I will fight you for this last piece of pie.

The cherry pie filling: success. Wild, unadulterated success. We were invited to dinner at a friend's house on sunday and in addition to
1. eating her fabulous meatloaf
2. holding her cute baby we also got to
3. eat cherry pie.
It was the best. Yes, I wimped out and used a store-bought crust (sorry Elisa, I cannot seem to channel your crust-making mojo) but it was still without a doubt the Best Pie I Have Ever Made.

the garden today: enormous

There were rumblings during that dinner that some out of town visitors may be by this week to meet the chickens, and that was the catalyst for me removing The Lazy and doing a summer cleaning of the chicken coop today. The chickens don't get to free-range much (see: multitudinous predators and a zero rate of free-range chicken survival) but every once in a while I let them out to explore the great outdoors. So while I was cleaning out their palatial, enormous, entertaining, flight-sized (can you tell that I feel guilty that they are not free-range?) coop they got they run of the yard. And what did they do? They stayed around their flock leader to see what she was checking out.

She was scratching up bedding and scrubbing perches and sterilizing the waterer and the feeder. Yes, instead of exploring the great outdoors to their fullest, the chickens followed me around. I shooed them off regularly and they did have some fun dust bathing moments and ate a whole lot of greenery but they kept trying to see what fascinating things I was doing. I couldn't help but laugh. At the end of the day I shut them up in a lovely clean coop with fresh trimmings from the vegetable garden, and tucked them in for the night.

I will also fight you for this wine, which I tasted for the first time on Sunday and loved. AND Mark Ryan is giving me grapes in October to make jam, as long as I give him some of the final product. And he also gave me a scone from his favorite bakery. I am so awesome. Actually, I am shy but get really talkative when it's about jam, which served me well in this encounter.

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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: 4
Eggs laid this year: 448

athletic tragedy

I was trying to pick one line out of this to describe it, one little snippet to give flavor. But I couldn't. I just kept laughing.


Gymnast Shawn Johnson Put To Sleep After Breaking Leg

holy cherry mackerel

many pits, and gloves to keep my hands from looking like a serial killer's

I helped Mona pick another 17 pounds of cherries from her tree today, more than half of which came home with me. In the beginning there was a lot of washing and pitting. Instead of making another batch of jam I tried something different. I took a pound of fruit and put it in a sterilized jar with 2 cups of vodka. After 3 or 4 weeks I'll add a simple syrup, and after another few weeks strain out the cherries. Then it sits for 6 months or so and hopefully will turn into liqueur.

pie pie pie

The rest of the berries turned into pie filling. Luckily I had some clear-jell on hand. I blanched the fruit and mixed it with some sugar, water, and jell and put that into big jars. I tested a spoonfull of it and had to stop myself from eating more. It was perfect crisp cherry, nothing like the clouded overly sweet canned stuff you can buy at a store. Now I have to make sure to give it all away before I make loads of pies. I suppose the big test will be of time. Tasting it tonight was great, and after processing and sitting in a dark cabinet for months I hope that the flavors will deepen further and become more rich. Cherry is a good storing flavor, I think.

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holy bleaugh

The other lesson learned for tonight: While at the grocery store I spotted some absolutely gorgeous fresh mackerel. You hold one of those fish in your hand and it is so dense and poised that it just feels fresh. Over the top fresh. Almost alive. I gutted one, stuffed it with lemons and dill from the garden and roasted it on the grill. I do this with whole trout quite frequently and it is delectable.

Mackerel is not delectable. If you were to slip the end of a candle wick in between the flaky bits of fillet you could see in the dark for weeks. It was the oiliest fishiest most revolting thing I have ever had. I put the plate out on the back deck and washed my hands several times. The taste was still there, the smell still on my hands. I squeezed the rest of the lemon and rubbed it all over my palms and in between my fingers. I drank a shot of neat bourbon. It was only after several washings with lemon and salt, and a spoon full of straight peanut butter that I was able to get the memory of that fish off of my body and out of my mouth. Oh please please do not ever eat a mackerel. Trust me.

harvest

today's harvest

The garden is pretty much exploding back there. I went out today to thin out the greens and found that the broccoli had reached critical mass. The tomatoes are 6 feet tall and have many blossoms.

Then on the way to get eggs I noticed that the strawberries had gone mad. I picked a good five cups of them, four cups of which made it into the house.

