Sowing the Seeds of...

Spring is here, it seems.  We've turned the clocks ahead (or stopped subtracting an hour from the oven clock that broke last year) and our spirits are a little brighter with the longer daylight hours.  And it says so on the calendar, it says that it's spring!  And while outside, it isn't all that green yet, inside, that plant we don't know the name of is starting to get new little branches.

I took that picture a few weeks ago, actually.  Now that little guy looks like this...

and there is even a new one just poking through the base of his stem:

How magical!  And I have been very productive, most days.  The only thing I haven't done is write about it.  It strikes me as somewhat amusing that I'm so behind on my productivity blog.  Let me show you some projects I've done recently:

Camp Cup Cozy

Just your basic repurposing project, using an insulated Big Y bag and sewing a cylinder.  Now I won't burn my fingers off when I pour boiling water over my ramen!  Pictured above is a delicious meal of beef flavored ramen with mixed vegetables and ground beef, which I had dehydrated myself.  The meat and veggies need to rehydrate for longer than the ramen needs to cook (and there's nothing worse than overcooked noodles, in my opinion) so I just cooked them for a few minutes in the cup before adding the ramen and more hot water.  Of course, it will taste better by the campfire.

Homemade Pumpkin Spice Protein Bars

I think these came out okay.  I got the recipe from this website, and I also made the chocolate chip ones, but I think I will do another batch before posting my official recipe.

Successfully Sealed Granola (Bars)

The cranberry-coconut-sunflower-seed-chocolate-chip granola bars I made in early February are still delicious, if not totally crushed by the vacuum sealing process.  But there is nothing wrong with eating handfuls of crushed granola bars on the trail.  Or dumping it into your oatmeal.  Or pouring the crumbs into your mouth and then licking the inside of the bag.  Opening a sealed bag does not count as something particularly productive, of course, but maybe this blog isn't so much about productivity as it is about showing off my successful recipes.

And if you were wondering how those turkey burgers came out, the ones with the homemade buns, well, they were really good.  The buns, they were okay.  Against my better judgement, I used a recipe that instructed to mix the yeast with the dry ingredients before adding the wet.  So they didn't rise very well, and they were very dense.  With a burger bun, you kind of don't want dense, because then all your stuff slides out the back when you take a bite.  Next time, I'll get it right, like with the pizza dough I made the other day, which I kneaded by hand and which rose beautifully.  Just remember, APY.  Always Proof Yeast.  Refer to this site, especially to the comment by Bobolink that begins, "Oh, I meant to say...."

Other things, like reading tons of books, and walking through the park, and going for a bike ride, yes, one single bike ride so far this year, and it was so wonderful, and as my bike friend and I parted ways, all those weeks ago on our bikes, we said, Let's do this all the time, let's always ride bikes, let's ride around and around the park all day long in the sun forever and ever.  And I definitely haven't ridden my bike since then.  Walking, on the other hand, is something I do all the time now.  Now that the clocks are turned ahead and it's not dark out when my dog's preferred companion gets home from work, all three of us can walk around the park and Cobi won't be confused that it's that girl who lives with him holding his leash.

So, yes, it is spring, and perhaps one of the most important things I've done in the last few weeks has been:

Planting Seeds with Carolyn

Planting day was a very exciting day for us.  We had been looking forward to it since last month, when we started talking about which seeds to plant and what to plant them in, and about south-facing windows and recycled or repurposed containers for the rooftop garden on Riverside Drive where these seedlings would grow and flourish.  I gushed about how wonderful it is to carefully place the tiny seeds in the soil, to gently water them and really you expect nothing, because how could a whole plant be trapped inside that tiny little vessel and how could your own clumsy hands be the ones to bring it forth, but then they grow, tiny little sprouts with tiny little unfurling leaves, and they keep growing because the sun keeps shining and your somewhat clumsy hands keep watering them.  Or, in the rooftop garden, the automatic irrigation system waters them.

