cultivating domesticity

urban bee corridors

2011-12-03T23:25:00.000-08:00

i’m super stoked on bees.
recently i went to a workshop called “how to grow a pollinator garden” put on by master beekeeper jennifer bach. i learned all kinds of fascinating things about bees. there are 20-50 thousand bees in a hive, almost all of them female (3-10% are male "drones"). did you know that the male bees are born from unfertilized eggs? does that seem possible? they are literally genetic clones of the queen. they hang out in “drone congregations” high up in the atmosphere. when a queen is ready to mate (only once in her life) she flies way up there and zooms past the drones, and whomever’s fast enough to catch up with her she mates with (12-30 of them) and then she keeps the sperm in her body for the rest of her life, using it as needed to fertilize eggs for the next 5 years. she only mates with drones from other colonies, so essentially it’s the genetic coupling of two different queens’ dna that produces the next generation. fascinating.

i also learned that bees in urban areas can often be healthier than bees in agricultural areas because they aren’t as likely to be exposed to pesticides and vast areas of monoculture crops – which are bad for their health. that’s pretty sad, but it renewed my sense of the importance of growing backyard and patio gardens, to provide a sort of urban bee corridor.
they recommended letting 10% of your plants like basil and lettuce go to seed so the bees can enjoy it too, plus then you can collect seeds for replanting. another good tip was to try to plant a diversity of flowering plants that bloom at different times, so the bees have a consistent source of nectar throughout the year. they also appreciate having a source of water nearby when they are feeding, so if you set up a water dish or feature try putting small stones in it so the bees can access the water without getting wet. i’m definitely inspired to plant more flowering things and hope to lend a hand to our pollinator friends.
i also learned that bees leave pheromones on a flower when they sucked out the nectar, and those pheromones evaporate at the same rate that the plant takes to replenish the nectar - so it's a kind of marking signal that says to other bees "don't bother with this one." awesome.
one more interesting tidbit- when the queen hatches a new queen, the old queen takes half the hive and leaves the house to her new protege - this is when hives "swarm" - the hive lands somewhere, usually a tree - and waits while the scouts go out and find possible new hive locations. when the scouts come back to the hive they report what they've each found, and each bee in the hive communicates with the bees immediately around her, and they come to agreement about which is the best new location by essentially "voting." i'd like to learn more about this process. some people are referring to bee hives as a "super organism" - meaning the hive has an intelligence and ability that is beyond the sum of its parts.
at the workshop they had honey tastings provided by local beekeepers - and the jars were labeled by which month/season they were harvested - i was amazed at how completely different honey from spring, summer, fall, and winter seasons taste - even here in hawaii where seasonal changes are relatively subtle.

i was catching up on overdue presents and other personal projects that had been on hold for the past month while i focused on our eat local campaign. The bees inspired me, and i went home buzzing with enthusiasm that came out in the form of these potholders for my friend -and fellow birthday buddy - cathy.
it’s been a while since i’ve done paper piecing – since the dragonfly quilt- but it came back to me and gave me an excuse to dig into my box of scrap fabrics, which was one of the few things i shipped from oakland to hawai'i when i moved. i whipped these out late one night and am quite pleased with how they turned out. cathy’s an amazing cook (among many other things), and i hope these bees will bring her inspiration as well.

crayon roll-up

2011-10-11T01:56:00.000-07:00

i’m pretty pleased with this super quick and easy baby present pattern i found at skip to my lou. i had a friend’s first baby luau to go to last weekend, and since i’d been so busy with work i hadn’t gotten around to a present until the day of, which also happened to be my first day of moving into our new place, so time was short.

thankfully googling “easy baby present sewing” turned up this gem – a crayon kit to go that’s vinyl on the inside so it doesn’t get all market up, and is small enough to wrap up and stick in your purse for instant entertainment on the road.
i didn’t have rickrack, which i think would have made it better, but i’m pretty pleased with how it came out, using some scrap camo print vinyl leftover from our grill cozy.

i also ended the project at exactly the right time – check out my spool of yellow thread at the very end of the project. a good sign!

hau’oli la hanau e kahiwa!

crockpot yogurt

2011-09-11T00:21:00.000-07:00

did you know you can make yogurt at home in a crockpot? i tried it for the first time this week, and was truly amazed - it's super easy, tastes great, and saves money. what's not to love?

my friend Momi sent me this recipe a while ago, and I finally had reason to try it out for the eat local challenge. i had bought a half gallon of local milk the other day on a whim because it was on sale, but i don't really drink milk, and i've been missing having yogurt in my (100% locally grown) smoothies in the morning, so figured this was the perfect time to try out the yogurt recipe. to be honest, i was highly skeptical that it would actually work. I've always been intimidated by yogurt-making, similar to my fear of proofing yeast when baking bread - it's so much pressure to get the temperature right so those little buggers will grow. anyway, despite my skepticism and nervousness, the process was incredibly simple - you just need to start it at a time when you expect to be home periodically to switch the crockpot off and mix in the yogurt. I made a 1/2 recipe because my crockpot is little and that worked just fine.

the ingredients.

--12 cups (3/4 gallon) of whole milk--pasteurized and homogenized is fine, but do NOT use ultra-pasteurized.

--1 6oz store-bought natural, live/active culture plain yogurt

the directions.

plug in your crockpot and turn to low. add milk. cover and cook on low for 2 1/2 hours.

unplug your crockpot. leave the cover on, and let it sit for 3 hours.

scoop out 2 cups of the milk and put it in a bowl. whisk in live/active culture yogurt. then dump the bowl contents back into the crockpot. stir to combine.

put the lid back on your crockpot. keep it unplugged, and wrap a heavy bath towel all the way around the crock for insulation.

go to bed, or let it sit for 8 hours.

in the morning, the yogurt will have thickened---it's not as thick as store-bought yogurt, but has the consistency of low-fat plain yogurt. (i actually found it to be quite thick - see note below)

chill in a plastic container(s) in the refrigerator. your fresh yogurt will last 7-10 days. save 1/2 cup as a starter to make a new batch.

*for thicker yogurt, line colander with cheesecloth/paper towels and set in big bowl. pour yogurt and cover. place in fridge.

now, fellow thick yogurt-lovers, don't be dissuaded (i was, and i think that's part of why it took me so long to try the recipe). i am not the kind of person who loves just eating yogurt, because i don't think it's rich enough - the one type of yogurt i fell in love with is a brand called Liberte from vermont that's something like 8% milkfat (yum!). now that i can't get that i settle for greek-style yogurt. and yet i LOVE this homemade yogurt - it's creamy and fairly thick and very flavorfull. in fact, i ate an entire 35oz container in the first 24 hours (is that gross?) and none of it has made it into the smoothies yet.
enjoy!

baby hats on a plane

2011-09-05T03:24:00.000-07:00

this labor day weekend i'm working on a long-anticipated baby project. yep the baby's already been born, but i don't want to give away the surprise gift, so i will *not* be blogging about that one just yet.
for now let me show you the baby hats i made on the plane ride back from oklahoma last month. these don't have a particular baby in mind, i just figure it's always good to be prepared with baby gifts - plus they're so fast to make = good plane project.
i actually only made 1 1/2 of these hats, since one of them was started during an impromptu crochet lesson involving marty's niece nia, his aunty linda, and... well, guess who knows how to crochet now?

mmhmm, that's right.

composting with bokashi

2011-08-29T01:17:00.000-07:00

here's a little video i made about my newest composting system: the bokashi bucket.
bokashi is an anaerobic (lacking oxygen) composting method that essentially pickles your food waste with the help of some special microbes. you can even compost meat and dairy - which I'm stoked about.
i never know how to dispose of old meat scraps, and so i've been saving used ziplocks and sealing them up in there and throwing them out - but that feels so gross. i just know somebody down the line (either picking up my garbage bin or at the dump) is doing to have to deal with the nastiness that is some rotting meat in a plastic bag. eew. so i'm stoked beyond words to have a legitimate way of returning that stuff back into the ecosystem.
the process is pretty simple, you sprinkle the microbe mixture on top of any food scraps you put in the bucket, and then when the bucket is full you dump it into a hole and bury it in the ground for 2-4 weeks, and then it's decomposed! magic. you can even make your own bokashi powder, which i'd like to try when i run out.
i've been hearing about bokashi and wanting to try it, but i was hung up on making my own bucket system (which of course never happened), and then i saw a deal come up on Kanu Values - full disclosure, this is where i work- but i've really been chomping at the bit to get a bokashi kit, and the deal sold out in about 30 minutes. the kit comes from each one teach one farms, here on o'ahu, and then have some pretty great resources on their website.
let me know what you think of the video - i'm pretty proud of my nascent video editing skills - next time i'll use my phone to film in HD, and probably repaint my fingernails.

btw, i'm over apologizing for not posting in forever, i fell of the "project a week" wagon. hard. and now i'm doing my best to get back on the horse.

week nine: planting in dresser drawers

2011-04-26T18:58:00.000-07:00

ok, so it's not really "week nine." i'm a whole month behind on my weekly blogging project, so i'm playing catch up here with some projects i did a while ago but that never made an appearance on the blog.
when we first moved into our little studio we weren't entirely sure how long we'd be staying in the place. we have a nice little backyard space, and i was itching to grow things, but i didn't want to plant a bunch of stuff only to move out before we could harvest. so we came up with a compromise: planting in recycled dresser drawers. they provide us a sort of grab-and-go garden, able to pick up and take them with us if needed.

the neighborhood we live near, moiliili, always has a reliable supply of unwanted furniture on the roadside, so we drove around and collected old dresser drawers - ones with solid wood or metal bottoms. we turned these old drawers into planter boxes by drilling holes in the bottom - thanks to popsie's tools.

we bought some potting soil - which i discovered is not, in fact, soil - but a mixture of peat moss, perlite, and composted material that drains better than regular soil and is good for container gardening. that being said, it's expensive to buy soil - potting or otherwise - so on popsie's recommendation i mixed the potting soil with regular soil we dug from our backyard.

we planted all kinds of stuff in the drawers: taro, kale, collards, chili peppers, yerba buena, okra, mustard cabbage, green onions, thyme, tomatoes, basil, sweet potatoes, and some other things that didn't make it like lettuce, cucumbers, and cilantro.

it was a while ago that we made the planter drawers, so things are growing nicely now. we even harvested our first taro this weekend - more on that in a future post. we also decided to stay a while in our little studio, so we've started planting in the ground, too.

week eight: garden harvest

2011-03-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

i'm going to use the excuse of unexpected travel and sickness over the past two weeks to account for slacking on my blog projects. this post is less a project than a collection of bite-sized morsels that emerged from our garden recently.
first, there's the tomatoes. while the tomatoes we originally planted have not fared too well - the only tomatoes that grew to full size were enjoyed by the birds while we were away in oakland last week - we have numerous "volunteer" tomatoes that have sprung up around the garden in places they weren't planted.

i hate you, birds.

i assume this, too, is the work of the birds. these little yellow cherry tomatoes somehow are much healthier than their original counterparts, and have managed to produce several handfuls of wee tomatoes that i've actually been able to harvest before our beaked friends get at them.

also in abundance right now are our perpetually-baby kale and collard greens. i'm not sure why the leaves stay small, maybe i planted them too close together in the container, but they are quite tender and hardly need to be cooked.

they go great raw into smoothies. this one includes frozen berries and some poi - yum! as well as garden greens.
i'm a big fan of sauteed garden greens and eggs in the morning. this is a variation on that. i've always been curious about the "egg-in-a-basket" concept, and this was my first attempt at making it myself.

surrounding the egg in a basket are chopped fresh garden greens - collards and kale - as well as lightly sauteed green pea shoots - the harvest from my project of several weeks ago. i've also planted some of the peas along the fenceline to see if they'll mature enough to give actual pea pods. i'll keep you posted.
other things i'm looking forward to harvesting in the coming months: taro and sweet potatoes!

week seven: carrot top crisps

2011-03-06T17:44:00.000-08:00

oops, i've fallen out of the routine here in the past couple weeks so it's time to play catch up. first on the menu is a new way of preparing carrots - using the greens.
i've always wondered if the tops were left on carrots just as a sort of back-to-the-landish aesthetic, but i overheard the interns at ma'o say in the packing shed one day while we were packing up csa boxes, that some people eat them. i tried it once, and found them a bit bitter, so i served them sauteed with garlic and jalapeno (because that will make anything taste good).

on a recent trip to the farmers market i met up with the lovely ladies of ma'o - interns cheryse, maisha, and anuhea - and because of the excessive rains of late they mostly had a whole lotta carrots to sell at the stand. i wanted to support, so i ended up coming home with six big bunches of carrots, greens and all, so this was inspiration to have another go at the whole carrot top thing.

cheryse - brilliant salesperson that she is - recommended making a carrot top pesto out of them, and i ran this idea past ed kenney, owner and chef of town restaurant, who i saw on my way out of the ma'o stand. ed wholeheartedly supported the carrot top pesto - saying he serves ma'o carrots with a pesto sauce made of their greens, to the mantra "what grows together goes together."
i have yet to try carrot top pesto, but my friend maile (who also bought six bunches of carrots from ma'o that day) made it to rave reviews from the family.

what i chose to do with my carrot top greens was take the concept of kale chips - one of my favorite not-so-guilty pleasures, and apply it to carrot tops. kale chips are the best (and probably best for you) alternative to potato chips i've ever had - and i love potato chips. crispy is hands-down my favorite texture for food, so anything that manages to be crispy i'm willing to consume. check out my friends' hannah and phoebe's i heart kale blog for my recipe for kale chips.

my first attempt at carrot top chips was a mixture of kale and carrot tops. again, i was concerned about the bitter flavor being overbearing and figured if it was a mixture it might be better. but something about the roasting process takes out the bitterness, so the carrot tops came out as crispy, crunchy, delicate melt-in-your-mouth greens without a hint of bitterness.

this is in b/w because i'm embarrassed about the state of my pan

the kale and carrot tops "crisped" up at different rates, since they are different shapes and sizes, so the next time i made carrot top crisps i let them ride solo. plus when the carrot greens are laid out on the pan and allowed to crispify they turn into a lovely delicate lace - something i imagine could be put to good decorative use at a restaurant - ed are you listening? :)

i used this batch of carrot top crisps to top a 3 layer roasted vegetable platter i was bringing to a potluck. it included beets, carrots, red turnips (who knew those existed?) as well as the greens from those root veggies - with the crispy carrot greens on top. unfortunately, by the time i arrived at the potluck the crisps had lost some of their crispiness, so i recommend eating them right out of the oven, especially if you live somewhere with high humidity like hawai'i.

week six: valentines fortune cookies

2011-02-14T17:05:00.000-08:00

marty and i are apart this valentines day, and i wanted to send him with something to open and celebrate our love while he's away. this was a great suggestion by my coworker friend julie: fortune cookies with favorite memories from the past year. she recommended getting nice valentines card stock and a chinese food container from ben franklin (they'll even cut the paper in circles for you there!) but i ended up doing this project late at night while marty was dj-ing, so i had to use magazine pictures (recycled!).

i sort of wanted to make real fortune cookies to house our memories, but it looks like those are really hard to make, and i wrote out 26 fortunes, so i figured that was kind of an exorbitant amount of cookies to eat by yourself, and awkward to share them with someone if they have personal anecdotes hidden inside.
so i went for the paper ones. check out this great tutorial on how to do it. it took me a bit to get the right size for the magazine pages to be transformed into cookie shapes rather than just crumpling or folding in half.

i took a page from the book (so to speak) of real fortune cookie-making when my rolled up tape trick wasn't really doing it, and i glued the inner crease and then put the "cookies" in an egg carton to set. egg cartons are so handy! the real fortune cookie recipes i read said that if you were actually able to deftly fold the fortune cookies while still hot enough to not crack and crumble (and perhaps not burn your fingers) you should let them cool in a muffin tin so they keep their shape.

that seemed to work well, and i did make it to ben franklin's the next morning before his flight to pick up a chinese food box (though all they had were shades of pastel). it turns out 26 fortune cookies is too many to fit in a box, even if they are paper and small. so the box was a little overflowing and i hope it made it safely to oakland.

happy valentines day.

week five: compost death star!

