For mom

One Swiss Brown cow rump. :)

A day at the fair

Saturday was sunny and lovely, so we went to the Puyallup Fair. Corn on a stick! Fried twinkies! Shiny rock posters that you could win by hitting a balloon with a dart. We saw it all. We saw:

a draft horse exhibition

horse rumps

a chicken with super long legs

4H cats in sumptuously decorated cages

sheep

Grange exhibits, with all of the fruits of the land

and I ate a funnel cake and got powdered sugar all over myself.
Tasty and fun!

Boys sometimes make passes...

...at girls with new glasses.

Hopefully the boys will not notice that the new prism prescription in my glasses makes me reel like a pigeon drunk on wild grapes. The feeling subsides after a few days, but for a while it is crazy! rollercoaster! time! Up side of it: I can see clearly again!

When advertising goes wrong:


A kitchen so inviting.....that you are relieved that you have a built-in island that allows you to separate your physical space from that of your creepy Stepford neighbors. Did they really drop by for a cup of sugar? EACH? Are they Staring At Your Dental Work? Thank god there is liquor in the cabinet above the refrigerator.

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Also, I miss Pavarotti. Freaky frittering starry-eyed bird of paradise that he was, with all of that flouncing and fame, his voice was beyond compare. You hear Nessun Dorma and you know that yes, if you are hearing it then it is his voice. Because of him, you weren't putting on airs when you were listening to opera. You were just listening to Pavarotti and everyone understood what that meant.


If you had been standing in front of him, if he had been looking at you while he sang, you would have burst into flames.

catsup commitment

I learned that if you want to make catsup, you have to put some serious effort into it. Twenty pounds of tomatoes (mostly roma), slit and dipped into boiling water, skins sloughed off, squishy fruit mushed in hands to extract the seeds. For the love of god, wear rubber gloves because that tomato acid is a killer. Boil that in your enormous stock pot for 45 minutes, along with some spices. Make your eyes sting with the fumes from a separate saucepan brewing cider vinegar and more spices.

Pulp the tomatoes through your hopelessly defective foley food mill. Curse, decide to throw it out (it was bought at the goodwill and for all I know is missing some key component, a spring I think, which allows it to actually MILL the food). Put the rest of the tomatoes through the good old cone sieve (another goodwill find, missing the wooden masher which is obviously a key appendage, but I made do with a big wooden spoon).

Add the strained seasoned vinegar to the tomato-ey slop and stir. Bring to a boil, then move to the uncovered crockpot on high. The recipe suggested this as a method where you didn't have to hover over it stirring constantly. Well, there was no hovering but there was also no appreciable reduction in 4 hours. Switch to the trusty le creuset roaster! Put it in the oven, one of my no-stir tricks. After two hours, no reduction in liquid. Realize you have spent the entire DAY making ketchup and grab a tawdry but excellent used book that your lovely husband bought for you over the weekend. Realize that if you were not married you would seriously consider seducing Dan Simmons, just so that he would murmer the plotline for his next book of genius in your ear after a glass of wine. It is somehow sexy that his older work is gumshoe horror scruffy detective horror fluff. So delicious!

I digress. Read the book. Sit at the stove counter. Keep the catsup at a rolling simmer and stir every 3 minutes. Over and over and over. Eventually it is reduced! Happily, this coincides with Charlie ("the spicer") returning from work. Keep one small jar plain for future reference. Allow your husband to go crazy with the adobo sauce in the rest, spicy spicy.

Twenty pounds, one day later: catsup. Several precious jars.

Also: One hefty jug of fresh tomato juice. What to do! Well, make The Best Bloody Mary In The World, of course. Secret ingredient: Penzey's english prime rib rub.


Also: turkeys are growing slowly. Their whistling in the kitchen makes me happy. The larger is named Babs, the other as yet un-named.

How much cauliflower can you eat?

tasty, tasty

Really, take a guess. Think about a head of cauliflower, and tell me how much you think you could eat in one sitting.

You know how much I could eat? An Entire Head of Cauliflower. Last night I made dinner, and Charlie ended up working way late so I was in possession of a huge pot of tasty lentils and a head of roasted cauliflower. The lentils, they were quite tasty. Two onions, sauteed long and low to sweetness in olive oil, add 1 cup french green lentils, 1 cup basmati rice, 3 cups chicken stock, bake in oven 1 hour or so. Simple and good. Cauliflower: cut up one head into 1/2 inch slices, toss with olive oil and a bit of salt, roast in 400 degree oven for about 30 minutes.

