A Vacation from Vacation

"It's like Dillinger once told me: 'Remember, it's always the darkest just before they turn on the lights.' " - from Anything Goes

I have this theory about vacations: they are for children, resort towns and swimsuit retailers.  In fact, I suspect they were designed by swimsuit retailers exactly the same way Valentine's Day was cooked up by card companies.  The gym is probably in on it too.

It's pretty genius, actually.

Glossy posters and shiny TV ads tantalize with photoshopped beaches that are a sharp contrast to my gray cubicle walls.  Images of people carelessly flung across a padded lounge chair haunt me as I wake up at dawn to sleepily pull on work boots and feed chickens.  

I buy in, and plan a vacation.  It goes something like this:

1. Decide on time-off.
2. Hope Matt and I can get the same time-off.
3. Apply for time-off.
4. Change time off-because Matt couldn't get approved for the same time.
5. Breathe a sigh of relief because we finally got the days in sync.
6. Find a place to stay.*
7. E-mail approximately two dozen people to ask exactly "how handicapped friendly are you?"
8. Find a place for the dog to stay.
9. Find someone just crazy enough to want to take care of chickens and still be relied on to not let them become skunk bait. 
10. Convince Katie to keep four baby turkeys for a week.  "They've only flown out of their cage twice.  Very easy."  
11. Confirm beach rental.*
12. Confirm all animal keepers.  Use lots of flattery to butter them up and ensure the well-being of animals.  
13. Mulch garden in attempt to prevent jungle tendencies.
14. Use Round-Up on everything else.
15.  Do laundry.
16. Find all the pieces of all the bathing suits.  Surprisingly difficult.
17. Attempt to have the whole house clean at one time.  It's never been done, but why not try again?
18. Mow grass within an inch of its life - must be done within moments of leaving .  Obviously.
19. Cram two weeks worth of office work into one week.  But do it in a way that does not imply that I can be relied on to work at these speeds when I get back.
20.  Schedule and pay contractors working on inspection punch-sheet for the house we're selling five days after we return. 

After days weeks months of that any vacation would seem like the lap of luxury.  Seriously, to sit down anywhere right now, I would think, "Wait - I don't have to pack a suitcase today? How incredibly indulgent!  I'm done following up on a sheep-sitter?  Well, well, well, look who is going all lazy today."

At this point the ocean shines brighter, the sand feels sunnier, the beach house more charming.

It is in the preparing for a vacation that the need occurs.  This is how the resort towns guarantee they'll stay crowded, the swimsuit retailers sell ill-fitting spandex, and the gym gets money for exercise.   

I plan to go enjoy the pants off this vacation next week.  And not only because I couldn't find all the pieces of my bathing suits.   

For a more poetic, sentimental view of our annual vacation, you can read what I wrote last year.

* I actually didn't have to do those things this time around.  Thanks, Dad!

Happy Valentine's Day!

A coworker brought in the biggest box of chocolate I've ever seen.  After eating most of them, we were inspired to make some Valentines of our own.

It might be a while before we're given free reign with chocolate again.

Hope you all have a happy Valentine's Day!

Note: The expressions on the Valentines are in no way meant to reflect the feelings of the models in the photo.

The Cookie Legacy

My mom is a chemist.  When I was young, this caused me some consternation.  I didn't think of myself as math or science minded, and I wanted to make her proud.  I didn't excel at numbers, Erlenmeyer flasks and graduated cylinders bored me, and my grades came with effort and not ease like in the language arts.  After high school, I dismissed science with a wave of my hand and set off to study music.  I chose a program that didn't have room for any science classes.  I knew my place in the universe, and it was in the arts.

Thankfully, with time comes perspective.  I understand now that an artist can't avoid the sciences any more than a scientist can avoid the arts.  And I also understand why my mom, and probably most of us, love chemistry.

Stress baking is nothing new.  Debbie Perelman of Smitten Kitchen wrote a piece for Martha Stewart Living in which she talked about dealing with the anticipation of childbirth by making brownies for the labor and delivery nurses.  In the movie Julie & Julia, Julie Powell is making a chocolate pie and says, "I love that after a day when nothing is sure . . . you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick.  That's such a comfort."

There is comfort in absolutes, and there are absolutes in chemistry.  I can't control how people act towards me.  But I can control the ratio of flour, sugar and butter in oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.  I know that the lemon in a lemon meringue pie naturally fights with the bonding agent and has to be proportioned correctly.   And knowing that the temperature of the butter affects the quality of pie crust and biscuits makes me feel just a little bit more in settled.

