Potato planting

We got the potatoes in the ground today.  This is new for us - we thought we couldn't grow potatoes in Arizona.  Of course, we still don't know if we can, but we are now at least on the path to finding out.

Here are the steps involved (some of which include pictures):

1. Go to Magic Garden or whatever nursery you like to shop at and purchase seed potatoes.  You can probably grow them with regular potatoes, but since the ones you buy in grocery stores have generally been treated with anti-sprouting spray (no, that's not the technical name for it), you would have to buy organic and probably specifically ask someone if you can use them for seed.

2.  Give them some time to sprout.  I put ours in a springform pan and put them in the sun when I took the other seedlings out.  A springform pan is not necessary, but it was what I had available in the size I wanted, plus I knew I wouldn't need it.

3.  After they've started to sprout, cut them, leaving at least one eye on each piece.  Let them dry for a couple of days.  Then you'll get this (note: I didn't cut two of them, because there weren't enough eyes):

4. Next, you'll need to coat them in sulfur, or something to prevent bacteria/disease.  At least, that's what I read.  I don't know if it's true or not, but Ryan worked in a greenhouse in college, and he says it is (ask him how long ago that was, and then ask yourself if you trust memories that are that old).

         4a. If your sulfur isn't a powder, you'll need to grind it.  We used a mortar and pestle, because that's what we had available.  Presumably, you could use a hammer, the sole of your shoe, a rolling pin, or pretty much anything else that can smash things.  This is what it looked like before:

    This is the adorable child labor we used to powder it:

And the powdered result, because presumably anyone who is looking for instruction from us on how to convert pellets into powder also needs this visual aid:

5. Once the sulfur is powdered, dip the cut edge of the potato in water and then in the powder.  Sorry, no pics. 

6. Planting:  We used an empty half barrel (it was a 55 gallon plastic barrel that we cut in half.  It used to house a blackberry.  During the two years of its growth, Ryan ate one blackberry, the birds ate six, and I had zero.  It was not very productive, so when Ryan forgot to water it for awhile and it died, we weren't very sad), and two empty bags which once held soil and peat moss.  The bag idea came from this article mentioning grow bags. But of course we weren't going to buy grow bags.  Why waste the money when we had some that we knew would hold soil.

Ryan mixed dirt from our dirtpile (yes, we have one) with some compost and the remainder of the peat and soil that were left in the bags.  To clarify, he mixed it in the wheelbarrow, not in the bags.  I realize that was confusing. 

I put the potatoes just below the surface, and Ryan sprinkled some dirt on top.  They look like this now:

The idea is that as they grow, we keep adding more dirt/compost.  Then, when they reach the top and we can't add anymore, we just let the plants grow.  When the plants die, we dig up the potatoes and have an awesome feast, as well as a good supply of potatoes to last us through the long hard winter.

We'll see what actually happens.

Importance of yeast

Ryan has been doing a lot of experimenting with bread making lately, and he has learned one very important lesson: you must always add the yeast.  If you forget to do so, you will end up with this:

What you can't tell from this picture is that this bread is hard enough and solid enough to potentially be used as a murder weapon, or at least, an attempted murder weapon.  After taking it out of the bread machine and dubbing it a 'neutron loaf,' we decided that maybe we could salvage it by chopping it up and using the crumbs in meatloaf or something.  It was able to be cut while warm and fresh, but I'm pretty sure if we followed through on our plan, we would end up destroying the food processor.

So, yes, add yeast. If you do, your bread will look like this:

This bread is soft and chewy and completely delicious.  Here's what it includes:

1 cup buttermilk, warm
1 1/2 tbsp butter
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tbsp dark brown sugar
1/3 cup flax seeds
1/3 cup sunflower seeds
1/3 cup soy flour
2 cups bread flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/3 cup heavy cream
1/3 cup water
2 1/4 tsp yeast (note: yeast is crucial to success)
3 tsp wheat gluten
3/4 cup rolled oats.

This is Ryan's own original recipe, based off of months of experimenting and whatever happened to be in the pantry at the time.

Procrastinator's Guide to Making Curtains

An easy tutorial on how to make and install bedroom curtains:

1. Go to fabric shop and purchase 6 yards of blackout fabric and six yards of curtain fabric.

2. Decide curtain fabric won't work in bedroom; make living room curtains with it instead.  Mess up. Try to fix mistake (this will be the subject of a different post, if I ever get around to fixing the curtains).

3.  Spend two weeks researching how to make roller shades and trying to find the component parts.

4. Spend a half hour at hardware store considering purchasing cheap shades, ripping the fabric off and replacing it with the black out fabric.

