From the latest issue of Cooks Illustrated. The secret is using a grated apple to add extra pectin and get the filling to gel up nicely but still taste like fresh berries without turning it into glupe.  I think it worked, but we were supposed to wait 4 hours for the pie to cool properly, and we could only muster 45 minutes. So it was still warm and runny when we had our first piece, but this morning it looks legitimately sliceable.

There's also vodka in the crust which they didn't explain at all. Very mysterious and Russian.

When we were little, my dad used to grow potatoes and store them year-round in the crawlspace under the floor. My two sisters and I would fight when it was time to fetch taters, because the whole thing felt almost-exotic enough to be a C.S. Lewis fantasy childscape: we’d pull up the secret floor boards in the living room, lift up the second layer of plywood, and the dark, dank smell of the crawlspace would rise up. We’d assume the position: standing bolt upright with our arms straight up overhead, so my dad could grab us by the wrists and lower us into the darkness below. When we finished passing up potatoes, we’d then extend our arms overhead and get plucked up out of the potato cave and placed ever-so-gently back into the living room.

We never did find Narnia, but when I opened a mail-order box of seed potatoes today, the powdery, almost moldy-but-not-quite smell of cellared potatoes rushed out of the box, and it was as powerful of a portal back to my childhood as any magic wardrobe could ever be.

The landlord loved us putting in a veggie patch, but I'm not sure he'd feel the same about this.

I don't know who yet, but someone is going to get birded up soon. Instructions for these little pretties are here.

I’ve made peace with this project, and now I totally love the fused plastic bag idea.

Sometimes I think I’m a little psychic. Because usually I charge into project even if it’s totally unreasonable and we have a dinner reservation in an hour. But with this one, there was some dread along with the excitement.

The deal is that I used too many layers of plastic, and that made sewing it all together pretty tough. But the project itself is easy-peasy, so if you only use 4 layers of bags (instead of my 8), I think it would work a charm.

Because all of the melted bags seep through differently, the finished bag has a campfire effect and I can’t stop looking at it.

I used these instructions but made up a more detailed tutorials with lots of photos here.

 

Don't get me wrong. I fed cows that became hamburgers without much heartache when I was little. So I'm not naive about food. But there is something heartbreaking about thinning seedlings, like these ghostly carrots-in-the-making. Barbara Kingsolver calls it the "virtuous green silence" of plants in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. And I totally get that.

But it works. Here's the last of the potatoes, first of the new lettuces:

 

I’m kind of cranky about making this lunch bag (more to come later), so I just procrastinated and googled “make grow gather” to see what kind of company I was keeping.

The page of results read like a dreamy dinner party conversation: ferries to British Columbia, a lavender garden, Hawaiian economics, making your own rock candy, something about using good data for investments, and using a journal when you grow tulips.

I love and fear the tarte. And I covet the skills that are regularly on display at the bakery down the street: fat slices of cauliflower gratin or glossy tartes aux fruits.

Here’s their cookbook. Every time I’m there, I stalk the store copy and add my buttery fingerprints to its pages like tracks in the snow. It is inevitable that when one day, when it’s sunny outside and I’m in a terrific mood and the door jangles when I walk in for a cup of au lait, I’ll make the impulse buy (does it still count as impulse if I’ve been mulling it over for months?)

But I think what’s really going on is it that I’m afraid once I own the book, I won’t have any excuse for making a lackluster baked good.

Ever.

Again.

Yikes. 

I want to go to Bedfordshire just looking at this.

This is my go-to gift for weary new mamas. It used to be for the soon-to-hitched, but look at how much we've grown up. The hardest part is tracking down the flax seeds and lavender, then all it takes is a couple seams. I haven't actually ever witnessed a new mother with enough time to pee, yet alone duck into a warm bed and indulge in some lavender eye pillow time, but if all it does is sit at the side of the bed suggestively, maybe they'll get to it one day. In the meantime, the practical casserole is in the fridge.

 

 

I'm kind of paralyzed with this project. I read about fusing plastic bags into fabric but I didn't quite anticipate some key things. Like corralling a huge pile of bags before I started and being very organized about cutting them and getting them ready. But that's not how I usually work, and I didn't realize how many bags I would need. The correct answer turns out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 20. And it turns out we don't have many plastic bags because we use canvas ones, so I didn't have a lot of color choice.

The ironing is a really cool process, in a Shrinky Dink kind of way.  Now I have these panels of fused plastic that I love the look of, but they may as well be 24 caret goldleaf for how precious they seem after all the cutting, fusing and ironing. My plan is to now make a lunch bag and hope this has a happy ending.

