In honor of Halloween, I am reblogging this scrumptious-sounding recipe from Stitchknit. Check out her blog if you get a chance!–Shelley

stitchknit

One of my favorite traditions during this time of year is to serve Dinner in a Pumpkin.  Kids love the idea of it first off……….and once they taste the mixture inside, they are just as wowed with the flavors as the adults are.  I’ve even had people say they couldn’t even eat ANY squash come away from the table a true convert!

If you’re lucky enough to have your own pumpkin patch, go out back and bring in one that’s the size of a large serving dish.  Otherwise, start at your local grocery store!

                                                                     Dinner In A Pumpkin

Ingredients

• 1 medium pumpkin (needs to be at least the size the ingredients listed here….and it has to fit in your oven!)
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 2 lbs ground beef
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• 1 (4 ounce) cans sliced mushrooms
• 1 (15 ounce) can…

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Skunk Funk

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tomfriedel

Dear Reader:

I let the dog out.

That was my huge mistake. I came back from a library viewing of Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead, and Delilah barked and barked at the door.

“Don’t let her out mom; I saw a fox run down the road,” the Teen said. Did I listen? No. I let the dog out, and off she charged, yapping her snout off. After about ten minutes, I stepped outside to call her in, and it hit me…eau de skunk! Not only that, the dog’s barks sounded muffled. Where was she? Not UNDER the mudroom…

Yup, under the mudroom in a little crawl space. With a skunk. For over an hour.

The stench permeated the mudroom and began seeping into the kitchen. I finally got the dog inside, in the bathtub, and worked in a lather of peroxide, baking soda, and dish soap and then relegated the little stinker to the cellar for the night. Fans, open windows, vinegar in dishes to absorb the odor, Scentsy wax warmers, and incense were my weapons of choice.

The next day, I made a run to the market for Febreeze, commercial room spray, and scented dryer sheets, escalating the war on pee-ew to chemical warfare. Hey, I tried the sustainable/organic remedies first, but desperate times, you know?

If the Teen were homeschooled, I might have been content with those dishes of vinegar placed strategically around the rooms. Absorbing the odor? Masking the odor? Both? It did work quite well, but this was full-on war. If this had simply been a case of dog getting sprayed and running through the house, it would have sufficed, but the mudroom is attached to the house. I have no way of getting under there to wash the skunk oil away. So there it sits, emitting stench like a giant jar of critter potpourri.

I didn’t want the Teen to go to school and be known for the next three years as Skunk Girl. When in dire straits, we resort to all the artillery we can get our hands on, right? And the best weapon was surprising. The bottle of Chanel No. 5 Hubby bought me for Christmas last year.

I spritzed it on before I went to the store, and when I inquired whether he smelled any hint of skunk, the checkout boy looked satisfyingly surprised and said, “Actually, you smell really good.”

Compliment aside, this experience traumatized me. I have some anger-at-skunk issues to work out. Fashion therapy below…

Redneck Advertising Campaign by flabbercrabby featuring chanel fragrance

What Debate? We Had An Earthquake!

Dear Reader:

Shaken…not stirred

Shaken, Not Stirred

While the rest of the country focused on the presidential town-hall debate last Tuesday night, Mainers were abuzz with excitement on an entirely different topic–a 4.0 magnitude earthquake that hit a few miles from Lake Arrowhead around 7 pm Tuesday evening. Lake Arrowhead is less than a quarter mile from my house, and the funny thing is, Lake Arrowhead is not a municipality…it is a literal lake. Lake Arrowhead Community is a homeowner’s association, however, so you could call it a quasi-municipality, and for a day or two we were ON THE MEDIA MAP.

I was bopping around on Facebook when the quake hit. The house shook, and a blast of sound like an explosion had me bolting out of my office share and down the stairs to the first floor to check on Dear Daughter and my dog, Delilah, who only barked once (unlike when she sees a squirrel outside and throws a full-on intruder alert). Like many, I thought maybe the furnace blew up…or the roof was caving in because a pine tree fell on it. As the house continued to shimmy like Mother Nature bellydancing, I realized it was an earthquake. I bounded back upstairs to post on my Facebook page the following elegant rhetoric:

“Holy crap did we just have an earthquake?”

I wasn’t the only one. Facebook posts surfaced on the screen like bass during a insect hatch on Lake Arrowhead. Within minutes my Facebook feed was all “earthquake.”

