Tag Archives: Food

Food, Gardening, Homestead

Letting go

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The okra gave up the ghost.

I knew it was simply a matter of time. After all, between the laws of diminishing returns and the downward creep of the thermometer, it was a given that even the hardiest of summer-loving plants would not survive the onslaught. And so it goes for the okra, finally giving in to the inevitable. They now stand in place, like guardians cursed to remain in one location until relieved by those who never arrive, becoming more gaunt and weary as time passes.

I haven’t pulled them out of the line yet, unlike the jalapenos, from whom I took the last fruits and then took to compost yesterday. I’d like to see how long they can stand before collapsing entirely, but will probably take the shovel and dig them out tomorrow – the shovel is absolutely required, as anyone who has grown okra can vouch for the rather strong roots the plants put down, anchoring them to the earth even as they reach toward the sun they adore. I suppose they could be tested as greenhouse-type growers, but this seems counter-productive, and it would be very difficult to cover them every night and uncover them each day, since they are taller than me at this point. There is also the promise of starting anew next year, planning for which has already begun in conjunction with the arrival of the seed catalogs for next year.

Now, we settle in for what passes for winter here, but which would be laughed off as mild by our counterparts to the north. For us, though, it is no laughing matter to be faced with shorter days and languishing temperatures when for at least some of us, the warmth is what brings us seriously to life.

Food, Gardening, Homestead

Preparation

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This afternoon, it was time to break out the plastic once more and create covered wagons everywhere. With a forecast low of 27 at the ranch, and with my continuing quest to have one ripe tomato in the winter here – one that will get to red or purple without cracking – wrestling with plastic to cover for the impending weather is just part of the routine.

I know some people poo-poo the idea of growing tomatoes in winter. “I won’t eat things out of season,”, they say, pointing to the additional environmental issues involved in raising things out of season, like the transport of the item from wherever it’s grown (South America, for instance) to the local market, or to the energy consumed in forcing things to grow outside their usual time. In this case, however, I am not transporting the item anywhere – except potentially to a tasty meal on my table – and we are expending no additional resources to keep the plants alive beyond the human energy necessary to pull out the plastic covers and get them set in place. That particular energy is fairly significant, because I have to say, high mil plastic is rather heavy. But, from an overall standpoint, beyond the initial purchase of the plastic, the environmental impact is pretty much zero, since it can be reused, likely for years with proper storage, without then sending it off to the recycling center.

Thus, the quest for summer vegetables in winter continues here at the ranch. I’m certain the weather will finally kill the okra that has been so productive for us, but that staunchly held up through previous freezes without benefit of protection. It’s a hardy beast, and as of this afternoon, still flowering with beautiful buds signaling another round of fruit. If it is still there in the morning, it will be a most pleasant surprise, although I’m aware there is still the issue of diminishing returns even for what was the star performer of last season.

Food, Life in general

Our city of perpetual construction

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It isn’t often that something like this happens, and I’d wager it is even less likely that anyone will ever see it in person. On this particular day, we were headed into town for yet another one of my followups after the lung surgery – I do believe it was this visit that the doctor told me I could drive myself again, as it happens – and on the way, in the other direction, there was a backup as far as the eye could see. Thanks to modern technology and the inevitable “always there” it brings, we were able to find out that the backup was due to a pilot of a small private plane making an emergency landing just off the interstate in the opposite direction.

Now, to anyone who has ever visited this city, or even had the opportunity to drive through it, it’s well known that some portion of the road system is under construction here, somewhere. In this case, one of those areas was this precise portion of the system, stretching several miles, where the pilot of the plane not only managed to avoid power lines on his way down, but miss the traffic stuffed into two lanes, the barricades on the sides of the road, the construction equipment and personnnel scattered about, and the large fence that would have taken it into the Publix warehousing area. Instead, he took out a few branches of some trees and a temporary fence surrounding some construction materials (but not the materials themselves, it seems) and came to a stop without anyone injured. According to one person who did see it, the pilot managed to come down initially on the road, then bounce back up over at least one car on the way to the far, grassy side. Remarkable, really.

