Leftovers: Golumpki Meatballs

So you open the fridge and there is a pound package of hamburger that's a couple days old. Oxidation has begun to make it look less appealing ...

Hmm. There's the leftover rice from two days ago when you made chicken piccata. Half a yellow onion lingers in a storage bag. Out in the garden, the stumps of three harvested cabbages still have big blue leaves living and waiting for someone to love them.

A couple months ago, I watched a food show in which some man threw his meatloaf ingredients into a stand mixer. Why not let the Red Lady Kitchen Aid stand mixer do all the dirty work? Throwing the meat, an egg, and the rice into the mixing bowl, I flipped the switch, and off she went, effortlessly and evenly mixing the ingredients. Why did I never think of this before?

Salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder.

The big blue leaves of the cabbage -- and a few outer leaves from a Napa cabbage in the back yard planting -- got wilted in a frying pan filled with boiling water. Into the Cuisinart food processor those leaves went, with the leftover yellow onion and a couple cloves of garlic left over from a salsa construction the day before. (Shh, I stole about three heaping tablespoons of Bernie's salsa and threw that in with the meat, egg, and rice mixture, too.) Having chopped to hell and back the cabbage leaves, onion, and garlic, I mixed those in with the rest. Go Red Lady, go.

I could have cooked the meatballs in the oven for three hours, but instead I placed them into a pressure cooker, with a can of tomato sauce dumped over them: 8 minutes at 15 pounds pressure. Cool off the burner for five more minutes, then cool the pressure cooker until the lid is safe to open under cool running water.

Then I walked away until later in the evening, when I carefully scooped the meatballs out and put them in storage containers for today's meal. Not only do they taste better the second day, but they're a lot easier to handle when they're cool. When they're hot, they fall apart. All the liquid from the pressure cooker went into a separate container.

That was yesterday. Today, I gently reheated the meatballs in the microwave on a low setting while I made fresh potatoes for mashed potatoes, and heated the reserved juice after adding a tablespoon of corn starch to thicken it just a little. (Flour works, too.)

Oh, yeah. Who'd have thought leftovers and discards could taste so good?

P.S. Don't forget the ketchup drizzled across the meatballs. You just would not believe how good that is.

Not Making This Up

Lillian and her mother came back from the store in gales of laughter. They couldn't even tell me what they were shrieking about -- Lil just called up a photo on her phone and showed me. I looked at it and gasped, "Where is THAT from?" (I figured it was some trash from Tumblr.)

"SaveMart!" Lillian cried, and then dissolved into another fit of giggles.

What on earth could they possibly have been thinking? Wait, don't tell me. I don't want to know.

The Diploma

I snapped this picture about 12 years ago, and I was ecstatic to have captured this species of bird -- the rufous-sided towhee is a very secretive bird -- on camera.

I've seen them down in the woods by the river; when I hear their call, I search for a glimpse of them. Not often successfully, either.

This year, I saw a bird scuffling around in my euonymus bush, saw a flash of orange-ish feathers about the color of a robin's breast. A robin? In a densely leaved shrub? That made no sense.

This past week, the mystery bird made his appearance right by our pool, scratching around among the river rocks and fallen leaves. It was a towhee!

You saw a bird, what's the big deal?

The big deal is that when we moved here, twenty years ago, our back yard was dying grass. A feeble fig tree and a twig-like little persimmon starved in the far corner. The patio off the kitchen was unusable because of the summer sun that baked the cement as soon as it was dawn. All along the east fence, there was a rock-hard hill of clay soil so inhospitable it wouldn't even grow weeds.

Earlier that year, I'd read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, and was full of ideas for terraforming barren ground. Our back yard was going to change.

We put the pool in, and then I began planting. Over the next twenty years, we had a myriad of shrubs and plants that came and went; the pampas grass, a perennial morning glory, and beautiful breath-of-heaven went nuts and tried to take over the world. But the real foundation came when we planted podocarpus gracilior (Fern Pine) on the south side off the kitchen patio, and a hopseed, a eucalyptus, and a lemon tree on the eastern side of the patio. Then a nandina (Heavenly Bamboo), the euonymus, and a few years later, another podocarpus.

