fava beans

Have you ever had fresh fava beans before? I have had them in restaurants, and have had canned fava beans (which are brown), but until last month I never had them fresh. My friend Michael at the Dazed and Infused blog and I split a CSA share from Waltham Fields Community Farm, a great organization in our city, and they had pick-your-own fava beans for a while. So I decided to try them! They turned out to be more labor intensive than I'd thought.

First, you pick them and bring them home and wash them:

Clean and shiny. THEN you remove the beans from the pod (which is inedible unless it's really young):

But wait! You're not done! The beans have a thick coating that is not pleasant to eat, so you have to PEEL EACH BEAN.

Unpeeled, half-peeled, peeled. It is really hard to peel them raw, so you blanch the beans, then slit the skin, then poke each bean out. And only THEN can you actually prepare the beans.

I cooked them with some garlic, olive oil, and a splash of cooking sherry, then mashed them to top some toast (pictured below with a salad).

They're tasty beans, but I didn't think they were worth all that work! From now on I will probably only buy prepared fava beans, either at restaurants or in a can.

bat house

I wanted a bat house almost as soon as we bought our (human) house. I love bats. I used to love seeing them swing low over the lake to catch bugs when I lived in upstate NY. And they need houses! Many species of bats are experiencing dwindling populations as their habitats become disturbed or eliminated because of human land development. A little brown bat (the kind that live in bat houses) are great for bug control: they can eat more than 1000 bugs a night! They eat mosquitoes, wasps, moths, gnats, beetles, and midges, all insects I'd love to be rid of. Waltham has an especially large mosquito population, which makes hanging out on our porch after dusk way less enjoyable than it could be. Annnnd since bat houses are set up to be ideal living situations for bats, bats are less likely to move into a human house or barn if there is a bat house nearby. (Fewer than 0.5% of bats contract rabies, by the way, so we weren't worried about that.) If you want to find more about bats, bat conservation, or cute pictures of bats, I recommend checking out Bat Conservation International's website. They also list many certified vendors of bat houses, including the vendor we chose: Habitat for Bats!

Their little bat emblem is a nice touch.

 You can make your own bat house (Bat Conservation International has specific guidelines and directions), but I chose to buy ours because we would have had to buy all of the materials anyway, and if you don't get the specifications right, you could actually injure the bats you're trying to house. Since I have few to no building skills, so I opted for the labor- and pain-free route.

The ideal location for a bat house is a tall (10-15 feet) pole or side of a building that gets a lot of sun. (Bats like warmth! That's why, if you live in a colder area, the bat house has to be a dark color.) You should be near a wooded area, but not too close, and you want to be within 1/4 miles of a body of water. We get a lot of sun and are fairly close to woods, but we're actually 3/4 miles away from the Charles River. I initially wanted to put the bat house on the side of our house, but didn't want to wash bat droppings off the siding on a regular basis, so we decided on a tree in our back yard. Trees are normally not ideal locations for bat houses because they tend to be shady AND bat predators (like owls) can perch on branches nearby, but this particular tree doesn't have any overhanging branches and is far enough away from other branches that we decided it would do. I wanted to drill right into the tree to mount the house, but Kevin was concerned about the health of the tree. so he spent some time online looking up other ways and devised a bungee-cord mount with the help of some online forums.

We borrowed an extension ladder from our neighbor (thanks, Michael!). Kevin held the ladder steady (not an easy job-the soil was still really soft in the back yard from all my earth-moving) while I put up the house. There was a lot of nut- and bolt-dropping from the ladder because I am clumsy. But when we were done:

We had a mounted bat house!

Little brown bats migrate to our area in late May/early June, so starting in June, I went back to the bat house every now and then to peek up inside-but never saw any bats. FOr a while I didn't seen any bats in it or flying around in the evenings, so I've been afraid we didn't have any bats. But 2 weeks ago, when I went to water my garden (which is near the bat house), I noticed there were BAT DROPPINGS at the base of the tree! And last week I saw a bat circling our driveway. SO WE HAVE BATS! (Or at least one bat.) Hooray! Hopefully now that they know it's there, more and more bats will migrate to the house each year. And someday I will sit out on my porch at dusk and not get eaten alive by mosquitoes!

ongoing project: my front yard

I'm trying to get back into the swing of blogging, no less because VEGAN MOFO is in September this year! Since I'll be posting about food every day of that month, I'm writing about the house this month. I meant to be updating all summer.. but it turns out that the first year of being a first-time homeowner is really time consuming! July's post was and the next couple posts will be about some of the projects that have been taking up so much of my time (which would otherwise have been spent blogging, I'm sure).

