Author Archives: angelina

Santa Rosa Gardens

I love this porch decoration.

This is next door to us.  Most of the houses on this street are either old or vintage (it’s an official historic district with signs and all).

I remember when this yard was lawn with some perennials.  Over the years more and more people have been getting rid of their lawns.  I don’t actually hate lawns – I mean I HATE having one myself because I loathe mowing and I think it’s a waste of space I could be using to grow food or flowers – but I think lawns are pretty, it’s just that I’m really bothered by the amount of water it takes to keep them up and how many chemicals people use to kill off the weeds in them and the unnaturally strong fertilizers used to feed them – both of which contaminate natural waterways.  So while I understand that having lawn is something many people enjoy – I can’t help but really enjoy seeing people rip them out to plant drought resistant plants or vegetables or flowers or trees.

I also remember this garden when it was just being planned and planted out many years ago.  It’s filled in beautifully.  The house that goes with it is also quite lovely and has had a lot of work done on it.

Really sweet front garden.

Mulching is really important in a dry warm climate.  This garden looks a little bare.  You have to be patient with gardens and let them fill in.  Sometimes you have to add more later to fill in gaps.

You know nothing makes me happier than to see people growing vegetables in their front yards.  Vegetables are beautiful and I object to the idea that they should be sequestered in the back like servants or the poor relations you wish no one knew about.  Now I sound like I think poorly of everyone who grows their vegetables in their back yards.  I don’t.  I promise.   Sometimes the back yard is the only good spot for them.  I just especially love to see them center stage.

You know I had to share the McMinnville style garden with you.  This is the view from my office and it makes me smile because it’s like the universe was making sure I wouldn’t forget my Oregon adventures and my antipathy* for miniature Japanese maples.

Well, I’m off to shower and make some more hamburger buns.  There aren’t any good ones on the market shelves.  I saw several with high fructose corn syrup in them.  Lordy lou – is nothing sacred?  Seriously, bread requires very little sweetener – just enough to feed the yeast beasts – there is no excuse in the world to be using HFCS in bread.  So.  Making my own buns.  I hope you have a wonderful Sunday!

*I don’t really hate them – I just got really tired of the formula for yards in Mac:

mostly lawn+ miniature Japanese maple+a sensible flowering bush+a tiny bed of annual flowers usually cut into the lawn (often in a kidney shape)=de rigueur.

And NO – not all gardens in Mac follow this formula – there are plenty of interesting and pretty gardens that are following their own stars – it’s just that there aren’t enough of them yet to distract me from the ubiquitous same-same.  Still, in the six years I lived in Mac I saw more and more gardens doing their own thing – so I think there’s lots of individuality to come.

The Garden and the Cost of Small Things

Sweet spot in our back yard.  My aunt and my  mom planted lots of lavender and it was blooming just as I arrived here – smelling amazing!  The bee activity was fervent.  Don’t you want to sit in that chair?

The back yard is mostly shade but there are a few sunny spots and this is one of them.  The peach tree needs to be put in the ground.  It has a bunch of little peaches on it but I’m not sure they will ripen.  It has survived many years in this barrel.  My mom says they meant to have the bottom of the barrel popped out so it could root in the ground but think s that didn’t happen.  Its diminutive size supports her theory.

This is how much water is wasted while the shower is warming up.  I used it to water the dwarf peach tree.  It took little effort to catch it in this pot and then take it outside to use in the garden.

I’ve been looking at water bills and comparing our water bills in McMinnville to the ones here and am appalled to discover that we were using 20,000+ gallons of water a month up in Oregon (a fluctuation between 11,000 to 28,000 at the highest).  We had a running toilet we couldn’t fix which may have accounted for part of it and also a leaky outdoor faucet we didn’t catch for many months.  Still – while I wouldn’t call us particularly wasteful water users – I’m shocked.  My mother’s water bill for June is outrageously high but the usage is much lower than our Oregon usage was at about 8,000 gallons.  This all has me thinking about how I use water and how I waste it.

The bottom of the lemon tree’s barrel WAS removed and it shows.  It has grown from a fairly small tree to pretty big.  It has a lot of small green lemons on it so in trimming it I left those limbs alone.  

Clearly the job is not done.  Fine tuning will be required.

Trimming the tree will hopefully encourage the tree to fill in those bare spots.  Once the lemons have matured on those lower branches I will trim those up too.  Next is to give it more water and some natural fertilizer.  My mom thinks it’s in too shady a spot but over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen it getting quite a bit of sun so hopefully that’s not an issue.

I’m pretty stressed out about paying off old bills and the IRS and the ORS but I’m trying to keep calm about it knowing that we’ll do it, we’ll manage.  Our situation and our prospects have both improved quite a bit and we just have to get on payment plans and budget and we’ll meet our responsibilities.

We still have a whole truckload of things in Oregon and I’m starting to feel the pinch.  We need our couch and my dressers (that are really dining room furniture) and there are so many things there that I am trying not to replace before we have a chance to bring them down – like a bunch of trash cans.  You don’t think it’s that big of a deal to replace stuff like that and if you only need to buy a few replacement things, that’s true.  But living is expensive, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, and the little things add up super fast.  Things like kitty scoopers, trash cans, mattress pads, toilet scrubbers, laundry baskets, pet bowls, bottle brushes, etc.  The price of each of those individual items is fairly insignificant on its own but when you add them up you’re suddenly spending a couple hundred dollars just on basic crap.  Useful, but really basic.  And then there’s the furniture itself – we have tables up in Oregon that we really need here.  The couch and dressers and side tables and book shelves… to replace all of that – even with thrift store finds – would cost us a few hundred dollars.  So it is cost effective for Philip to go back and get all those things.  But it’s still money we barely have.

