Butternut squash and split-pea stew

I made this recipe tonight, and as usual, it was fantastic. I clipped it out of Sunset Magazine a few years ago because I love butternut squash, and it sounded interesting. I make it at least a few times each fall. It is so flavorful and unique.

I halve the amount of butter used to save some calories, and I don't believe that it detracts from the taste. The star anise are a bit pricey, but not any more than the meat for a similar sized non-vegetarian dish would cost.

It also goes pretty quickly, after you get the squash cooked. Earlier in the afternoon, I cut the very top off a big squash (to vent) and put it in a glass baking dish with half a cup of water, covered loosely with plastic wrap. 15 minutes in the microwave and I was able to easily slice the skin off with a knife and chop the meat. I left it in a bowl on the coutnertop covered with the plastic wrap.

Yum yum yum!!

Eggplant parmigiana FAIL

Last night I tried to make eggplant parmigiana and the problem came with drying out the eggplant. The recipe called for sprinkling the eggplant "generously" with salt. It didn't indicate how much salt to use, nor how I would get the salt off. I thought, "maybe it will come off in the hot oil?" Well, it didn't. The final result was too salty to eat.

Any suggestions on how to prevent this in the future?

Sale sale sale!

My garage sale got mostly rained-out, so I'm offering the choicest leftover items in a "virtual" garage sale. Please email me at kathy@schrenk.org if you're interested in any of the items.





Wet suit, probably 1.5 mm thick, served me well on one dive in Florida in March. Size 9/10, brand name Dacor. $25


Wool jacket, size 6 petite, it's BLACK, not grey, like it appears in the pic. $10




Lot of two women's pants, size 8 Short, by Old Navy. Pretty darn nice dress pants for Old Navy! One is grey, the other black. Would work well with the wool jacket above! $12


Lot of 3 jackets, size 12-18 months. Grey one is Greendog (Macy's) brand, orange rain jacket is Old Navy, orange hoodie is Gymboree. $10




Women's black sweater vest by Old Navy, size Medium. $5



24 month Carters onsie, new with tag, $5



Red Talbots Kids sweater, super-cute, size 18 months, worn maybe twice, $5


Chariot jogging kit for a Chariot double chassis (click here for details). $50


SF tank top, teen size XL, fits a petite woman, $5





Lot of 3 onsies, all by Talbots Kids. Blue one is long sleeved, size 18 months; red one is NWT, size 24 months, short-sleeved polo; cream one is NWT, size 18 months, long-sleeved turtleneck. If your boy fits into these long-sleeved ones now, he'll fit into the short-sleeved one in the spring! $15

Thanks for checking out my on-line garage sale! :-)

Cookin up a storm

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This has been a good weekend for producing tasty treats in the kitchen. First I made pumpkin chocolate chip bread on Friday night, after I devoured a bunch that the snack mom served on Thursday morning.

Last night was chili night, with cornbread from scratch, my own chili seasoning and tomatoes from my store. For some reason it seemed better than usual. Maybe the white beans?

And right now I'm eating a dish that I just dug up on the CSA web site. I don't know why I always worry about what to do with "all these beets" from the CSA. After I cooked the ones for this recipe, roasting as directed, I could have eaten a whole serving of it without anything else. The recipe probably didn't need the raisins, and I skipped the pine nuts because I didn't have them, but the beets made it so flavorful that it didn't matter.

Ch ch ch changes

Last week Arthur started at a new school. It's a Montessori, which basically means that the approach is to provide academically enriching activities for the child to chose from and let them work at their own pace and on what they chose to work on. This sounds pretty unstructured, but it's mega-structure compared to the play-based parent co-op Arthur had been attending.

Last week was his first official week at his new school, but he only attended for about a day-and-a-half, due to runny noses and grandparents in town. Monday was mega-meltdown day. He screamed and yelled and fell on the floor writhing when I tried to drop him off. Finally I pried his hands from the door and ran, and he was ok. Yesterday was Tumblebus day, promptly at 9, so that was easy. And today he walked right in, I said "Adios" (the Spanish teacher comes Wednesdays) and took off. All good.

