After stockpiling delicious seasonal homegrown and foraged foods over the past weeks, this weekend was spent cooking and baking. For dinner one weeknight, I made the incredibly comforting cheddar rice from this cookbook using the last of the paste tomatoes from my garden. Another night, we had a meaty skillet pizza, using up the last of a large batch of pizza dough I’d stashed in the freezer. After watching the latest episode of The Great British Bake Off Friday, Saturday was all about baking. There's nothing quite as good as fresh baked bread, still warm from the oven, and the white bread with poolish from Flour Water Salt Yeast has become my new favorite. It’s basically baguette in a loaf form, and I've finally baked it enough that it’s begun to feel easy and familiar, something I can throw together on a lazy weekend with what feels like little effort. Between steps in the bread making process, I also made a tart, using upsome of the pounds of alpine blueberries we’ve harvested over the past weeks. It’s mostly improvised, so sadly I have no recipe to share, but then I think these berries are delicious in any form, so really no recipe is needed!
Read moreLife: Week 39
My favorite season is off to a fantastic start, with misty mornings burning off into warm, clear afternoons. Sadly as the days are growing shorter and cooler, this week also marked what will likely be my last big harvest of the year from the veggie garden. I’m already looking forward to planning out next year's garden, learning from some of my mistakes and making improvements where I can. After seeing just how parched my open, sunny backyard became this August, the most important improvement I have planned is installing drip irrigation. I’m hopeful that going in to next year with a reliable watering system in place will improve my harvest, especially for my water-loving crops like squash & cucumbers. Because, let’s be real, even working from home with constant access to a hose to keep the garden happily hydrated, my efforts were inconsistent at best. I'm also planning to grow corn next year, and to avoid providing the deer with another snack, I'll need to come up with a cover for that bed tall enough to accommodate towering stalks of corn. Lots of prep and planning to keep me busy through the winter!
Read moreLife: Week 38
Fall is my absolute favorite season for hiking. I know I've said it before, but right now it feels especially true. This year, it may be in part due to the fact that it took most of the summer for me to feel comfortable venturing much beyond my own backyard. As though the Cascades were conspiring to lure me back the their fir scented embrace, the condions this weekend were my absolute ideal for an early fall hike. Even the drive to meet my Alpine Trails Book Club friends at the trailhead was stunning, with low swirling clouds and vibrant fall color. I even surprised myself, managing to both hike all the full length of our roughly 6-8 mile hike (no one’s distance tracking device seemed to agree once we were back at the trailhead). Happily I also had plenty of time to pick enough of the tiny but oh-so-sweet alpine blueberries that lined the trail to fill the Nalgene bottle I brought specifically for that purpose. Those now wait in my freezer as a treat for those long winter days when I need a reminder of sunny days in the mountains.
Read moreLife: Week 37
Another week of burning eyes, a scratchy throat, and constant worry that these could be symptoms of COVID-19 I'm feeling and not just the effects of the toxic air. By midweek, being trapped in our sealed up house had me feeling mentally and emotionally exhausted. Obviously that meant it was a great relief when a fall storm blew through late Friday evening and finally wiped out the lingering smoke. Over the two weeks we spent shrouded in smoke, summer gradually shifted towards fall, and Sunday afternoon, under blindingly blue skies we pulled pound after pound of perfectly ripened apples off the larger of the two trees in our backyard. Now that I don’t have to worry about the possibility of further contaminating the already stagnant air inside our house by baking, I’m now very much looking forward to experimenting with all things apple - pie, sauce, tart, muffin. If you have a favorite apple recipe you'd like to share, I'm open to suggestions for using up our bounty!
Read moreLife: Week 36
The clear skies of Monday feel oh-so-far-away at this point. After another lovely backyard tea (so lovely I forgot to take any photos!) celebrating my neighbors baby due this fall and an afternoon of pizza & beer with Andy's sister and mom, we were caught completely by surprise at the wildfire smoke that quickly rolled in as we were enjoying a dessert of plum cake. By Friday the air quality had rocketed up to Unhealthy, so we had the house entirely closed up, and were only stepping outside as absolutely necessary. By Saturday, conditions were wavering between Very Unhealthy and Hazardous, so we spent the entire weekend revisiting an old favorite video game - Fallout 4. It felt especially bizarre to find clearer skies in a post-apocalyptic video game than we had outside, but 2020 just seems to be one strange and uncomfortable experience after another. One hilight in a gloomy week - after hoarding my slicing tomatoes for about weeks (stupice, if your curious), along with my first harvest of jalapeños and a precious onion (of which I planted far too few) I made my first batch of homemade salsa. Charring veggies under the broiler with such poor air quality probably wasn't the best idea, but it was well worth it. Thankfully Andy managed to fabricate an air purifier for us using an old fan from our woodstove and a couple of HEPA filters, so we were able to keep out indoor air safely breathable after my broiler adventures!
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