Body & Food & Garden & Home 17 Sep 2007 06:13 pm
catching up
Here I am with a wee bit of the flu and a cobwebby blog, so I’ll do a little catching up. In a nutshell: I’ve been domestic.
Most recent things first: rosettes. I’m a real vulture for going-out-of-business sales, and when Martha By Mail went under, I snapped up some fantastic Halloween rosette irons on the cheap. Finally we got around to trying them out. These are implements for making crispy little deep-fried Scandinavian cookies. You make a thin, simple batter, dip the iron in most of the way, then deep-fry. I think they’re best sprinkled with cinnamon sugar — imagine an airy, crispy essence of cinnamon toast. It took a little while to get the hang of it; you want to have everything at exactly the right temperature, or you wind up with rather abstract rosettes as the batter drips off the iron. Soon, though, we had it down. I hope to make crispy deep-fried pumpkins, spiders, and bats for my friends soon!
In body news, my hip still hasn’t quite healed, though I’m not gimping around too badly. Apparently I’ve got some kind of a problem with my right obturators, deep inside the hip; my rotation’s pathetic. This does not please me, though I’m a little amused by the horrible sounds that joint keeps making. I suppose I should go back to PT and/or find an LMT to work on them. (I love Mark the LMT, but crotch massage is past my boundaries for a male massage therapist. Maybe any massage therapist.) Ugh. In the meantime, I’m just rolling them out with some small Yamuna balls, which helps a good deal, and hoping the problem will magically go away.
I’d planned to replace much of our front lawn with a big vegetable garden this summer, but with one of my hip joints still in limited service, I decided that Combat Gardening was probably not in the cards for me. So I called the Seattle Urban Farm Company, who came out and installed a beautiful new raised-bed vegetable garden in two days flat. They even included automatic drip tape irrigation, with the line cleverly snaked under our walkway and the remaining grass. It’s marvelous. I can hardly believe how fast everything’s grown; I’ll be harvesting the first bok choy this week. (Pot stickers!) I’m definitely calling these guys again. For a few days after the garden went in, I felt slightly unmoored– there’s this great garden in front, and yet I am not sore. How can this be? Eh?
I’ll definitely be calling them again anyway, because once the fall planting season cools down a bit, we have plans to put a chicken coop in the back yard. (We’re getting ever closer to hippie paradise here at House of Cranks.) SUFC has a chicken expert on staff. Brad loves chickens. To hear him talk, you’d imagine that they are the sweetest, most wonderful animals in the world. I don’t know about that. Josh is still more pro-chicken than I am, but I’ve come around on the subject. I’m interested in the eggs, mostly, and I’m also a little curious about what I might be able to train a chicken to do. (Apparently, dog trainers often work with chickens to hone their skills. There are even “chicken camps” for trainers.) Plus, some of them can be very pretty.
Speaking of front yard changes, we finally had our alder tree taken down. It was in pretty weird-looking shape after the developers next door sheared off all the branches on the west side of the tree. Plus, I have a strong suspicion that I’m allergic to the thing; it’s either that or the birch, or both. In any case, we called up Seattle Tree Service and they came out and took the thing down. The process was fascinating. And I got to see it a little more clearly than usual because one fellow was being trained. Ours was his very first tree ever. At first I could hardly watch; he’d put on his climbing gear upside down, and I thought, “Oh no, catastrophe ahead.” But Mike, the certified arborist who’s the boss, corrected him without freaking him out (would that all teachers were that good) and got him ready to climb up and limb the tree. He was all ready to go when he looked up and said, rather tremulously, “Do you think there are squirrels in that tree?” The tree came down safely with no squirrel attacks or other catastrophes. Hard to believe that thing was just sixteen years old; some years it grew more than an inch in diameter. Alders are amazing.
We kept the wood for firewood. I was sure we were going to get a splitter. No way could we get that tree split ourselves. And by “ourselves” I mean “Josh”. You know, we all have our oddball gifts in this world — I’m a bizarrely fast and accurate collator, and Josh can pack boxes like a pro. And then there are our anti-gifts. Do not, on any account, give me an axe and a load of wood to split. Many years ago, at the peak of my physical condition, I spent ten weeks in the backcountry of Yellowstone doing trail work. Every day, I’d try to split some wood for the fire. And pretty much every day I was grateful for my steel-toed boots. I am world-class lousy at splitting wood. So, while I could help stack the wood, all the splitting was up to Josh. And Josh did it. The man is a machine. We’ve now got a woodpile that must be about 8′ by 6′ with some more left over.
He really has been pouring it on. (Josh, you rock.) The new shelves he built in the shed are fabulous. I’m amazed at how much more space we have in there (using the opportunity to get rid of some junk didn’t hurt) and I’m excited to see that we can probably fit a workbench in there. Maybe I’ll even get that glass kiln I’ve been wanting for years but had no place to put. (Yes, because what I really need is more things to do.)
Josh went gonzo on those shelves the day after I made macaroni and cheese for us, his dad, and my mom. If that’s what a really good macaroni and cheese dinner does, well, heck, I will make some more. I used the Beecher’s recipe that was in the P-I recently. It felt like some pretty high-stakes entertaining: this was my first butter-and-flour roux (as opposed to an oil-based roux), my first white sauce, and my first cheese sauce. The next day, I read about a cheese sauce that had curdled. Boy, am I glad I didn’t know anything could go so wrong. Served it up with some salsa and some steamed local broccoli; for dessert we had some homegrown plums, roasted with a little Zulka sugar and topped with a dab of whipped cream.
In other food news, Josh and I learned to can last month. We’ve put up some rhubarb and strawberry-rhubarb jam, and still have lots left to can. I hope that someday soon we can have another canning day.
