Boss Lady

Last weekend I went out to the backyard with the intention of showing the tomatoes who was boss.

And wouldn't you know that there were some dissenting opinions, so that showing has continued into this week.

Meaning that there were so many fucking tomatoes on those plants that I'll be showing them who's boss all week as I freeze/cook/puree/slice/chop/boil/toss them.

Thankfully, at the end of this week, I fully intend to have Boss Lady status - at least as far as the tomatoes are concerned. My status with the other members of the household (yeah, tomatoes are pretty much members of the house now, what with their reserved space in the cupboard and all) is up in the air, I'm sure, as Rocket has informed me that I'm "on the bubble" since she knows her Pelt Removal appointment is fast approaching.

Anyway.

In order to be The Boss of the Tomatoes in an appealing and satisfying way to more than just moi, I decided that I'd just work tomatoes into every single day of our weekly dinner menu so that Bubba could appreciate Boss Man status among the tomatoes, too.

Also, he is good to have around in food surplus situations because he is a boy and therefore can eat impressive quantities of food, even though he keeps up a super svelt frame. The fact that he keeps ratcheting back to the skinner holes on his belt whilst he hoovers up all the leftovers and snacks and always has dessert is just something I'm not going to cover right now because it friggen irks me.

HOW ARE THESE THINGS POSSIBLE? And, how come they don't happen to me?

Moving on...

To first give you an idea of the amount of bossiness I have to force on these plants, let me tell you that during my Saturday morning harvest, I walked away with 32 lbs of tomatoes. I really have to update the tracker with the recent harvests because they've been big ones and I think we may be approaching the 200 lb mark with tomato harvests this year.

In this case, it was more than my cardboard TJ's flat could handle, so I had to call the old broken bucket off the bench.

Put me in, coach!

And in case you can't really appreciate the magnitude of this harvest based on the angle of this photo, this is how much room they took up in my sink as I rinsed them. Which is to say, ALL of the room.

The tomatoes are two and three deep in there. Yeowch.

So, to go about handling all 32 lbs here, I thought first that I'd just freeze them all. Or, maybe, I'd can half and freeze half. Or maybe I'd have a canning-A-THON and can them all. And then rent out one of those POD things for storage.

But then I realized that I'm stupid.

I mean, all winter we make do with homecanned and frozen tomatoes, all the while longing for the coming summer's harvests of fresh tomatoes so that we can have things that you can't really have with canned or frozen tomatoes. Like, say, tomato salad and tomato pie and tomato sandwiches and basically anything you need a fresh tomato to achieve.

You can't be thawing out a frozen tomato to slice up for a salad because that is just nasty and weird.

So, DUH, I finally wrote up a menu of favorite fresh tomato dishes, parceled out the number of tomatoes I'd need to fulfill them and then processed (ie. cut out the stem holes) and froze the rest into gallon sized bags to feed the chesty.

That's eight gallons of tomatoes, there. Yah. Anyone up for chili?

It's funny how the chesty is nowhere near capacity. This thing is fucking scary.

I'm afraid to start stacking stuff in there because it'll get lost and will have to be hauled out with a crane someday.

So far, the menu's working as planned. We started the Tour de Tomato with the "Use While Fresh" basket looking like this:

And last night, after three tomato-heavy dinners, it looked like this:

And in case you're tired of me talking about all these tomato things rather than telling you what we've been doing with all these tomato things, here's the menu.

Sunday night: Tomato Pesto Pie (sans sausage because the store is so far away)

And rather than making a pie PIE, I made individual pie pockets. Well, you'd have to have really big pockets for these, but the crust forms something of a pocket, so just go with me, here.

If you like time-lapse photography, check this shit out - the tomato version:

Slice the dough > Add pesto > Add tomatoes > Add cheese > Add pesto > Add tomato > Cover/Crimp > Bake > Slice > EATYUM

When I make it again, I'll just make it the normal way.

Monday night: Creamy Tomato Soup

This didn't turn out as creamy as promised (by the recipe) because I pussed out and used 2% milk rather than cream but before you get all USE CREAM YOU RETARD! I just want to say that this was due to laziness (I had 2% in the fridge and the cream was all the way at the far away store - see "Sunday night: Tomato Pesto Pie") rather than Fear of Fatness and had there been cream in my fridge I so would have used it.

But, as it turns out, my Fear of Fatness makes the likelihood of having cream in the fridge so slim that I'd advise that you not hold out hope. We'll have to, instead, hope that one day my laziness subsides.

Still good enough for Bubba to eat a gallon of it for lunch.

Tuesday night: Ratatouille with sausage

This is an old standby recipe for those times when I have a crisper full of farmshare and nowhere to turn.

This time I spiced it up with jalapeno sausage from good ol' TJ's and piled on a lot more parsley than you see in this photo. Because I'm self-conscious of my over-parsleying ways, OK.

DON'T YOU JUDGE ME.

Judgers.

I served Bubba's over rice, but this is mine - 100% ratatouille

As for tonight and tomorrow and the day after (and after and after...), we'll be having BBQ brisket and beans courtesy of Chesty and a loverly tomato salad. Tomorrow I think I'm making this tomato bruschetta again and Friday we're having pizza.

And, with any fucking luck, we'll hit the weekend with an empty basket on the counter and HEY just in time to refill it with the ripe ones from the garden because OH MY HELL I went out there this morning and there's more.

Imagine if I'd planted SIX tomato plants? We'd be moving into a POD right now just to give them room.

And when did I become so obsessed with PODS? Weird, that.

Running update: I now make up special names for my running clothes to legitimize my shopping.

