Great Aunt Pearl's 24-Hour Salad

This "salad" of marshmallows, whipped cream and fruit (recipe below) inspired a lot of good Christmas party conversation. I brought it to two different parties, with full disclosure that it was my great aunt's recipe from the 1960s. (I think the 1960s part went without saying. It did look a little out of place). The photo to the left is from a Betty Crocker cookbook for a similar 24-hour salad, and looks pretty much like what I made.

Making the salad was a little more challenging than I expected. I did all my shopping for this at Whole Foods, which meant that I had to buy the organic, preservative-free but extremely sweet and oddly stiff eco-marshmallows that Whole Foods sells. Once I got home and gave a few of them to my daughter and her visiting friend, I dug down further in the bag and realized they were moldy. Yuck! I guess preservatives do serve a purpose. I would rather have ancient, rock-hard mini marshmallows than mildewy ones. This inevitably led to a confession to the playdate's mother that I had fed her daughter moldy marshmallows. Happily, she took in it in stride, and both little girls' immune systems (and mine) kicked in to save us from a night of puking. Jeff brought home a bag of traditional, preservative-enhanced marshmallows to fill the void.

Also, there aren't any white cherries to be had in December (and I'm not sure if I've seen them any other time of the year either), so I went with canned pie cherries.

Next came the strangest part of the recipe - the cooking of the egg-and-lemon substance that binds the salad together. I'm not used to making lemon curd (which is essentially what this is), and I wasn't sure what it was supposed to look like when it was fully cooked, so I cooked the hell out of it. I didn't want to give anyone salmonella. Maybe because of this - and maybe not - I thought the salad ended up with a strong eggy taste that I found kind of disgusting. I'm not used to the combination of fruit and eggs. (Is anyone?)

I wasn't sure if the eggy taste was "right" or not, but my first taste tester (our babysitter) said that it tasted exactly like the salad her grandmother used to make. And when I brought it to the first party, people really seemed to like it - to my surprise. The great thing about it was that it led to a lot of good conversations about recipes of the sixties, relatives, family recipe collections, etc. The reaction at the second party was just as good. People liked the crunch of the slivered almonds and the fact that this recipe really isn't too sweet, despite the marshmallows. Interestingly, our French acquaintance Sebastien ended up being its biggest fan; he ate four servings. French food isn't big on marshmallows, so maybe it was the novelty.

So the salad was a success, even though I didn't like it much myself, due to the eggs. If I make it again, which I might, I'll find a way to bind it together without them. I'll also add more almonds and maybe some apple to give it more crunch.

I did a search for 24-hour salad and found that this recipe is still alive and well on the internet. Apparently, it was very popular at one time; and most of the recipes do contain eggs. Another blogger who is exploring mid-century recipes wrote it about a slightly different version here. Most of the versions I found (like this one, which hilariously labels it as Italian) call for vinegar and egg yolks instead of entire eggs. Gotta love the (computer-generated?) text that goes along with this:

Its surprising to know that you have not tried my 24 Hour Fruit Salad recipe yet. This recipe is ideal for people on a Low Fat regimen. This compelling 24 Hour Fruit Salad is the Side Dish of choice for a winning meal... The Italian 24 Hour Fruit Salad is a delight to serve and enjoy. I will look forward to your feedback.

Right, because anything made with whipping cream, marshmallows and butter has got to be low fat, right?

[Recipe to follow; I have mislaid my cookbook!]

Great Aunt Lee's BBQ Ribs

Great Aunt Lee's BBQ ribs recipe came as a relief after the chicken 'n' chips fiasco. It was really good, and I can definitely imagine making it again. I'm not posting the recipe at the moment because I don't have it with me right now, but it involved vinegar, ketchup, "meat seasoning sauce" (I used BBQ sauce), molasses, and onion soup mix. It inspired me to make something I rarely make - not particularly healthy (did they even have healthy food in the sixties?) but definitely tasty. If I made it again I would add some liquid smoke. 8 out of 10.

Goodbye, annoying old chicken coop

Today I finally managed to dispose of my old chicken coop. A volunteer from the Portland Backyard Chicken group picked it up with her pickup and drove it down to a family in Salem who needs a chicken coop. I'm glad to be rid of it. After two raccoon attacks, it just had bad mojo. Plus, it was a lousy design. I hope the new owners manage to reinforce it (I did warn them) and tweak the design so that it works for them. Meanwhile, our occasional landscaper Jose is coming tomorrow to help dig out the ditch around the new coop so I can install the hardware cloth and bury it a foot deep. I also bought a beautiful double-glazed, six-paned window today at the Rebuilding Center that I am going to incorporate into the henhouse design.

