Sticks

Posted: November 14, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: decorating, fall, office | 3 Comments »

Long story short, I spray painted some sticks.  I’m pretty pleased with myself.  However, if you recognize how ridiculously mundane it is that I’m writing about it, you may want to click away now.

To fill up my new shelf, I wanted something that would bring the golden yellow color up from the rug.  I love this color and wanted to see it elsewhere in the room.  I also wanted something that would add a little height to the stuff up there.  So I found this big yellow urn thing for 50% off at Hobby Lobby.  Have you ever been to this store?  Everything seems to be 50% off all the time.

It still seemed a little empty, so I got to thinking about what I could put in it to add even more height.  I can’t seem to keep plants alive, and I refuse to have fake flowers or greenery around here.  I do like the idea of dried flowers, but they didn’t really feel appropriate in this big honkin’ urn.

Along with the piles and piles of leaves, we also have an abundance of loose sticks in our yard from all the trees.  I gathered some up today and attempted to make it look less like a pile of kindling by spray painting them black.  It’s a black satin finish just because I had a can hanging out in the basement.  It would probably look even less like kindling if you did them up in some fancy color.

Oooooo.  Ahhhhh.  Painted sticks.  Not terribly complex.  Yet, it makes a nice little filler for my new yellow vase.  And I like it.  So there.

Fall Leaves

Posted: October 24, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: fall, yard | 3 Comments »

“We want a big yard with lots of trees!”

Those were our words eight months ago, while house shopping in January.  Since then we’ve endured a summer of bickering over who’s going to mow the 1/2 acre lawn with a push mower.  And just when the grass stops growing, we enter yard work hell…leaf season.

We got what we wanted, a big yard with lots of old big trees.  They give you that fleeting moment of blazing fall color, then they shit all over your yard.  The colors are beautiful, don’t get me wrong.  But until today, we didn’t even own a rake.  We didn’t have many trees in the yard of our rental house in Knoxville, and it doesn’t come in much handy when you live in an apartment in south Brooklyn.

I sort of had a sunny disposition this morning about doing something quaint and very autumnal like going out and raking leaves.  But now my arms hurt, dammit.

I set out to do as much as I could of the front yard.  There are two biggun’s out there that dropped their leaves early.  And you know, to keep up appearances with the front yard being nice and cleaned up.  No one can see into the backyard so our laziness can hide out there for a while.

After about 20 minutes of back-breaking labor, the neighbor took pity on my pathetic weak arms and revved up his gas powered leaf blower.  That thing kicks ass.  It makes short work of those leaves.  Your arms still kind of hurt afterwards, but it’s over so much quicker than raking.

In Knoxville during the fall you just pile up all your leaves along the curb and this big sucker truck comes around once a week and sucks them up.  I have no idea if this is a common thing or not, since leaf removal was so far off my radar for the first 26 years of my life.  I clearly remember my dad getting mad at us for jumping in the leaf piles and messing them up because he had to bag them all up himself (and was bitter about it to at least to some degree).

Conclusion:  We need a leaf blower.  Stat.  Before the big backyard trees really drop.

In other fun fall news, yesterday I made these excellent apple cheddar scones, and I got my first CSA butternut squash of the season.  For dinner tonight is my absolute favorite butternut application, this Ina Garten risotto.  Well, I make a somewhat hacked version of that risotto that eliminates the saffron (I’m cheap) and the pancetta (it’s totally unnecessary).

Also in the fall spirit, I haphazardly planted these three mums in the flower bed out front.  And I also buried about 25 fall bulbs around the joint.  We’ll see how those work out.  Talk about unrewarding effort…digging and refilling 25 holes and having nothing to show for it until six months later.  It turns out that yard work is hard.  Who knew?

Schooner

Posted: October 17, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: fall, pets, technology | 5 Comments »

Oops, we just got a second dog.

Our house is now officially a zoo.  But it’s the cutest zoo ever…look at this thing!!  She’s a six week old Jack Russell mix and we’re calling her Schooner.  She only weighs about 2.5 pounds now, and likely won’t grow bigger than about 15 pounds.

We had been considering it for a while, and besides the dying-of-cuteness factor, I think it’s best in the long run for Seamus to have a little companion for the rest of his years.  He spends a lot of time alone, and sometimes it seems a little sad.  But then again, I do love projecting emotions on animals and inanimate objects, so it’s hard to say.

The big dog is still pretty hesitant of her, but he’s slowly warming up and teaching her how to eat sticks in the yard.  She’s completely fearless.