Today is Saturday and that means it’s cleaning day.  We’re going back to our old schedule.  The house is cleaned every Saturday.  Philip and Max will clean the upstairs because it is their space, not mine.  I will clean the downstairs.  So it’s time to take a shower and get going!

Finding Everyday Rhythm

The first thing I baked in our new house were hamburger buns using my friend Emma’s recipe posted at The Kitchn.  It was wonderful to bake bread again – I haven’t done it for years.  My mom was baking bread for us in this past year and I loved it.  But I missed the feel of young dough in my own hands.  These buns are the best I’ve ever had so if you want to have a hamburger bun that will stand up to your burgers – make this recipe!

Unpacking is a slow process when you’re me.  I get easily overwhelmed by all the other details of moves that must be attended to, such as getting your new State license (you’re supposed to do it within 10 days of moving!!!!!) and paying off old bills and communicating with the IRS and setting up new accounts for everything.  Still, we’re making progress.  Even though we don’t have everything we own down here yet.  Yes, there’s one more trip with a truck to go.  Were we worried about fitting all our furniture here for good reason?  No.  It’s pretty bare in here and we could use all the furniture we already have that’s mouldering in our poor old house in McMinnville.

My sister visited us this weekend and lit a fire under our ass such that my old rhythm was kickstarted: we cleaned, we unpacked, we did house things that normal people do weekly like sweep the porch and the floors and mop and scrub… it was brilliant and I haven’t felt that good in a long time.  Maybe 7 years.  If you think that’s pathetic you are invited to keep that to yourself.
Everything here is way more expensive than it was in McMinnville.  Our water bill for July is $145 and the biggest water bill we ever paid in Oregon was $90.  Food is more costly and the most shocking thing I’ve noticed so far is that the produce in the supermarkets is not nearly as good and fresh as it is in Winco – the poor people’s discount market – I haven’t been to the farmer’s market yet which is probably where I’ll find the best produce but this is California for God’s sake!  Everything grows here.  There is little excuse for produce to be bruised, old, or sad here.  Yet, this is what is.

It is heartening and also telling to see more and more vegetable growing going on in empty lots here and in front gardens.  It is going to be a real boon to grow food on my FIL’s property for the family (if he lets me).

Sometimes I wonder if anyone misses seeing that fat chick whizzing by them on her conspicuous Vespa.  I can’t help but hope my Vespa will be remembered.

I have been having a lot of thoughts about home economy and what that means and how to evaluate it after having a troll plague an old post of mine that tackles the question of whether or not sewing your own clothes in economical.  I have been wondering how best to evaluate the cost of living and the cost of doing things oneself – there’s the compound way of looking at the numbers, there’s the flat way that takes some allowances, and there’s the straight across the board price comparison.  Now that I’m living in such an expensive place I’m compelled to look for new ways of conserving energy and of saving money.

I have so many details to sort out still.  I have to pass my motorcycle written DMV test, I have to pick primary doctors, I have to unpack and do laundry.  But the bottom line is that except for missing the people I care about and enjoy who still live in Yamhill County – I’m so fucking happy to be home I feel incandescent under this bloated disgusting body that I am going to reclaim.

I’m not lonely.  I’m not an outcast here.  I’m not outside all the social circles – I’m in my own social circle!  There aren’t so many social cliques – or at least if there are I am blissfully unaware of them and therefore unable to feel left out and leprous.

Life isn’t perfect anywhere.  I’m terrified for Max to start school.  I’m worried about the price of life.  But I’m also hopeful and this house is amazing.  Every morning I feel lucky to wake up here.

The reality for a person with chronic major depressive disorder and GED is that life WILL be full of difficult days and no amount of life happiness is going to prove the easy cure to what is wrong with my body.  Still – the base line of comfort and happiness matter a great deal – if your baseline is pretty good then the bad days are easier to handle.  If your  baseline is very low and dark then it’s only that much more of a struggle to see light.

I feel my life rhythm returning and that is vital to my stability and my overall sense of well being.

I swept my front porch and trimmed my geranium to encourage more growth.

To most people this would be the most ridiculous thing to celebrate.

I am not most people.

I am happy right now.

 

Artichoke Math: home grown versus store bought

I still hear people asking if it’s really worth it to grow your own food.  Usually what they mean is “Is it cheaper?”.  In our country this is how we evaluate nearly everything.  By its cost in dollars.  There are aspects of growing your own food that are difficult to quantify such as the benefit of choosing the variety of food you grow, knowing exactly what chemicals (if any) were used in their cultivation, and getting your food directly from the garden to the table in a matter of minutes or hours rather than days.

The cost of growing your food is much easier to quantify.  You can make it as expensive or as cheap as you want.  There will be a cost but you control how much you spend on garden tools and purchased compost and the seeds or plants themselves.  Depending on where you live you may have to pay close attention to how much you spend on watering your garden.  When I consider the cost of gardening I don’t include and then add in the cost of tools every time.  You don’t replace your garden tools every year (unless you’re fighting off zombies with them) so I think of it like this: gardening requires an initial investment of some things like wheelbarrows, shovels, trowels, and clippers.

