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the MoneyPit update, no 6: rat slide

{11 March 2014}

We first laid eyes on this house (well, the for sale sign outside of this house) on Nov 1, late at night. Since then weâ€™ve visited it on a weekly, if not daily, basis, and this morning was the first time weâ€™ve seen sunshine inside it. The east-facing living room windows get a faceful of morning sunshine that pours through the living room, into the dining room and down the hall. Itâ€™s just that the sun hasnâ€™t really BEEN out since Nov 1. Everything about this house has been grey â€“ grey stone faÃ§ade, grey bricks, grey plaster dust everywhere, dirty grey peeling walls, grey brick buildings next door, grey sky outside the windows, piles of dirty grey snow outside. The house is tucked between two taller buildings, so I was concerned about how much natural light it gets. So even though itâ€™s more customary to make the 1st floor the owners unit (opportunities to duplex down into the basement eventually), I wanted to live on the 2nd floor because natural light is everything to me. Seeing the sunlight pour in this morning helped reaffirm that decision. Iâ€™m trying to imagine what it will look like once weâ€™ve added color to the walls and the floor is refinished to a nice shiny blond oak. The sunlight will bounce around and fill up every room, I hope. That is, until we can afford to install remote skylights (living in the future will be so awesome).

The rest of this weekâ€™s update is mostly pictures:

The 1st floor kitchen ceiling continued to deteriorate in the hunt for leaky pipes:

Mostly it deteriorated onto the floor:

Ben fixed some stuff with a hammer:

I won the door battle with our contractor:

We got to see (more of) the houseâ€™s bones:

They removed the wall between middle and rear bedrooms to make the new master bedroom:

And finally, they installed a rat slide! (The hole for the dryer vent was one of the places that rats have been using to get into the house. Now that thereâ€™s a dryer vent, itâ€™s sort of like a water slide for the rats. Wonâ€™t the rats be surprised when one day they end up in a dryer! I guess we need some kind of mesh screen).

the MoneyPit update, no 5: when teamwork means throwing one’s spouse under the bus

{03 March 2014}

one of the things i love about my husband, and our marriage, is that we’re really good at doing projects together. which is to say that we have complementary, rather than identical, skill sets. i manage things. ben designs things. i keep track of stuff in spreadsheets, ben can mat and frame pictures and then hang them straight. i’m good cop, ben is bad cop. sometimes he throws me under the bus (ben: “it’s my wife, you know, she’s insisting on sourcing these vintage these solid core wood doors.” foreman: “oh, yeah, man, wives. i get it.”), sometimes i throw him under a bus (“listen, i really want to go with the premium windows but my husband thinks it’s a waste of money. is there any way you can come down on the price just a teensy bit more?”). we strategize. we support each other. i see the big picture. he has the patience to do the little things right just when i get exasperated and want to rush through them. when one of us gets overwhelmed, the other one somehow finds a reserve of calm, confidence, and reason. we have a lot of conversations that go like this:

b: “where are you?”
me: “at home depot looking at moulding profiles. i’m suddenly feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of installing our own crown moulding. we can do this, right?”
b: “of course. it’s just the painting of it i’m worried about.”
me: “painting is the easy part. we buy primed moulding, slap two coats of paint on it before we install it, and touch up after it’s done. i’m intimidated by learning to mitre corners.”
b: “mitring corners is the easy part. i can do that.”
me: “we can totally do this.”

it turns out that making a play is nothing more than a set of russian nesting projects. we both majored in projects. projects are in our career DNA. planning a labor-intensive DYI wedding (simultaneous with a cross-country move through a trick of unfortunate timing) taught us that the skills we’ve honed in our theatre careers are applicable just about everywhere else. our wedding vows included the phrase “i will support your dreams, your projects and your harebrained schemes.” which, as it turns out, is a pretty good description of what buying and renovating a vacant building in the middle of the worst winter chicago has seen since 1978* is really like.

what happened this week? well, it appears that the plumber is still chasing down leaks, judging from the rapidly deteriorating condition of the 1st floor kitchen ceiling. there are a number of expensive projects on hold (refinishing floors, replacing windows) because we’re waiting to find out of there’s some very expensive disaster related to the plumbing that we have to deal with first.

the foreman plowed ahead and framed out and installed cheap steel doors, apparently because the contractor never told him we wanted to find our own vintage doors. then he tried to tell Ben that we couldn’t keep changing things on him, which is when Ben threw me under the bus. he and the foreman had a good manly moment acknowledging the demands of their wives, and we all moved on. so this beautiful wood door that we found at a salvage yard will be the front door of the first floor apartment, but our apartment will have the cheap steel door and tacky stock frame with contemporary moulding that is nothing like the moulding profile of the rest of the house. le sigh. first world problems.

