Snapshots: Snakes 'n' Summer

Most of the time when my mom brings the kids random toys and other diversions, I save them for some later time. Last time she came, those diversions were water guns and water balloons. Those I saved for the last day of school, which was conveniently 83 degrees.

(Swim) suited up for battle.

And look who we saw when we were getting on the bus to come home on the last day of school.

It's Howard's cousin!

Instead of a coffee maker on the counter, we have an electric kettle, which I use with a french press to make my coffee. Our five-year-old kettle melted down in a rather spectacular fashion a couple of weeks ago, so I had to order a new one. The one I got is glass, and when it's on, the base is surrounded by a blue light. 

When it's at a full boil in a dark kitchen, it looks pleasingly like a lava lamp.

My coffee is so much groovier now.

And lastly, here is a bowl of fresh fruit. I do not usually have enough fresh fruit to have a fruit bowl of the sort that seem de rigueur in carefully styled kitchens, but I happened to have a very photogenic variety this week. And a photogenic bowl, too.

A. bought the pomegranate so he could plant the seeds and grow a tree. Isn't that why you buy fruit?

And there you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Schoool's Out for Summer

"Schoooool's out forever. School's been blown. To. Pieces."

Name that song!*

Anyway. Food . . .

Friday 

Short version: Pretzels, ice cream sandwiches, pork with green chili, garlic bread, raw radishes

Long version: I was outside weeding my asparagus at 3:30 p.m. when the phone rang. It was the mechanic, telling us the van was ready to pick up.

The mechanic is an hour away, and they would be closing for the weekend at 5 p.m. Our next opportunity to get the van wouldn't be until the following Friday. 

Road trip, kids!

Luckily, everyone was already outside, so all I had to do was pile them into the Honda. I quickly filled a few water bottles and grabbed a bag of pretzel sticks from the pantry to placate the hungry children. We also promised them ice cream after we got the van.

It was really hot on the ride down--the Honda doesn't have any air conditioning--but it started to rain right before we got the mechanic. There was no thunder, so while we were waiting for A. to pay and get the keys, I let them all get out to run around in the (light) rain.

Because we know how to have a good time.

We got them ice cream sandwiches at the gas station before we headed home. Very luckily, I had already made garlic bread and cooked some pork country ribs, so when we got home all I had to do was pull the meat off the ribs and mix it with some of the green chili sauce. I also threw some green beans right in with the pork to up the vegetable content.

Saturday

Short version: Leftover pork, chicken patty sandwiches, carrot sticks with curry dip

Long version: I had a plan involving some of the pressure-canned bull meat, but then I punked out with those frozen chicken patties and leftovers. A. and Cubby were helping Rafael fix his windmill and they didn't get home until 8 p.m., so it was just me and the other three kids anyway. They were happy with the sandwiches.

Sunday

Short version: Roast beef, roasted potatoes, sauteed sprouting broccoli, blueberry/apricot dessert oatmeal

Long version: Sprouting broccoli is a new thing for me. I bought the seeds at Baker's Creek Seeds when we stopped there a couple of summers ago on our way home from Blackrock. They're a fall-planted plant that's supposed to overwinter and produce the broccoli florets in early spring.

The first fall I planted them, they didn't even germinate. Too dry, I suspect.

Last fall they germinated and grew pretty well, but the only ones I got through the winter were the ones that were in one of the sunken box beds. They survived because I could cover them to protect them from both the voracious rabbits and the cold. They're supposed to be winter-hardy, but I don't think they're hardy enough to withstand zero degrees without some protection.

Anyway. They grew nicely in the spring and I finally harvested enough for a side dish.

Sprouting broccoli doesn't form heads, just individual florets on a kind of bushy plant. It looks sort of weedy, but it tasted really good.

This is a purple variety, although they turn green when cooked.

This was the sleeper hit of this meal. Every single person said how good it was. Even A., who doesn't even like broccoli, told me I should grow it again. 

Done.

