torley manor

After a long period of successfully not breaking any mugs, we’ve had a couple casualties over the last few months. You may remember me talking about breaking my Roboto mug (and its subsequent replacement), but now we must lay rest to my Carnegie Mellon scotty dog mug.

Its been cracked along the edge for awhile now, tho’ on the left-handers sipping edge, so not a reason for this household to consider tossing it. I’m not sure who cracked it, but lets blame it on Andy. Anyhow, like i said, it had been cracked, but we kept it in rotation, until we were doing dishes after our 3rd anniversary party and realized that the crack had extended along the entire wall of the mug (you can see the slightly darkened line of the crack in the photo). So we decided it was time to retire the ol’ guy.

The scotty dog mug will be missed – a remnant of my time in the employ of Carnegie Mellon University. Its been over 5 years since i left that place and I worked there for about 3 1/2 years – making that mug likely 6-7 years old. We’ve shared quite a bit of tea over the years my old friend.

But the mourning was short lived as my boss, Dirty Pete, showed up at the anniversary party and bestowed upon us a nice set of 2 new mugs.

These are handmade mugs by Justin Rothshank of the Union Project. They have a really amazing metallic finish on them and an image of a power hammer-drill. Apparently there is a teapot with the same finish and design. We may need to hunt that sucker down. I hadn’t realized that the Union Project had a ceramics program, but they do, and they offer a nice selection of stuff for sale. Check it out!

It was a weekend of discovery in the garden.

On saturday, while digging up the sweet potatoes, I overturned a shovel full of dirt from the corner of the raised bed only to unearth 8 tiny mouse/rat babies.

Here’s a pic of some of these cute lil’ fuckers…

Not knowing what to do, I tossed them in a bucket to hold them in until I could think of a course of action. After Emma got home from work, we decided the best solution was to get them out of our backyard, so we took them in a shoebox to Allegheny Cemetery where we deposited them under a pile of leaves in a small garden. Did they perish without their mother? Its likely, but it seemed the most natural/humane way to handle them. Good luck lil’ guys!!

Then on sunday, while picking the string beans (yes! the late batch of beans is providing a nice harvest!) I saw something in the dirt. Picking it up and cleaning it off revealed a little cowboy with a gun figurine. So awesome to still be finding random toys and whatnot in the garden after 3 years.

Gotta love ‘em. Most versatile cookies ever. This recipe is from a really great super snobby food blog called Baking Bites that I read occasionally. It’s probably the best thumbprint cookie I’ve made OR eaten. It’s got just the right texture, which is (surprisingly) accomplished with cornstarch. They’re pretty impressive cookies, whatever way you go about them.

Ways to go about thumbprints:

1. As per the original recipe, fill the unbaked cookies with jam/fruit curd and bake.
2. Bake unfilled cookies and carefully fill the wells up to the brim with a thin frosting that will harden on top and stay gooey inside. This is especially good if you zest a lemon into the cookie dough, and put a bit of lemon juice into the frosting. Very grownup cookie. I’ll show you some of these eventually. The trick to that frosting is a bit of corn syrup. You’ll laugh but I got the recipe on the back of a dollar package of Christmas cookie cutters I got at the Bloomfield Foodland …. which featured Santa and a six pointed star. Amazing.
3. Bake unfilled cookies and show off your fancy frosting tips while you pipe in some buttercream frosting. I went for chocolate this time, but have done orange frosting, and vanilla too, and I don’t think there’s really any way to go wrong here.

Chocolate buttercream frosting piped onto vanilla thumbprint cookies.

Raising a cookie army. I quadrupled the recipe. This picture is not all of the cookies!

Proud mama with her million cookie babies. Q says “Look at those cute fuckers!” and I agree.

(Also known as the right way to make those sweet potatoes I made a while back.)

This was a stellar summer meal: string beans straight out of the garden right before dinner, a veggie burger with fresh tomato from the garden and lettuce from the farmer’s market, and glorious glorious sweet potato slices.

The recipe is from “Ultimate Vegetarian Recipes” from Parragon Publishing — it’s a 500-page coffee table style book with tons of food glamor shots, including prep photos. A lot of the recipes are really impractical and not the way I would choose to do things (and a lot of them really focus on eggs and cheese), but I am glad I stumbled on this recipe. .. .. …. if you can call it a recipe. Really it’s just a method, I guess.

