Digging Out

The Pit and I ventured outside late Saturday afternoon, and took some pictures of our buried cars.

When we woke up Sunday to a beautiful sunny day, we decided that digging out would be prudent before ice formed and the cars were trapped forever. This was easier said than done though...for a start, we don't own a shovel. After taking a quick survey of our immediate neighbors and concluding that they were just as useless as us, The Pit braved the knee-deep snow and wandered over to the management office of our complex. It turned out that they had had three shovels to lend out, but that by 11 AM when The Pit came asking, two had already been broken by tenants. Consequently, there was quite a long waiting list for the sole remaining digging instrument.

At this point I had a brainstorm. There's a mall about two miles from our apartment...this is walking distance! We would attempt to buy a shovel, and get some long-overdue Christmas shopping out of the way too! Of course, high-stepping it through the snow on the as yet-uncleared sidewalks was a bit more exertion than I was expecting, and there were no shovels to be had for love or money at the stores when we arrived. However, we did get some Christmas shopping done, a task I actually found more exhausting than the walk itself. I hope our gift recipients appreciate their presents...as we literally had to walk four miles (for more old-timey cred, part of this was uphill) in the snow to get them.

However, after we trudged back to our apartment, there was still the matter of our snowed-over cars. The shovel waiting list had still not reached our name, and the afternoon was soon to turn to evening. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and so we further violated the suburban taboo against neighbor interaction... we wandered until we found a house with a cleared driveway, and then knocked on their door and begged to borrow their shovels.

Fortunately, these people gave up the goods with nary a blink, and The Pit proceeded to demonstrate his manly worth by digging out both cars. Me? Well, the neighbors had given me a shovel too...I managed to immediately scratch the hood of my car with it, and then milled about getting in The Pit's way while trying to clear some ice. So basically, we resorted to our usual gender roles with minimum confusion. For further demonstration of this, recall incidents such as this and this.

Snow!

So exactly two weeks ago, on December 5th, I took the following picture out of our living room window.

I meant to blog about how my first East coast winter was officially beginning, and make some point about how much more awesome California winters are. Then a giant cold front hit California, and all my OC friends complained on Facebook about how they had to wear sweaters AND coats when going outside. There was frost on the grass and scarves where a necessity!

At that point, my blog post about one day of snow on the East coast seemed a little anticlimactic, and I shelved the pictures.

But! Now DC is experiencing THE STORM OF THE CENTURY!! Or so the local news would like us to believe. A couple of days ago, the weather people were saying we would get maybe 6 inches of snow over the weekend. As the week wore on, these predictions grew hysterically, until yesterday the guy on the country radio station was screaming about 25 inches of snow. Flights in and out of DC were cancelled, and when I stopped to buy shampoo at Target yesterday afternoon, I was nearly run over by panicked shoppers grabbing toilet paper and bottled water. I was distinctly out of place waiting for the cashier with just one paltry item in my hands.

However, despite the evidence of barely controlled panic in my fellow citizens, throughout all this excitement I merely rolled my eyes and figured that a) the local news people were just exaggerating for ratings and b) Virginians were particularly gullible. Then we woke up this morning to the following view:

As the afternoon has worn on, the snowfall has not abated, and in fact seems to have increased. I took the following picture a few minutes ago.

As you can see, despite the snowplow going through this morning, the street is pretty well covered, and the cars mostly buried. It appears we aren't going anywhere for a bit, so I suppose that it's a good thing I feel uncomfortable with less than two weeks worth of delicious dry goods in my pantry at any one time. We have plenty of food and toilet paper, so no last minute panic was necessary here, even if I had been less smug about the weather predictions.

The Pit is currently baking some fresh bread, and I've got a pot of soup going on the stove. If you need us, we'll be celebrating our first snowstorm together by cuddling on the couch and watching the snow fall. And fall. And fall. You should probably send for help when the blog posts stop.

Cashew Chicken

When I first told The Pit that I might like to make Cashew Chicken for dinner, he was oddly unenthusiastic. Here I was suggesting something new, with an Asian flavor no less, and he was muttering about how he wasn’t fond of cashews. News flash Pit: me wanting to make something Asianish happens…oh, maybe never again. Grab this opportunity with both hands and do not let go!

