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Last summer, Brooks and I spent quite a bit of time thinking about adding plants to the yard that would result in more continuous blooms from early spring to frost. There are wads of graph paper stashed around the house that are basically hand-drawn Gantt charts of planting and blooming schedules; this, to my mind, is taking my project manager-y-ness to an extreme, but it worked. We did a lot of planting last fall, and some in January and February as well. In all, we have added poppies, Asiatic lilies, day lilies, hyacinths, phlox, ranunculus, irises, tulips, crocuses, dahlias, and other flowers that aren’t coming to mind right now…to a yard that was already well-planted with flowers.
The result has been fabulous. We have had flowers since late January, crocuses by the hundreds, and months of tulips. To balance out the number of bulbs that die back and leave blank spaces, we have also added numerous new flowering plants this spring: a beautiful camellia snagged at Portland Nursery one beautiful February day, a Daphne ‘Carole Mackie” for scent and floral interest in mid- to late spring, an Endless Summer Hydrangea (Blushing Bride) and a couple of Edgeworthia chrysanthae, which stopped me in my tracks with their lovely light yellow blooms in late winter. The incomparable Meg de Hass van Dorsser of Margaret’s Enchanted Gardens, Ltd., helped immensely with recommendations. She also helped legitimize my Hydrangea longings to Brooks, who sort of hates them. And by “sort of,” I mean truly detests them.
Following are some photo highlights. I’ll write more about some of the specific areas we have focused on at a later date.
Irises
Our first irises opened in early March, which actually scared me a bit. That seems too early.
Now, we have many in bloom. Most of the irises we have are the light purple color shown first, as luck would have it:
Daphne “Carol Mackie”
Edgeworthia chrysantha (aka Chinese paper bush)
Garden supervisor, Canis lupus familiaris (common name: Brooks Jr.)
With the exception of the dog’s photo, all of the images are from today–what beautiful weather we have been having!
I am categorically in favor of any new eateries with a full liquor license setting up shop in St Johns. Despite that, I have mixed feelings about The Fixin’ To. This highly Portlandized purveyor of Southern-esque food opened a few months ago, and we have been in several times. This is despite the fact that their website doesn’t bother to list their business hours. No, you must delve into their blog or Facebook fan page to find such irrelevant information.
The first time, we left in despair of ever obtaining not just food or drink, but eye contact with anyone who worked at the establishment. This was during their first week of business. They eventually compensated for this hipster habit of ignoring non-hipsters with some signage indicating that one should order at the bar.
Our return visits have gone better. While we lack that ironic panache that would likely get us quicker service at the bar, we have successfully sampled several of the items on the fairly short menu–chicken dumplings (totally decent), Frito pie (vegetarian and meat versions–also decent), Rotel (good, if not like any I ever had in the South) and the weekend biscuits and bacon gravy (nauseatingly awash in butter, in a bad way, and made with bacon that reminds me of the paper-thin slices of a meat-like substance available for breakfast at any Holiday Inn Express.)
A menu with a few more options would probably work in their favor. Perhaps an expansion will happen in time. The food is basically ok, if not really Southern. But it’s a Portland twist on Southern, so it makes sense.
It’s ultimately the hipster vibe that rubs me the wrong way. I have an innate dislike of hipsters anyway, but the Portland variety of hipsters who provide food service are particularly annoying. The total lack of acknowledgment when you arrive is one of the key failing I associate with their ilk. When you couple that with the fact that Travis, Ben, and crowd at Leisure, just a couple blocks away, can remember your name after a couple visits and always at least make eye contact when you show up, no matter how busy they are, The Fixin’ To falls short of the St Johns standard.
Too bad. I was very ready to like the place.
This pearl of wisdom comes straight from the lips of Randy Plew, owner of recently minted Plews Brews in St. Johns. The space Plew’s Brews occupies, which formerly housed Plew’s last endeavor, a grocery store, seemed to transform practically overnight into a beer store last month. This can only be a good thing, especially given that Plew sells growlers of a variety of very decent beers (HUB, Ninkasi, and others were on tap today), for a bewildering $7. Build-your-own six packs from a limited but good supply of bottled beer set you back $9.
We dropped in today chasing a rumor that they would be selling beer making supplies shortly. This proved to not be exactly the case. (We can go to Kenton for that, but maybe, one day….) Still, we enjoyed a couple of pints in the purple and green setting, and came away with a growler of IPA, laying out $13 in the process.
It’s pretty cool to see a business you think will work starting from the ground up. The place is not yet fully stocked, and a number of displays are completely empty. Rumors about future serving of food abound. I think Randy is on to a great idea, and I can’t wait to see what he does with the place.
