But so yeah… two Sundays ago this happened:

Lila had to be in on the fun. She’s fast with her little hands.

and she’s an excellent pasta machine technician.

but then she went to play at the neighbor’s and I got to fold and slice the Tagliatele.

and foolishly piled the nearly two pounds of noodles all in one giant lump, then had to toss them so they wouldn’t stick together while the water came to a boil. The noodles stretched and twisted and became a big mass of awkward.

That tasted like heaven anyway. Most delicious noodles I have ever eaten. Ever.

Note to self: buy some studio lights, fer feck sake. Enough with the yellow-glowing food shots. Jeeze.

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I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t use the Bell’s pickling spices (because I forgot to buy them) and they have a nicer mix of ingredients… or if I just like a saltier pickle. So I dumped out the brine, rinsed the pickles, made up a new brine with double the salt and just peppercorns and the garlic for spices and will give them a few days soaking. I don’t know. Just not loving them.

The dill chips on the other hand are almost there. Another few days and we’ll have achieved dill chip perfection.

If you’re my neighbor and you’d like some, give a shout. I love to share!

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Dumb. Hiney.

I have missed my Bread and Butter pickles so much. The last batch I made was the summer of 2003. That year, my 50-foot fence row in the garden put out enough cukes to make 64 quarts of Bread and Butter, 24 quarts of garlic dills, 24 quarts of spicy dills, 24 pints of relish, over $250 worth of cukes to sell at market, an entire giant crock of half-sours that went bad and got dumped in the compost, bags of them given to friends and neighbors, and who knows how many left to bloat and rot on the vine. Can you say prolific?

Since we moved into this house, I have not managed to harvest a single cucumber from my gardens. Blight, mildew, vine borers, beetles, and now this year we can add a family of piggish woodchucks to the litany of problems keeping me from making pickles with my own blamdam cucumbers. It’s just not in the cards here (yet), so I ordered a bushel of organic pickling cukes from Sandy at Elizabeth Telling Farm for $30. I just refuse to go through another year without my own pickles and the sound of Tyler groaning with happiness every time he makes a sandwich.

Oh, how he’s going to hate my rationing.

My mom made Bread and Butter pickles when I was little. I can’t recall if she did it every year, or just a few times, but I do remember spreading mustard on two slices of bread, slapping thick slices of bologna on the bread, then covering that with a slick layer of super-thin-but-crisp, sweet pickles. Oh, sense-memory. Dang. These jars will be ready in a few weeks, I must put bologna on the shopping list.

But, as I mentioned before, it was blazing hot on Sunday, and the idea of canning that whole bushel made me want to pack up my things (my laptop, my iPhone and a few beers) and move into the freezer in the basement. So I got my step-dad’s half-sour recipe and made up a bucket that will be ready to taste-test tomorrow.

TO! MOR! ROW! (squeee)

Of course, that still left about eleventyseven cucumbers to deal with, so I also made up a four-quart container of dill chips using Martha Stewart’s Dill-Pickle Chips recipe because it looked quick and painless and did not involve boiling ten gallons of water on the stove top.

These will be ready to sample on Sunday.

I think these are going to be incredibly crunchy pickles. Five days later and I’m eating some of the cukes I left out for nibbling with hummus, and jiminey they’re SO crispy and I never even put them in the fridge.

OK. How about some recipes?

I have no idea where I got this one…

Bread and Butter Pickles (yield approx 6 quarts)

4 quarts sliced pickling cukes
2 chopped green peppers
1/3 cup canning or other coarse salt
1 1/2 tsp tumeric
2 tbsp mustard seed
1 1/2 tsp celery seed
6 chopped medium onions (I use sweet onions)
3 whole cloves garlic
5 cups sugar
3 cups white vinegar

In large bowl, mix together cukes, peppers, onions and garlic. Toss with salt and cover with crushed or cracked ice. Let stand for 3 hours (in fridge if it fits, but my bowl won’t, so I just leave it on the counter and that’s worked fine).

Drain and pack in jars while you bring the vinegar, sugar and spices to a boil in a large pan. This time, I cut my cukes on the thick side for some unknown reason, and they didn’t pack into the jars as well. You can see some of the jars in the photo above have a huge amount of pickleless brine at the bottom. Oh, well. Pour the hot brine over the pickles in the jars. Run a butter knife around the inside edge of the jar to work out any air bubbles. You’ll probably have to top off the brine. Wipe the rims, top with lids and rings. Process in water bath 15 minutes. Let them sit for a few weeks before you sit down one hot night with the jar between your knees and a beer in hand. Trust me, the flavor gets better with age.

