Sibling hangout

Earlier this year, my brother and sister and I made a pact that we would make fun plans at least once per month among just the three of us. (I think "make a pact" sounds more serious than it actually was, but it also sounds like a total sibling thing to do, doesn't it?)

Now that we've been successful for three months running, I think it's working. Important to note: We don't see our parents less than usual! These hangouts are strictly in addition to our larger family activities.

May: We ate ice cream at Izzy's.  I definitely set up my camera on a counter and put the timer on for the first picture. The second is the patented Long Arm photography technique.

June: We met for happy hour in Uptown and got to sit outside.

That was also the site of one of my favorite photos ever:

This month, the only day that worked for all three schedules was tonight - that's right, July 31. We planned for dinner at my house, specifically to use our CSA vegetables because my brother and I have boxes from the same farm, but we didn't plan too well. We set the dinner for a Wednesday night, when we pick up our boxes on Thursday, so we both had to fetch vegetables from the grocery store for our seasonal menu.

My brother made salsa and I made a slight variation of this chicken and summer vegetable tostada, with chicken off the grill and black beans on the tostada instead of on the side. Dessert: blondies (like brownies but with brown sugar and pecans instead of chocolate) warmed up and served with vanilla ice cream. (Yes, I did want a reason to make blondies!)

Wish got to participate this time - and by participate, I guess I mean get held by my sister.

I very much like this new tradition with these sweet siblings.

Marvelous Monday: Week 30

I'm starting the week with a full, grateful heart after a sweet party with family and friends yesterday.

Other marvelous items of note:

1) I am utterly captivated by Gone With the Wind now and would love to have an impromptu book club with anyone that will entertain such an idea, although I'm only halfway through it.

2) I used up a bunch of zucchini with a new recipe tonight: zucchini and basil lasagna. I thought I had lasagna noodles at home and it turns out I didn't, so it became a bowtie lasagna variation. Bonus: I got to use a full cup of basil from our garden in it! (And I give the recipe a thumbs up, with or without pasta variation.)

3) The late July clouds are fantastic.

4) I squeezed in a run over lunch today.

5) I get a preview via email of each week's CSA box, which is a marvelous thing in itself, but today's newsletter was exceptional because it teased watermelon!

Let's end this post on that watermelon note. What's your favorite watermelon-related recipe? Favorite summer recipe that you must cook each year between Memorial Day and Labor Day?

The first harvest

Here it is! Before we went over to the garden this morning, I grabbed a bucket, hoping that wasn't wishful thinking. Good news: it was green bean time!

Clockwise from left: the cucumber, two mystery peppers, and a mess of green beans. There were also two little cherry tomatoes ready to go, with a whole slew that are going to be ready in the next week.

The top pepper, which is either a small poblano or large jalapeno, is going into salsa momentarily, so my fingers are crossed that a monstrously hot pepper plant didn't sneak its way into our basket earlier this spring. I will update you accordingly.

Have no fear

Ahhh!!!!!

Don't worry! It's just a Friday night with the little wolf.

Happy weekend to you, Reader!

Three things Thursday

Here are some sights in my world today:

Flowers glowing along my route on this morning's run:

The perennially confusing lone shoe in the road. How do people lose just one shoe?

This week's beautiful, full CSA box: the season's first sweet corn and tomatoes, plus onions, cucumbers and much more - including a gorgeous, bright orange bunch of carrots. I ate a carrot before I even got home to unpack the box, so I can't blame Wish for chomping on a few chunks, too. He loves carrots.

WHAT

Onward to Friday!

The first heirloom!

Marvelous Monday: Week 29

It's Marvelous Monday!

1) I seem to have conflicting goals in that I'd like to improve my 5K time but have not been particularly inclined to adjust my weekly mileage accordingly upward. That trend stops now! (I hope.) Six miles in the books this morning + a sunrise:

2) I cut up a gigantic, sweet watermelon over the weekend. There are few things more refreshing to me than watermelon after a morning run. (I feel like at least one-third of summer Marvelous Mondays include watermelon in some form. Maybe closer to half.)

3) Also in watermelon-related news, Wish has always been curious about watermelon but usually nibbles on a chunk and then discards it somewhere around the house. This watermelon must be really sweet, because he has decided it's the best thing in the world and scarfs it like it's on par with steak.

