Stuck At The Starting Gate

So, I have my gleaming white brand new freezer, waiting to be filled with goodness. Just waiting for one hundred pounds of summer tomatoes, roasted eggplant, and any summer fruit I can scrounge up at the last moment. Seriously. It's in there humming away feeling empty, like a trashcan in a hoarder's house. This is practically abuse. However, today is a holiday and I'm stuck at the start gate because my favorite farm isn't answering their phone. I think they are actually taking a day off.

I'm trying to soothe my itchy desire to freeze stuff by concentrating on the super good dinner I'm planning to make: Fresh tomato mozzarella tart with a basil crust, rosemary roasted new potatoes from the garden, and baby beet salad with kalamata olives and feta. AND...if I'm up to the task: fresh peach tart with vanilla custard. Oh boy. That should keep me plenty busy.

Plus, I have to clean up the house just a little because we're having new people over. People we met the day we moved into our last store location. I don't go in for impressing people really. Because the sooner they know who I really am, how crazy, how untidy, how my dinner conversation has been known to fell giants with iron stomachs, the better. However, I think there's a limit to how dirty my house should be when people are coming over. Even when our very closest friends who are more like family come over, I care about not having my house look like the aftermath of a drug raid.

The thing is, Chick chewed up a piece of drift wood and it now covers our entire living room carpet in drifts of salty sandy goodness. I've been averting my gaze for days now, not having time to deal with it. You don't believe me? OK, it's true, I could have made time but instead I made eggplant. And chair cushion covers.

My plan is to do a deep cleaning tomorrow. The first day back to school for Max. I plan to scrub and do (AND FOLD) laundry. Shut up. Seriously, I really will fold the laundry. All of it. Stop laughing. I will prove it to you in pictures. Oops, can't do that because our computer is broken. That's it, no rosemary potatoes for you! I plan to clean up the garage a little. I plan to scrub our bathroom (the "master suite" bathroom that I don't let company use anymore because it's so dirty). I plan to sweep and scrub and scrub and sweep until my house is no longer the supreme example of the grand entropy of life.

So for today, I am merely going to make it a little less scary in here.

The lucky thing is that I do have ratatouille to freeze. So there will be at least a meager offering for the rapacious 14.1 cu. ft. freezer whirring dolorously away in the garage. Soon, my little ice cube, I will stuff you silly with summer food.

I do talk to my appliances occasionally. But isn't that so much more acceptable than leaving them notes all over the house as I used to do for the cockroaches when I lived alone in San Francisco?

I have to go shopping for school supplies for Max too. Which I am going to do the moment I walk away from this laptop. I leave these things for the last possible moment. Hopefully this town will not have run out of #2 pencils by now.

One last note: apparently second degree burns don't heal all that fast. Or remain painless.

How To Wake Up On Sunday Morning

Late into the night my sewing machine was tapping out it's non-encoded* rhythms as we worked together to cover some cushions for a neighbor in a very cool bark cloth that, being mostly white, I could destroy in less than two minutes. In fact, when I stopped to eat some dinner at 11:30pm I had to put all the white fabric in a haz-mat container while I ate to prevent any marinara sauce from leaping from my fork onto the project as it is wont to do around here.

I've never covered cushions before and I am dying to show you the results. I'm quite proud of the zipper work. Even though I have the clearance to share this project with you, my technical team hasn't yet cracked the necessary procedures to allow me to upload pictures from my camera to my laptop.

When you watch too much Alias you can't help but start talking like a fake CIA agent.

I didn't finish the cushions until 2:30am. I kind of wish I hadn't stayed up so late. But only because of how I feel this morning. I got on a roll with them and didn't want to lose steam only to discover I still haven't finished them come next Thursday.

At 7am Max came into my bedroom with a gusher. And a mild panic about the gusher. Normally I can handle bloody noses almost any time of night or day, because I've had to. What's amazing is that until now I've never woken up to one of his extravagant nose bleeds. At first it was fine and I was awake in exactly one second, putting pressure on his nose with tissue, trying to induce calm in him. However, the bleed didn't ease up and Max was making it harder by freaking out when some blood got on his lip, then his hand. Suddenly I felt kind of sick.

