Posie Gets Cozy

Tyler's Tomatillos, and a Time-Out

I TiVo a few cooking shows on my little upstairs television so I can watch one or two after I hop into bed, before Andy and Clover come up. I like this quiet time when I am cozy and my hands are still and I can watch Ina or Tyler or Alton make something. The three shows I like, Barefoot Contessa, Tyler's Ultimate, and occasionally Good Eats, have very different styles, their hosts very different energies. Ina is calming and competent; Tyler is full of whirling energy; Alton seems to make everything more complicated than it has to be (?), but I always learn something.

Lately, I have been choosing to watch the Tylers first. Such a nice guy — I saw his Chefography the other night. Good guy. Good food. Made his Chicken Enchiladas with Roasted Tomatillo Chile Salsa on Saturday night and they were fantastic. I highly recommend them, especially for a party or something ('cause the recipe makes a lot).

It was my first time cooking with tomatillos and I really like them. Sort of tart but sweet, and still mellow. You roast this stuff first, then bang it about in the food processor, then add part of it to the chicken sauce, part of it to the top of the enchiladas (below the cheese). Good stuff!

I'm going to sign off here for a bit and try to get myself a little more organized. I'm having a hard time staying on top of it all lately, and my in-box is a big disaster. I truly regret that I am unable to respond to a lot of the questions that seem to pile up in there, and here — please check my FAQ pages for some answers if you don't hear back. I'm working on Book Idea #2 and it is happily though completely occupying me. But I am going to try and get off my computer a bit to get outside and write some recipe cards in the sun. I feel like a mushroom that has been under a duvet cover of moss, and the sun is supposed to come out soon.

Of course, Emily's suggestion of uploading recipes to Tastebook.com and making your own cookbook is so tempting I can hardly stand it. It would require lots of time on the computer, but how awesome to wind up with a cool binder like that? They have great stock photos, and you can use your own, as well. I ordered the sample recipe cards and will let you know what the quality looks like when they come. This was not even on the list of things I need to do, but I can see that it could easily become one of those activities I could become quickly obsessed with as my in-box implodes, my pets go unwalked, my calls go unreturned, and my husband is forced to eat Combos and microwave popcorn for dinner.

Anyone know what this is?

Well I mean, does anyone know who makes this fabric, or what it's called, or, more importantly, where I can get another half yard? It's much prettier in real life than this yucky scan, and it's a gorgeous weight, like lawn. Wait — is this from Mill End Store? Ack. If you recognize this fabric, will you let me know? I need a bit more to finish something and am blanking.

Thank you for all the sweet bike ride comments, and the recipe card thanks, and the Cranford weigh-ins! I did love it. My favorite line was, "That cow is like a daughter to me!" I also loved "And now . . . anemones." That was wonderful. Can't wait 'til next week.

Eeeenywho, egads I have a lot of catching up to do. Lots of email to answer, so if you're waiting to hear from me, it might just happen this week. Might just happen!

A Bike Ride in the Country

After an incredibly stressful several months at work, Andy took some time off these past few weeks. As an early birthday present, I bought him a new bicycle so we could go out riding together. I have a really nice cruiser that he got for me eight or nine years ago. Now we ride in style. I love riding bikes because I can go so much further!

This is the Springwater Corridor, a former railway corridor once used to carry produce from the small farms to the city. Now it's a pedestrian/bicycle/horse path that crosses southeast Portland for about twenty miles, give or take. Yesterday we started at 122nd Avenue. That's Mt. Hood gleaming above the trees, about fifty miles away.

We rode to the old neighborhood of Ambleside in Gresham, once a vacation destination for Portlanders looking to get away for the weekend, now just a sweet little neighborhood. Here's the entrance and the darling house that faces the path. It's all private, so you can't get any closer. But, oh. It's so lovely.

The path wiles flatly through miles of brushy, blackberry-brambled urban countryside. Small farms, rickety outbuildings, chickens and sheep, and backyard ponies line the trail, along with the occasional apartment complex, busy-road crossing, and sketchy character. For the most part, it's a bucolic respite, smelling of weeds and fresh-cut grass and the gurgling creek. My favorite part is actually a short detour through the neighborhood near 158th, where a recent flood damaged the old trestle bridge. For a few blocks you must leave the path and travel the sleepy, carless road, over the creek, past the horse pasture.

I still think of my bike as my pony, as I did when I was a child, horse-crazy and filled with hopeless, stomach-aching longing, tying a string to my handlebars for "reins," riding my bike over "jumps" (painted lines) in the school parking lot behind my house. I set myself complicated obstacle courses in which I would compete (against myself), occasionally wiping out in spectacular displays: full-body abrasions and blood-curdling screams that would wake my after-dinner-napping father, who was never pleased with this. He did not like horses.

