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November 25th, 2009
10:36 am - Thanksgiving!
Those of you who know the version of me who lived in Baltimore will be surprised. I'm cooking for Thanksgiving.
We will be having
-Turkey with apple stuffing: we have leftover apples from my canning extravaganzas
-Garlic mashed potatoes
-Squash
-Peas
-Bread: made in the bread machine
-Pumpkin pie from scratch! I just took the pumpkin out of the oven.
It's just me and TD. He has stuff to do in town this weekend, so we weren't going to take a long trip down to my parent's. Then I talked to my mom and we decided that it would be better if I came down next weekend... and my dad is out of town anyhow. So we're home cooking for ourselves. Sadly we haven't found anyone who wants to come over (and is in the state), but on the plus side we will have enough left-overs for the rest of the year.
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September 25th, 2009
11:01 am - Canning 2009.5 - Tomatoes!
The same day that I picked up the pears from the Craigslist lady, I also went to a U-pick place to get tomatoes (Karam Farms down near Oregon City). They sent me out into the fields with two 5-gallon buckets and I picked "Early Girl" tomatoes. There were BILLIONS of tomatoes out there, but many of them were already very bruised or rotten, so the picking took a little while. Not too bad, though.
Two 5-gallon buckets of tomatoes turns out to be roughly 50 pounds of tomatoes. Saying "50 pounds of tomatoes" sounds way larger than they looked in their buckets... but 50 pounds of tomatoes is a CRAPLOAD of tomatoes to can.
I couldn't get to the tomatoes on pear-canning day, then I had to work all of Tuesday. Tomatoes got canned on Wednesday. They were slightly the worse for being stored for two days, but we put them down in our basement storage area (wrapped in garbage bags) and they came through ok.
Here's what I ended up canning:
1. Quartered tomatoes packed in juice: This recipe was taken from online and sort of combined with the recipe in my Ball canning book. Basically, the tomatoes were peeled by dipping into boiling water, then quartered and cored. About 1/6 of them were mashed in a pot and brought to a boil, then the rest of the quarters were added and boiled for 5 minutes. Then they were packed into jars. The recipe called for 10lbs of tomatoes (I started with about 11 because some of them had bad spots that I needed to cut off) and produced 4 pints of canned tomatoes.
2. Seasoned tomato sauce: This is from the Ball Complete Book of Preserving (pg 364), which my mother got me for my birthday. This was actually the first thing that I started because it needed to cook for so long. Tomatoes get washed and quartered, then a few go in the pot to start boiling and they get mashed. As they boil, other quartered tomatoes get added to the pot and they get cooked for about 2 hours (with onions and spices). Then, it all got ran through the food mill to separate out the skins and seeds. This worked quite well - better than anything else I've ever put through the food mill. After that, the sauce gets boiled some more and then packed into jars. This recipe also started with 10lbs of tomatoes and it made 5 pints of sauce.
3. Herbed seasoned tomatoes: Also from the Ball Complete Book, this is basically the same recipe as the first one, except that spices were added to each jar. The tomatoes have floated to the tops of their jars and all the spices are sitting on top of the tomatoes. It's fairly funny-looking, but will hopefully be tasty. I started with 36 tomatoes (or maybe 38, rounding up) and made 6 pints.
4. Tomato-basil sauce: From my Ball Blue Book of Preserving. Onions and garlic are sauteed, then washed quartered tomatoes get added to the pot. This is all boiled for about 20 minutes, then run through the food mill. After that, I added about 1/4 cup of frozen basil. We had gotten the basil from our CSA and weren't going to eat it all, so I ran it through the food processor and then froze it in roughly tablespoon servings. I think I may have overshot the basil on this recipe because I was supposed to be making a half a recipe, but added the whole amount of basil. It tasted ok when I sampled it, though. Half a recipe starts with 10lbs of tomatoes and produced 5 pints. I think that I didn't boil this down enough because it looks pretty thin in the jars, but I figure that I can always boil it down some more when we eat it.
5. Basic tomato sauce: From the Complete Book of Preserving (pg 262). At this point in the evening, I was tired of working with tomatoes. I took the rest of them, washed them and quartered them and boiled them until they were soft. Then they went through the food mill and were boiled until I was tired of boiling them and they were thicker (it's still a fairly thin sauce). This started with probably slightly less than 20lb of tomatoes, but I didn't weigh them. It was just all the ones that were left. It ended up making 3 quart jars and 1 pint jar worth of plain sauce.
