The Front Yard Design

It's good to know when you're in over your head and you can find someone to help.

This happened with our neatly packaged little farmhouse with an acre of raw land.  The house was upgraded by someone we think of every day but never knew, who redesigned the rooms, finished the attic, ran new electrical and plumbing, upgraded the kitchen and baths and did an outstanding job. The only thing we had to do was move in.

That great experience somehow gave us (me) the idea the rest would be a piece of cake. We muddled around with a garden and informal drips, uncovered an iris garden in the back that we've kept alive and been charmed by the figs, pomegranates and olives, but we couldn't make headway on the yard.

My hummingbird/butterfly/bee pollinator garden idea didn't come with a plan, just lots of drought friendly yard tours and pics from the internet. No wonder trying to do it was  front was lost in translation and has since languished for the last several years. I swear to you each of those rocks has a big ugly toothy grin reminding me I'd bitten off more than I could chew. Don't I know it. There was 43,800+ feet of unlimited potential. We needed a plan.

Pretty much we weed our hearts out and mow it like crazy, try to keep it neat and focus on the gardens all the while wishing the outside could reflect our deep love of living here. We needed someone with know how.

Enter Kimberly and a couple of yard installer companies, and we're pretty jazzed with the result.

We also met a great local guy to do the hard prep work, haul off the rock, level and rototill the yards and even run irrigation on the other side of the drive. Looks like there may be a little old fashioned bartering along the way.

Tomorrow it starts.

Restoring Hardwood Floors

https://www.littleyellowwheelbarrow.com/restoring-hardwood-floors/

RESTORING HARDWOOD FLOORS AFTER YEARS OF NEGLECT

BEFORE & AFTER

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SRestoring hardwood floors can be challenging. Years of traffic, dropped items, scratches from bedposts, fires, and floods leave behind damage.

Refinishing the hardwood floors in our home meant dealing with all those things. Over the last century, these floors saw everything.  I still insisted on salvaging them  They were the only historical pieces left in the entire house and I did not have the heart to tear them out

Luckily oak is wood that can stand the test of time. If you can find old oak floors, the likelihood of restoration is high.

Even if you think your hardwood floors are beyond repair, you may be able to breathe life back into them.

The floor in the kitchen was beyond restoration (so they said). We found evidence of a flood, a fire, and a DIY attempt that went wrong.  Whoever attempted to restore these floors gave up midway.  They tossed down a 1/4 inch of leveling compound, some linoleum and called it a day.

Restoring this floor would prove to be a challenge.

Our living room was in slightly better shape. For how it was done, the link is attached. 

I present to you our floors as proof that anything is possible when you’re working with wood.  Many people told us they were beyond repair.  Good thing I’m stubborn.

OUR HARDWOOD FLOOR RESTORATION THE BEFORE & AFTER

Can you believe they are the same hardwood floors?  The after photos all look different colors, but all the floors are a warm brown like the very last picture.  When I took these photos, I was using a potato.

Was it worth it? YES. I love my floors. It cost us 1.00 (Canadian) a square foot for the sander rentals, sandpaper, stain, and polyurethane.

They are not 100% perfect, but I’m okay with that.  These restored hardwood floors have a rustic charm that adds a lot of personality to the house.

If you’re sitting on hardwood floors that are covered up by linoleum or carpet, you should have a peek.  You might not have to repair anything.  Your floors might only need a refinishing job.

Although our hardwood floors took months to restore, the actual sanding, staining, and sealing happened over one single long weekend.

If you have any questions about our floor restoration, feel free to drop me an email or leave a comment.

Dirt to Design

We've got this itch to start on stuff now that I am home to help equally. I'm a little more itchy than the Hubs with me being the freshest retiree, but still.

Our land is mostly dirt except for the amazing trees that have been here since the early 1900s, when the house was built. Other than the house, the garage, a 50 foot gravel drive and the trees that have been here forever and the little sculpted areas for garden and herbs, and the Kalamata olives, Pomegranates and Mission Fig trees, the space is woefully underutilized.