2011-02-09T12:44:00.000-08:00

i have been doing a lot of thinking about compost. it's not that i don't love my worms - i really love my vermicomposting worms. they just can't keep up with all the kitchen scrap waste we produce in our house. they are voracious little eaters, but we've come to find out that if we feed them too much at once it attracts black soldier flies to the worm bin. and while everyone says black soldier flies and worms get along fine and can be friends in that bin, that is not our experience. our experience with black soldier flies led to the untimely demise of our first beloved batch of worms (rest in peace), which you haven't heard about on this blog because it was too traumatic for me to discuss. and i still don't really want to talk about it, so suffice to say we replenished our worm colony and we stopped feeding them so much.
so we have been having a backlog of compost build up in our freezer (we keep a ziplock baggie in the freezer until we can put food scraps in the worm bin), and it became apparent we needed to start another composting system. if i had a little more space and wasn't renting a place where we live quite close to our neighbors, i think i would start a regular old compost pile in the yard. but i'm not sure how long we're going to be renting this spot and i'd hate to leave the landlord a pile of decomposing matter in the backyard if we move out. so i wanted to keep our compost bin contained.
i did a lot of internet research and read some excellent books from the library on different methods of composting, and i got excited about the compost tumbler as a system that was well suited (and fun!) for us. it's a self contained barrel that spins on an axis, thus providing ample aeration that is crucial to expediting the composting process. it keeps pests out, and looks a little more managed than a pile. plus you don't have to dig into it and turn it, which i think is one of those things i would avoid doing.
i wanted to build a compost tumbler myself, and there are great tutorials out there for how to do it, but i realized that it would take me a long while to scrounge up recycled materials to build with and borrow the tools necessary, and our freezer is filling up all the while, so i made the decision to buy one premade. i chose a compost tumbler i wanted, the cheapest model i could find, and went to purchase it online - because there doesn't seem to be anyone (besides costco - and they don't have the model i wanted) who sells compost tumblers here on o'ahu. however, as i found out through numerous online sellers and amazon, shipping to hawai'i would cost me more than the tumbler itself! so i had to scrap that idea.

purely by chance, (and maybe because i was a little bit obsessed) i found the CompoSpin compost tumbler, which is actually a spherical compost bin ball that rotates on a base. they carry it at costco online, but not in the stores here, so i found a seller on amazon that was willing to ship to hawaii for not too much money - this composter ships in pieces that you assemble, unlike the other models - and i bought it. i was super excited to start composting in my new ball (and i was eager to make some room in the freezer) so i anxiously awaited the estimated shipment arrival date, and i waited, and i waited. and finally i contacted the company who told me the only way they could ship to hawaii was by parcel post and it might take up to 6 weeks. which burst my composting bubble, but thankfully, and surprisingly, it arrived this weekend on our doorstep.

Death Star Composter from Willie Maze on Vimeo.

marty and i breathlessly assembled it (a really fun process of snapping pieces together) and brought out our squirreled away bits of food scraps we've been hoarding to fill it up. it turns out to quite resemble the death star. here's the video of that process, watch for the impromptu cameo appearance of our friend, brutus.

week four: posture wrist rest

2011-02-06T22:36:00.000-08:00

now that i have a job where i spend most of my days in front of the computer, i'm noticing the repetitive strain on my body: namely my wrists, neck and shoulders. i remember years ago i had a nice squishy mini-beanbag pillow-type thing that i rested my wrist on while handling the mouse, and that seemed to help. if i can, i'd rather make something myself than buy it, so i got an idea when my new laptop battery came in the mail padded with some squishy foam inserts.

since i already had the sewing machine set up from finishing the 'ulu quilt, i decided to whip up a quick wrist rest.
i took one of the foam inserts, folded it in half, and stitched up a mini pillowcase out of scrap fabric. i stuffed the folded foam into the pillowcase and finished the last edge by hand. it was a quick and dirty process, but i'm pretty pleased with the results. while the texture of the foam is not quite as appealing as whatever those little beads were in the manufactured wrist pillow, it is significantly lighter - it hardly weighs anything - which is a definite advantage considering my shoulder bag weighs nearly a ton with my laptop and all the other junk i carry around in it (another possible factor in my shoulder tension).
i finished the wrist rest off with a reminder to myself, figuring i'm going to be seeing it periodically throughout the day. my friend megan and i have started a practice this year of checking in for 5 minutes once a day to ask each other 5 questions that we want to be held accountable for. one of my questions is "how is your posture?"

i'm hoping this little reminder will help me stick with that commitment.

week three: 'ulu quilt

2011-01-24T00:16:00.000-08:00

they say you have a year to give a newly married couple a gift. i've taken that advice a bit liberally and this gift is maybe a year and a half after the actual wedding. but hey, it's handmade! and what a great opportunity to continue celebrating your marriage.

so i read somewhere that the 'ulu (breadfruit) tree symbolizes marital bliss. i have never been able to find that reference again, so the specifics of why that is are lost to me, but i have a lot of respect for the 'ulu; its abundance and versatility made it a great companion for polynesian voyagers to bring on the long canoe journeys across the pacific. if you've never had the opportunity to eat 'ulu it can range from potato-like (and makes great chips, mashed, steamed, baked), to sweet-fruity dessert-like, depending on the variety and ripeness.

anyway, the seed was planted (so to speak) in my mind >2 years ago to make an ulu quilt for my friends jake and nicole's wedding. what better wish could you give someone for their wedding than marital bliss?

i chose the fabrics at fabric mart, a store in our neighborhood with a dizzying array of aloha prints. this is also the store i got my lovely curtain fabric and the camouflage water-repellent fabric i used to sew a cozy for our little bbq grill (these projects apparently happened when i was in blogging hiatus-mode). they've got pretty great prices, and i have to say i respect them for having a website called fmart.
i misjudged the amount of fabric i'd need for the wall hanging quilt i was making. well, no. what actually happened is that i was bullied by the filipino aunty in the store into buying less than i knew i needed for the project because it was the end of the roll and she was giving me a deal on it. and i guess because i'm chinese i totally played into that. my thought process went something like "well, it's about 3 inches less than i really want for this quilt, but it's a deal..." so i made do.

the process of cutting out a pattern for hawaiian quilting is really fun - like cutting a fabric snowflake. i decided to do the breadfruits in a lighter green to accent, and made up a hexagonal quilting pattern that i think makes them look real. other than that the process is pretty tedious, pinning and then hand-appliqueing and hand quilting inside and out of your design. this is the second hawaiian quilt square i've done, the first was a lehua blossom for my mom.

while i'm counting this as one of my 52 projects in 52 weeks, it obviously did not take me a week to make. it took me quite a while to complete, and i'll dispense with excuses about that and suffice to say i'm excited to send it to them. so if you're a friend who has gotten hitched in the past, um, several years and you haven't gotten a gift from me yet - don't lose hope.

week two: egg carton sprouts

2011-01-17T13:50:00.000-08:00

i know it hasn't been a week yet, but i'm making up for getting a late start, so here's week two of the 52 weeks project.

we had a backup of recycling during our holiday travel time, so i guess i had inspiration to reuse materials that were stacked up in the recycle bin. i was looking at our egg cartons, thinking about possible uses other than returning them to local egg farms, which is also awesome.

the other day at kokua market i impulse-bought some dried green peas, because i was thinking about how much i love fresh pea shoots - remember that post? they go great on salad, in spring rolls, just grazing...
so i got the idea of using the egg carton as a tray for sprouting peas. i figure it's biodegradable paper, and it should hold up for the week or two it'll take for the sprouts to grow. i used some potting soil i had leftover from various other planting projects and was pleased to note that the little closure flap on the egg carton fit like a puzzle piece into the little open area on the top of the carton, so i could use both sides for planting.

after planting the tray of pea sprouts i decided to use the egg end for starting some sunflowers i've been meaning to plant near our laundry line along the backyard fence (sorry temperate-climate friends, it's totally still planting season here). but for those of you who have frost outside right now you can do this project in the window sill.

one year, 52 projects

2011-01-11T18:48:00.000-08:00

i am inspired by marty's new year project - posting one minute of video every week for 52 weeks - so i think i'm gonna start a project of my own, or rather 52 projects of my own, in the spirit of cultivating domesticity. plus it's a great way to get back on the blogging bandwagon after falling off during my stint of working on an organic farm on the other side of the island.

ever since we got home from our whirlwind tour of the continent over the holidays, i've been obsessing over little diy home improvement-type projects, trying to utilize stuff we have around the cottage for new purposes. to start the year off right, since we are already in the second week of january, i'll be posting two this week.

week one: herb-infused olive oils

we had a big bottle of olive oil from costco kicking around in our tiny kitchen, and infusing olive oil was a project i sort of intended to do before the holidays to give as gifts, but you know - better now than never.
our backyard garden was quite bountiful after all the winter rains, so we harvested some rosemary, basil (which was going to seed and needed to be trimmed back anyway), and chili peppers. well, no that's a lie - the chili peppers came from maile's farm because those red-butt birds ate all our chili peppers while we were away.

anyway, we also had a *few* empty sake bottles laying around because it would be a pity to recycle bottles that pretty. which we boiled to sanitize, and then stuffed full of rosemary, garlic, basil, and chili peppers.

and now they are sitting for a bit to get nice and yummy. i don't know much about how long they need to infuse for, but i figure we can start taste-testing in a week or so.

i think these infusions may make a cameo in our misto - one of my favorite new kitchen utensils. it's great for lightly greasing the grill, breads, pans, etc. and i can't wait to make grilled pizza with our herb-infused oil. i also scored a big bag of plastic pouring spouts from ross recently, so i'm in the process of re-purposing every alcohol bottle into something new and pourable.

worm composting!

2010-08-08T14:05:00.000-07:00

i am so excited about worms right now. i’ve been hearing about worm composting for a while, and now that we’re living in a space with a garden (and no curbside composting) we decided to go for it.

so the first question is: where do you get worms?
i did some research on this, and it turns out that while earthworms are great for your garden, they are not the ones you want in your compost bin. as it was explained to me, earthworms are kind of solitary, slow-eating fellows, who generally like to stay buried in the dirt. the worms you want for composting are the kind that like to live in a colony, come to the surface to eat (the term is “e pigeic”), and eat their body weight in food every day. there are two types of ideal composting worms: red wrigglers and blueworms. now, i read somewhere that you could pick up bait worms from a fishing shop and those would work – but i don’t do enough fishing to know if that’s true, and i suppose it depends on your bait shop. it’s worth a shot if you can distinguish red/blue worms from earthworms.

this is the blueworm, Perionyx excavatus

as it turns out, there is a worm store – yes, a store devoted to worm composting –two blocks from our new house. what are the chances of that? so even though i balked at paying $40 for ¼ lb of worms (!) we went there to get our worm colony set up. i figure, as long as this works out i’ll only have to buy them once and then they’ll make worm babies and i can give them away to friends (or start selling them for $120/lb!).
so we went to the worm store and they were super helpful answering all our worm questions. the worms eat any kind of food scraps, paper, cardboard, leaves – they don’t recommend putting in meat or dairy because it spoils and smells bad and can attract other kinds of critters to your worm bin. i’ve also heard not to put garlic or onions in there, but the guy at the worm store said that’s just for the sake of smell, the worms will eat it. what I found out recently from my friend noelle recently is they don’t like rice, so i’ve been avoiding putting rice in the bin.
we left the worm store with a ziplock baggie full of worms and dirt – and because we had a few more errands to run and I didn’t want to leave them in the hot car – i carried around a purse full of worms for the afternoon.

we made the worm bin ourselves, it’s really easy so i don’t recommend buying a worm bin unless you’ve got money to burn. i got a tupperware bin from walmart for $5 - i think i bought a bigger size than I needed for starting out (18 gallons), but i figure the worms can grow into it. i would actually recommend starting out with a smaller bin (like 10 gallons), since the worm guy said if they're in a large bin they spend more time looking for food and for each other to mate, so they eat/reproduce more slowly. we drilled ¼” holes on the bottom, sides, and lid for ventilation, and then put it up on cement blocks with a tray underneath to catch the worm juice. yep, worm juice. they call it “worm tea” and it supposedly makes a really good fertilizer for your plants – you can dilute it 20:1 and spritz the leaves, or water the soil with it.

when we got the worms home we had to make up their bedding. so we layered a burlap bag on the bottom of the bin – to encourage them to stay in there and not slip out the holes in the bottom. then we ripped up strips of newspaper and crumpled it and moistened it to make a bed. i guess they really like to bed in newspaper (or regular shredded paper) and they’ll eventually break it down too.

then it was time to put the worms in their new home. we poured out the worms and dirt from the ziplock, and they say you should mix in some of the dirt they’re used to into your new bedding, this involves slowly carving away at the outsides of the dirt pile. these worms really don’t like light, so they’ll dive inward away from the outside of the pile as you carve the dirt away, leaving a wriggling ball of worms in the middle – which is pretty fun.

once you’ve got the dirt mixed in with the bedding you can put your worm ball in there – don’t break them up, they’ll do that on their own. and then feed them and put more newspaper on top and tuck them in with another layer of burlap. you can leave your worm bin uncovered – which helps with ventilation, but it also invites other critters in there and since our backyard is a lizard haven I didn’t want to encourage the lizards to predate our worms – those little buggers are expensive! so we keep a lid on ours.

if you figure they eat their body weight in food a day, you can start out feeding them ¼ lb of food scraps daily – or what we’ve been doing is keeping a bag of scraps in the freezer and then feeding them the whole bag at the end of the week. i’ve also heard that the freezing process helps break down the food so they can eat it faster. keep in mind you have to thaw it before putting it in the bin – you don’t want frozen worms. as they start to break down the newspaper you can add more, and always bury your food scraps underneath the newspaper layer, and keep everything moist – they like moist, dark conditions. you can even keep your worm bin inside your house – but since we have very limited indoor space we’re keeping them in the shade outside. you can expect other kinds of bugs and stuff to live in there with the worms and help break down the food. as long as you keep nice conditions for the worms they should leave peacefully together. They worm guy said that if your colony is unhealthy that’s when other organisms can come in and take over.

and that’s it! they’re super low maintenance and so gratifying. marty and i never thought we’d be so excited about worms. they look really happy themselves; they’ve been getting fatter and reproducing. and though they were kind of shy for the first week and hanging out at the bottom of the bin, now they’re eager to come up and eat stuff.

our first few feedings were really coffee grounds- heavy, because that was pretty much all we were producing in waste when we first moved in. i’m not sure how the worms deal with coffee, but i figured we might be cracking them out on caffeine, so i stopped putting coffee grounds in, and started sprinkling them around the outsides of our planter boxes so discourage slugs from munching our vegetables. i also try to chop tougher things – like rinds and peels – up before feeding it to them, just to encourage the breakdown process.

the worm poops are called “vermicast,” also known as “gardeners gold” because it’s great for planting and adding extra nutrients to your garden. once your worms have eaten their way through about 6 months worth of food, you can harvest the vermicast – and separate out some worms to give away if you like. i’ll give a full report when we’re ready to harvest.

ho'i'o: foraging for fiddleheads

2010-06-13T15:38:00.000-07:00

on the continent they're called fiddleheads. here in hawai'i they're known as ho'i'o. unless you're from maui - then they are pohole. or if you're japanese, in which case: warabi. these are my current vegetable obsession. closely followed by watercress - but more on that later.

i have had the incredible good fortune of spending a lot of time lately in waiahole, where my friend maile lives with a waterfall, taro patches, gardens, and a very sweet dog. maile invited us out a few weeks ago for a "true food sovereignty experience" - foraging in near her stream for young fern shoots. i love foraging. it's so satisfying. i think i could spend all day rummaging around in ferns taller than myself, hunting for those tightly curled little fronds, bursting with life. the first time we picked we were advised not to be careful with the rest of the fern leaves - the mature ones. the more you knock those down the more the plant send out new shoots, and i have been reaping the bounty on that advice as new shoots come up weekly.

you can eat them right there while you're picking; raw they have a kind of what my aunty wanda calls "gneah-gneah" quality to them. meaning, i think, that they leave a bit of a texture on the roof of your mouth. i would describe ho'i'o as the cross between asparagus and okra. but much prettier. it's got that firm, watery, tasty quality of asparagus with a bit of the slimy this-must-be-good-for-me quality of okra.

the most popular way to eat ho'i'o is in a salad, where you blanch the ferns and combine them with opae (shrimps), tomato and onion. i tried a number of different dishes using ho'i'o, like stir fried with leftover ahi poke and chili peppers. or sauteed with carmelized onions. i also made my own version of ho'i'o salad, adapting grandma ho's recipe for watercress salad. this went over pretty well at a couple of potlucks, so i'll share that recipe with you here.

ho'i'o salmon salad

1 block tofu, drained and cubed
2 tomatoes, diced
3 green onions, finely chopped
1 package bean sprouts (1/2 lb?), blanched
1 can salmon
1 can bamboo shoots, sliced thin
1 can baby corn
as much ho'i'o as you like, blanched

sauce
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 Tbs sesame oil
3/4 cup soy sauce
juice of 1/2 lemon

just layer the ingredients in an order that's visually appealing - with the ho'i'o on top to showcase it, and then pour the sauce on top. obviously all of those ingredients are optional - i added the bamboo shoots and baby corn, that does not feature in grandma's watercress salad - which she was sure to let me know.
there aren't any photos of this salad because, well, when i'm cooking for a potluck i'm usually running late. so here's a photo of one of what they look like in a pan. i'd love to hear about any other dishes you've tried with fern shoots - leave a comment!

thanks to maile for the photos and for the experience!

if emeril lagasse were korean, this is how he would make sangria.