Anyway, I overcame his cashew objections by telling him he could eat around the nuts, and made a somewhat modified version of this Simply Recipes dish about a month ago. Despite my marinating the chicken for much too long, The Pit loved it, cashews and all. He’s been asking me to make it again, and earlier this week I think I got the recipe just right.

What you’ll need for about 6 servings:

• 3-4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts (about 1 ½ to 2 pounds total)
• ½ to ¾ cup vegetable oil (or peanut oil if you have it on hand)
• ½ cup soy sauce (or tamari if you’re feeling fancy) – about 2 tablespoons per chicken breast
• ½ cup honey
• 3 tablespoons chili powder
• 2 cups roasted cashews (either salted or unsalted, doesn’t make much difference)
• 2 small-to-medium onions, diced
• 3-4 tablespoons chives or green onions, diced
• 1 ½ cups uncooked white rice

Steps:

1) First, marinate the chicken. Cut the chicken breasts into 1-inch cubes, place in a gallon size plastic bag, and mix with the vegetable oil, soy sauce, honey, and chili powder. Squeeze the bag and make sure the marinade ingredients get well mixed and cover all the chicken pieces. Double bag if, like me, you manage to drop raw chicken pieces all over the outside of the initial bag, and then leave in the fridge for ½ to 2 hours.

My mistake with the dish the first time I made it was leaving the chicken to marinate overnight. This resulted in an extremely appetizing aroma, but a taste so intense that mixing in 2-3 times the normal amount of rice barely diluted it. This time I left the chicken to marinate for about 2 hours, and the flavors were much more balanced. Shorter marinating times might be okay, but I wouldn't actually leave it for much longer than this.

2) Start your rice cooking about 20 minutes before the marinating period is up. Remember to turn off the heat at the appropriate time, but leave the rice covered and warm while the rest of the dish is cooked.

3) Dice the onions. You’ll probably still have time left on the marinating, and can use it to make some sort of quick accompanying salad. I’ve made this cucumber salad and this coleslaw. The salad was excellent and the coleslaw only so so (although it improved significantly after sitting in the fridge overnight), but I’m open to other suggestions for good salads to go with cashew chicken.

4) READ BOTH STEP 4 & STEP 5 NOW. When the chicken is done marinating, heat a large skillet to medium high, and use tongs or a slotted spoon to transfer the chicken pieces to the skillet. Sauté until the chicken is cooked through. Save the remaining marinade for a little later.

5) At this point the original recipe suggests setting aside the cooked chicken, sautéing the onions in the leftover sauce, and then mixing the chicken back in. I mindless followed these instructions both times I’ve made the dish, but upon further reflection, I see no clear reason why – I have a very large skillet, and to save some time and dishes, I’ll just cook the chicken and onions simultaneously next time.

6) When the chicken and onions are just about done, mix in the cashews, and pour the remaining marinade into the skillet. Simmer for another few minutes to kill any bacteria in the marinade.

7) Serve over the cooked rice, and sprinkled with the diced chives or green onions.

Notes:

I first left the chicken to marinate overnight because I wanted to save some time the next evening. If you’re on a tight schedule and want to prepare as much as possible ahead of time, I would mix together the marinade ingredients the previous day, and also cube the chicken ahead of time. That way you can just dump the chicken into the marinade bag as soon as you get home, and then let it sit while you cook the rice, dice the onions, and make a salad.

It all started with a little bleach

So, OL has an issue with laundry. She likes to use bleach. A lot of bleach. So much bleach that her neighbors are getting irate. They all share the washers and dryers on her floor, and have sent numerous angry letters to the building manager, complaining that her bleach has ruined the clothes of anyone unlucky enough to use the machines after her.

Explaining to OL that she uses too much bleach is impossible. “I only use a few tiny drops!” She cries. “Dos other peoples are just jealous of how clean my clothes are! Dey are spreading vicious lies!”