Yes, planting day was a very big deal.  This would be my second year with a garden if I hadn't decided to trek through the wilderness for most of the growing season, and this is Carolyn's first year planting her own seedlings.  I was excited to do some vicarious gardening, and she was convinced that I was the container gardening expert because of my fire escape garden last year:

Garden Before..

Garden After...

But why start from seed, asked Carolyn's boyfriend, worried, perhaps, about the responsibility, about the mess, about all the work it would take to coax these delicate things into living.  The seeds are, after all, living at his apartment, with its dry heat, under a not-so-south-facing window near some books that we did protect with plastic, but, even so, what if one of the little paper cups were to tear or topple over, strewing soil everywhere, and what if he and Carolyn are busy at work, or out of town, what will happen if they go dry?  Why go through all this hassle when, in a few short weeks, you can go to the farmers market and buy neat plastic trays of seedlings grown by professionals, all ready for transplant right into the automatic irrigation system in the rooftop garden?

Because.  It is special.  To watch a pepper seed sprout and grow leaves and then the leaves multiply and then that first flower which lifts its little head and opens to reveal a round green bulb which fattens with the rain and sun and it grows and ripens into a pepper, and then the plant is just covered with these peppers, and there are hundreds of tiny seeds trapped inside that red and green and yellow flesh, seeds just like the tiny one that you just stuck in the dirt two months ago.  It was one seed and now it is hundreds.  It is amazing.

Because, and this is the even more corny part, but I believe it, this makes us think about what the earth is made of, and what life is about--not just your life as an actor or a hair stylist or a bank teller or a cook, or my life as a writer, but, like, actual life, like living, and what it means to be alive and breathe air and walk on the ground and hold a handful of dark soil.  You're bigger than the plant in your garden, probably, and you feel powerful because you made it grow, but it's a part of something that's bigger than you, and who's to say that plant didn't make you grow it?  Okay, that's a different story, but when you think about all of it, the circle of life, the planet, the universe, and everything, it transports you out of this crazy city where everything is just the commute to work, the screeching of train tracks, the rent is too damn high, and taxicabs and coffee, and everyone trying to be somewhere more important than where you are so get out of their way, please, now.

So, in the quiet of David's apartment while he was working, we planted the seeds.  Peppers, broccoli, kale, and calendula (because I have a million calendula seeds and they look so cool).

And Carolyn is nervous that they might not grow.  She's nervous about the dryness in the apartment, about how she won't be able to water them twice a day, about whether or not they're getting enough sun.  So I told her, they're plants and they're smart and they'll find a way.  They'll grow because they really want to grow, and if conditions are really so bad that they can't grow, then maybe they'll hold off for a little while, until conditions improve.  All you can do is just write it in your garden journal and think about how to do it better next time.  Anyway you have to get on the subway and go to work, don't be late, but wasn't it great that for a little while, that one day, you got your hands dirty, pressing those tiny seeds into newspaper cups full of soil, and didn't you love the dirt under your fingernails, how it made you feel closer to nature?  I think the seeds will grow.  Maybe I'm overconfident, but, I really think they will, I mean, they have to.  I think the seeds will grow because, honestly, we just love them.

PO TAY TOES

Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew!

Or, of course, dehydrate them.  Which I totally did last week.

First we had to buy a food processor, which I'll tell you about in a moment.  While I waited for it to come in the mail, I dehydrated some lean ground turkey and some carrots, peas, corn, and green beans.  I did those  according to the instructions at www.backpackingchef.com, and they came out just fine.  I bought some nice yellow potatoes at the farmers' market in Grand Army Plaza, on one of those nice sunny days where it actually ends up snowing halfway through your pleasant walk around the park, and maybe the jeans you were wearing were a little too thin and you end up almost freezing your legs off, and then the next day it's sunny and 50 degrees somehow.  And I talked endlessly about my potato plans.

