Things I Learned in October

It's fall!

Here are a few things I learned this past month...

There are gobs of good books available on Amazon for Kindle for FREE! Most of these books are classics, which is perfect because I usually prefer a book that has stood the test of time over a current bestseller. I'm going to be working through this list for years.

The book, Les Misérables, is not only readable, it is excellent. Ever since watching the movie almost two years ago, I've been wanting to read Les Mis, but I've been intimidated by its massive size. Since it's free for Kindle, I dove in a week ago and I'm hooked.

My husband enjoys classic books too. When he saw the list of free ebooks, he asked if I recommended any. I told him that The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde was an addicting read. He read it, loved it, and moved onto another one of Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous novels, Treaure Island. He says it's even better than Jekyll and Hyde. I have book envy.

If you take a branch off of a tomato plant, stick it in the ground, and water it, you can grow a whole new tomato plant. Here's Grace with the new plant.

Sleep deprivation is just as hard the second time around. Sleep dep reveals the worst in me - I get cranky and emotional and I can't deal with anything. My sleep dep reveals the best in Michael - he is patient and gracious and ever-loving. Where did I find him?!

Going for a walk is an almost acceptable alternative to caffeine. I normally have a cup of hot, black tea every morning. While nursing Grace, I noticed no difference in her napping habits based off of my caffeine consumption, so I kept up my habit. With Cora, a simple cup of tea can mess up her napping for hours, so I've reluctantly given it up. In giving up caffeine, I've found that a thirty minute walk can perk me up almost as well. Though you can be sure that when I'm done nursing, the first thing I will do is drink a cup of tea.

While words tell me, art moves me. Over the past weeks, I've come across multiple forms of art on the theme of being welcomed by God despite my mess. I've been a follower of Jesus for over two decades, so it is a very familiar message, but I feel the art speaking to me in deeper ways than I've ever felt this message conveyed. Thank God for poetry, paintings, parables, artful prose, and literature. 

The poem is George Herbert's Love (III).
The artful prose is Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Son writing about Rembrandt's painting by the same name, both based off of Jesus' parable of the prodigal son.
The literature is Les Misérables, specifically the scene involving the Bishop and his silver.

Homemade Salsa

What's my new favorite way to use up garden tomatoes? Homemade salsa! There are probably endless recipes online. Here's the salsa recipe I've been making dug up from a January 2012 post on this blog and slightly modified. It's quite quick and easy to make and is just about the tastiest way I can think of to eat my veggies.

Ingredients
Four large tomatillos
Two roma tomatoes or a couple of handfuls of cherry tomatoes
A quarter of an onion
A chili (Serrano? Habanero? You decide the heat level! What do we use? One tiny, fiery Thai pepper.)
One bunch of cilantro
One garlic clove
Salt

Directions
1. Roast the tomatillos, tomatoes, onion, and chili on a baking sheet under the broiler or on the grill, flipping them as needed, until they turn brown and toasty all over. Burnt spots are good. If you want to be really healthy, you can toast up whole wheat tortillas in the oven or on the grill to serve as baked chips.
2. Pulse all the ingredients in a blender or food processor until your salsa reaches the desired texture. Add more salt if needed.
3. Serve with chips. (And horchata!)

Seven Things I Learned in August

1. I love short hair. It's me. 

I enjoy change and variety, so for over ten years, I've repeatedly gone through the cycle of growing my hair long only to chop it all off. My hair had gotten super long over the past year. I chopped it into a long bob a couple of weeks ago. It feels so light and free. I'm already dreaming about how short I'll go next time it needs a trim.

2. You cannot grow summery vegetables with little sun.

Our garden is a sorry sight these days. Our brussels sprouts and artichokes completely failed. Our squash and tomatoes are only barely producing. I sometimes catch myself dreaming of what I could produce if I had the requisite 6+ hours of sunlight. I'm looking forward to being successful again when winter rolls around and we grow veggies for the leaves not the fruit.