I am about to launch into many months of gardeningblahblahblah so I thought I'd share some parting words about my winter running, the forthcoming spring time running and how I'm worried that not running a single half marathon this year will ruin my life or at least cripple my not-really-a running career to the point where all I'll do during the times when I normally would have been on a 12 mile training run is wander the neighborhood in my running shorts pointing at the race medals strung around my neck going, "Look, fuckers! These mean I don't *have* to run long distances anymore, OK."

Yes, my mind wanders when I run and I have an awesomely creative and inappropriate imagination.

Also, I realize that 13.1 miles is only considered to be "long distance running" to some people so don't get all "Um, loser - you're not running long distances until you're in the 26 mile range, OK?" in the comments because I'll ignore you and also quietly hate you. And, despite my innate crabbiness, I don't want to hate you.

Anyway, mostly I just worry about The Fatness and not being able to hike as fast on our backpacking trips, as I set my sights on the 5 and 10Ks in the ever-present Active.com Upcoming Events in Your Area emails.

I mean, yes, I have been vaguely tempted to sign up for the Seattle Rock N Roll Half Marathon, if only for the chance to maybe possibly see a bald eagle, like, right there along Lake Washington again so that I can be an inappropriate ass, again, and shriek "Holy Shit!" amongst a sea of horrified runners, but I've learned an important lesson about re-running a race:

Don't do it because it's very boring.

Yep - thanks San Jose Rock N Roll, for that life lesson.

OK, so the second time I ran it, it was OK. I was going for time, which I made swiftly and with little added effort, but the third time (last year), the race was terrible. I was bored to the point where I considered just running off the course at the six mile mark *knowing* that I wouldn't care later about ditching out on the run because I was *so over it*.

But, thankfully, the tiny competitor in my mind (and let me be clear when I say, "tiny", because I'm not all that competitive) forced me to stay and finish what I started. So, really, it probably wasn't the tiny competitor in my mind, but more the HUGE A/R accountant in my mind that wouldn't let me flake on a commitment. Or a race entry fee.

OK, the fee part was probably the tiny Jew in my mind, but whatever. Jew, accountant - let's not get buried in semantics.

All in all, the lesson was learned and as I was finishing that dull drag of a race, I decided that I would certainly not run it again. At least for a while. Because HI no one did anything remotely interesting to their front yards in the year's time between the '08 and '09 races and so I had nothing to look at but the same tired landscaping and the ankles of the toads in front of me.

Boh-ring.

About my winter running, though. Well, I think we're done with that season now, too.

I had, officially, one day that required YakTrax, but as I had not yet purchased the YakTrax, I spent the duration of that run slip-sliding away and very nearly snapping a groin muscle (no injury sustained, though, so YAY).

After that fateful day, however, I did buy the YakTrax and have since used them many times - in Tahoe. Where it snows. And where I like to take the dogs out for leash-free roaming while I drink wine out of a coffee cup.

Like I've said before, I'm a class broad.

I think the arrival of the YakTrax also marked the permanent stowing of the remainder of the winter running gear like the vest, tights, long-sleeves and thick running pants.

Though I may break the tights and long sleeves out for the Mermaid 10K if the weather makes an evil turn on the eve of the race like it did last year.

Fine. I'll manage.

But, in a deliberate attempt to welcome spring and force winter to the back of the closet, I got myself what I'm calling, a Transitional Running Top.

"Transitional" because it has short sleeves rather than long or tank sleeves and will let me transition between the cold ass mornings of the winter and the cool and lovely mornings of spring.

You get it.

Mostly this is because, while I'm ready to wear tanks on my morning runs, I tend to get the hairy eyeball from the freaks all wrapped around their paper coffee cups at the stop lights and sometimes the older gal in her head-to-toe winter running outfit (with matching headband - sharp!) goes out of her way to interrogate me on what exactly is my problem aren't I freezing.

Sure, I can say No and wipe some of my carefully cultivated boob sweat on her forehead to illustrate my point, but it's easier to just wear short sleeves so that my barren shoulders don't attract so much attention.

It's amazing how an extra two inches of fabric extended over the shoulders can mitigate so much unsolicited inquiry into my mental status.

But, surpriseSURPRISE, I actually quite like my Transitional short-sleeve top even though I thought I'd certainly hate it.

It's more form-fitting than the one-size-fits-most free race day technical tees I've been wearing, but not to the point where it rides up my midsection until it's sitting just below my boobs, thus offering up a quivering display of my midsection.

It's a nice, slick, breathey, wicking type of fabric - which is good for the inevitable sweating I do when it's *GASP* 40 degrees during morning intervals, and on top of that, I daresay this top has made me faster.

Oh sure - a top can do that.

And I would know, too, since my last two interval runs, for which I wore my Transitional Top for the first two times, have been in the 23s.

Yep - suck it - Runs in the 24s! 23 is the new 24! And I will now wear this Transitional SUPER FAST Top until such time as it becomes less maniacal to wear a tank top before the 7 o'clock hour.

Which sort of gives you an idea of what my spring time running will be like. Tank tops and shorts, intervaling out my Tuesday and Thursday mornings and long running my Saturday mornings, all with the ill-conceived goal of making time on my races.

In other words, 2010 probably won't be so much about trail running (as I'd previously thought) as it will be about nailing down some specific distance times. Like I've said before, I'm going for a sub-60 10K race time. And, since I managed a sub-30 5K at Thanksgiving last year, I'd like to now make that a sub-29 5K. Which isn't as glamorous as a sub-30, but it's faster than my finish time of 29:14, so you can understand my reasoning, yes?

