Chilly outside = chili inside :)

Got to use some of the garden tomatoes from the freezer - love it when a plan comes together!

Goat Cheese, etc.

In getting my backyard vegetable garden together, I knew I wanted to mulch the area between the rows with something to keep the weeds down, but also something that would give me something to stand on so I wasn’t wallowing in the mud back there. I’ve seen lots of people do crushed stone or mulch, but I was hesitant to do that because 1. A lot of work, 2. A lot of money, 3. Seems like a pain to undo if I don’t want a garden in the future..or if my seedlings crap out and I’m stuck with nothing this year.

So I started contacting some of our local farmers looking for straw. Our area is really lucky to have a pretty vibrant artisan farm population. Many of these farms are operated by families and are either organic or at least less reliant on chemicals than the larger agribusiness operations. One such farmer is my friend Lois. Lois raises goats, feeds and milks each of them by hand, and turns their milk into nationally recognized, award-winning cheeses that she sells to restaurants and vendors around the country. It’s hard work, but she loves it..and the cheese is ridiculously good.

Anyway, Lois hooked me up with a few (too many) bales of oat straw which will work for my mulch and hopefully not drop a bunch of seed into the plots. As much as I’d like to sew my own oats…I’d actually rather not.

Greeeeeen Acres!

While I was there, I bought a couple ounces of chevre from her and planned to make a recipe I’d seen a year or more ago that I’ve always wanted to try: goat cheese and caramelized onion pizza.

I was not disappointed.

I had a leftover hunk of pizza dough in the freezer from earlier in the week, so I rolled that out after my onions had browned and become super tender and sweet. I added a little garlic, salt, and pepper to the onions for more flavor. I spread a basic béchamel (butter, flour, milk, salt, pepper, parmesan) over the crust, spread my onions over that, and crumbled the goat cheese over top of everything. I baked it at 420F until the toppings were melted and slightly brown and the crust sounded hollow when tapped.

The picture is a little blurry because I was in a hurry to eat the rest :)

So freaking good. My white sauce probably could’ve used more flavor, but otherwise this was way good. I thought later about adding a few leaves of thyme to the mix for next time. And there will be a next time! (If nothing else, I'll make the onions again. While the pizza baked, I was standing over the pan eating them by the spoonful. They were like candy!)

Last night was unproductive on the home front as I was called out to meet with a local guy about a fundraising project we’re working on. But I did have time to make a big batch of fettuccine for dinner (and lunch and dinner and lunch and dinner) with some asparagus I picked up at the grocery store. Not a bad day!

The pasta needed more Parmesan...but that's always the case :)

Hodge-podge

This is one of those ‘catch-all’ blogs I do that pertain to everything and nothing all at once.

The first part of that is me being a creeper and taking random pictures of random people’s property J I went on a little farm visit late last week for work – I had to take pictures of the houses and outbuildings on the property to satisfy my underwriters, and ended up deciding I might like to be a farmer if I could be a farmer on this particular farm.

Maybe I'm just too big a city-boy, but I don't know many of you who have cool little 100-year-old water towers in your yard. Or playhouses.. these are cool grandparents :)

This spring has really gotten to me for some reason. It’s unseasonably warm, everything is in bloom, the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing just enough to mess your hair and it’s amazing. Something about this old farm – and Iowa in general – just struck me as being the coolest place in the world at that particular moment. It has been in operation by the same family for over a hundred years and it has just the right amount of character that comes from 50 layers of paint and thousands of feet shuffling across the front porch. Luckily, the owner was happy to show it off J

I didn't know what this bush was? Fire engine red blooms. Like I said, this spring is getting to me.

Back on my homestead..

The baseboard project has gone really well! I have designated myself as the outside corner master. Inside corners..not so much, but we’ve decided “That’s why God made wood putty.” When it’s all painted and sanded, it looks really great..just like it’s been there forever J Pictures to come!

After a long Saturday of crawling around on the floor with the baseboard project, I decided to walk up the block to the brewery to take in the music. I hadn’t shown you the brewery yet, so I snapped a picture. Good beer, good music, no manual labor. It was a great night!

The Brewery in all its live music glory.

Dad and I worked most of the morning yesterday leveling out the backyard and making the back of the neighboring apartment building’s garage look less like a bomb had gone off near it. The latter of which turned into kind of a neighborhood effort: we raked the brush and pulled some old wood out away from the building, the neighbors came by to help haul stuff away, and a friend brought by some hosta splits from her garden. I watered them in last night and again this morning..we’ll see how they do!