4) I'm working on Gone With the Wind, this month's classic book project. I'm really enjoying it, but you wouldn't know it by looking at my reading patterns. I've been reading it right before bed and average literally four or five pages before I fall asleep, even though I don't find it boring at all. I finally made actual progress this weekend, which is good because I'm not sure an average of four pages per day will allow me to return it to the library on time.

5) It's almost green bean and cucumber harvest time in our garden.

What's marvelous about the start of your week, Reader? Have you read Gone With the Wind? Do you stock up on as much watermelon as I do in the summer? Does anyone out there not like watermelon? Please share.

The galette

Although she is in Washington, D.C., and I am here in Minnesota, my dear friend Nathalia and I have been on the same wavelength in terms of cooking this summer.

We have both been having fun trying new recipes with in-season produce, thanks to our respective CSA boxes. I've both learned a lot and gotten a bunch of inspiration from her, including last week's summer squash enchiladas. (I was eager to see what regional differences existed in our CSA boxes, but we also got to talk through what on earth we might do with garlic scapes around the same time earlier in the summer.)

Our kitchens are more than 1,000 miles apart, which is the actually the closest we've lived to each other since we graduated from college seven years ago. Our blogs are one good way to keep in touch with the daily details of each other's lives, and it has been especially fun for me to see what a marvelous cook she has become. It would be So Much Fun to live in the same city and get to cook together, but for now, we discuss from afar.

So it's nicely fitting that Nathalia was the person to introduce me to today's project: the galette. This spring, when I visited Nat and her husband in Washington, she whipped up this pretty dish that looked a lot like apple pie but easier and more fun, with a pie crust base that folds over the edges instead of completely covering the filling. (It kind of looks like pizza combined with pie, which should help you understand the draw for me, but it has even more flexibility because the filling can go sweet or savory.)

Recently, I saw a recipe for Lemony Ricotta Summer Squash Galette while flipping through Better Homes and Gardens and, with a bounty of summer squash and zucchini in this week's CSA box, I decided to try it this afternoon. I made the pie crust with guidance from Smitten Kitchen in the morning and let it chill until late afternoon, then got the zucchini, summer squash and ricotta filling moving. (I was very excited because the only ingredient I needed at the store was the ricotta, which is downright serendipitous.)

I loved the colors and shapes during the prep!

That's one medium summer squash and one zucchini. There's one more summer squash in the fridge that I'll use up later, but I didn't want to crowd the galette.

Here it is, egg-washed and ready to go into the oven.

Also, it smells like a pie while cooking in the oven but functions as dinner - a major plus in my book.

Forty minutes later, this comes out of the oven. Hello!

If you have extra summer squash and zucchinis on your hands - or heck, even if you don't - I recommend that you give this galette a try.

Natty doesn't know it (until now), but she (and her apple galette back in April) gave me the encouragement to try my hand at this recipe. It's one of a zillion reasons why I'm lucky she's my friend.

Morning sunflowers

In addition to the marigolds I wrote about earlier this week, I also love one garden neighbor's sunflowers. (Is it too late to get in on the sunflower game? I need some plans for when my green beans are done.)

I think sunflowers are magnificent. Also, this neighbor's garden has tons of huge regular-size tomatoes growing. He or she is doing some good stuff.

Some of the sunflowers are still all closed up.

Some remind me of a little bonnet. (Fun fact: my mom made me a bonnet once for a Laura Ingalls Wilder Halloween costume and I wore it on many more occasions than just Halloween. Not kidding.)

And then, of course, some sunflowers are in full bloom:

Right after I was done looking at the sunflowers (or finally heeded someone's gentle suggestion for fewer photos and more weeding), the sun popped over the skyline and cast gold light over the whole garden. Ooh. I could have started all over but decided to attend to garden chores. Cucumbers are growing like crazy and a pepper plant has decided to grow at, like, a 45-degree angle, so we'll get a stake for it this weekend.

Also, next week, I will consider blogging about something besides our garden and the neighboring gardens. Consider.

Happy Friday to you!