i made the first mortgage payment. i pitched a fit about doors. i might have shed a tear or two over our contractor’s inability to return a phone call. the internets taught me a lot about door hardware, and faucet plumbing. it snowed. again. i looked at a bazilion images of front porch railings on pinterest. i made appointments with three painters and two floor refinishers to bid on work that we’re not yet sure we can afford. a window salesman came and gave us his pitch. it snowed some more. i learned that a surprisingly large number of wood restoration companies throughout the country are named ‘the strip joint’. ben finished drafting the plan whereby we turn two tiny bedrooms into a master bedroom, a pantry, a walk-in closet and a linen closet. closets! we will have both vintage charm AND closets!

given the distinct lack of communication between our contractor and his foreman, we have our doubts about whether they will actually move the walls around to the right places. the dimensions are all right there on the drawing, but it’s not clear that anyone who is doing the work is looking at the drawing. so, returning to our theatre roots, this morning we went by the house and taped out the positions of all the new walls and doors:

the MoneyPit update no 4: our metroid map

{23 February 2014}

my video game-playing career really peaked in early middle school*, which means that nearly all of my video game reference points are Super-NES-era games**. there was a summer that my brothers and i played metroid like it was our job. for those of you ~~who were cool in junior high~~ not familiar with the game, it follows the adventures of a sort of futuristic spaceman-bounty hunter who has to explore alien tunnels and caves. there’s a tremendous amount of territory to cover, but you can only see it displayed on the screen one room at a time and there’s no master map to reference. it became necessary to start mapping the tunnels ourselves to avoid falling into the jaws of the same monster over and over again. we’d draw the turns – right, left, up, down, elevator here, bottomless pit there, on an 8×11 sheet of paper, and when the map ran off the edge of the paper we’d just tape another sheet on to the side, so that the map grew in a sort of organic fashion.

over the course of the past two weeks, we’ve been taking measurements of the house as needed in order to hunt for vintage doors, to think about adding windows or moving walls around, or try to figure out where the furniture will go. usually i take and call out the measurements to ben who sketches it into his notebook, and then later drafts it to scale on the computer.

eventually we’ll draft the whole house (there’s no such thing as as-built drawings for this place, it was purchased strictly as-is and full of surprises), but without time to do the whole thing we keep popping in and grabbing a measurement here or there. the end result is that ben’s notebook reminds me of the metroid maps of my childhood. while we don’t have any elevators, or monsters***, we do have that weird random air shaft. (there will be more pictures of the air shaft as soon as it’s safe for us to get up on the roof, which is currently buried in some of the 66 inches of snow that have fallen in chicago this winter).

yesterday Ben was able to join the various pieces together to complete the map of the interior of our apartment:

and if reading groundplans isn’t your thing, here is the narrated video tour teresa requested last week.

in terms of progress this week: the electrical work is nearly complete. our contractor says that means that the “spaghetti bowl” that was our breaker panel has been all sorted out. there was a moment of panic mid-week when they opened up a kitchen wall and found some electrical wiring that had been run sans conduit. for a moment we thought the whole house might be like that, which would mean about $10k in extra work. but a few spot checks in other rooms determined that it’s only in the kitchen, where the recent, spectacularly shoddy, rehab work had been done, that had unsheathed wires running behind the sheetrock. everything else has nice, 1950’s era BX conduit. which means it’s still not up to code, but also not unsafe.

the plumbing was hooked up and turned on, only to discover that there is a leak between 1st and second floors (there’s now a hole in the 1st floor kitchen ceiling where they went in after the leak). the house was winterized, meaning that the pipes were blown out so that they couldn’t freeze, in 2012, but neighbors tell us that the place has been vacant for 3-4 years. which means there’s a distinct chance that the pipes froze in the winters of 2010 or 2011. so there’s no telling just how many leaks they’ll have to chase down. finding leaks seems to be an inexact science (ie, turn on the water and wait to see what drips), which means i can only hope we find all of them BEFORE we take possession of the house.

* after that i started hanging out with boys who were more interested in hacking a circa-late-70’s UNIX mainframe than they were in completing Metroid levels, and i never really made it back to video games. possibly, it’s just that i haven’t had any free time since i was 13.

** once in college a friend and i happened upon an old Super-NES system and stayed up all night trying to save the princess (we did). I was amazed to discover that i still know where all of the extra coin blocks are located in Super Mario Bros. there is a treasure trove of useless information rattling around up here.