Yeah, true, it's not as fun to say, "I'm going for a sub-29 5K PR and sub-60 10K PR this year!" as it is to say, "I'm running two half marathons", but when you get down to the bottom of all this, running isn't usually associated with "fun" for most people, so I can be a little less rigid with my standards of declaration.

I'm sure you agree.

And that is about all the running updating I have to do for now. Gird your loins for the forthcoming gardening talk.

Mass Murder Menu

One thing I've come to love when dealing with the farmshare is a menu that kills off a lot of different stuff.

Because that means all that stuff will stop haunting me in the crisper and I can relax until YIKES it's Thursday again (tomorrow - SHIT) and the crisper fills back up.

I will admit that there have been times with the farmshare where I've come to understand the mania that drives postal workers to do that thing they're so famous for doing under the pressure of THE MAIL - IT JUST KEEPS COMING.

But, worry not, friends - I don't own a firearm or the burning desire to use one - so you are safe.

The vegs, however, are at the mercy of my Mass Murder Menu.

Now, I won't go into my weekly menu planning strategy right now (though, I suppose I could at some point, if anyone was interested, but I'm not sure it's that super special that I'd be doing you any favors...anyway) but when it comes to mass murder of the vegetable kind, these menus sort of fall together. And they're awesome. And they include dessert, which is an important part of a balanced meal if you're Bubba (or me, who are we kidding?), so they're usually big winners.

Thankfully (I think), the farmshare usually includes some fruit so we're not left completely dessert-less and I don't always have to be rummaging in the back of the cabinet for that one Reese's egg that fell out of the bag when we were hoarding Easter candy or anything like that.

For last night's Mass Murder Menu, though...

I came home from getting my hair did and took the full Iron Chef approach to dinner: Open crisper, identify thing that must be eaten otherwise shame will befall our house (beautiful broccoli), identify other thing that must be eaten otherwise grodiness will befall the crisper (stupid mizuna), set items on the counter, determine most efficient/edible method for dispatching said items.

What I ended up with was pretty fucking good, actually, and I got to fix up a recipe we'd tried before but found to be lacking in a certain porky area. SCORE.

Also SCORE was the fact that I got to use some fruit from a friend's tree (Thanks, Elke!) and reuse the bowls four times in one meal.

That sounds gross and like a strange thing to strive for in a meal, but it happened and it seemed like an interesting new approach to not doing so many dishes (even though *I* don't do the dishes, so what do I care?), so I'm going with it. Don't try to ruin my good time, y'all. Or Bubba's - with the dishes and all.

Broccoli Killer

Roasted broccoli and walnuts with prosciutto

Recipe adapted from RealSimple's Orecchiette w/ Roasted Broccoli and walnuts

Just make the recipe as shown, but sub out orecchiette for whatever small-ish pasta you have on hand (I had whole wheat penne), stir chopped prosciutto (YAY! PORK!) into the mix when you add the broccoli to the pasta, and toss with a bit of asiago, provolone and parmesan. And if yer real fancy-like, add a bit of black truffle oil. BUT ONLY IF YER FANCY-LIKE.

Mizuna Killer

Citrus salad with goat cheese

Recipe by moi

Ingredients: (Makes 2)
Bunch of mizuna
2 oranges, peeled, cut into small wedges
1/4 cup of crumbled goat cheese
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil

To make:
Rinse the mizuna really well, making sure to knock off any remnant dirt from the farm. Trim off excess stalk at the end (I just don't like it. You can do whatever.) Fill a couple bowls with the mizuna, add goat cheese and oranges, pour on a bit of olive oil (however much you, personally, like - this isn't rocket science), a bit of salt and a healthy grind of pepper.

I like a lot of pepper on this. It's good with the sweet oranges and smoky goat cheese. And it makes me sneeze, which is good in a cleansing way. Just don't sneeze on the salads because, ew.

Apple Killer

Apples and honey

You don't need a recipe for this

And if you're wondering where the fourth bowl use came from, well, Bubba had a slice of that chocolate beet cake in his bowl after the pasta and salad and apples, so that counts as four. I, however, did not have any cake because I was full.

And I've heard that is a good reason to not continue eating. Although I had a hard time coming to that conclusion as I watched Bubba carving off a head-sized slice of cake and lowering it into his bowl with a forklift.

That man, he fears no cake. Nor does he fear The Fatness. I, however, fear The Fatness enough that I was able to resist this fourth bowlfull of dining goodness. Even though it would have brought my Mass Murder Menu to even greater heights.

I'm a woman with limits, people. Limits, I say.

Squash Killer [RECIPE]

You know I took down the Magnificent Squash Bug Attracter (aka the Ronde de Italia squash) long, long ago when I got tired of ker-smashing the beetles that were multiplying between its every fold, but alas, the farm share has ensured that I still have lots of squash.

And might I just say that THANK GOD I pulled that squash plant when I did because otherwise I'd be in big trouble right now with the fatness. 

Why the fatness? Well, let me tell you.

I've found the best way to get rid of loads of squash (zucchini, crookneck, whathaveyou) is to shred it with The More Trouble Than It's Worth Mandolin and put it into chocolate cake.

Because everyone loves chocolate cake and since they don't know that there's evil monster squash inside, they eat it all up like WOO CHOCOLATE CAKE and I go WOO THE SQUASH IS GONE and then WOO MY PANTS FEEL TIGHT because I love chocolate cake, too. Whoopsy.

But the satisfaction I get from stowing two or three huge squash in something that will be readily disposed of is extreme, and so I carry on. Let's hope my jeans make it through squash season. 

