Things I Do On My Stay-cation...

Last year I spent a week digging a hole.  Seriously.

So here's the newest project that I worked on finished.


I spent my stay-cation laying stonework on the front walkway and finished that seating area that I started last summer when I moved the entire garden and dug a huge hole in my front yard...  which I had started and then just kinda left that way for a year.  Yea, that project.  Finished it.

Nothing cooler than chairs on bricks in a hole...

I know, I know--a big hole in my front yard. For. a. year.  I am SUCH a great neighbor to have in the suburbs with all the perfect Stratford Wives-esque yards.  But don't worry, we put the furniture up on bricks in the hole, so from the street, it looked right.  For. a. year.

Lol, I know what you're thinking.

So anyhow, this blog isn't really about food today--so my talk about food will be brief(ish).

It's summertime here, and even though we've had the most insanely wet and rainy summer ever known, I still want a lot of free time to be outside enjoying the short hot season we get around here.  I want to be in the garden, or in the pool, or hiking in the woods and not tied to my kitchen home-making mayonnaise and almond flour from scratch and two-bite raw paleo brownies (though I would enjoy eating one...)  So I've been cooking very simple lately.  There haven't been any exciting recipes to post.

It's no secret that I have been getting a vegetable CSA box delivered to my front door every week (thank you Zephyr Organics), which I am absolutely loving it.  Because they only give you what is in-season at that moment, so far my CSA box at first had a lot of tender greens, but now we're getting into the more robust greens (kale, chard, turnip and mustard greens).  I expect as the season goes on, those greens will slowly be replaced with the orange vegetable kingdom and all kinds of root vegetables.  Ever since the boxes started arriving, my meals have been entirely planned around using up those veggies before the next box arrives.  It has been a game of extreme veggie gluttony to get through it all, and I've been loving it (has all that excess eating caused me to gain weight?  Hell no.  Green veggies will never do that no matter how many you eat--take THAT, my keto-friends!!).

So right now my fridge is bursting with fennel, zucchini, cauliflower, turnip greens, 2 pks snow peas, garlic scapes, parsley, swiss chard, purple kale, spinach, romaine, a regular leaf lettuce, and a package of radishes.  I have been drinking a ridiculous amount of green smoothies lately to get through all those leafy things. Every recipe is geared to using up more of those leafy green veggies.  At some point in the next few days, this will end up on my family's plates so that I might see the back of my fridge for an hour or two before the next CSA box arrives.  Ah, the problems I have....

Before:  Rotting wood and sagging stairs

So onto today's topic:  The walkway.  What was wrong with the old walkway?  Well, for starters there was no where to sit out front under all of our shady trees.  But more importantly, whoever did the original walkway decided to use pressure-treated 4x4 wooden posts, bolted to the original concrete stoop, to hold the stairs up.  Not a great long-term solution.  Wood rots, and stairs sag and slope.  The walkway was narrow, the step was narrow, and the stoop was so small that you couldn't swing the screen door open while more than one person was standing on the stoop.

It's funny what you find when you rip something apart.  Although it looked like it had been done professionally enough, upon ripping it apart I found all kinds of scraps of not-pressure-treated 2x4's that they'd shoved into small spaces here, there, and everywhere, to full holes where they'd mis-cut the wood.  C'mon people, pressure treated wood is the cheapest stuff you can put outside--scraps of leftover garbage pieces of 2x4 are JUST NOT APPROPRIATE!  Anyhooo...

Before--with some wood scraps.  They were everywhere. 

Ever laid stonework?  Whew, THAT was an entire week of heavy lifting.  (WOD, thy name be reno project!)  It poured rain all week, and I worked through most of it (and it was hot and humid the whole time--hello crazy hair).  That meant that the ka-jillions of buckets I hauled from driveway to walkway--in 20L metal pails--were full of not just limestone chips, but WET limestone chips, and when I was done with those, then there were buckets of soaking wet sand.  Followed by a thousand trips up and down the driveway for the actual cobblestones; 2, 3, 4 at a time, until my hands refused to hold them in a grip anymore.  And then some more sand.  This was a project we thought would take us about 4 days, but it took us 9 days and I didn't get any downtime whatsoever on my holiday, and returned to work needing a holiday from my holiday.  But it does look rather fabulous now, right?


So, some notes about this project...  We replaced the pressure-treated 4x4 framing around the garden and framing the whole thing--but chose to go with wood again because of the  cost.  The stones cost us about $1300, and that was enough money already.  I didn't want to go over $4/sq ft.  I'd found ugly stones at the Home Depot, that I was prepared to settle on,  but a trip to the local landscape supplier for limestone  and sand turned up a hundred stone choices that were a hundred times better quality for the same price.  The cobbles cost us $4.13/sq ft.  So there, always check out the local landscape supplier first.

For the new stairs, I ended up picking very large stacking stones (designed for building a stone wall), and matching giant capstones.  We laid cobbles under the stone wall so we could glue the stones into place, and back-fill them limestone.  They would have been fine dry-stacked, but we didn't want any shifting.  Ever.  So it's all glued down around the steps.  The whole walkway was sloped away from the house, both for drainage and to meet the driveway smoothly.  The seating area is sloped too, but less so.