*** unless you count the rats, which CAN get awfully big.

the MoneyPit update no 3: investing in heavy metals

{16 February 2014}

there still isn’t a lot of exciting renovation progress to report. the contractor promises he’ll have his crews running at full speed starting next week. it’s understandable, given the delays we encountered in getting utilities turned on, that his crews were busy with other things and couldn’t just drop everything to start the first day that we had heat. but it’s also frustrating that we’ve now been paying to heat a drafty, poorly-sealed house up to 60 degrees around the clock for a 10 days now and still hardly any work has been done.

some demo work did start this week. as you can see, the basement “half bath” has become a quarter bath:

they also started some of the system inspections, and “discovered” that all the copper water pipes in the basement are missing. our contractor called us over to the house on Thursday to deliver the news. you’re missing some copper, he told us. yes, yes we knew that. but what we didn’t know was that the 203k inspector left it out of the repair list so the contractor didn’t include in his bid. which means we have to pony up separately for that. there’s a contingency fund for exactly these sorts of things, but we’d hoped to use it on sexier projects than plumbing.

the interesting part of this process is that i have no frame of reference for what things cost. i’ve been working in theatre long enough to know that if a director says he wants to fly an actor, that’s a minimum cost of $10k, but if a director asks if that white cotton dress can be purple by tomorrow night, that’s just a box of rit dye and an afternoon of labor. even before pricing out a project, i have SOME reference point for knowing how many 0s we are talking about. but not with house renovations. things are surprisingly expensive at times, of course, and other times surprisingly cheap. Ben asked our contractor how much it would cost to add a window in the south-facing living room wall, and it was less than $2000. But 20 feet of 1″ copper pipe in the basement? $3300. it costs less to CUT A HOLE IN A BRICK WALL than it does to attach a few pipes to the basement ceiling. but the water main isn’t really an optional repair, so we signed the change order and the next afternoon this went up in the basement:

in the mean time we’re trying to get through the stuff that we can do ourselves. i bought a washer, dryer and fridge today. our unit came with a fancy new fridge (an icemaker? i’ve never had one of those!) but we needed one for the rental unit. we deliberated but in the end decided than spending an extra $200 to get a stainless steel finish on the fridge was silly, but worth it. stainless steel finishes on kitchen appliances are so in vogue right now that i think it will make the apartment rent better than a big blocky white one. and, considering that i am the world’s worst bargainer, i’m proud to say that i at least asked for a discount and managed to talk the salesman down by about $100 from the sticker price. i’m sure someone else could have done better, but it was pretty obvious i wasn’t going to leave without buying some appliances today. there’s only so much bargaining power in that situation, and i didn’t have ben along with me to play good cop/bad cop.

the MoneyPit update, no 2: the heat is on

{09 February 2014}

how cold was our house? well, not quite as cold as this place, but a close second. (seriously, check out that link. it’s way more amazing than the rest of this post).

but no longer! the heat is on! after 22 days and 5 service calls, we have gas service and, happy surprise! the furnaces work. Ben stopped by the house last night and sent me this visual report:

there’s not much else to tell; we spent all week trying to get the gas on. the contractor cut down the remains of the drop ceiling in the basement. we shoveled a lot more snow. the snow has been drifting in strong winds and piling up against the fence, so that on one side of the yard the snow is more than 4 feet deep. i suspect we will be well into may before it all melts.

in the mean time, here are a few more “before” photos.

the living room looking into the dining room, 2nd floor unit:

some solid electrical work in the basement:

1st floor unit front door. or, what’s left of the front door:

front door. well, what's left of the front door.

this is what happens when you don’t heat a house for three years:

before. all the before:

fun fact: we bought the house without ever having seen inside the shed in the corner of this photo. now the snow is piled up so deep we can’t really get to it. but at some point we’ll have to saw off the padlock and see what’s inside. yikes.

101 in 1001: [037] make a new recipe from each cookbook i own

{03 February 2014}

10. Standard Baking Co. Pastries

Feb 2, 2014
Chocolate Biscotti

This cookbook was gifted to me at my bridal shower by lau; the first thing I made from it was the excellent cheddar scones, in the kitchen of our seaside cabin while on our honeymoon. The first meal my new husband and I cooked together. Since then, this book has mostly served as a guide for making croissants, which require the dedication of an entire weekend, but are totally worth it. But both of those were accomplished before I started this 101 challenge, so I needed somethign new in order to keep this cookbook on my shelves. I recently had one of those break-a-tooth rock hard sorry excuses for biscotti in a cafe. Like a raccoon washing its food, I had to soak in coffee until it turned to mush in order to eat it. I remembered that biscotti isn’t really supposed to be like that. Years ago, a co-worker’s Italian mother sent a care package with homemade biscotti in it, and when I tasted it I realized that all of those bland, crunchy logs served in cafes didn’t represent biscotti any more than hershey’s represents chocolate. Properly made biscotti has crunch, and is delicious dipped in coffee, but it also has a softness that gives way when you bite in to it.

The Standard Baking Co Pastries book has two biscotti recipes – one almond-flavored and traditional, the other chocolate walnut. The chocolate recipe was described as being “almost cake-like” because of an unusually high fat content. I liked the sound of that, so I skipped over traditional almond and went straight for chocolate. They came out exactly the way I wanted them to be. Crunchy, but not break-a-tooth crunchy. Would benefit from a quick dip in some coffee, but only to enjoy the flavor and temperature combination of the coffee-against-cookie, not to make it edible.

