Cosa Nostra Woodinville

So my friend Elisa asked for help demolishing select parts of her deck. She needed a crowbar and some muscle and some enthusiasm for bashing things apart.

"Sure!" I replied "but my thumbs are kind of messed up so I don't know if I'll be much help. But I can bring the crowbar and a sledgehammer."

"What, did the mob get to your or something?" was her reply.

I laughed out loud. Yeah I guess there is that whole mob and putting you to the thumbscrews. And then I started to think about it. What hurts the most on me? My thumbs and my knees.

Holy crap, I am being haunted by the mob.

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The real reason? I have a bizarre deformity in my femurs that means my kneecaps float more than they should. This leads to strange pains when kneeling, and sometimes I pop more than is usual while running. My thumbs? Well, after a few weeks of good weather and incredibly vigorous weeding cutting pruning pulling sawing clearing yanking twisting and mowing my hands are pretty much shot.


However, I rather like the devil-may-care impression of the mob. Yeah, I didn't give up my secrets under duress. Yeah, yeah. You just try me.

duck and cover

It's 11.55pm, and obviously our neighbors have spent their entire stimulus checks on explosives.


Here's to hoping that they run out of cherry bombs before 2 am!

treats for all

best landscaping plant ever.

So the jam I made today came out well. I knew that it was strawberry-jam-making season. There were a few hints:
1. Bellevue strawberry festival (which I unfortunately missed this year)
2. Super hot weather
3. Driveway landscaping producing awesome berries
4. Detailed notes in jam-making cookbook are always within about a 2-week range

my much-annotated recipe

I succumbed. At the grocery store there were flats of local berries. You know, the kind where each berry is garnet red and still has an inch or so of stem sprouting out from the leaves. You can smell them about 5 feet away like red honey. I got a flat today and set to work. It was not as hot today as it has been but still was lovely and the air felt great on bare skin (see: bikini accident). I made two batches of my popular strawberry and lime jam. This year I got my beloved Weck tulip jars to function properly.


I love those Weck jars. So much that I never want to use them because then I will not have them anymore. Ridiculous! Today I forced myself to use four of them and will have to give them away because otherwise I'm just going to set them on windowsills and admire the red jam within and never want to open them. For now I will allow myself to hoard the rest of the empty jars.

the metal clips come off after the jars have cooled

At any rate, five pounds of berries were reduced to a stack of tasty sweet jars. You can't exactly survive on fresh jam alone, so I also made some tabouleh. Then at dusk I took out leftovers for the chickens. They dined on parsley and mint stems, a few heels of bread, and a mealy apple. Happy chickens....now lay me some eggs!

tabouleh for me

treats for the girls

Breaking News from the Department of Dumb

Tip:

Don't make jam while wearing shorts and a bikini top.




ouch.

from 50 to 90

And just like that, summer has arrived. Harry is pleased.

popcorn

In the pot, five by five

I'm pretty sure I remember when my parents got their first microwave. I was a junior in high school, and it was 1989. My mom (and now my dad) have always been from-scratch cooks, and we didn't use that microwave for frozen pizzas or pot pies or hot pockets. No, by golly when you made a pot pie you made it in the oven and it took an hour. When there was a babysitter (which wasn't often) there would be the huge treat of a frozen pot pie for dinner and a person could practically camp out in front of that stove waiting for the damn thing to cook.

I digress. When that microwave oven came into the house it was used for one thing only: popcorn. Oddly, that enormous hunk of technology was used to provide a service that had been provided flawlessly for as long as I could remember by a big pot on the stove. Was it the novelty? Well, yeah, you could make popcorn by pushing exactly one button. The one that said "popcorn." Yay, Modern Life! Bring me my jetpack, for I am embracing The Future!

It took years for me to go back to in-the-pot popcorn and I am proud to announce that my microwave is now mostly used to defrost containers of soup stock. In the Brown house this is important, since the freezer is about half-full of various stocks and we use a lot of it. And it takes a very long time for a frozen 4-cup block to defrost on the counter. Now when I have a hankering for popcorn I do it the old fashioned way.

1. Put a big pot on the stove. Pour enough oil in to just cover the bottom, drop in 3 popcorn kernels, put the lid on, and turn the burner on high.
2. When the kernels pop, dump in as much popcorn as you want. Typically 1/4c kernels for 2 people.
3. Wait for them to start popping, and when they do, shake the pan back and forth every 10 seconds until the pops slow to one per second.
4. Open lid, sprinkle on desired condiments. Salt, pepper, chinese 5-spice, cayenne, aleppo pepper, cumin, sugar, whatever you like. I do not recommend putting all of these things on at once. Please for your sake only pick things that match up in flavor. I highly recommend salt, sugar, and cayenne. Feeling like you need to top off your day with a million calories? Melt some butter and mix that in, then sprinkle on parmesan cheese.
5. Dump into bowl and eat.

More work than the microwave? Well, you do have to wash the pot eventually. But it takes probably 5 minutes max to go from "I want popcorn" to "I have popcorn."

My secret ingredients for an excellent popcorn experience:

Oh, msg, I faint in your flavorful forbidden embrace. Please don't tell anyone.

Popcorn leads to mandatory flossing, which leaves you with the wonderful glow of hygienic superiority that only flossing can give (nevermind all of those parmesan calories)

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Cat ecstasy:
I have never seen Harry so content in all of his 12 years of life.


Best thing about this picture:
Right after I took it Charlie said "you're not going to put this on your blog, are you?" I assured him it was completely tasteful and that no one would make fun of his red plaid comfy pants.

Proof of Florida

To remind myself that it wasn't just a dream:

Sand like sugar


Seafood seafood everywhere

and pruned fingers to prove it!

feed the fish hanging around the docks...

...so they can grow up to feed these fish, which you can catch and eat

Forget your sunscreen? Spray it on with this crazy car-wash-hose looking thing!

Marvelous invention: beer in a metal can so you don't have to worry about breaking it. Now if only they would start serving Stella Artois in those cans instead of american beer...

No trip to florida is complete without a pilgrimage to chick-fil-a

Wait an hour for dinner? Sure! We're game! At least there was a bench to sit on while we waited, and waited, and waited. Then when we got inside we waited another hour for food. But the fried shrimp was still delicious.

Sienna, how sweet you are.