Arthur doesn't do so well with transitions, so it's no shock there'd be a couple bumps. The biggest challenge may be getting used to the teacher, who today passed on a note that said: "Arthur got a timeout during recess today for saying to the other children in the sandbox 'stinky penis.' Please discuss this with him tonight."

Can-tastic!

This is a lot of tomatoes.

My mother-in-law is in town and yesterday she loaned her 30 years of canning experience to help me "put up" lots of tomatoes (probably about 40 pounds, costing me about $48). This is fourteen 32-oz jars (why do they call it canning when you use jars?) I borrowed the supplies (a very large pot, a mechanism that holds the jars in place, a gripper to pull the jars out of the boiling water and a funnel) from someone in the mothers' club.

The jars cost $1.10 each. I need to go to the store and figure out what the actual cost per oz is for the home-canned vs the store-bought. Of course there's a lot of work involved with the actual home canning, but there are benefits...

I love fall!

Last night I made butternut squash soup and it made the whole house smell divinely of fall. I used two very large squash and double the recipe, leaving out the chili flakes.

This was after the boys and I went to the nursery and got a bunch of lovely Halloween-colored plants. We're not into Halloween so much, at least not like some people are, making their front lawns look like graveyards (ick). I much prefer to decorate for two months of "Harvest" time leading up to Thanksgiving. It's starting to feel a little bit like fall; maybe Sunday was the last day of 80-plus weather!

Here's some of our handiwork (this pic doesn't quite do it justice; those coreopsis [the daisy-type flowers are an incredible shade of orange)!

Furiture fun

This is a piece I picked up at Savers -- after I took the sander to it.








Here it is with a new coat of paint and some fabric from Cloth in Sydney. The paint is left over from the bathroom trim painting -- it's a bright purple. I think I'll repaint it with the brownish purple I'm using in the guest room...

Tomatoes!

I use tomatoes in at least 50 percent of the recipes I regularly make, so when my mother-in-law comes to town at the end of the month, she's going to teach me how to can, and tomatoes are going to be the big staple to "put up" in our house. I'll be borrowing the gear from someone in the mothers' club and my neighbor is planning to come over and learn from the expert, too.

Yesterday I asked one of my favorite vendors at the Menlo Park Farmers' Market which of his tomatoes would be good for canning. He said I should buy one of his big boxes of "soft" tomatoes for $20. Oh my word that's a lot of tomatoes! Below is a picture of maybe half of them in the sink. Last night I boiled, peeled and chopped the rest. This morning I finished the job. About five of the tomatoes were too far gone to even be used for canning and another 5-10 were some variety that just disintigrated when I tried to peel them. It boils down to what seems like not very much: three gallon freezer bags filled half way.

New room

It's time for yet another room transformation, but not nearly as dramatic as last time: this one involves only one room of the house being covered in dust.

The former office was more-or-less transformed into a functioning guest room for the house-swappers. This mainly involved moving some furniture and making some new curtains (which I stopped liking before I finished making them). Since then, we stayed in this house in Australia that was green and purple, and I fell in love with the color scheme. (Now I just need to find the right fabric for curtains.)

Last night I did some spackling of the area that used to be covered by these random strips of faux-wood about a foot below the ceiling. Hideous. Today I sanded the spackling. Have you ever sanded after spackling? The dust is incredible. I was covered in it. The room is still covered in it, after I wiped the walls and the floor with wet rags. I will have to do so again tomorrow. But then the fun begins! Gotta buy that paint this week...

Bare walls

I'm pretty sure we are never going to find proper dining room furniture. We have a table and chairs, and we did have a corner cabinet for china, but the new door to the kitchen made the corner too small for the cabinet. For some reason, it is really hard to find corner cabinets. And then we need some kind of console table for the wall on the other side of the door. The problem there is that someone in my family is way too picky. The good news is, if we had an Asian-themed decor scheme, we would have found a dozen pieces to suit our needs at the Home Consignment Center in Mountain View today!