I brought these to a super bow party and when I set them out, someone asked, “ooh, are those, like, brownie sticks?” The answer is yes, they are basically over-cooked brownie sticks. Delicious, overcooked brownie sticks.

Make it again? Definitely. I might try to combine the almond flavoring of the traditional recipe with the butter-fat structure of the chocolate one. Maybe.

9. The Mac + Cheese Cookbook

Jan 8, 2014:
Mom’s Mac and Cheese

My mother’s mac and cheese is probably the first recipe I learned to make, and its one of those recipes I can make without measuring. But I basically stopped making it at home once I discovered Homeroom, the Mac + Cheese restaurant in Oakland. We used to meet up with my brothers there for dinner occasionally (okay, any time we could all end up in Oakland at the same time). While Homeroom serves a dozen gourmet riffs on mac and cheese, I noticed that my brother matt and I both always order the version that was closest to what our moms made. Sharp white cheddar, with broccoli and toasted breadcrumbs. Last fall Ben and I were eating there on a trip back to California and discovered that they’d published a cookbook. We immediately bought two, one for each of my brothers. And under the Christmas tree this winter there were three copies – Matt and Carrie bought us one too. It was the Year of the Homeroom Cookbook.

So all of this is to say that I decided to use the cookbook to check in on the quantities of the recipe I’ve always been making. Turns out, the Vermont Sharp White Cheddar recipe just about exactly what my mom makes.

I made a vat of mac and cheese to serve 12 people at work. It was declared a success.

8. The Science of Good Food

Jan 6, 2014:
Mushroom Risotto

Ben gave me this cookbook a few years ago. It’s more of an encyclopedia of cooking science than an actual cookbook, but there are recipes scattered throughout. It’s an excellent reference. Curious about the maillard reaction? Want to know why baking at 325 is completely different than baking at 350? This is your book.

I used the basic risotto recipe as a place to start on this mushroom extravaganza, but here are the details of what I made. So I can make it again, because, yum:

– generous glug of olive oil
– 3/4 large white onion, chopped
– 3 cloves garlic, pressed
– 1 cup risotto rice
– 2 cup mushroom broth (see below)
– 1/2 lb button mushrooms. half of them sliced, and half cut into quarters or 1/2″ chunks.
– 1/4 lb shitake mushrooms, sliced. if dried, soak them in hot water for 45 min first.
– butter. lots of butter.
– 3/4 c grated parmesan. or more. there’s no such thing as too much, really.
– salt and pepper to taste
– fresh or dried thyme and rosemary, finely chopped
– dash soy sauce
– dash worchester sauce (not vegetarian, FYI)

saute onions and garlic in olive oil until onions are soft. add rice and stir until rice is coated and warm. begin adding scoops of mushroom broth, stirring until the liquid is absorbed before adding more. stir and stir. continue adding liquid until rice reaches the desired consistency. overdo it and it’ll get gloppy, so stop when you like it.

meanwhile, saute mushrooms in butter until released liquid is nearly all evaporated. then add to the pot with the rice.

stir in seasonings, cheese and butter. serve immediately.

mushroom broth:
– 1.5 lb button mushrooms
– 1/2 onion
– 1 carrot
– 2 stalks celery
– 3 smashed cloves of garlic
(or whatever other veggies you fancy)
– salt to taste – go easy, you can always add more salt when using the broth in a finished dish later

rough chop everything and throw into the biggest pot of water you have. Simmer for 90 minutes. Drain and discard vegetables. Return pot to the stove and continue to simmer until the stock is reduced to your taste, 20 min or so. I like to freeze it in 2-cup quantities in plastic baggies for easy use later.

7. Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables

August 28, 2013:
Curried Cauliflower

This is the cookbook from our CSA Farm, Angelic Organics. It includes a vegetable identification guide, to help hapless CSA subscribers to not only identify rarities like celeriac and sunchokes, but also know how to eat them. The book is organized by vegetable, so when you have a lot of cauliflower you can turn to that section and find a variety of things to do with it, and the vegetable chapters are ordered according to the season, so you could cook your way through the book from start to finish, if you wanted to. It’s also full of snippets of wisdom and philosophy from Farmer John, snapshots of the farm, shareholder letters and comments, and, randomly, margin notes consisting of overheard conversations that seem to bear little relevance to the rest of the cookbook:

YOUNG WOMAN: I was having trouble with my roommate in college — communication problems. I kept eyeing a dead tree outside my dorm. After a week I brought the dead tree into our room and set it up between our beds. Every day I hung another dirty sock on a branch.

ACQUAINTANCE: What did she say about that?

YOUNG WOMAN: Nothing. She never said a thing.

ACQUAINTANCE: Did she know it was there?

YOUNG WOMAN: Yeah, she knew. A couple of the branches went right into her closet.

