Category Archives: housework

Korean Kale Salad

food and cooking, garden, home, housework

The washer repairman didn’t call, didn’t come, so I was “stuck” at home all day. As I got busy cooking up lots of stuff in the fridge, and harvesting from the garden, and then cooking that, I remembered why I love getting stuck at home. So much gets done, when I get some momentum.

1) I made Ropas Viejas from beef chuck, for filling burritos. This means “old clothes” in Spanish, and is shredded, seasoned meat. We’ll have burritos tomorrow and use that, and I’ll have some to freeze.

2) I made a soup stock from some lamb bones, and took the meat off to add back to the soup.

3) I picked about 20 pimientos and for the first time tried roasting them under the broiler and my, did the skins come off easily. A few pieces I nibbled on like candy, and they were that sweet, and most of them I froze.

4) I made Red Pepper Butter by mixing two of the roasted peppers with sweet butter in the food processor; then I froze it in a jar for something…later.

5) I cut yams lengthwise and brushed them with olive oil, then sprinkled on salt, pepper and fresh rosemary (which I’d just picked from the back yard) and roasted them for dinner.

Then, after dinner, I got around to the kale that I bought a few days ago, and made Korean Kale Salad. This recipe I adapted from one in Sunset Magazine some years back. For number of ingredients, and simplicity of preparation, it is easy. I haven’t run across anyone who doesn’t like this salad. I had the nerve to serve it for Thanksgiving dinner the first time, and the guests were thrilled to have a tasty green vegetable that wasn’t cooked to death.

You start with 12 ounces of curly kale, which should be about a bunch. I haven’t weighed mine before, but I suspect that the bunches are getting smaller, because the salad seemed to get saltier every time I made it. So I reduced the salt in the recipe. If you find that it is not salty enough, you know what to do.

Tear your kale into bite-sized pieces, throwing out the tougher stems and veins. Wash it in a big bowl or the sink. Boil water in a pot and throw the raw kale in. Push it down with a spoon and keep it under the water until it is wilted. The original recipe said 4 minutes but I call that cooked. I blanch mine for 1 1/2 to 2 minutes.

Dump it into a colander and let it drain. I have a huge colander, so don’t let my photos scare you. I doubled the recipe because I have the equipment, and because I can eat a lot of this salad. By the way, a bunch is said to make 6 servings.

When the wilted kale is cool enough, grab it by bunches
and squeeze all the water you can out of it.

 

I ended up with 9 or 10 little wads of squeezed-dry kale.

Make the dressing, which has evolved under my culinary direction to consist of 1 tablespoon Asian sesame oil and 1 tablespoon soy sauce.

It’s a good idea to whisk the two together in a cup.

Put the kale in a bowl and toss it for a while to open up the leaves again. Sometimes I have to use my hands again at this point, or a couple of forks.

Pour on the dressing and toss another while. It does take some time to get the dressing evenly spread around.

It looks nice if you toast some sesame seeds and sprinkle them on top.

I had so much fun today, it left me with not enough time to post pictures of all the other stuff I made. The repairman finally did come, and my washer had healed itself temporarily, so tomorrow I’ll do laundry.

Winter’s A-Comin’.

home, housework, winter


When winter is in the air, what is the important thing to do? Lay in a supply of firewood.

We live in a drafty house, but thank God, we have a good wood stove and we don’t have many days that wood burning is banned. Last year I broke the law (isn’t it unconstitutional anyway?) a couple of times when I really needed that cheery fire to make the “barn” a hospitable place. We are on the fringes of the area where wood smoke is a problem, so I like to think it doesn’t actually apply to us.

Yesterday we got a big load of fuel delivered, and P. was around to help carry and stack.

When we do get temperatures that make us turn on the furnace, my chore time will shift from gardening to fire-tending. It’s my job to build the fires and keep them burning. And if I don’t, my phlegmatic self becomes more so, and the urge to climb in bed with a book just to warm the bones presses on my mind.

Mr. Glad found one log that was particularly curvy and pretty.


Ahh…the look of Providence, and wealth, and warmth.

Trying to Be Present

housework, poetry

Sundays usually feel transitional, but they don’t always strike me the same way. If the upcoming Monday is free of outside obligations, Sunday can feel restful all day, as I know that I can organize myself and accomplish quite a bit of work the next day, and get the week off right (although I know Sunday is the first day of the week, my mental calendar doesn’t show it in that position.)

 

This week’s Lord’s Day falls in the middle of a season that is transitional as well. I’m just through a very busy time, and waiting for a Big Event, the birth of a new grandchild. It’s a chance to catch up on little bits of work that no one is holding a deadline over my head about. Such as that slow de-cluttering I have a backlog of. This afternoon is providing some time for sifting. Much of the stuff is linked to my past, and I have to dispose of many things in the future–maybe the very near future, like tomorrow?


To remind me to enjoy this work, and to say hello, I give you another of Richard Wilbur’s Opposites, #19:


Because what’s present doesn’t last,

The opposite of it is past.

