Something New

We cook a lot of good food around here.  Both Paul and I love to cook and have our own specialties.  His is usually more ethnic...Indian, Mexican, etc.  Mine tends toward pastas and soups and breakfast foods.  Between the two of us, there isn't much we haven't tried.  However, tonight I made something entirely new, something neither one of us had ever eaten before...gnudi.

Gnudi is a made-up name trying to sound Italian like gnocchi.  Gnocchi is classified as a pasta often made with a potato base.  It looks like little balls of dough and is quite good.  I've made it before using sweet potatoes and it was delicious.

Gnudi was apparently created by the Spotted Pig restaurant in New York City.  It has a base of ricotta cheese, eggs, and flour.  There is also lots of fresh ground nutmeg and some chives involved.  It sounded intriguing so I decided to go for it.  

I made fresh ricotta cheese, which is really easy by the way, and let it drain overnight.  Then I added the rest of the ingredients and formed the "dough" into 1" balls.  They were then buried in cups of semolina flour and left overnight in the fridge.  After bringing them back to room temperature, they are dropped in boiling water and cooked until they pop back to the top of the water, just a couple of minutes.  Really pretty easy.

I served them with chanterelle mushrooms (my favorites!) sauteéd in butter with garlic and thyme.  Oh, my!  They were like little pillows of deliciousness, slightly chewy on the outside and soft and gooey on the inside. They have definitely been added to our list of good things to make again.  How fun to discover a new taste treat! 

Saucy Tomatoes

I know, I know I've posted about tomatoes twice before (!) but I just can't help myself.  It's tomato season again (hallelujah) and that means time to make tomato sauce for the freezer.  Every year we plant at least a dozen sauce tomato plants, usually either Roma or San Marzano tomatoes.  And every year Paul would talk dreamily about the Milano Bush tomatoes he used to grow.  Somewhere along the way, he quit starting his own plants and couldn't find the seed for Milanos anymore.  Then, lo and behold, there it was, Milano Bush tomato seed in one of the seed catalogs this year.  Of course, one thing led to another and before you know it we're buying a whole indoor seed growing set-up so we can start our own tomato plants in March!  

I'm happy to say we were successful and planted 10 Milano tomato plants in the garden.  They are just starting to come on.  If all the tomatoes on the plants ripen, we'll have plenty of sauce this year.  

 

Today I made the first batch of sauce from the first real picking of the Milanos.  It really is easy with our tomato saucing contraption.

 I got two pints of sauce from this bunch.  They are in the freezer as I type.  Fresh frozen tomato sauce tastes like it just came from the garden when you use it.  It's definitely a staple around here.  So we get that tomato taste all year round!

The Old Yellow Rose

There is a beautiful bushy yellow rose that grows here on the Palouse.  I'd noticed it around the area the first few years I was here.  One of my neighbors has one growing along his fence.  It gets 5-6 feet tall and just as wide.  There is another one growing across the river from us on an old home site.  The house long ago burned down but some of the flowers are still there.  

My neighbor told me he thought it was called a Harison's rose.  I did a little research and found that it is indeed that rose and that it's origin is quite old.   "The original plant was discovered in the garden of amateur hybridist George F. Harison in Manhattan in 1830.  Suckers of it traveled west with the pioneers.  'Harison's Yellow' rose runs under a few different names including: ' Hogg's Yellow', 'Yellow Rose of Texas', 'Harisonii', the 'Oregon Trail Rose' and 'Pioneer rose'."
      
About three years ago I decided I wanted to try to start one of these roses.  I drove over to the old home site and dug up a couple of suckers and transplanted them along our fence by the road.  Unfortunately, this was the same year of the Vole Wars and those little buggers tunneled right under those starts and they died.  Sigh...


So last spring I headed back to the home site and dug up a few more suckers.  Luckily no one lives around there who cares.  These starts went into the same spot along our old fence and have done quite well.   I was quite excited a few weeks ago when I discovered buds on the bush.  And now it is blooming!  The blossoms aren't large but they smell really sweet.  There is something lovely about continuing the spread of this old rose around the countryside. 

Sew Much Love

Paul, my husband, practices a martial art called aikido.  He's been doing it for 20 years and has a black belt in the art.  As you can guess, it is a big part of his life and very important to him.  Practitioners of aikido wear special clothing on the mat.  One piece of this clothing is called a hakama.  It looks like a pair of very pleated culottes.

So, imagine his chagrin when he needed a new hakama and found that the company he had previously purchased them from had gone out of business.  

Now in my life I have done quite a bit of seamstress work.  I used to make many of my clothes and have done sewing for other folks, too.  I've made everything from tea towels to wedding dresses.  It seemed like making a hakama should be within my realm of skills so I went hunting for a pattern and the proper fabric.  
 