3. How to make homemade Greek yogurt in a crock pot.

It's so easy, I've made batch after batch. My go to breakfast these days is yogurt drizzled with honey with a handful of granola mixed in and a cup of tea alongside. I found a recipe for how to make homemade ricotta cheese from the yogurt whey. I hope to try it soon.

4. My husband listens to eclectic music.

I suppose I've always known this, but I learned it at a deeper level. This summer, while doing reading for a seminary course, he listened to chip tunes, movie soundtracks, instrumental bluegrass, and bluegrass/Classical fusion. Ever seen a world class mandolin player play Bach? It's pretty incredible. Watch it.

5. Ten hours of work without childcare is the right balance for me! (For now.)

Women (and men more and more these days) all have different ideas of what is the "right" balance between work and home time. I started working again about a month ago. In the past few weeks, I've discovered that about ten hours of work is totally doable with a six month old. It's refreshing, mind stimulating, and fun. More on what my work is to come...

6. My daughter looks like my husband.

7. Nose piercing doesn't hurt much.

That's right. I got my nostril pierced. I've wanted a little stud for years. A year and a half ago, I was going to get it done with my sister, but had a fainting spell and lost the courage. A year ago, I went again to get it with my sister, but they refused to pierce me because I was pregnant. A month ago, I went again with my friend, but they again refused, this time because I was breastfeeding. I called my doctor, got the green light, went in a few days later, and finally got it done. I love it!

Little Happenings

I celebrated my first Mother's Day on Sunday. I got another ounce of selfishness squeezed out of me as I realized that the day that is for celebrating mothers is still full of sacrifice for the kiddo. I was really looking forward to the day, but woke up especially tired, and then Grace struggled with napping all day eliciting more exhaustion and tears from me. But, boy was she precious in the evening when I made her smile, giggle, laugh, and coo! I am so grateful for my little daughter, bad days and all.

A picture of Grace because I know that's
what you really want to see!

~

Did you catch that above? Grace is laughing! I have never seen anything more precious in all my life! 

~

My dear friend, Marie, was in town for a wedding last week. She carved out time from the wedding festivities to hang out with me. We met our freshman year of college, lived together for a year in college, lived together for a year after college, and were bridesmaids in each others' weddings. She moved to Chicago in 2009 for grad school, and we haven't seen each other since then. It was so fun to catch up in person rather than via our infrequent phone dates.

~

I have been using the Baby Connect app to track Grace's feeding, diapers, sleeping/napping, and her weight & height. Baby Connect takes the numbers I enter and turns them into all sorts of nifty charts and stats. For instance, I know that she's had 427 poopy diapers since she was born. Nasty. It's the only cell phone app I've ever paid for, which says something about how good it is. If you're a parent or hope to someday be one, check it out!

~

We recently had a couple days where the temperature hovered around 100 degrees. I am not ready for another So Cal desert summer. In fact, I'm never ready for this type of weather.

~

Grace and I are flying to Colorado on Monday! We're going to chill at my parents' house for a few days while Michael is at his students' summer conference. Then, Michael will be joining us for a full week after that. I am looking forward to cooler weather, mountain fun, lots of baby help, not being on point for meal planning and cooking, introducing extended family members to Grace, and spending hours and hours with family!

~

In garden news, our brussels sprouts plan is sprouting its brussels! (You know what I mean.) We also have a number of green tomatoes that have appeared and numerous other seeds have sprouted. We'll hopefully start harvesting new veggies in just a few weeks!

Chernobyl Strawberries

Why do I garden? Produce tastes better when picked at maturity. I love to watch the process of growth. It's nice to get outside. I can grow food that is expensive or that can't even be purchased in a grocery store. It's satisfying to eat food that I grew myself.

It's also fun to see all of the crazy shapes fruits and vegetables take when they aren't produced commercially. Here are some of our strawberries from our strawberry barrel that look like they've survived nuclear fallout! 

Check out these too.

And speaking of fruits and vegetables that are hard to find in grocery stores, I just got seeds for Romanesco broccoli in the mail! I've been fascinated by this fractal vegetable since college, but have never actually seen it in real life, so we're going to grow it! 