In vegetables, are on the cusp of the season change, when our CSA box is full of the long-awaited summer tomatoes but also the early fall vegetables like cauliflower. Consequently, last night I turned beautiful yellow heirloom tomatoes into 101 Cookbook’s Golden Tomato Sauce and tonight I roasted cauliflower. When I was a kid we used to eat cauliflower by boiling it and then covering it in cheddar cheese sauce or butter and parmesan. Delicious, but in either preparation the cauliflower was merely a vehicle, and tasted like nothing at all. Learning to roast vegetables, rather than boil them, was a game-changer.

This almost doesn’t count as a new recipe from a new cookbook, as I used it more for inspiration and riffed freely, but hey, this is my 101 list, my rules. I selected this recipe mainly because of the spice mixture. We have this box of Indian spices that I was itching to use and didn’t want to settle for a recipe that only called for curry powder. Not when I have turmeric and black mustard seeds and toasted pomegranate powder and fenugreek, whatever that is. The tricky part is that I have ZERO intuition for Indian spices, so it’s hard to actually select a recipe based on the flavor profile. So I just looked for a recipe that called for several of the items in my box. I combined the spice mixture from this recipe with the the oven roasting technique from Smitten Kitchen’s Cumin Seed Roasted Cauliflower (which is also very good, btw, and requires fewer Indian spices on hand).

Make it again: totally. In fact, I’m going to record what I did here so I can remember later:

Curry Roasted Cauliflower
Serves 2

1/2 head cauliflower
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp mustard powder
1 tsp sea salt flakes
1/2 tsp crushed coriander seeds
1/2 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 c greek yogurt
cilantro
fresh lemon juice
crumbled feta

– Clean and chop cauliflower. It doesn’t matter if the florets are all the same size – a variety of sizes results in a variety of textures when it roasts.
– Combine 2 tablespoons vegetable oil (ghee would probably be way tastier) and the spices.
– Toss the oil mixture with cauliflower until it is fully coated.
– Place on a baking sheet or roasting pan. Roast at 425 degrees 20-25 minutes, turning every 5 min.
– While the cauliflower is roasting, combine greek yogurt with a squeeze of lemon juice and a pinch of salt, and dice the cilantro.
– Serve cauliflower topped with a sprinkle of crumbled feta, chopped cilantro and the yogurt alongside.

6. The Bread Baker’s Bible, Rose Levy Beranbaum

April 26, 2013:
-Pizza Dough

i was on a quest for a pizza dough that i could mix, rise and bake all in the space of one afternoon. most recipes have you make it the night before, since a 12-hour nap in the fridge improves the depth of flavor. i knew it existed, and the first one i landed on was, surprisingly, tucked in between the excessively complicated multi-step, multi-day recipes of Beranbaum’s Bread Bible. most of the recipes in this book require that you book your entire weekend around the completion of just one (unless we’re talking about sourdough starter, in which case you may as well go ahead and clear all your appointments for the next month and warn your husband you’ll be in the kitchen with your science experiment until further notice). her recipes are delicious but needy. (haha, ‘needy’ breads…)

so back to pizza dough. there were some red flags when she insisted that only unbleached white flour could be used, and that instead of using a dusting of cornmeal to keep the dough from sticking to everything, it uses olive oil. so it’s a strange, soft, oily dough that wants to tear if you even look at it wrong, and tossing it into the air was right out considering that it was bathed in olive oil that would have flung to the far corners of the kitchen. instead of rolling it out she has you sort of press it into the corners of the baking tray. from where it springs right back. i spent about 10 minutes trying to coax the small lump of dough into two 7″ round pizzas and finally gave up and allowed it to be two 5″ amoeba-shaped pizzas.

anyway, the useful takeaway from this recipe is that it pays to cook the pizza crust for a few minutes BEFORE adding toppings — it helps the crust actually set up, and keeps the vegetables/cheese from turning mushy/rubbery before the crust has even considered cooking through.

and the whole point of this exercise was to try cooking pizzas on the gas grill outside. why, exactly, when i have a perfectly nice pizza stone in my oven? well, because i could. and it was finally warm enough and light enough at 7pm that we could find our way to the grill in the backyard for the first time since we moved in.

cooking the pizza on the grill was awesome. i will totally do that again. it had a nicely browned, crisp crust on the bottom, softer and doughier on top. it reminded me a bit of naan. strangely enough, this crust actually asks for a light smattering of toppings, not a giant mound of melty commercial mozzarella. i didn’t know such a thing was possible until we tried it, but it might honestly be because the dough was so good that the cheese got in the way of fully appreciating its many textures. and amazingly we didn’t destroy the cheap cookie sheet i used on the grill. (Beranbaum’s grill instructions call for a ‘black steel pizza pan’, of course but i just checked that my old Farberware non-stick was good up to 500 degrees and hoped for the best).

the only gripe about the grill pizza is that the top layer of cheese didn’t really brown much, but i’m not sure if we had left it on longer if it would have caught up, or if it always needs a quick spin under the broiler anyway.

make it again: i’d use this dough recipe only if i was in a hurry, or if i was trying to recreate naan. otherwise i’d rather use a recipe that didn’t shun cornmeal or wheat flour or rolling pins. but i will definitely cook pizza on a gas grill again, especially in summer when it’s too hot to turn on the oven.

