My indentured servant is back

My mom made that mushroom. 

Without meaning to, I took a vacation from the blog. I wasn't doing any cooking or cookbook reading and I got involved in a bunch of other projects and weeks slipped by.

I have not cooked since mid-June, when my kids went to New England to visit their grandparents. One night I put steaks in a skillet and turned on the stove to produce dinner for my husband and me. My husband looked at the steak on the plate and said, "No salad!"

No. Salad would have meant washing lettuce.

Here's what I've been doing instead of cooking:

Milking Natalie twice a day. Six quarts daily since her babies left. 

Making cheese with that milk. Have made camembert, taleggio, ricotta, chevre, a tomme that used up 16 quarts, St. Maure, and Neufchatel.

That gray matter isn't mold, it's ash, and the cheese is great.

I'm getting more confident, getting better, becoming less fearful about experimenting, less fearful about eating the cheese, although there have been a couple of cheeses so monstrous I wouldn't even feed them to the chickens.

Speaking of chickens, a raccoon killed Sally, the sole survivor from our first batch of Buff Orpington chicks. That was sad. A few nights later, the raccoon came back and tried to kill another chicken, but we ran outside with a flashlight and scared it off. The raccoon slithered over the fence and I went down into the muck and found the mangled bird.

sickbed

I nursed Sprite back to health, although she now staggers when she walks. Sprite used to lay eggs in our kitchen window box.

I don't ordinarily like impatiens, but these look like little roses.

Which has never looked better!

I've revived the garden in a big way. There are now tomatoes and squash, but mostly I just planted or transplanted perennials and citrus trees and vines. The irrigation is finally all in place so maybe this time everything won't die. I want some of the things I do around here to actually stick so I can be living in a functional and adult house by the time I qualify for AARP. No more overambitious plans and half-assed false starts.

With that in mind, I finally gave in and bought an Oriental rug. This sounds mundane, but it was a huge move for me. In buying this dirt-camouflaging Turkish carpet, I gave up once and for all the dream that I will ever live in an airy and darling home full of florals and charming vintage white furniture from the flea market. I wasted a lot of years on that pretty dream and it was a relief to let it go. I wish I'd never heard of you, Rachel Ashwell.

Now I just need to repaint.

The dark, complicated, quietly vibrant carpet replaces an insipid, totally filthy pink cotton rug which I had come to hate. I am so happy with this rug. I plan to die with this rug.

Owen came home a few days ago. It is good to have him back to help with the animals and also because he is nice. Not sure what or from what book, but tonight I am going to cook.

Almost as pretty as Smitten Kitchen

I saw a recipe for rhubarb-rose preserves in Linda Ziedrich's Joy of Jams, Jellies and Other Sweet Preserves and since I have both rhubarb and roses just outside my door, decided to make it.

You simmer fruit, flowers, and sugar and watch as the mixture moves rapidly from beautiful this:
to less beautiful but still beautiful this:And then you put it in jars. Here's what Ziedrich says: "A few minutes before writing these words, I opened a six-year-old jar of rhubarb-rose preserves, and for a moment I thought that the roses were blooming in the garden. These preserves can raise you out of midwinter blues into happy plans for spring."

Hope so!

Our garden is basically a catastrophe this year -- it was an unhappy spring -- but the six rhubarb seeds I planted in the happy spring of 2009 have grown to a lush, waist-high forest. Some people say you should wait until year three to harvest rhubarb, but the stalks are so abundant and thick that I pulled a few anyway. This is the leaf from a single stalk, with a big, fat hardcover book for scale:
Bloggers are always coming up with contests. What contest should I set up so I can send the winner a jar of this jam?

We're going to eat a lot of persimmon pudding

I've been derelict, not cooking at all, serving everyone grilled cheese sandwiches and pancakes. The last week has been nutty  -- in good ways! Chief among the positive developments: My mother came home from the hospital, is eating with gusto and feeling better than she has since September. The new chemo is doing its job. Cancer will shock you when it goes on a mad rampage, but it can shock you every bit as much when it suddenly turns tail. The last few days have been disorienting in that regard, but we're not complaining.

Garden update: 

Back in December, I ordered a bunch of bare-root trees and they finally arrived. Yesterday, we planted. I went overboard with my order, but especially in the persimmon department: fuyu, chocolate, and hachiya. What is wrong with me? They are very beautiful when fruiting in the fall (see aspirational photo at top), but we struggled to find places for those three trees. If even just one survives, we are going to be drowning in persimmons.

