Last one of the year

Life isn't always easy when you're the only boy in a family of girls. Add in being the last birthday of the year, after the excitement of Halloween and your always-dramatic only two years older sister's birthday, and Tor's birthday can sometimes feel a little ad-hoc.

Add in an aversion to chocolate in its purest forms, and well. . . what are you going to do?

Fortunately, this year boys from his class were available to play video games at a new arcade, his dad was willing to do party duty while I ran off to Oregon, and Smitten Kitchen can be counted on for fantastic cakes.

The Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake is a huge hit, because somehow the presence of peanut butter makes chocolate go from an "eeew" to a "yay!" The ganache was easy and fun, and it's a pretty cake. Lots of bang for a moderate effort, my kind of late in the year birthday effect.

With this one turned 12, only one more child still in single digits -- the time seems to be moving on pretty fast.

In Matters of Dirt, Dirt Matters

The planting bed out front has purchased "garden soil" in it. It gets the same kind of watering as the back. It had broccoli and kale planted in it right about the same time as the back yard.

I think they look pretty anemic. While I'm sad about that, the plants in the back are giving me cause for optimism. Even though I routinely gripe about my colander garden soil, the work I've put in seems to have paid off. The back yard cole crops, in three different beds, look greener and larger.

Another interesting point is that the back yard plants have had some insect predation (just look at those broccoli leaves below) but they appear to be "fighting back" effectively, outgrowing the chewing of the cabbage moth caterpillars.

Long Term Decisions

A long time ago, I told myself that having birthdays in the family between Halloween and Thanksgiving would be "no big deal," and better certainly than between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Turns out, since Halloween is like the high holidays here, it isn't terrible, but it's also not super easy.

Until this year, when my OACAH (oldest available child at home) decided that a nice dinner out with her family would be a good way to celebrate. Less pressure, lots of fun, and that freed me up to concentrate on the parts of birthday celebrating I do enjoy.

Cake.

Cake is the part I like.

Not just making cake, but looking up new cake recipes and considering them, and trying them out, and testing them, and everything else. So these late in the year birthdays are all about the cake. This one is The Celebration Cake from Bake it Like you Mean it, by Gesine Bullock-Prado.

I had help, too. Not just from the youngest child, who licked beaters, and the dogs, who tried to get at it, but my sister in law is visiting, so I had competent adult help. Even she couldn't keep me from making bonehead errors, which is why there are three spare wrongly-measured ingredient chocolate layers downstairs in the freezer.

Oops.

Making new ones with appropriately measured ingredients helped a lot.

Layers of vanilla butter cake, flourless chocolate cake, raspberry buttercream, and raspberry preserves make what I think of as a terrifically girly birthday cake.

 

And that girliness is appropriate, I think, for a young lady turning 14.

I can hardly believe it. As we do every year, I told her the crazy story of her 45-minute birth, we made the jokes about her always being in a hurry, and marveled at how big she's getting.

This one is turning into a marvel of maturity, and her shining qualities keep showing themselves. Her friends are lucky to have her, as are we. We're especially glad that tolerance of her siblings is one of her qualities, because brothers will do things like this if at all possible.

I haven't even tried it yet. Last night's dinner was too filling. So maybe a slice with tea today, then the search for friends and neighbors to feed it to begins. This cake called for 10" layers, which is craziness indeed. I did discover a new restaurant supply house, though, so nothing but all future disposable income is lost.

One more birthday cake, then Thanksgiving pies, then at least one Buche de Noel. I'm a happy winter baker!

Our Lady of Perpetual Parsley

. . . and kale, and, alas, Oxalis too.

It's true. If I never wanted to grow anything but kale, tomatoes, beans, parseley, cilantro, and oregano, I could dispense with all deliberate planting.

Missed dropped tomatoes, kale plants gone to flower, bean roots hibernating underground, my garden is full of potential. If the circumstances are right, as in the tiny kale forest below, up they pop.