Hodge Podge: Wednesday edition

Oh, dear. I thought about this post and was gearing up for a Three Things Thursday, until I realized that, yes, it's indeed still Wednesday. This week is flying, so I'm not sure why this happened. Josh came back from a work trip last night, and Wish and I picked him up at the airport and the dog flung himself into Josh's arms. It's really true that one fun part of dog ownership is seeing how thrilled a dog is when you come home everyday. It's even better when these two see each other after time apart. Wish sulked and moped and he's very happy that Josh is back home.

This morning I saw the tiniest little lone flower backlit against the sidewalk. I loved it. Later in the day, it had flipped upside down and the magic effect was gone.

Later in the day, I went to the library to pick up the two books I had on hold. I was delighted to see the books together, which are pretty much the definition of old school. I love my Kindle, but I feel like this is how classics ought to be read, no?

Finally, with temperatures in the 90s for the better part of the week, I swung over to our garden after work to give the plants a quick drink of water. I had planned to go tomorrow morning but was talking to my mom on the phone and got the word that the plants would only probably be okay if I didn't go until tomorrow. (I bombard my mom with questions, usually about watering patterns, to which I seem to expect definitive answers because of her amazing gardening prowess. I'm sure she's thrilled by this.)

Anyway, the light was really pretty, and all of a sudden, tiny peppers and cucumbers have emerged. I watered the plants and then looked around at the rest of the gardens. One of my very favorite gardens in the whole area (there are 50 total) happens to be very close to our plot. The owner is growing vegetables but has filled in the free space with gorgeous orange and yellow marigolds. They were practically glowing tonight in the July evening sun.

I am keeping cool and hydrating with a mint fizzy. What book should I read first?

Hot sun makes the basil happy

Marvelous Monday: Week 28

Monday! Marvelous! Go!

1) This evening I stopped by our garden plot. I saw a sea of green cherry tomatoes thanks to a combination of this weekend's torrential rain and today's hot sun, and then I noticed one lone very perfectly orange-red ripe cherry tomato. I know this is sort of overdramatic, but I hope I never forget the wonder I felt looking at this darn little tomato.

2) I got to stroll with Molly and her baby again today after work. We meant to have weekly running dates on Mondays, but it has been so hot both times we've tried to meet in the evening that we've just walked instead. I find more joy in walking around neighborhoods than I have in years past, and today's extra bonus was walking up a beautiful street that we hadn't seen or noticed before.

3) I tried my hand at making enchilada sauce over the weekend. I want vats and vats of enchilada sauce in the freezer from now forward.

4) Wish makes me laugh out loud most days, but he has been especially goofy lately. Over the weekend, he was pretending to be catlike as he stalked some pigeons, and even the pigeons figured out his game from, like, eight yards away. Poor guy. Stealth is not his forte.

5) I just got notice from the library that my requested copy of Gone With The Wind has arrived. I have an unexplainable hankering to read that book. I also have Pride and Prejudice waiting for me. Can you tell I'm about to embark on a classics kick?

Bonus marvelous: our wedding is now less than two months away!

What's marvelous about your week so far? If you are a Minnesota gardener, how did your garden fare with all of the rain this weekend? Any good classic books you've discovered or come back to lately?

Pork Chop Trot: 2013

It's a tradition now!

If this Pork Chop Trot business sounds familiar to you, it's probably because I wrote about it last year when I ran this 5K. My brother and I had such a good time running last year - followed by a visit and meal at Grandma's house - that we vowed to come back this year if possible. So here we are!

I woke up this morning to hear serious but not severe thunderstorms rumbling outside, which is not the best way to rally a runner to get pumped up for a race. I had coffee with my usual summer pre-race breakfast (English muffin with peanut butter - winter is oatmeal with PB) and took a grouchy dog for a walk in the lingering rain. Then my brother and I hit the road, for our first 5K of the summer.

We arrived in time for a short warm-up jog, and then the race began. The rain wrapped up during our drive, leaving behind a cloudy day with a strong wind - better conditions, I thought, than last year's full sun and mid-70s. The first mile was mostly downhill but nearly fully into the wind, and it got to me when I was away from other runners.

Then the course veers left, onto a single-lane dirt road that cuts through a cornfield. Last year, the corn was over my head, and it was such an amazing little moment that I thought of bringing my camera this year solely to photograph this road. I chose not to, and that worked out, because this year's delayed summer meant that the corn was just above my knees and it did not quite convey the same wonder I felt last year running through the field. Also, this year the dirt was soft from the overnight rain, so all of my focus was directed toward my footing.

