Sunday, Sunday

Yesterday we were like a couple of crazy errand-running fools. We got up bright and early (because for some reason I'm losing the ability to sleep when it's light out, and with the time change I haven't been able to sleep in. I was having a weird dream about zombies the other morning once the sun came up. Unrelated to the story at hand) so I even had time to exercise before we had to leave. Our morning was very carefully planned out. We left at 9:45 and arrived at Babies R Us to shop for the shower at about 10:20. We were done there by about 10:50 and only had to head across the street for an early lunch at Chipotle! (Another tangent: did anyone see the South Park episode a few weeks ago where they said eating Chipotle made you crap blood? They made fun of the show Ghost Hunters in the same episode. It was funny.) Anyway, I tried the pork for a change, which was delicious, and Alfred had his usual (chicken fajita burrito with black beans added). We actually had to wait about 5 minutes before they opened. We were their second customers.

After lunch, we went to pick up some grass fed ground beef from the farm that we've gotten it from before. The owner wasn't there, which was good because we were on a schedule and we would have been there chatting for awhile. We made it home by about 12:40. Plenty of time for me to get ready and wrap the gift (aka put it in the gift bag with some tissue paper.) All of that, with a lot of driving, in only 3 hours!

(I found a funny ecard to go in this post, but I can't get it to copy for some reason. Go here to see it. Then come back. Thanks.)

The shower was nice, even though I didn't know anyone. Well, I know Allison, the pregnant one, and I'd met one of her cousins before. She had a rubber duckie theme, it was really cute. And I bought her a bunch of bath things, so I fit right in. We played a game where we had to come up with as many words out of the baby's name as we could. I did terribly. I got 17. The winner got 45. No melted candy bars in diapers, so that was good.

After I got home from the shower we pretty much just relaxed. We caught up on a bit of TV, made some pizzas on naan for dinner (we're trying to be creative and use up some of the random stuff in the pantry), and that was about it. An excellent Sunday, if I do say so myself.

bullet points!

• I left work at freaking 4:00 this afternoon! I had to stop at Home Depot on the way home, but still got here by 5:30. Amazing. I've been working a lot of (unpaid) overtime the past couple of weeks, so I decided to see what it was like to work only a 40 hour work week again. So far, it's nice. But judging by my schedule the rest of the week, I'm guessing the 1 hour I saved today is going to be swallowed up by Wednesday.
  
• We made a massive amount of beef stock yesterday. About 40 cups, to be exact. Which sounds like a lot less than it was. Alfred got a bunch of beef bones for free from our grass fed beef source, so we couldn't let them all go to waste. We froze most of the stock, but kept some in the fridge for french onion soup this weekend. We actually just went through the process of getting rid of the fat (it solidified in a thick, disgusting layer on top overnight) and packing it all up for the freezer. Messy.
• Yesterday I also made what might be my best loaf of bread ever. We cracked open a jar of our fresh strawberry rhubarb jam to try it with. Words fail to describe just how delicious it was. I could eat the entire loaf in one sitting. I'm trying to resist.
• We totally forgot about the shuttle launch yesterday. We were watching tv while dinner was in the oven and suddenly Alfred said "hey, when was the shuttle supposed to go off?" Answer: ten minutes earlier. Oops. We had discussed driving down to see it go up in person, but that damn stock needed to be made.
• I went jogging this afternoon when I got home from work. I also planted my new(est) azalea (I'm up to 5 now, and I think I'm killing them) and cleaned the bathrooms. I should work 7 hour days more often.
• Re: azaleas. Yeah, of the 3 I got last year, 1 looks awful, 1 looked great and had lots of flowers but the flowers and leaves have gotten all droopy, and 1 looks ok but has no flowers. I have 2 new ones now, both of which still look ok, but haven't been around long enough for me to really destroy yet. Give me time.
• I found a hilarious blog by this girl who was rereading all of the old Baby Sitter Club books. I loved those damn books when I was younger. She's not posting anymore, but I've been plowing through the archives. It's good stuff.
  

it's back!

Briefly, at least. Obviously it went out again the other day after that short post, but right now it's back. I started writing this Sunday and hopefully it will post today. We'll see.

So what have we missed? All sorts of fun stuff! For one thing, we opened 2 new programs at the new museum last Thursday. I was insanely busy Wednesday through Friday, getting things ready and set up, and then making sure everything ran smoothly with groups. There were a few really long days, but in the end, everything went very well. Except for a slight mishap first thing Thursday morning: I smashed my thumb with a hammer. Hard.














