Alive again

What happens if you neglect your blog for a month or two? Especially if you take no notice of your web host’s email notifying you of a PHP upgrade?

The blog DISAPPEARS, that’s what! I took a random look at my google analytics last night and discovered I flatlined on Nov. 23. I checked the blog and it was gone. During the night, it occurred to me to check emails from my webhost. Sure enough, a PHP upgrade notice for Nov. 23.

At least my web host is responsive. I submitted a support ticket at 4 am and by 6, they’d found and fixed a database corruption. I don’t really know if that was caused by the php upgrade, and don’t really care, as long as I don’t have to start from scratch setting up the blog.

I may even go back to bed. It’s still only 6 am!

Leaf peeping along the Blue Ridge Parkway

The last time we were more than a day’s drive from home was Paris in March of 2008, so we’re WAY overdue!

We’re flying to Washington, DC, next week. We’ll spend four nights at the Hotel Monaco in old town Alexandria, then pick up a car and take several days to drive through Shenandoah National Park, the Blue Ridge Parkway, Great Smokey Mountains, and on to fly home from Nashville. As a bonus, we get to stop and visit friends in Knoxville!

I’m hoping for cool crisp days, spectacular scenery, and breathtaking fall color.

Foolish optimism – the winter vegetable garden

I’ve tried with limited success to grown a good winter garden before.

Theoretically, I know it’s possible, but the timing is tricky. It has to be planted late enough to keep from frying all those cold-loving plants in 100-degree weather, and early enough so they get some growth in before the dark and cold of December and January shuts everything down. Even if there’s nothing to harvest before December, if the plants have a good start, they’ll just wait the cold out and then burst into action in February.

I started at the first of September, filling one of the raised beds with sugar snap peas, carrots and rat-tail radishes. Since then I’ve been fighting off the snails (they LOVE tender little carrot seedlings) and the little green caterpillars “planted” by those pretty white butterflies. Who knew that caterpillars would like sugar snap peas? Dusting with BT is helping. And did I mention the last heat wave of the season last week?

Still, some of the peas are halfway up the fence, and the radishes look great, although they’ve yet to produce any flowers or pods.

Since the first of September, I’ve been adding more plantings as space is freed in the beds and the veggie plants become available at the nursery. Now I have gorgeous cauliflower plants, lush Italian parsley and newly planted celery, red cabbage and broccoli plants. Oh, shallots and onion sets too.

A few days ago I planted four of my small boxes with spinach and lettuces. These boxes are ringed with copper tape and filled with fresh potting soil every year to defeat the snails. It worked last year–I hope the snails haven’t spent the summer working out a plan to outsmart me.

I routinely cover all my raised beds with a wire mesh (about 2 x 4 in) when they’re empty or newly planted so the soil isn’t mostly covered with plants. This keeps my cats from doing their business among my veggies, but it isn’t enough to keep the squirrels from their fall food-burying frenzy. I saw at least a dozen fresh holes in and around my newly planted areas this morning. The photo below, a few years old, is of my sweet Carlos lounging on top of the wire, suspended two or three inches above the dirt. Anything for a sunbeam!

La fin des haricots*

They were wonderful while they lasted, delicious and amazingly productive, but when I took my eyes off the beans for a few days (road trip to Oregon), the aphids moved in and took over. Earlier in the season, I would have put up a fight, but I was beginning to get tired of beans anyway so I decided they might as well go.

Mom helped me tear them out and free up this year’s new fence for climbers. The fence worked so well and is so sturdy that I’m done forever with teetery bamboo pole tepees. All it took was three cheap poles and two fence panels from Home Depot.

Naturally, the minute I had empty garden space, I got itchy to start my fall garden, so last week I planted sugar snap peas the full length of the fence. Now I’m checking several times a day to see if the seeds have emerged yet. This morning I planted carrots and rat-tail radishes in the rest of the box (plus some other radish varieties and arugula in a couple of earth boxes that looked lonely and empty).

It’s hard to say whether my timing is right for starting the fall garden. Most years I’ve been too late, but this year I may be too early. Time will tell!

* French idiom meaning “the end of the beans, ” described in Clotilde’s Chocolate and Zucchini blog. Here, obviously, I mean it very literally.

My raisin nut bread

Unlike baguettes, which take few ingredients and lots of careful handling and technique, my whole wheat bread with raisins, cinnamon and walnuts has a long list of ingredients and not much technique involved. It’s a big ugly lumpy brown loaf, but it tastes good! It’s rich enough that a single piece toasted, even without butter, is a satisfying and reasonably healthy breakfast. (It’s even better with butter and apricot preserves.)

I started making it for our breakfast toast, years ago, with one of those fussy recipes for “perfect” raisin bread from Cooks Illustrated and a bread machine. I’d freeze half the loaf so it wouldn’t get stale before we could use it all. After a while, I got tired of dragging out all those ingredients only to dump them in the bread machine and have to do it again a week or two later. Besides, I wanted the counter space used by my bread machine for a KitchenAid mixer.

So now I make three loaves at a time, using the mixer for the mixing and kneading. The mixer will only handle one loaf at a time, so I get the first loaf started kneading, then assemble the dry ingredients for the next in a big measuring cup and the wet ingredients in another, ready to dump in when it’s their turn. I stop at three loaves only because I have three bread pans the same size and because I’m not sure four would fit comfortably in my oven.

The recipe has evolved a little from what I originally started with, and it may vary from time to time depending on what I thought I had in the pantry but don’t. I think it originally called for vital wheat gluten, which I no longer bother with because it didn’t seem to make any difference when I made it without.

I sometimes use honey and sometimes brown sugar, and sometimes I leave out the sweetener, cinnamon, raisins and nuts to make a simple whole wheat loaf.

I don’t know what the lemon juice is all about (it was part of the original CI recipe), but I always use it, to keep the dragons away I guess.

Raisin nut bread – 1.5 lb loaf

1 cup lukewarm water
1 large egg, room temperature
3 tablespoons (plus or minus) honey or brown sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon butter
¼ cup nonfat dry milk
1 ½ teaspoons salt
1 1/3 cups bread flour
2+ cups whole wheat flour
2 ¼ teaspoons active dry yeast or instant yeast
¾ teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 to 3/4 cup each golden raisins and walnuts

If using active dry yeast, proof it in the water with a little of the honey. If using instant, don’t put it directly on the salt or cinnamon, both yeast killers.

The amount of whole wheat flour required will vary depending on your flour, the humidity and maybe the phase of the moon. You want just enough so that the bread will come together in a smooth shiny ball in the mixer. I usually use about 2.5 cups.

Let the dough rise until double in an oiled or buttered bowl, then form the loaves and let it rise again in the buttered pan (sometimes I just use PAM) while you preheat the oven to 425. When you put the bread in the oven, reduce the temperature to 350 and bake for 40-45 minutes, until it reaches about 205 degrees.

Let it cool for five minutes or so on a rack, then tip it out of the pan to finish cooling.