Half-Sour Pickles

Place 3-4 grape leaves in the bottom of a 6-8 quart food grade plastic container or crock, and then top with 24-30 small, washed, whole pickling cukes.

add 1 stalk celery (optional)
1 bunch dill
1 tbsp pickling spices (I didn’t have the pre-made, so just used mustard seed, dill seed and celery seed
3-4 whole cloves garlic
3 tbsp kosher salt
1/2 cup white vinegar
1 tsp alum if you don’t have any grape leaves.
If you like ‘em spicy like I do, then add 1 tsp (or more to taste) hot red pepper flakes (homemade if you have).

Bring a teakettle of water to boil and pour it on top of everything in the container until just covered. Place a plate on top of the pickles to weigh them down and keep them submerged in the brine. Cover with a clean dish cloth and leave on the counter 5-6 days. Taste. If they’re good, start eating and put the rest in the fridge. You can cut them up into spears and pack in jars with the brine.

I doubt mine will last long enough for all of that.

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I planted raspberry canes in one of the six beds over in my mother in-law’s yard our first summer here (has it really been three years?) but as with everything over there, they didn’t get enough sun. This spring I dug them up and moved them to a very sunny spot on the side of the front porch along with a dozen other new canes and they’re looking great. They remind me that it’s sometimes difficult for some of us to adapt to transplanting. That sometimes it’s hard to find the exact right combination of elements needed to help someone grow and thrive. Sometimes we have to try a lot of things to figure out what doesn‘t work first.

Like me. Since moving from New York to Ohio I have needed to try a lot of things to find what makes me grow and thrive. Some of those things made my roots so dry they couldn’t take in any nutrients at all, and they shaded me so much that I produced no fruit.

But all of this trying has made me dizzy and I feel starved for some sense of success. Looking back at all of this transplanting from idea to idea, I see that I’m a great starter, but lose interest quickly. I fall down on the follow-through. I love to take the spark of an idea and flesh out all of the details in my mind and sometimes on paper, but rarely manage to take the bigger ones through to implementation. I don’t even want to tell you how many domain names I’ve purchased in the last five years, all with nebulous business ideas attached to them.

I want to know why.

I’m tired of waving my hand and dismissing myself with the same old phrases:

I get distracted too easily.

I’m still discovering what I want to do when I grow up.

I don’t think the story I’ve always told myself is the whole story. It goes a lot deeper than that and I think I’m ready to start digging. Our situation demands that I pick up the psychic shovel and push. I don’t want to keep spinning my wheels like this forever and I have this idea that I think is viable and sustainable and that gets me excited every time I open up my spread sheet to add more information to my plan.

But I’m afraid:

That what I want to do is already done by somebody else and so much better (even if it is far away in another city or state).

That financial success will mean spiritual failure.

So I keep opening that spread sheet to add details. I have a list of people I need to call and I put off calling because of that dewy-eyed dreamer thing. But I keep adding names and numbers and my list of questions grows.

Soon.

I tell myself:

Listen…it’s only pizza. It’s not as if you want to open a hotel. It’s a truck with an oven and good, local, seasonal ingredients. It’s a few tables and a cooler and umbrellas. It’s permits and fees and taxes. It’s marketing and making. You can do this. Just do it one bit at a time. Really, now. It’s only pizza.

If I can do it? It means a part-time gig that generates an alternate and much-needed revenue stream for my family and is a nice counterbalance to the computer-intensive writing and graphic design work I also do part-time. It will allow me to participate in the incredible downtown revitalization that’s happening right now in my community.

Oh, and making it truly successful, I’ll get paid to do something I love: feed people.

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One thing I have given back to myself is knitting, not nightly, but when I’m in the right frame of mindlessness. I bartered some of the website work with Maxcine, and asked her to knit me a pair of fingerless gloves.

They need washed, and how. I wear them all the time (except while cooking after she admonished me for it). She also sent along skeins of the same yarn, so I can make myself a matching scarf. My lighting is terrible in here, especially at night, so please excuse the golden tint. Pretend I took the photo by candle light in honor of the solstice. Maybe you can make out the lace and bobble pattern?

