my new favorite book




i just received the wonderful gift of little house in the big woods, and it is definitely my new favorite book. it's a how-to guide to my ideal life. a few quotes:

+ on dolls: "mary was bigger than laura, and she had a ragdoll named nettie. laura had only a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief, but it was a good doll. it was named susan. it wasn't susan's fault that she was only a corncob."

+ on rendering lard from the family pig: "ma was trying out the lard in big iron pots on the cookstove. laura and mary carried wood and watched the fire. it must be hot, but not too hot, or the lard would burn. the big pots simmered and boiled, but they must not smoke. from time to time, ma skimmed out the brown cracklings. she put them in a cloth and squeezed out every bit of lard."

+ on filling the pantry for the long winter ahead: "onions were made into long ropes, braided together by their tops, and then were hung in the attic beside wreaths of red peppers strung on threads....the barrels of salted fish were in the pantry, and yellow cheeses were stacked on the pantry shelves."

some tasks, like building and working a smoker, and cutting logs for a log cabin, are even illustrated with pretty accurate drawings. it's seriously out of control. i'm only on page thirty, and i've alread learned how to churn butter, smoke deer, knit, kill a pig, bake, and everything else above. it's ridiculous.


not so much in this shot, but i've found that i have trouble sometimes getting my lens to focus on what i want it to focus on. sometimes, when i want the front to be in focus and the back blurry, it ends up with the middle focused, and the forefront and back of the shot blurry. it's really annoying, and upsetting when i get back home and upload the photos onto my computer. dad, what am i doing wrong?


++++++++++++++++++

going on lately:

+went to emmy's spaghetti shack and the seward st. slides with cynthia (though looking for the slides might have been more fun than actually riding them). i'm not going to link to it, but the slides have their own yelp page with 149 reviews. wtf?

+almost done with my big project (kind of). it's due 10/19, but i pretty much have to be done with it by 10/1...i'm feeling pretty good about it, but not good enough to blab about it on the internet. if anything comes of it, i will definitely celebrate here.

+crazy novella's brought one of her piggies to the restaurant for us to butcher with her. today, we made prosciutto, pancetta, soaked the heads for soppressata, and cleaned the loins and tenders for her to take home. tomorrow we'll show her how to make arista, boil the heads, and clean the shoulders for salami. i think she plans to make bacon, pate, and a bunch of other stuff with the other pig. she's a maniac, and i see a LOT of pork in her future. yikes. i'll try to remember my camera for tomorrow so we can take some photos of the heads.

resolution updates




i just thought about what i resolved to do at the beginning of the year. it's time to check in and see where i am:

to take at least three photos a week that i am really happy with.--uh, not so much. i go through fits and spasms. plus, it didn't help that i broke my portrait lens and was a little depressed for a while after that. i replaced it a couple of weeks ago, and i'm back to taking some more photos. i also am a little obsessed with my cheapo elph's video function....

to leave california at least once.--check! i went to hawaii in may. and this week, i'm leaving again. yes!

to become familiar with the sewing machine and make something from the fabulous denyse schmidt book amber gave me we have more pressing projects to work on, but i'm still hoping we can make it up to crockett to have lex's mom give us a tutorial before winter sets in. (what do you think?)

to be more careful about what i eat. i need to eat more vegetables. --i have been soooooo much better about this. conscious produce thoughts float through my head every time i'm hungry.

to write at least two things i am proud of.--one down, one to go. and i hope to be done with the second by the first of october....

to fix the toilet paper holder.--i'm happy to say: done and done.

so i guess my record's not so bad. i've just got to pick up the camera a bit more. and the sewing machine.

(juj's scarves)

every single day i have to remind myself to remain grounded, not to just throw away my computer and get a new one because there are better ones out there, not to feel bad because other people around me are having successes small and large, not to give up completely on everything just because it's been hard lately.

it's difficult, and i guess you'd think i'd learn after enough days of this. but i never do.

am i the only one?


