True Kitchen Confessions

Readers, you may remember those potatoes that I dug up while taming my garden-gone-wild. 

Well, something bad happened to them. We’ll get to that.

I should first admit to you that I am either a brilliant cook or a horrible one and it’s never in-between.  Something that drives me absolutely batty is that Joseph IS a good cook.   He might even be considered GREAT, but I would never tell him for fear it would inflate his already sizeable cooking ego.  Now, let me tell you something, Joseph cooks once, maybe twice a year, and has his domain over such delectable dinners as Thanksgiving and Christmas.  He might dust off his pots and pans for Easter, but that’s pushing it.  And these are also the times we have guests over so I get to hear things like:

“Oh, you are so lucky!”

“You must eat like this every day!”

“I wish my husband would cook like yours does!”

“How do you deserve a guy like this?  What did you do?”

Well, I got news for all of you: I cook 363 days out of the year.  Whenever we eat something, it comes from my pots and pans.  I am the one scrubbing my Dutch oven out after a meal.  I’m the one who does the thankless, no one cares cooking.  What?  No applause?  Well, don’t worry I’m used to it. 

The way I cook used to include recipes when I was younger.  My Gram gave me a copy of Betty Crocker, and I love it.  But I’m the kind of guy who thinks that I’ve got the idea after I’ve cooked something once or twice.  Sometimes this works out great.  For things like stews, I throw whatever I feel like into my trusty Dutch oven, and delicious things always come out (after  a stew or two that did not invite second helpings, I got the idea of what worked and what didn’t).  I also rarely experiment.  (Part of me not experimenting is that Joseph always finds experiments not-as-good as he would have done, thanks.  The other part is I am a tiny bit lazy and don’t like fixing things that aren’t broken.) 

So, back to my potatoes:

You’d think that a guy from Idaho would be able to peel potatoes in seconds flat, but I almost always cook them with the skins on and this is more out of that laziness we’ve discussed rather than a fondness for flavor.  You’d also think an Idahoan would be able to cook a potato …

Joseph wanted Potato Salad, and I thought that the first day of summer would be a great day for fried chicken, potato salad, corn on the cob, and a coconut cream pie for desert.  Don’t get excited, I bought the pie!  So I boiled the eggs, added the mayonnaise and the jar of sweet relish along with some other spices (I also am always throwing random spices into things, I can never leave well enough alone).  I boiled the garden potatoes.  I left the large ones alone and boiled the small ones whole.  Then I drained them, added the egg-mayo mixture, and mashed it all together.  It felt a little harder than usual, but that was fine.  Joseph criticizes my potato salad the most for being “mashed potato salad” and having none of the original potato shapes in it. 

Now for the taste test! 

*CRUNCH!!!*

Raw crunchy potatoes were peppered all through the salad.  Apparently the only potatoes that boiled properly were the big ones I cut into pieces.  All those little potatoes just sat in the hot tub and refused to cook. 

My Great Aunt Katie, one of my favorite people of all time, never served a broken egg in her kitchen, even if it meant that she threw away a half of a dozen.  She hated broken eggs: they were a disgrace.  Well, this potato salad was a disgrace and I couldn’t face Joseph’s smugly disgusted look when he bit into a raw potato.  So I went straight to the compost pile and got rid of the evidence. 

After I simmered down, I made batch number two from store-bought russets.  I was out of sweet relish so I had to use my last jar of homemade (thank you) bread-and-butter pickles that came from my very own, garden-grown zucchini.  I chopped these up coarsely to add textural interest … or maybe just because I’m lazy.  (I’m sensing a pattern here.)  I added a new egg-mayo mixture to the batch with a little salt, a little pepper, a little turmeric, and a liberal dash of garlic powder and I had a happy husband! 

I burnt the chicken, for reasons I may get into later … not my fault, I am having oven trouble!!! 

Joseph loved it.  When he got home on Tuesday, he was a hog in heaven.  And what was his favorite part of the whole meal?  Nope, not the potato salad: it was that damn gosh darn, store-bought pie!

Favorites

While I do enjoy bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite things with you:

My friend Katie gave me these nesting dolls that are actually measuring cups!

Unicorns are my favorite animals.

Mason Jars come in very handy.

Sunflowers are one of my favorites in the garden.

And of course, Mermaids are my absolute favorite anything!

