Gentleman Charlie

Our gentleman Charlie just turned 9. My mom named him Gentleman Charlie. She appreciated his manners when he visited their house and deferred to their dog and made his dignified rounds visiting everyone as we sat in the living room. He is much more rambunctious/obnoxious in our house where he is lord of his domain. I appreciated how expertly and elegantly he tempered himself as a visitor.

Everyone counts on Charlie. Easily rattled and spooked Clover is most relaxed when she's falling asleep on him. He's sprouting white hairs everywhere now but he is still in charge of what he believes is a farm, as right hand man to Dan who he believes is a farmer. He's so often worried, but no one can talk him out of that.

My parents' dog Moxie lives with us now. Three dogs is more than I would have taken on, but this is the right thing. She grieved my dad when he died. She was one of the few things my mom responded to as her dementia took off galloping after she lost her husband of more than 50 years. We admired Moxie for changing everything she knew and taking off on a road trip to a new house where she could visit my mom every day but it was all upside down.

She is an explosion of coarse long white fur and we had her groomed down to fluff. We called her PJ because she looked like she was zipped into white footie pajamas.

We mark our lives with dogs. My family always defined eras, no matter how brief, with dogs. Scooter. Peppy. Toro. Easter. Rogan. (Rogan Redbeare O'Dunboy, our pedigreed Irish Setter named after our ancestral family castle in Ireland! We all sat down at the dining room table and looked through history books and our genealogy and thesaurus entries for "red" to name him.) Shane. After the kids left home, one Christmas we bought our parents puppies to keep them company, Buster & Willie. Moxie was a stray who wandered up to my mom on Easter while she was watering the flowers in the front yard. The neighbors had all been trying to catch her for awhile. My mom let her inside for a drink of water and she never left. Until she made the sad, hard, drive with my mom to our house in Colorado after my dad's sudden death.

Gentleman recognizes gentleman.

St. Francis, who was quoting Job 12:7-8, said "Ask the beasts and they will teach you the beauty of this earth." St. Therese promised she would rain a shower of roses down on earth as a blessing after her death. In my life that shower of blessing is our R, who is named for St. Therese and for the Blessed Mother. But each of these doggie souls who come to us at a certain time and leave at another time, always much too soon and with so much grieving, is also a sign from God that he loves us. It helps, as I grieve the loss of both my parents in one year that is so hard I can't even talk about it yet, to see their dog obsessing over bunnies under our deck. She has wrecked some deck boards with scratching and slobber, but she is happy here. It still startles me to see her merry little dark eyed face in my house sometimes. When she so clearly belongs to theirs, which so recently isn't there any more.

End of May Garden

We might get peaches from our trees for the first time this year! We've had late frosts after they've blossomed ever since we planted them.

The irises my mom gave us from her house have gone crazy this year. I love looking through them to the arbor gate.

We fenced in the front garden with a black metal fence this year. I loved the bamboo fencing but it really did not hold up to the Colorado elements. Here are the fava beans and peas, with kales and salad greens in the background. 

Peas!

We also added paving stones between the rows and are trying black plastic mulched with straw this year to keep the weeds down. In the back rows are tomatoes. Planted more closely than usual because we're going to trellis them with Florida Weave this year and try to keep up with the pruning. The farthest row is eggplants and peppers. Under the black plastic is a drip system that I'm hoping will help us keep the garden watered through our hot dry summers.

The morning light is beautiful in May, while things are still green and not completely dried out. 

This is a scented Rose Snowflake Geranium. It smells wonderful and I love the airy open blossoms. 

Holiday Weekend

Yesterday was a frustrating day. Too hot to work in the garden, a flat tire that meant long hot delays getting where we were going, and a mysterious leak in the basement. Today the only productive thing I did was make these cherry hand pies. They are on my great grandma McDonald's hand painted Bavarian china.

