Shopping with the Girls

Last year, for the first time ever, Erica talked us into Black Friday shopping. 

You can tell that this year's shopping was not on Black Friday, because we look pleasant.

Sharing the Prairie

Six Thousand Layers

I was recently asked to bring dessert to a gourmet dinner party.  I paged through a few cookbooks before deciding that Puff Pastry Apple Tarts would be perfect.  After all, crisp apples with a blush of red are the very essence of autumn's glory, and puff pastry is delicate enough to balance a hearty meal of several courses.

One of my dearest friends, upon seeing my handiwork, declared that the only reason I had made the pastry from scratch was that I am "an overachiever."   But the real reason is that the local grocer doesn't carry frozen puff pastry, and I had neither time nor inclination to drive the thirty miles to one who did.  However, I just smiled and nodded when she tossed out her allegation.  This particular friend doesn't lack for confidence in her own reasoning, and is not easily distracted from it.


Homemade puff pastry is no harder than making a loaf of bread.  You use your rolling pin and the power of exponents to create thousands of layers of butter and dough.  Then you pop them into a hot oven where melting butter and rising steam lock in a delicate crispiness.

So if you are also "an overachiever," I highly recommend this little endeavor the next time you need puff pastry dough.   I have posted the full recipe here.  Or, if you are still holding the line against holiday weight, just scroll down and enjoy vicariously.

There are basically three parts to making these tarts:

1.  Whip up a dough that's a lot like a pie crust.  Wrap it around a pound of butter, sort of like gift wrapping a birthday present.  Don't think about the pound of butter, just do it!  This recipe makes enough dough for lots of tarts, and you're going to eat just one.

2.  Roll it out.  Fold it in thirds.  Chill.  Roll it out.  Fold it in thirds.  Chill.   Roll it out.  Fold it in thirds.  Chill.

Once you have repeated this process six times, you've made 2187 layers of dough and butter.  One more roll and you have 6561 layers.  If you are a math head or a homeschooling mom,  figure out an algebraic equation to express the relationship between number of layers and how many times you repeat the folding/rolling process.  Mental exercise keeps your brain in shape, and you have to chill the dough between rolls anyway, so you've got time.

3.  Cut your dough into squares, put some crispy thin apple slices on top, dot with (a little more!) butter, bake and eat!

Now, if you're really an overachiever (and if you made this, you definitely are :) , go run a few miles to work off that butter.  You will feel great the whole way, smiling and rejoicing at how good life is.

Equine Sunshine

Erica's Michigan house, dressed in autumn.

It will be great to see Erica today in her Nebraska house, also dressed in autumn.

Canning Colors

Does this look promising?

I don't think so.  It looks like kind of a mess to me:   a strainer full of mushy apples and seeds and tough cores.  But the book said---the book said---to boil the apples without peeling or cutting out their middles, because most of the pectin is in the skin and core.  Pectin is what makes fruit juice set up into jelly, and jelly was the best end I could devise for these apples.  So I boiled them all into an ugly muck.

I didn't have much to lose.  Someone gifted me the soft, mealy fruits.  It was an act of kindness, I'm sure, but my first bite vehemently declared that these apples were chicken food, not people food.

John remembers his grandmother making apple jelly---lining up her jars on the counter, filling them with the hot syrup and then floating a clear stream of melted paraffin on top for a seal.  I like to think that when the babies weren't crying and the hogs weren't out, his grandmother paused for a moment before she whisked the jars down to her closet under the basement stairs.

I like to think she took time to notice the sunlight flaming through the colors she had just sealed in glass.

I hope she smiled at the contrast when she set her autumn hues alongside chunks of summer green that she had canned with the pickles a few weeks earlier.  Colors tucked away for future reference, holed up in the closet beneath the steps, waiting for release into January's shroud of grey and tan and white.

When I tossed the pale mash to the chickens, they pounced, fighting and flapping and clucking loudly over the tastiest bits.  They didn't even miss the autumn brilliance that is sleeping in my basement.

Winter Garden

I weeded my garden today, plucking out all the lettuce and cilantro that had seeded itself in amongst my intentionally planted spinach.

Fresh baby greens for the salads tonight!

There are two key elements for weeding fresh baby greens out of your garden in the middle of Nebraska in the middle of November:

1.  A hoop house.  I've had mine up for several years.  You can read about it here and here.

2.  A bit of laziness.  That means you don't harvest all of your lettuce in the spring, because you just didn't get around to it.  So some of it heads out, dropping the seeds of fresh November baby greens in the bed next door.

It also helps if you plant non-hybrid lettuce in the first place, so your fall seedlings grow up to be just like their mama and daddy.

Setting up a hoop house, weeding in November, and eating fresh spinach in March are good ways for a Texas girl to fight back against the rage that Nebraska calls winter.

HeArtwork

You didn't forget my creative friend Derri, did you?

I think Derri is creative in part because she surrounds herself with other imaginative folk.  They spontaneously see joy, invention, and newness in places where my eyes are bouncing along half asleep in the same-mobile.

