Pillow Road

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2009-07-27T00:26:00.001-07:00

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Dreams of Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie

2009-06-04T22:30:00.001-07:00

Nancy made this pie from fresh strawberries and rhubarb from the garden. It was everything you want in a pie -- tart and sweet but blended together. The homemade crust was perfect; the top had a nice bumpy, browned texture, reminding me of moguls.

A dream pie, really.

Nancy made the pie for a dinner we enjoyed just before I left for Maker Faire.

Cut Flowers and Cauliflowers

2009-05-23T18:49:00.001-07:00

I picked iris recently and this cauliflower, which also had a purple tint. They just seemed to go together.

Memorial Day Weekend Sweet Peas

2009-05-23T18:44:00.001-07:00

I seem to have a patriotic bunch of sweet peas, fragrant as can be.

Spring Showers

2009-05-03T11:43:00.001-07:00

This weekend brings spring rain showers, a bit late in the season but very welcome. It reminds me of the kind of ample rain you get in the East Coast in the spring. Everything in the garden is soaking it up. Peas are doing well, and the pea blossoms are beautiful. Many spring flowers seem to pop against the gray sky.

My Easter Basket Overfloweth

2009-04-13T14:40:00.001-07:00

On Saturday, I picked leeks, carrots, onions, chard, mustard greens and spinach for Easter dinner on Sunday. My Easter basket was full.

For Easter Sunday, Nancy made a Daffodil punch and I made Sangria.

Sunday's dinner was beef brisket cooked with leeks, carrots and a jar of canned tomatoes. The full dish was very colorful heading into the oven. The brisket was slow cooked about four hours, (and could have used more time). Then I pureed the vegetables and combined with the liquid from the pan to create a rich, red sauce (like a ragout) that was served with polenta.

I made a spinach salad mixed with red merlot lettuce, grapefruit and strawberries tossed with a citrus dressing. I had two loaves of homemade bread -- the boule recipe from "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day."

Nancy's excellent Bundt Cake was served for dessert. A fine dinner and a great day, with lots of sun and poppies out in bloom.

More pictures on Flickr.

Making Lemon Cheese

2009-04-03T23:00:00.001-07:00

Experimenting with vuvox.com

A Good Look at the Lamb

2009-03-23T11:08:00.001-07:00

It is sunny today and the lamb and *his* mother have come outside, affording me the opportunity to take some good photos.

A Lamb is Born

2009-03-21T22:56:00.001-07:00

I came home to a new lamb. The ewe had given birth to a single lamb during the previous night. Katie found the lamb this morning and she says it's a female. Glenda's not sure. I didn't pick it up yet.

Last year, we had two lambs and both were black. This year's lamb is speckled, but mostly white with a black head, like the ram. She looks a bit bigger than the either of the lambs from last year.

Beautiful and wondrous!

Six Eggs from a Badling of Ducks

2009-03-14T10:57:00.001-07:00

When I came home from three days in San Jose, I collected six duck eggs. That's three times the total number of eggs I collected from my ducks to date. Now, ducks don't lay eggs in one place like chickens do -- at least not this group

-- ok, I bothered to look up what you call a group of ducks on Wikipedia:

And I found a dopping of ducks (diving), a plump of ducks (flying), a paddling of ducks (on water) and otherwise a badling, a flush, a raft, a sord, a team, or a brace of ducks. Who would have thought that there was such an extensive menu of options? I'm going to go with "badling", which is not meant to be pejorative -- my ducks behave nicely and now they are productive.

But I was saying also that you don't find duck eggs gathered in one spot, which is how a peep of chickens lay their eggs. Duck eggs are not evenly distributed either. They are simply spread about and you have to hunt for them. I felt like a kid at Easter placing one egg in a basket and going to search for another.

These duck eggs were covered in mud and grass; they needed some cleaning to look as good as they do in the photo above. One delight is the soft pastel colors of the shells, some tinted pink and others a light green. Duck eggs are bigger than chicken eggs, and so are the yolks with a deeper, darker yellow. Roughly they taste the same but I will be trying them out in different recipes.

To conclude, some words from Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sir Nigel", which seems to play with peasant/pheasant speech:

"Nay, nay, lad, it is indeed sad to see how little you know. Your hands, Nigel, were always better than your head. No man of gentle birth would speak of a herd of swine; that is the peasant speech. If you drive them it is a herd. If you hunt them it is other. What call you them, then, Edith?"

"Nay, I know not," said the girl listlessly. A crumpled note brought in by a varlet was clinched in her right hand and her blue eyes looked afar into the deep shadows of the roof.

"But you can tell us, Mary?"

