Steel Planter Boxes; urban garden

After looking at an untold number of single family houses to buy and getting out bid four times on shit holes that weren't even move in ready, we were worn out and completely discouraged. So we decided to take our landlord's offer and buy the townhouse that we had been renting for the past 2+ years. Buying a townhouse at first seemed like we were settling due to the lack of a garden. So this year (now that we're done with the inside re-model, the sauna, and the pizza oven) we have decided to focus on getting a garden in.  The 19th and Union corner of the house was completely overtaken by ornamentals doing us no good. These just had to come out. It has now been 5 weeks of a completely full yard waste bin and one full truck load to the dump and we are finally rid of the corner ornamentals.

Instead of using untreated lumber that breaks down quickly (but is nice and cheap) or cedar that's really expensive we decided to try something a little different with our raised beds. They are made of some 3/16 and some 1/8 inch plate steel. We were able to get most of the metal as scrap at 50 cents per pound and the rest of it was 90 cents a pound. But with it all weighing in at over 400 pounds it wasn't cheap at roughly $300 for the set of three beds. Two of the beds are ~8x3' and one is ~5x3' for a grand total of ~65 square feet of urban gardening fun. We also built  a 6' tall trellis for peas and beans. 

Hard Cider - Our new tradition

We set out with the idea of grabbing enough apples from the farmers market to make a gallon or so of hard cider. We planned to use our Acme juicer which if you have one of these juicers you know that even a gallon is pushing it. After just a few minutes at the farmers market it was clear that we would have to rent a real press. We ended up with ~60 lbs of random seconds and a press from Bob's Homebrew.

Pressing the apples was a bunch of fun and Ana, David, Nora and Natalie all helped out. It came out to be a perfect 5 gallons; just right for a carboy. I used some sulfite on it and pitched champaign yeast in the morning.

I'm pleasantly surprised just how well it turned out. (I just got around to posting about this but we made it in the fall.)

Ridiculous Overkill; Stainless Steel Tamper

My brother-in-law Brandt has gone nuts over coffee. He got himself a crazy fancy home espresso machine and an equally nice burr grinder. For a while he was using sub par beans but recently a roaster opened up just across the street from him. After chatting with the owner/roaster and beginning to buy his beans, Brandt has started pulling some creamy delicious shots.

So the other day Brandt was preparing to pull me a show and I noticed that the tamper that came with his fancy machine was far less than fancy. It was totally out of place with all the cool equipment so I decided to machine him a new one. I got a 5" long 2.5" diameter cylinder of solid stainless steel. I've never worked with stainless steel before but I got lots of advise from my machinist friend at work and just started cutting.

The final product is ridiculously heavy and a gross overkill but also so fricking cool that you can barely even believe it. I took it to my neighborhood coffee shop, Tougo, and had Dannel my favorite barista make me a shot with it before I gave it to Brandt.

El Horno de Union Design

Here are some plans (or sketches) for the wood fired clay oven we made. We were able to finish the entire project, not including the roof, in about three days of work. Since we live in Seattle it's necessary to have a roof over the cob. We had some guys that build bicycle tailors and work down at 20/20 cycle weld us up a roof frame that we then covered with corrugated sheet metal.

The clay for the oven came from a local gravel quarry. They hate hitting clay veins and happily give it away. I got it from a woman who bought an entire semi load of this clay for only the cost of the driver's time. She used the clay to make an entire cob house (see picture below).

I tried to use some old fire bricks that I got off Craig's List. It quickly became obvious that used bricks are just too imperfect and would simply not work for the oven floor. So we had to purchase new bricks but ended up using all the old fire bricks to build the attached grill area.

The only other building component that had to be purchased was the sand. I'm sure that if we had of just tried, we probably could have gotten the sand for cheap or free but instead we just got it from the masonry section at The Home Depot.

Gourmet Club - November 2009

Well that didn't go so well.

Tarah and I are part of a Gourmet Club that meets every few months. It's really just 4 couples of self proclaimed foodies that come up with a theme and have a ball eating great food and getting drunk. The meals usually consist of 5 courses with the host making the appetizer and the main dish. Comfort Food was the theme this time, leaving it basically wide open for interpretation. Tarah and I have been having so much fun with the busiati pasta that we wanted to do that for the club; plus it's standard that a dish is practiced and perfected before the club dinner which we've already done with this dish. "We'll just make a couple of small changes so it's more traditional" we said, "we're good at pasta, what could go wrong" we said. So instead of my normal pasta recipe we used a traditional Sicilian recipe with only semolina flour and water. And instead of the cheater method for making the shape we followed the video that I mentioned in my last posting.