SF fabric tour

A couple weeks ago Linda and I went to the city looking for fabrics for a couple projects. We were both mostly looking for home decor fabrics, but I also wanted to get a better feel for what the shopping is like in SF, so I got recommendations from a few friends who sew.

First we went to Discount Fabrics in the Mission. Definitely a place to go back to! They have at least a little of everything, but I've never seen as many different kinds of trim and wacky stuff you can stick on your clothes or curtains. For this reason it's one of the go-to stores for my belly-dancing friends.

Linda found everything she needed there. I found some good candidates for the guest-room curtains I plan to make, but didn't actually buy anything.

Next we went to Fabrix, which was underwhelming. It's a pretty small place, but it's crammed with fabric that mostly seemed cheap and blah. It might be a good place to check out regularly to see what comes through if you lived in the neighborhood, but I wouldn't seek it out.

Across the street is a place called Satin Moon that sounds great, but it's closed right now because of a water main leak! I'll check back next time I need something special. My impression is that it's mostly home dec type fabrics with some high-end silks.

Discount Fabrics was on our list but we didn't make it there. Definitely hoping to check it out some time. I'm also intrigued by this place in the Haight.

Britex, of course, is the Mood of San Francisco, but is pretty overpriced. Rounding out my list is a place you should definitely check out: Peapod. It's a tiny store in the Inner Sunset with a great selection of quilting fabrics. They are beautifully chosen and displayed and coordinated; I bought all the fabric for this quilt I made for my niece, Gwen, at Peapod.



Thanks to Lorah, Laura and Rebeca for their recommendations on where to go!

Finally, I found a pretty cool blog post about SF fabric stores.

New guest room!

Right now our guest room consists of some bland curtains, a blah-ish lamp and some leftover office furniture. When our house-swappers were here, there was inflatable bed, too. The only exciting piece (and it is pretty darn exciting, if you ask me) is the bedside table that Nathan and I (mostly Nathan) made in a woodworking class we took way back before we had kids.

But I have big plans: new curtains, which I started shopping for last week. A new sofa bed, of the same kind Linda and Adam had in their guest room (yes, I slept on it, and it was very comfy). And a color scheme that I plan to base partly on the house we stayed at in the Blue Mountains and partly on the invitation to a million-dollar wedding we went to on Lanai about six years ago -- in short, green and purple. Here's an idea of the colors from the Blue Mountains house:

veggies, veggies, veggies

If you invite me to any kind of potluck event this summer, I shall be bringing a green salad. That's because I get piles of lettuce and other crazy greens (bok choy, arugula, mizuna[?] among them) each week in the CSA box, and I can only eat so many salads. I've also had it with fava beans, and even though almost everything I cook has onions in it, I still can't use them all.

But the CSA also brings lots of the best strawberries ever, wondeful fresh eggs, and yummy stuff we are excited about like carrots and fennel. And those apples that are like eating candy, but are already gone for the spring. And I've lost about 3 pounds since the season started 7 weeks ago, because I'm eating so many more veggies, and not as much other junk :-)

Look who's a cook all of a sudden!

As I write this (on the granite) three pots going on the stove, plus the center burner griddle: squid in tomato sauce, fava beans with bacon, and pasta to go with.

Later tonight I might make a cake from scratch -- just the cake part, cause I made the peanut butter filling and the dark chocolate frosting yesterday.

That, my friends, is now how I roll.

AFTER

Yup. There it is. Greatest. Kitchen. Ever.

It's been done for the past three weeks, expect for the microwave, which was installed a couple days ago (anyone need a big, silver microwave, less than a year old?).

There will be more pics later, mostly showing the insane amount of storage space. I think I'm going to start keeping my fabric stash on some of those high shelves (we have 8 more inches of vertical space, you know).

Also, that is, in fact, a new range. It boils water in about 3 minutes and most certainly did NOT cost $3,000. It's a regular old Best Buy range that is super-awesome and discounted thanks to Mr. Schrenk's mad bargaining skillz.

