Chantilly Lace

We have family here from northern California this week (they must be most devoted, since they're willing to visit Tucson in high summer) and we've been having a wonderful time. A few years ago the female contingent of the family established the tradition of visiting the Chantilly Tea Room - my mother, our daughter-in-law and granddaughter, and of course, me - and this year we allowed the males - Joe, his son, and our 7-year-old grandson to come along. It's a lovely place, very ruffly and lacy but also quite cozy and comfortable, and the food's excellent, as is the service.

One of the nicest things is the way each person who's having hot tea gets to choose her or his own teacup from the shelves on the wall.

My grandmother had a lovely collection of porcelain cups and saucers in a custom-built corner cupboard. I'm not sure what happened to them, but these are a lovely reminder.
     You can order a few different types of high tea, with 24-hours notice, and that's what we've done in the past, but this time we just went for lunch, and the soup (a cold watercress soup very like a vichyssoise but much greener), a couple of different salads (the chef's special chicken, nectarine, and feta salad and a curried turkey salad) and a bacon and bleu cheese quiche were all great, as was the carrot cake trifle for dessert - we were all so full that we just ordered two of those and shared them.

Such a pretty place, filled with beautiful things, a place to be pampered and well-fed: I think we really should go there more than once a year! And I really should have taken pictures of the food - please forgive me.

I'm ready for my closeup, Mr DeMille

No, it's not Gloria Swanson, but this guy sitting in the fig tree is at least as much a prima donna as her character in Sunset Boulevard ("primo donno"?). My last post had a picture of his mate on the hummingbird feeder, and he's around a lot, but he won't hold still long enough for me to get a picture. Yesterday and this morning, however, he did! We've never had hooded orioles stay around - usually spotted them passing through once or twice per summer, but this year they settled in and have raised two chicks who are as big as their parents now. Here's dad again, on the hummingbird feeder. He's a bit bigger than the birds it's designed for, to say the least! See how it tips . . . .

We're having a good time watching the finches at the feeders I picked up at the 99¢ Only store. I'd been missing house finches - don't miss them any more. They're here in droves now and I'm doubly glad I let all the wild sunflowers grow, because the house finches are bigger than the goldfinches and often take over the feeders and keep the goldfinches away. The goldfinches are getting more assertive, however. Here's a typical scene, with two house finches on the perches and one (not so patiently) waiting her turn:

I guess the biggest news is that Joe finished the shade house! Here it is the first night; the porch light is inside the structure so we can sit out there and read by it.

 It opens off the master bath. As you can see, we haven't really furnished it yet (the chair and metal table were put out by neighbors for the brush-and-bulky pickup; they will be painted. The chair is incredibly comfortable! One person's trash is indeed another's treasure!).

I'm not rushing to finish furnishing it, though we have put up a few things that you'll see in the next post. Part of the thrill is in the seeking, and the joy of serendipity (like finding that chair!).

Roots and Wings

While we're "waiting for the miracle" of rain, the additional plants we've put in the back yard, plus the "use what you've got" birdbaths and the hummingbird feeders, mean that for entertainment, often all we need to do for entertainment is stand at the kitchen window! I haven't been able to get a good picture of the hummingbirds that visit the feeders, but other birds like it as well, it seems.

 This female oriole's mate has visited as well, but I wasn't fast enough to get his picture. I'll keep trying. Now I keep the camera on the counter by the window!

A couple of these tiny finches - young goldfinches, maybe? - like to hang out there, and although hummingbirds will chase other hummers away, they'll feed right alongside these little guys.

 This large glazed plant saucer on a currently unused plant stand makes a fine birdbath. The lesser goldfinches (I wonder if that name hurts their feelings?) like it very much, as do all the other birds that hang out in our yard. In this heat it's good to provide water for the wildlife, so we have a few of these around the yard.

Lots of lizards this year, like this one perched on the rocks of one of the wonderful terraces Joe built on our hillside. The rocks of the terraces give them places to hide and the plants, like these new salvia Greggii, provide cooling shade.

Quite a lot of lizard love going on lately too. These two chase each other up and down this mesquite tree and crawl all over each other - I feel like such a voyeur watching them, but it's so much fun. That tree is a bit of a miracle itself: ten or eleven years ago, when it was much smaller, a windstorm pulled it up by the roots. We dug out the hole some more, put it back in place with a pole to prop it up and rocks around the base to hold it down, and it's been just fine (and is much bigger now). The same thing happened in a neighbor's front yard but they didn't try to save their tree - they just left it there and a few months later cut it up for firewood. Probably they didn't realize how simple it would have been. I read, probably 15 years or so ago, that every mature tree adds, on average, $10,000 to the value of a property, and even without that incentive, in the desert we need all the trees, all the shade we can get.
     So, having moved from birds to lizards to the roots of trees, we'll move to the roots I had in mind when I chose this title, parsnips.

