apparently last week’s canning event broke something in my brain, because today i spent my saturday making a triple-size batch of marathon cookies and a vat of pesto sufficient to see us through the long winter with garlic at nearly every meal.

the cookies were ostensibly for Ben and his dad, who are leaving tomorrow on a week-long backpacking trip, but since it’s kind of a time-intensive cookie i figured it made sense to make a huge batch to keep in the freezer*.

and then there was this bundle of basil on the counter that i had liberated from the CSA last week and had been keeping alive all week in a water glass. i figured that since i already had the food processor out and all, i really should turn the basil into pesto. but then, if i was going to dive into making pesto, no sense in messing up all those cooking utensils (praise be for the food processor), i should really be making it in quantity. which meant more basil. Berkeley Bowl had 1 lb bags of basil for $5, so the next thing i knew i was buying additional lemons, and pine nuts, and parmesan, and 2 hours later, i had a giant mixing bowl full of pesto. fortunately, it freezes beautifully, and all winter long we’ll be able to just scoop out a tablespoon of it as tho it were ice cream. (mmm…pesto icecream?)

still, did the canning loosen some deep, evolutionary need to hoard food for the coming winter?
a few years ago i briefly dated a guy who was a food hoarder. it was crazy. when you opened his freezer it was a solid wall of food, and after a few weeks i realized that the reason he would never let me go into the basement level of his apartment was that it was packed floor-to-ceiling with dry goods. not organized like a mormon pantry or anything, but we’re talking crazy-town, stuffed to the ceiling with flats of ramen and bags of rice and god knows what else. he worried constantly about mice getting into the basement and would periodically chuck his cat down there in hopes that it would eat the mice. he also spent a lot of time making vague references to post-apocalyptic survival plans, but that’s a story for another time.

wait, how did this become a post about my dating indiscretions? i was talking about pesto. pesto! and marathon cookies. for my wonderful boyfriend who is headed off into the woods for a week. invariably, despite the best of intentions, I will be staying up till 2am and ignoring the dishes. (it takes so little time on my own to revert to my feral state.)

* for the uninitiated, marathon cookies are this wonderful power-bar cookie creation from the lovely lady over at 101 cookbooks. in lieu of butter it uses white beans and olive oil for the fat component, plus wheat flour and oats, sugar, dates, sesame seeds, anise. they freeze beautifully, taste good straight from the freezer, travel well, and make a perfect pre-workout snack. not as good as an actual cookie, but far better than a cliff bar.

here’s the photoset for our trip to Eatwell Farm this weekend. Ben and I are members of this CSA, and every few weeks they invite members out for a party centered around whatever is most ripe — in the spring there are strawberry parties, in the late summer it’s tomatoes, and so on. they set up a lovely field kitchen where folks can cook, can, and make dishes to share. later in the evening there’s a campfire, and we set up tents and spend the night under the stars, waking early the next morning to eat local tortilla and eggs from the farm. it’s pretty great.

this year i convinced teresa, chris and geneva to join us so that teresa could teach me how to can. it turns out that there’s a reason why we invented machines that do our sauce-making-and-canning for us. because it took seven hours to yield nine jars of red sauce. and i give it only a slight chance that we’ll give ourselves botulism…still, a lovely time was had by all. and the best part of canning in a field? no clean up.

oh, and did i mention the hundreds of baby chicks? the cuteness!

1. Lavender shortbread. Taste testing reveals that 1) that’s a whole lotta butter, 2) i like salted butter in shortbread far better than unsalted, i care not what you shortbread purists say, and 3) 4 tsp of fresh lavender was plenty. i’d suggest dialing it back to 2 or 3, and be sure you find a way (spice mill, mini food processor, mortar/pestle, knife) to really chop the buds up fine. still, i made cookies that small like fresh laundry! the house smelled AWESOME while these were baking.