Or if you choose to look ahead,

Future’s the opposite instead.

Or look around to see what’s here,

And absent things will not appear.

There’s one more opposite of present

That’s really almost too unpleasant:

It is when someone takes away

Something with which you like to play.

 

If I start to think about all the playing with words he does here, I begin to see that I could enter into two opposites of present at the same time by being discontent: miss the present moment, which is also taking away from myself, and thereby missing the gift/present God wants to give me.


And I don’t want to miss it, so, “Hi ho, hi ho, It’s back to work I go!”


Christ is Risen!

What Am I About?

crafts, food and cooking, garden, home, housework, my garden, quotes, ,



When a man is in earnest and knows what he is about, his work is half done.   –Mirabeau

My trouble is, I don’t know what I am about. Or as we moderns would say, I lack focus. Some days the thousand details to be seen to, the hundred or so projects unfinished, don’t bother me. But today is another matter.

Maybe I am in transition from a heavy thinking period into a time when I need to attend more to housework and at least a couple of those tangible projects. The philosophical questions, and the writing projects–I assure you, just cranking out a few good paragraphs for this blog is a Project– can wait. It occurred to me that I should shut just down the computer for a spell, but then I remembered that if I write even a few words on the subject, it will help me come to grips with my “problem.” And in the process, I’ll share a few things from my week, somewhat haphazardly.

I recently started a new project, just to make things more difficult. A baby quilt for which there is a deadline, of course. Deadlines are just a facet of time, and time is not a bad thing. Christ sanctified time, if that were needed–and I don’t want to start thinking too much here!–when He entered it. So time, and deadlines, are all part of being human, and I mean that in a good way, as Christ was The Human. He had a deadline, the cross, but He never hurried or fretted.

This photo is one of two baby quilts I’ve made, both more than twenty years ago! I don’t want to show you the fabric for the current one yet, because I want it to be at least partly a surprise.

The photo of melon and blueberries is a beautiful image, yes? Those two just seemed to belong together. But it was an idea based solely on the visual sense, and failed completely when tested by the tongue. The honeydew was SO yummy by itself, and the blueberries were perfectly sweet and distinctive in that flavor that blueberries have. But together they clashed, or rather, the honeydew completely ruined the blueberries, and you wouldn’t know by that bowlful of color that blueberries were anything but flat and sour at the same time.

The fruit bowl surprise ties in to another somewhat philosophical point–about our western emphasis of the visual– that will have to wait. If I ever get back to that part of what I am about I’ll post the picture again. It’s pretty enough for a repeat.

There are two types of basil here. The green one is growing in my garden, and the purple-tinged bunch was given to me by K.

I washed it and spun it dry and did make pesto, though she wasn’t sure the flavor would be right. “Everyone” has a pesto recipe so I am not going to post mine. I got it about 30 years ago from a weekly very small-town newspaper, a recipe from a local woman who used sunflower seeds instead of nuts. Since then I have adapted and changed the recipe and switched to walnuts and then pine nuts and back again.

Pesto is infinitely variable. Depending on what you are going to do with it you might want to use more olive oil–or butter, as an Italian lady I knew used to do–to make it more runny. You might like to add some parsley or use toasted almonds as the last recipe I looked at did.

This time I was putting it on toast. We thought the flavor was outstanding. And just for good measure, I’ll show you the pan of zucchini I served that night.

I’ve lately noticed a phenomenon repeated from the past: one spends so much time cultivating the vegetables that it’s hard to get back in the house to cook them into the dinner. B. used to come out in the garden looking for me, asking if there was a plan for dinner that night?

Today I knew what I was about when I did my gardening in the morning! Tonight I will be ready.

I watered the vegetables and made a second picking of Blue Lake beans–wait! Do those look like Blue Lakes? You’re right, most of them certainly do not. A few, from last year’s seeds, are true to type, but my packet was mislabeled. The beans I am getting are mostly sticky, coarse and with a flat profile. They will probably have a bean-y taste, if they resemble Romanos across the board.

Hmm…another surprise in life. If you can’t get what you like, you have to like what you get. I’ll just slather them with pesto and everyone will love them.

Anyway, the green bean tower-tepee looks pretty, especially with that Celtic cross my friend H. gave me in the background.

This last picture is of my favorite flowers this summer, some nasturtiums and lobelia in a big pot that was a bargain at Food Maxx of all places. Year after year I try to get new varieties of nasturtiums to grown from seeds or plants in many places all over the garden, but they never take. Instead, the standard variety keeps growing in the cracks in the concrete around the pool pump where no one sees it.

nasturtiums+ 09

So this year I put two healthy starts in a pot, and with more TLC they are thriving. I’m wondering if I should place the pot over against the fence and encourage some seeds to self-sow in the ground…

Now for a closing thought, before I leave you to attend to the other kind of work–or toil:

Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.  —Herman Melville