Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

August 25, 2015 Laurie Graves 12 Comments

Yesterday, I went to the dentist’s office to have my teeth cleaned, and while I was there, I had X-rays. Clif will be retiring from his job the end of September, which means no more dental insurance. I figured that if any work needed to be done, then September was the month to do it. Well, good thing I had those X-rays. As it turns out, I need to have a tooth extracted, and I need a new crown. All will be done around my birthday. Happy birthday to me!

My teeth are naturally straight, and even though they are a little yellow from all the tea I drink, they look pretty good. However, sometimes looks can be deceiving. Every two years, I have X-rays, and they inevitably show that something must be done to Laurie’s teeth. In the past, it was fillings. Now, it is crowns, and with this new one, I will have had five crowns. As for the extracted tooth…it is going from the bottom and cannot be fixed.

Our out-of-pocket cost for the five crowns has been about $2,500. What a nice Canon camera I could get for $2,500. I know. Teeth are important, but I can’t help feeling a little wistful about the money spent.

When I came home, I told Clif about my teeth, and while he agreed with my assessment about the money, he was philosophical about the matter. “You need your teeth,” he said.

Indeed, I do.

After discussing teeth, Clif mowed the front lawn, and I tidied the patio and back garden. I cut back the phlox so that it wasn’t leaning over the dwarf snapdragons and touching the patio. Afterwards, I propped them up with green wire fencing. I swept the patio and cut some of the spent stalks from the daylilies. The garden still looked ragged, but it was a decided improvement. At least things were tidy. More or less.

The sky was clear, the sun was setting, and Clif and I decided it would be an ideal time to have drinks on the patio. We both know we only have a month, at best, where we will be able to do this. We talked about my teeth, his retirement, and our sidelines—selling photo cards, computer consulting, and the strong possibility of a book being published in 2016. Our card business has begun to pick up, and we are excited about all our ventures.

As Katherine White would put it, onward and upward. Even the prospect of dental work couldn’t dim our enjoyment of the evening.

Nature

Phlopping Phlox and the Crickets’ Song

August 24, 2015 Laurie Graves 4 Comments

Last Friday, a hard rain came. It beat down the backyard garden, making the already ragged bed look even more ragged. The bee balm is helter-skelter, and the phlox has been bent so far down that it is touching the patio.

However, to borrow from Jason from his excellent blog Garden in a City, the weather has gone from being hot and humid to cool and humid, which is an improvement. Still. I mourn the old days in Maine when August was hot—but not too hot—and dry with cool nights. How I loved those days, which we have not had for many, many years.

I will do what I can for the gardens. I’ll prop up the phlox so that it is not touching the patio anymore. I’ll cut the flowerless stems of the daylilies, which were spectacular this year. They, it seems, love the humid heat. I’ll also sweep the patio. But I won’t do any major cutting back for another month or so. Clif and I both agree that we would rather have a ragged garden than one that looks as though it’s been given a crew cut.

After the hard rain, I went out to take some pictures, and I will admit I got some nice photos of a variety of phlox that had not been beaten down.

Somehow flowers with rain drops always look pretty.

As do the hens and chicks, veiled by a spider’s web.

As I was taking pictures in the front garden, a little frog hopped out of a low bird bath and disappeared into the tall growth. Too quick for me to get a picture. Unfortunately.

Another consolation is that even though August is humid, the crickets still sing their high, sweet song. It wouldn’t be August without them, just as it wouldn’t be spring without the peepers. When you live in the country, you look forward to the voices of the natural world that come with each season—the peepers, the loons, the wood thrush, the buzzing grasshoppers, the crickets. What a loss it would be not to have them!

At night, the windows are open in my bedroom, and I fall asleep listening to the crickets, who will sing until the cold silences them. By then my windows will be closed, and one frosty night when I return home from, say, book group at the library, I will notice that the crickets are no longer singing. Next year, next year they will sing again.

It’s my guess I’ll have another few weeks where I’ll be able to leave my windows open and be soothed by the crickets’ song as I fall asleep.

Nature

Silent Sunday—August 23, 2015

August 23, 2015 Laurie Graves 2 Comments

Animals - especially dogs

Fed-Up Friday: Let It Snow

August 21, 2015 Laurie Graves 15 Comments

All right. Even for someone like me, who loves summer, this high heat and humidity has gone on a little too long. I am ready for cooler weather.

In fact, this is starting to look pretty good.

The picture, of course, was taken last winter when Liam looked a little frosty. And while I don’t really want it to snow—not yet—I have been thinking ahead to Christmas and to cards, which I love to send.

This will be our Christmas card for 2015, and I have found it very soothing to look at it during this extreme heat and humidity.