2. strawberry plants. i put in strawberry plants back in late may, and for a while they were doing great (assuming that “great” is defined as, “making delicious strawberries for me to eat”). with the arrival of the summer fog, however, the strawberry plants seem to have lost all interest in making fruit, and are concentrating all of their energy on growing big green leafies, and sending out shoots in every direction as if making effort to colonize the rest of the garden is quickly as possible. anyone with experience growing strawberries? is lack of direct sun causing this aggressive, fruitless behavior? (actually, lack of sunlight makes me aggressive and fruitless, too).

3. we are done with wedding traveling season, hooray! after making three trips to the east (or third) coast in the past 5 weeks we are most pleased to stay home for more than one week at a time. i have garden projects, things to bake, shelves to finish constructing. when did i get so old and boring?

4. as of july 1, i have an assistant at work! i generally try not to blog about work (rule no 1 of the internet: never post anything anywhere you wouldn’t want your boss or your mother to see), so we’ll leave it at that. but i am hopeful that this means that the life-work balance is about to get better. if there was an epiphany from last week’s visit “home” to chicago, it was that my life-work balance is a disaster. and if i’m not happy living in california, it’s not california’s fault, it’s that i have had no time to pursue a life outside of work for the past two years. something needs to change.

5. books recently finished: (audible is radically changing my literary life and the way i feel about an hour-long daily commute) State of Wonder, Ann Patchett; The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell; Thunderstuck, Erik Larsen. to quote lau on reading David Mitchell, “i’ve been trying to ration myself and make it last, but i kind of want to crumple it into a ball and stuff it into my eyes.”

1: sometimes when i think of our cats’ quirks, i think of them in the framework of a cat social networking profile. like, “i’m eddie, i’m a 7lb abyssinian and my favorite places to sharpen my non-existent claws are the bathroom scale and the alarm clock. when i throw up, i like to bury it under the curtains.” or, “i’m zeke, a 17lb bengal. my favorite foods to eat are dry cat kibble, dental floss, poisonous flowers, and eddie.”

2: these are things you would never utter outside of our household, right?

1: oh, actually, i was just thinking about it as a blog entry.

another weekend where i was a whirling dervish of domesticity. i spent saturday helping chris and teresa pack up their house. as often happens when you’re hanging around a house that is in sorting-and-packing turmoil, i was the beneficiary of a number of cast-off things. today’s spoils consisted of: a trunk-load of of dirt, a bag full of spring onions and green garlic just picked from the garden, a spring-form pan (cheesecake shall be forthcoming), a roomba (look out, cats), a quart of chicken stock, and two decorative boxes that i believe contained christmas gifts from me to C&T last year and will likely be regifted right back to same again this coming christmas.

to augment the trunkful of dirt, i stopped at Lowe’s on the way home this morning to get potting soil and a couple of plants, and, while this week’s bread dough rose on the counter (i told you. Whirling Dervish. Domesticity.), i went outside to make a second assault on the garden. it felt like a lot of work for not a lot of results, but i managed to:

– plant tomatoes and basil in hanging buckets
– install hooks on the fence to hold said tomato buckets. i have to admit that the buckets were cheap but pretty ugly. i wonder if i can paint them? plastic-friendly spray paint or anything toxic is pretty much out now that there are plants inside, and i suspect that latex will just flake off. hmm.
– arrange cinderblocks up my porch steps into a sort of waterfall container garden. ask the internet how to paint cinderblock and make shopping list accordingly.
– clean up all the neighbor’s garbage that was in the back garden plot, shoot holier-than-thou looks at said neighbors.
– move a big planter barrel from the front yard to the back plot, and fill it up with the dirt from the car.
– dig a couple of other planters, in various states of decay, from neglected corners of the yard and set them up in the back garden plot.
– clean up more cinder blocks for terraforming the back plot.
– sweep up all the leaves and dirt and weeds all over our concrete-slab of a yard.
– plant impatiens in pots on the front porch. i planted impatiens seeds in those pots 3 weeks ago and watered and fussed over them every day and got zero germination. so i gave up and bought bedding plants instead
– wondered some more about the tiny mystery potatoes that are in my front garden bed. how did they come to be?