Sour Cream Bread.

It's been a while since I chronicled a bread baking adventure. I have been stuck in a bread rut. When I do get around to making a loaf I usually stick with my easy whole wheat. It's fast and it's reliable. I found myself marginally bored today so decided to try a new recipe. It's a sour cream bread. Back when I first started baking my own bread over five years ago I made a loaf that used sour cream. I remember I liked it and made it a couple times, but this is a new one to me. I generally don't want to write up a big to do about a recipe I haven't proofed a few times, but what the hell.

It starts with a sour cream base and uses that for the bulk of the moisture. When you mix in the proofed yeast/water/sugar mixture and start adding flour it resembles more of a frosting than anything.

After another cup or so of flour it turned into something that resembled cookie dough.

A good long knead got it all together.

Out of the oven and looking fine!

Verdict: Sour Cream Bread is like eating a cloud. It's AMAZING. I will definitely make this again. I can't ever use a whole carton of sour cream and it gets moldy. This bread is a great way to use it up and feel like you are literally eating a corner of heaven.

A look back at 2010...

January: I spent a lot of time on the couch with my arm elevated, watching movies and taking pain medication. We talked a lot about putting in a garden and toyed with the ideas of making a garden on the side, in the front, building retaining walls and other fantastical notions. I found out I was losing my job.

February: I got laid off. I started this blog. We built three raised beds in the front yard and started seeds. By the end of the month we had radish sprouts. Our worm compost bin started to take off with the second generation of worms showing their face.

March: I had my second surgery. I started to really enjoy having days of time and used a lot of it baking bread. We got our first vegetable - radishes! I sold my car and became a full-time pedestrian.

April: I learned to knit! It's become a habit since then and I haven't been without a project for more than a couple days. We started to get some more variety from the garden, namely kale. I continued on with excessive bread baking.

May: It was my birthday! The spring garden was bursting with lettuces, spinach, peas and kale. The summer garden was budding with roses, bean sprouts and tomatoes. I began contemplating what I really want out of life and quickly realized I like actually doing things (ie, growing my own food, knitting my own clothes, cooking from scratch) rather than working to pay for them (ie, buying produce at the store, buying sweaters and scarves and hats and gloves, buying pre-made or boxed food).

June: The fruit trees began to bear. The house was flooded with cherries and as necessity is the mother of invention I learned to can. I made my first jam and jelly. I finished my first knitting projects. The garden was producing like mad filling our freezer with spinach and kale (I'm actually using some of the frozen spring spinach tonight-it's still going!) and giving us daily broccoli and salad greens.

July: I kept baking like mad and made my first sourdough to a resounding success (I have another batch going right now. Two days in, four to go.). I continued canning as the plum tree ripened. I started planning for right now. I had my winter garden plans all mapped out by mid-July.

August: I learned to make my own yogurt! Hopefully the first in my dairy related adventures to come. Next year prepare yourself for cheese making. I also made my first pickle. Believe it or not I still haven't dug into the pantry stash of pickles. I made so many small batches of refrigerator pickles over the summer that we haven't had to go into reserves. Right now we still have two jars of green tomato pickles in the fridge. I finally learned to make a good pie dough and I stopped buying tortillas and started making them myself.

September: We expanded our storage capacity for canned goods as they were taking over the kitchen. We built a patio in the backyard. I started back to work and started having more time to knit. Go figure. The onions were harvested and cured (and now almost gone. There are a couple tiny ones left in storage, but I bought onions for the first time in three months yesterday. It was a sad day.).

October: The month of tomatoes. Winter seeds were all in the ground. Mike found a functioning sewing machine, which I still have yet to learn to use. We painted and updated the bathroom, which we still have yet to finish completely. The job thing is clearly starting to get in the way. I start to realize that I can't do the corporate thing and will likely never make a lot of money and realized I'm OK with that. I just need to require less. Serious thinking and plans begin about my future.

November: We built the cover for our patio. Everything in the garden died aside from kale and arugula.

December: Lots of rain and lots of work results in lots of knitting. Also a massive amount of holiday cookies.

It's great to look back on everything I have done this year. Sitting here now I snack on pickles and put preserved plums in my yogurt. When I peek in the storage pantry there are still jars lined up of fruit and pickles waiting to be eaten. It's rewarding to see that work I put in back in the beginning of summer is still paying off now in the dead of winter. I am concerned about next year. I won't have as much time to devote to any of this and I want to expand our garden space at the same time. Anyhow, here are my goals for the coming year:

• Learn to sew
• Begin organic pest control
• Better fall/winter garden prep
• Have cold frame
• Increase pickling repertoire
• Dry something
• Grow own herbs, preserve
• Get in summer canning routine
• 70% vegetable growth - through winter
• Set up grow lights for Spring? - at least Fall.
• Make one personal bread recipe
• Put in fence
• Begin testing soil, amending
• Start regular fertilization
• Better tree pruning
• Make a soft cheese

Final harvest.

