I'm still not going to buy beets

More beets in the CSA box this week. I had to do something with them, since I still had the beets from the last box. So, I cut them up (surprise - half were white inside!) and roasted them with a little olive oil and sprinkled them with salt. They were edible, but I am still not going to buy them and will only eat them under duress (or if needed to finish the CSA box). Kale chips, on the other hand, were great. Torn into bite-size bits, the curly kale greens were tossed with some olive oil and roasted for about 10 minutes into crispy yumminess.

5

JT turned 5 on Monday. He helped me bake chocolate-chocolate chip cupcakes and wanted light green and orange frosting stars. We were out of cupcake liners and the cupcakes turned out kind of dry and short, but he liked them. We picked up a friend of his from the preschool and I took the two 5 year olds to the free yoga class at the library. On the way home they insisted on telling knock-knock jokes. JT's favorite: knock-knock/ who's there/ mary/ mary who?/ merry christmas! and his friend's: knock-knock/ who's there?/you/ you who?/ you in the bathroom. I'm not quite sure why that was funny, but I am not a 5 year old boy.
We had a little cupcake celebration at our house and the boys played outside until there was a boomerang incident and then a croquet ball was thrown in the air and bounced off the car, towards a window. In the evening we had another cupcake celebration and more presents. He didn't care for the cape I made him (in orange and green) - the neck shouldn't have had velcro and it wasn't long enough, but he did say he would like it if I fixed it. (Sigh...) Mr. Burli's present was much more exciting - 2 hockey sticks for street hockey - painted in orange and green stripes. JT also liked his other presents, and he saved the one from his cousin for last. "It sounds like legos!" It turned out to be Playmobil pirates. Also a hit. He even tested out the boat in the bath.
So, 5. No longer is brown the favorite color. Nor pink. Although today when the store didn't have orange streamers for his party, he said he would take pink instead. No, everything needs to be light green and orange. And the favorite sport was bowling up until a couple days ago. Now it is soccer with hockey a close second.
He still loves trains, but power miners and pirates and dinosaurs are also high on his list. Tonight the train tracks were used to make a 'book club' game where 2 cars named Superwhy and Sarah flew from the book club into a book. (Apparently he spent too much time playing around at pbskids.org today.) He also helped Mr.Burli shred some newspapers for his pinata, but insisted that first they scan the papers for comics. He saw an editorial cartoon with Barack Obama, as he pointed out. How did he know? "He has big ears and a tall head." Well, duh.
He is also very excited about going to school, although taking him out of preschool is confusing because he seems to think that he will be going to Kindergarten any day now. He wants to do experiments and learn things, he claims. We visited a magnet school fair run by the school district the other day, and he said he wanted to go to 3 of the schools - all had pictures of kids doing fun things. (I was less impressed with the technology elementary which claimed 'all kids learn to use word by 6th grade.' ?!)
JT also told me that he doesn't like me for the first time the other day. I was a strict mom and said that he couldn't have ice cream since I warned him not to ... whatever it was, I seem to have forgotten... but in any case, he understood and blew his chance. He said he liked me again that evening. Thank goodness!

Recipe Run Down

So our CSA box is nearly empty, but I still have those beets to deal with. And a bit of salad, some chard, some spinach, some celery and the tops of the carrots and fennel. I am tempted to make a dish with the carrot tops, even though some sites I perused claim that they are poisonous. Then again, lots of things are poisonous in large doses. Anyways. Tonight we had cabbage braised on the stove. Not as tasty as in the oven, but nice, in a cabbage-y kind of way. Yesterday we had the zucchini with some rice pasta and other veggies (carrots, red onion, cilantro, green onion) in peanut sauce. The kale was made into kale and white bean soup, and the fennel was braised on the stovetop and served with sweet potatoes and skillet turkey meatloaf. So that is the run down. The dragon carrots were awesome just raw. The peas, well, less so. Oh, we had those with ham and creamy paramesan pasta. Waaay too much work to shell the peas. I even added some from our courtyard garden, and still there weren't enough to warrant all that work. I think I will plant sugar snap peas next time.

For JT's preschool birthday party, I made broken glass jello. At his request. I prefer not to have jello too often, considering it is mostly sugar with artificial flavor and coloring (we eat A LOT of sugar in this house but try to avoid HFCS, and the artificial colors and flavors), but this was a really cool way to have jello! Basically it is 4 flavors of jello made with half the water, cooled until set, then cut into squares and tossed in a pan. Then you use sweetened condensed milk (JT thought that tasted like Tiny's milk - he tasted some out of a bottle, in case you just thought, excuse me?), 2 packets of unflavored gelatin, and some water to make the white part. The kids at his school seemed enthusiastic/mystified/grossed out/delighted. One boy insisted on using a fork. Another wanted a piece to save for his mom. I think that counts it as a success. Now JT just has to narrow his choice for birthday cakes down - he selected 25 for his short list. What a kid.

A New Hair-a

He finally consented to a haircut and chose this style himself. Actually, he picked out a mohawk dyed red and green, and this was his second choice. At first he refused to get into the chair, but after some cajoling and reminding him that if he wanted spiky hair, he had to get his hair cut by a professional, he relented. We read a Magic Schoolbus book while the scissors flew around his head. I nearly cried. I think Mr. Burli did, too, this evening. But the boy seems pleased.