Yeah, the white fridge and dishwasher are a little out of place, but we're not going to replace appliances that are less than five years old for purely aesthetic reasons.

In case you've forgotten, here's the before, as a reminder:

Grommets are hard

I finished the first of the two curtains; the grommets were by far the hardest part. I would manage to force one on there and all my grip strength would be spent. Nathan had to do most of them (pliers wouldn't work because it would make marks in the plastic). I'll post pics tomorrow when it's daylight.

Curtains!

Things are more or less back to normal (kitchen fully usable, travel done for several months) so I get to sew again! Curtains for the back room. Grommets. Good stuff!

Fava beans, leeks and "green garlic"

These are three of the items from the first four CSA shares that I have never cooked with before. But leeks go well with steamed broccoli and mushrooms, apparently. I'm not so down with this mild garlic business; garlic is like a woman with strong opinions who loves to share them -- muzzling her is immoral. There's also some other stuff I've never heard of and can't remember the name of...

I also need to boil the artichokes at some point. And steam broccoli. I get sick of salad really fast, though.

Hot stuff

Now that we have a kitchen, it's too hot to cook indoors. 93 today, so we'll be grilling dinner.

Happily coinciding with the completion of the kitchen is the start of our CSA season. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture; you pay a farm at the beginning of the year for your whole spring-summer-fall's worth of produce, and the farm has cash for its expenses. This particular farm has been doing this for 14 years, and there's a waiting list every year, so it's gotta be good.

This means we're getting all kind of crazy vegetables that I have no idea what to do with. Fortunately the woman at the farm sends out an email each week with cooking instructions and recipes.

Tonight I'm making something with leeks and broccoli, to go with the grass-fed steak from the Menlo Park farmers market

The home stretch! (no, for realz!)

Yesterday our stove arrived, and today James installed allll the pulls. So we can actually get stuff out of all our wonderful drawers and cabinets. The very last step (I think) is the microwave over the stove, which is supposed to come Thursday. Woo, stove!

Now we're cooking with gas!

Gas in little canisters from REI, that is. There's still no range in our kitchen, but Nathan bought a new one last night, I'm told. I'm in Illannoy visiting family, which is why my fans are left to clamor for new pics.

Last week, in between trips to Florida (ie swamp) and Chicagoland (ie tundra) I did a lot of cooking on the camp stove in the backyard. Fortunately, it wasn't snowing there, like it was at the time here.

Have you hugged your dishwasher today?

Probably the hardest thing about the kitchen remodel has been the lack of the dishwasher. I guess I miss the oven a little bit, but I can buy cookies at the store. Do you have any idea how hard it is on your back to wash dishes in the bathtub?

But today, James got the dishwasher AND the faucet hooked up! Good for our marriage, for sure...

Much better!

More malfeasance

This defies comment.

Maybe they were high on sealant fumes.

They will come back and fix it.

Our countertops are HOT!

That backsplash ain't bad either. Yeah, those diamonds are the same as the countertop granite.




ALL the cabinets are in. Not necissarily all the doors, but I'll take it.



James says he can have our dishwasher back in place and hooked up by the end of the day tomorrow (Friday). THAT would be exquisite.

Malfeasance

Today the tile installers told Nathan at noon that they didn't have the tile we wanted for the backsplash in stock so we'd have to chose something different BY THREE P.M. if we wanted the install to go ahead tomorrow. Nice. Reeeall nice. So I drove to SAN LEANDRO (near Oakland!) at lunch time to pick out something new. When I asked them how much of a discount they would give us for this inconvenience, there was some uncomfortable silence and diverting of gazes.

But the good news is that the cabinets are installed and ready for Black Galaxy to be installed on themm tomorrow! Woo! Drawers!

Our first cabinet!

Our very first cabinet, the corner high cabinet, is hung! It's a beaut! The lazy susan below is fitting into place nicely. And next to that, DRAWERS!!!!!