My potato "bark," as Chef Glen calls it on his website and in his wonderful e-book, was going to come out awesome, I was quite sure.  Way more awesome than the potato cubes I tried to dehydrate a while back.  I didn't cut them small enough, not even close, and after probably twelve hours in the dehydrator, a ton of them were still soft in the middle.  And they didn't look very appetizing.  I put them in a jar anyway, just to see what happened.  Now they look like this:

Not so nice.  I won't be trying to dry potato chunks again, not unless I'm slicing them to chip-thickness, which is to say very thin, which is to say, I need a mandoline, which is another kitchen gadget I don't want to purchase right before moving out of here.  Plus, I don't want a crappy one.  I want a nice one that isn't going to dull after I slice up a few cucumbers and peppers and potatoes.  To chip-thickness.  So.  I'll be saving my pennies.  Anyway, why dry sliced potatoes when you can make potato bark?!  For convenient use in many backpacking meals!

"You know, we can buy potato flakes," said my life-long hiking partner.  "We can buy the ones that are a hundred percent potato.  Like, nothing but potato."

No!  Just, no way!  Why would I buy potato flakes for assembling backpacking meals, when I could spend all my time and energy making my own potato flakes?  I mean really, you could buy buckets and buckets of any type of dehydrated food you wanted, and you could be pretty sure that it wouldn't have any white fuzzy bits, and maybe it wouldn't even be that expensive.  But where's the fun in that?  Where's the productivity?

But yes, I did feel like I was spending all my time and energy on these potatoes, maybe because I decided to make them right after a particularly exhausting ten-hour shift, maybe because of all the mistakes I made along the way.  The first one, of course, being that I didn't measure anything.

Well, I measured the cup of beef broth that I used in the mash--you can't use butter and milk because it won't dehydrate well--and I measured out the Worcestershire sauce I was using to give it a little bit of a shepherd's pie flavoring when it all came together in the end.  But I didn't weigh out the 2.5 pounds of potatoes that Chef Glen calls for in his recipe, in fact I probably used quite a bit more.  Nor did I realize that one cup of beef broth is 8 ounces, not the 16 called for in the recipe.  I was tired, okay?  I just wanted to get this potato goop into the dehydrator.

Before you spread it on the trays, though, you have to blend it up so it gets extra goopy.  You will notice on the Backpacking Chef website a picture of a nice pourable liquid potato.  It looks so convenient, so easy to spread.  So I popped my beefy mash into the fridge to cool off a little before scooping it into the food processor.  Another mistake.  I think this processor is not the correct device to use for this recipe.  In fact, there is a warning in the instruction booklet: Do not puree or mash starchy vegetables like potatoes. They will be overprocessed in a second and turn gummy.  Yes, I read this warning before I even started the project.  And I ignored it.

Here are my overprocessed, gummy potatoes:

As you can see, they will not pour.  Honestly, though, they didn't look all that nasty.  Just, whipped, is all.  Because I kept on whipping them up.  Even though I knew they would be overprocessed in one single second, I just kept pulsing the machine and dumping in more broth, hoping to make liquid potato.  It was not so.  And of course, all of the mash wouldn't fit in the processor at once, so I did this over and over and over with each blob.

I began to spread the whipped up 'taters very thinly on my dehydrator trays, which of course are annoyingly round, because I do not have the fancy $300 Excalibur (saving my pennies).  I use parchment paper for these sorts of jobs, and each time, I have to cut it into a donut shape.  Anyway so I covered all five trays, and then realized that I hadn't even used up a third of my potato whip.  The paper was crinkling from the moisture and it was impossible to spread the stuff evenly.  And I had a terrible stomachache.

But you know, a dehydrator really can't do anything but dehydrate the crap you put in it, so, lo and behold, a few hours later, my thin sheets of potato whip were getting crispy.  I flipped them over, passed out, then woke up at 5am to break up the sheets and put them into bags.  Potato flakes!  That is, flakes of 100% potato with no weird preservatives and crap, except I guess whatever is in the broth.  Or, potato bark, invented by the Backpacking Chef and almost totally screwed up by me!  (I don't have pictures of them in flake form.  It was 5am.)