Even now, in the final days of the year, we still have fresh produce coming from the front yard. Harvested today:

1 bunch kale

6 carrots

1 bunch arugula

'Twas the day after Christmas.

The day after Christmas we took to the forest. Well, Forest Park anyway. It was a little chilly, a little drizzly and a little cloudy. We actually hiked through the clouds. We got a nice look at this one from within and above it.

Mike wore his secretly-knitted-Christmas-hat to keep warm. I managed to finish it in a week only knitting while I wasn't at home. Success!

We made it to the top at the Pittock Mansion and took in the view. On a clear day you can see all five mountains. That day we could see my old apartment, the Columbia River and across town to Mt. Scott (really more of a hill).

*For those of you I worked with in the spherical realm, check that out above. iPhone, stand in one spot and spin while your phone takes multiple photos and stitches them together, and does a decent job at it for what it is. Now just think about all those hours and days you spent tweaking stitching scripts. Makes you a little mad, doesn't it?

'Twas the day before Christmas...

Merry Christmas Eve!

I've been so busy the last few weeks with work and preparation for the holidays and other various projects that I haven't had time to sit down and write about any of the things I've been doing! First off I finally finished the arm warmers I started back in September. They are riddled with mistakes, but I told myself I didn't care and that they were practice, so I just kept knitting. And, now when you put them on and look at them from across the room, you can't even tell.

I had a busy weekend last weekend with holiday cookie baking. I made German Honey Cookies, Whipped Shortbread and Peppermint Fudge.

I made some yogurt too, which I have fallen out of the habit of doing. Of course, as soon as I told myself we didn't eat enough yogurt for me to keep making giant batches there was a bout of gastrointestinal distress in our house and we had to go out and actually buy a big carton of yogurt. I had failed. But I found myself last weekend with half a carton of milk on the verge of expiring, so it got me back in the yogurt-making swing of things.

We are going to do the family Christmas celebration tonight and the kitchen has started working! I made my little timeline of oven temps, cook times and prep times to make sure everything is ready to go by 6pm. So far we are on schedule! Bread is rising, beans are simmering...

And in between things I've started my next knitting project. It's going to be a cowl with a big wooden button. I'm knitting on size 19 needles, which, frankly, makes me feel like an elf. They are gigantic! On the plus side it makes knitting go super fast, which is in need after the last 3-month project. Some instant gratification is needed around here.

And, lastly, here's a cat. Merry Christmas!

Tannenbaum.

We got our Christmas tree last weekend. We decorated it with ribbon and candy canes.

We left Lemon at home all day on Thursday and came home to find the bottom half of the tree stripped of candy canes. The only evidence was some plastic wrapping by her crate and the fact that she kept sniffing the tree to find more. It didn't seem to affect her any aside from now begging when we eat candy canes. Oh, Lemon.

The cats are enjoying sleeping under the tree too. It makes a good cat cave.

From the Flood.

Greetings from the depths of Oregon winter. They have been saying this is supposed to be an unusually wet and unusually cold winter here this year. I think they are right, just not necessarily at the same time. It's the beginning of December and we already had a light snow and almost a week entirely below freezing (pretty rare here) and now we are in the midst of a week long biblical level rainstorm, but it's pretty warm getting into the 50's. It's been coming down hard for a couple days already and here's our outlook for the coming week:

To be fair, it's not unusual for the 5-day to be all clouds and showers, but "heavy rain" and "rain" are serious business. I'm already looking forward to the break on Tuesday for just "showers". Storm drains are clogging and flooding the streets in places and our backyard is a giant mud pit. Consequently we have muddy dog prints on our carpet.

I went into the garden yesterday morning to grab some carrots for dinner and it was like pulling the carrots out of water. There was no resistance whatsoever. I also noticed that we are almost out of carrots! There's only about a half dozen left out there and they are pretty tiny. Well, that just means I need to plant more carrots next year.

The Aftermath.

I took a peek at the garden on my way out the door in the morning to see how the plants fared over the freezing patch we had last week. Well....the kale bounced back like a champ, arugula is holding on and there are still carrots in the ground but that's about it. Chard is dead, lettuce is close to it, cabbage is wilted, broccoli and cauliflower were eaten down to the nub again...it's a sad little winter garden.

Thanksgiving.

I spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Texas with my family. It was a nice visit filled with queso, rellenos, margaritas and breakfast tacos. I also got a couple runs in there too (thank God!). I'm back now and feel the need to make a to do list that I'm going to stick to. I've just been getting things done willy-nilly the last couple months and I need to get some structure back in my self-sufficiency dreams.

