guests & projects

so my mom and sister just left. which makes me very sad. after the wedding in houston last weekend, they came out to see the house, visit, and work on projects at the house. my sister is pregnant, so we didn't do anything too crazy : ) i miss them already!

my mom is a landscape designer. which means she drew up plans for our gardens! i have big dreams of a bountiful kitchen garden and robust cutting garden, and she helped me figure out what to put where. our front yard will be a wonderful oasis of lush flowers that bloom throughout the year against an evergreen backdrop. and she recommended we add a bit of physical structure to help provide focus and framework to the cottage garden look i'm after. she also suggested a kitchen garden in the front! shhh - don't tell phil. he's not too sure about edibles in the front, but her plan will be beautiful, if i can execute it correctly : ) she confirmed our suspicions about the tree in the tiny "backyard," too... it's dying. we'll have to figure out if the city or utility company will help cover the cost of removing it. but then we'll have another parking space! she suggested a structure on the back patio to provide shade and privacy, and then a vertical garden for more edibles. and an evergreen rosemary as a green wall between us and the next-door neighbor. smart lady!

we cooked at the house for most of our meals. sarah is pregnant, which means restricted diet - and cravings. and my mom follows a FODMAP diet. which is very restrictive. no garlic and onions! that makes it difficult to eat at restaurants without special ordering like crazy. plus, i had dairy delivery on tuesday and farm share on wednesday, so we had plenty of options for cooking fresh, seasonal food.

my favorite meal was a roasted chicken. i ordered a whole roasting chicken from south mountain, so it was delivered to the house on tuesday. it was already cleaned (hooray!!), with a bag of innards in the cavity. i followed the recipe from my favorite martha book, with butter and rosemary under the skin.

we used some olive oil, salt and pepper, and roasted the livers in the same pan. we put potatoes and a couple of garlic cloves around it. my mom can't eat the garlic, but still likes the flavor, so we left it in big pieces so we could pick it out after. i also chopped chives all over it. it roasted at 450 for about an hour... 

and came out gorgeous and crispy! the potatoes weren't as crispy as i like them, but they still tasted good. we ate it with steamed green beans from the farm share, because that is something sarah craves. weird. but healthy! she is trying to eat as many different foods as possible to expose baby's palette to lots of healthy foods. the best part of roasting a chicken is having leftover roasted chicken : )

like for nachos at lunch the next day. mmmmmmmmm. we finished a few projects... cleaning up and organizing the back room into a study and work room, putting together the dining room, making blackout roman shades for the den's french doors, and putting the final coat of poly on the dresser. those posts are coming, but i'm up to my eyeballs studying for an architectural registration exam, so i'll have to write them on procrastination breaks. 

i have loved spending an entire week with my mom and sister : ) and next time i see them, i'll have a new nephew! 

the milkman always rings twice

in my quest for reasonably-priced, high-quality food, i lean toward local and small. i've watched food, inc. and i've read just about all of michael pollan's books. my interest (phil may call it my obsession) with healthy, fresh food started in high school, when i read a couple of books by dr. andrew weil. the first one i read was this one, eating well for optimum health. heavily influenced by my mom's health issues and my grandmother's reliance on medicine, i decided i do not want to take medicine unless absolutely necessary. bodies are intricate, complex systems and EVERYTHING is related. and i think food is one of the strongest tools you have to help you stay strong and healthy, not to mention help you age gracefully and maintain or improve your quality of life. one of my favorite podcasts, by the compassionate cook, says "if you don't have time to be sick, make time to be healthy." that really resonates with me!

so with all my amateur food and health research, i try to eat real, whole foods, produced responsibly without harmful chemicals. i am also a supporter of seed saving and try to not buy genetically modified foods, if i can. so all of that together leads me to buy our food from smaller, local farms - i can ask more questions and there tends to be a different type of transparency in the production. i also like being able to put faces with where my food originates... as strange as this may sound, i am more likely to use up all my produce from farm share than from the grocery store. i feel a responsibility to thoroughly enjoy the food when i think about all the work that has gone into its production. 

anyway... all that to say, we had our first milk delivery! haha. is it obvious yet that i am passionate about food? : ) i have been wanting to do the delivery service for a couple of years now, but couldn't in our rosslyn apartment.  we got a metal box for our porch and a driver who comes every tuesday. i make my order online by sunday night and it is charged to my credit card. they have one time or recurring orders (in case you forget to order!), which i love. this first order i just got a half gallon of skim milk and turkey bacon. the milk is good, cheaper than whole foods and tastes the same or better. we haven't eaten the bacon yet, although i was surprised: it came looking like canadian bacon. not what i expected. but it will make yummy breakfast sandwiches this weekend, all the same : ) next week, i'm ordering eggs and chicken, too. i'll keep you posted!

doing the math

this is the farm share i got this week.  the farm share cost $450 for june through the end of october. that's just about $21 a week. let's do a comparison against giant, a grocery store near me. which is cheaper than whole foods, where we typically shop since it is two blocks from the house. i used peapod, the online delivery service. i chose organic where available. while the farm share is not strictly organic, i feel like it's a better comparison for quality.

- small, seeded watermelon $7.99

- pint blueberries $4.99

- bulb of fennel $2.49

- 5 pears $6.45 ($1.29 each)

- eggplant: 1 purple, 2 white, 1 orange turkish $7.96 ($1.99 each, but the grocery store only has purple)

- 4 large heirloom tomatoes $5.56 ($1.39 each)

- 1 green pepper $1.99

- mixed small tomatoes $3.49

that's a total of $40.92. ummm so the answer is yes, it's worth it. no question! not only do we get to try all kinds of new things (orange turkish eggplants??), but it's less expensive for a better quality product. and we're supporting a local farm family. obviously i am passionate about this - i think it may be the focus of too many posts!

our next adventure? milk delivery! we should get put on a route in the next couple of weeks : ) i will definitely let you know how it goes - i am very excited. i've been wanting to do this for over a year now.  

blueberry buckle

we have gotten a lot of blueberries in our farm share this year. tons and tons. i have eaten them in my yogurt, juiced, or frozen most of them, but we were still having a hard time finishing them before they started to go bad. so i pulled out one of my favorite cookbooks, the family baker, to inspire me. i'm not sure if it's in print now, but i have always had excellent success with the recipes and they are super easy to follow. each entry includes other ideas for variations, entertaining tips, substitutions, and a little history of where the recipe originated. so i decided on a blueberry buckle to take to a backyard barbecue we had on sunday afternoon : )

it's basically cake batter with blueberries on top. a sweet, slightly lemon-y cake batter and farm-fresh blueberries!

then you dab the rest of the batter on top. it doesn't matter if it's ugly, or uneven. i think it's kind of supposed to be like that. 

then a super yummy crumb topping goes all over the top (and maybe the counter...).  so it's kind of like a breakfast-y coffee cake. but we ate it with ice cream and it was a hit! 

not only did tony dress to match the blueberries, but he had seconds! the best part of cooking and baking is having people to enjoy it. 

...oh and having home-made baked goodies for breakfast monday morning was a plus, too : )