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“Tidying” – addendum

“Tidied Up” utility drawer!

While it may seem daunting to clean out your kitchen drawers, my MO is to dump everything out first; clean the space next; and ONLY put back keepers. The rest goes out or elsewhere.

So these photos are indicative of what got emptied out first.

Surprisingly, most things went back in an orderly fashion. I only have a couple of small boxes of stuff to give away to Savers. It’s not as bad as one might think.

And it feels SO GOOD once it’s done. An offshoot of it is that you also know exactly what you have and where it is. For example, I have about five instant meat thermometers, none of which work well when I really need them! And 3 oven thermometers.

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February 23, 2016

“Tidying” – the Japanese way . . .

my de-cluttered kitchen “sparks joy”!

If you haven’t heard about it yet, Mari Kondo’s book entitled “the life-changing magic of tidying up” has been on the best-seller list for quite awhile. If you are interested in de-cluttering your surroundings and your life, you might try her process of what she calls “tidying.” Her pitch is that if you truly tidy things up, you will never have to tidy again!

Simply put, she advocates dispensing of ANYTHING that does not “spark joy.” If you go around and intuitively take down and do away with whatever doesn’t make you extremely happy to see or have it, you will have prioritized what you want to have around you. The second rule is to have a place for everything that you do keep. This is important because without each thing having its place (like scotch tape,) it will float around where you can’t find it or clutter up some other space.

I’ve tried reading this book a couple of times. This past weekend, I read it again in large-print, borrowed from the library while waiting for a two-piano concert to begin. Imprinted with the messages, I went home and looked around me. Just about everything I have in my home “sparks joy” – mainly because that has been my criteria for having them in the first place. My problem is that although my things spark a lot of joy, there’s too many of them around.

So, I decided to cull some thing away to create a more peaceful aura: I took down the metal branch chandelier from the holidays. I moved a flowering cyclamen plant to a table near the canaries in the other room where it actually gets more sun than here on the kitchen table. A fresh bouquet of tulips in one of my favorite vases was moved to a corner bookcase shelf rather than sitting on the table. Now, there’s just a pair of deep burgundy twisted candles in antique brass candlesticks and a lady-slipper orchid with an antique tin of dried pods on the cherrywood tray at the end of the table. I also culled items from the kitchen windowsill.

Before simplifying the visual landscape of our kitchen/living room space, I tackled cleaning out all the kitchen drawers. I’ll bet you know what that’s like. There’s always one drawer that is a catchall for everything: twisty ties, rubber bands, measuring tape, cough drops, picture hangers, screwdrivers, packing tape, flower frogs, miscellaneous thread, string, pens, pencils (you get the picture.) Anyhow, I did it, taking photos of all the things I emptied out on the kitchen countertop in order to reassemble them back into empty, cleaned-out drawers. You should try it sometime! If you’re like me, you’ll have a bunch of leftover stuff that you don’t know what to do with. Kondo recommends ditching it – either throwing it out in the “garbage” or giving it to Goodwill.

Which brings me to the big flaw or omission in Kondo’s theory. What do you do with things that shouldn’t be thrown away or recycled? Auction them off? Give them to people who probably don’t want them anyhow? I guess we’ll have to figure that out for ourselves.

In any case, I’ve given myself this week to “tidy” our living space, next week for clothing and the week after for books. That’s not the same order that Kondo recommends but it’s the one that works best for me. I started with the hardest one first: miscellany!

I was tempted to post some of the “before” photos that I took to show my husband because he was out tuning a piano while I had the kitchen drawers taken apart. I find it’s easier to do these kinds of tasks when he’s not around, looking over my shoulder or worse, going through the stuff himself and making even more work out of a simple sorting exercise. You might have this same experience yourself. For example, if I ask G. to put something in the pantry, he’s still out there minutes later, starting to rearrange things to his liking. Plus, I have discovered I often can’t locate what he’s put out there until some months or years later. The pantry clean out isn’t scheduled as yet until the other phases are completed.

By that time, sparks will fly all over the place as our rooms, clothing, books and whatever is left over are “tidied up” once and for all. It does feel good to know what’s where and that you know why you’re keeping it. The pantry should be a cinch by then.

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February 23, 2016

a winter supper . . .

Gjelina, a restaurant in Venice Beach, California, serves simple vegetable dishes and has recently come out with a cookbook. It arrived on Sunday and the dishes looked appetizing, promising flavors that might be more complex than usual.

Since we are wanting to pare down on all the things that we should be eating less of (red meat, potatoes, sugar and bread) I thought we’d try changing our mindset so that we would share a vegetable dish as our our dinner, rather than as a side dish to add to a heavier meal.