First, here is the home my husband and I bought a little over a year ago:

It was a partially flipped house built in 1910. I say "partially" because it seems like the flippers did the minimum amount of work they could do while still getting away with calling the home "flipped." But that was okay with us--we were both okay with the "fix-me-up" nature of some of our house.

I'll show you some inside shots in a later entry, but the real projects that have been sucking up my time are outdoors. Did you notice my front yard in the picture above? And how by "yard" I mean "dirt?" Here's another view:

 

When we moved in, the only green in the front of our house was a few patches of crabgrass. (Which, true to crabgrass's nature, soon became "a jungle of crabgrass.") I put down grass seed and am still slowly trying to choke out weeds.

The slope of the front of our lawn is a difficult angle to mow, so I decided to turn the worst of it--the edges-- into flowerbeds. First I had to get rid of what was already there. I bought some black plastic sheeting. (Specifically I bought "landscape fabric," but any black plastic sheeting will do.) Because it is black plastic, it not only blocks the weeds underneath from getting any light, but it absorbs light, making the ground underneath it super hot, killing the weeds and (hopefully) their seeds. I laid it down along the edges of the lawn. It comes with flimsy plastic stakes, but I knew they wouldn't do the job for the many months I intended to leave them there, so I also just weighed down the plastic every few feet with pavers.

The green on the lawn in this picture is all crabgrass.

I did this in October of last year and warned our neighbors that it would look ugly for many more months, but it was in an attempt to make it look pretty in the future.

This past April, I rolled back the plastic, which had done a good job killing the weeds! I used a digging fork to turn the soil, mixing in some compost as I went. In retrospect, I should really have used some stronger tools (like my hoe axe!) and done a better job of really mixing up the soil, but I didn't know that at the time.

The picture above shows freshly-turned dirt on the bottom left side, and the paler row of not-yet-turned soil. Please ignore my thumb in the corner (oops). The picture below shows the fully turned bed:

One bold robin, one of the first robins of the season, LOVED ME for turning all the soil, and followed me around the yard like an excited dog. All I had to do was turn my back, and when I'd turn around, there he'd be. He was sort of my yard work mascot this spring, as every time I did a new project, he'd be watching me and eating any worm I might unearth.

I then planted flower seeds. many of which died. Our front lawn gets full sun all day, every day, and we had an incredibly dry spring. I had picked all drought-resistant varieties, but despite daily watering, I couldn't keep the flower beds moist enough for little seeds to thrive--poor things! I replanted a few weeks ago, and some of the flowers are finally coming in, but it's a slow process. I've learned my lesson for next year: I'll have to start my plants indoors.

This is still a work in progress. It's not as pretty as it will be next year, but it's a start. I'll keep you posted!

spring 2013 project: my back yard

(AKA, DIY yard terracing! Whoo!)

One of the reasons I wanted to move out to Waltham, our city/suburb, was that I wanted to be able to have a house and outdoor space of our own. I wanted a garden and a yard where our future kids could play. We couldn't get that in the middle of Cambridge or Boston. The lot we ended up with is relatively small, but the front is big enough for some flower beds, and the back yard had a small green space and the edge of a rocky hill. It looked spacious enough when we had first seen our place in late winter, but when the back yard started to fill in with weeds and poison ivy come spring, I realized we actually had very little useable outdoor space.

(You can see larger versions of these picture by clicking on them.)

That lush green jungle is primarily just rocks, broken glass, a large dead tree, and poison ivy. Definitely not useable.

We paid landscapers to remove the worst of the brush last fall; I had gotten a bad case of poison ivy last summer (I used to be immune! but no longer) and didn't want to mess with it again. We were then hoping to have the landscapers terrace the backyard a little, but when we got the estimate for the work, it was about $10,000. We could definitely not afford that! I decided to try working on it myself. (After paying a professional to take down the dead tree. I knew I couldn't do that myself.)