A hakama turns out to be a very complicated garment.  
It has a number of pleats both in the back and the front.  Here is a picture of one so you can get the idea...and that's just the front.  

Once we found the pattern and the right fabric, I set to work.  
Oh, my!  I had no idea how difficult this was going to be.  It got to the point where I would work on it for a while and then have to give my brain a break before I could go back to it.  

 






But I persevered and finally finished it.  Paul is very pleased and a little bit proud, I think, that I made it for him.  

Here he is in his new hakama...





 



and breaking it in getting thrown 
by his sensei. 

Thankfully, a hakama will last for a long time.


The things we do for the ones we love!  And it's totally worth it.

Wildflower Walk

Living out in the country gives us a wonderful place to walk.  We just head out down our gravel road for what we call a "three mile Idaho."  By the time we get about a mile and a half down the road, we're in Idaho.  By the time we get home, we've gone three miles.  

This time of year the walk down the road is awe-inspiring.  The countryside is abloom with wildflowers...lots and lots of wildflowers.  These pictures are ones we took just today on our walk.  If you click on any of them, they will get bigger and show more detail.



 The blue one on the left is Brodiaea.  

The yellow one on the right is Arrowleaf Balsamroot with some purple Delphinium.

This shows a drift of purple Delphinium.

This is Golden Pea close-up

 


...and more down by the river.

This one is Groundsel.

The white one is Prairie Star and the blue one is Blue-eyed Mary.












This shrub is called Serviceberry.  It's growing up into a Ponderosa pine that is also "blooming" with red cone "flowers."

This yellow is Swale Desert Parsley (a type of lomatium).












This last one is a favorite of ours, Camas.  

I have to confess that these last two photos were taken on our property in the prairie Paul has been restoring for the past twenty years.  If you want to read about that project, visit his blog at palouserivermusic.blogspot.com .




We feel so lucky to live in such a beautiful place...all right down the road.

Asparagus!

It's suddenly spring on the Palouse!  Actually the weather the last week or so is more summer than spring but we'll take it!  Life is busy, busy in the garden.  Seedling are sprouting, trees are blooming, and flowers are dancing with color.  I love spring the most.

Last spring I planted a small asparagus bed.  I carved out a little nook of the encroaching prairie for 6 plants.  One must be patient to grow asparagus.  There is no harvesting until the plants have been in for an entire year and then one can harvest only for two weeks.  The next year you can harvest for about 4 weeks.  The following year for 6 weeks.  After that you can harvest an entire 8 week season!

See what I mean about being patient?

Anyway, this is the first harvesting year for my tiny patch and look what I picked today!  I'm so excited.  It's not going to be much of a meal but I bet they are going to taste wonderful.

I recently read that 24 mature asparagus plants will yield about 10 pounds of asparagus in a season.  Obviously, at 6 plants, I have under-planted!  I am already making plans to expand the asparagus bed and put in more plants next spring.  We love asparagus around here!

Starting Over

Life is full of do-overs, or times when you wish you could do-over, and gardening is no exception.  There is the occasional plant that turns out to be disappointing or dead once the winter has gotten to it.  There are plants that just show up in my garden that I didn't put there, remnants of a former life...for instance the Shasta daisies.  Around here, Shasta daisies are an invasive species, no kidding.  I thought I could control them but, they were voracious and I had to pull them all out before they took over the entire flower garden.

And then there are the things that just don't turn out the way you had planned.  The latest, for me, were my raspberries.  They are my favorite berry and I really look forward to first ripe ones eaten right off the cane.  Unfortunately, the type that I planted here turned out to be a rather late ripening variety.  In my defense, I ordered a different kind but these were substituted by the nursery (it was an online order) because the ones I wanted were all sold out.  I figured that would be okay and that they probably knew what they were doing.  Now, I'm not so sure.  

The problem with a late ripening raspberry here is that we have a rather short growing season compared to many other places and these berries often did not get ripe until late August or early September.  Our first freeze is often mid to late September which means a very short raspberry season.  Not good.  So I made the decision to dig out the raspberry patch and start over.  This was no small feat.  I agonized about this decision over the winter.  It's hard for a gardener to pull out a perfectly good plant but I finally decided that having a longer raspberry season was more important.  

About a month ago, I dug out the old canes and cleaned up the bed.  This week we added some compost to the soil and I worked it in to give the new berries a nice place to grow.  Today the new raspberry canes went in.  This time, instead of ordering plants from somewhere, I got starts from my friends Diane and Michael who live over in Potlatch, about 8 miles away.  Diane doesn't know the name of this variety.  Her starts were given to her by another local.  She calls them "Prolific Potlatch" raspberries.  I figure these are all good omens that my raspberry bed will produce some really yummy berries.  Thank goodness for do-overs!