And then the course goes back onto pavement for the third mile, and my legs were feeling the first two miles. The first few women were evenly spaced out roughly every 10 seconds ahead of me: close enough to see but not quite catch up to. I finished about 50 seconds slower than my best 5K time, and I felt good about it.

Every runner has different food and drink cravings after he or she finishes a race. As I've written before, from Chicago Marathon 2011 onward, I've gotten hankerings for soda. It sounds kind of odd, but I think the caffeine and fizz (and sometimes sugar) are pleasing to my system after a hard run. I told my brother on the drive up that I wanted to grab a fountain drink on the way home, but with a gap between our race and the awards ceremony, I made a beeline from the finish line to the town bar across the street for a soda.

I can't say my immediate post-race routine has ever included a bar. But with a cold Diet Coke in my hand moments after finishing the race, I was a happy camper. Brother and I posed for a photo:

Later in the morning, we learned that we had both placed in our age groups. When I was looking at the results board, I realized that it was my last year in the familiar old 20-29 age group! 30, here I come!

We headed over to Grandma's for lunch (the second of three times that I'll see her this month!) and then hopped back on the road toward home. It was a fun morning with my brother, and a great return trip to Pork Chop Trot, one of the races I'm going to look forward to every summer.

Summer vegetable adventures

Back in the spring, Josh and I decided to sign up for a larger CSA share than we've had in past years. With the warm, sunny weather lately that I've documented extensively here, the crops are going crazy, and the CSA's box contents get better every week.

This week's box was heavy. It contained:

Cabbage

Cucumbers (lots)

Fennel

Garlic scapes

Green beans

Green top red beets

Green zucchini

Purple kohlrabi

Romaine lettuce

Salad mix

Scallions

Snap peas

Yellow summer squash

Our household is particularly enthusiastic about cucumbers, green beans, zucchini, scallions, snap peas and yellow summer squash, and I expect those vegetables to go fast.

This has already become known as Wish's Summer of Cucumbers. He thinks a chunk of cucumber, especially the end of one, is extra-fun because it functions like a ball but is edible. His face in the following photo is either DON'T TAKE MY CUCUMBER or PLEASE GIVE ME MORE CUCUMBER.

But besides seeing your favorite vegetables in the box, part of the fun of a CSA is figuring out what to do with new-to-you or strange-to-you vegetables. Each week, I've focused on trying a new trick or recipe, either on tried-and-true favorites or vegetables on which we haven't gotten hooked yet.

One week, we grilled zucchini and yellow squash for the first time. I loved the yellow squash, and the zucchini turned out okay.

Last week, I tried a watermelon salsa recipe I had clipped from a Food Network Magazine when we were in Colorado. I was short on mango but used watermelon, cucumber, jalapeno, red onion, basil and lime juice and zest. It was good served with chips, but it became infinitely better when I came home parched from a hot run and scarfed it like a salad.

That week I also used up cabbage with my first try at making cole slaw. I also used the food processor for the first time that my mom gave me and swore I would love. I was intimidated for a long time but can now confirm that it's an amazing machine. I tried a chipotle coleslaw recipe (with chipotles in adobo sauce) from the same issue of Food Network Magazine. We used most of the batch in pulled pork tacos, which was a good match for it.

This doesn't really have anything to do with CSA tips because we haven't gotten mint yet in a box, but if you do find yourself with extra mint, you should definitely make yourself a mint fizzy. If you've read Miles and Laurel in previous summers, you know that it's one of my favorite summer drinks: mint muddled in sugar, with club soda poured over it. Bonus points if it's in a mason jar.

One of the keys, I've found, is to address the box's contents right away. Cook a batch of something, cut up some veggies for snacks, bag everything up. Tonight (after the cucumbers) I turned my attention to a vegetable I'm not hooked on yet: beets. The farm provides a newsletter with tips about how to use each vegetable, and the beet paragraph noted that the author's favorite way to eat beets is roasted with sunflower oil, salt and fresh rosemary. Not only did I have those ingredients on hand, I had just been musing inwardly about how I loved any vegetable roasted in sea salt and oil (see: kale chips, another CSA-related experiment earlier in the summer). This could be just the ticket to learn how to love beets!