Harvest

I tried to grow flowers twice. Both times I failed. Then, Grace came along. We didn't tend to our garden, the weather warmed, and three of the winter leafy greens bolted sending wispy yellow and white flowers high over our garden.

I suppose I have found the most successful flower growing formula for me: plant veggies + don't take care of them = flowers!

The fact that the whole garden was trying to go to seed clued us in to the change in seasons, so we're in the process of transitioning our garden from winter mode to summer mode. We harvested the edible parts of the bok choy, Chinese broccoli, arugula, and snap peas and ripped out the rest of the plants. We harvested lots of carrots and beets too.

By the way, beet greens are edible and delicious. When they are young, throw them in a salad along with other greens. When they are mature, follow these instructions:

1. Blanch the greens in boiling water for two minutes and then cool them immediately in ice water. To use the stems, chop them up and blanch them for a little longer than the greens.
2. Lightly brown finely chopped garlic in olive oil, then sauté the greens and stems in oil and garlic.

Any edible greens can be cooked this way!

Michael is outside right now working on the summer garden. It will include two types of squash, several varieties of peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, and other yummy plants. Pictures and a post to come!

Little Happenings

With my little girl's arrival just four weeks away, I have been emotionally convinced that my life is frozen in anticipation for that big day. But, this isn't the case. Everyday life seems ever eager to ebb and flow and bump along and ever unwilling to absolutely freeze. Let me share some of the little happenings of everyday life.

In no particular order:

My job downtown with an immigration attorney ended about two months ago. But, I am still volunteering once a week with the same local nonprofit. The rest of my time is spent resting, sleeping a lot, preparing for baby's arrival, moving slowly, and working on a project that I shall unveil in June...

I spent some time online recently looking for cute poses and helpful tips for photographing newborns. I came across the term "mamarazzi" for the first time. I am going to be such a mamarazzi!

Getting to know our new neighbors was slow at first, but has been picking up. I have been texting and hanging out with a neighbor (Lori) across the street who is a first time mom. Here's our housemate, Jen, holding Lori's four month old, Cadence.

Remember when I used to blog about our garden all the time? I rarely mention it, but it's still going! Our successful plants right now are arugula, bok choy, and Chinese broccoli. We're trying to grow at least a half dozen other things including brussels sprouts, artichoke, purple cabbage, etc. We'll see how the other plants do! (Confession: I thought they were called brussel sprouts until I wrote this post. Are they really called brussels sprouts?)

Within the topic of plants, our lime tree is budding! See the two teeny limes northeast of the white flower?

In the world of prepping for the baby, the car seat is in, the changing table is all set up, and the cloth diapers are ready for whenever we're ready to switch to them.

How can something that's going to cover a butt and hold poop be so cute?

Yesterday, we had our first ultrasound in over fifteen weeks. For some reason, I haven't always felt fully convinced that we are having a girl. Well, she's still a girl! And she's looking great. After the ultrasound, I felt overwhelmed with gratefulness for how smoothly everything has gone with this pregnancy. Even yesterday, we found out for the first time that her head is down, making a cesarean section much more unlikely, and she's facing my spine, which usually makes labor faster and less painful. I'll take that!

It's hailed twice in the last few days! What the hail?! That was dumb, sorry. : )

Adventures in Constructing a Raised Bed

It's been quite a while since I've written about my garden, and since moving to our new place, it's quite different! So let me catch you up with our slightly crazy shenanigans.

Before moving, Michael decided he wanted to do a gigantic raised bed, so we went to a hardware store to purchase the supplies to make it ourselves. Upon exiting the store, we realized that the planks for making the long ends of the raised bed were almost the length of our Corolla. As we discussed how to fit them in our car, another Lowe's patron walked by and commented, "You guys win the award for most unrealistic." Michael and I awkwardly smiled at each other and proved him wrong:

The two long boards filled our car from the dashboard all the way out of the trunk a couple of feet. During our half mile trip home, the two planks of wood managed to turn on our windshield wipers for us, making us laugh even harder than we already were at the ridiculousness of our venture.