Something to note is that you have to add 1 tbsp of lemon juice to all the jars (2 to quart jars), which uses up WAY more lemon juice than I had originally anticipated. I don't know that I've used as much lemon juice in my entire life as I did canning these tomatoes.
According to the U-pick lady, they will have tomatoes in season until probably close to the end of October. That means that I can make another try at canning tomatoes with a different type.
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September 21st, 2009
10:12 pm - Canning 2009.4
Today's theme was pears. I found a lady on Craigslist who was selling two bags of pears for $4 each. She had picked them up off the ground while cleaning up a neighbor's yard. I was a bit skeptical of the "off the ground" part, but thought for $4 I would check them out.
They turned out to be an excellent bargain. Many of them were bruised, but I used those for pear butter and jams and just cut the bruised parts off. There were enough that weren't bruised to make a batch of sliced pears.
For reference later on:
1. Batch of pear jam from the recipe in the box of pectin. Apparently you can't make reduced sugar pear jam, or at least there isn't a recipe for it in the box. The full-sugar pear jam is EXCELLENT tasting and beautiful in color.
2. Batch of pear butter from the pickyourown.com website. It uses a little bit of orange zest and orange juice, which makes it quite tasty. This starts with 8 quarts of pear sauce, which cooks down to probably around 4. It takes HOURS to cook down, so this was actually the first one I started today, but not the first one that made it into jars. I put the whole batch through my food mill and fed the stuff that wouldn't go through to the worms. It's a very nice texture this time.
3. Sliced pears in apple juice. I read online that you don't really need to can sliced pears in sugar syrup to preserve them - apparently just apple juice (or even water) is fine. The ones that didn't make it into jars got eaten with cottage cheese and were very nice. The leftover apple juice that the pears were cooked in is now in the fridge waiting to be a tasty beverage tomorrow morning.
4. Pear and raspberry jam from one of the books my mother gave me for my birthday. The recipe was a bit vague ("6 medium pears, peeled and cored"), but I tried it anyhow. It's the first jam I've done that used liquid pectin. It seemed to be gelling fine in the pot as it cooled, so hopefully it'll work out, vague recipe and all.
I also went and picked tomatoes this morning (after picking up the pears). They were both down south by Oregon City and I didn't feel like driving down there again on Wednesday. The tomatoes are in garbage bags sitting in our storage (which is in the basement of one of the buildings). I'm hoping that they'll keep till Wednesday. The pears wouldn't have, so the tomatoes got bumped down the to-do list.
No pictures of this whole canning extravaganza.
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August 15th, 2009
August 13th, 2009
09:54 pm - this summer's canning, 2.0
Today, my friend and I went and picked peaches and cucumbers (and a few ears of corn) at Sauvie Island Farms.
( Read more... )
Earlier today, I compared myself to a squirrel what with the storing of food and all.,
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June 11th, 2009
12:50 pm - Meme
I posted a life update so that I wouldn't ONLY be posting a meme. But I think it's a good one. You're supposed to fill in your answers so that I know more about you. If you don't, I won't be offended. If you do, I'll be interested.
1. Your Middle Name:
2. Age:
3. Single or Taken:
4. Favorite Movie:
5. Favorite Song or Album:
6. Favorite Band/Artist:
7. Dirty or Clean:
8. Tattoos and/or Piercings:
9. Do we know each other outside of LJ?
10. What's your philosophy on life?
11. Is the bottle half-full or half-empty?
12. Would you keep a secret from me if you thought it was in my best interest?
13. What is your favorite memory of us?
14. What is your favorite guilty pleasure?
15. Tell me one odd/interesting fact about you:
16. You can have three wishes (for yourself, so forget all the 'world peace etc' malarky) - what are they?
17. Can we get together and make a cake?
18. Which country is your spiritual home?
19. What is your big weakness?
20. Do you think I'm a good person?
21. What was your best/favorite subject at school?
22. Describe your accent
23. If you could change anything about me, would you?
24. What do you wear to sleep?
25. Trousers or skirts?
26. Cigarettes or alcohol?
27. If I only had one day to live, what would we do together? (If you have no idea, just say something crazy, it'll entertain me!)
28. Will you repost this so I can fill it out for you?
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12:30 pm - Life Update.