Great Aunt Lee's Chicken and Chip Casserole: Never Again.

This isn't the kind of recipe I usually gravitate toward, but I was looking for something easy to make for one of Melina's swim class nights (for some reason they only offer her class at 6:15 p.m.) and this sounded tasty and filling, if not exactly healthy. I think this is the first time I've ever actually made anything with cream of (anything) soup. If I keep up with my goal of cooking everything in this cookbook, it certainly won't be the last.

Great Aunt Lee's Chicken and Chip Casserole

• 2 cups cooked chicken (I used Trader Joe's precooked chicken)
• 1 cup diced celery
  
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
  
• 2 Tbsp minced onion
  
• 1/2 cup pimento-stuffed olives
  
• 3 hard cooked eggs, chopped
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
  
• 1/4 cup bottled French dressing (I used Thousand Island)
  
• 1 tsp lemon juice
  
• 1/2 tsp salt
  
• 1/4 tsp pepper
  
• 1 can condensed cream of chicken soup
  
• 2 cups crushed potato chips
  

Combine and bake for 20 minutes at 450.

Results

This was just... weird. With all due respect to Aunt Lee (who was really just doing her best with the recipes that that the 1960s provided, and who actually pushed the family's envelope a lot when it came to food), it is hard for me to imagine that this dish was ever considered appetizing. I was expecting all of the ingredients to come together to form a "more than the sum of its parts" whole, bound together the culinary glue of cream of chicken soup, mayonnaise and French dressing; but instead, it ended up being a random crunchy boiled stirfry with only a grayish brown gravy holding it in common. And let me say, hard boiled eggs and olives are just strange together. Honestly, it didn't taste that bad, and I had a few helpings, but after a few minute of looking at all the little chunks in the gray gravy, I just couldn't take it any more. The only good things about it were that a) it was pleasantly crunchy; b) it didn't taste too bad; c) it had a nice combination of vegetables and protein; and d) it gave us all a good laugh, and Jeff played a joke on Melina using it as a prop. Nuff said.

Score: For a blind person, 6; for a seeing person, 3.

Great Aunt Billie's Artichoke Bake - A Good Vegetarian, Gluten-Free Potluck Recipe

For my first recipe, I thought I'd start with something that was both easy to make and easy to eat - Aunt Billie's Artichoke Bake. I made this for my book club, which includes one vegetarian and one gluten avoider. (Billie was always the life of any party, and I know she would have loved our book club). We just read The Help, so we had a southern-themed potluck. Since California is south of Oregon, I figured this recipe qualified:

Great Aunt Billie's Artichoke Bake

4 jars marinated artichoke hearts (drain, save the juice from 2 jars) Simmer in juice for 5 minutes:

• 1 large onion
• 2 cloves of garlic

Beat 8 eggs lightly. Add:

• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1/4 tsp oregano
• 1/4 tsp hot pepper sauce
• 4 tbsp parsley

Chop up artichoke hearts. Add 4 cups sharp cheddar cheese, shredded. Fold everything into eggs. Pour in greased pan (7x11) and bake at 35o for 30 minutes until solid. Cut into squares. Note: "Great for parties."

I made this pretty much as written, although my dear husband bought the wrong kind of artichoke hearts (non-marinated ones in a can). I figure that Aunt Billie probably had to deal with similar upsets. I halved the recipe (making enough for seven adults) and added a bit more oregano and hot sauce. It felt wrong to simmer the onion and garlic in the artichoke juice instead of in olive oil, but I did it anyway.

The recipe resulted in a very tasty crustless quiche which disappeared pretty quickly. If I were going to make this again, I would sautee the onion and garlic in olive oil, add some canned Ortega-type green chilis, use the right kind of artichokes, and drain the liquid off before baking (30 minutes wasn't quite long enough to evaporate it all.) All in all, I would give this an 8 out of 10: easy and tasty. What's not to like?