5. Super Natural Everyday, Heidi Swanson

April 23, 2013:
-Weeknight Curry

i finally made a curry! i’ve made a few attempts at curry before and it was always a miserable failure. now i can’t really tell why, because this was so easy, but whatever. going up in boise, idaho in a household with a severe peanut allergy, i wasn’t exactly raised on the flavors and techniques of south east asia. (but just watch me improvise a cream sauce). so it’s taken some time to catch up.

anyway, my one complaint about many of the recipes on 101cookbooks is that they take about three steps and three pots too many, particularly for a weeknight. but this one was surprisingly simple, and has the added advantage of being a ‘back of the fridge’ recipe, adapting to whatever leftover vegetable are languishing in the crisper drawer. which in this case were mushrooms, potatoes, onion, asparagus, red bell pepper, broccoli, cauliflower, and tofu. and we have dinner for tomorrow, too.

btw, it’s worth noting that the photography in Heidi’s book is at least as beautiful as her food. this is one cookbook that i actually feel bad about spilling on as i work. (usually i think that just gives them a patina that indicates their usefulness).

make it again: yes, but trust the recipe when it comes to vegetable-simmering time. and be less shy with the thai curry paste. and this curry isn’t really right for potatoes. better to stick with vegetables and not have to cook them so long.

4. The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, Deb Perelman

April 13, 2013:
-Kale, Caramelized Onion and Wild Rice Gratin

so, a little preface here: the whole point of the cook-one-recipe-from-each-cookbook assignment was that around the 190th time i moved apartments, and lugged at least two insanely heavy book boxes dedicated only to cookbooks around, i made myself a promise that i could only buy a new cookbook once i had either made something from, or given away, every cookbook i already owned. that was like 3 years and 3 moves ago, and i’m still not done. but a handy little loophole is that the rule doesn’t prevent anyone from GIVING me cookbooks. enter birthday gifts. M & C sent me the Smitten Kitchen book for my birthday last week and holy food p0rn batman, the closeups on peach “breakfast” cobbler are enough to make me wonder why we’ve been eating kashi and greek yogurt all this time if we are, in fact, grownups that can do whatever we want.

so i’m a little disappointed that the first thing i decided to make from this cookbook came out kind of meh. i’d make it again, but with a significant set of adjustments. it’s not really the cookbook’s fault, it just wasn’t my favorite set of flavors. i had conveniently forgotten that i don’t like the sweetness of caramelized onions.

make it again: yes. with adjustments. and not on a week night – B would eat one of the cats waiting for this dish to finally be ready.

next time:
– make a half recipe – we’ll be eating this all week
– double the kale
– cut the kale “ribbons” into short lengths, otherwise the dish turns into a tangled yarn ball when you try to scoop out a serving
– cooks beautifully in the cast iron skillet – do that again (only use the 8″ one)
– mix some parmesan in with the swiss cheese – it needs more saltiness. particularly if you’re using homemade stock/broth.
– add mushrooms. always mushrooms.
– try with sauteed but not caramelized onions (and cut the quantity in half)
– surprisingly, go easy with the breadcrumbs on top. they kind of overpowered the rest of the flavors
– pick (or make) a high wild rice-to-regular rice ratio. i picked a mix that only had a decorative amount of wild rice and the result was a mushy texture. the chewiness of the wild rice would have been nice. and since the rice is cooked and then gets thrown into the gratin and has more liquid added, the rice can be a bit undercooked going into the final assembly.

3. Bake the Bread, Buy the Butter, Jennifer Reese

i opted for this particular recipe because it was the simplest of the crÃ¨me brÃ»lÃ©e recipes i could find, and i had a hangover from the previous night’s birthday revels, and only so many hours before dinner guests were going to arrive. why didn’t i just go out and buy some cookies for dessert, you ask? well, because three months ago i started making my own vanilla extract (from this same cookbook) and it was FINALLY READY so of course i needed to make something to show off the wondrous $59 billion dollars worth of vanilla i had created at home for 12 cents worth of supplies (there’s a post forthcoming about this).

first let it be said that hangovers don’t usually me sick, or even headachy. but they do make me spectacularly slow and stupid. but the ingredient list was encouragingly short: eggs, cream, sugar, and whatever flavoring you might wish for (i chose vanilla and cardamom). it turns out its all in the technique. suddenly i had cream approaching boil on the stovetop, only half the eggs separated, the sugar not yet measured, and wait, what’s that about a water bath? and how many crÃ¨me brÃ»lÃ©e pots do we have? 4? but we have 9 people coming to dinner tonight.