Gluten free, from a King Arthur Flour recipe. My kitchen was too hot for the pastry to stay cold and bake up flaky, but everyone liked them. R visited with the chickens and we marveled that we still have four of our original (she calls them the OGs) girls. This is Cricket, who at age 5 still lays beautiful bluegreen eggs. We still have the OGs Marigold, Egglantine, and Stellaluna, and the later additions Flannery and Willa. We've lost Iris, Colette, Poppy June, Felicity, Fialka and Charlotte to what appeared to be natural causes. All of them just passed away overnight in their coop over the course of five years, no illnesses or predator injuries. (Thank you Charlie the livestock guardian!) Tilda turned out to be a rooster and went to live on a farm since we can't keep roosters in the city.  The next year, Poppy Junior and Bonnie turned out to be roosters although they were sold as pullet chicks, and we adopted them to a farm along with their sister Sylvie who was attached to them.

We have a new batch of chicks who are almost big enough to leave the brooder inside and join the big chickens in the coop. This is Frances and Ginger the day we brought them home. They are bigger than this now. Charlie takes his chicken protector job very seriously. Ginger is a Bielenfelder and Frances is a Cream Legbar, who will lay sky blue eggs. Males and females have different coloring from birth in those breeds, so we know we won't have the heartbreak of raising a chick by hand and then hearing a crow. Then we added Flora the Speckled Sussex and Mila the Red Star, who is also certain to be a girl. Flora is supposed to be a pullet also, but we've had bad luck with pullets turning out to be surprise roosters. We love her and really hope she's a girl. Flora came with Evangeline, who got progressively sicker after we brought her home. She was tiny and unsteady on her feet and we couldn't get her to drink or eat. I stayed up all night keeping her warm and feeding her electrolyte water, but she died in my hands near dawn. It is always hard to lose a chicken, but this was our first chick who didn't make it, and it was heartbreaking. She was the shape of a little bumblebee. I still feel so sad thinking about her.

I'm going to try to wake up early enough tomorrow to work in the garden while it's still cool. After letting the front yard garden languish for a few years as life events got in the way, it feels so good to have it up and running again. I'll take some pictures tomorrow.

I would like to start recording our life here again

This blog is a record of our life in this house, as the years go by, that I am so grateful we have. Birthdays and holidays. The routine sustaining happy family times that change with the seasons. They have come and gone and we remember them. This year, after some dormant seasons, we have the front yard garden well underway. A new fence to replace the bamboo one I loved that did not hold up to the Colorado elements. Seedlings under lights since January, most planted out already.

R is starting high school in the fall and graduating 8th grade this week. So many emotions. So much loss. Both my parents within the year. The first anniversary of my dad's death is a few days after R's graduation.

I don't know where to start, so here is a picture of my first batch of kombucha. I understand I am way behind on this trend, and that there is not a lot of science behind the health of this fermented brew. R likes buying it at the grocery store so I looked into making it and found that I love the process and the taste. We all think we feel better after drinking it? My second batch went too long and everyone thought it was too sour. My third batch will be ready tomorrow.

Cast Iron Pot Roast

Chuck roast in my vintage Wagner Ware pan, ready for the oven. 

We finally un-glutened and re-seasoned my favorite vintage cast iron pan. Some cookware can hold on to traces of gluten, which can transfer to the food you cook in it. If you're celiac like R, even that trace of gluten could make her sick. My stainless steel All-Clad Dutch oven and smaller saucepans are fine. But nonstick pans can have tiny scratches where gluten can linger even after repeated washings, and cast iron is porous.

So we replaced our Teflon skillet, and put the cast iron through the oven's self-clean cycle. This takes the pan down to bare metal, and burns off all the gluten. It also burned off the careful seasoning we've built up. This is an old pan, that we got second hand and already beautifully seasoned. But it was easier to heat seal and re-season it than I thought it would be. I'll do a post about that process soon.

This is by far my favorite pan, and it's great to have it back again and safe for R. It makes the best pot roast. Get the skillet piping hot and sear the salted and peppered beef (this one was a chuck roast) in a little oil (I used avocado oil). Take the beef out, add more oil if necessary, and layer thinly sliced potatoes on the bottom of the hot skillet. After the potatoes start to brown, add sliced onions, carrots, and a bay leaf or two. Put the roast back in the skillet, and almost cover it with a mixture of tomato paste (or ketchup), gluten free beef bouillon, and hot water. Add a bay leaf or two, and other herbs if you like. Cover the pan with aluminum foil, or a pot lid if you have one big enough.