Exploring the foods of my recent ancestors

For this Thanksgiving, my talented and thoughtful mother put together a collection of family recipes from her mother and her mother's three sisters. It's an amazing book with photos, stories, reminiscences, and scanned recipe cards - most definitely a keepsake. It contains 13 breads, 17 salads, 38 main dishes, 17 cakes, 11 cookies, 9 pies, 12 other sweets, and 22 other miscellaneous delights. Most are from the 1960s and 1970s, and most serve a crowd. I believe my mom is putting together a Facebook page for the book, and if she does, I will post it here.

I thought it would be an interesting idea to commit myself to make every recipe in the book. (I know I recently tried unsuccessfully to do that with an issue of Gourmet, but I think this is more likely to happen). Not only will this honor my recent ancestors Cecile, Billie, Pearl and Lee by replicating their culinary efforts, but it will also be an interesting look into the changing nature of food - both during their lives and in the years since. In other words, a lot of the recipes involve jello, and a lot involve marshmallows, and some involve jello and shrimp both at the same time. Being a Portlander in 2010, surrounded by other Portlanders with our collective concerns about gluten, levels of organicity, free-range everything, chemicals and food allergies, it is going to be a real challenge not only to make this stuff, but to get people to eat it. It will be an adventure in culinary anthropology as well as geneology, and I expect most of it will be delicious, too.

I am going to try stay true to the recipes, although I can make changes that will make it more likely for the recipe to actually get eaten. For example, I can divide a recipe in two, I can use organic ingredients, I can increase the amount of spices added (but not the type), and I can reduce the sugar in some recipes if I think it will entice people to eat them. (I'm thinking of the 3-bean salad with 3/4 cup sugar. That's just not going to happen.)

Chicken catch-up

Well, I haven't posted on here since September, which is pretty bad. Unfortunately, Raven & Sabrina are no more, thanks to a raccoon attack in September. Dolley is living at my coworker's house until I can build a nice new raccoon-proof coop. I am building the coop now, and I expect to have it done by spring. I'll try to post a few photos here as the coop comes along.

This is Sabrina. Or maybe Sabrino. For the last three days I have been awakened by the sound of a rooster - first, an early attempt at crowing, and as the days have gone on, more and more like the classic "cock-a-doodle-do." At least he (?) only crows once or twice (usually at 7 a.m.). I'm still hoping Sabrina might turn out to be a confused hen, but it's looking less and less likely every day.

A raccoon attack

Last week was really hard on our chickens. On Friday night at about 3:00 a.m., I was awakened by the most horrible bloodcurdling noise from the back yard. I feared the worst, so I ran around searching for my bathrobe and a flashlight, but I couldn't find them so I ended up running out in the rain in my PJs, with no glasses and just a wind-up flashlight.

I heard thumping in the coop, and when I threw upon the lid a raccoon rushed out, ran into the bushes, and started hissing at me. I hissed back. I was under the influence of massive amounts of adrenaline, and Jeff says I was screeching like a lion was eating my innards. It's amazing all of the neighbors' lights didn't go on. (I talked to one neighbor later who didn't hear a thing). To add the chaos, the cat was sitting outside growling and grumbling at the raccoon, and I was afraid they were going to fight.

When I opened the coop, Martha was sitting on her perch, unscathed. I grabbed her and ran inside and put her in a box, yelling for Jeff; Jeff came down and I told him I was sure Dolley was dead and to look for her. Jeff shooed the raccoon off and said he saw Dolley lying in the run. I told him (rather hysterical at this point) that he was going to have to kill her if she wasn't already dead. Jeff picked Dolley up and brought her in, and she was so ruffled and bloody that we couldn't even find her head - I thought she might have literally lost her head, like Mike the Headless Chicken. After a few moments her head became visible. She had been wounded terribly on the back of the neck, though we couldn't see it then. We put her in a box in the basement. Later I tried pouring hydrogen peroxide on her wounds, but it was too traumatic for both of us so I stopped.

The next morning I tried to find a vet that would take her and fortunately found a great emergency veterinary clinic in Tualatin that took her right away. They stitched her up (apparently they get a lot of chickens and pet turkeys). It cost $175, which I thought was reasonable given that she is a real pet now.

So now she is living in a big dog crate in the play room, and I have to feed her three or four times a day and give her antibiotics twice a day. She is improving; she has taken some small supervised outings into the yard, where she has pecked at bugs and flowers, but she tires easily. I am hoping that soon she will be able to feed herself, because I don't really have the time and patience to sit for hours trying to feed a chicken (although I have anyway. I signed up for it).

