• Potatoes and other goodies

    I prepped and seeded the ground around the septic tanks on Saturday, which took a lot of hours for a relatively small area. The ‘prep’ part of that equation is the vast majority of the effort – since our land was pretty well wooded until we built last year, there’s still lots and lots of roots and other random detritus that I need to rake out before I can do anything with the yard. To up the enjoyment factor, there were swarms of gnats out late Saturday afternoon, and my legs still itch this morning. But it did get done, so now the last remaining area to be tackled is the leach field. Can’t wait.

    Yesterday I was able to get my potatoes and chard planted, to go along with the peas, lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, and onions that I planted about a month ago (most of which are coming along very nicely). I always do a standard Bright Lights chard, because I think half the fun of cooking is making your food look nice, and having a garden from which you can pick a rainbow of colors makes it that much easier.

    On the potato front, this year I’m going to try German Butterball – “First place winner in Rodale’s Organic Gardening Taste Off. A good choice for roasting, frying, and especially for mashed potatoes. Russeted skin and buttery yellow flesh. Always one of our favorite all-purpose potatoes. Excellent for long-term storage. Very good yields. 100-120 days.” (from SSE). Anything I can fry, roast, and mash is a winner in my book, and it’s a tribute to my German heritage (if it actually originated in Germany…). Maybe a bit of a long season for my neck of the woods, but we’ll see how it goes. I also threw in a couple of redskins from the store that had sprouted. Now I just hope things don’t get so wet that they start to rot – forecast for the next week or so consists of, you guessed it, rain (with one partly cloudy day thrown in so things don’t get too monotonous).

    However, since I was starting everything from scratch at the new house, I put in raised beds (in part to mitigate the excessive springtime raininess), and so far they’ve been a charm – in prior gardens I wouldn’t have even been able to walk without sinking, and I’ve had stuff planted for a month! Speaking of that, at some point this week, I’ll have a post or two detailing the current layout of all the gardens and orchard, so everyone can share in my excitement 🙂 Stay tuned!

  • Lamburger

    Made lamb burgers for dinner tonight. I enjoy lamb, while S isn’t usually a huge fan of the flavor, but she was a good sport today. I think more than anything else, I just like saying lamb burger. Lamburger. Laaaamburger.

    Anyhow, I do say that this blog is about food too, so I may or may not occasionally post a recipe or two. However, one of my quirks in the kitchen is that I rarely follow an exact recipe (except maybe for baking, where accurate measurements can be more important). Most of the time I take ideas from a recipe, or several similar recipes, and add my own touch. I know, I should have been a chef. So if I’m relaying a recipe to y’all, I’ll probably stick with very precise ingredient amounts like “a little,” “a bunch,” and “some.” Okay, the details:

    Lamb burgers

    About a pound of ground lamb
    Crumbled feta cheese (1/2 cup or so?)
    Couple cloves of crushed garlic
    Spoonful of molasses
    Moroccan seasoning (this is just a jar of stuff we had in the cupboard that I thought would work well – use any other spices you prefer, to taste)

    Mix all the above (by hand is more fun than with a utensil; nothing like squeezing ground meat between your fingers). Saute in a pan, or grill, or bake. I pan-fried tonight. Serve on a toasted bun, and top with my homemade yogurt sauce.

    Yogurt Topping

    One small container of Greek yogurt
    More feta cheese
    Chopped cucumber
    More Moroccan seasoning

    Mix all these too.

    Serves two to four. I made some whoppers, so it was only two.

    Laaaamburger. Hehe.


  • Wind

    I woke up way early this morning to the sound of… nothing. Seriously, I like noise when I’m sleeping, so silence is as effective as any alarm clock. The sound of nothing was the result of the power being out, which was the result of the winds that blew through last night and this morning.

    Since we have a basement in our new house, I went downstairs to check the sump pump, which apparently was not installed with a battery backup (I know what I’m doing this weekend). This of course meant that to avoid a flood, I had to empty the pump well by hand. Thank goodness it wasn’t raining, otherwise I’d have been fighting a losing battle. In the end, the water was rising slowly, so I only had to go down every few hours, though when it was all said and done, I probably lugged up about 100 gallons. Good times.

    In between the water-lugging sessions, I read, played with the boy while he wasn’t napping, read some more, and ate chips. And I went outside, but there were no puddle curses uttered today – the grass seed is finally starting to germinate! I know the picture looks sparse, but I’ll take it. It’s a step in the right direction.

    On a fun note, since the power was out for 12 hours and there wasn’t much else to do, I was able to start and finish a 400 page book today. That’s what I call making the best of the situation.

  • Nice to meet you.

    Hello. After many months of perusing numerous blogs, I told myself, “Hey, I can do this too,” and thus the decision was made to add even more clutter to an already cluttered blogosphere, so here goes…

    My family consists of my wife and our eight-month old son (whom I’ll affectionately refer to as “S” and “C”), our golden retriever/collie mix Sadie (whom I’ll affectionately refer to as the mutt, the rat, or dummy as the situation warrants), and various other woodland creatures. We live on a few acres in Northeast Ohio, twenty miles or so east of Cleveland. We lived in a suburb for the past several years, and, in October, just moved into a new house, back out in the country where I grew up (S is also a country gal, from just a bit further south).

    I like to play outside and enjoy being dirty, which my wife just cannot comprehend. I also like to cook (or more accurately, eat the results of my cooking), and enjoy music, sports, photography, reading, and relaxing, the latter of which I don’t get to do enough of. Since we just moved in recently, there are still more than a fair number of projects that I’m working on, and as the weather warms up, the project focus has shifted outside. However, we’re currently in the midst of the wettest April on record, so much of my ‘project’ time outside has consisted of looking at the yard and cursing all the puddles.

    Anyways, there’s the first post. I’m sure I’ll look back on this someday as the point where the magic began, but for now, I have to go back to work. So, I’ll try to get some posts out in the next couple days regarding current projects, seeds that I’ve started, and various other gardening activities. Until we meet again…