There once was a hole in the kitchen

And to cover it, Len was just itchin'.

Some background: A family owned this old house for decades, and then a real estate agent bought it to flip it, and now we own it. The flipper "renovated" fast and easy. I've said before, she did a great job revealing the house's charm, but the updates don't appear to have been undertaken with thoughtful, methodical, and detailed approach.

One of the major updates to the house was a complete kitchen renovation. They tore out the wall that had separated the kitchen and dining room, and we love how open it is. The head-scratching part of it, though, is illustrated in the photo above. When the kitchen and dining room were two separate rooms, it made sense to have an vent in each room, but now that they are essentially one big room, you can see we were left with a nice, large antique floor vent (which Len also spruced up, but that is a story for another time) and a small, ill-fitting, cheapo, modern floor vent just two feet away. They don't even come from the same duct run. 

Why is this so perplexing? Well, they laid brand new tile in the kitchen. They had to custom cut two tiles to accommodate the small, now-pointless vent. Would it not have been easier (both on the worker and, later, on the eyes) to close off that one short duct to that one small vent and just lay whole tile over it?

That's exactly what Len did, retroactively. Guided by a This Old House segment, Len carefully chipped out the two affected kitchen tiles, covered the hole, and cut a new rectangular section of subfloor. Luckily, in the basement, there were spare kitchen tiles, mortar, and grout leftover from the renovation. 

That's right, that's Tom Silva on the laptop screen, guiding the way.

The kitchen floor, when it was first laid and grouted during the big flip, sat around for a year collecting dirt before we moved in and ascertained it had never been sealed. We cleaned and sealed it last spring, but the once-white grout was mostly a light tan by that time. When Len grouted these two new tiles, the contrast was stark. We ended up re-grouting the entire kitchen floor so it would match. 

And of course, a couple of days later, we sealed it. Like you're supposed to.

There once was a hole in the kitchen,
and to cover it, Len was just itchin'.
Len erased that dumb hole
with a little help from Nicole.
Now that tile floor is totally [90s slang for awesome]!

.

Mourning the Apple Trees and Moving On

There's a saying: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. Often used to inspire some action in one's life, it can also be taken literally, and that's what I'm doing today.

Twelve years ago, we hefted a grapefruit-sized (maybe bigger) Wolf River apple in our hands and thought, You are 300 miles from your birthplace in Thorp, Wisconsin. We are going to eat you. And then we are going to plant your seeds, just for fun. Probably nothing will come of it.

That was in fall 2008. The seeds we planted from that Wolf River apple, soon became seedlings and then saplings. They spent their first three years in pots, overwintering in our unheated garage with newspaper and blankets as insulation. In the spring of 2012, Len did the hard work of digging holes in the heavy clay of our townhouse yard and planted them . They bore fruit in 2015 and every year after that, although harvests were not large.

Our apple tree history in blog posts:

April 21, 2009 (seedlings)

November 3, 2009 (winterizing)

March 20, 2010  (after winterizing)

March 4, 2012 (pruning)

May 13, 2012 (planting)*

*The city suddenly cut down the ash tree in our backyard one day; Len dug out the leftover stump, and that is where the third apple tree now resides.

Summer 2015 (first fruit)

And now...

February 2020, we put our house up for sale because we'd signed a contract to buy the new old house. The apple trees were now almost as tall as the house. They would have to stay behind. (Our babies!)

I did a lot of searching and reading and video-watching. I cut scion twigs from each of the three trees (pencil-thick, straight, recent growth, each at least 12 inches long), wrapped them in a damp paper towel in plastic bag, and stored them in my in-laws' garage fridge, which held only beverages, so the scions could stay away from any other fruits or vegetables that could off-gas and cause early budding.

I ordered four dwarf rootstocks from an orchard, and they arrived in March. I tried my hand at whip-and-tongue grafting. Two of my four grafts seemed to have survived! Leaves popped on the scions. I planted one in the yard of our new old house and kept the other in its pot as a backup.

Come summer of 2020, some insect ate away the new leaves. I continued watering diligently, but there was no new growth. We eventually tossed the potted spare -- it also looked more like a stick now and less like a baby tree.

Now, spring of 2021, still nothing was happening on the grafted tree in the yard. I had to accept that it really was dead. (In fact, I just pulled it out of the ground like plain stick -- I guess the roots rotted, and the graft site had ultimately failed. Maybe I overwatered.) The cousins in Wisconsin have sold the farm. Unless we go steal an apple out of our old yard, this heirloom line of Wolf River apples ends its journey where it is rooted. 

Instead, we'll carry on the tradition honorarily. Last fall, I ordered three heirlooms from Trees of Antiquity: two Egremont russet apple trees, an English Victorian variety supposedly good for fresh eating and cider, and a Napoleon (a.k.a. Queen Anne) cherry tree, which is the kind my Grandma used to have in her yard (that tree cut down just last year and also on property soon to be sold). The trees arrived early this April!

Our new experiment, besides just trying to grow trees, is the art of espalier. Espalier should be a good strategy for growing more productive trees in a compact space, here along the fence (I know, I know, easy access for the squirrels). 

The first task was (gulp!) an aggressive prune to encourage side branching. 

Wish us luck.

.

Rainy day lentil and chorizo stew

Early spring is a tease. A stretch of beautiful sunny days hinting of summer suddenly give way to gray, chilly days of off-and-on rain. It was on one of those days, and I needed warm comfort food. I  also wanted to "iron up" in preparation for a blood donation appointment, so lentil stew was on the menu.