Which is a truly nightmarish image. 

This is how a young persimmon tree looks in February:

Can you even see it? The tall stick in the foreground.

 

We also planted four fig trees along the street outside the fence, since deer do not eat fig leaves. We can never have too many figs. And we put in some (more) raspberries, grapes, blueberries, and two columnar apple trees, which are wonderful because you can plant them in tight spaces. They grow straight up like . . . columns. This is what the Scarlet Spire columnar apple tree looks like as of 5 minutes ago:

An asparagus.

After the big morning in the yard, my husband threw an all-boys Super Bowl party and I went to the movies to escape the shouting and potato chips. I didn't love watching Jeff Bridges throw up, but otherwise really enjoyed Crazy Heart.

(I should say, I have a horror of watching people throw up, even in movies. Maybe especially in movies, because you can't leave the room. Others will probably not be similarly offended.)

Smug, smug, smug

With the homemade mozzarella, we made pizza. What else? I used whey, a cheesemaking byproduct, in the crust. The tomatoes and basil: from the garden. 

For dessert, brownies that contained eggs from our sweet chickens. 

Brownies were (clearly) popular with the local baboons, but I don't think it was the free-range, fresh eggs. I think it was the Baker's chocolate and C&H sugar from the Miller Ave. Safeway. 

Oh! I almost forgot. The vanilla extract. Homemade. I am going  to post about homemade vanilla soon, but want to run a taste-test first. This week.

 

We have a party to throw today. Four boys are coming over tonight to celebrate Owen's 9th birthday. I'm going to bake a cake, preferably one that does not involve a trip to the supermarket. Not because I'm a locavore, but because I'm lazy.

Alright. Whatever. We'll do Mexican food.

Three pounds of tomatillos from the sad, ravaged garden. One of the only vegetables that the chickens did not trample, maim, or eat. The tomatillos are telling me that the next cuisine I tackle should be Mexican. My children, spouse, and sister are telling me that the next cuisine I tackle should be Mexican. I sat for 30 minutes this morning reading Rick Bayless cookbooks for inspiration and failed to become inspired. All I can see, stretching deep into the fall, are long drives to special grocery stores. Wrapping tamales all by myself. Shaping masa boats. Making elaborate moles that no one really likes. Hassles. Weight gain. The passage of time. . . 

I find Bayless's cookbooks forbidding. Not as forbidding as Diana Kennedy's books, but definitely intimidating. Who else writes good Mexican cookbooks? Research required.

I suppose I just need to start and all will be well.

Miss Saigon

I was trying to load my last pictures from Vietnam, of my father and me at the Rex Hotel rooftop bar. We had a swell time at the Rex, drinking draft beer, eating peanuts and trying to figure out which couples were legitimate and which involved hookers, as at least one definitely did. But right after we took the pictures I dropped the camera and it no longer functions, not even enough to yield its photographs. My husband will have a fit when he reads this, as he contends I should not be allowed to own a camera. He may be correct.

The photo up top is from earlier in the trip. The laundry wasn't all that cheap, but I will vouch for clean, nice, and fragrant.

Anyway, we're home. The grass is always greener and all that. The last few days in Vietnam, I pined for home -- for the garden, the puffy blue sofa where we watch TV (pitiful), my kids (so very much), turkey sandwiches with lettuce. Now that I have most of it back (minus the kids, who are still with their intrepid New England grandparents), I miss Saigon. Everywhere we went in Vietnam had charm, but Saigon is special. You should watch this video if just for 30 seconds, because it's a very fine representation of that wack city. Early on, my father and I threw ourselves into the traffic, walking many blocks during the day, at night, in the blistering heat, in the rain, after a few drinks, stone sober, always scared out of our minds. The last day, we took taxis. It seemed too sad to die right before we were going to get to go home.

But the people who handle that traffic with nonchalance and elan, they're awe-inspiring. The way a Saigon native saunters into an onrushing horde of motors scooters while talking on a cell phone, wearing stylish shoes, and carrying a small child has to be one of the coolest sights in the world. 

