Ears in the eye

And now, the day has gone to the gods already.  I meant to type dogs, but you'll soon know why even that best laid plan failed terribly.

Today my kids are in Salem and my hunny is at work and I worked in the garden all morning, ran some fairly boring chores and did not pass the liqueur store on the way home, but rather drove in to the parking lot and purchase enough gin and tonic to last me another year (hint: small bottle).  And here I am with kitchens to clean and a list of things to do before I take off tomorrow to pick them up but I can't remember what's on that list anymore, nor where I exactly put it down. And this leads me to blog as if it's the dead of winter and I actually have something to say. 

Summer is not a time of profound internal discoveries.  It is not a time for discussing the meaning of life.  Summer is a time of being the meaning of life.  Of being a child of the sun.  Being a mother in the lake on her floaty.  Being a sister, daughter, niece and cousin of summer salads and freckles.  Summer IS the meaning of life.  And in the eyes of such whirlwinds we do not question.  We arise, we don our swim suites, we milk our cows and we are what all of this was leading to.  The fruit of labors.  The harvest.  The reapings of the sowings.

I go out to my garden around 4:30 every evening and I ask myself, "What are we having for dinner today?"  I peek under the leaves and find out.  Squash.  Something I've never been able to grow before, giving me the (now obviously erroneous) idea that I had a black thumb.  Turns out, it was probably just terminally clayish soil.  We've got zucchini and patty pans coming out of our ears.  I am now practicing summer squash birth control, least they organize, unionize and over throw us.  

Dinner? Sauted squash and broccoli and snow peas (still!), carrots, beets.  Some onions and garlic too.  On a bed of rice or rice noodles or my own lettuce.  Lunch today was my own cheese and carrots.

We gardeners compare notes and thereby put ourselves at ease.  The tomatoes aren't setting, it's unanimous.  Gardeners agree that the bushes are loud mouths, all bluster and bombast, while the fruits are few and small.  My corn stands alone, huge and making ears already.  A gardener asked me, "WHAT ARE YOU PUTTING ON YOUR CORN!  WOW!"  Nothing but shit people, cow shit.

And my summer continues, an eye of pure existence in the existential storm of my mind.

She's ALIVE!!

Gasp! Gasp!  Here, grab my hand a pull me out for a minute and I'll explain everything.

Things got really hectic here and you fell off the priority list.  Of course, you're not on the list today.  And I'm learning that whatever doesn't go on the list has a better chance of getting done.  The list is like a nightmare of things I SHOULD accomplish.  And the rest is just me floating along/drowning, keeping my head above water and trying to breath.

Obviously, this type of hecticity would only happened after I put this quote up on my facebook page: "Beware the banality of a busy life" attributed to Socrates as discovered in a magazine article from The Greater Good.  I had to double check it wasn't The Onion.  It's hard to imagine an ancient Greek sage using English words like banality and busy.   Were the Greeks busy? Bustling about in their bed sheets and laurels?  "Oh gosh, Thelma, seriously, I'd LOVE to help sheer your sheep, but I've absolutely got to bring this up the Athena's temple for sacrifice today.  It's been way too long and what with the wooden horse I've got in the back yard and the Spartan camp out, I don't think I can fit it in.  And Ethos has a play date tomorrow with Eros and we've rescheduled that 12 times already this moon!"

Despite my misgivings about the quote's origins, quoting Socrates is really classy, so I took it to my public page, which is like begging fate to hurl way to much to do at me. And so I got smack upside the head with summer "vacation".  A tidal wave, rearranging my shorelines and cabanas.  Ah... the irony.  Socrates is laughing.  At something.  Either being mis-quote-attributed, or the tsunami of busy-ness that hit me just when I was bragging I wasn't.  Thats the Greek mythology for you.  NEVER EVER BRAG!

I can't even remember most of the stuff I've been doing.  I have a vague feeling it's been fun, however.  And this summer is WAY WAY WAY better than last.  I know people here in this town.  Fun!!  And the kids are a little older and less whinier and haven't just moved all over creation 2000 times in one year, so they're happier.  We're still adjusting to this new life here.  EVERYTHING is so very different than what we've experienced before.  The finances are as tight as before, it turns out, but they're a totally different style of suckiness, which has been an expensive understanding to come to.  And we've developed a whole new accounting method.  This thing with Huck gone all day and sometimes all week is also very difficult for me to get used to.  Not that anything here is any harder than it's been.  It's just different hard.  Which is harder, in the beginning.  And all these acres and this big house, nice, but harder to manage that I expected.  Which is fine.  Life always seems to be harder than we expected.

