The moon, and family

I have a perfect spot just here, where my computer desk sits in fron of the french doors between the great room and the sun room, which has glass on the south side, where my view is. So, in the summer, I don't see so much because there are two maple trees which shade the sunroom and keep the solar gain to a minimum. In the winter the view is great, the maples will have lost their leaves, and I have a clear view to the Cleveland sky, grey and leaden from November until May, with barely any relief. But I do see some distance, all the way to the turnpike where I can see the 18 wheelers pass. I can hear them, too.

I figured out the reason for my depression that's been building over the past few weeks. It's because over the course of the last three months, my job description has changed. I am now a full time cancer patient. I had three surgeries, a pleural effusion drained, and eight sessions of radiaton for a brain tumor since June 30. I have a chronic cough that is so intense that I nearly black out, and I dribble urine (how embarrassing). I have a row of brown medicine bottles on a shelf in the bedroom, several on the kitchen window sill, and then all my alternatives in the kitchen cupboard. Apparently they didn't work. Should I keep taking them? Would I be even sicker if I had not? Greg makes me his special Jack Daniels, honey, and lemon cough syrup every night and I believe it's as effective as any of the prescriptives. It's likely rotting my teeth, though.

Today I felt pretty good. On Friday, I was looking at the garden's bounty of tomatoes and realized that we have not made pizza margherita even once this summer, from fresh home grown tomatoes, though we did push it and buy tomatoes once or twice. So I was thinking that we'd make pizza on the grill for the family on Sunday, and apparently great minds think alike, because Greg came home and said that Nathan had suggested pizza on the grill for Sunday. Well, since Greg had to go into work briefly at 6:30, it seemed a good idea to do it here. And since we're half way between Tristan's family, it seemed logical to invite his family, too.

Now, before I start to talk about making pizza on the grill, let me just say that I have spent the best money ever at yard sales buying dress-up clothes for little princesses. Over the course of the evening I saw Annabelle and Casey in probably six outfits each, most of which involved a wand, a tiara, high heels, and satin or netting. Being the mother of four sons, this never ceases to amaze and thrill me. And Quin, playing with the action figures - also from a garage sale- that I missed by seconds buying the whole set up. I didn't even know what it was, but I knew we needed the whole set. We do what we can.

Paige called today while I was resting and talked to Papa. They raised over $200 from their lemonade stand to donate to Triple Nagative Breast Cancert Foundation to work for a cure. I am surrounded by incredible people, and their parents are my children and their wives.

So, the pizza. I made the dough, and sliced tomatoes from the garden, and put them on a rack in the oven with the convection fan on to dry them out a bit so they wouldn't make the pizza soggy. I made the dough, and decided to cook one side, so that it would only take half as long when we were cooking with hungry people waiting.

The recipe for "pain ordinaire" calls for four ingredients, flour, water, yeast, and salt. The ratio is basically three to one, flour to water, a handful of salt, half a package of yeast. I do it in the ancient KitchenAid mixer (really, it's 35 years old). Six cups of flour, about a tablespoon of salt go into the mixer bowl. Then, two cups of warm water (body temp) and a package of yeast in a cup, let it start to bubble. (I cheat and put a sprinkle of sugar in usually). Then, start the mixer, add the liquid to the dry, and let it mix with the dough hook attachment for five to seven minutes. If it's stubborn, stop the mixer, stir it all together with a spatula and let it mellow for five or ten minutes. then turn the mixer back on and let it knead. It should all come together as a mass on the dough hook, perhaps with some raggedy shreddy stuff on the bottom. You might need to add another tablespoon of water - not too much. Since I was doing this four times, I pulled it off the dough hook and tossed it into a big bowl. Repeat, three times. Knead the whole mess together for a couple of minutes, then cover with something - in my case it was a pizza pan large enough to cover the bowl. I have about a pound of dough left over that's in the fridge, and I can make a nice baguette tomorrow, and that dough will tast incredible for having fermented an extra day.