It’s been so good to have a knitting project to work on again. I love making something that actually takes shape and progresses with every session. Wouldn’t it be nice to see the same kind of progression with my novel? I’ve been working on it a little bit just about every day this month, but it feels like swimming in place while the water gets deeper and my feet no longer know how far it is to the bottom.

Can I tell you what I’m really looking forward to? Next weekend. Having the holiday behind me and the next two months of winter days and nights to work (for pay and pleasure). I’ve scaled the whole holiday thing way back, by about 70% by my estimation. And still, it’s a grind and a pressure and a battle with feelings of guilt and frustration. It still feels like a dance in the land of unreality.

The consumer aspect of this “celebration” hasn’t worked for me for a long time, but this year the shopping and the wrapping and the gifting…no matter how careful I’m being about it, I still feel as if I’m stuck in an old vaudeville reel.

So here’s to unwinding the old patterns, to gathering in the warmth, to the returning light. May your days and nights be some approximation of merry and bright.

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It’s amazing to me how an empty flat surface is a signal to every one of us to dump anything and everything we’re holding each time we pass by until the surface is no longer recognizable. Is that a table under that mess of books, magazines, DVDs, crayons, Polly Pockets, faerie wings, barrettes, graham crackers, unopened credit card solicitations, to-do lists, seed packets, recipe cards, and building blocks? I’m not so sure. As a matter of fact, I’m beginning to think of it as my personal hell.

This is the play area I set up for Lila in the corner of the living room, just behind where I have my desk in the stair alcove. She spent almost no time playing there this summer, but every time I asked her to clean up her things in the living room, she collected items and stacked them on top of the table until it ran out of space, when she then began to shove them underneath until it looked as if its legs had come off the floor. The photo above shows the mess when it’s already about 85% cleaned up.

A giant corner bookcase stood in that corner before I began, but I moved it to the other side of the room so I could give Lila a small one to store art supplies and a few other play things that need shelf space. It took me days to finish because every time I emptied out a bag, basket, or box, I’d have another pile of teeny, tiny items to sort through and find their mates so they can all be stored together. I hereby declare that my child does not need another pack of crayons, magic markers, colored pencils, or construction paper. She has eleven pairs of children’s scissors, 300 rubber stamps, and 20 ink pads. We go through sketch pads like toilet paper around here, though, so feel free to load her up on those at the holidays.

It’s amazing to me that we still haven’t hung anything on the not-so-newly painted walls (didn’t we paint last winter?). Could be because the husband has all of the good tools locked up in his garage, along with the hanging hardware, and I’m too cheap to buy any more. Well, once we get Cheril’s painting of the trees hung, and the two prints Mom and Steve gave to us mounted up the stairwell, things will feel more finished.

But for now, Lila’s got a sweet little corner to get her crafty homemaking geek on when the weather’s nasty this winter, with plenty of natural light if the sun cooperates.

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Jennifer, The Baklava Queen is one such almost neighbor, and I’ve enjoyed some lovely email exchanges with her about blog posts, local grain mills, baking and gardening. I’m so happy she took time to write a post on her own blog as a contribution to the Able Hands Photo Project.

“…the philosophy behind the project (at least for me) has a connection to how I approach cooking and preserving food and sharing it with others. Work has so often become a nasty four-letter word for many of us, but there is so much that we do with our hands to make life easier for others or to create beauty or simply to do what we each feel is needful in our own lives. Work can and should be a joy and full of meaning, and that’s what I try to practice in my kitchen as well in other aspects of my life.”

I love this. Check out her link in the quote, which is to another of her posts about the time it takes to make and eat local foods and fresh meals daily. Reading that has me thinking about my role as the keeper of the kitchen and how that has changed for me over the years from one of exclusion to inclusion. I used to hate having anyone in the kitchen with me. I couldn’t think straight or focus on my work, so I would shoo everyone out to play while I worked. But then I would get so spiteful and annoyed at the lack of help and at the sound and sight of the rest of my people off having fun while I toiled away in the kitchen.

