This Just In

I don't know what happened to last week.

Apparently I was personally responsible for rocking the vote last Tuesday because once the election and Senate races were called and we pumped our fists in the air and cried with happiness, I fell into a state of deep exhaustion that lasted the rest of the week.

At least it was a blue state :-)  Go Virginia. And Ohio. And last but not least Florida.

By the weekend we had opened up our hearts and home again to friends. Friday night brought Thai food and our friends Mary and Sarah to celebrate both their baby Jackson's first birthday and my first year of non smoking,which ended on October 31. Thank you all for being so supportive. I quite honestly couldn't have done it without every bit of encouragement both virtually and in reality.

I can't tell you how good it feels to take a deep breath.

Sunday was spent, as all good Sundays are, at the gym, in the garden and in the kitchen cooking up something delicious for our garden mentors, Geoff and Chuck. They brought eggs, a blueberry crumble and the sad news that indeed the rest of our leylands need to come down, and come down soon before they fall down.

Just as I was about to start a fund for Leyland Relief, our neighbor Nelda, who is to leave for a year in Afghanistan to help with rebuilding, specifically of the roads, offered to pay for the removal of our trees if we watch her garden for her while she is out of the country.

We would have cared for it anyway but don't tell her now.

Which just goes to show you, as GG always says, everything always works out in the end.

The End.

xo jane

Get Stuffed AKA The 5 Little Peppers

So this morning I'm in the kitchen chopping vegetables for stuffed peppers and as I'm finely dicing a handful of button mushrooms I flash back to my first restaurant job in San Francisco.

It was located on Nob Hill, there was a  Swiss chef, a kitchen full of ambitious young male cooks and me.

I was hired as prep/dessert cook.  In the hope of discouraging me from staying in the restaurant I was thrown (literally) 25 pound bags of onions to peel and dice, the same  amount of potatoes to peel and slice, gallons of cream to whip and baskets of mushrooms to chop. I don't discourage easily though.

I quickly learned the difference between 1/4 and a 1/2 inch cube and the importance of each.

I honed my knife skills here but there was many a slip between the knife and the skill set.

One of the slips took off a finger tip forever lost in 10 lbs. of mushrooms.

After a quick tip to the emergency room, I was back at work.  When you're 5'2, 90 odd pounds and you work in a male dominated industry you don't make a big fuss over accidents. 

So bandaged and wrapped I was working the dessert station mixing ice cream with fresh fruit.  I piled it in a dish and topped it with a dollop of whipped cream and a bit more fruit.

One dessert got an extra touch, it got my finger shaped bandage.  I didn't realize it was missing until a scream was heard from the dining room.

That dinner was comped :-)

Tonights' dinner of stuffed peppers has a filling of sauteed onion, garlic, mushrooms, kale, ground turkey, quinoa, feta cheese, a few teaspoons of tomato paste and S&P, I prebaked the peppers in a 350degree over for 15 minutes and will stuff and bake them tonight at the same temp for about the same time.

No fingers were lost in the preparation of this dish.

Post Storm Adventures Continue

This storm has turned me into some crazed blogger who can't stop posting.

I was gong to title this fifty shades of orange and show you the pumpkin muffins I made this morning, using, ahem, local honey from our friends' hive instead of sugar and the pumpkin granola I baked next ( gotta do something with the other 7 ounces of pumpkin, right?) BUT we had a lttle incident in the night that deserves press.

We had a pretty painless storm. The power went out about 11:00pm, just in time for bed and came back on in the middle of the night. Lucky us.

We did though lose one of our leyland cypress trees, all 30 feet of it. It came down between our house and our neighbor Nelda's, leaving a large window into the alley right behind our house and the very unattractive hotel across the street. There had been a beautiful viburnum sweet spice in front of it, this also hit the dust.

But where the states have FEMA, I have GG and GG has a chain saw. 

I applied for assistance and she responded, quickly,

The tree is cut up into county approved lengths and is waiting curbside for Friday removal. The viburnum is standing and the questions remains what to do about the other 7 leylands.  Some have half of their root ball pulled from the ground and all are leaning to the left. They're planted on a berm so they have a shallow root system.

If we don't have any more high winds we can take a few days and maybe wait for the boys from the farm to come for dinner on the 11th and weigh in on the matter.

You've heard of a barn raising? Anybody want to come to an old fashioned tree removal party?