I had no idea what I was doing. I have never landscaped or done anything close to it. Mowing our lawn last summer was the first time I'd ever mowed. The only "garden" I've ever grown was the pots of herbs I grew on the fire escape of our last place. But I am not one to let inexperience stop me! Have you ever heard the silly kids' joke, "How do you make a statue of an elephant?" The answer is "Take a block of stone and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." This was the approach I decided to take with the backyard. I would chip away everything that didn't look like "my" back yard.

I got started in late March/early April, after the snow had melted but before anything could grow. I wasn't sure what I would do yet, but I knew that the first step was to clear away all of the leaves, sticks, and branches so I could get an idea of the land I had to work with.

Partially cleared. Unfortunately I didn't take many "before" pictures. This was the worst part of the project. There were decades' worth of leaves to rake away, wrapped around decades' worth of rotting branches and garbage. More than half of the yard was covered in winter creeper, an annoying, invasive vine that kept getting caught in the rake and making my job even harder. I had to pull out all the vines and runners and roots, some of which turned out to be poison ivy roots. I couldn't tell at the time because it was too early for the poison ivy to grow leaves, so it blended in with the winter creeper runners. After my first rash of this season cropped up, I started wearing long sleeves, arm warmers, and my work gloves, and washing myself and all of my clothing obsessively after each time outside. There was also a huge amount of broken glass throughout the yard, which I removed shard by shard.

While I did find a couple 3-4 hour chunks of time on weekends, the vast majority of this work was done between when I got home from work and when the sun set, which was about an hour a day in April. And because of social life stuff, I couldn't be home before dark every day. So it took me the whole month to clear the back yard, one hour at a time.

All cleared. Now that I had an idea of the shape of things, I could sort of envision how best to make it useable space. I imagined two distinct levels: one larger, even one on the bottom, where someday I'd have a garden, a seating area, and a bird bath. The other, upper level would be smaller, left sort of wild, with trees and eventually flowers. I would make a path between the two terraced levels.

I didn't know how exactly that would work, but I liked the idea. Online searches for the best way to level one's land mostly gave me answers like "rent a tractor" or "hire a landscaper," so I was on my own. I did find that for small leveling jobs, people used what a bunch of sites called a "grub hoe" and a dirt rake. I could have gone to the hardware store for these, but first I went to my dad. He had an extra dirt rake (this is the best part about being from a really rural area: of course my dad had an extra dirt rake) and while he only had one grub hoe, he gave it to me because he "never wants to have a reason to use it again." (This did not bode well for how laborious the work ahead of me would be.)

What I call a grub hoe, on the left, is also called a grubbing hoe or hoe axe. It has a hoe on one end and an axe head on the other. You use it to hack at the ground to dig and loosen up the dirt you want to move. It belonged to my grandfather, who was a farmer. It was really exciting and sort of sappily symbolic to me that I would use the same tool he used on the land where I grew up to improve my own home and land. The dirt rake, on the right, is what you use to move the loosened dirt around. These were my buddies for weeks of work and remain my favorite yard work tools.

Again, I could only put in about an hour a day of work, and even then only a few days a week, but I hacked at and raked the ground, pulling out winter creeper, poison ivy, and locust tree shoots as I found them. (I am proud to say that I seem to have eliminated the first two, but those darn locusts are still my enemy.)

The finished version! At least, as finished as it's going to get this year. I sprinkled some grass seed around just to have something growing out there, and other plants have sprouted up. I also planted a garden! A real one! That wild rabbits love! The bottom area is mostly leveled and larger, with plenty of space for our garden (which will hopefully be twice as big next year). Someday we'll put a bird bath and a seating area back there, too. The top area isn't quite as leveled as I had hoped it would be, but there are so many roots from our trees and the trees on our neighbors' property that it was really difficult to move the earth around. It is flatter now though, so it's easier to walk on, and I made a little path between the layers on the right side.

It's getting overgrown, but I just can't spend much more time on it this year.  It's still a work in progress, but I'm so happy with how far it's come!

earth machine compost bin

House decorating/beautifying is still taking place, as well as yardwork. I've been doing yardwork! The most yardwork I've ever done is maintaining a tiny flower garden when I was in college, and now I'm mowing! I'm creating flower beds! Everything is a process; pictures will come soon (or, more realistically, when the projects finish--so maybe not super soon).

