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German Potato Salad & tastes of home

Jun2

Guys, I made German Potato Salad this weekend!

This is a ~thing~ for me, because GPS (always “GPS”) is one of the major staples of family picnics in my natal family. My grandma made it, my mom makes it… I’ve never made it.

I made it with purple potatoes and jowl bacon, which did a bit to get my brain out of the “will this taste like home?” place, and I think it turned out pretty delicious. Not just like grandma’s or Mom’s… but still delicious.

I was a slacker and forgot to call Mom for the receipt – thus part of the problem with getting it to taste right – so I used this recipe http://www.foodiecrush.com/german-potato-salad/ – and added chives, because this time of year we have loads and loads of chives and not much else.

It didn’t taste quite like home, but it tasted reminiscent of home, which, I think, is pretty darn good for a first try.

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Grandpa-to-Me Cooking

May19

There’s a rage, it seems, for Farm-to-Table dining; there’s a few restaurants open in Ithaca right now that tout it and it gets play in some blogs. In short, it’s local food delivered to local consumers – in restaurants, it’s high end stuff made with low-food-miles food. I find it an interesting movement, but I live in the Frozen North, and I like my oranges, and my fresh produce in December, and so on.

There’s also – as we found out when we were taken out to a fancy place for dinner for our birthdays in Troy a few weeks back – a trend for buttermilk-fried ramps right now. And let me tell you, they are delicious. Ommity nommity tasty, with just enough onion flavor. We bought some ramps from our local farmer’s market and tried it out – so good

But to bring this around full circle, trendy things are pricey, and ramps have a very short growing season and are in fashion right now, so much so that people fear overharvesting.

Enter my grandparents’ farm, and the small forest there that my parents harvest for wood. And a visit to meet with my other (surviving) grandmother at my parents’ place 2 weekends past.

And my mother just happens to say “oh, would you like some ramps? We can go dig them.”

Let me tell you, grandpa’s-woods-to-table tastes even better than farm-to-table.

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Time for Yardwork!

May13

~~It’s Spring! It’s time for all the chores~~

We’ve come to the time of year when I can almost rely on the weather not being frosty overnight – it reached the 70’s yesterday! (Low 20s C) – so now is the time for all the yardwork, and planning all of the house stuff.

I’ve started keeping a notebook, writing down everything that I need/want to do on the house. I think a couple basic things in the bathroom & the foyer are first there – especially the things we already have everything for.

But that’s this weekend. I started on the garden way back in March – the peas I planted are coming up; the carrots & beets aren’t. But that means it’s time for another round of seeds of both of those.

We won’t put starts in the ground until Memorial Day, but my Egyptian Walking Onions, Horseradish, mint, chives, and oregano are already up from last year.

And I’ve been making fire!

We have a Giant Brush Pile I’ve been working on knocking down, with the help of an electric chipper-shredder (mostly last year) and a small fire pit. Now that’s fun – sitting out there feeding wood into the pit, the table ton my lap, writing in between chopping up wood for the fire.

And last year’s firewood is mostly cured, so it moves into the garage now – it’s stacked along the garage door wall for the first year, to get the sun – to make room for the wood we’ll be ordering in a week or two. It’s hard, satisfying work with direct, tangible results. I like it.

Of course, today it’s raining. Maybe I’ll work on a skirt this evening.

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Weekend!

Apr18

Such a lovely weekend!

This was my Big Four-Oh, or, as I like to think of it, the very beginning of a 7-month-long celebration. And it was an awesome celebration!

We went to visit our friends in Troy (E.Mc and Pivin; I was in their wedding a couple years ago. We visit them as much as we can manage). There we had awesome sliders (the only meat-on-bread you’ll get me to eat, unless you count tortillas as bread) at http://slidindirty.com/, a short but very fun hike at Saratoga Spa State Park (Hot springs!) and a longer hike around Saratoga Springs, the town. I found some lovely books in a used book store described to me as having non-Euclidian geometry involved in its layout (I think it’s just L-Space 😉 and a nice necklace in a really creepy “antique” market going out of business.

Then we had dinner at http://www.pecksarcade.com/ – nom nom nom.

There was a lot of eating involved in this trip! 🙂 Also a good deal of drinking. The next day was all-you-can-eat sushi as well as buying a bow tie for the kitties (They liked it fine once we took the bell off).

