Shumai

ready to combine

I hadn't even heard of dim sum until I moved to Seattle. Charlie was introduced to this Chinese cuisine while living near San Francisco and learned to love the perpetual-motion loop of steam carts and little food wagons pulling past your table, tempting you with things you couldn't quite identify. For me, the first few times it was good to have someone in-the-know along to recommend especially tasty items. Charlie's favorite are little steamed fish dumplings perched atop green pepper slices. I love lo mai gai (I think this is the correct name....Karen, tell me if I'm wrong because you've made it for me in the past), sticky rice and meat steamed in lotus leaves. Then there are hum bow (bbq pork inside sweet buns), sesame balls, custard buns, and many other delectable choices.

assembled shumai

We both like shumai. There are endless varieties, but it is fundamentally a meat-shrimp-mushroom-vegetable paste inside a thin wrapper and then steamed. Tonight Charlie decided he was going to make chicken and shrimp shumai. He led us off to Uwajimaya to get the necessary ingredients (I did not even want to attempt to make shumai wrappers from scratch) and then home to start the chopping. He substituted shitake for the more traditional black chinese mushrooms because I'm a bit of a mushroom chicken. We stuffed a whole bunch of wrappers, and then steamed four to test them and see if they were good. While they were in the steamer, he whipped up a dipping sauce. Were they delicious? Oh my yes. I am waiting right now for our dinner guests to arrive so that we can cook the rest and I can eat them until I can eat no more.

ready to come out of the steamer

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Eggs laid in the coop this year: 92

Wingchair begins

ready to be taken apart

Last year I took an upholstery class and re-covered one of Mimi's bee chairs. The class was fun and the chair came out looking pretty professional, so I kept my eye out for a wing chair. I found one at the Goodwill for the princely sum of $25 and it first sat in the living room (to make sure we liked the shape of it) then the dining room (to get it out of the way) and finally the basement where it lurked waiting to be reborn. All of the late winter classes were full, so it languished for months and months. I brought home several fabric samples for Charlie and he picked out a taupe velvet and I bought a big roll during a sale at Joann's.

Henry supervises

some of the 4,000 reasons why I have blisters on my hand now

One thing I learned from the first class was the first day you do nothing but rip your chair apart. It takes hours and hours. Since that's something I can do at home I decided to do a little pre-homework and come to class with a stripped down chair and already made welting. That way while the rest of the class was prying out their first 23498273048 staples I could monopolize the teacher's time and get my chair underway. I spent most of the day Wendesday down in the basement prying and ripping and pulling and sneezing at all of the stuffing dust.

naked chair!

giving the legs a few rubs of danish wood oil

To make the welting I finally used a technique that I'd read about many times. Starting with a square, you cut and sew, then draft the lines for your strips, then sew one more time. You've got a bit of a moebius strip then and can continuously cut out your length. The seams are already done for you, which is very nice. Then I sewed and sewed and sewed and ended up with my 20 yards of welting.

the big lump of fabric

which, under Henry's careful supervision,

becomes strips

and then welting

As I was looping it into a bundle, the fabric store called and my class has been cancelled for lack of participation. I've been moved to mid-February. Ah well. I'm not entirely happy, but at least all of the pre-work is done. Now it will just sit in the basement a little longer.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 2
Eggs laid this year: 59

rain-proof

construction begins

I should have done this last summer, but I didn't. The chicken coop is large and airy and lovely but it does have an Achilles' heel: willful precipitation. Our usual dreary mist is ok; driving rain is ok. But when the wind blows and there is day after day of stuff falling from the sky then a considerable amount of it finds it's way into the coop. The snow was the worst since it remained in tiny drifts. Recent crazy rain has been pretty bad too since the coop bedding is a thick layer of wood shavings. If they get a little wet then I just distribute scratch (chicken corn treats) to the offending bits and the chickens peck and shove around that area and the dampness eases. But with continuous blowing rain the entire floor of the coop is wet. It is unpleasant for everyone.

Hand comfort sponsored by Gabriel, who knit me these hand warmers. It was very cold outside!

