The Liebster.

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Andrea over at Meandering the Maze bestowed the Liebster Award upon me recently.  Thank you Andrea, I’m honored.  For the longest time, I kept quiet about my blog, not knowing which direction I wanted to really head in with it.  I started blogging following an exceptionally craptastic year where I lost my crafting mojo.  At the first glimmer of it’s return, I had the idea that maybe if I started a blog, it would help that mojo stick around and maybe even inspire it.  The fact that anyone likes to read my babble leaves me feeling sort of ‘ah shucks’.  Really. Thank you.

“Liebster” is a German word meaning dearest, beloved or favorite, and the Liebster Award is sort of a chain letter among bloggers that’s intended to showcase exceptional up-and-coming blogs (typically, those with 200 or fewer followers). Now, there’s no evaluation committee or formal award process for the Liebster, but in a way it’s even nicer – it’s recognition that a peer has noticed and appreciated your hard work.

So, in receiving this award, I’m supposed to thank Andrea and pass it along to 5 others. They in turn are supposed to pass it along.  Without further ado, five of my favorite blogs. 

1.  From Prada to Payless – Just your average American family, finding themselves living paycheck to paycheck, facing foreclosure, wondering how all their hard work has landed them there.  Erin is honest, eloquent and real. 

2.  Savannah – Savannah is a rock star.  Not just your average college student with a talent for photography, Savannah’s list of good works is long, starting with THON as well as her own foundation, The Jedediah Thomas Smith Foundation in honor of her late brother.  How many 20 year olds do you know with their own foundation?  She’s a do-er.

3.  The View from Indigo House – Leni says she’s lived her life backwards, having had several careers before going to college.  She’s raised chickens, pigs, ducks as well as children and can milk a cow. She teaches and muses about food, gardens, culinary history, rural life, among other things.  She also can be found over at the Monticello blog where she has a monthly series on Jefferson era recipes. 

4.  Make it stop – While working on her novel, Vikki keeps us entertained with tales of motherhood, book reviews and social commentary.  (She’s also my Cville Swaps cohort.).   She makes some wicked French Chocolate Granola too.

5.  Makin’ Projiks – Sweet crafts, sweet thrift scores, sweet holiday decorations for all seasons and even sweeter kiddos.  Sarah may actually own more vintage linens and Christmas ornaments than me.  I love seeing her latest projects and her latest scores.

All of these women, many of whom I am honored to call friend outside of the blog world,  inspire and touch me in many ways. They are all smart, funny, talented women who shoot straight from the hip.  Definitely my kind of gals.

Thanks again Andrea!

January is not quiet here. Not at all.

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While that first week in January seems like an abrupt change from the quiet pace of the week before, it’s also the week you realize that you haven’t done much of anything for oh, the better part of a month, that wasn’t holiday related. At some point in that week, I start to remember that the other two people that live in my house have birthdays this month, although at that point, they feel like they are at the end of the month and still so far away, despite the fact that at least one of the birthday people is highly bothered you haven’t done a thing about her birthday party yet.

Which leads me to the second week in January, when I sort of have an ‘Oh Shit’ moment and realize those birthdays are NEXT WEEK and I really need to get my act together.  I tend to approach their birthday week the way I do Christmas, with a menu & baking plan – after all, there are cupcakes to be had for her class, something for her actual birthday dinner, something for the party she insists we have in her honor and although he says he doesn’t need anything, something for Pat.  Edie came home from the hospital on his birthday and for the first few years of her life, I’d point to her as his gift, stick a candle in what was usually the last piece of her cake and call it a day.  Really, I need a plan, otherwise the week just spins out of my control and Pat’s birthday gets overlooked. Again.  Which is so not fair to him.