8409 N. Lombard
Portland, OR 97203
It took a while for our tomatoes to really hit their stride, but at the end of August, they started ripening a thousand a minute or so. Since the whole goal of learning to can was to do something with our tomatoes, this was very exciting.
Marinara sauce is a huge part of that goal. We both enjoy simple, quick dinners involving pasta, cheese and tomato-based sauce on weeknights. It cuts into our Stargate: Atlantis viewing time much less than a full-blown meal involving 27 pans and a blowtorch. So why not make a sauce that was so tasty, it could stand on its own with some whole wheat pasta? Why indeed.
I scoured my favorite canning book, The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, but it had nothing that looked exciting enough. Surely having both onions AND garlic in a tomato sauce does not result in instant death-by-botulism. It was my massage therapist, Natalie, who eventually pointed me the right direction with a link to Canning USA. Warning: their html will hurt your eyes and heart.
Since I have both renegade canning and mathematical adequacy in my genes, I couldn’t help but a) notice some non-death-inducing improvements that could be made (like caramelizing the onions and adding dried oregano), and 2) figure out that their input/output claims were nonsensical. You cannot gather that quantity of ingredients, reduce it by a third, and have 9 quarts of sauce.
So, here’s what I came up with. Tomato quantity and lemon juice are increased. I feel in my heart that it’s acidic enough to be safe, but, you know. Make this at your own peril. If the USDA kicks your door down, don’t come crying to me.
Marinara sauce
Yield: 9 quarts
Active work: 2 hours
Total time: 6.5 hours+-
Ingredients:
1/2 c olive oil
3 lbs white or yellow onions, chopped
20 lbs tomatoes Continue reading Canning recipe: Marinara sauce
 Our own canned marinara sauce and plums Lately, most of my calls with my mom include her telling me once or more that she’s so glad ONE of her daughters learned how to can. Take that, four sisters! I win–mom likes me best! I have put her instruction to good use, unlike certain people. </evil laughter> While more canning will certainly happen as fall progresses, we currently have some 50+ jars of food we have canned:
- Blackberry jam (with blackberries from parents’ yard!)
- Blueberry lime jam (with blueberries I picked!)
- Peach + Maker’s Mark butter (with peaches from nearby Sauvie Island)
- Carrots and garlic (from our garden)
- Whole peaches (picked them off of Germantown Rd with neighbor Liz)
- Marinara sauce (with tomatoes and herbs from our garden; relax, methtards didn’t take ALL the tomatoes)
- Plums in vanilla syrup (plums from parents’ trees)
In the process of preserving this modest array of food, I have learned a bit.
- Canning will take at least an hour longer than you were hoping, and more if you have someplace to go afterward
- It’s possible to dirty every dish and pan in the kitchen, twice, before you’re done
- Standing for hours+warm summer day+avoidance of bottle-breaking drafts+water heating+hoiking carrots out of the ground=exhaustion and a marked lethargy surrounding spending any additional time in the kitchen
- Silicone oven mitts are worth their weight in carbon fiber
- Canning peaches is not worth the work. That’s what the freezer is for.
- Opening the second bottle of wine around the time you start processing jars is fine. Opening the second bottle of wine while you are still cutting fruit up is just plain dangerous.
- When you freeze tomatoes, they roll clinkingly around like billiard balls in the freezer if you disturb them
- Speaking of the freezer, it’s a faster way of preserving *some* kinds of food, if you don’t have time to can and do have space to freeze. It is, however, far less satisfying.
- I already knew I had a super fabulous boyfriend, but I learned an additional great thing about him: he’s an awesome canning accomplice.
The highs so far have been basically everything but the peaches. Those bastards were a nightmare. The variety we picked was extremely fragile and was bruised by the time we got home from the orchard. They proceeded to disintegrate in the jars when we canned them an hour or so later. AND they floated to the top of the jars. There was no way to smash them into the jar without macerating them, and with the specter of my mom’s perfect canned peaches hanging over me, I couldn’t do it. For a nice winter project, I’ll knit the jars some skirts so they look less…exposed.
The ongoing but passive aggressive battle with methtards/can wraiths has reached a pivotal time: last night, we set out two weeks’ worth of bottles, all meticulously defaced so as to render them unreturnable. We then listened for the telltale sounds of pilfering in the dark and were gratified to be able to witness a local can wraith in the very! act! of stealing bottles from our recycling bin.
One can only imagine the existential crisis he endured upon attempting to return them at Spaceway. Oh right…methheads are not capable of existential crises.