Now, the thing about a yeast dough (or beverage) is that yeast really develops its flavor over time. You've got bread machines and recipes for one hour dinner rolls, but don't be fooled. Yeast likes to work slow. When I have the time and I'm making bread, I'll use half the amount of yeast in the recipe and double the proof time. In fact, because I'm such a scrooge, and beer yeast is so expensive, I only ever use one bottle of yeast for two batches of beer. I split it, and give it a couple more days fermentation time. I think it's a better product, and it saves me six dollars.

For pizza dough, or any kind of yeast bread that you will be serving in the evening, start as early in the morning as you can. Work in a cool room, and let the yeast work its magic with flavor. I mixed my dough before noon, had a nap in the afternoon, and started making crusts at about 4;30. Two circles at a time, slide onto the hot grill, close the lid. The point is to prebake the top so you can assemble the pizza onto cooked dough, then put onto the grill and bake the bottom while the ingredients do their dance on top. I had sliced up lots of fresh tomatoes from the garden, but they seemed really wet, so I put them on a baking rack and held them in the oven at about 150 degrees with the fan going, all afternoon. I pureed garlic, basil, and olive oil which Nathan brushed on the crust, and on top of the ingredients. So - pizza margherita, brush crust with olive oil/basil/garlic mixture, layer with fresh sliced tomatoes, top with fresh mozzarella. Nathan also made some traditional style pizzas for the kids with jarred sauce, pepperoni, sausage, and cheese. We did the whole thing outside, picnic table by the grill, tapped a new keg of homebrew, opened a bottle of red wine, and a half gallon of chocolate milk. What cold be better than that?

These times are precious, cooking outdoors with the family. One of my regrets, though i have very few, is that we didn't eat enough meals outdoors. Sometimethe bugs were really bad, but mostly it was just more convenient to eat inside at the table. Don't make this mistake. Eat outside, with the family, and enjoy the summer. It passes so quickly.

Screen doors and fried food

Greg's been irritated with me for fourteen years now. Every spring, when the weather warms up, I open the doors. I love having the doors open. He doesn't like screen doors. I open the doors anyway and the bugs come in. I tell him he has to put up with the bugs if he doesn't want screen doors. For the last few years, he has said he'd put in a screen door if I would get one. Well, I've looked and looked. The doors that go onto the back porch are strange sized, I got them at the Pella sale years ago and we built the house to fit the doors. But, there are no off the shelf screen doors that fit. The front door is a standard size, but I haven't been able to find something that's not ugly at Home Depot or Lowe's, and buying off the web is expensive and uncertain. So, still no screen doors, still getting bugs.



At this particular moment, I have a problem. I have a hummingbird in the house, upstairs where there's a tall cathedral ceiling. Yesterday I heard a chirp/squeak that I decided was the ceiling fan, but now I'm wondering if it wasn't this hummingbird. I've had a chickadee in the house before, but never a hummingbird. I don't know how to lure it outside, and I hate the thought of losing a hummingbird. The only thing I can think to do is to open the windows upstairs, and take out the screens.

I just this minute learned something that I did not know five minutes ago! Those little sea snails, you know the tiny ones that cover everything at the beach? They're called periwinkles, and they're edible. Well, most everything is edible, but The Joy of Cooking has a recipe. Boil them for three minutes, pick them out with a skewer, and dip in garlic butter. By golly, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do with a sea snail. But periwinkles? I thought periwinkles were flowers, blue ones, like in Joni Mitchell's song...."peridots and periwinkles, blue medallions, gilded galleons spilled across the ocean floor..." It turns out it's the name for both the marine snail, and for the common groundcover with blue flowers called vinca, or myrtle, or...periwinkle.

Greg says he's making fried seafood dinner tonight. That's one of those things that seems more suited to a "fry house" than to my kitchen. When I make it, it's a huge affair, and makes a terrible mess. I've been teaching him to cook, and in typical Greg way, he now thinks he can go straight to the head of the class. I think I convinced him to fry two kinds of fish, oysters and shrimp, instead of four, and maybe only three kinds of battered vegetables. We'll see.

