Food Porn

Garden Three-Bean Salad with fresh French Dressing.

We got this recipe out of the June issue of Better Homes and Garden. It's been floating around for a while. We were out in the garden today and I pointed out the nice crop of green beans that were ready. When we came back in, Nick pulled out the page from it's current pile and said let's make this salad.

Over all, it was a tasty salad. The only ingredient that we could pull from the garden was the green beans. The chickens destroyed our lettuce crop, which sucks because we had the prettiest heads of butter crunch lettuce that would of been picture perfect. I would like to point out too, that I think that our chickens have discerning taste or just really good timing. Because until just a week ago, the lettuce remained unmolested. From starts the chickens picked and scratched around the plants leaving them alone. But once the lettuce started to get to that perfect stage, boom! Carnage. They are now banned.

Well, a quick run to the store didn't turn up any butter crunch so red and green leaf had to fill in. However, I almost went for an iceberg head, thinking the cold crispness would pair nicely. I'm almost wishing I had gone with that. The leaf lettuce just didn't have that crisp crunch I wanted.

The best part of the salad was the combination of beans. We love edamame and cannellini beans and I would not of thought to use them together, but the pairings with the fresh dressing and the fresh green beans was perfect. It made for a nice dinner on a summery day, not to mention the slight hangover we have from our overnight wedding reception. With our salad we had a nice, young bottle of Smart Water.

Here's the recipe (as seen in BHG magazine):
2 cups fresh green beans (trimmed)
8 cups mixed greens
2 cups frozen edamame (thawed)
1 cup canned white beans (cannellini: drained and rinsed)
1 cup radishes sliced
1 recipe Fresh French Dressing (follows)

Dressing:
in blender combine 2 medium tomatoes that have been seeded and quarterd; 1/4 cup olive oil; 2-3 Tbsp red wine vinegar; 2 Tbsp tomato paste; 1 Tbsp snipped tarragon; and 2 tsp dijon mustard. Cover and process until thoroughly blended. Season with salt and pepper to taste. If it's too runny, add more paste and process further. Refrigerate.

Microwave the green beans in a microwave safe bowl with 1/4 cup water and 1 tsp salt uncovered for about 3.5 - 5 mins on high. Set aside and allow to cool. (I took them out at 3.5 minutes, and then rinsed them with cold water to stop the cooking. I like my beans tender crisp. Nick ate them like french fries!)

The recipe says to toss everything together and dress lightly with the dressing. I like assembling a bowl by layers and then applying the dressing. It was appetizing, it spared the ingredients that were leftover from being soggy and unappealing. I now have left over ingredients to make a bowl for lunch tomorrow.

If you try the dressing recipe, let me know. I'm curious to hear your thoughts and want to tweak it. It was okay, good even, but something was lacking.

Tithonia rotundiflora 'Mexican Sunflower'

Food Porn

I love the color of fresh eggs. I know, five eggs for breakfast seems excessive. In my defense, these are bantam size. This is a salad plate. So I have to cook more to have the same portion size of large eggs. Right?

Up Next...

Getting to this next post took longer than I would have liked. I've been traveling quite a bit and feeling run down. Time to get going again...

I mentioned that while we were in the process of looking at the house in Bothell that we had also looked at another home, the one we are in now. So, going back a little, we did look at this house and at that time no one had been living in it for over a year. We first looked at in April or May. It was musty, dirty and a little creepy.




One of the first things that became obvious to me was that the basement was a pot growing operation at one time. There were a lot of extra walls, the distinct odor of cannabis, and the reroute of the house's 220v line. In the the back where the laundry and furnace were, there was extra insulation, sound proofing if you will. Probably because the generator was so loud.

It was in rough condition, smelled bad and the property was this long weedy jungle. All in all it was not inspiring.




After the demise of the other opportunity, we discovered that this house had been reduced. Surprisingly, we took a fresh take on the house and began to really look at it. After going through the inspection, we started evaluating things about this house and saw that it wasn't in nearly as a bad a shape as we thought. In fact, this house felt pretty sound.

We went ahead and made an offer and got accepted. We ordered an inspection and went through the whole process all over again, but this time we kept feeling better and better as we went. There were some definite problems: leaky pipes and drains in the bathrooms, someone stole the hot water heater right before the inspection, the deck was rotten, the carpet was soiled heavily, there were rats and ivy and black berry vines were swallowing the house, it was a short sale and...well, you get the idea.