The card is a good reminder that the seasons change in Maine, that it won’t always be this hot, and that instead of melting down at around 2:00 every afternoon, soon enough I’ll be putting wood on the fire.

Food

Everything Is Better with Brown Butter on It

August 20, 2015 Laurie Graves 2 Comments

Yes, that is delectable zucchini quiche next to the beans with brown butter.

Well, maybe not everything, but brown butter is a culinary delight that is right up there with chocolate, fresh corn on the cob, and garden tomatoes. It is that good, and if you haven’t tried it, then get out a little saucepan and brown some butter.

It’s not hard. On medium heat, melt a couple of tablespoons of butter, but when the butter is melted, don’t remove the pan from the heat. Instead leave the pan on for about five minutes, until the butter becomes, well, brown. You will have to watch it because while you want brown butter, you don’t want burned butter. So leave the pan on the burner until the melted butter takes on a nice brown color.

Now, what to do? You could add some chopped sage, which becomes crispy nuggets of deliciousness in the brown butter. Then, you could drizzle the brown butter and sage over green beans, the way I did on Farmer Kev’s beans pictured above.

You could drizzle the brown butter and sage over pasta with sautéed summer squash and zucchini. Sweet red peppers would make a good addition to the squash and zucchini, but for this dish, I would stay away from green peppers. Too sharp.

You could drizzle the brown butter and sage over cooked carrots. Boil or steam the carrots until tender, drain, and add the butter.

What about new red potatoes? Remember the title of this post. Of course brown butter is delicious on potatoes.

Winter squash and delicata squash also shine with a drizzle of brown butter, with or without sage.

Even though we hardly eat it anymore, I’m even going to sneak in a suggestion for fish, any white fish, but especially haddock. Bake the fish at 350° for fifteen or twenty minutes, until it is flaky. Remove the fish from the oven and drizzle the brown butter—without sage this time—over the fish. Close your eyes as you eat the fish. You will wonder, is this fish or lobster? I don’t know why brown butter on haddock tastes like lobster. But it does.

So as August wends its way to September, as the green beans continue to flourish, as the carrots grow bigger, and as the squash and peppers ripen, treat yourself to some fresh vegetables with brown butter.

Once you do, you’ll be plotting ways to use brown butter on other things, sweet as well as savory. As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, brown butter is that good.

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday: 8/19/15—Pictures from a Hot and Humid Mid-August

August 19, 2015 Laurie Graves 4 Comments

Food for Thought

My Little Schedule Turned Upside Down

August 18, 2015 Laurie Graves 6 Comments

When you work at home, you have to establish some kind of routine. If you don’t, then it is easy to fritter away the time so that the hours pass, and the laundry is not done, the bread is not made, the blog post is not written, and the pictures are not taken. My usual routine is to write and work on photography in the morning and focus on household chores in the afternoon.

But today is very hot, very humid, and I decided to flip things so that I would be active during the coolest part of the day and at my desk in the afternoon. My little schedule has been turned upside down, and it feels odd. Nevertheless, I did everything I wanted to do, just not in the usual order. When it’s 90º in the shade—and the relative humidity nearly that high—it’s important to plan activities, especially when you don’t have air conditioning.

So far, this August has felt like July. In fact, for the past five years or so August in Maine has felt more like July. Time was when August was hot and dry during the day and cool at night. The lawns stopped growing, and those who mowed them to an inch of their lives had a brown stubble rather than a green carpet. Not anymore. In central Maine, everyone’s lawn looks as lush in August as it did in June, and I can count the times on one hand when I’ve had to water the potted plants outside. I was not surprised to read in the Boston Globe that rainfall in northern New England has increased by ten percent in recent years.

Despite the heat and the rain, I am counting my blessings. A friend who recently moved to Portland, Oregon, wrote, “The heat this summer out here has been stunning, way, way out of the normal, like exponentially…. I heard that some of the big CA redwoods are showing signs of stress. I don’t even want to HEAR this. Some are 3,000 years old. Scientists are in the groves now doing some testing, also flying over to see which ones are looking stressed. We have so many fires in OR and WA now that I don’t remember the number. Not near us and not on the northern coastal area. But not far inland. Eastern OR is desert and scrub country, ranches and grasslands and some ranches are burned.”

Dare we call this climate change? Yes, I think we should. Those of us who have lived in Maine a long time have seen many changes, some of which, like the cardinals, actually seem pretty good. Other things— such as ticks and lily beetles—not so much. The heat and the rain lure these creatures farther north.

But climate change or not, the gardens at the little house in the big woods have that ragged look they always get at the end of summer. Still, there are interesting things to photograph.