In other news, our old camera finally kicked the bucket this weekend, thus only phone photos available at the moment.  I’ve secretly been waiting for the day that the old camera dies so I can get a new one.

I’m strongly considering the Canon S90.  I just have to get over the price tag and bite the bullet.  Why no DSLR?  Because I wouldn’t use it enough to justify the cost, and for travel it’s so much easier to have a small camera instead.  The S90 is supposed to have a ton of manual features that give you more image control than most other compacts.  Plus it is supposedly great with low-light photos which our old camera SUCKED at.  Basically every decent indoor picture that I’ve taken for this blog was shot using a makeshift tripod.  For every usable picture you see here, there are about six that are too blurry to use.  So I’m looking forward to using something a little more powerful and accurate.

Care of the Earth CSA

Posted: December 7, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: cooking, fall, Knoxville, produce | 3 Comments »
This fall I stumbled upon a new local farm called Care of the Earth Community Farm that was offering a fall season CSA farm share. I’ve always been interested in the CSA concept, but it always seemed like such a big commitment of time and money. But since this farm just got up and running this year, they decided to offer a partial season from September through November. So it was only a 12 week commitment, thus significantly cheaper than a full season. So I did it…and it was GREAT.

I went with the half share, which turned out to be just the right amount each week. A typical box from early September might have been 3 summer squahses, 2 green peppers, 4 jalepeno peppers, 2 large tomatoes, one small head of lettuce, one bunch of swiss chard, one bunch of herbs, a few small potatoes, a bag of green beans, and maybe some other little things too.

By the late fall there was a lot of butternut squash, carrots, beets, brussels sprouts, cabbage, and dark greens (so much damn kale!) I found myself cooking a lot of different things that I would never buy at the store, because I had to use it all up. I learned that roasted beets are amazing, and that I don’t much care for turnips or radishes (especially that evil daikon radish).

They had a little open house one Saturday afternoon at the farm. It’s just outside Knoxville to the east side of town. They have about 30 acres total. For this first short season, one young woman did ALL of the work herself. Everything. She fed 50 people for three months. I think that’s an admirable job.

The last CSA pickup was the Sunday before Thanksgiving. And now, two weeks later, I’m really missing it. The freshness of this produce was like nothing else I’ve ever had. I guess I got used to it, because after a weeks worth of Kroger produce again, it’s just not the same. I was wavering on whether or not to make the investment for their full season next year, but the last week or so has completely made the decision for me. I can’t wait until it starts again in April.

Fall Saturday

Posted: October 18, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: cooking, fall | 5 Comments »

Yesterday was awesome. We had absolutely nothing to do. So I decided it was time to stop mourning the passing of another summer and embrace the fall. Pretty much the best way to do this is to cook things that contain pumpkin, cinnamon and/or apples. So I did.
Seamus, don’t you dare.
These pumpkin muffins were really good. I made them as soon as I woke up…somewhere around 10:30. You really can’t beat that. Then with the rest of the can of pumpkin, I made this pumpkin apple butter recipe, courtesy of Nicole. It’s pretty delicious, I was impressed with the texture, and how easy it is to make. Next time I think I might add more pumpkin than apple, since it basically just tastes like good apple butter. I used a honeycrisp apple because Kroger manipulates my eating habits by putting things on sale.
I also thought that this might be a good day to drag out this old bread board that used to be my grandmother’s. It’s a big flat wooden board that kind of latches onto the countertop so it doesn’t slide around. I discovered that the back edge of it has our last name scratched into it, but uh, spelled wrong. Missing the “k”:
So I didn’t really feel like making bread, per se. Too much waiting and not enough instant gratification. So I decided to try my hand at some scratch made noodles. I guess you could say pasta, or spaghetti, but they didn’t really resemble any kind of actual pasta, so let’s call them noodles. I used this method.
Now there isn’t anything particularly autumnal about this dinner. But c’mon, I made my own noodles, that’s impressive, right?


Please excuse the ugly dishes. I’ve been eating off of these for close to 20 years and I’m not buying new ones until they all break.
The noodles came out a little rubbery. I’m thinking that this could have been caused by either 1.) overworking the dough, or 2.) overcooking them in the water. I have absolutely no way of telling, and nothing else to compare it to. So maybe I’ll try it again sometime and do something differently. Or maybe I’ll get the Kitchen Aid pasta attachment and they won’t look like rubber worms next time. Either way, it was a delicious fall Saturday.

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