Paper Pie

Snow-Capped

If you keep up with this here little blog, you may have noticed two things. One, is that my posting has become a little lighter as of late. Life is very busy with this little toddler of mine. She is not fond of me spending large chunks of time sitting at the computer and typing, so I try to get my blogging in while she naps. Sometimes she does not nap, and sometimes I need to do a little knitting or meditating during nap time. I do love to post quite regularly though and I am going to try my hardest to get into a little routine of early morning blogging, so hopeful things will pick back up again in this space very soon.

The second thing you may have noticed is that my family has been on the hunt for snow all winter long. We finally found some this past weekend in the same place we looked over the New Year's holiday. Last week somewhere around Tuesday, our partners in family fun informed us that there was rain in the forecast for LA which meant there would be snow in the mountains. Mandy, being the extraordinarily gifted organizer and motivator of folks that she is, found us the Dancing Bear cabin for a great deal and we were on our way. Driving up on Friday at 5 seemed daunting, but traffic was much lighter than expected and we got up there in record time. That evening I was out on the front porch of the cabin and swore that I could hear the rushing rapids of a river. I did not recall there being a river in the area and asked the others. They told me it was the wind whipping through the pines - a storm was certainly afoot. The next morning we awoke to the most beautiful and peaceful snowfall that I have seen in a very long time.



The babes loved getting cozy in front of the wood stove with their pjs and stuffed bears (quite aptly, Dancing Bear cabin was filled with stuffed bears.)













And it was St. Patrick's Day to boot! I brought everything green that I had and found the perfect hat in the cabin to top off my get up. I'm not even Irish, though I did pay them a nod while making my coffee that morning. The jig is a dead giveaway, no?


We played outside . . .








and in . . .

The girls showed us their best down dogs. After all, they have been attending yoga with us twice a week for a year now.





It was so nice to come back in to the wood stove and kniting needles after being out in all of the cold air for so long. We all hail from places with snow; Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington, but Southern California has a way of thinning one's blood. I've traded my parkas and snow boots for lightweight sweaters and sneakers. When we had our fill of the snow we packed it up and headed back to lower ground where the weather was warmer. All the while the little ones amongst us cried: I want to go back to the cabinet.  Until next time, snow-capped mountains!

Citrus Harvest

One thing that will never become ordinary to me about living in California is the abundance of fruit trees growing everywhere. Most everyone I know has some sort of fruit growing in their yard and just this weekend as we were strolling through the neighborhood, we saw figs, persimmons and bananas all during the same walk. We have a mandarin tree in our backyard and an orange tree in the front. I knew it was going to be a bumper crop this year when the tree in back was heavy with green fruit in November. I have watched the dimpled, thick-skinned orbs slowly turn from green to orange and beg to be picked for a few months now. We were throwing around the idea of picking all of the fruit a few weeks ago and then there were the bees, and we didn't want to engross ourselves in a big project like that while there was a whole lotta swarmin' going on a few paces over.
The fruit itself is a bit too sour to eat straight but I had big plans to juice them and add a little something to sweeten it up. On Saturday, after lunch, we pulled into the driveway and rather spontaneously rolled up our sleeves and dug in. We certainly had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, as we ended up with about 50 pounds (or more) of fruit. The tree was prickly too, leaving lots of scratches and dirt all up and down my arms, many times, I had the thought of getting my gloves, but I just kept motoring through. On by one, we picked each little juicy orange. I hadn't anticipated how oddly satisfying it would be to clear the tree of all of its fruit.
As you can imagine Rylie thought it quite fun, this little exercise of removing all of the apples from the tree. She prefers to call oranges apples. We've mentioned that they are actually called oranges many times, but she dances to the beat of her own drum, ya know?


Once we decided that we had harvested all of the fruit that we could possibly get from the trees, and it was about 2 hours after we started, I gathered up a big basket of oranges and went inside to get to juicing - by hand.