By the time we’d finished with more poking and prodding at the doctor, the backup was gone, but the cleanup continued, with reps from the NTSB coming up from Orlando, and crews deciding the plane had to be sawed into pieces in order to get it out. This is what I managed to capture on the way past the wreck area.

They’d already removed the damaged wing and the tail section, and loaded the plane onto a trailer, ready to be hauled out. Less than a day after this happened, it was hard to tell anything had actually happened, except for the missing piece of fencing that had been up around the construction material. Less than a week later, it was impossible to say, unless you’d seen it, where exactly the plane had come down.

As it turns out, the plane had been recently bought and was being flown in for maintenance – but had not been flown in quite some time, nor had it had maintenance in quite some time. One of the engines failed, and on the pilot’s attempt to return to the local airport, the other engine failed as well, leading to the emergency landing.

It occurred to me this evening, after having a bit of a crash landing myself – sudden dizziness and an immediate need to land myself on my rear on the kitchen floor, leaning up against the cabinets – that I’m probably in need of some maintenance myself. I couldn’t recall what I’d eaten today, which is not terribly surprising, given that as much as I cook, I can’t eat much of what I do cook. I’m guessing that I hadn’t had enough to eat, since I feel better now that I’ve a bit of food and some watered down orange juice (so as not to turn my mouth into a fiery pit due to the acid) in me. I just don’t eat as much as I used to, after being on tube feeding for nine months, and I am not, in general, all that hungry in any case throughout the day. Much like the plane, I suppose it’s time for an overhaul of sorts, with greater attention to the fuel I’m giving myself.In the same manner, I suspect that almost anyone could find some portion of their life that needs a bit of a tuneup.

To kick off, I have some garbanzos soaking in some plain water. Tomorrow, I’ll boil them with the hambone I saved from Thanksgiving dinner, add some spices, toss in some potatoes, onions, and ham from that aforementioned bone to make some spanish bean soup. On the side: freshly made italian bread, with a side experiment of trying to break it into four smaller loaves instead of two large loaves, and freezing two of four: one after the first rise when the loaf is shaped, and one after the loaf is proofed. Then we’ll be able to see which one fares better in the oven after it’s been thawed. The other two, of course, will be baked until golden, brown, and delicious, then slathered with butter and eaten with good soup as we head for several consecutive nights of hard freeze weather.

Cancer, Food, Gardening, Homestead, Sports

What I did on my non-vacation weekend

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I worked. I cooked. Worked. Cooked. The usual.

I wasn’t feeling quite well over the weekend, and today still do not feel as well as I did last weekend. I’m not quite sick now that whatever minor sinus infection I had cleared itself out, but also not quite feeling a hundred percent. Generally, I blame this on the fact that I’ve had far too many doctor/hospital visits, and there are simply too many sick people in those places. Fortunately, I’m done with the doctors until November unless something comes up, since the last visit to the pulmonologist this past week gave me an all clear after an xray followup to track that nasty fluid buildup to make sure it was fully drained. But like I said, hanging around in hospitals and offices brings with it the potential for random bugs to crop up, and I’m guessing that’s what this nonsense is.

On the plus side, I cooked, a lot, this weekend. Today is mom’s birthday (happy birthday, Mom!), and we just had a small dinner for immediate family Saturday night: my sister was down from Georgia, my brothers both up from Orlando, and my other sister and I. Saturday night: classic steakhouse dinner, with steak (grass-fed, organic, no less), shrimp three ways (boiled, scampi, and asian-inspired), baked potatoes, corn, bruschetta (I made two loaves of Italian bread, and by the end of the night, both were gone). Sunday morning, as is his habit, my brother made breakfast, and people went about their business for awhile before returning for a day of football. The football food: roasted red pepper soup, guacamole, more bruschetta (and two more loaves of Italian bread), roasted sweet potatoes and carrots from the Lazy Dog Ranch garden, and two chickens that had been brined in a honey-pepper mixture and then smoked for about four hours (plus a fresh batch of bbq sauce). I also made some cherry-chocolate-toasted almond ice cream for those who like that sort of thing. The youngest brother also assembled an eggplant parmigian after I fried off the eggplant slices, and one of my sisters made sauce, since my sisters were bugging him to make it.

