The Lawrence Farmer’s Market

It makes me so happy that the Lawrence Farmer’s Market is back open in full swing for the Spring and Summer.  It is my favorite Saturday morning routine to get up early, grab a delicious iced coffee from Henry’s, and mosey through the Farmer’s Market, picking up the most tasty fresh veggies and beautiful flowers.  They also have lots of home made food items for sale like hummus, cookies, bread, honey and cheese.

Its still early in the season, so the vegetable offerings aren’t quite as diverse as they get during June-August, but there was still much to enjoy.  I picked up some eggs, rhubarb, green onions and honey.  I love fresh eggs.  Behold:

Organic Eggs

But perhaps my favorite thing about the Lawrence Farmer’s Market is seeing all of my favorite Lawrencians there.  I was lucky enough to go with a great friend of mine this past Saturday and we saw several friends during our stroll through the market.  And of course, lots and lots of colorful Lawrence characters.

The Bee Guys

If there’s a Farmer’s Market in your community, try to visit it sometime!  It is simply the best place to get fresh (usually organic) produce and flowers, plus, there’s a real sense of community.  And if you’re lucky enough to live in Lawrence, you really owe yourself a visit!!

Any Questions?

Yes Phil, you have a question???

Yes, I agree, you ARE the cutest cat in all the land.

Really? Another question already?  Okay, but just this one last one.

Oh yes, we HAVE gone completely bat-shit insane.  And YES, our blog has completely degraded to only featuring our cats.  We have officially become those scary people down the street that parents keep their kids away from.  FEAR US.

The Post-Wisdom Teeth Report

Sunning Sophie

I didn’t want Sophie to feel left out of the blog.  After all, she is The Original.

In the Big News of the day, Greg is now minus 2 wisdom teeth.  He had a smooth and successful extraction of his top two wisdom teeth this afternoon.  He is disgustingly nonplussed by the surgery.  He only had a local anesthetic so he didn’t even have to recover from general anesthesia.  No really, I’m glad that he’s not feeling icky, its just that my own wisdom teeth surgery – an entire DECADE ago (god I feel old) – was a bit more traumatic.  I remember a lot of complaining and groaning and milking it for all its worth.  But heck, that sounds more like me in general than Greg.

Right now we’re both enjoying the soft food diet.  Who doesn’t love an excuse to eat jello, pudding and ice cream?  Actually, Greg is starting today on a liquid-only diet and the Carnation Instant Breakfast really isn’t cutting it for dinner.  I guess that’s why its not called Instant Dinner.  You have to be half asleep to accept this as a meal replacement.  I’ve been taste testing the jello and pudding, you know, to check for poison.  I have to look out for my honey.

RE-DONK-ULOUS!

Oh, am I in the way????

We all know that we are merely here to serve at the cat’s pleasure, right?  I’ve been compiling a stock of uber-cute Greg and Phil photos.  I didn’t know what I was waiting for to post them…perhaps a show-stopping cute photo to head line the entry.  Well, this was clearly that picture.

Man I love my boys!!!!

Greg and his Baby Boy

You like my tail in your face??

Phil's Favorite Spot in the WORLD

And for our Grand Finale…

The life of the Phil...so hard

Is it any wonder I am head over heels for my favorite guys?

Landscaping – Finally!

When we bought our house last year, we prioritized the money (oh so much money) that we would be spending on making our new house a home.  We felt the first priority was furniture.  What’s the use of a pretty lawn if you have to come inside and sit on a futon and pack your clothes up in rubbermaid bins?  We’d both lived like college students for long enough!  So the year we bought our house, our efforts went to the interior (and to that trivial expense of our wedding).  Now, we are finally getting to the landscaping.

By far the biggest project has been the preparation of the new garden beds in the back.  When we moved in, the back corner of our lawn was already dug out and landscaped, although pretty pitifully landscaped.  So we extended on to that area to increase how many veggies I could plant.  That preparation was much slower and more intensive than we expected.  Did you know that a mere 2 inches below your soil may lie a rock quarry?  We didn’t either.  But alas…here’s a post I wrote on my other blog about the monumental task of excavating the rock from that garden bed.  It was AWFUL.  Luckily, we put those rocks to good use for filling in the area under our deck.

Drainage Rocks

Greg and I have spent many weekends working on the beds, and they are almost ready for the vegetables to be planted.  Today’s project was the installation of edging stones (Greg’s task) and the planting of a bunny repelling border of marigolds (my project).  Here are the fruits of our labor, it makes it all worth while to stand back and look at how pretty it is!