It's doing better now, the swelling has gone down some and I can bend it almost all the way. The bruising is healing a bit already, too. It doesn't hurt to touch at least, but I can't put any pressure on it yet. It's interesting to see how often you use your left thumb. Toothpaste, for instance. And it's a good thing I cut my nails last week!

Friday was also Ella's sixth birthday! Mike sent me a picture of her with her cake that he took on his phone. Freaking cute. Damn kids, getting old.

This weekend was nice and calm, but productive. We made a whole mess of jam, since we still had some frozen strawberries from last spring, and they're on sale right now since they're in season.

We made strawberry kiwi, strawberry rhubarb, strawberry ginger, and strawberry apple. Now all we need is some more yogurt to eat it all with. The goat we get our yogurt making milk from should be producing again, so that's exciting. I think this weekend I'm going to make some bread to eat it with, too.

The last 2 nights we have had the most delicious, gorgeous salads for dinner, using lettuce that we bought from the farmers market. There's only 1 true local farmer there, and it's the lettuce/green leafy veggie guy. It was so good, I didn't even use dressing. Also, I'm listening to the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in the car on my way home from work (mornings are for NPR) and I'm turning into a total hippie. I want to move to a farm.

Ok, I think we're pretty well caught up now. In case the internet doesn't work (assuming this posts), I may not post again till Saturday. I hope you can all hold out until then.

it's what's for dinner

(I'll warn you now, there may be a few "that's what she said" moments in this post. Enjoy.)

Last week we got our 1/4 cow worth of meat delivered. It's from the same place we got our lamb from that we visited this summer. (We're eating one of the guys in the last picture of this post.) I had to leave work early, and then they ended up not getting to our house until 3 hours later, so that kind of sucked. But hey, with all this beef, I wasn't complaining!

And so we now have a very full freezer. Full of beef. Grass fed, healthily raised beef. Which is good, because I've decided that beef is my favorite meat. I think I could live on hamburgers and steak for the rest of my life. I mean, I'd probably like to have a pizza now and then too, but if I had to make a choice, it would totally be beef. Incidentally, I decided the other day that if I had to choose one drink for the rest of my life, it would be Kahlua and cream. So apparently I'd be living on Kahlua and cream and beef. Awesome!

We also got our shipment of this really nice wine that we've been getting since our trip out to Napa. So we had a fancy little dinner last Monday to celebrate all of our new food items. We didn't actually drink our new wine, because it came with a little note asking us to let it rest, so we drank last year's wine. Still, it was all quite delicious. Feast your eyes on this.

goats and sheep and cows, oh my!

Ha, I'm so original.

We finished our homemade goat cheese this morning. It took an awfully long time for not a whole lot of cheese. It wasn't much work at least, it just had to sit in a pot and then hang in some cheese cloth. It made a big mess, which of course was all my fault because I folded the cheese cloth too many times. But hey, it tasted good. We'll have to come up with some cool recipe to use it in.

Alfred's also been working on arranging to pick up our lamb meat. I never did put the pictures I took in this post, so I'll just put them up today. Two posts for the price of one! Or something.

So when we first got to the sheep area, they were all chilling in the shade and ignoring us. Then once they heard the feed bag rustling they all came charging over the hill. It was kind of crazy, like something out of a movie.

Then Alfred got to feed them. Talk about crazy! There were a lot of damn sheep, and they wanted their food 5 minutes ago. He almost got knocked over a couple of times. They'll get their comeuppance when we're eating one of them next week!


The trough in the back was supposed to be for the babies, because it was lower to the ground, but a bunch of older ones followed them. They were nuts. There was actually a sheep in the trough at the front of this picture, but you can't see it because of all the other ones knocking her down to get to the food.

We also had some pictures of the male sheep (rams, I guess) but I must not have copied any onto this computer. Too bad, because you can see their balls in the picture, and they are freaking huge.

We also got to see the cattle, one of these will be in our freezer in another month or so. Unfortunately my camera battery died right after I took this picture, so it's the only one I have of the cows.

And that's that. Come to Florida, we'll feed you and then show you a picture of what you're eating!

The Return of the Hippies

That's right, get us back home and we're all hippie, all the time! This morning we had yogurt and granola for breakfast, as we often do, but the yogurt we had today was homemade from fresh goat's milk (that we purchased, no we do not have a goat). It was a little runnier than store bought yogurt, but it tasted better. We stirred in some of the blueberry jam and granola we made on Saturday and man, was it tasty! And purple! We also had some roasted red pepper and crab soup for dinner last night, and on Saturday we had these venison burgers:

They were so good. Complete with homemade rolls, I might add. I found a new, super delicious recipe. I love being able to cook again!