In other news, I finally got sick of eggs in the microwave, and I busted out the camp stove and some of the propane Linda had to unload when she moved. Yum, scrambled eggs with cheese. The boys were pleased. Oh, the thermometer said it was 40 degrees when I was in the back yard cooking the eggs.

Good thing we like our microwave

Remember how I said we weren't going to eat out every day during the kitchen remodel? Um, yeah.

But it's been two-and-a-half-weeks now, and leftovers are getting old, literally and figuratively. I have a list, and today or tomorrow I'm going to the store to buy actual food for an actual recipe: pork and vegetable stew, in the slow-cooker. I'm making it Wednesday, partly because there were still some spots on the sign-up sheet for bringing meals to one of our preschool moms who just had a baby. I guess that was the kick in the pants I needed...

Not much visible progress on the kitchen in the last week or so, but James has been here every day spackling or priming or something. He just put a coat of paint on the ceiling, so that's done. The floor is done, too. He says he's going to move all the cabinets into the kitchen today, and get started on installation. He has to finish the cabinets by Thursday, because that's when the countertop installation starts.

Floor tiles are in! Tomorrow there will be grouting. Some other miscellaneous work Thursday and Friday, then James is supposed to install the cabinets on Monday!

It would have been nice, though, if the floor tilers had told us that we wouldn't be able to walk over the tiles to get to our laundry room for a day before they laid that tile. Oh well.

Rock and roll!

James and his crew have been "rocking," aka putting up sheet rock. There is still "taping" and "mudding" to be done in advance of the tile installers coming tomorrow.

Still no ceiling

The electricians are done, and James claims he'll be giving us walls and maybe a ceiling tomorrow. We can actually see daylight through the vents in the roof, which reduces the efficiency of our furnace quite a bit. Fortunately, it doesn't get cold here...

WE HAVE A DOOR!!!!!!

Regaining the door between the kitchen and the dining room is roughly half the reason for doing the kitchen remodel (drawers is roughly the other half). Here it is! Of course, there are no appliances, cabinets, walls or even a ceiling. And there's a pantsless toddler with cupcake all over his face. And this crazy guy on the left in charge of it all. ;-)

Tomorrow: more wiring (you know, codes and stuff)

"As long as that wall is open..."

I'm sure there has never been a home remodel during which that phrase or something very similar hasn't been uttered. It first happened the other day while Nathan was staring into the attic, which is completely exposed to the kitchen. He was dreaming of the skylight he has dreamed about for years. Turns out that dream is dead (though we are still determined to put one in our living room some day -- we even made sure the solar panel installers left room....).

I said it again when looking around the living room and thinking about lighting and landing strips and realized the living wall opposite the kitchen could use a sconce or some other light fixture...

As it turns out, that's not going to happen either, thanks to budget constraints. But there's always room for dreams...

Schedule change

Remember in my last post I said the floor install would start next week! Just kidding!! Nathan talked to the tile place and they said our tile wasn't in stock yet! As it turns out, this makes James happy, because he decided to switch electricians and the new guys can start Monday. Nathan also was starting to think the walls should go in before the floors, so maybe that will all work out, with the floor tile install starting one week from Monday.

Tonight was a leftover night, and I think tomorrow may involve more cooking at the neighbors'.

Exile

I sent this email to a few people around 2 p.m.:

I tried to blog this from a restaurant with a big outdoor toy play area, but I can't write blog entries on my g phone, ironically. We're here because the house is basically uninhabitable because of dust. The demolition should be done this afternoon, but then the whole house will need to be scrubbed. This afternoon we'll probably hide out at our neighbors', since they're out of town. Who knows, we might just decide to sleep over there and tackle the cleanup tomorrow.

When I was home after school, around noon, the house looked like there had been a volcano eruption. That's when I hurried the boys back out the door and we rode to Main Street Coffee, which has the awesome toy area and no soda fountain. The boys chowed and played and we were there for about two hours. Then we went to the library and hung out for about an hour, then went home. James had had his cleaning service come through and things were back to being in a livable condition. There's still a lot of dust in some parts of the house, but that's to be expected.

