OF THE COOP!

My father, who makes a living building – among other more utilitarian things – beautifully crafted decks and garden structures, has been recruited (by yours truly) to build my Xmas present. My hen house! I’m not sure what thrills me more – finally being able to purchase my chicken babies or having something that my father designed and hammered and sweated over. I’m kinda hoping he puts a big red bow on it! Here is the first pic that he sent me.

It will be able to slide out for cleaning and each divider lifts out! I squealed when I saw this!

 

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