As for the suburban garden I longed to return to: what a bummer. Still no ripe tomatoes and something has been eating my pumpkins, scooping out all the flesh and turning them into little tureens. Rats? The big fat chickens? If I had a camera, I'd take a picture. No eggplants, not a one. No melons. Snails have shredded the chard leaves into lace. A lot of squash, and that's thrilling. Just thrilling. I sat around in Vietnam pining for a garden full of zucchini. 

It's still great to be home. 

Bees & Birds

After visiting Novella Carpenter's farm yesterday, I came home and nervously decided to inspect our bee hives.  One morning last week I got up and, still in pajamas, decided to go peek at the entrances of the hives. During the day there are bees flying everywhere and they pay no attention to me. But this morning, when there was zilch going on, a guard bee spotted me four feet away, came zooming out and went for my head. Started thrashing around in my hair and after two minutes of frantic/furious buzzing, stung me on the back of the neck. It was horrible. Not the sting, but the sound of a tiny, angry creature crawling around in my hair. I have some primal issues with bees in my hair.

Anyway, I screwed up my courage and went into both hives yesterday.

The bees are doing okay, despite the proximity of the toxic buckeye tree. I did not see "brood" in the upper chambers of either hive -- just lots of comb and pale honey, both capped and uncapped -- which is not ideal. But I'm not sure what to do about it. According to my reading, there should be more brood.

I was also slightly worried that the bees were producing queen cells when I saw the lumpy formations on the bottom of this frame: 

But the raggedy comb extrusions appeared to be filled with honey and were not as tidy as the queen cells I've studied in photographs. If an experienced beekeeper sees this and has any thoughts, I would be grateful.

As I've mentioned before, I spent $934.69 on starter bees, two hives, and equipment. This morning I got curious and made some calculations:

A fairly average Bay Area hive can produce 25 lbs. of honey per year according to this site. Some hives produce much more; other hives perish. I don't expect any honey this year, but let's say I'm perfectly average and end up with 50 lbs. of honey from my two hives in the summer of 2010.

 

Twelve pounds of honey = 1 gallon. 

You can buy "Marin Mix" honey  -- which can't be much different from what my bees are making -- from Local Harvest for $88 per gallon.

 

So if I were to sell 4 gallons of our honey at that price, we could conceivably take in $350 per year. There would be other expenses -- sugar water, extra supers, jars, charming labels, etc. -- but at this rate, we would earn back our starting costs in roughly three years.

Interesting. And completely hypothetical. It's hard for me to believe that a beekeeper as amateurish as I am will ever actually collect honey.  It's even harder for me to imagine finding the wherewithal to bottle, market, and sell it. 

I still think the chickens could eventually earn their keep. Check out our handsome chicken house, built by Husband a few years ago as a fort:

I'm sure our neighbors love it. 

The garden is much prettier, albeit overcrowded. 

I was underconfident after years of disappointment, overplanted to make up for mingy yields, and now have a jungle. 

Novella Carpenter's city farm

My sister Justine and I both recently read and loved the book Farm City in which author Novella Carpenter describes her funny and inspiring adventures raising vegetables, bees, chicken, bunnies and pigs on the empty lot next door to her apartment in an Oakland, California ghetto.

This morning, Justine and I decided to find her farm, which turned out to be disappointingly easy given that Carpenter has published the address on her blog. We love us a good sleuthing mission and this did not test our well-honed skills. We could tell you stories . . .

The place was literally just off a monster freeway. Not a great neighborhood, lots of boarded up windows and stray shopping carts. But not entirely awful. There were families around doing ordinary Sunday things, like walking home from church and washing the car. No sign of Carpenter. It felt wrong to just barge into someone else's garden, but the gate was open and bore a welcome sign, so we did. 

It was a mess -- but wonderful.  I think my lame photo up top just captures the mess. You have to trust me, the ramshackle, pell-mell abundance was beautiful to behold, with peach and avocado trees and scarlet runner beans and trees full of figs and unripe apples all higgledy piggledy with tomatoes and chard and zucchini and artichokes. We also saw one chicken and a few cages of bunnies.

  

And, of course, there were bee hives. I have to say, Carpenter's bees seemed a little lethargic compared to mine. I wonder if the one of the hives is defunct.

I absolutely love this kind of place, always have, and don't know precisely why. I can't say my reasons are purely noble; they're not grounded in concerns about sustainability or protesting Nabisco or anything high-minded like that. Or at least not completely. It just makes me so incredibly happy when I see a much-loved, food-growing garden, especially one with animals. That this one sits in the middle of a gritty neighborhood makes it all the more magical.

