Cuba Meets The Northwest

Sweet yellow corn. I love melting butter on hot corn and sprinkling with pepper. It's just to die for.
2 fish from Mark's fishing derby. The one on the bottom was placed 2nd in weight for a while before it was booted by a beast. That's ok, it was still fun to participate. I think we ate that one for dinner. The other was tossed into the brink for the smoker.

Papas Con Tocino. Potatoes wrapped in bacon, then baked. Take em' out of the oven, drizzle with olive oil, salt & pepper to taste, and add fresh cilantro.

The beast that went into my belly. Thanks, you were tasty!

The Sweets

Fresh bread and the world's best honey.

The Goods

Mia and I harvested our potatoes. 4 varieties. She planted the purple one's and I believe some red ones. I also have Fingerling and Russett. (I think)
All the stash! I was kinda surprised.

An authentic Italian dish. Spaghetti with a clam based tomato sauce and herb. No cheese anywhere! It was light and kinda refreshing but it took all my inner strength to not grate some parm and toss it on there. I wanted to taste what the dish was suppose to taste like. It went well with fresh bread. Next time - bigger clams and fresh parm please!

Mark left for work earlier today so the girls and I cranked up the blues and baked blue cookies. It was fun. First time I've ever made sugar cookies. I love them, but they're usually so sweet that I can only have just 1. So why make a whole bunch? Well, I follow this blog called Heidi Bakes, she's here in Seattle, and she put this recipe up and they looked sooo good. So I wrote it down and tried it. They're good, but pretty sweet as expected. I tried to make them nice n' thick so I dont have 30 of these to deal with. I have a sweet 15 or so. Anyone want a cookie?

I've Decided

I've decided from now on to make my own tortillas.
I've also decided that I love my husband just a bit more these days as he continues to show me his talent with Salmon. Here, he's getting ready to smoke up a batch.

I've also decided that he has the best recipe in town and the lady who sells smoked salmon fillets at the market for $9 a piece is dreaming. Mark's is way better.

I've also decided why my blog has suffered and why I haven't been doing a whole lot. I needed a break. A long break. I can only be a 50's housewife for so long before I need a few drinks, and a visit from my Harvey roots.

Slowly I'm feeling the urge to come back and start baking and cooking an assortment of stuff. I made and baked bread for the first time in a long time yesturday and have cooked dinner 3 nights in a row now. I made a creamy smoked salmon pasta dish that was rich and sinful. Crusted hamburger pie. I cleaned a rotisserie chicken and made a good casserole with it.

My yard has also severly suffered as a result of my "absence". I feel embarrased by it. I need to harvest my potatoes soon and today feels like a good day to do that. My grapes did well with the recent heat and I have way too damb much rhubarb.

Blueberry Jam

Spices & blueberries

My pots. Sterilizing jars and watchin' the clock.

Almost to a full rolling boil.

The product. I put a bit on a plate and put it in the fridge so I could taste it soon, it came out a bit sweet. Next time I'll adjust the spices and sugar. Less sugar, more spice. I had the same problem with my grape jam. That first batch was SOO sweet, I just poured it out. We will definitly eat this, but for sure will be changing.

Berries, Berries & More Berries

It's time for freezing blueberries. At first, I could only pick enough to make muffins, or pancakes, or just a small bowl to snack on. Now, they're so abundant that it's time to freeze. I just lay them flat on a baking sheet, freeze for a few hours at the very least, and foodsavor them. This is batch number 1. This will be a constant for usually the next 2 months. I say usually because I'm not sure what to expect this year with all this cold weather and lack of sunshine. Also, I plan on trying to MAYBE make a small batch of blueberry jam.

My grapes on the other hand seem to be doing ok. I do worry about them because they certainly got too much rain. They hate that, and even showed some signs of a struggle. That seems to have disappeared, but they need a quad dose of sunshine...like yesturday!

Potatoes are doing great. I'm waiting for the plants/flowers to start dying off a bit them I will slowly start to dig them up. I planted a few varieties so it will be fun to see what I dig up.

As for my all around gardening that I had planned this year, I get an F. The crutial time when I should have been doing things, I was renovating a house. It seemed there was one thing after another keeping me from doing any major work. I sort of gave up in June and decided to just keep what I did have going the best that I could. Apparently when I learn to keep the yard and gardens better, I'll be able to bring home a puppy. Yes, I planted that seed last night.

Two weeks and counting, I should be no less than an hour into the mountains filling my big box with blackberries. Definitly with a few loaded guns as the bears desire this area heavily. I can't wait! I've been dreaming about blueberry and blackberry pie.

Isabel's Party Supplies

Well, this was MY party supply. Chilled vodka.
I started my enchilada sauce at 4a.m. Slowly cooking, at this point it was almost 6am. This was no problem but intimidating being the big secret family recipe n' all. Also first time I'd made it.

