"Dad is great! Gives us chocolate cake!" - Bill Cosby

I never know what to get H for Father’s Day –but this year was relatively simple – I am having a portrait taken of the three boys together; we got him a new pair of sturdy leather work gloves since he lost his last pair; and I bought him a panini press. We were at a party over Memorial Day weekend at which the host served Panini with grilled veggies, meats, and cheeses. H was rapturous. It was a no-brainer.

We host Father’s Day dinner; in the past we have served grilled steaks but this enterprise frustrates H because his family is all about the well-done steak. H and I like our filet rare. It made him crazy and ruined his day to have to grill the living daylights out of a gorgeous piece of meat before anyone other than he and I would eat it.

Instead we prepped and grilled two eggplant, four zucchini, four red peppers; also sautéed two giant bunches of spinach. We offered fresh mozzarella, whole milk mozzarella, and sharp provolone (also white American for the kids). Our meat selection consisted of hot and sweet salami, cracked pepper roast turkey breast, hot capicolla, prosciutto, and Genoa salami. Our sides were fresh fruit (grapes and strawberries), devilled eggs, kettle potato chips, garlic- and feta-stuffed olives, a tossed green salad with carrots, cucumber, peppers, grape tomatoes, and field greens from our CSA. I baked a chocolate cake, served with vanilla ice cream, for dessert.

H wielded the press like a pro. Once we figured out that you kinda have to hold the sandwich back in the press with a wooden spoon until the bread heats and collapses a bit, they got a lot more professional looking. (Sorry, I did not take photos, as really, how would I explain THAT? My in-laws know the Internet exists, but that might be about it.)

I myself had a panini with prosciutto, provolone, zucchini, and spinach, chased by several (um, more than that) olives and about four devilled eggs. (I would have eaten more but everyone else ate them first – grumph.)

Liz at Pocket Farm is hosting a One Local Summer project, encouraging bloggers from around the country to eat at least one dinner a week created from local ingredients.

Still in the practically post-coital glow of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle, I leapt aboard the bandwagon and signed up. I was thinking I might try to make my panini my first local meal for the project.

The ciabatta came from a local bakery that we know we are insanely lucky we have: their bread is amazing. Their raisin-walnut loaf is wonderful toasted with butter for breakfast, and I would walk across hot coals for their green-olive foccacia; often half of one was an entire meal when I was younger, thinner, and less, um, solvent. (What? Aren’t olives a vegetable?)

The butter was from Beaver Meadow Farm in nearby DuBois (that’s “DEW-boyz” to all you non-yinzers. I know, it makes my ears bleed, too.)

The prosciutto is made by Parma Sausage, in the Strip.

The spinach was from our CSA.

But the provolone was imported, as were the olives. I am sure my mother-in-law used Giant Eagle eggs for the deviled eggs, which means they could have been shipped from anywhere in the country. (I probably would have used eggs from Hillandale Farms, in Ohio, but really, I am still jonesing for my own chickens, although I need to investigate Mildred’s Daughters eggs.)

And that’s just what I ate; the rest of the cheeses, and lots of the meats, are most definitely not local. I think I can do better, especially for my first week out. But I have to admit, those panini are damn yummy.

So was the chocolate cake. H requested this one especially, as he likes the hint of cinnamon in the cake and the rich-without-being-too-sweet icing.

He may be a raging pain in the ass as a husband, but he’s a damn fine father and I was happy to celebrate the day with him and our three beautiful boys.

************

Brabham Family Chocolate Sheet Cake

(From Michael Lee West’s wonderful Consuming Passions)

2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1 cup water
2 sticks unsalted butter
4 TBSP cocoa
½ cup buttermilk
3 eggs, lightly beaten
½ tsp salt
1 scant tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 350.
Mix together flour and sugar in a large bowl.
Boil water, add butter and cocoa and stir till everything is melted and it’s thickened a bit (it doesn’t get very very thick, just FYI).
Pour over the sugar and flour.
Using a large spoon, blend well.
Add buttermilk, eggs, salt cinnamon, soda, and vanilla.
Mix well.
Pour into a buttered 9x13 pan.
Bake 35 minutes.
Cool 5 minutes (preferably on a wire rack) and ice cake in its pan.