So I made a set of removeable panels to block unwanted water but let in desired light. The long top pieces are held on with wing-nuts, and when they are removed the vertical slats can roll up to make long storable lengths. Over time the plastic creases should ease out and it will look more uniform. It took a few days because of my resolution that "everything about the coop shall look professionally done and not haphazard." This meant painting the wood and with 40 degree days and 30 degree nights that takes a while to dry.

So tonight I got the panels up and celebrated by giving the girls two huge bunches of spinach and an entire new bale of wood shavings. They will have dry toasty feet tonight.

Let's not mention that at 4m today it was dreary and so foggy outside that I was thinking about tentacles reaching for me from the brush. Bonus: no visible snow in this photo!

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During 2008 there was one huge food transition for me. I'd always found avocados to be tasteless and dull, not worth the fat and calories to eat guacamole. Charlie and most of my friends would happily eat my share with beatific expressions and I could never ever get what they were so fired up about. But suddenly when we were in Cabo I fell in love with avocados. It was strange, to go from a state of complete ambivalence to actually craving a food.


It looks like 2009 is following that trend, and I don't even have the hormonal excuse that I had in Cabo. Tonight I bought a bunch of beets. I've always hated the damn things but wanted to like them because they have so many fantastic vitamins and let's face it: how often can you actually consume such an intense color? I kept trying them and just not liking them at all. But tonight I made matchsticks of three vivid red beets, a slivered root of fennel, and tossed it with a white wine vinaigrette. And if Charlie doesn't get home from work soon I am going to eat it all.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Wednesday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Tuesday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Monday: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Sunday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Saturday: 3
Eggs laid this year: 57

House tools

Since the rain stopped for today (yay!) I took the opportunity to clear some of the brush outside. Our street was still down to one lane because of fallen tree branches. All clean now! I let the chickens out while I was working and they stubbornly refused to return to the coop. After a good 20 minutes of chasing them I threw my hands in the air and told them they could all get eaten alive if that's what they really wanted. Hopefully once it gets a bit darker out they will go in on their own.

what you have when you own a house

what you have when you own a house in the woods

I really enjoy my chainsaw, but the axe makes for a great cardio workout. I only now noticed that Penelope is in that axe photo. I promise that it is only in my mind I want to chop the stubborn little chicken for being so obstinate.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 5
Eggs laid this year: 36

The world needs ditch diggers too, Danny.

Reporting for duty!

The rain, it is still falling. The Seattle Times has some rather harrowing pictures of people being rescued by little tin boats and horses being taken to the fairgrounds when their stables are evacuated. It's pretty grim stuff especially since all of the same areas were hit with a terrible flood only a year ago. There were a few happy stories of people who had just about finished flood prevention alterations to their homes (raising them three feet off the ground in some cases) but for the most part people are still staring up at the lip of the hole they got into after the Dec 2007 flood.

an amateur job, but effective

Our house isn't in real danger, but I decided to be even safer than I was yesterday and add a few more feet onto the ditch. Now if nothing else the flow has been pointed at a few different directions and will soak in evenly. The seasonal creek next to our house is raging along. Part of me wishes it was warm enough to open the windows at night and listen because the rushing water does make such a relaxing sound.

The traffic cameras in Duvall are off the charts. I've seen flooding from the cameras in years past, but the river is almost inside the traffic circle. I had a difficult time imagining it could get so high. People joke about how Duvall is an island now, and they are not far off. I've read about people that work but don't live there being ferried across from the Woodinville side in boats.

from early this morning

a different angle of the same intersection at 2.39pm today

Hopefully the worst is almost over and the rivers will crest and recede by Friday. If not, we will have to split the cost of a canoe with some of our friends who are stranded on the island. Or else start sending messages in bottles.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Wednesday: 4
Eggs laid this year: 31

Rainy

I left the Yeti in the driveway and drove my prius today for the first time in weeks. Of course, the price we're paying for having the snow melting came in the form of Emergency Broadcast Network interruptions on the radio every few hours warning of record floods. Our house is situated well for that sort of thing, though I do admit I went out this afternoon and pickaxed a ditch to divert some of the worst runoff to the side of the house. I can only watch the little river trickle under the front porch for so long before becoming really nervous about leaks and such.