When I make fried seafood platter I've found that oysters are better with a crushed cracker coating, other shellfish with a double dip of egg/milk, then cornmeal and flour, and vegetables in egg and flour batter. That's probably why it's such an ordeal. I think we will try to make a pretty dry batter and use it for the veggies and shrimp, and then dip the oysters in egg and then in cracker crumbs. I have told him that he needs to start really early so that the batter can set on the food, but it's two o'clock and he's still at work - on a Saturday. This is going to be a learning experience. Maybe between the two of us we can actually come up with a workable system. Stay tuned.

Later that same night ........ when Greg got home I told him to see about opening windows upstairs to see if the hummingbird would find its way out. He found the bird, sitting forlorn on the windowsill in the loft at the peak of the cathedral ceiling. Greg, the hero and rescuer of all things, went and got a ladder to open the window where the bird was looking out. I think this hummer may have been there since yesterday because I was hearing a chirping then, so she was pretty tired and thirsty. When Greg opened the window she just sat, dazed and confused, but he was able to pick her up and when he held her aloft, she flew away. Whew! I hope she made it to the feeder ok and will recover. The air traffic on the back deck is so busy now with the hummers preparing to leave, it'd be impossible to keep track of one.

And the fried dinner was a success! He made shrimp and scallops, mushrooms, eggplant and zucchini. And even though I already said no more zucchini or eggplant this season, I ate it again, and it was good.

Feeding the kids

There's something about having leftover biscuits that calls the boys home for lunch, I swear it. It's the same thing that used to make Tristan appear at the door just as pizza was coming out of the oven, or just before it arrived. So yesterday I got home and Tristan was making himself lunch (he's allowed because he's here painting the deck) of biscuits with boneless chicken thighs, cheese, and sliced fresh tomato. It looked pretty darn good, and I thought I'd have one, but then the phone rang and the other two said they were coming for lunch. Oh, well, I knew they'd want the biscuits. Made short work out of them, too.

In my adult life I can't think of any one thing that has brought me more satisfaction, again and again, than feeding my sons. As infants, they were noisy, vigorous nursers, and took everything they wanted from me until they were satisfied, and that was all, each for over a year. As toddlers and youngsters, you couldn't keep food in the kitchen. It was nothing to go through thirty or more pancakes or a couple dozen eggs on a Saturday morning. I cooked, they consumed, and then ran, played, worked it off.

Now they're grown, big, sturdy men, and they can still put away some groceries, but they can also work like no one else, especially when you get them together for a little friendly competition. But the thing that they have that makes me proudest, is not their strength, or their intellect, or their drive, or their handsomeness, but their kindness and compassion. And that now that I am sick, they are making sure that I have everything I need. It's a good man who takes care of his mother.

Sleep

Never in my life have I been a napper. I don't sleep in cars. I have chronic insomnia. My kids' friends knew not to call after 10:30 because if I am asleep and get awakened, I stay awake. So what's with the sudden somnolence?

In June, on the day of Quin's birthday party on a Saturday afternoon, I felt pretty lousy, so I decided to try lying down for a while to see if I could pull it together a bit. By golly, I fell asleep, and felt so much better. Since then I have acquired a new skill, of napping. In fact, if I miss my nap I'm useless.

Yesterday I went down for a nap at one o'clock. At three I looked at the clock and turned over. At five I woke up and decided I felt like babysitting. Nathan and Katie, in true form, did not mind the last minute offer, and we had a wonderful evening watching 101 Dalmations with Annabelle and Grayson on the big bed. It was very much like I imagine Heaven would be, if there were such a thing. I have put up with a lot of physical abuse in the past few months, so I imagine that my body is healing from radiation starting in April to my spine, then surgeries in June, July, and August, and radiation to my brain in August. Sleep is good, and when I'm asleep nothing hurts.



Here it is, Mama's Biscuits!