Gawd, I was so bitter all the time. I still get that way sometimes, because everyone else has something just as pressing to do as getting food on the table. I sometimes resent the fact that I’m the only one who does any planning for meals — something that has to happen daily, and can get a little boring and uninspired. And sometimes, I just don’t feel like it. Sometimes I’d so much rather sit and read blogs or a good book. But those are pizza nights.

I have learned that if anyone’s hanging around in the kitchen while I cook, they’re fair game, but I’m struggling with the dichotomy between my two kids and the way they regard work. Lila is happiest if she’s given a task to help with and gets so frustrated if we forget to include her in our work unless she’s off playing with a friend. If there are mushrooms to chop for dinner, she’s my girl working the paring knife with precision. If Ty’s the only one around? It’s hardly worth the heavy sighs and leaking air. Ty is a teenager and I don’t know if I need say anything else about that. But I see other teenagers with much stronger work ethics and I wonder if I dropped the ball somewhere along the line with him. I think I did. I think we all did, the grown ups in his life. I think we have all handed much too much to him. While we don’t do that anymore, we missed the opportunity big time during his formative years.

I think when he was Lila’s age, I made every effort to distract him with play or entertainment so I could get my work done quickly, efficiently and without having more mess to clean up in the end. I didn’t know how to deal with “mistakes” he might have made. I wanted things to be as close to perfect as possible. I’m pretty sure that the subtext my lovely young man has absorbed is “why bother? It’ll never be good enough anyway.”

If he saw me working, it was seldom joyfully. More than likely he picked up my frustration and my hurriedness. I know we’re supposed to improve with age, maturity and experience, and I have. I have much more patience this time around (not perfect, but greatly improved). These two kids have very different temperaments and proclivities. But they also have had two very different mothers, and obviously two very different fathers.

I try now with Tyler to talk about my work in a meaningful way, as if chasing behind the damage done, trying to gently, inconspicuously show him how good work can be. How important it is to balance the work and play, to not allow the need for entertainment to take us away from caring for and shaping our homes and our world into a better place. I tell him why I cook the way I do, why I grow food and preserve it, why I write. Why I clean the bathrooms and mop the kitchen floor every now and again (so our feet don’t stick to it and hold us in place so we can be devoured by the ants attracted to the sticky film from the constant cupcake baking frenzy). But it’s difficult and I worry he’s not getting it, or that he’s getting it much too late so that it’s just words bouncing off and him seeing me do my thing and he’s thinking, well good, so let her work. I’m going back to my game.

But I keep at it. Remind him to do his chores. Invite him to help me with projects. There’s always work to be done and opportunity to talk about it.

So how do you think about the work you do?

- – - – -

If you’re on flickr, I hope join the Able Hands Photo Project Pool and share your photos of hands at work, rest and play.

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Maybe it just seemed like such a fussy DIY thing to do when I have so many other things that I have to try to squeeze into so few hours at home. Maybe it was just laziness? Well, I don’t think I’ll be buying pre-made granola ever again. My homemade is the best tasting topping for yogurt I have ever eaten. Ever.

Oat and Honey Granola

5 cups rolled oats
1 cup almond or walnut or pecan meal
1 cup lightly ground flax seed
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup honey
1/4 cup maple syrup

Preheat oven to 275º

Mix all dry ingredients together in a large bowl.
Mix wet ingredients together and pour over dry ingredients. Mix well to coat all of the oats. Pour into two greased 13 x 9 glass baking dishes. Bake until golden, for about an hour and a half, stirring the oats every 20 minutes or so.

Chris asked if it was okay for him to eat some in the mornings, he knew I was so excited about the flavor and thought maybe it was all just for me. Yes. I get like that sometimes. Usually with things nobody else likes anyway, like my pickled turnips. But sometimes it’s more serious, like when I have a bar of Dagoba chocolate with chili flakes. Yeah, that’s a back-off everybody situation. I’ve been known to slap hands reaching towards my Dagoba chocolate.

But I’ll share the granola because there’s nothing that makes me happier than hearing the contented chewing sounds and yummy groans coming from my people when they’re eating something I have made with these two hands.

Lila has asked for “yogurt cereal” just about every day since I made it last week, and I’m probably eating too much of it. That lightly sweet, toasted nutty flavor with the chewy crunch, well, you’re just going to have to take my word for it that it’s the best thing for breakfast and makes one hell of an afternoon snack. Or even better, try it for yourself.

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