To celebrate driving I took Charlie to work and ran some errands that had been piling up, like buying chicken food. I also stopped by my favorite toy store to do some Important Craft Research. My Wednesday crafting partner Rachel received a lovely wooden potholder loom for Christmas. Trouble is, the instructions are in German and the design is a little different from any loom I have seen before. I figured that the best way to try to figure it out was to get into the mind of the potholder-directions-writer. To see firsthand what the traditional loom mechanics were and try to apply them to a two-sided peg setup.

research begins

It became clear that I needed to make potholders. Really. So I bought myself a little loom and listened to the rain come down and made two cotton and one wool potholder. The setup worked as well as I remember it from childhood. It's a little fussy, especially when you get near the end because the loops want to pop off but the finished product hides a lot of amateur error. And it's hard to go wrong with whatever colors you use. I love that the place that makes the kit is a factory that makes big hardcore serious looms for the most part. I imagine it is run by people that love weaving so much that they want everyone to do it.

three successful specimens
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And in other informative news, behold our method of solving the tomato paste problem. It seems like whenever we are cooking something that calls for it, both of us are convinced we have some and don't buy more at the store. Then it is discovered halfway through food prep that there is in fact no tomato paste in the house at all. Whomever goes to the store buys many cans which lull us into a false sense of security over subsequent weeks, and the cycle begins anew. Not anymore!

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Eggs laid in the coop Tuesday: 5
Eggs laid this year: 23

French Eggs

breakfast stage 1: research

I have a passion for scrambled eggs cooked in the French style. Unfortunately, I do not seem to have a French bone in my entire cooking body. One of the highlights of our Portland trip was finding a breakfast cafe that served eggs with that divine loft, that foamy delicate point where the protein is heated just enough to make a lattice of structure yet it gives with the slightest pressure from your mouth. My eyes are closed in pleasure, just remembering.

stage 2: mise en place (coffee is for my belly, not the eggs)

My scrambled eggs are typically a hockey puck. The biggest problem is that my two desires are on the razor's edge of being mutually exclusive. For the eggs to have the texture that I want, they need to be just barely cooked. But my biggest egg-based horror is the uncooked egg. Having my own hens and watching the egg from butt to table (so to speak) I don't have to worry quite as much about the dangers of eating uncooked eggs. It's the texture of uncooked egg whites that render them inedible to me. So I start out with the fluffiest of intentions and then cook and cook and cook until I am sure every molecule is fully heated. Hence the puck.

stage 3: heat

A lovely friend gifted me with Mastering The Art of French Cooking for my birthday. After reading Julia Child's biography I knew I wanted to read the cookbook because French cooking seems to be heavy on technique as well as particular ingredients. But the eggs! She taught me how to cook the eggs! This morning I rustled up some fresh thyme, sage, and parsley, and then some creamy gouda. Following dear Julia's directions I attempted to make my eggs. They weren't quite perfect....I definitely chickened out and cooked them probably 30 seconds too long. But they were no puck that's for sure.

stage 4: not a bad attempt!

New Year

The Yeti looks more and more handsome with each passing day. He is the only reason that we can leave our house at all. I kept thinking that the snow would melt and it keeps on stubbornly laying about. We got another 6 inches or so last night. A few days ago I shoveled off our cars and started them both just to make sure everything was still working. We're both getting impatient for the road to clear off...me because I'm tired of getting horrible gas mileage and Charlie because he misses driving his fast car. But no real complaints here! I am just happy that we can get groceries and Charlie can make it to work.

Some Christmas memories before too much time passes:

the elves filled stockings

the tree and a mound of gifts

Sienna's holiday dress

Sienna and Kevin looking relaxed and happy

Spirit wondering when Sienna is going to drop some more cheerios

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Sunday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Saturday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Friday: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Thursday: 3
Eggs laid this year: 18

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Eggs laid in 2008: 399