Sick like I was going to throw up. Or pass out. Or throw up right before passing out. Or pass out and then throw up and choke on my own vomit and die unexpectedly leaving Philip to deal with all bloody noses in the future which would be so ironic because he's the one with vasovagal visual response to stimuli. I shoved the tissues at Philip and ran to the spare bedroom recently vacated by my mom and tried to ride out the waves of nausea.

This isn't how I prefer to start my day. A day that feels like it may turn out to be a tactical nightmare**. We need to pick up the freezer I bought at Lowe's (for $70 less than I had intended to spend-I'm so proud of that!), but to do that we have to borrow a friend's truck that has to be jump started and kept running which means we all have to go on this errand. So I suppose I also need to clear out the space intended for the freezer. We're going to Portland to see my mom, though I don't really know when or what the plan is because I'm a total lame-ass and haven't figured any of that out ahead of time. I'm not sure what we'll do with the dog, I don't want to leave her for that long alone at the house, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to bring her either. Somewhere in there I need to drop off the cushions too.

On a day like this, one should wake from a long restful sleep, refreshed, with a Stepford style calm child whose nose doesn't bleed copiously all the time, and one should have everything all planned out.

To look for the good in everything is an annoyingly noble goal. Here's some good:

• Max isn't a hemophiliac, which is a comfort. If he was he'd probably already be dead or I'd be institutionalized from the trauma of dealing with potentially deadly bloody noses all the time.

• Freezers don't have legs. This is good for many reasons, one of which is that the freezer I bought can't walk out of Lowe's without us so there's no reason to get all panicky because we have to arrange to pick it up. Us anxious types will panic about anything. We've got no discerning taste whatsoever.

• I didn't throw up. I hate throwing up and fear it. Seriously fear it. I will not tell you the lengths I will go to to avoid hurling. You could almost say I have a phobia of vomiting. Which isn't surprising since I have a highly sensitive gag reflex.

• Because I finished the two projects hanging over my head I can be free to enjoy myself and my new freezer without the guilt I would experience if I knew I should be sewing instead of chopping the last peaches of the season to freeze. Which I'm praying I'll get to do. Peaches are almost completely gone.

• Plus, I'll get paid for the projects I finished which will help to offset the cost of the freezer which, if it had legs, would be tapping it's toes in impatience right now in the loading dock. And also freaking out all the Lowe's employees who aren't getting paid enough to deal with mutant angry appliances.
  

I'm really trying to focus on the good but Max is being a complete stinker and I see what the real tactical nightmare is going to be today: dealing with Max. Max isn't going to cooperate with anything we've got to do. He's going to drag his feet and that mouth of his is going to let out the longest string of complaints that any child has ever been able to sustain. He's very skilled at this. He could win awards for his ability to maintain a constant string of negativity. Sometimes I get so weary of his bad attitude that I kind of wish I was deaf.

I guess I better go untangle the day's objectives. I could really use some good disguises too but I'm afraid that if I were to wear disguises I wouldn't look cool like Sydney Bristow, I would look like Divine. I think I should avoid that for all of our sakes.

Copy that.




*I've been watching A LOT of Alias. Everything in my head is theatrical agent talk.
**I love this expression and am constantly looking for an excuse to say it.

Cherry Season!

On the east coast and in the Midwest sour cherries are not very hard to find (from what I hear), but here on the west coast they are like rare birds who can't fly and are therefore dying off because it's evolutionarily less useful to have wings that don't work. I guess no one sees the point of growing sour cherries because you have to preserve them or cook them in pies to get the best out of them and who has time for that? You'd think, what with Washington state dripping with cherries it wouldn't be that hard to track some down.

You'd think.