I am obviously currently not a journalling person. It always seems to me that there's not that much going on, but then when I consider what people would have missed about my life if they just read my journal, I guess there is quite a bit. So here you are.
Yesterday was my last day of high school students. Potentially ever. I don't want to totally exclude it as something I might do in the future, mostly because I'm not completely sure of my ability to get a full-time community college teaching job. High school has good benefits and pays for you to have a summer off. Part-time community college has enough benefits for me as a single person with no child, but doesn't pay for any time that I'm not working. The major benefit of community college is that it doesn't involve high school students.
My seniors this past year graduated last week. They were all awesome and I was extremely proud to watch them walk across the stage. That's one of the things that I enjoy most about high school - some of the kids astonish you with who they are. Some of them are well worth establishing relationships with and some of them make me feel lucky to have known them. They almost make up for the ones who are disrespectful, closed-minded, and totally unwilling to learn anything. Almost.
So thus ends the era of me being a high school teacher. I had some major disagreements with how my administration ran things this year. That was enough to tip the balance in favor of me quitting. One of the teachers that I work with keeps saying to the other teachers that she "told them so" - meaning that she told them before I was hired that they shouldn't hire someone with a PhD because I was almost certainly going to run off to greener pastures. I sincerely don't feel that's true. I in now way went into this high school teaching job with the idea that I was going to leave it and go teach community college. I think that if I had been as happy at this high school as I was at my high school in Baltimore, I would still be teaching high school. I just didn't respect what was happening at this school in the same way. The administration here did some things that I thought were ridiculous and at no point during my entire tenure did I feel that they actually cared about me (as a teacher, as an individual or as someone with an advanced degree). They didn't seem to value what I would have been able to bring to the school. And so, feeling that certain situations were unfair and feeling unvalued, I chose to depart.
This summer, I'm teaching at the CC part time. This situation seems to be acceptable to people who ask me what I'll be doing next. Apparently because it's summer, I'm not obligated to have full-time employment. In the fall, I'll still be teaching CC part time. That's when people become confused. They almost always ask if I'm going to start working there full time. Well, yes. That would be awesome. Unfortunately, community colleges are very heavy on part time instructors. They don't hire people full time because it's much more expensive (in that they have to pay them a lot more AND they have to pay better benefits). There ARE no full time community college teaching jobs. It's not that I don't want them. And those few that there have been have not hired me. No, just because I have lots of degrees doesn't make me immediately the most qualified applicant. I've applied to 12 or 15 full time college or community college teaching jobs in the past two years and have gotten very pleasant rejection emails from most of them. From the rest of them, I haven't heard anything.
I've decided to take an anatomy class at the CC in the fall. They will pay the tuition, so all I have to pay is fees and for books (which I'm hoping to borrow from another instructor). I've never taken an anatomy class before. It'll be educational and will give me something to do when I'm not teaching. Yes, there are still classes I haven't taken. No, I'm not going to get any other degrees.
Me and TD are doing fine. We live together very well. We discuss the status of our relationship every month. It goes something like this:
Me: We should talk about our relationship.
Him: I like you.
Me: I like you too. I guess I'll keep you for a while longer.
*we kiss*
The dog is getting old and slow. Also, fat. Other than that, he's uneventful. Right now, he's laying on his bed with the tip of his tongue sticking out and his eyes rolled back. He's twitching his paws as he dreams something of great doggy importance.
The degu are plump, furry and quick. I find them delightful even when they choose to eat holes in the carpet or nibble on the woodwork. They provide me with endless hours of entertainment.
The chinchilla is also entertaining. Never having really met another chinchilla, I'm unsure if having only three brain cells is a characteristic of the entire species of chinchilla or of our chinchilla specifically. I hypothesized last night that there are either no predators in their native environment or that they escape from them purely by virtue of their intense cuteness.
I got a new laptop. It's very shiny and sexy. I'm expecting to attract lots of hot chicks by virtue of my increased sexiness with it on my lap.
Today, I go play golf with my (soon to be former) coworkers. Mostly, it's a chance to drink and laugh at each other. Should be fun.
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April 24th, 2009
09:15 am - No on HR 669
There's a bill that just finished in subcommittee hearings that I want everyone to know about. Right now, it looks like the bill isn't going to get out of the subcommittee, but it might. So I need your help. Please learn at least a little bit about this bill and, if you care (or if you like ME), email your representatives so they know that if it comes to a vote, you are opposed.