"Surely, sweet sir, one talks of a sounder of swine."

The old Knight laughed exultantly. "Here is a pupil who never brings me shame!" he cried. "Be it lore - of chivalry or heraldry or woodcraft or what you will, I can always turn to Mary. Many a man can she put to the blush."

"Myself among them," said Nigel.

"Ah, lad, you are a Solomon to some of them. Hark ye! only last week that jack-fool, the young Lord of Brocas, was here talking of having seen a covey of pheasants in the wood. One such speech would have been the ruin of a young Squire at the court. How would you have said it, Nigel?"

"Surely, fair sir, it should be a nye of pheasants."

"Good, Nigel - a nye of pheasants, even as it is a gaggle of geese or a badling of ducks, a fall of woodcock or a wisp of snipe.

A Leek-y Mop

2009-03-07T14:31:00.001-08:00

Speaking of shaggy, the roots of the leek that I pulled this morning sure looked like the head of a mop.

A Portrait of an Ewe

2009-03-07T14:25:00.001-08:00

Our ewe is expecting. We should have lambs soon. Her coat is a bit soggy and shaggy from the week of rain.

Mustard's in the Air

2009-03-04T22:09:00.001-08:00

Starting sometime in February, we begin to see mustard flowering everywhere, its yellow blossoms covering entire fields or found in patches between rows of vines or nearby apple trees. However, what is most noticeable about mustard is the subtle, very delicate scent that comes as such a surprise this time of year. It seems to be the only thing in the air and it carries the promise of Spring.

Before moving to Sebastopol, my wife and I came from Boston to visit in February 1989. I remember mostly identifying this sweet scent in the air. I didn't know what it was then, but this scent still makes California seem fresh and inviting, a counterpoint to the winter weather in the East where February often seems like the longest month of the year.

I have mustard growing in the yard.

I have mustard greens growing in the garden. Mustard is a brassica, related to broccoli, cauliflower and kale, which also grow well this time of year. Some mustard greens have very large purplish leaves and a sharply bitter taste that I like, a bit like a moment of horseradish. I was also growing mizuna as a salad green. It went to seed in February and its smaller yellow flowers have such a nice scent that I cut off the tops and put them in a vase in the kitchen.

That's Amore

2009-02-26T09:49:00.001-08:00

"When the moon meets the sky, like a big pizza pie, that's amore."

I made pizza the other night and I can't help thinking of the song that Dean Martin made famous.

For pizza dough, I followed the recipe in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Any recipe will do really. What I like about this book's approach is that you throw together the ingredients for the dough in advance and let it sit in the refrigerator until you need it -- up to two weeks. I made the dough in the morning and let it sit out for a few hours and then put it in the refrigerator until I was ready to make pizza. Thus, you can think of making pizza as a two-step process, and since one step can done in advance, the actual making of pizza takes less than half an hour.

This dough had about two cups of whole wheat flour, about 1/3 of the total. I rolled it out to about a ten-inch pie.

I used a jar of tomato sauce that I canned last fall, which with a little salt and oregano had a nice consistency. I added a few toppings such as mushrooms and onions, then topped it with mozzarella cheese. I preheated the oven for twenty minutes to as high as it would go -- over 500 degrees. Inside was a pizza stone and I was ready to bake a pizza.

About eight minutes later, my pizza was done. The crust was firm and bumpy, having risen during baking. The biggest problem with homemade pizza is a soggy center portion of crust, caused by too much sauce or a crust that's too thin. This crust was somewhere between thin and thick.

I placed the pizza in the oven and pulled it out using a "pizza peel", a flat surface connected to a long handle. I bought a pizza peel because when I was baking bread, I had trouble transferring the dough from a bread board to the baking stone. If you don't get the dough off the board cleanly, it folds in on itself, and collapses. It's not a fatal problem but the loaf suffers.

Last weekend, I went to a kitchen store to look for a pizza peel and I struck up a conversation with an older woman who recommended a metal pizza peel over a wooden one. It's much lighter, she said. She also told me to use a lot of cornmeal on the peel to prevent sticking. I wasn't using enough. She said that she was baking bread and making pizza using this great new book, "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day." "So am I," I said proudly, as excited as she was. (Moments like these are rare in shops, but you don't get them at all shopping online.)

Here's a half-white, half-wheat loaf that I baked, a six-inch free form round from 1 pound of dough.

Blossoms

2009-02-22T16:43:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, before the rains started, I saw blossoms emerging on the plum trees. This one holds its cup-like shape.