I let the parsley go to seed because the bees like it. Bonus is I never have to deal with fiddly parsley seeds and their picky germination requirements. Apparently, benign neglect is the key.

There are downsides, I assume. I haven't figured out all of the succession keys yet, so I have either "all" or "none" as the settings. Remember the Tunnel of Cilantro?

I also can't really choose with any pinpoint accuracy where these plants will show up. True confession -- I may see parsley all over as I may have flailed some seedhead branches all around while singing a few weeks ago. . . "Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyyyyyyyyymmeee." Still, it's a generalized planting technique.

However, if you like serendipity, if you are lazy, and especially if you're willing to eat stuff when it feels like showing up -- I am still trying to force pint after pint of lovely Sungold cherry tomatoes on neighbors, and may hand them out as Halloween treats tomorrow -- I can heartily endorse it as a technique.

What pops up without effort in your garden?

The Big One

Our sadly neglected front yard apple trees put on a lovely show this year. I've been eating apples almost every day.

Sometimes it's been difficult to see them because they're hidden by volunteer Sun Gold vines, but the other day I was picking some tomatoes to force them on offer them to neighbors, and saw the apple of the season.

Yum.

The other Big One?

She seems to be having a lot of fun and studying hard at college. We were lucky enough to get to see her play in a casual tournament last week.

Watching my kids play remains one of the very most enjoyable things I do.

Daily meals

Some nights it's all I can do to put food on the table -- sometimes going so far as to order takeout or pick up burritos from the very nice people up the street. But I do write a menu every week and try to stick to it. I also like to try new things -- tonight is one example.

I like gnocchi. At restaurants. At home, it's hit or miss. Out of nowhere, I figured I'd give it a try, and was inspired by some pop-up recipe with spinach. So I looked until I found a recipe I really liked. Also I'm trying to clean out the freezers, and we had two half-bags of spinach waiting. Coincidentally, they were exactly the weight specified. Yay!

After I baked the two kilos of Yukon gold potatoes, then riced them, mixed in the cooked and drained spinach and two cups of flour, it looked like this.

Then the dough got rolled out into ropes. It's pretty wet, so we'll see how it goes.

I tried cutting pieces with a knife

But decided that kitchen shears were easier and squished the ropes less.

 After cutting, a quick push with a fork makes groovy places. Apparently, it helps sauce cling.

 

A test run in the afternoon.

They're. . . okay. I think they'll be better with butter, Parmesan, cream, and nutmeg tonight. How could they be worse?

Edited to add -- gnocchi were only okay. Sauce was terrific. Oh well . . .

The other first is this plum torte. Very very easy to make. I can hardly wait to cut into it. I may end up taking it to spinning to share.

Making Do

The volunteer Sungolds have climbed the espaliered apple trees out front. The plant nearest the sidewalk is dense, with many smallish tomatoes. It reaches through the fence to the side where the toddler lives. She runs there each morning and picks orange tomatoes to eat.

The plant toward the back has bigger fruit and longer, whip-like branches. Denise helps me pick and slice, trying to save as many as possible. We feed them to anyone who will eat them, and still there are more. I think there will be cherry tomatoes until a hard frost. Will I manage to not pull them out before January?

Estimating how much to plant is an art I've not yet mastered. I thought three Principe Borghese plants would keep me in sun-dried tomatoes all year long. Given the vagaries of my irrigation system, I underplanted. I'm trying to keep up with the harvest and preserve as many as I can. I'm already eating them, chopped into quinoa, tossed with pine nuts over pasta, and in salads.

But drying them in the oven isn't resource-wise, and perhaps more importantly, I'm over-crisping them. I'm pretty impatient. There's a book in our local library about building a solar dehydrator that looks pretty interesting. I'd hate to buy an electric one.

In the mean time? I'm making do with the huge solar oven-like thing out front. The dash of the van is good for turning crystallized honey back into pourable liquid, and it's doing a great job on these tomatoes, too.

What passers-by think of it is beyond my knowing. The results have been wonderful.