I used to be an absolute dunce when it came to making cookies.  I didn't like to eat them and I didn't like to bake them.  I had no idea what I was doing, but now I do. Did you know that refrigerating the dough for 36 hours causes the oils in the butter to break down and absorb more of the salt and sugar?  It's chemistry.

Thursday, I had a bad experience at work.  It was exacerbated by the soup I had spilled down my front at lunch.  As I spent the afternoon giving my side of the story, I was always conscious of the streaks of crusty soup on my clothes.  So when I went home, I pulled out the mixer, the unsalted butter, and the chocolate chips and made oatmeal, chocolate chip cookies.

A calm settles over me when I'm baking.  I am reassured by the predictability.  And I feel close to my mom seven hundred miles away.  Because in the sifting of flour and leavening and the creaming of cold butter and sugars, I know I understand her better than I did fifteen years ago when I was so anxious to make her proud.  I better understand the wonder that chemistry has for her, and I'm grateful to share that wonder with her in the kitchen.  It is in these little things - not my bachelor's in music - that I begin to really know my place in the universe.

The recipe comes from here, and I saw it first here.  Here's the recipe as I made it:

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 cups of all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup of unsalted butter
1 cup of granulated sugar
1 cup of light brown sugar, packed
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (Original recipe calls for 2 teaspoons, but I'm using some seriously strong vanilla these days.  Thanks, Charise!)
2 cups of rolled oats
2 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips

If you're going to bake the cookies immediately - preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Cream the butter and sugars until smooth.  Add vanilla and mix to blend.  Add eggs one and a time, mixing at medium speed until thoroughly combined.  In a small bowl, combine the first four ingredients (all the dry ingredients except the oats and chocolate chips).  Slowly add to mixer and beat until just combined.  Add rolled oats and chocolate chips and mix with a spatula until combined.  

Refrigerate at least one hour and up to 48 hours.  (Obviously, you can skip this).

Place generous spoonfuls of cookie dough on your prepared sheet and flatten with your hand.  Bake for 10-12 minutes.  It was 12 minutes for me - but my spoonfulls were pretty generous.  You want to remove them with the edges are starting to brown but the middle is still a little undercooked.  Let them sit on the cookie sheet for about 3-5 minutes then remove to a cooling rack to completely cool.

Little House in the Deep South

We looked for over a year and a half, but nothing we looked at even came close to having all of the specific characteristics we wanted.

1.Acreage
2. Flat pasture
3. One story
4. Wide door-ways
5. NO open floor plan.
6. Laurens County
7. Reasonable distance from work,

The houses with wide-doorways had small kitchens and open floor plans.  And the houses with acreage were hilly and mostly wooded.  Looking back, I should have know that any house we found that matched all these parameters would be unique and require work.

But then Matt and our realtor George found this house on fifteen acres.  Fifteen flat acres.  It fit all of our requirements and it was in our price-range.  As you know, we made an offer and finally moved our lives here.

It is, of course, a work in progress.  But for now, here is a photo tour of the house that has been the cause of so much consternation and excitement in our lives.

View of the front room looking in from the living room:

The kitchen is directly across from the front door:

To the left of that is a closet, the guest bath, utility room, and the stairs leading up to the loft:

Looking up at the loft and into the living room:

Another view of the loft with doorway between the front room and living room closed:

That glass paneled door leads to a bedroom that we are currently using to house lizards and spiders.  No tours of that!

Going through the pocket doors, here is the living room:

The master bedroom is off the living room:

So there is the first floor our farmhouse.  Pictures of the outside and loft to follow!

Life Lately

I didn't have to work today.  I always end up washing a lot of dishes on my days off, and today was no exception.  It started with the bundt pan for roast chicken at 9:30 this morning and ended with the bundt pan for banana cake cake at 9:30 tonight.  My day of dishes has come full circle.

In case you're wondering, I did not eat roast chicken at 9:30 this morning.  At least, I didn't intend to when I roasted it.  I wanted to roast a chicken to shred for some meals this week, and decided to try out a method for roasting that Jennifer had sent me last week.  When I saw that crispy skin, I couldn't resist cutting off pieces and eating them with my toast and coffee.  Possibly the weirdest and best breakfast I've ever had.

In spite of my snacking, I ended up with three bags of chicken for this week.