Michael Pollan, in his little paperback called “Food Rules” says basically that we should eat primarily what grows above the ground (greens) and eat less, stopping when we feel 70% full. Thus, I thought it might be a novel idea to shift our expectations and cut down by sharing a vegetable side dish that preserved flavor and that also retained foodie cooking flair that I would miss terribly if all we ate was steamed green vegetables! I took macrobiotic cooking lessons years ago and while it might be healthy, it wasn’t long on flavor or culinary interest, at least not to me.

So tonight, I roasted orange beets, marinated them in a sherry vinegar, orange juice, olive oil dressing to which I added avocado and fresh segments of mineola oranges, topped with toasted, crushed hazelnuts. It was satisfying and tasty too. Next time, we thought we’d put this dish on a bed of arugula and watercress greens.

Other dishes in the line-up for supper this week are cooked coarse corn grits (polenta) topped with a fresh mushroom melange and a poached egg on top; roasted acorn squash with brown butter and fresh rosemary and caramelized Japanese sweet potato wedges served with yogurt and fresh lime sprinkled with sliced scallions. A bountiful green salad of arugula, baby spinach, watercress with a sharp soy-ginger-lime vinaigrette might be tasty alongside. Or add some garlicky shrimp scampi to the aforementioned green salad.

To break the monotony, I did come home with a Bell & Evans organic chicken that I’ll brine on Wednesday and roast with potatoes for dinner with an old friend on Thursday night. AND, since fresh crabmeat from Maine is still available, I might make a crabmeat quiche as a treat for the weekend!

And so it goes.

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January 27, 2016

fresh lemon rosemary shortbread cookies . . .

Tonight’s dinner consists of fresh ginger marinated thin ribeye steaks grilled and sliced over a large green salad with arugula, lettuces, cucumber and grape tomatoes. The dressing contains a touch of jalapeno pepper and some fresh lime juice.

To complement it as a small sweet for dessert, I thought I’d make half a batch of Meyer lemon fresh rosemary shortbread cookies. I didn’t have enough flour to make a whole batch – and just as well because we probably shouldn’t eat so many of them. Lemon zest grated on the microplane, fresh rosemary leaves chopped up (left over from making lamb loin chops over the weekend); one stick of unsalted butter, lemon juice, vanilla, flour and salt completed the ingredients list. The dough is chilling in the fridge for an hour so I thought I’d take a few minutes to write up this short post for a shortbread cookie experiment.

When the dough is chilled, the recipe calls for rolling it out to about 1/4 inches thick and cutting out cookies to bake about 10-12 minutes in a 325 degree oven.

And, here they are! Scrumptious!

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January 27, 2016

a nocturnal visitor in our chimney flue . . .

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January 24, 2016

rosemary roasted cashews . . .

It’s about an hour before the kickoff for the Pats vs. Broncos game in Denver today. Otherwise known as “Brady vs. Manning.” Last night, I had a recurring dream that I had made some Asian dumplings with a special energy powder in them for the Pats. In fact, in the dream, G., my husband, was supposed to bring them to Danny Amendola (I kid you not.) Anyhow, it was a humorous dream to have.

But this afternoon, I was casting around for something to make as a snack for us to eat during the game since it starts mid-afternoon. Lemon pound cake was an idea but had two sticks of butter and two cups of sugar in the recipe even though I have some Meyer lemons in the fridge that would have been perfect to bake these little treats.

I did remember that I had some raw cashews in the pantry – and then came across Ina Garten’s recipe for roasted cashew nuts with fresh rosemary. Since we’re having lamb loin chops for our supper tonight, the fresh rosemary was on hand, and I also liked the idea that the nuts would be roasted first and then coated in a mixture of fresh rosemary, brown sugar, butter, cayenne pepper and salt rather than the old standby of coating them with egg whites which I’ve tried a couple of times with walnuts and which were sticky and unappetizing to deal with.

So, here are the nuts, resting in the still warm oven after being coated with the mixture. It seemed like common sense to put them back into the oven (350 for 8 minutes) to dry out a little and crisp up on their own since they were raw to begin with.

This isn’t Asian dumplings similar to my comical dream last night, but our good wishes are there for the Pats to win today.

Here’s hoping!

Afterword: Well, that was a painful game to watch if you’re a Patriots fan. We enjoyed the nuts but wished the Pats were going to the Super Bowl. In hindsight, this season has been a meaningful one for us in New England given the bad press and hype regarding the NFL’s punishment of Tom Brady. Go Pats!

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January 20, 2016

knitting “fur” . . .

I’ve been knitting all my life. Until recently, I used yarns that were made of wool. Simple, right? I got into the habit of knitting free form – that is, making up measurements and stitches that I liked, especially seed stitch and antler cable patterns.