The cost of water is highly variable so it will be different where you live than where I live.  Here in Oregon it’s a lot cheaper to water your garden than it is in California.  You don’t have to start watering regularly until at least a month later than you have to in California.  The water isn’t rationed here and we get so much of it falling during the spring that spring crops rarely need watering at all.  In the southwest water is more expensive and precious than it is even in California.  So there are places where this is definitely a bigger cost and concern for growing your own food.  I will counter this with the fact that there are a few ways to cut down on watering your vegetables (drip lines, heavy mulching, and under-planting come to mind).

If you’re gardening smart then you aren’t buying compost for your garden, you’re making it.  Fertilizers can also be made from things in the garden such as comfrey (you make a comfrey tea to pour on the plants).  Depending on where you live you can also get free horse/cow/goat manure from people who keep such animals.  This might be hard if you’re gardening in a large city but even most cities have farmland not far outside of it where such things as free manure can be found.  When I set up a garden initially I do buy a large quantity of compost because I always do raised beds and I have to buy soil to fill them with.  After that I don’t buy compost and I rarely buy fertilizers or pest control products either.  So my yearly garden expenses aren’t very high once I’ve set my garden up.

I’m mentioning all of that because I want to acknowledge that there are a lot of costs to consider when gardening but most people with gardens are already spending all that money whether they’re growing vegetables or not.  So it seems silly to me to quibble over those costs because the person who is gardening but not growing any of their own food is spending the same amount I am (probably more if they have any lawn) but they also have to buy more food than I do.  So what if you were watering an artichoke plant where some lawn used to be?  Or where a rhododendron used to be?  How much would it save you to grow some artichokes of your own?

Here’s some artichoke math I was doing just yesterday:

I have 5 artichoke plants that I paid about $2.50 each for.  This year I picked and ate 24 artichokes of varying size from those 5 plants.  That means that each artichoke cost me .52 cents.

I saw some globe artichokes on sale at the store yesterday for $2.69 each.  I recall that last month they cost $3.69 each.

24 home grown artichokes cost a total of $12.50

24 store bought artichokes on sale cost a total of $64.56

Even when you consider that my home grown artichokes were much smaller than those enormous ones at the store – the math still works out in favor of home grown.  The truth is, I didn’t buy those artichoke plants this year.  I planted them last year and they did yield artichokes but I didn’t count them and I didn’t eat them because I was not paying attention to my garden enough and they flowered before I could pick them.  The plants died down and then they came back this spring.  And just for the record – I didn’t water them once.  So this year I actually paid nothing for those 24 artichokes.

One other thing to note is that size is NOT superior when it comes to artichokes.  It turns out that those small artichokes – the baby ones – they haven’t matured enough to develop the inedible choke yet – which means that more of the leaves are edible and tender.  I’m telling you – they are wonderful!

I love artichoke math.

Why not plant some artichokes for yourself if you haven’t already?

My 25th Move

Some things I’ve observed about moving that I have probably already observed during many of the previous 24* times I’ve moved:

1.  Every single thing you own you should own because it has an actual useful place in your life NOT because you just hate throwing things out or giving them away.

2.  In spite of learning the above wisdom, I still have hundreds of pounds worth of stuff that I am simply unable to make decisions about right now so I’m moving it with me.  What can I say?  I’m a work in progress.

3.  Moving is expensive.  Just like going bankrupt is very expensive.  We can’t really afford this move but we can’t afford NOT to move.  Quite a snag.

4.  Try to arrange a move so that you’re not on the rag while you pack, plan, or execute the actual move.  Especially if your PMSing makes you semi-suicidal.

5.  Don’t have pets if you ever plan to move.  Or, at least, don’t have six of them.

6.  It turns out I’m a serious box snob.  Half of our boxes are new and half are used boxes we bought for cheap off of Craig’s list.  One person’s idea of “good condition” is another person’s idea of “derelict quality almost not worth using”.  I like brand new boxes with full integrity and no writing already on them.  This does NOT agree with my philosophy of re-using and recycling.

7.  I tape boxes better than my mom and Philip.  They will not likely agree with this.  I have a method I have been using since I was the shipping manager at Weston Wear.

8.  Moving is one of the best ways to test your family relationships.  (Second only to having babies with someone which is followed by traveling with someone.)

9.  Moving requires good friends.  This is why you must MUST help your friends move when they need you because eventually you will need them too.  One of life’s greatest opportunities for reciprocity and community bonding which is necessary for getting through things like hard winters or a zombie apocalypse.

10.  It used to be that books and clothes made up the vast majority of my belongings.  Now it’s kitchen and pantry stuff.  I have very few clothes over all but I have a minimum of 25 boxes of jars, tools, pots, peelers, strainers, and other things necessary for cooking and preserving food.  When I’m done I may well find I have closer to 40 boxes of this stuff.

11.  Moving while also working can make children into orphans.  My kid is awesome.  He’s so flipping awesome about the fact that I’m pretty much ignoring the crap out of him because I don’t have enough hours in the day to work, pack, breathe, and also hang with him.  Plus he’s awesome because he’s being patient with how snappish I’ve been.

12.  I need a bigger brain and a better nervous system if I’m ever going to go through this again.

13.  Moving is unhealthy.  The dust it kicks up into your lungs is awful (especially for people like Philip who have asthma).  It wears you out.  It strains your back.  It deteriorates your diet (if it was already unhealthy, it will become even less healthy) because you don’t have time to cook or plan for healthy meals.  You use up things you have in the cupboard and buy easy to make things like cheese sandwiches.