You'll need:
5+ cups self rising flour. Don't attempt biscuits without self rising flour, unbleached if you can find it, and fresh.
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 sticks butter - the real stuff - cold
2 1/4 cups buttermilk

A heavy canvas cloth
Biscuit cutter - I use a can with both ends cut out. I have three sizes.
Rolling pin, but in a pinch, a wine bottle.
Pastry blender - not absolutely necessary but it's what I use to cut in the butter. Otherwise a couple of knives or forks.

Heat oven to 425.
Sift flour with baking soda into a large, wide bowl.
Cut the butter into chunks, drop into the flour, and then use the pastry blender to cut in the butter until it's in small pieces. If you like a flaky biscuit that makes layers, leave the butter in pea-size bits. If you like a more consistent cake-like biscuit, cut it in until it resembles grainy corn meal.

Add most of the buttermilk and use a rubber spatula to gather it into a dough ball. Let it rest for three or four minutes to absorb the liquid. If it seems dry, add a little more buttermilk. You just have to practice to know what it should feel like.

Spread plenty of flour on the pastry cloth and dump out the dough. Knead by folding it over on itself gently as little as you can to get it to hold together. Then roll out (put flour on top of the dough and on the rolling pin) and cut, and put in a 12 X 18 baking pan. I let mine touch each other. Bake for 14 or so minutes.


Now, here are some facts. Biscuits are tender because they are made without developing the gluten (protein) in the flour. Two things go into this. One, the flour is soft wheat, which is a low protein flour, like cake flour. All purpose flour has much more protein and is hard to keep tender. The second is in how you handle the dough. Rough, heavy kneading develops the strands of protein. This is good in bread dough, bad in biscuits, cookies, cakes.

The size of the clumps of fat (butter) matters. As the wet dough surrounds pieces of butter, it makes layers. When the dough bakes, you have little pockets of butter that will melt, forming layers in the dough, and the water in the butter makes steam. Together this makes those nice buttery layers that let you pull the biscuit apart without cutting it. High oven temperature is a big part of this, too.

You can make biscuits on a work surface that isn't a canvas cloth, but it's a lot harder to handle the dough without adding too much flour. The result, if you're not careful, is a dry, tough biscuit.

When you cut the biscuits out, try to cut straight down, and don't twist. Twisting seals the edges and your biscuits will be dome shaped instead of cylindrical. Flour the cutter between each cut if you need to. I've never had good results trying to cut biscuits with a glass.

I use a silpat liner for my baking pan. You can use parchment paper, or grease the pan very lightly. I bake on the top shelf. The biscuit will not quite double in height, so use that as a guide to how thick to roll them. About 3/4 inch or a little taller is good.

A little more info about xeloda, as I know so far

Xeloda is one of the few oral chemos, that is, it's taken in pill form. There are definite advantages to this, obviously, it is much more convenient than going in for a full day and sitting in a chemo room waiting for a drip. But it's a three week cycle, like most chemos, two weeks of daily pills, then one week off for recovery. This allows the body to receive the chemo not in one horrific blast, but in a dose that stays high enough to do its job without making you so very sick for four or five days. Xeloda can have some pretty nasty side effects, I've heard, but the worst one is "hand - foot syndrome." The skin on the hand and feet get burned and blistered, sometimes cracking and blistering and even bleeding. If I had not already stopped making pottery, I would have to stop now, I guess. The other major side effect is diarrhea. Xeloda gets processed in the liver and broken down into another chemo that's been around for a while, 5-FU. And while it doesn't have a great response rate , only helping some 30% or so of patients, it's definitely worth a try simply because of the convenience. And, it doesn't cause hair loss!

Mid-August, definitely time to start making pesto. I had some basil on the table and brushed against it and it filled the kitchen with its fragrance. Be sure to leave a leaf bud beneath where you pick so it will grow back.