Then, I saw a posting of a knitted cowl that looked like wild animal fur. The pattern turned out to be available on Ravelry for free. And I managed to scrape together enough yarn to make three of them for myself and two daughters: two out of a color called “otter” with a faint hint of brown tone; and one out of “grizzly” an all black-tipped yarn.

Well, it was hard calling it yarn actually, because the actual knitting felt like handling tips of fur even though it was completely synthetic. The only drawback to knitting with this yarn is that if you happened to drop a stitch, you were unable to find that stitch again amidst all that fuzz. I learned that the hard way and had to stitch up some holes afterwards. But the good news is that this yarn knitted up is also very forgiving. You can’t see the holes nor the repaired parts.

These cowls, fashioned after the TV series, “Highlander” which I haven’t watched myself, are extremely lightweight, warm and very flattering. The yarns in “otter” and “grizzly” are almost extinct everywhere. They are “winter colors” I’m told so places, even if they restock, won’t be doing so until the Fall, unfortunately.

These cowls require six skeins of this Louisa Harding yarn called “Luzia.” There is a funny dark styrofoam filler in the middle of each skein. I can’t imagine finding anything equivalent to how these cowls look or feel. It was an interesting and worthwhile endeavor to knit these. They each took about a day and a half of knitting straight through the day on size 10 needles; 55 stitches across.

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January 10, 2016

a flock of cranes . . .

The other day, I saw a flock of white paper cranes (and a few swans) in an etsy listing:

(https://www.etsy.com/listing/178440685/flock-of-white-origami-cranes-paper.)

There are lots of origami cranes online but this particular one caught my eye because of the way it was asymmetrically arranged and photographed in a courtyard setting. Usually, what people do is arrange a few in a circle to make a mobile – nice but not dazzling like the ones shown above.

Hope you enjoy seeing the flock of cranes too!

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January 2, 2016

dumplings on New Year’s Day! . . .

We had some visitors here for lunch today. They were people whom I had known 20-30 years ago. I realized upon seeing them again that I really didn’t know them at all or even if I ever had.

For New Year’s Day, I made chive-pork dumplings, making wrappers from flour and warm water. It’s not a complicated recipe but it does take care and some time. Here are some photos of them ready to go into the pan for browning and then steaming until the bottoms are crisp!

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December 31, 2015

“hi-protein” life! . . .

zucchini & onion in olive oil w/cheddar cheese beside a jumbo organic egg for a hi protein breakfast!

My birthday was this week. It’s not a big deal to me and serves primarily as an internal milestone to adjust my life in ways that are easier and more enjoyable. So instead of waiting for New Year’s to make resolutions, I decided to make some on that day. Short and simple:

DO more and buy less! (speaks volumes, doesn’t it?)
Use cash for food and shop 2X a week!
Read, write, play the piano and listen to music a lot!
Avoid toxic people (most important for true well-being)
Live fully (mindfully) and give thanks . . . every day!

That’s about it. I was tempted to put down stuff about losing a little weight or exercising but that’s so boring. But one thing I did think about this morning was what best to have for breakfast that was hi-protein, low carb, low sugar and most important – appetizing for me to eat on a regular basis.

There’s a lot to read about this topic online and some of the suggestions were either way too fussy (frittatas! eggs in avocadoes!) or expensive to make. I remembered that I had some leftover zucchini in the fridge and had just bought some jumbo organic eggs at the farmers market the other day. So I took a small frying pan, added olive oil and sauteed some chopped vidalia onion and the zucchini. Grated some fine Kerrygold cheddar cheese on top after it was cooked and fried one of those eggs with a huge yolk beside it.

It smelled wonderful and tasted even better with a sprinkling of Maldon salt and cracked pepper on top of everything. A cup of black coffee topped it off! I was so happy to discover this combination which was hiding right under my nose in the fridge! It’s not as high in cholesterol as bacon/sausage with the egg and tastier than a scrambled egg by itself. And no fruit that contains grams of carbs and sugar, no oatmeal, grits or toast, no English or corn muffins. Breakfast is my favorite meal and the carb/sugar restrictions have made it challenging since the aforementioned grains all contained high carbs along with fruit juice and fresh fruit full of carbs AND sugar!

Not anymore though with veggies and a sprinkling of cheese served with eggs. Fresh baby spinach would be good too – I even think a small braised endive with fried egg might be delicious for New Year’s Day breakfast tomorrow!

braised endive and egg with cheddar cheese

So, on New Year’s Eve, here’s to a new, repeatable hi-protein breakfast concept paired with a higher-nourishing lifestyle. . . and to living with more verve, relaxation and FUN in 2016!

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