Busy baker.

We went camping on Friday night. It was a good time and fun was had by all, especially Lemon. She loves camping because she gets to play in the river all day. Mike and I tried out our Vibrams for their original use - traction in the water. We rock hopped up and down the Salmon River. Normally I am terrified of doing this because I have terrible balance, but in a barefoot setting it's so much easier. You can use your whole foot to grip, and the shoes give a little extra traction. We went trail running too and ended up running about two miles and then walking about four more. We headed back yesterday afternoon and were so exhausted and so sore! That's the best kind of soreness though - the kind you get from just running around outdoors and having fun.

Now that we are back home I'm on a baking kick. I'm making a batch of English Muffins this morning. We haven't had those in a while and I should try to make them more often. I started up another sourdough. It's sitting on the back of the piano again and should be finished by next Saturday. And I figured while I was making a mess of the kitchen and baking that I should just go ahead and make some tortillas for the week. So, I made some flour tortillas too.

I'm also starting to look into the real practical options for next year's garden area. We have a space on the side yard that slopes pretty heavily from the backyard down to the sidewalk (This picture is from the Spring, the grass is dead yellow now, but the area in the back from the sidewalk to the fence will be garden.).

Originally we were planning on building a retaining wall and filling in the entire area so we would have an extended backyard essentially for gardening space. I'm also looking into the option of just putting in terraced raised beds. This is seeming like a more and more appealing option as fall quickly approaches. If we are going to level the land we really need to get some soil in there before the rains start because it's going to pack down a lot. If we do the raised beds, however, we just need to get a plan soon, measure, lay out burlap or carpet or something to kill of the grass in the areas we need and let it sit over the winter. Then build the beds next February like we did with the ones in front.

Any thoughts on garden design?

Is it Fall yet?

Unrelated to the fact that it is about 90 and I've been working in a room with no air conditioning all day I am getting excited about fall. I stopped off at the Urban Farm Store yesterday and finally picked up some missing fall seeds. Mostly though, I impulse bought fall seeds. I just couldn't help myself. I spent part of this morning adding cabbage, french radishes, arugula and some yellow onion sets to the garden. I also got some more cauliflower in there and replaced for the umpteenth time broccoli and kale seeds that keep getting unearthed by the cats.

I'm suddenly really excited about those cool-weather crops. I think it has a lot to with the fact that my summer garden isn't the bountiful harvest that I expected it to be. In fact, I think the spring garden kept us better fed. The cucumbers grow slowly, the tomatoes are in a perpetual state of green, the peppers are just now starting to fruit, and my beans are just sad. I'm excited by the prospect of something new and I have high hopes for a bountiful fall and winter garden.

Morning Mist.

What am I doing today? Well, I'm making Bread and Butter Cucumber Pickles, I'm making zucchini pickles, I'm making yogurt, I'm taking an online class on the dynamics animation system in Maya and I am enjoying a steady morning mist, which means I don't have to water the garden.

It's no wonder that Portland seems so caught up in the urban farming craze. It's that misty rain that just makes it feel right. It seems at least every other neighbor has a vegetable garden. I love going for walks and peeking into other people's yards to see what they have growing and if their peppers are bigger than mine. I saw someone the other day who had converted the parking strip between their sidewalk and the street into a healthy sized corn crop. My neighbors have chickens and so do several of my friends. When I went to buy canning supplies this year I walked into our regional big box chain supermarket to find a summer display of canning kits and supplies on sale for all your summer canning needs. It's just kind of what people do here.

I'm happy this morning to look out the window as I drink my coffee and look at the rain. I've actually missed it. I don't think I'm quite ready for it to be like this every day again, but that steady mist makes getting up early to pickle and can and make yogurt just feel like what I'm supposed to be doing. And it makes me yearn for a country cottage all the more. Maybe in a few years....

Harvested today:

• 1 kitteh

Rocky Raccoon.

I got up this morning about 6:30am when Lemon started jumping up on the bed with a ball in her mouth to wake me up. I got up, without my glasses, let her outside and looked at the garage floor and saw some strange blurry discoloration. It looked a little like a crime scene, or something from Blair Witch...

I looked closer and saw that it was raccoon prints. I suspected our raccoon had started coming back recently because the cat food has been going really fast. I have proof now.

I was worried the prints were in blood at first, but then I realized what had happened. The raccoon, let's call him Rocky, had come into the garage through the cat door and smelled some lovely rotting food inside the worm compost bin and had tried to get in. In the process Rocky got his little feets into the compost tea that is collecting in the bottom pan. When he realized his feet were all compost-tea-y he waddled over to the cat water dish and cleaned himself. The cat's water was a nice shade of brown. Then he went over and checked out the dryer....and then the prints stop.