The problem is how to take what I'm imagining and make it real. 

A few years back we tried and failed. I had this great vision of a rock and tanbark front space with a walking trail and benches and an open space for wildflowers. It would have plantings and little funky decorations like a vintage metal headboard and yard art. The bees and butterflies would come and we'd sit on our little bench and enjoy them with the ferals Bob, Rook and Smudge.

I had internet pictures. I had a crew. We had the Hubs with a tractor and a big load of rock. Let's just say it didn't exactly go as planned.

So after licking my wounds for lack of preparation, needless effort and expense - not to mention creating a whole big mess to clean up -  it has stayed that way a long time. The Hubs and a friend made some progress but the yard is a wreck. And working FT, I couldn't find the energy to get out there and make a dent.

Failure has a way of sparking new ideas, though.

Like, we need a design. On paper. By someone who knows this stuff. A design we can understand and achieve. And someone to design the irrigation so everything stays alive. Something to follow.

So this is our dream space.

Leave about 30% of the untamed space in back alone. The target range stays and we'll add an activity course for the dogs. It should blend with our homestead and the community: simple, purposeful, and casually containable. We'll need space in back for entertaining and plant a stand of fruit trees to give us more fruit varieties since I'm so into canning.

We definitely need some grass to romp and play and lots of indigenous plants with room to nestle seasonal garden veggies around.  My herb garden stays.  I guess in the end we want things we can eat and purposeful plantings and butterfly/bee/hummingbird loving trellised vines  -  plus lemongrass, citronella, and lemon for the natural mosquito repellant we make.

Oh, is that all.

So on Monday, Kimberly the Visionary will be here. She specializes in natural and functional designs for our zone. I'm excited.

Not MY Nana's Meat Sauce

I am Midwestern, a mix of Scottish/English/French, and I'm lucky to come from a long line of frugal, hearty cooks. We're big stick-to-your-bones kind of cooks, and keep-you-warm-in-a-blizzard cooks.  I didn't grow up in the Midwest but my parents did, and they did the raising.

The one and only spaghetti sauce I know is a red sauce with browned hamburger meat with some onions and spices, cooked up in about 30 minutes (less if you were using a jarred sauce). Through the years I've worked to improve the basic sauce with longer simmering times, fresh ingredients, freshly picked herbs, more garlic or a spoonful of pesto, but it pretty much resembles the original version.

And then last week I found something called Sunday Gravy. Man! Those Italians know how to keep a secret. The back history of the sauce is that Italian families have made Sunday Gravy for generations and passed the recipe and basic principles for making it from mother to daughter. It's completely adaptable, and an added plus is it transforms leftovers with an amazing sauce that tastes like nothing I've ever had.  Apparently each new generation can totally make it their own without sacrificing the original flavor they remember as kids.

An Italian friend who didn't know the term Sunday Gravy until I described it, said, 'Oooh! That's the refrigerator gravy my grandmother made because she used up all her meat leftovers. We had it all the time.' 

And that made me love it even more, because people like me who hate to waste food love anything that disguises leftovers into an amazing meal.

So I gave the recipe a try.  We had it, we loved it, we shared it, they loved it, so it's definitely blog worthy.

Here is the amazing original post and long version of the sauce with, of course, the recipe:   http://www.platingsandpairings.com/authentic-italian-sunday-gravy/

Browning

I have this need to give recipes my personal spin. So ...
- I didn't toss the garlic, because you don't do that.. And I increased the amount.
- I added in more seasonings.
- I cooked it all afternoon, in a Dutch oven at 325 degrees, not on the stovetop. My stove tends to run a little hot and I didn't want to burn the sauce and I didn't want to stand guard over it.
- I found there was so much meat in the sauce I ended up increasing the ingredients to compensate for it. Plenty of meat for tripling the original recipe. Basically I doubled the meat and ended up quadrupling the ingredients to keep up with how beefy it was.