What was a desert is now a woodland, and the summer sun comes through the 'forest' canopy only in little sparkles. Under that canopy, a monstera deliciosa thrives beside a large-leafed philodendron. White-crowned sparrows return each year at fall equinox to scratch and feed in the undergrowth; goldfinches pack the feeders; scrub jays patrol the branches to scream if they see a cat.

But this year, a towhee.

For me, that's a lifetime achievement award.

NaNoWriMo 2018

How many times have I said I'm not going to do this to myself again?

Oh, well, here I am, Day 2, with 2515 words in my count already. Not done for the day, either. I can't say how many words I will type tonight, but my goodness, NaNoWriMo is already doing what I wanted it to do.

I got a late start yesterday, what with it being a holy day of obligation, and then having some outdoors work to do, as well as a landslide of laundry that miraculously appeared in the laundry room, and roasting two chickens and prepping another two for the freezer (I buy cheap whole chickens and then cut them into wings, breasts, and leg quarters). By the time dinner was done, I was ready to write.

Until the football game came on, which I was sure would be a lame-ass ridiculous display of ineptitude that I could ignore. Wait, what? The Lame 49'ers quarterback, CJ Beathard was out with an injury? Garappolo is out for the season, so that left ... whaaat? The former practice squad kid, Nick Mullens to take over as QB? Preposterous!

Then the kid marched his team down the field for a touchdown.

Okay, put the computer away, got to watch the new kid on the block. So much for 2000 words the first day.

When I sat down with my computer this morning, all set to write, I had a strange reaction: my hands began to shake like I was hyper-caffeinated. I couldn't type fast enough. Sure they were rough, un-thought-out words, but they were WORDS, and they were MINE, and no one can ever take them away from me, except me, if I decide to delete them.

I stopped trying to make up shit to write, and just listened to what the characters were saying and doing, and transcribed as fast as I could.

My, that sure does feel fine.

At least today.

And the kid did good.

A Completed Oil Painting!

This sucker is finally done, after ... whaaaat? Nearly 20 years? Oh, surely it couldn't be that long.

But wait, the reference photo for it was on 35mm film. Well, maybe it was only 17 years ago.

I did a couple faint-hearted attempts at it; I knew the basic structure was the road and the palmettos. But every time I started working on it, I began to hate it. Recently I had an urge to smell solvents and linseed oil, so I pulled it down off the wall (dust-covered) and cleaned it up, and decided to mess with it as an abstract.

I kept the palmetto silhouettes, and began with a sky of ultramarine blue. Loved it. When I got to the road and the cadmium red light and cadmium red medium, I felt like I had hit one out of the park, or flung a perfect spiral football pass for a touchdown.

Yeah, that was ME shining through, maybe finding my oil painting 'voice' at last.

Labor Day Effort

For quite a few years, the Filthy Pikers have toyed with the idea of "10K for Labor Day" -- that is, writing 10,000 words over the four day Labor Day weekend. I've never managed to achieve that, but this year, I thought I'd give it another try.

In my voyage of creative discovery, I realized anew this past weekend just how much I hate deadlines and quotas. I could not find a single drop of desire to write, even though I have two interesting stories started.

However, I followed my sudden rabid urge to create. I needed to make an image to go with Charles Cicirella's poem "Modern Day Job" in the Piker Press, so I tackled a work of pastels. No, I wasn't thinking of the Hulk when I made green the focal point of the picture. (In fact, when I was done I wished I hadn't used green.) It was a lot of fun having ALL my pastels spread out on the side of my work desk, so much so that I'm going to do that again today.

Then it was time to move on. My Sony camera has more features to it than I was ever able to use (DSC-H400), but with the creative urge on, I perched on the back patio in the morning light and just played with the thing. Photo after photo, setting after setting -- it was glorious!

This is the breadfruit plant that thrives in the southeast corner of the yard, under a canopy of fern pine and hopseed. I loved the way the light was shining through this newly-unfurled leaf.

