My Dog is Chelsea

Not that this should come as any surprise whatsoever, but being a homeowner is expensive.

I love my house and I’m glad I bought it and I simply LOVE not having a landlord calling me up to yell at me for things I didn’t do, like the time she found a microwave by the garbage and accused me of dumping it there. (I didn’t even have a microwave, and it was a 10-unit building with open access to the garbage through the alley. It could have been left there by just about anyone in Portland.)

But being your own crazy landlord comes at a price, namely, in the last week alone: $1,400 worth of heating oil, $500 to replace a broken window, $80 to figure out why the hell the water has started to taste like mildew (and still does, $80 later). Suddenly my first-time homebuyer tax credit isn’t seeming quite large enough.

And now, my friends, it seems that the MDIC household will be needing a new hot water heater, which is likely the cause of the mildew odor and the weird white sediment that’s plugging up the water pressure in the shower and the kitchen sink.

Le sigh.

I signed up for this, I guess. And I’m not complaining—I’m glad I did. I’m just saying: being a homeowner is expensive.

File that one under “Yeah, DUH.”

I’ve been thinking for some time now that I should create an MDIC spinoff blog that focuses exclusively on food. But then I pinch myself and remember — oh wait! Last time I checked I didn’t have time for one blog, let alone two.

So, there you have it, my waning readership, you’ll just have to deal with posts about food interspersed with posts about… whatever it is that I write about when I’m not talking about food. At least I’ll throw in some pictures for good measure and easy scanning.

Behold a random picture of the last tomato harvest of the 2010 season, inserted for easy scanning.

Got home from work today and figured, to hell with cooking, I’m going to defrost some sauce I made back when the tomato bed wasn’t a goopy tangle of dead vines. I’ll cook up some penne and toss it with parmesan and call it good. Lazy and easy and delicious.

Next thought: but maybe I should bake some bread to go with it?

More scanning ease! Here we have lamb shanks and cornbread cooked over the fire pit in the backyard. Made this back in August or so.

Luckily, just as I’d had that ridiculous thought, Martin had been perusing through our free copy of This Week, a painful-to-read “newspaper” that the Oregonian delivers to our door on Monday evenings in hopes that we’ll be inspired by the dreadful advice columns to subscribe to the actual paper. (Somehow, we never are.) The one bonus of This Week – other than providing a free source of poop bags — is that it contains selections from FOODday, the Oregonian’s rather respectable food section.

When Martin overheard me musing to myself about bread and the stand mixer and where did I put the yeast?, he suggested that perhaps I instead try THIS recipe, noting that it would be a great use of the two small jalapeños left in the garden:

Jalapeño cheddar beer quickbread!

So I did. And it was quite delicious. And much easier/faster/reasonable than baking bread on whim after a long day of work.

Really, the only good way to consume a PBR: bake with it.

Cheesy crusty deliciousness.

Soft, moist, spicy and cheesy. Most excellent!

Notes:

• Didn’t have whole wheat flour (the ants ate it) so I substituted a cup + a TBSP of unbleached white.
• The recipe says you can choose between a quarter cup of oatmeal or a quarter cup of cornmeal, which seems a little odd to me. I went with cornmeal — because if cinnamon’s not involved, I see no reason to bring oatmeal into the picture. I was out of yellow cornmeal, so I used blue cornmeal instead, which I have no idea why I have in my cupboard. But I do.
• I added shredded cheddar to the top before sticking it in the oven, because I just love the way crusty baked cheddar looks.
• Left in the pepper seeds for extra spiciness. The result is that some bites are spicier than others, but I kind of like that.
• I might cut back on the beer just a smidge. Or choose a slightly more distinguished brand than PBR, which kind of reminds me of day-old backwash. Every so often, I can taste the PBR in this bread, and that’s not a good thing.
• Other than that, it was perfect, and made an excellent accompaniment to the penne and marinara. Would be particularly delicious with my favorite bean chili recipe, which I’ll share one day when the mood strikes.

It’s now been more than six months since I bought the house. And have I finished unpacking? Duh. Of course not.

Which is nothing to beat myself up over. We all have a few of those boxes that just seem to linger in the basement, collecting dust and filled with who-knows-what, because we can’t bring ourselves to bother unpacking them. I am sure my boxes will still be sitting there in 5 years.

What’s in them?

Who knows.

I do hope that at least one of them contains my father’s ketchup recipe. I have looked in all other logical locations for it—in between pages of my cookbooks, in bags of random papers I didn’t know what to do with when we were packing, on my bookshelves, in my hideously unorganized collection of clipped recipes, in my desk drawers, under the couch, etc.

It would kill me if I lost it.

But I did find this:

It’s a can of chocolate-covered ants that my mother found in the same Great American Kitchen Purge that turned up the old ketchup recipe. Apparently my father had been holding on to this can for years. It’s just a bit smaller than a can of tuna fish.

The ants are probably about 40 years old. Crazy, huh? When I shake it, I can hear something bouncing around in there. Certainly not like a robust can of chocolate-covered ants, but I can tell that they haven’t disintegrated entirely.

I wish I could open it and see what remains, but something doesn’t feel right about that. Once you open a can of ants, you can’t go back.

Last tomato season, I wrote a story.

A few weeks ago, as I was bushwhacking through my tomato jungle idly picking cherry tomatoes in my garden, I remembered it. And it occurred to me to submit it to my favorite food blog, Culinate.

So I did. And they published it!

That’s my exciting news: My first food-related essay to be published somewhere other than this ol’ website of mine.

In other exciting news: I AM GETTING A KITCHENAID STAND MIXER. I can barely contain myself. Unfortunately, there’s been a run on the pear color and I’ll have to wait a few weeks until it comes off of back order. (However: I was kind of on the fence about pear. Maybe I should switch to green apple? Life is full of such difficult decisions.)

Loved this little gem in this week’s CSA newsletter. Now, if I can only remember these words when I need them most:

“With a big shift in weather this week, fall starts seeming pretty close. No doubt, by this point in the season our crew is feeling it, working early mornings and long days, often six days a week. Letting yourself feel plain tired when you are is a big advantage over being grumpy and agitated. It’s something our farm crew has figured out — patience saves your energy for the task at hand. I have to say, over the years it seems like attitude is the single most important variable in this crazy undertaking.”

I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated this place. Trust me, it’s on my list of Things I Really Want to Do and (Hopefully) Will Do Soon.

Until then,
MDIC