Yesterday Alfred went all sorts of crazy and did a bunch of yard work, including cutting down a palm tree. We have approximately 47,000 trees in our yard, and a good portion of them are palms, which drop their fronds and make a mess and block all the sunlight so we can't grow anything. Alfred's planning to cut down several of them so we can try putting down sod and can actually have a yard. Just in time to move! Figures. Anyway he went all crazy with the chain saw while I was working on dinner, I ran outside with the camera (and my cell phone in case I needed to dial 911) just in time to catch this action shot (to the left). Not the way Alfred had intended it to fall, of course. The picture to the right is what it looked like from the dock. He cut it up into a few pieces and managed to haul most of it back up, he just left the top for when I could help him. I managed to take a shower right before he started working, so I was exempt from helping. I didn't even plan it that way, I swear!

It's always amazing how different and nice the yard looks after it's mowed. Here's the before:

If you can see it, there's a weed (helpfully identified by my red arrow) that was about 6 feet tall. And the after:

Much better! He did the front yard too, but I forgot to take an after picture, so you'll just have to imagine how nice it looks. Maybe I'll post a picture after I weed between the bricks in the walkway. Then it will look even nicer.

Alfred also talked to our neighbor for awhile (the one with the immaculate lawn, as you can see above). His son was supposed to get married in his backyard on Alfred's birthday, but - surprise! - she's pregnant. They wanted to have kids right away after the wedding, so she went off her birth control a little early, thinking it would take awhile. Ha! And get this - she doesn't have insurance. Um, duh. Might be a good idea to get some health insurance before actively trying to get pregnant. But hey, what do I know.

a meaty sunday

Ok, I screwed up. I took pictures yesterday and copied them onto the computer at home last night, but forgot to save them to my laptop. So I have no pictures of our adventure yesterday for this post. And we won't be home for a few days to get them. You'll just have to come back and look at them in a few days.

Anyway, we did have quite the little adventure yesterday. Alfred found a ranch about 45 minutes from us that raises and sells grass fed beef, so we went there yesterday afternoon to check it out and give them a deposit check. The people we met that showed us around, Tammy and Jeff, were seriously the nicest people I have ever met in my life. They showed us all the sheep, even let Alfred feed them (he almost got knocked over, it was really funny), showed us 2 of their big bulls, and then showed us the rest of the herd of cattle. It was really good to see the farm and see Tammy interact with the animals, you could tell that she really cares for them and that they're in good health. She's also the one that slaughters them, so she'll be killing a ewe for us in a week or two!

They also took us to their house, which is right down the road from the ranch, because they had been telling us about the pork kielbasa they made and offered to give us some. We ended up going home with two packages of kielbasa, some ribs, ground venison, a bucket of crabs, and some other cut of pork that I can't remember. Just because they had so much and wanted to share it. Talk about southern hospitality! Combine that with the steak we got from the owner of the ranch to try out the meat before we place our order, and we are probably set for a month! They were telling us about a hog hunt they went on recently - Tammy stabbed a 250 lb hog in the heart to kill it! That's freaking hard core! We ended up spending about 2 hours with them, they were just so friendly. The coolest thing they showed us, which I unfortunately didn't get a picture of, was an alligator head in their freezer. Apparently the gator had gone after Jeff's son, so he killed it (he's a game warden, ha) and kept the head. The gator was 10'2" long! That is huge!! The head took up the whole damn shelf, they're going to stuff it and give it to the son.

Saturday was good too: I went to a used bookstore near Billy's house, spent an hour and 40 minutes and $15 and bought a few books, then we went out to dinner with Ilya and Mercedes after Alfred got back. And no, he did not shoot any hogs.

so, how was your weekend?

My weekend was just stellar, thank you for asking. I could have done so, so much around the house, but I didn't. I didn't even need to clean because we've barely been home to mess the place up since I cleaned last. I was saying to Alfred yesterday how I wanted the kitchen floor washed, the windows cleaned, the back yard cleaned up and weeded... but I didn't want to do a damn thing. That's not to say I didn't do anything. Here's my weekend in a handy bulleted list.

• Saturday I headed to the farmers market and picked up some delicious, healthy, cheap produce. All of this came to $10. I feel like that's a good price, but I can't really be sure because I've never bothered doing a comparison at the grocery store.

• I got hit on by one of the vendors at the farmers market. He was wearing a shirt that said "Let's flip a coin. Heads, I get tail. Tails, I get head." I was wearing my glasses and hadn't showered yet. He suggested we go to a strip club that afternoon (because he had to give me a bunch of singles as change.) Yeah, it was pretty awesome.
  
• Speaking of my glasses, I didn't put my contacts in once this weekend. My eyeballs thanked me.
  