Chocolate Icing

1 stick unsalted butter
4 TBSP cocoa
6 TBSP milk
3 ½ cups confectioners sugar
1 TBSP vanilla

Melt butter in a saucepan.
Stir in cocoa.
Whisk in milk, pouring in a slow stream.
Remove from heat, add sugar and beat.
Stir in vanilla (and 1 cup chopped pecans if you like – we do not like.)
Icing will be grainy and lumpy. Pour over cake and spread to cover. Icing sets quickly so work fast.

We served this with Turkey Hill vanilla bean ice cream, from Lancaster County, about four hours east of here. (Reinhold’s is made right in Pittsburgh, and is the most delicious ice cream, but it’s not readily available in the typical grocery stores.)

And I forgot the vanilla in the frosting because Primo was interrogating me about what I was making, and I don’t do well when I am distracted when baking. It seemed ok, but I do wonder if it had anything to do with the icing not really setting? Which was fine, all gooey with the cold ice cream and all.

And since H left this morning with the two older boys for Stroudsburg and Thomas, the remainder of the cake is ALL MINE. Oh yes!

"If you ask me, there isn't enough blue food." - Mark Darcy in "Bridget Jones's Diary"

H went to play poker with friends tonight.
While I generally would rather read a book than watch a movie, I do have a small stash of old favorites, comfort movies, as it were.
Thye include “Moonstruck,” “Love Actually,” “The Parent Trap,” “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” and “Roman Holiday.”
Every once in a very great while, I will add to the collection. Recently I purchased a sure-to-be-godawful DVD called “Stick It!”
Its tagline caught my fancy: “It’s not called gym-nice-tics!”
I mean, c’mon, that’s FUNNY.
Plus, long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, when I was young and thin and shorter, before my seventh-grade growth spurt that put me at five-eight, I was a gymnast.
Not a particularly good one by any means – I spent an awful lot of time trying to learn to do an aerial (never succeeded) and a back extension (successful). I could do front handsprings but not back handsprings. I finally managed a back hip circle on the bars just before I grew half a foot.

I was gymnastics-obsessed - spent my seventh summer cartwheeling in my poor mother’s living room and jumping around on the front lawn pretending to be Nadia Comaneci. I amassed quite a clipping collection about Olga Korbut, Nadia, Ludmilla Turischeva, Tracee Talavera, Julianne McNamara – I knew all the names, all the big stars and the up-and-comers. I even subscribed to US Gymnast for a while.

I took lessons at a teeny little gym called Sunburst Gymnastics. I went once a week, for an hour, and then to gymnastics camp (half-day) for a week in the summer.
I competed in one meet, and I still have my medal (in fairness, I should tell you that everyone who competed got a medal, if you managed to do your back somersaults, and kick turns on the beam). Like everyone else in the gym, I sewed all my ribbons and patches to my leotard, and I wore little white anklets with colored pom-poms on the backs, and I will tell you right now, I HATED wearing grips on the bars, I only used chalk. I longed –yearned, I tell you - for calluses on my palms, and rips on those calluses.

My first floor routine was to the theme from Pink Panther (I could probably still do it if I had to – ba dum, ba dum, ba dum ba dum ba dum, ba dum ba DUMMMM, badadaDUM), second level floor was to Nadia’s Theme (natch), and the level three floor routine was to “Evergreen.” I never got past level three, sadly.

So. Did I watch this movie tonight? No, I did not. Because it was all the way UPSTAIRS and I was all the way DOWNSTAIRS and I am LAZY.
[WARNING: non sequitur approaching]
So I popped in “Bridget Jones.”

My favorite moment: when Mark Darcy kisses Bridget at the end, and she says, “Wait a minute. Nice boys don’t kiss like that.” And he growls, without even opening his eyes, “Oh, yes, they fucking do.” And then he wraps her in his overcoat.

The funniest moment: the fight scene between Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy.

The most heart-wrenching moment: when Mark meets Bridget’s friends, and is all shy and sort of awkward and cute, and then he flashes that gorgeous, elusive smile…sighhhhh...

The most cringe-inducing scene: Bridget’s speech at Mark’s parents’ ruby anniversary party. Or maybe when Bridget shows up at what she thinks is a tarts-and-vicars party in a Playboy bunny outfit, and everyone else is dressed normally…or when she answers the phone, “Bridget Jones, wanton sex goddess," and it’s her mum...or...or...let’s face it, I love Bridget because she’s real. She fucks up. A lot. She says stupid things and acts like an ass. But she means well, and loves her mum and dad, and sticks by her friends. I would want her to be my friend. And tonight, for just a few hours, she was.