 

We should have gone to a movie

Had an amusing experience last night. Alright, sixty percent amusing, forty percent annoying. Actually, maybe just plain annoying, but with amusing elements.

I've recently started reading this fascinating blog about urban beekeeping, and decided to work down the list of links to see if I could discover some other interesting beekeeping sites. Anyway, I was reading one of the links when I got to a section where the blogger rants about a Slate story in which the author argues that gardening is actually expensive. I got the tiniest bit agitated when I realized she was talking about a story I wrote. She refers to me as "honey" in a sarcastic way. Otherwise, nothing about bees.

Speaking of gardening, here's our new curry leaf "tree": 

I ordered it back in February from a nursery in New Jersey and it finally arrived on Thursday, wrapped in wet newspaper. I'm sure I will find a way to kill it before ever harvesting a mature leaf, but I had to try. Curry leaves are a fragrant herb used in Indian cooking (they're unrelated to curry powder) and I've had a hard time finding a reliable source, what with periodic quarantines. As you can see, the plant is startlingly petite, but it has potential. On the other hand, check out this second "tree" I ordered to give to my friend Lisa:

I can not give that to Lisa. Thing is not gift material. Note how the toothpick towers over the "tree." If the nursery weren't in New Jersey, the people so unfriendly, and it had cost more than $9, I would ask for a replacement. 

Yesterday, I also bought a Kaffir lime from our local nursery, but that was a proper tree and cost considerably more than $9. See? Gardening = expensive. At least when you have no self control. 

Farm Report: We have three bushes and two berries

That is our first gooseberry. I want to make the world's tiniest tart in celebration.

I do not love nature

We had a windstorm yesterday that blew out a small section of our fence and during the brief period before I noticed the breach, deer entered our yard. Our young pear and apricot trees have both been denuded of their leaves, and the apricot lost its single fruit. The gooseberries were partially stripped. Deer are very sweet and graceful when grazing on remote hillsides, but when they break into our garden I hate them with such vitriol I would have no trouble running Bambi through the new sausage machine. Ok, maybe not Bambi, but Bambi's childless uncle. It would be payback for countless past crimes against the loquat tree (R.I.P.), the grape vines, the ceanothus (which they supposedly do not even like), the roses. 

Sadly, illegal.

Mark is turning over soil as I type. I had to leave the scene to escape the resentment vibrating from his body in squiggly lines, like in a comic strip. The only thing he would enjoy less is to pay someone.  

A riveting garden update

Unlike some people, I've been having mixed luck with seeds this year. There's a tiny, tragic graveyard of onion seedlings out on my deck; I set them there to get some fresh spring air, and they keeled over dead. I was sad.

On the other hand, who cares about onions when you have asparagus? See above. Very intrepid and cute. They were the last seed to germinate and I'd despaired, but then they all shot up a few weeks ago and have been impossible to discourage. Also doing well are the tomatoes, eggplants, and artichokes. The cardoon crop has already failed -- I pulled up one of the corpses and it had an 8-inch root, so I think it was feeling cramped in the little pot. I'm going to try planting cardoons directly in the soil when I have found a place for a dedicated bed. You can hardly ever find cardoons at the farmers' market and they're delicious, though I've never figured out how to cook them right. 

Also, I'm worried about the worm box. Essentially, the seething masses of worms have ceased seething. I have theories about what's gone wrong, but it's too disgusting to describe in detail.  

 

Garden Plans

Isn't it lovely, my bountiful garden? 

If I think about it too much, I will cry. When we came back from vacation a year ago July the construction crew had bulldozed our garden. Gooseberry bushes, raspberries, artichokes, a pink lemon tree (yes, there is such a thing), sorrel, epazote, all kinds of herbs, rhubarb, rose geraniums, strawberries, miniature roses, a dwarf orange tree, and much more, all of which I planted myself, had been smothered, crushed, or ripped up by the roots. In its place, there were trucks, crumpled Subway wrappers, empty 7-11 cups, and several tons of gravel. 

But, like they say, spilt milk.  

I'm paying someone to turn that grim parking lot back into a patch of dirt, in which I'm going to replant our garden. In anticipation, I started some herbs in a pot on the deck. 

They're cute. I try to be philosophical. This is the cycle of life and construction projects. But thinking about that old garden really does break my heart.