• We had a delicious pizza Saturday for dinner. Toppings: pears, pecans, and gorgonzola cheese. I was inspired after buying the pears that morning.
• I beat levels 4 and 5 on the second quest of the Legend of Zelda. I'm a nerd, by the way.
  
• We worked on a new set of house plans. Alfred had gotten a whole bunch of books out of the library to look at for ideas and found a really good plan in one of them, so he drew it out and made some modifications to make it fit what we wanted/needed. It looks really good. The next step is to get it drawn up professionally so it can go to an engineer and get approved to build. Then we'll be ready to go once we get all of our permits.
• I caught up on all of the episodes of "so you think you can dance" that were on the dvr. The show where the top 20 all performed didn't record for some reason, so I missed that, but it's ok. I'll live.
  
• Our dvr decided to start to break. I think that's why my show didn't tape (see previous bullet point). It worked a few times this weekend, but not much. Someone's coming out to fix it next Sunday. Luckily we don't have much taping this week, so if it doesn't work, we won't miss much. But I think I'm going to ask Ellery to tape so you think you can dance for me though, just in case. Can't be too careful.

Non stop excitement, I tell you what!

blueberries!

It's blueberry picking season! So, like the good little hippies we're becoming, we woke up early on Saturday morning and went out to pick some blueberries.

We got to the first place at 7:30am. That's right, we were awake early enough to be somewhere at 7:30. On a Saturday. The parking lot was actually packed. And, believe it or not, they were out of blueberries. By 7:30! Apparently there are lots of other hippies out there, too. But, as you may have guessed by the pictures (aren't they cool? I love the last one), we did not give up that easily. The owner told us about another farm about a 10 minute drive away, so we headed over there.

By the time we arrived at the second farm, the parking area was about 2/3 full (I use the term parking lot loosely, it was really just someone's front yard.) She was also out of buckets to use to pick, all before her normal opening time of 8am. Luckily though, these bushes were nice and full of berries. And man, were they delicious. We picked about 3 1/2 pounds worth (and ate quite a few along the way, just to make sure they weren't poisonous or anything.)

So, it was fun. And they are delicious. And we were done and back at Ilya and Mercedes' house by maybe 10:30. Plus, then I got to bake my blueberry pie! We want to go again though, because we've eaten most of them already, and because we want to try making blueberry jam. And maybe some muffins, or a cobbler. And I want to make another pie. I just love making pies. I just love baking in general, would you have ever guessed that? I should really get back to work on that at-home bakery thing...

pasta-riffic!

We tested out another mixer attachment this weekend: the pasta maker! Yes, folks, we made our own pasta. It was awesome. Here's how it happened.

It all started when Alfred and I watched an Alton Brown episode about eggplant. Thus inspired, we purchased several eggplant from the farmers' market on Saturday and decided to make baba ghanoush and pasta with eggplant and tomato. We followed Alton's instructions to roast half the eggplant and salt the other half. Ilya and Mercedes were joining us for dinner, so after they arrived we got cracking.

The baba ghanoush was good, but I forgot to add the garlic. Next time, it will be better. I blame the bloody mary.

Then we started on the pasta. For this I enlisted the help of Mercedes and Katie.

Alfred and Ilya helped by continuing to drink.


It looked like real pasta!


Katie and Alfred graciously offered to play sous chef, aka chop all of the veggies (eggplant, tomato, onion, pepper, garlic, basil, and parsley). No pictures of this, but it really did happen. I think that was my favorite part of the evening: not having to chop!

And so we have the finished product:


I had already eaten a bunch before I remembered to take a picture, hence the plate looking kind of juicy. It was yummy.

We then settled down for a nice long stretch of speed uno. Now, as most of you know, Mercedes is from Spain. It stands to reason that she thinks in Spanish and translates that into English for our benefit. Also, in Uno, when you are down to one card, you yell out, "Uno." The back story thus established... at one point of the game, when she was down to her last card, Mercedes called out "one." We had quite a giggle.

warning: gross stuff about beef ahead

I'm reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, which Alfred has already read most of. It's what has really spurred him into becoming a hippie and trying to produce more of our own food, or at least getting it from healthier, local sources. I just got back from lunch, where I read while I ate. And now I get why he's turning into a hippie.