Sweet Hearts

It's Valentine's Day.  At our house, we don't make a big deal out of Valentine's Day.  Oh, we have our traditions but they have nothing to do with store-bought cards and gifts.  Our philosophy is that, honestly, every day should be like Valentine's Day.  It feels like that to Paul and me.  However, we do like a little celebration just as much as the next couple so we celebrate the day of love with some lovely rituals. 

The first is that we always make each other a Valentine.  Sometimes they are goofy, sometimes serious but, always, made by hand.  

The second is that I always make shortbread hearts.  Shortbread is a favorite around here.  Maybe it is partially because Paul has Scottish heritage.  Maybe it's just because it tastes so darned good.  Either way, I make them as a Valentine's treat.  This year is no different.  This year's batch looks just like every other year's.  Big shortbread hearts drizzled with a little pink glaze.  There's no better way to say I love you than a good cookie!

Winter harvest

It's winter on the Palouse.  This means cold temperatures, rain, snow, and wind.  It means snowy, icy roads and bundling up before heading out anywhere.  It's wool socks and sweaters and a fire constantly burning in the woodstove.  It's certainly NOT gardening weather, that's for sure.  Well, except for this.  The carrots and parsnips we left in the garden bed last fall finally got dug up today.  I was afraid they might be mushy by now after all the hard freezes and snowy weather but, they were beautiful!  

It sort of amazes me that we can still get something from the garden at this time of year, especially here.  When I lived in warmer climes, winter gardening was not unusual at all.  Lettuce in December?  No biggie.  But here, not so much.  That's why digging up these root vegetables is kind of a thrill.  They look great and taste even better.  Homegrown carrots have a flavor unknown to those store-bought carrots.  So good.  

Now we are brainstorming about what wonderful carroty things we will make in the next few weeks.  Some will get roasted, along with those few parsnips, with either a roasted chicken or a pork roast.  Some may become part of a risotto with carmelized carrots that I like to make.  Paul has requested some be set aside for him to make Zanahorias Picante (a Mexican spicy pickled carrot salad).  Yep, we'll have no trouble at all eating up our winter harvest!

Man's Best Friend

I had never lived with a dog before I moved here to live with Paul.   Oh, we always had dogs when I was growing up on the farm but those dogs lived outside and never came in the house.  They were farm dogs.  I was only really attached to one of them, Buddy.  Unfortunately, Buddy had a roving eye and a yen for the female dog across the highway.  Late one night, it became his undoing. He was hit by a car and killed.  It took me days of crying to get over it.  I think I was about 12 at the time.

However, part of the Paul package was Gracie, his border collie.  I was a bit apprehensive about living with a dog that came indoors.  Would she be in the way, leave dog hair everywhere, be a nuisance?  Well, she was all those things but she was also an amazingly well-trained and intelligent dog.  She grew on me.

Gracie was smart enough to know what certain words meant and so we had to either spell things or use alternative words when we didn't want her to get excited...like perambulate instead of walk, flying disc instead of frisbee, or European football instead of soccer.  But she still had ways of figuring things out that we couldn't understand.  She seemed to know before we did that we were planning a walk down the road.  She would start to get excited if she heard my noisy sock drawer upstairs (where she wasn't allowed to go) assuming I was putting on socks and shoes for a walk.  Even the times she was disappointed because I was only going out to work outside, her enthusiasm for my putting on my socks and shoes never waned.  She was always hopeful. 

As you may have guessed by my using the past tense, Gracie died about two months ago.  She was getting to be a bit of an old dog.  She had blown out her knee last year and limped a little now and then.  She didn't always move as fast as she once had.  However, she seemed to be doing okay for a dog of a certain age.  Until one day, after one of her beloved walks down the road, she just didn't seem to have too much energy.  As the day wore on, she seemed less like herself, not wanting to come inside from the rain, panting and just lying around.  We knew something was really wrong when she didn't even wag her tail when Paul talked to her and petted her in her "den" behind the couch that night.  We decided we would have to take her to the vet the next morning.  She died in her sleep that night.  Blessedly, it was fast and relatively painless.  She was home with her pack and in her den.  A good place to be.  

That was two months ago and we all still miss her.  It's often at funny times like driving in the driveway and not seeing her run down to meet us.  I notice it most when I come downstairs in the morning.  Gracie had decided some time ago that I was the person who would let her outside in the morning and she would greet me, excitedly, at the bottom of the stairs and do her little jumpy run ahead of me to the front door.  I still expect to see her there sometimes.  

Gracie is buried out in our prairie.  This spring we will plant a Ponderosa pine over her.  Gracie was a good dog.