Wow. That's something I've never said before. 

ANYWAY.

If you want to hide all your squash in a cake (and let's face it, who doesn't? It's very fun.) maybe try this recipe from my favorite cookbook of all time so far, Serving up the Harvest by Andrea Chessman (thank you, Jeph!). 

This time around I actually almost followed the recipe to a T, or whatever, because it was the first time I made it, so I wanted to make sure I knew what it was supposed to taste like before I started fucking with things and got a cake that tasted like a good ol' horse's ass or something.

If you want to know what I'll do next time (you want to know. Go on now.), I'll be swapping the butter with nonfat plain Greek yogurt because The Pioneer Woman says so and also I did this on a recent brownie recipe and YUM. Later on that though, let's make the cake.

Or rather, the cupcakes. I find a whole cake is hard to give away, so I make cupcakes. It helps my jeans to fit.

Dark Chocolate Zucchini Cupcakes
Adapted from the Dark Chocolate Zucchini Bundt Cake recipe

in Serving up the Harvest, Andrea Chesman

Ingredients

2 1/2 C flour

3/4 C unsweetened cocoa powder

2 t baking powder

1 t baking soda

1 t salt

1/2 t ground cinnamon

2 C brown sugar (make sure you have this before you make the whole recipe)

1/2 C butter (or, in the future, maybe nonfat plain Greek yogurt)

2 eggs

2 oz baking chocolate, melted + cooled

1 t vanilla extract

1 C coffee

3 C grated squash (WOO)

To make:

Preheat oven to 350

Grease your cupcake tins (this made almost 2 dozen) in whatever fashion suits you. I just tried that Pillsbury Flour spray or whatever and really liked it. There's some purported No Fat Cooking going on there, but who knows what that means.

Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon in a bowl. And really sift it using a sifter or something because it mixes it nice and gets rid of lumps. No one wants to eat a lump of baking powder, y'all. That's nasty.

I have no lumps.

Beat together the brown sugar and butter in a mixer and add the eggs one at a time until they're combined. Add in the chocolate and vanilla until combined and then switch off adding the coffee and flour mixture until it's all in there. Scrape down the bowl and then mix in the squash. 

Pour the whole mess into the cupcake tin and bake for approximately 30 minutes or until the toothpick does the Coming Out Clean thing. 

Allow to cool and watch for Cupcake Monsters that do shit like this:

Our Cupcake Monster is called Bubba.

And then, once they're cooled and you want to impress people, add some powdered sugar to the top to be fancy. If you want, you can use the FANCE method I learned while standing in line at the store.

See, as I was buying the brown sugar I thought I had but didn't and was soothing my aggravated soul with a free sample reading of Real Simple, I came across this month's New Uses for Old Things (best magazine section ever methinks) that was to use a tea ball to shake powdered sugar over things. 

I do believe I said aloud to myself: YES. I WILL DO THIS. 

And then I did. See below.

Tee dah! That shit is perfect.

But, if you're just going to be shoving all the cupcakes into a zippy bag and taking them to work to pawn off on your coworkers who still fit in their jeans, feel free to ditch the fancy ass sugar and just leave them plain. They're still real good. Promise. I even ate one in the car to prove it - so there.

Now go love on your zucchini. GO.

Does NOT taste like a horses ass

Fava Bean Hummus
Doesn't it look like wasabi? So green it made me nervous.

2 cups shelled and cooked fava beans/broadbeans/whatever the hell you call them
2 cloves of garlic
Juice from 1/2 lemon
1T Extra virgins
Salt and pepper to taste
Potentially a little H20

To cook your fava beans, remove them from their sleeping bag pods and boil them in seasalty water for a few minutes or until you see the outer skins start to split. Drain the beans and run cold water over them to cool their molten lava exterior so you don't burn the crap out of your fingers when you then squeeze each bean from its protective outer casing into a bowl.

In a food processor combine favas, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper to taste. I start with about a tsp of salt and pepper and work it out from there. I like things salty, so there ended up being a lot more than 1 tsp salt in the final product.

Blend the ever-loving crap out of it until it's a nice puree and looks like wasabi. If your mixture is not mixing, try adding a little water, more lemon juice or a little more olive oil to get it to smooth out. If you're really crazy and not as afraid of the fatness as I am, you could add some tahini because it would be really yummy I predict. HOWEVER, again, this could result in Horses Ass taste, for which I will not be responsible. But if you try this and it's good, tell me exactly HOW good it is and then I can decide whether it's worth setting aside my aforementioned fear of fatness.

Once your hummus is hummusy, I can suggest serving it with some nice toasted organic rye (thank you bread share), crisp radishes (thank you farm share), fresh arugula (farm share) and parmesan, sea salt and cracked pepper.

I can tell you that, to me, it did not taste like a horses ass. It also didn't taste exactly like your average hummus because, well, it's made from fava beans rather than chickpeas/garbanzo beans/whatever the hell YOU call them, so it tastes like fava beans. I predict that if you like fava beans enough to eat them by their lonesome, then you'd like fava hummus. And if you layer enough stuff onto a big piece of toast with your hummus then chances are even better you'll like it.

I won't say who Bubba, but someone with whom I was dining enjoyed a good amount of pepper and parmesan on top. Then there's me. I liked the hummus so much that I shunned the bread and just started dipping radishes right in the hummus so that I could legitimize the amount of hummus going into my mouth.

I figured jamming my finger right in it or getting a spoon from the kitchen wouldn't leave me a lot of wiggle room in the "Everything in Moderation" department. A concept with which I am constantly doing battle.