14.  I have found an inordinate amount of weird office supplies in my house that I’ve never used and can’t think why I thought I needed them in the first place.  Labels, mostly.  Not useful ones.  And reams of paper that are neither good for printing on or using.  Where did it come from?

15.  In general – I see a need for much more careful purchasing in my future.  Do I really need that face cleanser (mild soap has always worked just fine for my skin) or glue (we’ve found 3 bottles of Elmer’s glue and we barely have enough need to justify having 1 bottle of it) or picture framing hardware (most of our stuff is simply hung with nails) or tubes of weird toothpaste I know I’ll hate because there’s only one toothpaste I can stand to use… all over my house are purchases that turned out to be a waste and yet I can’t return them** or give them to the Good Will.  Everywhere I turn there are signs of wasted money and packaging and landfill crap.

That’s all for today.  I have to work and then I have to pack.  Same old same old.  There are exactly 7 days before the move.  7 DAYS.

*Actual number of times I’ve moved in my life.

**I am pathologically incapable of returning things to stores so I probably have a higher percentage of wasted purchases sitting around my house than the average person who has no trouble at all returning stuff they bought that they discovered they really didn’t need or want.

Cleaning Out Your Child’s Room: How to Decide What to Keep and What to Throw Away

There are many parents who believe that every drop of glitter-covered glue their child recklessly throws down on a piece of paper is a precious relic of their child’s life.  From the age of two until the age of eighteen, when one hopes their child will be packing their bags for college, a child will accumulate a staggering amount of artwork, toys, homework, clothes, papers from school, notes, projects, and mysterious crap that defies categorization.  Every single year my son has gone to school I have ended up with at least two grocery bags’ worth of paper crap from the school year.  That’s a lot of crap.

Those parents who view everything their child touches as a precious relic and never throw anything away will not benefit from the advice I’m about to give.  There’s nothing wrong with keeping everything if that’s what’s important to you.  In the early days of parenthood I found it incredibly difficult to decide what to keep and what to throw away.  If I threw away any of Max’s pen scribbled “art” would he resent me when he grew up?  Would it make me a bad mom if I didn’t want to keep the piles of returned Kindergarten homework I accumulated?

Let me tell you right now: what you keep or don’t keep of your kid’s stuff is NOT a question of good parenting versus bad parenting.  So if you’re keeping everything your child spit on because you’re afraid that throwing it away makes you a bad mom – stop it!  And if you’re the sentimental kind of mom and you see someone like me ruthlessly throwing my kid’s stuff away and you wonder if you’re hanging onto things you shouldn’t – stop it!  There is no judgment of parenting here.

I happen to be pretty sanguine about throwing stuff away.  I am easily overwhelmed by stacks of paper and cartons full of old toys and clothes and I start to feel choked by the accumulation of things.  So for me it’s important to curate my son’s belongings every year.  Especially the accumulation of school stuff.  If you’re like me and want to save some things for your child but don’t want to save everything and you don’t know how to decide what to keep and what to toss, I have some guidelines that may help you.

How to decide what to keep and what to throw away until your kid is old enough to help make these decisions with you:

Favorite baby toys.  Pick just 2 or 3 to pack away and ditch the rest.

Save just the most loved ones.  “But Jonny loved ALL of his toys equally!”  No he didn’t.  You know that’s not true.  Pick two or three to represent the lot.  Donate the rest of them to: other friends with kids, social workers who work with kids who have no toys, the Good Will, or your church.

Clothes.  Only keep a few items to remind you of how tiny he/she was.

I have kept a tiny t-shirt my sister gave to Max when he was born and his first pair of Vans shoes that my brother gave him, and a silly felt strawberry hat a friend made for him.  That’s it.  Everything else he’s grown out of I either threw away (because they were in a mostly destroyed state) or I gave to others who needed them.

Curios.  Not toys but not relics either… what to do?  Save no more than one book sized box full over the course of your kid’s childhood.

My son loves to pick up rocks and screws and rusted things and save them forever and ever and ever.  I’ve saved enough of them so that when he’s an adult going through his kid stuff he’ll see that he was the kind of kid who liked rusted nails.  But I definitely throw out the bulk of it.  He doesn’t notice this culling of his things because there’s always still some of it around.  I throw out all the plastic doo-dads that he brings home from kid birthday parties and classroom events.  Those little 1 cent cheap-ass stupid plastic thingy-ma-bobs.  Let them hang around for a year and then throw them out.  I promise your kid will not remember that little plastic parachute guy.  Or the other 20 of them either.

School work.  Save everything that has personal information that will be interesting for you and your kid to look at when he/she’s grown up and toss the rest.  Such as:

