Cooking Days

75°f/24°C, mostly sunny, high of 90 today. Storms all around us but so far the rain b has missed us, sadly, so unless we get rsin tonight we will begin watering on earnest tomorrow.

I stayed home all this past week, finally venturing out yesterday evening and today. It has been blistering hot all week, with highs in the 90s and heat index over 100 every day. Miserable weather.

So I went out early to stringtrim, weed, water the potted plants and a few new things i planted last week, and just muck about a bit in my gardens. 

In this, the biggest flower bed, I have been pulling out the Mexican primroses by the handful, so that the other plants have more space, and can be seen. I still have a lot to do,  plus cutting back the iris leaves.

Veggies are coming along well. The cucumbers are climbing and blooming like crazy, but I can't see where any fruit is setting, because bees are not out much to pollinate in this heat.

The green beans are blooming and I think are benefiting from the shade of the asparagus. 

I am one of those nuts that talk to my plants, yes I am. I praise them, apologize if I break one, ask them what the problem is if they aren't doing well. They never, ever answer me, thank goodness, or I would know I had gone off the deep end for sure.

It took a day to get used to having to be inside 

so much, but I soon developed a routine--clean and cook in the early part of the day, paint or do furniture work in the afternoon, followed by listing on ebay. 

I have done a lot of cooking too. Staying home is good for that. I accidentally opened a quart of kidney beans one day, thinking they were the cranberry juice that I use to make mimosas. Yeah I know, how could I have mistaken them? Well, the cranberry juice is made by putting a cup of berries in a jar, adding sugar and water, and then water-bath canning for about 40 minutes. So in the darkest corner of the cellar, the kidney beans are right beside the cranberry juice. I just saw dark red, grabbed a jar and without looking at it popped the top in the kitchen.

Now, a quart is a lot of kidney beans. I had canned them to use in chili, but sure wasn't going to make chili in this weather. So I made a big batch of Spanish rice, and froze all but what we ate for dinner, along with a salad.

 The next day I made liver and onions, which we love, with baked potatoes and a salad.  I also made raspberry banana bread, 

Afternoon break with the bread, iced tea and my current book.

and one day made raspberry jam, 

the next day strawberry jam with berries from the freezer. 

Then Thursday evening neighbors Jeff and Tamara showed up with a bucket full of Chicken of the Woods wild mushrooms. 

What a gift! I pickled most of them Friday, 

and used some in an Alfredo penne pasta along with Swiss chard and broccoli from the garden 

and sliced tomatoes from the farmer's market. I saved some nice pieces to fry tomorrow for dipping in ranch dressing as Tamara recommended. I put two containers of the pasta in the freezer. It will be nice to have these ready-made meals on nights when I don't want to cook.

I also made a large batch of granola, because with this heat and moulting the hens have slowed way down on their laying. Can't blame the poor girls!

So even though it been "cooking hot" outside, the actual cooking has been going on in my kitchen.

I have finished the desk I was working on, 

along with this mirror (waiting in my storage room with other stuff I cleaned up this week for the booths),

and started on this mirror and this  "architectural piece", which actually was once on the back of a dresser, I think. It will make an interesting wall piece, I think.

Yesterday evening we went to the farmer's market for tomatoes and cucumbers, and to pick up butter from Maddie.  Just look at the difference between her butter and store butter! It costs twice as much but in my book it is well worth it. Like the milk we buy from her, the taste is just excellent. We are spoiled, no lie.

After the market we stopped at a Mexican restaurant because I was craving a Margarita,  and we ran into a friend there. We had a nice visit, then afterwards ran out to the "Yacht Club" and met up with granddaughter Jordan and her new husband. Even though Jordan lives locally we rarely see her because of her busy schedule with her work and her 3 children, so this was a rare pleasure. When we got home I realized I had left my phone behind, but Jordan and her guy brought it out and stayed til midnight. She also brought me the remainder of some limoncello she had made! I am looking forward to trying it.

Today we were out and about again, but this post is long enough so that can wait for another day.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

That One Son of Mine

75°f/24°C, clear and humid again at 7:30am. Some places in ourcstatevreached 100° yesterday. Watered some plants and pots, picked 2 peppers, put down some cardboard mulch. Back inside by 9am.

My #4 son, Aaron, was in Montreal, Canada  last week to do some work. I did not know that Montreal is a French-speaking city! How did I miss that? I knew Quebec was, but never realized the primary language of Montreal was also French.

Aaron had a fine time trying to read road signs and such, and of course communicating was complicated too, suncebhe doesnt speak any French. Some people he met were bilingual, but not everyone. But he was thrilled to be able to try poutine, which he gave a two thumbs up.

Aaron travels extensively in his work, traveling around the country doing repair work at various sites for a contracting company. One day he may be in Florida  fixing the heaters in a bay where manatees over-winter, the next working in a plant in western New York. Some weeks he hits three worksites, others just 2, depending on the job. Today I believe he is in Wyoming, then goes on to North Carolina. Or maybe he's already in North Carolina; it's hard to keep up with him. 