The dessert was supposed to be a crisp to use some apricots I bought on Thursday that were not as flavorful as I would have liked. However, the frozen blueberries once again released so many juices that they overwhelmed the topping. Also, the topping was mostly oats--trying to use up the crazy quantities of quick oats I keep getting from our neighbors--so it actually ended up tasting sort of like very fruity oatmeal. It was good with whipped cream, though.

Monday

Short version: Cheater's pizza, pizza omelets, green salad from MY LETTUCE, HOORAY!

Long version: I did back-to-back bread bakings this weekend so I could make bread for end-of-year teacher gifts, which means I made garlic bread two nights. Rather than give the kids garlic bread on Sunday, though, I saved that loaf and cut it in half to serve as pizza crust. A bag of Finny's sauce from the freezer, grated asadero cheese, and there's an exciting workday dinner for the children.

A. and I ate the omelets. I've never made these before, or heard of them, but I'm sure there are recipes for them somewhere. All I did was season the eggs with dried basil, garlic powder, salt, and pepper, then fill the omelet with asadero cheese, and top the finished omelets with the tomato sauce. They were quite good.

The salad, though, was what made me very happy. It was my lettuce (hooray!), as well as some of my arugula, green garlic, and the flowers from some wild chives Cubby found when he was herding sheep and brought home for me.

I was so proud and touched when he showed up with plants he had foraged and brought to me, for several reasons: 1) He identified them on his own. 2) He knew I would be happy to get them. 3) He was excited to eat some himself. 

That's my boy.

Tuesday

Short version: Beef stew meat with vegetables, pasta, steamed broccoli

Long version: I cooked the package of stew meat I took out with four cubes of green garlic puree from the freezer, a quart of pressure-canned beef stock, and the remaining half cup or so of Finny's sauce from the pizza. It was very good. I just love it when all the flavor comes from things I prepared in the past, so I can just dump stuff in.

In the same pot as the meat, I put in the last half of a bag of chopped calabacita (like zucchini) from last summer, and a few carrots cut into chunks.

The pasta had two cubes of basil pesto from last summer, plus butter and cream cheese.

Wednesday

Short version: Steaks, leftover rice or roasted potatoes, frozen green peas

Long version: I only cooked four steaks ("only," ha), but the boys had been eating treats in their classrooms all day because it was the last full day of school, so they didn't eat as much as they normally would.

Thursday

Short version: Hot dogs, tater tots, baked beans, leftover peas

Long version: Last day of school! When I was actually in the grocery store myself last week, I was able to buy such indulgences as hot dogs (with buns!) and tater tots. Which I saved for the last day of school.

The baked beans were some from the last batch I had made and frozen.

The children were very excited about this meal. I was not excited by the actual hole that was kicked in my living room wall while they were wrestling as I was preparing this meal.

Welcome, summer! Ugh.

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

* School's Out by Alice Cooper. And here it is! You're welcome.

T.T.: Remote Living, Part 1

Some time ago, a reader named Lauren mentioned in the comments that she always has so many questions about what it's like to live in "such a rural area."

This made me think that I should clarify the distinction between "rural" and "remote." 

A "rural" area is anyplace that isn't urban or suburban. You can live in a rural place--like Blackrock--that's only a twenty-minute drive from a city. Or even closer. Rural is a place you can have chickens and some land around you, but you're not in a city. But rural areas are not generally what I would consider especially incovenient. They may require a bit of driving, but they are a reasonable distance to an urban center.

"Remote," on the other hand, is inconvenient. At least, in our modern understanding. Where I live now would definitely be considered remote by most people's standards. It's 100 miles to even a small city, and that small city might not even have something like a Walmart.

To get to Walmart from our house involves a lot of miles of this.

There are people who live more remotely than we do--say, the Alaskan bush--but not many.

Anyway.

I think it's really common for people to have a LOT of questions about what it's like to live remotely, so I'm going to do a series of Tuesday Tips post about that. Starting today with Lauren's questions.

How do you get your groceries home intact? Do you have to take a cooler any time you do a grocery run?