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simple pleasures of the past few days:

seeing all of the tomatoes (endless tomatoes) at green string farm

spending time with sweet philip two days in a row

an unexpected chicken sandwich at bakesale betty

our nice porch dinner of sweet corn on the cob, coleslaw, steak and dirty girl tomatoes, melon and gelato (gosh, that sounds like a lot, but it really wasn't overwhelmingly disgusting)

having juj around

breakfast at tartine:
sometimes, the simplest things are the sweetest:

peanut butter and honey for breakfast

chubby kindergartner's pencils

taking a shower after an unexpected 14-hour day at work

winning a game of dominoes

sleep.



today we made tons of tomato sauce, so i decided to can most of it for the winter.

we save all of our tomato scraps and ends, and all of the overripe tomatoes for sauce. i also buy lots of #2 tomatoes from farms like happy boy and dirty girl just for sauce (the dirty girl tomatoes are so beautiful and tasty right now! go out and buy some!).

we cut the tomatoes in half and roast them in the oven at about 300 degrees F for several hours, stirring them occasionally, until most of the juice has evaporated. this intensifies the flavor, and yields a less watery sauce.

then we cook a bunch of red onions (and i mean A LOT) in olive oil, letting them brown. we add garlic, every basil stem in the restaurant, a ton of olive oil, salt, and of course the roasted tomatoes. we let it all simmer for a few hours until the sauce is sweetsweetsweet. right at the end, we throw in a whole bunch of fresh basil, and then pass the sauce through the food mill.

then, i stuff sterile jars full of basil and pour the hot sauce over it. i process the jars for about 30 minutes, and let them cool at room temperature. it's a lot of work (each batch takes us two days), but the sauce is so sweet and delicious, and this way we can taste a bit of summer in the middle of the coldrainygray winter. it's totally worth it!


i saw andrea at the farmer's market today, and we made a pledge to start posting something every day, even if it's just a photo or a little something.

sometimes, i'll write this big, long thing and then not post it for one reason or another, mostly out of fear.

i'm going to try to get over that.

this is a photo of one of my favorite parts of my house. it's a little shelf over the kitchen sink where i've set many of the things that i love, but don't get to use very often. there's my beehouse tea set, my collection of moroccan tea glasses, some orange flower water that a friend brought from brooklyn, and the vanilla extract the same friend made for christmas two years ago. it should be ready soon....

until recently, the beautiful 200-year old copper pot a friend in italy gave me was also on that shelf, but the earthquake last month shook the pot off the shelf and with it, a few of my special glasses, which were sadly shattered. so i decided to put the pot somewhere else for now. somewhere much closer to the ground.


i've started to carry my dinky little camera around with me. some mediocre pictures are better than no pictures, right?

these are bay leaves and lemon verbena hanging in the back room. pretty much the most beautiful bay leaves ever.

i just wrote a whole grumpy post, then deleted it. then i wrote a grumpier post on a different topic, and deleted that.

maybe it's better not to be grumpy right before i go to sleep (or try to).

goodnight!


i finally feel like summer is hitting its stride. there are berries and peaches everywhere, technicolor-red dirty girl early girls are finally here, and eggplant is incredible (i am in love with the lovely imperial black beauty from riverdog, an heirloom variety that's kind of ribbed like costoluto tomatoes).

today i finished up a couple of lemon verbena projects--making syrup for sodas and lemon verbena liqueur for the bar (and bottling and corking them both. i got to use the oh-so-exciting corking machine). the syrup turned out nicely--i'm really happy with it. it'll be so cool to have homemade soda on the menu (i also have a hankering to make ginger ale and root beer). the liqueur is martian green--witness below:



we're not exactly sure what we'll do with the liquor, but it's actually pretty nice on its own. i was really surprised at how much of the chlorophyll got sucked out of the lemon verbena leaves by the alcohol. it was crazy stuff, though--97% pure alcohol (which i think is actually illegal in california) that our friend who has a local vodka company traded us. i had to dilute it 8 or 9 times. i wasn't really into tasting the stuff after the first few sips, but the cooks were all over it, volunteering left and right. i think a couple of them might have gotten tipsy before dinner even started. i'm kind of lemon verbena-ed out, to tell you the truth. until friday, anyway, when we'll get another box of it and it'll be time to figure out more ways to make money out of weeds.

in the battle between industriousness and procrastination, one of my sides has finally prevailed....

i can't believe how much i got done today. i'm really happy with myself! i wrote about eight letters in italian (!), three in english, took major notes, and did a ton of internet research on a big project that's been hanging over my head for months. it feels so good to have knocked out so much in just one day.

the good thing about procrastination is that i stew so much about stuff that i work through most of the difficult thought processes before i ever actually have to do any work. by the time i sit down to the computer, i've sorted through most of my thoughts and can just type. it's quite freeing, actually.

i'm also really happy because i was planning on recycling a bunch of work for this project, but i kind of made a mental breakthrough that is going to make this project even better than the last one. yay!