This year, they are both having milestone birthdays (She’s 10!! and he’s 10 years older!) and after all those years of neglecting Pat’s birthday, I want to do something to celebrate him.  My sisters & I have birthdays the same week and my mother was able to pull off 3 celebrations in one week, every year, not to mention an actual party for at least one, if not two of us on top of that.  Surely I can do two birthdays in a week, yes?   I think what gets me is that it’s just after the holidays and I’m ready to give up desserts and eat rice & beans for a few weeks and curl up with a pile of books and watch lots of bad movies, while these two birthdays smack dab in the middle of January means the party keeps on rolling….

And it’s not like I’m just working on birthday celebrations.  Putting things off the month of December into January means I also spent the week meeting with people and beginning the process of taking the business to the next level, which is exciting and scary all at the same time. I have my next wine column due in a few days and while I have topic in mind, I have a slew of research to do, not to mention writing the thing.   I had volunteered to chair Bingo Night at school for the PTO back in November, thinking, oh, it’s not until January.  Which turns out, is this month.  The one with all the birthdays.  At one point Pat looked at me and asked what I was thinking when I took that on.  I’m not sure.  One of these days, “January” will click with me as actually very busy.

I think this is why I don’t do resolutions – because January is just as crazy as December is for me and after the lull of the first week, when I think I can just settle into winter coziness comes the realization that I need to continue to keep it in high gear for just a few more weeks. 

I’m really looking forward to February.

In Season.

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The other night while watching television, we saw a commercial for a local produce store.  After their whole pitch about how they are the best for fresh, local produce, and the tag line “If it’s in season in Virginia, we have it in stock”, they immediately announced a special on strawberries.

Edie actually beat me to the yelling at the television. 

“It’s January.  Where in Virginia are those strawberries from!?!?!”

And then yesterday, as we were heading out to meet the egg lady*, Edie told me how in school that day, her class watched a video that included footage of chicken houses. You know, the big ones, with no windows and the sign telling you that this family farm is a proud producer of chicken/eggs for (Insert name here of big food producer, like Tyson or Perdue). Apparently they are studying the southeast and that particular clip was part of showing how the chicken industry is important economically to the region.  Every time we’ve ever driven by one of those factory farms, her father has been sure to point out, in great detail how gross they are.  Because of his career in environmental non-profits, he is well versed in how factory farming is harmful to our environment, not to mention our health.   So to be shown this as a ‘good thing’, well, my child was slightly horrified. 

“Why would you show that to people and then want them to buy the chickens and the eggs they are trying to sell?  It’s gross Mom.”

Yes, my dear, it is.  But it’s good to show that, because maybe, just maybe, it will make people sit up and question where their food comes from.

I’m pretty sure my kid takes this for granted. She’s a not quite 10 year old foodie, and has been on a first name basis with more than a few pieces of meat that have come across her plate – heck, she’s even seen it being born.  She has been raised with me questioning where all our food comes from as long as she can remember.  I’ve been called obsessed about knowing where our food comes from.  We are what we eat, after all.  My husband says of all things to be obsessed about, this one has healthy implications for our family, and it’s a good thing.  Living here in Charlottesville, it’s not hard to find like minded folks.  Back in June, Forbes Magazine called us the locavore capital of the world.  I know that the whole ‘eat local’ movement is often dismissed as a yuppie thing and I get why.  It does take tend more, both time and money, to eat foods that aren’t factory farmed and processed.  This is where I tend to go off on huge rants about how the system needs to change.  And while there are a number of changes that can only happen at the top, we need a grassroots effort to make the top sit up and notice.  This grassroots movement needs to encompass all of us, no matter our economic status, education level or the color of our skin.  Everyone needs to sit up and realize that those chicken houses are beyond disgusting, that those strawberries on special in January are strawberries in name only, because they sure as hell don’t taste like the ones I pick out of my garden every spring and I shudder to think at the chemicals involved to make them look that big, firm and red this time of year, despite the number of miles they’ve traveled.  That all this cheap, processed food is actually costing us more in the long run than it’s saving us in the here and now.