And you know what ? It was. Oh, my, beets are good when they're roasted with rosemary.

This week's project, I think, might be fennel, another vegetable that I haven't conquered (but not for any good reason). Any tips from you guys about fennel? Your help is much appreciated!

The dog and the wrestler

Put it in ink

Speaking of chronicling progress...

Last week, I alluded to an ink-related fiasco at Miles and Laurel. (Just call it the dark side of calligraphy to be dramatic, okay?) One of my friends asked what ever happened to that mess, and the truth is, it really was an ongoing project that just ended.

The background: Josh and I were joking around about my latest calligraphy project, and I started gesturing wildly, and one of my flailing hands sent an open bottle of calligraphy ink sailing.

This was no gentle spill, friends. We both gasped, and he grabbed a roll of paper towels ("Don't rub the ink in!") while I ran to the computer to Google "how to remove black ink from carpet." (That's a Google search I'll never have to re-do.)

The internet was very optimistic about our chances of removing the ink, but I'm not sure we were. There are a bunch of household products that can help, including rubbing alcohol and vinegar. I spent the next two and a half hours blotting the ink stain with paper towels and rubbing alcohol. Each pile of paper towels kept lifting up a bunch of black ink, so I was happy that it seemed productive. (But I was definitely excited to go to Lake Minnetonka by the end of the morning.)

When I came home, I was excited to see what the spot looked like after all that work, and the moment that I saw that it appeared that I had done nothing at all was the only time that I got really frustrated about the whole mess. I mean, it looked bad.

We had stopped at our local hardware store for gardening supplies the previous day, and my calm fiancé remembered that the woman ahead of us in line had been renting a Rug Doctor carpet-cleaning machine. The next day, I trotted back to the store to rent our own Rug Doctor, for $25 for a full day (cheaper, I rationalized, than new carpet might be).

We got to work with the little machine and the bottle of carpet cleaning solution that you buy with it. This is the closest thing I have to a Before picture. I think it gives you the general idea of how rough our starting point was, considering that I had spent the better part of the previous morning pulling black ink out of the carpet. Our hopes were not set high at this point.

But, oh my, the Rug Doctor is a good machine. It took out a ton of the ink and also made the rest of the carpet look a lot better. This is what it looked like after about an hour:

The next morning's light was not quite as kind:

But still, when I returned the Rug Doctor the following day after another hour or so of work on the spot, the progress was undeniable.

A day or two later, I had reaffirmed my resolve to keep chipping away at this darn ink stain. We went back to the hardware store and I asked where we might find ink removers. The staff member pointed us in the right direction, and we picked out two products that looked promising. (That's also when I saw that the Rug Doctor's cleaning products line also included a spot treatment for particularly difficult stains, which I had totally overlooked when I rented the machine. Oops. If you ever find yourself in this situation, try that first, please!)

Enter the next step: the spray bottle. Of course, I just threw away the bottle so I can't sing the exact brand's praises to you, but it's pretty obvious: it says something about specifically being for all kinds of ink-meets-carpet fiascos.

The instructions say to spray the stain, cover it with paper towels, and place something heavy on it ("like a phone book"), with the promise that within an hour or two, the ink will be lifted out of the carpet. I don't think we even have phone books, so instead I used some college textbooks, my medicine ball, and a box of my winter clothes. Here are my helpers in action:

That stuff is magic! Over the next few days, it kept lifting ink with each application, so I kept working on it. Here's the carpet, closer to the end of the week:

And when I ran out of the cleaning solution, I took it as a sign that our project had reached an appropriate end, and we deemed the carpet salvageable. Cue the trumpets!

Perfect? No. An enormous relief? Yes!

Marvelous Monday: Week 27

I've missed a couple of Marvelous Mondays lately, including the halfway point of 2013! Time to get back:

1) I'm almost done reading The Shining Girls, which is making the media rounds this summer. It's creepy and probably not the best book to read before bed, but it's got me hooked.

2) Molly and I had planned a run for this evening, but with the temperature hovering near 90, we thought a stroll might be wiser. Baby (her sweet boy!) came with us and we had a splendid walk around her neighborhood.