We moved and constructed the raised bed. Then, we had to fill our enormous box with dirt. Even if we purchased every bag of dirt at Walmart, we wouldn't have had enough. So, with a quick internet search, I found a nursery that sold dirt in bulk, so we rented a U-Haul pickup and went. Mind you, the cost of the dirt and the truck rental combined was about half the cost of buying bags of dirt!

When we told the woman who worked at the garden center that we wanted two yards of dirt, she laughed at the size of our truck informing us that two yards of dirt would weigh two tons which was well over the load limit for our F-150. We felt about as sheepish as we did in the Lowe's parking lot with two huge planks of wood. So, we quickly halved our order to one yard.

Here's our dirt. It doesn't look like much, but it's a ton. Literally.

Michael then rolled a ton of dirt, one recycling barrel at a time (we're too cheap to buy a wheelbarrow) into our backyard dumping each surprisingly heavy barrel of dirt into our raised bed. It was the hottest day of the summer, peaking at 106 degrees. He finished around 1 or 2pm, so he managed to do this work when it was a mere 103-105 degrees outside.

He didn't let me help because I was (am) pregnant. I didn't mind! So I took pictures. :-)

After all of that work, it turned out that the 1/2 topsoil 1/2 compost mix we purchased was super clayey. We transplanted all of our plants into the new garden bed. A couple died, a couple lived and flowered like crazy without producing any fruit, and a couple of plants have thrived including...

...Thai basil...

(Shorn down.)

...and Thai peppers! How convenient for making Thai food. And that's exactly what we did.

Here's our final basil harvest.

The horrible soil has been super frustrating, but that's just how gardening goes. It's a lot of work. But, for some reason we really enjoy the challenge! Though when we have both an infant and a garden to care for and keep alive, the garden may fall by the wayside for at least a time. We shall see.

Summer Dinner

After weeks of waiting, our tomatoes finally turned red, so I made this for dinner:

No, I am not on a diet. In fact, I had In-N-Out for lunch. I just find that I often eat unusual dinners when my husband is out of town and I particularly love this salad... I think it's called Caprese? Or Insalata Caprese? Or Caprese Salad? I don't know. All I know is that it's delicious.

If you want to make it:

1. Layer slices of tomato mozzarella cheese (fresh mozzarella is best!)
2. Drizzle with olive oil and squeeze fresh lemon juice on top (balsamic vinegar is how it's always served, but I prefer lemon juice)
3. Sprinkle on salt and fresh ground pepper to taste.

Enjoy!

Satisfaction = WPR

There is a direct relationship between the amount of work, patience, and risk a plant takes and the amount of satisfaction you get when you harvest it. In mathematical terms that would be WPR = S
W = hours of work
P = weeks of waiting
R = number of times you freak out thinking the whole plant is going to die
S = satisfaction


For lettuce, W = 1hr, P = 10 weeks (we get little sun), R = 3. So, my satisfaction is 30. Don't ask me what the units of satisfaction are. They might be smiles or something cheesy like that.


With my purple cabbage, given that I gave the cabbage about 3 hours of attention picking off pests, it took about 30 weeks to grow, and I thought the whole thing was going to fail at least 20 times, my satisfaction level upon harvesting and eating it yesterday was at a whopping 1,800 smiles.


Clearly feeling the satisfaction. Well, not so much.

I think I was pretending the cabbage was a weapon, so I was trying to look intense. How embarrassing.


Onto the next pictures. There she is:

My Husband is Trying to Grow a Pineapple

I firmly that believe that everyone is weird. You just have to get to know individuals to unearth their quirks. And, to me, it's people's wacky sides that make them so interesting and fun to know!


My husband is no exception. (And I love it!)


It all started innocently enough with a few tomato plants, a bed of Chinese broccoli, a mushroom kit. Now, the gardening going on at home has reached some new level of absurdity considering how little experience and space we have.