His stay in Montreal was short---arrive one day, work the next, and fly out on the third. He was doing some electrical work on the Mount Royal Tunnel, a 100-year-old light-rail tunnel which has been undergoing extensive renovations since about 2018, and is supposed to re-open this year. The work was slowed down early on when a century-old box of dynamite was inadvertently exploded in the tunnel. Apparently it had been left there during construction in some obscure niche. Fortunately no one was hurt. 

Aaron enjoys his work. We often call him MacGiver after the TV show, because Aaron can fix pretty much anything electrical or mechanical, and is pretty good on electronics too. Which is even more surprising, when i think about it, since he grew up without electricty--- we finally hooked to the grid in 1989 or 1990, cant recall exactly, but Aaron would have been finishibg high school by then. His college degree is in Veterinary Science, but he never worked in that field; since graduating college was a lead instrumentation tech at a power plant until moving to this job last year. While there were plenty of challenges in that power plant, I always felt like he wasn't using all his capabilities. These days, I don't worry about him being bored!

 

Aaron and Sassy in the 1972 Mercury Aaron rebuilt pretty much from the door handles up.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Dealing With the Heat

78°f /25.5°C and humid at 7:30am, 92°f/33°C now with heat index of 101° and expected to get hotter this afternoon. No chance of rain.

We were out early again this morning, getting done what we can before it gets unbearable. I have finished my stringtrimming work for now, thank goodness, but haven't been in the vegetable garden in the last 2 days, so that will be tomorrow morning's work. So far everything looks okay, although I did have some watering to do for the pots and planters. I added a little liquid fish and seaweed fertilizer to the water to give them a little boost.

The rest of the morning, once I showered and rested a bit, was inside work. I did some organizing in our work/storage room, hung out some laundry, and started a pot of broccoli- cheese soup, which is simmering as I write. I used broccoli stems and leaves from the broccoli I harvested (and we ate) the other day, plus a couple packs of broccoli frozen last year that need to be used. This afternoon I plan to make black raspberry jam, and put the last coat of wax on the desk I have been working on. And maybe do a few easy listings. 

A little note here on the plastic bag dryer I use. I don't know if any of you reuse plastic bags, but this card displayed works great for me.

I am adjusting to this new staying-inside routine, but i do get restless. I want to be outside! But if course that's impossible in this heat. I did finish another book, an older title by Judith Guest called Errands. It follows the lives of a family before and after the father's death from cancer. I must say, it was a bit of a downer, yet at the same time hopeful. I don't know if the author has ever experienced what she was writing, but she certainly has a deep understanding of grief, and of how and person progresses through a cancer diagnosis. She was spot on, at least in my own observations of friends with cancer, and my own journey through deep grief. Now i am starting a book by one of my favorite authors,  Alice Hoffman, titled Here on Earth. I hope it is as good as others I have read by her 

A couple of you suggested hiring a lawn service to mow for us. Larry mows between an acre and 2 acres, it's just the way our place is laid out, and it's not easy.  I have no clue what lawn services cost, but I am sure it would be quite costly. I am thinking about it though, and about how we will manage as we get older. To pay for such a service would probably strap us very tightly financially,  if we could afford it at all. I really don't want to tie down my one son who lives closest to us either. But I do not want to move either. So trying to think this through

How are you managing the heat where you are? Iris, I know you are not warm at all! Right now I am kinda jealous of those of you with more moderate weather. It used to be that we might get a few days of extreme heat in mid-July, but never in June. 

I remember when I was a child in northern Virginia,  the local radio station would have a contest to guess the day and I think the time  when the temperature reached 100°. It happened almost every year, usually in July. Manassas had very humid, sticky summers, as I recall, even worse than here, and similar to that of Washington,  DC, which was only 25 miles away. We had no air- conditioning back then, almost nobody did. Mom would close up the living room and pull the curtains so that at least that room would stay somewhat cool. 

The rest of the house though, would really heat up. We children played outside under a big shady maple, or in the sheltered and shade side yard. Sometimes we were allowed to turn on the hose and run through the cold, cold water, or fill a galvanized metal tub to play in. What bliss. We would make Kool-Aid popsicles in ice trays, using sticks saved year to year. Dinner was often just sandwiches or something very simple, because who wanted to cook in that heat?

When I moved here, we had no electricity for about 15 years, so no fans or AC to cool off. We didn't have these big shade trees either, so the house would really heat up. Fortunately these hills cool down nicely at night usually, so sleep wasn't difficult, and mornings were not too bad. Even when we got electricity, we didn't get an air conditioner until 2003, when my parents were coming for a (very) rare visit.

Today we have 3 window units--a big one in the kitchen that cools the main part of the house, a small one in the log room, and another small one back in the work/storage room. Often these are all turned off at night, and we will open the bedroom window. Maybe it was all thosevyears of our lives without AC, but we both enjoy the night air, and the quiet music of summer nights.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.