Short answers: In the back of the car with all the animal feed, and yes. Usually two coolers. 

Longer answer: Luckily for Lauren, I did a whole post about this once, and here it is! Since I wrote that a couple of years ago, the very small store sadly closed, so now it's just the micro store where we can usually get milk and eggs, and then a lot of open road between us and the nearest bananas. 

Are there different/special supplies you keep on-hand is case of (God forbid) a medical emergency?

No. I'm pretty careful about keeping any over-the-counter stuff we may need in stock--children's Tylenol, bandages, etc.--since I can't just run out to a store to get some. But I don't keep, like, a tourniquet or something on hand. We have volunteer fire departments in both villages that are ten miles away from us, plus there's an ambulance company about 25 miles away that responds to emergencies. And, in more serious emergencies, our county has a contract with a medical helicopter company for transport to a hospital. So if anything really bad were to happen, I would call 911 and one of those agencies would respond.

You can still get Amazon deliveries . . . right?

Right. The UPS driver is a local celebrity because he is our provider of All Things Ordered Online. Anything you can get online, I can, too. Maybe not with the two-day shipping guaranteed, but it will get here eventually. This is, honestly, probably the biggest game-changer for remote living ever. Well, that and the Internet access itself. I order a lot of things online that I have in the past purchased at stores--clothing, canned tuna, paper and ink for A.'s office printer--and I feel very lucky that I can. 

There! Those were Lauren's questions. If there are any more specific questions you have, go ahead and leave them in the comments and I'll answer them next week. Otherwise, I'll do a more generalized overview of the things I think are helpful for living where I live.

Snapshots: Split Peas and Chicks

Thanks to the regular boxes of excess commodities food our neighbors give us, I have seriously alarming quantities of split peas. The bags were flopping all over the upper cabinets in the kids' bathroom where I store overflow pantry things, so I decided to use some of those handy half-gallon mason jars A. gave me for Christmas to corral them.

I was not expecting to need so many jars, but here we are.

I need to start cooking split peas approximately once a week for the rest of the year to get through all of these. BUT THEN THERE WILL BE MORE.

That plastic container on the end has brown rice in it. Also an excess commodities item.

I ran out of big jars before I could consolidate the five bags of powdered milk also in those cabinets. And we shan't even speak of the twenty-five pounds of quick oats that are currently in my freezer.

Apparently, the commodities program is supplying preppers? I don't know.

Anyway. Other things . . .

I planted out my single, solitary surviving pepper plant. I did put some more seeds in wet paper towels to sprout and then I'll just plant the sprouts right outside. But those haven't sprouted yet, and if they never do, this is my only shot for bell peppers.

No pressure, pepper.

Since we actually got some rain, A. decided it would be safe to burn all the various bits of wood that littered  the property.

For additional safety, he contained the fire in this pit the kids helpfully dug many months ago.

I LOVE burning all the nasty, splintery bits of wood that accumulate all over the place. I spent quite some time happily gathering up disintegrating pieces of particle board and random sticks all over the place and chucking them into the fire.

Now if I could manage to collect all the rocks and bits of broken concrete I trip over all the time, I'll really feel like I'm getting somewhere.

And last but not least, we have chicks again.

Hi, chickies!

That one black one under the lamp was the one the boys brought home from school. They always put some eggs in an incubator (many of the eggs this year came from us) at school in the spring and then send the chicks home with the kids. There were only six surviving chicks this year, so we just got that one.

It was so sad listening to the solitary chick cheeping for its friends that we went the very next day to buy six more chicks to keep him company. We were planning on getting some more laying hens anyway.

We went to Tractor Supply to get the chicks--A. chose Buff Orpingtons--and the lady put the chicks in this carrier box that looked disturbingly like a large Happy Meal box.

Would it be in poor taste to make a joke about chicken nuggets here? (Get it? Poor taste?) (Okay, I'll stop.)

