And thus a post is born. There aren't too many colleagues I'll share the link with: this FQ persona is my secret identity and all. Besides, there aren't many (um, three? four?) who cross the line between co-worker and friend. And that's just the way we like it here at Ph & the FQ land. Work at work, life at home. Boundaries, people.
But anyway, for those four, and the other six people on the planet who read our natterings, voila: our summer.
* Long weekend in Los Angeles, much described in previous post.
* Food projects! A friend recently called us homesteaders. I gave Phrodaux a book for his birthday that talks about being "householders." Whatever. We are having a good time with food projects. I went to a new doctor this summer and when she asked, "Do you control your salt intake?" I didn't really know what to say, but eventually sputtered, "Well, we make all our own food." (Well, barring a few choice items and the occasional night of take out). She was not impressed. Piffle. I was not impressed with HER. Anyway, here are food-type highlights.
- Loquats! Our loquat tree had fruit for the first time since we planted it, something like 10 years ago. They are funny little things, mango-ish apricots with multiple pits. Phrodaux pickled the fruits and made liquor out of the pits. See caption below for pickle reactions but the liquor...DAMN. Ph just brought me a taste as I worked on this very post. It's Amaretto. SO good. (Phrodaux here: only three more months until it is "ready")
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| Pickled loquats: Thumbs up from Phrodaux; Yuck, you can have them from me. (and our lovely friend who I can't remember her code name, but we love her and she also liked the loquat pickles) |
- Fermenting! At one point this summer we had 10 things fermenting all at once (no explosions or fight clubs so far). There were a couple kinds of dill pickles (1 pint of one recipe, 3 gallons of the other), brined green beans, cabbage/carrot kimchi, sourdough bread (I've kept my starter alive since January, feeling very proud), yogurt, cheese (raw sheep's milk feta!) and who knows what else.
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| Raw sheep's milk. I had no idea how expensive milk could be. Answer: $26/gallon. |
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| Smallest amount of cheese making supplies you can buy...and a recipe uses 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon. Must make more cheese.... |
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| This is the tidy before picture, before things started to bubble over. No explosions, just some oozy brine. |
- Outdoor kitchen at the farm! Take one covered patio,
add a custom-made work bench (Ph is awfully handy), an induction burner, and some accessories and there you have it - my canning kitchen. It's a colossal pain in the everything to get the big canner to boil on that burner, what with the puny power from the laundry room via extension cord and power strip. But still...when the tomatoes have to process for 45 minutes and it's 98 degrees outside, it's nice to be able to avoid steaming up the whole house.
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| This is the path up the hill, to the up the hill neighbors' place. |
- Wheat! Gluten-phobes beware, upcoming paragraphs and pics are very wheaty. At some point this summer our up the hill neighbors at the farm stopped by on a Friday night to see if we wanted to come up Saturday for the binding. You can imagine us city folk: "Um, sure, we'd love to {we don't know what that is}."
Here's the shortest I can make this story. Farmer Joe, a real farmer, planted some acres of soft wheat (not the hard winter wheat used for flour). I think the sole purpose was to have an excuse to pull out the antique equipment, get the family together, and have a good time with the grandkids. This is a lovely family and it was delightful to be part of their harvest. And now we have a freezer full of wheat. I won't buy farro, spelt, barley, freekeh or maybe even rice for at least a year.
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| This is the binder. It cuts the wheat (kind of knocks it over), clumps it into bundles, and wraps them with twine then dumps them out onto the ground. It used to be pulled by horses but now it's pulled by a tractor. |
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| After the binder spits them out, they are sheaves that need to be stacked into little teepees to dry. That was our job: we were the pioneer ladies. I even got Phrodaux a bonnet. |
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| Sometime during the week, when we are impersonating grown ups in the city, the sheaves were stacked up on a trailer. |
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| The following weekend, the thresher comes out to play. It has a belt a zillion feet long, run by a tractor. The sheaves go in and bounce around a bit, then the straw goes shooting out the top (see below) and the wheat goes into giant stacks (lower right of this picture). |
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| Straw hats and pitch forks ensued but it wasn't Green Acres, it was amazing and gorgeous and cool. |
* Pond Expansion. There is a pond at the farm, a deceptively calm place that in fact teems with life: frogs, salamanders, dragon flies, water-walking spiders, the occasional blue heron drive by and very rarely a visit from the world's shyest ducks.
But Phrodaux thought: Hey, how about MORE pond? And when he said that in front of our equipment-happy neighbor (across the creek neighbor, not up the hill neighbor), a digging weekend ensued.
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| Then this happened. |
We are still amazed at the amount of dirt that came out of the new
pond space, which for now (until the rains come, please let the rains
come) is pretty much a puddle.
Still, the boys had fun with the equipment (Phrodaux: and only one very minor head injury) and then we made the nice neighbors a thank you dinner: pizza, pizza, salad, pie. But we had to take it to them; our house was 95 degrees inside (that's what you get for baking back to back pizzas at 500 degrees).
(this is actually the back of the car on the way over)
* Plumbing adventures: See Phrodaux's forthcoming post about the Kraken. You get the idea. (Phrodaux: the horror... the horror... the horror...)
* A long weekend in Charleston, S.C. Random, eh? We really liked the PBS show Mind of a Chef, particularly the segments with Sean Brock in them. So just for fun, we went to Charleston to eat at his restaurants. Yes we are spoiled and no we do not have children. ANYWAY, interesting place in terms of geography, vegetation, history, architecture (all those things completely unlike where we live) and the food & drink scene (much like where we live).
- A space where food and drink have been served since the 1700s.
- A lukewarm server who warmed right up to us when we asked first about the space and then a million questions about the food.
- Ember-roasted potatoes on trout cream with crispy trout skin and trout roe (Phrodaux said, "You're going to hate that" but he was so, so wrong.)
- Blue crab salad, like a fishy version of the best coleslaw you ever had.
- Blueberry pot de creme served in a little fish bowl-type vessel, with birch bark infused cream frozen with liquid nitrogen. I know, molecular gastronomy stuff is so annoying but it was like tapping through the surface of a cloud then eating tree-flavored cream.
- A conversation with the bartender that yielded samples of his homemade bitters, a customized cocktail using those bitters, and a picture of his hand written recipe for peach (aka Peychaud's) bitters, which Phrodaux is brewing as we speak.
* And finally, I know it's a letdown but the best part of summer? Time. Unstructured, unbound time. A morning to drink coffee and read, an afternoon to run random errands, naps pretty much every day, writing stories, swimming with the dogs.
I wish there were two of me, one to do the job I love, one to live the regular life I love as much.