The sauce starting out

In a large Dutch Oven:
Step 1 - brown all the meat in oil, and set it aside on a plate
1 lb or less each of pork - beef - and Italian sausage (cooked or not; anything you have on hand)


Step 2 - turn down the heat, toss in 10 cloves of garlic to soften and scrape up stuff from the bottom.

Step 3 - add most everything to the pot except meat:

One onion, roughly chopped
Tomato product: 135 ozs of a combo of crushed tomatoes, diced, stewed, or garden/canned or frozen fresh.

Browned Meats, added to sauce

Some fresh basil leaves
A couple of branches of fresh Marjoram (just toss it in, stem and all)
2 bay leaves
Salt and Pepper (I leave the salt out until the end)
Any other favorite sauce flavorings
A couple of carrots sliced 1/4 inch thick, because I am wild for them in pasta sauce

Step 4 - Nestle the meat back in and bake it

If the meat is a little cramped, that's okay. If you're genuinely short of sauce, add broth and mess with it. Once everything looks good, put the Dutch Oven in the oven on a mid level shelf - covered - at 325 for about 4 hours. I checked it once an hour, because the aroma pretty much made it impossible not to.



At about the 2 hour mark taste for the kind of flavor you want - super meaty and deep. You can remove some of the meat here if you'd like. I left the sausage in for good.

Step 5 - After it cooks awhile and flavors do their thing, remove the meat and pork chunks to a plate - and work on the broth.

Late adds/adjustments:
To thin: Add broth (beef or pork), and I did use at least a quart
To deepen the tomato-y flavor: Add tomato paste, up to 6 oz

By now, The Gravy is delicious enough without the meat, but I added it back in to my sauce. Personal preference, I guess.

The Gravy was served over linguine that night with some fresh parmesan, green salad and a sourdough baguette. Two nights later we had it again, this time over homemade ravioli from Jackson CA, and it was also excellent. I hear it's great over polenta and mashed potatoes.

I pressure canned the rest in pints, sure that it will be our reach-for sauce for entertaining, gifting, and when we are out on the road. The canned sauce definitely needs a little thinning, so a pint is plenty for four mouths if served with sides and some bread. As my mother would say, Delish.

PS I started another batch last night.

Land Ho

One of the best things about feeling fingertips on the keyboard again, other than hearing the clicking sound and giving it a good dusting, is the joy of taking time to be quiet with myself. 

On the one hand I suppose I can say something about life being full and overflowing, and not enough time to squeeze it all in; but the truth is more of a shameful reminder of how easy it is to get pulled from something I love to do and fill my time with less gratifying things.

The Artichoke continues to return from the hot unrelenting summer heat and in the late fall through early Spring produces long healthy fronds and *sometimes* beautiful artichokes to enjoy while the getting's good. It inspires me to do better.

The decade of deep drought is taking its toll.  Like people, you can only guess what's going on inside.

We lost a pomegranate. Very randomly, she quit leafing last spring and no fruit came, but the little tree in the partial shade of the olive in back seems to have come into its own, and so we had juice and jam after all. 

A lovely old Halloween shaped Black Walnut that hugs the house has last year's leaves hanging ominously on its branches and we will know soon if they sound the death knoll for it. 

So far, the Pines and Valley Oaks and Olives are standing tall.  So far.

The old fig is in a new phase of its life, as a home for bugs. One brave branch remains, stretching upward, and 50 or more shoots coming up all around the tree to start again. Its bark is loose and perfect for the woodpeckers.

I'm half terrified about discovering the large wild fig along the northern edge of our yard facing the farmer's field. The outside freezer is already half full of figs that are outpacing our capacity to eat them and, with two harvests a season, we've got whole and chopped figs packaged for breads and cookies - pureed figs for leather and to be paired with chicken breasts - whole figs - fig sauce - and in the pantry, fig vodka, jams and preserves.

Fig lovers, come on by!