Chicken for chicken and biscuit casserole, chicken quesadillas and this bbq chicken quinoa salad I'm obsessing over right now. I used the carcass to make broth.  It was a good excuse to use the wilted celery and sad looking leeks in my produce drawer.

I am pretty excited to try this roasting method again - but with vegetables and to eat for dinner.  Have any of you roasted a chicken in a bundt pan before?

Thank you for all the encouragement after my last post.  The house is feeling like more like home. My cousin Laurie (cousin by marriage - but I totally claim her) gave me some really good advice my first week here.  She said, "Remember in Night at the Museum how chaotic everything was on the first night?  And then at the end of the movie he's just saying goodnight to everyone and everything is calm?  Pretty soon, this will all seem normal, just like in Night at the Museum."  I don't think I'm quite to the end of my movie yet, but I am certainly more comfortable with Teddy Roosevelt and Sacajawea than I was four months ago.  Today I unpacked my last box.  Hooray!  I didn't realize how much that would go towards making me feel settled.

I took advantage of the sunny weekend to take a photo tour of the house.  I'll share that on here soon!

In the meantime, here is a picture of some new additions at the farm:

I call the lamb Sacajawea.  And I tell her goodnight every night.

Comfort Me with Apples and Christmas Gruel

Ok, it's not really gruel.  But thanks to Charles Dickens, gruel has a distinct holiday edge over other cereals.

There is a quintessential scene in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol...never mind, who am I kidding - all the scenes in A Christmas Carol are quintessential.  However, when Scrooge is visited by the deceased Jacob Marley, he is interrupted in eating his evening gruel.  It is often overlooked that Mr. Scrooge has stopped at an inn for his evening meal on the way home.  The gruel is just a midnight snack of sorts.

It seems reasonable to assume that in the usual spirit of Christmastime this inn served up the kinds of things seen in the breakroom of my office recently.  While it probably wasn't buckeye bars, turtle bars, spinach dip, and hot turkey sandwiches, I am sure the theme was the same.  Heavy, hearty, high on sugar, high on sodium and excessive.

There comes a time in these holy days when we all need a little gruel.

Of course, I don't literally mean gruel (gross).  I mean quinoa with milk and maple syrup.

While I do enjoy cooking quinoa with rice and mushrooms in beef broth, I especially love it cooked in milk.  I've seen this referred to as "breakfast quinoa," but I eat it for dinner or as a snack more than I do for breakfast.  Mostly because breakfast for me is coffee and digestive biscuits at work.  But also because hot quinoa - high in fiber and protein - makes a really satisfying meal when you are feeling a little food-weary.  And let's be honest - 'tis the season for food weariness.

There is no rocket science to breakfast quinoa.

For one serving, rinse 1/2 cup of quinoa.  Heat quinoa and 1 cup of milk in a saucepan over medium heat until it boils.

When it boils, lower the heat, cover and simmer for 15 minutes.  Stir in 2 T of maple syrup.  Or brown sugar.  Or stevia.  Cook for another 8-10 minutes until quinoa is soft.  Not all the milk will be absorbed.  Add more sweetener if desired.

Eat.

Avoid ghosts.

And here is where I try to be serious and introspective and tell you that this recent move has been so, so hard for me.  It's troublesome to talk about, because truthfully it has been a complex process of a few extremes and many subtleties.  I worry that if I talk about the extreme difficulties, I risk negating the extreme positives and losing the subtleties altogether.

There have been inconveniences - developing an allergy to some of our furniture, developing an allergy to the carpet in the new house, waking up with multiple bug bites, losing heat, losing hot water, not having kitchen lights, and vacuuming ants out of the walls.  One morning I opened my eyes and told Matt that I loved him.  He said, "I don't want to alarm you, but there is a spider on your face."

There have been some highlights - our Halloween party, making brownies with my sisters, and the sense of being home.

Perhaps the most significant facet of all, is the support and love of our friends.  I am learning to redefine friendship.  I've heard that in adversity you learn who your true friends are.  I think we've always known who our true friends are - what we are learning now is how very "true" they are.

Our friends have let me call them at all hours in tears.  They have put aside their own comforts to help us with ours.  They have unpacked with us, they have painted with us, they have prayed with us.  And they have given us some wonderful advice.

Proverbs likens a word fitly spoken to apples of gold.  While I have no wish to improve on the wisest man to ever live, I have to say that for me in recent days words fitly spoken have been like breakfast quinoa.