The ragged bee balm nonetheless keeps attracting the bees

A sign of things to come, despite the heat

Will tomorrow be another topsy-turvy day? That all depends on the heat.

People

The Woodman Cometh

August 17, 2015 Laurie Graves 4 Comments

On Friday, we had six cords of wood delivered to the little house in the big woods. We have a wood furnace in our basement—or down cellar, as we Mainers say—and this is our primary source of heat in the winter. (We also have electric and propane, so we are covered.)

We like to refer to the wood as “nature’s gym,” as Clif and I must stack the six cords before the snow comes. All right. In fact it is Clif who mostly stacks it. But I will help, too.

Nature's gym, waiting for us — Nature’s gym, waiting for us

And elderly man drove the truck with the wood. Just how elderly he was I didn’t know until I started talking to him about hauling wood.

“I’ve been working in the woods since I was eleven,” he said. “Back then we used horses to get the wood out.”

“Horses?” I asked.

The man nodded. “I’m eighty years old. That’s how we did it back then.”

“You’re eighty? No way, ” I replied, and I was being completely truthful. The man looked to be in his late sixties or early seventies. It seems that nature’s gym has worked for him.

The man smiled. “I am eighty.”

“When are you planning on retiring?” I asked. Clf will be retiring the end of September, and it was on my mind.

He answered, “To me retiring means sitting around waiting to die. I’m not going to retire.”

“Well,” I said, “if I’m lucky enough to live to eighty, I hope I look as good as you do.”

“I have had a few things tinkered with—bypass, stent, and knees.”

Still, here he was, delivering our wood and not planning on retiring. Our talk then turned to where to put six cords in the relatively narrow space between our driveway and the woods. We certainly didn’t want it on the other side of the driveway, on the flower beds.

“If some of the wood goes in the driveway, then that’s all right,” I said.

“I’ll see what I can do,” the man replied.

And he did very well indeed. He delivered three loads—two cords each—and most of it was piled off the driveway. On the last delivery, I looked out the window and saw him scrambling over the wood he had previously delivered. He was trying to figure out how to dump the last load without getting too much in the driveway.

I hurried outside. “It’s all right. It’s all right. Don’t worry about the driveway.”

He smiled sheepishly. “Not quite as agile as I used to be.”

Just as he finished with the wood—some had to go in the driveway, but we still have room for the car—I took the first batch of gingersnaps out of the oven. I had time to put a couple on a paper plate and bring them out to him before he left. After all that work, it seemed to me that an eighty-year-old man deserved a couple of cookies.

“You’re leading me astray,” he said, but without a moment’s hesitation, he took the cookies.

After the man left, I thought about what he had said about retiring. For someone whose life has revolved around physical activity—he’s worked in the woods for a very long time—I can see how retirement would be a torment rather than a blessing. I hope when it is his time to go, that he does so quickly, maybe by the woodpile as he’s gathering wood. (My friend Tom Sturtevant died that way.)

It would be a fitting end for an active man.

Books, Nature, People

It Hardly Needs to Be Said

August 14, 2015 Laurie Graves 11 Comments

First and foremost, a very happy fifth wedding anniversary to my daughter Shannon and to my son-in-law Mike. It hardly needs to be said that they are my favorite couple, but sometimes it is good to state what is so obvious. They will be coming over on Sunday for a special meal, and we are even going to grill steak for them, a rare treat as we seldom eat beef. We’ll also have grilled bread, Farmer Kev’s red potatoes, Stevenson’s corn on the cob, and cake, of course. An August meal. And such a lovely month in which to be married.

****************************************************************************

I am reading Glady’s Taber’s Stillmeadow Seasons, published in 1950. For years, Taber lived in Stillmeadow, a 1690 farmhouse in Connecticut. Gladys Taber wrote many nonfiction books that followed the seasons at Stillmeadow, and her writing revolved around nature, home, food, dogs, and family. Sometimes she would add a dash of social commentary, mostly progressive: “There are many things we cannot do—we cannot make all people rich, or intelligent, or noble—but all people should be fed.” Is it any wonder that she is one of my favorite writers?

Here is a link to the Gladys Taber entry in Wikipedia, and it provides a bibliography of her work.

In the summer, I usually read on the patio when I have my afternoon tea, and that is where, appropriately enough, I am reading Stillmeadow Seasons. As always, my reading is interrupted by all that is going on. I watch mourning doves patrol the lawn until Liam chases them, and they fly away. I watch the trees, in summer deep green, move as the wind blows. Above them, is a bit of bright blue sky.