But she doesn’t want to get kicked out of the building, so recently she’s been bugging her son about doing her laundry at his place. He’s offered to take her stuff and wash it for her, but categorically won’t let her into his apartment, as the sight of his housekeeping is likely to send her into unrelenting hysterics. However, since she feels his housekeeping is on par with his laundry skills, she's horrified of him actually touching her clothes.

Thus we came to the decision that if she could navigate the stairs up to my apartment, I would let her use all the bleach she wanted at my house. She insisted the stairs wouldn’t be a problem, and so we set out yesterday for the laundry mecca that is my home.

Of course, as soon as we got to the top of the stairs, OL started complaining of chest pain. I asked her how bad it was, and she told me she didn’t know. Given this unimpressive report, I wasn’t really concerned, as previous similar complaints had all been forgotten within a few minutes. However, five minutes later, she was still rubbing at her chest, and I got a bit more worried.

Getting medical details out of OL is like trying to wring water from stone, but after repeated questioning she conceded that the pain was pretty sharp, and that she’d never experienced something like it before. I asked her if she thought she might be having a heart attack

“How should I know” she muttered “I’ve never had one before!”

Point to OL conceded, I decided to call her doctor and ask for advice. The doctor suggested I take her to the ER to get checked out, so off we went, back down the evil stairs and fifteen minutes to the hospital.

I kept asking OL how bad her pain was, and she kept rubbing her chest and explaining *where* it was. But she certainly wasn’t in so much pain that she couldn’t comment about the girth of a woman crossing the street, or about how much closer her apartment was to the hospital than mine.

Then we got to the ER, and it was the doctors’ turn to try and get medical info from OL. “Are you allergic to anything?” they asked her. “YES!” she cried, and as everyone waited expectantly, she got one of her biggest gripes off her chest: “My carpet! It makes me sick!”

Carpeting aside, things got a little crazy after that point, as a tech took an EKG, and suddenly a sort of controlled vortex of chaos centered on OL. It quickly became clear that the doctors thought she was having a heart attack, and nurses converged out of seemingly nowhere to take care of her and ask her questions. They didn't do much better with their question than I had, but a few nerve-racking hours and a trip to the Cath lab later, everything settled down.

It turned out OL hadn’t had a heart attack in the typical sense of the word. Although the EKG had gone crazy and some of her heart tissue was damaged, she didn’t have any blockages in her arteries, and her prognosis for recovery was excellent. The cardiologist said he had never seen a case of her incredibly rare syndrome before.

Once again, OL proved to be a one of a kind, and is now at home and resting after her ordeal. As she's never met a Jewish stereotype she didn't like, she's also been telling everyone who will listen (and a large majority of those who won't) that her son is clearly to blame for this unpleasant incident...if only he had taken her to do the laundry at his place, none of this would have happened. So far I've escaped all blame for living in an apartment without an elevator, but I'm expecting the guilt trip to start at any point now...

Wedding Venue Search, Day 3

Now that it’s been more than a month since my trip, and I am actually on a plane back to the Bay Area for Thanksgiving, I think it’s time to finish up my account of the wedding venue search. Day 3 of our search…well, Day 3 was magical, although in ways that didn’t involve venues.

See, we had slated Day 3 for explorations of Oakland/Piedmont locations with The Pit’s mother…henceforth known as Irene, since that is her name. Although beautiful, neither of the places we looked at were quite the right size. However, while driving around town Irene noticed a tiny little bridal store on Grand Avenue. We decided to stop by on the spur of the moment to see if they would show us some dresses.

Although several female friends and relatives had repeatedly bugged me about going dress shopping, this was actually the first time I had ever set foot in a bridal store. The whole idea of bridal stores kind of intimidated me, if we’re going to be really honest. There was the requirement for appointments, the high pressure sales ladies, and the general feeling that I didn’t belong in any place that carried tiaras as a matter of course.