The New Garden

Marigolds and Spirea

We decided to plant bushes (the Spirea) along our neighbors fence, because the less I have to get near that fence, the better.  As you may recall, it is the source of months of anguish due to poison ivy last year.

I also got some wonderful satisfaction from the removal of the Yucca plant in our front landscaping bed.  I hate this plant.  Its ugly and collect leaves.  I’ve been lobbying for its removal for months and was finally given the green light today.  I have to tell you, the last sickening CRACK as the bulk of the root ball broke was fabulous.

Death of the Yucca

I believe Greg’s words were more in the neighborhood of, “you can cut it back as much as you want.”  So he was mildly surprised to come out and see that I had employed a shovel.  I don’t ask twice and I don’t wait for second guesses.  I seize the moment, and in this case, the shovel.

The Yucca, where it belongs

I wish I had gotten a photo of the real “before” when it was in its fully yucky Yucca glory, but this is so much better.

Hostas, minus the Yucca

Since there was now room to spare, I decided to plant a few Caladium bulbs I bought a while back to fill in the empty spaces.

Planting the Caladium

So what’s up next?  If I can actually wield a shovel tomorrow (which is questionable due to my back), I will plant the rest of the spireas in back and some beautiful Azaleas we bought for he side of our house.

Spirea and Azaleas

Greg and I are so dog tired from today’s work, but when you get a day as beautiful as this in Kansas in Spring, you must seize the moment!

Pipe Burst Repairs…

I know, people are saying, didn’t that whole pipe burst thing happen many months ago? Well, yes, it did. But after getting everything settled with the insurance company, and then getting it settled again after getting a repair quote, I was finally itching to get some work done on it tonite.

My accomplishments:

1. Remove drywall between joists in effected area (10ft x 16in)
2. Remove old (and now slightly modly) insulation
3. Place new pipe insulators on the pipes to prevent this from happening again.
4. Place two overlapping layers of insulation
5. Staple it all down.

Pretty much, the only thing left to do is to remove some popcorn around the hole. Replace drywall, then mud it , sand it, and replace/blend popcorn.

Not so much to look at...

I would like to thank Josh Fry who gave me the awesome “Laser” Saw that was used to cut into my delicate cieling. I am sure that the cieling felt nothing Josh.

Trip to Denver

Greg and I have been working hard around the house lately.  I have been posting regular updates on our garden on my other blog.  Its been lots of very hard work excavating the rocks in our back yard to prepare the beds for planting.  Plus, the winter leaves its mark on the lawn, so just getting it back to looking well-groomed for the Spring takes lots of work.  So between that and our stressful and busy  jobs, we were more than due for a little vacation.  I proposed just taking some time off to do some hard-core Spring cleaning and gardening, and Greg countered with the offer of driving to Denver to see some friends.  Guess whose idea we liked better?

We left Thursday morning and stayed until Sunday.  In that time we ate at some wonderful and quirky restaurants, did some shopping, saw a movie, watched some basketball, and visited with some of our closest friends.  We also got to stay in some really nice hotels.  G did the Priceline thing and got us an awesome deal for our first two nights to stay downtown at a super swank hotel.  We could pretty easily get used to that kind of treatment!  We also loved being in downtown Denver because (and I didn’t know this before) its very vibrant and fun.  Lots to do and see.  Unfortunately, I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures.  Any time I started to pull out my camera G gave me a dirty look because for some reason he hates having his photo taken.  But I did convince him to take one photo at our hotel in front of the fancy waterfall!

Relaxed and Happy!

We enjoyed watching KU kick some butt over the weekend, there are lots of KU fans in Denver!

Well, it was a short trip, and we’re happy to be home safe and sound (and out of the car).  The kitties are being a bit clingy now, but we’re not complaining!

New Blog for Becky

In the interest of keeping this blog more about Greg and my life, and less about my hours of experimentation in the kitchen, I have started a new blog.  I am always thinking…I want to blog about this recipe or that dinner I had, or this yummy dessert.  But then I stop myself, because for some reason, I just don’t see it fitting in with the theme here.  So now I get to post all of the crazy domestic-related stuff that I do to keep myself entertained and  mentally healthy.

