Experiment with bitter oranges (updated)

I'm half serious when I say that we bought a garden with a house in it. The yard is full, overly full, with all sorts of oddities, most of them with thorns or prickles. The yard will require editing, after I decide what stays and what goes.

One of the plants that has been in my "to go" list is a bitter orange tree-let (Poncirus trifoliata) because it is a mass of twisted thorny branches planted in an awkward spot that served no purpose in the garden that I could tell. I may have to reassess that opinion. I've ignored the plant all summer, intending to dig it up this fall when it's not so miserable hot, and then a few days ago I found it had produced fruit, seven or eight small, fuzzy, fragrant fruit. The fragrance is odd: citrusy, medicinal and borderline janitorial all at the same time. Not conventionally pleasant but somehow still compelling.

The little oranges sat on my counter for a few days making the kitchen smell peculiar. Their uses are limited, it seems, so I thought I'd try infusing them into vodka. I dug through one of the last unpacked boxes for our small liquor stash, but no vodka. There was a bottle of white rum, though. I sliced the little buggers as thinly as their zillion seeds would allow, dumped everything into a jar, added some whole allspice and dried ginger bits because they smelled good together with the oranges, and filled the jar with the rum. Let's see what happens, and whether this plant is a keeper after all...

(ETA I'll add a photo when I can figure out how to make Blogger cooperate with my Mac. Also, the fruit is resinous as hell. Getting my knife, the bowl and the cutting mat clean took some serious elbow grease and a lot of full strength dish detergent. I had to toss the sponge afterward.)

(2nd ETA: The experiment was a total fail. It looked cool but when I opened the jar up after a few days of infusing, the "janitorial" smell had gone from borderline to OMFG. My garbage disposal smelled great for a few days though. Looks like the plant it going back on the list of plants to dig up.)

"Ah ha" or "Doh" moment?

Reading Ruth Reichl's latest book the other night, I found one of those ideas that is so simple and obvious, and yet I had never even considered before: when making chicken broth, put the seasonings and other goodies in with the chicken AFTER the foamy stuff that you should skim off cooks out of the bird. This, after years of cursing under my breath as I skimmed peppercorns off with the foam and bobbed the spoon around trying to separate the foam from onion halves and garlic cloves, eliminated that little frustration while making a batch of Thai-inspired coconut chicken soup for the freezer.

A little mystery

The in-between house is diagonally across the (very busy) street from the large, old cemetery. The historic part with the pre-statehood graves and such is on the far side of the cemetery from here. It is the relatively newer section near us that I walk the dog along every morning. It is bordered by a stone wall, and after we wander up the alley between the backyards, greeting the friendly dogs behind their fences, hurrying past the unfriendly ones, and visiting with the cats who have figured out that my dog is a pushover, we walk the sidewalk along the cemetery wall back toward the busy road and the house.

Sometime during the last year, I noticed for first time that there was a small bouquet of flowers left on the wall of the cemetery just outside one of the side entrances. It didn't really register to me then, not until a couple months later when another one appeared. The first one was a mixed bouquet, like you would find at the grocery store, still in its cellophane sleeve. The second one was yellow roses. Then a few months after that, some sort of lily.

This past Monday morning around 5:30 I found the next bouquet, pink roses. They had been left not on the wall, but deliberately placed in the middle of the driveway of the side entrance to the cemetery. Some drivers take a shortcut through the cemetery, and the bouquet had been run over at least once, even though it hadn't been there long. The flowers were still fresh, or as fresh as they can be after being run over. So I did what others probably had done before - I picked the bouquet up and put it on the corner of the wall by the entrance. I guess I was the first jogger or dog walker to notice them this time. Eventually the groundskeepers will pick them up and throw them away.

Not going into it... but hey, plum cake!

... the last 9+ months, that is.

New rule for Little Bit for checking out library books: at least one has to NOT be about cats. However, "Mr. Wuffles" by David Wiesner is just the best! Love love love it! (Ordered a copy.)

A few hints of fall weather have kicked me out of the doldrums a bit, and this afternoon my aspiring pastry chef and I are making a plum cake.

(This kid can knead dough!)