Anyhow, the great mystery now is whether or not he will succeed in associating the Great Bottle Fail with those people in St. Johns with the cool fence and break out our windows.
Previously
And even more previously
As promised, here’s Brooks’s perspective on bottles, deposits, and meth heads.
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So, thank you to Ms. Christine for letting me post on her blog. I don’t often have blogworthy thoughts, but here’s one.
[Editorial comment: this is not factual. On any day of his choosing, Brooks could quit being a lawyer and become a world-class blogger.]
The Oregon Bottle Bill. Oregon was at the vanguard of recycling when it devised a system to create an economic incentive to recycle glass beverage bottles. Buy the beverage, return the bottle to the merchant, get a nickel. At the time curbside recycling was nearly non-existent and the system worked.
You’d bring your bottles (and later cans) to the store and the attendant would count them, give you a slip and you’d shop, turning the slip in as part of your payment for your groceries. Lovely.
In its implementation in the urban areas of Oregon (which contain the significant majority of Oregon’s population) it is broken and should be abolished. Continue reading Op-ed thoughts on the Bottle Bill from Brooks
I spend more time thinking about how to thwart meth heads than I’m really willing to admit. But the fact that every bottle of beer we consume means a meth head has a shot at freakin’ five cents galls me. We’re talking TENS of dollars in annual contributions to the criminals if we set our recycling out at the curb.
However, tonight Brooks and I spent 3o minutes at the St Johns Spaceway, surrounded by dodgy people and dodgier smells, trying to return what turned out to be the $9.80 fortune in bottles we had amassed. He has eloquent lawyerly thoughts on the matter; I have annoyance and a strong bias in favor of being home, eating dinner rather than in the criminal queue at the bottle return place.
The long and short of it is this: we have decided not to return the bottles anymore. “But what about the MONEY?!!1!!1one!?” you may ask. Suffice it to say that the large economic hit we take by not returning our bottles is…negligible.
“But what about the meth heads?!” the more perceptive of you may ask. Well, we have a plan. We will be rendering the bottles unreturnable by defacing them in such a way that the bar code can no longer be scanned, which will mean….wait for it….that moron meth heads will take our bottles for a while, but will find that they can’t get five cents each for them when they hie their worthless asses to Safeway!
Thank you, thank you. This was a joint decision powered by Inversion IPA. Brooks has some words on the matter as well. Look for a guest post soon.
Friday, Brooks and I went to meet Bella, a 4-year-old English Bulldog who was surrendered by her owner. Expecting to meet the dog and have the weekend to talk about it, we were surprised to instead find ourselves driving home with her that night, having agreed to foster her until we decided one way or the other if she worked for us.
Since then, we have learned a lot about her. She is very calm and quiet around the house. She handles being by herself fine, and she is glad to have us come home. She lazes around a lot. She is afraid of our spiral staircase, like most dogs. She thinks a walk is going out the car port and coming in the front gate. She doesn’t do well with change. Unfortunately, she apparently doesn’t know how to interact with many people at once, and not with children, either.
Many of her characteristics are really great for us, but we don’t want a dog who’s the terror of the neighborhood. So, we’re going to see about doggy boot camp or some consultant help. If that doesn’t make her better, she will need to find another home. I hope she does work out.
Last weekend, as planned, my parents came up to our place and helped us out on a number of fronts.
Mom taught me, and a few other lucky women, to can. I’ve done research and read books, but having mom’s advice and lore from decades of experience was simply great. She’s a bit of a renegade canner, and when she mentioned sealing jams with wax and skipping the water bath entirely, I expected USDA commandos to break through the kitchen door. But we learned the importance of following the recipe, keeping the implements clean, and how to use a pressure cooker.
By the end of the weekend, we had canned two batches of blackberry jam (thanks for bringing the fruit, mom!), one batch of blueberry lime jam, one batch of Makers Mark peach butter, and a whole bunch of carrots and garlic, which we plan to use in soups.
While I was learning to can, Brooks, my dad, and a great group of volunteers were helping raise our new fence. Raise. I guess I say that because it was like an old-fashioned barn raising. A fence raising. We got most of the way there; I wimped out on the sealing with linseed oil Sunday evening, and there is a colorful and eclectic array of finials that are awaiting install. Plus the gate. But all in all, it’s really looking good:
The fence is based on one a few miles away that Brooks saw and liked. He has, however, made a number of improvements, and the finished project will be fantastic.
Now that we have (most of) a fence, the next step is obvious. We will get a dog. Tomorrow, we’ll meet Bella and fall in love with her (you just know some things in advance) and bring her home as soon as we are screened and approved. Happy day!
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