The Last Year

This past year has been one of change and adjustment. This time last year Handsome Son and I were caught up in the fever of Senior year basketball season. This was going to be the year. His team member had yet to crumble on the corner of the court, going down like a duck shot from the sky, leaving four of the five Senior starters to carry on alone the rest of the season; having an excellent season, but not the one we hoped would end with a run for the Gold Ball.

The team carries on this year, neither my son nor I has seen a game. I think they are again having a good season, but without expectations weighing heavy on them.

Baby Gardener was born in my birthday month. Now 8 months old, we seem to have a special bond. It is like we are connected at some cosmic level. I saw him Wednesday after a week's absence. When he saw me enter the room, he began bounding up and down in his jumper seat frantically waving his arms. Picking him up, he reached out to touch my face, like, "I HAVE MISSED YOU!" He put his head on my shoulder and let out a deep sigh. My heart melts for this tiny scrap of humanity that has both me and his mother completely entwined around his finger. We are both terribly biased, but believe him to be the absolute best baby in the world.

And, my Handsome Son is now Handsome College Man. He is liking college a lot and doing well. I hear from him barely weekly, because unfortunately, I did do my job well. He tells me he will be home for a month over the holidays, although now I have started a new job, going back to my career in the restaurant business having landed a position as an executive chef. I won't have quite as much free time over the school break as I did when I was substitute teaching. Next week, my baby will be 19. It seems incredible that it could be so.

I received an email from the site coordinator asking for my garden bio for the Master Gardeners' January meeting. Eight months and counting down to the day in July when my garden will be featured on their garden walk.

I added these window baskets under my windows which will have cocoa fiber liners and (hopefully) billowing annuals for the garden walk. I picked this beautiful green apple color and painted a number of items, including this large pot, some garden chairs, trellis, and used it to add a decorative element to other items in my yard.

Planting a conga line of pink lily-flowering tulips I unearthed this massive slab of block and concrete from one of my garden beds. What in the world it was supposed to be leaves me drawing a blank. A foundation stone? Anybody? No building other than an outhouse ever graced my backyard to my knowledge.

And before the weather has turned too cold, I finished staining my fence a nice dark brown. The covers for the cushions for this shabby chic garden sofa need completing-- a winter garden activity. I also need to decide whether to paint or not to paint this frame? Leave it the off white blistering paint, re-do the off white, or paint it the green apple, or maybe for contrast a dark federal park green?

I still want to come up with some nice plant labels, too.

My winter gardening projects. And oh, the chef in me is crying for some freshly grown basil!

What is keeping all the gardeners out there busy these days?

Stay warm all!

Permanence

(Pictured is hosta 'Abiqua Drinking Gourd', one of several hosta that take a long time to mature and is shown this spring in my yard, but was taken from a division of my Elgin, IL garden, where the parent remains, untended.)

Thanksgiving Day is a balmy, warm day here in the Midwest. I'm spending time with family in the Elgin, IL area, where I lived for a couple decades. Everything is familiar and yet totally different.

I have the opportunity to walk through a garden I established nearly 25 years ago and see that which remains.

The Boston ivy still covers the southern stone face of the house; trimmed back several times, but never obliterated when it was realized how it cools the exposed dark stone face.

The green ash I nurtured and which grew to 30' tall has fallen victim to storms and dry weather, as has the Calgary pear planted in the hellstrip by the city, the parent of my current smokebush-- gone, and a 'White Profusion' butterfly bush that had reached nearly as great proportions, also gone.

What remains? A holly grafted to have both the Blue Boy and Girl on the same bush, a green yew topiaried into a perfect 8' tall ball (that pre-dated me by 40 years), the akebia quinata, a French lilac, the two walnuts, a sweet autumn clematis.

Surprisingly, a 40' Chinese elm, invasive by anyone's standard, has made the hell strip its own. Transplanted out of the real garden space as a seedling on the tip of my shovel, nearly 25 years ago. It has surpassed the typical street tree life span by three times. It survives the crazy utility cutting crews, drought, wind storms, and 50,000 cars a day car exhaust in an area where more and more street trees have succumbed.

Yanked out? The privet hedge, which was never as nice as the carefully manicured short privet hedge in my current yard. The one here never received enough sunlight.

Of the perennials, the big winners are the hosta, daylilies, and 'Autumn Joy' sedum.

The gardens are no where near as exuberant. In the spring, I have heard that the tulips have perennialized and sometime put up a show 500-strong.

This garden is a garden without a garden, but a garden still.

The Hobgoblin: Consistency

So as the days shorten and my personal challenges to my cooking expertise increase, so have the challenges to the victim "Eaters" to critique the meals I serve them. Family and friends, and even Handsome Son have been stepping up to be food victims to a vast array of foods I have never attempted to cook for them before or have not prepared for decades.