Parsnips are among the less commonly grown and eaten vegetables in the U.S., at least it seems so to me. I only remember having them a couple of times growing up, and I liked them very much. They look like white carrots, and are indeed such close relatives that in Roman times they were called by the same name, pastinaca. Interestingly, in those days carrots were white and/or purple, not the orange we know. Today parsnips are much more expensive at the market than carrots, which may be one reason they don't get used much. They're also much sweeter than carrots, with a taste that's been described as rather like honey, butterscotch, or cardamom (I think nutmeg might belong in that list) - some folks might not like that in a vegetable, but we love them. In addition, they're rather slow growers and require good, fairly loose, deep soil. I've read of people growing them in long concrete drain pipes filled with potting soil to provide the depth they need. I didn't do that, but I did plant them in a half wine barrel, where they did well, though they never got as big as the ones in the market - or else I wasn't patient enough to wait that long. We didn't have a huge crop, just enough for three or four meals, the last of which was this soup, which began looking like this in the pot:

 and looked like this for lunch half an hour or so later (mostly unattended, very easy, very tasty).

Here's the recipe, from Recipes from the Night Kitchen by Sally Nirenberg, a wonderful cookbook of just soups (with a few chili and stew recipes). Don't be put off if the ingredients in the title sound strange - it's absolutely delicious.

PARSNIP SOUP WITH SOUR CREAM AND MUSTARD
1 T. butter
1 Spanish (brown) onion, coarsely chopped
1 pound parsnips, peeled and sliced (I didn't peel, just scrubbed well with the vegetable brush)
5 cups chicken stock
1/2 - 3/4 tsp. Dijon mustard (be bold, use the 3/4)
1/2 cup sour cream (I used nonfat and it was just fine)
Sour cream or plain yogurt for garnish (optional)

Melt butter over medium heat in a heavy bottomed soup pot or large saucepan. Add onion and cook, covered, until golden, about 10 minutes (turn heat down if it seems to be browning too quickly).
    Add parsnips, chicken stock, and mustard and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and cook until parsnips are very soft, about 20-25 minutes.
    Remove solids with a slotted spoon and place in a food processor or blender (add some liquid if using a blender, and be sure to take out the clear center thing from the lid and hold a folded towel over it, to avoid explosions). Process until very smooth, gradually adding the sour cream and more broth. Pour it all back into the pan to stir in whatever broth remains there.
    Garnish each serving with a dollop of sour cream or yogurt, if you like. As you can see, I forgot that part and didn't miss it at all.
Yield: 7 cups

Now how easy is that? I may not grow parsnips again, but I will definitely buy them, and I definitely will make this soup again!

A Bit of This and That

I was listening to Leonard Cohen the other day - always a good way to set one's head straight, in my opinion - and the song "Waiting for the Miracle" came around. That's how a lot of us feel here in Tucson, right now, waiting for the miracle of the monsoon. We've had a couple of teaser trailers, the best one about a week and a half ago, which I missed because I was indoors at a museum with a friend and her granddaughter. We caught the tail end as we came out, and it was a good one. I had never seen water running like this is the washes near our house and I had to pull the car over to document it. My friend's 6 1/2 year-old granddaughter thought the adults were really strange, but then, she lives in Portland, Oregon, where rain is not such a rare and precious thing.

Greasewood Road at Ironwood

Greasewood at Speedway

Nameless wash by our house where we walk most days. I've been trying to get Joe to relocate that big green rock to our yard, but he says no, and he has a point; it must weigh over 400 pounds (bigger than it looks in the picture).

We've had a good deal of sunshine since then, with temperatures in the mid-100s, so whatever we do in the yard and garden gets done in the early morning. I even got ambitious inside the house, at least a little. I cleaned and organized the linen closet, which had become a rather scary place, and in the process made some happy discoveries, like finding out all the extra pillowcases hadn't run away together to Mexico.

It won't compare to Martha Stewart's but now I know where everything is and I have a nice full box to take to Goodwill.

I've also had time to do more knitting, etc., though this isn't mine. I received these two potholders as part of a knitting swap and they are so pretty, so big, and so thick that they're currently living on the table, ready to protect it from hot dishes.

I'd been going to give away this little shelf, but instead I hung it over the bookcase between the living room and kitchen, and got the egg cups out of the cupboard so I could enjoy looking at them.

