RELEASE THE KRAKEN!!

 (I choose to believe she is putting a broken boat back together, you know, like a kit)

There is this place, the whole area was the sea, with big fishies, and little fishies, and all manner of wiggly squiggly things in between.

Then the sea decided that it needed a nice place near the coast, you know, where it could just chill, maybe have a nice cold drink and put its feet up, so... picked up and moved west, or really far east, it is all a matter of perspective.

(this is not the beastie, but a different beastie, a beastie that found a home)

In doing so, a beastie of legend, and with maybe a bit of agoraphobia, was left behind. Its new home was filled with things familiar, a few less familiar, but still, you take what you can.

It stayed and made a new home. There was this nice family that kept it company, some other nice people were added as they are when mommys and daddys do mommy and daddy things, and when their time passed, another nice family, then another with feets in twos and feets in 4s (that brings us more or less to the now time).

(feets of four, or you would see them if they were not below)

(containers of feets that come in twos)

(familiar things were added, but sometimes that's not enough...)

But not all was forever well, over time things started not going very well, the beastie, it sorta had a job to do, but being a former beastie of legend, this particular kraken under the home, grew sad....

(not the sea, but the under)

Surrounded by the remains of both the vanquished and the friend, the kraken was no longer happy under the home.

(I found this in my shoe)

The kraken cried, she cried and the tears burned and popped, and bubbled, and fizzled, and made the hot air foul, the smell of brimstone...

Those that tried to make the kraken more at ease with her previous task (more those with two feeties than those with four)  noticed the sadness and the tears, and had to do something to help.

So for 24hrs the ones that lived in the above house crawled and worked, exclaimed in ways creative and profane, sawed and glued, wrenched and writhed... to set the kraken free from its dark and sad temporary home.

(the kraken was freed)

so...

here is the less "flowery" version.

f.

and the longer version...

The drains no longer did things like "drain", tried to explain that naming something drain implied certain expectations, but as with many inanimate things, rational discourse and/or yelling is often ignored. There was a dose of H2SO4 drain cleaner, rinse and repeat, and nothin'. (yes, most drain cleaners are more of the greater than 7 than the less than 7, but a chemist...)

(some places just look welcoming don't you think?
yes that is the crunchy, crunchy skull, not pinecone)

Then there was the crawling under the house, and when I say house, I mean the place that looks like a house, but is in fact, the place where all vermin go to die. So the nice gravel under the house is actually all the bones. All... the... bones...

See picture above. I really thought I had a stone in my shoe, it was a vertebra.  The pine cone that went crunch under my hand as I crawled out you might ask? skull...

At which point, the concept of "drain" was more than embraced, and when I say "more than embraced" I mean more holes than are normal draining type holes started draining with gusto. (picture cramped under the house, can't sit up or even do much more than lay there, can't really even turn around without toe and finger crawl and trying to escape the stream of sulphuric acid...)

(a much cuter sea monster)

Then there was the endless soldier crawling under the pipes and heating ducts through acid soaked mud (plastic was put down to maybe avoid excessive chemical burns). over and over and over and over and over. Did I mention I did this a few times?

(my well organized "workspace" plastic is to keep the acid from eating away the concrete... whee)

...cut pipes with sawzall (remember the space?), drain more acid, parts runs back and forth to town, buying all the couplers in all the hardware stores (this part is not an exaggeration, we did buy all of several parts from all the hardware stores in town), build the new kraken, make the 197th crawl back to scene of the crime to clamp said new kraken in place (with all the couplers)....lay there there for a while wondering at one point if those that live in the above world of light and snax will miss me at some point, or at least be curious what that new smell coming from the underworld is and investigate...


and...

no leaks...

really? no leaks on the first try?

crap.

(the sea gods now are laughing, laughing and taunting me...)

What did you do for your summer vacation?

The Fairy Queen officially went back to work this week (though of course she spent last week putting her room back together, moving furniture, unpacking boxes, etc.). She reconnected with a few colleagues then, the other zealous ones who come a week or more early (unpaid, duh) to get things ready. But this week was the first time since June that the whole staff was in one place at the same time. And the words that resounded up and down the halls, through the office, work room, and library were: How was your summer? What did you do?

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")

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.

Raw sheep's milk.
I had no idea how expensive milk could be.
Answer: $26/gallon.

Smallest amount of cheese making supplies you can buy...and a recipe uses 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon. Must make more cheese....

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Sometime during the week, when we are impersonating grown ups in the city,
the sheaves were stacked up on a trailer.

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).

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.

The nice calm pond.

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).

 

Dinner at Husk was good, drinks at its bar better, and dinner at McCrady's goes onto my list of top 5 lifetime meals.

 Sadly, I have no pictures from that McCrady's meal, but here are some context free bits I remember, feel free to build the puzzle anyway you like:

• 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.

life.

 (a dog's life...sun on the belly after swimming in the creek)

             

...have you ever been walking down the street in an unfamiliar part of town, or sitting in the middle seat on a flight to Denver on a Wednesday, or digging a big hole in the yard for no reason other than a big hole in the yard seemed to be needed to be dug, when you find something that makes you say "hmm, I didn't know life was about that?..."

...just a question...

                           ...maybe it's just me...

A long and winding road

How, you might justifiably ask, does a goofy garden event in Eugene, Oregon in 2008 lead to lemon curd in 2015? So glad you asked, chickadees, because there's a story in there.