And there you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: A Green Chili Week

Friday 

Short version: Roasted roosters, garlic bread, cucumbers with ranch dip

Long version: Our neighbor--the one with whom we butchered the bull--dropped by on Wednesday with three mean roosters her daughter wanted to get rid of.

I can't even count how many chickens we have gotten this way over the years. A. is a very accomplished rooster exterminator at this point. He long ago decided that plucking is really not worth the time and effort and just skins the birds, but this time, since they were young roosters, he decided to pluck them.

So I roasted them. 

I covered them all in green garlic puree and salt, and just roasted them at 400 degrees about an hour and a half. I also put some butter on the skin, since they seemed to be drying out.

I think I should have covered them with foil to start, though, because the skin was still dry even with the butter. The store chickens are really wet, so you don't want to cover those, but these birds could have used a little moisture trapping.

They also could have used more flavor. The garlic flavor was very muted after the long cooking.

Oh well. They were fine. And the resulting carcasses made a LOT of good stock in the pressure cooker/canner the next day. Plus, I pulled off about five cups of meat after pressure cooking them.

Saturday

Short version: Ground beef tacos or skillet, green salad with ranch dressing

Long version: The younger kids had their meat in corn tortillas with cheese. A. and Cubby had the meat fried with roasted bell peppers and onions, then mixed with cheese. I had mine in a salad.

Sunday

Short version: Green chili chicken casserole, green salad with ranch dressing, chocolate fondue party

Long version: I was idly clicking through recipes in the morning when I came across a recipe for an enchilada casserole made with chicken and green chilis.

And who had already-cooked chicken and many, many bags of roasted green chilis in the freezer? THIS MOM.

The recipe I saw had a sub-recipe for the green chili sauce, which was just the chilis, onion, garlic, chicken stock, and cumin. I used green garlic, since I don't have any regular garlic cloves right now, and the green chilis Miss Amelia keeps giving me. The original recipe also called for using some jalapeno to add some heat, because that recipe assumed canned chilis from the store.

New Mexico chilis are nothing like that. They definitely do NOT need additional heat. In fact, the resulting sauce was so spicy that I added cream cheese to it to tone it down. And it was STILL way too spicy.

Because of the spiciness, I used a lot less of it than the recipe called for, and the resulting casserole, while tasty, was a bit too dry. The heat was reduced some while it was cooking--I suspect a lot of the bite came from the raw green garlic--but there was still enough to burn my mouth a bit.

Anyway. I made a GIANT batch of the green chili sauce, most without the cream cheese, so I froze a bunch of it and we ate it allll week in everything. That creamy green chili sauce is excellent in scrambled eggs.

Sunday is homemade dessert day at our house, but I didn't make a dessert. At least, not ahead of time. I was just going to give the kids marshmallows, but then I decided at the last minute to melt some chocolate chips and peanut butter (plus a tiny bit of cream to loosen it up) in the microwave and let them dip their marshmallows in that. I also found a lone graham cracker in the pantry that I split into four pieces for them. 

They thought this was the most thrilling dessert ever. And I thought it was great that I didn't have to bake anything. Wins all around.

Speaking of wins! I asked A. to make me a real, functioning gate for the garden. To replace the propped-up, splintery piece of garbage I've been battling for two years now. This was my only Mother's Day request.

Cubby helped.

New gate! On hinges and everything! YAY!

Monday

Short version: Green chili hamburger stew, bread and butter, cheese

Long version: I made this stew the day before while I was making the casserole, using the leftover ground beef taco meat and many of the same ingredients from the casserole for the rest of it. It was a lot less spicy than the casserole, though, and very good. A nice, warming dinner for a chilly and rainy (hooray!) night.

Tuesday

Short version: Rapee Morvandelle, baked broccoli

Long version: Cooking a big ham always means there will be leftover ham for daaays. I wanted to finally use up the last of it, so I made a dish I remembered making years ago from the MiL's copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. 

I don't have a copy of the book, but the recipe was easy to find online. I used this one, doubling it and substituting some things: cheddar for the swiss cheese, garlic powder for the fresh garlic (too lazy to dig some green garlic), no herbs because I didn't have any, and adding extra milk to use up the last bit of a gallon jug.