But she stole my boyfriend, just so you know.

There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.

Last week, on my way to go grocery shopping, Seg asked if we could go next-door to the Big Bird and play with the Thomas trains at the bookstore. Since he finished his preschool year two weeks ago, we were under no time constraints to get the grocery shopping done at a specific time, and I can get coffee just as easily at the B&N as I can at the BB, so what the heck. The boys staged giant train wrecks centered on the trestle bridge, and I looked at books.

Noticing that the last Jennifer Chiaverini Elm Creek Quilts novel was out in paperback, I scooped that up. (I have to read all my library books first, though.)

And ever since the library-book-replacement debacle, I keep thinking I should just BUY Primo’s books (because, you know, we have a twenty-dollar-bill tree growing in a sunny spot in my muddy backyard…). But I like to buy classics, books I think all the boys will eventually enjoy, and that bear rereading (we’re on our fourth reading of Paddington, and they’ve been pestering me for more Mr Popper’s Penguins, which has to be, upon rereading, one of the dullest books ever written). So I brought home Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Now, the movie “Willy Wonka” is ODD (although I harbor a shamefully weird crush on Gene Wilder), and I won’t let the kids watch it yet; and many other Roald Dahl books are ODD (I still sometimes have nightmares about his story “The Swan,” from The Wonderful Stories of Henry Sugar and I was NOT an especially sensitive child by any means). But I thought Charlie might be a fun book to read aloud to the two boys this summer, before bed and during the lazy, hot afternoons, swinging on the porch swing. Well, that was the theory at least. Primo started it yesterday afternoon, propped up on his elbows in our front yard, his feet draped over the side of the wading pool where Seg pretended to be a polar bear. He gulped it down, begging me to stay up a little bit later so he could finish it before he went to bed (I let him. Sucker.) I was charged to bring home more Charlie books today – but our library doesn’t own Charlie and the Glass Elevator, so I checked out Matilda (my personal favorite) and the deliciously creepy James and the Giant Peach.

A ten-year-old friend recommended the Alex Ryder series, by Anthony Horowitz, and I did look at them but I think Primo is still a wee little bit too young for them just yet.

He also proudly showed off his Pokemon Pokedex, and now Primo wants one, too. Because that boy is digging Pokemon these days, and he loves nothing more than memorizing statistics. He reads the sports page every single blessed morning, and can rattle off batting averages, point totals, plus-minuses, and possibly even, who the hell knows, over-unders. I think nothing would delight him more than becoming a repository of useless Pokemon information.

Public schools wrap up Tuesday, and I am already fearing trying to keep that boy in books this summer.

*************

Yesterday I began Betty MacDonald’s The Plague and I, a rollicking account of her year in a tuberculosis sanatorium. No, seriously, I do have to admit, probably only MacDonald could make this a good read. I mean, she made life on a chicken farm hilarious in The Egg and I so who was I to doubt? I have coupled it with a serious attempt to finish Clare Clarke’s The Great Stink because the reviews were so good, and the writing is so evocative. But that’s sort of the problem. It’s a book about the engineering and building of London’s sewer system – and even I, the great iron-stomached one, am finding it tough to read it while eating, which is my favorite way to read.

So I am off for my lunch hour – to read about TB or read about sewage. Tough call.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. - Barbara Kingsolver

All righty, I am digging this eat-local thang. Let me on the bandwagon! I’ve always been sort of conscious of the vibe, but now I am realizing exactly how much good even just a little effort can do. And I have the zeal of the convert, only not so much converted as convinced. Maybe more on the do-good-to-your-fellow-man and a little less on the hellfire and brimstone, but you know, otherwise...just like a convert.

Barbara Kingsolver has inspired me with her wonderful Animal Vegetable Miracle; Suse and I have been planning our commune’s farming venture (Suse, can we name some of the chooks (that’s Aussie for chicken, my little Internet schweeties) Burp and Slurp? I’ll explain later...), and I have been reading about chickens and chicken coops and chicken feed and chicken breeds pretty much nonstop.

Gina and I have a date on Saturday night to MAKE OUR OWN MOZZARELLA.

