wood & glass

I must report that the kefir grains are no more—we have discovered it's not our thing until we have a goat or something. To be frank, right now I'd rather drink milk myself than feed it to a mass of bacteria.

In other news, though, we have a new picnic table! 

Mom and Dad came over last Saturday (with tools!) and we spent the day measuring, planning, and building—and eating the season's first rhubarb crisp. 

After finishing it on Sunday, staining it on Monday, letting it dry, and waiting out some heavy rains, we celebrated a sunny Friday evening with our red table and Red Chair IPA. Yes, fitting! 

We ate out in sprinkles and sunshine on Saturday night, with our raincoats, but it looks like we'll be eating inside for the rest of the week. Our table is getting a good initiation to Seattle spring wet! 

Our other shiny new (after some serious scrubbing and all the rain) garden item is the greenhouse! It's half finished, awaiting some still-missing parts (I'm an English major, not a math major—and miscounted), but soon will house our lemon tree of love and some tomatoes. Perhaps next year, an avocado tree! We've already decided that the avocado will be our first anniversary tree. 

an onion sunday

I'm discovering that I may have just tasted onions for the first time today.

A few weeks ago, Tim bought a 25-pound bag of onions on a bulk buying spree. We're both in the philosophical camp that a meal isn't a meal without an onion--but somehow, even at an onion a day, we're losing the race against time.

So I turned to my trusty Best Recipe cookbook for French onion soup, that rich and dark and caramel-y stew of onions and not much else. I know I can always count on two things when I consult Best Recipe: that I'll be amazed at the flavor of the recipe and amazed at the time I spent on it. So far this afternoon, I've spent four hours with my onions--and with still half an hour or so to go (although honestly the onions cooked happily unattended for three of those hours), I'm not so sure I want to make soup with them any more. I just want to eat the whole pile right out of the pot.

And I'm no longer sure I can ever go back to cooking onions the easy way, sautéed for whatever time we can spare after work before we're too hungry to wait any longer. These onions--these Best Recipe onions, these Sunday afternoon onions--are unbelievably dark, shockingly and deeply flavorful, with no trace of the bite and snap that made my eyes water so much when I chopped them. They're completely transformed.

(Sadly, this soup only used 4 pounds of onions, so I plan to slow-cook the rest of them overnight and then pop them into the freezer for easy weekday meals the next few months.)

works in progress

We have mastered baking bread. Our routine is simple--every four or five days, we start a batch of no-knead bread. Flour + yeast + salt + warm water. About twenty hours later, after it's risen and risen on top of our washer and dryer (warmest place in our house), we bake it. It always comes out crispy and golden, with a melt-in-your-mouth crumb, infinitely devour-able.

Other things, we haven't quite mastered.

A few weeks ago, I started dreaming about making kefir. One thing led to another, and two tablespoons of kefir grains arrived at our house before I'd really done all the research (the email listserve on the island is a bottomless source of freebies).

Kefir grains are not grains, but lumpy white masses of bacteria that look like--if you're being kind--cauliflower. I googled kefir-making tips the night the grains arrived (found this crash course), poured milk in a glass jar, added all my kefir grains, and stuck it on top of our dryer.

I knew that making kefir is like doing a science experiment. It all depends on variables: time, temperature, ratios of milk to kefir, and perhaps the mood of the kefir grains, if bacteria can be moody. There's no exact recipe. But I was pretty sure that, in about twenty-four hours, we'd be slurping tangy, thick kefir and feeling quite hip.

Twenty hours later, right after I got home from work, I peeked at the science experiment, expecting to find . . . well, not what I found. Curds! Curds and whey. A sign of disaster--too much heat or too much time or too much kefir grains.

We were rushing to head off to dinner with some friends, but I had to save the grains. Like my dad warned me, kefir grains are not as demanding as kids, but more demanding than pets--they need to be fed and cared for 24/7. I strained out the grains, planning to throw the whey to the plants and attempt to turn the curds into kefir cheese, until I measured out another two cups of fresh milk. Fresh? Oh no. It looked . . . off. "Tim?!" I shrieked, not for the first time that night. Tim came running, tasted the milk, spat it out. Rancid!

The curds and whey went down the sink. The milk went back to the store. We went off-island for the weekend, so the kefir grains went into the fridge in a cup of fresh milk.

At least the curds-and-whey disaster wasn't my fault (I think). But I wasn't quite so excited to try again post-weekend. The second batch didn't work--grew a yeasty skim on top, but didn't thicken or turn remotely kefir-like. The third batch worked, at least more than the others; it's thicker and tangy and less disastrous. But we're a bit kefir-shell-shocked--stunned at the price of the only non-ultra-pasturized milk at the island store ($5 for half a gallon) and the thought of feeding that to our cauliflower science experiment every day and the thought of pouring that milk down the sink if it fails to turn to kefir.

Another thing we haven't quite mastered? Our second listserve freebie. A 6x8 glass greenhouse, it's turning out to more resemble a jigsaw puzzle than a home for our little lemon tree.

Perhaps the moral of the story is that we should avoid listserve freebies, no matter how tempting. But I'm more inclined to file these--kefir and greenhouse and more than a handful of other projects--as works in progress. We have mastered making bread; I am learning to master my bike commute; we are starting to settle into our routines of cooking and cleaning and living together; but much is still taking shape. Like the marigold and bachelor's buttons seedlings in our windowsill, our life on the farm is new and green and growing. Our list of plans and dreams for this year is long and hopeful. It's all getting started, with room for learning and trying again.