Unbeatable Eggs

2009-02-21T14:52:00.001-08:00

My friend, DC, was asking recently about raising your own chickens. He wondered if you could tell the difference in the quality of the eggs: taste, color, or texture. "No, not really," I said to him. Although I've heard people rave about the differences, I've thought the claims to be exaggerated. I haven't found my own eggs to be dramatically different from good quality eggs in our market. However, some groceries have cheap "factory-fresh eggs", and the yolks lack the color and size of what I've seen from our own chickens.

I was reminded of the conversation this morning when I fetched eggs from the chicken house. When I cracked open the eggs into a bowl, I really noticed the yolks, and how big and bright they were. So for today, I can say that the eggs from my chickens are unbeatable.

But not so unbeatable that I couldn't proceed to do just that with a whisk. With a handful of spinach from the garden, I made a spinach and cheese omlette for two. That plate made me truly grateful that I have chickens. Vive le difference!

Artichokes and Frogspawn

2009-02-19T23:12:00.001-08:00

A few weeks ago, I visited a friend's house in Freestone, an off-the-grid home powered by solar. Walking the grounds, I admired a beautiful, vigorous artichoke plant that I wished was in my yard. (I have smaller plants which are frequently attacked by gophers.) This picture makes the artichoke look even bigger, as I shot from below, looking up the hill at it.

They also had a small stone-walled pond near their house. Inside it were clusters of frog eggs, so called frogspawn (look it up in wikipedia). You can see them near the center bottom of the photo below. It won't be long before there are tadpoles swimming in the pond.

The tadpoles will develop into night-singing Pacific Tree Frogs.

Rainy Days

2009-02-16T11:03:00.001-08:00

We returned to rain. As much as I enjoyed New York City, visiting museums, meeting lots of interesting people (including my daughter) and going to the opera, all of which felt good for the soul, I'm happy to return home, even with rain here to greet us. I walked around in the rain this morning and I felt everything had changed around me, and this was my chance to notice it.

We've not had enough rain. Last year, I had recorded 18.92 inches of rain already, compared to 5.38 inches this year to date. The problem was January, which had only .92 this year, compared to 9.15 inches last year. The current storm has produced 2.55 inches (as of 10 am on Monday) and so far in February, we've had 4.46 inches of rain. We need more days like this.

The rain is beautiful, creating its own world in so many ways. The rhythm of rain falling on the roof is serene, one that recalls for me afternoons with winter rains in LA and napping as a child. The rain wants in.

The trees upon the rim of hills are whitening, blurred through mist, merging with the sky. The pasture is spongy under foot; the tracks created by a horse have become errant strokes of mud across the nibbled grass.

The cabbage plants, like small children not seen in a while, have really grown up while I was gone. They seem sturdy, ready to come on. On rainy days, there is less of a gap between the high and low temperatures, today running between 48 and 44 degrees. On February 2nd, a day when we had no rain, the high was 67 degrees and the low was 32. My guess is cabbage prefers rainy days.

Garlic is also doing well. Like onions, it seems to grow so gradually over the winter that I wonder if it's going to survive. Then it starts coming on, growing faster as spring closes in.

Some of the shrubs have begun to bud. I saw this newly emerging leaf on my walk. How it stands out, small but aspirational, extending itself like a relaxing hand against the grey, angular sky.

Leeks

2009-02-04T10:03:00.001-08:00

I picked the first leeks of the season this morning. They are destined for a potato-leek soup tonight.

Chickens and Ducks

2009-01-31T20:52:00.001-08:00

Poultry and wildfowl census: three Australorps out and about the yard and five Rouen ducks rounded up in their pen.

We got our first duck egg this week.

The Time Bank

2009-01-25T11:07:00.001-08:00

I came home Friday night late from work and in about ten minutes I had prepared a delicious lite meal. Nancy was surprised and I must admit, without seeming to brag, that I surprised myself. I took a round of goat cheese, rolled it breadcrumbs, diced a shallot and put it on top of the cheese and warmed it in the oven. I went out to the greenhouse, grabbed some leaves of several different kinds of lettuce and soon had a salad. I went to the pantry, grabbed a jar of tomato sauce, added some water and salt, and put it in a pan on the stove. Once the cheese warmed up, I put it on top of the salad, and poured the tomato soup into mugs. Everything in the dinner was homemade.

What made this ten-minute dinner possible was work that I had done much earlier. I made the goat cheese two days before. The lettuce was planted a month ago and tended regularly ever since, protected from the elements in the greenhouse. The tomatoes were planted last summer, and I canned several gallons of tomato sauce in September.