  • Keep:  star student posters with a snapshot of your kid (probably with a fake smile plastered on his face) and that funny information the teacher asks them such as what they want to be when they grow up and what they like to do with friends etc.  Saving these shows you how much your kid changes every year and are interesting.  Other examples of this are “all about me” type projects.
  • Keep:  short stories or personal essays from school.  These can be very enlightening about your child’s imagination and they will probably enjoy reading them as adults because they are often very funny.  Only save the ones that shed some light on who your kid really is.  Generic assignments are toss-worthy.
  • Keep:  school art projects that required some muscle flexing creativity.  Foam boards with a bunch of foam stickers?  If you really love them, keep one.  Focus on keeping drawings and paintings where your child was using their imagination.  You’ll have a lot of those too.  If there are 20 that all look essentially the same (like my son’s paintings he did when he was a toddler) keep only 10.
  • Keep:  cards made in school for mom and dad.  Keep the ones you love the most.  Especially where they have written something for you.  I found a few generic construction paper hearts with glitter on them and threw them away.   It was clear they were meant to be given to mom and dad but they aren’t personal enough to warrant taking up space.  I keep all the ones with notes to me or his dad on them.
  • Keep:  cards from other kids to your kid and cards from relatives to your kid.  If your kid wants to throw them out when he/she grows up – let that decision be on them.  Cards are reminders of the people who liked/loved your kid as they were growing up.  We can all use those kinds of reminders once in a while.
  • Toss:  homework drills.  All those papers where wee Madyson’s hands were first practicing how to make the letter “a”?  That’s just work your kid had to do and I’m not convinced she’ll want to be reminded of every assignment she labored over while wishing she was doing something more fun.
  • Toss:  assignments stapled up in construction paper and full of cut and pasted information gathered for a report on tarantulas?  Unless you think your kid will never learn to use Google and will need to go back and reference that quaint report.  They don’t reveal anything personal about your kid.  Not even if they got an A+ on it.  You have report cards to trace their grade history.  Unless there’s a memorable story attached to such pieces of school work they shouldn’t take up valuable closet space.

Awards, ribbons, trophies.

I think these are always worth holding onto because achievements, even small ones, are worth celebrating and remembering.  But you didn’t need me to say this.  It’s just that the list would be incomplete if I didn’t include this category of stuff.

Books.  Set aside your child’s favorite books from the baby years.  Just a few.  You know which ones they are.

Max told me that he wanted to keep his favorite kid books to give to his own kid some day.  He’s only 11 years old right now but I thought that was a reasonable request.  I involved him in the sorting out.  I promised him I wouldn’t throw any out that were important to him but that we needed to pick some to give away to other kids to enjoy right now.  We weeded out about half of all his little kid books and are keeping the rest of them for him until he grows up and either wants them or really doesn’t.  Now he’s collecting books in his own right and it will be up to him to decide if he wants to get rid of any at all from this point on.  There comes a time when they start having a very strong sense of what’s important to them to keep or not.  Max had no opinions on this a couple of years ago.  He didn’t want to get rid of ANYTHING.

And that’s the thing – once kids get to be about 10 or 11 years old they should get to be part of the culling process when it comes to their own stuff.  When they’re babies up until about that time they have little sense of discernment about what stuff will be valuable to them when they’re older and what stuff is just going to molder and take up space and depress them when they move out and mom forces them to deal with it all.  So your job until then is to be the curator of their relics.

I hope that this guideline helps keep this task from being overwhelming.

Recipe for Minestrone Soup With Fresh Fava Beans

Fresh fava beans are in season now and I can’t get enough of them.  Usually I use them in pasta dishes or in my favorite grilled polenta dish but this year I had a craving for minestrone soup so I’ve made it a couple of times already.  No one is complaining and I had to act fast to get pictures of this second batch because it was being eaten so fast.

Yes, fava beans are one of the more labor intensive foods out there.  How can I convince you it’s worth it?  I could promise to send you a reward for giving them a try but I’m too lazy to get down to the post office.  I could list all the reasons why I look forward to shelling and peeling favas every year but that would take too much effort.  I could engage in a guilt campaign that would make my grandma proud but guilt uses up a lot of energy.  Why expend all my energy trying to convince you that processing fresh favas is worth it when I could use that same energy to process the 3 lbs of favas waiting for me in the kitchen?  So if you don’t feel up to the work of preparing fresh favas – you can add a can of cannellini beans instead.   It will still be an awesome spring minestrone soup.  I won’t think less of you, I promise.

This recipe makes a lot of soup.

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Recipe for Minestrone Soup With Fresh Shelled Fava Beans

10 bowls of soup

Recipe for Minestrone Soup With Fresh Shelled Fava Beans

Ingredients

  • 3 lbs fava beans, shelled, blanched, and skins removed
  • 1 lb spinach, washed, stemmed and roughly chopped
  • 1/3 cup olive oil
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 3 carrots, chopped
  • 3 potatoes, diced
  • 1 quart canned diced tomatoes (or a 28 ounce can if buying from the store)
  • 3 garlic cloves, finely minced or pressed
  • 1/2 cup finely minced mix of oregano, parsley, thyme, and just a little bit of lovage
  • 2 quarts water or stock, plus more as needed
  • 1 cup of whole wheat rotelli pasta
  • 2 zucchini, chopped
  • 2 tsp salt
  • freshly ground pepper

Instructions

  1. While removing the favas from the pods put a pot of water on the stove and bring to a boil. Add the beans to the boiling water for one minute. Drain and then put them in a bowl of ice water. When the beans have cooled, remove the skins and set the beans aside for later.
  2. Carefully wash the spinach (even if it's prewashed - it often still has grit in it) and remove the stems as you wash it. Then chop it roughly and set it aside for later.
  3. Heat the oil in a big soup pot. Once it's hot add the onion, carrot, and potatoes. Saute on med/high heat until the vegetables slightly brown. You will need to stir frequently to keep them from sticking.
  4. Add the diced tomatoes, garlic, herbs, and two quarts of water. Stir well then add the spinach. Bring it to a boil and then turn down to med/low heat and cook until the carrots and potatoes are just tender. Usually about 15 minutes.
  5. Add the pasta and fava beans and cook for ten more minutes. Add more water if it's getting too thick (this is a matter of personal discretion). The pasta will suck some up.
  6. Lastly add the zucchini, salt and pepper. Cook for five more minutes and then turn the heat off. Let the soup sit for a while to finish cooking the zucchinis.

