torley manor

Hello little sweet potatoes! I wanted to eat some sweet potatoes, so Q went out to the backyard and pulled up a handful.

Chop and pan-fried an onion, a few garlic cloves, a good sized chunk of ginger, and then add the peeled and diced potatoes, about two tablespoons of curry paste (cheater!), about a teaspoon of red pepper flakes, and a can of coconut milk. Let that heat up and start bubbling, add a few big handfuls of chopped fresh spinach, and let the works simmer till the potatoes are tender. When it’s about ready, add a shot of soy sauce, and serve over rice.

Blurry and steamy photo, but photo nonetheless.

Simple as that, and DANG! It’s remarkably good for such a simple dish. Would be even better with some firm chickpeas or some good fried tofu like the thai trucks know how to make. Maybe that’s my next project: deep fryer!!!!

I feel like I hear all the time about how people can’t afford to eat a vegan diet, because vegan food is so expensive. This annoys the hell out of me for two reasons:

1. I think it’s really important to spend money on food, to really honestly put your money where your mouth is. Food, clothing, and shelter are necessary to survival, right? So why not spend the money on food that will sustain you and your local economy?

2. The stuff that’s too expensive to make regular meals out of is the ultra-processed fake stuff, like soy cheese and deli slices. Make a treat out of it. You really don’t need to eat that much dairy cheese, and you sure don’t need that much soy cheese. It’s a matter of being a smart spender.

That said, I’ve been thinking a lot about where my priorities are — is it most important to me to eat a vegan diet? To eat an organic diet? To eat a local diet? Or to do the best I can with those three criteria? Where do I compromise and where do I stand my ground? I don’t really have a lot of answers, other than that it’s more important than ever to me to support local groceries and local farms.

Allegro Hearth baguette, market broccoli, sauce and spinach ravioli from the co-op.

Dinner tonight featured foods from a local bakery, a local farm, and two really good deals at the food co-op, which meant we fed ourselves a fine meal on ten bucks. It’s not hard to do, but it does take some planning. Get into the groove, etc etc.

PS: Got a bushel of Macintosh apples at the market today! Sauce is in our future! Here’s half of ‘em:

Living room, with carpet and no furniture.

Why, it’s layers of various wood stain, just as you suspected!

In an allergic panic a few weeks ago, I convinced Q that tearing out the carpet in the living room would be a good project for the day. We ripped it out (still have to tear out the dining room and hallway carpet, and then THAT IS IT! NO MORE CARPET IN THE WHOLE HOUSE!) and then realized we had no idea what we actually wanted to do about the floor.

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Our house has a little bit of a funny facade. The front is a stone facade, in pretty good shape and very similar to a lot of houses in the neighborhood (not so many on our street, but a lot of houses on a street not far from us). The other three sides were a remarkably weird faux brick siding — not Insul-Brick, but actual thin slices of brick cemented on to chickenwire. I can’t imagine it was intended for outdoor use. It seems like something a home improvement TV show designer might recommend for making the interior of a kitchen more “rustic.”

A few years ago, we had contractors tear off the brick siding on the two most exposed sides of our house, insulate, and re-side with cement fiberboard siding. We couldn’t afford to do all three sides at once, and cement fiberboard really means putting your money where your mouth is, compared to most siding options (There will be no poison vinyl siding in my future. No sir.).

We’ve got contractors doing the third side of the house now (see pumpjacks and unpainted siding on our house, which is on the right), and we’ve learned a bit about the house this time. Last time all I can recall learning is that it really was true, our house had no insulation in the exterior walls. Who builds a house in Pennsylvania without putting insulation in it?

Perhaps the same braingeniuses who used steel flashing!

I’ve finally confirmed my suspicions that the kitchen door once had a transom over it. If you look closely at the photo, you can see some wads of insulation being held in with baseboard trim. Yes!

And there was another window in the little bedroom upstairs! I would NEVER have guessed that, and I think if we had known it was there, we might have had it put back in. But we didn’t know, and now there is siding over it again, which hopefully we will not need to replace until we are old. It’s a pretty sunny room anyhow.

I try not to love Things, but I sure love this house.  Q and I have been talking a lot lately about how easy it was and continues to be for us to put our roots down here, and to make plans to live here until we die. It feels like a lot of folks we know buy a house and plan to stay a while and then move on, but we’ve put so much energy into making this a place we want to be and live …. it’s hard to imagine just sending it along to another owner in our lifetime.

Cheers to feeling settled and sure, eh?

The public documentation notwithstanding, our summer has been really busy and we have a lot to show for it!

The harvest has been pretty swell, and I am pleased with how well and how much we’ve been putting by. We didn’t get to making any tomato sauce (yet! there is still a bit of time for that!), but in our cupboard you’ll find:

• 14 pints of canned tomato salsa
• 14 pints of canned tomatillo salsa (all our own tomatillos, too!)
• 4 pints of popcorn! yes! total success!
• one little jelly jar of the Tiger’s Eye soup beans

And in our chest freezer you’ll find:

• vast quantities of frozen homemade pesto (our own basil!)
• 15 boxes of string beans
• 3 tall boxes of strawberries
• 1 box of peas
• 2 boxes of carrots, sliced (soups!)
• 4 boxes of corn cut off the cob (for winter cornbread and chili)

Still in the freezer, but from local farms rather than our back yard:

• 2 gallons of blueberries (separated out into pie berries and muffin berries, because I am nothing if not my mother’s daughter)
• 1 gallon freezer bag of sweet banana peppers
• 1 gallon freezer bag of jalapeno peppers
• 2 gallon freezer bags of sliced bell peppers
• 3 boxes of sliced peaches

Q made a list of the fruits and veg in our freezer:

Come over sometime. We’ll make you dinner.