My neighbor's queen palm was blooming, and I had a good view of the fascinating golden cascade. Using the fence as a tripod, I was able to get a nice zoom-in of the blossoms.

Back to the shade and morning light! Bernie has a coleus on the shady bank, the variety is called "Camp Fire." The stems are dark red, nearly black, and the leaves catch the light beautifully. Sadly, the camera didn't want to catch the light except as a glare.

All that warm, pinky lit-from-within color was lost. How can a camera see things so much differently than my eyes? Exploring a light-blocking setting on the camera (for the first time ever) gave a somewhat better result:

From the darkness of the shadows, I moved to full sun on my potted corn plants. After giving me a few delicious ears this summer (it has been a lousy corn year everywhere in the Central Valley because of the high heat), the corn has dried. Beautiful when it's green, beautiful dried, too. When it turns white, I think of it as "ghost corn."

Back to the studio, and Photoshop. I needed a cover image to accompany Ken Dubuque's humorous essay, "Armed and Dangerous." Using some public domain clip-arty images, I was able to cut and paste together a contraption that put me in mind of the mommies who barrel along the sidewalks, shoving huge buggies before them, all the while staring at their smart phones:

The stripes were simply for graphic effect visually, but what was stupendous to me was that in fiddling with settings and tools in Photoshop, I was able to get onto the screen just what I could see in my head.

Between Photoshop and my camera, I was able to capture this antique-colored portrait of Bernie's zinnias. I've always loved how zinnias hold their shape even while their summer color begins to fade.

And finally, since our cell phone joined the ranks of Electronics That Refuse To Do What They Were Meant To Do, Bernie got me a Motorola g6 that has a pretty spiffy camera feature of its own. This is the first photo I took with it, on Monday evening:

My glass of wine! What better subject could there be, at the end of the holiday weekend? And with that tenth picture, if a picture is worth a thousand words, I did achieve 10K for Labor Day. Cheers!

My First Giclee

Joma and I were wandering around Kaiser Permanente Hospital the other day (while Dzyiadzy had a quick routine eye exam) and I noted, on the walls of the halls, some art work whose medium was called "Giclee." (Kaiser has some really, really absorbing art on its walls, displaying local artists' work.)

I was impressed with some of it, but I had no idea what "giclee" was. So I Googled it when we came home. Giclee is an art form, recognized (named?) in 1991. It involves a print of an original work, enhanced by application of other media, such as paint, pastels, pencil, ink, whatever.

HAD to try it out, so I printed out a picture of one of my corn crops in the past, one in which I had leached out much of the color to give a shady look to it. Then I added a couple yellow/orange values to it, some purple, and a bit of green. I was thrilled with the result, even though Bernie viewed it and was unable to see where I had added anything. (It's subtle, okay?)

He went on to snark about "giclee" meaning "pintura por los numeros" in Spanish, which was rather rude, but kind of funny, too.

The main drawback I see is the cost of printer cartridges, but it was fun to add my own highlights to my own photo and come up with something a bit different. I have another print waiting for me on the work desk, but tomorrow is tentatively "oils" day, and I plan to stink up the studio with solvents on multiple canvases, throw convention and decorum to the wind, and paint like a maniac.

New variety this year -- Eight Ball zucchini, by Burpee's Seeds. Aren't they adorable? Flavor? Zucchini is zucchini, near as I can tell. But grill the slices over an open charcoal fire with red onion, pineapple, and mushrooms, and then toss them with some Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce, and you've got a snack fit for any picnic or summer supper.

No, Really, Are They That Intelligent?

There is a red dragonfly that cruises back and forth the length of our swimming pool. I know it's not the same one every year, but every year, there is one.

Kermit sees the dragonfly as sort of a flying chicken wing, and longs to crunch it. (He does eat flies, of course, being a frog.)

I was watching them one afternoon, as Kermit raced down the side of the pool, and the dragonfly zoomed down the center. At the bottom of the pool, the dragonfly would lift off and fly over the fence, with Kermit stomping and roaring on the deck below.

That dragonfly is teasing him, I thought, and then chastised myself for anthropomorphizing animal behavior.