Charlie called me while I was eating and I remember saying "I think I might go back for more cauliflower." I mean, would Richard Simmons throw on his mr. goodbody skinsuit and castigate me for eating my fill of *cauliflower* for heaven's sake? It amounts to the most dietetically free item in the entire universe! So I went back for more, and I went back with a vengeance. Oh my it was so very good.

spite!

Today Charlie did not work (!) and we went to the Redmond farmers market and bought an alarming amount of tomatoes (around 15 pounds) to make ketchup. I will be industrious on Monday when I have the day off from work. We also got some melon, and some cheese, and some absolutely divine russian stout beer and sat out on the deck in the late sunshine and played spite and malice. Right now Charlie is taking a nap to absorb the mellowness of that superb beer, and I am going to go wake him up to eat more cheese and melon and some left over lentils.

happy summer henry

Alas, there is no leftover cauliflower.

curry cravings

pear frangelico not-burning jam

I went to the grocery store tonight and they had a special on local pears. Oh, they looked scrumptious! I decided to make a batch of Charlie's favorite pear frangelico jam. Turns out my 15 pounds was enough to make two batches of jam and a yet-unfinished experimental batch of pear butter. That experiment is currently burbling in the crock pot and will do so for the next 12 hours or so. The jam was scary, since I'm coming off my unprecedented bad streak of TWO jams ruined in a row. Two luscious awesome jams burned and I haven't been able to figure out why.

cooling down

The first was my best-ever strawberry jam. I was so excited that I didn't even write about it. While at the duvall farmer's market with Kristie, I got several pints of possibly the most perfect perfumed hot summer strawberries ever. I labored over them in a painstaking three day maceration process, with gentle boilings, and sugar, and then lime zest, and more gentle boilings, and pectin development in the refrigerator. I even had a SPECIAL set of german jelly jars set aside for the occasion. They close with rubber rings and clips and are beautiful. The end result? Twelve jars of burnt jam in perfect german jars that I am having a hard time finding replacement rubber gaskets for. Those rubber rings? Only useable once, thank you.

would you just look at those perfect berries?

Then came the blackberry bay leaf. I wrote about it the other day but had not followed through with the crucial key step of *tasting* it first. I lovingly spooned some into my breakfast yogurt and when I ate it it was unmistakeably burned. Disgusting black caramel burnt sugar taste. And for each jam, I don't know why! I cooked to below the 221 degree jam set temperature, because each jam just wouldn't get above 218. Was it the natural sugar content? Was I lacking in super jam fairy dust? I will never know, but I do know that I ruined two awesome batches of jam with my bad luck.

The pear jam hopefully will redeem me.

aesthetically pleasing german jars, a thorn in my side

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So I know that if you crave red meat that means you need iron. And peaches can mean a deficiency of beta carotene. Chocolate = b vitamins. Grapes = you may be dehydrated. But curry? Ever since I tried some chicken curry sausages from Larry's Market (a local grocery store) I have been thinking about them. Tonight I managed to buy more and ate them for dinner like they were ambrosia. Oh, so tasty! I am already thinking of how this weekend I can talk Charlie into making me a red curry. He makes such good ones....

two new family members

My drink of choice: Wild Turkey Bourbon. So tasty, so very tasty with two sugar cubes a dash of bitters and a crushed mint leaf.



You know what I also like? Real Live Turkeys. A guy on Craigslist advertised turkey pairs for sale last week. I wasn't really interested in teenage turkeys, but I did email him to ask what his experiences have been with predators and how his large-ish turkeys dealt with it. He's never had a problem with raccoons, which was music to my ears. Also? He had tiny baby chicks, unadvertised. I drove up their today, through two hours of godawful traffic, and was rewarded by a happy flock of Bourbon Red turkeys and miscellaneous chickens. The big tom was funny, strutting around and constantly gob gob gobbling and making sure that we knew exactly how awesome he was. Are they tame? Well, the guy walked over and picked up the tom turkey and cradled him under his arm. All of the teenage flock were way more curious than they were aggressive or scared.

Sold! I brought home two turkey chicks. One is nine days old, the other around three. They have been sleeping nonstop ever since coming home, so the picture is not the most compelling. There is no way to tell if they are toms or hens for the next three months or so. We'll have to be creative with naming. They will be living in the kitchen until the end of September, I suspect. The three month old adolescents the guy had were at least two feet tall, so they get big fast!

the flock of rambunctious teenagers, with dad at one o'clock

I am excited to have friendly hand raised poultry again, and hope that these babies will have a long and happy life.

sweet sleeping babies!