Having a bag of actual flakes of potato renewed my confidence, so I spread out the rest of the goo on the trays, much more thickly in order to use it up.  Once again, like magic, the goo turned into crispy sheets, and I crushed it up and asked my campfire expert to do the first recipe test.  A handful of ground turkey, a handful of dried vegetables, and a double handful of potato with equal parts water made a nice little stew over the campfire that is our gas stove.  Okay, well, it suffered a little in the seasoning department, since I didn't put nearly enough beef broth and Worcestershire, so when I packaged up the appropriately sized meals...

...I made sure to mark them Needs seasoning / hot sauce!!

Shouldn't be a problem.  Last time I went backpacking with this hot sauce addicted guy who I live with, we were eating out of the same pot, and I made him hold onto his Cholula bottle and shake it onto his individual spoonfuls, so that my own bites would be safely un-spicy.  But it seems he's influenced me in certain ways over the years.  I can handle a few jalapeno slices with seeds, and when I make tuna salad I squeeze in a little sriracha.  Not to mention all the other stuff: the IPAs, the Minecraft, the portobello burgers, pepperoni pizza, the idea of having chickens and goats in the backyard and getting your hands dirty, and, of course, backpacking--all these things I didn't much care for in the past.  I like a lot of things now, and I like that I like them.  This time around, out in the woods, we're going to be cooking up my homemade shepherd's pie, and I'm going to be carrying a bottle of something spicy.  And we're going to go ahead and stir it right in.

Well, in any case, it's five meals down, about thirty to go, that is if we want to be eating homemade half the nights we're out there.  Got to be done by mid-May.  Do you think I can do it??

What to Write About?

Elated after my first blog post, I spent the whole week telling everyone at work about my awesome new blog, and how productive I'm going to be, and how I'm struggling, really, with identifying myself as a blogger, something I never really thought I'd be, and how, really, there are hundreds of craft and recipe blogs out there that I can't compete with, but I'm really going to try to be something different, I'm going to focus more on the writing, I'm going to tell funny stories and include valuable life lessons.  I'm not going to give you the link, I told them, until I have more posts and it looks like a real blog.

So everything I did this week, I thought about writing up in a blog post.  But every day, I realized that I had actually done nothing blogworthy.  I went to work, some customers irritated me and some didn't, I came home and played Minecraft.  Every dream I can remember from the past few days has been about work (customers order things from me, then I get really confused about why I can't find the espresso machine, then I realize work is in my bedroom, then more customers come up, and it's all very confusing) and about Minecraft (those were pretty cool dreams, where I was going about the real landscape as if it was a Minecraft world, punching trees and grass blocks).  I thought about opening up the granola bars that I vacuum-sealed a month ago to see how successfully they have been preserved, but then I realized that vacuum-sealing is vacuum-sealing and that means that they are almost certainly just fine.  Well, maybe I'll open them in a week or two to see.  In any case, none of these things are blogworthy.

On my day off, I finally put the carrots in the dehydrator.  It was 10:30 am, and as I spread them out on the trays, I felt very good about how productive I was going to be.  I was listening to NPR, and NPR doubles productivity, because while you are slicing carrots and steaming them in preparation for preservation, you are learning all sorts of new things, like how John Boehner's name is pronounced BAY-ner, which you never would have known from just reading the boring politics articles in the New Yorker, which is the only periodical you read, and you occasionally wonder why people don't make fun of that guy's name more.

So it turns out, carrots go from this:

to this:

in a matter of about eight hours.

So what did I do with those eight hours?  Who knows.  I probably played Minecraft and looked at Pinterest pretty much the whole time.  I also organized the recycling and swept the floor.  Sweeping the floor, of course, is fruitless, because the broom movement only makes the dog hair tornadoes swirl and spread all over the place, when before they were neatly settled into the corners.  Anyway I did the best I could.  And though I did the dishes in the morning, by the evening there was a pile twice as high.  Funny how that happens.