I made a large outline calendar of skills and accomplishments I hope to achieve that spans five years and includes things like "Learn to use sewing machine", "Make a soft cheese" and "90% vegetable growth" by 2013. This one might be a little out of reach, but I'm setting my sights high!

Anyway, I only have a few things left on my list for 2010 that I haven't done yet. They are:

• Learn how to use sewing machine
• Sew something
• Research organic pest control

I can definitely track down a copy of my sewing machine model's manual and I can definitely research organic pest control. Actually sewing something within the next month might be a little much, but maybe I can try to make a throw pillow or something. Gotta keep on track!

Winter is upon us.

I woke up this morning to a frosty landscape. Kale covered in ice crystals.

Frosty leaves covering the winter garden.

Our dirt.

We made dirt. This used to be bits of onion and stems of broccoli and eggshells and squash innards. Now, it's black gold! Thanks, worms.

First Fire.

We got the fireplace all fixed up just in time. Chance of snow tonight and lows in the 20's this week. Brr.

First Frost.

It's getting cold! There is a call for snow in the valley on Monday! Yikes! And my garden is sitting out there exposed. I don't have any sort of cold frame or cloche; I am woefully unprepared. I'm not too concerned about it though. Frankly, the winter garden is pretty sad anyway and I'm seeing this as a good not-so-scientific experiment to see just how long I can grow things here without protection. I think the kale and cabbage should be OK and they are the two crops that are actually growing well and I would be concerned about losing. In fact, kale is supposed to sweeten after going through a frost.

I'm hoping in the next couple weeks to make a real plan for next year's garden expansion and maybe even get myself a some cover built by next spring for early crops.

The Bathroom: Epilogue I

It started pouring in Portland at some point during the day. I work in a room with no windows, so I wasn't privy to the whole thing, but I do know that it was raining when I went to lunch and it was raining the whole way home. For some reason Portland traffic gets exponentially worse in the rain, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense since it is raining all the time. It took an hour today to make it from the office to the vanpool drop-off. Then I had my bike ride home ahead of me.

I invested in a new cycling rain jacket this summer and this was the first time to wear it in a heavy rainshower. I'm glad to say when I got home and took off my rain gear there wasn't a drop of water on me! I'm also glad to say when I got home that the vanity was installed in the bathroom!! Mike had told me earlier in the day that he wasn't going to have time to get it installed like he had planned, so I certainly wasn't expecting it. It was a great little surprise.

Now, just to get the baseboard trim and maybe paint our wall cabinet to match (but I'll take my time on that one).

Workday dinners.

One of the hardest things I have had to adjust to with working again is trying to still cook from scratch. I simply don't have much time and I have certainly not had the motivation to prep in the mornings. I have a hard time waking up before the sun does. On a good day I get home by 7pm. Today is one of the good days. I also managed to actually find a quick recipe and it utilizes ingredients that I need to use and have on hand already. It's the merging of all three elements. Fresh Tomato Lentil Soup with homemade whole wheat toast:

After so many nights of getting home in a frenzy and rushing to get dinner on the table by 9pm or getting stuck in traffic and not even getting home until after 8 with no chance of a homemade dinner it's a welcome relief to be able to put fresh garden produce (tomatoes, onions and herbs) on the table in a half an hour and still have time to play with the dog in the backyard.

Patio: Complete.

It's been a big day on the homestead today. We finished our patio (Aside from sealing up some holes, which has to wait for two consecutive days of good weather. This may take a while.)!!

We got the chimney cleaned! When the inspection was done on the house they said the chimney needed cleaning before making a fire. It's only taken a year to finally get around to it. But, we finally have everything now - wood, a clean chimney and fireplace tools to boot. Mike is out back chopping wood as I type to christen the fireplace tonight. So, without further ado, here's a photo log of building the patio cover:

First side up...

Becoming a structure. Mike says hi!

Triple rainbow to christen the patio. Seriously....triple!!

Finished! Playing with Lemon and keeping dry!

Southern foods from the North.

I did some cooking Saturday and finally got around to making those green tomato pickles. They had been sitting for so long that some of them started to ripen! And rot. I lost a few tomatoes, but still had enough to make a couple jars of pickles and make a nice plate of fried green tomatoes for Cajun night (I also made Gumbo. yumm). They were pretty delicious.

I was really pleased when I looked down at the counter mid-prep and saw all my green tomatoes from the summer garden, onions from the fall garden and fresh kale from the winter garden all coming together.

I also got a nice surprise in the mail from Texas. My friend has a pecan tree in her yard and I am reaping the benefits! Turns out these things are really hard to shell. Like Mike said, I could eat pecans as much as I want as long as I shell them myself. It's kind of a pain in the butt. But a delicious one.

