J is for Jambalaya

Photo credit: deepsouthdish.com

It's still wicked cold in my stretch of the outback, and that always makes me crave spicy foods. I love all kinds of ethnic cooking including Indian, Mexican, and Jamaican. One of my favorite dishes is jambalaya, a Creole dish that includes celery, peppers, onions (known as the "trinity"), tomatoes, various meats, and often seafood all mixed into rice. The Cajun version is made without tomatoes. My favorite recipe is from an old Fannie Farmer cookbook and it goes like this:

Chicken Jambalaya

4-5 pound chicken, in quarters

2 tablespoons oil

2 tablespoons bacon fat

Salt

Freshly ground pepper

1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1 cup diced ham

1/2 cup chopped green pepper

1/2 cup chopped celery

1 large onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

5 cups chicken broth

1/4 cup minced parsley

1 bay leaf

1 1/2 teaspoons thyme, crumbled

1 cup chopped canned or fresh tomatoes

2 cups rice

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Rinse the chicken pieces and wipe dry. Heat the oil and bacon fat in a large skillet.  Brown the chicken pieces and sprinkle them with salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper. Remove from the pan and set aside. Add the ham, green pepper, celery, onion, and garlic to the pan and cook until the vegetables are soft. Add the chicken broth, parsley, bay leaf, and thyme; bring to a boil and cook uncovered until the broth is reduced to 4 cups. Remove the chicken meat from the bones in large pieces. Put the chicken meat, the unstrained broth, the tomatoes, and uncooked rice in a casserole. Stir, cover, and bake for 1 hour, checking every 20 minutes and adding more hot broth or water if it dries out. Remove the bay leaf before serving.

This recipe quite easily serves six people with the addition of a salad. For the two of us, it makes several generous meals. It also freezes very well since it doesn't have shrimp which tends to get rubbery when overcooked. We love this meal, and on cold days, the smell and warmth from the oven is so cozy and comforting!

What about you? What's your favorite meal on icy days like this? Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I is for IRS or is that IRiS?

Yesterday you saw a bit of our artwork. Since I'm scrambling to get tax paperwork together, I thought I'd do a little promotion to help pay the tax lady. This is Aunt IRiS, an original piece of art (using me as the model) my husband created a few years ago - based on the Uncle Sam Wants You posters from the WW2 era. Every year, sales from our CafePress account help us pay what's due. You can click here to buy a mug. They are lovely gifts for anyone with a personal accountant, or just to use yourself while you're suffering through the season. Especially satisfying if you have an irreverent sense of humor, and a stiff drink within. Ooh, and look! CafePress has the tee-shirt on sale in the "gifts for accountants" category.

It's wickedly cold and windy again, so my gardening plans are still on hold. I'm hoping that my irises, which have poked their green spikes out of the soil, will live to bloom. I have them all over the property. They are tough and seem to like the challenging conditions around here. They tend to be pale though - the soil is too lean to impart much color. I have lots of these:

What I covet are these:

A girl can dream, right? Now back to Aunt IRiS. Have you finished your tax return yet?

H is for Hoops

H is for my hoop, with

which I often play.

Sometimes it's very

naughty and tries

to run away.

This is a stained glass window based on an old Victorian woodcut that I built many years ago as a fundraising donation for a local charity. I'd thought to create a set using the entire alphabet, but never got back to it. It was quite large, roughly 30" x 40". Can you imagine it in a child's nursery?

I'd write more but it's been a bit hellish around here with extremely windy weather. I've had trouble with my ears and hearing all winter - third round of Meniere's Syndrome - and it's making me a little miserable. So enjoy a bit of my art instead of the usual writing.

Here's something by Hubbo related to Horses. The cover for my Princess Willy Be series (young chapter books). Cute, isn't it?

 I'm waiting for a few more drafts before I start playing with titles and fonts.

 

G is for Gardening

I'm a bit late this morning after returning from a very long day trip to Denver. One of the highlights of Sunday was a trip to the Denver Botanic Gardens where things are still looking pretty brown, with just a few hardy bulb flowers peeking their heads through the cold ground. Still it was a lovely day and there were loads of people out walking the paths. I came away with numerous ideas for my own gardens. Also a real appreciation for water features, hard-scaping, and architectural features like pergolas. Here are some photos of images that inspired me and might translate to my own efforts here at home:

Water feature with simple sculpture

A smaller pool that would work in my yard

A flagstone rock garden with native plants

Brick hard-scaping with a covered path to the right

An evergreen mound adds a mass of green

I don't think I would have noticed these features during the summer when the gardens are a riot of color. I got a lot more ideas from the barren gardens than I thought I would. It's all about getting the "bones" down right. That's true with anything, I guess,  whether building a house or writing a novel. Get a solid foundation first, and all the embellishments tend to enhance the picture.

Speaking of novels, maybe I'll make some headway in the next few days. It doesn't look like I'll be gardening much.

By "damaging thunderstorms" they mean high winds, hail, rain turning to snow, and a possible tornado. Nope. Definitely won't be gardening. How's the weather where you live?

F is for Flowers

F is for flowers, which I adore! There is rarely a time, winter or summer, that flowers do not adorn my home. Here's what is gracing my dining room table now:

I've even thought of creating a series of paintings using my favorite blue vase, because I've taken so many photos of it over the years with different arrangements:

My garden is a riot of color every year too - well as much color as you can expect on a prairie:

My favorite place to write when it's cool and not too windy:

How about you - what's your favorite flower? Leave me a comment!