My thought is this, if I really like something (Nutella, pie, green olive tapenade, brie, gin, Lay's potato chips), there's no use in trying to satisfy my craving AND exercise restraint at the same time. It just always ends in disaster because if I try to trick my craver by having a tiny bite of brie smeared onto a big old cracker, I'll just go back and have a hundred crackers with the same tiny bite of brie on them in order to get to the big slice of brie I wanted in the first place.

Had I just had my big slice of brie and none of the pesky crackers in the first place, it probably wouldn't have been as naughty in the calorie department as that same amount of brie on top of a hundred crackers. Right?

SO - I just go ahead and have the big slice of brie or the big slice of pie or the big scoop of Nutella
or the double G&T or all the Lay's I can eat before Bubba snatches the bag from me, and thus, save myself the unsuccessful trickster calories I would have eaten in crackers, toast, fruit or sandwiches. (Bubba's rule is that you only eat chips when you're also having a sandwich).

I think you understand my crazy girl math on this one.

Anyway, we had this for dinner on Saturday after we tried to kill ourselves with pupusas for lunch. It was a nice light dinner and went well with the local Syrah gifted to us by our lovely neighbors. It also didn't fight with the pupusas in the belly, which was a bonus. Those bitches can get feisty.

There's a bit left in the fridge, so I imagine that I'll finish it tonight, along with a slice or two of the leftover rye and arugula and radishes so that I can make room for whatever the farm share doles out this PM.

Also - coming soon I will have a very important Adopt a Crop update that you will not want to miss if you like cucumbers, garden ramblings and the probability of dick jokes.

Yet still. [CHARD KILLER RECIPE]

Meet my mortal enemy.

My my, is it nearly November? Wow. That's incredible.

CAN SOMEONE PLEASE TELL THE CHARD TO STOP NOW?

Our farm share, at least the standard version, is coming to an end in few weeks. Which means that, hey!, we might be able to get the crisper and countertop fruit bowl and bread basket and, let's be honest, composter, under control because there won't be a weekly influx of new stuff to shoehorn into our house.

Well, we might have been able to, had we not just gone ahead and signed up for the winter farm share.

Because we like to torture ourselves. And because the thought of going into a grocery store for produce makes me want to cut myself.

Thankfully, the winter farm share is less hectic and needy than the standard share. It doesn't come every. single. week. and there's sturdy stuff in there like root vegetables and winter squashes (butternut hellOOO!) that can withstand some time sitting on the counter getting the evil eye from yours truly.

Oh yeah, and there's also chard.

Chard, the fucking wonder vegetable that does not die or go away no matter the frost or the cold or the LOATHING that comes by the hand that grows it.

No, it lives on.

Look at me. I'm so alive right now.

And it multiplies when you dare to prune and eat some of it. And then it also comes in the winter farm share because these people know that they can only lessen their interaction with the thing, but never free themselves completely, so they continue to share it with us members even though I'm sure everyone hates it by now. Definitely so if those sharers also were so stupid to plant it in their home gardens because their mommies didn't tell them that CHARD NEVER DIES.

Ahem.

To say that it has taken on Bermuda grass characteristics would be appropriate since we have resorted to throwing our hands in the air and saying, "The only way to get rid of chard is to move" like all the Lowe's people say when you ask them about how to get Bermuda grass the hell out of your life/yard.

Only you can't eat Bermuda grass. Well, and you can get rid of chard by ripping it from the vegetable beds. Whatever, it's still scary.

The farm share came last week, and since our lovely neighbors picked it up and divvied it up between the households, I ended up with some chard. And some kale. And some other kale that's equally ugly and awful. And then I began to slowly panic because the bottom crisper was overflowing with green leafy things that I knew we couldn't put down in one week.

And then the blessed fabulous neighbors sent me a recipe for chard before I had a chance to throw myself from the roof.

Close call!

And because I love you very much and don't want you to suffocate under your own pile of chard in the event that you still have a SHIT TON of it, too, I will share this recipe with you now.

This isn't the best picture, but it was good enough for lunch leftovers, says Bubba.
Big talk.

Finny's Chard Killer Lasagna

Adapted from Lasagna with Chard, tomato sauce and ricotta, NYTimes.com, 10/9/08
My changes in bold

Ingredients
1 recipe of The Best Tomato Sauce Ever. Yep.
1 generous bunch of Swiss chard (1 1/2 lbs)
Salt
6 unfrilly no-boil lasagna noodles (Note: frilly noodles are grody. I use Barilla noodles because they are not grody OR frilly. Score.)
Extra virgins
1/2 cup lowfat ricotta cheese (remember the scary fatness!)
1/2 cup of freshly grated Parmesan

To make
Preheat the oven to 425

First, start your Best Tomato Sauce Ever. Yep. and don't even try swapping with some other useless store-bought sauce because I WILL KNOW WHAT YOU'VE DONE. Also, it won't be as good. Trust me.

While the tomatoes for your sauce are roasting up in the oven (see, I'm making you do it) boil some seasalty water and, after cutting those big stalks off your chard and rinsing the leaves in cold water, dunk your full chard leaves in the boiling water for 1 minute. Then take those leaves intact (I find my Oxo tongs do the best job here) and dunk them in icy water.

Some fancy people refer to this process as blanching, but I'm not fancy, so let's just call it dunking, k?

Then you'll want to squeeze out all this water. But how do you do it without making an unholy mess? You stack those leaves into a neat pile, place them on one end of an unrolled tea towel and you roll them up while squeezing.