Then yesterday, Kermit and I were in the bedroom, and Kerm was looking out longingly at the pool. Suddenly, a red dragonfly flew up to the door and HOVERED just in front of Kermit's nose. Not for a split second, but for seconds, eliciting a big roar and a rearing on doggy hind legs. Then the dragonfly sailed away.

Seriously. No dragonfly has ever done that before.

Maybe I wasn't so far off as I thought.

This Was Going To Be Beans

January and August are the months when I plan out my garden. I draw a little schematic of the planter boxes and pots in the front yard, and know what I want to put in each one for the growing season.

This year, I got the tomatoes right, at least. I have nine Shady Lady tomato plants, four Early Girls; they are my workhorses in tomato production, and I'm aiming for 400 pounds this year. I made room for a pot with the two little nincompoop tomatoes that came up in September in among the kohlrabi and wintered over just fine on the front porch. (They actually gave me my first few tiny-but-tasty tomatoes this year.) The lady who runs the local hardware nursery talked me into a San Marzano again, and this year, the variety is doing well. Then I got crazed and put in a "Yugoslavian" plant and a German variety in other pots, just for a lark.

The rest of the plantings ... hmm. Two variables struck hard: the STUPID weather and the ACCURSED snails.

Our winter was dangerously mild, right up until almond blossom, and then we got slammed with some plunging temps. In fact, I was listening to a couple farmers talking in the hair salon, and one of them was recounting how badly hit some of the orchards had been at a crucial moment when a freeze occurred. Yeah, I know about that. My first planting of corn and beans rotted in the ground because the swelling seeds froze. The second one, ditto. Another freak frosty few days did it in.

The third try got me a nice germination rate, but then the little sprouts of corn began to disappear. And where my beans were planted, little holes appeared in the ground. Birds? No, I have everything netted in the spring. It was snails or slugs, creeping in and chowing down the little sprouts even into the dirt, roots and all. Bastards.

So my corn crop looks like a bad haircut; if I get any corn at all from this planting, I'll immediately plant another crop. Beans I'm starting in pots up off the ground on the sheltered north side of the house, to be planted as space becomes available.

Which brings me to the above photo: when the bok choi were harvested, the violas were supposed to be removed and beans planted. But then a poppy came up in the middle of them, and the violas themselves have grown to heights of color I never would have dreamed of.

Much as I love my wax beans, there was no way I had the heart to tear out that riotous party of color.

Dolmades from Solar Power

When we set up an appointment with a solar power company to talk about how to move forward for our future electric needs, I had no idea this would be the result: dolmades, or stuffed grape leaves.

This is the way it happened: Bernie set up the appointment, and gave me the option of sitting in on the presentation and process -- I had things to do and didn't want to be bothered. When the representative arrived, Bernie greeted her out in the front yard garden and chatted with her about it, because she was so impressed with the growing food and wanted to come live there. Bernie needed to call some past electric company records on his computer, so he handed the rep, Lamis, off to me to show her the back garden.

She noted the lemon tree, the plum tree, the shady oasis -- and then dove for the grapevine that stretches twenty feet along the fence. "Do you make stuffed grape leaves?" she asked. "Oh, no? Okay, I'm going to cancel my lunch meeting and show you how!"

We quickly ascertained that I had all the necessary ingredients on hand, and then we listened to her presentation and what design we'd need for a solar power system. Done, she turned to me and said, "Let's get some grape leaves!"

Grape leaves for stuffing should be young and tender, about the size of your hand with fingers outstretched. No stems. We returned to my kitchen with handfuls of leaves, and began. Here are all the ingredients we used:

Grape leaves, blanched for a few seconds in a pan of boiling water
1/2 pound ground lamb, browned with
3 fat cloves of garlic, diced.
2 tomatoes, diced
a small handful of fresh parsley, minced
1 cup of rice, steeped in hot water for the time it took to prep everything else
1/4 onion, sliced into rings
another tomato, sliced
olive oil
tomato paste
salt
pepper
cumin
beef broth

The lamb, garlic, tomatoes, parsley and rice, with a drizzle of olive oil, the salt, pepper and cumin got mixed in a bowl. One by one, we rolled up teeny spoonfuls of the mixture into the blanched grape leaves. The mixture is placed in the middle, just above the stem stub, the sides are folded in, and then you roll it all up to the top. It holds together remarkably well.