When I lived in Sonoma I went on a mad sour cherry hunt. I actually tried to find mail order sources here on the west coast as I have heard there are on the east coast. No luck. I tried every local farm to find out if they had a Morello tree hidden on their back acre that I could pick from. No dice. Even though the west county in Somoma used to be full of cherry orchards. This was long before it was all vineyards and long before it was all apples which were mostly chopped down to make way for the grapes. Now there is almost no evidence that they once dominated the agricultural landscape. I heard about it from old farmers.

There are lots of cherries here in Yamhill county. Cherries everywhere! This is something you never see in California. Roadside cherries. Cherries in front yards. However, they are all sweet.

Lisa E. has begun a new hunt for cherries. It seems she's found a possible source here in Yamhill County. On Sunday we are going cherry picking. Of course we're going to pick sweet cherries. But besides eating them there isn't a lot you can do with the sweet ones. They lose their flavor when cooked and doused in sugar so pies, preserves, and other deserts don't shine with the sweet cherries.* Here's what we'll do with the sweet ones: we'll eat a ton of them fresh, we'll try oven drying some and dehydrator drying some others (to make a quality comparison), and we might make a little ice cream. We might even try making one of the recipes for preserves made with sweet cherries just to see how it turns out.

At this same orchard there is a sour cherry tree, but the owner has informed Lisa that the cherries on it are very small. We're bringing her cherry pitter to see how easily they pit. If they pit easily we will pick sour cherries and make sour cherry jam because it's one of the best jams on earth to those of us who like our jam with a little tartness. My all time favorite is made by the company Bon Maman. Philip bought it once a long time ago and since I don't like to try new things very freely, he had to convince me that it wouldn't kill me to take a taste. You see, I had only ever had cherry deserts and preserves made from sweet cherries which basically just taste like cooked sugar. Oh boy! I am so glad he made me try it. It tasted like cherry candy, the kind that is bright red and made with artificial flavorings...except that it was a gorgeous deep red and 100% natural.

I seem to have developed a habit of planting sour cherry trees wherever I live. I planted two at my last house and two at this house. I keep thinking that it isn't enough. Morello trees are quite small naturally. What if I never get enough from them? I'm not as sure about the Montmorency trees which is the other variety I planted. I kind of think I ought to plant at least one more. Another thing you can do with sour cherries (better than with sweet) is make liqueur. I haven't had tons of luck making good liqueurs but once you've tasted a really good one it's hard not to want to keep trying.

I've made an excellent plum liqueur and my friend Sharon has made an excellent cherry liqueur. I have to note that she used sweet cherries but didn't use as much sugar as cherry liqueur usually calls for and it turned out excellent-but she didn't write down what she did so it will remain a mystery forever.

The bowl of cherries above is this years Morello harvest from the front yard. Not a lot you can do with a tiny bowl of sour cherries except look at them and dream about what you'll do with them next year when you have enough of them.

So cherries are going to kick off our farm and preserving adventures for the season. I'm so excited! Now I have to start looking for an extra freezer. I needed one last year but didn't get one. I've needed one for a few years but have not wanted to make a rash choice. I don't know whether I should just get an extra fridge/freezer combo-but then I probably still wouldn't have enough freezer space, or get an upright freezer, or get one of those chest freezers? Which is best? The upright seems the easiest to find things in. The chest freezers are cheaper. There's all this talk of frost-which ones are frost free? Anyone have suggestions?

The one thing I know for sure is that I'm getting one with a low energy star rating which means I won't be buying locally unless my Sears can order a low energy Kenmore. Around here the only ones I've seen in person are the ones that eat up the most energy possible-are we trying to use up all the fossil fuel right now on purpose? Please! On line I've seen a lot of models that are very efficient compared to what I've seen around here.

For anyone else wondering what to do with a surplus of local cherries, here's a list:

dry them (sweet)
pit and then freeze them (sweet or sour)
preserves (best for sour)
ice cream (sweet)
syrup (sour)
liqueur (sweet or sour)
sauce to put over ice cream or other deserts (sour)

*This is my opinion possibly not shared by anyone else. That's alright, I'm used to it.