Then you unroll the towel and take your moist (GROSS WORD) little chard cigar over to the cutting board for ribboning. The grody towel can then go into the wash or your kitchen laundry hamper if you have it (we do because I'm A/R like that).

Now you can ribbon slice the shit out of that weirdly small chard cigar. See how technical this all is? Fun times. Oh, this is also a good time to admire how small chard gets when it's blanched/dunked and remind thyself that chard doesn't have to be scary like when it's in the garden giving you the finger.

Once you're done making The Best Sauce Ever. Yep., pour the sauce into a good sized bowl and, with your fabulous tongs to which you often whisper sweet nothings, toss your sauce with all that ribbony chard.

OH YES YOU MIX IT TOGETHER.

See, stupid other sauce won't cut it here. It has to be The Best. Lest you forget.

Then you just put the whole mess together as such:
Coat the bottom of an 8x8 pan with a bit of the sauce mixture
Then one layer of un boiled lasagna noodles
Then ricotta
Then sauce mixture
Then some shredded parm
Repeat once more and finish with noodle, ricotta, sauce, parm
Sprinkle some salt, oregano, basil - whatever on top if you have it.

Wrap the whole deal with foil and bake in the oven for about 30 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool, uncovered, for about 5 minutes or until it cools below MOLTEN LAVA temps. Cut and serve with a big ass salad.

Bye bye chard!

This cutting board is no match for me.

A really good vegetarian thing we had in Munich. No, really. [Recipe]

I guess the first thing you think of when you're going to Munich, or Germany for that matter, isn't "Oooh! I wonder what kind of great vegetarian restaurants they have!" because, duh.

Frankly, until our local friend suggested we get on the U-Bahn and traipse across the city to this "vegetarian place that's one of only two in the city and supposed to be really good", it hadn't even occurred to me that vegetarians (or vegans, as our friend is, for that matter) could even survive in the Wurst Everywhere capital of the universe.

Seriously, friends, to estimate that I ate 50 wursts during our short stay in Germany would probably not be much of an overstatement. Also, I love wurst. And beer. And pretzels. And maybe I shouldn't get carried away here because none of those things (well, maybe beer) lived at this vegetarian restaurant we visited when we slowly stepped back from the biergartens for one single solitary meal at the behest of our lovely wurst-free friend.

I think Bubba and I would have been perfectly happy to eat wurst, pretzels, beer and maybe some Obaztda at every meal, three meals a day, for a week. Or, for that matter, the rest of our fucking lives, but it's probably good that we didn't and won't because can you imagine the fatness? Yikes. It would be extreme.

This is Obaztda and it is The One of pretzel spreads.

Anyway! One day we ate a meal that didn't have any meat, in a really nice little restaurant run by one very enthusiastic and sweet woman and in this restaurant we had a soup that we've been talking about ever since. The moment I tasted the soup, even, I knew I was going to have to recreate it at home. To the point where when the nice and very busy woman came back to see how we liked it, I very nearly held her hand while asking her for specific details about the making of the soup so that she couldn't run away.

I didn't hold her hand though, because that would be stalker-ish and I've been told that's a no-no. Also, I have been told that Germans are not "touchers" and, so, holding her hand may have garnered me an awesome kick to the face. Who knows? Those guys can be a little unpredictable what with the drinking and all. Even the vegetarians I bet.

Enough about that though. I don't want you to get the impression that all the Germans we met or left un-molested in the city were anything other than lovely and non-abusive because they were. Probably because we didn't try to hug any of them or hold their hands.

See! I can learn! Also, I learned that when you step onto an escalator, say when you're coming up from the subway for instance, you better get your ass over to the right if you plan to stand there like a useless lump because GOD HELP YOUR MOTHER FUCKING SOUL if you're standing on the left when a trainload of Munichers want to descend the escalator of their own volition and find it blocked by your dumb foreign ass.

This is Germany, friends, and there are rules and those rules are to be followed OR ELSE. You know. It's Germany.

And, as another aside, I love this about Germany because I love rules and I love them more when people follow them because then everything works so well and then you can accurately predict when your train will arrive because the schedule says it will be there at 12:03 and hot damn if it doesn't show up at the stroke of 12:03.

Not 12:02. Not 12:04. 12 FUCKING OH THREE.

Love you, German People - you make my heart sing with your efficiency. Also, your beer, wurst, pretzels, biergartens, bike lanes, Oktoberfest, Black Forest, flowers planted in every window, ham and...what the hell was I talking about again? Oh yeah, vegetarian food.

So, this thing we had at the one of two vegetarian places in all of Deutscheland was the boring sounding, "Pumpkin Soup" which sounds boring like I said.

But, I do love fall soups, soup in general and pumpkin, so I was basically already going to order it until the very nice and busy woman running this show all by herself told me that it was thickened and made creamy with marscapone and then topped with pumpkin oil and pumpkin seeds.

I would like you to sit there and appreciate that EVEN THEN, after she told me these delicious sounding details, I stillSTILL did not try to hug her or even touch her arm meaningfully as if to say, "Thank you, nice Germaness, for creating this masterpiece of pumpkinness that I am sure to love. I am certain that it will enrich my life and, in so doing, will add an unexpected element of joy to our vacation."

No, that would have been too much. So I didn't do it. And I want for you to recognize the significance of it.

OK, we're done with that now.

So, we had the soup, and it was fantastic and we also resisted licking the bowls because we were sure there must be a rule against doing that because, in addition to being Wurst Land it's also Rules Land and our working theory was that if you *thought* something might be against the rules, it probably was and you'd be best to avoid enraging the rules.

Don't do it! They do not fuck around! We are told, anyway. We don't speak German, so what do we know about anything.