2010-05-25T01:36:00.000-07:00

definitely one of my favorite things about living in oakland was our frequent trips to "the beach." i know that i now live in hawai'i where there are *real* beaches, and i do appreciate those too, but there is a special place in my heart for that grassy spot on lake merritt where we would pop a bottle of bubbles on a sunny afternoon and watch the people in the town pass by.

on one such beautiful recent sunday afternoon we were joined by our good friend sierra, and decided to stray from our usual champagne fare to make our own sangria. i'm a big fan of sangria, and not a big fan of spending a lot of money (boy am i sad to be living in the land of ridiculously expensive produce). so i took this recipe from emeril lagasse's "essence of emeril" food network and adapted it to fit whatever was available cheaply at the korean market up the street. here's the original recipe:

Ingredients

    * 1 (750-ml) bottle red wine
    * 1/4 cup brandy
    * 1/4 cup orange flavored liqueur (recommended: triple sec or Grand Marnier)
    * 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
    * 2 tablespoons fresh orange juice
    * 1/4 cup sugar
    * 1/2 orange, thinly sliced
    * 1/2 lemon, thinly sliced
    * 1 unwaxed apple, cored, and cut into thin wedges
    * 1 (750-ml) bottle sparkling water, chilled

Combine everything but the sparkling water in a large plastic container or glass pitchers. Cover and chill completely, 1 to 2 hours. When ready to serve, add the sparkling water.

i found our favorite cheap wine, crane lake, which tastes pretty terrible on its own, but mixed with all this other delicious stuff it's perfect. and it only costs $3/bottle. so we doubled the recipe. we were blessed with a continuing overflow of VSOP from our winter brandy drink days (thanks, megan) - including spiced cider and eggnog, and courtesy of sierra's grandma's liquor cabinet we also had triple sec. i picked up limes, lemons, and a ton of mandarins from the koreans, plus some fantastic meyer lemons we had from marty's uncle bobby's place (i sure miss those). rather than apple i went for the nectarines that were on sale at the korean market, which ended up being mostly overripe, but some of it was salvageable and along with the mandarins gave a nice sweetness to the sangria.

that's pretty much all i have to say about that - it was the best sunday afternoon ever. thumbs up for sangria. thanks to sierra and marty for sharing it with me. definitely fond memories for the town.

irish car bomb cupcakes

2010-05-21T13:58:00.000-07:00

this week's mission was to make some kind of incredible thank-you gift to show my appreciation to our friends brutus and kyle, who let marty and i stay at their apartment all week preceding my cousin's wedding. cupcakes have been on my mind lately, and thanks to rachel's suggestion i headed over to smitten kitchen for this incredible recipe.

if you're unfamiliar with the drink sensation that is the "irish car bomb" it goes something like this: you take a shot glass and fill it half full of bailey's irish cream; float jameson irish whiskey on top to fill the shot glass, which you then drop (glass and all) into 3/4 pint of guinness and chug. i don't say "chug" lightly here. this is what they call a "volatile drink" - meaning it not only froths and foams when you drop the shot into the beer, but it will also start to curdle almost immediately if you let it, so you really don't want to waste time.

perhaps it's in bad taste to name a drink after an act of violence, and perhaps i'm perpetuating that by claiming the name for these cupcakes, but i admire a nation that refers to its period of ethno-political conflict as "The Troubles," and chocolate whiskey and beer cupcakes just doesn't have the same ring to it.

i've said it before, but smitten kitchen is brilliant. who would think to turn that into cupcake form? feel free to submit a comment here with suggestions of what else you'd like to see turned into cupcake form. i'll see what i can make happen.

i should also mention that these may top the list of most expensive homemade cupcakes ever.

could these few ingredients actually cost over $45? in hawai'i they sure can.
don't let this dissuade you from trying - i'm sure if you live someplace where food is reasonably priced you won't have the sticker shock. it's just that here in the most oil-dependent state in the nation we import 90% of our food from overseas, and that's a problem.

i drew the line at the $4 whole ~~paycheck~~ foods wanted to charge me for paper cupcake liners, and i'm going to go ahead and encourage a cultural shift here - do we really need to have our cupcakes half-wrapped in paper? my cupcake tin is nonstick, so it's not an issue on my end, and i am hopeful that the recipients of my baked goods will embrace the going green aspect of their gift.

i should also say these are not cupcakes for the fainthearted - neither for the baking nor the eating. it took me a solid 3 hours of baking/assembly, and well - you can see the ingredients.

so here's the recipe - from smitten kitchen: (with my comments in italics)

Chocolate Whiskey and Beer Cupcakes
Makes 20 to 24 cupcakes

For the Guinness Chocolate Cupcakes
1 cup stout (such as Guinness)
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably Dutch-process)
2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
2/3 cup sour cream

Ganache Filling (Updated to double it, based on many commenters suggestions — thanks!)
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate
2/3 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons butter, room temperature
1 to 2 teaspoons Irish whiskey (I recommend Jameson, though I had to substitute Jack Daniels because that's all I could find in the tiny airplane-sized bottle, and since i'm living in the house of jehovah right now with grandma ho i don't have the usual bottle of jameson in the cupboard)

Baileys Frosting
3 to 4 cups confections sugar
1 stick (1/2 cup or 4 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature
3 to 4 tablespoons Baileys (or milk, or heavy cream, or a combination thereof)

Special equipment: 1-inch round cookie cutter or an apple corer and a piping bag (though a plastic bag with the corner snipped off will also work - unless you let your ganache chill too long and then you bust multiple holes in the ziplock bag that result in many spouts for frosting, ahem)

Make the cupcakes: Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 24 cupcake cups with liners (or not - save the earth!). Bring 1 cup stout and 1 cup butter to simmer in heavy large saucepan over medium heat. notice that says one cup of guinness - that means you'll have to drink the rest of the beer while baking, bonus! Add cocoa powder and whisk until mixture is smooth. Cool slightly.

Whisk flour, sugar, baking soda, and 3/4 teaspoon salt in large bowl to blend. Using electric mixer, beat eggs and sour cream in another large bowl to blend. Add stout-chocolate mixture to egg mixture and beat just to combine. Add flour mixture and beat briefly on slow speed. Using rubber spatula, fold batter until completely combined. Divide batter among cupcake liners, filling them 2/3 to 3/4 of the way. Bake cake until tester inserted into center comes out clean, rotating them once front to back if your oven bakes unevenly, about 17 minutes. Cool cupcakes on a rack completely. my cupcakes took 16-17 mins and were very fluffy/springy. i couldn't tell if they really tasted like guinness, or if i just had that taste in my mouth from finishing off the beer.

Make the filling: Chop the chocolate and transfer it to a heatproof bowl. Heat the cream until simmering and pour it over the chocolate. Let it sit for one minute and then stir until smooth. (If this has not sufficiently melted the chocolate, you can return it to a double-boiler to gently melt what remains. 20 seconds in the microwave, watching carefully, will also work.) Add the butter and whiskey (if you’re using it) and stir until combined. i used the microwave method - since i have use of a microwave at grandma's house and the chocolate melting process can be a little nerve-wracking when you're worried about ruining that hella expensive chocolate you just bought - it took maybe 2 rounds of 30 seconds each with a lot of stirring in between rounds to get there - don't overdo it. i have to say here, the chocolate ganache went from "mmm, that's tasty" with the ghiradelli and cream to "i may just have to pipe that directly into my mouth and forgo the whole cupcake thing" when i added the whiskey. turns out whiskey and chocolate is a knockout combination. i would even go ahead and add another couple teaspoons of whiskey next time to bump up the flavor. i was worried about it preventing the ganache from setting, but it set just fine.

Fill the cupcakes: Let the ganache cool until thick but still soft enough to be piped (the fridge will speed this along but you must stir it every 10 minutes). Meanwhile, using your 1-inch round cookie cutter or an apple corer, cut the centers out of the cooled cupcakes. You want to go most of the way down the cupcake but not cut through the bottom — aim for 2/3 of the way. A slim spoon or grapefruit knife will help you get the center out. Those are your “tasters”. Put the ganache into a piping bag with a wide tip and fill the holes in each cupcake to the top.
she says "tasters" here like there are going to be cute little plugs of cake to pop in your mouth, but what i ended up with was a big pile of crumbs. not that that stopped me from shoving a handful in my mouth.

i'm including a picture of what an apple corer looks like here - because i had to ask somebody myself. it worked great, and i probably didn't even need the grapefruit knife, though i was super excited to have an excuse to use what is probably my favorite utensil of all time - grandma ho has this special grapefruit knife that has one end with two blades so that you can cut up both sides of the grapefruit section at the same time - i love this knife and i think about it every time i eat grapefruit. that's not the end i used for the cupcakes, i'm just excited about it.

Make the frosting: Whip the butter in the bowl of an electric mixer, or with a hand mixer, for several minutes. You want to get it very light and fluffy. Slowly add the powdered sugar, a few tablespoons at a time. if i could have located my sifter after the move i would have used it here to sift in the powdered sugar so i wouldn't have to content with the lumps.

[This is a fantastic trick I picked up while working on the cupcakes article for Martha Stewart Living; the test kitchen chefs had found that when they added the sugar slowly, quick buttercream frostings got less grainy, and tended to require less sugar to thicken them up.]

When the frosting looks thick enough to spread, drizzle in the Baileys (or milk) and whip it until combined. If this has made the frosting too thin (it shouldn’t, but just in case) beat in another spoonful or two of powdered sugar.

Ice and decorate the cupcakes.

i was being stingy with the ganache at first, but i ended up with extra at the end - so don't be shy to fill them full. i also chilled the ganache a little too long in the fridge - and didn't let it come back to room temp before putting it into my makeshift pastry bag, so i busted some extra holes in the sides which ended up decorating the area around my cupcakes and hands as well.

i experimented with a few different designs. here's what the combination of whiskey ganache and baileys frosting looks like:

Do ahead: You can bake the cupcakes a week or two in advance and store them, well wrapped, in the freezer. You can also fill them before you freeze them. They also keep filled — or filled and frosted — in the fridge for a day. (Longer, they will start to get stale.)

i'll let you know how they are received.

falafel waffles

2010-04-27T14:55:00.000-07:00

ok, so i can't take credit for it, but this is a brilliant idea: waffles made of falafel.
falafel waffles, if you will.

i love falafel, but mostly the crispy outsides, when it comes to the crumbly middle part of the falafel balls i'm less than interested. so when i found this suggestion to make falafel in the waffle iron i couldn't wait to try. plus you have the benefit of not having to deep fry the falafel balls. don't get me wrong, i have NO problem with frying stuff (and especially eating fried stuff), but it's probably healthy to try out other methods of cooking once in a while. the post i found uses falafel from a mix and reports success, but that's not what we do around here, so here's the falafel recipe i used to make it from scratch, from joan nathan's The Foods of Israel Today:

    * 1 cup dried chickpeas
    * 1/2 large onion, roughly chopped (about 1 cup)
    * 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh parsley
    * 2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh cilantro
    * 1 teaspoon salt
    * 1/2-1 teaspoon dried hot red pepper
    * 4 cloves of garlic
    * 1 teaspoon cumin
    * 1 teaspoon baking powder
    * 4-6 tablespoons flour

1. Put the chickpeas in a large bowl and add enough cold water to cover them by at least 2 inches. Let soak overnight, then drain. Or use canned chickpeas, drained.

2. Place the drained, uncooked chickpeas and the onions in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Add the parsley, cilantro, salt, hot pepper, garlic, and cumin. Process until blended but not pureed. (i followed the recipe here - but i would actually say go ahead and puree for the purposes of waffle falafel-making)

3. Sprinkle in the baking powder and 4 tablespoons of the flour, and pulse. You want to add enough bulgur or flour so that the dough forms a small ball and no longer sticks to your hands. Turn into a bowl and refrigerate, covered, for several hours.

after refrigerating the mixture you can heat up your waffle iron and oil both sides generously. i found it a little awkward to pat the falafel into the waffle iron, since i'm used to pouring a liquid into the iron that then puffs up. this is not like that, what you put into the iron is what you get out - no expanding or shrinking, so go ahead and pat it in all the way to the edges. bake until golden brown.

i decided to use the waffles to dip into sauces, tahini sauce and raita - rather than putting them into pitas with lettuce and tomatoes as a sandwich, though that would also be good. the tahini sauce was a big hit, and the raita was a delicious pairing - deceptively hot and cool at the same time (marty's concept of a "pinch" of cayenne is a little more like one of my handfuls).

here are the recipes for those sauces:

Tahini Sauce (via Epicurious)

Gourmet | January 2004
Yield: Makes about 1 1/4 cups

ingredients
2 garlic cloves
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt, or to taste
1/2 cup well-stirred tahini (Middle Eastern sesame paste)
1/3 cup fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh cilantro
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin

Mince garlic, then mash to a paste with sea salt. Whisk together garlic paste and remaining ingredients until combined well. Cooks' note: Tahini sauce can be made 1 day ahead and chilled, covered. Bring to room temperature before serving.

Cucumber-Mint Raita (via Epicurious)
Bon Appétit | August 2004
Yield: Makes 8 servings

ingredients
1 large unpeeled English hothouse cucumber, halved, seeded, coarsely grated
2 cups plain whole-milk yogurt
1/4 cup (packed) chopped fresh mint
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon plus pinch of cayenne pepper
preparation

Wrap grated cucumber in kitchen towel and squeeze dry. Whisk yogurt, mint, cumin, and 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper in medium bowl to blend. Add cucumbers and toss to coat. Season raita to taste with salt and pepper. Cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead. Keep refrigerated.) Sprinkle raita with pinch of cayenne pepper and serve.
Enjoy - and leave a comment to let me know how it goes if you try it!

benedictorious eggs and english muffins from scratch

2010-03-26T14:26:00.000-07:00

ben·e·dict: (noun) a newly married man, esp. one who has been long a bachelor.

ben·e·dic·tion: (noun) an utterance of good wishes.

food for thought.

we ate a lot of good food in hawai'i, and one of the best meals we ate was home-cooked "breakfast for dinner" eggs benedict made my by stepmom, kat. it was incredible. which is hard to say for someone who has hated poached eggs my entire life. i, in fact, am that jerk at the restaurant who asks to have the eggs benedict, "but could you make the eggs over hard instead of poached?" yeah. that's me.

but these eggs were awesome. and the hollandaise was divine. so it inspired me to embark on my own eggs benedict adventure.

as usual, i'm always wondering: do i need to buy that? could i make it myself? plus i'm in the process of trying to clear out my cupboards before i move, so i decided to make english muffins. from scratch.
did you know that english muffins are baked on a griddle?

a word to the wiser-than-i here, if you're gonna make english muffins from scratch (or any kind of bread, for that matter) you need a little foresight in meal prepping. unless you want to eat dinner at 10pm, which is how it turned out for us.

i found this recipe for english muffins, and used it as a rough guide. my tweaked version went something like this:

english muffins

    * 1 cup milk
    * 2 tablespoons white sugar
    * 1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
    * 1 cup warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
    * 1/4 cup melted butter
    * 4-6 cups flour (i used a combination of white and pastry wheat, and i didn't need the whole 6 cups)
    * 1 teaspoon salt

warm the milk in a small saucepan until it bubbles, then remove from heat. mix in the sugar, stirring until dissolved. let cool until lukewarm. in a small bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes.
in a large bowl, combine the milk, yeast mixture, butter, and 3 cups flour. beat until smooth. add salt and rest of flour, or enough to make a soft dough. knead until springy. place in greased bowl, cover, and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size.
punch down. resist the urge to knead - i read somewhere else that the "nooks and crannies" that we all love about english muffins (aka their ability to soak in butter) are formed by the less you handle them. roll out to about 1/2 inch thick. Cut rounds with biscuit cutter, drinking glass, or empty can. Sprinkle a surface with cornmeal and set the rounds on this to rise. dust tops of muffins with cornmeal also. cover and let rise 1/2 hour.
heat greased griddle. cook muffins on griddle on medium heat until they start to puff and brown - the recipe says about 10 minutes on each side, but i thought that was too much. keep baked muffins in a warm oven until all have been cooked (i'm not sure why that is unless you're going to serve them all immediately, so i didn't do that). allow to cool and place in plastic bags for storage.

make some new friends, because you've just made more english muffins that you can possibly eat by yourself, three meals a day, until you're sick of english muffins.

the results: mine turned out a little closer to the bagel end of the bread spectrum than the english muffin end, but i'm pretty sure that's because i didn't have the patience to let them rise fully twice (remember i hadn't accounted for that in my meal prep time). other than that they're pretty tasty, and next time i might forgo the wheat flour and do straight white flour; i mean english muffins are a decadence anyway, so why bother trying to make it healthy?
did i mention that this was a meal of firsts for me? i haven't made english muffins before, and i've also never poached an egg. or made good hollandaise sauce. and both of those things have a reputation for being tricky.
the hollandaise was actually the inspiration for this meal because i made meringues a few nights before and had leftover egg yolks.
i relied on epicurious' basic hollandaise sauce recipe for guidance. here's the recipe with my thoughts added:

hollandaise sauce:
* 3 egg yolks
* 1 tablespoon cream
* 2/3 cup melted butter, cooled to room temperature (the original recipe says 1 cup, but that's a ton of
butter, and the reviews of the recipe recommended cutting it down)
* 1+ tablespoon lemon juice,to taste (you can also use white wine vinegar, but i think vinegar's disgusting)
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* Dash of cayenne pepper

Use a small, thick ceramic bowl set in a heavy-bottomed pan, or a heavyweight double boiler. Off the heat, put the egg yolks and cream in the bowl or upper section of the double boiler and stir with a wire whisk until well-blended — the mixture should never be beaten but stirred, evenly, vigorously and continually. Place the container over hot water (if you are setting the bowl in water, there should be about 1 1/2 inches of water in the pan; in a double boiler, the water should not touch the top section). Stirring eggs continuously, bring the water slowly to a simmer. Do not let it boil. Stir, incorporating the entire mixture so there is no film at the bottom. When the eggs have thickened to consistency of very heavy cream, begin to add the cooled melted butter with one hand, stirring vigorously with the other. Pour extremely slowly so that each addition is blended into the egg mixture before more is added. When all the butter has been added, add the lemon juice or vinegar a drop at a time and immediately remove from heat. Add salt and a mere dash of cayenne.