El Nino 2010

It was a wet week. Our backyard was a lake, and at some point 3 of these chairs scootched off the deck in the wind. Luckily, the only plant damage I've noticed is one broken arm of a schwartzkopf, taken out by a falling deck chair (however, you can just stick the arm in the dirt and voila! a new schwartzkopf!). Had we installed the rain barrel we wanted to, it would have been full. But now the storms are gone (although there is more rain in the forecast), and we (hopefully) filled in the low spots in the back, reseeded the yard, and topped it with smelly fertilizer (smells like a farm). The front is still a mess of weeds, some grass and mud, since we have yet to come up with a good plan. I don't want to take the "grass" out before we have a sketch-up done with the plans for plants and the (possible) dry creek bed, mounds, etc.
With the rain, our mysterious wet spot in the wall reappeared. So the boys crawled under the house to check things out. It was quite damp on the ground near the leak spot, I was told, but neither of them felt compelled to slither on their bellies for a closer look. (JT scampered out as soon as he realized his gloves were wet, and Mr. Burli followed him quickly thereafter.)

{{The power miners going into the cave to face the treacherous rock monsters.}}

So this morning after entertaining Tiny for an hour (he is an early riser), I passed him off to the boys and went back to bed, only to be awake by the sound of a steam engine in the living room. Only it wasn't a steam engine, but Mr. Burli sawing open the wall. These things happen when I least expect them.

{{Hmmm, this appears to be old wallboard, 3/4 inch thick. And see how much insulation we have? No wonder it is cold/hot at our house.}}

It is still unclear how/why the water wicks up to that spot on the wall, so hopefully it will rain this week and we can do some experiments.
Oh, and in other news...

This week the littlest Burli decided to learn to crawl. Actually, he had been doing 'downward dog' for a week or so, and then he moved on to trying to crawl but mostly slipping around on the hardwood floors. Then on Sunday we went to our friends' house and he discovered that carpet was best for crawling. So Monday he practiced, and by Tuesday he had taken off. So far he has almost eaten the cat food twice, fallen down the 2 steps into the living room once, and managed to open the drawer under the oven part way. He loves being mobile - and it is great fun to see where he wants to go! He often heads to the bathroom (he has a fascination with the bathtub), and if Mr. Burli and JT move into a different room, he follows behind. He also loves Diego and will follow him, too, but since Koroschka (the other cat) is more elusive, he hasn't been able to even pet him.

Our First CSA Box!

In a lull in the rains, I picked JT up from school and we headed to North Park to pick up our first CSA box. Part of my New Year's resolution to "eat more vegetables" (I know, this is my resolution every year), it was finally time. When I had wanted to join years ago, Mr. Burli claimed that we wouldn't be able to eat everything, so now my challenge is ... to eat it all. We got a cabbage, a spaghetti squash (not quite ripe but picked before the rains would have gotten it), red chard, red and green leaf lettuce, 2 bulbs of fennel, some kind of kale, red carrots, spinach, sweet peas, beets, celery, zucchini, micro-greens. sage and oregeno. Last night we ate the beet greens sauteed with some onion and garlic. Very tasty. I do not like pickled red beets, so I am curious to see whether I will like the beets in whichever manner I end up cooking them.
From our garden, we have had some radishes and a few leaves of mesclun lettuce, our micro-greens were eaten by cabbage worms, and I also picked some sweet peas.
Supposedly the drenching will continue on again today. Last night we had lightning! and thunder!

Mundane but Good

Not much to report or blog about, just the usual. Since the earthquake in Haiti, I have had trouble coming up with a blogpost. After I saw the pictures, I immediately thought, that could have been us... that could still be us. Who knows when the big one will hit here? Anyways, I think most people have found ways to donate what they can, but I will pass this one on: the AAA (American Anthropological Association) recommended Partners in Health, a group providing (supposedly) anthropologically-informed humanitarian aid. [edited to add: my sister also recommended them, so there you go.]

We have enjoyed the fact that we have not had an earthquake and no fires this fall, and that we are all healthy and (in some sense of the word) wealthy. JT brought home Rudi the bear from his preschool - the travelling bear whose adventures are then chronicled in a journal and shared with the class. I explained to JT that I had a lot of chores I wanted to finish Friday before we could do something fun, and lo and behold... as I was nursing Tiny and then taking a shower, JT informed me that I could not come in the other rooms. And I heard all sorts of suspicious noises. When I came out, he had cleared the table of the breakfast dishes, wiped it off, swept the floor (all the crumbs were under a basket), picked up the toys in the office and the living room and made his bed. He was very proud of himself. So we went to the park and then to one of his all-time favorite places.

Meanwhile, our yard and gardens are coming along. The lemon tree has several buds and flowers, the orange tree has some new growth, and in the front, the pomegranate is budding as well. I also harvested a handful of peas and a purple radish.

We spent Sunday at Quail Botanical Gardens, which was beautiful. And then we gathered up supplies for the Wet Wallop storm - several days of rain and wind are forecasted with a possibility of 8 inches here at our house. Already today our backyard, driveway and front courtyard were mini-lakes. Hopefully the rain will begin to soak into the soil better (although we have a good bit of clay) and some of plants that are now underwater will recover...