I am going to suggest to the Dispute Resolution Center that they do a summer camp for elementary to high school aged children with siblings.  Working titles, "Spend your summer not in your room."  "Indian burns and hair pulling, how not to escalate,"  "Avoiding Juvvie,"  "Siblings: manipulate, don't mutilate."  "Quietly seething: a guide to not disturbing your napping mother."

And what of the garden?  Everywhere I go I hear people complaining that this has been the worst year for gardening.  And so I feel obliged to keep my mouth shut in public about this:  My Garden ROCKS!  (the fates sooo did not hear that, right?) I thought this would be the year I made all the bad mistakes and learned from them.  I gave myself permission to fail miserably, completely and terrifically.  I girded my psyche for sickly vines, withered leaves, earless corn twigs, monuments of weeds.  And what I find instead is Eden.  It was all a flat, dry pasture not even a year ago.  In it's place I have built 14 raised beds, 20-25 feet long each, with wood chip pathways in between.  I have squash, winter and summer, which are already 10 times larger than any I've ever grown before.  My corn, said to be impossible to grow here, was thigh high by the fourth of July.  My tomatoes are already ripening.  My freezer is overflowing with blanched snow peas.  I have a rocking chair in the orchard, my weed viewing perch. I sit in it and gawk.  Is it the manure?  Is it that I learned all the hardest lessons with my three small raised beds in Pullman?  Is it beginners luck?  Is it that I followed all of the advise in my three books on gardening and ignored the naysayers who nay sayed every week that I'd just royally messed up and would have to replant?  What is going on here?  I'm in total shock.

What I do know is that I've been waiting for this moment for a long time.  I've been dreaming of this garden my whole life.  My engine was revved and I was ready to go. But I think, no, I KNOW, I've bitten off more than I can chew.

Not going well?  The mysterious row in the garden.  My garlic.  Funny, that's the one thing I've been good at before!  And my herb garden.  It was a bold move I stuck in the middle of the lawn and now it's this dessert of struggling baby plants.  I know how to fix it: manure!!  But my energy is slipping.  My dreams are biggering and biggering and my energy is shrinking and shrinking.  I think I need to stop the dreaming for a while and just catch up.

And the lawn mower finally came back from the dinky repair shop and that's helped.  The "lawn," such that it is was already 4 feet tall.  I'm not kidding.  And mowing it down was like curing a blazing headache.  I felt like I could suddenly see and think.  The fuzz was gone from the edges. And I found so many garden tools!

So, here it is.  Summer.  Fresh carrots for lunch.  Kids all over the place.  A lake-side swim and I've wandered out over my head.  I'm trying to back float.  To breathe.  To taste this dream even as it threatens to drown me.

Vigilante Justice

What I was going to say was that Huck was sent out of town last week.  Because it's summer vacation, of course. And that means the kids are home and Huck's gone.  He was at Hanford, helping out a with that Super Fund, instead of here, helping with the Super Fund in my kitchen.  This seems to be more and more obvious (but so far no one's saying much about it): before we do things, we should first know how to clean them up.  Take oil drilling, for instance.  PBA's.  Mining.  Space junk.  Or nuclear waste making.  If you can't clean up the mess, don't make it.  Rules I learned in Kindergarten.  And should learn in the kitchen.

And then I was going to tell you that while the cat was away, the mouse tried to play.  I bought myself a Rose', a wine type that Huck hates.  It was from France.  Unfortunately, it was a very crappy thing.  Either the French have totally lost their vintage touch or they just don't get the $5 range AT. ALL.  I mean, there are decent wines in the $5-$10 range and this was not one of them. It had such a cute label.  I can just hear the French: "Zee Americanzz, they juzt like the bicicletta, in zee pink, wiz zee bubbles on zee label.  Tahehehe.  Ziz is zhit.  Total zhit wine, I pizz it when I pazz zee kidney ztones.  Zee? American Rozze.  Heh. Heh. Heh."

But then, I realized that this 109 year old house makes enough creepy noises with Huck here and if I told the world, or all five people reading here, that he was gone, the house would probably make even weirder noises.  As it was, I barely slept.  Lights on.  Such a ninny.  I was so tired during the days, I fell asleep on the park bench "watching" the kids.  It's not like we didn't do 3 whole months like this before... and this was but one week.  I've lost my grit.

And while that cat was away, other mice did play.  These pests always emerge when the man of the house is absent.  When my dad left town, we ALWAYS had a bat in the attic.  Count on it.  Mom would scream and we'd all know just what it was.  Maybe it's the testosterone pheremoney things those men exude that repel rodents. 

