MAY 2010

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Pasta and a Rye to make you sigh

It was a gorgeous day. The Olympics may be a disaster just to the north of us, but

the weather down here has been spectacular, whether or not spring is a month or two early...

we took a long walk to the post office in the full sunshine, dropped off our packages and then came home for lunch. Afterwards we did some work around town, stopped in at the library and came home to cook. I've been looking forward to making this.

Dinner was fresh pasta with a sauce of cannelinis, carrots, onion, garlic and kale with some parmesan on top. It was splendid!! Really hit the spot and I love the way the cannellinis give everything a creamy sort of taste. It was also a bread day, which got a little mixed up with the bee class on Tuesday...both starters got an extra day of feeding which meant that we got a day of sourdough pancakes. :-) Anyway, I made rolls with the wheat starter, and made a sponge for a sandwich bread that I'm making today. But I tried some new flavors with the rye and I'm really delighted with the way they turned out. We had a toast party before bed and ended up eating half of one of the loaves!! To the rye I added two tablespoons of anise, some chopped and rehydrated mandarin orange peel I saved from the holiday season, and a couple of cups of raisins. This made an awesome loaf! Really fragrant and it tastes wonderful toasted. I've been having a hankering to make fisherman's bread, which has dried apples, raisins, and anise in it, among a few other things, and this has satisfied my desire. The anise is a really lovely scent. It's kind of new for me to be using it.

At the Re-Store on Tuesday I found just what I've been scouting for...two gallons of dark exterior latex - non toxic. The paint is for the exterior of the bee hives. One gallon is unopened and a very dark red color (I want the dark colors so they will absorb heat - since we're in the north -or at least I think we still are...) and the other is 3/4 full and a kind of aqua greenish color that I'll use to make some patterns on the hives to help the bees orient to the correct hive. We're starting to get pretty excited about the bees, the closer we get, and a little nervous too. Hope we can treat them right and get them well established. It's a tougher job with the advent of Varroa Destructor (who just has a name like a character out of some epic sci fi extravaganza...and is far more lethal it seems. Still and all, the work's gotta be done so we'll try our hands...Off to work in the sun...we've still got tons of work on our restoration job and today we're working on the raspberry patch, which needs about two full beds removed completely (we're inheriting many canes!!)...more later!

Monday, February 15, 2010

Frog Wine and Cream of Broccoli Soup

I mentioned that we did some tadpole sitting for a friend who is the delightful and highly intelligent eight year old daughter of friends in town. Kiki is a pretty cool girl!! Anyway, I have never tadpole sat before, and found it to be a pretty exhilarating experience. :-) Tadpoles are not particularly chatty critters, and these are only just starting to show the very slightest little peek of leggies coming on. They were quite well behaved.

This morning Kiki arrived at the doorstep (well, the sliding glass doorstep) with a bottle of wine in hand. The wine was a surprise but most wondrous of all was the superb drawing of the frog on the bottle. This little drawing is a keeper. I really get a kick and a half out of kids pictures, and this one is going in the save file. He's a very handsomely drawn frog. Who ever knew that a tadpole could be so polite?! Plus, it's exciting to see what these tadpoles will look like when they pass through their entire transformation.
Also in the photo are the fixings for a cream of broccoli soup I made tonight for dinner. I've been craving it, which is odd since I've never once made cream of broccoli soup and can't even recall ever eating it before. I made a vegan rendition of the soup. It was very simple. I started with making a veg stock. I save onion ends, carrot ends, mushroom stalks, etc. in a bag in the freezer so I can make quick stocks any old time. I made a quick stock and baked an acorn squash from Chuck and Itoko's garden while waiting. In the meantime I cut up two big Washington State onions, 6 cloves of one of our last garlics from Maine (Awwwwww), trimmed, peeled and sliced the broccoli stalks I've been saving, and cut up into florets a big bunch of organic broccoli that the co-op had on sale this week. I also cut up one big potato from a friend's garden as well to thicken it. Once the stock was finished, I strained it into a bowl and started sauteeing the onions and garlic. I added the potato once they had turned translucent, tossed in the tater, continued to sautee a bit longer, then added the broccoli stems (not the florets) and the veg stock. From here, I allowed the soup to simmer along till the squash was within ten minutes of being done. At that point I put some chapeau rolls in the oven to warm and put the florets in the soup. They cooked about ten minutes and then I pureed them with the immersion blender (which is a great tool that I'm so happy to be culinarily reunited with!!) Great dinner! The soup turned out wonderfully, and very nice with the good hearty rolls and candy sweet acorn squash. Yummmy!
Tomorrow it's time to go to our fourth beekeeping class!!!!!!! We're taking leftover lasagna for dinner in our little lunch can. :-)

Workbench Work!

Today was a day off for us. We stuck around the house and did our things...we had early-ish visitors, friends Kiki and Itoko. Shawn and I tadpole sat for Kiki last week while she went ice fishing up north. For obvious reasons the tadpoles were unable to make the trek to Northern BC. I wouldn't want to be a tadpole on a fishing trip either. We were brought a thank you bottle of wine complete with the world's most fantastic frog drawing. Photos to come in future installments. Then I did a massive and cathartic cleaning of this disgusting house. It stunk of mildew when we got home last night after a weekend with Shawn's mom. Very annoying. We are ticking off the days till we leave this place. It's not a bad little house, but the mildew stench has been most irritating. Anyway, what fun to do a full vaccuum (no I'm serious, I really loved finally having a whole day to just have at it!!) full mop, scrub all the sinks, toilet and tub, plus we aired the whole place out, taking full advantage of the four opening doors and windows and just throwing the place open to the good fresh air. penny sat for a few hours outside on the porch in her carrier, watching shawn's woodworking project. He is building a bench. This weekend he picked up the vise of his dreams (an Irwin Record made in England and damned hard to find in the US, which makes it even more exciting to him to have found it at a great price!) in Seattle (Happy Birthday!!) and now must finish up his bench building. He was trying to put the legs together using pocket screws, but the attempt failed and he has decided he is ready for more advanced joinery and has scrapped the idea of the pocket screws. Goodbye Kreg. It's been nice knowing you. The clamps are on to put the side pieces on the actual work top. He's been having an amusing time trying to build the workbench without a workbench to work on. :-)