After several hours, and not making the slightest dent in our supply, I had filled a 4 quart pitcher. The juice is certainly bitter but we experimented with different sweetners and we added a bit of sparkling water and made a pretty refreshing drink reminiscent of Orangina. We picked up some basil yesterday and we have yet to experiment with a basil orange ade. The rest of the juice I packaged up for friends and neighbors.


After that I looked in this book for more ideas to use up all of this citrus that we now had on hand. I had brought some lemons home from Mandy's tree on Friday, so I decided to make an orange and lemon marmalade.



Somewhere around the third orange, I realized that marmalade is a pretty labor intensive venture. Once you julienne all of the zest, you then have to segment each orange away from its membrane. I plodded through, it was late, and I was to the last bit which is boiling the marmalade to get it up to 220 degrees and then Rylie woke up. I went in to lay with her for a while, thinking my marmalade would be ok to just boil away on the stove unattended (??) When I returned, the marmalade had scorched and made a giant mess out of my favorite enamled pan. It was all I could do to scoop the quickly hardening black goo into the garbage and leave the pan to soak overnight. The memory of the marmalade debacle followed me around like a black cloud all day Sunday. After a long and arduous struggle between a sponge and my blackened pan, I tried again today and this time I got through to the end.



I'm not sure how many more batches of this I have in me, like I said, it is quite laborious. After the juice and the marmalade, I have about 40 pounds of bitter oranges and mandarins left without any real plans. Any ideas about what I should do with them?

This Moment

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.
Amanda Soule

Simple Food: Baked Radish Chips

I know I've told you before about my love for the CSA box that shows up on my doorstep every other Tuesday morning. Inside, there is organic, seasonal and local broccoli, chard, spinach, Cara Cara oranges, romanesco, Braeburn apples and more. One little veggie that has been showing up a lot lately are bunched radishes. I don't really have much of a history with them. I remember my uncle would have a container of radishes in his fridge soaking in cold water. He would eat them raw with a little salt during those few months in Michigan when the air is so hot and thick it is hard to move. Besides that, I know that I usually try to avoid them in salads because they seem a bit too peppery. So I looked up ideas for what to do with them and discoverd that some people make chips from them. Sort of like the turnip chips I made a while ago. And just like the turnips, these little chips are definitely an imperfect snack as they take a while and there is a lot of work involved and they shrink in the oven and cook unevenly, but all of that being said I find them so irresistable that they oftentimes never even make it from the roasting sheet to a plate before ending up in my mouth.
I had three bunches of radishes on hand that I had accumulated while dragging my feet on what to make with them. In Heidi Swanson's book Super Natural Everyday, which is where I got the Turnip Chip recipe, she says you should slice the turnip, or in this case the radish, no thicker than 2 credit cards stacked on top of eachother. I quite like that description and just the perfect thinkness, too. I really take my time with this part because admittedly I love to chop, slice and dice. Maybe I worked for Mrs. Patmore in a previous life. I like to be in the kitchen using my hands, it is a meditation of sorts. Once you have them sliced up, toss them in a bowl with a few go rounds of olive oil. And lay them flat, piece by piece on a baking sheet.
Perheat the oven to 425 and pop 'em on in there. Now, it can take anywhere from 10 - 20 minutes for the chips to bake up. I stay really close to the oven for this part and keep a watchful eye. The thinner chips on the perimeter will darken first, so I'll pull them off the sheet and return the pan to the oven for the thicker ones to continue cooking. Once they are tender enough for your liking, put them in a bowl and enjoy with a squeeze of lemon or a shake of salt. Don't be too put off by their appearance, what they lack in aesthetics they more than make up for in taste. But like I said before, it is a rare occasion that these homely chips even make it to a bowl around these parts. Oh, and I am quite fond of using the whole plant, so the morning after I made these chips, I threw their greens into the blender with an orange, apple and strawberries and kickstarted my day with a delicious green smoothie. I did the same thing with the carrot tops this week too.

Hello From Sunday

What are you up to today?

This Moment

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.
Amanda Soule

Bees!

Last week I was out running errands when I received this text from my neighbor:

A swarm of bees has moved into your fusebox so please do not park in the driveway.