I had coffee yesterday with my friend Ivana. She was a big driving force in the new wellness policy adopted at Charlottesville City Schools recently, and is working on some other really great ideas, among them, a new roaming monthly potluck, to be held on the 3rd Wednesday of every month.  Families are welcome and child care is provided for a nominal fee (a $3 donation).  If you can’t make it this month, but are interested in being on the mailing list, there’s a spot on the website for that.  I’m really looking forward to this gathering. 

I try not to rant on here too much about the state of our food, although I do talk about how much local food we eat, my garden and canning.  I’ve been told I should use this space to talk more about my passion for overhauling the food system in this country and perhaps I will.  It’s really not hard to learn how to change the way you eat.  I often hear from friends and family “You’d be proud of me” and they then proceed to tell me how they’ve made some small change in their diet as a result of listening to me babble about the state of our food.  Yes, I am proud of them and yes, I’m proud of myself, for getting them to think about where their food comes from.  This is how we are going to change the system – from the bottom, one small step at a time.

*The egg lady is a vendor from the Charlottesville City Market that I have been buying eggs from for some time.  She asked if I would like to continue getting eggs from her farm all winter and so now I meet up with her in parking lots to get my goods.  The first time I met up with her this fall, it was in an abandoned Martha Jefferson parking lot, cold, getting dark and really sort of sketchy.  I kept waiting for some undercover agent to bust us.  It had that sort of a feeling….

Something borrowed.

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I often find that when people share recipes with me, unless I’ve actually eaten the dish before, I have a tendancy to file them away and forget about them.  Lend me the cookbook with your own notes in it though?  Well, I might try it.

The recipe in question was “Jimmy Ray’s Butternut Poblano Soup”.  Among the spices used were both chili powder and cinnamon, so right there I was intrigued.  For the longest time I was pretty sure that cinnamon only went in my morning oatmeal or apple pie.  Anything else was just weird.  And then I discovered Mollie Katzen, who is my hands down favorite cookbook author, and some of her interesting uses of cinnamon.  I still am not brave enough to throw it anything on my own, but any recipe that calls for it, I’m game.


See?  It must be good.

The cookbook is from a resturant in Athens, Georgia, by the name of The Grit.  The recipe is a vegan one, and while I’ve got nothing against vegan, I wasn’t in the mood to go to the store for soymilk.  So I used real dairy in the form of milk & butter, instead of soy versions.  I think cream would be outstanding in this soup, but I was fresh out.  I may actually be slightly over cream at this point in my life, having just gotten through the holiday season, heavy on the cream.   There was still a nice richness to the soup, even with skim milk, but that may have been the smidgen of chicken broth I used, as I was also fresh out of vegetable broth.  (I realize that those changes took this lovely soup about as far away from vegan as possible and honestly, I don’t mind vegan, we do eat that way at times, but I’m also the girl who fries her tofu in bacon fat.)

I made a few other changes to the recipe, mostly to fit what I had on hand.  So, instead of buying and roasting poblanos, I just pulled some of the anaheim peppers I grew, roasted, chopped and froze last summer out of the freezer.  Fresh herbs were used for the parsley and rosemary, in place of dried, which is what the recipe called for.  I may have used too much parsley – I went out and cut some from the garden as it was getting dark and I didn’t realize until I started chopping how much I had.  Oh well.  There are worse things than too much parsley in your soup.  It may have covered up for the fact that I didn’t take the seeds out of my hot peppers, as the recipe called for and they ended up in there as well.  While I’m confessing all the changes I made, I’ll go ahead and say that when I froze the chopped peppers, I filled jars, so there was no measuring ‘one to two’ peppers.  I just eyeballed it and threw in what I felt was a good amount.

It was….delicious.  It had some heat from the peppers, but not too much, because Edie ate it without complaining. She commented on the ‘interesting’ spice mix.  She thought perhaps I had thrown ginger in there and was surprised to learn it was cinnamon.  As this isn’t my recipe, I’m not going to post it, although if you do a google search, you are likely to find it.  I haven’t decided if I need this cookbook yet or not, although Pat’s already waived the ‘no net gain’ of books rule on this one.  Seems Dahlia raved about it to the point where he was sold on it before he even tasted anything out of it.  That’s pretty big. Although, since he got me “The Way to Cook” for Christmas, I’m not sure how much he holds to that rule.  He did let slip though, that since he got me a Kindle, he’s wondering how many books we can get rid of. Hmm. 

