don’t think about it too hard

So you know how I really love slow-made home-cooked beans and think that it’s nice to take your time and make your own stock and your own liqueur and your own salsa and everything?

Well. Sometimes you just want to bring a pile of tasty food together and neither work nor think too hard to do it.

Enter the loaded baked sweet potato.

It’s embarrassing how easy and delicious this meal is. And it’s so good, you can even feed it to company. It’s fun to set out all the little fixins in little dishes. I like setting fixins out in little dishes.

Go buy

• 1 large sweet potato per diner
• your favorite kind of bacon, buying at least 6 slices for two people (general rule: buy as many slices as you think you’ll need and then buy two more)
• an avocado
• sour cream
• fresh salsa–pico de gallo or another refreshing sort found in the refrigerated aisle, if you don’t have something homemade in your fridge (and if you don’t, it’s really easy to make, but that’s something for another blog post)
• cilantro
• chives (it is a baked potato, after all)
• red onion
• corn chips
• cheese of choice for shredding (or, for the ultimate shortcut, shredded cheese)
• a lime
• hot sauce of choice
• 1-2 cans fat free refried beans. CANS. It’s okay. I promise. Nobody else has to know. But we do tend to tell everyone we feed them to–we seem to maintain a full disclosure kitchen policy. Our favorite has become Rosarita Fat Free Traditional. The commercial says they’re authentic, anyway. (Oh man, that commercial is so wrong. Aaaand I can’t stop laughing at it.) This, however, is what happens when you empty the can:

Laugh. And then stick tortilla chips into the bean monolith and enjoy. Don’t think about this one too hard.

Stick the potatoes in the oven and get that bacon cooking using your favorite method fifteen or twenty minutes later. We like to array the bacon on a cooling rack that fits inside a rimmed baking sheet–the fat that doesn’t render becomes airy and light and smoky, somehow, when it’s baked. Putting the bacon on a rack tends to result in quicker cooking times.

For us, the bacon usually takes about 25-30 minutes in a 400 degree oven. The sweet potatoes take more like 45 minutes to an hour. Definitely get those going the minute you get home. Note that you can’t really bake a sweet potato incorrectly, or for too long. Lately, I stab them a few times with a knife to let steam release, rub a thin film of grapeseed/canola/high heat oil on them (half teaspoon each potato, maybe), and lightly dust them with salt. I bake them uncovered in a glass baking dish. But you can also put them un-lubed in any kind of baking dish you have. Or wrap them in tin foil and throw them directly on the oven rack. Or microwave them. Just make sure you stab them first. Especially if you put them in the microwave–otherwise they light on fire.

My dad did this once when I was 5. I saw flames in the microwave and ran to the basement to find him. The smoke alarm hadn’t gone off yet, but there was fire in my house and that was scary, so I chased him down and asked him if I should stop, drop, and roll. I can imagine his take on the conversation: “Whatever for?” Well, Dad, because there’s a pretty blue flame emanating from your potato in the microwave, and Mrs. Lange said to stop, drop, and roll if there was fire on you.

And that is why you always stab your potatoes.

Pretty much everything else is assembly. Heat up the beans. Chop the chives. Cube the avocado. Coarsely chop the bacon. Put things in pretty little bowls if you want, or just stick a spoon in the damn sour cream container.

Topping the potato is fun. I like to put the beans on my potato first, followed by sour cream and chives and cilantro and then salsa and hot sauce and bacon and avocado on top. Jesse likes a small amount of beans directly on his potato and then a lot of beans on the side, with chips.

But you see how this is post is more about an idea than an actual recipe or meal plan? Like, basically, if you know how to make bacon and a potato, you could have just stopped reading when I suggested the concept of the loaded baked sweet potato. Which I’m sure is not something I came up with originally, or first, or whatever.

What this post boils down to, pretty much, is that sweet potatoes stuffed with bacon and things are good, and that it’s okay to eat fat free canned refried beans.

But wait–let me just tell you one more thing. You now probably have a few little containers of leftover fixins. Some extra chopped cilantro, some salsa, some onion, and maybe even some bacon and avocodo… BEST OMELET EVER the next morning.

But don’t just take my word for it. Go to the store.

goodbye dollies

Yesterday was my last day at a particularly wonderful hospital with particularly wonderful people. I left because of the less-than-wonderful commute. I get 6 hours of my life back per week now. I’ll be working at a hospital that I could see from my bedroom window, were there a forest fire.

That’s hyperbole, but just barely.

So I brought in a treat for each of my last three shifts. I have been informed that I really nailed it with the treats I brought in yesterday, so I’m going to tell you about them.

I don’t do a lot of baking–I’m by no means a bad baker, but sometimes I just choose the wrong recipe or sub in the wrong gluten-free flour, and I end up haunted by some funny aftertaste. This time, I wanted there to be no potential for misunderstanding: these treats needed to say “I like you guys and am going to miss you so much that I want to give you diabetes.” So a treat that I could assemble from ingredients that already were delicious on their own was the way to go.