Note: If you proceed with care your Hollandaise should not curdle. If it does, however, don't despair. Finish adding the butter as best you can. Remove sauce to a small bowl, clean the pot and put a fresh egg yolk in it. Start over again, using the curdled sauce as if it were the butter.

that recipe's verbatim because it turned out quite well. i cut down the butter (as mentioned) and bumped up the lemon juice because i like a tangy hollandaise, but other than that i think the instructions were spot on.

while all of this english-muffin-cooking and hollandaise-sauce-stirring was going on on the stove, i decided to do the asparagus and the bacon in the oven, separately, so they wouldn't take up my stovetop space. the asparagus turned out a little dry, but bacon in the oven is great - and requires do much less attention.

finally, the poached eggs.
i've been intimidated by the notoriety surrounding poached eggs and how difficult they are to make. thankfully, i have the internet. so i didn't have to figure out how to make them myself. i recommend these guidelines, which tell me that those little cups that hang on the side of your pot are actually not only cheating but making your eggs steamed rather than poached. good thing, i didn't have those anyway.
here are the main tips: bring your water to just under simmering, add a tablespoon of vinegar and a little salt: the vinegar will help your whites stay put and not feather out all over the water. once you gently slide your eggs into the water - turn off the heat, cover, and let sit for 3 mins.
admittedly, i let mine sit for a bit longer than 3 mins because i'm grossed out by runny yolks, but that's what poached eggs are all about, i suppose, so go ahead and do that for yours. now, i also went through the extra step of dipping my poached eggs in warm water after removing them from the pan because i really dislike the taste of vinegar, but this adds several extra degrees of hazard with the potential to have those whites you worked to keep together fall all apart (which definitely happened to me), so proceed with that at your own risk.

and voila - breakfast for dinner has never tasted better. i mean, butter + eggs + bacon + asparagus, what could be bad?

Kung Hee Fat Choy!

2010-02-14T21:09:00.000-08:00

happy chinese new year and valentines day! i don't usually post about things that i haven't actually made myself, but my aunty wanda made these cookies the other day that were too hard to resist. she was inspired by this article in the honolulu advertiser about the tradition of almond cookies for chinese new year. it turns out it's an americanized cookie - traditional chinese nut cookies were made out of walnuts - but i'm grateful for the switch, since walnuts make my tongue swell. inspired by the morning newspaper, and taking advantage of her newly-retired lifestyle, she called my aunty billie - popsie's sister, for her masterful almond cookie-making tips. included in the expert tips is:

you HAVE to use crisco. yep. you can't make crispy almond cookies without crisco. so take a deep breath and get over it.
you should HANDLE them. i always assumed handling the cookie dough too much would make the cookies tough, like pie crust, but it turns out you should roll these cookies between your palms at least ten times each, till you can feel them change texture.
to make them all uniformly flat, you ball them onto the cookie sheet and then drape a dish towel over them all and use a rolling pin or drinking glass to flatten them all at once. this also gives them a nice waffle texture.

these cookies are awesome. here's the recipe aunty wanda used, courtesy of the honolulu advertiser:

Brenda Leong's Almond Cookies

• 1 cup butter-flavored solid shortening (she uses Crisco)
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 large egg at room temperature
• 1 tablespoon almond extract
• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• Red food coloring blanched almonds.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Using an electric mixer (preferably a hands-free stand mixer), cream shortening and sugar very well. Add egg and almond extract and cream again until built up and smooth. Mix together flour, baking soda and salt and gradually add to batter while mixing. Form and decorate cookies with food coloring or almonds on ungreased cookie sheet. These cookies spread. Be sure to place them 3 inches apart. Bake at 325 degrees for 15-20 minutes.

Makes about 30 cookies.

the brilliant innovation that aunty wanda put on these cookies is the heart stamp. chinese almond cookies traditionally have a red dot in the middle, and since it's also valentine's day today she made the red stamp into a heart by carving the end of a carrot and dipping it in food coloring. genius!
happy year of the tiger, everyone!

baby hat in a night

2010-02-04T21:38:00.000-08:00

i had one night to make a baby present. my friend ikaika was having a first year birthday for his son, ka'uhane here on o'ahu and i found out the day before. good thing babies are small. i recalled my friend sandra saying she had a crochet baby hat pattern that she was able to make last minute - two in one night, maybe even - for a baby party recently, so i asked her to send it to me - thanks sandra!

i love the pattern, those little ear flap/tie things are super fun, though i didn't exactly stick to the pattern. i'm not good on checking gauge, and the crochet hooks i was borrowing from grandma ho were all sized in japanese, so i have no idea what size hook i was using. plus i really don't have a clear reference for how big a one-year-old's head would be, so the sizing is all an approximation. i added the little lines in the middle by crocheting into just the back loop of each stitch - something i had accidentally taught myself to do all the time, and my guatemalan host mother helped me figure out why all my crocheting looked ridged like that.
i got the idea for the variegated outline from the photos sandra sent me of her hat - that's my favorite part. so i used some extra yarn i have from the owl sweater i'm *still* working on for myself, and picked up a little hank of variegated yarn to accent.

i didn't have a baby head to model the hat on, so this stuffed dog had to stand in.
now upon meeting ka'uhane i have no idea of the hat will actually fit, he's a big boy. but it was a fun late night project to give me an excuse to get caught up on season 5 of lost.

watermelon baby quilt

2010-01-20T00:09:00.000-08:00

aryn's done it again. she created this beautiful quilt top - in watermelon colors - for our friend claire's newly arrived baby, celia. celia arrived early and healthy, six weeks early in fact, so the quilt wasn't quite ready for her upon arrival. but with a little pushing it was ready for her baby shower - which turned out to also be a celebration of her one month birthday.

i love aryn's choice of fabrics and combination of colors. so well done. she hired me to do the assembling, quilting and finishing parts of the quilt, which was fun for me. baby quilts are a great size to work with! i want to make only baby quilts from now on. so all you people who are waiting for your wedding presents from me... take note.

i wanted to do something subtle since the pattern of the fabrics is so vibrant on its own, so i did some stitching in the ditch around all the blocks and then chose one of the stripes of fabric in each square to do some stippling on - in corresponding pink or green thread. i think it came out really nicely - it's subtle on the front but allows some of the pieces to pop out, and the back is a fun maze of swirls and lines.

for the binding i split the difference between aryn's method and mine - she does a turn over of the backing fabric and machine stitching; i do a bias tape binding and finish it by hand. So i turned over the backing fabric as binding and finished it by hand. it's time consuming, but i like the hand stitched touch.

Finally, we made a little dedication on the back for celia, and aryn wrapped it up and hopped over to the baby shower. done and done.

if you like piecing quilt tops but hate the assembly and quilting parts, give me a shout - quilter for hire. cultivatingdomesticity(at)gmail(dot)com

also have to give a shout out to my mom for making this awesome thread-catching pouch that hangs off the side of the sewing table - by the grace of gravity and a sand bag - and handles all those pesky little threads you snip off during the course of quilting that always end up all over the carpet and jamming up your vacuum cleaner. and it's so pretty on the outside and soft and furry on the inside, thanks mom!

a year of domesticity: 2009 year in review

2010-01-03T21:12:00.000-08:00

in reflecting back on the past year of crafts and cooking endeavors, i thought it might be nice to provide some photo highlights - the best of 2009 moments in cultivating domesticity...

in january:

we learned about how to prepare and cook in a hawaiian imu, even if it's been raining for weeks.

then we learned how to make your own cleaning products at home, with the popular tutorial on making laundry detergent for less than 2 cents per load.
also, my update on green cleaning products got the attention of Clorox - who commented on my post, defending their corporate honor.

in february:

i finished my first hawaiian quilting project - a lehua blossom quilted pillow for mom. the post includes some history of quilting and native resistance in hawai'i.

we celebrated valentines day with a loving menu and decorative crafts

in march:

we explored some ideas around how to refresh your wardrobe using tired winter sweaters

and provided some tips on how to clean, mend, and repair the things you love around the house.

in april:

i conquered my fear of fermentation and made my fist batch of sauerkraut

and provided some of my ruminations on pesticides and michelle obama's garden

in may:

we celebrated strawberry season at our local csa farm

and we celebrated my mom's birthday with carrot cake for breakfast

in june:

i started raising pea sprouts

and decided i like dried apricots better than the fresh ones

in july:

i hired myself out to quilt aryn and adrionna's masterpiece

and took advantage of the basil abundance to make and freeze homemade pesto

in august:

i wrote up my thoughts on julia child as a home cooking revolutionary and the state of homecooking today: what does it mean that we collectively spend more time watching cooking contests on tv than actually cooking ourselves?

and knit a tri-colored baby hat for nasra

in september:

we had much to celebrate with apple pie and popsie's recovery

and then sele and my joint bacon birthday, and finally the engagement!

in october

we honored my little sister, aliana's ninth birthday with the pufferfish pouch

and we hoarded and canned heirloom tomatoes in preparation for the tomoato-less months

in november:

we were busy creating a crafting business plan and prepping for our first craft fair

and finally, in december

the cultivating domesticity brand was born

and i was holiday-obsessed with putting cranberries in everything

i hope you enjoyed the little review of domestic moments of 2009. i'd love to hear your favorite moments - if you tried any of these things, or have your eyes set on a recipe or tutorial you'd like to see in 2010 - leave me a comment! happy new year.

holiday obsession: cranberries

2009-12-31T17:14:00.000-08:00

this year's holiday theme for me has been cranberries. from cooking to crafting to fashion, i'm obsessed with the little buggers and their delightful color.
it started with cranberry relish. well, truth be told it started with a sale on cranberries at the korean market. but then that led to my favorite holiday dish - one that always has people asking for the recipe, so i'll give it to you now. it's the easiest dish to prepare for a big payoff in taste and compliments.

CRANBERRY RELISH
2 cups washed raw cranberries
2 peeled and cored apples (tart kind)
1 large, whole (as in peel and everything) seedless orange, cut into sections
1/3 to 1/2 jalepeno (veined and seeded), chopped fine
1/4 (or more to taste) cup sugar

fill a bowl with cold water and your cranberries - if you're buying a bag you'll have a little left over once you use two cups. wash them around and pick out any soft or wrinkled ones. then you're basically going to add all the fruit chunks above into a food processor - this is way better if you have one of those old school meat grinders and then you can feed everything through that and when you crank it the cranberries make a really satisfying popping sound. if you're using the food processor method you can pulse them until they're chopped into smaller chunks, but you want to be careful not to overblend, otherwise it'll just be mushy - you want the fruits to still maintain their structure. i find it works best for my little cuisinart to do it in batches. when you've chopped up all the fruit you sprinkle the sugar on and mix it around, then let it sit at room temperature for 45 minutes so the sugar melts (this makes a big difference), and then you can keep in in the fridge after that. we started adding jalepeno last year and i love the way it opens up the flavors with a little kick without being noticibly hot.
so there was that.
and then we still had a couple bags of cranberries, so i decided to freeze them. while i was considering what to do with frozen cranberries i made about 5 batches of these viennese crescent (aka russian tea cake, aka mexican wedding) cookies. i use pecans because walnuts make my tongue swell up, but if you can handle walnuts they're a cheaper alternative. this recipe comes from my mom:

CRESCENT COOKIES
½ pound butter
¼ cup granulated sugar
2 cups flour
1 cup ground nuts (walnuts, pecans, etc)
1 teaspoon vanilla
powdered sugar for rolling

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Cream the butter, then add the granulated sugar, flour, nuts and vanilla and mix thoroughly. Shape with your fingers into delicate crescents, about 2 inches long and ½ inch wide and thick. Roll them in the confectioners’ sugar and bake on an ungreased cookie sheet for about 30 minutes, until just faintly browned. Cool, then roll in more confectioners’ sugar before serving.

one thing i noticed in my many iterations of this recipe over the course of the week before christmas (we consumed a lot of butter and nuts!) was that i really prefer sweet cream butter in this recipe over unsalted. in fact, i added a sprinkle of salt in with the powdered sugar in that batch to compensate for the lack of saltiness.

these cookies are crazy good. i recommend making them for a party so that you don't just eat them all week and then make more when you run out. ahem.
just to satisfy my cranberry craving, i served the cookies with a little cranberry centerpiece and a few springs of thyme for holiday cheer.
we also discovered that frozen cranberries are a nice compliment to a glass of champagne - and if you muddle them up a bit they turn your toasting glass a nice shade of pink.

and finally, on christmas i had a craving for truffles, and - you guessed it - cranberries. so i followed this basic recipe for bittersweet chocholate ganache truffles, and then added chopped frozen cranberries to the ganache and rolled them around in cocoa powder and nibs with a little salt. they're spectacular. a little on the goey side because i think the cranberries added too much liquid to the mixture, but they hold their shape and the bittersweet chocolate and tartness of the berries goes really nicely together.

to top it off, i've been eyeing this sleaveless turtleneck sweater for a while that i'd gotten from someone and had in the "might be useful for future craft project" bin - and its cranberry color spoke to me recently. i had seen this tutorial on turning old sweaters into a shrug (or "caplet" as they call it), and i'm really into drapey shawls and shrugs these days, so i tried it out with the cranberry sweater.
you basically turn the sweater sideways, pick out the side seams so it opens on the top and bottom, and then cut off the top (and bottom, depending on the sweater) and sew those together. it worked like a charm. i had to pick up the stitches on the top when i cut off from the sleaves and neck portion of the sweater because it's such a chunky knit, but then I stiched it together, and also stitched the bottom of the sweater (where it's ribbed) together and then gathered it for a little flair. i'm really excited about this shrug right now. hannah and i got our nails done the other day and i later realized i'd chosen a sparkle cranberry color, so going out tonight for new years eve is going to continue the theme: cranberry and cocktail dress, here i come!

cultivating domesticity is in business

2009-12-08T20:21:00.000-08:00

cultivating domesticity has entered into a whole new crafty realm. in the past two weeks we have:

conceptualized and designed a new logo and visioning statement for the cultivating domesticity brand
had that logo and statement made into two custom rubber stamps for use in business cards and labels
started mass production of measuring tape wallets and fused plastic bag pouches
set up as a vendor at a craft fair
sold some stuff.
installed paypal on the blog - check it out on the sidebar
and i'm on the way to opening an etsy shop

most of the credit for these efforts goes to my amazing fiance, marty, for supporting and seeing this process through, especially as i'm preoccupied with simultaneously finishing one job and starting another.
also thanks to the help of many friends and family - mom for prepping all the wallets, adrionna and sonny for assisting with shopping, hannah for setting us up at the craft fair and sharing her wisdom, aryn, megan, and katy for their support and visioning with branding language, and all the friends and fam who have been avid readers of the blog and who came out to the first craft fair to support - thank you!

it's been a good learning experience. my sewing machine broke down the night before the craft fair - right when i was counting on pumping out a bunch of last minute wallets.
for one, i learned that "heavy duty thread" is actually for hand quilting, not machine stitching - oops. thanks to the ladies of sew images for teaching me that lesson and fixing the timing issues on my poor machine. secondly, i only sold two wallets and three pouches during the course of the craft fair, so i didn't have need to be stressing the night before about not having enough products. thirdly, i picked up a lot of good ideas and inspiration for display from other crafters who came to the fair, and our brilliant idea to bring lamps and christmas lights was affirmed when our table was the warmest, most luminous booth in the joint.

lastly, i learned a ton from hannah, who has been doing this kind of thing a while and picked up the slack in terms of things i never thought of, such as: money for change, receipt books, and display. i also learned that if, at the end of the night you haven't really made a profit (as seemed to be the case for most vendors) it's a great idea to go around and trade with other people whose stuff you like. i got a great necklace made out of the little vinyl circle cutouts from the centers of old records from sarah at glitzfritz.

here's the new logo and visioning statement:

i love the rubber stamp aesthetic, and the cost effectiveness and reusability. thanks, marty.

i've already had several orders for measuring tape wallets - if you're interested shoot me an email: cultivatingdomesticity [at] gmail [dot] com
i'm relishing the process of packaging and sending them out. i love gifts. if you're looking for holiday gifts you can order now and have them in time for the holidays... i'm just saying.

venturing into the world of business crafting

2009-11-29T13:50:00.000-08:00

i'm trying out something new here at cultivating domesticity:
mass production.
we've been busy little bees cooking up a plan to make my crafting endeavors profitable, and working long hours in what marty lovingly refers to as "the sweatshop."