We did cook dinner tonight at our friends' house; we have their keys and I knew they'd be out of town, so I called just after experiencing the dust storm and my friend, blissful on a ski lift, said, "no problem!"

The demolition is done.




Next up: the floor install starts next week.

Surprise!

In any remodel there are surprises -- any time you open walls, it's inevitable. This one was a doozy, though. After measuring for and purchasing and taking delivery of our cabinets, counting on an extra 8 inches of wall space after removing the drop ceiling, we find there are load bearing beams in the way. Oops. OK, after another look, James, our head guy, decides one of them is definitely not load bearing and will go to City Hall and find plans to determine if the other one is. So maybe we won't have to replace 30% of our cabinets...

Then there's the mold, which I don't really want to think too much about.

Also, there's supposed to be a separate circuit for the kitchen outlets, fridge, disposal, dishwasher and microwave; in ours all five of those are on one. So now we need a whole new box or something, and that's going to be expensive.

On a worse-things-could-happen note, the placement of the door between the kitchen and the dining room will probably force the departure of our dining room corner cabinet. This isn't horrible, but kind of a bummer because we looked a while for the perfect piece and ended up getting an unfinished cabinet, which we spent a lot of time staining a gorgeous red. It looks like it's part of the house. On the plus side, if we get another naked piece of furniture (very economical), we have the tools (sander) and the know-how to do it right and not have it take forever.

Demolition

Just getting started...

cabinets gone...

oh, there's a hole there!

bye-bye, wall...

James and Nathan, wondering what is up with the weird brick-ish walls?


almost done...


there's a lot of mold up there...

Adjustments

The coffee maker is in the hallway bathroom (the one I just painted purple!). Coffee and sugar are on a knick knack shelf in the hallway, so as not to be ruined by humidity.

I just figure out how to make hard boiled eggs in the microwave.

The train table and most of the toys have been moved from the back room to the living room, along with the microwave and eventually the fridge.

I am listening to some seriously loud banging right now.

Before...

So here's the deal with our kitchen: some chuckleheads who owned the house before us ruined it. There used to be a door between the dining room and the kitchen; who would want one of those? thought Mr. and Mrs. Chucklehead, apparently.

There are two drawers. TWO.

You need a head lamp and one of those grabber thingies to get items out of the back of the floor cabinets. See, drawers and high cabinets are difficult to make and install, and Mr. and Mrs. Chucklehead are lazy, in addition to being dim.

Pantry? Also superfluous.

I guess when we bought the house I didn't see all the problems with the kitchen because I didn't really cook. Today, of course, I have to cook, cause kids cost money that we used to spend on eating out. I won't go over the whole saga about why it took us seven years to finally get to this point, but happily, along came James, a stay-at-home dad for the past year who is looking to get back into construction and did a small job in our back room before we decided he could do the kitchen. He's giving us a good rate on the labor because, he says, we're helping him get back into the business.

The kitchen's only good points are it's large size and the fact that it's almost square, so no pricey custom cabinets are necessary. Still, this is all going to cost us more than I took home in a year as a reporter.




No, that isn't some kind of camera trick, the floor tiles really are that ugly.

And so it begins

Today is the first day of the rest of our kitchen's life. The real work begins: boxing up everything in anticipation of demolition starting in just two days! The official schedule calls for everything to be done by March 10 (our 10th wedding anniversary!) -- we'll see...

So many questions... what objects do we absolutely need in order to eat every day? How many coffee cups, sippy cups, glasses, cereal bowls, spoons, forks, plates?

I'm determined to keep from using tons of paper plates and eating out all the time. I've been cooking big meals with lots of leftovers that can be frozen and reheated. Will a hot plate, grill and slow-cooker get us through? (The microwave and full-size fridge will stay plugged in in the back room.) I'll need to plan some meals from the slow-cooker and grill cookbooks we have... slow-cooker on rainy days, grill on others...

My current purging strategy: throw out any food that's open if I can't remember when I opened it; take dry goods that aren't opened to the food bank.

Up next: some background on the project, plus BEFORE pics...