Enter the Hello Dolly.

The song was stuck in my head. That’s why I thought of them. It’s a little ironic. “Dolly will never go away again!” goes the lyric.

JUST KIDDING! DOLLY AIN’T NEVER COMIN’ BACK!

Anyway. The bars. Inspiration came from these two, and then I made them my own a little bit. Here we go:

Goodbye Dollies

Ingredients

• 3 cups coarsely crushed GF cookies–I used a cup of Mi-Del Oreo knockoffs, a cup of Pamela’s Dark Chocolate Chunk cookies, and a cup of homemade gingersnaps that I found in the back of the freezer. Mi-Del gingersnaps would work here, too. Yes, you just spent $15 on GF cookies. I didn’t say this was cheap. Your coworkers are worth it, and you’ll have some left over. It’s your last day. (To crush, I threw whole cookies in a plastic bag and wailed on them with the bottom of a saucepan for a while.)
• 1.25 cups of softened butter (don’t cry)
• 1 12 oz bag chocolate chips
• 1 12 oz bag white chocolate chips (mine was actually 11 ounces and it didn’t matter)
• 3 cups shredded sweetened coconut
• 2 cups coarsely chopped pecans, almonds, peanuts, or other tasty nuts (or a mix!!), roasted–roasted and salted would be AWESOME
• 2 14 oz cans sweetened condensed milk

Instructions

Grease a 9×13 baking pan. Line it with two strips of parchment paper and let the ends hang over the sides. Grease the paper, too. Cooking spray is fine for this. Preheat the oven to 350.

Mix the crushed cookies with the softened butter in a large bowl. Spread this mixture on the bottom of the baking pan–it’s your base layer. Cover every square millimeter or you’ll have a hell of a time getting these off the parchment.

Next, throw down all the chocolate chips. Then the white chocolate chips. Then the coconut. Then the nuts.

THEN, POUR BOTH CANS OF SWEETENED CONDENSED MILK EVENLY ALL OVER THE TOP.

Pop the pan into the oven for 25 minutes, or until the sweetened condensed milk is bubbling and caramelizing all over. While you’re waiting, score yourself some insulin.

Here’s the hard part: bring the pan out of the oven and let the whole mess cool COMPLETELY. Trying to cut this slab into bars before it’s completely cool will result in molten ooze and the stickiest mess you can imagine. After the mass had mostly cooled, Jesse helped me pull it out of the pan using the parchment paper overhangs and placed the beast on a cooling rack, which I managed to fit into the refrigerator. After 45 minutes or so, the mega-bar had cooled enough that we could cut into it just enough to test a corner, but it still wasn’t cool enough to cut into squares. I left it in the fridge overnight and by morning, it was ready.

I cut the treats into squares and replaced the whole mess (minus several for Jesse) into the pan. Discussing it with my coworkers later, I realized that this is technically a “no-sugar-added” dessert. Very wholesome.

As for my last day? It was pretty sweet, too. Everyone was very, very nice to me. I had relatively stable patients. Nothing terrible happened. I had time to say goodbye. I have lots and lots of gratitude.

It’ll take a while to sink in. Change always does, for me.

I might need to make another batch.

when life gives you lemons, go buy a shitload of everclear

My mother-in-law knows how to party.

She keeps the wine glasses full and the cheese plate brimming. She is generous with her warmth, her conversation, her home-grown tomatoes in summer and rosemary in winter.

Cheryl’s birthday is in late January, and by some miracle of grace I managed to consider this fact back in early December when we were also trying to concoct a Christmas present for her. Now, everyone but Cheryl will tell you that she’s hard to buy for. “I’m easy!” she says. “I like everything!”

Right. Exactly.

We had just been over to the in-laws’ for dinner. Cheryl followed the meal with a moderate offering of her favorite liqueur (and possibly her favorite liquid), limoncello. Cheryl tells the story of her first encounter with the stuff: following a sumptuous meal in Italy, the server brought over little tiny glasses of an icy cold, screaming yellow drink. “We didn’t order this,” she and my pa-in-law humbly protested. “It’s included with the meal,” explained the server. And she took a sip and her socks blasted off her feet through the front of her shoes. She was in love–silly girly “Call Me Maybe” love.

So I decided to see if I could make some for her. I’m glad I started looking into this back in December because while it’s easy as pie to make at home, it does take about 5-6 weeks.

First, go buy 18 organic lemons. Or a lot of them. If they’re huge, buy 14. If they’re tiny, buy more. If I were really helpful, I’d be able to tell you how many pounds of lemons to buy but I just can’t. And I’m starting to think it’s not that important, because it doesn’t really seem like you can have too many lemons, only too few. What about Meyer lemons, you may ask? You can go that route, but be ready for some extra headache when peeling them because their skins are much thinner than their conventional counterparts. I went with your average organic lemon and have no regrets.