No, silly, that's not horrible Eugene, that's OUR garden, back in the tidy days.

Comfortable? This is a long one. You might need to lay in some supplies. Hard tack, cornmeal, dried fruit...Oops, we're not going on the Oregon Trail (Phrodaux here "...you have died of dysentery..." Phrodaux out), are we? Maybe just iced tea and a cushion. Relax.

So. Once upon a time, Phrodaux and I were much more into ornamental gardening than we are just now. These days we're just barely keeping the home (city) garden alive (F-ing climate change...how is it that it didn't rain in June? That temps got to 100 in June? That the blackberries are ripe and the farmers already have their hay in? What the $#)$*)*$?????). Farm garden is another story. Fueled by Phrodaux's ingenious drip system of 5 am watering every other day (from our well, all right?), we are enjoying kale, mustard and collard greens, lettuce, raspberries, garlic, a few potatoes, and the occasional rogue sugar snap pea, while dreaming of tomatoes and chiles and gravenstein apples.

Wait. That wasn't my story.

Editor, everyone needs an editor. Have you noticed? Next time a friend starts to tell you a story, remember FQ's advice: Everyone needs an editor.

Anyway...2008. Ph & FQ go to the hell mouth that is Eugene for the Hardy Plant Society Study Weekend. Go ahead, look it up. There we meet Fab MV, our NYC pal of PR and Green Envy fame. At first we thought he was someone's gardener. It was the Tevas and the gardener finger nails. But after a swoony weekend of new and shiny friendship, we googled him, of course, and came up with this. Oops, no one's gardener.

But based on one weekend, fast friends we were. We went east in 2009, he came west in 2011. Then in 2013 we went east again, for the trip that started this blog and included Fab MV's milestone birthday party, at which we met K & S, who became our lovely friends in L.A. There are a lot of stories in there (burned vegetables, renegade cocktails, magnums of Veuve Clicquot, a treacherous staircase and the Fairy Queen's lost shoe) but this post is already too long and we haven't even entered the same time zone as the point. So maybe later.

ANYWAY (Editor! Is there an editor in the house??)

(Phrodaux here "...you have died of dysentery..." lots of that going around)

 * * *

24 hours have passed. Where was I? It was supposed to be about lemon curd, right? Now I'm out of patience for all this meandering. Cut to chase! Through gardening, we met Fab MV. Through him, we met lovely K&S. We recently spent a long weekend with them in LA, admiring their beautiful West Hollywood bungalow,

taking in lots of groovy architecture,

Future home of Fuse Lighting and its amazing genius founder, our friend, K.

OK, so whatever about the architecture, it's a hangar. But that's the Endeavor.
It went to SPACE. Made me cry to see it.

Oh, California. It's a drought, people. Why are you adding grass in front of the observatory??

The Bradbury Building, of Blade Runner fame. So unnecessarily beautiful.

The train station. Also swanky-pants beautiful. Also in Blade Runner (look for it!)

 ...and eating eating eating good food. Highlights:

• Wurstkuche
• Ostrich Farm (no, we did not eat ostrich)
• Egg Slut (where Phrodaux had to order the dish called Slut, but I'm not sure if it was because of the name or because it was the most complicated thing.

(Phrodaux here "...you may not have died of dysentery...this time...let's say it was weasels, yeah, weasels")

And of course TALKING about good food. K&S are good eaters but don't cook too often (except for S's otherworldly guacamole, which I have had the immense good fortune to eat twice now. Capers! Who'd have thought?) On the other hand, Phrodaux and I are deep into our "let's make that" phase (gin, tonic, bitters, jam, pickles, sourdough, dinner) and are nursing a major food lab fantasy (see future blog post, I'm sure).  So, once we were back at home and K texted with the news that a friend had some Meyer lemons to share, and was I serious about making lemon curd, what could I say? Other than YES SEND THEM RIGHT NOW PLEASE. Which I mostly did. I may have been slightly more polite.

Sent they were, each lemon lovingly hand-wrapped in paper. This was a LOT of lemons.

Without Phrodaux, I trekked down to the farm on a Monday afternoon with a mission. Make some curd.

(Phrodaux here "...you have died of dysentery..." what exactly did the Oregon Trail smell like, eww) FQ: It couldn't have smelled as nice as my pile of lemons.

Let us set the stage. My recipe makes exactly two half pint jars and the curd cooks for ~9 minutes of constant stirring. I quadrupled it, which required more than an hour of constant stirring (if you stop stirring, you get lemony scrambled eggs - not often served in fancy tea shops where everyone is wearing a fetching hat). And it was 98 degrees outside. And approaching that inside. My arm may have shrivelled a little bit. There may have been whimpering and an occasional curse word. The dogs didn't care; they were already mad because we were NOT SWIMMING.

At the end of the day, there were 8 gorgeous jars of curd cooling on my table, a long swim with the pups, and a care package full of nice things to send back to the boys in L.A. (curd, jam, pickles, bitters - I'm glad I didn't have to describe contents to the dippy FedEx girl).

 
Around here we are enjoying our curd on English muffin bread (thanks, America's Test Kitchen) as well as on schlumpy meringues (I think it was too hot for height when I was making them).

Food experiments proceed, and friends are found when and where you least expect them.

This guy? I think he's saying: Relax. It's all good. Or maybe: Hey, where's my lemon curd?

(Phrodaux here "...you have died of dysentery..." Game over. Play again? y/n)