Ruined

The Wrangler has been picking oranges in the orchard every Saturday morning and kicking off the day with freshly squeezed juice. We're ruined for life. Store-bought juice now tastes like water. Our homemade OJ is atomic orange and packs a punch. Just a few sips scratch the itch. (I wonder if people ironically overeat when their store-bought food lacks flavor and thus is not very satisfying?)

Not a Must, Crust

Even before I jumped on the farm-fresh bandwagon, I was a pie crust purist. I've made lots of pies over the years, and I've never looked to a store-bought crust to do the honors. Making pie crust is easy. Everyone has the ingredients (all four of them) on hand, and it takes less effort and skill to roll a pie crust than to unwrap and thaw a frozen store-bought crust. My pie crusts are perfectly light and flaky, if I may say so myself. However, I have a deep, dark secret: I dislike pie crusts. I just don't think they add much value, especially considering the calories and lack of nutrition. I've been making apple crisps instead of apple pies for years. I'm a traditionalist and do roll a crust for my pumpkin pies, but I've decided to bake crustless pumpkin mousse in ramekins this year. I'm pleased to report that even the esteemed New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman agrees with me on this one. He recently wrote that, "pie crust adds little to a fruit dessert apart from heft or calories."

I'm carrying this philosophy from the dessert realm to the savory sector. I've been a making a lot of quiche lately--I'm trying to eat more green veggies like broccoli and asparagus, and burying them in eggs and cheese has been a decent way to stomach these vile weeds. But instead of whipping together a pie crust, I make a mushroom crust. I don't know if it's necessarily a healthier option, but it is delicious.

Mushroom crust:

Chop about 1/2 pound of mushrooms (any kind) and saute with garlic and a pat of butter. When the mushrooms are soft, add 1/2 cup of crushed saltines. Pat this mixture into a pie plate sprayed with non-stick spray.

That's it. You can add a variety of fillings. My staple is broccoli and cheese: saute bite-sized pieces of broccoli with either chopped sweet onions or green onions, until soft. Pour over the mushroom crust. Sprinkle with Swiss or cheddar cheese. Mix four eggs with 1 cup of cream or milk and pour on top. Salt and pepper to taste. Bake at 350 until firm--about 30 minutes.

Back to the Start

Pop Over

I have a dark secret: I haven't baked much bread since moving to the farm. Every time I walk into the kitchen, I am shamed by the idle bags of flour, jars of yeast, and spacious countertops perfect for kneading dough. I don't bake as much during the summer, so perhaps I'll throw on an apron and get serious in a couple of months. In the mean time, I've been appeasing our guests with popovers.

Ah, the popover, a staple of my childhood. My mom made popovers--perfectly light and fluffy on the inside and a crisp golden brown on the outside--in the mornings and served them piping hot from the oven with butter and jam. Many supper clubs serve them with dinner. (I could write a separate blog entry on midwestern supper clubs, which I adore.)

I don't think that the popover, which purportedly is the American version of Yorkshire pudding, is a midwestern thing. But for some reason, I've never seen them served in restaurants on the east or west coasts. And so far, none of my guests have been familiar with popovers. One friend who is a very skilled bread baker was amazed that popovers aren't a yeast bread. "No yeast," I told him. "Just flour, eggs, milk and a pinch of salt." I could tell he didn't believe me.

My point here is that everyone who comes to the farm sort of expects to be greeted by the smell of freshly baked bread. I can't seem to set aside a few hours for bread baking, but popovers are doing the trick quite nicely. They're delicious, festive, easy to make, inexpensive, and low-cal/low-fat. I guarantee that you have the ingredients on hand.

I use my mom's recipe, which is adapted from the Betty Crocker cookbook:

4 eggs

2 cups flour

2 cups milk

1 tsp. salt

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Grease a popover or muffin pan.

Beat the eggs by hand just until mixed (don't overdo).

Add the flour, milk, and salt. Mix just until smooth.