It happened so fast... I was in that much denial.  First there were a few tiny pellets on the counter top.  But maybe they were flax seeds.  And then there was the beheaded and disemboweled mouse in the hallway and a proud, bloody cat.  And then, the final straw on Wednesday:  I opened the silverware drawer and there was this little brown mouse with big chocolatey eyes and the longest eyelashes I've ever seen.  It squatted and gazed up at me, this big pathetic, hopeful expression, "Hi, my name is Fivel and I'd like to be your pet.  Do you have any spare wheels or balls or anything around here that needs to be incessantly turned all night?  Something squeeky?"  If it hadn't been so placid in the face of something 2000x its size, I might have just shut the drawer and continued on my little Denial Way.  Mouse?  I saw nothing of the sort!  Just a brown straw slipping behind the forks!

Although we live not in squalor, we've gotten a little lax, not sweeping before bed, leaving dishes on the counter over night.  Upon moving in we noted: old house + big field = mouse heaven and we vowed our vigilance.  We'd done battle with the mini-beasts before.  In Pullman.  One night, Huck returned from the shed proclaiming that something VERY LARGE had taken up residence in there over the winter.  It'd been months since we could open the door due to, actually, five full feet of snow and then some.  The next morning, we smelled, we saw, we marveled.  And the brown shag carpet draped all over the shed turned out to be mouse droppings.  You see, our cat needed special food for his urinary blockage problem, and our vet-friend scored us a bunch for free.  So we'd stored it, in it's original and secure paper bag.  Mousey gluttony ensued.  And those mice had the best damn bladders and urethras of the mouse kingdom.  And with such an infinite source of food, they felt their future would be bright enough to feed no less than a thousand kids. We suited up and scoured that shed, and made it to shine like the top of the Chrystler building. 

What could the suddenly starving mice do now but rush the house?  Within hours, there was crap in the pantry and sighting hotline set up.  We stopped feeding the cat until he pulled his weight, which wasn't hard.  These mice were so slow and stupid.  It's like what we'd all be if something should happen to our tenuous food supply chain.  We'd all just wander the streets going: "doh, de, doh!  Were'd the food go?"  Until some giant man stabbed us with a garden stake...just like Huck.  Traps.  Plug in anti-mice sound machines.  I foamed up all the holes around the pipes, causing massive stink bombs under the house a few days later.  Ick!

So we knew.  Yes, we knew all about mice.  We have the trash and compost cans they can't get in to.  And trap expertise.  Yes.  I may be mostly vegetarian, but when mice (and outside: gophers) get into my food stash... it's war and war is not pretty.  Even so, the physical and glue traps creep me out.  I mean, who would want to listen to a stuck mouse cry for four days before it finally gives up the ghost?  And the traps that hold up to five live mice?  What are they going to do in there until they starve to death? Well, what would you do? Breed.  ICK!! Doomed mouse orgies under the fridge and I'd have to listen to it while making dinner.  I don't think so.

So, we've got this black box and the mouse goes in, completes an electrical circuit, usually in some very bizarre position, and bam! Instantly fried, its little sizzled tail pointing out the back.  I open the lid and drop it into the trash.  Viola.

After admitting to myself that I'd been running and screaming for five whole minutes.  I had to come to terms with what was now fact: mice had invaded my drawers.  I searched the nut, seed, rice, bean drawer below the flatware drawer.  This is the drawer where, when we moved in, I vacuumed up "flax seeds" and a few stray lentils.  And I guess, subconsciously, it registered as a "suggested serving"  and I stuck my dry goods back in there.  And bought blond flax seeds.  So I spent the night vacuuming out drawers, dumping torn open bags of rice and beans, scrubbing, pouring unscathed food stuffs into glass jars, sweeping, mopping and setting traps. 

Sweaty and exhausted, Huck rang then to tell me, of course, that he was at a winery tasting the best wine he's ever had (not this Pepe le Pew crap I've been trying to come to terms with) and the best meal and a fabulous stroll along the river and he misses me.  Well.  @#%$&^*.  I miss you too, honey, but for all sorts of different reasons.  No... it was sweet of him to call; the right message, but at the very wrongest time.

So, I killed them.  Two.  I think that's all.  They're in the trash together, side by side, the beautiful one with the doe eyes and the blander one too.  A pair, and hopefully they weren't too busy in those walls eating and pooping and breeding. 

The Longest Day of the Year was three days ago.

CHEESE!

I made a new cheese this week and it was an awesome feta-type thing.

I took a Mozzarella making class a few weeks ago.  I paid for it!  I showed up on time!  And here in lumbers the instructor, who had just been informed he was doing it THAT morning.  And now he tells us that he only has goat milk and you can't make mozzarella with goat milk.  So he's going to show us how to make un-named cheeses.  "If you want something with a name, you have to get all scientific.  Which I don't do.  Basically, if it's harder than yogurt and edible, it's cheese.  So let's see what we make this morning!"  Um... but I can already do that, and do do that, in my own kitchen, for free!  Regardless, I figured a 20 year veteran of random cheesing might have some thing to teach me.