Lamis squirted another tablespoon of olive oil into the bottom of a pot, put the onion rings and tomato rings in (to keep the grape rolls from scorching) and then stacked the rolls tightly together. She mixed half a little can of tomato paste with water, poured that over the top, and then added a cup of beef broth.

A small plate was put on top of all that, to keep the grape leaves from moving around and unraveling. "Bring it to a boil," Lamis told me, "and then turn it down to low and simmer it for about an hour." Off she went to her next appointment.

I am truly glutted tonight from those incredibly delicious dolmades. Bernie nearly fell to the floor at his first taste; Lillian pounced and gobbled a plateful when she got home from school. Honestly, I have never tasted anything like them, even though I have been served "dolmades" at restaurants and potlucks before. (The past dolmades get quotation marks from now on.)

And the other surprising thing was the encounter with Lamis as well. Her family is Middle Eastern in origin; my ethnic roots are in Mexican culture (and of course Central Pennsylvanian, where I grew up in my Dad's home town), but there was nothing strained or false in harvesting food together from the garden and sharing camaraderie in the kitchen while we prepped and talked about our family histories.

It was a tremendous amount of fun.

Around 2pm the phone rang. It was Lamis, making sure that I'd turned off the dolmades, and very happy to hear that we loved them.

I hope to hear from her again.

The Kohlrabi Harvest

With warm weather allegedly coming home to roost this next week, it was time to switch over the kohlrabi planter to a cucumber garden. Here are my lovely kohlrabi, washed up and leaves removed.

Peeled, sliced into half-inch slices, blanched for 80 seconds, ice-bathed for 4 minutes, allowed to dry, flash-frozen, and packed into 10-ounce bags, it all now resides in our freezer.

Chard Harvest

 First things first: get your pot of boiling water ready, with an ice bath nearby, and a plethora of toweling to dry things off a bit, and a timer. Not shown is the colander for the ice bath, so that you're not fishing around in that pan trying to get your chard pieces out.

Then you get some energetic younger person to drag in 1000 tons of chard from the garden, and cover your table with it. Then you whine and wheedle them to separate it into bundles of a dozen stems each.

Next step is to admire its leafy beauty, because you grew the stuff in a raised planter box in your front yard. Then it is time to begin the processing.

Using your chef's knife (which you have sharpened to the point of being able to slice though your daughter's calendar edges on the wall) you run the edge of the knife down the back of each stem, separating the colorful center rib from the green leaf. When you have a stack of leaf halves, you curl them up to make a tight little log, and then cut thin strips, making adorable little pinwheels of green. Cut the pinwheels in half and put them in a prep bowl. Next, chop the ribs into bite-sized colorful pieces and put them in a separate bowl.

Blanch the greens for 1 minute, ice bath them for two. Blanch the rib bits for two minutes, ice bath them for three. Put them both on a cookie sheet and flash freeze them before packaging them for eating when the weather is too hot to have fresh chard.

When you can finally stand to even look at chard again, cut a white onion into halves, then cut THIN ribbons and saute them in a tablespoon or two each of butter and extra-virgin olive oil. Add the chard, and cook until tender. Add a bit of salt and some garlic powder, and at the very end, a few squirts or squeezes of lemon juice.

This will provide the impetus for planting chard again next fall. (Or early spring if you live in areas where the ground freezes.)

Uhh...Happy New Year? When Was That?

It's not surprising that January went by quickly, what with NFL playoffs and ridiculously mild weather to begin the new year, but what about since then?

The week before the Superbowl, I came down with the flu, obligingly brought home from Kindergarten by Joma. What a shame, because John had bought me two big packages of chicken wings to cook up for gameday snacks. I mean, what is a Superbowl for but eating goodies all day and hoping the Patriots lose? But although my fever had broken by Sunday, the lung and throat irritation made it impossible for me to cheer as the Eagles won, and for the next six weeks, I was worthless. I slept sitting up (in a sling chair with pillows propping me on all sides), then graduated to the couch where I could sleep propped at a little less of an angle, and after a week into March, was able to lie down in my own bed.