I got to thinking how this ten-minute dinner was like cashing in a savings. The earlier work I had done was essentially about storing time -- and energy. I was making this time-savings available to myself somewhere in the future. It is like having a time bank. The benefits of the work you've done today or in the past can be redeemed in the future.

Of course, our ancestors would have understood the concept of a time bank even more instinctively than we do today. I could have had an "instant" dinner. I could have shopped for these ingredients and brought them home and made the dinner just as quickly. I could have had this dinner prepared for me. In either case, I would be paying for other people's time whereas this personal time bank is about managing my own investment.

First Pour: Chocolate Stout

2009-01-25T10:44:00.001-08:00

I brewed this batch of beer two weeks ago today, and last night had a first taste of this stout.

The main ingredient that makes this beer so dark is a chocolate or deep brown roasted malt. It's very smooth, low alcohol, and it starts out with a nice head.

There's a backstory to this stout. I brewed this batch alone -- without Ryan's usual help. I was getting somewhat frustrated by the end of the process and more than a little tired after seven or eight hours of intermittent work. It was getting cold and late in the day. I had promised my wife and daughter that we would go to the movies. I was running up against a deadline, and needed to finish it up and do the requisite clean-up. I felt that all day I made a bunch of mistakes, which I had to pay for in time. For example, siphoning was hard, with a lot of starts and stops as the hop-flakes kept clogging the siphoning tube. Instead of the brew flowing into the carboy easily, and quickly, I was getting transfering the brew in smaller and smaller batches. I was sure I was messing up this batch, putting at risk the entire day's work and ultimately, the beer wouldn't turn out right.

So, the unexpected joy of this chocolate stout is that it beat my falling expectations -- it turned out just fine, despite my fumblings. And we did make the movie that night, which we very much enjoyed: Milk.

Secret Gardens

2009-01-07T22:46:00.001-08:00

I read this piece by Dana Goodyear in the New Yorker today about cell-phone novels, a phenomenon in Japan called keitai shosetsu. These are the cheap, lurid paperback novels of our day. Their authors compose the novels on cell-phones and share them under pseudonyms. They don't wish to be known. It's another insight into the amazingly obsessive-creative Japanese culture.

Goodyear's article has a wonderful quote from Jakucho Setouchi, an elderly woman who is a Buddhist monk and a novelist come to judge a competition. She says:

I'm eighty-six years old now and I don't usually get surprised by things and I don't get so excited, right? But how do you stay excited by life? Keep secrets.

I sometimes feel that we live in an age that doesn't keep secrets. People say everything that's on their mind as it comes to them. They blog, chat and twitter. They speak in public on cell phones as though all conversations, and the relationships behind them, are the subject of public interest. It's as though a culture tuned to TV imagines the camera is always on them, and it's a matter of how much gets recorded.

The Japanese seem to know how to nurture and value a private life. Public life is well-ordered because there's a lot that's private behind it. All cannot be revealed; it takes time and we must be deliberate about what we say. We are lucky to have our own private world, and live in our imagination, and see how it finds the means of expression over time.

Keeping a garden is like having one's own secret world to care for and explore. A garden is a proxy for this private world. It's both ordinary and extraordinary. As the gardener, I get to develop it and discover its delights and mysteries, which are mine as well to keep. It's full of little surprises that one finds repeatedly, day to day, and which allows one, as Setouchi says, to stay excited by life.

The photos are from a family trip to Japan in 2005.

First Steps in Cheesemaking

2009-01-04T23:52:00.001-08:00

I bought Nancy cheese-making equipment for Christmas. (I know, I do tend to buy things I'd like for myself but it wasn't her only gift.) I started making some basic soft cheeses. The first was a goat cheese. I bought the goat milk at the store, though the milk comes from a Sebastopol dairy.

Essentially, you add a culture to the milk along with rennet. The curds form, separating from the whey. The picture below shows the batch ready to be poured into molds, and drain further.

After they've drained for about twelve hours, I took the cheese out of the molds and dried it. Here are four rounds of "Chevre" about ready to be wrapped up. Salt is sprinkled on all sides.

It was pretty much ready to eat in two days from start to finish. Nancy and all who tried it thought the cheese was very tasty. The texture was especially good. I made another batch of soft cheese using cow's milk, which also turned out well. When it was done, I added some herbs to the cheese as well.

All in all, at least at this beginner's level, cheesemaking is not so hard but, like baking bread, it requires time and attention.

Full Freezer

2009-01-04T19:02:00.001-08:00

Not everything fit in a 14.3 cu ft freezer but I put in as much as I could. It's somewhat organized with the best cuts at the top. Bottom drawer is ground beef.

I had another small freezer I filled with more ground beef.