E is for Earth Day

Earth Day is an annual day on which events are held worldwide to demonstrate support for environmental protection. It's observed on April 22 each year and is now celebrated in 192 countries. I remember the first Earth Day in 1970 when I was still in high school. Who knew that the Earth Day Network would grow to this size? And yet we really haven't come far enough or done enough to reverse the environmental degradation of the 20th century. I think Bill McKibben in his book Eaarth has a better handle on what we have yet to face.

Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth.

That new planet is filled with new binds and traps. A changing world costs large sums to defend—think of the money that went to repair New Orleans, or the trillions it will take to transform our energy systems. But the endless economic growth that could underwrite such largesse depends on the stable planet we've managed to damage and degrade. We can't rely on old habits any longer.

Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back—on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change—fundamental change—is our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.

Pay close attention to that last paragraph. Can you see our society willingly scaling back and hunkering down? I'm doing it by choice and have reduced my lifestyle for several decades. I have a long way to go, but no one else in my family is even willing to do this. We live in a narcissistic society where everyone's idea of success is to make more money and have more stuff. Because we deserve it, right? Reducing is mostly lip service. Americans really don't want to live small. It's easier to go to an Earth Day festival and feel good about it. How about refusing to buy anything wrapped in plastics? Inconvenient if not impossible. Live in a small house? Own only one car... or no car? Add "refuse" to the reduce/reuse/recycle paradigm? Doing without is what it will take if we want an Earth to celebrate.

What are you doing to reduce your environmental footprint? Is Earth Day every day for you, like it is at my house? 

D is for Dreams

And I'm dreaming of dirt, as in garden dirt. High on my list of priorities this year is improving my soil, in large part so it holds moisture better. My raised beds look pretty good:

It's not black Minnesota soil, but it's a lot better than the anemic prairie dust in other places around the property. It's also free of pesticides and herbicides. All that improvement came from clean top soil, compost, and poop from local cows and chickens.

I worry about what I'll be able to grow around here as the weather heats up. We're still in a major drought area and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. Water is plentiful and cheap in my town, a situation that says more about bad leadership than reality. Conservation will have to start soon or we'll simply run out of water like the next town over. My planning includes all kinds of sustainable gardening methods from all over the world, like my own keyhole gardens - I'll talk about those in subsequent posts. But this map hints at what is in store for a large section of the U.S. this year.

Dreams - I hope there will be more to my gardening efforts than that. I'd like to be able to grow and put up most of my vegetables for the next year. I've never succeeded in that, but I think it's a worthy goal. Have you ever tried it?

Speaking of dreams, here's a terrific book by a city gal who met her true love and took a completely different career and life path into The Dirty Life.

Kristen Kimball now works a draft-horse powered farm with her husband. I loved this book, and her blog is a fair treat too. Be sure to bookmark it and visit often. Look at the dirt in her seed flats!

C is for Challenge

For the A-Z Blogging Challenge as well as for so many others - I can turn this letter into a World Crisis!

I'd be a lot more challenged if I hadn't gone through the alphabet last month and brainstormed themes for each letter. I have my handy list to refer to and here's what I can choose from today:

• compost
• clocks
• convenience
• chickens
• cold frames
• chocolate
• cats
• cows
• corn
• cedars
• clary sage
• coolness
• children's books

I'll talk about my dreams of becoming the Compost Queen later. Also my neighbors chickens when we get to E for eggs. I don't need the temptation of chocolate since I just gave up sugar... again. I could write about my neighbors cows, but I'd rather tell you about their luscious milk when we get to M. Because having raw, local milk is a very cool thing indeed!

So meet a few of my cats:

This is Sassafrass

Pippin on the Roof

Chai being Bored 

Duchess on Call

On a grander scale, I'm feeling dreadfully challenged by all the environmental issues we face, whether from oil spills, GM contamination, declining bee populations; it seems like our battles are endless, and I often feel we're losing the game, don't you? I suppose we can only take one step at a time and do what we can. Part of my contribution to environmental betterment is through promoting a little publisher named Little Pickle Press. They publish children's books in an environmentally sustainable way. Here's one of my favorite titles by Rana DiOrio.

You can buy the hardcover book here.  It's also available through iTunes and Kindle for you gadgets. Because teaching children how important the environment is, well, it's as important as teaching adults to take care of the only planet we have.

What about you? What's challenging you today? Please leave me a comment.

March Weather Wrap-up

It was a curious month of weather, with more extremes than usual. Gratefully we got a bit of snow. The widest temperature spread a week apart was 70 degrees, from -7 one night to 63 degrees one day a week later.

Here's Moby Drift which is still about half the size, but is rapidly melting away. This is from last weekend.

Wishing everyone a happy Easter and Passover! Stop by often as I'll be posting daily as part of the A-Z Blogging Challenge.

The Lows and Highs of Weather

This is January 2013 and look at those "snaps" every few days. This is what global warming experts talked about thirty years ago. We go from -15 on Sunday to a high of 51 on Wednesday - a 65-degree swing. I wonder how this will affect the trees?

On our agenda this week is more work on cold frames and adding real windows to the glass house that will enclose the goat shed. We scored a houseful of old wood-framed windows which will replace the plastic sheathing that didn't last the summer! Live and learn. Here's the framework. I told hubbs I want white trim with cuteness and a British look. We have a way to go, huh? :D

Even though it's cold, my thoughts turn to making compost. Here's a terrific post from Jaden at Steamy Kitchen about making compost in three days.  I haven't mastered making compost in three months! You?