Whew! Twas shitty, let there be no doubt.

Nevertheless, February brought THE longest bloom of the almond orchards I've ever experienced, and their perfume of our air was glorious. I knew I shouldn't be sucking in all that pollen-laden breeze, but I could not resist creeping outside to revel in the beauty of the scent, even if it did make my coughing worse.

And then there was this: my wild almond tree on the north side of the house, planted by some God-sent scrub jay a few years back, was finally mature enough to pop out two lovely blossoms.

I'm looking forward to being alive for a few more years, and hoping that I'm around long enough to stand within my almond tree in its February bloom, drinking in the lovely air, with bees buzzing all around me.

Also I hope that the medical profession does a little better at homing in on which strain of flu their vaccines prevent. I sure don't want to lose two months again next spring.

Not Good Art

Now that Christmas and Thanksgiving are past, I felt I could finally talk about this image from BHG in 2016.

The photo credit is a person named Andy Lyons, with "Prop Styling" by Sarah Cave.

What was the title? "Turkey with Gonads"?

Back to Meat

Some weeks ago I posted a recipe for marinated tri-tip steaks, and promised that the next time we made the dish, I'd do a better explanation of how to cut the tri-tip into steaks.

The red arrow is the point where you want to begin slicing.

Working in cuts of about an inch or so wide, you work back from that point, which allows steaks cut against the grain of the muscle -- the first step in tenderizing a cheap cut of meat.

Kind of an aside from the topic, it's not a budget-breaker to get a good knife. I bought a Victorinox 6-inch chef's knife, perfect for my rather arthritic little hand, and I use the bejabbers out of it. Worth every penny, and it just glides through the meat.

There -- that's the first cut of steak. Tiny, but that's okay. They get bigger. You can kind of see the grain of the meat running from bottom right to top left at a 45 degree angle.

As the strips get wider, you just cut them in half when you're done with each strip. Don't peel that fat off (except for the fibrous top layer, which looks like skin and is nasty) because the marinade turns the fat into a seasoning bomb.

The part of this roast that had me a bit peeved was the area where you can see the grain, where the butcher had trimmed the fat away. Dangit, when I buy an "untrimmed tri-tip" I want my fatty goodies.

So there you have them, lovely little fat-marbled steaks that will soak in that marinade and make your eyes roll up in your head as you eat them, beautifully caramelized on your charcoal grill.

I'm still loving turkey leftovers from Christmas dinner, but just looking at these pictures again makes me want to rummage in the freezer for a tri-tip. Maybe for New Year's ... can I substitute a tri-tip for pork and sauerkraut and still have New Year Luck?

In other meat news, Bernie rolled out his LEM sausage stuffer (his Christmas present) yesterday and made up a batch of his excellent sausage mixture. It went smoothly and easily, and we ended up with nine pounds of gorgeous, delicious sausage.

Looks just like Peachey's Farmers' Market back in Amish country in Pennsylvania in the early 80s. Yum.

Blue, Green, and Yellow

Every six weeks or so, Chewy.com delivers a 44-lb bag of dog food to our porch. It's inside a box, and to minimize the movement of the bag of dog food, the box is then stuffed with brown packing paper.

Last year I used the brown paper as Christmas gift wrap -- with sprigs and spots of color to decorate up the neutral tone.

This year, I thought I'd try something different and dye the wrapping-paper-to-be with Rit liquid dye. I had a number of wads of the packing paper, so I put the hottest tap water I could get into a kitchen trash can, added a big pot of boiling water, a whole container of Rit Royal Blue (8 oz), and stuffed the paper in.

Some of the packing paper more or less disintegrated into shreds; some made some really cool patterns (the second batch will be the wrapping paper), but the color was INTENSE and infected my imagination, as I happened to have squirreled away a heavy corrugated cardboard panel that came with my studio Football TV.

With some purchases of green and yellow Rit, I set to work, dyeing paper and unfolding it on the front lawn to dry.