In the meantime, my greatest domestic triumph is that we've started composting! When we first moved to Waltham (the Boston suburb I now call home) and went to pick up our recycling bin from the city municipal building, the lady who works there told us that Waltham has teamed up with another nearby suburb to provide compost bins to residents at discounted rates. A lot of places do this, as it saves the municipality time, money, and space by not having to pick up so much garbage,  so if you're interested in getting a compost bin, look into whether your city or township has a composting program or subsidy.

from earthmachine.com

The city gives you a choice of compost bins, and I went with the Earth Machine, since it seemed like the easiest. It retails for around $60, but with the city subsidy, I paid half that. The only trick was that I had to go to the municipal center of the next town over and pick i up--then drive it home. We have a tiny car, but fortunately the composter comes in parts that you assemble at home:

Getting it into the car was tricky, getting it back out was much tricker.

I had already plotted out the place it would go in our back yard: close to the house, but not so close that it would be a problem in case it attracted critters or began to smell (I know compost is not supposed to do either thing if you do it right, but I was afraid I might mess it up).

You have to put it somewhere flat or the convenient bottom panel won't sit properly. I put it by that rock because the rock is already hard to mow around, so I figured adding a hard-to-mow-around compost bin wouldn't change much.

My first step was the attach the bottom panel to the bottom half of the bin.

It clicks in, but it doesn't actually secure with anything, which might be frustrating for if I ever want to move the compost bin. So I'll just aim not to have to move it ever.

Putting on the top half of the bin was trickier than I imagined.

The dude at the municipal center told me I'd have to get someone to help me with it, but I had thought he meant because I was a girl and it might be too hard for me. Nope. It's really just more of a two person job--it's hard to click all the tabs into place at once if you're by yourself. I finagled it by stepping inside the bin and sitting on one edge while I pushed on the other.

Next was sliding on the door to the compost bin,

...which was no big deal.

It comes with convenient pegs to secure the whole thing to the ground. Again, there's nothing to secure that bottom screen to it if you remove these pegs, but these are still handy in case I get really vigorous with my compost turning.

They were also easy to drive into the ground.

And voila! I have a compost bin!

I've had it less than a month, so it's much too early to know how it's doing, compost-wise, but the results are pretty dramatic in terms of waste reduction. In composting our food scraps, we have reduced our garbage by 1/3 to 1/2. And I'll get some great compost to apply to the gardens I'm hoping to have ready next spring... A pretty good deal! And even if it doesn't work out, it's an interesting experiment.

My biggest complaint, however, is that I got the first manicure of my life a week before setting up the compost bin, and the set-up process chipped my nail:
 

...so I guess they were not meant to be installed by ladies with pretty nails. I normally don't have pretty nails, though, so I guess I don't mind.

I've been so busy with the house that I haven't been cooking that much in the way of new and exciting recipes yet, but I'll try to get back in the swing of food blogging for September. I'm definitely planning to do daily Vegan Month of Food blogging this October, though, so that should put me back on the front lines of blogging. See you soon!

house tour

Soooooo one of the reasons I haven't been posting much lately is that the husband and I have been in the process of first searching for, then buying a house! We're buying a house! We close (and move) in less than two weeks, which is exciting and awesome and overwhelming.

As we get closer and closer to moving, I'm starting to miss our current place already. It's a tiny condo that the husband bought a few years before he met me, and we're really happy to move onto a bigger, better place... but over the past 3 years, we've really turned his condo into our home. It'll be sad to leave it behind. So! I thought I'd give you a little tour before we left for good.

Our place is a converted attic, the third floor of a building. So after one flight of stairs outside our unit, you get to our front door--which opens to another set of stairs. If you were coming into our place, you'd enter at that door at the bottom of the stairs. Come on up!

Now, when you get to the top of the stairs, you can turn left to see our dining/office area:

On the far left there's a big window, which was hard for me to get a picture of because of all the light.

Now, turn to your right.

Our living-room area! Please ignore the stupid-looking cat tree. You may recognize the t-shirt pillow shams from this how-to entry!

Now we'll go through the living-room area to the hallway on the left!

So many doors! The closed white door to the far left is a bathroom, the next door is the kitchen, then the bedroom, and the closed white door to the far right is a closet.