Now go to the liquor store and ask for 2 750 ml bottles of Everclear. You have to ask for it: envision innocent little me walking into a liquor store and looking around for a while, walking up to the counter with a perplexed look on my face when I couldn’t seem to find this iconic alcohol. See me ask the bleach-blonde clerk where they kept their Everclear. Imagine her wrist-flick-hair-toss and her “Ohmygod. We keep that stuff back here, sweetheart.”

Some people do this with vodka (Giada de Laurentiis, I’m looking at you), but we don’t screw around.

Wash your lemons. Now, with a sharp paring knife and a lot of patience, you need to peel them all. Carefully. You want to avoid the white part of the peel (the pith) entirely; you ONLY want the bright yellow stuff that in other applications is zested. The pith is bitter. We don’t want a pithy limoncello. 

I did all my lemons in one go, but I imagine you could take your time and stick the lot in the fridge for a while if your hand cramps up. (Your fridge would smell great.) I brought out my mandoline slicer, put the blade at a very thin setting, and managed to speed up my process. By the 18th lemon I was getting so good at it that I was pulling off the zest in one long zest-slinky.

Stuff your peels into one half-gallon Mason jar (you’ll ultimately need two of these for this recipe)–you can find these at your local hardware or grocery store with a canning section. You could use pretty much any glass container with a well-sealing lid. Pour in both bottles of Everclear, cap tightly, and shake. Stick this gorgeous jar out of sight in a cool dark place. Back of the pantry worked for me. Back of a cupboard away from the stove would work, too.

Now you have 18 naked lemons. Give your poor lemony hands a break and then juice your fruit. Put the juice in freezer bags or ice cube trays and stick them in the freezer. Feel smug about the immense quantity of high-quality lemon juice you now have at the ready for numerous sweet and savory flavor-boosting applications.

Every day or two for the next 2-3 weeks, say hello to your jar of limoncello-to-be. Pick it up lovingly and then shake the hell out of it.

After the appropriate time has elapsed, bring out the jar. Measure out 6 cups of white granulated sugar (no fancy turbinado or coconut palm shit for this application). Pour 5.5 cups water into a large saucepan and bring it up a to a boil. Slowly pour in the sugar, stirring with a whisk as you go to encourage the sugar to dissolve. Once it’s dissolved, remove the saucepan from the heat, cover, and allow it to cool to room temperature.

If your saucepan is big enough to accommodate your simple syrup and all the liquid from your Mason jar, great: set a strainer over your saucepan and dump the contents of the Mason jar into it. Let the peels drip drip drip and then set them aside–well, really, you’re going to be discarding them, but first you should have the opportunity to marvel at their neon yellow color and dessicated near-crystalline crispiness.

Also, how cool is it that you started out with two thin clear liquids and you ended up with a thick opaque one?!

Okay. Stir your limoncello and pour it into your two big Mason jars. Pop these back into their safe dark cool place for another 3 weeks and agitate the jars every day or so.

When your time is up, bring out the limoncello and pour it into pretty glass bottles with a rubber seal.

Store the limoncello in the freezer (the alcohol content is far too high for this stuff to even consider freezing) and serve it icy cold and often–straight, or in your margarita, or a dash in your champagne, or on your vanilla ice cream.

This recipe made enough for me to give Cheryl about two thirds (maybe even three quarters) of a gallon of limoncello. This may be my favorite gift-giving experience to date. I gave Cheryl her limoncello at her birthday dinner, out at an incredibly accommodating restaurant in NW. Can I tell you? I don’t want the manager to get in trouble, because when I asked him if I could whip it out so she could taste it–an unorthodox request to begin with–he dragged me over to the bar to let me choose which of their 6 different kinds of glasses would be best.

(The restaurant was Southland Whiskey Kitchen, and it’s exactly what Portland has needed since we got here. Amazing.) He gave us glasses for everyone, with one of their giant fancy ice cubes in each since the limoncello had been sitting out at room temp for a while.

So what did Cheryl think? Her face says it all.

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welcome home chili beans

I’m going to tell you about a special pot of beans.

First, the occasion: my mother and stepfather have moved here. Let’s try that again: MY MOTHER AND STEPFATHER HAVE MOVED HERE. They’re living in an apartment not 15 minutes from my house. This is the first time I have ever lived in the same city with my loving, thoughtful, dangerously witty fisherman stepfather, and it’s the first time in over 10 years that I’ve lived in the same city with my inspiring, intuitive mother (who, for the record, usually manages to out-fish my stepdad). So last Friday, we had a small family gathering to celebrate their arrival. We had some champagne to drink. Hence, I had a pot of beans to assemble.

A pot of beans, though? How do you elevate a pot of beans to something worthy of such an auspicious occasion? You take your time, tasting as you go, and you enjoy the process. And why choose beans when the bounty of the Pacific Northwest is available at the seafood shop just across the bridge? Because in our world, beans are a true comfort food. They’re all about coming home. And because my mom said, “Just throw something in a pot. One pot. Keep it simple.”

Welcome Home Chili Beans

Serves 6 big eaters with leftovers for a nice lunch or two.