From her bedroom window she had seen (and heard) an entire swarm of bees searching for a home which they found in our backyard fusebox. This was the sight when I arrived home:

My neighbor also let me know about an organization of volunteer beekeepers that offers live removal of hives. I would be lying if I said I did not rack my brain thinking of any way possible for me to keep these magnificent creatures, but considering I have no equipment, a 19 month old baby, a landlord and a complete lack of knowledge when it comes to beekeeping, I thought the next best thing would be to turn them over to the experts. I called the bee rescue hotline and left a message. A volunteer named Yvonne, who lives in the area, called me back and we made arrangements for her to come to the house on Tuesday to get them. Yvonne has loads of bee knowledge and it was fascinating to pick her brain. She was so nice and patiently answered my many questions all the while she was carefully collecting, oh, about 10,000 bees.


She arrived with all of her gear and set up her smoker. The smoker is essentially a tin can with something smoking inside, you can see she was using the bellows there to really get it going. Yvonne uses small burlap bags that she gets from local coffeehouses in her smoker because they smoke for a good long while, but she let me know that anything that will smoke will work, like twigs or dead leaves. The smoke is used for two reasons, if the bees smell smoke they think there is a fire and they will fill their honeybellies. This makes them more docile and some scientists think that a bee will not sting with a full honeybelly. Secondly, when a bee is going to sting it releases a pheromone to let the other bees know that it is time to sting, the smoke helps to cover the smell of the pheromone. While she was getting herself set up, a few of the bees came over to her and were sniffing her out. One even bumped up against her, which she told me was considered a warning. They were telling her to get lost.

I was nervous enough out there myself, shooting from several feet away with my zoom lens, so I left Rylie inside to watch all of the excitement from her window. She was really interested in all of the commotion, and especially Yvonne's suit and veil.


This is how it looked when Yvonne opened the box. I asked her how many bees she thought were living inside and she said 10,000 - 15,000, which is a small hive. Hives usually average between 40,000 - 80,000 bees.



The process of collection was pretty straightforward. Yvonne had a small metal tool that she used to coax the bees from the hive and into a small box. She would then empty the small box into a larger box below. In doing this it is impossible for her to avoid disturbing the honeycomb, and in a twist of sad irony, some of the bees drowned in their own honey as a result.



This is the view inside the larger box. Yvonne knew she had gotten the queen because the bees were staying inside the box even though it was opened and because the bees were fanning their wings as if to say: Here she is! The queen is here! I learned that if more than one queen is born in a hive, they will fight to the death to determine who will be the sole queen of the hive. She then takes her one and only mating flight where she is inseminated by several male drones. The fuzzy-bodied males will die after they have mated with the queen as they have served their sole purpose in life. All of the worker bees in a hive are female. A worker bee's life span is six weeks, wereas the queen can live up to five years. I found that to be utterly amazing for an insect.

The brush was saved until the very end because the bees really hate it and they tend to fly wider and more erratic as a result.



Honey production rates vary from hive to hive. It is possible to harvest between 20 - 40 pounds of honey from a hive in the summer that was set up that spring. However, Yvonne mentioned that she acquired a hive in October of 2010 that is still not ready to harvest. The reason being that some bees produce slowly, and they also eat the honey themselves. Just depends on your bees I guess.

Once she had collected all of the bees, Yvonne taped the box securely and put a mesh screen over the holes. She was planning to deliver them to a beekeeping friend whose hive had recently absconded. There is always a chance that the bees will leave a location that they do not choose themselves.



Rylie couldn't stand inside and watch any longer, she had to come out and see what was happening. My neighbor came over and helped me keep an eye on her while I was fervently playing photojournalist. Yvonne gave Rylie a piece of the comb and she loved the soft supple feel of the wax. And we weren't the only one mesmerized by the bees.


Yvonne said the bees were very nice compared to how aggressive they could be in that sitaution. Later that night she sent me this photo of the bees in their new home. I hope they are comfortable there and love it as much as our backyard fusebox. 


Please stay, little bees, please stay.