We watched the Dolphins take a win against the Vikings, and turned off the Jaguars game in disgust after the Chargers reached the 30-point mark. The battle of the Mannings was not all together that interesting as the Colts put the beatdown on the Giants, but that is what younger brothers are for, as everyone who has a younger brother knows.

Overall, a very nice weekend indeed. The weather is not yet modulating into fall for us here, even though some mornings have dipped near the 60 degree mark. This is actually a good thing in my book, as my seedlings in the flats will go out into the garden in the coming weeks, hopefully to give us some good output now that the captain is back in the game and not having another chunk of something cut out. I could use about five degrees of cooler weather in order to get the fall snow pea round started. Out in the frames directly, I put in a round of limas, snap beans, carrots, cukes, leeks, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, and cowpeas. We’ll see how they do in what can still be some brutal heat, with no rain and only the standard watering. If I can stay healthy, with no more nasty surprises coming up to kick me in the ass, and I’m able to hold the bugs at bay, I’m hoping to get some kind of decent production out of this season yet.

Food, Sports

Wabbit season

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Duck season! Football season! Yay!

About damn time. College kicked off last night and continues through the weekend, the NFL begins next week, and soon we will be awash in games. I watched – or, rather, listened while helping paint one of the bedrooms – to South Carolina stomp all over Southern Miss, and then USC make it past Hawaii. As for Towson and Indiana? Yeah, right.

Anyway, the painting. Someone who shall not be named decided one of the bedrooms needed to be painted a different color: radiant sun, to be exact, although to me it looks like an off-white sort of color, but who am I to say? It will take a couple of coats, since it’s lighter than the current color, but it’s good exercise for me, even though by the end of the taping around the baseboards and the subsequent painting in that area, I was getting a bit sore. Still, with that part done, the rest is fairly easy, just rolling away, and we should finish today. Just in time for some Georgia person to arrive and stay for a few days.

And it’s time to go back to cooking a bit, too: this afternoon, stir fry, with chicken and lots of veggies, and scallion noodles. Since we will have people in the house this weekend even though we are not doing a big gathering as in years past, I’ll be brining a butt today so it can go on the smoker in the wee hours and be ready for Saturday afternoon’s more traditional kickoff of a slate of college games. We also need more bbq sauce. And I think, just for fun, we’ll do a bit of chicken as well, as it’s been forever since I’ve done any smoked poultry. Chicken breasts alone are tricky, as they’ll go from tender, moist, and delicious to rubbery dried out nastiness in no time, so perhaps a whole chicken is in order (but I’ll have to rig something so the chicken doesn’t drip on the porkalicious goodness that will be in the smoker before it). Applewood smoked chicken quesadillas for leftovers, anyone?

Cats, dogs, chickens, and other critters, Food, Homestead

Going around the bend

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Tomorrow, another visit with the oncologist to see what the results of the testing say – hopefully, there will be results and this won’t be another trip into town for nothing.

Today, though: planning. Planning for next season and next year. This afternoon, I managed a tour around the rear garden to see the pitiful state of affairs. Blight has taken hold of several frames of tomatoes, and the bugs are munching on the cukes and zucchini like it’s their personal buffet (although I did manage to squash a few during my brief stay outdoors). The corn is dead, for yet another season, and I’m of half a mind to just give up on that altogether. The new round of lima and green beans are not thriving, as they say, and are either dead or dying. Some of the transplants I managed to get into the frames before going into the hospital are still alive, and even thriving, including a new round of Cherokee Purple tomatoes and some bell peppers. The watermelon and butternut squash transplants don’t look horrible, but they’re skinny things and I’m hoping they make it through.