Takes about 4 hours if you’re making your own stock and doing everything the day of serving. 3 hours if you’re an efficient multitasker for a living, like me. You could probably do this in the span of 1.5 hours if you’re using canned beans, boxed stock, and like to feel rushed. OR, if you roast your squash and garlic and make your Umami Bomb and Chile Stock a day ahead, and your beans are soft and ready, shit–this could take you like 45 minutes total. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure cooking experience.

Here’s what you need:

• 1 2.5 pound butternut squash (or an equal quantity of sweet potatoes), peeled and cut into 0.5-0.75″ cubes
• 3-4 slices of uncured bacon
• 2 large carrots, diced
• 3 stalks celery, diced
• 1 large sweet onion, diced
• 1.5 pounds of dry black beans, soaked overnight/forever until soft OR like three or four cans of black beans with some of the liquid reserved (OR, if you’re like me and find that soaking dry black beans overnight does next to nothing, pop 1.5 lbs dry black beans in a pressure cooker with water to cover by several inches and cook on high for 22 minutes, using natural release method to liberate your beans)
• The strays in your fridge/counter. Mine yielded 2 small leeks, a little red potato, and 1.5 cups of mildly seasoned cooked chicken breast. I’d totally use the chicken again in another iteration.
• a couple bay leaves
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1-2 tablespoons chili powder–Now, if you have some nice powdered ancho chile, use it. If you have the crap from the spice aisle with the green lid that just says “chili powder,” use it. You don’t have to be a chili powder snob here. You’re already using dried chiles in this recipe so you’ve got some some cred. And just note that each powder has its own potency. You’ll have to add this one to taste, and that’s okay. Each pot of beans is a unique snowflake.
• Lots of stock.Well, probably at least 4-6 cups depending upon how thick or thin you want your beany goodness. You want a good quality low-sodium chicken broth in a box or better yet, a chicken or veggie broth you’ve made yourself at home. I used something I’m going to call my Odds and Ends Chile Stock… scroll on down to the notes below to see how I usually do it. I’m probably not giving it enough credit for the deliciousness of this pot of beans.
• 1 recipe Pot Bean Umami Bomb, below
• salt
• pepper
• mild vegetable oil–olive, canola, or grapeseed

Okay. Take heart. This is not a difficult recipe by any means, but it does require a little time and assembly. First, preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Now is a good time to get the stock going on the stovetop as outlined below, if you’re going that route. Toss the cubed butternut squash in 1-2 tablespoons of oil and prepare a head of garlic for roasting as well.  Pop these into the oven and let them go for 30-45 minutes, checking in occasionally to ensure that your squash is not burning. When the squash is cooked to your liking (I like mine just shy of burnt), pull everything out of the oven and set aside. And try not to eat all the squash while you do everything else.

While your stock is finishing up, dice your carrots, celery, and onion (and save those ends for more stock!). Finally, slice your bacon into strips widthwise. If you’re like me and want to use the same pot for the stock and the beans (mom said to use just one), finish your stock and pour it elsewhere to get your pot back. Heat the pot on medium high heat. Add the bacon. Cook until it reaches your desired level of crispness. If your bacon has put off more than a tablespoon or two of fat, spoon some of it out into the jar of bacon fat you keep in your fridge. (I’m just assuming you have one by now). Add the onion, celery, and carrots and saute until the onions are starting to turn translucent and the carrots are beginning to soften. Now, add the chili powder, coriander, cumin, bay leaves, and a teaspoon or two of salt. Continue to saute as the spices get aromatic and coat the sweaty vegetables. If you’re doing cubed chicken, add it here, along with any other fridge strays. Then add your beans and mix everything up. Slowly add stock while stirring so you can see exactly how thin you’re making your chili. I probably used about 4 cups of broth and a cup of pot liquor (the thick inky liquid left over from cooking my beans). If your beans weren’t quite soft enough, simmer this mess until they’re to your liking.

Once your beans are soft enough BUT NOT BEFORE, dump in your Umami Bomb and add salt to taste. A squirt of lemon juice at this point is a nice touch, too. The thing is, if you add acids like tomatoes and lemon juice before your beans are soft, they’ll be a bitch to soften.

Let everything simmer and mingle for a while. Half an hour. However long it takes to get your in-laws and parents wrangled around the table with drinks in their hands. Taste for salt and add if you need to. Set out an array of fixins. Mine included:

• rough-chopped cilantro leaves
• sour cream
• diced raw red onion
• shredded cheddar
• lime wedges
• broken corn chips–oh man, we had a random bag of Fritos hanging around. Heaven.

Avocado would be great here, too. Damn. Now that I type that, I realize I should have had it. Just gonna have to do this again.

I set the pot in the middle of the table–the big, functional, less-than-gorgeous pot– along with my biggest measuring cup to use as a ladle, since I find that our ladle is tiny and I’d rather not have to scoop fifteen times to get the serving I want. Whatever. It wasn’t about the pot, or the measuring cup.