Back to reality….

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It’s January 2, the big yellow angel came back this morning restoring some semblance of routine to our lives (which was miraculously NOT as bumpy as I had feared!) and as I procrastinate on taking down holiday decorations, I thought I’d show off some of the new things that have worked their way into our home this season.  While visiting Pat’s folks the week before Christmas, we acquired a few quilts that Pat’s Grandmother had made over the years.
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Among them, this crazy quilt.  I remember when she made this one – at the time I was inspired enough by it to contemplate learning to quilt, something I still haven’t entirely let go of, but haven’t entirely embraced yet either…..
The basis of this quilt are old ties that Pat’s Grandfather wore.   I also recognize some fabrics that had been kicking around in her stash (Over the years, I’ve inherited parts of that stash as she scaled back.)
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There is so much detail and handwork in this quilt.  It’s amazing.  I just can’t do it justice with photos. It’s an inspiring piece to have on our bed and wake up to every morning.
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Another quilt we brought home is this Southern Belle Quilt. It’s much older, with more padding than any other quilt we’ve gotten from Grandma, and has been through the wash a number of times so it’s soft and fluffy on top of being beautiful.
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The fabrics in it are amazing, as is some of the handwork.
There is a small tear though, towards the bottom that I’m not entirely sure how to go about repairing.
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I’m looking for help in how to fix the tear (so if you have a suggestion, please let me know!).  For the time being, it’s sitting on the back of the sofa in the living room, folded neatly so the tear doesn’t get worse.  I simply couldn’t put it in a closet until I got it fixed.
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The third quilt we brought home is a butterfly quilt for Edie’s room. She has a bit of a butterfly theme going on in there and I think the browns will help balance out all the pink.  There are a few small repairs to be made this quilt before it lands permanently on her bed, but they can all be easily done by hand.  And, since it’s a newer quilt and I inherited part of the stash, I know I have the original fabrics on hand to make the proper repairs, should I need more fabric.
Suddenly, having the stash just became a good thing.  Funny how that works….

Out with the old.

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This past year has had some big changes in our lives- Pat changed jobs after thirteen and a half years with the Bay Foundation.  I lost mine, and then decided to go out on my own.  That’s had a pretty big ripple effect and we’re still figuring out what the new normal is around here.  I imagine the new year will be continuing along that path.  I have a few things in mind that I’d like to see happen in the new year, but I don’t count them as resolutions as much as I do the effect of taking the last few weeks off.  Many of them are actually along the lines of what my friend Erin wrote the other day.    I really couldn’t say it better myself.

Happy 2012.

Our Holiday.

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Betty’s home for Christmas. Actually, Betty’s home for good. NYC was great, but Charlottesville called.  And so all is right with my world.
Somehow, Christmas Eve,  I ended up completely re-doing the Christmas lights on Betty’s tree (oh, my Christmas OCD kicking in….) while Edie came down and helped her put the tree up. 
And Pat came down and helped decorate the rest of her house.
  
I can’t remember a Christmas eve, or a Christmas really, that wasn’t punctuated by ‘check-ins’ with Betty of all sorts.  Phone calls, walks down the street, helping each other do last minute    decorations/wrapping/santapresentbuilding/baking/shopping/just visiting with breakfast/lunch/dinner/drinks/just visiting always happening at some point…..And to have her home after months of being away, knowing she was home to stay?  
There was much joy and merriment.

The ladybug hat was a hit. 