amazingly, it all came together. ben saved the day with a beautifully-timed birthday gift of two of the cutest little teeny tiny Le Crueset pots, (and we made all the couple share a dish — romantic, right?) somehow i managed to not curdle the eggs even though i didn’t really read any of the chemistry behind custard-making until AFTER the brÃ»lÃ©es were in the oven, they were completed with enough time to chill for the proscribed four hours before serving, and we didn’t even burn the house down braising the tops.

the texture was smooth and creamy just like it should be, the top nice and crusty caramelized, and so the only disappointment was that we could hardly taste the vanilla or the cardamom. it was mostly just rich fatty eggs/sugar/cream. which is great, but misses the entire point which was to show off my homesteading ability to make my own vanilla extract.

make it again: yes. with a hangover? maybe not.

for next time: double the recipe to get 9 servings (they were a little skimpy at 1.5 times the recipe), use approximately 4 times the vanilla and much fresher cardamom (also maybe simmer cardamom pods in the cream rather than just using ground cardamom of indeterminate age), and continue to ignore the internet’s insistence upon a water bath; as long as you stick to 225 degrees and a long slow cooking time, there seemed to be no need.

2. Tassajara Dinners and Desserts, The San Francisco Zen Center

March 11, 2013:
– Mushroom Ragout, served over
– Parmesan Polenta

accompanied by sauteed greens, it was a bit ambitious for a weeknight, but so delicious. and it has completely changed my mind about polenta. i’d only ever ‘made’ it at home by slicing open the prepared tubes of yellow goo from Trader Joe’s. it turns out it’s so easy (but does require a fair amount of stirring time) and so much more delicious when made fresh. i used coarse ground cornmeal from the bulk section at Whole Foods. so much more flavor than the prepared stuff, and it and cost about 10 cents per serving. win-win.

make it again: yes, not on a week night.

1. Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, Jeff Hertzberg, ZoÃ« FranÃ§ois and Mark Luinenburg

March 10, 2013:
– Whole wheat sandwich loaf

despite singing all the praises of my no-knead artisan loaf, i’ve kind of been wishing for a loaf-pan-shaped loaf lately for making sandwiches. this came out pretty darn well for a first pass. i cut the honey by half since i don’t like sweet breads, and i wish i’d had some nuts and seeds to add for more textural variety. not the best bread i ever ate [but then again, wheat bread never is], but still tasty, healthy, and it held together even when sliced thin and toasted. B expressed muted enthusiasm, which i take to mean he likes the artisan bread better but he’s smart enough to know that when one’s partner is baking fresh bread, one doesn’t complain lightly.

make it again: yes, with modifications

the MoneyPit update, no 1: like coaxing an elephant

{02 February 2014}

This update is actually a non-update. In order to start work on the house, we have to warm it up, because even the heartiest Chicago electrician can’t work in a house that is 10 degrees inside. So first we have to get the furnaces up and working. In order to do that we need the gas turned on. The day after we bought the house, Ben called the utility companies to request service. People’s Gas said that the gas was turned off at the main under the street so they’d need to come out and dig. They couldn’t schedule that until the following Thursday. So we twiddled our thumbs for a week. Shoveled snow because that’s the only thing we can really do at this point. Chipped all the ice off the sidewalks. Swept the front stairs and took down the for-sale sign. On Wednesday they called to say they didn’t get the city permit in time to dig. They rescheduled for the following Tuesday. I researched washer and dryer models; Ben dug out the garage door which was walled in by 3 feet of snow from the typical Alley Snow Wars. That Tuesday the high temperature was -2 degrees. Gas company called and rescheduled for Thursday, because no one can work outside in that cold. On Wednesday they called to say surprise, they had an available crew and could start right away. Ben headed over (thankfully there’s a cafe with wifi across the street where Ben can work while waiting on service appointments). They started digging up the street. Slow going because we haven’t seen a temperature above 32 in more than 6 weeks and the ground is frozen rock solid. Dug all day. They missed the main. Filled in the hole and said they’d come back the next day and try again. Came back Thursday. Ben is on a first-name basis with the cafe owner. They give him bottomless cups of coffee. His caffeine habit is going to be out of control by the time we finish this project. Dug up more street, found the gas main. Turned on whatever needs to be turn on. The crew went inside with Ben, turned on the meters, cranked up the furnaces. They both seem to work, yay! But the gas should be hooked up to the water heater but we don’t have a water heater which means that our contractor needs to cap off something or other before it’s safe to leave the furnace running. Then, on their way out the door, without Ben noticing, they apparently popped a lock on each meter. Our contractor’s furnace guy showed up the next day and called and said he couldn’t turn on the gas because the meter was locked. Thus began 24 hours of Ben calling People’s Gas and getting left on hold, disconnected, sent to voice mail. He was told the meters are locked because the main isn’t turned on. But it is turned on it, he said. I saw them test the furnaces. But the computer says right here that the main isn’t on. Clearly if it’s locked, it’s because it’s not turned on. Well, you’ll have to talk to the distribution department about that. But they’re not open until Monday. So here we sit, trapped in some sort of administrative hell, while the days tick away. Owned the house for 18 days now and we still haven’t done any actual work toward renovating it into an inhabitable (and rentable!) space.