3) Later in the evening, Josh and I had marriage preparation class. We've been meeting every week or two with a couple at the church where we're getting married and go through a workbook with exercises about communication, financial goals, conflict resolution, and that sort of thing. We were totally unsure about what to expect going into these classes but have found them really interesting, productive and valuable.

4) With each member of my household contributing, we've finished the eight pounds of strawberries I picked with Mom last Tuesday. That is not marvelous, but the strawberries were definitely marvelous. We ate most of them plain, made strawberry shortcake once and finished the leftover strawberry toppings on ice cream.

5) We cleaned yesterday and are starting the week with a clean house, which makes everyone happy except Wish, because he had to listen to the vacuum cleaner.

What are you up to this week, Reader? Best book you've read so far this summer? Favorite summer food? Tell me, please!

The garden: Month 2

Have you ever worked on a project and seen a photo or other evidence that reminds you dramatically of how much progress has happened since you started? I love the idea of chronicling slow progress that might otherwise be forgotten. With this in mind, I'm trying to bring my camera over to our garden plot at least once in awhile, to remember what happens over the course of the summer in my first garden.

Last week, I dropped by to water the plants and noted that it was the first time all summer I had visited the garden solely for that purpose, which highlights the tons of rain that fell earlier this season. How things have changed since then! Josh and I visited at least every second day this week, and everything is moving so much faster now that summer's hot, dry days have really arrived. Our little crops are loving this weather.

(And I was loving the row of community watering cans that were set out this morning by other gardeners working at the same time we were there.)

Here's the update on what happened since I last wrote about the garden:

Last month, I watched what I thought were green bean plants coming out of the ground and may have even googled "what do young green bean plants look like?" to make sure I wasn't hanging my hopes on weeds. Now, in early July, they are undeniably green bean plants!

I also love the little green bean seed that went rogue and sprouted away from the two neat rows of green beans that I planted. It is crowding my basil plant a little bit, but I have to admire its perseverance.

I grew about eight basil plants from seed and one actual basil plant, in case it's confusing to see several tiny plants next to a monster plant. They popped out of the ground recently and I'm amazed by how fast they've grown since then.

Here's the difference in just a few days!

We have a bunch of pepper plants - red and green bell peppers, jalapeno and poblano - and two of them have the tiniest peppers starting to grow. Our cherry tomato plant has about a dozen small green tomatoes on it.

My cousin gave me two tomato plants that were grown from seeds that come from way back in my family tree (true heirloom tomatoes, right!?), and they were looking a little bit sad for quite awhile during the gray, rainy weeks. Watching them go wild now is one of my favorite parts of the garden so far, because I like their story.

Since we got such a late start on planting everything, we've made a few adjustments. With no progress in sight and long germination timelines noted on the seed packets, I ditched my poppies and rosemary plans. We raked over those parts of the plot and started over with rosemary and sage (plants, not seeds) and a row of carrots. In Josh's side of the plot, we added another pepper plant and a cucumber plant. Today, I noticed that my carrots have just popped out of the ground, reminding me that I need to get another row in to stagger the carrot bounty in the summer or early fall.

The first few weeks of the garden were a Grade A question mark, and the garden didn't require as much attention because of all the rain. When the green beans popped up, I was so excited and surprised that I realized that I had not truly expected anything to happen in the garden this summer. Now that the plants are thriving more, it's so much more fun and gratifying to go over to weed and water our garden.

I can't wait to see what happens (and what we learn) through the rest of the summer.

Skyline clouds

In "Is today's sunrise picture too much like Thursday's sunrise picture?" news, today's run meandered around downtown St. Paul, where I saw the morning sun just above the city's skyline:

I tried to get out early to fit in some miles before the temperature climbed, but at 6:30 a.m., I did a double-take when I glanced at my phone's weather app and saw that it was already 77 degrees in my neighborhood. I was nervous about what that meant for the quality of my run, but those clouds in the photo above stuck around for most of time I was out there. Cloud cover helps a lot.

Then: my beloved summer watermelon-mint-lime smoothie, leftover pulled pork tacos, a visit to the Science Museum of Minnesota, and dinner out on the town! Hope your Saturday is good, too.

City sunrise

Sometimes you don't need mountains or lakes or wide plains to catch a sunrise.

Parking lots get them, too!

Happy Fourth to you and yours!