Now I am hungry.

a view from afar

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I read the blog of a woman in California who is an artist as well as a film actress. Her boyfriend is a photographer and filmmaker. Her writing is usually sprinkled with photos by her, photos by him, and her paintings. It's a slice of life that is wonderfully different than mine and always interesting. A few weeks ago she included a picture that I just couldn't get out of my head. So I swallowed my shyness and wrote him an email asking if I could buy a print of the picture. To my surprise and delight he agreed and sent me an 11x14 photo. The frame finally came today and I got to put everything together. Now I need to figure out the perfect spot to hang it....

My prized Dave Naz photo, edited slightly for the under-age set reading my blog.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 5
Eggs laid in the coop Tuesday: 2
Eggs laid this year: 429

cherry berry

remarkably fake-looking cherries

I found myself on the top rung of a ladder with a shopping bag draped over one arm, wondering why the best looking cherries were always out of reach. I kept picking, and Mona climbed up in the crook of the tree and filled her own bag. Her neighbors drifted by on afternoon walks and were enthusiastically offered cherries right off the tree. Did you know that when you pick cherries they look exactly as they do on slot machines? A pair of green lozenge leaves perched above two long stems each ending in a red drop of a cherry.

the cauldron a-simmer

A little tart, perhaps, but tight skinned and firm and brilliant shades of red. Perfect for cherry jam. On the way home I finally invested in a cherry pitter (for some reason, $12 I had been resisting spending for many years) and proceeded to work my way through hundreds of cherries.

somehow the wide grin doesn't look so harmless when covered with red juice from macerated cherries

The jam was extremely simple and had less sugar than I have used before. The end result was a very low yield but highly concentrated fruity jam. Delicious, especially with creme fraiche and scones.

I even used the last of my special weck jars

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 5
Eggs laid this year: 422

Landscaping

Planting strawberries around the driveway is the best landscaping
decision I have ever made.

Clams

Harry observes us cooking

We took a stroll through the Redmond farmer's market on Saturday to see what was in season. Strawberries are definitely bursting everywhere. As we walked into the dog-and-stroller filled market, there was a thin old man dressed in brown with shocking red fingers. He was pushing strawberries into his mouth with the happiest look on his face.

clams, we will make your demise worthwhile

I did get some berries to munch on but the real score were the clams. Charlie and I both have been a bit obsessed with seafood these days. One market tent contained a man and four huge rolling coolers. They were full of oysters and cherrystone clams, picked that morning. What do you do when it's barely noon on a Saturday and you have plans that evening already, and you find yourself holding a heavy cool bag of fresh clams? If you are Charlie you also buy some fresh asparagus, garlic, and tomatoes and you go home and make clam linguini. For lunch. Dinner be damned.

I stopped eating long enough to take a picture

This is one of his best new dishes, and he's been refining it over the past couple of months. It has reached perfection. We both ate it while sitting in the kitchen and it was absolutely delicious.

Nip

Potency: proven. At home I have an old birdcage top over our catnip
plant for the same reason. It's not so much that cats eat all of it,
but that they roll and scrub their fur in the leaves. The plant can
only take so much vigorous love...

Legendary Fluff

The summer fluff season has begun around here, much to my delight and my horror. Delight is obvious: floating on the breeze are hundreds of tiny white tufts from the cottonwood trees. If you've ever seen the movie Legend you will look in my backyard and expect a unicorn to trot out of the shrubbery. It looks positively magical.



It's also the bane of my life because the fluff season corresponds with Charlie and I getting slammed with seasonal allergies. We're both constantly jittery and stoned from pills and you can tell when they've worn off because the fusillade of sneezing starts. But the fluff certainly is pretty.

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just a fragment of one of the piles

I spent most of the day in the basement hiding from nature and working on my scrappy project. So, so many pieces of fabric.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Tuesday: 3
Eggs laid in the coop this year: 383

reason #34,983,084,239,4923

to love Charlie?


He comes home from work and makes shrimp, scallop, and calamari pesto. I sit there and drink wine. (well, I also peeled the garlic)

inspirado

happy potatoes, outgrowing their containers

The warm weather has been doing wonders for the garden. I even had to break out my tomato-irrigation system early in the season. August is usually the dry time here, and you can go crazy trying to keep needy plants watered. When I was maintaining a p-patch at Marymoor park, I couldn't bike out to the garden every day and water. So I used a system of soda bottles. You poke just a few tiny holes in one end, fill it up, and let it drip. I bury the top few inches of the bottle in the ground and cut a larger hole at the exposed end, then fill it with a handful of rocks to help with stability. The nose of my watering can fits in the hole just right and the tomatoes get a low slow dose of water right where they need it.

drippy

I've tried to use soaker hoses before, but have found them to be a pain in the rear. Plus the garden is so far away from the house that I can't even stretch our super long hose all the way.