I do not have a pretty food blog-y picture of the finished product. I was too busy with the champagne and the broken chips and the warm fuzzies. My mom and stepdad, my mother- and father-in-law, Jesse, and me: the six of us fit snugly around our table. But before we sat down, while the beans finished, we traveled as a cluster from living room to kitchen to dining room. We just wanted to be near each other, sharing stories of cross-country road trips, of sketchy motels in Wyoming, of leaving the Midwest.

~~~

Odds and Ends Chile Stock

Ingredients

• 2-4 ounces whole dried chiles–New Mexico, guajillo, or ancho are good choices. Anchos are my favorites for their sweetness and quiet smokiness. You can find these at lots of upscale grocery stores–Whole Foods, I’ m looking at you–but you’ll find them cheapest at your local, well, cheapest grocery store. Rainbow, Festival… I got this bag for $3.99 at the Albertson’s down the road. And I live in a 90% white suburb. If you’re in Minneapolis, there’s a Rainbow on (East) Lake that I’m really missing for shit like this.

• 1-2 gallon freezer bags full of discarded vegetable ends. The bruised top layers of onions. The butt ends of carrots and celery and squash. Cloves of garlic that were so tiny they were impossible to chop without causing homicidal rage. Kale spines, cilantro stems. If you’re not saving these bits already, it won’t take you very long to fill up a bag. Keep it in your freezer. If you’re not saving ends and want to make your own veggie stock, break up a couple large carrots and two stalks of celery, and quarter three or four large onions.
• a couple bay leaves
• 6-10 whole peppercorns
• rind of a hard cheese, like parmigiano reggiano (optional, but it adds an incredible layer of oomph to your stock)

Heat a very large (6 quart or more) pot over medium high heat. Remove and discard the stems, veins, and seeds from the chiles. Drop them in the hot pot and let them soften and release their aroma, but don’t let them burn. Give them 3-5 minutes, moving them around to prevent outright searing.

Next, plop in your veggies. They can come straight out of the freezer. Fill your pot with enough water to submerge all the solids. Throw in your bay leaves, peppercorns, and cheese rind if using. Raise the heat to a very bare boil and then immediately turn it down to a low simmer–so low that you see a bubble rise to the surface every second or two. Walk away for at least an hour. When I made mine last week, I think I let it go for two hours. You can’t really overdo it.

Once your stock has simmered long enough, it’s time to remove the solids. Try to save the chiles; the rest is great for a compost pile. The chiles will sort of look like slimy roasted red peppers. Reserve them for the Umami Bomb we’ll talk about next. Don’t waste your time or your cheesecloth straining the stock further to clarify it. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Pour finished stock into freezer bags and, if you’re up for it, label the bags with the dates/what kind of veggies you used, especially if you had some pungent ones in there. Stock made of brussels sprouts leaves might not work in all applications, for instance. The stock can be stored in the freezer for a very long time.

Pot Bean Umami Bomb

This little concoction is something that will add a nuanced layer to any pot of beans or chili you’re putting together. Umami is the savory meaty flavor of glutamates and nucleotides that is so often the missing element when you taste a dish and find it lacking “something.” Crescent Dragonwagon seems to use this technique a lot in her delightful cookbook Bean by Bean: to ensure a nice round flavor, she mixes up a cup or two of some umami-rich ingredients and adds it to the main pot towards the end. Kind of feels like cheating, but hey. Here’s my version, and it requires:

• the spent chiles that you reserved from your spent stock veggies (or 2-4 ounces of chiles you heated on the stovetop and then steeped in 1 cup of boiling water–chile tea!)
• 1 can tomatoes (diced/crushed/whole makes no matter; fire-roasted is great, if you have it)
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste
• half a teaspoon of fish sauce
• 1 head roasted garlic (make it this way and you’ll feel very clever)
• a tablespoon or two of tamari/gluten-free soy sauce

Blend all of the above in a food processor/blender until smooth, and keep it at the  ready.

shifting focus

My favorite yoga teacher encourages us to remain steadfast in challenging asana, to shift the focus from what we can’t do to what we can do.

That’s what I’m trying to do with my gardening. Focus on what I can grow. Lettuce in the rail planter boxes yielded one big salad for Jesse and I, and has not made an effort to re-leaf. The greens in the backyard withered within two weeks. The tomatoes in the back have grown and are sprouting fruit… but I remember last November pulling a pound or more of green tomatoes that never ripened off the vines the previous homeowners had planted. I think it’s just not sunny enough back there.

But! Look at Cuban oregano.

Check out Thai basil. I grew him from seed. (Oh man, I gotta start thinning him.)

This little early jalapeno plant is going great guns on the front walk in the sun.

Even the herbs in the back are happy. So happy, the oregano ended up going to seed faster than I could use it.

As Jesse reminds me, we don’t need to grow our own. In fact, a green-minded homeowner’s best efforts should likely be focused on regular attendance of a farmers market to support local foodsystems than on a less-than-sustainable homegrowing practice.

Unless it’s FUN.