The part I read today was all about what cattle are fed on a feedlot before they're slaughtered: mostly corn (which is not natural for them and therefore makes them sick), mixed with antibiotics (since the corn is making them so sick), protein from sources such as chicken parts and droppings, and whatever manure gets stuck to their bodies throughout their lives on the feedlot that doesn't get washed off. I'm reading this as I'm eating a taco with beef. Lovely. It's also talking about how Mad Cow Disease became a problem because cattle used to be fed protein from other cattle, aka cannibalism. Now it's much better though, cause they eat protein from chickens, which of course are fed beef protein. So now the cattle gets digested by the chickens before being refed to other cattle. There's also stuff about E. coli becoming more resilient because of the change of stomach pH in cattle. Is this sounding as gross as it sounded to me in the book? Cause it sounded really gross. I want to be a vegetarian.

In non manure related news, we should be receiving our permit from the Army Corps to build our house any day now. Also, we're supposed to be getting our official address from the county today. We might really get to build a house! We also looked at a couple of houses that we could potentially rent while our new house is getting built, assuming we can somehow rent our current house. (We're thinking vacation rental for our house, unless Katie finds a couple of friends who want to rent it instead.) One house we looked at today is already owned by Max's company, the other is being purchased this month (or maybe next month, I'm not sure). Either way, it would cut down our commute and, depending on what we rented our house for, our monthly housing cost. Which is a good thing. Then we can use the extra money to buy grass-fed beef! (You like how I connected my two topics? I feel like Dave Barry!) (You like all my linking in this post? I feel like a dork!)

have I mentioned

that we're turning into hippies? This weekend we made some more jam (strawberry jalapeno and orange marmalade):

and some granola:


as well as our weekly ration of rolls. I feel like we made something else too, but I can't remember. I know a lot of time was spent in the kitchen, anyway. I'm feeling a little scatter brained at the moment. So, for lack of a better post, please enjoy some Fun with Photoshop. If you click on them they look cooler.

A couple of pictures from strawberry picking:


Rosemary and me when we visited a couple of summers ago:


Group picture from the day after our wedding:

I think this one's pretty self-explanatory (original is on the left):

more domesticity

Apparently we couldn't slow back down to our usual leisurely weekend pace after all the excitement of the past couple weeks. Saturday we hit up the farmers market, ran some errands, I cleaned, baked some bread (which didn't rise because I killed the yeast by using water that was too hot), we went for a nice long walk (which resulted in me being sore the rest of the weekend), and got started on some apple butter. Sunday we finished the apple butter (which turned out really well), made some strawberry orange jam (early taste tests indicate success), spent almost 2 hours trying to boil water to seal all those jars of deliciousness, went to the beach, baked some rolls for dinner, and caught up on the last 2 or so weeks of tv. Craziness. A good weekend overall though, and having an extra day off didn't hurt either. I'd have more pictures, but our camera battery died this weekend and the charger and spare were both at the office in the computer case I used as a carry on to go to Minnesota, and I forgot to get the pictures Katie took. My bad.

Completely unrelated... have I ever mentioned my inability to stay awake for our drive to work? Probably twice a week I fall asleep during our morning drive. Today, for example, I passed out for about 15 minutes. It's a nice little nap, but sometimes (like this morning) I end up kind of disoriented and more tired when I wake up. Luckily the AC in our building is fixed, so the cold jolts me back into reality pretty quickly. Until the hypothermia sets in, then I'm out again.

strawberries

It's hard to post when I don't have a computer. I apologize to my legions of fans :)

We went strawberry picking with Ilya and Mercedes on Saturday! It was a perfect day, sunny and warm, and when we finally found the place (it was a bit off the beaten track) we had a lot of fun. Well, at first we were a little confused, it was just a whole bunch of land with no one around, but we finally found someone and figured it out. The set up was cool, this is the entire field of crops that they grow to sell:


Right now it's mostly strawberries. It doesn't look like much, but we were able to pick almost 30 pounds total! We also tried some of the lettuce and other veggies that she had growing. Here's a close up of the planting system. The white boxes are just styrofoam, I think, and they're all stacked so you can fit a whole bunch of plants in a much smaller space than if they were planted in the ground. Plus it's easier to pick the strawberries this way. And, it's all organic!

After we picked the plants clean, the lady (I think her name was Betty Jean, rather fitting I thought) took us over to see the animals. They had chickens, pigs, donkeys, goats, cows, all sorts of stuff. They also grow a big corn maze every year that's open to the public.

Once we got home, we washed, cut, and froze most of the berries. How luscious do they look??


We're going to make jam with them once we get all of the supplies. Alfred bought pectin online so we're waiting for that to get shipped. In the meantime, I made a pie! It looked much prettier before it was baked and juice leaked out in a few places. It was super delicious though.


Yesterday we just hung out at home. It was cloudy and dreary all day. Saturday was so busy that I needed a day to be kind of lazy, so since the weather wasn't as nice I figured we had a good excuse to sit around. And eat pie, of course!