Be Right Back

Dear Interwebs,

If you will excuse me for an evening, Jeff and I are celebrating our 7th wedding anniversary today. Woo!

I have no real pearls o’ wisdom to dispense on the subject of relationships, except this.

After a while, whether you are married or not, in a committed relationship it ends up being as much about the life you build together as whatever romantic relationship started you off. Dogs, kids, trash pickup, fights, career changes, family excursions, budgeting, whatever else. All the mundane and the profound things. I’m lucky to have found someone to weather it with.

And he even puts up with my yarn and fabric lying around everywhere!

Happy Side Dishes Day

I always did like the side dishes better. Potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, cranberries. These are a lot of my favorite things. I wouldn’t want them all the time, but if you’re going to do it, do it big, right? Maybe that’s just me.

So Jeff took pictures of me periodically from about 1 pm when I started until about 6:30 when it ended. Yes. I cooked for 5.5 hours. And it was SO MUCH FUN. This was about 2 pm when I was chopping butternut squash.

It was a Food Network meal. I made Emerilized Green Bean Casserole (the kind where you use fresh green beans from Jennifer’s garden) and make your own french onions and wild mushroom mushroom soup. Except I used Alton’s baked onion rings from his casserole instead of Emeril’s fried ones.  This is me about 3:30 chopping the last of the veggies – garlic. The squash had finished roasting.

Then I made Roasted Butternut Squah & Maple Soup, also from Emeril, with tarragon oil – fabulous, by the way. Plus I made Michael Chiarello’s Definitive Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes, which are TOTALLY OMG AWESOME. I also made a Celebration Roast (veggie roast) with butternut squash, mushroom and apple stuffing, which I think is better than tofurkey. Oh, and gravy! This was around 5 pm and the food prep was done and things were cooking. Jennifer was pureeing garlic for the potatoes. I had gained an apron. This was Intense Cooking Time.

Did I mention there are two pies? Oh dear, I don’t know how I’m going to eat them. I’m writing this in a lull between food eating and pie. The goal is to stay awake. Seriously. You know what I mean. Don’t lie. This is about 5:30 pm, and Jennifer and I are surprised here by Jeff. The soups are done, the potatoes cooked, the green beans blanched. I’ve used four dutch ovens to cook dinner and 7 bowls, and 3 saucepans, not to mention two baking dishes.

The day was not without injury. I sliced off a bit of my left index finger and grabbed a hot pan. Burns are normal for me, but slicing not so much. Luckily, the finger slice didn’t hurt. I lost feeling in my thumb and first two fingers of my left hand when I had spinal surgery, so it just bled and I went on. You see Wesley is interested in what’s going on. This is around 6:30 pm. There are things in the oven now, and everything’s nearly complete. This is me and MIL in her kitchen.

7 pm. Wrapping up, cleaning up. I’m cooking the garlic puree to put in the potatoes. The soup’s warming. The green bean casserole’s cooking.  The herbs that have been in the foreground all day are finally in the pots. The baked onions are out on the right.

FINALLY DINNER. TASTY.

Hope y’all had a lovely, food-stuffed time with your loved ones. TTFN. I’m going to go have pie.

California and other stories

So what I was doing three weeks ago before things in my life got sidelined, derailed and permanently altered was trying to relax. Ironically enough. I was on vacation in California, seeing what there was to be seen and visiting my brother. Although I’ve been to 42 out of the 50 US states now, I’d mostly missed CA except for one trip to San Diego, but I was too young to really remember it. It turns out that California has a fair amount of spectacular in it, kinda like this:

If that’s not your cup of tea, perhaps you’ll like the quiet coastal lighthouse wreathed in fog just down the road.

I mean really, who wouldn’t like this sort of coastline? Even though I grew up near Texas beaches, there’s no comparison with this. The truth is that many Texas beaches are rather smelly, sad and dirty affairs due to all the offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. They don’t look like this. Or smell like this. Have I mentioned the gigantic and pungent eucalyptus trees near the coast? And the pine trees? It seemed like no matter where we went, it smelled like awesome.

Anyway, we went all over the place from San Francisco to Felton to Santa Cruz to Monterey to Big Sur and back up to Nevada City and Truckee and Lake Tahoe. We encountered quite a bit of wildfire in our travels, first the Lockheed Fire and then the Yuba Fire. I spent half the week with ash falling on me and smoke in the air. This, for example, was what I saw north of Big Sur near Carmel-by-the-Sea (cough cough hack hack).

Big Sur is beautiful and dramatic and slightly nerve-wracking, but overall much of that stretch of Highway 1 is quite peaceful, and there’s more farmland along the coast than I expected. A lot of beautiful vegetables that really made me want to cook quite desperately. When we got to Jeremy’s cabin in the Sierra Nevada, I cooked quite a bit, just to relax, because by that time we knew Audrey was really sick and we were upset at being so far away. In the end, I left my brother food for a week I cooked so much. The news also made me quite weepy about all animals, like this snoring/barking sea lion. They are really more like watery dog-like beings.

So did I mention Lake Tahoe is spectacular? My brother sat out and contemplated it one afternoon.

We did also spend time in San Francisco proper wandering all over the place from the Mission District up through the Castro then up Market to downtown, and up to the wharf and stuff. We treated ourself to Greens restaurant one night for some fine vegetarian cooking, which was quite easily the best meal I’ve ever had in my entire life. When down in the Castro, after having some extraordinary coffee at Philz we sort of stumbled upon ImagiKnit, whereupon I purchased six skeins of Pima Fresca yarn (bulky pima cotton) from Queensland Collection in chambray. I wasn’t planning on that, but it was sooo pretty, and on sale … and as you can see, by that point I was weak. You see, ImagiKnit separates plant and animal fibers, and also labels stuff very clearly instead of just stuffing it all in. Usually I end up with itchy, red hands from picking things up to see what they are, and it was so enjoyable to go to a yarn shop without having an allergic reaction from handling wool.

It was great to see my brother, who I’m very close to, and neat to see his job. He does utility pole inspections in various guises, part of making sure the electric infrastructure in parts of California is operational, that they’ve cleared stuff out to avoid more fires, that nothing’s going to fall down and kill people or leave them without power. It’s neat. If sometimes dangerous for the enormous ants, unruly ranch animals, cantakerous rural folks, occasional cliff hiking and of course, the Very Large Splinters. Like this one.

I also got to see my nearly-three-year-old cousin, and her mom my first cousin, and her husband, and they are all very lovely and exuberant people who live in a lovely seaside community that most of us would give our left arms to live in. We just haven’t figured out places like this exist, and that you can really live there. They fed us, and sheltered us, and I’m afraid we were very upset and poor guests one night, so we’ll have to make up for that later.

So that, in a nutshell, was my vacation, which went awry halfway through, but was still quite memorable for both Jeff and I.  I’m sure it will pop up in future art/craft projects. And now I leave you with one last classically-Californian-sunset-but-seriously-it-can’t-really-be-that-pretty picture. Because really, it is that pretty.