The other part of planning involves chickens. We decided before I went in for surgery that next year we’re going to raise our own chickens for meat in addition to those we keep as layers. This is not without logistical issues, of course, and it’s likely that only my brother and myself will be able to actually butcher the birds, but that’s fine. Other family members can handle the less gruesome parts, like packaging the birds, whole or pieced out, once they’ve been dressed. That seems like a fair enough division of labor to me.

Since the birds are generally processed at about 12 weeks, and the chicks are available year round, we could do multiple groups per year if it turns out to be worthwhile. I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be, as how often do most people really get the chance to raise their food almost from start to a very definite finish? We’re not quite on the path to hatching our own chicks here, and probably never will be since that would require a rooster, and that simply isn’t happening around here. I’m content enough with ordering chicks even though it isn’t as completely self sufficient as would be the case in a utopian universe. Now, if it really comes does to the end of the world as we know it, complete with zombies, we’ll rethink that part of the equation. Until then, we plan for stocking the freezer with freshly butchered, pasture raised chicken, right off the property. There are, no doubt, worse things in life.

Cancer, Food, Gardening, Homestead, Life in general

Breathe deeply

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I am certain that my half dozen faithful readers are wondering what cliff I fell off, given my complete lack of maintenance here on ye olde blog front. What, they ask, is she doing? Lolling around, eating bonbons, instead of planting things, cooking goodies, and the like?

I’m not much on bonbons. At least for myself, not these days.

No, dear readers, yours truly has actually been doing things like whipping up batches of pizza dough for the freezer, babying plants along and harvesting goodies (six pounds of cukes the other day!), making bread and butter pickles and foisting them off on anyone within arm’s reach, cooking up some homemade french onion soup (delicious!), and pulling weeds (a losing battle).

But I’ve also been undergoing yet another round of tests, from an x-ray to a CAT scan to a PET scan to a biopsy, and on the 6th your intermittent blogger will be back in the hospital, this time to remove a wedge of lung that has a suspicious lesion on it, along with a lymph node hanging out near the trachea that also looks suspicious. None of this is good news other than the fact that a) it’s very small, and b) it’s very early, so given my overall good health, my total lack of smoking, ever (which makes it all the more ironic this second time around, having some crap I absolutely should not have),  and my relatively young age, should be not as big a deal as it would be were I a two pack a day puffer with cardiac issues and high blood pressure.

Still, it’s no fun, and I’ve had enough of medical stuff these past five years to last me a lifetime – in fact, it seems like I’m making up for a lifetime of not a whole lot of medical anything, doesn’t it? And still, the same people ask the same question over and over again: smoker? The only thing I smoke is bbq on my Bradley, thanks. They’re always surprised, and I suppose given their professions, they should be, since it still surprises the hell out of us here that me, of all the people in this family, should be receiving these diagnoses. On the plus side, I’m probably the healthiest person in the family, so my odds are a lot better for recovery than most everyone else’s.

The doctor says a 4-7 day stay in the hospital (let’s aim for four here), and then six weeks for recovery (too long for me), which will put us at the beginning of planning stages for the fall garden. Once again, it seems another prime season has been lost in some fashion, this year from a late start due to an extended illness and death in the family a few months ago, and now an interruption in the height of the season due to surgery and recovery. One of these days, we will have all the pieces together for an actual, planned, well-begun, well-managed season.

The tomatoes are soldiering along as well as they can, although the heirloom Cherokee Purples went down to blight due to an extraordinary run of rain we had. The paprikas, the stars of last year’s garden, and the bell peppers are both a major source of disappointment this year, as neither are producing. The latter is especially discouraging, as I wanted to stash plenty of roasted red peppers in the freezer for those times when I want to make soup. On the plus side, as we’ve been going through all this testing/scanning nonsense, I did get some more flats started, and put in (I think) about 36 starts of a bell pepper called Fat N Sassy. If there is a more appropriate name for a pepper that should be perfect for roasting, I don’t know what it is. On the downside, these will be ready to go out into the garden proper in the next couple of weeks, and I’ll be directing traffic instead of participating fully, what with all the mother hens hovering.

