Weekend = Too Fast

I took a slightly longer lunch Friday because I knew I wouldn't have time over the weekend and I needed to do something about my giant bowl of tomatoes before they went to waste. The bowl just keeps filling, by the way..

I’ve been thinking about this technique I saw a while back – you take the innards out of the tomatoes and slow roast the..hulls, I guess you’d call them, until the flavor is really concentrated. I salted and peppered to add flavor and sprinkled with sugar to take the acidity out of the tomatoes. I also rough chopped a few cloves of garlic and threw that on the pile. Roast on a sheet pan with a wire rack for as long as you like..you'll smell garlic and tomato all over the house.

A couple black cherry tomatoes, yellow, beefeater, Roma, and others. Not a job you do in your dress pants.
http://beyondthebluegate.blogspot.com/

I didn’t roast mine for as long as I would have liked..again, because I was doing this on my lunch break..but I think the end result was really great, nonetheless. The tomatoes still had enough moisture in them that they created a sauce-like consistency when run through the food processor, but weren’t as ‘bright’ tasting as they would have been right off the vine. The garlic added a lot of flavor, and the sugar helped mellow everything out. Because I had so many different varieties of tomatoes, it’s a really deeply flavored sauce. Once I’ve got some pasta, I’ll add some herbs or wine (or nothing at all) and enjoy truly homemade pasta sauce!

Saturday morning, I got out of bed ready to rumble! Before breakfast, I decided to go outside and start salvaging the bricks from the two front steps that I’m having redone. Once I started chipping away at the brickwork, I realized just how bad the condition of the steps really was. The brick was actually the best part of the step..they really didn’t want to let go, save for a few.

This was taken shortly before I bought the house..and the cracks had only gotten wider.

A couple of the bricks had been falling out anyway, and a few came with a little help.

10 minutes later..

The rest of the bricks were STUCK and wouldn't budge..but the whole step would. As I see it, the steps were poured on a short, shallow limestone foundation, so there was a lot of heaving with every freeze/thaw cycle. This explains the cracks and out-of-level appearance.

About an hour later, my parents came by and we made quite a bit of headway on the baseboard project, finishing up most all of the kitchen and laundry areas. All that is left to do is the bathroom, my bedroom, and a small closet!

Laundry all trimmed out and painted!

Dad worked on the toe kick part of the kitchen cabinets – very snazzy (and very FINISHED looking!)

From the laundry: notice the area under the cabinets? Dad finished that up Saturday. Our friend Aimee came and fixed my kitchen outlets, too..everything's coming together!

Mom and I wandered around caulking and touch-up painting. Everything looks so much better once it’s all been ‘tightened’ up a bit J

Saturday was my time away from my projects. I went to Des Moines to spend time with friends and ended up staying through to Sunday night. A couple really cool stops along the way:

·         http://zombieburgerdm.com/ - been here several times. The food is awesome!

·         http://www.continental-lounge.com/ - super classy/sexy bar. Had a sidecar and listened to jazz with a lady friend. Instantly felt like Don Draper.

The "Planet Terror" at Zombie Burger: Cheddar cheese, bacon, BBQ sauce, caramelized onions.
I had the "Dead Moines", not pictured: ham, prosciutto, gouda, and truffle mayo. Gets better every time I go!

Yeah..this basically sums up my Saturday..

Tomatoes!

The large ones (still on the vine) and the Romas are from my backyard weedpatch/garden.
The larger, heirloom varieties are from my farm box - thanks Blue Gate Farm!

Solarium windows making a comeback!

While I’ve pretty much done my own thing with this house, I am still trying to be sensitive to its history. Especially on the exterior and the larger, more expensive and/or hard-to-change areas of the house. I use the old family pictures as a reference more often than not, and I think they have been hugely helpful in giving my project(s) a direction. Especially when it comes to the front of the house.

While my landscaping may never look this good, I hope the house will!

As you can see, the front of the house used to be much more ornate than it currently is. However, over time, the roof over the enclosed porch/solarium proved to be too leaky and too big a headache to maintain anymore and the current sloped roof was put in place sometime in the 1970’s.

