Food: Scarborough Fair Oil

Are you goin' to Scarborough Fair,

Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme?

Remember me to one who lives there;

She once was a true love o' mine.

So goes the song.  And I have these 4 herbs growing in my garden.  And I love infused oils.  Inspiration hit me like a thunderclap on this fine spring day!

So I took a little bit of each herb:

and chopped them fine and mixed them together until they looked like finely chopped grass clippings, but smelled a heck of a lot better.

Put them in a prep bowl, poured about a quarter cup of extra-virgin olive oil over the top, covered up the bowl and shook gently.

Man oh man.

My question is: besides dunking sourdough bread in it (obvious choice), whatever shall I do with the stuff?  The possibilities are endless, and I am thinking:

• coating chicken with it before roasting
• using as a substitute for my plain olive oil when I oven-roast potatoes
• turning it into a marinade with some white wine and garlic
• using it as a butter substitute when mashing potatoes
• tossing with pasta and Parmesan cheese
• experimenting with Scarborough Fair pesto (see above)
• drizzling steak, pork chops, and any other grilled meat with it.  Besides hot dogs. ew.
• Could it possibly be used as a tiny garnish for risotto?

What do you all think?  I'm all ears.

Food: Mac and Cheese experiment II

So I did another mac and cheese experiment.  It turned out even better than the last recipe, if I do say so myself.  Plus I learned a lot.  Such as: never trust a mac and cheese recipe for the roux.  You have to know your roux, defend your roux, beat the heck outta your roux until it's that badass golden color and then SLOWLY add your milk and get it to the perfect simmer as it thickens all bubbly and wonderful.  I have never followed a recipe to successfully make a perfect roux.  Every time I've improvised, the roux gets awesome.  So: never trust the recipe.

Anyway, here's what I did.

grated an 8oz. block NY reserve aged cheddar, a 4 oz block of Yancey's Fancy roasted garlic cheddar, and a 4 oz block of Yancey's Fancy Champagne cheddar.

Boiled the pasta in salted water for 6 minutes and then drained.

Made the roux with a stick of butter, a pile of all-purpose flour, and a whisk.  Seriously, I just added flour and whisked until it looked like that wonderful roux you see on food channels.  Then I slowly whisked in bits of milk until it turned into a very thick gravy.  Then I added more milk slowly.  And then let that get thick and bubbly and coat a spoon.

Added: a whole ton of garlic powder (shame! but I was out of fresh garlic), probably 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (sprinkled it in), a teaspoon or so of smoked Spanish paprika, a teaspoon or so of dry mustard, 1/2 teaspoon-ish of kosher salt, and tasted.  It tasted good.

Mixed in the cheese till it melted.  Adjusted the seasonings until I tasted even more yum.

Mixed in the cooked elbow pasta.  Poured the mixture into a 9x13" pan and covered with a generous amount of panko bread crumbs.  Baked at 350 for 35 minutes.  Took it out of the oven and let it sit for 5 minutes.  Dished it up.

It was good.  And no, I didn't take a picture, because I was too busy eating it.

Gardening pictures

I finally was able to take some pictures of the garden repairs.

Here's the strawberry bed, that someday will be replete with berries (I hope!)

Basil that survived the freeze warning the other night

Rosemary, doomed to only one summer with us in this cursed zone 6.

German thyme

The cutest little sage plant that I could find, that is looking markedly perkier now that he's in the ground instead of in that terrible, horrible, root-bound peat pot.

Parsley, which grows into a large bush here.

Greek oregano

and... dock.  The cursed dock weed that invades every part of my yard and garden and threatens to take over.  Hickory-dickory dock.  I hate dock.  I took this next to the lilac bushes that we inherited from previous tenants.  Sadly, the lilac bushes never bloom, but the dock certainly flourishes.

But that's the state of affairs right now.  And I hope they stay beautiful.

Gardening: a horror story

Let's face it: I am a neglectful gardener who follows a very predictable pattern.

Every spring, I get all excited about plants and gardens and fun stuff like that, and every spring I go all gung-ho into planting edible things thinking we're going to save mother lodes on grocery bills by eating our own fresh produce.  By summer, I have forgotten to weed and prune and pluck and give the poor beds the TLC they so desperately need and deserve, and every summer I wind up with a ginormous weed bed out of which you can sort out the following:

• enough basil to make a container of pesto sauce
• enough chives to last a family of 4 a year or more, even if they use them heavily
• some strawberries that haven't been eaten by rodents
• a handful each of raspberries and blueberries
• unidentifiable piles of herbs that have either been choked by weeks or overgrown to the point that I don't recognize them anymore and don't know what to do with them.
• The Monster Weed that has the huge long taproot, grows anywhere, and is impossible to get rid of.  I don't know what it is, I don't want to know what it is, because it is so strong and so horrible.  I have named it Audrey II.

Every year, I say it's going to be different, and every year the weeds overtake me.

This year, it IS going to be different, because I have a new strategy: mulch with Preen built into it.  Plus, I'm actually going to get out there and do things to my garden.  Really. I promise, because I want to love the yard we have and be proud to show off my garden to visitors instead of sheepishly saying that I have a black thumb and shrugging when they tell me that they remember me being all excited in the spring...

