A Year of Gratitude

I am fairly contemplative, but rarely set New Year's resolutions. I usually arrive at the New Year out of breath and ready to sleep for 36 hours straight after the December rush. The kids are home, we are spending time with friends and family, and suddenly, it's January 4. Oh well.

But I would like to start this year with a concentration on Gratitude -- marking and developing a constant awareness of God's blessings and gifts and grace. So I'm joining the Gratitude Community, and will work on listing here my 1000 Gifts.



Here goes, in random-thoughts order .... it's so hard to put aside the need to be perfect even in this.

• a loving husband who keeps me honest with myself
• the chance to raise three daughters who are so amazing
• the thousands of photographs of those girls that I'm sorting through and scanning
• sunshine in January
• a bit of land to grow things
• picking tomatoes and oranges in January
• lovely yarn
• one foot surgery behind me, one to go
• medical insurance
• handmade socks
• my new lavender candle
• a husband who will always get the cricket/spider/lizard/whatever out of the house
• a "Eugene de Beauharnais" rose that blooms nine months of the year and smells like I hope heaven smells
• daughters who invite me to watch movies and knit with them
• clean sheets
• a freezer in the garage, filled with food
  
• coffee
• good black tea
• coffee heath-bar crunch ice cream (the best of the best)
• a Mac, any Mac, but the MacBook Pro is really a joy to use
• Photoshop
• my camera
• canning
• my shower, which is everything I ever wanted in a shower
• forgiveness

there! that's a start.

New Year's Soup

A blessed New Year! This soup nourished us today, and kept the tradition going. The photo is blurry but will have to do. S asked me to please remember how I made it so I can make it exactly the same again. (How can you possibly make soup exactly the same again?)

New Year’s Soup

By a Californian of Southern Descent

1 lb black-eyed peas

1 onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

2 hot chiles, minced

(or 2 tbsp chile-garlic paste)

1 bell pepper, minced

1 tbsp “better than bouillon” chicken base

1-2 cups chopped ham

handful swiss chard leaves, chopped

(or substitute fresh spinach)

Rinse and clean black-eyed peas. Put in large pot, cover with water and bring to a boil. Boil one minute, remove from heat and let rest one hour. Meanwhile, chop vegetables. Saute onion, garlic, chiles and bell pepper in a bit of olive oil until soft. Drain peas and return to pot with sautéed vegetables, chopped ham and chicken base. Simmer until peas are soft. (I cook in pressure cooker for five minutes under full pressure, letting pressure drop naturally. This usually cooks the peas sufficiently.) Add chopped swiss chard and simmer until of desired consistency.

This delicious soup will use up the rest of the Christmas ham, while providing you with your traditional New Year’s black-eyed peas and greens.

Serve with cornbread and a bottle of Tabasco sauce. Can be served over a mound of rice for a version of "Hoppin' John." Feel very lucky, healthy and ready for a new year.

Just another knitted object in the bathroom mirror

There are probably 72 billion photos on the web of someone aiming a camera at a bathroom mirror while modeling a newly-knit item. We all try to be nonchalant about it, but it still strikes me as funny.

I finished a small shawl, blocked it, and will wrap it tonight. It's going to a good friend, one who is impossible to buy a gift for, and I hope she will enjoy it. The pattern is Storm Cloud Shawlette, available free here, and is one of my favorites. The pattern is so simple, but a great way to use a couple hundred yards of very very nice yarn, and this yarn is fabulous. It's Alchemy's Synchronicity in Foxglove, 50% merino and 50% silk. It's light and warm and silky, can be scrunched up into a scarf or draped like a shawl. Mmmmmm. I have more yarn and am tempted to make myself one, but it's not a good color for me. But I have dye....

Chili-Garlic Paste

Not a timely post (much more Christmas going on than chilis, but oh well) but I wanted to post this.

When our chili pepper garden took off last summer, I made a Chili-Garlic Paste as a way to store the chilis. It was a great success, and when S brought in the last batch of chilis last month (last post) I made another batch, hopefully to see us through the winter. I actually took some photos which I just found. (It's been a long month.) I mince assorted chiles from the garden with fresh garlic in a food processor, and freeze the mixture in "plops" for later. I use the paste frequently for Asian-inspired dishes, soup or even just chicken for a weekday dinner.

My trusty (antique?) Cuisinart is perfect for this.


Recipe? I cleaned, seeded and cut the chilis in fairly regular pieces and threw in an appropriate quantity of peeled garlic cloves.


Then I processed lightly until the mixture was minced finely, but not pureed. Sometimes I add a touch of olive oil to hold it together, but didn't this time.


