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.

Just a few Midwestern photos

So remember I made that quilt, and I said that it was inspired by Iowa, in particular the farming area where my parents are from and where I spent a lot of time when I was growing up. Well, it was on my mind because I took my vacation there this fall, and went to a harvest festival in the town my grandparents live in. So I thought I’d show you where the inspiration came from.

So yeah, the inspiration is obvious. I can’t really emphasize enough how much my summer and winter trips influenced me while I was growing up. Even my family didn’t know that until I said it on this blog, though. I’m not a particularly communicative person, apparently.

Southeastern Iowa is beautiful. This particular area is close to the Mississippi River, which is my favorite body of water (I’ve even swum parts of it, which I think about now and – ew! snakes! fish! tugboats!), and has, as far as I’m concerned, the best weather ever. And if you think Iowa is fla, it’s really not (cue Dar Williams song the Hills of Iowa).

The fall leaf photos you’re seeing now are from Geode Park maybe 10 minutes from my grandparents. It’s a state park around a lake. It would be a rather forested area if it weren’t for all that farmland, but all that farmland makes that an easy fact to overlook. They have maple trees, obviously, which are my second favorite tree behind aspens. Aspens win because there’s nothing like sitting in an aspen grove on a breezy spring day and listening to the leaves chime. I recommend a porch on a mountainside in an aspen grove in Colorado. Really.

I had a pretty relaxed time – went hiking a couple of times, did some sewing, went shopping with my grandparents, and my aunts and cousin came down over the weekend. There was a parade and lots of food (and the amount of baking was ridiculous). One day I took a trip down in to Illinois to visit where my other grandparents used to live, and where they and many other relatives are now buried. I don’t get many chances to wander around there, but I wanted to show Jeff around, because I have a lot of memories there, too.

I think it’s interesting, as I get older, to think about the things that ended up influencing the way I think about the world now. I’ve lived in a lot of places that I think have influenced me. Yet all the factors seem so disparate, and sometimes I think end up existing in sort of tenuous harmony in my mind. In my adult life I’ve chosen to live in three of North America’s largest cities, yet when my mind seeks artistic inspiration it turns to … pastoral Iowa? Okay. Sure. Maybe if I lived in pastoral Iowa you’d see me drawing my inspiration from Manhattan, then?

In any case, fall in Iowa certainly offers a lot in the way of busy farmers working to get hundreds of acres of grain corn and soybeans in before the first freeze. It was a very wet summer and this put off planting and caused Other Bad Agricultural Things (clearly I’m not a farmer). I visited a stretch on the Illinois side of the Mississippi where the fields had a foot of standing water – anyone remember when it flooded in Iowa? That water hasn’t all gone away months later.

Hey it’s me! I’m big on detailed self-portraits, eh? This is sunset on the Mississippi … it’s about a mile wide here. *sigh* Such a beautiful river. In summer there’s a nice little farmstand on the other side near there.

Now that I’m finally getting to taking care of pictures and trip stuff, and my 65+ backlogged emails, and my office-craft area looks less terrifically and horribly messy, I might actually get back to that crafting thing. Unfortunately, you know what one result of my big House Cleanout was? I found all those pesky clothes I’ve been meaning to mend, hem and alter. Isn’t that just a terrific joy? </sarcasm> I have sworn I will get to some of this though, and not just create new messes, which seems to be what I’m most skilled at.

Until I make it back to the computer, I bid you adieu

Happy Hallowe’en Roundup

Happy Halloween!

So where’ve I been?  Well, two days after I wrote my last post, Jeff and I were standing in our living room and decided we needed to do “a bit” of fall cleaning. We’ll go through all the closets, we said. We’ll rearrange the furniture, we said. … A week and a half later, I found my computer again …

I was comparing last year’s Halloween craftiness to this year’s. In 2007 I made an October candy calendar, 3-D Halloween cookies, and Halloween costumes: a ladybug for me and candy corn for Audrey and Callie. I also crocheted a ghost-and-pumpkin set last year. This year I made the quilt for my Halloween swap. That’s a lot by itself, right? I’m still happy I did that quilt, because I finally proved to myself I could do something like that I have a habit of not believing I can do things.  So my Halloween craftiness has been limited this year, only because I was working mostly on non-Halloween craftiness on the side.

Gingerbread Pumpkin Cupcakes

I did make gingerbread as my 2008 Halloween treat. It’s my pumpkin-ey decorated take on a recipe from a Denmark cookbook – that is, Denmark, Iowa where my grandparents live. Many years one of the women’s circles of the town church (there’s just one church, the town only has 300 people) puts out a cookbook of recipes from cooks in the community. The first recipe book was put out in 1949 – my grandma still has an original, which is very “well loved” and held together with a rubber band, as you can imagine. I have a reprint of that cookbook put out a couple of years ago, and that’s where my gingerbread recipe comes from. It’s the recipe my grandmother recommends from the mother of one of her friends.  (The one issue with this cookbook is that it could really use a Table of Contents or an Index!)

As my special treat fer ya, here’s the recipe for Ginger Bread by Mrs. Arthur Meyer (it’s awesome).  I will note that if you make cupcakes out of this, it takes about 20 minutes to bake and makes 12.  Her recipe doesn’t say how long to bake things.

• 1 beaten egg
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 1/2 cup melted butter
• 1/2 cup boiling water
• 1-1/4 cups flour
• 1 t. soda
• 1 t. ginger
• 1 t. cinnamon

Sift flour, soda and spice.  Mix in order given, beat thoroughly.  Batter is very thin.  Bake 350.  8 servings.

Halloween Costumes?  What are You Going To Be?

I am not technically making a costume for myself this year, however I am going to be someone. This is probably only funny to me, but I’m going to be Chris Knight from the movie Real Genius. Yes, I know I’m female and he’s not, but Chris is absolutely my favorite funny, irreverent character from my favorite movie (1984, yeah!), and in some senses, geekdom is really universal, isn’t it? I had such a huge crush on Val Kilmer for such a long time. I’ll be rocking his I love Toxic Waste t-shirt and sparkly head gear from his job interview (”Why are you wearing that toy on your head?” asks Dr. Dodd. “Because if I wear it anywhere else, it chafes,” replies Chris) and of course, bunny slippers (”May I take this opportunity to compliment you on your fashion sense, particularly your slippers”). If you’re familiar with the movie, you will find this outfit and these quotes hilarious. If you are not, you now think I’ve lost my mind.

As a side note, Callie has been with us a year. It seems like just yesterday we brought home a ball of fluff barely the size of my hand, and now she’s pretty fat, has a 6-foot vertical leap, is ridiculously fluffy and is sort of … I don’t know, I guess slightly on the side of demonic.

See what I mean? When did she learn to drink from a cup?