What the Rain Brings

Slugs and Fungi, at least.

This spring is another wet and cool one.  We got all excited by a (brief) shot of warm weather in mid-May and planted a bunch of stuff in our garden, only to see the eggplant, basil and peppers turn yellow and wan in the subsequent rains.  However, as the season has progressed things _have_ gotten a little better.  At least we have some radishes:

 And here is a shot of the whole garden.  The tomatoes are on the right, with all the rebar poles.  Eventually we will have the cages up.  Interesting note:  the stuff that's doing the best (other than radishes, which are hard to screw up) is a patch of asian greens that volunteered.  We just left them and are using them in stir frys, etc.

On a trip back from Bend, we stopped by one of our favorite mushrooming spots around Mt. Hood.   We'd hoped the recent rains had restarted the Morel season.  No such luck:  but we did find a nice batch of Boletus Rex-Veris (B. "True King"), which is basically a spring version of B. Edulis.  We made some cep soup last night and that was pretty tasty.

Here's a photo of our find:

...not too bad for about an hour's work.

Retrospective, 1 year ago; current house projects

I was reviewing our old blog postings done about 1 year ago. This time last year we were stressing about the exterior house colors, and the various built-ins had arrived: kitchen cabinets, upstairs cabinets/shelves etc. I sure am glad we're past all that now.

Current house projects are mostly centered around building storage shelves in the basement. That's been a step-at-a-time process, because I wanted to seal the basement floor _before_ putting in the shelving. We got some acrylic sealer from our contractor, thinking that we would do that part ourselves. Well it's taken awhile but we're about halfway through that part of the project. I've been cleaning the concrete before applying the sealer, and that involves sweeping, vacuuming and then wet-mopping. Doing 1900 square feet that way is just going to take some time.

In addition to the concrete sealing, I've been working on making a router template. My shelf design calls for some additional 2x4 supports, and I don't want them sticking out past the edge of the shelf -- so I'm going to route out some pockets in the shelves so the supports will be flush with them. A saw won't work because of the back edge of the pocket. So I found some thin plywood at our building materials recycling place -- 39 cents for a 1' x 3' piece -- and cut a template for my router guide. I used a coping saw to cut out the back edge. I tried out the template yesterday on some scrap plywood (we have LOTS of that around) and after a bit of refining with a file it will be fine for the job. I need a sharper router bit though -- maybe a carbide bit instead of the high speed steel one from my el-cheapo router bit set.

That reminds me. Long back one of my acquaintances was using a router to make some speaker cabinets. He had a wood panel clamped to the top of his very expensive table saw, and unfortunately had the router bit set too deep. He cut a slot across the cast iron surface of his saw and didn't even notice it. It was a carbide router bit. Note to self: don't use a table saw as a work table.....

Been awhile

A little catchup to do -- the most-recent post was back in October '11. A few highlights --

The garden season was an extended one -- we finally got enough ripe tomatos and peppers to make some tomato chutney and salsa. Here's the salsa just before canning it:


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Fall mushrooming: We managed to bag (literally) a few Chanterelles. Lisa went on a couple of foraging trips with a friend down to Black Rock, which is on the East side of the Coast Range near Salem. Pretty good hunting there.

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The frosts seemed to come late this year -- but when they did I got some nice photos:

and:
This latter photo is interesting because it shows the location of some heat leaks, where the frost has melted on the roof. It can be seen that most of the heat is coming out around the fireplace chimney. I need to get up in the attic to see what's going on there. The insulation may have been moved around when the exhaust pipe from the fireplace was put in....

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ISTFA (International Society for Test and Failure Analysis):

This is a professional society I belong to. Since I'm in the failure analysis biz, this is a good symposium to attend--in addition to lots of technical info there's always a good vendor exposition where we can take a look at all the latest tools. I co-chaired one of the sessions (that's how I get my company to send me to these things). This year the symposium was in Silicon Valley.

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Thanksgiving!

We drove over to my Dad's in Clarkston for Thanksgiving. We thought it would be a good thing to do, since it was his first Thanksgiving without Mom. The roads were good so we arrived without incident. We stopped by Chateau L'Ecole for a break and to taste some of their wines. Pretty good overall but pretty expensive, too. We bought a few of their less-expensive offerings.

It was nice to get together for Thanksgiving. My sister and brother-in-law, along with their daughter, drove over from Pendleton, too.



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Christmas:

What would Christmas be without our chocolate truffles? This year we did three different kinds. In addition to the usual grappa-soaked prunes and Monmorency cherries (both courtesy of Trader Joe's), we tried chili-mango. For the latter, we added some ground pasilla pepper to the chocolate ganache, and also dusted the just-dipped truffles with some of the pepper. Here are some shots of the process:

1. Make the ganache (centers). The chocolate is melted and mixed with butter, cream and the drained/dried fruit. Over the years, the chocolate we use has become less and less able to "absorb" the butter, so I have found it necessary to cut the butter in about half. Ganache that has too much butter in it looks very much like a mixture that has seized, and is very difficult to correct. It took awhile to figure out what was going on, too..

Weighing the chocolate. It is much more accurate this way. That's Trader Joe's Pound Plus chocolate.
Getting ready to combine the chopped chocolate and hot cream. It isn't necessary to use a double boiler or Bain Marie to melt the chocolate: just nuke the cream and add to the chocolate.
The Ganache and fruit:


The final result, after coating and pretty-fying the truffles:
From left to right, we have two of the prune and one of the cherry truffles. The chili-mango look very much like the prune -- just a slightly darker dusting of powdered Pasilla pepper.

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This year the family "did" Christmas at our place. Talk about a baptism of fire -- we were slated to have 13 visitors for this gig! Not all stayed at our place, since one of my nephews and his wife live in the Portland area. Still, we had 7, in addition to Lisa and me, staying there. We did prime rib for the Christmas dinner. I cooked it in our charcoal slow-cooker. It came out pretty good, altho next time I think I would add less apple wood to the fire -- it was a little too smokey.

Decorating our small live Christmas tree:

First evening dinner (we cooked a Costco ham):
The above photo was taken from the bottom of the stairs, toward the nook.

Christmas Morning. The tree is dwarfed by all the gifts!

Christmas prime rib!
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Finally, on a sadder note, our old cat Rosco continues to fail. He has lung cancer. We're just trying to keep him comfortable and monitoring his condition. When he starts acting uncomfortable or in pain we will put him to sleep. If there's a kitty heaven we're sure that he will be greeted by our meezer Dancer and his friend Mittens.