We'll be replacing the windows in the solarium/greenhouse and rebuilding the latticework around the front door to match the older pictures. I will also have the small window put back above the bay window and am trying to find a design for the gingerbread in the gable.

With all kinds of new roofing products out there, I would LOVE to be able to replace the pitched roof over the porch with a flat roof and rebuild the decorative rail. That will be a project for another..year.

The project we’ll be working on soon enough is residing the front of the house and replacing the windows in that area.

Our siding project last year lasted as long as the weather would allow – we hung siding (in sweatshirts and hats) until November 9^th when the snow started to fly. At that point, I was out of money and siding to hang so it seemed like a natural stopping point.

With the other big projects finished, and the inside of the house becoming more and more finished every day, we’re turning – once again – to siding.

Completely by chance, I was able to purchase seven new windows for the solarium at a deep discount. The windows are double hung, aluminum-clad Pella brand and are absolutely outside my price range if not for the restocking sale offered by the manufacturer (Pella Corporation’s headquarters happen to be 15 miles away..in Pella: http://www.pella.org/)

Playing in the big leagues now!
http://www.pella.com/home/default.aspx

So, I lucked out yet again J Now I’ll have all the windows back in their original placement – I’m even ordering muntins to match the pattern of the old style from my pictures so I can have the best of both worlds: the charm of the old style, with all the efficiency and convenience of new products!

More trim, more paint, more better :)

Kind of a low-key night on the homestead.

I walked through the farmer’s market, bought some eggs, and picked up my farm box after work and went home to see what I was getting into this week. Looks like a good mix – and things I’ve had before! Sometimes the familiar can be good, too J

Lovin' my farmer's market brown eggs!

Contents of my farm box: green onions, mixed lettuce, herbs, misc. tomatoes, chard, little yellow things I have to research, purple peppers. Healthy, healthy!

 My only real project last night was taking the door down between the laundry room and the garage and painting everything. It has been cool enough (FINALLY!) the last two or three days that I felt comfortable enough opening the house to the elements.

Pretty easy process..I unscrewed the hinges from the jamb and set the door up in the garage for painting. I would alternate between painting the jamb and painting the door, giving each time to dry between coats while I worked on the other. Pretty efficient, I’d say!

Garage door all painted up!
My wire rack is looking a bit crowded these days. Another coat of paint on the inside of the kitchen cabinets and I'll clear this out a little better.

I also took a minute to snap a picture of the work we did the night before. In addition to the quarter round from the previous post, we hung the ‘headers,’ as we’re calling them over the doors to the garage and the driveway. It looks so much more finished now! A little caulk, a little paint, and it will look crisp and clean..and, most importantly, DONE!

Trim: in place.

All painted..and glowing :)

It's beginning to look a lot like..finished :)

So, I’ve been posting much shorter entries lately. Which, for long-time readers, is probably fine because there are a few over the past several months that are a bit lengthy. Anyway..for whatever reason, the shorter posts just seem more in line with what’s going on around the house lately. Little projects here are there being finished up – but the impact of those projects is pretty huge!

The last “little” project to be done was painting the inside of the house. The entire. Inside. Of the house. When compared to building a garage or rewiring the entire place, it’s not a huge project..but it took some time, nonetheless. Now that that’s been completed, we got back into trimming things out.

Last night’s project du jour was the quarter round in the front half of the house. When we tore out the plaster and lath and replaced it with drywall, there was a pretty good sized gap between where the wood floor ended and where the wall (and even baseboard, in some spots) began.

Remember these gaps? No more!

The solution I chose was a thicker, taller baseboard that would be more in keeping with the age and scale of the house, and a ¾” x ¾” quarter round strip to fill in the gap and give it a more polished look.

I bought the quarter-round preprimed - all we had to do was throw on a couple coats of the 'White Dove' paint, cut it, and pop it in place.

Over the course of a couple hours last night, we had pretty much everything done save for a few small pieces in the office, and it looks really great!

Much more finished looking!