 The green glass owl on the upper left (holding incense sticks and a woodpecker feather) belonged to my grandmother - it's actually a toothpick holder - and most of the rest I've found at antique shops and thrift stores. The tiny pomegranates on the upper shelf hardened before they could get any bigger, but I couldn't throw them away. And the glass cup on the top right holds a cardinal's feather and butterfly wings I found in the garden. Someday I'll find just the right way to use them in some kind of art piece.

 This little shelf I found for a dollar or two at a yard sale. I know I want to paint it, but haven't decided on a color, so I hung it up where I could see it, to help me make up my mind.

Both sets of chicken salt and peppers (more thrift store finds) have the pouring holes in the front, which seems very silly. Apparently they weren't intended for use!

This little pitcher and cup belonged to my grandmother, who would be 118 if she were still with us, so they're quite old. I don't have too many family heirlooms, but those I have, I treasure. These are what's left of a children's tea set and I just love them.

And now it's time for a cup of tea (in a bigger cup) and since the weather forecast does give us a chance of rain (though much more in a couple of days, in time to wash out 4th of July barbecues and picnics) I'll go back to optimistically "waiting for the miracle."

Rhubarb and Chutney

I had a very nice day in the kitchen yesterday. It started with rhubarb which, fortunately, Joe loves as much as I do. Unfortunately, it's difficult to impossible to grow in southern Arizona. I know. We've tried. But every spring it appears in the market, and brings back memories of my grandparents' rhubarb that grew more or less untended out beside their garage.

When I was a kid my friends and I actually pulled up stalks and ate them raw - and we liked them, sour and puckery as they are (my friend Angie and I also went through a phase of eating mustard on our toast - go figure). We only ate the stalks; the leaves are poisonous. And we incorporated the plants around us into our play, too. I remember that one day a few of us put my biggest doll in my wagon, surrounded her with Grandma's flowers (Grandma wasn't real happy about that), and paraded slowly and solemnly down the road in a funeral procession, waving rhubarb leaves over her like the big fans wielded by slaves in an old black and white movie about ancient Egypt. (We did stop short of burying my doll.)

     I found some tasty-looking rhubarb recipes at the Land 'o Lakes website: http://www.landolakes.com/recipes/. Just search "rhubarb." My other Grandma made an amazing Rhubarb Crunch; the recipe involves a Jiffy cake mix and strawberry Jell-o, and since Jiffy mixes can be hard to find these days, I'm going to try to come up with my own version and will post it when I'm successful (notice I say "when," not "if"). But I had another, more pressing kitchen project yesterday, so I chopped up and froze most of the rhubarb in zip-lock bags.

I did make some simple rhubarb sauce with: 

     2 cups chopped rhubarb, 

     1/3 cup sugar, and 

     1/4 cup water. 

Just put it all in a saucepan, bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and let it simmer about 5 minutes or until the rhubarb gets nice and mushy. Don't worry that you won't have enough water; the rhubarb releases a lot of liquid. 

     The resulting sauce, delicious over a custard pudding or in yogurt or just by itself, is a lovely pink (the redder the rhubarb, the prettier the color) and a nice blend of sweet and tart. Add more sugar if  you think it needs it, but start with just the 1/3 cup - if you get too much, you can't take it out.

     The bigger project, one I'd been looking forward to for some time, was making tomato chutney. Most of the recipes I'd seen were for green tomato chutney, and they really meant green! Supermarket tomatoes were fine for this as they are rarely perfectly ripe and more often quite unripe. I found these Romas at a nearby market, many more green than they look in this picture, and at a ridiculously low price - so I bought 5 pounds. 

The recipe I decided to use comes from Nigel Slater, who writes for The Guardian. It's at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/04/nigel-slater-green-tomato-recipes/print. He uses a mix of green and ripe tomatoes, but since mine were neither one nor the other, I just threw them all in together and figured the end result would be about the same. I also multiplied the recipe by 2.5, since Nigel's is based on using just 2 pounds of tomatoes. But I was laying in a supply for the winter (even though it's only May - we love curry and go through quite a bit of chutney, not just with curry but in other applications, like cheese sandwiches - chutney on Cheddar? Divine!). 