Idahome

I usually think that I will end up back in Idaho where I grew up.  I don’t know why I think this, as there are no immediate plans to get back there and I have plenty on my plate with career and school.  But there is this part of me that romanticizes living there in spite of the nine months out of the year chance of snow, the colorful rednecks that make living openly there difficult, and the overuse (on my part) of Wal-Mart. 

Joseph tells me he romanticizes living back in the swamps thanks to his new favorite television series, “Swamp People.”  I promise you now, that is NOT going to happen.

But when we have quite little trips out to visit the family, and see my little Idaho nephew, I get a nice sense that it would be a cabin in the woods, Joseph’s catch of the day in our skillet, and blue skies forever and ever. 

Somebody pinch me, I know I am dreaming!

(Joseph's catch of the day)

Jungle Juju

I was going to garden in earnest today and began with the exposed garden bed that did not have the snake in it this morning.  I found to my amazement that this particular garden bed seemed to want to be weeded.  The soil was very soft and fluffy and full of potatoes that I had planted two years ago!  It was as though the garden bed was giving me blessings in homage to my Idaho roots (or Idaho rhizomes if you will).  The work was as minimal as it could be with such neglect as it has been through, and I was thoroughly convinced that I had just had a bad start with the other garden bed. 

When I turned my attentions to the bed in question, I was sorely reminded of just how hard and uncompromising the soil was! Indeed, the bed was infested with firmly rooted blackberries, and swarming with beetles and bugs. A slug clung to the breaking board that formed the bed, and as I dug I came across buried chicken bones that had become brown and spongy. The full moon is almost upon us and I suddenly had the feeling that these two beds were like two Tarot cards. One offered potato-blessings and the other had only snakes and beetles to portend.

I taught myself to read the Tarot when I was in my late teens.  I have an aunt who stylizes herself as a would-be-Voodoo Priestess, and a grandmother who came for the Appalachian Mountains and seems to at least be familiar with the practice of hoodoo and other things.  (Though Gram would be the first to say such things aren’t respectable.)  I can read the signs when they come to me, and I think that these four garden beds are signs.  Two are revealed to be luck and misfortune.  The other two, being still covered with weeds, seem to be as of yet unmasked



I will be planting the two beds today: one soft and receptive and the other hard and mean.  I think I will be turning the other two beds over to reveal the messages they portend as soon as possible.  Until then, I’ll be keeping fingers crossed, out from under ladders, and will consult my black cat Hex to see what he has to say on the matter.    

Welcome to the Jungle

There are no fun and games.  The garden is much worse off than I had originally thought.  It seems a year of letting it go wild had produced hardened soil, beat down with grass roots.  At the moment, I have a bad back and the job I see before me is a back-breaking one.  Half of the garden is still covered in growing grasses, too.  I’m not sure what I am going to be able to do with this.  And it is the tenth of June, which means I only have a limited amount of time before I have to get seeds in the ground or else I should scrap the whole project. 

I had planned on buying already-started tomato plants, zucchini plants, and possibly some sunflowers (which are a favorite).  The seeds were going to be for beans (both green and spotted beans for drying), parsnips, peas, and radishes.  But the very walls of my raised beds are rotting, and just hitting them with a rake is knocking them down.  It seems that those rotting boards were also home to wildlife such as a garter snake that did not want to hold still for a photo shoot. 

I really want this project to succeed, because even though I am a lazy gardener, I love gardening.  I love the process of growing my own food.  I love cooking it and canning it and serving it to friends and family.  I just doubt that I have the energy to make this happen. 

Well, no hasty decisions need to be made just yet.  I still have a week before my next days off which will force me to make decisions about what to do with my crumbling mess.  Dirty gloves and garden tools aside, at least I got the basil planted!  Now I just have to find Joseph’s mozzarella plant. 

The Jungle

What a horrible year 2011 has been for springtime and gardens.  I hadn’t worried about it thus far because I figured I was moving out of this old farm house and so I didn’t mind that my garden was going to be nonexistent.  To make matters worse, I hadn’t gardened last year, either, because of nursing school.  So my garden is full of blackberries and weeds up to my eyebrows.  But Joseph weed-wacked half of my garden and told me I should get to planting.  The fact that my garden is weed-wacked means I can actually reach the roots of all those weeds.  I asked him what he wanted to plant and he said tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella. 

Well, after thinking of gardens in my past, I figured I should just do it.  Either I fail miserably or I succeed amazingly.  Either way, it should make for some good blog entries!

My 2009 garden was so amazing, even the honey bees made an appearance from the brink of extinction to visit it.