Anyway, as you know, we went on with our vacation and ate many other delicious things (which were mostly not vegetarian at all) and then came home and I thought about this soup.

Every time I saw a pumpkin (which is a lot because people around here grow them in their front yards and also it was Halloween and now it's nearly Thanksgiving) I thought of this soup.

Even when I saw one in a tree in Freiburg.

So, this weekend I went out on a hunting expedition for the ingredient I thought would be findable at Whole Foods, land of the niche food bullshit, but alas went home with unrequited pumpkin oil desires.

So sad.

ButBUT I did find marscapone and that's the real key ingredient here and FOR THE LOVE if you like pumpkin and you can handle marscapone (super dairy and fatness) please make this soup. And if you can't find pumpkin oil, please don't despair, because I made the soup without it and it was good.

Like, ruuuuuuuuuully good. Like, when I asked Bubba whether he wanted to have pork chops (his fave) tonight or just have reheated pumpkin soup and arugula, he didn't even blink an eye before he shouted, "PUMPKIN".

Which is big. The man loves pork chops and he's calling for pumpkin before pork chops. That's what a crazy person would say. OrOR someone who loves this soup.

And, I had to love it, one bite of the soup and I was magically transported back to that cutesy little tiny ass restaurant in Munich with the darling gal in her Dirndl offering up her little menu with Kürbis soup right on there. (For the record, I have no idea if it said Kürbis, because, again, I don't speak German, but I assume it did because that's what it was. Whatever. Stop looking at me like that!)

So, don't you want to make this? Because it's really easy. And, for real, only took about half an hour from start to finish.

AND I bet, if you don't have a starter for your Thanksgiving dinner and want to be all festive and shit, you could make a big pot of this soup and serve it up before having the barftastic turkey (if it's not smoked, I do not like it) and everyone will still be your friend even after they've eaten themselves into a painful Thanksgiving food coma.

Though, they SHOULD be your friend already if you just cooked and served them a giant meal. I mean, who are these ungrateful guests that get pissed that they're so super full from the great food you just slaved over for them? Jerks.

Pumpkin Marscapone Soup

Adapted from this recipe

My changes in bold

Ingredients
1/4 cup butter, salted, whole
1 cup chopped onions
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1/4 cup dry Sherry
3 cups vegetable broth
2 teaspoons dried thyme

1 teaspoon dried thyme leaves

1 Tablespoon fresh thyme leaves
3 cups pureed pumpkin
1 cup mascarpone cheese
Much salt and some black pepper to taste 

White truffle oil

Salted roasted pumpkin seeds

To make
1. Melt butter in an 8-quart saucepan over medium heat. Add the onions and garlic and cook until an aroma develops. Add the sherry and cook until it is reduced by half.

2. Add broth, dried thyme and thyme leaves and pumpkin puree, and simmer on medium-low heat for 20 minutes. Stir in the mascarpone cheese until incorporated completely. Add a good amount of salt (DO NOT UNDER SALT, DAMN YOU) and some fresh ground pepper to your liking and serve hot with a bit of truffle oil, fresh thyme leaves and pumpkin seeds on top. Plus, some fresh hot No-Knead Bread.

Get ready to love. 

BIGHUGETHINGNEWS

For a second I was all, “I wonder if it’s even going to seem like BIG HUGE THING NEWS anymore after all of this hype and waiting around and not helpful tweets like this one.”, but then I realized that, No Way.

It’s totally still BIG HUGE THING NEWS.

To me.

And since this blog is all about me and that’s what you guys have been reading about for the last seven years (still wows me, that number), I think you’ll still see it as BIG HUGE THING NEWS, too.

Because the BIG HUGE THING NEWS is all about me and my life and also Bubba and our life and how I’m apparently doing my damndest to change it all.

I’m throwing a curveball, friends, a big fat life curveball and I’m hoping for the best while also knowing that there’s a very real Worst out there that could take over these best intentions of mine and set me back on my ass, OUR asses, like nothin’.

To give you an idea of the big fatness of this life curveball I’m throwing (and let’s not forget for a minute that I have zero eye/hand coordination and that throwing’s not my game to begin with), I already had (and have) a pretty sweet life.

One that didn’t, from an outsider’s perspective, probably need a big fat curveball thrown right at it. No, I imagine that most people looking at my life would have been like, “Hey, that’s pretty sweet. Great job, amazing husband, cute dog, evil cat, fun times galore, much drinking and misbehavior. Good going, weird girl.”

Not, “Ugh, what are you doing with your life, weird girl? Get your shit together. Throw a curveball. Change everything you’re doing because WOW you’re really fucking shit up.”

Which is what I’ve always thought was the premise for changing one’s life - the act of majorly fucking it up for a long time and needing a big fat curveball of change to shove everything back onto the rails.

But my life was great - IS great - and yet still, I’m shoving and curveballing and basically, if looked at on paper, fixing what’s not broken.

Except on the inside, I knew it was broken.

I was, in my early 30s, still living the life that I designed for myself when I was a teenager. Which, if you think about it, is what a lot of people do because that’s what we’re sort of guided along to do, right?

We go through school, all the while being prepped for the idea of college and trying to do things to get into the college that will serve us best in the long run. Which means deciding what we Want To Be.

When we’re, like, 12 years old.

So, shit that’s important and shiny and fun when you’re 12 is what you end up basing these decisions on.

And when I was 12 and impressionable and watched MTV (at my friend’s houses, we never had cable) and went to the mall and did whatever, the shiny interesting shit was what was on TV and blasting out at me from billboards and the radio (terrestrial, since there wasn’t satellite radio then - savages) and Cosmo and what not.

