Secret Squirrel

I put the "Moroccan" in quotes because it, like all of my vague wavings in the direction of ethnic cuisine, doesn't even pretend to be authentic. But it has dried apricots, mint, cumin, and chickpeas in it, so.

- Fry 3 cloves of garlic in olive oil.
- Add chopped-up dried apricots, dried mint, cumin, and turmeric (because it doesn't taste like much in a strong-flavored dish like this, and maybe it'll keep us from getting Alzheimer's!).
- Add can of chickpeas, juice included.
- Add 3/4 jar of chopped tomatoes.
- Cook for awhile: delicious soup!

I served this with Mollie Katzen's latke recipe, and some of my canned applesauce from last fall.

What's really important here, though, is that this represents the last jar of tomatoes, the last potatoes, and the second-to-last jar of applesauce, and therefore the end of the bulk of last year's preserved food. (There are still a few shallots, 3 jars of peaches, a bag of frozen corn, some frozen pesto, and probably one or two other things, but nothing that would add up to "dinner.")

I've certainly eaten out a lot more since Thanksgiving than I will once I have farmer's market bounty to cook from again. And I ended up only feeding myself this winter rather than feeding myself and spooky_thing. That said, though -- I'm eating my last jar of tomatoes, and the farmer's market opens again in a couple of weeks. I'd say the first year of the Grand Food Preservation Experiment was a success!

( What I learned about food preservation )

In case your flist hasn't exploded as much as mine:

CA Supreme Court rules that the state must legalize gay marriage!

I announced this to my office as soon as I read it, knowing that I could do that, in a school, and have it be received as uncontroversially great news. I heart my job.

(But we were still first.)

(I saw my students' production of Grease on Saturday night and have had the damn songs in my head ever since. *smacks self in head in vain attempt to dislodge earworm*)

Anyway, it's a month until summer vacation, and I need something to do. I don't do well with vast chunks of unstructured time, so please help me structure it! Volunteer or paid gigs welcome. I would enjoy: ( Cut for job ideas )

Finding summer jobs is harder than it sounds! Most teachers (if they work at all) seem to work at a day camp (little kids give me hives), work at a residential camp (I don't want to disappear for the summer), or teach summer school (which doesn't need librarians). Eventually I'll figure out this summer thing, but until then I'll continue to rely on Dr. LJ.

(I also want to spend lots of time with you this summer! Yaaaay, free time!)

The weather ended up way nicer than it was supposed to be today, so I did some yard work:

- De-grassed the remainder of the perennial garden. I did 2/3 of it last year, composted, and mulched the top, but left this part because I didn't have enough compost. The good news is that the mulch has done a fabulous job keeping the grass from coming back.

- Planted cosmo seeds in the rear of the perennial garden (though they are not perennials -- I just can't figure out how else to name the sections).

- Planted snapdragon seeds in the front of the perennial garden. I don't know that I can grow snapdragons from seed in Boston in mid-May, but I gathered the seeds from last year's snapdragons, so it doesn't hurt to try.

- Planted zinnia seeds in the annual garden.

- Planted morning glory seeds along the front fence. When facing the street, the seeds on the left were store-bought, and the seeds on the right I gathered from last year's morning glories. It'll be an experiment!

- Bought basil: 2 in the Bed of Doom, 3 in the back of the strawberry patch, and 1 in the perennial bed.

- Bought a lovely deep purple flowering columbine and added it to the perennial bed. The columbine I planted last year is growing happily, but never seems to flower. What's up with that? (Columbines are some of my favorite flowers. Want more!)

- Moved the pot of lettuce and the pot of herbs (chives, rosemary, sage) to the back of the Bed of Doom, because it looked like they were getting munched by something in the front yard. The front generally gets more bird activity, so hopefully a change of venue will make them forget about my tasty leaves.

- Tossed an endless number of cutworms out of the yard to the street. They're moth larvae that eat the stems of young plants. I haven't seen a lot of damage, but all the same, get outta my garden! I'm sure I didn't get even a small percentage of the ones that are there, though. The thing to do, I'm told, is to put down paving stones and mulch to attract beetles, which eat cutworms. I've done that, but no beetles yet.

I have, as the subject would imply, flowers on my strawberries! (Just the Fort Laramies, which I guess are the earlier-bearing variety.) Nom!

I also have a pot full of happy-looking lettuce seedlings, some pushy tiger lilies trying to shove the daffodils aside, nicely regrown balloon flower, and antique sweet pea seedlings, which I didn't think were going to come up at all!

The chard seeds have also sprouted in the Bed of Doom, and appear to be thriving. It goes against my nature to waste perfectly good (future) food, but should I eat chard from a bed that was sprinkled with sawdust of indeterminate origin? I suppose I should research the arsenic thing... (My landlord, of course, had no idea where the lumber came from or what it might have been treated with.)

Er, did anyone else feel igry reading today's xkcd?