All except for one serving was consumed at the one meal. Guess they liked it.

I put the broccoli florets in a covered casserole dish with some water and baked that along with the casserole. It got a little overdone, but it was fine.

Wednesday

Short version: Chicken patty sandwiches, leftover enchilada casserole, sliced cucumber

Long version: Miss Amelia called on Tuesday to ask if A. could stop at her house on his way to school on the bus to pick up some food she wanted us to take. Because it was too heavy to carry home otherwise.

I braced myself for a ridiculous quantity of food, and it was indeed a GIANT box. Included in it was a bag of those dubious frozen chicken patties we got from the school maintenance guy many months ago. The kids love those in sandwiches, so that's what they had.

A. and I had the casserole.

Thursday

Short version: Tuna and stuff

Long version: This was a crazy day. We went hither and yon and back again. I made tuna salad for dinner, which the kids ate with crackers and cherries. A. and I had it fried with cheese, like a tuna melt without the bread.

And then we all went to a very long Latin Mass that went until 8 p.m. But! After Mass there was food. So then the children had Frito pies* and barbecue sandwiches and salad and cake and cookies and Cubby snuck a Coke in there. At 9 p.m.

Craziness. Good food, though, and it was fun.

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

* This is a very regional thing. It's just Fritos topped with taco stuff--meat, beans, tomatoes, lettuce, etc.

T.T.: How To Shear a Boy

Some time ago, I got an e-mail from Andra, asking if I could do a tips post about cutting the boys' hair. And . . . here it is. Finally. 

I should start right off by saying that I am very (VERY) far from an expert. My goal is just to keep my three boys and my husband presentable, which I realize is not a high bar. 

But I do keep them presentable, with minimal effort from me. And how I do it is with the clippers.

That's what we call them, anyway. This is what they actually are: Remington Indestructible Hair and Beard Trimmers. "Indestructible" is almost certainly hyperbole, but I've been using them to do four haircuts a month for five years, so that's pretty close. 

A. remembers them being about 25 dollars at Walmart when he bought them in New York. The price apparently is now up to about 40 dollars, which is still a really good deal if you compare to a barber shop.

Anyway.

That set comes with oil, which I would encourage you to use. It keeps the trimmers from pulling so much on the hair while you're using them. I put the oil right along the edge of the trimmer's teeth. It just takes a couple of drops.

I find the most important tip for giving boys a haircut is bribing them to do it in the first place. Mine really do not enjoy it, but they know they get a treat of some kind afterwards--a Hershey's Kiss or a cartoon or, in the case of the most recent haircut, a fruit shake (smoothie) on a hot day.

When we lived in the Great White North, I had to do haircuts indoors, in our kitchen, which I hated. Cleaning up hair in my kitchen was gross. Here, I can do it outside year-round. Much better.

So when you're ready, set the victim up on a somewhat low bench or chair. Cubby prefers to take his shirt off. Calvin and Jack usually keep theirs on, to minimize itchy hairs on their skin.

Whichever way, make sure you have a guard on your trimmer before you start. The guard is one of the plastic comb-looking pieces that fit onto the metal trimmer head.

I repeat: Make sure you have a guard on your trimmer before you start.

If you don't have a guard, then you will shave that person bald. Unless bald is what you're going for, double-check for the guard before you begin. I have accidentally shaved without a guard with every single boy and A. when I failed to check before I started or the guard slipped off mid-haircut, so just know it will probably happen to you at some point. But check anyway.

The guards start at #0, which is the shortest--almost bald--and go up to #5, I think, which is the longest. I've only ever used the #3 and the #2. Now I just use the #2, since it doesn't grow out quite as fast with the shorter length.

Once you have your oil and guard on, you can start cutting. Position your trimmers so they look upside down, in the opposite direction of the hair growth, so the teeth on the guard are sort of combing the hair before its cut. Like so.

It's really hard to take a photo while working a trimmer, by the way.