my thing has always kinda been about trying out new ideas, patterns, recipes - i'm excited by experimentation. but i've been realizing i'm lacking the second half of that process, refining and perfecting.
i noticed this around thanksgiving meal planning this year. thanksgiving is one of those times when people love to indulge in the tried and true classics, and it's an opportunity to showcase your best recipes. as much as i love to cook, i don't have any best recipes. i found myself scouring the internet for tasty-looking ideas for new things to make for thanksgiving, and it made me realize that i haven't settled in on any recipes long enough to develop any standard go-to dishes.

so for the new year my intentions are to balance new experimentation with refining and perfecting some good ones.

same with crafting. i'm constantly making one-offs based on new ideas and methods i want to try out. as much fun as that is, it's not a way to make money. and i've been ruminating on how to make my crafting time profitable. a couple of ideas have come up: one is starting an etsy shop. the other is selling at craft fairs. it just so happens that there's a craft fair coming up here in oakland, and it's going to be held at our friends' brand new nightclub, the new parrish. it's the perfect spot for our foray into the business craft world. cultivating domesticity will be there.

and thinking about marketing my crafts has started all kinds of ideas around branding "cultivating domesticity:" developing a logo for business cards, tags, and website - notice we now own the domain www.cultivatingdomesticity.com (thanks early santa!). marty's helping me think through design and the intentions behind the brand, so stay tuned for more on that as it develops.

the one thing i make that i've been working on perfecting for a couple years now is the measuring tape wallet. i made myself a wallet out of measuring tapes a while ago, and the checkout counter interest in that wallet is through the roof. i have been kicking myself on a regular basis that i don't just make extras and carry them in my purse because i could probably sell at least one a week just responding to people's interest.

but i've been working on perfecting the design. my original design involved a snap grommeted right into the measuring tape itself, and the constant pressure of snapping/unsnapping everyday eventually wears out the measuring tape material. i've tried several prototypes over the past few months employing different methods of strengthening the snap area, but with marty's help we finally just solved the problem: velcro. now with confidence in the long-term durability of these wallets we're putting them into full effect.

so back to the sweatshop.
this is the perfect craft fair to showcase cultivating domesticity, but the timing is a little tight. we just got back last week from hawai'i, and i'm in the process of ending one job and starting another, so it's been long hours in the studio with lots of help from friends and family. mom came down this weekend for thanksgiving, with the understanding that she'd need to put in some hours in the sweatshop if she wanted any turkey. thanks to her speedy and steady work we've got all the measuring tapes cut and prepped for wallets, plus a bunch of dragonfly fabric cut for pufferfish pouches.

marty has become the resident expert on fusing plastic bags. we'll devote a separate blog post to the process of recycling plastic bags into water-resistant pouches, it deserves it's own spotlight. suffice it to say right now that marty has developed several new innovations on the technique that ratchet the quality and aesthetic of the product up several notches.

i've been experimenting with several different shapes and sizes of pouch, some small enough for sunglasses and sewing accessories, others big enough for cosmetics and toiletries. i love the structure and puffiness that the fused plastic provides these bags; adding a fused plastic layer to the pufferfish pouch, along with twill tape tabs to help with the zippers has made a great bag way better.

so here's your sneak peek at what we'll be offering at this year's feria urbana craft fair this thursday, december 3rd from 6-10pm at the new parrish.
if you're in the area: come through to support and enjoy music, drinks, food, crafts, and good company.
if you're not in the area but are thinking about holiday gifts, hit me up at cultivatingdomesticity@gmail.com - i'm taking orders!

hoarding heirloom tomatoes for winter

2009-10-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

suddenly in the past two weeks it's turned into winter in the bay area. i really wasn't prepared for this since i was just walking around barefoot at the park a couple weeks ago, but as the chill sets in and now the rain has started i'm kicking into squirrel mode - hoarding and saving all the fruits of summer/fall for the long hard winter ahead (ahem, forgive me friends who live in places that actually have winter - i think i'm funny).

much as i was doing at about this time last year, i decided to start by canning our precious heirloom tomatoes while we're still getting them in our farm box and they're still gracing the farmers markets. last year i was a little grumbly at the price of preserving heirlooms, since they shrink down so much that the cost to cans produced ratio shocked me. but come the middle of the winter when the only tomatoes in sight are those hot house water sponges in the grocery store i was so grateful to be able to crack open a jar full of the flavors of fall. so i vowed to make them again this year, and here i am.

i supplemented our usual farm box tomato stash with a run to the farmers market, only to realize when i went to pay for my bounty that i didn't have enough cash. thankfully the guy at the stand knows me (he's one of my two favorite vendors at the farmers market) and graciously told me i could pay him next time. i mention this because it's happened to me a couple of times in the past month - once at a coffee shop i'd never been to before in the financial district of san francisco - and i love the recognition that even in a seemingly big, anonymous urban place people look out for and trust each other.

i had to call to consult with aryn, since i was tomato canning solo this time, about temperatures and process. it goes something like this: wash your tomatoes. oil a baking pan (or two in this case) generously with olive oil. aryn made the "generous with olive oil" point to say that the tomatoes seem to do nothing in the oven for a while, and then reach a point where they burn easily if you don't have enough oil on the pan. i experienced this; she's right.

i also tossed in a few whole cloves of garlic with the tomatoes this time, figuring everything is made better with roasted garlic. stick your pans in the oven at about 400 degrees for somewhere between 20-40 mins. i hear you can slow roast tomatoes, but i'm not really one for slow processes.

if you're canning heirlooms, you're likely to have a variety of sizes of tomatoes - from very small to very large, thus the range of cooking time. watch them carefully and once they slump into a little puddle it's time to take them out - i opened the oven every few minutes to take them out in ascending order of size so the little ones wouldn't burn.

while your tomatoes are in the oven you can get started on the water bath. bring a giant pot of water to boil, and steralize your jars and lids by boiling them for about 5 mins.

when all your tomatoes have successfully roasted you can layer them in the jars with basil, garlic, and lemon juice. the lemon juice here is crucial - about 2 tablespoons per jar - to discourage botulism. i like to layer them in alternating colors, with a basil in between, and then top it off with a little of the tomato juice/olive oil mixture left in the pan from roasting. it also helps to run a spatula around the edge of the jar to encourage the air bubbles to come out, and i recommend doing this before you top off the jar at a 1/4 inch from the rim - otherwise it can get messy. i speak from experience. make sure you wipe the edges of the jar so you can get a clean seal and screw on your lids to they're on but not too tight.

process the jars in the boiling water bath for 40 mins (or longer if you're using larger jars). take them out and let them cool for a day somewhere where they won't be disturbed. make sure your seal was created properly (the lid shouldn't be able to pop up and down when you press on it). and admire your work. good luck waiting until winter to crack them open; i've been salivating over mine all week.

the pufferfish pouch - happy birthday to ali

2009-10-11T21:35:00.000-07:00

last weekend was my little sister, aliana's 9th birthday. she went zip-lining with my dad. i'm so jealous and bummed i couldn't be there to celebrate with them in person. but i did celebrate her birthday by making a few crafty goodies to send her way (and calling to wake her up on the big day at 6am - not knowing she had the week off of school - oops).

i found this pattern for what marty has aptly named "the pufferfish pouch." it's a super cute boxy zippered pouch for keeping your goodies, and fast to whip up once you have the hang of it.

i included in the pouch one of my coveted measuring tape wallets. i started making these about a year ago and checkout ladies all over the bay have been wanting to purchase them. i'm perfecting the design before i start mass producing them, but i think if i ever get around to starting an etsy page this will be my first item of sale. my problem with making business out of my crafts is that i never want to make a lot of one thing - i just want to try out new ideas all the time. but that's no way to make money. so stay tuned for a possible craft business starting in the near future.
finally, i made ali a button bracelet - hey, why don't we wear buttons as jewelry more often? there are some great buttons out there. it's been a while since i've made any kind of jewelry, so i hope my techniques will hold up to the test of time and gradeschool pressure.

i sure miss being around for family time - i'm looking forward to a visit soon.

roasted red pepper dressing

2009-10-05T23:45:00.000-07:00

we've been getting tons of bell peppers in our farm box lately, and i love peppers - but i rarely buy more than one red or yellow bell pepper because they're so pricey. did you know that red bell peppers are the same as green bell peppers, they're just ripe?

anyway, i didn't really know how to handle this influx of colorful peppers in my life - and while we've been chopping them up and adding to dishes i still had a handful left over. so i pulled out a recipe from the complete vegetarian cookbook for sweet pepper dressing. it's delicious and good on all sorts of things.

i love roasting red peppers, so i went ahead and did that rather than boiling like the recipe calls for. my preferred method for roasting is to throw the peppers on a sheet pan under the broiler - i even do it in the toaster oven if the peppers are small enough to fit in there without touching the broiler - that way you can monitor their progress easily through the window. just rotate the peppers every few minutes as the skin starts to blacken so that they're nice and charred all over. then i pop them in a paper bag - which helps the skins loosen from the flesh - and let them cool in there. peel the skins off and take out the stems and seeds. this one ended up looking like somebody's heart, i thought. and then you throw the pepper in the food processor with some oil and vinegar and salt and pepper - i also added a bit of lemon juice to mine - and that's it.

here's the recipe:

SWEET PEPPER DRESSING

Makes about 1 cup

1 large red pepper
4-6 tbs olive oil
2 tsp wine vinegar

a little lemon juice (optional)

salt and freshly ground pepper

1. [if you don't want to roast your peppers like i did you can use this method:] Put the whole pepper into a saucepan and half cover with water. Bring to a boil, then simmer for 15-20 mins, until the pepper is very tender. Test by piercing it with a fork.
2. Drain the pepper and remove the stalk and seeds. Purée the pepper in a blender or food processor, then add the oil and blend again. You should have a thickish scarlet emulsion, like a mayonnaise. Gently stir in the vinegar and salt and pepper to taste.

we used the roasted red pepper dressing as a pizza sauce since i'm not really a fan of tomato sauce. it was delicious - kind of sweet and very flavorful. i imagine it will also be good on salads, pasta, and i think it would pair well with cheese and crackers.

bacon and bubbles at the beach... plus a surprise

2009-09-29T10:51:00.000-07:00

last weekend was my birthday. and sele's - we're birthday twins. we decided to celebrate our lives with two of our favorite things - bacon and champagne. it was a great party. good friends with blankets in the sun, eating bacon and drinking champagne - what more could you ask for?

i had to scale back my ambitions for making bacon treats for the party - so i wouldn't spend the whole day fussing in the kitchen and get out to enjoy myself. i had a few ideas of bacon dishes i wanted to try, and a lot more that didn't get made.
included in the things that didn't get made are:
bacon truffles
peanut butter bacon cookies
bacon rice crispies
bacon jam
bacon (as in, making it yourself...another time)

i found this recipe for bacon pops: basically goat cheese balls rolled in crumbled bacon, pecans and herbs - and i love all those things, so that was definitely on the menu. it didn't exactly turn out the way i expected - the bacon and pecan mixture didn't so much crumble as it did melt into a kind of sticky, chunky butter, and i didn't feel like sticking lollipop sticks in them, so they were a little mushy - but really, with those ingredients it was bound to taste good. serving with slices of apple was a good move - as there's only so much bacon and cheese one can eat before needing a pallet cleanser.

i had intended to make bacon-wrapped cherries, which seemed like a wonderful combination of sweet and savory, but i guess cherries are out of season now - so i returned to the classic bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with more of the goat cheese-herb filling. very tasty, though i have to say aryn brought bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with gorgonzola, and i think gorgonzola is much tastier in that dish.

sele made bacon waffles that she filled with dulce de leche ice cream in a kind of choco taco-like effect. awesome.

sele also contributed the best bacon-themed gift:

yes, that's bacon lip balm. it's an experience that really can't be described. you'll just have to try it. don't worry, it's vegan and kosher.

marty and i were enamored with these mimosas we had recently at our friends hannah and win's wedding that included a splash of port, so we recreated those for the party. these were a huge hit - though i can't tell you how many times we had the conversation:

"it's a mimosa - with port,"

"what?! there's PORK in here?"

i guess that's what you can expect when you're having a bacon and champagne party.

and then, toward the end of the party came one of the biggest suprises of my life...

it went something like this:

i said "yeah."

more uses for peanuts and a druken pie crust

2009-09-07T13:30:00.000-07:00

last week i took an unexpected trip to hawai'i to visit with my grandfather, who was in the hospital. we weren't sure if he was going to make it out of the hospital, and all of his kids and grandkids flew in to see him. it's a testimony to the power of love that he turned around from having "eight toes in the grave" as my dad says, to coming home and back into his element surrounded by family. thank you to all of you whose aloha and support made that possible.

in honor of popsie, this post deals with two of his favorite food things: peanuts and apple pie.

for months i've had a bag of raw peanuts in my cupboard leaftover from making boiled peanuts a while back. boiled peanuts are a favorite of popsie's, though he can't really eat them now that he's on a salt-restrictive diet. since it was quite a while ago that those peanuts were fresh, i wasn't sure if they were still good to boil and eat, so i decided to sprout them. i remembered a sprout vendor on kaua'i who sells little ziplock baggies of peanut sprouts - which are fresh and nutty and nothing like roasted peanuts - so i decided to make my own. i shelled those little buggers and soaked them in water over night, then plopped them into the sproutman bag (which is supposed to reduce mold and such, but you can sprout these in a jar or even between moist paper towels because you're only sprouting for a couple of days). peanut sprouts are ready to munch when they have little tadpole tails sticking out like this:

they're great sprinkled in salad, or just by themselves like regular peanuts. i highly recommend peanuts for sprouting - if you have access to raw peanuts (mine came from the korean grocer up the block, where they were labeled "law peanuts" - no joke), they're super quick and easy to sprout and taste amazing.
i also saved a couple of these peanut sprouts and planted them in little pots in the window sill, just to see what would come of them, and it was so exciting.

the peanut surfaced in the soil and then split open to reveal the a little plant in the middle. under sele's care while we were gone visiting popsie they flourished and now look like this:

i'll keep you posted if they start bearing peanuts.

on my last day in honolulu i baked an apple pie (popsie's favorite - again, without salt). i hadn't baked an apple pie in quite a while, so i based my recipe loosely on this one from smitten kitchen. my aunty wanda had a good suggestion to reduce the liquid in the pie filling - which inevitably leaks out of the apples while they bake and then makes your crust all soggy- microwaving the apples for a few minutes to allow them to release their juices.

i tried this, and then boiled down the juice until is was thick and sticky and added it back in. i guess i didn't microwave them long enough, though, since the pie was full of liquid when it came out of the oven anyway. now i know for next time. i didn't have any on hand at my grandparents' house, but a good trick i learned from cook's illustrated is to use half vodka, half water for the liquid in your pie crust. using vodka solves that problem i always have, where i'm afraid of adding too much water to my pie dough so it becomes chewy and not crispy, but then i don't add enough liquid and it's crumbly and really hard to roll out and work with. using vodka allows your dough to be moist enough to be easy to work with, but then it evaporates in the oven, leaving your crust crispy. the reason this works is that the ethanol in vodka doesn't bond to the gluten in the flour the way water does. here's an npr story on the "pie dough crisis" - in which chris kimball explains the vodka secret.

the crust turned out fine without the vodka (other than the excess pie filling liquid issue), which may have been in part due to our inability to wait for the pie to cool down before digging in. here you can see popsie encouraging the pie to cool.

do it yourself: a julia child legacy

2009-08-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

i went to see julie & julia - the new movie paralleling julia child's process of writing "mastering the art of french cooking" with a young woman's endeavor to blog her way through all 524 recipes in that groundbreaking cookbook. obviously, there were enough parallels to my own life that it seemed imperative to see it on opening night - even though that required a last minute change of theater location after our first attempt sold out.
as i've mentioned before, my own blogging endeavors are inspired by julia child - including the name and sentiment of cultivating domesticity - partly because she was one of the smith women (along with betty friedan and gloria steinam) who shaped my early thinking about gender roles and feminism. i graduated exactly 70 years after julia child, with a different, perhaps more nuanced approach to gender - one that somewhat wrapped around the bend from feeling relegated to the kitchen and home sphere to eventually feeling empowered and inspired by exploring my domestic creativity. enter julia child again.

from what i understand, her cookbook and subsequent long-running cooking show, "the french chef" made cooking meals from scratch at home accessible to women in a revolutionary way. julia's sincere appreciation for good food, her determination and attention to process - to doing things right - from scratch, combined with her own ungainliness and transparent acknowledgment of her own little mistakes and misgivings - she "took the fear out of cooking," and gave women permission to explore and create in the kitchen without needing to be "perfect" at it.
which is precisely what i'm doing in my own kitchen now. i rarely make the same thing twice - just because i love trying new ideas, and because i have a partner who appreciates and encourages my exploration.
michael pollan wrote a really interesting piece in the new york times magazine recently about how people in our country right now are cooking less, and watching cooking shows on t.v. more. the article has a number of fascinating points, i'll share a few of my highlights here:

cooking as a spectator sport
the "cooking" we're watching on t.v. these days is nothing like the cooking on julia child's show. her show was intended to actually teach and encourage you to cook these meals at home - it was filmed in real time, meaning you actually sat with her while water boiled or butter melted and she chatted you up about tips in the kitchen, and while it wasn't aired live, it also wasn't edited, so if she dropped something on the floor (which she did on occasion, but as she informed terri gross of npr in the late eighties, never a chicken, and she would never swig out of a bottle as some have suggested, at least not in public), you saw that too.

