Thanksgiving update

Thanksgiving progress update: four weeks out.

Some pretty corners beginning to emerge around the house.

Ceramic birds perching on ledges. To-do lists overpopulating on the dining room table. Hours spent laying in bed, eyes squinched shut, trying desperately not to run through every proposed menu item and the work it will require...

Dubious progress on back kitchen.

Last week:
This week:

Dubious. Yes. The nightstand has been painted, and after this evening's touch-ups it will hopefully find a home in our guest room. I've begun to sand the desk. The windows, visible in the earlier picture, have been re-glazed, re-painted, and re-hung.

What's keeping me awake at night is the two copper-colored dupioni silk slipcovers I'm supposed to make, the bedroom floor that's supposed to get redone, and the miles of white window-trim to be scrubbed and shined.

Four weeks to go. Eeep.

A Sunday hike

I'd begun to lose hope that we'd get another day like this. October was unusually cold, dark, and rainy in these parts (this seems to be the theme for the year...), and once we got past mid-month, I'd about given up hope for a sunny reprise, a bit of indian summer.

Thank goodness, a bright and warmish fall day. A day for a hike.

Hooray for state parks. And for October sunshine, and wizened witch hazel flowers, and for geese.

And appropriately Halloween-ish fungi.

And fearless determined log-walking terriers.

And peaceful car rides homeward.

Post-Industrial Household Artifacts, with quilt

This was the scene on my dining room table yesterday evening. It isn't always clean and tidy. (Rarely, in fact.) Oftentimes it's the scene of an epic battle between sewing projects and squashes, periodicals and paint cans. All is cleared away for dinner, but in between mealtimes, chaos reigns supreme.

Click on the photo below for an interpretive view:

Oh well, at least it's colorful.

Most excellent mushrooms

So, you know what we haven't had in awhile? A recipe. Remember back when food used to be one of the things this blog was about?

A few things conspired to push me away from kitchen-blogging:
1) I was in the midst of one steamy-windowed canning session after another
2) The light began to ebb out of early evenings (see above) causing all photos to have either a weird fuzzy yellow glow or be sort of washed-out and grayish.
3) I made several extremely-un-photogenic meals. Bread puddings, and casseroles in general, are not blogworthy foods.

But. The light isn't going to get better until, April, say, and meanwhile its autumn, hands-down my favorite time to cook. There's squashes and swarthy root vegetables to contend with, thready carrots and voluptuous onions and the heralded return of soup season. Thus, I bring you the above, a most excellent autumn meal.

The "main course," a roasted portobello cap with black beans and a sprinkling of blue cheese, tastes far more delicious that you would think. The textural contrast between the moist, earthy mushroom and the nutty beans is almost enough on its own. Add cheese and it's otherworldly. This has become one of Patrick's and my special occasion dinners, one to look forward to all week long. If you don't like blue cheese, feta would make a fine substitute.

Black-bean stuffed Portobellos with Blue cheese

6 hefty portobello caps, stems removed
2 cups black beans (preferably home-cooked, though beans from a can will work in a pinch)
4 oz crumbled blue cheese

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Arrange your portobellos gill-side-up on a cookie sheet. Fill each with a generous spoonful of beans, and an equally generous sprinkling of cheese. Bake as close to the top of your oven as you can for about 15-20 minutes, until the mushrooms are adequately cooked and the cheese is slightly melty. If desired, you can finish them under the broiler for a minute, to imbue the cheese with a nice toasty color.

Anything and Everything Roast Vegetables

Assorted vegetables, suitable for roasting:
Beets
Carrots
Potatoes
Turnips
Parsnips
Sweet potatoes

Yellow onions

Whole garlic cloves

Brussels sprouts
Cauliflower

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.

Cut things into similarly-sized chunks: peel beets and the like beforehand; cut the onions into wedges; halve the brussels sprouts; divide the cauliflower into florets. The vegetables in the top group are firmer and need to roast for 45 minutes. Mix them together with a tablespoon of olive oil and a half-tablespoon of balsamic vinegar per pound of vegetables. Spread them out on a cookie sheet or roasting pan, salt and pepper liberally, and let them roast.

After about twenty minutes, you can add any other, softer vegetables you desire. Toss them with oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper, too.

When the vegetables are all soft enough to eat, pull them out of the oven and try to keep your husband from grabbing them right off the tray.

Enjoy!

A pause in the action, and a return

Would you like to hear an excuse for where I've been the past three weeks? I could come up with one, I'm sure, but it would sound pretty pathetic. Blah blah blah, family events, blah blah blah, dirty kitchen, blah blah blah, wrapping up canning and freezing and getting sucked in to Christmas present-making, but really? Really I just needed a break. A wee one. I had the past week off from my day job. In that time, I focused a mighty momentum on our little house, and busted out a string of projects that felt good to accomplish.

This is a busy time of year. Everyone knows. Not only are there the preparations for winter, the end-of-harvest food preservation doings, there's Christmas looming large as well, with Thanksgiving tucked in there for good measure.

In the past two weeks, I've taken a very serious look at our house, and appraised the five remaining weeks left in the calendar, and gotten a little queasy. I hosted Thanksgiving for the first time last year. It was a big deal. At the time, I was not working. I was, truth-to-tell, a little bit bored. What better cure for boredom than the excuse to pour heart and soul into a whopper of a meal plan, a menu worthy of Nobel-prize commendation? (They should have a category for that, they really should.) This year, I have two jobs. Things will be different. The next five weeks are going to be very very full.

So in the calm-before-the-storm, I had to step back and ready myself. I went and enjoyed the aesthetics of chickens:

The Farmer's Museum, Cooperstown, NY

I baked hamburger cupcakes.

I handily beat Patrick at Scrabble.

I did some peaceful cemetery strolling.

I did some shopping.

Quite a lot, actually.

I bought a little cottage-style nightstand, and an antique desk in need of refinishing. As a result, the back of our kitchen now looks like this:

Suffice to say, it's going to be a busy five weeks.

What projects are you undertaking this autumn?

In the season

The pictures tell the story better than words ever could. So I'll leave you to them:

It was everything an October hike should be.

Preparations: baking bread

Nothing like coming home to a 58-degree house to inspire one to turn on the oven. Since this week has brought us lows in the 30s, there's been a lot of baking going on at our house. A lot of baking, and roasting, and card-playing, and generally hanging out in the warmest room of the house: the kitchen.

This time of year, it's always a battle of willpower to decide when we'll wimp out and turn on the furnace. October 1st is usually the point at which we cave in, but with sunny mid-60s weather on the way this weekend, there's the motivation to stretch our furnace-less time a few more days. Why not? There's plenty of baking to do.

And there's nothing nicer than a warm and aromatic kitchen on a raw autumn day. When I came back from a twilight stroll to the garden with a handful of muddy carrots, stepping through the door and into a bright and bread-scented house was divine.

A hot mug of tea, quilt-covered knees, and many pieces of warm seedy toast with butter later, the house was a habitable 62 degrees, and I almost relished putting on flannels for bedtime.