Whew.
on 17 Sep 2007 at 6:37 pm 1.Mia said …
Chickens!!! Excellent!
Next … Nigerian dwarf goats!
on 17 Sep 2007 at 6:41 pm 2.Cam Sculpin said …
Totally! Josh and I have both signed the petition in favor of allowing the goats in-city. In fact, I am now a card-carrying member of the Goat Justice League. No kidding, I’ve got the card.
I love goats. They’re just the kind of trouble I like. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough space for goats, even little ones, unless we give up some of our garden, and I don’t want to do that. But it sure is tempting.
on 17 Sep 2007 at 6:55 pm 3.Mia said …
Don’t you have neighbors you can sacrifice for more space or something? It’s for the goats!
on 17 Sep 2007 at 7:18 pm 4.Cam Sculpin said …
Oh, I’ve thought it, all right. That empty house next door that the developers are slowly, slowly working on, for instance — its backyard would be ideal for goats. Covet covet.
There’s also the bullying old lady who owns the place behind us; she’d be a fine sacrifice, as far as I’m concerned. But she’s sprayed so many pesticides, herbicides, and plain old toxic chemicals into my yard that I hate to imagine what she’s put into her own. I wouldn’t want to inflict that chemical monocultural moonscape on a cute little goat. Besides, it’d be inconvenient to take down the enormous fence we’ve constructed to keep her and her spray bottles out of our yard.
on 17 Sep 2007 at 7:59 pm 5.cissa said …
I love rosettes! Haven’t had them for years; at some point I’ll get a deep fat fryer again, though. I *think* I have a Halloween set of irons, acquired years ago…
The raised-bed installers sound fabulous! I wish they were around here… And chickens! Way cool- I’m jealous!
What breeds are you looking at, and how many?
Personally, I prefer mac and cheese with a custard-based sauce; I can get more cheese into it that way. It’s a bit less forgiving than a roux-based sauce, though- especially when made with cheddar, which is what i do. I love cheddar.
on 17 Sep 2007 at 9:50 pm 6.Cam Sculpin said …
If I’d put any more cheese in there, I think I would have exploded! mnam mnam mnam…
We’re planning on two, maybe three chickens. No bantams, that much I’m pretty sure of. My mother has war stories of having to go out and collect chicken eggs from fierce bantam hens when she was no older than five. (She’s still not real happy in the presence of birds of any kind, particularly when they flap their wings.)
I like the Buff Orpingtons. There’s one up the street who’s so docile as to be practically sessile. Josh and I were biking by one day when we saw that the family puppy had gotten hold of the family chicken and was trying to wrestle it. It’d grabbed hold of a wing in its teeth. That was an odd moment; we didn’t know these folks at all, and didn’t quite know what to say. But we knocked on the door, introduced ourselves, and said, “Um, we noticed that your dog is playing a little rough with your chicken, and wanted to make sure you knew about it.” Much consternation and immediate dog-chicken separation ensued. But what amazed me was the chicken. This was not like the chickens my mother’d told me about. No, this chicken hunkered down and tried to ignore it all. That’s my kind of chicken: wholly unthreatening.
on 18 Sep 2007 at 1:04 am 7.catenoid said …
I was looking at the SUFC site and noticed that they predict produce from April to October, and I set to wondering: if you want to grow all your own food, what’s the best/easiest way to not get scurvy in the other six months? (Why yes, this is not traditionally my department - why do you ask?)
As for the chickens - eggs, meat, and mother repellant! Score!
on 18 Sep 2007 at 9:56 am 8.Ted said …
I was very intrigued by the Beecher recipe, but I had to wonder about the cost. How much did you wind up spending on cheese?
on 18 Sep 2007 at 10:42 am 9.Cam Sculpin said …
Ted: Got me. Josh did the shopping for that. But it wasn’t cheap, I know that much. (Though still not as expensive as meat, I expect.) Definitely a dinner-party kind of recipe.
Catenoid: Off the top of my head, I’d say you have two options: extending the growing season, and storing food.
I’m actually going to get a much longer harvest than that — maybe not a full four-season harvest, but pretty close. That’s because I’m growing some really hardy things: kales, carrots, beets, etc. (I suspect that the SUFC doesn’t promise a longer harvest on their website because they are not the world’s most popular vegetables. Everybody wants lettuce and tomatoes, it seems.) Apparently cilantro can make it through the winter, too. Next year, when I’m a little more organized, I plan to have some cold frames as well. And come to think of it, if I have chickens, I might be able to make a small, old-fashioned hot bed — that’s a bed heated by composting manure.
And then there’s storing food: drying, freezing, canning, or root-cellaring are the methods that come to mind. Some of those winter squashes, like the Hubbards, are said to last all winter in a cool root cellar. (Territorial Seed even has one variety that they claim will last as long as a year.)
Of course, you do lose some vitamin content in the processing, but canned tomatoes are still pretty good in the vitamin C department.
on 19 Sep 2007 at 12:17 pm 10.catenoid said …
Thank you.
Manure is way too useful. It struck me that for applications where the manure is isolated from the foodstuffs - like perhaps this - you could actually use human manure. Collection is an issue, and the Web sites I found seem to assume horse manure for some reason.
In addition, manure will also repel some mothers.
on 19 Sep 2007 at 12:23 pm 11.catenoid said …
Sigh. Nope, not parasite-proof. At least, not without a barrier layer.
on 19 Sep 2007 at 12:46 pm 12.Cam Sculpin said …
Catenoid, you might be interested in the Humanure Handbook. There’s a subculture of people composting their poop. SFGate.com had an article on some of them a couple of years ago.
I dunno.
on 08 Oct 2008 at 12:15 pm 13.Shari Benoit said …
Hi I have been looking for hollween rosette irons. Do you know of any other sorce where I might find some? Shari