Ben put it best: “I think of it like coaxing an elephant through city streets. we’ll get there, but not quickly. you just have to be persistent and reasonable…and occasionally you have to clean up an enormous, steaming pile of shite.”

We did make a horrible mess out of the street, tho. Sorry neighbors!

weekend recap

{27 January 2014}

I had a such a lovely weekend in California. I got in late Thursday night and met Ben at his motel in Berkeley. The next morning I hopped a train for Pleasanton and spent the morning catching up over coffee with my college roommate, and the afternoon hanging out with her and her kids (burritos and legos!) The back to Berkeley for happy hour drinks with Ben’s coworkers, and a few of us continued on to Little Star for what I maintain is the best pizza in the world. Saturday we had a beautiful run up Strawberry Canyon in the Berkeley hills, then breakfasted on tortillas, salsa and eggs at a cute breakfast place near campus. Then off to San Francisco to hang out with Matt and Carrie and see their new house in Noe Valley. We devoted the afternoon to the pursuit of coffee and poking around a yarn shop, then home to admire the amazing view from their kitchen window, and play scrabble and eat Indian takeout. Sunday morning Chris and Teresa and the kids drove up from Palo Alto and we all walked down* to Tartine Bakery, loaded up on pastries and coffee and took the kids to the playground at Dolores Park. Then Matt whisked us off to the airport to await our [much too soon] flight home.

The unusual weather happening both in California and Chicago makes the comparison between places extra painful right now. Normally it should be 30’s and a little snowy in Chicago, and 50’s and rainy/foggy in California right now. But the drought in Cali means that it’s sunny and 70, while in Chicago the polar vortex means that we have a foot of snow and temps as low as -16 degrees. Subtract a few more degrees for windchill and we’re looking at a temperature spread of 100 degrees. It’s too much. I just hate winter. And it’s only the 3rd week of January! But I love my friends and my theatre community and my husband and the cost of living and my new house, and those things are all in Chicago.

I know that no matter where I live, Chicago or California, I will miss the other one. Until Ben and I figure out how to create our bi-coastal** existence, anyway. I wish we could buy plane tickets in 10-packs!

On the agenda for our next trip to California: Bay to Breakers, Maker Faire, visiting my new nephew***, and hopefully taking my niece to see some children’s theatre for the first time. Between now and then, I just have to tech two shows and we have to renovate an entire house. No bigs.

* Or skipped, depending on individual preference
** That’s west coast and third coast, for those of you who think only in terms of east and west
*** Scheduled to debut in March!

How to Throw a Cocktail Party in a Vacant Home, or, Pee Before You Come Over

{20 January 2014}

So, we bought a house. More accurately, we bought an empty shell that I lovingly refer to as Our Money Pit. Renovations will begin just as soon as the permits come through, but right now its just so cold and dusty inside that its tough to imagine living there. Intellectually, I know that once the place is warm clean inside again, it will feel like a home, but we’re not there yet. However Ben had the great idea to invite a few (hearty) friends over to celebrate last weekend. A literal housewarming, if you will. And so I offer you,

How to throw a cocktail party in a vacant home in 10 easy steps:

1. One hour before your guests arrive, send an email to remind them that no plumbing means no bathrooms, so….pee before you come over.
2. Let your guests know that the attire is “sleeping bag coat.” If they are Chicagoans, it’s a safe bet that they have one.

3. Packing blankets make nice seating, except that it’s too cold for anyone to sit down anyway.
4. Keep the drinks menu simple, and warm (ginger hot toddies and irish coffee).

5. Remember that no plumbing means you also have to bring in the water for making drinks. Unless you want to be melting snow for your drinking water, a practice which I can’t recommend for Chicago. (Incidentally, plenty of snow (and pigeon feathers) collected in the bathtub since the bathroom window doesn’t shut!)
6. Hang some Christmas lights at the front door so your guests know WHICH vacant house to enter.

7. Find the single working outlet and circuit all the Christmas lights together. Add a cube tap to simultaneously power the space heater and electric kettle and cross your fingers. Locate the fuse box in advance, just in case.

8. Space heaters are a nice visual gesture but when its 10 degrees out, they have very little impact.
9. Have a thermometer around so you know exactly HOW quickly your guests will freeze to death.

10. After a quick round of drinks and a tour by flashlight, adjourn to someone else’s house to warm up over cheese fondue.

Homeowners!

{15 January 2014}

After signing the paperwork, our very next stop was the hardware store for a snow shovel, salt, and a padlock for the front door. Renovations begin next week!