Fill the popover cups 2/3 full. If using a muffin pan fill the cups 1/2 full.

Bake at 450 for about 20-25 minutes. Lower temp to 350 and bake another 15-20 minutes until golden brown and puffy.

Serve with homemade honey butter and jam for a sweet popover in the morning. For a savory popover with dinner, serve with meat, au jus, or gravy.

Farm Fresh

We're hosting a house guest this weekend, and it's fun to plan menus that take advantage of the fresh food grown right here on the farm or just a few miles down the way: lemonade made with lemons from our orchard and garnished with mint from our garden; caprese salad made with local farmstand tomatoes, basil from the garden, mozzarella from the Rainy Day Ranch creamery, of course, and drizzled with the Temecula Olive Oil Company's finest; home-baked bread with homemade honey butter (featuring local honey, of course); the Wrangler's signature guacamole dip with avocados plucked from the trees literally minutes before mashing; lots of oranges and tangerines; and maybe some fresh pomegranate juice if I can scrounge up a basketful of pomegranates. They're not in season until September, but we do have a few.

I'm acting country cool, but I have to admit that all of these things could be made with ingredients from container gardens in the city. We did all of this stuff back in the cottage. I guess the real excitement starts when I'm growing things like pumpkins, or getting eggs and milk from my own animals. (I'm not sure about the idea of eating meat from animals raised on my own farm--my pesky anthropomorphism gets in the way.)

But in the mean time, I will try to be present in the moment as I sit back and relax with some freshly squeezed lemonade and a warm slice of bread right out of the oven.

Cross Country Cake

I've previously blogged about my cake fixation. In sum, there's a particular cake made by a grocery store in Minneapolis that I love, and no other cake will do. This past weekend I attended a wedding back in Minnesota, and I ordered one of those special cakes to bring home on my return flight to California. The Wrangler doubted that TSA would allow my precious carry-on cargo, but I planned ahead. I printed and highlighted the relevant parts of TSA rules stating that cakes are allowed. I scrunched my fancy wedding attire into a ball and jammed it into my backpack along with a pair of jeans and a shirt. So what if my cocktail dress was wrinkly and that I'd be wearing the same jeans and shirt the rest of the weekend? The airline permits only a carry-on bag and one extra item. And that extra item would be a cake, no matter how unkempt I looked.

We picked up the cake at 2PM today, but we still had three hours before our flight. "We best go straight to the airport," I insisted. It was a muggy 86 degrees in Minneapolis, and I didn't want my cake melting in the car while we traversed down memory lane at the Mall of America or arcane places from our yester-years. The Wrangler didn't hide his annoyance. I could tell he couldn't wait for TSA to confiscate my cake and eat it in front of me. He didn't get his wish. The cake sailed through security with no problem and, in fact, received many oohs and ahhs.

When boarding began, I jostled my way to the front of the line to preboard with the "passengers with children and anyone else who needs a little extra time to board." After all, which is more difficult to carry, a kid or a cake? Did I mention that this is a large cake--serves 24? "Here, I'll put the cake in this special cabinet to keep it from sliding," the flight attendant told me, as I boarded the plane. I looked frantically from my cake to the flight attendant to the Wrangler. Did I dare risk leaving my cake in the galley kitchen of the plane with this stranger? I gave in. "I can't believe you let it out of your sight," the Wrangler marveled, after we'd settled in our seats. He scanned the front of the plane. "I think I see the pilot with a big piece of cake."

I made it home with a perfectly intact cake, and I intend to freeze it and eat one piece a day for 24 days. It's going to be a good month.