Armed with the dried papers, a couple foam brushes, and Mod Podge, I more or less completed this decoupage torn paper panel today.

I say "more or less" because there are a couple areas I want to tweak, including removal of the blue stripe in the ochre area.

It was a ton of fun, and I look forward to trying other projects like this.

The New Stove

This was a sight I hadn't seen for 16 years -- the fireplace minus the Buck Stove insert.

I can remember the winter I insisted on getting an insert -- electric rates had skyrocketed and we were enduring rolling blackouts while PG&E scrambled trying to buy energy. Some nights I sat with my shoulder nearly in that firebox, trying to stay warm, getting madder and madder by the hour.

The Buck Stove insert heated our whole house ever since.

Nevertheless, it wasn't really what I thought it would be. Like a lot of people in unfamiliar circumstances, I didn't really know what questions to ask. I wanted a woodstove that I could feel radiate the heat, that I could put a kettle on top of and have the water warm to provide a little humidity for wood burning's dry air.

The Buck Stove didn't do that. Even when it was burning hot, hot, hot, you could put your hand on the top and not be burned. To get the stove's heat out into the room, you had to run the fan.

But that was the other problem. As dust accumulated over each winter, (and this is the Central Valley, whose dusty conditions gum everything up) the fan would imbalance slightly and rattle at certain speeds. By each Spring, I was so sick of hearing a running fan I couldn't wait to get out to the studio for the quiet.

This year, we did a little research, and just happened to walk into Valley Fire Place the day after a woman saw her new stove and decided it was "too small." She sent it back to the store. What mad coincidence -- this was just what we were looking for! So since it had been unpacked (but never used) VFP gave us a discount on it. Nice.

And there it is, on its adorable little legs, awaiting installation.

We did a winter configuration of furniture, moving the big table out into the front room, the little table into the kitchen, and the rolling island to the side under the bird pictures on the wall. We know what a wood stove does to the temperature in a room, and we wanted plenty of space in front of the heater so that we could bring chairs in if we were in need of great heat, or just lounge on a rug on the floor, basking. (I used to wrangle with our border collie Desi and the two cats for the hot space in front of our wood stove when we were back East in Pennsylvania.)

We had been scheduled for installation on the 17th, but yesterday VFP called with news of a cancellation, did we want the stove in early? Considering that we knew there was rain on the way, and a bit of a cold snap -- oh, yes, we did.

 By nightfall, it was in, standing on the hearth like it should always have been there. A chindi rug -- again, how about the coincidence -- that was supposed to arrive Thursday also arrived Wednesday morning, so as soon as the work was done, the new rug went down.

And within minutes of starting our first fire in the new stove, Kermit realized that a certain Great Dane mix with no undercoat never had to be cold again.

See the screen? We're probably going to use that for the forseeable future -- that little stove gets HOT!

The dear lady who thought the stove was too small ... bless her heart. She was probably wrong, unless she was trying to heat a whole mansion; we're certain this model will heat our house AND my garage studio for all but the coldest days of the year. I wish I knew who she was, I'd send her a thank you note.

Know anyone who wants a Buck Stove insert?

Morning in the 2017 Fall Garden

I haven't been very successful at growing cabbage in the garden -- up until now.

Last year I tried purple cabbage, and some of them looked gorgeous, (but not all) and the flavor was a little astringent for my tastes. This year is green, and they are simply breath-taking.

The cabbage you buy in the store is round and light green, but I can attest from experience that those big blue leaves make a wonderful golumpki. I used to buy whole cabbages untrimmed when we lived back East, and freeze some of those big leaves for winter cabbage rolls. I look at these plants and see not only golumpki, but blue leaves for stir-fry, and for fried cabbage with onion as well.

Years roll by more quickly all the time, so this morning, I decided to take portraits of my current garden so I remember what worked, and how beautiful vegetables can be. The full set of portraits can be seen in my Flickr account, Palmprint Gallery.

This morning was also our first foggy morning, dressing the garden in wispy whiteness. My pictures were taken just after the fog lifted.

Joma Monochrome 4

Fourth choice