     The Guardian is a British paper, so some of the amounts in Nigel's recipe are metric, but you can find a handy conversion calculator at http://www.worldwidemetric.com/measurements.html. You might want to bookmark this calculator; it's easier to use than any I've seen. Here are the ingredients and amounts I used, multiplied and adapted from Nigel's:

Tomato Chutney

5 pounds unripe but not terribly green tomatoes

2 pounds onions, chopped

9 ounces raisins

1 pound 5 ounces muscovado or dark brown sugar

3 medium sized hot red chiles (I used a scant 2 T. dried red chile flakes)

1 T. kosher salt (don't use iodized salt when pickling or canning)

5 tsp. yellow mustard seeds

3 1/8 c. cider vinegar

Nigel says to just halve the tomatoes and rough chop the onions but I prefer both chopped a little finer - not fine, just not quite such big chunks. If you're using truly green tomatoes, do as Nigel did and put them in a big (very big, if you're making as much as I did) pot with all the other ingredients except the red tomatoes and bring to a boil, then simmer 1 hour, add red tomatoes and simmer another 25 minutes. 

     I just threw everything in together, as you see here,

 and let it simmer about an hour and 20 minutes. Here's how it looked after about 30 minutes.

 Stir fairly often so it doesn't stick (a nonstick pan helps with that). Then ladle it into sterilized canning jars and process in a water bath for 10 minutes. Aren't the little pink-checked lids cute?

I got 8 jars; most of them were 12-ounce jam jars but there were a couple of pints. The canning kettle only holds 7 jars so one got designated for immediate consumption. Joe didn't mind that at all. He'd probably eat almost anything if it had chutney on it, and I might too.  

     If you've never canned anything, it's far less intimidating than many people think. There's a pretty good video on YouTube (probably more than one, actually) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1jpyXPdCRE and instructions/tutorials at a number of websites, including http://www.frugalupstate.com/crafts-diy/tutorial-hot-water-bath-canning/. Of course there are also any number of excellent cookbooks that focus on food preservation.

     Go ahead! Make some chutney or rhubarb sauce (you can also can rhubarb sauce) or something else that, when you open it up in the dead of winter, will remind you of spring! I'm pretty sure you'll be happy you did.

  

when the work gets in the way

I really like my job. I really like my life. However, there just never seems to be enough time for . . . whatever it is we want the time for!
     Several weeks ago I got an invitation to a baby shower for a former student I'm very proud of and very fond of, but I couldn't go because I already had another  commitment I couldn't get out of - I felt bad but then I thought "okay, there's still time to make a nice gift." As I said, this was weeks ago! One good thing was that I've gotten to know both her siblings (both of them have been my students) and would soon be going to a graduation celebration for her younger sister, another wonderful and extremely talented young woman. So I knew I could just take the baby gift with me to that party.
     And so I did, but even with the extra time I thought I had, wouldn't you know it? I still wound up finishing it that morning - where does the time go? Anyway, I just wanted to share this picture of the completed quilt. I didn't intend to let Cosmo near it, but he jumped up there and looked so darned cute I had to let him stay in the picture.

     The quilt is bigger than some baby quilts, more than 50" x 50", but as a mother I always liked them big enough so that if you spread them out on the floor, the baby would have enough room to roll around and crawl around a bit.

     And yes, it's a boy, due in 6 days (and mama was getting pretty impatient when I saw her at the party a few days ago).

oh, the cleverness of you!

My title today comes from Wendy's remark to Peter in the wonderful live-action 2003 film of Peter Pan (vastly superior in every way to the animated Walt Disney version so many of us grew up with). The perpetual child, Peter doesn't really get irony, and actually, I don't mean it ironically - I just really like the line!
     What I'm talking about specifically is this wonderful low-tech fountain Joe put together on our patio, from 2 pots - one very large and deep and one fairly large but low and shallow - and 3 saucers, along with a couple of corks, a currently unused plant stand, and a metal cachepot for bailing. It provides an hour or more of the relaxing sound of trickling water without the hassle of pumps and electric wires (we did have a nice water feature with an inexpensive solar pump a few years ago, but it was an illustration of the saying that you get what you pay for - we didn't pay much for the pump and it didn't last long).

He used, or rather re-used, a wine cork in the low flat pot at the bottom to keep the water from leaking out and a champagne cork in the larger hole in the larger pot at the top to let just a trickle through. It did involve some fiddling to get just the right angle and position of the cork to get the desired effect, but when he was done, it trickled just right into the very small saucer underneath, then the larger vessels below that. When all the water's out of the big pot, you just pour what's in the bottom two containers back into it - the large saucer in the middle is heavy and awkward to move, so that's where the little green cachepot comes in - it's perfect for bailing. The three wide containers at the bottom are positioned/tilted so the water flows slowly and gently from one to the other. It's very nice and it was a lovely Mother's Day surprise.