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Inspiration struck for a sewing project today. If all works out, it will be a little something for some girls I know who are heading into renaissance fair season with their musical mother....

I am a compulsive saver of scraps

that eventually will become something

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Eggs laid in the coop Monday: 2
Eggs laid in the coop this year: 376

deckstravaganza

It is done! I was looking over my list of projects and realized I should deliberately pick one that would take advantage of such a long stretch of dry weather. Around here, there is a small window that you can complete projects that suggest a 24-72 hour drying time. Usually it is in August.

mangy deck in need of refurbishment

Enter, the back deck. When we bought the house three years ago one of my first projects was stripping and staining the back deck and the front porch. The front has fared quite well, mostly because it is protected by the porch roof. The back deck is right in the line of all weather that comes our way, brutal sun or driving rain. Once I cleared all of the plant pots and bbq off it became apparent how badly the wood needed refinishing.

wood stripped and prepped, now waiting for the next morning's stain

Tuesday was spent stripping the old stain and prepping the wood for new color. I endeared myself to the neighbors by crawling around and re-hammering in every single nail. Over the years they had popped up a bit, and were rather uncomfortable on bare feet. Not sharp but very prickly. Unfortunately there was some sort of acoustic perfect-storm where each hammer blow boomed up from the deck, reflected off the back of the house, bounced across the yard and was thrown back by a wall of trees and then back out again. Each bang was magnified and echoed. I went as fast as I could. It was definitely worth the noise. My feet are happy.

complete!

Then yesterday I got up early and stained against the sun. You're not supposed to put stain on in direct sunlight or when it is above 90 degrees. The sun only came into play near the end, but the heat index was already in the low 80's at 8 am. I was constantly bent over either the deck or the stain tray, and sweat dripped from my nose. I didn't dare stop to wipe my face beause the sun spread through the backyard faster than I expected. The stain went on and it dried for 24 hours. Tonight I moved all of the pots back out there and am going to celebrate by sticking a beer can up a bought chicken's bottom and cooking it on the green egg. Don't tell the chickens.

harry making sure that his catnip is still available
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Eggs laid in the coop Wednesday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Tuesday: 5
Eggs laid this year: 360

garden delight

images of summer: driveway chalk mirrored on bare kid feet

All that sunshine has inspired my garden leap into the summer. I've been leaving the tomatoes and peppers uncovered at night, which is good because they are getting too bushy to properly cover without a degree of squashing. The slug invasion decimated the basil crop but the jerks contented themselves with that and trundled back off into the damp woods.

garden '09 bursts forth!

The squash, pumpkins, and cucumbers have grown their sets of true leaves. Perhaps this year I will finally get a crop of zucchini. Laugh all you want. I've never ever had a squash plant produce. With my last plants I even tried hand-pollination with a paintbrush. One gardener's curse is another gardener's longing, I suppose.

wee little broccoli-in-training

Pole beans are poking up around all of the stakes in the beds. I figured their growth would track well with various plant's needs for less direct sun. The greens will be especially grateful I am sure. Tomorrow I think I'll plant the next crop of greens and carrots, maybe mixed in among the shadier area underneath the tomatoes.

view from the deck

Today was my first proper harvest: mixed greens, dill, anise, cilantro, lemon verbena, and snips of thyme. I have an unbridled passion for green salads with vinaigrette, the more herbs the better. To celebrate today's bounty I bring you the best salad dressing ever. Charlie actually pouts when we run out and I am too lazy to make more right then. As with most recipes that have just a few ingredients, your final product will be a direct reflection of the quality of what you put into it. Trust me, you will not feel like you have wasted your exquisite balsamic and fancy olive oil.

greens that are just begging for...

Suzanne's Perfect Vinaigrette

1T honey
1T prepared mustard
1/3c balsamic vinegar
1/2c olive oil
salt & pepper to taste

Combine honey, mustard, vinegar, and s&p in a bowl.
Briskly whisk in the olive oil. Drizzle over greens and enjoy. Pour the remainder in a jar, refrigerate, and administer as needed.

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Eggs laid in the coop today: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Sunday: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Saturday: 3
Eggs laid in the coop Friday: 4
Eggs laid in the coop Thursday: 2
Eggs laid this year: 351

Testing, batman

And let's see if mobile posting works!

Let's see if sms posting works...