As an adult, this longing for the country life manifests itself in pasteurized, suburban-girl ways — a bike ride past some piney, running sheep (those are sheep), Thursday concerts at the farm, berries from the farmer's market, August pilgrimages to the county fair. I know nothing of the realities of the country. My mate is a city boy at heart; though always up for a field trip, he is a thoroughly social creature, delighting in close neighbors, cable TV, and the urban hustle. Our patch of property, at 50 by 100 feet, is almost too big. Well, it's quite enough. My longing is mostly fantasy, I am sure. I do know that country life isn't easy. But what I really long for is a slower life, one with less input, less output. Not easier, just quieter. Less car. More animals. More weather.

At least we have this beautiful bike path. I think there's a Sunday farmer's market at the end of it, too, in Boring.

Excellent. We'll be there.

My sister made us some recipe cards!

Isn't my sissy the most awesomest??? Look what she made for us:

Click here for the free downloadable pdf that you can print out on cardstock with your inkjet printer and cut out. Here's the strawberry one:

I love these. I had been on the verge of grumpily designing my own (because I have been wanting, pretty much every day for the past year, to completely redo my recipe box properly and I can never find recipe cards that please me) when Julie showed me her adorable and recently updated web site last week, and I saw these sweeties there. PERFECT. Done. Now for a nice pen, and a lazy afternoon. . . .

Thanks Jules!!! You rules.

Cranford on PBS Sunday Night

If you come to visit me for longer than a day I'll probably try to make you watch my favorite movies, including Wives and Daughters, my absolute favorite 19th-century BBC period-piece, based on the book by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Sunday night PBS's Masterpiece series will begin airing three episodes of Cranford, based on another Elizabeth Gaskell novel about a small English village struggling with the effects of the looming Industrial Revolution.

I think this aired last winter in the U.K.? Was it good? It seems like it's gotten great reviews. I'm excited for it, I must say. If you aren't able to watch it Sunday night, they're making it available to watch on-line for a limited time starting May 5. Can't wait.

Warm Night, with Reading, and Kitters

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on her tuffet.

She's like, "Oh, you WILL pay attention to me. When I sit on your head, lady."

All in Their Places

On Tuesday, I started winding floss. It had to be done. For several years I have had three very full boxes of floss bobbins, organized by color. But this week I rewound all of them onto plastic bobbins (many of the old ones were on paper), labeling them with their DMC stickers (if I could — many of the numbers were not noted, and I had duplicates of many), redoing my rainbow.

It took two days. Rewinding flosses and planting them into rows of flossy tulips is fun for about . . . twenty minutes. On the fourteenth bobbin, you're still like, "Cool, this is fun, looks pretty, only 249 more to go, no prob, bring it." By the 50th you're like, "Yeah, they [whoever they are] are so right, I so totally have no life. None." By the last ones (in the 200s) you're feeling very mental, much as you did when you were finishing the ripple blanket on the ripple assembly line, sort of panicking and winding faster than your carpal tunnel allows, like someone running downhill on America's Funniest Videos (and by the way, as a longtime AFV watcher I never thought anyone could replace the comedic lunacy of Bob Saget, but Tom Bergeron you are hilarious, especially when you do that Big Head thing? — you should do a Big Head thing on someone running downhill toward, like, a big pile of soft hay or something. That would be hilarious. And also, more merry-go-rounds and treadmills. There's just nothing funnier than people wiping out on those). Anyway, when you're on your last bobbin, you will feel like your brain got all tangled and spun on the floss merry-go-round, so go have a bike ride and clear your head.

Oh, the bike ride. Well, the tire was brand new, put on at the bike shop that morning because the one from last year was flat. When it blew, Andy let me ride his new bike to save my bad foot the three-mile walk, and he led my lame Palomino pony (actually, she's more of a buckskin) back down the no-street-access path in topsiders and no socks ( = six blisters and a sad, barefooted walk back into the bike shop since he couldn't fit the shoes back on over the bubbles. I dared him to walk in barefoot. No one got it, though, except us, natch, because our humor is so subtle and cleverly hilarious. At least they didn't charge us to replace it again).

Guess we'll be getting that emergency repair kit we so cavalierly passed on at the bike shop the day before (when we were buying Andy's new bike). We pretty much go to the bike store every day. The bike guys said there was something wrong with my rim, which popped the tire, but supposedly that's been corrected now, so we'll see. . . . We are biking dillettantes. Don't ask us to be smart about it 'cause we won't. But look at these awesome bicycle baskets by David Hembrow. You may wonder why they are so expensive until you watch the video of him making one and then it is all very clear. Now that's handmade, baby.

Anyway, back to me. I am so loving the variegated hand-dyed cotton flosses from Weeks Dye Works and The Gentle Art. The Valdani threads are beautiful, though I haven't tried those yet. I buy evenweaves and fancy floss from Acorns and Threads here in town. After I recovered from the winding, when I saw how many regular floss bobbins I had that weren't numbered, I also hightailed it over to the DMC web site and ordered a floss color card, which should be here any day! Oooo, I can't wait!

Yes, this is how I get my jollies. What of it.