However, Margene’s Bridal was pretty much the antithesis of everything negative I had ever imagined about wedding dress shopping. The place must have been filled with fairy dust, that’s how beautifully perfect the whole experience was. Let’s start with Vicki, our sales girl. I had not previously guessed that magical bridal fairies came in Russian-accented, platinum blond, and tattooed beauty-mark* versions, but there you have it:

This girl never once pressured me to buy anything, just happily brought me dress after dress to try on. She not only listened to what I wanted, but also extrapolated from her experience, and by the end of the afternoon, I trusted her so fully that I let her help me into a dress more voluminous than I had ever imagined. Then I stood there staring in the mirror, completely shocked that I loved the way I looked in a dress straight out of Louis the XIV’s court. I know! Me! In a princess dress! She even stuck a tiara in my hair that I didn’t hate:

I still wasn’t convinced that this was *the* dress, as there were several that I liked equally well. But I had started out the afternoon of venue searching in rumpled travel clothing, feeling frumpy and out of sorts. Two hours and 15 wedding dresses later, I couldn’t have felt more beautiful. Fairy dust is the only possible explanation.

In fact, so dazzled by the experience and the choices were we all, that I couldn’t make a decision, so I shall be going back there this week to try on my favorites once more and make an actual purchase. I am very excited to run around the place half naked again.

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* Irene promptly tried to wipe her beauty mark off with a napkin, but luckily Vicki was more amused than offended.

Fall Veggie Side Dishes: Roasted Brussels Sprouts Au Gratin

Next up, a Brussels sprout recipe found at the Closet Cooking blog. Also relatively simple, although requiring a few more ingredient and steps than the previous entry: Roasted Brussels Sprouts Au Gratin

What you'll need for 3-4 portions:

• 1-2 lb Brussels sprouts
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• kosher salt and pepper
• 1-2 cups bread crumbs
• 1 cup Gruyere cheese, grated
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 2 tablespoons melted butter

Steps:

1) Preheat oven to 425°F.

2) Trim the Brussels sprouts and cut them in half. Toss with the olive oil in a 13x9 inch baking pan, then spread in a single layer on the pan. Sprinkle liberally with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.

3) Roast for 20-30 minutes. While the sprouts are roasting, grate the Gruyere cheese and mix together with the bread crumbs. If your bread crumbs are unseasoned, you may want to season with salt and pepper...I happened to have a bunch of stale croutons in my cupboard, so I stuck those in a plastic bag, sealed without extra air, and pounded with a hammer to make bread crumbs. Crouton crumbs mixed with regular breadcrumbs proved to be delicious.

4) Once the Brussels sprouts are roasted, pour the heavy cream over them, and then stick them back in the oven for another 10 minutes. I forgot to take a picture after pouring the cream, but this is what the sprouts looked like after roasting:

Note: if you're feeling health-conscious, you probably don't need to use the entire cup of heavy cream. I was making some soup at the same time as these sprouts, and used about 1/4 of the cup in the soup, and 3/4 in the roasting pan. The spouts did not seem to suffer.

5) Melt your butter, and mix in with the cheese and breadcrumbs. When the sprouts and cream come out of the oven, sprinkle with the mixture. While the originial recipe called for two tablespoons of butter, I'm not really sure that both are necessary here...a little butter is probably necessary to keep the crumbs from burning, but next time I'll try cutting it down to one tablespoon.

6) Broil for 3-4 minutes on high, until the top is golden-brown.

Both The Pit and I loved this dish, although be warned, it doesn't taste great microwaved the next day.

Fall Veggie Side Dishes: Baked Asparagus

I haven't posted recipes in a while, but that's just because the laziness kicked in, not because we haven't been cooking recently. We've actually had quite a few delicious veggie side dishes in the last few weeks, and while I was going to do a round-up of three in one post, I've changed my mind and will drag out the excitement for you for three days instead.

First up, the easiest and simplest recipe of the bunch, found on the Food Network site, and requiring only a very minor modification of cooking time: Baked Asparagus

What you'll need for 2 large portions:

• 1 bunch asparagus
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• kosher salt and pepper

Steps:
1) Preheat the oven to 400°F. Wash the asparagus, cut off the bottom inch or so of each stalk, and dump the stalks into a plastic bag.