Anyway:

1. Boil a sweet potato whole (ten minutes for a big one. maybe a bit less for a smaller one.)
2. Let it cool enough for you to touch it without cursing. Peel it with a vegetable peeler or your fingers or a paring knife. All work pretty much equally well.
3. Cut into slices — the recipe says thick ones, but I like them better when they’re on the thin side because they get crispier.
4. Pour a little more vegetable oil in a big skillet than you think you should. Heat it up, add the sweet potato slices, squirt a little chili sauce on them, and cook them till they have some darrrrrrrk brown crispy spots on ‘em. Make sure both sides get good and crispy.

The actual recipe says to grill them, and I guess if you’re into that kind of thing, it’s probably good. What can a grill do for me that a skillet can’t?

Based on a suggestion from a pal, I looked into the FLOR company — they make modular carpeting, and it was vaguely remembered by said pal that they have recycled options. The website is remarkably uninformative so I sent away for the catalog to get a better sense of their policies.

It’s never explicitly stated that any of the carpets are made with recycled materials, they do have an environmental responsibility program that they call “Mission Zero (TM)” — which aims to “eliminate any negative impact our family of companies may have on the environment by 2020.”

Well, you’ve got a long way to go if all but three of your carpet options are made of nylon, polyester, or acrylic. (The other options are wool, corn-derived fiber, and sisal.)

I have been thinking so much lately about what my priorities are, in terms of being a responsible consumer. It’s been very much in the front of my mind lately, as I recently bought a new pair of shoes and spent what felt like forever trying to choose a product that was non-leather, non-vinyl, comfortable enough to withstand the amount of walking and standing I do, at least not totally hideously ugly, and made with decent labor practices. So, especially lately, I try to pay a lot of attention to (as Rick Sebak might say) What Things are Made Of And Where They Come From.

The manufacturing process for nylon creates a particular greenhouse gas far worse (can you quantify “worse” in this case?) than carbon dioxide. HOLY SHIT. And since I just officially became a climate change alarmist after watching a Nova program on PBS, I can’t fathom choosing to buy something with such a huge impact.

But the thing is . . . . . . . . . it’s so hard to accurately measure impact, for someone who is just a regular consumer. It’s not like your average consumer (and I include myself in that category) has ready access and time and energy to look into life cycle impacts for all the materials in the products they’re looking to buy, especially when they’re not all listed. How do you begin to tabulate any of that information about the glue that holds the top and bottom of your shoes together?

So back to the FLOR modular carpet tiles and other sustainable or just less-poisonous flooring options. The bottom line here is that they cost a LOT more, pretty much across the board, than do non-sustainable and more-poisonous options.

I find myself thinking more and more that, despite my decision to eat mostly vegan, maybe some animal products are more sustainable. Would I buy three pairs of canvas shoes in the span of time it would take one pair of leather shoes to wear out? But then I start to think again about all the reasons I want to remove myself from the animal processing industry, about working conditions for slaughterhouse employees.

And then I start to think about how many many many options we have to choose from, and how none of them feel very good.

Today I yanked the potatoes. We had six plants growing in a raised bed. This is our third year of growing potatoes and we’ve had modest success in that we’ve always actually gotten potatoes, but not necessarilly as many as one might imagine we could get. For the last couple of years we have attempted to mound the dirt around the plants as they grow, which in theory is supposed to increase your yield. This year we spent way too much money on new dirt in order to aggressively try this strategy. Results = inconclusive.

From six plants, this is our complete harvest…

Many garden plants are an economic plus for a househould. Spend $2 on a packet of seeds, get many many times the value of that in veggies from that packet of seeds. Potatos, not so much in our experience. We could’ve gotten more potatoes than our harvest for the cost of the seedlings alone, not to mention the cost of the fancy store-bought dirt we brought in.

But ultimately there is something very exciting about potatoes. It’s a gamble and a surprise. You watch the plants grow all summer and get huge and you have to wonder what’s going on below the surface. Then when the time comes you break out the shovel and dig them up and there’s no turning back. And even if you only get a handful of potatoes from your crop, goddamnit, there is nothing like some fresh potatoes from your garden (especially if you’re living in the city, like fresh grown corn from your garden, its just something that you normally don’t get).

Will we continue to grow potatoes here at Torley Manor? Probably. At least give it another year and see if we can increase our yield. If not, maybe we’ll find it better to devote that section of garden to something else.

Speaking of which, our patience with the brocolli looks like its about to pay off. Two of the 3 plants now have edible looking brocolli heads on them. This guy is about 4″ across now. The other one is just starting to form. So exciting!!!!