You want to work in the opposite direction of the hair growth. So I start on the forehead and work up to the middle of the head, moving from center out to the sides. Then I go to the bottom, on the neck, and work up towards the middle. 

I'm sure there are professionals who can tell you a better order to go in, but that's what I do. You have to go over each portion several times, and in the middle of the head where there is likely to be cowlicks or other non-standard directions of hair growth, just do it in all directions until it looks even. Make sure to get all the way to the front in the forehead so there aren't long bits in the front.

When you're working around the ears, you can kind of bend them down out of the way.

Kids love this. Ahem.

Once the hair looks even all over, you can do the close trimming. To do this, take off the guard.

The two parts that need to be trimmed close are around the ears and along the edge on the neck. I cut the boys' sideburns (not that they have real sideburns--I just mean the hair next to their ears) even with the middle of their ears. That gives me something to line up with. Make it as even on both sides as you can. 

Then around the ears, bending them out of the way, because if you're going to draw blood, this is where it will happen.

Then continue on below the ear and around the neck in a curve, making an even curve all the way around to the other ear. Repeat the ear trimming there on the other ear, and you're done!

You can use a cloth at this point to wipe off all the little hairs stuck all over. I have the boys remove their shirts if they haven't already and use that. Works way better than trying to use your hand.

And then they have to have a shower. And I have to change my shirt. And sometimes my bra, because those little hairs get eeeeverywhere.

That's it! It's not that hard. I have been doing this now for about five years, and while it's a pain, it's much less painful than driving all four boys--I include A.--to an actual barber or salon and paying for it.

Lastly, if you mess up a little--which I have, multiple times--don't stress about it. It's hair. It will always grow back.

Snapshots: DIY Shearing

Happy Mother's Day! Cubby made me an origami tulip.

Not for Mother's Day; just because he remembered I liked them.

The very nice but somewhat old shearer --he had to have been at least in his mid-70s, probably closer to 80--who came to shear our sheep last year has stopped returning phone calls. I have to think it's related to his age, and I can't blame him, but A. still had some seriously woolly sheep that really, really needed to be sheared.

So he bought electric shears and readied himself for the woolly battle.

He sheared a couple of sheep with non-electric hand shears when he got his first sheep many years ago, and he had a very frustrating experience with electric shears last year that completely failed because the machine failed. Maybe because these are a Merino breed, which has incredibly dense wool. Or maybe because the shears were garbage. In any case, he was apprehensive about trying again.

However, the sheep weren't getting any less woolly on their own, so he fired up his new shears on Friday and, with Cubby and Charlie's assistance, sheared some sheep.

First, the smaller helpers herded the sheep into the old hog pen in the pasture.

These sheep had no idea what was coming.

Here we go. Merinos, unlike most other breeds, have wool down over their faces, which makes for some tricky shearing around the eyes and ears.

Jasper parked himself right here, about two feet from the action, and was literally vibrating with excitement. Chill out, dog.

This first sheep took about an hour to shear, as A. figured out how to adjust his shears and shear more efficiently. The next one took about 45 minutes, and the last about 30 minutes.

He did two more on Saturday. He's bringing some sheep to auction, so he doesn't have to shear those.

In other news, Howard is back.

Hello, Howard.

We had a predator of some sort around last week that forced open the door of the rabbit casita. A. found Howard in there, torpid from eating baby rabbits. He had incriminatory white fur around his mouth. A. wasn't too upset about losing some rabbits--they do indeed breed as fast as you've heard rabbits will--so he just brought Howard over to show the children, and then let him go.

For last week's state testing treat, I made flour-less peanut butter cookies for Cubby's and Charlie's classes. I'm always pleased by how they spread out in such a symmetrically round shape.

Well, except for the egg-shaped one in the front there. There always has to be one rebel.

In addition to being flour-free, they only have five ingredients, are incredibly easy to make, and are delicious. Yay.

Poppy volunteered to be quality control. The cookies passed her rigorous examination.

And there you have it! My life, snapshotted.