There may be photos. I’ll check tonight.

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Wish List – clothes to fill out my wardrobe – for my own edification

Mar21

Wish List Clothes
Things I should look for whilst shopping

Tops, no-tucking:
* Black short or 3/4 and long sleeved

3/4 or short sleeves
* to go with wheat pants
* to go with blue pants

One to three bright short-or-3/4-sleeved shirt, may be one of the above shirts.

—-

Black skirt, long
Black skirt, short, straight.

Blazers or structured cardigans, esp. see pants above.

Something navy in re. bottoms.

—

Open-toe nice shoes

The Perfect Mary Janes, Black

Scarves? To match things.

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New Wardrobe! Stuff I bought yesterday with the help of Freosan & T.

Mar20

I got three pair of Basic Dress Pants in black, grey, wheat. (same exact pant)
I got a cute dress that will be cuter when I lose 10 lbs but is pretty cute now
I got a nice little sleeveless shirt I have to figure out how to tuck in.
and and
a “ballet cardigan” which is one that comes to the waist and then ties, no buttons.
and a nice scoop-neck shirt.
and a couple plain shirts.
also, a bottle of wine for my soon-to-be-former boss-boss, a bottle of wine for my Awesome Reference co-worker, & 2 bottles of wine for my wine cellar.

Good haul!

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This weekend I will…

Mar12

* Install a sink (with husband) – stalled, need supplies
* Get all of the dishes that are my responsibility cleaned
* vacuum at least one room
* Bake a loaf of bread. Maybe two. – baked
* Start sorting my wardrobe, with an eye towards a capsule wardrobe idea
* write at least 1300 words, mostly of catch-up on goals – 550 written, halfish of catchup.
* if possible, turn over 1 or two garden beds and plant some pea seeds & maybe some carrot seeds – 1 turned over and carrots/beets planted – second turned over and peas planted.

ALSO:
Inventoried seeds (woah) and started garden plan list.

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Rainy Day, warm and pleasant.

Mar10

Wyste has been journalling, and it’s got me thinking about gardening and home improvement.

If the weather holds – and weather.com says it will – I could see if I can turn over the beds this weekend. Might still be too frozen.

It’s probably too early to plant carrots – they say “3 weeks before the last expected frost” which is more like mid- to late-April – but I could risk a single batch. Peas, on the other hand, say “as soon as you can work the soil,” so if I can get the bed with the trellis turned over, I could do that this weekend.

We started burning brush, too. Kind of nice sitting out there with a laptop, writing while the fire crackles. Now all I need is a wifi repeater.

How are your plans for the spring shaping up?

And has anyone tried any hydroponic gardening?

Or in pots? I’ve been looking up stuff for next winter, including salad radishes.

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Origin of the Planties

Mar9

I have been thinking about plant origins and variations.

Spurred by this article and lovely infographic, and the fact that when you plant 5 or 6 different Brassicae in one long garden plot, it becomes really really obvious they’re the same plant (esp. Kale and Brussels sprouts! They make nearly identical plants!) and by this cute video showing plants then-and-now, it makes me wonder both about what’s in our garden (right now? Dirt and last year’s carrots and leeks, and one barely-surviving kale plant) and about worldbuilding plants.

And then I think about growing purple potatoes, and I think about this, Ursula Vernon’s informative rant on the Potato Apocalypse, and I think about varieties.

We have such bounty, and such breadth and depth available. It’s pretty awesome.

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Looking forward to spring – garden plans

Feb29

Is it spring yet?

I was wandering around this past weekend without a jacket, so it certainly seems like spring. We’ve started to order seeds – though I need to find a source for purple seed potatoes – so that makes it seem like spring. There’s only a tiny bit of snow anywhere, so that looks springlike, right?

But it’s not yet March, and I live in the northeast. It’s not spring until May, most years. You don’t plant without some sort of covering until Memorial Day weekend (May 30th, this year). And our last frost date is in mid-May.

Still, I can start planning. Planning is easy.

So what should I plant this year?

P.S. My kale lasted till mid-February again this year before it started to turn brown on the tops. Definitely planting kale again.

P.P.S. We still have a few apples from our biggest tree sitting on the kitchen counter.

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