The whole thing leaves me with many conflicting feelings. It's a lot of work to put into a chicken; if it happens again I don't know if I would go to so much trouble, although I don't know if I could just let nature take its course. Sometimes I think it might be better just to give the girls numbers and take a more farmerly attitude. On the other hand, it is rewarding to see such a maimed animal recover, and it makes me respect chickens more. They are surprisingly resilient. But after putting so much effort into rehabilitating Dolley, I don't think I can eat chicken for a long while. It just doesn't make sense to me now - plus it kind of disgusts me. More tofu coming our way!

A chicken lost

A week or so ago, we lost our chicken Abigail to an unknown illness. She had been steadily getting more confused - she couldn't find her way out of the coop - and when I finally checked her out she had lost a lot of weight. She had an appetite, and her comb was red (usually a sign of health), but she had diarrhea. I gave her vitamins and electrolytes in her water, hoping that might help, but when we came back from riding Portland Sunday Parkways she had died. I was a bit sad, but Abigail had never really bonded with me and she was somewhat of a bully to her peers, so I wasn't heartbroken. Melina was completely unfazed and very excited about the possibility of getting chicks. Jeff buried Abigail under the Buddha statue in our yard, where she rests to this day. (By the way, I had the other two hens tested for worms just in case that's what felled Abigail, but they both got clean bills of health).

First lost tooth

Melina lost her first tooth just a few days after her fifth birthday. It came out when she was roughhousing with her dad, and the Tooth Fairy give her $5 for it. When she saw the $5 bill she said, slightly disappointed, "I already have one of these." She hasn't quite gotten the grasp of money yet.

Princess out, pirate in

Melina informed me the other day that she is done with princesses, and now wants to be a pirate. She also told me that a certain kid at preschool wanted to play princess and knight with her, but that she would only play that with Quin. She and Quin have a very special relationship.

Melina turns five

On May 1 we celebrated Melina's fifth birthday - a little late - with a potluck at the park. It was her second birthday party (the official one took place at a restaurant, with her parents and grandparents, on the actual Day Of). Unfortunately, the weather was cold and windy - not that the kids really minded. The highlight was the breaking of the giant kitty pinata, which turned out to be incredibly resilient and took at least three rounds of whacking by every kid present. The second highlight was the cake, a sheet cake from Fred Meyer, and which turned out to be surprisingly good.

Melina had been waiting to turn five for about half a year (in March she proudly told people she was four-and-eleven-twelfths, and then four-and-ninety-nine-one-hundredths). There was a lot of competition among her friends over who would turn five first. Several of her friends went before her, which was always a source of angst.

Now that she is five, she suddenly looks older and taller. She is almost a young lady now. That's about the only change so far. However, last Saturday she rode with us on the Portland Sunday Parkways loop, and actually rode six miles on her bike with training wheels. (Jeff pushed her up some hills). No way she could have done that when she was four!

A couple of milestones

Melina has passed a couple of important milestones lately: she doesn't need pullups anymore, and she can buckle herself into her own car seat! Yay! She also rode her bike to school for the first time the other day (I went with her) and rode her bike around the block alone with her friends for the first time. And her two bottom front teeth are loose. Time keeps marching on!

A correction on lead

I just noticed that in my last discussion of lead in eggs I failed to mention that my calculations were off by a factor of 10 - as the chemist wrote, "Your egg results are 0.2 to 0.4 ppm (ug/g) not 2-4 ppm! Therefore 0.4 ug/g from a 18 g egg would be 0.4ug/g * 18g (g canceled out) equal to 5.8ug (micrograms) per egg yolk." For an egg with 0.2/ug/g that would be 2.9 ug/yolk, I think. (Anyone with more knowledge of microchemistry than me is welcome to check my figures!). According to the FDA, the average adult takes in 2.5 ug of lead per day from dietary sources (1994-1996), compared to 38 ug per day, on average, between 1982 and 1984 and presumably before (!). (That's because lead was removed from cans). In Australia, the PTTIL (provisional tolerable total intake level) - the amount safely consumed per day - is less than 75 ug/day. I believe the US PTTIL is similar. (This level was determined in order to figure out how many oysters people could safely eat a day).

So I guess what this all means - to me, anyway - is that it's OK if we eat an egg from our chickens once in a while. We shouldn't eat more than seven a day. The fact that my blood test for lead came back "zero" after many months of eating our eggs confirms that. For kids it's still a different matter, though - kids don't get rid of lead in their bodies as well as adults and their tolerance is much, much lower.