HR 669, the Non-native Wildlife Invasion Prevention Act, would ban all non-native species from being bred, sold or transported in the US. The idea behind the act is a good one: non-native species are bad and can wreck havoc on an ecosystem. However, the act itself is totally unwieldy. Don't get me wrong, I'm totally for reduction of invasive species... this bill just isn't the way to do it.
Pets currently owned would be grandfathered in (as long as you can prove that you owned the pet before the act was passed), however those pets couldn't be transported across state lines. When their current owner died, the pet would no longer be exempt and would be euthanized. Anyone who couldn't prove they owned their pet before the act was passed would be required to have the pet euthanized.
Obviously, if you know me, you know why I am strongly opposed to this bill. Dogs and cats would be exempted from the bill, but degus and chinchillas, not to mention gerbils, most types of aquarium fish, and almost all reptiles, would be on the chopping block.
If you google HR 669, you'll find a bunch of websites (all against the bill). Here's one that I thought was specifically helpful.
Also, try No on HR669 which has a link to email your congressperson.
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April 18th, 2009
08:57 pm - Fun, fun!
Tonight, we went to see Roller Derby (me, TD and my mom). It was lots of fun. I think we even mostly have the rules down at this point.
One of my students from last term is on one of the teams.
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April 8th, 2009
10:29 am - gardening
on Tuesday, TD came home early from work and I decided that we should go through the worm compost. 2/3 of the bin had been sitting without addition of new food for a month or two, and I figured it was probably ready for use. Also, it was a beautiful day to be outside working in the "garden".
I had walked down to Home Depot with my wheeled box and picked up some plants (tomato, strawberry, rosemary, several kinds of flowers) and I wanted to plant them.
We emptied out the pots from last year (still containing dead plant tufts) and TD sorted through and picked out most of the roots. The roots were put aside to go back into the compost bin after we'd sorted it. While he was doing that, I harvested some dried seeds from some of the old plants. More on them later. We dug out the compost scoop by scoop and put it into a large rubbermaid bin. As we went, we picked out most of the worms and put them back into the "new" side of the compost bin.
We dumped the compost on a tarp on the lawn next to the old soil from last years pots. We sorted through the compost again, picking out more worms. I wanted to minimize the number of worms added to containers because I don't think there is enough space for them in there and we need them in the bin, anyhow. I mixed the old soil with relatively worm-free compost (in probably a roughly 1:1 ratio) and used it to plant my plants.
We added new bedding to the worm bin and mixed it all together. We also added a couple of scoops of the old compost that we'd taken out, just in case the new stuff in the bin wasn't decayed enough yet for the worms to eat. The unused relatively worm-free compost went back into the large rubbermaid bin to wait until I need it to plant something else.
This morning, I was poking around online and reading about container gardening. Someone had posted instructions to make seed starter pots out of newspaper. The basic idea is that you wrap the paper around a wine bottle and then fold the ends up to make a little round paper pot. Filling it with soil gives it enough structural integrity that it doesn't unwrap and you can plant seeds in it. Once they sprout, the whole thing goes into a larger pot because the newspaper will degrade rapidly and the seedling's roots can poke right through it.
I didn't have a wine bottle, or newspaper, so I took sheets from a phone book and wrapped them around a spice container (diameter roughly 2 inches). I filled them with relatively worm-free compost from the large rubbermaid bin and planted some of the collected dried seeds. 13 tiny paper pots are now sitting in a round baking pan (we only rarely bake, and never round items) on a small table near the sliding glass door. We'll see if any of them sprout. If not, I will go out and buy some seeds to plant in them. I believe that the seeds are from marigolds and basil. I'm pretty sure about the basil... the marigolds are somewhat more in doubt.
I'm feeling quite ecologically sound and very much like an urban gardener this morning. I'm headed out to Fred Meyer to purchase a hose (the apartment next door has an outside faucet), another large pot and something else to plant in it (possibly another tomato, maybe a bean of some sort). I think that I'll be able to grow good stuff using my worm compost, then at the end of the season, we can compost this soil and mix it with new worm compost next spring.
Even the degu are contributing to the process: most of the new bedding that we mixed into the worm bin is either paper that they've shredded or litter (mixed with hay) from their cages. They're quite efficient shredders of old phone book pages, and it makes awesome worm bedding. I also used their left-over phonebook pages to make my seed starter pots.
Current Mood:  pleased
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