whereas cooking shows today are more like sports events than they are instructional. prime time cooking shows are edited for the drama and instant replays of fast-paced chopping and firey flipping, and are so outrageous in their ingredients and staging restraints as to be completely impractical for purposes of actually recreating their dishes. and that's the point. if cooking shows today inspired you to get up off the couch and into your own kitchen, they would be failing at their purpose of keeping you in front of the television.

i don't have time to cook
this is, of course, the number one reason people give for not cooking at home. according to pollan's article, we spend an average of 27 minutes per day cooking (and another 4 cleaning up). (which reminds me that both marty and i noted the absense of any talk of who was doing the dishes during the year julie spent cooking her way through julia's cookbook). this is half the time we spent cooking as a nation when julia child's show came on air. but also, it's half the time it takes to sit down and watch an episode of "top chef," or any other prime time show. so it must not be all about time.
i'd say it's also about being tired at the end of a work day - which i can attest to myself - and about the messages we get from corporate entities who have a vested interest convincing us to let them cook for us.

there's a particularly interesting bit in the article about the inception of pre-made meals in the u.s. market. a lot of innovation was put into creating instant meals for soldiers during wwii, that then (much like the conversion of chemicals in weaponry to their peace-time use as agricultural pesticides) needed a new post-war market. pollan describes how the first boxed cake mixes fell flat after being introduced to the public. women, whether they worked or not, rejected them outright - saying making cake from a box wasn't really "cooking." and they felt like it was dodging their moral obligation to cook for their families. industry did a lot of focus group testing to determine what the lowest common denominator was to still be considered "cooking," and determined that - for cake mix, anyway - breaking an egg would do it. so they removed their instant powdered eggs from the mix and gave women back the autonomy of breaking their own eggs and thus feeling like they were "cooking."

you are what you eat... and a stranger is doing your cooking
another possible casualty of buying into the whole "i don't have time to cook; how 'bout we just eat out" phenomenon is your health. while this may seem intuitive, michael pollan gives an explanation that centers around what he calls "special occasion" foods. because baking a cake from scratch, or frying up french fries for instance, takes so much effort - not to mention clean up time - it's something we didn't choose to do on a daily basis when we were cooking for ourselves. but now you can drive up to the take-out window and get fried foods 3 times a day if you like. and because sugar and fat are exactly the things that leave us happy and wanting more, it's in the best interest of a business not to skimp on those when preparing food for their customers. he, in fact, ends the article with a question posed to this unsentimental food-market researcher, about how we might undo the effects industrially prepared foods are having on our society; he responds:

“Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”

so let me extend this invitation, in the spirit of julia child's influence and inspiration: do it, and do it from scratch.

beets = better than bbq chips

2009-08-09T21:28:00.000-07:00

a quick note on roasted beets: they're amazing.
i know it's not exactly the season to be talking about beets, and i'll probably have more to say on the subject come fall when there aren't also bounties of heirloom tomatoes, peaches, corn, and all the summer harvest to rave about. but for now, i just have to say i've been roasting beets and adding them to salads and spring rolls and, well just popping them in my mouth whenever no one's looking.

they've got a sort of sweet, salty, smoky flavor, and are so pretty to look at.
marty describes them as "better than barbeque chips," so what more is there to say?
they're very easy, seem relatively healthy, and don't take much time.
basically you slice the beets into 1/4 inch rounds, lay them flat in a single layer on a cookie sheet or baking pan that's been greased with olive oil, dust them with a little salt and pepper if you like, and bake in a hot oven ~400-425 (i've been throwing them in with other things, like baked tofu, lately so my temperature guage hasn't been exact) for a while, maybe 20 mins - check on them periodically and flip them over once they start to brown on the top.

this is the salad i put them on, though they seem to be hidden under the sliced steak, baked tofu, feta, corn, and heirloom tomatoes. like i said, it's a summer bounty.

hats around the bend

2009-08-04T12:31:00.000-07:00

we just got home from oklahoma and it feels like many things are coming full circle. for one, it just occurred to me that this blog is almost a year old. as i was knitting up a new hat for nasra, whose head has outgrown last year's knitted cap, i started thinking about how i was knitting that hat in oklahoma last year, and how it was one of the first posts that appeared on the blog.

i followed this pattern for the hat this time. it's a very simple pattern, but made all the difference in terms of taking out the guesswork in decreasing. i was looking for a project to keep me busy on the plane and use up some of the odds and ends of various yarns i have kicking around the house. i used no. 8 double pointed needles, since that's what i had on hand. as the pattern says, this hat is very stretchy and should accommodate nasra's baby head growth for a while. i can even fit my own head in there, though it doesn't quite look right.

baby's head goes in there.

quilting for hire

2009-07-29T10:31:00.000-07:00

just before leaving for oklahoma i finished up this gorgeous orange and blue quilt aryn made for adrionna's birthday. aryn pieced the top together - and it's stunning - and then handed it off to me to assemble and quilt.

i have to admit it took me a while to get around to it, and we had to move all the furniture out of the living room in order to spread it out entirely, but once it got pinned together it went very fast. i love the piecing aryn did with the backing - it adds a great dimension to the back and then comes across to the front on the binding, which i really like. i'm definitely steeling that idea for my next quilt.

once i got the quilt sandwich assembled and pinned together, i quilted long, wavy lines from top to bottom throughout the quilt. this was all on aryn's suggestion, and i have to admit i started out skeptical that wavy lines would look good on a horizontal and vertical striped surface, but it turned out looking fantastic. i chose a goldenrod-colored thread that blends nicely into the oranges and stands out a bit on the blue.

i tried aryn's method of binding, which uses the extra backing of the quilt to fold over to the top and machine stitch it all the way around. i usually cut a bias strip of binding and stitch it by hand to the front, so this method was much quicker. i didn't do a perfect job of it, but i think i'm the only one who's sweating my misstakes, so i let them slide.

the quilt looks quite nice put together.

and it was received with great enthusiasm.

pesto goes on everything.

2009-07-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

basil season is in full swing here in the bay area, and we've been getting bunches of fragrant basil bouquets in our farm box, and at the farmers market. which means it's absolutely time to break out the blender, suck it up and shell out some dough for pinenuts - those little buggers are pricey. as you see from the photo, according to the korean market down the street these are "finenuts." indeed, they are.

i found in my recipe box - and by "recipe box" i mean recipe folder on my computer - a recipe called the pesto manifesto. i can't rightly recall where i got this, so my apologies to whomever i'm plagiarizing by posting it here.

The Pesto Manifesto

Here it is, the ultimate in pesto recipes, the world expert's final word in pesto making! PESTO, THE RECIPE
Place 2 large cloves of garlic in the bottom of a blender or food processor. Add 3 cups very firmly packed fresh basil leaves, 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese, and 1 cup olive oil. Grind for 10 seconds. Add ½ cup pine nuts. Grind for 8 to 10 seconds longer. The sauce should contain small pieces of leaves, and the nuts should be just broken up, not pulverized. Remember that pesto was traditionally made by hand, and you don't want modern appliances to give it a baby-food consistency.

tips i have about the process:

one - use a food processor. because i have a hard time committing to relying on just one recipe at a time, i consulted several other pesto recipes. one i found at epicurious suggested that "using a blender rather than a food processor produces a smoother puree," and though this flies in the face of what the pesto manifesto thinks is legitimate pesto consistency, i took their advice. let me save you the trouble and say what it really does is burn out the motor on your blender and make your kitchen smell like an auto shop. and let me tell you, my kitchen already smells enough like an auto shop on the regular.

two - storage is key. you're making fresh pesto here, so don't expect to have a jar in your fridge for weeks and dip into it for every meal - which is precisely what i'm doing right now, but that means the top layer of my pesto is a yucky brown color, so do as i say not as i do. i say make it within the day that you're going to use it for some yummy purpose, and freeze the rest. pesto freezes really well, and my recommendation is filling up an ice cube tray - which makes perfect one serving cubes of the stuff for later.

three - suggested use. since i have been dipping into that jar for several weeks now, i've discovered that pesto goes with pretty much everything i want to eat. pizza, omlettes, sandwiches, pasta, garlic bread, fish, polenta, pretty much everything that's ever tasted good tastes better with pesto on it. until you get sick of pesto and/or it turns yucky brown because you haven't put it in the freezer.

dried apricots = better than the real thing

2009-06-14T10:49:00.000-07:00

apricots are one of the few fruits i actually prefer dried over fresh. i just found that out this week. we've been getting apricots in our farm box lately, and while i appreciate their rich, tangy flavor, i actually find myself wishing for the chewiness of dehydrated fruit rather than the kind of mealy fleshy fruits themselves. sorry apricots, your texture gives me the creeps.
thankfully, aryn owns a dehydrator, which i was able to borrow last night after our dinner party celebrating the end of school (oakland public schools, that is).
dehydrating apricots is a nice sunday morning activity. the process goes like this:

juice a lemon or lime and add about a quarter cup of the juice to one cup of water. this is your dipping bath for the apricots to prevent oxidation (browning when exposed to air). cut your apricots in half - they come with a convenient guiding cleavage down the one side which makes this process even easier. remove the pit. you can chop them up smaller at this point, but i prefer a good mouthful of apricot, so i left them in halves.

grab each half and pop it inside out, meaning give the skin side a good poke with your thumb. this is called "popping the back" and i guess it helps it dry more evenly. my halves ended up more flattened than inside out, but i can see how that would be helpful. let them soak in the citrus bath for about 5 minutes, and lay them out on your dehydrating racks. if you don't have a dehydrator to borrow you can theoretically dry your apricots in the oven - if your oven gives you the option to go as low as 120-150 degrees fahrenheit, or even in a sunny window if you happen to live somewhere particularly hot and not humid.

from what i've gathered online, if you're using the dehydrator you'll want to set it between 120-140 degrees fahrenheit. you can start it out on the high temperature end, for an hour or so and then turn it down for the remaining time (somewhere between 12-48 hours). you'll be able to tell they're done when they are leathery with no pockets of moisture, and if you tear them in half and see moisture beads along your tear line you'll know you need more time.
for now, the dehydrator is pumping out a soothing hum of hot air and apricot smell into my kitchen and i'm enjoying it immenseley.

raising pea shoots

2009-06-08T22:35:00.000-07:00

i bought some fresh peas from the korean grocery the other day, thinking i'd sprout them and have some pea sprouts to sprinkle on salad. plus i'm really enamored with growing vegetables in the house since i popped a couple mung bean sprouts in a pot on the kitchen window sill and was amazed to see them grow into real plants that even bore little bean pods.

when they started sprouting i realized i had confused pea sprouts with peanut sprouts (which are actually my favorite), and i wasn't really sure what to do with the pea sprouts. then i remembered how much i love pea shoots - they seem like such a gourmet delicacy on salads. so i punched holes in the bottom of an aluminum potluck pan (it already had a hole so i figured i wasn't ever going to make a casserole in it anyway), filled it with soil and sprinkled a couple handfulls of sprouting peas into it.
a few days later i came to terms with the fact that i really wasn't ever going to eat any of the sprouted peas, so i made two more planter trays with the remaining sprouts.

and they grow like crazy. they were tall enough to harvest in less than a week. here are some good instructions on when and how to harvest pea shoots. they say you can harvest every 3-4 weeks, but my peas are growing so fast i'm harvesting every few days. they are so responsive to light you can almost see them bend backwards when i spin them away from the window. they make me really happy.

in fact, if i were going to say something about them, it would be this:

um, sort of.

i was surprised (i dont' know why) by how much they really taste like peas. i've been clipping them and adding to somen salad - which, by the way, is the best potluck dish ever. people love it. hit me up for the recipe if you want it.

cake for breakfast

2009-05-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

i figure the best thing about birthdays is that you get to eat cake for breakfast.
we were celebrating my mom's 58th birthday this weekend. she came down from mt. shasta for a visit which included walking on the beach at point reyes - lovely although it's suddenly winter again here in the bay, a goat roast at our friends' new club downtown (what birthday would be complete without a goat roast?), and we did a storycorps interview together in san francisco.

we started her birthday off right with cake for breakfast. every week for months we have been getting a bag of carrots in our csa box from terra firma farm. they are the best, sweetest carrots in the world. but a person can only eat so many carrots. so we have an entire refrigerator drawer full of carrots. i came across a recipe for carrot cake a few weeks ago that my mom had sent me, and i remembered she really likes carrot cake, so i've been planning to use up some of those carrots in this recipe. then i found this recipe from smitten kitchen for carrot cake - so i sort of blended the two recipes together. i like everything that has ever come out of smitten kitchen, so i used that as a base in this cake and added a few extras: toasted pecans (since walnuts make my tongue swell), dried craisins (because i can't stand raisins - as they say in benny and joon, they're like humiliated grapes), a little shredded coconut, and i meant to add some crushed pineapple, but forgot about it until after i'd put the cakes in the oven so that will have to wait till next time.
as smitten kitchen points out, the best part about carrot cake is the cream cheese frosting. she added some maple syrup to her frosting, which i did as well, but then i thought it could use a little extra kick so i grated some fresh ginger in there too. that was a big hit. it sparks the pallet enough to be raise questions but is subtle enough that it's hard to put your finger on.
and here's one of my best kitchen tips ever, learned from my friend rachel's chef friend: keep your ginger in the freezer. it makes it waaaay easier to grate. you'll be amazed. i love fresh ginger, but i hate all the muscle you have to put into grating it - this makes all the difference, plus ginger snowflakes are pretty delightful.
so we're now eating carrot cake at every meal because, well, it's a vegetable right?

strawberry season is here

2009-05-17T01:49:00.000-07:00

last weekend, the farm that delivers us a box of fresh, local vegetables every week opened up their fields for u-pick strawberries. sele, aryn, and i took a field trip (literally) up there to gorge ourselves on strawberries and bring home a few boxes for frozen and canned delight. it turns out aryn, having grown up on a strawberry and asparagas farm, is a pro at strawberry picking and we loaded up our 3 flats ($10 a piece!) in no time.

the strawberries were beautiful and picked at the peak of perfection, which means they don't keep long in the fridge, so we got right to work processing them. my freezer is now stocked with little ziplocks full of strawberries, and i was inspired last year when my friend rachel told me her mom was making strawberry cardamom jam. i haven't stopped thinking about it since then, so i figured now was the perfect time to try it out.

as much as i raved about pomona's pectin, the problem with not using sugar in the jam is that once you open the jar it only lasts about 3 weeks before starting to get moldy. so aryn and i decided to revert back to using regular pectin; however, i neglected to buy enough of the regular pectin to accommodate the strawberries we were canning, so we ended up having to do an awkward split midway through the process and using some of the pomonas as well.
so the process went something like this:

we washed the berries, and squished them between our fingers - resulting in strawberry splatters all over the kitchen blinds - which i left as inspiration to myself to get around to making some curtains. then we boiled them down with some hand-ground cardamom, grape juice and honey (just juice for the kerr brand pectin, honey for the pomonas pectin).
i won't detail the canning process here, but if you're interested check out previous posts on jamming.

the pectin snafu resulted in half of the batch becoming jam and the other half becoming something more like strawberry sauce. Still tasty, we had some on waffles this morning.

we also made some fresh daiquiries in the process.

michelle's garden makes pesticide-lovers "shudder"

2009-04-14T08:15:00.000-07:00

i've got to give props to the obamas on their domestic endeavors at the white house. if you're going to have two things that really make a house a home, a puppy and a garden are pretty good choices.
here's a the layout of michelle obama's garden:

click for a closer look

i love all the leafy greens and herbs. and i love the message she's sending about the importance of eating locally, knowing where your food comes from, and connecting with the earth through raising plants.
but not everybody loves that message. listening to democracy now! earlier this week i heard the following report:

Pro-Pesticide Group Criticizes First Lady’s Organic Garden

And First Lady Michelle Obama is coming under criticism from a pro-pesticide industry group for deciding to plant an organic garden at the White House. The Mid America CropLife Association recently wrote to the First Lady to urge her to consider using pesticides, or what they call "crop protection products.” One official with the pro-pesticide group said, “While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made [us] shudder.” Mid America CropLife represents agribusinesses like Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences and DuPont.

i am amazed, first of all, that there are people who shudder at the thought of organic vegetables and that anybody is willing to publicly support putting chemicals on our food - knowing what we know about the effects of these chemicals (remember DDT?) on our bodies and our environment. you can read the full letter here; i especially like that they address the letter to mrs. barack obama. what year is it?

i know a thing or two about pesticides, and i'm learning more through my work with breast cancer action. yesterday i was on a call with dr. tyrone hayes, of uc-berkeley about his research on a pesticide called atrazine. atrazine is the second most commonly used pesticide in the u.s. and it is the most common contaminant in our water - drinking, surface, even rain. it's used in incredible amounts on the corn fields in the midwest. it's also an endocrine disruptor - it converts testosterone into estrogen. i'm particularly interested in this because estrogen is what regulates the growth of breast cancer tumors - and pretty much everything we know about breast cancer: how it develops, how to treat it, has to do with regulating exposure to estrogen.
Figure 1. Map showing distribution of atrazine-use by state. Atrazine use by crop is also shown. Map courtesy of United States Geological Service (USGS).

