Chihuly, first visit

My sister Linda and her husband Al made a quick trick up from San Antonio this week to go to the Chihuly exhibit at the Dallas Arboretum. We all four schlepped over there (it's a 53 minute drive from our house). It's really spectacular! Well, the Chihuly pieces are amazing, but the Arboretum itself is well worth the drive.

I've seen some pretty great gardens, from Bellingrath on the Alabama Gulf coast to Buchart on Vancouver Island, the Borromeo Palace garden on Isola Bella in northern Italy (where the bamboo had its own gardener) to Fragrant Hills Park and Beihai Park in Beijing.

The Arboretum has lovely formal areas, but is so very appealing because (besides being on the same continent, conveniently reachable by car) it has all these quiet tucked-away spots where I could easily see myself sitting and reading, or sitting and chatting, or just sitting for a while. And a lot of those spots are beside White Rock Lake or near charming water features that include little water falls or things that look like springs or creeks. And I do love me a spring or creek!

The Chihuly show was scheduled to end next week, but is so popular it's been extended through the end of the year. Our good friend Pat is coming up next weekend to go, so I'll be visiting it again. If you're in the area, you should too!

That's the "Dallas Star" piece behind me. And that's me looking
surprised that blue spikes are coming out of my head.

The wisest hockey columnist

Most of the time I like Brandon Worley and others at Defending Big D, probably my favorite hockey blog. Good information and usually good opinions. (Sometimes their 'doom & gloom' outlook gets to me, or they'd be my unqualified favorites.)

Picture of Benn & Morrow for no particular reason
other than I can and the team can't.

I like Ian Hudson's take on the current NHL lockout. He's a professor of economics at the University of Manitoba, and his views are pretty sensible. (Gee, that's a shock, right?)

I like Jeff Gordon columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (or, actually, STLtoday.com). He distilled the issues between the NHL owners and players to its very essence, as far as I'm concerned.

But they could both be usurped by Gavin Bard, from the Heckler Spray blog ("Internet villainy & grown-up gossip since 2005") just because of this one quote:

Gary Bettman, the weaselly grim reaper of the National Hockey League, is quite possibly the worst human being in the world.

Yeah. You tell 'em, Gavin.

A quick note about two things

First, if you bought the most recent Groupon for Classic Cafe, it expires on Wednesday, so you need to get there in the next couple of days. Second, if you get there in the next couple of days and they're still getting okra from their garden, order the fried okra. Yeah, it's not something you'd expect them to have on their upscale menu, but it was incredible. I never thought of okra as being something that would be much better home-grown — I mean, it's not like tomatoes, right? —but it made an amazing difference. (Plus, of course, you probably have to know just exactly how to cook it, which is something Classic Cafe is very, very good at.)

This is going to be easier than I thought

Rich cleaned out some bookshelves over the weekend (oy, huge mess in the living room for a few hours). After going through the giant stack he pulled out, he came in and deposited a stack of those Sunset-type books—you know, the big, thin paperbacks that were always some kind of How To guide or basic reference books—on my desk. They were mostly about gardening (flower, bulb, vegetable) and houseplants, but there were a few about canning, pickling and the like. (Apparently we had some big plans in self-sufficiency when we first met, though it could also be that the books were just on sale. At the time, neither of us could much resist a marked-down book.)

One of them was 12 Months Harvest, an interesting book about—duh—preserving food. And making cheese, soap and bread (delicious together) as well as covering a few other Foxfire-type subjects. (It was published in the hippie-dippie 70s, so that might be rather shaping my impression of it.)

Since I've made a tiny little foray into the world of preserving food (boiled cider, aka apple molasses and freezer strawberry jam), I've kind of gotten the bug. I asked for and received a canning starter kit (I had to borrow from Rich's friend Ron to put up the boiled cider), so now I'm really ready to get going. And this is Autumn! It's harvest season. There should be lots of stuff to preserve!

Yeah. I'm still thinking about it.

There is one thing I'm definitely going to try, though. In that stack of books there was also a copy (a hard back copy) of Better Homes and Gardens Home Canning Cook Book. That one contains a recipe that solves a forty-year conundrum for me. When I was in high school (circa the dawn of time), my cousin Mike and his Massachusetts-born wife Kathy gave my parents a jar of cranberry jelly. This is not the same stuff you serve with turkey at Thanksgiving. It's actual jelly, made to spread on toast. It was delicious. I ate it every morning until it was gone. And there was no more.

Now, children, keep in mind this was long before the Innerwebs existed. All I could do in those primitive times was keep an eye out in the grocery store, and hope that my travels might one day take me through cranberry jelly country. Many years passed, and the IETF fellows put together the Internet thing. I used it to search for cranberry jelly. I found (and tried) jam, preserves, spreadable fruit…but nothing was ever exactly right.

Somehow it never occurred to me to look for a recipe for it. The Home Canning Cook Book has one. It's complicated and exotic, requiring many ingredients and painstakingly precise chemistry: You boil cranberry juice cocktail and sugar, add pectin and put it in jars. Whew!

So soon I'll once again have cranberry jelly on my toast. And someone will, no doubt, be getting some via the Homemade Christmas Gift Grab Bag. That makes the book mess all worthwhile, I guess. Who knows? Maybe I'll even try a little soap to go with it.