And peeps? I’m thinking not so much. The herbs have been fun for me. The peppers in the sun are pretty great. Tomatoes out in the sunny front yard would be pretty cool too. But the radishes, the lettuce, the beets, even the carrots have me anxious and for some reason I’ve attached a fair amount of my worth as a domestic onto their success.

So guess what? I’m not gonna do it again next year! I’m gonna focus on what I can grow, and what’s fun. Because really, I’m privileged to say that where I’m coming from, that’s the point.

hosta worship

I’ve never quite understood the appeal of the hosta. It’s a big leafy green thing that just sits there. You can’t eat it, and it doesn’t produce colorful flowers. For the longest time, I thought of the hosta as dull landscape filler.

My dad, on the other hand, is a hosta devotee. A few years ago, I called him on a Saturday late in fall. He answered the phone with a very reverent, dreamy quality to his voice. I immediately became suspicious and asked him what he had been up to. He proceeded to explain that as the first frost was nearly upon his central Wisconsin garden, he had just come inside after cutting leaves from each of his numerous hosta plants and was in the process of placing every single one in its own pretty stoneware bowl throughout the house. So that he could worship the leaves just a little longer. Because he loves hostas so much.

I know, Scout. I know.

Anyway. I’m here to say that perhaps I too am becoming a hosta-worshipper. Here’s my story.

Back in March, I bought a low-maintenance, no-turn compost bin at Metro–the big Enviroworld thing you see there. Our yard is small and I was concerned it would be a dominating presence (and not in a good way), but there appeared to be an empty spot along our south fence between a couple larger bushes. I grabbed a shovel and jumped on it a few times to make sure I wouldn’t be covering anything up. I encountered no root structures, and there was no surface evidence to suggest that anything had ever grown or been planted there.

So there it went.

Towards the end of May, Jesse was in the yard mowing grass and noticed a leaf sticking out from underneath the bin. Ever curious, he investigated–and found this sad (and probably angry) specimen beneath:

FORGIVE ME HOSTA! I BESEECH YOU! I checked. I checked! With a shovel! There he sat, all white and slimy, with a few leaves poking out from underneath the bin shouldering the entire photosynthetic effort for that big plant. The compost bin was immediately relocated (thank heavens it had a bottom panel) and within just two weeks,

I was forgiven! I even made an offering of Sluggo to him, sprinkling the organic molluscicide at his hosta-feet, and now his leaves need not fear becoming slug lunch.

I’ve seen the light, as it pertains to the hosta. These resilient plants can stay, and it seems that they wouldn’t care if I said they couldn’t.

These days, I’m filled with the hosta spirit.

and we’re rolling

While the rest of the country burns, either literally or figuratively, we have glory.

LOOK AT THAT WEATHER.

I have responded by actually relaxing a little bit (don’t laugh) and regrouping for another garden experiment. In my last post I expounded upon all the reasons why nothing has grown in the back yard, and why things may grow in the front. I have done the research, imagined an intervention (or fifteen), and am ready to implement.

So, in the back planter boxes: it’s all a game, baby. Trial and error. This playful iteration will involve the following adorable little plants that Portland Nursery gave me in exchange for 9 bucks: Bright Lights rainbow chard, Flashy Troutback romaine (how could I not?!), Joi Choi bok choy, and Gourmet Mix lettuce. These puppies are going in the heretofore  fallow raised beds in the back, and we’ll just see. They’re happy and robust and have a lot of potential energy built up in those little bodies. If they don’t make it, well, that’ll speak volumes about my soil. Or something.

In the front: rail planter boxes! On the front porch rail! I’m going to hold off on details in the hopes that we’ll get the first-hand account of their installation from a very special guest blogger.

In the meantime, I also grabbed some big (16″ and 20″)  fake terra cotta pots and plopped them in front of the steps up to our porch.  These containers are sitting in full-ass sun for most of the day. I transplanted one of the pepper plants from the back beds into the 16-incher as a very unscientific experiment. My hypothesis: this potted pepper in the front will go bananas, and the guy sitting in the back yard will remain all runty. Nevermind that they’re two different pepper varieties (padron in the back, jalapeno in the front), are in two different kinds of soil (Miracle Gro Organic Choice outdoor potting soil in the front, endogenous dirt and Black Forest Soil Amending Compost in the back), and that one is in a pot and the other isn’t. Anyway. I also put some of that Organic Choice crap in a big pot and went nuts with carrot seeds. And LOOK!!!!!

CARROT SPROUTS!!!!

I felt a lovely cool breeze of relief when I peeked into that pot this morning and found those guys standing at attention. Like, I almost cried. I put them in that pot 15 days ago and have had a little worry in the back of my mind about them ever since. I’m not sure why this whole gardening thing tickles my anxiety, or propels me towards globalizing–as our dear android Data would say, “making an unwarranted extrapolation” from one minuscule ‘failure’ in the garden to the broader landscape of my life and choices. I have ‘failure’ in quotes because this is a fucking experiment, and in research, results which do not confirm your initial hypothesis ARE STILL IMPORTANT AS HELL and worthy of report.