Notes

A really big handful of fresh herbs will result in a half a cup of minced herbs. There's no exact science here. I went out in the garden and picked a lot of oregano, a little parsley, a few sprigs of thyme and a pinch of lovage.

If you haven't used lovage before - it's very strong so a little goes a long way. It adds a wonderful celery flavor to soups. If you don't grow lovage then you might want to add a couple of stalks of chopped celery to this soup (throw it in at the same time as the onion).

As always with soup - how much water or stock you add is a personal matter. I used 3 quarts of water but you could add a little more to make it thinner or less for a thicker soup. So start with the 2 quarts in the recipe and then use your own preferences as a guide.

https://stitchandboots.com/2012/05/29/recipe-for-minestrone-soup-with-fresh-fava-beans/

Good Change In The Air

My mom brought me this diminutive bouquet of English daisies and buttercups to cheer me up the other day.

My treasured elderberry is budding out!  Since I will be digging it out of its bed in the next couple of weeks to transport to California I doubt it will fruit.  The buds will probably just die off.  But the sight of these umbels is still thrilling.

I almost didn’t spot this artichoke in the tall waving quack grass.  There’s one more bud out there so we may get to eat two artichokes this year before we leave.  I intend to grow a bunch of them at my father in law’s if he’ll let me.  I want to marinate my own artichoke hearts eventually.  That’s my favorite way to eat artichokes.

Philip got a job!  He starts on June 1st so he came back up north to us to finish a couple of freelance projects and to help us start packing.  We’re so beyond excited that he got a job (with health benefits!!!!) that we’re kind of floating at the moment.  There’s a lot we have to do for this move to happen and go smoothly and I’m a little overwhelmed but I’m so much less stressed knowing that this part of our life is now settled and we can turn our attention elsewhere.

Some of the things we have to do are use up everything in our freezer.  I think I’ll be making and eating a lot of muffins.  I’ll have to check it every few days to see what I can do with it.  It’s hard to focus on the freezer when the farmer’s market has such amazing produce all of a sudden.  Carrots, favas, spinach, lettuce, and the first zucchinis!  I made an amazing minestrone soup on Friday using mostly fresh local produce and fresh herbs from my garden (I used a tiny bit of loveage, a bunch of oregano, and some parsley and thyme).  It was one of the best soups I’ve made in a long time!  I will be making it again and then I will post the recipe here.  Maybe next week or by the end of this week.

It’s also time for me to start counting calories again and tracking my exercise.  Yes, I know, I said I was going to do that a million times before and as recently as two months ago so what happened?  All that stress and not sharing what was going on and Philip being in a heightened state of stress undermined me completely.  Now that things are lining up and we’re headed home I feel like I can focus on my health.  To me this means eating cheese in much more modest amounts (time to start practicing for my dairy free cooking challenge that begins in August!) and eating smaller portions and really ramping up my fresh produce (not smothered in cheese) intake.  More fruit.  Fruit is not much in season right now and I’m easing up my local food restrictions to help me make the transition to a cleaner better diet.  Don’t be disappointed in me – please! I bought bananas and I’ll be buying cucumbers too and some other things not in season that normally I wouldn’t be buying right now.  Whatever it takes to transition my eating from super cheese laden to much lighter – I’m going to do what it takes.

It turns out I don’t get to go to BlogHer Food in Seattle and I’m bummed about that.  I’m bummed until I realize that the reason I can’t go is because we have huge moving expenses coming up and a paycheck gap between Philip’s new job and old job and the weekend it happens he will have just started work and can’t come be with the kid.  So the second I feel bummed I remember how HAPPY I am that Philip has a job and how excited he is to work for his new company.

Instead I may (big uncertainty here) be able to attend the big BlogHer event that’s in NYC again in August.  We’ll have moved and there’s a good chance that with Philip’s new pay we’ll be able to afford it.  So I want to lighten up before that.

The big thing is that I need to make some shifts and it’s like moving a mountain – but I know that once I get going, once I make a little progress it will be much easier to keep going.  Once I move back to Santa Rosa I am going to join the YMCA which is only a small walk from my new house.  I belonged to the Y for years when I used to live there and I made good use of the gym to lose the weight I gained while pregnant.  The Y is a great place to work out and has some really good fitness classes as well, though I prefer the elliptical and weights.

One last thing before I get back to work – I got two more Culinaria books – the one for Hungary and one for Russia and they are great!!  I intend to convert a few recipes from those books to vegetarian recipes.  The Russian diet isn’t necessarily known to be thin-inducing but they use buckwheat a lot and I’m going to learn to make that well.  I grew up eating buckwheat with steamed vegetables and loved it.  I tried making buckwheat last year and it turned to complete mush on me.  I think the Culinaria instructions deserve a try.  The only difference I’ll make is I’ll only use one tablespoon of butter or oil instead of an entire stick of butter.

I also got a couple of vegan cookbooks from the library and there are some good ideas in them but “The Conscious Cook” relies heavily on processed meat replacements and soy products.  I love tofu but I’m not a fan of highly processed soy products.  That’s one of the things I object to in a lot of vegan cooking.  If I was ever to be vegan I would want most of my food to be free of processed vegan products.  I can see how useful vegan mayonnaise is and when I go dairy free I’ll definitely be using that.  But no fake processed cheeses.  I don’t eat fake processed cheese based on dairy so I won’t use non-dairy versions.  Have you looked at the ingredients on tofu-dogs?  They’re no better than regular ones.  Maybe even worse.