Our little strip of dirt that's three feet deep and two bedrooms wide now boasts the following plants in various stages of growth: parsley, basil, strawberries, five types of tomatoes, carrots, red bell peppers, serrano peppers, thai peppers, a hydranga, some other flowers, squash, two types of lettuce, kale, chard, arugula, bok choy, cilantro, celery, spinach, snap peas, three types of beans, tomatillos, artichokes, red cabbage, rosemary, a couple of succulents, and beets. I'm probably missing something. Oh yes, the onion flower. An old onion started sprouting, so we stuck it in the ground and after producing many green onion-like shoots, it is now a three foot tall purple flower with a thick green oniony stem.


The seeds from within the pits from within the apricots that I bought this weekend are now in jars filled with dirt in our fridge to fake winter like conditions to force them to sprout. So, I guess Michael's officially growing an apricot tree too.


We also have red bell pepper plants growing thanks to my husband taking the seeds from red bell peppers bought from the store, drying them on a plate in the sun, and planting them a few weeks (months?) later.


And even with all that going on, I think this new development takes the cake when it comes to absurdity: Michael is trying to grow a pineapple. I fully endorse this event or product.


Here's the original pineapple.

Removing the top:

Letting it dry out in the backyard. (Mind you, this is following instructions from the blog of some man who has successfully grown pineapples in the continental US.)

The top sitting in water in a jar on top of our fridge. The goal is root production. Notice the water changing schedule, written in dry erase marker, with a reminder for me to change it while he's out of town this week.

An old yogurt container filled with proper pineapple growing soil waiting to receive our pineapple plant.

Assuming all goes as planned, it is going to take two to three years for our plant to produce a single pineapple. I'm not holding my breath.

Unorthodox Produce

One of the greatest privileges of living in Southern California is that, for a large portion of the year, I can pick lemons from local trees for free instead of from produce piles at the grocery store. And one of my favorite things about picking lemons myself, aside from how incredibly sweet and lemony they taste, is that I get to see the hilariously unorthodox shapes that they sometimes take.

A couple of months ago, Michael and I discovered what has become our go-to lemon grove on public property across the street from his old elementary school. It's as adorable as it sounds. Side note: I would love to find in my neighborhood a go-to orange grove, pomegranate grove, kumquat grove, tangerine grove, avocado grove, ... You get the idea.)

Here are two specimens of the pounds and pounds of lemons we picked last Tuesday. The one on the right is about the size of your typical lemon from the grocery store pile. Check out the bad boy to its left!

Isn't that cool?! I guess I have had the fleeting thought that perhaps whatever made this lemon this way is something that I shouldn't be ingesting, but then again, there is no way to find out and they're so delicious (I even eat the skins), I don't really want to know!

Onto the other unorthodox produce.

My snap pea plants have grown into quite a tangle. Unfortunately, the peas are the same exact shade of green as the leaves and the vines. Therefore, I will scour the tangled vines, picking every last snap pea only to find (every single time that I pick, mind you!) a monstrosity of a snap pea tucked in hiding.

Again, grocery store sized pea up front. Bad boy in back.

Pretty huge, huh?

Purple Carrots

I bought Michael purple haze carrots last year for Valentine's Day, or something like that. We finally planted them in October, and according to the seed package, they should have been ready for harvest in two months. Well, they struggled for six months, as most of our ground plants do, due to a lack of sun on our tiny strip of dirt that is overshadowed on the east and west by two story buildings.


On Sunday, I wrapped my hands around one carrot's green foliage and gave a tug. It resisted hard. A few more tugs and out popped these awesome purple carrots. Good job little guys! Now I am going to eat you!

Winter Garden Tour II

In November, I posted this picture of our winter garden:

Here's the same spot, today:

We did it!


Michael and I have been harvesting about one large handful of snap peas every few days. Store bought lettuce has been replaced with salads of mixed greens from the garden -- everything from beet leaves to Chinese broccoli to kale to spinach to regular old lettuce. We should begin harvesting our purple carrots and beets any day now.


Butter lettuce & purple haze carrots:

Beets:

More carrots and beets growing out of a plastic pretzel jar:

Our Chinese broccoli forest:

We officially LOVE gardening!