Guest Photographer

First, today's lunch:


Then some shots from today's guest photographer. R took these this morning.


Geraniums in the front window. Foggy, cold morning in the background.

I love her shot of the geraniums.

Santa Fe Pictures

Some pictures from our Christmas trip to New Mexico. This is the afternoon we spent in Santa Fe, at the galleries near the train tracks.

It was uncharacteristically overcast and gray. We let R pick out a puppet from the Farmer's Market, and she picked this Jack Russell terrier. She didn't let him out of her sight for weeks.




I used to walk past those train tracks, down Paseo de Peralta every day on my way home from the downtown art gallery where I worked the year after college. This is where I lived, in the upstairs apartment. It looks the same, maybe less run-down now. I wonder if they still have the old cast-iron footed tub. That place was so spectacular when the sun was just going down and all the windows filled with light. A molten gold that made the furniture look like it was on fire. That light always pops into my head when I hear the Cowboy Junkies or Glenn Gould's recording of "The Goldberg Variations." It must be what I listened to most when I lived there.

Here is some graffiti outside my favorite restaurant, La Choza. Just down the street from my old apartment.

This is outside the International Folk Art Museum on Museum Hill. The colors look different on a gray day, more variation in the blues and grays. In some ways Santa Fe is more interesting when it's not baking in the sun.

1.26 Bento

This is the week they do Iowa Basic Skills Testing. R has never done standardized testing. I wonder how she'll do. I'm trying to pack her lunches with brain food that she will actually eat. I made some "protein cookies" with silken tofu over the weekend. I asked D, how bad are these, really. And he said, "they're ok if you choke them down really quickly." They had a thumbprint in the middle with some homemade jam, to jazz them up a little. R told me yesterday, "if you bring me another one of those cookies for an after school snack that has SAUCE in the middle, I will be very mad." I should point out, Charlie loves them. I have been using them to lure him up the stairs into his crate. I wish they were doing dog testing this week, because his nutrition is tip-top.

Summer in January

We are broke after Christmas and limping through to payday, it's gray and windy and cold, and we all have the Sunday-evening melancholy. This is exactly the kind of day I was thinking about when I canned all that sunny produce this summer. I brought up some jars of garden tomatoes and Palisade peaches from the basement shelves and made dinner.

I made soup with the jars of our Purple Cherokee tomatoes and a Bob's Red Mill soup mix that has beans and barley and tiny whole wheat alphabet noodles. I put in grape tomatoes (from Chile? or Mexico?) I had on the counter, and right at the end stirred in some summer basil puree we still had in the freezer. It had such bright flavor--it cheered us all up. We also had turkey burgers, a pear-dried cranberry-and apricot salad, spinach, and a homemade baguette. I have been making bread with a sourdough starter since December. It smells so good while it's baking with a pot of soup simmering above it.

We ate by candlelight and played Debussy. It was peaceful. D said it was "classy." He was making fun of me, but he kind of meant it too.

I think Charlie is going to be one of the smaller border collies. He's only eight months, so he still has some growing to do. But I don't think he'll get much bigger. He is such a joy in our house.

For dessert I made a galette with the peaches I canned in August. Golden and warm from the oven. Sun in January.

Breaking the Spell

Sometimes when I haven't written the blog for awhile (like the whole month of January), it gets harder to post. I'll just jump in with what we did Friday after school.

Chocolate pumpkin muffins.

Chocolate Pumpkin Muffins
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
3/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
3 T ground flax meal
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups sugar (can substitute 3/4 c. agave)
10 oz canned pumpkin
2 large eggs
1/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
Preheat oven to 375. Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Combine the pumpkin, sugar, eggs, milk and vanilla and mix well. Add the dry mixture to the pumpkin mixture and stir just until moistened. Add the melted butter and stir until incorporated--don't over-mix. Stir in the chocolate chips. Bake in 12 muffin cups, lined with paper liners or sprayed with cooking spray.
Bake for 20 - 25 minutes or until the center is set.

Right behind R's hand are the most irritatingly-named environmentally friendly baking cups. "If You Care." It's a good product, but who wants to be nagged by their cupcake papers.

Everything in my house is bothering me. The art on the walls, which I keep taking down and moving around, the furniture, the lack of a mantel and fireplace screen. We sanded down the big white chair to get it ready to refinish. The couch is next.