Like Derri's friend Ellen, who has embarked on a project to create one heart every day, for a year.  Turns out Ellen's world is full of funky, colorful, wispy, bold and crazy hearts, lurking everywhere and just waiting to be born. Like this one:

and this one:

and this, made from a rubber band and two staples:

Ellen posts photos of her hearts here (ellensdailyheart.blogspot.com) - a new one every day.  Be sure and visit often for a fun journey through Ellen's heARTsy world.

I've never met Ellen, but I credit her for turning my flour-laced counter into a blank canvas the other day when I was baking.  I wasn't really planning to copy Ellen, but before I knew it I had reached up and swiped my index finger through, creating a little heArtwork of my own.

A whiff of creativity can put sparkle into the most tedious tasks.  And it's delightfully infectious.

How can  we catch a bit today?

(Thank you, Ellen.  I hope you have a happy Sunday!)

Harvest Progress

We had a little rain.  That's good.

We really needed a little rain a couple of weeks ago, when soybean harvest was in full swing around the county.   Soybean harvest is always dusty.  These pods reaching skyward are crispy crackling dry.

See the dust kicking up behind the grain cart and combine as they mow through the field?

Soybean harvest was especially dusty this year, because our fall was so dry.

More than once, within a few miles of where I live, something wasn't quite right in somebody's combine. Something like a bearing going out, something that makes a lot of friction and enough heat in the combine to ignite a dry soybean stem or pod.

One day as I was headed home, I saw a plume of smoke billowing skyward from the direction of my house.  The fire was a few miles east of us.

The wind came to whip the flames into a fury.

The volunteer firefighters came.

The old farmers came, lining the road with their old pickups, with their old bodies leaning on them, and talking about how dry it was.

The guy who drives the road grader came.  The road grader is normally a slow-moving machine, crawling down the gravel with a wide blade sunk into the top bit of road, smoothing out the potholes.  I glanced in my rearview and saw the road grader flying toward me, kicking up dust.  You know something is wrong when the road grader is going faster than you are.  The driver had been called to bring his machine and plow up some of the unharvested soybeans, creating a wide, bare patch of dirt across the middle of the field for a firebreak..

They got the fire out before it spread to neighboring fields and houses.  Then it rained, and then all the soybeans were harvested,

and now corn is king.

You Go, Girl!

End of a Long Day

Old. Corrugated. Building.

Baseball

Tommy Lasorda once said, "The saddest day of the year is the day baseball season ends." 

This year, I think he might be right.

Go, Rangers!  Get 'em in 2012!

Reverse Shoplifting

At this point, is the best course of action to try and suspiciously tuck the banana deeper into my purse, as if I were stealing it?  Or should I slip the banana out of my bag and drop it into the bin with all of Kroger's other unsold bananas?

I can afford to donate a banana to Kroger's.  Reverse shoplifting might be the safest plan.  On the other hand, if I'm caught pulling the banana out of my bag, it may cast a time-consuming pall of distrust over me, leading to a line of questions and perhaps a search of pockets and purse.

But if I don't lose the banana, and it pops its yellow nose out while I fish for my credit card.......not good either.

What would you do?  The lady or the tiger?

If you don't know The Lady or the Tiger, a short story first published in 1882, you can read an updated version of it here or the longer original here.

Erica in her Hillsdale home.

Colorado Colors (part 4)

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

- Mark Twain

Persuasion

A while back, Rachel read me this gem while surfing the net from my living room sofa:

When I teach persuasive writing, I tell students that if they truly want to change someone's mind, they need to
           a) establish common ground with him,
           b) give him a dignified way out of his position, and 
           c) be the sort of person whose side he'd like to be on.


It sounds like the author is talking about respect---respect for yourself and respect for those who disagree with you.  It is a virtue sadly missing from much of the current political dialog.

Fertilizer Party

Draft horse guys can make a party out of anything, as long as there are a a few four-legged powerhouses involved.  So when John invited a friend to help spread manure, Steve was quick to head our way with his Percherons, Bill and Bob.

Since we only have one manure spreader, the guys took turns.  Audrey was home for the weekend.  She chatted with Steve while John coached Candy and Jess up and down the field.

Then Steve's team stepped up, and Audrey caught her dad up on the news from school.

A manure spreader uses thick iron chains and bars to move the load toward the back of the wagon box.  There the beaters and a metal spiral called "the widespread" spin, flinging clods out into the world, peppering fertilizer out across the field.

Any critter that accidentally wound up in the wagon box would have to thread its way past three sets of metal on the move in order to survive the trip.

The back end of an antique manure
spreader--not family friendly.

So when John saw a garter snake in the manure pile, he tried to nudge it out of harm's way with his boot.  After all, while garter snakes are harmless to humans, they are carnivorous, like all snakes. John would much rather have this one hunting slugs and mice around the farmyard than serving as fertilizer itself.

This snake would apparently rather fight than switch; it flashed its tongue, but didn't flee.

"Let's just move it," Audrey said swooping up the snake with bare hands.

Some things never change.

Audrey 2001

                                                                                                 

Audrey 2011

Silence

...nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.                    historian William J. Durant

                                                                                       (Thanks to brother Larry for the quote.)
In the multitude of words sin is not lacking, but he who restrains his lips is wise.

Proverbs 10:19