Walking through the neighborhood :)

Walking home for lunch today after our first snow of the season.
I had to stop and take a picture of the sunlight around my neighbor's houses across the street with the crunchy leaves still poking through the fresh snow. Another subtle reminder of why I live here :) 

Chicken Stock..ready for soup season!

I had been keeping a couple chicken carcasses in the freezer the last few weeks - any time I do anything with chicken, I'll wrap and save the bones until I've got enough to make a batch of chicken stock. I supplement the bones with chicken hind quarters I buy from the deli counter at the grocery store. After the meat has cooked through, I'll strip it from the bones, keeping the meat and returning the bones to the pot to finish simmering. All-in-all, it's about a three or four hour process, but it's so incredibly worth it.
In the pot I've got my chickens, three heads of garlic chopped cross-wise, three yellow onions chopped into quarters, a handful of carrots and celery stalks, a couple bunches of parsley and thyme from the garden, whole black peppercorns, and kosher salt to bring out the flavor.
I brown my ingredients before covering them with water - it adds a little more flavor to the stock and lends a deep brown color. Homemade for sure! :)

Because I use a large pot designed for canning/jarring to make my stock, I end up with SEVERAL quarts for the freezer. The last time or two I've made it, though, I've taken the added step of simmering the stock after pouring it off of the other ingredients but before packing it up for the freezer. It seems to concentrate the flavor that much more...plus, it ensures I'll actually have room for all of it ;)
And not a minute too soon! After I finished this, I gathered up the leaves from the yard and burned them in my vegetable garden. I had used up everything in it for this year, so was ready to clear and prep it for a new season next year. And wouldn't you know it, only a few hours after the fire died out, we had our first snow of the season!

I bake because I'm a patriot.

Happy (late) President's Day to all!

I celebrated my day off by doing almost nothing. A nice luxury. Though, after a day of pretty much lounging around, I tend to get restless and usually end up making something good to eat after everyone else has gone to bed. For those of you who may be concerned, I always share with the "roommates."

Based on Ina Garten's Summer Fruit Crostata from her book "Barefoot Contessa At Home", my Winter Fruit Crostata was soooo good and pretty easy to make! (A crostata is to Italians what a galette is to the French - a rustic, free-form, pie-esque pastry. My dad noted that it’s actually just a pie without the pan. Point: Dad.)

I followed the pastry recipe to the letter. By the time the dough had relaxed in the fridge long enough, I was done peeling, chopping, and seasoning the apples and had time to do my happy dance around the kitchen a time or two.

I used Gala apples because that's what I had on hand. Ina recommends (and I agree) that you use a tart apple such as Granny Smith. This gives the crostata a little extra flavor. Alas, I had Gala, and it's nearly gone, anyway. Must not have been too bad..
For the seasonings, I just went with what tasted the best along the way. A good pinch of salt to bring out the rest of the flavors, a few big shakes of cinnamon and nutmeg, a clump of brown sugar, and enough sugar and flour to create the right amount of "goo" - a technical baking term. To loosen the mixture and contribute to the goo, I added water - though, orange or lemon juice tastes amazing and provides the right amount of zing which, again, keeps the apples from tasting like every other apple pie you’ve ever had.

Bake at 450F for 20 minutes and you've got yourself a tasty little President's Day treat. And because the tart is supposed to look rustic, no one will notice when you rip it completely in half while moving it to the cooling rack :)

The re-assembled result.

Waiting...

Well.. where to begin?

The joy of home ownership has already begun. Or, not begun..depending on how you view it. At this point in the game, I’m still waiting for legal issues to be resolved.

Storytime:

The man who lived in the house next door was very ambitious. He had big ideas of taking his older home and restoring it into something beautiful – much the way I do. Working by himself on the weekends, he would dive into home-improvement projects with the best of intentions. As anyone involved in these sorts of things will tell you, once he started one project he would invariably run into another..and another…and another. Before long, he had fixes and repairs started all throughout the house, with very few – if any – actually finished.

About that time, he suffered a severe stroke. By all accounts, he’s doing better, though not well enough to move back into his house. So, what’s left is something of an eyesore…which is putting it delicately. In the years since, his house has become what we in the insurance industry would call an “attractive nuisance.” Teenagers looking for a thrill, critters, and even building material scavengers have been through the house – all the while, breaking windows, spray painting graffitti on the walls… generally up to no good. The house sits there, open and exposed to the elements. With the rain and snow we’ve had this past year, you can bet any attempt to restore the place would be expensive and time consuming if not impossible given budgetary constraints.

And so comes the holdup. As I’ve said, my little house and my neighbor’s big house share a driveway.

When my house was built in the late 1860’s, it sat on a double lot. Presumably, the open lot was used for gardening…maybe even a carriage house at one time as several in the neighborhood had carriage houses or even full barns. Around 1915, the owners of my house sold off the open lot to members of their family who built a big, gorgeous house. It had a large formal living room, a grand paneled staircase in the entryway, leaded glass windows and doors, and a surprisingly spacious kitchen for the time. That said, there was a separate staircase off the kitchen for servants access to the upper and lower floors.

