Costume Party - Part I

I threw a costume party last night solely to create an excuse to make and wear a Regency-era gown.  I've had the pattern for months and have been dying for a reason to sew it.  As usual, I left it until the last minute, which means I was sewing yesterday morning when I really should have been cooking, but it was actually fairly easy and came out looking fantastic!

The not-completely-finished bodice.

The bodice and skirt, still a little rough around the edges.

Posing with my friend Jeff, who was kind enough to wear a cravat, my favorite form of neckerchief.

Fluffy Focaccia

I love really fluffy focaccia, but I don't make it very often because it's not great for you.  When you make and eat as much bread as I do, this is a major consideration!  Last night I whipped up a loaf of the fluffiest focaccia ever for my friend Becca's visit.  The trick - as always - was to let it rise for over an hour in the pan, allowing the whole thing to double in size before I baked it.  (Most recipes claim that this only takes half an hour, but I don't believe it.)  We ate it warm out of the oven, and it practically melted in our mouths!

New Project - Rolling Raised Beds

I love gardening but don't have a huge yard.  Actually, my "yard" is the flowerbed area on each side of my huge, pointless driveway.  For the past six years, my duplex neighbors and I have gardened every inch of arable (and not-so-arable) land on our postage stamp property.  If I owned the property, I would dig up the driveway and turn the whole front of the house into a garden.  Le sigh.

To our credit, we have tried to overcome our planting space deficiency - and beautify the unused driveway - by putting out planters.  Then, a couple of years ago, my neighbor's sister built a beautiful "raised bed" on casters.  It's a little smaller than your typical 4' x 4', because it has to be light enough to wheel around the driveway if necessary:

This sad little picture was taken just after we sowed our seeds this year.  In the late spring and summer, this box is bursting with produce!  This box measures approximately 2' x 2' x 4', which I calculated holds over 1000 lbs. of topsoil, but it's still relatively easy to maneuver on the casters, if you put your back into it.  I was planning to make one or two boxes measuring 2' x 2' x 3'.  I've heard that it's best to use cedar, which is more rot-resistant than other woods, and, of course, I need untreated wood.  I priced it at Home Depot at about $80.00 for one bed - for the lumber, screws, and casters - although I'm guessing that one of the building supply recycling centers could sell me the materials for less.

In depressing news, I also learned that I could buy a 20'' x 10'' x 24'' rolling raised bed made of plastic from Home Depot for $20.00.  Leaving aside the fact that the plastic will break down over time and leach into the soil, and that it may simply crack under the weight of the soil, I find this disheartening because it undermines my belief that I can save money and make a better product by building it myself.

To leave you on a happy note, here's an idea of what my happy and delicious garden will look like in a few months:

 

 

 

Crazy huge lettuce . . .

 

 

Lovely, sweet peas in the pod

WTF, Hail?

March weather in Portland can be chancy, but I'm an eternal optimist.  I planted seeds directly in the soil a few weeks ago, after a rash of sunshine, secure in the knowledge that hardy spring greens can germinate under pretty much any conditions.  Apparently, those conditions don't include heavy rain for part of every day that waterlogged the soil.  I say the same thing every April, though, and eventually some of my seedlings come up weeks after I was expecting them and I have to reseed a few of the rows.  That's just part of a gardener's life.  One thing that I haven't accepted as part of a gardener's life is random, heavy hail.  It's just appalling.  I'm out checking on my shoots on a sunny day, trying to assess damage, and the hail starts coming down on me!  It hails for five or ten minutes and then lets up, and the sun returns.  I know it's not going to kill my little seedlings, or my daffodils and hyacinth that have been foolishly blooming since February.  I just don't like it.  And I'm pretty sure it killed the crocuses.

Hankering for Indian Food

I love baking, and I love bread.  And it's quite possible that I could live on bread, cheese, wine, and whatever fruit happened to be in season for the rest of my life.  But, when it comes time to eat actual dinner and (gasp!) vegetables, I prefer the flavorful and exotic.  At the moment, after reading a few books set in India, I am obsessed with the idea of the delicious, easy Indian meal.  So far, I haven't found it, except at the amazing Bombay Cricket Club in southeast Portland.  But trying to cook decent Indian food in my kitchen - especially trying to cook India food without spending the whole day in the kitchen - is a lot harder than I expected.

My recipe for dal is hit-or-miss and kind of bland.  Its saving grace is that it only requires about six ingredients, all of which are found in most kitchen cabinets, and that it keeps well and tastes better with age.  It's a fast and easy recipe if your taste buds don't mind being a little big bored the first two days.  I boil red lentils with onions, garlic, turmeric, cumin, and ginger, and I saute another batch of onions and garlic, then I mix them together and add salt and pepper.  If I happen to have cilantro, I garnish with that, which adds some needed flavor. 