The dough felt great and actually the new method of shaping the pasta worked well and was really fun. We learned in the past that the pasta needs to dry out in order to hold its shape during cooking; so we dried the pasta overnight.

After a delicious appetizer of polenta stars toped with a tangy chutney, and an exquisite example of what may be the embodied definition of comfort food, french onion soup, came our dish. We planned ahead and had the water heating before we sat down to the soup. After the soup we salted the water and through in the pasta. 2 minutes "no, I think it's basically dry pasta, it'll probably take just a bit longer" 5 minutes "no sorry it's still hard" 10 minutes then 15 minutes "what the fuck." Finally after 20 minutes in boiling water we removed and served the pasta. Everyone was polite as they discretely curled their tongs back to removed hard bits of pasta from their molars. The reality is I don't know if it would have ever fully cooked. The braised meaty main dish was another out of this world example of comfort food and what better way to end the theme but with warm molten chocolate toped with whipped cream. Overall the meal was great and we ended the night by having a cocktail at Boka (the bar on the first floor of their building).

Busiati; Pasta Recipe

One of our food highlights was eating busiati with trapanese. Busiati (or busiate I can't tell what's correct) is a special pasta shape found only on the west coast of Sicily; originating in the town of Trapani. Trapanese (its name gives it away as also being from Trapani) is an uncooked, hand pounded sauce of tomatoes, roasted almonds, basil, mint, garlic, and olive oil (link to sauce recipe) that is commonly served with the busiati. We fell in love with the shape for its look and its ability to hold a significant amount of sauce and knew we had to try making it when we got home.

We read that busiati is still being made totally by hand in the region but after having made it at home I really can't see how this is possible. Even after gaining some reasonable proficiency, it takes Tarah and me working together like 30 minutes to form this recipe into busiati, and that's only enough for like 2 to 4 people.

THIS IS ONLY AN APPROXIMATION
There seem to be a number of different ways of making busiate which you can see many examples of and videos of on the web (I especially like these two video 1 and video 2). But instead of rolling "worms" of pasta dough we simply rolled the dough into fettuccine noodles and wrapped those around a skewer. Also, this is my normal pasta dough recipe but actually buciati is traditionally made with a simple flour water dough. Next time I make them I'll try the traditional methods but for now I just wanted to make an approximation. And I have to say they have been really good.

Pasta Recipe -
- 2 cups unbleached all purpose flour
- 2 eggs
- Olive oil
- healthy pinch of Salt

Put the flour and salt in a food processor and pulse to mix. Add the eggs and ~2 Tbs of olive oil. Mix until it looks like homogeneous bread crumbs. while the mixer is running start adding water. This should only take a couple or few tablespoons. When the dough seems like it's starting to come together let it mix for a while longer and see if it will form a ball. If not add a little more water. Kneed the ball for just a little while then let the dough rest for 15 minutes. Divide the dough into quarters. Roll it out to a #5 on the Atlas pasta roller and cut into fettuccine noodles. Cut these noodles in half so you now have two piles of fettuccine noodles that each represent 1/8th the total recipe and are ~6 inches long. We found a wood skewers to work well for wrapping around. It is important for the pasta to dry for several hours or overnight to ensure that they hold their shapes during cooking. We cooked one batch just after rolling and they almost completely unrolled themselves. The finished dish below is from our Italy trip.

Italy - 2009

Tarah and I had a wonderful month in southern Italy. We combined a one week conference in Castellammare de Stabia (just south of Napoles) with three more weeks making our way down the Amalfi Coast and across Sicily. There were many highlights of the trip but the main highlight (aside from the obvious; being the food) I would say was the Path of the Gods on the Amalfi Coast. I'm a little overwhelmed to just jump in with a run down of the entire trip so I think I'll dole out stories in random order as I feel like writing about them. Here's a link though to our web site where you can see many of the photos.

http://www.tarahandpaul.com/photos/Italy-2009.html