Christine in Portland

Mid-spring garden update

Christine — Mon, 10 May 2010 01:27:46 +0000

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!

Fixin’ to…take your order…eventually

Christine — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 03:37:02 +0000

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.

“It’s easier to sell good beer than outdated mayonnaise”

Christine — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:34:57 +0000

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

Canning recipe: Marinara sauce

Christine — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:32:39 +0000

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

3/4 c freshly chopped garlic

1 bottle red wine (try a cab)

1/4 cup sea salt

lots of black pepper

1/4 c dried oregano

3 c fresh herbs (try parsley, basil, and Greek oregano)

1 1/2 c bottled lemon juice*

Aviation gin, a couple of limes, some sparkling water, and ice

Destructions:

In a really, really large pot that’s stainless steel, begin caramelizing the onions in the olive oil. Heat should be medium to medium low. Adjust the heat on the onions as necessary so you don’t incinerate them. Don’t forget to stir them occasionally.

During the 45+ minutes that will take, roughly chop the tomatoes. Peeling and seeding is optional.

Fill a large glass with ice. Pour a shot of gin over it, squeeze a half of a lime in, and top off with sparking water. Give a gentle stir. Begin drinking. There’s not much chopping left.

When the onions are caramelized and smell like awesome, throw in your garlic and saute for no more than two minutes, until the garlic just begins to turn golden.

Add the chopped tomatoes, the wine, the salt, and the pepper to the onions. Stir a bit. Measure out the dried oregano and briefly crush between your palms before adding to the pot.

Simmer the sauce until it’s reduced by a quarter to one third. This will take 3-4 hours. During that time, you can nap, pull out the remnants of the lemon cucumber plants, or drink the rest of the gin. It’s all up to you.

At the three hour mark or so, begin sterilizing your jars. Hurray, dishwashers! Also, heat up water in the other humongous pot you happen to have around the house. It should be deep enough to conceivably cover lots of jars with about an inch to spare once their mass is displaced. Your lids shouldn’t be boiled, but rather heated gently in water so they are clean and stuff.

Process the fresh herbs with the lemon juice until chopped, about 15-20 1-second spins in ye olde Cuisinart.

Add the herbs and lemon juice to the tomatoes and simmer for 5 more minutes.

Fill your sterilized jars, working one at a time, leaving about a half inch of head space. Wipe down rims, center the lid, and screw on the ring until it’s finger tight. Oh yeah, baby.

Process the jars of sauce in boiling water for 35 minutes. Turn off heat, let them rest in the water for five minutes, then remove them and place them on a towel in a draft-free area. Let them rest for 24 hours.

Check and make sure they have sealed. If they have, you can remove the ring (if you want to) and store them in a dark, cool place. If they haven’t sealed, you’re pretty much screwed, since the weekend is shot and you may or may not have time to re-process half-spoiled marinara sauce.

I don’t know, though, since all of mine sealed and are now sitting happily in the kitchen. There was an extra cup or so that was really, really delicious. I ate a good portion of it using potato chips as a spoon. Ummmm…yeah.

*Why bottled lemon juice? Because it’s a known acidity, unlike fresh lemons or limes. Yeah, I initially revolted at that one too.

Summer canning summary

Christine — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:25:21 +0000

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. 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.

Bottle schadenfreude

Christine — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 04:48:39 +0000

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

Op-ed thoughts on the Bottle Bill from Brooks

Christine — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 04:12:51 +0000

As promised, here’s Brooks’s perspective on bottles, deposits, and meth heads.

——————

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.

The problem:

As the number of bottles and cans labeled for deposit grew stores began switch to automated machines in which you’d stick the container, it would read the barcode to confirm that the container qualified and add to a total in the machine, printing the total on a chit slip when you pressed a button to indicate you are done.

The stores make little to no profit on the bottles returned (the unclaimed deposits end up in the hands of distributors). Thus the stores have no economic incentive to make bottle return easy or efficient. Instead the machines are invariably placed in a ghetto adjacent to a corner of the store.

Most of the bottles returned once contained beer, sweet, lovely beer. Mmmmm. As Homer said, “I would kill anyone in here for one drop of sweet beer.”

But I digress. What happens to beer left open to the atmosphere (like the remnants in the bottles?) It gets colonized by a variety of bacteria which digest it and produce acetic acid. Which, while quite fun to play with in its glacial form, in dilute quantities found in bottle return ghettos stinks mightily.

Next, the machines operate poorly. It often takes multiple tries to get the machines to accept a pristine bottle or can which bears a clear barcode and is part of the program. Much frustration.

An anecdote–we’ve been hoarding our redeemables so as to avoid supporting the population of local can wraiths. (See two paragraphs below for a definition). We went today to the local Safeway to redeem them. The can return ghetto stank and the floor was sticky. The machine refused at least half of the bottles once and many multiple times. In the process I ended up with some stale beer on my hands. Basically a frustrating, disgusting experience. Christine went in to the store about half way through the ordeal to ask for a hand count because the machine was so balky. The answer was a crisp “No, we don’t do that anymore.”

Also, the majority of urban Oregon now has curbside recycling of all manner of things including glass and aluminum. Thus, homeowners can leave their otherwise redeemable bottles at the curb, forfeit the deposit but be assured the glass is still be recycled instead of dumped in a land fill.

This leads to the next problem–can wraiths prowling the streets with stolen shopping carts, stolen bicycles and trailers and other accessories. Many of these folks are drug addicts trying to feed a habit or others prone to petty crime. Basically your garden variety Lowlifus Americanus These are not people for whom I wish to provide an income. Nor do I want them to have a reason to regularly surveil my home and vehicle.

So, in summary, we have a system in Oregon whereby grocery purchasers pay in money to a system which is most often redeemed by addicts or criminals, or left in the hands of distributors. The stores in turn have every incentive to not repair or maintain the machines or keep them clean and in working order. This further discourages the average person from availing themselves of the system.

The practical solution:

For now, we will simply rub the barcodes off of bottles and crush cans before putting them out to recycle. That way we avoid the hassle of redeeming them, deny the can wraiths any profit and still see that our aluminum and glass waste doesn’t end up in a landfill.

The consequence of this is that the distributors of the various beverages those containers once contained get to keep our deposits. While not fair, that is tolerable.

The better solution:

Eliminate the bottle bill wherever curbside recycling is operational.

Keeping the bottle deposits from meth heads: round two

Christine — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:32:19 +0000

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.

Bella’s first days

Christine — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 04:19:35 +0000

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.

Canning festival: check. Fence raising: check.

Christine — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:19:18 +0000

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!