So here we are.

I’ve got posts coming up on the rail planter experiments in the front, the amazing food we ate and fun times we had when Rachel and Tracy came to visit, and how hostas will outlive the nuclear armageddon and maybe even the zombie apocalypse.

Expect more semicolon overuse and rampant run-on sentences.

garden bitch

I did everything right, I think, and nothing grew.

Remember this post? Well, take a look at that to-do list. I did it. I did it GOOD. I had to wait until the end of April to do it all, thanks to our record-breaking rains in March, but I did it. I planted my seeds according to Mel Bartholomew‘s directions after prepping my soil according to Steve Solomon and Portland Nursery‘s suggestions. May rains and I watered them in. It was cool, but according to my books, warm enough.

And nothing grew. Even the weeds haven’t been particularly enthusiastic.

I bought two tomato plants and two pepper plants at the Oregon City Farmer’s Market to ease the pain. They’ve begun to show flowers, but even they haven’t been particularly enthusiastic about being here. They haven’t grown much. And I’m seeing pictures from friends back in MN who have actual little green tomatoes popping on their similarly-early-varietal vines. What gives?

I have a few theories, but that’s just what they are–theories. I haven’t knowledge enough to definitively say YES, THIS was my PROBLEM, and NO, it WON’T HAPPEN AGAIN if I do x, y, and z. This is uncomfortable. I find myself in yet another face-off with uncertainty. Please, post in the comments if you have earthy wisdom to share.

In the meantime, here’s what I think. I think that I’ve only been in this house since November, when the trees were lean and it seemed like these raised beds would get sun. Well, the trees in my north neighbor’s yard are filling out and reaching over a little to shade my beds. My east neighbor’s trees are doing the same. And my own trees to the south of these beds are fattening up, too, leading to a mostly shady back yard. Oops. Seems like a no-brainer, but I didn’t see it back in December. The trees that were sparse in December will fill out and provide a canopy in June.

The tree-shade is one thing. How about the shrub-shade? The raised beds are dotted with large shrubs. Larger now that the weather’s warmed and the sun peeks out more frequently. Jesse insists, rightly of course, that we are the boss of them and can prune them down or take them out entirely. Removing them feels inherently wrong to me, somehow; they’re so mature and round, and I like round things. We’ve pruned and trimmed, but I wonder if their large roots are sucking up all the goodness I mixed into the existing soil. And they do cast shadows. And even if we did nix them, that would still leave the problem of the shady trees.

I’m not so sure about my seed-planting technique, either. The square-foot method of planting involved placing no more than 2 seeds in a spot; this seems to leave no margin for error. I trust Mel here, but have you ever seen a carrot seed? Tiny! The size of a comma on this page, maybe. I’m second-guessing.

And finally, drainage. These beds are made of cinder blocks and bricks that are mortared together. We’re talking minimal drainage. And since we’re on a south-sloping hill, any runoff from my north neighbor’s backyard collects in the beds and stays. Practically up until June, this soil has been cool and damp despite the warmer weather.

Hm. Perhaps this was not the best place to plant sun-loving veggies after all. Kale, you’re up.

This leaves me hunting for sun on our property. It seems most reliable, actually, in our south-facing and south-sloping front yard. In fact, it seems most reliable right off the front porch. I’m thinking rail planters. And a big giant pot of carrots. This isn’t quite scientific–instead of changing one variable and observing for a different outcome, I might CHANGE ALL THE VARIABLES and see what happens.

There’s something cheeky about the idea of having heirloom beet leaves, rather than impatiens and violas, peeking out over my suburban front porch rail.

Stay tuned.

this could get dangerous.

Yesterday, I made a grocery list. Then I went out into the world to get acupuncture for the first time ever (figured it was my duty, as I’m starting massage school in about a week). Then after that I sat down in my car and looked at my list and saw “nut butter” scrawled at the bottom. And I was feeling all creative and open and shit after the acupuncturist pulled tiny needles out of my feet and I thought, “I could just make my own.”

So I went to Bob’s Red Mill and hit the bulk section and picked up roasted Oregon hazelnuts and whole raw almonds and dry roasted cashews with salt and some flax seeds. I didn’t measure the quantities. I was feeling too free. I already threw away the receipt, but I remember looking at the total and feeling clever that the cost of ingredients was about the same as a jar of the stuff at the store, but would make a larger quantity. Here’s a before picture:

So I plugged in my VitaMix (I could have used my food processor, I think, but I feel like using the VitaMix gives me more crunchy hippie cred) and whirred the flax seeds around on high for 30 seconds. I don’t know this for sure, but it seems like somehow busting open the seeds would make their healthy goodness easier to absorb. People eat flax seed meal for the omega 3s and fiber, right?