2)Add a tablespoon of olive, close the bag, and shake it to evenly distribute the oil on all the stalks.

3) Lay the asparagus out on a foil-covered cookie sheet, and sprinkle liberally with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.

4) Bake for at least 25 minutes to get the asparagus tips crunchy. I actually made one batch where I baked for 40 minutes (to time it with the rest of dinner) and the asparagus only got more crispy and delicious.

Caps vs. Wilds

So, we've covered my optimistic tendencies. But I'd like to talk about The Pit for bit. He...well, let's just say that optimism does not come to him naturally. From the outside looking in, it appears that he imagines the worst possible outcome to any particular situation, and then adjusts his plans accordingly. For example, when I wanted to attend a dance at his grad school, he feared that I would bump into his ex, and that this interaction would result in drinks being thrown.* Similarly, my speeding makes him think about the strong possibility of death in a fiery wreck. And if I undress in front of an open window? GOOD LORD WOMAN, RAPISTS ARE PROBABLY WATCHING!

Hmm, now that I read over the examples I just offered, there does seem to be one consistent Peachy-shaped element in all his fears, doesn't there? But let's just pretend I never made that particular observation, and move right along to the rest of my story.

See, early last week I talked to our pregnant friend, she for whom the quilt was wrought. And she informed me that her husband had gotten four free tickets to a Capitals hockey game on Friday. Assuming she wouldn't be giving birth at that particular moment, she wanted to know if The Pit and I were interested in accompanying them to the game. I said yes, and told The Pit about our conversation when he got home from work.

I had assumed that free tickets were a relative no-brainer to accept. This was silly of me, as The Pit immediately started thinking about all sorts of things that could go wrong for a very pregnant lady (and her accompanying friends) at a professional sporting event. I reassured him that he would probably not to be called on to deliver a baby on the ice, and that even if she did go into labor, there was going to be a great story to tell afterward.

My reassurances did not make him feel much better, although the news that the free tickets were in their own box somehow did. Remarkable, no? In any case, our friend did not go into labor, the Capitals won, I got a fiercely coveted hot dog, the box seats were amazing, and in fact the whole outing was quite thoroughly enjoyable. A much different experience from our previous foray into DC professional sports. Go Caps!

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* We actually get along quite well.

Finished!

Speaking of hobby projects that take decades to complete, let's talk about my quilt. My FINISHED quilt! Yes, that's right...my friend's baby is due any day now, and I feverishly completed the quilt yesterday.

And all it took was four months or so...for something measuring 35 inches by 52 inches. I don't know how people summon the willpower to quilt anything bigger. Now that I think about it, I guess that is the exact reason sewing machines were invented. Quilting anything bigger by hand seems to require the moral fiber of an Amish person.

Since I am not, in fact, Amish, I did end up running into some technical issues while sewing. Chiefly, the fact that I couldn't figure out the quilter's knot, which is how you are supposed to end a line of stitching in the middle of the quilt without making a giant mess. Dina Who Is Not My Sister kindly sent me a link to a video showing how to do it, but although it seemed relatively simple when I was watching, I could not for the life of me actually get the needle, thread, and fabric to cooperate. So all those long diagonal lines quilted through the top? Yeah, those were each done using one super long piece of thread.

My original vision for the quilt also included very thin brown edging all the way around the outside. However, it turns out that thin borders are quite tricky, and what with the baby being due at any second, I decided to forget The Plan and just end the quilting process by folding the backing fabric over the top and stitching it in place as a border (what my Quilting for Dummies book called self-binding).

The downside to self-binding is that it's supposed to be less durable than other sorts of binding. Being a fool optimist, I read that bit about 'less durable,' and then went ahead and decided to machine wash the quilt anyway. So after finishing all the stitching last night, I stuck the quilt into the washing machine on the delicate cycle, crossed my fingers, and hoped like hell that the whole thing wouldn't fall apart. I know that the lead up convinced you all that something terrible then happened, but apparently holding your breath and hoping is an effective strategy, because all the stitching held, and the batting didn't even shrink enough to notice.