When I take a class, I asked lots of questions, trying not to be annoying or interuptive, of course.  Normally, teachers LOVE me.  They love that someone doesn't have a glazed look in their eyes.  They love that someone's engaged enough with the topic to actually ask relevant questions.  But sometimes, I get a dud who can't see what a gem of a student I am.  One professor YELLED at me to stop thinking.  Another professor walked out on the class when I innocently asked for clarification on the topic of the Roman's being totally egalitarian... apparently there was a pile of personal history there and I stepped in it.  Another teacher, concerned about my having a pulse and some enthusiasm, apparently a very rare trait in her classes, suggested I get my thyroid checked.  And this one slowly drawled, "You...know, that's...the...great... thing...about... the...internet. You...can...just...look...up...all... these...questions... on....Google."

The one thing I did get out of the class was a more cavalier approach to cheese making and the edibility of disasters.  Hence, my totally rockin' feta, which I then used in a fritatta (which we have weekly now) made with my yard's own lamb's quarters, my own chicken eggs, my own cream (from the cows, of course!), and some left over rice noodles.  Yum! 

And then, here's the real story.  Huck's Birthday cheese cake.  He wanted cheese cake.  Me, I am from a Betty-Crocker-Box family.  And Huck's from a scratch-learned-in-Switzerland family.  I'll be making a cake and he'll suddenly have feedback about the direction I'm mixing the batter (apparently you go different directions depending on which side of the equator you live on!), the types of peaks my eggs whites have crested to (Rockies vs. Appalachians)... whatever...some sort of esoteric bakery knowledge he pulls from a universe with which I have had no contact.  His helpfulness has unintentionally made me very conscious of my complete vacuum where this world of knowledge might exist.  Sensing my performance anxiety, he offered to make his own cake, but I just couldn't let him. After the "Fred-Flinstone-buys-Wilma-a-bowling-ball-for-her-birthday" present fiasco, I felt I just had to make it.  And guilt, fear and a total lack of confidence are always the best places to start with any endeavor.  Right.

I hunted through several hundred cheese cake recipes searching for the right, gluten-free one.  I knew he didn't want gummy cream cheese.  So we needed a marscapone or cottage cheese recipe.  And I thought I found what I was looking for in our antique cook book.  A fabulous looking recipe promising "basic" cheesecake.  I have since concluded that cheesecake recipes have come a long way, baby, in simplification.  This can't be what everyone else is making.

I thought I had enough time.  One hour to piece it together.  One hour to bake.  And one hour to cool while I picked up Blue from her day camp.  But one hour later, my miscreant egg-whites still wouldn't fluff.  My whipped cream was quickly regaining consciousness.  I was very confusedly creating "dry cottage cheese" by rinsing the cream off the curdles. Meanwhile, I was frantically searching for a substitution ratio of cornstarch for gluteny flour (1.5 tsp for 1 TBS wheat flour!).  So, I figured I would finally fold in my sickly egg-whites right before I left to pick Blue up, slap the baby in the oven and get back just in time to take it out, assuming no traffic.  But my cottages weren't blending with my crest-falling whipped cream, so I got out the food processor.  And I proceeded to dump the mixture in, before looking to see if I had put the blade in, which I hadn't, so it gushed straight through to the counter.  In the mean time, my 12 minute egg-whites completely deflated.  I quick called Huck, cried, hung-up (as if it was some middle school prank!), and ran out to pick up Blue.


Upon return, I screamed through 8 eggs to get my three egg whites, thanks to separation anxiety.  But these hard won whites went from placid ocean to Grand Tetons in less than two minutes! Lucky me!  I finished it up, poured it all into the spring form.  I transferred the top rack to the middle and we were on our way.  Right.

I checked back an hour later to find something strange going on with the oven rack.  I'd moved only half the rack down.  So there was my cheesecake, perfectly cooked and practically flowing over one side, while the hazelnut crust plummeted into an abyss on the other. 

Huck's assessment was that it listed like a drunken sailor yet to find his sea legs.  The recipe said NOTHING about cooling the cake, so we slopped the hot cream onto my nifty display pedestal. And there, the force of gravity and the fact that the solid was still hot enough to be a liquid took their tolls and we blew out the starboard side while the port side imploded in emptiness.

And the only candle we could find was the nine from Blue's birthday.

Nevertheless, it the was the best tasting, best textured damn pile o'cheesecake any of us have ever had or ever hope to have in our lifetimes.  Seriously.  God, it was so WORTH THE PAIN!  I'll do it all again, I swear.