'Way back in the Dark Ages of the mid-1980s, I encountered Zwetschgenkuchen in Germany. The version I fell in love with was made with a lightly sweet yeast dough and small tart plums - Zwetschgen - on a sheet pan. It was served with a sprinkle of sugar and a dollop of whipped cream, though I liked to skip the sugar part to enjoy the exquisite contrast between the tart plums and the sweet dough,which the whipped cream just made heavenly.

(Three lbs of Italian prune plums,
pit removed and quartered)

Every recipe I have found on the web for US bakers calls for Italian prune plums for Zwetschgen. They do not have that exquisite tartness that I remember from those backyard Zwetschgen that made the cake of my memory so divine. But since that is all that is readily available, Italian prune plums it shall be.

(Yeast dough - pre-rise)

For the yeast dough I fell back on an old favorite. I was afraid it would be too puffy, and I knew the flavor isn't quite how I remember the Ur-Zwetschgenkuchen's because I have made it with apples a bunch of time (oh, SO good, btw), but I know I really like it, and none of the others were calling out for me to try them today. Little Bit pretty much did all the kneading while I cleaned up; all I had to do was give it a couple of squeezes to catch a few rough spots. Wow!

(Plums onto the dough)

So, my helper girl took her bath during the big dough rise, and afterward she was in charge of putting all the plum quarters on the dough base. She used every one of them, all three pounds. Then the second rise while we ate dinner, and into the oven while I walked the dog. Egg was kind enough to keep an eye on our crazy oven then. See, the temperature control on it is, to put it kindly, unreliable. Set the dial for anything under 300F and you're usually fine, but anything above that, and the beast just keeps on heating unless you constantly dial it back, and then back up a smidge, and then back down as it races for 550F+, and so on. I discovered this a while back when I started baking bread - set the oven to preheat to 475F and came back to find it approaching 650F - YIKES!



After thwarting the oven's efforts at temperature-related sabotage, I present this slab of delight:

Yes, the edges are "rustic", and no, it's not the Zwetschgenkuchen of my memories, but oh, it is indeed wonderful and luscious and satisfying (with just a little whipped cream).

Still in between

Still here at the in between house. Six months later, I might add. I think we are real estate impaired. No room for a real Christmas tree, so I bought a 4 ft tabletop tinsel tree. A purple one. With purple lights. My MIL has just about come unglued. Little Bit LOVES it. She wins.

Here are two little projects, for Little Bit, naturally:

I made up Molly the blue dog on the fly. With my very limited crochet skills, I am pretty pleased with how she turned out. Little Bit was the creative director for this one. Stripey Cat is from a kit that Little Bit talked me into buying for her when we were supposed to be Christmas shopping for other people. Little Bit insisted that she needed a hair bow, though, which was not included in the kit. Stripey Cat has almost supplanted Dora as the most favored toy, but not quite.

I have one of those, but I don't know where it is

Chez Squirrel is still the "in between" house (our rental). In the 6 months we have been house hunting, we have found three houses that we liked enough to make offers. On the first we just didn't come to mutually agreeable terms with the seller, so no hard feelings there. The last two went sour due to stupid seller tricks. The last one really hurt; the place was damn near perfect. 

When we moved into the in between house, I was not expecting to still be here now, and I selected the boxes to unpack accordingly. Throughout the time we've been here, I periodically have needed something I know I own, but it is boxed away somewhere and stored in one of three locations: the attic, the Pod or the storage locker back near the old house. The longer we stay here, the more frequently often that happens. It is becoming a running joke for me to then say that I know I have whatever it is that I need or am looking for, but I just don't know where it is. And now that cooler weather is approaching, included in that are jackets and long sleeved shirts. 

The Pod and the storage locker in our old hometown are beyond help, but the attic, well, I've put that off long enough. This weekend's project is to sort and organize the boxes, and maybe I'll find a jacket or two before the first real cold snap of the season.

All clean and nice

Stinky dog is no longer stinky! (Poor mutt, he hates baths.) We used the self-service pet bath around the corner - no clearing the drain of dog hair, no smelly dog towels to wash, no kneeling on the tile bathroom floor!

Sadly, the rescue kitties for adoption were not there this morning, so Little Bit's enjoyment of the trip was diminished, but she rallied her spirits at the sight of the soapy dog. Neither dog nor daughter enjoyed the hurricane force doggie dryer, however.