And for the first time EVER, I managed to make some pretty kick-ass looking cinnamon buns for Christmas breakfast.  I started them way ahead of time and let them rise Christmas Eve, before I popped them in the fridge to bake in the morning.  It made a big difference.   
Pat made me that for Christmas.  Isn’t it cool?  I told him I wanted a floor lamp for the dining room – it gets no direct natural light and therefore is unbearably dark this time of year. So he made me one out of a poplar tree branch he found on the ground at the park.  And the lampshade was an old one lying around that he redid.  He asked me for fabric – I was sort of consulted every step of the way of his creation, so it wasn’t a surprise, still it was fun to design something with my honey.  I love how it turned out.  He’s awesome.
The fabric is a knock-off Lily, with embroidered palm trees.  It was in the stash and I was torn between that and a darker, heavier linen.  The palm trees are good.
It was a lovely, lazy Christmas day, with friends & neighbors popping in & out.  I hadn’t put a menu together, but when I did, I found my notes from last year and realized it was exactly the same.  I remembered thinking to myself last year, it was the best menu ever.  Clearly, it was.  I think we have this Christmas thing down.  We have spent the days since lazing around, eating leftover chocolate cake and popcorn.  Other leftovers too, but to be honest, that was dinner the day after Christmas. 

Let the baking commence.

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We are just back from visiting Pat’s folks for the holidays.  In a wild burst the day before we left, the tree went up, the house got cleaned AND I got every present wrapped.  Yes, I was exhausted, but to walk in the front door last night after 10 hours on the road with my family (and a delightful family sing along to The Clash at one point) knowing there were now 2 days to go and all I had to do was figure out what cookies to bake felt pretty darn tooting good.
I feel strongly that after eating cookies Grandma made all week, we could stand a cookie break.   The other people that live in this house think otherwise though, as both of them have given a decent sized list of what they think we ‘need’ to get through Christmas.  I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no to any of them.  We’ll just have to wait and see what I feel like doing. 
Merry Christmas everyone.



Not quite there yet.

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Currently my living room looks like Christmas has exploded in it.  Boxes everywhere.  The tree is halfway decorated, with oodles more ornaments waiting to be put on.  There are some wrapped presents, some handmade presents to be finished floating around,  decorations that need to go somewhere, plus our usual clutter.

I used to get really worked up about how everything needed to be perfect at Christmas.  The house had to be cleaned from top to bottom, every room needed to be decorated. My mother always said that Santa Claus didn’t come to a dirty house and somehow I still thought that. 

Two years ago, as I was recovering from stomach surgery and just simply did not have the physical energy to deal with it, I realized, Christmas is not in how your house is decorated, it’s not in making sure the tree is perfect,  it’s not in making sure you have the right cookies made, it’s not even about gifts, because Christmas can and will happen without all those things. 

Of course, I myself didn’t remember this until after I had spent the better part of two days making sure the lights on the Christmas tree were *just so*.  I took myself for a nice long walk and remembered that lesson.

So what if my living room looks like Christmas exploded, so what if I just blew the dust off a hallway mirror before stringing lights on it.  From here on out, I’m not going to stress about Christmas and just kick back and enjoy it.

Because you know what?  Santa DOES come to dirty houses.

Bacon Jam and Other Good Food Highlights from Yesterday.