so being exposed to additional estrogen-like compounds from our environment is of particular concern when we're thinking about the breast cancer epidemic - and it is an epidemic. in 1964 a woman's lifetime risk of developing breast cancer in the u.s. was 1 in 20, today it's 1 in 8. which, incidentally, is a trajectory that coincides with the "green revolution" here in the u.s. where we took the chemicals left over from wwii and found new uses for them as pesticides and fertilizers on our food crops.

so while we're waiting to see the results of this unofficial experiment that's been happening by exposing people to chemicals through our food and water, tyrone hayes is trying to find some quicker answers by studying frogs. frogs synthesize hormones the same way vertebrates, including humans, do, and when you expose male frogs to atrazine - some end up "feminizing" - their vocal box changes and their testosterone levels drop - and some end up changing sex entirely - they develop eggs in their testes and mate successfully with male frogs.
and if you look at exposing rats, even to small amounts of atrazine in the womb, their offspring have problems with mammary gland development.

other studies have been recently in the news, such as this one, suggesting babies conceived in the spring and summer are more likely to be born with a range of birth defects because of the contamination of pesticides and other agrichemicals in the water during that time of year.

so where are the regulations on this? well, there really are none to speak of. the only federal regulation on chemicals is the toxic substances control act of 1979. and it's pretty irrelevant to what we're dealing with now.

yesterday, the EPA announced it's going to require pesticide manufacturers - for the first time ever - to test the chemicals in their products to see if they are endocrine disrupters. it's never to late to start, i guess. what i found interesting is that our friends from CropLife showed up again in the news - saying "For pesticides, we think the likelihood is extremely low we'll have any concerns come to the surface."

and i'm sure they will do their best not to find any problems with their pesticides- so we'd better have our eyes open to the kind of studies coming out of industry about their own products.

or we can all start growing our own in chemical-free neighborhood gardens, which is pretty damn subversive and seems to really piss them off. though i'll argue that we need to do both, since those pesticides have legs - atrazine can travel over 600 miles from the point of application.

ps - until your garden gets big enough to provide all your food needs, here's a handy shopping guide about what vegetables are the most and least pesticide-ridden, so if you have to make decisions about what to buy organic - and who doesn't in this economy? you can see which fruits and veggies are safer than others.

sauerkraut saturday

2009-04-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

i never thought i liked sauerkraut. i have a kind of tenuous relationship with foods that are essentially rotting. blue cheese - huh uh, kombucha - definitely not.
but after tasting some homemade sauerkraut at a friends' house a couple years ago i had to change my outlook on the pickled cabbage. plus it's more like kimchi than anything else, and i love kimchi.

i'm kind of alternately fascinated and disgusted by the idea of keeping a batch of ~~decomposing~~ i mean fermenting vegetables in my house for later consumption. but i've been collecting cabbages each week from our farm share and i've run out of other ideas of what to do with cabbage, so i decided to spend my saturday morning prepping my first attempt at sauerkraut.
plus they say fermented stuff is real good for you.
i found this great tutorial on how to make sauerkraut - unfortunately i didn't watch the video until after i'd made my batch, so i should have done a few things differently - i'll just give you the video now to spare you my mistakes.

the process is pretty simple: you chop up the cabbage, and whatever other things you want to put in there. i added garlic and wakame (seaweed) and a few anise seeds, just to see what that was like. you layer your chopped cabbage with sprinkles of sea salt, and then pack it down into your container a little bit at a time.

then you cover it with a plate and stick a jug full of water on top to weight it down. it's supposed to look something like this:

i didn't exactly have all the requisite tools at my disposal (they say you're not supposed to use anything aluminum in the process, fyi). so i had to be a little creative with what to pack the kraut into. i ended up using my salad spinner bowl, since it was the only thing i had that size that wasn't aluminum. You're supposed to fit a plate "snugly" inside the bowl - and i also didn't have the right diameter plate, so i ended up cutting one of our many flexible plastic cutting boards into a circle and pairing it with the steamer basket from our rice cooker to hold the water jug weights. we'll see how that goes.

upon watching the video, i think i should have sliced my cabbage a lot thinner, but i do like my sauerkraut crunchy, so ... this is all an experiment.
hit me up if you've got good sauerkrauting tips.
in the meantime, we'll be waiting around here for the kraut to do its thing. updates forthcoming in one to three weeks.

here's what my little sauerkraut bundle looks like in its towel tent.

end-of-springtime sweater renewal

2009-03-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

it feels like we're in the final throws of spring here in the bay area, and if you're like me you're itching to wear some summer clothes just to encourage the season along. but i'm learning that it's advisable - no matter how anxious you are for summer - to at least bring along a sweater or two to combat the ever-changing bay climate.
i've got a lot of sweaters, but honestly i've either worn them till i'm sick of them throughout the winter, or they have holes in them, and/or don't actually fit me anymore.
so in the spirit of march mending month, and always in the spirit of conserving resources in this economy (the above and below posters are courtesy of the u.k.'s wartime "make do and mend" campaign) i've collected some options for sprucing up your sweater wardrobe.

option 1: fix a snag

i'll admit that when i snag a sweater my usual response involves ~~cursing~~ rolling the loose end into a ball, tugging at the edges of the sweater, and praying it stays put. i can't say this technique has ever actually worked long-term, so i'm glad to provide you with a super easy tutorial on what you're really supposed to do when you snag your sweater.

option 2: mend a hole

if you've got a more substantial hole (rather than just a loose thread bit from the snag) you can easily mend it - knits are generally really forgiving; i've done many a sloppy i'm-on-the-train-to-work-and-i'm-determined-to-mend-this-hole type of mending jobs on sweaters and you really can't tell at all. so even if you don't consider yourself a seamster/seamstress i think this is a repair you can handle. here's a little video tutorial:

How to Sew a Hole -- powered by ExpertVillage.com

option 3: embellish over a hole

i like this idea of embellishing over a sweater hole because it both makes the item wearable again as well as adds a brand-new appeal. i still recommend mending your hole first before adding embellishments. plus this option will cover up any weirdness you may have created while mending that hole.

option 4: crochet a patch

i had to include this hole patching idea because i think it's so interesting. you're basically crocheting into the perimeter of the sweater hole - this method is for big holes - and crocheting a spiral into the middle. i like it.

option 5: let's be honest, you're never going to wear that again.

part of spring cleaning is a realistic assessment of what you're hanging onto despite knowing that you'll never really wear it. i've got several sweaters that fit into that category but i'm just unwilling to toss them. i just think it's a pity to get rid of something as potentially useful as a sweater.
i'm willing to be reasonable enough to admit that it's no longer useful as a sweater, so here are a couple projects you can make out of old sweaters:

recycled sweater animals

yes, this project is brought to you by martha stewart (don't judge me). aren't they cute? the pattern looks super easy; i love the idea of upcycling a well-loved sweater into a stuffed animal, and i'm always looking for gift ideas for friends' babies.
you'll need to felt a wool sweater to start off with for this project, and martha doesn't explain that part in her online pattern, so here's a tutorial on machine felting - basically you're just washing the sweater in hot water until the fibers mat together.

recycle that yarn!

i recently needed to buy enough yarn to knit a sweater - more on that in a minute - and i realized
a) that's a lot of yarn, and
b) it costs a ton of money
so now i'm looking at those sweaters in the back of my drawer in a whole new way. inthe way a hungry wolf looks at a wooly sheep, i suppose.
it is, in fact, possible to recycle old sweaters into reusable yarn - and they tell you the best way to go about it at craft leftovers.if you're not a knitter, but like to take things apart you can always give your plunder to a knitting friend - one thing about knitters, we can't seem to turn down free yarn.

option 6: make your own

i found this sweater pattern online and fell in love - i really like owls. so in typical fashion i got really excited and bought the yarn (ugh) and started knitting - and then my enthusiasm ran over a speedbump and i haven't picked it up since. the speedbump was gauge. testing gauge is recommended for anything you're knitting that has a pattern, to make sure what you're making is similar in size to what the person to created the pattern was making. gauge is created by the particular combination of the weight of yarn you're using, the size or your needles, and how tension you use while you're knitting. i've never really understood how gauge works in a pattern, and i have very little patience for knitting something that is not actually the sweater i'm so anxious to be making, so i rarely test my gauge. i did test the gauge on this one, and instead of knitting up a nice square, i made a long skinny rectangle. but then i didn't really know what to do about my gauge being off, so i just proceeded to try making the sweater and seeing how it turned out. it turned out small. really small.

so now it's sitting on the needles waiting for me to figure out what to do.

spring cleaning roundup

2009-03-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

the apple blossoms are out and i am ready for spring.
here's a little collection of spring cleaning tips i've rounded up this week:

march is "mending month" over at craft magazine - and they have posted some great tips on mending and cleaning, including these great stain removal tips.
when i learned the bit about baby powder on grease stains my life changed for the better. somehow i'm constantly dripping oil on my clothes.

they've also got great advice on removing sweaty armpit stains from your cotton t-shirts. you know you've got them.
now that i've got a sewing machine, i'm determined to treat it nicely and care for it so it doesn't get cranky. if you've got one i encourage you to take this opportunity to pamper your sewing machine with this spring cleaning for your sewing machine tutorial.

finally, if you've got a much loved quilt around your house that's seen better days, i found this useful tutorial on patching up those ripped spots.

if you've got spring cleaning tips to share please send them my way.

bacon hugs.

2009-03-08T20:09:00.000-07:00

giving gifts is one of my favorite little pleasures.
especially if it's the perfect gift.
so when i found this item via craftastrophe i was thrilled.
not only is it so true,
and we both share a serious love for bacon.
but it's especially funny to give a jew.
and supporting independent artists and crafters is always a good idea.

happy half-birthday, sele!

hawaiian quilting

2009-02-28T10:48:00.000-08:00

while i was in hawai'i over january i decided i wanted to try my hand at hawaiian quilting. quilting has a rich history in hawai'i, intricately wound up with the social and political forces that have shaped what hawai'i has gone through in the past century. as i understand it, the quilting craft came to hawai'i with the missionaries. prior to the fabric quilt influence, bedspreads in hawai'i were made from kapa - tree bark, beaten and felted together and decorated with inked stamp designs. when hawaiian women picked up the fabric quilting craft, they created a unique quilting technique and design that is readily identifiable as particularly hawaiian.

hawaiian quilt design motifs reflect nature - often plant forms, and they radiate out from the center in a geometric design. this effect is created by folding and cutting fabric like you would a paper snowflake - which unfolds into a multi-faceted design. hawaiian quilts are hand appliqued - meaning you stitch the snowflake design by hand onto a background, and then the quilting is done by hand as well, often echoing the shape of the center pattern, like ripples of water.
because the craft was taking form in hawai'i amidst serious political and social upheaval in the form of first missionary and then capitalist influences, there is an interesting story to be told in the quilts made by hawaiian women.
during the period of the illegal u.s. overthrow of the sovereign hawaiian government, you saw many quilts in hawai'i incorporate the hawaiian flag into their design. because loyalty to the sovereign hawaiian government (and eventually hawaiian culture itself) was forbidden during that period, many of these "beloved flag" quilts were made to be reversible, with the flag motif hidden underneath. the most exciting thing i learned today is that queen lili'uokalani made an incredible quilt during the 10 months she was imprisoned in 'iolani palace, following the u.s. coup that deposed her and her efforts to lead her people to reinstate their sovereign government. in the center of the quilt are the words, "imprisoned at 'iolani palace ... we began the quilt here ..." it's worth clicking to take a closer look at the details, she embroidered dates of the events of the overthrow, her close friends and supporters' names, the hawaiian flag and kalakaua coat of arms. i love acts of creative acts of resistance - and this beautiful work blows my mind in a number of ways.

so i really can't follow that historical legacy with my own modest first attempt at hand quilting, but that is what this blog is about - so here goes.
i chose the lehua pattern for my quilt block. lehua is the red blossom of the ohia lehua tree - which is one of the kinolau, or body forms of the fire goddess pele. the ohia lehua tree is one of the first plants to grow on recent lava flow beds. i wrote my honors thesis about pele and the hawaiian struggle against geothermal energy development, which my mom helped me with editing, and i was making the quilt for her so i figured she's appreciate it.
cutting out the design like a snowflake was really satisfying - an entirely new technique for me. however, i was running late to catch my flight back home when i chose to cut out the design (i know, not the best time to do craft work, especially with a new project - but i really wanted to have some handwork to do on the long plane ride) so i ended up breaking one of the cardinal principles of snowflake cutting - leave the middle corner intact. so when i unfolded my design on the plane i realized my parts were all disconnected since i hadn't placed the middle point on the corner to cut. oops. marty helped me problem-solve that situation by creating the star-shaped space in the middle of the flowers while allowing them to "high five" on the edges.

i actually think this ultimately improved the design, though next time i'll know to take more time with my cutting. the applique piece actually went pretty quickly - i was probably halfway finished with it by the end of the flight, but hand quilting the rest of the piece took me another month. you're supposed to measure a finger's width between your echo lines when you're quilting around your design, but i couldn't seem to keep my lines that far apart, so i ended up doing a whole lot of close together lines, which took a while.

i was also learning to make those tiny tiny stiches by hand. the book i was reading said expert quilters get about 10 stitches in per inch. i definitely was not achieving that level of accuracy, but i did make a lot of stitches.

here's what the underside of the quilt looks like with those stitches.

ultimately i made the quilt square into a pillow, since i wasn't about to hand stitch an entire quilt, and i think pillows are more functional and comforting than wall hangings.
mom got it in the mail this week and was very excited. in fact, my coworkers say they could hear her phone excitement from the other side of the room.

this is the card i sent with the package. thanks to hannah for the fabric.

love day cooking

2009-02-21T10:23:00.000-08:00

valentines day was a week ago, but if you're like me you're always looking for ideas to store away for next valentines day, so i thought i'd share the menu from our meal. we decided to stay in and cook at home this year - i think the hype around going out to dinner for valentines is crazy and i wanted no part of that. but i did want to celebrate the day by trying out some new recipes.

oven grilled flank steak - recipe from nytimes food blog bitten. this is a great and easy way to get the outsides of your steak nice and singed on the stove and then cooked in the oven. plus i always like a dish in a cast iron pan that doesn't need to dirty extra dishes. i especially like the part of the recipe that says, "when the smoke becomes intolerable, take it off the stove" that didn't happen, but i prepped myself to detach the smoke alarm in case it did.

here are the steaks smothered in carmelized shallots.

and we made a trip over to the fish market in rockridge to buy fresh scallops, which i marinaded for a moment in a passionfruit, lavender, maple, sesame oil sauce and then seared on the stove.

sauteed broccoli & collards with bacon.

smashed potatoes - of all the things on the table that night, these definitely were the most discussed, as in "i only want to eat potatoes like this for the rest of my life." more on that later.

and finally, i attempted a molten chocolate souffle, recipe from bitten again. i was skeptical of the short baking time, so i left them in there a little longer which kind of ruined the molten effect, but they were still tasty. especially with homemade whipped cream. and i'm a fan of anything you can make in a rammekin.

so the "smashed potatoes" recipe comes from pioneer woman, via veganyumyum. they call them "crash potatoes," but i like my name better - i think it's more accurate and it's a reference to a phrase i used to say as a child every time i came to the top of an escalator. not sure what that was about... ah, kids.
they are really everything that's good about potatoes: they have the crispiness of homefries, the tenderness of mashed potatoes, and the nutrious skins still on like baked potatoes. plus they're way healthier than the way i make mashed potatoes because they only have olive oil and spices drizzled on them. fabulous.

so the idea is: you boil the potatoes whole (i used the pressure cooker for the first time with potatoes and it worked great in 10 mins), then you lay them on a baking sheet and cut a little "x" on the top of them to help them smash more gracefully. then you take your potato masher (or a fork) and smash them. then drizzle them with olive oil and spices - in this case i used rosemary, salt, a little lavendar,black pepper, and a little crushed red pepper - just because it was valentines day and i felt like we should have the color. then you bake them in a hot oven (450 degrees) for about 20 mins or as long as they are still getting crispy and not burnt.

here's my little romantic decorative craft project, thanks to mayamade for the inspiration. i cut out heart shapes from brown paper bags and then sewed them into strings using a running basting stitch on the sewing machine, which was really fun.

thanks to sele for the food photo documentation.

updates: cleaners and clementines

2009-02-18T01:40:00.000-08:00

i recently started a full time job with breast cancer action, which is great and i'll have more to say on that later. for now i have a couple of quick updates on recent posts. for one, i saw this recipe for candied whole clementines, which i think may be even better than the citrus peels i have been making recently.

second, i was on a conference call last week convened by women's voices for the earth, in which we were discussing the facts and myths of disinfectants. from that call i got a lot of good information, and they provide some great resources about making your own cleaners - as well as information about what's toxic about commercial disinfectants.
in fact, they have everything you need to host a "green cleaning party", including recipes for all your basic household cleaners. so i had to post this update to my last post with those links, because it improves the quality of my information significantly. for instance, they answer the question: how well do they work?
as well as provide information that i realized i was a little foggy on about household cleaners' effects on human health. one of the things i learned recently that really stands out in my mind is that chemical limit standards are set by what supposedly won't harm an adult male - but the effects on children (and pregnant people, elderly, etc) are entirely different - especially if we're talking about exposure to chemicals during critical windows of development, so what we should be doing is setting limits based on the most vulnerable populations. here's some further info on institutional cleaners and children's health, and tips on sanitizing safely for children.
and because i believe in taking action on things that are important, here's an opportunity to sign the petition for safe cleaning products - calling on Proctor and Gamble, Clorox and others to disclose what chemicals are in their cleaning products.
i read this morning that earthjustice is bringing a lawsuit against Proctor and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and other companies in new york for the same purpose - to disclose the chemicals in their products, so stay tuned on that front.
as you might expect, the working life is leaving me less time for blogging, but i've still been crafting, so check back for updates.

make your own cleaning products

2009-01-27T15:30:00.000-08:00

this blog post is a confluence of several streams of thought for me; one is my continued attempt to tread lightly on the earth and reduce toxics in my own life, another is my concern with treading lightly on my pocketbook, especially in this economy and with my (soon to be over) long stint of unemployment. so in all my unemployed leisure time spent cleaning the house, i've been bothered by having to shell out a lot of money for cleaners that are likely giving me - and moreso whomever is bottling them and living next to their factories - cancer.
that said, i'm also not one to suffer salmonella in my kitchen or mildew in my shower.
so with the energy of new years resolutions to get cleaner and more organized, i offer my efforts at making your own non-toxic cleaning products.

i started with laundry soap, because our house was recently graced by the presence of laundry machines (thanks, sele!) that have changed my life and made me smile daily. i've been filling the washer with buckets of water collected from the drip in our shower - which is really just a stop-gap measure until the landlord decides to prioritize fixing the leak. i'm not holding my breath. but what's really been irking me is how much laundry detergent costs at the store, and how i have to sort of shut out my conscious consumer mentality to just buy whatever's cheapest because i can't afford the luxury of nontoxic. so when my friend harold suggested that i could make my own laundry soap i was intrigued. it took me a while to compile all the requisite ingredients, so let me detail them here for you.