Let's go into the kitchen first!

The kitchen is the one room where I didn't get to pick the paint colors. The husband had renovated it back before he met me. I like it, though! You can almost see my container garden on the fire escape out the window. And on the wall is my beloved yard-sale-acquired vintage kitchen clock. I've had it in every kitchen of every place I've lived since 2006!

Here's the view of the kitchen if you're standing by my beloved clock. This room is the room where the slanted ceilings bother me the most. The husband and I are both 5'8, and we each bump our heads at least once a week. It's perfect for someone under 5'5, though; hopefully the person who's buying our place is short!

Okay, continuing the tour. Back into the hallway, where you can see...

The husband's gecko tanks! Some people think lizards are creepy, so we'll move along... Let's peek into the bathroom!

Is it weird that I'm showing you pictures of our bathroom? I don't care, because I freaking LOVE our bathroom. The colors make me really happy, from that gorgeous blue to the beautiful tiles...

TO THE BRIGHT GREEN SHELVES. Like I said before, I picked out the paint colors for all the rooms but the kitchen, and I love them.

Done in the bathroom? We're almost finished! The last room is our bedroom.

More bright green shelves! Something really interesting to cats must be happening outside the window.

Here's a view of the bedroom if you're standing by the window. You may recognize the shade on the skylight from my how-to entry on how I made light-blocking shades.

Okay, thanks for visiting my place! Let me walk you down the stairs...

What's that you say? You love my green-painted stairs? WELL, before you go, let me tell you about them! I've done a lot of home improvement and decorating type stuff around our place over the years, and the stairs are one of my favorite big changes.

They used to look like this:

The carpet here was old, grungy, hard to clean, and clawed by the cats. (You can see my paint chips on the left--I had a rough time narrowing down the colors!) So the husband and I ripped up the carpet.

...and discovered that the carpet hid the fact that the treads were too old and thin to walk on much longer. They needed to be replaced. So when my parents visited one weekend, my father (who is super DIY-savvy--he built the house I grew up in!) and the husband, in just one morning, replaced the treads with some inexpensive pine.

They put on the trim I THINK not just to look pretty, but because the risers weren't level? Anyway, it did look pretty. We then we primed everything:

It was tricky to paint and prime our stairs because we had to either paint ourselves in the house for the day, or out. So we had to plan accordingly! But after a couple weekends, the stairs were done!

Nice and green. I am so proud of these stairs! Annnnd that leads you out of our place. Fritz (the creepy cat at the top of the stairs) and I say goodbye... and thank you for coming on our house tour!

I'm going to miss this place. However, I'm excited to show you some before and after photos when we move into our new home!

homemade maple syrup vinegar--results!

As I added a splash of maple syrup vinegar to a dish last week, and saw I was almost out, I thought, hey, I should make this again, making it was fun! And then I realized that I had written about making it back in October and never let you know how it turned out!

In this October entry, I made maple syrup vinegar from this popular science article. Before aging, it filled three mason jars:

So, I aged it for the required 4+ weeks. After 4 weeks, it was a little fresh (bright?) tasting, but by 5 weeks it had deepened. I strained it, to get out the larger chunks of "the mother," but I didn't run it through a cheesecloth (which would make it clearer), because leaving a little bit of the mother would deepen the vinegar-ness. I would say it was really at its best at 6 weeks, at which point I put it into (sealed) containers. I was concerned that a lot would evaporate out in 5-6 weeks of aging with only cheesecloth as a cover, but for all those weeks, not much evaporated out:

My plan was to make it for Christmas gifts, but to be honest, I only ended up keeping half for myself because I liked it so much. HOWEVER, I did give away the other half of it:

I made cute little bottles for it.

Then wrapped it in a paper bag! Easy, and cute.

If you have some extra maple syrup around, I TOTALLY recommend this recipe. It was delicious, and I find the vinegar to be a lot more versatile than I'd expected. I had known it would be good for salad dressings, but it's also excellent when added to virtually any sauteed vegetable--carrots and mushrooms especially. Its flavor plays very well off of a particularly garlicky or oniony dish, and you can use it anywhere you'd use balsamic vinegar, though it's a bit sweeter and a little less sharp. Plus you'll feel like a mad scientist while making it.