A bit of bright blue sky above the patio

The grasshoppers seem to know it’s August and have begun their buzzing song. I have come to associate this sound with August, and I look forward to hearing it every year. At night, the crickets, with their high, sweet song, take over. I have heard some acorns drop—not many—just enough to remind me that fall is around the corner.

Along with the falling acorns, there are other reminders that fall is coming—the gardens are starting to look a little ragged, but along the edge of the woods, the jewelweed twinkles like tiny lanterns. Jewellweed can be fairly invasive, and I have to pull it back to give the other woodland plants some space. But what a welcome glow it is in August.

Then there was this: The other day, in Rite Aid, I was looking for Hershey bars to tuck away for s’mores for when Dee comes to visit in a couple of weeks. A woman, who was also eyeing the candy, said to me, “They’ve got Thanksgiving decorations out.”

“Get out of here,” I replied.

“Look up,” she said.

Sure enough, along the top shelf above the candy, was a row of ceramic pumpkins, scarecrows, and other fall decorations.

“I don’t know about you,” I said. “But I’m not thinking about Thanksgiving yet. No way.”

She laughed. “Me, neither.”

No, no, and no. We still have half a month of beautiful August to enjoy, and after that, September, which in recent years is nearly as nice as August.

Autumn and Thanksgiving will come soon enough. No need to rush them.

Movies, Recipes

Variation on a Theme: Zucchini, Garlic, and Basil Quiche with a Dash of The Big Chill

August 13, 2015 Laurie Graves 7 Comments

Once a month, Clif and I host a movie night at our house. We are movie buffs, and we have three friends who are just as keen on movies as we are. It’s a great inexpensive way to get together to watch and discuss a film, and we all take turns picking out the movies.

Last Saturday was movie night, and we had a summer potluck dinner to go with it. Alice brought a package of homemade sourdough, which Clif grilled, and she also brought carrot cake. Diane brought a salad, and except for the eggs, everything came from her garden. As for me, I made a quiche with Farmer Kev’s zucchini and garlic. The basil came from my own little garden.

I got the idea for this quiche after I made Mediterranean eggs—scrambled eggs with zucchini, basil, and garlic topped with cheddar cheese. I wondered, would this taste good as a quiche with a cracker crust, similar to the one I made with summer greens? Why, yes it would. In fact, this has become my favorite quiche, and I plan to make it regularly while I have plenty of fresh basil. As far as I’m concerned, basil, garlic, and olive oil are the holy trinity of the food world, and when you add eggs, cheese, and zucchini, well, you have something that’s pretty darned good, to borrow from Clif. And it reheats beautifully. What more can you ask for?

Onion lovers might want to add or substitute onion. However, as indicated above, garlic and basil really are a team that’s hard to beat. But as you like it.

For the movie, we watched The Big Chill, a 1983 movie with an incredible cast that includes Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, and Jeff Goldblum. In brief, seven college friends reunite after the suicide of a mutual friend. The college friends are now in their thirties, and their youthful idealism has fizzed away. Not surprisingly, most of the characters are disappointed with the directions their lives have taken—one has become a star in a cheesy detective series; another a journalist for People Magazine; and another longs for a baby. I would have to say this is a movie about regrets, large and small, and after thirty years The Big Chill stills feels fresh and relevant.

Many adults, I suspect, no longer burn with youthful idealism, and many more are perhaps not where they thought they would be twenty (or more) years down the line. Most people deal with the loss as best they can, and some even go on to lead very creative lives, just not in the way they had planned. Others are swamped by regret and the disappointment it brings.

Friends, a good movie, and good food all add up to quite a Saturday night with not a single regret.

Zucchini, Garlic, and Basil Quiche

Ingredients
For the cracker-crumb crust

1 1/2 cups of cracker crumbs
1/3 cup of melted butter

For the quiche

1 tablespoon of olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt
Pepper, to taste
1 cup shredded zucchini, squeezed dry between paper towels
2 tablespoons of chopped basil
4 eggs
1/2 cup of heavy cream
1/2 cup of shredded cheddar cheese

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Combine crumbs with melted butter, press into a 9-inch pie pan, and bake for 10 minutes. Remove from oven and set aside.
Heat the tablespoon of oil in a skillet. Add the zucchini, garlic, salt, and pepper. Sauté lightly, for a couple of minutes, until the zucchini is just barely soft. Remove from heat.
Beat together the eggs and the cream.
In the cracker-crumb shell, spread the zucchini mixture, sprinkle the cheese, and then the basil. Pour the egg mixture on top.
Bake for about 45 minutes or until the quiche is golden brown.
Let set for five minutes before cutting.
Serves 4 or 5 people, depending upon appetite and what else is served with the quiche.

Notes From the Hinterland