This is the real story, I think.

Yes, we had an earthquake. It was a big one by Maine standards; however, it was the speed of social media response (could we call it “reporting” even?) that illustrates how much society has changed. Twenty minutes after my Facebook post, the first reporting by the online news sites trickled in. Trickled? That is how we describe news reporting a mere twenty minutes after an event? Crazy, but true.

Here is one example of the viral nature of social media. A spoofy Facebook page called ISurvivedThe101612Earthquake gathered over 84,000 “likes” in a mere fifteen hours after the quake. 84K! We are living in a New Media Age. News is immediately reported and transmitted and shared and “liked” and “tweeted,” and we expect nothing less than that immediacy. We are all in the loop all the time. The fault lines have shifted. We, all of us, ARE the media circa 2012.

So, almost a week later, the frenzy has passed, the buzz had quieted, and nobody talks about the earthquake much. Guess it’s old news now, but we sure did have fun here for a couple of hours . . . Outside the Box.

Easy Weekend Cable

Dear Reader:
Quick post to share my localista find of the week, a Jordache faux fur coat from Goodwill for $20 from the Biddeford, Maine Goodwill store.

Faux Sure I Have Style

And then, of course, I had to go to Polyvore.com to see if I could create a similar look. Maybe I can knit a cable hat in this gorgeous wine color?

Presto Pesto!

and Other Ways of Preserving Your Bountiful Garden

Homemade herb-drying rack made from a stick and some yarn. From left to right: thyme, French tarragon, chocolate mint, and rosemary.

Dear Reader:

This year’s garden was a great success. One giant sunflower produced fifteen or twenty blossom/seed heads and provided the early autumn garden with a showy display. The straw bale gardens gave the tomato plants a much-needed boost of sunlight along with the nitrogen fertilizer and carbon from the straw, and we had plenty of Early Girl and heirloom tomatoes to slice for sandwiches, chop for salsa, and wedge for salads.

Black-eyed Susans are still blossoming out there along with the deepening pink of Autumn Joy sedum. Even the new female Winterberry is bejeweled with deep red berries!

Bread & Butter Pickles

Cucumbers were so abundant this year I was able to make a few pickles. Pickling was surprisingly easy and amounts to nothing much more than chopping and slicing veggies and herbs, making a brine out of salt, vinegar, sugar and spices, and pouring the brine over the veggies in glass containers. These Bread & Butter Pickles came out very crisp and white where I’d always been used to softer and more yellow, but the flavor was intense and delicious.

I found my recipe in a 1980’s Betty Crocker Cookbook, but Mother Earth News Magazine has a good starter article right here online plus a heads-up about a book outlining small-batch pickle production (say THAT ten times fast).

An excess of tomatoes from my parents’ excellent garden up n’oth became hot, spicy pasta sauce. The process for the sauce is simple. Boil water in a big pot. Dump in the tomatoes and wait 30-40 seconds. Lift tomatoes out with slotted spoon and dump into cold water in the sink. After a minute or two, slip skins off tomatoes and cut into fourths. Throw into large slow cooker pot with onions, garlic, chopped veggies like zucchini, hot peppers, green pepper. Add salt, dried herbs or fresh herbs to taste. Add cooked meat if desired. Let it simmer for about seven hours. You can also add tomato paste to thicken it if you like. The sauce can be frozen in freezer bags or containers.

Calendula in the Herb Garden

Perhaps the most successful of my garden experiments this years was the herb box. Along with the sunflower mentioned above, I planted fennel (see Grand Fennel-ly ), rosemary, and basil. In the front of one perennial bed, a French tarragon comes back and grows bigger every summer, and down at the end of the driveway beneath the forsythia bushes my friend Sandi kindly divided for me, a hardly little thyme comes back year after year after year.

This year, I decided, I would preserve a bit of these herbs to see me through a winter season of cooking. The basil were huge. I grew weepy just thinking about pulling them and throwing them on the compost as I’d babied them through the first rough month of transplant shock, daily watering, and Japanese beetles. One night seemed to be threateningly cold, and so, fearing frost, I gently pulled up the basil and placed each one its own plastic grocery bag. These I crammed into the mudroom until I could figure out when and what to do with them.