Planted today:

• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Spinach
• Cilantro

Harvested today:

• 1 head lettuce
• 2 scallions (one giant)
• 1 lemon cucumber
• 1 pickling cucumber
• 1 zucchini
• 3 carrots (one of each color)

• 4 yellow pear cherry tomatoes (the first kind of legitimate tomato harvest!)

• 3 good looking apples that fell from the tree. Any ideas what to do with these? I have them sitting out as decoration right now. I ate one of the apples a couple weeks ago and it was pretty good, but they aren't quite ready yet.

A couple pictures.

We left town for one night and this is what happened:

Zucchini grow fast!

I'm getting excited about homegrown onions.....almost there!

Time.

I started writing a blog for several reasons:

1. I wanted something to occupy my time and make me feel purposeful when I no longer had an office to sit at from 9-5.

2. I wanted to share what I'm doing with friends and family.

3. I wanted to show that doing things the old-fashioned way isn't that hard, because you were going to find out with me as I learned.

Number three was a bit of a gamble, because I really didn't know how hard it was going to be and I didn't really know everything I was going to do. I knew I would grow a garden and bake some bread and add on some more skills, but I didn't know what they would be. In the past six months I have gotten 10 times better at making bread, I've been able to grow almost all my own produce (right now I pretty much only buy onions, garlic and potatoes at the store), I've learned to knit, I've learned to make yogurt, I've learned to can and preserve and make pickles, I've learned to live without a car.

In all of this I have learned that it really just takes a little commitment, a little planning and a lot of patience. Honestly, most of the things I do take a lot of time, but aren't really time-intensive. It just requires some planning to know how long something will take, but most of the time I am just sitting around and waiting.

The first batch of pickles I made takes two weeks (still waiting). The actual amount I time I spent actively making pickles was about 20 or 30 minutes. The rest of the time is just sitting around and waiting for the pickles to sit in brine, or ferment in the fridge. I made a second batch of pickles this week that I actually canned to keep in the pantry. They took a little more time, had to sit overnight and canning does take up a chunk. But even so, with the canning process included, the active time I spent making those pickles was about an hour.

The yogurt I made took a day and overnight to make and had to cook for eight hours. But really, the active time I spent making it was about 30 or 40 minutes. I just had to plan a little and do it on a day I knew I would be home in the afternoon/evening so I could keep an eye on its temperature. But, mostly I was doing other things and just popping in the kitchen periodically making sure the temp was keeping steady.

Bread baking can be a time-intensive process, but it's also mostly just waiting. On average, a loaf of bread takes three or four hours from start to finish, but that's with all the rising and baking included in there. It's the same thing with the yogurt – you just have to plan it for an afternoon you know you aren't going out. Having said that, I still have my fall back recipes for bread that are quick. There is the no-knead whole wheat that from start to finish takes an hour and a half and only has me actively involved for about 15 minutes. Even with a full-time job just by waking up a few minutes early I could get some homemade bread cooling on the counter by the time I walk out the door. I have a nice fall back Italian loaf too that only has one kneading and one rising phase. If I decide to make pasta at the last minute, or need a loaf for dinner I can get it out and on the table in about two hours. But, again, I'm only actively making that bread for maybe 30 minutes. The sourdough I made, which took six days in total, had me actively working on it for about an hour and a half. The rest of the time it was just sitting in the corner doing its thing.

Knitting, on the other hand, just takes a really long time.

(pictured: Tim enjoying the plushness of my newest knitted dishtowel)

Anyway, I guess my point I want to emphasize is that even though I am spending what seems to be like a lot of time doing all these homemade things, it's really not that hard. Sure, it still takes time, but I think the result is worth it. I'm very grateful I have had these last six months to be able to experiment and try new things any day of the week though. I just find so much joy in making things. It's like magic when milk turns into yogurt, or flour turns into bread. If I could somehow make a living selling pickles and sourdough bread, I would.

Getting there.

Breakfast this morning consisted of homemade yogurt with fresh picked “wild” blackberries, homemade whole wheat toast and a pot of tea. The only way I could have done better is if I grew the tea (though theoretically I could have had my chamomile, but I opted for another) and if I made the butter on my toast (maybe from my own goat milk!) and if I made the honey in the tea, but I don't keep bees (yet). Give me a couple years; I bet I can do it.

But this brings me to my real topic of today – I made my own yogurt! It's something I've been wanting to do for a while. I keep hearing that it is really easy, but I was a little worried about making it work. It required keeping the yogurt at a constant 110 degrees for about eight hours. I did my due diligence and invested in a kitchen thermometer; I needed one anyway.