My CSA starts next week (and we are going to be gone for a bit, meaning my first haul of strawberries and asparagus are going to be eaten by other people! Wah!)

I have found a source to recycle plastics 6 and 7 (the city only takes up to 5); once a pile accumulates, I can drop them off on my way to work (which means I have to drive rather than take the bus...hmmm...everything’s a trade-off, I see). I have found a place that accepts paperboard and boxes for recycling, so all our cereal boxes and cartons go in a box to be hauled off once a month there, along with any corrugated cardboard we have amassed. I am contributing kitchen scraps to my neighbor’s compost bin. I faithfully dump several pounds a month of junk mail and scrap paper into one of those fundraising recycling dumpsters. And the grocery store recycles plastic bags of any kind. Our family’s garbage output has decreased from emptying the trash once or sometimes even twice a day, to emptying about once every two days.

Alas, we still have all the dog poop and cat litter to cope with (it’s the only type of “manure” you CANNOT compost – why is that?) - and I am still using disposable diapers. I also am still drinking my share of “Colombian blood” in its 10% post-recycled sleeves and paper cups. But we are working on it. I am in the market for a nice, hefty, refillable travel mug type of dealio...

(But I continue to drag the empty soda cans and bottles out of the desk trashcan at work and throw them in the recycling bins – is it so hard to walk the ten steps to the bins? Really?)

I just requested Joan Dye Gussow’s This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader from the university EZBorrow program. I also want to read Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, by Alisa Smith, but my public library account is currently blocked because I owe them for a lost book (Primo’s, not mine). And I am trying to track down a copy of Jackie French’s Backyard Self-sufficiency but it is apparently unavailable in the States for less than a mortgage payment or two.

I am also interested in reading It’s a Long Road to a Tomato, by Keith Stewart; Second Nature by the inestimable Michael Pollan, which is sitting on my living room bookshelves; Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food - Gary Paul Nabhan; and Deborah Madison’s Local Flavors: Cooking and eating from America’s Farmer’s Markets. (As is my wont, I will track down and read voraciously every single book I can find about a topic that has piqued my interest. It’s Droutism, but for books.)

Today – today I built the raised part of a raised bed. It’s only a little bit raised, to account for the slope of the side yard. See why I am terrified my children will roll down the hill and over the wall into the brick alley below?



Thank God I have my Matrix. But the little truck, it is missed.


The walls of the bed are contructed of 2x4s which, at a buck-fifty for an eight-foot-length, seemed about the right price. My nailing skills leave a lot to be desired so I just screwed the damn thing together with scabs and 3/8" drywall screws and my weenie little drill, and hope it won’t be moved for a long while. Next comes the fun part (ha!): removing the grass and digging in the peat moss and topsoil.


See my collection of studly tools? I DO own a real (Makita) drill, but it’s dead, so I am forced to use my mother’s itty-bitty Black and Decker.
And I love my Sawzall. I have no idea how we lived before we bought a Sawzall.



I have been bringing home stray plants for several weeks, and they will be greatly relieved to be in the ground...currently they live on my front steps.


Except my tomato plants. They’re my favorite (shhh, don’t tell the others). They went in right up against the house, where H is terrified I will flood the basement while watering them. (Yeah, I know, hard to believe he’s an engineer.) (Also, I am well aware that my rosemary is looking peaked.)



My lettuce trenches come in a close second; I just planted them a few days ago so no sproutage yet but I look forward their tidy little rows marching down the planters.


My Shasta daisies seeds have sprouted! I like masses of the things, but started plants are too expensive. So just as at the old house, I dumped several seed packets into some peat pots and voila! We have daisiage.


The chives, however, refuse to poke their pointy little heads aboveground.


While waiting for the weeniedrill to recharge, I cleared weeds and removed dead-leaf mulch and yanked out maple volunteers from around the rosebushes. We have about a dozen lining the alley wall. We also, turns out, have wasp nests all over the place. Which I discovered after raking out the roots of some dead grass under the rosebush. They were little teeny wasps, and were fortunately even less interested in me than I was in them.


The cat, whose secret hiding-from-Punto place I discovered, was even less interested in me. Go figure.


The raised bed is four feet by approximately eight feet. A prefab chicken coop with a covered run would have a footprint only about two feet longer, and if I built my own, I could tinker with the dimensions/layout.
The other sideyard is crying for chickens.

Cluck, cluck, cluck!