I successfully made crackers! I'd never tried before, and they totally worked -- despite fucking up the recipe. Here's my recipe for tasty crackers:

- Start with recipe for "A Rich Cracker" from Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads (thanks, Lexi and the Simon & Schuster galley room!).
- Preheat oven to 400.
- Misread the part where it says "1/2 stick" of butter rather than "1/2 cup" of butter. Add way too much butter to 1 c. flour + 1/2 tsp. baking powder + 1 tsp. salt and mix.
- Stir together 1 egg and 3/4 cup of milk...or really, more like 1/4 cup of milk and the rest water, because I ran out of milk. Add to the butter & flour.
- Add another cup of flour in 1/4 c. increments.
- Try to transfer it to baking sheet to knead and roll. Realize it is far too sticky to do these things. Wonder why. Notice the difference between "stick" and "cup." Reject doubling recipe for lack of milk.
- Add another 1/2 c. flour to make the dough manageable. Knead with dough hook of KitchenAid for 4 minutes.
- Roll out half the dough on each of two cookie sheets. Sprinkle salt on both and dried rosemary on one. Put in oven for 10-15 minutes, until brown and crispy.
- Take out, cool, decide rosemary crackers are especially awesome. Wish I'd made more of those.
- Pack them in containers and take them to janet_carter and Roommate M's house. Leave oven light on.

Ta-da! Crackers! I wonder what the real recipe tastes like...

(Seriously, I'm pretty pleased with myself for saying, "Huh, I messed up -- but I know what dough is supposed to feel like! Let's see if I can fudge it!" and having that work. Clearly Operation Bake-a-Lot is teaching me something...)

(I need a food icon! I think it should say NOM! in big letters, with some sort of appropriate graphic that isn't actually a lolcat.)

NSTAR is finally instituting a green power program in Massachusetts! You can elect to get half or all of your electricity from wind power. They haven't confirmed a price yet, but they're guessing that it will cost an average of $4-7 extra a month. For me, and for most of you, that's nothing, really. Woot!

Find out more about it and pre-enroll here.

The lettuce seeds I planted a little over a week ago have sprouted and are now teeny little arugula-tasting seedlings. I need to get a shallower, wider planter for the next round -- it's stupid to fill up such a deep pot with soil for something with such a shallow root system.

One of the mystery perennials is now clearly my tiger lily, forked from last year's awkward single stalk into a veritable cluster of two or three.

No sign yet of my sweet peas or poppies, sadly. Maybe all the rain the last couple of days will help.

Also, I spoke to the landlady last night, who said that she didn't think anything actually got thrown away; my compost is probably still in the trash can, buried under chunks of wood and nails and sawdust. Urrrgh.

Because I'm absurdly sentimental (and because worms are wicked valuable, yo, and I don't have a thriving colony anywhere else yet), I might actually dig under it all (carefully, and wearing gloves, of course) to rescue the worms. They can live in this year's compost instead.

On Friday I went to a conference on making independent schools environmentally sustainable. What does this have to do with my job, you ask? Absolutely nothing (except for the independent school part). I saw it advertised, asked to go, and because my school is awesome about professional development money (if less awesome about environmental sustainability), they said sure and handed me a check.

The conference was life-changing...or at least, I hope it will be. This depends on my being able to sustain (har) my post-conference level of inspiration and enthusiasm, which has not historically been my strong suit.

( Click here to find out how I will CHANGE THE WORLD!!1! (This is long; I have lots of processing to do here) )

(I've also made a bunch of new icons today at work, instead of actually, you know, working. This one's for Camp Nutella/Freak, especially jadelennox and froggoddess.)

Upon coming home today, I noticed a silver trailer in the other driveway and broken bits of what looked like my back porch lined up along the wall. Uh-oh...

Turns out the landlord decided to re-do the back porch, which was sagging. In theory, this is nice. In practice? Fucking tell me first! My future tomato bed (and current chard bed, if the seeds ever get the chance to sprout) is strewn with trash and sawdust. My hanging plant and Christmas lights have been removed. Our outdoor chairs and table and my garden pots and everything else I put out there have been piled in the middle of the porch. The entire paved part of the back"yard" is covered with sawdust and odd bits of wood and probably nails.

Last year's compost, stored in a trash barrel, which I've been using to make the yard that they own less leaded and capable of growing things again? Gone.

The recycling bin that my roommate so carefully filled and put outside for pickup tomorrow? Filled with Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee cups and other workman crap, which I will now have to pick out. (Not to sound like an elitist asshole, but seriously, would it be so hard for people who work on other people's homes to be respectful of their trash-disposal methods? At least they put their crap in a bin of some sort, rather than just tossing it on the ground. That's an improvement over my past experience.)

My plan of eating outside when my friends come over for dinner on Friday? Shot, unless all of this is finished and cleaned up in the next two days.

Look, I know we don't own the place. But we live here. We keep our things here, we act out our lives here. I have put an enormous amount of time and money into the yard in just the year that I've been here, and it is a vast improvement from how it started, if I do say so myself. It wouldn't be so hard to give us a call a couple of days before doing something like this so we can move our things out of the way. Less work for you, none of our stuff gets thrown out, I don't feel fucking violated when I get home and nothing's the way I left it. Win-win!

I usually appreciate Slacktivist's blog -- he's a smart, informed man with interesting things to say. Yesterday's post about Obama's "cling to guns and religion" comment is even more worth reading than usual.