5. Decide step 4 is stupid and wasteful.

6. Continue shopping for one week, and find curtains on clearance that will match the bedroom, but are far too long.

7. Purchase curtains with intent to hem them to fit.

8.  Leave curtains in stack on dresser for two weeks (this step is very important!).

9.  Finally decide to purchase a curtain rod.

10.  After browsing online for a couple of days, go to store and purchase two double curtain rods, as well as clips for the blackout curtains.

11.  Immediately install curtain rods with brackets three inches from edge of windows, rather than the recommended six inches.  Note: installation of rods includes swearing and repeatedly moving toddler out of the way.

12.  Make blackout fabric into curtains (this involves exactly one cut per curtain and no sewing).

13.  Hang blackout curtains.  Realize that using only one piece of fabric when there is a center bracket in the curtain rod means that the curtain can only be opened by bunching it together in the middle.

14.  Procrastinate fixing it.

15.  Hang the too long curtain from rod, suddenly understand why instructions say to hang the brackets six inches from the window.

16.  Decide that rather than un-installing the bracket, you will just lengthen the rod and hang part of the fabric outside the bracket (it works).

17.  Now that the curtain is hanging, measure the length and determine where to cut.

18.  Take curtain down and put on living room floor, until the toddler starts walking on it.  Then move it to the couch.

19. Wait five days for Ryan (or whoever in your household has the capability of cutting a straight line) to cut the fabric.

20.  I don't know.  We're still on step 19.

Weekend accomplishments

Accomplishments this weekend:

1. Planted carrots and garlic outside, started spinach and Roma tomatoes in egg carton indoors.
2. Put transplants in the ground: Early Girl, Black Cherry, and Sungold tomatoes; three spinach plants; strawberries; ancho and bell peppers; garlic chives; nasturtium.
3. Transplanted herbs into pots: cilantro, oregano, rosemary, and peppermint.
4. Nearly finished play kitchen.
5. Cast on for baby blanket for J&H's new baby (baby is due in 5 weeks, pattern is complex, it may take that long).
6. Repaired biking glove with duct tape (that was Ryan).
7. Made bagels (almost -they're rising right now).

So not that productive of a weekend, but we did get some things done.

Vanilla Update

I previously expressed my concern that using vanilla pods that had already been cooked for ice cream and then rinsed would not be sufficient to flavor sugar.  I'm pretty sure I was wrong.  I haven't tasted the vanilla sugar yet, but I did open both jars and smell them, and yes, they do smell very strongly of vanilla.  I'm going to call that a success.

And the homemade vanilla ice cream?  It's made me realize that I've never actually had vanilla ice cream before.  I always thought it was flavorless.  To me, vanilla ice cream was always a neutral, boring choice, tasting cold and sweet, but utterly lacking in any real flavor, and really providing no pleasure.  Perhaps that's because my childhood experience with ice cream was limited to the ultra cheap, and there really is no flavor when it costs $3 for a gallon.  I acknowledge that the chocolate ice cream of my childhood was largely flavorless as well, but I traded that in for the good stuff a long time ago.

Anyway, the vanilla ice cream I made was really good.  The recipe called for three vanilla beans, but next time I might use only two.  I don't think the flavor will be harmed by the reduction.

And just to chronicle the experience:

All those black flecks are tiny vanilla seeds.  Three pods worth. Yum.

Experiments with food

The play kitchen project has stalled a little, because the weather has been so perfect we've been doing yard work instead.  The garden plots have been turned and additional compost has been added, but Ryan is thinking that we need to supplement our smelly homemade compost with the store bought stuff, so we can't actually plant until we get that.  I've been continuing to rearrange the gravel in the front yard.  Soon, the pink gravel will be moved and I'll be able to cover the bare spots in the green-grey gravel.  It's hard to work on that when Ryan isn't around, because I end up with a little toddler following me.  She thinks she's helping, but grabbing handfuls of pea gravel from the driveway and dumping it on whatever I'm working on is not actually helpful at all.  In fact, it's hinderful (which I know isn't a word, but it sounds like the opposite of helpful, so I'm using it).

Meanwhile, we've been trying out various food experiments.

One of our shared main goals is to reduce waste.  One of my personal goals is to eat as many mashed potatoes as possible.  Unfortunately, these goals are contradictory, because I like my potatoes peeled.  So when we made mashed potatoes on Friday night, I decided to try an experiment and use the peels for something other than compost.  After a little bit of digging around on the internet, I combined a couple of recipes and made potato peel chips.  First, I soaked the peels (which, due to the use of small golden potatoes and Ryan's peeling methods, were each about the size of a thumbnail) in salt water for about an hour.  I didn't bother measuring the ratio of salt to water, because I like salt.  Then I sprayed a baking sheet with olive oil and baked them at 350 for about twenty minutes, which was enough time to dry them a little.  Then I added garlic salt (as previously stated, I like salt) and baked them another thirty minutes.  My baking time was based on the un-scientific method, which was to pull them out when I needed the oven for the bagels that I was making simultaneously.  The peels turned out delicious, so I think we'll be doing that again.  I also used the potato water in the bagel recipe instead of plain water.  I didn't actually taste a difference, but that could be because the bagels were coated in garlic, which would overpower any potato-y flavor.