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It’s December.  While I suppose I could be decorating the house (which somehow in my mind involves cleaning it as well and I’d rather avoid that as much as possible), or crafting fabulous gifts (leaving that for my knitting circle tonight) or shopping for gifts (which means leaving the house and dealing with the madness out there right now), yesterday I decided to curl up in my kitchen and try a few recipes that have piqued my interest lately.
The first one was a Cranberry Spread I’d seen here.  We are big fans of cranberries, with any and every presentation of cranberry being good with us.  The recipe looked easy – 2 bags of cranberries, a bottle of maple syrup and lemon extract. When finished, I yielded about seven 4 oz. jelly jars, that I canned in a hot water bath.   I may have to make another batch or two before fresh cranberries disappear from the produce aisle.  As a side note, I spread some on a slice of this triple fudge banana bread for breakfast this morning and they paired beautifully. I highly recommend making both.  (Chocolate and cranberries are oh, so good together. And as there was lots of fruit as well as whole wheat flour involved, I’m declaring it a healthy breakfast.)
Up next, was Bacon Jam. I am a big fan of bacon.  It makes everything better.  I can’t handle eating a large amount of meat well, but somehow there is an exception for bacon. I’ve been known to eat an entire pound at a time, straight out of the frying pan.  I love bacon.  I’m one of those cooks who saves every bit of my bacon fat and then uses it in place of (or in addition to) butter or olive oil when I start a pot of soup, or to fry things like green tomatoes and tofu. (More on this in a minute.)  So, as I started seeing bacon jam pop up on many of my favorite foodie sites and even crafty sites on the web, I was intrigued.  In my usual fashion, I read a number of recipes and blogposts about it until I felt I had a good handle on a recipe.  Ultimately, I went with this one, because it involved a slow cooker.  Over the years, anything with the word ‘jam’ or ‘jelly’ in it has tended to not quite work out for me.  I’ve scarred some pans, not to mention my ego and quite possibly my family, in making jams that never quite set or that were just completely inedible.  It wasn’t until I read that you can make fruit butters in a slowcooker that I was successful in anything but straight preserving and pickling. (I’ve made apple & peach and am now convinced I can butter anything.)
So, bacon jam.
Good bacon is key, so I called up my friends at Open Gate Farm.  They have a fresh rosemary and Virginia maple syrup cured bacon they smoke themselves that is just beyond words.  Cville peeps, if you like bacon, then you need to get yourself some of this. Tell them I sent you.
 
They sell it in slabs, so you can cut it to the thickness you like. 
I realized I had forgotten to pull my bacon out of the freezer to let it defrost, but I was pleased to discover you can slice it frozen with a serrated knife quite beautifully.
I prefer to cook my bacon on cookie sheets in the oven – you can do a pound or two at one time, without getting grease all over your stovetop and surrounding area.  I love this method.
Slicing the bacon was probably the most difficult part of this whole endeavor.  Once the bacon is cooked, you saute some onions and garlic in the leftover fat, add cider vinegar, dark brown sugar, and coffee.  Don’t question the ingredients, just hold out for the finished sum of their parts.  Dump it in the slow cooker for a few hours until it’s thick.  If you love the smell of bacon, then you will be in heaven for the next few hours. When the liquid is thickened, throw the whole thing in the food processor (Or in my case, the blender) and coarsely chop it.  Voila.
A sweet yet savory, bacony spread for biscuits or whatever you can dream up.  I packed this in 4 oz jelly jars as well, once again, yielding about seven of them.  As it is recommended that any meat product be pressure canned and I am lacking a pressure canner,  I instead chose to freeze the jars so that they will keep for a longer period.  I cannot stress enough how much good bacon is a key ingredient in this. 
I wasn’t done with my good food day yet. We had some leftover oysters from our weekend that I fried up and turned into po-boys for dinner last night.  Edie is not a fan of the oyster and requested my fried tofu version, that is based on a recipe from  Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes.    Normally I fry the tofu in bacon fat (I told you it would come back up!), for an extra rich flavor.  I cube and then bread the tofu as you would anything else you would fry.  Unbeknownst to her, I tossed her tofu in the oyster liquid to moisten it, to help the breading stick.  She liked it so much, she asked if there was any leftovers for her lunch today. (She will like oysters, she will!)
I usually make my own tartar sauce and while I am still experimenting with my recipe, yesterday I added some plain yogurt to the mix, with excellent results. It gave a certain tang to the mix that complimented the oysters beautifully. Here’s a list of what I threw in there:
fresh parsley
sprinkle of dill
small amount of finely chopped onion
a few finely chopped dill pickles
salt
pepper
celery powder
lemon zest
lemon juice
mayo
plain, lowfat yogurt
Stir & refrigerate.  The more it sits, the more the flavors will combine. I somehow never am able to make enough for it to keep on hand for more than a day or two. I’ve heard it keeps for up to a week (or more). 
All in all, it was a good food day around here.  Lots of experimenting, lots of happy results.