PESTO

First toast a handful of pine nuts. I set the toaster oven for eight minutes at 375 and that works great, including preheat. If you're doing it another way, watch carefully because it burns in a second!
In the food processor put about four smashed cloves of garlic and fill the container with basil leaves and flowers. Throw in a good handful of grated parmesan and about a quarter cup of good olive oil. Start by pulsing the processor, and keep opening up and pushing the leaves down. As you start to get a puree, add the pine nuts, and a little salt. Add more oil to your own liking. The more oil it has, the better it will keep. You can freeze it in ice cube trays, then dump them into a zip-lock bag to use all winter. If you're keeping it in the fridge for a few days, pour a layer of oil on top to prevent oxidation.

Pesto is great tossed with pasta and then topped with pan-seared shrimp, scallops, or chicken. It's also a great pizza topping for pizza on the grill, but that's a story for another day.

Well, it poured, and I didn't plant

It's Thursday already, and I'm trying to have some energy. I did go and buy a few yard sale things, but I was so out of breath that I was perfectly useless afterward.



Today I spent a lot of time on the phone and email gettin set up to begin Xeloda chemotherapy on Monday. Turns out it has to come from the Anthem specialty pharmacy, and won't be here until then. I've mapped out on my computer calendar two weeks on, one week off, ad infinitum. If only....



Bourbon Slush



I would make bourbon slush except I'm low on bourbon. But here's the recipe, courtesy of Kathy Cole, and with some tweaking.



Boil six cups of water like you're going to make a gallon of iced tea. Pour over four quart-size tea bags, with two thirds cup of sugar, and let it steep.



Into a gallon pitcher, put an extra-large can of oj concentrate (16 oz), a big can of lemonade (12 oz) and three cups of cold water. Add the iced tea concentrate, and 2 1/2 bottles of bourbon. Of course since I use Jack Daniels it's Tennessee whiskey slush and not bourbon slush. This makes just under a gallon total. I freeze it in two seven cup containers, and usually have some left over to do something with.



The recipe Kathy gave me said you serve it like sherbet by scraping it out with a spoon, but what I like is to scrape a good helping into a water goblet and add orange juice and club soda. Sometimes a shot of whiskey, too. Her recipe also didn't call for such concentrated tea, but I like this since I almost always dilute it. The thing to remember is that both sugar and alcohol prevent freezing hard, so if you want to add whiskey, you should put a little less sugar.

Time to plant fall salad greens

Reminder: It's just past halfway through August and time to plant salad greens for the fall. We've had good salad pretty much until early July, with the cool, damp spring. Then everything bolted. Yesterday Greg pulled the old stuff from the raised bed, and we will need to get it prepared and new seed down before rain comes later in the week. That should give us thinnings by late September, and good salad greens until Thanksgiving.

We also need to think about how we will house the chickens this winter. I like the idea of having them inside the garden space, with active raised beds covered against the chickens. But I believe we need to add another room onto the coop. I hope it's not going to be too difficult to convince Greg.

Summer Closing In

It's been a good three or four weeks since I went into the vegetable garden, what with the new breathing issues. On Saturday I went and could barely see the garden for the weeds. So yesterday, that was our quest, to get back the garden before it was totally wasted. I had planted three kinds of corn, to ripen about a week apart. Greg picked a couple of ears on Saturday, and they were a little past prime. Yesterday I picked a boxful, plus eggplants and tomatoes, and the last of the zucchini, to pawn off on the family and friends. I hope the corn was still fit to eat.

BATTER FRIED EGGPLANT AND ZUCCHINI

First, peel and salt the vegetables. Both eggplant and zucchini contain a lot of water, so to batter them, you need to account for it. Toss in a bowl with flour, and let it stand for at least twenty minutes. At this point you have a nice gooey coating on the veggies that's great for pan frying in just a shimmer of oil. If you want a heavier batter to deep-fry, here's what to do. In a separate bowl, beat an egg with, oh, say a third to a half cup of flour. Add a little liquid, beer or club soda or water, but not milk (that makes it too cakey) so that it's thick enough to dip into. Put all the flour coated veggies in this batter, and then one at a time into hot oil (about 375 - I'm guessing). Turn once, they'll be done really quickly. You can use this batter on other veggies, without pre-salting, to deep fry, but you'll need to salt the batter. Mushrooms, green beans, etc.