This makes me feel like such a narcicist. Right before I gave my sister her birthday present, I stopped on the sidewalk so my husband could snap a picture of the wrapping. This is from stumasa, the gorgeous store down the street from me. I haven't had occassion to ever buy any of their wooden furniture in the back half of the store, but I have had many an occassion to linger in the front part, fondling eveything in my path.  I normally skip store-issed gift wrap because it's so cheeseball or fussy but  theirs, of course, is understated and gorgeous. When I got home, I decided the  succulent candle would add a nice pop of color and texture.

Under the wrapping are goregous melamine plates and platters from the super-rad  thomas paul for my sister's lush new backyard that I plan on spending plenty of time in!

 

Ah, the paper I love to hate.

As part of the SF Chronicle's story on 20 and 30-something jam makers, the writer puts this trend into context by saying home canning is part of the new crafting resurgence. She points to the ever-popular knitting example but misspells the term "purl." It’s only the second-most popular stitch, and that's after the stitch that’s actually called "knit."

Now I don't expect everyone to have deep technical knowledge of these things, but that's what diligent copy editors and editors are for. It's just sloppy.

On the bright side, at least they’re telling the larger story of jammers like me. I’m totally addicted, stalking around the kitchen looking for new fruit combos to boil up and slosh into a jar.

A crazy and long week covering some forest fires out here -- forgive the lack of posts.

Come Friday night I smelled like a campfire (albeit a raging, destructive one) but I was craving a project and even though we had to leave the house in a half  hour, I opened the refrigerator and saw the apricots silently calling to me. I had bought a pile the weekend before and left them to macerate in some sugar and fresh lemon juice and this amazing liquor that I have a crush on right now.

It’s called St-Germain and it’s made from elderflowers in France. The bottle is gorgeous and comes with this little blue and gold booklet that has very serious captions such as, “Un bohemien” underneath a picture of a romantically-disheveled man plucking huge white flowerbombs and gently placing them into a canvas sack, casually slung over his shoulder.

Apparently, these bohemiens gather all the elderflowers on the hillsides over a few days each spring and then pedal them to a distillery for that year’s batch of St-Germain. You would think a bottle of liquor that results from all that pedaling and gentle crushing of huge flowerheads would set you back a small villa, but it’s only about 30 bucks. Vraiment.

It could be that I'm a sucker and the company is using underage French child labor or gentically modified elderflowers. But I'm chosing to believe the marketing propeganda and we've been putting it in cocktails and testing it out with lemondade and stuff, so I decided to add a couple extra slugs to the big green pot of now-simmering apricots.

With the clock ticking, I whipped up three jars of apricot-elderflower jam in record time (I’ll share a technique I learned about in a forthcoming podcast). I thought it might not be sweet enough, but it turned out tangy and interesting with a deep apricot flavor and color.

 I am definitely feeling more bold in my jam-making these days. June Tayor’s sometimes-surprising and always-amazing flavors are a constant inspiration. And only making a few pots at a time frees me up to be more adventurous, so it’s not like I’m wasting a glut of fruit if something goes wrong.

Plenty of my spontaneous projects go deeply wrong (my family still begs me never to try limoncello again), but the stars aligned for this one and I emerged a cocky and victoruous jamming superhero.

The other day, someone sent me some kind of trend report predicting that the Swiss Miss braid would be around another summer.  Call me a follower, but I’ve been sporting braids ever since. I forgot how much I love them, and how the look gives me a little Pippi Longstocking joie-de-vivre.

I aspire to this one – but I don’t have long enough hair, or (even more on point), the patience to accomplish this. Not to mention that I’m a real person instead of a bronzed-up runway model with great cheekbones. But some of these stick-thin ladies did inspire me to look for some coaching. The closest I found was this. But after checking it out, I realized that I'm not going to develop my braiding style as much as unearth it.

In my case, this kind of disheveled, start-like-gangbusters, then-peter-out is what I’m all about.

I forgot my camera to document this, but on Saturday, we headed up to Sonoma to pick up some wine. We’re not fancy-pants wine connoisseurs but last summer, I was in Sonoma with my some of my family and we stumbled across this vineyard through a series of serendipitous events. There was just one of sons there when we stopped by, but he treated us like we were old friends and kept the wine flowing and at the end of the tasting, we signed up as members and made off with some old barrels that he offered us. Ever since, I’ve sort of wondererd whether we were just tipsy and smitten with the whole scene, but we returned this Saturday and the wine – and vibe – was phenomenal. They don’t have an official tasting room, the family just strung up some lights in their barreling room, set bottles of wine out on top of barrels, and kept bringing out platters of barbequed shrimp, rosemary-pork kebabs and pans of fresh brownies.