The next morning (late morning) in the subway station, I took out my notebook to write a little about the multiplying dishes and the impossible sweeping so that maybe I could make it into a blog post.  I had only written a few lines when a man who may or may not have been crazy started yelling at me from the other side of the turnstiles.  "Me and you ain't never gonna get along," he said, I think.  He was just pointing at me and yelling, and I really couldn't understand what he was saying.  Something about minding my own business?  Was he yelling at me about how I was taking notes?  What the hell!  After he walked out of the station, I made a quick note: "I'm putting this away now, but not because of the crazy yelling guy."  And I pretended not to be bummed out about it, but I was.  The first time I take out the dumb notebook in a month, and I get yelled at about it.

So that's my story this week.  Feeling discouraged because of crazy people who yell incoherently, doing a whole lot of un-blogworthy things, having endless work dreams, and on top of all that, forgetting to take my vitamins, which I just now realized.

But tonight is different.  Tonight, I made cookies.

Interesting how the cookies are what ultimately made this a blogworthy day, seeing as how we also walked 2.5 miles in the park while even more carrots were shriveling up in the dehydrator, and I made an egg sandwich for lunch while listening to Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, and I read a few chapters of the book that I have been totally neglecting in favor of this computer.  It's amazing how much easier the book is on my eyes; I should really go back to books full time.

When my cookie-taster, the one I'm marrying sometime next year, expressed an interest in some classic chocolate chips, I began work immediately.  These cookies are worth writing about, and they are worth telling people the web address to this thing.  Hopefully they are worth reading through all of that previous stuff up there, all that stuff I just wrote even as these cookies were still cooling on the counter.  So here is my recipe, adapted from the instructions you find on any package of chocolate chips, and of course, cut in half.

Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies

with a little peanut butter

and of course

Whole Wheat Flour

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup butter, softened

1/4 cup peanut butter (I used creamy, though you could of course use crunchy, and I probably used more than 1/4 cup; I was estimating, because no one likes scooping the peanut butter into the measuring cup and scooping it out again--that's too much peanut butter loss on the sides of your implements, plus more things to wash after)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 egg

3/4 cup whole wheat flour

1/4 cup plus a little more all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

a little salt

Half a 12-oz package of chocolate chips.  I didn't measure how much that is.  A cup?

You pretty much know how to mix this all together, I'm sure.  Classic cookie instructions.  Creaming the butter and sugar, adding the other wet stuff, mixing in the dry stuff, chocolate chips come last.

 The substitution of the peanut butter plus the whole wheat flour made it so my dough was maybe a little more dry than it should have been, but no matter.










If you roll up the cookie balls with your hands, they should stick together fine.  And maybe, like me, you have a pre-cut piece of parchment paper waiting for you in the box!  This time it didn't escape unscathed; the chocolate chips left their mark.  It's okay, I'm not crazy enough to try and save my parchment paper a second time.






Bake at 375 degrees for something like fifteen minutes, until they are just starting to get a little brown on the edges.  Mine mostly kept their round shape, maybe next time I'll squish them a little before they go in.

As usual, I baked a few cookies and rolled up the rest of the dough for the freezer.  Here's the cookie log all wrapped up, posed next to the plastic wrap my mom bought for me at Costco when I was twenty-one and moved into my first solo apartment.  It was a two-pack.  We may finish the second roll just before leaving New York.  Four years later.  Is plastic wrap supposed to last you that long?

These cookies are, of course, best enjoyed with a cold glass of milk.  Which I don't have a picture of.  Though starting this dumb blog has made me into somewhat of an insane person in the picture taking department, I haven't gone that far.  Yet.

On tomorrow's menu are turkey burgers on homemade buns.  Bun style is to be determined, but wouldn't it be neat if they were pretzel buns?  We'll see what my burger-maker thinks.  And maybe it will be blogworthy....