After all that, we agreed to buy the house. I think Nick was more on board even before the offer. It took me awhile to really find my inspiration. I think I was hung up on the scope of the property. I could see that it was huge, but the shape of it daunted me. Our last house sat in the middle of the property, providing me with garden rooms. I had all these little zones to play in. This one has all the yard in one place. I remember driving up to the house on my days off and staring at the back yard from the deck and sitting down below for like an hour trying to visualize my new space. I'm still trying to find my vision, but I've made some progress a year later.

The most unexpected thing out of all of this was how quickly we would a)buy and close on a new house (that was in short sale) and b) sell and move out of our old house. Short sale houses were taking up to six months to close, let alone take possession. We figured that our old house would take at least that long if not longer to sell, and considered the possibility of it becoming a rental until it did sell. Our old house sold via word of mouth. We never did list it. In fact, within a six week period we bought and sold and moved. We were in a total whirlwind the whole time. Our emotions about selling our first home together completely caught us off guard. Everything was happening so fast and before we knew it, were here.

Cicada

Found this dude while shopping in/near Philadelphia.

Food Porn

Food Porn: Cheesesteak Eggrolls at The Continental in Philadelphia.

Where to begin?

You have to start somewhere, and we've been trying to decide how to jump in when a whole year has passed at this point. My thought was to try and post from the beginning, to tell the story of how we even got to 'here' in the first place.



I guess it started when we realized that there wasn't going to be a lot we could do with the old house, at least not with out a sizable investment from us in the money department. We had a couple different contractors come out and give us some ideas about what we could or couldn't do with the existing structure. We needed to know what the best direction to go in would be if we were going to even try to do something. We looked at raising the roof and adding a second floor, but the house was not structurally sound enough to support a second floor. We thought maybe if we raised the main floor and finished the basement, and that got us a maybe, but not without significant rework and structural issues. That left us with expanding off the back of the house, which was pretty much the only option. We couldn't do that for anything less than $150k and that didn't include the finish work.

With that in mind, we set out to see what we could get for our money. This set in motion the search. We spent a good deal of time looking online at listings and time on Sundays driving around and checking things out in person, often running away quickly. Invariably, something would be wrong, the neighborhood, the age, the style. It wasn't until we stumbled onto a house in foreclosure, and most of the houses at that time were in some form of short sale or foreclosure, that we found a house that really resonated with both of us.



After having an older home, circa 1935, we both agreed that we were more interested in something a little younger. We are very drawn to 50's to early 60's style homes and loved the idea of a mid-century modern design aesthetic. We found what looked like a mid-century modern jewel that was neglected and in need of love. The property was perfect and it screamed out to us from the "full of potential" point of view. We drove by it every chance we got and walked around it and in it. Turns out the door on the back of the house was not secure. It wasn't like we were trying to break in, we just tried the door and it opened. This fueled our fascination and allowed us to really get invested emotionally.

We contacted our agent and arranged a 'proper' viewing and decided to make an offer. In the interim, he also took us to see the current house we are in now, but we couldn't be tempted. We were in love with this property. We could see all the landscape potential. We could see all the remodel work that could bring it up to date and still play up it's mid-century lines. It consumed our free time and our days off.

Our offer was accepted and we scheduled an inspection. I don't know how to describe the feeling we had after about an hour into the inspection. Nick had to excuse himself. I hung in there and followed the inspector from room to roof, to septic tank and to the kitchen. Everywhere we looked, every thing we saw, did nothing but doom this house. I knew after an hour that our pockets were never going to be deep enough to bring this house back from the precipice it had so clearly fallen over such a long time ago.

That was the end of that dream. It was a sickening sensation, and a real disappointment. We had spent so much time, way too much time, daydreaming about what could never be. We took it hard.

Reinvent Yourself

I've been looking back on this blog and revisiting posts and comments and I'm a little embarrassed about the style of it and the writing. Mostly I'm amazed at the responses that I got from so many people. I can't believe how long I actually kept this up.

Since moving and working on the new house, I told Nick that we really need to document this house and it's progress. And not just the house and it's remodels, but the garden and it's evolution as well. We kicked around the idea of creating a new blog, but when I searched for viable names to use, it became apparent that it would be so much easier to come back to this one. The name is still relevant, and truth be told, we kind of feel like Lucy is a lesbian dog, and prefers the idea that she's one of the boys. We are not trying to label her, we never use that term in front of her, and we are very accepting of whatever decision she makes. We promise to love her no matter what.

Some of my old blogging friends are my friends on Facebook. That's been the primary place where we post changes to the house, but there isn't really a format to discuss what we've done, what we went through and how we got to where we are. We are going to attempt to do that here. It's something that we can do together and a way to share our ideas and maybe even get a few from 'you' as well. This is assuming that anyone will find this or read it, let alone leave a comment.

Marigold