It just required some milk, I used 2%, and some yogurt to start it off. Behold – if I keep up on it, this is the last yogurt I will ever buy!

I heated the milk and mixed in a couple tablespoons of the yogurt.

Then I kept the yogurt mixture in a water bath at 110 degrees for eight hours. Keeping the burner on low with occasional checking and adjusting of heat kept it within ten degrees for the entirety.

It was still pretty runny up around the seven hour mark and I was getting worried that it wasn't working. Mike and I went slightly dejected into the kitchen at the eight hour mark, which was also bedtime, and it was thickened! It worked!

Then I left it in the fridge over night and drained off the liquid in the morning.

Now I have yogurt, which I can flavor with the various fruits around the homestead – including blackberries. Before we moved in the backyard was half covered in blackberry bushes. They are a weed here – the sides of freeways and the sides of trails in the woods for that matter are covered in blackberry bushes. They are one of our banes, in fact, because there are thousands of little blackberry sprouts in the backyard that we have to fight against constantly. The problem is, blackberries are delicious. We are trying to let a few of them grow along the back fence and around the cherry tree. And now it's blackberry season, so we have “wild” blackberries too. Yum.

Bifur, don't eat the chicken.

I was sitting at the kitchen table eating my breakfast when I looked out the window and saw a chicken in our yard. Our neighbors behind us have chickens and this one obviously flew the coop. Not such a big deal besides our having three cats who have a taste for bird. Mike went outside to try and catch the chicken and return it to its yard. He chased it onto the fence to start. Here he is trying to tell the chicken that its yard is that way (camera phone from inside the house, I apologize for poor quality)

Right after this one of the cats, Bifur (the one always getting in trouble), walked into the backyard, stuck his tail straight up in the air and walked briskly in the direction of the chicken on the fence. I cut him off at the pass and distracted him with pets.

The chicken did eventually walk down the fence and hop back into its own yard. And Bifur seemed to forget there was a giant tasty bird in his backyard.

Attack of the green onions.

You just don't find scallions like this in the supermarket. It's gigantic!

Harvested today:

• 1 giant scallion
• 1 head butterhead lettuce
• 1 perfect carrot
• a few dragon tongue beans
• 1 yellow pear tomato
• 5 pickling cucumbers
• 2 peach colored roses to sit on my kitchen table

Putting up the plums, and other things.

It was a busy day on the homestead front today. In the morning I finally got around to putting up the plums. I ended up with 4 quarts of plums in syrup for later plum usage this year (they'll be good for baking and what not) and 4 half pints of plum preserves. The cookbook assured me this is delicious on cheesecake and I can only assume ice cream as well. I'm really looking forward to drizzling some over a scoop (or two) of vanilla ice cream.

We've started ripping out the grass in our backyard to put in a patio!

We were fortunate enough to come by oodles of paving stones and now we are actually going to have that patio we keep talking about. Tres exciting!

There are a couple smaller harvests that came through – chamomile and oregano. I've been snagging the chamomile for a couple weeks now; there should be enough for a couple pots of tea once it's done. The oregano keeps flowering, and the plant is pretty sad anyway, so I'm drying what was left. Plus, we are out of dried oregano in the house.

We pulled up the broccoli. Man, some of those things were like little trees - the stalks got huge! They weren't producing much anymore and I need the space for the fall crops. I think fall lettuce, garlic and shallots are taking their place.

The harvest has been a little lax the last week it seems. We've gotten a couple zucchini, some beans and straggly broccoli, but that's about it. No news on the pepper front. They are taking their sweet time to grow. No more cucumbers yet. The tomatoes are growing though and will hopefully start to ripen soon. Plus there is always chard, carrots and lettuce standing by when we need it.

Pot Pie.

What do you think of when you think of the idyllic farmhouse style meal? Probably a roast chicken or turkey with stuffing and a side of green beans. Well, what if you were a vegetarian? That's right, it would be a pot pie. So warm, so savory, such a throwback in time.

I grew up eating the frozen pot pies, which I always liked, mostly because it involved gravy. I'd never had a made-from-scratch one before though. Judging from everything else I have eaten this year as my first homemade version or homegrown version I concluded that I had never had a pot pie before. It has got to be better than the frozen kind, obviously. But I was pretty sure it would be amazing.

When I thought about making a pot pie from scratch I would feel intimidated. First, it would require me to make a pie crust. I've only ever made one pie crust in my life and it was for a disastrous pie. A pie I had to take to a wedding. A pie I was required to take my picture with at said wedding so everyone could know who made which pie. It was embarrassing at best. The pie did taste good – it just looked awful because my crust was such a disaster. Secondly, I would have to make a tasty gravy. This is actually an easy thing, but for some reason I find it intimidating. I'm just not totally confident in my roux-ing abilities yet.