Tamale Truck

One thing that this urban cowgirl will miss in the (probably) far-off future when she permanently trades city lights for starry nights in the country: street food vans. These are not to be confused with the properly licensed street food vendors selling the food truck equivalent of chain restaurant fare. I'm talking about the mom-and-pop shop run out of a sketchy-looking van parked in an alley. These vans, which have loyal followings, sell homemade delicacies for practically a song. They never hurry, and they never skimp. Germaphobes surely avoid these vans like, well, the plague, but in all my years of partaking in these non- Health Services-sanctioned feasts, I've only gotten seriously ill once. (And it was my own fault. In retrospect, no I shouldn't have eaten gray chicken fried rice sold from an Igloo cooler in a dark corner of a parking garage. Both the rice and the chicken were unequivocally gray--we're not talking just a grayish hue.)

When I lived in Boston, the best sausages with fried peppers and onions were served up in Kenmore Square on Red Sox game days. My favorite sausage van was conveniently parked on my route home from class, so it really was no wonder that I gained the Freshman 15. When I lived in Chicago, my second-story loft had a window that opened into the alley. Every day at noon, a sandwich van would pull into the alley, I'd open the window and toss down a handful of change, and the sandwich guy would throw me a tuna melt. When I lived in DC, my coworker regularly purchased me tasty meat pies or breakfast sandwiches from a guy on her corner (not from one of those bland "commercial" vendors that line Constitution Avenue). Is it any wonder we became such good friends? She is one of the Six-Button Cowgirls. Once in a border town south of Brownsville, Texas, I had the best mini-tacos imaginable, served from a cart in a dimly-lit alley and washed down with an odd-tasting Coca-Cola that was nonetheless refreshing. I still am haunted by those scrumptious street tacos that I am unlikely to ever find again.

I really could go on and on, but I will spare you the details of my love affair with street food vans. I must mention, however, how truly fortuitous it is that, on occasion, a guy will come to the back gate of our Laguna Beach cottage and ask if we want any tamales. Today was one of those occasions. It was noon, and I had just about polished off a column of Thin Mints. The pets were playing on the patio and started to bark. Thin Mints in hand, I peeked out the window and saw a dirty, white, windowless van inching slowly down the street (a sight that looks suspicious to mothers but auspicious to me). "Tamales?" called the guy in the passenger seat. I stopped, mid-crunch. "Yes, yes," I hissed at the Wrangler, handing him his wallet and shoving him out the door. Within minutes, the Wrangler returned with hot, homemade pork tamales, chicken tamales, and chile rellenos. It is true that I generally don't like Mexican cuisine, but oh how I adore van food.

Third Time Is NOT the Charm

For the the third year in a row, I struck out of the office's annual chili cook-off. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. My chili is pretty darn good, if I say so myself. It's not a very spicy chili (after all, I am from the Midwest), but it's hearty and tasty. I think I need to acknowledge the possibility that I'm that person who fancies herself a good cook while my poor dinner guests raise their eyebrows at each other and shuffle things around on their plates. This does not bode well for the cookbook on which I've been working for the past three years.

Keep It Simple, Sweetie

After seeing Food Inc. and reading a couple Michael Pollan books, I jumped on the bandwagon and began making a greater effort to eat organic and locally-produced food when possible. But the funny thing is that, despite these efforts, I hadn't been paying much attention to food labels. I mean, I knew that homecooked meals usually are better for you than buying packaged convenience food or eating out. But I still wasn't paying very close attention to ingredient lists.

A couple weeks ago, the Wrangler picked up a bag of store-bought bread and read aloud the ingredient list:

enriched bleached flour, water, skim milk, high fructose corn syrup, vegetable oil, yeast, salt, wheat gluten, corn starch, mono- and diglycerides, ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, sodium and calcium stearoyl-2-lactylate, datem, calcium peroxide, ascorbic acid, azodicarbonamide, enzymes, yellow corn flour, natural flavor, paprika extract, calcium propionate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate, calcium carbonate, ammonium chloride, distilled vinegar, soy lecithin, soy flour

That is the actual ingredient list for the store-bought bread! In stark contrast, let me list the ingredients in my homemade bread:

organic unbleached flour, water, yeast, kosher salt

Yep, that's it. And, as I've written before, the artisan bread recipe I use allows me to bake a fresh loaf each day in about an hour. (And only five minutes of that hour is "active" prep--the rest of the time the dough is rising or baking.) I don't need high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, vinegar, paprika extract, and at least 15 unpronounceable chemicals in my bread, so I'm going to pay attention to labels and no longer buy bread with this kind of stuff in it.