Afterwards, we found a spot of shade and laid out some old tablecloths and picnic fixings: pesto potato salad (taters from the garden and fresh petso, along with peas and tiny little balls of fresh mozerealla), peanut noodle salad, olives, salami, cheeses, cherries and flakey, buttery palmiers (bakery-bought because there’s no way in hell I could make them that good).

Yes, I forgot my camera but it felt something like this:

 

A balmy day here in San Francisco is rare enough, but a downright balmy evening is like a unicorn. Last night after a dinner out with some pals, we stepped out into the night and I wanted to lick the air it was so gorgeous and soft and warm.

That seemed weird, so instead we found a nearby gelato store and bought flavors like watermelon and stracciatella and walked slowly, slowly up the big hill towards home, with nothing to do but savor something cold and delicious and stop every once in a while, as if pausing in place could make it last forever.

 
 

 

Finally home for a weekend to tackle the garden. The potatoes are all that remain from the winter crops, but they’re blighted and spotty so I pulled the worst-looking one up because my curiosity got the best of me. Lo and behold, they worked! I forgot that potatoes are the most fun crop to harvest ever, because it’s like a treasure hunt under the soil. You dig around with your fingers or a fork or a trowel and scoop up earth and soil-crusted potatoes, and you never know how many are down there.

So after that episode of potato joy, we went to work irrigating. Our raised bed is about 5x10’, so we didn’t need much in the way of supplies. This local store is the holy grail of information on irrigation systems, and they were great with us because we had no idea what to do. The idea is that the drip irrigation delivers water right into the root zone (unlike overhead watering), so the soil is kept pretty consistently moist, instead of going through swings of wet wet wet from a big watering, then dry dry dry while I sometimes forget to water. We'll see.

And I highly suggest some refreshments throughout the project: 1) Mason jar with half beer, half ginger ale, 2) and jar with slices of oranges, limes or whatever you have on hand, stuffed with a bunch of fresh cut herbs. 

I can tell this is going to be a new craft crush: upholstery trim necklaces. These are some images I took of the idea right after it came to me, so these are just draped around my neck. I need to pick up some proper closures, or maybe just tack them closed with a couple stitches so I can loop and pile as the mood strikes.

I lust after a real room with a real door that closes so it can contain all my craftiness, stashes of supplies, and – most especially, a huge work table. But alas, we also want to live in San Francisco. 

However, our lean square footage didn’t stop my incredibly game husband and me from sectioning off part of our living with a moveable wall that acts as a little studio. We’re lucky to have a big living room, and this end was limping along as dead space, sucking the life out of the rest of the living room until the nook came along.

This project took some carpentry skills, but nothing too mega. We got the wood precut at the lumberyard, so you don’t need anything more fancy than some nails and pluck. My husband made the frame out of 2x4s, then attached pre-cut hardboard on one side and pegboard on the other. We (and I’m being very generous to myself when I use that word) popped it on casters so we could expand or contract the little studio depending on our living room use.

One the studio side, I painted the pegboard pale pink and added towel bars from Ikea hold stashes of fabric.

 

On the living room side, I painted it light blue and added some red flowers from a stencil I made. I found a two-dimenstional flower I liked in a pattern book, scanned it, and blew it up to size of a piece of paper. Then I traced it onto a stencil sheet, cut it out and painted in a random pattern that I made up as I went along.

 

I offer in case you, too, lust after a room of one's own.

Maybe it's the spring blossoms still clumping down from trees, but I am totally in love with honey right now. I'm still using the mass produced kind in my tea every morning, but I'm collecting new fancy pots of varietal honey like they're scratch-and-sniffs stickers and I'm 10 years old all over again.

One of these is from a friend's father in Dublin, who's kept hives for decades. It's grainy and nectar-y and sweet. The other is deep and molassas-y and mellow.

Granted, I don't know exactly what to do to best show them off. When I bought one of these at the farmer's market the other day, a guy beside me was looking for the darkest honey they had, because it has more antioxidants and he slathers it on his face every day before taking a shower.

I'm thinking more along the lines of drizzling some of this over ice cream, or baking up some honey cakes. But his skin did look pretty good.