Dreams.

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do with my life lately. I had a lot of time to think about it this year. I've been thinking about how I have my dream job now and it's not really what I want out of life. If 13-year-old me could see me now working at a feature animation studio alongside people who have worked on every animated movie I've seen since I was born I would have exploded with excitement.

But now that almost 30-year-old me is here it feels like it's something that I get to check off the list once this film is done. Worked on a feature film, check. Now, moving on...

If I go back even further though, 8-year-old me would explode with excitement if I lived in a cabin the woods. So maybe that's the next thing on my list. In all seriousness, though, I do have a dream of my life where I can spend the majority of my working time working at living and not at an office. I would be much happier spending my time directly providing my own food than abstractly getting a paycheck to go and buy it later.

One of the other blogs I follow wrote a little piece on dreams and I really enjoyed it:

"Believe–and make no mistake, believing means working. Dreaming AND doing. (Doing doesn’t mean you have to buy a farm tomorrow. But if it’s what you want, you should be doing something toward the goal. Every day.) There is no greater obstacle to your dreams than fear. And common sense. Common sense is a huge obstacle. If I had been making my decisions based on common sense, I would still be living in a 4000-square foot house in a posh suburb in North Carolina buying Viking cookware while I fed my kids mashed potatoes out of a box."

So I am going to keep working on that dream a little every day and just like with my animated film dream one day I might wake up and find that I'm already there.

Soap.

Last night I made homemade laundry soap (#10) for the first time. It was a mixture of castille soap, baking soda, washing soda and vinegar. The castille soap addition kind of pushed it over the cost-effective edge.

I should try one with Borax, although I'm a little scared of Borax as it's rather toxic. The other option is to make a detergent using grated bar soap. Mike is suspicious of the dissolving effectiveness, but I might give it a try.

The Bathroom.

As promised here are pictures of the bathroom pre, post and during work. It's still not done quite yet though. Here's the bathroom in all it's beige glory before we started:

The light fixture that came with the house was out of 1985. Mmm....wood panelling. The toilet holder was also wood. But the towel holder was a chrome/brass combo. Lovely.

When we took the mirror down we discovered a hidden medicine cabinet in the wall.

When we took out the vanity we discovered the previous flooring peeking through.

First coat of paint down. No more beige!

After we finished painting and went to put the new vanity in we discovered that it didn't fit. Our drain pipe comes out of the wall too low for the new cabinet. We thought the only option to keep the new vanity was to rip into the wall and redo the pipes about six inches higher. So says our friend, there is some kit you can buy to do the same thing, but on the outside of the wall. We're going to Home Depot this afternoon to verify. So, we still have the old vanity in there right now with no doors or drawers. The bathroom as it stands today:

My splurge.

We really like the orange bathroom. No regrets. I'll post pictures of the new vanity once we get that whole hoopla figured out.

Green Tomatoes.

Well, the plum tree is now bare of leaves and the 10-day weather forecast also calls for 9 days of rain. I think that means it's finally over. I pulled up the tomato and remaining pepper plants today. I harvested all the tomatoes that were left (and one lone bell pepper). Most of them were green.

These guys all show signs of ripening inside.

These guys are all immature and should be used green. Recently Homesick Texan posted a recipe for pickled green tomatoes that look kind of delicious. I do love pickles. There is always fried green tomatoes too. I've actually never had them before. Maybe now is the time.

Now that I have pulled up the tomatoes and harvested the rest of the fall radishes it's just the winter veggies left in the garden (By the way, I have three sandwich bags of radishes and I don't know what to do with them. I was hooked on that radish pasta last Spring, but Mike is off grains right now. Any ideas?).

As I said before, the winter crops aren't doing so well. What we do have that is promising to get us through the winter is:

Kale: Three plants are doing really well. They got a head start before whatever little bug or worm came that is eating the rest of my starts.

Red Cabbage: There are a few starts that keep getting bigger and are showing promise of making it. Cross your fingers.

Onions: We still have oodles of green onions out there ready to pick at a moment's notice.

Carrots: There are still a couple rows of carrots ready to eat right now. They are supposed to keep in the ground just fine, so we can use them as we will throughout the winter.

Broccoli: Maybe, just maybe I have one broccoli that will make it. It's a few inches tall and hasn't been eaten yet. But with only one to rely on, I'm not holding my breath.

Swiss Chard: We still have three rows of chard that are growing and holding well.

Arugula: I impulse bought arugula and I have two rows going. I'm glad I did because most of my spinach didn't sprout, and the ones that did aren't growing. Did you know in the UK they call arugula rocket? Cute.