This is what it looks like after 3-4 hours of slow roasting, at 250 or 300.

I brightened the flavors with some grape tomatoes and parsley, and served it on top of a green salad. We also had kiwi, strawberries and tangerine segments.

Cherry Almond Tart

I adapted a French frangipane (almond tart crust) recipe without the flour. I've had a bag of Townsend Farm organic dark sweet cherries in the freezer, and they were perfect for this.

The crust is almond meal, sugar, egg yolks and butter, with egg whites folded in. It leaked a bit out of my tart pan, so be sure to bake it on a cookie sheet. It would also work in a cake pan, but it might stick. Make sure to line any pan with parchment. 

Unbaked tart

Cherry Almond Tart

Gluten free

Serves 12 

Ingredients

2 cups almond meal
2 tbsp potato starch, corn starch or rice flour
8 TB (1 stick) softened unsalted butter
4 eggs, separated
¾ cup sugar

pinch of salt

1 ½ cups tart cherries, frozen or fresh
Turbinado (coarse) sugar for sprinkling on top (optional)

Lemon zest (optional)

Instructions
Preheat oven to 350. Beat the egg whites to soft peaks and set aside. Combine the softened butter, egg yolks, sugar, potato/corn starch or rice flour, salt and almond meal in a mixing bowl or food processor, Blend or beat just until smooth. Fold the egg whites gently into the almond mixture.

Line the bottom of a tart pan or shallow cake pan with parchment. Spoon the crust mixture in, and smooth the top with an offset spatula or flat knife. Scatter cherries evenly across the top, and sprinkle with coarse sugar. If using a tart pan, place on a baking sheet because the crust could leak a little. Bake 30-40 minutes, until the middle is firm and bounces back to a touch, and the surface is evenly browned. Sprinkle with lemon zest while still warm. Let cool for at least 30 minutes, or it will be hard to remove from the pan. 

More Books

But first a shot of my birthday present, a fancy Ninja blender.

Purple cabbage in a smoothie is actually really good. If there are enough berries, you can't taste the cabbage. And finally I found something to do with the cranberries I somehow over-purchased at Thanksgiving. Costco sells giant bags of frozen spinach and kale, so I tossed some of it in on top of the bottom layer of frozen raspberries, blueberries and blackberries. Someday maybe a Vitamix, but for now we're having fun coming up with combinations. So much better than making smoothies in the food processor. Knocking down those suggested daily servings of fruits and vegetables while hardly even trying. Until R gets tired of smoothies, which I'm sure will happen soon.

I wanted to keep a record of some of R's favorite books right now. This one was from Santa this year. It's one of the most entertaining books I've ever read.

"The antidote to fuzzy thinking!"

It's such a funny, imaginative treatment of a dry subject. My favorite part of studying logic was always the examples of bad arguments.

These are far and away her favorite books right now.

Beautifully drawn cartoon of the Japanese folk tale, "The Boy Who Drew Cats." We are big fans of the animated version narrated by William Hurt. We checked out several versions of the tale from the library, to compare illustration styles.

Three books that happened to be on the dining room table. A friend gave me Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain in high school, and we're starting lessons from it. I wish I knew what happened to my original copy. I found this one at the thrift store.

This is a fantastic book to teach shape, color and composition. How powerful lines are, the emotions they evoke.

And finally, another book to immerse yourself in, by the author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick. Wonderstruck.

From the website: "A boy named Ben longs for the father he has never known. A girl named Rose dreams of a mysterious actress whose life she chronicles in a scrapbook. When Ben discovers a puzzling clue in his mother's room, and Rose reads an enticing headline in the newspaper, both children set out alone on desperate quests to find what they are missing.

Ben's story, set in 1977, is told entirely with words, while Rose's story, set fifty years earlier, is told entirely with pictures. The two stories weave back and forth before ultimately coming together. Rich, complex, affecting, and beautiful–with over 460 pages of original artwork–Wonderstruck is a stunning achievement from a uniquely gifted artist and visionary."