I'm sort of like an athlete in training...

Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and good chefs. Every plate of a given dish needs to be of the same (and excellent) consistency that it was the last time it was prepared. I have been in the process of proofing and standardizing my recipes, rather than leaving them to the tasting and adding a pinch of the this or a teaspoon of that. I will not be the only one preparing these dishes. They need to replicate-able by all.

I am still sifting through my muffin and quick breads for a signature collection. I'd like to develop a couple more go-to cookie recipes. And then there are the commercially-available personal serving size salad dressings I will most likely use for most of the salad I serve, that although as much as I would like, I do not see the time to actually prepare my own, not if I actually do make some of my own mayonnaise, aioli, and chutneys.

And bake my own breads...

I need to sort through and choose.

As I develop my menu with labor constraints, food safety,and holding in mind, I pick and choose those food less apt to flame me in this new career reincarnation-- without playing it too safe.

So in the last two days, in addition to working everyday. I have been cooking-- a lot.

Date and orange quick bread; warm white bean, albacore and spinach quesidillas; beef, mushroom and sweet heat red pepper stir fry farfalle with broccoli; slow pot chicken and bacon; raspberry chocolate roulade; and a meatloaf en croute; I should be taking pictures for you to drool over.

The Twins are going to grow up to be food critics, perhaps, instead of gardeners. And dear sister-in-law confides she can't get Baby Gardener to eat any solid foods, although even as she speaks he can smell the aromatic crock pot of slow cook chicken and bacon I hold and is reaching for it; although hardly suitable for first solid food status for Baby Gardener.

Really? Really? Really!

I haven't been posting lately. I've been off finding myself. Since Handsome Son has become Handsome College Boy, the rhythmn of my life has changed. I've been looking for my path. It seems to have gotten choked with out with overgrown shrubs or something.

Well, my yard isn't really overgrown. It's going to be on the Master Gardeners' garden Walk this coming summer.

And I grew one kick-ass vegetable garden this summer.

I've been spending a lot of time with my nephews, The Twins and Baby Gardener.

Faithful Companion has become better mannered.

And my internet connection has been crap, to the point I called my ISP, on my landline.

And, I have been testing the waters, looking for full-time work. After spending over a decade piecing together my livelihood from various sources, and adopting a future world type career portfolio rather than a straight-line career, I thought it might be time to go "back to work".

But what work? Leverage my resources and start a full-scale landscaping company? Start that CSA? Follow through and enroll in one of those 18-month teaching certificate programs? Get some solid credentials in data warehousing and mining? Or something more in the food service and management line? Go back to mural painting? Muddle along substitute teaching and finish that funky garden art and decorating book?

Since I began this post I have actually been hired as an executive chef, and I am resetting my daily rhythmn yet again.

Frankly, it has been more than a decade since I last stepped into a commercial kitchen in a professional capacity. I have been raising Handsome Son. The kitchen I have walked into is so far out of scale with the meals I will be preparing that it's a little over-whelming and a little like the worse equipment exam straight out of Iron Chef. I have equipment I could literally bathe in and not a stem (or digital) thermometer. I have a dough proofing cabinet and no blender. The smallest whisk is longer than my arm.

All this to fees 20 to 70 people? Really?

Challenges, in the best sense of the word, abound.

So if you check this blog and I haven't written for a week, this is why. By next spring, the crocuses will bloom and I'll have this all straightened out.

Anybody want to buy a flat grill?

"Standard-timer"

My dad's clocks are not even right twice a day. That ends tomorrow.

When everyone falls back and Daylight Savings Time ends, my dad's clocks will once again be right with the rest of us.

Almost as adamant and off-kilter as the far-right "birthers", my father refuses to "jump ahead" in the spring. He does not change his clocks.

Visiting my parents is like slipping into a strange time warp.

As a farmer, what time it is means little to what work gets done. It is all a matter of light. Even, when he bought his first tractor with headlights, field work still was predominantly done in the daylight hours. Here at our latitude the high summer sun provides at minimum the twilight until almost 10 P.M.

I didn't realize this gift of twilight reminiscent of the Artic Circle's midnight sun until living in the greater Chicago area (42° 2′ 22″ N),I visited my in-laws in even more northerly located Bloomer, WI (latitude 45° 6′ 8″ N,) at high summer. Three degrees in latitude is equal to 24 more minutes of sunlight at high summer. And it is a noticeable difference. Elgin's astronomical twilight ends at 9:46 P.M.; Bloomer's at 10:31. On December 1, I will realize the very shortness of the days with sunset at 4:19.

So, this morning I captured the quality of my natural light on the last day of Daylight Savings Time at 7:00 A.M. when I walked Faithful Companion.

Tomorrow, when I and the rest of my time zone turn our clocks back and roll over for another hour of sleep, my dad will again be right with the world, with no change in his daily routine.