I started with this From a Chef's Kitchen recipe for Soupy Spanish Lentils with Chorizo, and modified it to suit the contents of my own cupboard and freezer -- and yard. Yes, the infamous dandelions make an appearance.

Lentil and Chorizo Stew

• 2 tablespoons oil
• 1 large link of fresh chorizo sausage (I cut mine in half so it would fit easier in the pot)
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 2 stalks celery, finely chopped (we keep frozen sliced celery handy for impromptu soups)
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• half a large red bell pepper, diced
• 4 to 6 cups chicken broth
• 1 1/2 cups brown lentils
• 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
• juice of half a lemon
• 3 tomatoes, chopped
• a handful of fresh greens (dandelion, spinach, chard, whatever)
• salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

1. Heat oil over medium-high heat in a large pot. Place sausage in the pa
   n and cook 6 to 7 minutes, turning to brown on all sides. Transfer to a plate. (Sausage will not be cooked all the way through at this point.)
2. Place onion in the hot fat. Reduce heat to medium and cook 7 to 8 minutes or until beginning to soften. Add the celery and bell pepper and cook 4 to 5 minutes more. 
   
   
3. Add the garlic, stir until fragrant.
4. Add 4 cups of chicken broth and bring to a boil. Add the lentils, smoked paprika and crushed red pepper flakes. Bring to a boil.
5. Slice chorizo into 1/4 to 1/3-inch slices. Add to the pot with the lentils.
6. Reduce heat, cover slightly and simmer 30 to 45 minutes or until lentils are tender, adding additional chicken broth as needed to maintain a "soupy" consistency. 
   
   

   

   I had the red wine vinegar and tomato paste ready to go for the original recipe but ultimately didn't use them.

   
   
7. Remove from heat and stir in lemon juice, tomatoes and dandelion greens, and adjust seasoning with salt and black pepper. The soup will be hot enough on its own to quickly wilt the greens.

The original recipe also included Manchego toast. I went for garlic bread from the freezer.

.

Just dandy - a lawn that's greenish

Feast your eyes. This is what organic lawn maintenance looks like.

Hundreds and hundreds of dandelions (and other weeds for which I don't have names but know I don't want taking over my yard), pulled out by the roots. This is just one hour's work in one afternoon. There have been several afternoons spent before it, and I even did 15 minutes of rapid weeding yesterday morning before logging on to my day job.

These hours of hand-wrenching, back-aching work are what you have to look forward to if you want to maintain your lawn in an organic, earth-friendly, chemical-free way. That is, if you're trying to maintain the typical neighborhood's green-grass lawn on a lot that was not so well-maintained in the years before you owned it. We're nursing our suburban fescue back to life.

This endless toiling is a big reason why most eco-friendly lawn options involve natural landscapes of native plantings. 

Here's an example from a neighbor's house.

It doesn't look like much right now, but then, the Illinois prairies are only just awakening from winter dormancy. In the summer, tall grasses and wildflowers fill out the little homegrown preserve here. It's pretty and requires far less watering than a short-grass lawn.

We're keeping most of our open lawn, though, because we like to get out on it to play yard games. I like to keep our lawn and garden as green as possible, and I don't just mean the color of the grass. We moved our compost bin and its contents with us, when we moved houses last spring, so you better believe I'll be using our compost to fertilize the lawn. Our lawn mower is a good, old-fashioned (but brand new from Home Depot) reel mower, and our weed whacker is battery powered.

But, we've never been 100% green. We balance being green with some convenient shortcuts, because not everyone can be a full-time homesteader. So, in our garage, there's a stinky little bag of organic chicken manure from a local garden center, and there's also a bag of very non-organic "weed and feed" from my grandma's garden supplies. I'll pull as many weeds by hand as I can, and I'll even ignore a few of them, but I might pull out the weed killer spray at some point for a targeted assault. We'll use water collected in our rain barrels as much as possible for watering the grass seed when we sow later this spring, but I know we will sometimes just use the hose straight from the house, because going back and forth with the watering can is a huge time commitment.

All that is ahead of us yet. For now, I'm diligently scouring the yard with the forked precision weeding tool, a.k.a the "pokey dandelion thingy."

I'm letting most of those piles of pulled dandelions dry out, and then I'll toss them into the compost bin. But, yes, we did eat a handful.

.

No photo, because I already ate it: Chocolate pudding

You know what chocolate pudding looks like. So, you don't need me to put a photo here of the chocolate pudding I made. There isn't a photo of it anyway, because I already ate it.

There are also no photos of the pudding while it was being made, because I was busy making it. Making pudding is not difficult, but it is a busy recipe. In case you have never made pudding yourself, I'll tell you why. There is constant stirring. Con. Stant.

Instead, I'll share a photo of the recipe itself, which came from Martha Stewart's Everyday Food magazines. I believe they're no longer being published, but I've kept a handful of them among my cookbooks, because the recipes are always tasty and generally weeknight-friendly.

I'll also be so kind as to give you a link to Martha's recipe online: https://www.marthastewart.com/314077/vanilla-or-chocolate-pudding

If you want to eat this pudding the same day you make it, you might start making it earlier than I did (6 p.m.), or plan on eating it as a midnight snack (around 9:30).

A note about the milk: I wondered if the pudding would noticeably lack a richness if I did not use whole milk. However, 2% milk was what I had in the fridge, and so 2% is what I used. This pudding turned out tasting like chocolate fudge -- no lacking anything. 

.