A few days ago, I took the time to organize where all the ‘header’ pieces would go – because we’re working with salvaged stuff, nothing fits exactly over the doorways in my house, so I was trying to fit each piece to a door with as little cut-waste as possible. Once I had everything placed, we cut the pieces down to fit as needed and did the necessary cutting, sanding, and filling to make them look good once they were in place. As of last night, the laundry room was done and we were starting to think about the more complex cuts for the pieces over the bathroom doors.

Last Tuesday’s farm box came and I feel a little embarrassed that I haven’t used up much of the produce..especially because the next box comes today at 4! Anyway, last night I made up a batch of seat-of-my-pants eggplant Parmesan. I say seat of my pants because I had never had 1. Eggplant, or 2. Eggplant Parmesan. I knew the basics – after all, two of the ingredients are in the name – but had never done it before. Granted, mine was the quickie version – no baking, just skillet-quick – but it was really good and gave me the confidence to buy and use eggplant again in the future!

OK, I cheated..this is NOT a picture of my eggplant Parmesan. I scarfed mine before taking a picture.
And this one looks better.

The other thing I tried was much more by the book – I found a recipe online for a banana cake that looked and sounded really good. I can usually kind of take or leave banana cakes, breads, etc. but this one was quite good. Really dense and moist with lots of cream cheese frosting. (The frosting was not from the recipe..it was mine: 1# cream cheese, ½# butter, 1# powdered sugar, 1t vanilla. So good.)

Waiting for the oven.

Trimmed the rounded top off the bottom layer (and dipped it in frosting..nice snack :) )

Again..cheated..not mine. But mine was kind of crooked - I'm not a professional, get over it.

http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2012/05/double-banana-cake

I brought the cake to work Monday, gave a hunk to mom and dad, and had a piece for dessert after my eggplant Parm..and it was pretty well gone! Which is fine..the last thing I need is a double-decker cake staring at me every time I open the fridge.

More trim tonight, I suppose – will post pictures as good things continue to happen! J

Almost forgot my trip (back) to Cedar Rapids! My friends were getting rid of a perfectly good twin bed that I will be putting in my office for visiting friends. We stopped off at Parlor City Pub & Eatery again this time and were very happy with it. Awesome beer selection and good food! http://www.parlorcitypub.com/

Around the House

My wooden spoons and cutting boards needed some attention. I sanded the spoons by hand (shown) and rubbed them down with board cream - a mix of beeswax and mineral spirits.

This should keep them from drying out and cracking. They were starting to look pretty neglected..especially the two on the far right. Couldn't believe the difference this made - the cutting boards look totally different too! (no pictures of the boards, yet)

The morning of the Fourth of July, we went to the annual antique market in Solon, Iowa. The only thing I found (that I had been wanting AND that I could afford) was this crock..perfect size for my wooden kitchen stuff!

Office with a fresh coat of "Greyhound" paint. Still more trim over the door top and across the bottom of the built in bookshelf. The library ladder is still in the "someday" category.

Pretty sweet setup: computer with speakers feeds the floor speakers and the surround sound in the living room. Party! Still looking for the right stand for the receiver/BluRay, but it will come.

I had a few friends over and actually cleaned the house..INCLUDING the floors! The place doesn't look too bad! There's a home-grown cucumber in that wooden bowl..I think I've got, like..45 more on the way. :S

Kitchen mini-update

Getting all the trim installed around the kitchen doors and windows. New beadboard and stainless steel backsplash, too! There's more stainless to come, so stay tuned.

Italian Plum Tart: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/italian-plum-tart-recipe/index.html
I subbed a little fresh orange juice for the liquer and left out the tapioca entirely.

Good night, sink.

I pick up my new farm box this afternoon – I wonder what I’ll be eating this week?

Greenhouse mini-update

What’s missing in my mini-greenhouse? Uhh…plants..

Corbel from the house next door that was demolished; scale from the meat locker my grandpa (and his dad) owned yeeeears ago; zinc table from the flower shop my mom owned; basically something from every part of my life :) It should look cool with a bunch of plants in here..especially with all the new windows I've got coming!