Something I was cataloging reminded me of Deep Fried Live! with Tako the Octopus (a cooking show that's sort of like Good Eats, if Alton Brown were an animated octopus). We used to watch regularly for updates back in the heady days of 101 (Brown's student tech support center and my main college hang-out spot).

So I checked to see if it still exists, 7 or 8 years later. It does! With new episodes!

Entertain me (and yourself) this week: find an internet thing you used to love and haven't thought about in years, and comment (or post) about it.

Yesterday was mostly about the front yard (though I did plant some antique sweet pea seeds against the trash-picked trellis in the side yard, and add another spearmint seedling to last year's slowly recovering mint patch):

- Weeded part of the perennial garden and dug in some partly-finished compost goop.
- Planted two kinds of creeping thyme along the border of the perennial garden.
- Leveled off a divot in the perennial garden with some top-soil-in-a-bag and compost goop, then planted a new kind of lavender there.
- Noticed that most things are coming back from last year, even things I thought were dead: columbine, rudbeckia, something mysterious and non-weedy that might be the platycodon (balloon flowers). Maybe I will conquer this difficult garden after all!

- Planted California poppy seeds in the flower patch. Those little buggers are rolly! I didn't so much "plant" them as "accidentally drop them all over the ground." Oh, well.

- Trimmed back last year's dead chives so the new bits can poke through, spread out some extra container mix, and added purple sage and rosemary to the herb planter.
- Filled another pot with container mix and top soil and planted mixed lettuce seeds.

Ok, tv-watching friends with good taste, I need some suggestions. spooky_thing and I have finished Buffy, season 1 of Heroes (with no reliable way to get season 2), and Freaks & Geeks. We're working through Babylon 5 with a group of people, and we're up-to-date on Weeds and Battlestar.

Things we've tried that he liked but I didn't: Deadwood, The Wire, Sopranos.*
Things I've watched already and don't need to see again: Six Feet Under, Angel.

What else is a) on DVD, b) at least a couple of seasons long, and c) arc-y and generally well put together?

* We tried the first episode of The Wire last night. This has become enough of a pattern that I have to acknowledge it, however Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm it makes me sound: I can't watch stuff with too much swearing. If characters tend to say, "Sit down, you motherfucking piece of shit asshole" rather than quitting at, "Sit down, asshole," it feels like I'm watching a movie in German -- I understand the gist, but it's hard work and the precise meaning is foggy. Perhaps premium-channel TV is not for me.

- Daffodils all blooming beautifully, and other bulbs are doing their thing. I think just about everything I planted came up!

- Three peas I planted a couple of weeks ago (in the front yard, against the lattice under the porch) have sprouted and are looking happy.

- Weeded strawberry bed. Strawberries are putting out new leaves!

- Spread some partially-decomposed "compost" from last year over the side yard and turned it under. Now my yard has worms; hopefully there'll be enough food for them to keep them fruitful and multiplying. I added some worms to this year's compost in the tumbler, too. Go, little worm dudes!

- Set off the future tomato bed with a brick border.

- Planted Swiss chard seeds along the tomato bed border.

- Set up trash-picked fence piece in side yard for the next round of peas to grow up. Discovered I already used all my pea seeds; will have to buy more tomorrow.

My step-brother is getting his discharge papers and coming home from Afghanistan! He's been there two years.

(Since he's not actually here yet, I'm a little nervous that he'll get sucked back in. I keep hearing horror stories about people who think their tour is over and then...not so much. But my dad sounded pretty confident, so yay!)

My Good Earth tea bag this morning would like you to know that:

"A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

(Warning: total downer)

I just finished The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perrotta. Here's a flashback of fundamentalist church founder Pastor Dennis, when he was a Best Buy techie in the process of being called by God:

"All he really knew at the time was that the store suddenly began to feel strange. He'd always thought of it as a humming hive of useful machines and ingenious works of art, but now it struck him as soulless, vaguely malignant. The customers didn't seem excited so much as dazed, pod people hypnotized by flickering images, stupefied by all that shiny metal and molded plastic. Sometimes, walking down the DVD aisle, he was almost certain he could smell something putrid, as if rotting flesh were hidden inside those elegant little boxes with pictures of handsome men and beautiful women on the front. He'd watch kids trying out video games on the in-store consoles and have to suppress an urge to rip the controllers out of their hands and scream for them to run for their lives. On more than one occasion, he found himself on his knees in the employee restroom, puking up his guts, although he didn't feel the least bit sick."

It made me a depressed environmentalist instead of a born-again Christian, but this is exactly how I feel on my bad days, walking through the world (or even on a good day, if I have to go to a place like Best Buy).

Today I actually a) remembered to bring the necessary dish and b) got up the nerve to ask the cashier at Cosi in South Station to put my soup in a reusable container. She just did it, no "I have to ask the manager," and no filling a throwaway cup to determine the amount and then pouring it into my container (as I had feared). It was awesome!

And now I have yummy soup for dinner, in a container I can microwave, and the only thing I have to throw away from the meal is the foil they used to wrap my bread (and even that I'll probably reuse once for something or other). Woot!