In further food experiments, tonight I am making vanilla ice cream, using some of those awesome vanilla beans I found on Amazon.  I haven't made this kind before - I usually stick to dark chocolate ice cream or fruit sorbets.  The ice cream isn't the experimental part though, since I just followed a recipe (from Make the Bread, Buy the Butter).  The experimental part comes in from the vanilla sugar that I'm attempting from the pods that I pulled out of the cream.  I don't know how well it will work, because I don't know much about vanilla and for all I know, the flavor could have cooked away.  The seeds are all gone, of course, but I've read that the pods can be used, though nothing I've read says anything about pulling them out of a cooked  ice cream base and rinsing them off.  If it works, I'll have some delicious sugar to use in my baking. If it doesn't work, then I'll have a jar of plain sugar with some seed pods in it.  No big deal.

Owl Family

Amigurumi: the Japanese term for a knitted or crocheted doll.  They're pretty popular, at least, if you hang out on sites like Etsy and Ravelry.  I've been crocheting for about 7 years, and hadn't ever made one (unless you count some really odd rabbits I made a few years ago, but they weren't cute, so let's ignore them).

One thing about learning a new technique or attempting something new: perhaps the best time to do so is not a few days before a child's birthday party, when you intend to give that new type of project as a gift.  But I am overly ambitious.  We were invited to a birthday party for a two year old, one of our baby's friends (yes, she has friends - though her friendships are based entirely on us being friends with the parents).  Of course, I decide I want to make an owl-themed gift, because I happen to know it is the child's favorite animal.

Through the awesome power of Ravelry, I found a couple of different patterns that would suit my needs, and then, for some reason, I decided that instead of making one owl for the child, I would make two, one in blue, one in purple (because those were some of the yarns in my stash).  Then I figured that if I was making two, then I might as well make a baby owl as well, and call it a family.  I kindly gave myself three evenings to complete this project.  That was not enough.  I ended up hardly sleeping the night before the party, and I ended up making a rather amateurish owl family with an angry-looking baby:

There are a lot of things I would have done differently, such as constructed better beaks and made the baby's eyes the same size.  I did like the wings and the horns though, and I did join all the pieces well, which was the technique I was most concerned with.

I think the problem I run into with things like this (besides not having enough time) is that I am over-confident in my design skills, even though those skills are utterly lacking.  So I take it upon myself to modify the pattern (in this case, nothing is exactly like the pattern, I modified each piece, some rather heavily).  And since I am not actually skilled enough to modify a pattern, especially when I've never made amigurumi before, I end up doing all kinds of desperate experiments late at night, while watching the clock and wondering how I ever got into this mess.  Then I produce a less than stellar item, but am too tired to care.

Vanilla Extract

As a solstice gift for the last couple of years, Ryan has bought me books he heard about on NPR (I love that he uses NPR as a shopping guide).   Last year (2011), the book was Make the Bread, Buy the Butter.  Two things: (1) I want to be friends with the author, because she is awesome; (2) this book has been an inspiration.  It's the reason we made bagels last weekend, and unfortunately, also the reason we ate 10 bagels in less than 36 hours and had to make another batch. And it's why I bought a quarter pound of Madagascar Vanilla Beans from Amazon.

Which brings me to today's project: I made two batches of vanilla extract.  The recipe (from the book, and from various online sources) is simple: 9 vanilla beans, and 12 oz alcohol.  I made one jar with vodka, and the other with gold rum, and in about three months I'll compare them and see how they taste.  

When I was searching recipes online (to compare to the book, because it sounded too easy, and I am neurotic and was afraid some integral step was missing), I saw all kinds of pretty jars that other people were using, and I started to think that perhaps my recycled salsa jars weren't sufficient.  I even briefly considered going to the store and buying prettier jars.  And then I felt like kicking myself, because if our whole philosophy is really combining environmental concerns with frugality (and it is!), then I don't need to go purchase new jars just to make my vanilla extract - that nobody will see - look nicer in the cupboard.  If I ever decide to make some as gifts, I'm sure I can find nice jars at a thrift shop, which I can then decorate with repurposed ribbon. 

Meanwhile, here's my super-fancy classy looking vanilla extract:

Other current projects: We hope to finish the play kitchen this weekend, and I am crocheting an owl family to give to a two-year-old at her birthday party Sunday.  If I have time, they will come in a nest.