When I am most weary - when I feel like I will never again find that sense of calm and control - what has been most helpful and wholesome for me has been the good advice of a loving friend.  What I am realizing is this: in order to give the best advice, you have to understand the person you are advising; and to really understand, you have to listen.

I've been reminded to take deep breaths.  To take it one day at a time.  To examine and adjust my expectations but not give up on my vision.  And friends who have had to live with more courage than I have reminded me, "It will get better."

It is dark when I get home in the evenings.  I plug in the colored lights on the Christmas tree and curl up on the couch with my bowl of quinoa, hot milk and maple syrup.  The cereal is soft and crunchy, warm and sweet.  I take a deep breath and thank God that we're not alone.

Country Living and Cocoa Brownies

I have this secret standard in blogging.  It is this: as long as the time between posts is less than a month, than I am still a regular blogger.  Tomorrow would mark one month, so here I am typing whatever comes into my head.

Right now my head is filled with thoughts of brownies:

 The first time I made these brownies, my sister Rebekah was visiting from Atlanta for the weekend.   We took our pug Henry and her new puppy Sherlock into the pasture to run around.  Sherlock is about half as tall as the grass, and could only get from place to place by hopping.  We would scoop him up and carry him, but he wanted nothing to do with that.  He would twist and turn until we'd put him back down in the dry, yellow grass.  Then he'd hop away from us, the only thing visible above the grass was the occasional glimpse of his silky black ears flopping up and down.

When we met up with my sister Sarah and her boyfriend Michael for brunch, somehow the conversation turned to brownies.  Both Sarah and I agreed we could really go for some.

"Actually..."  Rebekah rummaged around in her purse and proudly held up a Ziploc bag of two brownies.

This is just one more example of how Rebekah is awesome.  I mean, she has brownies in her purse!

We decided to continue our day out at the farm.  Rebekah told me she'd pick up frozen custard and a movie, if I would go ahead and make fresh brownies.  I found a cocoa powder brownie recipe from Smitten Kitchen and figured it had to be good.

It took only a little more time and no more effort than putting together a brownie mix.  Within 30 minutes, I was pulling them dark and steaming out of the oven.  Smitten Kitchen had said to let them completely cool, but Rebekah and Sarah poo-pooed that notion, and dug in with spoons.

We sat in the living room, looking out over the pasture where the now sleepy dogs had played and eating brownies from pools of melted custard.

This move has been difficult.  There were the nights of trying to cook with a flashlight.  The mornings I woke up covered in rashes and bumps (who knows what was going on there).  The night Matt and I spent three hours cleaning up a shattered fish tank from off the floor of an unfamiliar house.

But it has been wonderful too.  Doing it together.  Doing it with the help of our friends - friends who have surprised and humbled us with their unconditional love and sacrificial giving (hence, no more cooking with a flashlight).

Sitting in the sun-drenched living room with three of the people I love best, I realized that it was what I've wanted since I left Michigan seven years ago.  I'd missed the views and the peace of the country.  There is a nonchalance and wholesomeness to farm living that is slowly working its way into our days.

We are finding our new normal.  It is earlier bedtimes and earlier mornings.  It is views of our land and not an office park.  It is the sound of chickens and dogs instead of traffic and emergency vehicles.  It is just right.

And as I take my turn stealing a sliver of brownie so hot it burns my mouth, I look out over our tree-lined driveway and savor the feeling of being home.

Beware: these brownies are a cinch to make and even easier to eat.

Cocoa Brownies
Originally from Alice Medrich

10 tablespoons of unsalted butter
1 1/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup + 2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1/2 cup all-purpose flour

Preheat oven to 325.  Line a 8x8 baking pan with parchment paper (or foil).  In a heavy saucepan over medium heat, cook butter, sugar  cocoa powder and salt stirring occasionally until the butter is melted and the batter is hot.  Smitten Kitchen suggests a double boiler, but I have had no problems with a heavy saucepan - just don't let your sugar burn.  The mixture will be gritty.  Remove from heat and allow to cool until it is warm.  Stir in the vanilla.  Add the eggs one at a time and stir until the batter is smooth and shiny.  Stir in flour until blended.  Beat with 40 strokes.  Pour into prepared pan and bake on the bottom third of the oven for 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out with just a few brownie crumbs hanging on.  Let cool completely (or eat lustily out of the pan with your sisters).