Similarly, I've been making homemade ice cream lately instead of buying it. My recipe has three ingredients: organic half-and-half, sugar, and pure vanilla extract. Sure, my ice cream tastes a lot better than store-bought ice cream, but I'd never noticed that a premium brand's "homemade vanilla" contains: milk, cream, sugar, corn syrup, egg yolks, natural flavor, guar gum, salt, carob bean gum, annato. What the heck is annato, why are there two kinds of gum on this list, and what is corn syrup doing in my ice cream?

Feeling like we were onto something, the Wrangler and I read the labels on our canned goods. What you've heard about the ubiquitousness of corn syrup is true! I suppose that whether it's really bad for you is debatable, but I don't see why it's in everything--even canned tomatoes.

Chalk up two points for this cowgirl tonight. I have a batch of my freshly mixed bread dough in the fridge, and the Wrangler and I have just helped ourselves to two heaping bowls of homemade ice cream. (Clearly, simpler food is not necessarily synonymous with diet food.)

Crunchy Granola

Tonight I made homemade granola, and I'm pleased to report that the Wrangler pronounced it "the best thing you've made in a really long time." Although, now that I think of it, what is this saying about my other culinary efforts? Hmm. My recipe is based on the granola recipe in the Mountain Sky Ranch cookbook (the ranch that hosts the spectacular Wild West Women Adventure in Montana). It's a quick and easy project with yummy results, and the house smells cozy and Christmasy:

4 c. oats

2/3 c. each - roasted cashews, walnuts, almonds, pecans, and peanuts

1 c. coconut

1/2 c. brown sugar

1/4 tsp. cloves

1 Tbsp. each - cinnamon and nutmeg

1/2 c. vegetable oil

2/3 c. honey

2 Tbsp. vanilla

In a large bowl, mix the oats, nuts, coconut, brown sugar, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

In a saucepan, heat the oil and honey but do not boil. Remove from stove and add vanilla.

Mix wet and dry ingredients together.

Spread evenly on two parchment-lined baking sheets.

Bake in a 325 degree oven until golden brown, about 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes or so.

If desired, add dried fruit after baking. I added about 1/3 c. dried cranberries to one of the baking sheets. You also can add raisins, apricots, dates, etc.

Let cool. Store in air-tight container. Makes 12 cups.

Thanksgiving Eve

Tonight I baked two loaves of bread (one for the stuffing, one for the table), roasted and pureed four sugar pumpkins for pie, and made a 1/2 gallon of homemade vanilla ice cream. The theme this year is Thanksgiving on the Farm. For the first time, I won't be opening cans of green beans, cream of mushroom soup, and fried onions for the green been casserole. Nope, I'll be using fresh organic green beans, mushrooms, chicken stock, and my own caramelized onions. I'm roasting and creaming corn for the scalloped corn casserole. I'm making the stuffing from scratch, right down to the fresh sage, thyme, and rosemary from the spice garden. The only remnant of my Minnesota upbringing that will grace the table is the Jello salad. I'm using fresh fruit instead of canned fruit cocktail, and yogurt instead of Cool Whip, but I just can't think of an acceptable substitute for the Jello itself.

So, here I sit on the night before Thanksgiving, feeling ambitious and inexplicably smug. But check in with me 'round this time tomorrow. I'll either report that Thanksgiving on the Farm (a) was amazing and not really any more time-consuming than my old way of doing things, (b) was significantly more time-consuming but well worth the extra work, or (c) was a colossal disaster and a waste of time and ingredients. I guess we will see if I can kick the cans.