All the cakes baked (sorry a bit out of order) At this point, I was sighing with relief.

My challenge. The cake batter. This recipe is for white butter cake. It's very

complicated, time consuming and requires detailed temps. I also took a huge risk of not just doubling, but doing it x5. I know there's a lot of recipes that can't even be doubled, so the risk was do I save myself an entire day OR do it x5 and maybe have to run to the store and buy boxed cake? I'll run that risk.

I did however ruin my egg whites the first time around. Those are always kinda challenging for me. It's such a delicate balance of warmed egg whites, baking powder and sugar. Any of the latter not added correctly or clumping together will break your whites, or cause them to seperate. Adding the sugar too fast will cause your whites to not form stiff peaks. Not paying attention to this will cause your cake to deflate. Again, having all this x5, big risk.

So I started my egg whites again which put me behind a bit. They have to be a perfect room temp and so waiting for these to be ready set me back about an hour. I also ran out of frosting right before midnight. I didn't want to run the blenders that late so I called it quits for the night and went to bed. I was up at 3:30a.m. the next morning and started on my sauce, my tortillas, and the building of the cake.

The tortillas were easy, but time consuming as this was a recipe that could not be doubled. I was only get about 6 tortillas out of each batch and did about 12 batches. I had a hard time rolling them to be large, so had many different sized tortillas, but hey, they rolled just fine and were just as good.

Isabel's little cake.

One of the many dishes of rolled enchiladas. I also made Spanish Rice with probably the easiest recipe ever, only taking 23 minutes per batch. I felt these went well and am glad I didn't ruin any of it.

Isabel's main cake. Constructed carefully with straws. This had a strawberry puree filling mixed with buttercream frosting. It was very rich, and very moist. There was plenty of cake to go around and had a ton of leftovers.

Salmon Salmon Salmon!

Fresh caught Salmon. One of many and many more to come.
Ready to BBQ. I've gotten a bit of break thanks to my wonderful fisherman
of a husband. The rivers just opened up here and he's been out everyday and
brings me these babes. He tosses these on the grill and we eat this til' our little
hearts desire. Salmon and potatoes, salmon and wild rice and all with
sweet corn on the cob. I love these seasons!

Ramsay Fajitas

Special blend of spices to coat my peppers and meat with. Not as spicy

as I had hoped for, but smelled amazing!

Sliced and seasoned/marinated in a dry rub.

Guac. His recipe for this is amazing! It was sooo good. I was too caught up in

eating that I didn't take any pictures of this all done. I was pleasantly surprised BUT disappointed in the spice level. Next time I'll be heavy handed on the

chili powder. Still yummy!

A Piece Of Work, Definitly Not Cake.

So this is the top half of the hutch that I recently found in someones garage. My neighbors were having a 5 family yard sale, and I saw them organizing all the stuff they had been collecting. So I got tastfully nosy. 3 days before their actual sale, they let me look through everything that they had. I saw it, and had to have it. I showed them the amount of work it was going to take to get this lookin' good again and was able to talk them down and got what I felt like a steal.

This is the bottom half, almost completly sanded. This wood in the buff is beautiful! Of course there are doors that go in those spots, but they're staying off until I can get all new hardware. New knobs, new hinges. This much sanding took me over 2 hours. It's a solid, well built hutch and I cannot wait to see this finished. Will I get it done before Saturday? Probably not. At least it already looks better than it did!

Northwest Grown

Blueberry pancakes and eggs. Blueberries came fresh from the garden.
Steelhead fish. Made a simple brown sugar, lemon juice and butter recipe and baked this baby.

Yummy, rice.

Time

Time. I need more time. Time time time, where do you go? Out the window that's where. This is the first time in almost a week that I've had time to sit and play around online. It's terrible and I know my blog is suffering because of it.

I've been trying to get things ready for Ms. Bel's 1st birthday party, which might I add, nobody seems to be RSVP too. So what the hell am I making all this damb food for? For Isabel.

I'm getting tired of putting things out there for people. I try to open up a bit, and people can't deal because I don't think like them. I don't live in a box like them. I don't limit myself like them. So in turn I get judged, ignored, left out, called antisocial, and just put off to the side. What's really sad is sometimes you learn these things by accident. People say things that they don't think I hear because they don't know I'm sitting at the top of the stairs listening for my child.

Have the balls to speak it to my face. People have no idea who I am as a person and I no longer have any interest in trying to connect. 95% of the time this never bothers me because I don't lie to myself, I know I'm a tough pill to swallow. Every once in a while it shows up like a grain of salt and bugs me. What am I gonna do about it? Bake? No, can't put frustration into food. I'm not going to do a damb thing. I'm not going to conform to other people unrealistic ideas and needs just so they can cushion their box. What do I get out of that?

I'm done. Goodnight.