I had lots of random summer vegetables so I decided to make a one last night. I watched a cooking show last week about pie dough, and felt a little more confident in my abilities. I picked up a few tricks. The result was a pretty darn easy meal. It just required a few hours foresight to mix the dough and stick it in the fridge to chill. The gravy took all of five minutes, made from vegetable stock, and then you just dump it all in the pie and cover it up.

The dough this time came out great! It was the right size to cover the pie pan and it was flaky and crunchy on the edges. I was able to use up some green beans, broccoli, zucchini and carrots from the garden too! And I couldn't help but feel proud of myself when I sat down at the dinner table in front of my idyllic meal.

Dough Watch: The Final Countdown.

I'll spare you the anticipation. The sourdough is really, really good. I declared as soon as I ate a bite that it was worth six days. I'd say that's a success!

Last night I came home after spending time with friends and a couple beers to really just want to get into bed. But, I had bread duties. So, I donned my apron, added more water and more flour and some salt, dumped my dough on the counter and kneaded away. Then it sat in the corner for another 8-12 hours.

This morning I was ready for the final steps. I dumped the dough.

Then divided and shaped into loaves.

Then put them into floured towel lined bowls. And they sat again for a few hours in the final rise.

Then into the oven!

And they're done!

And they're good!

I will make sourdough again. Sure, it's a commitment and it takes a lot of patience, but that's kind of what this whole thing is about. I'm getting very patient. I hardly ever have instant gratification anymore. Except maybe for chips and salsa; that's the treat I usually have on hand. Otherwise it's two weeks for pickles, 6 days for bread and planning your dinners for December in July so you're sure to put enough seeds out.

Dough Watch: Bread Start

It's alive!!

Last night I took my finished sponge, which was growing and bubbling with yeast action and added water and flour for the start of the bread. I did my first kneading of the dough before I went to bed and then let it sit in the corner overnight.

I came back to the kitchen this morning to find this lovely, yeasty, rising dough ball. I wish I could put some smell-o-vision on this blog because the dough smells...sour. Like sourdough!

I took my lovely, yeasty dough ball and added some more water.

Then added more flour to make another new dough ball. It's rising in the corner for another 8-12 hours.

I have a good feeling about this sourdough. I think it's going to work! I did, however, forget to save some of the starter sponge. Oops. If I like the final product I'll have to start over from the beginning now.

My first pickle.

I mentioned before that I love pickles. Because of this I bought pickling cucumber seeds this year so I could make my own pickles. I had one pickling cucumber ripen last week and I put it in a salad. Not such a good idea. It was really unpleasantly bitter on its own. I learned my lesson on that one. This week I had five or six pickling cucumbers ripen, so I made a small batch of pickles.

I'm new to pickling and am learning that you can pickle just about anything and there are lots of different ways to make pickles, from easy refrigerator pickles, to one-day and two-day pickles, to pickles that have to sit in the corner of your kitchen for three weeks before you do anything with them. Since I only had a small batch of cucumbers right now I went with the easy, breezy refrigerator dill pickles. These aren't canned and preserved, so they have to be eaten within a few months. When all three of my cucumber plants start producing (right now only one is producing fruit) then I will make a bigger batch of preserved pickles.

First, I sliced my cukes and set them aside in a bowl.

I made the pickling brine with some vinegar, pickling salt, sugar and pickling spice and boiled it about ten minutes. Then poured the brine over the pickle slices and let it sit and cool for about a half hour.

Inside the jars I put some peppercorns, mustard seed, garlic cloves and dill. Then added the slices and covered with brine. Pickles, done!

Well, mostly done. They are fermenting in the fridge and will be tasty and edible in about two weeks.

2nd Refreshment, Sponge.

This morning was time for the next step of my sourdough bread. It was the second refreshment....of the sponge. I was saddened when I read the next step, which started by saying, "To start the bread...". I'm already four days in and I haven't even started on the bread yet, I'm still just making the sponge. Assuming the sponge is successful I can keep it going in the fridge and make unlimited sourdough breads with it and be able to skip the first four days of waiting.

I took out the ooey-gooey center, added water, white flour and mixed. I'm a little concerned I may have messed it up. I added the water and flour together, when I should have done just the water first and mixed the ooey-gooey center thoroughly in the water before I added more flour. It doesn't look very incorporated right now. Yikes.

Next step is tonight, when I actually start the bread. I think I knead some and then it rises overnight.