The peanuts are going gangbusters, and we’ve already enjoyed zucchini, green beans, filet beans, and okra from the garden, along with the aforementioned cukes. I have kidney beans, another round of green beans, and limas popping up out of the soil – once again, score one for getting these things in before surgery time!

This coming week I”ll be working like an over-caffeinated squirrel trying to get things in order before I go down for the count. The upside is that I’ll have time, sitting around on my ass, to post some of the pictures that I’ve been taking here and there. One thing I will say is that french onion soup, delicious though it is when homemade, is not very photogenic. It surely was tasty, though.

Food

What you missed

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If you were not here for the big bash, you not only missed the pleasure of my company – what’s not to love about the cook, after all? – but you also missed out on on a good time and all of this.

The Spread May 30 2010

Would you like a closer look? Of course you would!

Pulled pork, fresh rolls, roasted vegetables (including parsnips right from Lazy Dogs Ranch!), freshly made bbq sauce.

Smoked pork ribs, broccoli gratin.

Potato salad, grilled bbq chicken, baked beans.

Homemade italian bread, lightly broiled and with a DIY bruschetta mix (tomatoes, onions, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, fresh garlic, basil).

Old standbys: dogs and burgers.

If you’d been here, you could have had yourself a sampler platter, much like this one.

A bit of everything, please.

Not shown, because it disappeared much too quickly: homemade strawberry ice cream and homemade peach ice cream, along with both bananas foster and a batch of toffee chip cookies I whipped up at the end of the evening.

If you were here: thanks for joining us. If you weren’t: perhaps next time.

Food

Something’s fishy

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But not in a bad way. Allow me to explain.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, we held a bash that (quite naturally) included a great deal of food. More on that later. A portion of that was some fish we had been keeping aside for some pescatarian friends of the family, ready to stuff with herbs and toss on the grill. They didn’t make it, so we had some nice, fresh trout awaiting something to do with themselves. Or to have something done to them before they went over the edge.

After removing the heads and cutting the filets, then searing them very quickly, we had this.

Seared trout with buerre blanc and sauteed vegetables
Seared trout with buerre blanc and sauteed vegetables

It was fantastic: the fish was flaky, lightly seasoned, and the buerre blanc was smooth and silky, with the tang of the lemon juice feeding through enough to give the flavor, but not so much as to overwhelm everything else. What more could you ask than to have empty plates at the end of the meal?

Cancer, Cats, dogs, chickens, and other critters, Gardening, Geek stuff, Homestead, Life in general

A day like today

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I do not, as a general rule, sleep well or much. My family knows this because they have to put up with my oddball hours. Friends and clients know this because it is not rare for them to receive an email from me at some horrible, zombie-like hour where I, fresh from about three hours of sleep, have logged on to see what is happening in my little corner of the world.

Most of the time, this does not bother me overly much. After all, I have a great deal many more hours at my disposal than most people, meaning I can come up with grandiose plans about various things, and also cement the reputation I have garnered of being a robot rather than a human being. Since the radiation from the cancer treatments still has not brought me any real superpowers, I suppose it’s as close as I will ever get, although I won’t be doing this anytime soon.

Some days, though, the lack of sleep brings out the cranky, especially if I am also not feeling well. Like today. This makes me want to kick someone’s ass right off the planet for tossing a nonsensical legal threat our way about information in a domain registration that she provided, even though we have pointed out what she is saying means nothing and she readily admits she doesn’t understand the “jargon” – and by “jargon”, I mean English. Apparently, she is simply terrified that one of her “fans” (she is an actress, apparently) will find out her address from a years-old cached pieced of information on google, something that we do not control, last time I checked, and do some stalker-like thing, or kill her, or both. Or something. This is the time when I want to state it flat out for people: you are just not that important. You are not fodder for the next American Justice where some crazed, obsessed person hunts you down and kills you. You may tell yourself, actress aspiring to be famous, that someone would care that much, but let’s face it here: you provided your own biographical information to IMDB which is quite handily on your own web site, and it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist or some weirdo even slightly off their meds to find you. I know: I tracked down someone, including their name, date of birth, current residence, current hobbies, other web sites they visit, and the fact that they coached little league from a single piece of information (an IP address attached to a comment they left on a blog we host). With all the information you have provided on your own, deranged psychos could track you down if they wanted. They haven’t. This should tell you something about your place in the greater universe.