Fels Naptha: it's a laundry bar soap meant for treating stains. i've read that some people say you can use any kind of bar soap for this (as in ivory, lever 2000, etc) but i found fels naptha in the laundry aisle at my drugstore and it was under $2 so i got it.

Borax: a kind of scary-sounding, though apparently non-toxic, chemical compound that's useful for all kinds of around-the-house things like cleaning and making things less smelly and maybe warding off ants. also found easily in the laundry aisle. i love that it's called "20 mule team."

Washing Soda: this is potentially the hardest ingredient to find - i found it at the giant Longs instead of the down-the-street Longs, but i've read several comments online saying people have a hard time finding it at their local supermarket, so best of luck with this one. you can buy it online, but i couldn't justify the shipping cost. it's sort of like baking soda, as you can see, but a little different - so don't try to substitute. specifically, washing soda is sodium carbonate, baking soda is sodium bicarbonate (one less sodium and one more hydrogen atom). i'd never heard of it before, but apparently it is also useful in laundry and household cleaning.

other than that you'll need a big bucket, a grater, measuring cup, and big pot, and potentially a blender, but i'll get to that later.

there are several recipes out there for laundry soap, all basically using the same ingredients. i chose to go with this one because it used less washing soda and i heard somewhere that it can be harsh on your clothing to use a lot of washing soda. but i found this one today and it has prettier formating on its website, so i'm likely to try it next time. plus that recipe didn't really work out for me (details below) so i'm in the market for a new one.
i'll let you follow one of those recipes if you're going to make your own laundry soap, since my process went astray somewhere, but here's the general idea:
you grate the bar soap into cute shavings.

you boil this in water until they dissolve and then add the washing soda and borax, then you add a lot more water and leave it in a bucket overnight.

after 24 hours you are supposed to open up your bucket to find a laundry soap gel resembling egg noodle soup consistency. however, mine was a solid block of gel, more like cosby sweater consistency. here's what it looked like after i tried stirring it:

the guy who maintains the website i got my recipe from says that this has happened to other people where their soap turns into solid gel, but doesn't offer any advice further than it's not supposed to happen. he does offer that it still works fine, but i didn't want to have to take a bite out of my laundry soap every time i do a load, so i decided to blend it.

this resulted in a more watery-frothy consistency, which i decided was better than a solid, so i went ahead and filled an empty laundry detergent container and left the rest in a covered bucket, because this makes a LOT of laundry soap. which makes this a super economical way to do laundry. this guy has done a full cost breakdown analysis and says it comes out to about two cents per load of laundry, which is great even considering your own labor costs since the process is pretty quick and only involves grating and boiling water.

i haven't done laundry yet to tell you how the soap works, though that guy also has a case to make about that that involves spreading mustard on his shirts (i'm not about to go that far).
i hear you can put essential oils in your soap once it cools to make it smell however you want, though i couldn't find a scent on hand that both marty and i would want our clothes smelling like.

in addition to laundry soap, i also found this tutorial on making your own household cleaners. she has simple recipes for glass cleaner, furniture polish, air deoderizer, floor cleaner, and the two i made:

All Purpose Cleaner
1/2 tsp washing soda
1/2 tsp liquid Castille soap
2 cups hot water
10-15 drops essential oil
Spray Bottle

Disinfectant
Hydrogen Peroxide
10-15 drops essential oil
Spray Bottle

i used dr. bronners (magic hippy soap) for my castille soap, and though i was skeptical that 1/2 a teaspoon of soap was going to do anything for my cleaning purposes, i have to say that my bathroom sink never looked so sparkly.
as you can see from the photo, i covered my disinfectant spray bottle with opaque tape, since hydrogen peroxide loses its effectiveness if exposed to sunlight. and i used tea tree oil in both of these for its antiseptic qualities.
i believe you can also use castille soap to make your own dish soap, but it doesn't seem to be any more cost effective to me so i haven't tried it.
if this post inspires you to try making your own cleaning products or you have any money- and earth-saving tips to share, please comment.

grapefruitette

2009-01-26T12:28:00.000-08:00

an update from the candied citrus peel project. as previously mentioned, i started some candied grapefruit peels while baking the citrus cake, which weren't done in time to contribute to the cake, and after realizing through taste test that the lady from smittenkitchen was absolutely right about them being wickedly bitter, i left them "drying" on my countertop for two days. i took all the advice of boiling them three times in water before boiling in sugar water, and scraping as much of the pith off as i could to reduce bitterness, but those suckers are still face-scrunchingly bitter.

finally this morning i was able to conquer my chocolate hangover enough to proceed with the orangette-ifying of the grapefruit peels and based on my taste-as-you-go method, the dark chocolate was just what they needed to turn delicious. they're drying again now, and i think we have success.

sugar high of the month

2009-01-24T13:06:00.000-08:00

we have a lot of citrus in our lives right now in northern california. i went to the farmers' market when we got back from hawai'i to see what's in season around here these days and that was about it: lots of citrus.

and because i'm on this kick of trying to use things i'd otherwise be throwing away, i got the idea to make candied citrus peels. with the help of smittenkitchen, i made a batch of assorted blood orange, grapefruit, and meyer lemon peels last week. they turned out really tasty, but i think i miscalculated on how thin to cut them and they were a little mushier than expected. i had intended to make orangettes out of them to serve to guests, but they lacked enough of a backbone to hold up to that intention. marty thought they'd be great paired with a dark chocolate cake, and i'm never one to say no to chocolate cake, but it took me a while to muster up the energy to actually make one. until last night, when my chocolate cravings were insatiable. i searched around the internet for a proper recipe; we were thinking something along the lines of a flourless chocolate cake was the way to go, but i didn't have enough eggs in my refrigerator for that, and i wanted to use my new cake pans (thanks, mom!). so i landed back with smittenkitchen for her double chocolate layer cake. i read that at first as "double-layer chocolate cake," but really she means "double chocolate" layer cake - as in not for the faint of [chocolate] heart - but who wants to hang out with those people, anyway?

i did a whole lotta substituting in the cake recipe in a desperate attempt to not walk to the store in the rain. the good news about that is: it's fine to use three different types of milk (and by milk i mean heavy cream, coconut milk, and powdered milk) instead of buttermilk in this recipe (just add a splash of vinegar and it's all good). and it's fine to use olive oil instead of vegetable oil in chocolate cake - i used to only use olive oil when i was baking a lot of cakes in high school and people love it. the bad news is: it didn't save me from eventually having to run to the store 5 minutes to closing to get more cream and chocolate, because there is no substitution for good chocolate. i used scharffen berger's semisweet for this and the results were fabulous.

i filled and frosted the two cakes with the chocolate ganache from the recipe along with a layer of the candied citrus peels, and i think they pair together quite nicely. i was trying to make another batch of candied grapefruit peels while the cake was baking - because i guess i have a hard time sticking to just one task - but they weren't done in time for decorating the cake, so i have them drying this morning. i cut them a bit bigger this time for another go at the orangette idea. but for now i can't think about any more chocolate.

here's a quick tip about cake storage: if you are like me and don't have a proper carrying container to keep your cake in and you don't want to have your tin foil or plastic wrap ruining your frosting- my go-to method involves cocktail umbrellas. yep, i use them to test if the cake is done baking (because strangely i have a lot of cocktail umbrellas but no toothpicks) and then they double as a festive tent poles for my tin foil wrapping.

solidarity crafts

2009-01-18T11:01:00.000-08:00

e ala e - israel kamakawiwo'ole
[click that play button, this is the soundtrack for this post]

to wrap up the series of hawai'i reportback posts, i offer a different kind of craft: activism.
marty and i are both involved with creative direct action, and when we're home visiting kaua'i we do what we can to stand in solidarity with kanaka maoli - native hawaiian people - and support the struggles for self-determination, cultural revival, and environmental preservation.
on our previous visit to the islands, we talked about direct action, social movements, and roles for allies in solidarity organizing with katy rose, host of kaua'i community radio's show, out of the box. You can listen to our interview here.

during this last visit, we were called to action by the incredible attempt of hawai'i's governor, linda lingle, to steal and sell lands belonging to the native hawaiian people. governor lingle has filed a u.s. supreme court appeal to overturn the moratorium her own supreme court has put on selling off lands that were held "in trust" for native hawaiians since the illegal overthrow of the hawaiian government in 1893. these lands are commonly referred to as "ceded" lands, though they were "ceded" to the u.s. government by the very people who called for and supported the military coup that deposed queen lili'uokalani and then instated themselves as the new "provisional government," under the leadership of lorrin a. thurston and sanford b. dole (yes, Dole as in pineapples).

as if kanaka maoli aren't suffering enough from displacement, occupation, cultural and physical genocide, this is governor lingle's attempt to once and for all dismiss any claim that native hawaiians have any rights to their own land. really, that's what she's saying.

marty and i joined the kaua'i alliance for peace and social justice for a sign-holding demonstration on the main highway in lihu'e, kaua'i, supporting native rights and calling on lingle to withdraw her supreme court appeal. we made a number of signs for the demonstration, and a banner featuring the first flowers marty has ever painted on a banner (they look good, right?) these are some photos of the signs we painted.

that last sign aunty nani is holding refers to the akaka bill - a congressional bill introduced by senator daniel akaka of hawai'i that would give native hawaiians the same recognition as native americans. this might sound like a good thing, since kanaka maoli don't have any recognition right now, but it in fact would quash the claim for sovereignty and obfuscate the fact that native hawaiians never gave up their sovereign rights. and as marty and other native americans say of native recognition by the u.s. government, "you do not want to be treated like an indian in this country."
many see the "ceded lands" attempt by the lingle administration as paving the way for passage of the akaka bill, especially now with a democratically controlled senate and the support of president obama. read the open letter to president-elect barack obama, urging a moratorium on the akaka bill - written by kanaka maoli kupuna - elders.

our signs made a reappearance this week at another sign-holding demonstration on kaua'i - marking the 116th anniversary of the illegal overthrow of the sovereign hawaiian government. an estimated 5,000 people demonstrated in waikiki on friday, with the same message of opposition to the governor's attempt to sell "ceded" lands.
more to come this year, as the state prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of "statehood."

imu cooking

2009-01-16T08:46:00.000-08:00

next in the series of hawai'i reportback is the imu.
imu is the traditional hawaiian pit oven, dug into the ground and filled with hot lava rocks. traditional foods cooked in the imu include pua'a - pig, 'ulu - breadfruit, and 'uala - sweet potato, which are wrapped in ti leaves and placed in the pit with the hot rocks, on top of juicy mai'a - banana stumps, leaves, and burlap and then the pit is filled in with dirt to seal the baking process. one of my favorite dishes is laulau, where your pork or fish is wrapped first in lu'au leaves - kalo (taro) leaves, and then wrapped in a ti leaf package.
we dug a pit into some friends' yard this year around the holidays to do an imu. we prepared breadfruit, sweet potato, kalua pork, and pork laulau, as well as a bunch of turkeys that were bought in a sale frenzy, some rice pudding, and coconut stuffing.

since it had rained every day for weeks, the wood was a bit wet and we had some difficulty getting the fire started to heat the lava rocks. however, using new technologies such as the leaf blower and some hardwood pallets snagged from a local business, we were able to get up and running.

word to the wise: don't get too involved in your firestarting to notice if your hair has started burning off.
as the rocks were heating, we were chopping and crushing the banana stumps, which are very high in moisture and provide the steaming effect for the imu. this is a great material to use because bananas reproduce asexually from suckers that shoot off the side of the plant, so when a banana tree bears fruit it must be cut down (or it dies on its own) to provide room for the next shoot to emerge.

once the fire burned down and the rocks were sufficiently hot we covered them with the banana stumps and then laid our food on top of them. as you can see the steam is working its magic already.

from there the food gets covered first with banana leaves.

then with palm fronds.

usually the next layer is burlap, but we used a couple of tarps.

from here the edges first get sealed shut with dirt.

and then the whole thing is buried.

and then you leave it cooking for several hours while you go fly kites.

and when you get back you do the process in reverse.
you dig out the dirt.

and peel back the tarps.

and it looks like a crazy sea organism.

and then you check the turkey to make sure it's done.

and shred the meats.

and the feast is on.

thanks to my stepmom, kat, for the photos.

new year's traditions

2009-01-10T14:33:00.000-08:00

the past three weeks marty and i spent in hawai'i with my family for the holidays. and while we were enjoying ourselves and even doing radical domestic stuff, i couldn't bring myself to sit in front of the computer to blog about it. but now we're home and so it's time to catch up on the vacay postings.

we'll start with mochi pounding.

mochitsuki, the pounding and making of mochi, is a japanese new year's tradition, and my family joins our closest friends on kaua'i each year before the new year to pound it out and roll it up.

the process starts the day before, soaking the mochi rice overnight. after soaking, the mochi rice is put into the seiro, a series wooden steaming frames, and steamed.

the hot cooked rice is then put into the usu, a big carved stone bowl, where it is pounded with a kine or wooden mallet. typically three mochi pounders go to work first smashing and then pounding the mochi in rhythm.

the job is then finished up by one pounder while one adept person with quick hands scrapes the sticky mochi from the sides of the bowl between pounds with the mallet.

when the mochi has reached optimum consistency it's delivered to a wax paper and katakuriko , potato starch - covered table where the mochi gets made. one person pinches off little balls of mochi and the others form, pinching and patting them in their hands into the proper mochi shape.

some mochi are made with an, adzuki bean paste, in the center. we've also branched out to non-traditional but oh-so-tasty varieties like chocolate-peanut buter filled mochi.

most of the mochi are made into standard palm-sized confections, with a few batches made into special sizes for new year's traditions, such the tiny mochi balls used for ozoni, a soup made with mochi. also, special mochi are made for the kagami mochi, a traditional new year's decoration and offering made with one smaller mochi atop a larger mochi, which is then topped with a mandarin orange with the leaf attached.

the kagami takes its place near the entrance to the home at new year's time along with the kadomatsu, an arrangement of bamboo, pine and flowers that sybolize good luck for the coming year.
my family spends new year's eve with our friends, eating traditional good luck foods, such as toshikoshi soba (yeah, buckwheat!) and lighting off fireworks. our established tradition in the past few years is to build what we call a "morning glory circle" around our fire pit in the front yard. this tradition started one year when we had a few boxes of those fireworks called morning glories, which resemble sparklers but have the added effect of popping off sparks and being a little more firey. bored with the typical use of holding and drawing shapes in the air with these sticks, we planted them in a circle and lit the whole thing on fire. this was great fun, and each year the amount of boxes of morning glories showing up at our house multiplied exponentially, such that the circle of planted morning glories is now feet deep and the fire produced at midnight when we light the circle resembles something nuclear. here are some images of this year's circle, which we built in the back since the front yard was too saturated from weeks of rain.

happy new year.