Anyway, I’m ready to start eating better than I have been.  Time to go have a look at the freezer!

Have a great Sunday!

Vegetarian Baked Beans Recipe

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time with our next door neighbor Mrs. Stemple who was the most wonderful old lady that all the neighborhood kids flocked to.  She would feed me cookies and tea with milk and sugar (something we never did at my house – all herbal tea for us) and we would chatter or watch some tv or just sit around together.  She always had time for me and never told me to stop talking so much.  Every once in a while she would feed me something other than cookies.  One afternoon she fed me a bowl of baked beans from a can.  My mom didn’t buy much canned food so it was pretty novel for me.  Those beans were amazing!  I happily ate that magical dish until I got something in my mouth that was not food.  It was kind of slick and meaty and I reflexively spat it out and asked what else was in the beans.

Pork.  Of course.  This was in the early 1980’s and being a vegetarian wasn’t as mainstream or common as it is today.  Mrs. Stemple knew I didn’t eat meat but like most people back then she didn’t count pieces of pork as “meat”.  The dish was mostly beans so who cares if there’s some funky globules of lard and a bit of flesh or cartilage in it?  It’s not like she gave me a hunk of steak.  I loved the flavor and texture of those little navy beans and the tomato-y sweet and sour sauce they were cooked in.  I wished very much I could have those beans without the pork.

Many years later, I saw canned vegetarian baked beans at Trader Joe’s and bought some.  They were so much like pork and beans but without the meat they became a favorite of mine, so when I opened a can up one day and discovered they tasted different (and not in a pleasant way) I hoped it was just a fluke.  It wasn’t.  Every once in a while I’ve tried another can of them and been disappointed.  I realized that they must have changed something in the recipe.  At last I decided I was going to have to learn to make my own baked beans.  So I’ve been working at making a recipe for baked beans for a couple of years now.

I started with Deborah Madison‘s recipe in “The American Vegetarian Table” because she’s one of my favorite cookbook authors but she used soy beans and chipotle peppers and it was too dark and smokey.  It just wasn’t what I was looking for.  I have looked at many many recipes and most of them depend on some cut of pig for the flavor and the other vegetarian ones generally have too many exotic or weird ingredients that baked beans shouldn’t need.  So I decided to use the ingredient list on the Trader Joe’s can as a starting point.

This version I’m sharing today is really good – but it’s not quite where I want it to be yet.  I decided to put it up here because I lost all my notes on my previous versions – which I wish I could reference.  I won’t lose it here and I can tell you that my mom thinks these beans are perfect as they are.  I want something more from them.  I will post my next good version here too so I can keep track of the development.  If you try this version, please please let me know what you thought of it and what you would change.  This is a food quest and takes time to reach excellence.

Incidentally, David Leite is writing a new cookbook and said he’d consider working on the ultimate vegetarian baked bean recipe but I think I just might beat him to it.  (I am a David Leite fan – he’s really kind and funny and responds to his commenters on his blog which I find charming)

Print
Vegetarian Baked Beans Recipe

8 servings

Vegetarian Baked Beans Recipe

Ingredients

  • 6 cups cooked navy beans
  • 4 carrots, sliced
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 28 oz tomato sauce
  • 2/3 cups white wine
  • 2 Tbsp brown sugar
  • 2 tsp blackstrap molasses
  • 2 tsp mustard powder
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 30 to 40 grinds of pepper (or about 1/2 tsp)

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
  2. In a deep baking dish mix all the ingredients together.
  3. Bake for 3 hours.
  4. Seriously, that's it. Done.

Notes

2 cups of dry beans = 5 to 6 cups cooked beans. I cook my navy beans in the slow cooker on high for about 2-3 hours. I usually salt the water I cook them in.

https://stitchandboots.com/2012/05/17/vegetarian-baked-beans-recipe/

A Tour of the House We’re Moving To in Santa Rosa

My mom and my aunt bought this house over 7 years ago together.  My aunt lives in Wisconsin but loves to travel and had been spending time visiting us in California because she loves the warm weather and the California wineries.  They decided they would buy a house together so my aunt could have a California home away from home.  Not long after they bought it my cousin Nick had a terrible snowboarding accident which left him a paraplegic.  This changed my aunt’s life profoundly as she and my other cousins all pitched in to take care of Nick and help him adjust to a drastically different life.  Her California dreams pretty much ended right there.

After we moved to Oregon my mom went through a real rough patch while waiting endlessly to get into the surgery queue at Kaiser for her hip which was causing her tremendous pain.  We convinced her to come up to Oregon, at least for long enough to get her surgery, and she ended up staying because she loved Portland so much.  All these years this house on Cherry Street has been rented out.  Now that we’re moving back and need a place to live we get to live in this cool house!  Unfortunately, my aunt recently told my mom that she wants to sell it.  It’s not a great time to sell, though, so she’s decided to wait at least a year before putting it on the market.  I’m not going to lie, I hope she never sells it.  None of us will ever be able to buy a house again unless some miracle happens and I become a best selling author or unless Philip becomes a famous artist selling his pieces for buckets of cash.  We love this house.