Cake Pops

Cupcakes and tart yogurt are so two thousand and late. We've moved onto cake pops--delicious, decadent, decorated tiny balls of cake on a stick. No more agonizing when faced with chocolate, vanilla, red velvet, and pumpkin cupcakes. With cake pops, you can have all four flavors and not feel too guilty.

I bought Bakerella's Cake Pops book last week and ambitiously signed up to bring homemade cake pops to the holiday party at the barn. This is the kind of thing I have to do in order to get some follow through around here. Without my commitment in ink on the sign-up sheet, chances are good that the Cake Pops book would join my artisan gelato books on the dusty shelf.

And so, tomorrow I am off to Michaels craft store in search of paper sticks and styrofoam holders. Do note that, in a most excellent move, I perfectly timed this endeavor to my mom's visit over the holiday weekend. Mom...help!!!

Syrupy Sweet

In recounting my recent trip to Vermont, I'd be remiss if I described only the cheese farms and left out the maple syrup farms. For 30-some years I've enjoyed--and, truthfully, kind of preferred--pancake syrup like Mrs. Butterworth's or Log Cabin. I knew that "pancake syrup" contains corn syrup and maple-like flavoring but no real maple component at all. But I didn't appreciate the difference between pancake syrup and the real deal until I toured a maple syrup farm.

True maple syrup is essentially organic. It's simply the result of boiling the sap of sugar maple trees. Nothing is added. An astounding 40 (forty!) gallons of sap are needed to make one gallon of maple syrup. During the sugaring season in Vermont (depending on temperatures, this runs from March to mid-April), a sugar maple tree will provide about 10 gallons of sap. Most trees are not tapped unless they are at least 40 years old. A 40-year old maple likely will have only one tap; larger trees could have two or even three taps. But overtapping depletes too much of the tree's sap.

So, it takes about four trees, 40-years or older, to produce one gallon of maple syrup. Sugarbush Farm has 6,000 maples on its 550 acres and has an intricate system of tubes (the Wrangler is holding onto one in the photo) for transporting the sap. "What do you think?" I asked the Wrangler last night. "Will 10 gallons of maple syrup a year be enough for us on the ranch? We'll need just 40 adult maple trees."

"Are you kidding?" the Wrangler asked, incredulously. He walked over to the fridge and pulled out a small bottle of Log Cabin pancake syrup. "We've had this since we moved in here over two years ago."

"That's true, but when we're making our own delicious maple syrup, we'll probably use it for so much more than just French toast, waffles, and pancakes. Remember what the lady at the maple syrup farm said." Our friendly tour guide, sounding not unlike Bubba in Forest Gump listing the various ways to prepare shrimp, touted maple syrup's many uses: you can put maple syrup on ice cream, you can put maple syrup in oatmeal, you can put maple syrup in yogurt, you can put maple syrup on your cereal, you can use maple syrup in cakes, pies, and cookies, you can put maple syrup in whipped cream, you can put maple syrup in your coffee and tea...

The Wrangler looked skeptical. "I don't really see us putting it on our cereal or eating a lot of yogurt and maple syrup concoctions. And I'm not putting it in my coffee."

"Well, maybe we can give some as gifts," I said hopefully. "Who wouldn't want our fresh, homemade maple syrup?" But the vision of the two of us happily stamping through snowdrifts and carrying buckets filled with sap from our 40 maples had already begun to dim.

Maybe we will just buy ours from the good folks in Vermont.

Like Bees to Honey

As the Great Cheese Farm Tour 2010 drew to a close, the Wrangler and I agreed that it had been one heck of a trip. Who knew we'd fall in love with Vermont? We didn't even make it to Maine. I might have shed a tear or two of happiness while driving through the billboard-free Vermont countryside and commiting to memory the views of red, orange, and yellow hills. Yes, the trees had begun to change color.