Some of my other forays into making Indian food have been more successful, but also much more time-consuming.  Last week, I invited a few friends over for dinner, planning to make a curry dish with paneer and peas.  I had read in Indian Vegetarian Cooking that making my own paneer was an easy and more authentic alternative to buying expensive paneer in the store.  I'm not sure why I, who have never been to India or eaten anything I could be sure was "authentic" Indian cuisine, was so excited about authentic paneer, but do I have a well-documented preference for doing things the hard way.  Making homemade paneer was: really fun, messy, somewhat frustrating, and not as productive as I expected.  Somehow, I thought that five cups of milk would get me more than a flattish block of cheese about the size of a Polaroid.  All told, it took about 45 minutes to boil down, curdle, and strain the milk to get the thick, ricotta-like substance that would become the cheese, then three hours pressing the cheese under a flat board for it to firm up.  It eventually reached a consistency somewhere between medium and firm tofu.  Once I had doused it in flour and pan fried it in ghee, it was firmer and added a delicious creaminess to the curry.  I used this curry recipe from Epicurious.com and completely loved it.  Four of us polished off the six servings, plus rice, dal, and naan, in record time.

Local Really Is Better

In Portland, pretty much everyone agrees that local is good.  We like to get our groceries at the farmer's market or grow them in our backyards, we will reuse, pass on, or repurpose anything, and we like to live close enough to bike to work.  So why buy mass-produced liquor that you could get anywhere in the country, when we have some amazing and creative distilleries in our own back yard? 

Frankly, I had no idea they were so amazing, so numerous, or so close, until my friends Rick and Elisabeth began inviting me to distillery tours and tastings.  Today we visited House Spirits and New Deal distilleries in inner southeast Portland.  I'm already a huge fan of House Spirits' aquavit and their Aviation gin, and today we tasted their newest batch of white dog whiskey.  I think that this whiskey is certainly not for everyone - it's un-aged and I tend to prefer a mellower sipping whiskey that's been sitting around awhile.  But I also think that the many flavors in this whiskey are much clearer than they would be in a barrel aged whiskey, which a lot of people really like. And they obviously do - this whiskey sells out almost immediately upon release.

Over at New Deal, we tasted nearly the whole selection, including two amazing gins and a mind-blowing chamomile liqueur.  I was so blown away by all of the spirits we tasted that I had to have a bottle of their New Deal Gin No. 3, even though I'm trying to save money.  It is wonderfully smooth and will make an excellent martini.  The Gin No. 1 was also fantastic in a completely different way, and I wish I could have justified buying two bottles. 

Finally, the best thing about these local spirits is that they are priced competitively with most major, middle-quality liquors.  So, for about the same price as a bottle of Tanqueray, I instead get this delightful gin and get to feel good about supporting my local economy!

The Rest of the Food Pyramid

Because I spend so much time making bread, which requires the minimum of ingredients and really provides the minimum nutrition, I sometimes forget that other food (like vegetables) exists and that I have to eat it.  Every year around this time I start mucking around in my garden.  And I do mean mucking - I often have little to show for my March activity other than a few sickly shoots.  This year, though, I feel confident that my March work is going to pay off.  I was careful only to plant seeds that I thought were hardy enough to weather the possible April cold.  Today, I sowed kale, chard, spinach, mesclun, and beets.  The greens can handle these temperatures and the wetness that comes with them.  And the beets should do fine, although I have plenty of extra seeds if they don't.  And, let's face it, much of my March work is just weeding and taking care of the flowers anyway.

Today, however, I had a bit of a crisis of confidence.  I was talking to my neighbor who told me that she never grows beets because her partner doesn't like them and she couldn't eat enough of them to justify growing them.  I thought about all the leafy greens I grow, and how I don't really like all of them, especially the lettuces.  Since I don't exactly have a green thumb, it had always been a point of confidence for me that I could grow such lush lettuce, spinach, and chard.  But, if I don't eat them, then what's the point?  With that in mind, I planted only a tiny amount of mesclun, with the majority of the spring garden devoted to chard and beets, and the rest of the space claimed by the spinach and kale. 

Since I'm pretty sure that I purchased my own body weight in beets last season, I'm confident that I will eat all of them.  And there are enough uses for chard that I will definitely eat as much as I grow.  I'm less confident about the kale, but I know that many of my friends are experimenting with kale recipes this year, so I have only to ask (or donate).

My one dream for this summer, although I'm not sure that I will accomplish it, is to grow cantaloupe in my garden.  I love Oregon cantaloupe, with its fleshy, non-tropical taste.  I love living in a cool climate that is just temperate enough to grow this delightful melon, but thus far I have not been able to grow it myself.  This is my project for the summer, and I'm really looking forward to it!