My backyard was less a neighborhood effort, and more sweat on Dad and my part. Since my concrete man laid my driveway and the footings/slab for the garage, we’ve had these piles of dirt/gravel lying around. He offered to level everything out for us, but we borrowed our neighbors tiller and got after it. It looks much nicer than before, and it should be ready for homegrown produce whenever I am. …which could be a while, but it’s a nice thought.

Today, I’m back to work, but Dad has the day off and decided to build a prototype cabinet for the kitchen. We’ve got the materials and many of the tools..now if we could prove our measurements are correct we’ll be off and running!

It looks like a cabinet, right? Actually, shortly after I took this, Dad put its feet on and it looked much more convincing. We'll work on drawer slides soon and after a few more boxes come together we'll cut out a face frame..and it will be glorious.

More cabinets tonight, I imagine..and more pictures to follow!

This just in: ONIONS

Earlier this spring, I stopped by a little greenhouse not far from home and picked up a few bunches of onion sets. I’m pretty sure you could grow them from seed if you had A) any time, B) any space, or C) the equipment..benches, grow lights, etc. Since I don’t have any of those things, I buy sets.

These sets are tiny little onions waiting to be unleashed. By the time you buy them at the nursery, they can be anywhere up to the diameter of a pencil. Once the soil is warm enough, plant your mini-pencil-onions about 6 inches apart from one another and cover with dirt. We’ve learned that the spacing really is important, and for a very simple reason: if your onions are planted too close together they won’t grow to be very large. Which is fine – that way you can use an entire onion all at once rather than have half of a giganto onion floating around in the fridge.

Anyway, our old neighbor (the one I wrote about a while back) always said that your onions should never see the August sun – otherwise they start to get hot. Which means – in light of all the work we’ve been doing on the house – July 31^st was harvest day!

We had white, red, yellow, Texas sweets, and a variety called candy. Because I am a master gardener, I completely neglected to label the different varieties. Red and white I’ve got; otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, there are three different sizes of yellow onions. J

Because we planted so many, we had so many to give away. My grandparents got a batch; my bosses took several; the couple helping with my house got a bag full.. And we’ve still got onions. Lots, actually. Which is awesome because they’ll keep in the basement through the winter. Leave them dirty in a cool, dark place and they’ll keep as long as we need them to – usually they’re gone before any have the chance to spoil.

Happy Tuesday!

Homework

I hate homework - most everything about it, actually. I hated homework so much while in college mostly because I hated what I was doing in college. (I graduated with degrees in Financial Management and Economics...needless to say, this guy was the life of the party.)

I did that to myself because I didn't want to be the guy who was 30 years old, who still wore sweatpants everyday, and referred to passers-by as "Bro" on his way to Personal Wellness. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with sweatpants (I am writing a blog, after all..). I'm just saying the seven year college track wasn't for me. College was fun. A blast. For me, though, moving on was always the purpose. I stuck with a major I disliked because deep down I knew I could pursue whatever it was I truly wanted once I had a degree, and I didn't want to spend any more time getting from 'Point A' to 'Point B' than I had to.
However, there was one thing I learned more than anything while in college: if there was something I didn't want to do, I wouldn't do it. Not in a 'kicking-and-screaming-on-the-floor-of-a-department-store" sort of way. I would do what needed done, but I definitely didn't put my heart into it. And I wanted desperately to put my heart into something.

It took some time before I put it together.

Why was I always more willing to finish my homework when I knew there was a copy of "Cottage Living" waiting for me? Why was 'This Old House' always more entertaining than 'Jersey Shore'? And why do I have this odd fascination with reading Martha Stewart's blog every day hoping for more musings from the vegetable gardens and butler's pantries of Bedford?

I now have a theory. Anytime I have a serious (read: wine-induced) conversation with a really good friend, I find that all any of us are really looking for is simplicity. We don't need to be media moguls, billionaires, or Super Bowl victors. We just need to be happy. We just want to live a life that is full and somehow rewarding - and if we leave the world a better place than it was? Bonus!
I want a house. Not a big house, but one with character and a story. Something I can restore and make even better. A place to call my own and to open up to everyone. I want to have dinner in my too-small dining room using vegetables I grew in my too-small yard. I want something simple. I want a home.

So now I begin the rest of my life - the life after school. The life of my own choosing. The kind of life that gets me involved in my small community. The kind of life where I take my own bags to the grocery store, and save food scraps in a bowl on the kitchen counter for the compost pile. My simple life.