So I am now Doctor Domestic (sounds rather super-hero like, no?) and will blog about anything domestic, especially food related, starting from growing food in our garden, to preparing and preserving the food in our kitchen.  I’ll post recipes I invent, recipes I find from other foodie bloggers that I love and recipes from my stacks of cooking magazines and cookbooks.  Successes and failures, beautiful and trash-worthy, they will all have their moment of glory.  So please check it out if you’re into that kind of stuff!

And a totally random P.S. – I find it a bit funny that the WordPress dictionary flags “blog” and “blogger” as mis-spelled.  I’m just sayin’…

Yes I CAN!

That title is irresistibly lame, by the way.

Despite my job as a research scientist, my graduate degree and the fact that I self-identify as a liberal feminist, I truly long to be a 1920’s housewife.  And I do not say that disparagingly because I know that life was hard back then…harder than I can probably imagine.  So I kind of want to be a 1920’s housewife, but with cable, the internet, a car and of course my KitchenAid Mixer and my Cuisinart food processor.  I say all of this because I am going through another domestic diva phase of wanting to make all of our food from scratch.  Maybe its the economy or perhaps its all of the recent processed food contamination issues.  Whatever it is, I just feel like I’m saving money and protecting our health more if I make food from the rawest ingredients that my time will allow.  No, this doesn’t include milling my own flour or growing my own produce (yet), so call me a hypocrite if you’d like.

For a while now, starting when I lived in Tucson, I have been making the effort to freeze semi-prepared (pureed) food like roasted eggplant or roasted butternut squash so that I can buy produce when it is cheap and in-season and enjoy the flavor of it all year in easy soups.  Well, freezing is good but its applications are somewhat limited.  This brings me to my next foray in food preservation – canning.  I chose to use my birthday money on canning supplies.  Super dorky, but to me its the beginning of a fun hobby, and the possibilities are almost endless.  Fresh salsa from farmers market produce, jams, marmalade, pickles, dessert spreads, condiments, tomatoes, fruit…this list goes on and on.  Unfortunately I am starting this during the Winter months when produce is not at its finest, so I’m working with what I can (no pun intended).  For my first adventure in canning, I made orange marmalade and pickled garlic.

Orange Marmalade and Pickled Garlic

Aside from the endless peeling, the garlic was quite quick and easy.  Plus, the pickling really takes the hot bite out of the garlic, leaving a subtle, briney flavor.  Its yummy and healthy, although maybe not so good for my breath!  The orange marmalade was a bit more difficult to deal with.  I followed Alton Brown’s recipe and was missing one key piece of equipment – a candy thermometer.  Never in my life, despite all the cooking I do, have I felt the need to purchase a candy thermometer…until now.   The recipe calls for the mixture to reach a very specific 222-223F.  I had to guess-timate on this.  That was a bad idea.  What I ended up with in my preserved bottles is tasty and nice-looking, but quite runny.  Not really suitable for use as a “spread” on toast.  What it will be good for is a maranade for chicken or fish as well as a dessert topping or mix-in.  I’ll use it up somehow!  Anyway, its a cheap experiment, probably only about $5 for all the supplies for 11 bottles of the stuff!

The product of a hard day's work.

I’ve also been using our slow cooker a whole lot lately.  I got a new cookbook for it that has wonderful so far.  I’m 3 for 3 so far on delicious recipes from the book.   If you are looking for a way to make a cheap cut of meat into a mouth-watering meal, its only 8 hours away in your crock pot!  And by the way, I would post more photos of my successfully made meals, except I rarely think about photographing them until I am half-way through eating.  I’ll do my best to improve upon this, but no promises.

Birthday Party with the Fam-in-Law

Birthday Girl

This picture was taken by Morgan, with some help from Grampa Fuzzy…and by help, I mean that he didn’t let her drop my camera on the floor.  As I mentioned my first b-day post, the birthday weekend fun continued on Sunday evening with a wonderful party generously thrown by my in-laws.  My sweet niece and nephew got wind that it was my birthday on Valentine’s day, and, never wanting to allow the opportunity for cake slip past them, insisted on throwing me a party.  Well, I couldn’t disappoint the little tykes!  I can’t let a home-made b-day/v-day cake go to waste!

Am I getting to old for this?

The highlight of the evening was of course spending time with my little monkeys (as my sis-in-law calls them):

Covered in Smith kids!!!

And of course, the big boys were having fun too:

My mature husband

My equally mature brother-in-law

I loved it.  The dinner was good, the cake was good and the company was excellent.

Happy Girls