I thus declare my foray into quilting a wild success. I suppose there is one more judge whose opinion may be more important than mine...although for all the work I put into this thing, that baby damn well better love it.

Wedding Venue Search, Day 2

I may have mentioned this before, but The Pit has relatives living out in the country…that would be the Central Valley, outside the Bay Area, for those less familiar with California geography. Said relatives owned a dairy ranch for many years, and if you turn your eyes to my profile photo, you can see me accosting one of their adorable calves.

When talk of a wedding venue came up, these folks told me about an eccentric Dutchman living nearby. Apparently, for the last 15 or so years, this man has been hand-building a castle, brick by brick, on a plot of land in the middle of an orchard. After The Pit showed me intriguing pictures of turrets and castle walls, I decided that my mother and I had to see this place for ourselves. My grandparents joined us at the last minute, and the four of us set out for the two hour drive to the country.

As soon as we got off the freeway and started seeing miles and miles of fields and orchards, my grandmother, a confirmed city dweller if there ever was one, started oohing and ahhing. I guess she was somehow unprepared for all the open space, the lack of people and houses, and especially the presence of livestock.

Although my grandma maintains that she is and always has been an animal lover, it’s obvious to anyone who has ever watched her interact with a pet that this is not actually the case. In fact, she has always viewed animals with a kind of cautious suspicion, carefully and primly patting dogs or cats when necessary, but always maintaining a distance if possible. And now there were goats! And geese! And cows! Fenced in, this is true, but completely unsupervised, and just wandering about, possibly ready to get strike!*

* To be fair, I don’t think that she’s actually afraid of animals attacking…more like rubbing up against her and getting her pristine clothes dirty.

However, as we drove further and further away from civilization, she adjusted to the scenery, and there were only occasional exclamations about the hugeness of the fields and the scarcity of houses. By the time we arrived at our destination, she was really ready to appreciate the setting. And by the setting, I mean the huge Italian-style villa that The Pit’s aunt and uncle recently constructed on a slight rise of land in the middle of, well, basically, of nowhere.

The structure is very impressive when viewed from the outside, what with the cannon and flagpole and all, but it gets even more amazing from the inside, when you see the views out of the giant windows, and relax in the spacious courtyard. In fact, if we were having a smaller wedding, the villa itself would be a beautiful venue.

However, as the guestlist seems to grow longer every week, we instead enjoyed a lovely courtyard lunch before setting out for the two larger locations scouted for us. One was the aforementioned castle, and the other was a sort of lake and pagoda built by another dairy-owing family nearby.

First, the castle. Now when I say castle, I’m not talking about some sort of Disney-like façade. No, this is a *real* castle, complete with turrets, walls three bricks thick, and a fire-pit for roasting whole pigs. It is also being built on roughly the same schedule as a real castle…Casper the Dutchman has been working on it for about fifteen years, and estimated completion is in another fifteen or twenty years. Thus when we saw it, the inside wasn’t finished, but the existing structure could serve as an unusual backdrop for an outdoor wedding.

After the tour, we ultimately decided that the location was a little too remote and the facilities a little too primitive for our needs, but the amount of work that Casper had single-handedly put into the place was staggering. As my mother said, it was difficult for her to envision a hobby project that would take her a year to complete, never mind several decades.

The next location we visited also turned out to be unsuitable for us, mostly because of size, but was similarly awe-inspiring for the efforts that the owners had made to beautify their property. The place was a diary ranch, with typical buildings and fields to house and milk cows. However, adjacent to the cow pasture, the owners had dug out and landscaped a large lake.

They had accomplished this feat by themselves, with just family helping, for basically the same reason Casper was building his castle…these folks found that they had the space, and decided that they wanted to do something a bit out of the ordinary with it.

On the way home, my mom and grandparents couldn’t get over it…all that work, whether at the villa, the castle, or the lake, and not for some sort of financial reward, but just for the satisfaction of having built something beautiful. I trust it will not come as a surprise that the discussion ended with comparisons of Russian peasants perfectly happy to sit in shitty cow pastures for their entire lives, and much murmuring of "God bless America."

And thus ended Day 2.