I spooned the mixture onto a lined baking sheet in "plops" and froze them for a couple of hours. The plops then went into a freezer-weight zip bag and into the freezer.


I love to take one or two of these out of the bag and throw into some hot olive oil - saves time and is much fresher-tasting than bottled commercial chili paste - and they add a great flavor to chicken breasts or soup. Besides, it's fun.

By the way, our chilis were not hot this year....even the deadly habaneros were just sort of uncomfortably hot, and the jalapenos were downright mild. Only the cayennes were true to form. That made our salsa kind of boring, but the combination worked well for the Chili-Garlic Paste. YMMV.

Last of the Red Hot Peppers

Although a few of the tomatoes are still blooming and setting fruit, the peppers are pooped. S picked the last harvest of the hot peppers and brought in this lovely assortment. The cayennes and jalapenos are now in the dehydrator, and I'll make garlic-chili paste with the anaheims and poblanos. We still have the usual problem of what to do with the habaneros. To my mind, they are only good for giving to friends with studly sons who like to show off how much heat they can take. We're still having fairly warm days, so I hope we have more

tomatoes before it gets chilly.

I had surgery on my left foot last week, and have been recovering at home and getting lots of knitting done. I think I've finished four charity hats and a few Christmas gifts, and have several projects on the needles still. I can move around some now, but can only be on my feet a few minutes at a time. I'm enjoying the rest, but am itching to be outside. I did sit on the patio this afternoon for a while, knitting and enjoying the fresh air (and yes, my foot was up on the bench).

October is for Tomatoes - another experiment

While surfing around the gardening web this summer, I saw references to others in temperate climates rooting some slips of their summer tomatoes to grow a new fall crop. Hmmmm. Our warmest weather is always August - October, so back in August I took a couple of cuttings of Early Girl. Not my favorite tomato obviously (see Mr. Stripey), but a reliable early producer and handy. One cutting did very well, and a month or so later was ready to repot.
I also became fascinated with SIPs - Sub-Irrigated Planters, similar to the Earthbox. I spent a lot of time reading blogs and Gardenweb's Container Gardening forum. My garden was in the ground, but I decided to try to make a SIP for the fall tomato experiment. One blog in particular popped up with encouragement and links, Inside Urban Green. Long story short....I made a planter out of a 18 gallon Sterilite bin from Wal-Mart.
There are many, many photos of these around the web, and instructions much better than mine. Since I wasn't thinking about documenting this except for myself, I didn't take pictures of each step. The basic idea is a waterproof container deep enough to provide a water reservoir in the bottom, a platform between the soil mix and reservoir, a pipe or tube to keep the reservoir filled, and a couple of "wicks" - in my case, yogurt containers which will be filled with the soil mix and will wick moisture up to the main planting chamber. Also used: a throw-away plastic pot, and a piece of PVC pipe. I used the lid of the bin cut with a box cutter to fit into the bin where it would rest on the plastic pot, and cut holes for the yogurt containers to slip into from the top. I also cut a hole for the pipe, cutting an angle on the bottom of the pipe so it would not sit flat on the bottom. I drilled some holes around the pipe below the lid level. The plastic pot provides support, and all the drilled holes allow water to flow through the reservoir. After I took this photo, I also drilled some holes in the platform, in case we get some rain this year and the water needs to drain down, not up.

I drilled a 1/2" hole in the side of the bin, just below the platform. This serves as an overflow drain, and tells me when the reservoir is full.

I then packed the wicks (yogurt containers) with moist potting mix (not potting soil or garden soil), and filled the container with more mix. This mix has fertilizer already in it, so I didn't have to add that to the plan. (There are multiple ways to add fertilizer to SIPs ....I went the easy route.) I planted the rooted Early Girl cutting, set the bin in the sunniest part of the garden, and filled the reservoir. Other than filling the reservoir through the pipe a couple times a week, I've pretty much ignored it for six or seven weeks. I made it out to the garden yesterday to poke around a bit, and discovered the new cutting covered with blossoms, and a few small green tomatoes. If you look at the photo below, you can see the fill pipe. I need to rig up a support, since this plant is obviously growing well. Even more exciting (in our temperate but fickle climate), the plant is setting fruit.

Cost: $4 for the bin, $1 for the pipe, $6 (I think) for the planting mix. I'm hoping for a couple more months of fresh tomatoes! If this works as well as I hope, I'll probably plan a SIP garden for next summer. Or maybe spring....

Goodbye, Mr. Stripey

I will miss you. You've been such a delicious treat, and oh so worth waiting for. I hope to see you again next summer.