Anyway, then I poured the rest of the nuts in there, turned the machine on, turned the speed up to 10, and then flipped the switch on the far left to HIGH and pushed the mixed nutty goodness around with the tamper to make sure they all made friends with the blades at the bottom. And then the machine made the sound of a jet engine backfiring and the cats jumped off the couch and ran upstairs and I was afraid I was destroying this lovely and expensive Christmas present from my man and then all of a sudden it looked like nut butter. I turned everything off and tasted a spoonful. It was warm from the friction of the blades and the power of the VitaMix. Thicker than store-bought natural nut butters, and not as oily. Not as salty, either, but that’s actually OK. The cashews lend a mild creaminess to the mix, and the hazelnuts add a lovely roasty sweet flavor. It’s truly almond butter, though, which is good because that means I won’t eat it all in one sitting.

I used to buy peanut butter. I don’t believe in completely eliminating certain foods from my diet (BWAHAHA except gluten)–I think that can be a slippery slope towards disordered eating in this culture. But I really can’t keep peanut butter in the house anymore. I used to buy the Whole Foods brand natural creamy peanut butter. I would kill a jar in, like, three days. This started to get to a ridiculous place. I remember walking to Whole Foods from the Veggie Co-op when the roads were too nasty to drive my little Chevy Metro there. I just checked: that was a mile. I would walk a mile in the snow/ice/wintry mix to get my damn peanut butter. It was probably below freezing, too. And then I would walk back. The Co-op bought giant 5-gallon tubs of some other (often crunchy) peanut butter, but it wasn’t the same.

And now I have the power to make my own. At home. As long as I can refrain from buying peanuts next time, we’re safe.

I can still write a blog post if I have no idea what I’m doing.

The title says it all. Or, at least, quite a bit.

what the hell is this?

Since moving into our lovely lovely home, I’ve had to work a bit to change my mindset on my living space. In the past, it’s been apartments or stepping stones–you move in, you think “I better get this shit up on the walls and enjoy it before I move out in 6 (8, 11, 12, 20) months.”  And, significantly, you often don’t have any of your own dirt.

Dirt in the ground, I mean. Containers be damned. I kill things in containers.

We moved in November and have a smattering of things up on the walls. Every few weekends Jesse will get a burst of ambition and hang things or reconnoiter the office (or the closet, or the garage–bless him). Every few weekends I’ll get a burst of inspiration–or is it indignation?–and say EFF IT and paint the living room purple (“plum swirl”, actually) or the half bath a crazy mango and Caribbean blue. Or start a garden.

Woah there. Like I said, I’ve never had my own dirt. Like, in the ground. I remember the MULCH garden back at Mac, where I never helped out or had time or interest in learning anything from my green-thumbed neighbors. I succumbed to my  (false) perception of futility of growing things in Minnesota. Whatever. I’d like to think I’d have changed and would be doing the same thing if we’d stayed in Minneapolis, despite the relatively infinitesimal growing season.

That said, the Northwest has its own set of challenges too. We had sun and 50 degree weather a week and a half ago–couldn’t imagine another frost–and on Tuesday it snowed a few inches. It’s been raining for the last couple days, and turning over our clay soil while it’s this wet would make for a raised bed full of bricks. I learned this stuff from the good people at Portland Nursery on Division, who don’t care that I know nothing and was in fact a garden cynic a few years ago. I did my own research, too, and picked up Square Foot Gardening and Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades at the Powell’s Books for Home and Garden store on Hawthorne.

The Portland Nursery people seemed pleased that I’d picked those two to be my main guides after a brief and caffeinated Internet search for help. I like these books–if you can get past both authors’ “my way is better than any other way and let me tell you why a million times before I tell you how to fucking do it” tones, you actually will encounter a wealth of valuable instruction. I’m relying on it.

Well. So far, I’ve:

• pulled back the leaf cover over the raised beds we have against our south-facing fence in the back yard
• transplanted a giant fern because I own this place and put my ferns wherever I damn well please
• lay down 1 bale of Black Forest Soil Amending Compost to help break up the clay and improve the soil’s nutrients

• bought and assembled a compost bin (that Enviro World guy–perfect for our smaller space, my lack of motivation for turning the pile, and because we don’t need 15 cubic feet of amazing compost every 2 weeks)
• bought seeds and started planning my little square foot plots (I plan on picking up tomato, pepper, and lavender plants at the OC Farmer’s Market when it comes time)

To do, still:

• lay another bale of compost when the rain lets up enough for me to go outside without melting
• turn the compost under when it’s been dry enough
• pick up large garden labels and nylon cord or string to keep myself honest about how big a square foot really is
• …and, according to the Almanac‘s projected date of last frost, start planting in about a week!

Apparently, keeping soil healthy is a year-round task. We’re jumping into the cycle now, but not entirely from scratch–it’s clear that the previous owners cared about their dirt, at least a bit. The Portland Nursery info chick started waxing poetic about overwinter crops and I went cross-eyed. One step at a damn time. I’m under no illusions that I’m, like, a new hipster homesteader or anything.

But I do have some bitchin’ Carhartt overalls in my dresser.