I can't do that anymore.

So this year IS going to be different.  Yesterday we laid a sidewalk going from the patio to the fence gate and dug out the weeds from the garden beds to reveal really good soil.  Today, I planted and mulched the beds and have the following ready to go, and I hope it will work this time:

• strawberries in their own 4'x8' bed.  Hopefully they spread like weeds and take over so that weeds cannot.
• 2 raspberry bushes from last year, and 2 blueberry bushes from last year, with lots of strawberry plants around and between them to see if they'll grow.
• enough chives to... well, you know.
• leeks - 1 "set"
• 3 basil plants, big ones
• a single sage plant that I hope will grow into a perennial sage bush like I had in our previous dwelling
• German thyme - single plant
• parsley - a single plant, because I learned last year that a single plant will most certainly "do ya."
• a single rosemary plant that is in the ground, that I hope to dig up and save before winter this year.  I kill rosemary in pots, and I don't live in a zone where rosemary survives the winter.  More's the pity.
• oregano - single plant

My hopes are to have a nice herb garden that lets me USE the herbs in my cooking (oh boy!).  I apologize for a lack of photos, but it is blissfully raining out right now (saved me from having to water my plants as I planted them only an hour or two ago!) and gently drenching the soil of my sweet baby plants that I keep hoping will grow into something spectacular.

Psychology: Exercise

Since as long as I can remember, hubby has been craving a treadmill.  But not just any treadmill.  Nay verily, the treadmill that he coveted is the biggest, baddest, and most feature-laden treadmill on the market.  Oh, excuse me --it's not a treadmill; it's an incline trainer.  At first I laughed at him for it - who in the world would want to treadmill-ize uphill and downhill?  But then he explained the features to me and its benefits, and so guess what?

We got one.

And I gotta admit, it is one sexy piece of exercise machinery.  It has Google Maps built into its built-in Wifi connection so you can literally "hike" anywhere in the world.  I could jog in Paris if I wanted to.  All on a treadmill.  It has trainers built into it.  It will automatically incline and decline according to the "terrain" you've selected.  It has regimens built in for weight loss, competition, marathon training, and probably a whole heck of a lot of other things I can't even begin to fathom.

I'm addicted.  No, seriously.  I actually have used the thing, of my own free will and voluntarily and all that stuff.  Twice in one day, in fact (yesterday).  I am becoming an exercise addict, despite my processed-couch-potato nature.  Determination has set in to get rid of my belly (it's significant) and get some definition to my cankles.

Yesterday I got one-third of the way through one of the trainer workouts, and then just alternated between jogging and walking at 3 mph until I had burned 350 calories.  I was proud.  Today, I got to 126 calories and had to stop.  But I did go for 3 of the 4 miles of the dog-walk today (each lap around our dwelling area is a mile).

And my legs?  Oh, they hurt.  They gloriously ache, burn, throb, and protest against this amazing activity.  But I discovered something that I never really believed existed until I experienced it for myself:

endorphins.

food: quick dinner

When I don't feel like cooking, I usually make the same old chicken with pasta and spinach.  Always.  It has garlic in it, and chicken, and pasta, and spinach.  With a touch of butter or olive oil, depending on my mood. Today, I altered it and did the following vegetarian option:

• 1/2 pound pasta, uncooked
• 5 ounces raw spinach
• 1 jar Alfredo sauce (I used Classico roasted garlic)
• a whole bunch of garlic powder (because I am out of fresh garlic)

I cooked the pasta, then drained it except for about an ounce of the water.  Then I threw in the spinach and let it cook in the water for a bit (not a lot of water, just enough to "steam" the spinach).  Once the spinach was almost-cooked, I threw in the pasta and stirred.  Then I poured over the jar of Alfredo sauce and garlic powder and stirred.  It was delicious.

And no, I didn't take pictures because hubby's plate was the prettiest, and right before I could take a picture, he unscrewed the top of the crushed red pepper and poured the entire jar over his pasta before he realized that you flip up the top of the lid to sprinkle it on.  Since this happened to him at a restaurant once also, this was hilarious and amazing and I nearly squirted seltzer out my nose.

In other news, I started running on a treadmill today.  I am immensely proud of myself and plan to lose the 45 pounds I wish to lose by doing this, assuming my knees and shins can handle it.  Grrr.  Hear me roar.

Dogs: Noah

Meet Noah.  We are dog-sitting him while his owner is at Crufts Dog Show in England.

He is a very regal-looking boy... 

 who loves taking naps on couches...

and even more loves just plain sitting around on a couch. 

 Here he is with Winston (left) and husband (middle)

I can't get enough of him while he's sleeping because he is so darn cute 

He also loves looking at things outside like crows and other birds. 

What a gorgeous fellow!

Now that he has adjusted to staying here with us, he is a happy camper who hardly ever stops wagging.  He's not as playful as Oliver and Winston, but he is very loving and always cheerful.  I think I'm in love.

Oh yeah, and he's a Rhodesian Ridgeback, from Kaskazini Rhodesian Ridgebacks.  He has sired two litters of beautiful puppies thusfar, and I hope several more.  I'd like him to be the dad of a pup of mine someday.  If you're interested in getting a Ridgeback, I'd highly recommend this breeder. :)