I accomplished one major feat on this trip: I got the Wrangler excited about bees. Our visit with Jenna at Cold Antler Farm gave us the opportunity to process wool from her sheep and help harvest fresh honey. Okay, I'm using the word "help" a bit loosely here. I "helped" by carrying the matches for the smoker device that is used to chase the bees out of the hive, and the Wrangler "helped" by looking for the crowbar-like tool that extracts the plastic honey-filled frames from the hive. (The tool was under a bale of hay upon which a proud chicken had just laid an egg.) Jenna's hive has 30,000 bees, and she's been stung only once. She removed two frames (there are 10 total) from the hive, put them in a bucket, and brought them into the kitchen. She placed a colander in the bottom of a large bowl and scraped the honey from the frames with a brush. It oozed into the colander, which removed the wax and, well, bee particles.

Vermont currently is awash in goldenrod, and the honey is the exact color of the goldenrod blooms--which makes perfect sense. There is nothing as sweet as fresh honey. Except for maybe fresh maple syrup. I'll get into that later.

Kale-afornia Dreamin'

When I was a volunteer in the commissary at the National Zoo, I spent many a Sunday morning chopping up kale. The majority of the zoo animals' diets include kale. I knew that it is one of those wonder foods--rich in nutients and loaded with antioxidents--but I'd never eaten kale until recently. You probably know where I'm going here. Yep, kale is good for healing bones.

I generally can choke down greens only if they're disguised in soups, sauces, or Indian food. Luckily, one of the Six-Button Cowgirls has a more healthful way to prepare the vile weed. She makes kale chips. (She also has a very interesting food blog with wonderful photos.) I have to admit I was skeptical, but I gave it try. I tore the kale into bite-sized pieces, tossed in just a tiny splash of olive oil, and sprinkled with garlic salt. Note that she is fancier than I and uses a 60/40 blend of sea salt and granulated garlic. I baked the kale at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes, until all pieces were crispy.

All said, not a bad way to eat my kale. If eating straight-up baked kale doesn't grow me some bones, I don't know what will.

Crab Fest Rx

Out here on the left coast, people are fond of their dungeness crab. I gave it a fair shake when I moved here, but I've concluded that anyone who loves dungeness crab only does so because he or she hasn't had blue crab. Along with first-rate Ethiopian food, blue crab is what the Wrangler and I miss most about living in DC.

Admittedly, the words" blue" and "crab" pretty much describe me lately. It's been almost six weeks since I've been able to ride Moto. Sensing my mood, the San Diego-based Six-Button Cowgirl took matters into her own hands and had a half-bushel (translation: a lot) of large, live blue crabs flown in from Maryland for our own little crab fest. Never one to skimp, she also served up jumbo lobster tails, shrimp, corn on the cob, potato salad, corn bread, and her special dipping sauce concoction of Old Bay, butter, and vinegar. The Wrangler bravely transferred the squirming crabs one-by-one into the 19-quart lobster pot and covered with beer, water, and plenty of Old Bay. After boiling for about 25 minutes, the crabs were ready.

It was a little tricky picking crabs with one hand. The Wrangler wrapped me and my cast with a plastic bag, HazMat-style, covered me with paper towels, and handed me a mallet. I wasn't exactly channeling Jackie-O or Audrey Hepburn. But it didn't matter.

I could say something corny about good friends and good food being the best medicine, but I'm way too full.

Catch and Release...Into My Tummy

The Wrangler and I headed to the midwest last weekend to pay homage to our roots and families in northern Minnesota. In three years, I'll have lived outside Minnesota longer than I lived there. Each time I go back, it all feels a little more unfamiliar. Yet, I'm always doing things that only someone from my neck of the woods can understand. No one here in California knows what I mean when I say that the ocean looks just like Mille Lacs, or why nothing says "festive holiday" more than canned fruit cocktail mixed with jello, mini-marshmallows, and cool-whip, or that walleye tastes one thousand times better than any other fish (but northerns are more fun to catch).