A day where you think it would be nice to be able to eat and drink the way you used to. That an icy cold beer and a pile of wings would be great after sweating off a couple of pounds working on the ranch, except that you can no longer drink alcohol due to the radiation burning off the lining of your mouth and you really can’t eat wings any more because the chewing issues make it virtually impossible. That it would be great to settle in with a margarita and a blackened chicken burrito with extra sweet and hot chile sauce, but the spicy foods are offlimit now for the same reason alcohol is, and you know even as you sow the seeds in the garden that you’re unlikely to ever be able to eat habaneros or even jalapenos again any time soon, if ever.

On the other hand, on a day like today, where I’m having some trouble catching my breath and generally feeling like crap – oh, not to mention having a slight bout of anxiety over the fact that the doctor wants me to have a chest CT because of something they saw on the chest x-ray they wanted before I started hyperbaric dives after having yet another tooth pulled – it’s nice to Get Shit Done. Like sow the cukes from seed that I’ve wanted to do for several days now, for a total of about 140 seeds planted, with a little overflow from my nephew helper, who put half a dozen seeds in several holes while I tried to convince him that really, one was all that was required. I also directly sowed some more tomatoes and peppers, because let’s face it: there are rarely enough, and we intend to do a lot of preserving this year. If we have the space, I want to fill it with something. That includes the newest 8 x 4 frame I polished off today in the herb garden, with a little assist by my sister, who hauled a load of dirt and poop for me amongst the five others that I brought over and mixed in. Tomorrow, while we wrangle a scheduled CT from the hospital people and I stay out of the hyperbaric chamber until we determine what the hell is going on – and if I have walking pneumonia, I will, as I have told several people, be pissed – I will begin work on the final 8 x 4 frame for the herb garden. Tonight, I may just go ahead and sow some things in flats that really want the much hotter weather we will no doubt be heading into very soon, and set them up on the heat mats in the garage, turning on the lights for them in the morning.

It’s a day where you also get nice, chatty mails from certain clients, about their newest projects, and about being a test case who found a bad link on our site. Or from someone who understands the information (some of it erroneous) at some random, invisible data mining company is not the end of the world as we know it, which then leads in a roundabout sort of way to a discussion about critters and gardening/sustainability. Or from someone who congratulates us on ten years of putting up with all of this. Or where a pooped out puppy sleeps on the back of the couch while you work from home on a laptop, ass planted on the couch yourself, his tail slapping against the cushion now and then, his nose crinkling as he sniffs out a rabbit or turtle or whatever populates puppy dreams, every now and again his paws wiggling manically, chasing down a bird he will never catch, growling and then squeaking out what would be a bark were he awake. Or where you watch as your nephew, having discarded his swimming diaper at some point, stands on the patio in the shade, fresh from the pool, with only his water wings on, downing saltines with a slab of cheese between them, crumbs falling from his mouth and sticking to his wet chest. Or where you decide, apropos of nothing, that Saturday would be a great  time for a spaghetti dinner night, and that homemade pork/beef/veal meatballs in homemade sauce, with homemade Italian bread as a vehicle for carrying butter and garlic, would be a rather fine thing indeed, even as you muse about the possibility of making homemade pasta, just to top it all off.

Or where, in general, despite never having as much time as you think even though you don’t sleep, berating yourself for not writing nearly as much as you would want to (or anything at all, for that matter), and having a list of todo items that is constantly expanding, you think this is a pretty damned good life, overall, and that you wouldn’t trade a minute of it for anything.