Any suggestions other that giving GG a well earned muscle relaxer?

xo jane

And Now An Update From Storm Center Virginia

Feverishly cooking our way through Sandy.  GG made beef stew and egg noodles.  We just stuffed acorn squash with onions, garlic, zucchini, ground turkey, parmesan and ricotta and will serve it with a brown rice/ black barley/ daikon radish seed pilaf. 

I know, I know, we're such hippies.

I'm rolling the idea of pumpkin muffins around in my head but don't know if near hurricane conditions allow  me to break the ban on eating sugar.

 hahahahahah.

And if the power goes out?

Not sure. We picked up a couple of cans of sterno and figure we can rig up a heat and eat station.  We are our own caterers.

I also have a pot of espresso made and ready to drink.

It seems so odd to think of the government shut down, airports closed, no buses or metro running. Guess they want us all to stay home, huh?

Unfortunately with the government closed there  is no early voting in Maryland or DC today or tomorrow.

And we all know every vote counts.

Thank all of you who came to FITH and than invited us to your house. It was a great distraction and I got to go to Australia and see a bowl of lilacs, all purple and beautiful, just sitting there screaming spring.

Thanks. I needed that.

And before I go, in case you were wondering what the kittens have been doing to help in our time of worry and stress.

Cleaning the bathtub.

And hanging the new liners.

And we need new liners why?

Maybe cause they liked to hang on the old ones.

Whoops.

We have just lost power once and the light are flickering away.........gotta run.

Talk soon?

Flowers in the House of Stormy Weather: October 2012

Oops! You can stock your pantry, you can storm proof your garden, you can batten down your hatches, but you can't control a migraine.  Imagine the weather map depicting Sandy. Now imagine that storm swirling around in my head.  I am a human barometer.

But storm or no storm, migraine or no migraine, we need a few flowers around the house. 

The last of the hydrangea, our own hypericum berries, fennel and ornamental brown hibiscus, spruced up with a few roses and hips from the shop.(Lucy is sniffing around right now trying to get into the picture)

And of course the inevitable nose gay, full of opal basil, yarrow, geranium and one of our favorite hydrangea, Hydrangea macrophylla 'Nigra'.  It turns out it's beautiful at any time of the year!

And now I will pick up the nose gay in one hand, my cup of tea in the other and retreat to the bed room to do what all of the other sensible critters are already doing...

     I shall be out to join the party
                    in a few.










       p.s.- thanks to GG for typing

Changes In Attitude

But no changes in latitude.  We stayed.  Logging 12 to 14 hours on 95 in two days seemed overwhelming.  Especially with pre storm jitters.

The last time we drove back in a tropical storm, the road crews were using snow plows to keep the roads clear of water.

Times like that call for a xanax. 

So we're here doing the prestorm workout.  Shoppng Trader Joes with 100's of our closest friends.Stuffed acorn squash is in our near future.

We bought batteries, matches,candles and shower curtain liners.

GG is mowing the yard and we're storing the pots and trellises in the basement.  Hanging baskets will come down and hopefully the kittens can be wrangled inside.

I'm about to do a big cutback of annuals and a few remaining perennial flowers. Plus I bought a few roses home from the shop. This begs the question, should we party on as usual on Monday?

I'm going for it. I'll post late Sunday night and pray for power on Monday.

Come on by, I have lots of food and the Lab loves company.

Game on?

( FIACH)

It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere

Flying in the face of our own best thinking, we're off to Connecticut for the Hai's birthday this weekend.

We aren't totally ignoring the words "storm of the century" though. 

We'll party on Saturday night with the usual cast of scientists, journalists, fishermen and nurses.  There will be 4 dogs, 1 cat, Mr. Baby and some drunk yacht club boys. ( they are a new addition in their flag patterned belts and Nantucket reds)

On Sunday we'll go to brunch in the sweetest house on the Sound and meet the latest addition to the extended Guilford family, a baby girl.  Mr. B's all pumped up.

Then we'll hop in the car and drive back down to Virginia, quickly, quickly, where we'll reunite with the kittens and hunker down for some weather.

The forecast doesn't look good and neither does the possibility of FITH.

Perhaps we can show and tell the following Monday, the 5th of November?

In the meantime take a gander at flowers in a customers' house. Herefore to be known as FIACH :-)

Pour me something tall and strong, make it a hurricane before I go insane.

Definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and expecting different results.

For those of you on the east coast: stock up on batteries, red wine, candles and water.

Your roving weather reporter, Jane