Maybe next year's stay-cation will involve finally building that walkway from my new patio to the side gate.  You know, that place on your property where the grass never, ever grows anyways.  And maybe I'll add some more gardens, because no on can ever have enough gardens.  You know, my ex-husband used to always say that it was like living in the Brazilian Rainforest (his words, not mine) where every year, so many square feet of lawn disappear.  I think that my current (and final for-keeps) husband might agree.  I hate grass.  I tolerate it only because I believe it is a necessary evil of living in the suburbs, and to completely get rid of it would make me THAT house on the block.  Lawn-less yards can either go really well or really bad.  I don't want to be THAT house that went really bad that people whisper about and despise.  There are certain RULES to living in the burbs....


The worst irony about the reno project was that we received too much limestone and sand, and so even after finishing hauling all of that stuff, I still have to haul more to be able to park in my driveway again.  I've been filling new rubbermaid garbage bins and placing them around the side of the house--well, ok, I placed the bins, then hauled stone and sand by bucket-loads to those bins--and only stopped because I ran out of bins and places to put those bins.  Another paycheque later, and some more bins, and off I go again.  Its beginning to feel like it isn't ever going to end, but it will, and then I'll have a few minutes to turn to my gardens where I can dig some things up and move things around and generally get dirty because that's what I do best, and maybe, just maybe, if I can still stand up and walk, I might waddle around back to the pool for some sun, some reading, and some general floating around in circles--and there might even be a can of beer in my hand.  Or Perry.  Whatever the beer fairy brings me.

So if you need me, I'll be outside.

Come for a swim.

See you there.

Clam Chowder

Photo courtesy of thewellseasonedcook.blogspot.ca--sorry, loaned my camera to one of my teens...

I thought I hated clam chowder when I was younger.  Of course, I had only ever tasted the canned versions which were sweet and full of corn and red pepper chunks.  Ewww.

So of course, more than a decade ago now, when visiting a friend over a lunch hour and she offered me clam chowder I said "no thank-you" as politely as possible.  But she looked me square in the eye and called me out on it, saying, "That's because you've only ever had the canned soup kind of chowder.  That stuff is pure crap.  Try this,"  And I did, because she was my friend and I was a guest and all that, and....she was right.  Her chowder was creamy but not sweet, smooth and silky and did not have a hint of corn in it.  The secret, she swore, was bacon.  Yup.  She said that it helped to mask the texture of the clams, for those who weren't used to it's slight...chewiness.  I was sold.  And, she added, don't add the actual clams until the very end, or you'll get a lot more chewiness than you can handle.  Fair enough.  Don't need to tell me twice on that one.

It took me a while to wrap my head around how I was going to make this one a little more healthy--that chowder I'd fallen in love with (and had converted the rest of my clam-chowder-hating family into loving) had both white potatoes and navy beans.  Let's just say there were some disappointing early attempts.

But the other day, when my CSA veggie box arrived with Jerusalem Artichokes, I finally had an idea...  This was going to work out after all.  And it did.  It was awesome.  (The box also included parsnips and fresh sage, so into this recipe they went...)

Ever cooked with Jerusalem Artichokes/sunchokes?  Me neither.  Never even seen them before this.  That's one of the things I love about getting a food box--you get things you have never cooked with, and you have to Google them just to know what you can do with them.

So I learned that sunchokes are related to sunflowers, that they are tubers (like potatoes are), that they can be eaten raw or cooked, peeled or unpeeled, that they are slightly sweet, mild-tasting, and waaay less starchy than potatoes.  They can be boiled and mashed, made into french fries, roasted, shredded and served in coleslaw or over salads.  But more importantly--they are full of the prebiotic inulin.  In plain English, that means that they can cause a bit of extra gas.  Yup.  So at first, a little can go a long way.  That is why I used a blend of sunchokes and cauliflower for the base of this soup.  If it weren't for that gassy side-effect, I'd say they were a perfect substitute for white potato for the starchy-carb-adverse population out there.  Don't let that one thing put you off trying them, though.  They are tasty little gnarly things.  And this is pretty awesome chowder.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 c Jerusalem artichokes, peeled and chopped
1/2 head of cauliflower, chopped small
3-4 slices bacon
3 c chicken broth
1/2 c parsnips or carrots, chopped into coins
1/2 c onions, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
2 cans baby clams
1 tsp ground celery seed
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 Tbs fresh sage (or 1 tsp dried)
1 c full-fat cream (can substitute coconut milk, but will effect flavour a bit)

Method:

First, chop all your veggies.  Open your can of clams.  Saute bacon until crispy.  Chop bacon into bits.

While bacon is frying, pull out your dutch oven or large heavy-bottom pot and heat it up over medium heat.  In fat of choice (I used butter), saute onions, parsnips, and celery.  When onion is translucent, transfer veggies to a plate and set aside.

Add broth and juice only from canned clams.  Add celery seed, garlic powder, and sage IF using dried sage.  Add sunchokes and cauliflower and bring to boil.  Simmer over medium heat until cauliflower and sunchokes are tender.

Use either an immersion blender to puree, or move carefully to a food processor and puree until smooth.  Return to pot, reduce heat to med-low.  Add sauteed veggies back into the pot now, add canned clams, bacon, fresh sage and cream.  Stirring frequently, heat through but do not let it come to a boil.  Add salt and pepper to taste.