When I don't feel like cooking

Cooking dinner can be a challenge. Not that it's especially hard to do, most of the time—particularly for those of us with home offices, who can slip out to put the potatoes on or turn down the oven when we need to. It's the dailiness of the thing. Having to come up with something for your hungry household to eat every single, solitary night that comes along. If nothing else, it gets tedious.

Those of us with a few years' experience at it all have our go-to dishes and recipes for those nights when we really don't feel like cooking at all. Until now mine has been spaghetti and meat sauce. Like my mother used to make—McCormick's sauce mix and a pound of ground beef.

Just recently, though, I discovered that if I realize early enough in the day that I'm not going to feel like cooking, there's an even easier way around it. And it's really good, too.

(Adapted from WikiHow, How to Make Crockpot Chicken Tacos)

Slow Cooker Chicken Tacos

4–8 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
Chopped onion

1 packet taco seasoning mix
16 ounces (a medium-sized jar or 2 cups) chunky salsa

Tortillas
Toppings (shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, guacamole or sliced avocado, sour cream, shredded cheese, etc.)

Mix the taco mix with the salsa. (I use medium heat salsa, usually, because I'm not a complete wimp. Suit yourself and your own pain threshold.) Pour a little in the bottom of the slow cooker. Put the chicken and chopped onion on top of that. Pour the rest of the salsa combination over it.

Cook on high for about 4 hours or on low for about 6. When the chicken can be shredded easily with a fork, it's done. Remove the chicken and do that…shred with a fork. Return to slow cooker and mix with juices.

Serve wrapped in tortillas with whatever toppings you like. Pinto, refried or black beans, plus Spanish rice, round out the meal.

These tacos are so good, they remind me of my very first taste of Mexican food ever. It was 1966, I was nine, and we had just moved from Prichard, Alabama (okay, it's a suburb of Mobile, so not quite as Podunk Junction as it sounds) to San Antonio. We were living in an apartment (another first) while we looked for a house, and went to a drive-in Mexican place down the street. As I remember, my very first bite of my very first chicken taco tasted a lot like these. That taco made me a fan for life.

And these tacos make it very easy (in every sense of the word) to recall.

Make do (even if you won't have to do without)

I love making do.

That might not come as a surprise because I'm a knitter. I always thought that the image of someone who knits was kind of a genteel hobbyist, someone who appreciates serenity and has great patience. My clever niece pointed out, though, and quite correctly, that knitters are more closely related to brave pioneers and subsistence gardeners. We know how to do for ourselves. By being involved in the creation of garments that most people never even think of as homemade — like socks — we tend to be a 'get down to brass tacks' kind of group. What does it take to make a thing happen? How do we take something and turn it into that very useful, or even essential, item?

The percentage of knitters who keep chickens, for example, is much higher than in the general population. (I'm basing this on my own casual survey of my knitting friends. I'll conduct a controlled scientific study the minute I have a minute.) We also tend to spin, sew, weave, can, hunt, grow our own vegetables and herbs, brew our own beer, collect rainwater for irrigation and reuse things more than most people.

I'll tell you, there's something extremely satisfying about thinking you'll buy something and realizing that you can make it yourself instead. It's way better.

So I'm actually fine with living on a budget. Of course, I'm also fine with never having to think about money and just buying whatever I feel like. But I find being thrifty rather fulfilling.

And besides, my name isn't Campbell for nothing.

And in that same vein, there are a few kitchen…well, staples isn't exactly the word. Ordinary ingredients might describe them, I guess, or at least not-exactly-exotic ingredients. There are some things you can make yourself that you might not have thought of. One is extracts. After using commercial orange extract to make some really disappointing Creamsicle Fudge, I investigated and learned that it's easy as pie to make your own, as long as you don't need it for a month.

You can slap a label on it. It doesn't have to be straight.

Homemade Orange Extract

What you'll need:

An orange or two, with a nice, bright firm peel
Vodka
Glass jar with a tight fitting lid

To make:

Wash the orange. Zest it (I used my handy Oxo Good Grips peeler), taking care to only remove the orange part. No white. Chop the strips of orange zest into smallish pieces.

Put the pieces of zest in the jar. Add enough vodka to cover the zest. Put the lid on.

Make note of the date. Your extract will be fragrant and ready to use in a about month.

This works with lemons, too. It's much better than most of the commercial brands, and a whole lot cheaper.

You can also make your own sweetened condensed milk. Personally, I'm fine with dropping a few bucks on Eagle Brand, but I also only use it sporadically. If I do buy it when I'm not planning a specific recipe, I all too often end up discovering the can at the back of the cabinet a few years later, after its "use by" date is long past. So it's nice to know I can make it when I need it, instead of having to make a trip to the grocery store. (Thanks to Dish Away blog for the recipe!)

One of Life's Little Condundrums: Laundry Imbalance

I just sorted the mountain of dirty clothes in our bathroom (that's something I tend to let go when I get busy) and I noticed something odd: Rich had two or three sets of underpants/undershirts/socks for every shirt and pair of shorts in the hamper.

I haven't noticed him changing his underwear and socks twice a day but, on the other hand, surely I would have caught him before he actually went out not wearing clothes, right? Or at least I would have heard about afterwards, after he made bail. Right?