When this house was built, they also built adjoining garages at the end of their shared driveway and, because they were family, everything was hunky dorey. Fast forward a few decades, and the big house is owned by a new family. So, to keep everything on the up and up, the neighbors contact the folks who draw up abstracts and titles and other legalities to formally spell out who owns what. For me, that means my house owns about two or three feet of the driveway and all of my leaning, rotting garage. In order to insure everything stays on the up and up, my realtor, attorney, title company and banker have been working to resolve the issues created by the fact that the original easment inexplicably expired after 50 years.

By the way, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but my house has been in the same family since 1868 – how cool is that?! Which, also adds to the fun: my abstract hadn’t been updated since 1923…

In the meantime, we all wait for the ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ from a judge. I have been repeatedly assured by my banker that this is NOT the way the things normally go. Because of the conservatorship holding the neighboring house, we’re having to jump through hoops that wouldn't ordinarily exist. That said, with foreclosures at their highest levels, professionals in the business are seeing these types of situations play out more and more.

More generally – as we know – with old houses you really never know what you’re going to get.

Mission

Having said all the warm fuzzy stuff in my first post, I should now focus on what will probably be the more interesting challenge of the entire process. How do I buy, update, and live in this house on a razor thin budget?

Story time:
Well kids, we’re in a recession. The trend the last few years has been this: kids go to college, these same kids graduate from college, and get a job… Or so we thought.

Not that it’s impossible, but it’s definitely more challenging to find work than it has been in the recent past. So – if you’re like me – you keep the job you’ve had the last year of school even though you’re underpaid, underutilized, and ready to leave. You spend your evenings searching online job boards, following up on applications, and looking through house magazines..

Until one day you decide to get serious: Time to call in a favor. You talk to a well-connected friend back home in the hopes he or she knows someone (who knows someone) who knows about a job.

My friend says to me, "What are you doing next Wednesday? You should stop by and we can talk about what you’re looking for.”

“Sure, I was planning to come home Wednesday, anyway! See you then!”

OK, the part about me planning to drive 120 miles to be home for the afternoon in the middle of the week may have been a fib. A white lie, really. Harmless. But this sounded like the beginning of a nibble.

Long story short, I’m offered a position with a company that values its people, its customers, and its community and I love my work. Five years ago if you had asked if I would work in insurance, I would have laughed at you. Boring. No chance. Today, I see it through different eyes with a changed perspective. I get to work with small business owners every day – interesting people doing what they want and love to do. These people are in a position to make differences in the communities in which they live, and I get to help them along the way.

An unfortunate side effect of this and any other recession is this phenomenon people in the news media are now calling “Boomerang Children” – the kind that leave only to return after graduation to mess up your basement and eat all of your Dorito’s. Well, in that way, you could also say I am fairly typical for my generation; a boomerang man-child. (That just sounds gross, actually.. I’m sorry you had to read that.) I was fortunate enough to get a job, but rather than rent I decided to live at home for a short while to save up for the down payment I’d been waiting for. I find it to be slightly demoralizing, but financially it’s the right thing to do. Hence, BoomerangBungalow

So. As the boomeranging man-child, hippie insurance specialist that I am, I thought it would be nice to provide some insight to those in similar situations. I’ve never bought a house before, and I would bet many of you haven’t either. So, how do we make the final leap to claim our own independence? And how do we do so in a way that is responsible, practical, and affordable.

The point of this is not to be pessimistic or snarky, or complain in any way. I simply want to provide an honest account of what it takes to buy and renovate a house – and to provide a place for anyone else who knows about such things to teach all of us a thing or two.

For the sake of honesty going forward (and because I believe in full-disclosure), I should tell you I paid $27,000 for that cute little yellow house. If anyone outside of rural America should read this, yes THOUSAND. Even for Iowa, that’s ridiculously cheap. Slightly more expensive when you consider it needed a new roof 40 years ago, the plumbing has issues, the wiring is in need of review, the detached garage is leaning like Michael Jackson in “Smooth Criminal” from all the rot, along with all the typical updating things a person would do to make a home their own.

There is also the matter of the neighbor’s house. Or..lack of neighbor’s house – no one has lived there in five or six years.. and they left mid-renovations. Pictures to follow, though not pretty. It has become a neighborhood nuisance with broken windows and doors and aluminum siding waving in the wind. Lucky me, we share a driveway. However, at some point in the next year (or so) the city has plans to demolish the house to make way for a new home (or my own gigantic vegetable garden...we'll see!) In total I hope to spend less than the $50,000 I have taken out at my local bank.

This, my friends, is where the games begin!

I plan to do most of the work myself – and by "myself" I mean with an army of friends, family, and willing participants looking for free beer and/or pizza. This is (as anyone who has ever moved a sofa will tell you) where you find out who your true friends are J

Enough writing for one day. In the future, this will be much more entertaining – more pictures, videos, etc. but I haven’t taken possession yet, let alone started demolition. Have patience! In the meantime, have a great week!