Poor basil in the mudroom

Friends, let me tell you, basil fresh from the garden has a powerful odor! Neighbor Debbie stopped by and thought the mudroom smelled like old shoes. Hmmm. Hopefully the basil doesn’t taste like dear daughter’s gym sneakers. I rather thought the mudroom smelled wicked “herbal” and prayed no-one dropped over and came to a wrong conclusion about my gardening activities. All legal, I promise!

Ingredients for Presto Pesto

A week or so later, those basil plants were still sitting in my mudroom and beginning to look a little wilty. The predicted frost never materialized, and I gritted my teeth wishing I’d left my herbs in the dirt until I figured out what to do with it.

I knew I had to come up with something and fast, or else the poor plants would end up on the compost pile after all. A mid-week visit to my good friend, Donna D, prompted me to share some garden tomatoes and a large sprig of the basil. Donna D, in turn, gave me a cube of her homemade basil pesto and–bless her soul–a recipe to go with it. Voila! I had the answer to my herbal error.

The recipe calls for using a food processor and blending ingredients very slowly and deliberately. I don’t own a food processor. I do, however, own a blender. After trying with no success to puree basil leaves, garlic cloves and walnut in the blender with no liquid, I gave up and dumped in the olive oil and grated Parmesan and turned the blender on to puree for about three minutes. Presto Pesto! was born.

Pesto in ice cube trays

The trick to keeping the pesto for future use is simple: ice-cube trays. Empty your ice-cubes into a plastic container in the freezer so your family doesn’t throw a hissy-fit when they are looking to cool down their apple cider/workout water-bottle/iced coffee/red-wine-that-really- shouldn’t-be-chilled-but-whatever. Wash the ice-cube trays and dry them. Pour prepared Presto Pesto into the trays. Cover with plastic wrap and freeze. When frozen, pop out of trays and store in zippered freezer bags (or leave in the trays if you have extras for actual ice-production).

The pesto can be thawed and used later. I made four batches of Presto Pesto! with my starting-to-wilt-and-wither basil plants, and these batches filled two ice-cube trays. I think it must be fairly economical as those little jars in the grocery store are quite expensive (local big-box supermarket has a 4.5 oz jar for $3.29.) I used only a portion of a bag of walnuts and one wedge of Parmesan cheese. Pesto does take a bit of olive oil, but it is cheaper if you buy it in those big cans unless you are a stickler for extra-extra virgin fancy stuff.

Following is friend Donna D’s recipe just as she gave it to me. But to make it Presto Pesto! simply ignore the persnickety instructions about careful and slow blending at just the right moment and just dump the whole thing together in the blender and let’r go.

BASIL PESTO

1 1/2 c. basil leaves
2 cloves garlic
1/4 c. pine nuts or walnuts
3/4 c. thinly grated Parmesan cheese
3/4 c. olive oil

Puree first three ingredients in food processor until it forms a thick paste. Add the Parmesan cheese very slowly. Then add olive oil and mix until the consistency of creamed butter. Put a film of oil over top. Cover and refrigerate or freeze in ice-cube trays.

That’s it, Dear Reader! Whether you are preserving the garden by pickling, drying, canning or freezing, it is so much fun to go shopping in your own pantry during the winter months…Outside the Box.

Drop me a line and tell us about YOUR preserving projects this year. It’s always fun to hear someone else talk for a change.

Required Reading:
This is the best explanation I’ve ever read about what makes literature “literature.” If you are a writer–or an intrigued reader who always wanted to know why critics and literature professors do not consider Janet Evanovich’s novels “literary,” check out this essay by Oliver. Oliver also likes to write about beer, and he creates amusing dioramas out of Lego people and gnome statuettes to illustrate his ideas. Happy reading! –Shelley:)

Literature and Libation

I had a James Joyce-style epiphany regarding the idea of a “writing vision” while sitting in class this week. It struck me that while I knew why I liked to write, and what I like to write, and even sometimes how I like to write, I was still missing an overarching vision for what kind of writing I wanted to do.

This may seem odd. “Oliver, writing is writing, you silly person”, you might say out loud while reading this, rolling your eyes and mentally noting that I’m not very smart sometimes. And yes, in some capacity, that is true. But what separates Shakespeare from Stephanie Meyer? What makes Hemingway and Hawthorne worth reading, all these years after their time? Why do some authors stand the test of time, while others disappear into the 1$ bargain bin of history?

No one would argue that Dan Brown, Stephen King, James Patterson, and John…

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