Ah, the northern--a good-sized freshwater pike fish that puts up a fun fight but few Minnesota anglers keep. Most of us are fairly disappointed to find a northern on the end of our line. Northern filets have too many bones. But leave it to my dad to ensure that nothing goes to waste, even the oft-maligned northern. Dad's been pickling northern for years. The pickling process eliminates the bones and turns a tough filet into little tasty treats. It started as a tradition at--of all places--his office. The entire staff helped make jar after jar of pickled northern for the annual Christmas party. When I lived in DC and Dad came to visit, I actually overheard him boasting about his pickled northern to the random couple sharing our table at a Japanese steakhouse. The visibly perplexed couple clearly had no idea what a "northern" is, why people would be pickling it at the office, and why it was the delicacy du jour at holiday parties.

This past weekend, we saw Dad in action. My aunt is hosting a weekend party for 60 houseguests and instructed my dad to bring 10 jars of pickled northern, which apparently is just as popular outside the holiday party circuit. Dad caught the fish on his lake, cut the filets into bite-sized pieces, and soaked the fish in a water and salt solution for three days (changing the solution periodically). We observed him as he filled canning jars with sugar, onions, pickling spices, and fish. He poured half a cup of white wine in each jar, and topped off the jars with vinegar. When I saw the jars of pickled fish stacked in the refrigerator, I knew I was home.

Flame Grilled Pizza

I didn't get a picture, but our friends served us up one heck of a good homemade pizza. Actually, six good homemade pizzas--we each made our own--on the grill.

We used pre-made pizza dough from Trader Joes. Each package makes about two or three individual pizzas. If they're too large, they're difficult to grill. Roll out the dough and brush one side with olive oil. Place the dough, olive oil-side down, on a hot grill. Brush the top side with olive oil, and flip the dough after about three minutes. Top with sauce and pre-cooked toppings. I topped mine with traditional pizza sauce, sauteed mushrooms and onions, sausage (browned and crumbled), and cheese, but the pizza with alfredo sauce and chicken looked good too. By the time the cheese has melted (about four minutes), the pizza is done. Grilling makes for a nice, thin, crispy crust. Yum!

So Long, Soda

Aside from the animals, it is the idea of the fresh, homegrown food that makes the "simpler life" on the farm or ranch sound so appealing. Yet, while I'd given a lot of thought to local, seasonal, organic, and humane food over the past couple years and made some small changes (I buy organic and humane products whenever possible), my overall diet missed the point. For example, before my accident two weeks ago, I had an appalling 4-can-a-day diet soda habit. I had tried to kick the habit many times, with no success.

(The Wrangler, who doesn't drink soda, once protested my purchase of a 24-pack of Diet Dr. Pepper at Target. "You drink way too much," he scolded, not bothering to help as I struggled to carry the carton to our cart.

"I only drink a lot because of my job," I explained. "If I could just stay at home on the ranch, I'd cut way back."

"That's not true. You'd just sit at home and drink even more all day," the Wrangler said, oblivious to the craned heads of other shoppers who, looking at me with disapproval, undoubtedly thought we were discussing a different vice.)

My broken humerus and sacrum--yep, just learned that my tailbone area is fractured, not merely bruised--helped me to quit cold-turkey. I'm no longer a soda pop junkie. After the accident, I learned that caffeine, carbonated beverages, soda, salt, red meat, fatty dairy, refined sugar, and processed/junk foods (about 95% of my pre-accident diet) hinder bone repair. No can of soda is worth a prolonged recovery.

I Scream, You Scream

I followed the Wrangler's advice and made a batch of ice cream tonight. The man knows what he's talking about. I just mixed organic whole milk, cream, vanilla extract, and sugar in a bowl, dumped the mixture into the freezer bowl, and turned on the ice cream maker. Twenty minutes later we were scarfing down a nice bowl of homemade ice cream. As I made room in the freezer for the leftovers, I shook a fist at the gelato (a/k/a my rookie mistake).