Another egg lead test

I had our eggs tested for lead again, and they came up pretty much the same as last year - .2 and .3 ppm (last year the results were .2, .3, and .4 ppm). The chemist washed one of the eggs before testing it and ended up with the lower result. She suggested that we wash the eggs in the future before eating them. That lower result could also be because the egg came from a different chicken, but I often wash our eggs anyway because they tend to get dirty. (By the way, if a backyard egg is dirty you should it in warm water - cold water pulls bacteria into the shell. No need to wash a clean backyard egg. Wash eggs just before using, because eggs have a natural coating that keeps them fresh. You don't need to wash store-bought eggs at all - they have already been washed.)

So, disappointingly, fencing off the neighbor's garage didn't help. The lead must be in the soil of our backyard, which reinforces the need for Melina to wash her hands after playing in the dirt. Which she doesn't do much anyway, preferring to climb trees.

These results aren't terribly bad from an adult perspective (we could eat something like 7 eggs a day without reaching the maximum level recommended by the FDA) although of course lead isn't good in any amount. The benefit of eating backyard eggs (higher Omega-3s, etc.) might arguably outweigh those risks. But it looks like it's still store-bought eggs for Melina.

The tooth fairy already?

Melina just informed me that one of her teeth is loose. She says "I think that means I'm getting older." I think it does. It also means I have to get over the willies I get whenever I think of loose teeth. Guess I'm going to be seeing a lot of them (twenty, to be exact) over the next few years.

A visit to the farm

Today we went down to Woodburn with our friends Rafaela, Maya and baby Tobias to visit the farm where our beef came from last year. The farmer, Karen, grew up on a farm in Australia. She buys grass-fed cows from local farmers and then raises them for a while on her farm before selling the beef to people like us. We arrived at her farm on a rainy day and slogged across the pasture to the cow barn, admiring the chickens on the way. (Black sex-link hens are really striking... maybe I'll have to get one of those next). It was very muddy - I was glad I had tall rubber boots on. Melina was definitely not into the mud so I ended up carrying her over the worst parts. We met the two cows, Opal - and I can't remember the other one's name. Opal is very affectionate. (And she is not destined for anyone's freezer... at least not in the near future). She's pregnant (the father is a German bull) and due next month. We rubbed Opal's back for a while, checked out the milking barn and the hay bales, visited a calf named Lollipop and went back to the house to drink some Australian tea. All in all a fun adventure, although Melina hasn't taken to the farming life quite like I was hoping she would. Maybe when I start my goat farm...

Melina and Josie

Melina and her friend Josie love digging around in the costume trunk. They came up with these costumes completely by themselves.

About the Twitter feed

I just added the Twitter feed to my blog. I do a fair amount of Twittering for work, but I also have my own personal Twitter account. Often I accidentally post work Tweets on my personal account (it's too easy to do using the program I use) but I try to use my personal account mainly for articles that interest me - usually about backyard chickens, climate change, gardening, honeybees, and getting kids outdoors.

Free Range Kids

I just finished reading the book Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy. This is the mom who let her 9-year-old ride the subway alone from Bloomingdales home, and was subsquently skewered by the press for being "America's Worst Mom." Needless to say I loved the book. I remember spending hours and hours playing in the woods when I was a kid - there was an empty lot across the street that connected to some woods which connected to a cemetary (even cooler), and we used to climb around back there for hours with no parents hovering over us. I don't remember exactly how old I was at that point, but probably about seven. It bothers me that there's no equivalent place for Melina to play here - no wild places within walking distance.

But even if there were local wild places, times have changed. Pedophiles are hovering behind every other tree, right? Well, actually, they're not. Skenazy uses well-researched data to show that things are about as safe now for kids as they were when I was a kid roaming in the woods. (And guess what? There *were* pedophiles back then, but we didn't hear about them 24 hours a day on Fox news, and we didn't get alarmist emails from our aunts warning us to never park next to white vans...)

One statistic presented by Skenazy stood out for me: According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (the very same ones who put those scary pictures on milk cartons), the chances of any one American child being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are .00007 percent. If you *wanted* your child to be kidnapped, you would have to keep them outside unattended for - get this - about 750,000 years. A child is 40 times more likely to be in a fatal auto accident (not that that is particularly comforting, but how much do we worry about driving the car?).