I am a practical person though and know that I may have to find another place to live in a year.  In the meantime, I get to live in this house and I am SO excited!  So excited I want to give you the whole tour.  My mom took all these pics when she was still living there and she didn’t have any pictures of the back unit where she has chosen to live (a tiny apartment in the back of the house) so I can’t show you that.  The pictures aren’t all show-stoppers but you’ll get a good idea of what our living space will be like.

This is the front porch and that door enters into an enclosed porch which will be my “office”.  This house is right down town so there’s a lot of foot traffic on this street.  It’s also spitting distance (literally) from the middle school so there are lots of rowdy teens and parents around during the school year.  It’s not a quiet location and I’m so happy about that because I’ve had six years of complete quiet and I can’t wait to live somewhere where there’s good people watching from the front porch and friendliness.  This street is actually not the safest in the entire city as it has a few halfway houses on it and my old psychologist’s office is just three blocks down.  But who cares?  Makes life interesting.  Right now I am surrounded by adult foster care houses (on three sides) with “interesting” people coming and going all the time and routine ambulance visits (sometimes several times a week) so I’m used to an environment of unstable people but this time there will also be other neighbors and an awesome downtown a very quick walk away.

The back yard is low maintenance and very shady.  I won’t be turning it into a vegetable garden.  I also can’t do funky stuff with this property since we’re only renting it and my aunt will expect it to look nice when she decides to sell.  Mostly it will remain just as you see it.

Another view of the back yard.  This is what’s to the right of the previous picture.  Lots of trees and I can’t deny that the shade will make me happy since I can’t stand all that California sunshine and heat.  I’ll be so thankful to be able to get some fresh air without being beat down by the angry summer sun.  It’s a really pretty yard.  We’ll be putting in a laundry line for sure.

This is the back door that leads into the laundry room and then into the kitchen.  There’s some good sun in this spot so I will definitely be putting some herbs in and maybe a lemon tree.

This is my office.  The tile floor will be nice for keeping my feet cooler in the spring, summer, and fall when it’s always warm warm or HOT.  It’s long and narrow and full of light.  It’s a strange little space but when we decided to move into this house I knew immediately that it was the perfect space for me to work and write in.  I’m really excited to set it up.

This is the dining room which is bigger than the “living room”(below).  We don’t do much dining at a dinner table.  I know we’re freaks but it doesn’t work out for us as a family and it doesn’t mean we don’t spend quality time together or that we don’t make time for great discussions.  We just don’t do it over food.  So we’re most likely going to use this room as our living room and use the little narrow living room as a dining room.  It’s hard to tell until we get all our furniture there.

It’s hard to get an idea of this space from this picture but it’s the best I have.  Those french doors lead into the entry way where the front door is.  This room is rectangular and has so many windows and doors that there’s very little actual wall space.  The same is true of the dining room (above).  While this makes furniture arrangements difficult, it is also why the light in this house is so wonderful.

This is the downstairs bedroom which will be mine and Philip’s.  It’s weirdly shaped but decent sized.

This is the downstairs bathroom which is decently sized but features the smallest claw foot tub I’ve ever seen and my mom says it’s missing a foot and is not super stable.

The kitchen is not particularly exciting but it’s a medium size and has a gas range.  Not a lot of storage but I’ll enjoy it anyway.

BECAUSE IT HAS A GAS RANGE!!!!  Pretty sure that’s not the best gas range or anything but who the hell cares?  It’s not electric and for that I am super excited.  I hate cooking on electric stoves.  They’re stupid.  They’re also dangerous.  I’ve never come so close to burning my house down so many times just because the burners don’t look like they’re still on but they ARE.   If I happen to get to live here for a long time and if I had the money I would redo this kitchen with Ikea cabinetry, marmoleum flooring (or vinyl composite), and granite countertops.  And while I’m dreaming I may as well get my old O’Keeffe and Merritt gas range back from the house on Beaver Street.

This is upstairs.  Upstairs has its own small kitchen, this room which is an open living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom.  This room is going to be Philip’s office/art room.  The light is fantastic and he can do home brew projects in the wee kitchen (not pictured in this tour) and keep an eye on Max who’s bedroom is on the other side of the wall.

This bathroom is impossibly narrow but has a great CLAW FOOT TUB which I intend to use frequently.  On the other end of this room there’s another window and just enough room for a cabinet of some kind which is good because there is no other storage for this bathroom.  I wish the picture showed a better view of the tub.  It’s what I’ve been dreaming of having for the last six years.

Max’s bedroom.  Lucky boy.  It’s a nice sized room with good light which he’ll want to obliterate with dark curtains to get rid of the glare on the TV he uses to play his video games.

Just in case you missed the picture of my office in the beginning – here it is again. I’m going to be writing books in here, working for BlogHer in here, doing urban homesteading projects, and writing the Post Apocalyptic Cookbook in here.

Postage stamp front garden patches.  My aunt love agapanthus.  I know she’s not alone in her appreciation for it but it’s beloved of institutional landscaping and I really dislike it.  I will give these away to someone else and then when the day comes that I have to move out – I’ll put agapanthus back for my aunt if she wants me to.  I see herbs (both culinary and medicinal) and flowers going in these wee patches of soil.

That’s the end of the tour.  Philip took off this morning in his u-haul truck, trailing his car behind it.  It’s not pleasant to have him gone knowing he won’t be back for three weeks.  I miss him already.  He’s moving into the upstairs rooms (the other two units of the house are still occupied by tenants until July 1st).  Tomorrow he has a job interview with a company he really wants to work for.  Keep your fingers crossed for him and send him courage and brilliance at 1pm.

Hope you enjoyed the tour!