Which is to say - advertising.

I really absorbed a lot of advertising. And not the messages, necessarily - like I was running from one parent or store to another going, “I MUST HAVE THIS THING.” - but the concept of it and its power.

I saw that advertising did, despite folks’ intentions, influence people. It spoke to people. It got into their heads and got them moving. Albeit in some of the most tragic and ill-advised directions, but it got people doing shit.

And not for nothing, the stuff was sorta glamorous and shiny and cool and rad and all of those teenagery things, too.

I wanted to be a part of that. When I was 12.

So, I set out on a crash course to become part of that world. I took special classes in high school for graphic design, I went to junior college courses during high school to get ahead, I chose my college based on where I could major in Advertising and Marketing rather than just “Communications”, I steered myself right back to San Francisco’s Financial District as soon as I graduated so that I could work in one of the ad agencies I’d been ogling since my youthful days of traveling to Giants games with my mom, I then worked many long hours in various ad agencies and, when the age of internet advertising came along, I went full force into that world. Then I worked at the hub of internet advertising for nine years all up to my ears in it.

It was fun, thrilling, sucky, stressful, interesting, boring, exciting, depressing, awesome, lame and every other emotion in between. I cheered, I cried, I swore LOTS, I met some cool people and some shitty people and I changed.

Over the time I was living this self designed life of my 12 year old mind, I totally changed.

I mean, truly, I was probably working on this change my whole life, but didn’t really pay attention to it until I was sitting in a meeting in a conference room on The First Day of Spring and couldn’t stop thinking, “I should be outside.”

“I should be outside and my manicured hand that I’m now looking at typing away furiously on this keyboard should be balls deep in my garden knocking down the cover crop that’s rapidly going to beans so that it will have time to break down enough to feed my summer vegetable plants when I put them in the ground in a few weeks and...”

I’m in there with my laptop open, trying to contribute to a day long brainstorm session about online advertising operation strategies with my four inch heels jammed into the low pile carpet while routinely bashing my knees on the sunuvabitching table brace as I swiveled back and forth from looking at the overhead projector to my teammates to the laptop and, eventually to the window so that I could let my little inside voice get a word in edgewise for a little moment.

That was a few years ago.

I was still fully up to my eyes in internet advertising, the world of online technology and all the things that come in that burrito.

And it had started to feel not right.

I started to feel like maybe one day I was going to have to change burritos. I’d been an al pastor for most of my life and maybe I wanted to try being a bean and cheese for a while. Or a carne asada with pico de gallo. Or, maybe what if I was something completely different like a brandywine caprese salad with buffalo mozzarella and lettuce leaf basil...

What if that?

And then the little inside voice started to get not so little and then, eventually, not so inside.

I’ll spare you the intense, mind-numbing, extremely boring-for-people-who-are-not-me rehashing of the very self-reflecty and soul-searchy years that took place during my wind up - from the time when the little inside voice got too loud to ignore and when it became an outside voice making choices and throwing life curveballs and I’ll just cut to those curveballs...

BIG HUGE THING #1
Five months ago I enrolled in college (never thought I'd say that again) to get a horticulture degree in Organic Agriculture and Crop Production.

That's right. I'm going to be a farmer.

BIG HUGE THING #2
At the same time, I started building a business model for the kitchen garden coaching company that I’m about to launch.

BIG HUGE THING #3
And almost two months ago, I quit my job. My very great and lovely job at the very great and lovely company for which I’d worked for nine years.

And then came the pitch: Walking out the doors of the Great and Lovely job and into a life of uncertainty and excitement and passion and dirt and closed toe shoes and let me teach you how to test your soil and can your tomatoes and sow a cover crop and then WHAT THE FUCK HAVE I DONE.

Except, the WHAT THE FUCK HAVE I DONE part has not yet occurred. I imagine that’s on the horizon somewhere.

For now, I’m just basking in the glory of the pitch on its way to the batter.  The curveball is an unpredictable pitch that can throw off a batter something fierce and, in the case of my curveball hero, it breaks late and wears a disguise until it crosses the plate, so you never really know what you’re getting until it’s too late.

Also, I do not know when this became a baseball analogy, but since I do like baseball and I expect you not to argue with me while I’m pouring out my BIGHUGETHINGNEWS soul to you, I’m going to keep rolling with it.

So, quiet you baseball haters. I don’t understand you anyway.

The point is that Bubba and I - and let us not gloss over, meanwhile, the amazing, heart-swelling, superhuman husband strength that this man possesses which is pushing this whole life curveball over the plate that I will cover in many future posts - are changing it up.

(Now that I think about it, I should have used the changeup as my pitching analogy of choice, but I think that the world understands a changeup even less than a curveball, so I’m going to give myself a pass here, so nevermind this.)

We’ve both changed jobs, I’ve started school and a business and we’ve set our futures on a completely different trajectory than it was when we first got together a dozen years ago. We still want to end up in the same place, but our road to get there just now looks a lot different.

And he has finally gotten his true deep-down wish - I am forced to wear proper shoes. 

I will wear proper shoes. BUT ONLY FOR THE FARM TOUCHING. And only under protest.

You just can’t wear flip-flops while working on a farm. Which I was told in no uncertain terms during our first outing to the department's farm for my organic ag lab in my Reefs.

The next week I showed up in my Van’s, worn Atlas gloves and ballcap and promptly shoved my arm shoulder deep into a pile of compost.

I was home.

And now you all get to watch as I take a swing at this life curveball. Enjoy.