And another interesting fact: people in other countries - even countries that are less safe - are not nearly as paranoid as we are. Kids in most countries walk to school - even without parents along! How's that for revolutionary? Playgrounds are unsupervised! And in Denmark, people routinely leave their kids in strollers outside restaurants while they eat. A Danish woman tried that in New York and almost got arrested.

Skenazy also presents well-reasoned arguments for letting your kids encounter germs, eat raw cookie dough, trick-or-treat on Halloween, play in the woods, and do other normal childhood activities that our culture regards with excessive paranoia.

All in all, this book was a huge breath of fresh air for me (the other women in my book club loved it as well). The only thing I didn't like about the book was that sometimes Skanazy seemed to pick worst-case examples as counterpoints to her arguments - examples that are too easy to dismiss if you don't know people who match them. I got the feeling that most of her examples came from wealthy Connecticut suburbs - definitely not Portland, where people tend to be slightly more laid back. I don't know anybody who won't let their kid walk three houses down to a neighbor's. However, I still got a lot out of this book. (And yes, I can hear my mom worrying that I'm going to let Melina walk across Portland alone or go on a three-day solo vision quest in the wilderness. Don't worry, mom. I know there are still bad people out there. And Melina is only four... the vision quest can wait until at least 12.)

To learn more about Free Range Kids and the movement it has inspired, check out their website.

But first, an update

Melina is all of four-and-three-quarters now. She seems to have grown beyond her scared-of-everything phase, and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what phase she's in now. She pretty much wants to be playing with her friends *all the time,* which can be exhausting. When she has friends over I tend to do a lot of refereeing, although I generally try to keep out of the minor squabbles. She still wants to be with her friend Quin all the time, although Quin seems to be entering a sort of "girl germs" phase and would rather play with boys. That is, unless Melina wants to stand in as Princess Leia - that's always acceptable. Melina also likes to play with her eternal friend and sparring partner Amanda, as well as several cute little girls from preschool, and our neighbors across the street.

When Melina's not playing with friends we are frequently doing out door activities. It's been an incredibly warm winter, but we've managed to go skiing several times (often with other families with kids). Last weekend we went with 20 other friends to a "cabin" in Sunriver (a very large, sprawling cabin), with very high hopes of skiing every day, but unfortunately I was attacked by some sort of intestinal bug and spent most of the weekend a) lying on the couch reading b) lying on the couch watching the Olympics c) lying on the bed sleeping and d) lying on the bed bemoaning my fate. Jeff got a nice day of skiing in, and Melina got a trip to the High Desert Museum with some friends, but neither Melina or I saw any white stuff to speak of.

Melina is getting to be a pretty good skiier, though. Like everything else, it all depends on her mood. When she's in a good mood she's a great skiier. She falls, and she doesn't complain; she tackles the "backcountry" with gusto (she likes to ski through the trees instead of on the groomed trail); and she can go down minor hills without mishap. When she's in a bad mood, she spends most of the time in the sled complaining bitterly about the cold. That's why we've been going skiing with other families lately - it seems to improve the mood. (Are all four-year-olds this moody and fragile?)

In February we went to a different rental cabin with a different group of friends. It was beautiful, rustic, and quite a bit more relaxing than the Sunriver trip would prove to be. We had about 4 inches of new snow while we were there (the first photo is of Jeff and Melina standing in front of our car when we got back to the sno-park). Melina had a lot of fun playing in the snow with the other kids.

I usually take advantage of the long car trips to Mt. Hood to knit. I've knit several hats lately and I knit the one in the second photo for Melina. I also knit a ridiculously complicated scarf for a friend... maybe I'll post a photo before I give it away.

On the chicken front, today I finished siding the chicken coop with cedar shingles. It looks pretty random - shingling in a neat yet random way is a lot harder than it looks - but it's a vast improvement over the last look, which was a combination of tarpaper and red-painted plywood. I don't think the chickens appreciate it much (we haven't been getting many eggs lately) but the rest of us do.

Another month, another pledge to do better

So my friend Becky informed me that she missed my blog posts, which finally pushed me far enough over the cliff of procrastination to actually post something here. I won't go into all of the details about why I haven't posted; nothing major, just distracted by life in general. I realized that I do have some pretty strong feelings about parenting stuff lately so maybe I will try to express some real opinions here instead of just reporting on what's happening in our lives.