Thoughts

My opinions, my thoughts

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Oh Deer!

It happens every year.  When you least expect it, a deer helps itself to a big serving of our garden.  Most of the time, they do it right before you planned to do some “anti-deer” work to prevent the damage.  When I decided a few Sundays ago that it was going to be the day to spray deer repellant on the plants in our front yard, it shouldn’t have surprised me that the night before, our local deer made a date to eat a few things in the area to be sprayed.  Just to remind me that they exist, just to remind me that they are smart.  Just to remind me that they have planted a bug inside our house…..it was if they were in the room when I announced my deer repellent plans a few weeks back.

The good news is that the deer in our area only have a couple of small gardens that they can get to on our property.  These gardens are in the front of the house.  The majority of our gardens are in the back of the house where we had a six-foot metal deer fence installed to keep them out.  The black metal fence snakes through the woods and seems invisible when all of the plants and trees are fully fleshed out during Spring, Summer and most of the Fall.  People tell us that a deer could jump our six-foot fence, but please don’t tell them that because they have never attempted it.  The fence allows us to plant a large amount of plants outside and not have to worry about damage from grazing deer.  The battle against the deer is only in the front of the property.  The front yard is the battle field.

Here’s the only rub when deer graze in the front yard.  Everything planted in the front yard was labeled “deer resistant” at the point of purchase.  The front gardens contain such deer downers as peony, bleeding hearts, boxwood, monarda and echinacea.  Plants that just don’t taste good to a deer…or so I thought.  I quickly realized that there aren’t any plants that are truly deer resistant.  These plants (like the Monarda that got eaten in the above pictures) are really just ones that deer don’t care for as part of a regular well-balanced deer meal, but if they are hungry enough, they will eat them.  So we do our best to keep our front gardens protected.  We continue to spray deer repellent a few times a month (it really works well) and, when the deer take time to have dinner in our garden, we do our best to trim the damage and hope that what they ate left a bad taste in their mouths.  A bad enough taste to stay away…..but it never is.

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A Happy Father’s Day Wish To All The Dads Out There

All of us here at Acorns On Glen want all the Fathers out there to have the absolute best day possible.  This is the first Father’s Day since my Dad passed away and so now, more than ever, I want everyone to realize the importance of calling up your Father and saying “I love you”.  Such simple words to mutter, but so important for your Father to hear.  So here’s to the all the Dads out there.  May each of you understand how important you are in your children’s life and how much you are loved.  Tell us, how are YOU going to celebrate?

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Friday Dance Party – Alex Clare’s Too Close

It’s time for another edition of Friday Dance Party on Acorns On Glen.  It’s the time where we give thanks for making it through another week and for being alive and present here on Earth.  How do we celebrate another week of living?  We dance.  So, are you alive this Friday?  Are you and your family safe and sound?  Take a few seconds now to be in the moment and realize what a great life you truly have.  Did you give thanks for that?

Good, now let’s dance.

It’s graduation time everywhere I turn here in Connecticut.  When I was little, families only celebrated when you graduated from high school.  Today, we are going to parties to celebrate graduations from elementary school, junior high school and high school.  I guess the more parties the better, right?  While I like to go to a graduation party, I have always tried my hardest to get out of times where I was invited to go to the actual graduation ceremony.  I find them extremely boring…..really, so boring they are painful.  The truth be told, I find them so boring that I didn’t even attend my own college graduation.  I had the college send me my diploma and instead of going to my own ceremony, I enjoyed a long vacation in New York.  I think I don’t like the ceremony because of the speakers that are there to encourage the youth.  I have always cringed at the speakers that are chosen for graduation ceremonies.  What really can these speakers say to the young ones that is not cliché and something we’ve heard a thousand times.  Unless you can nab Obama or Oprah to speak at your graduation, you should just skip it in my opinion.

I say all this about graduation speakers and their weak speeches and then I kind of do the same thing this week.  Someone at work asked me what advice I would give to a young employee and I said without hesitation one of the oldest pieces of graduation advice ever given:  “never give up”.  Even though it’s true, it is a lame piece of advice.  I’ve been in the working world over 25 years and this is the best I can do?  I guess I understand why I’ve never given a graduation speech.  So my piece of advice, in all its wisdom, is why this week we are listening to Alex Clare’s song ‘Too Close’.  The actual song and the album it was on bombed when it was released in 2011.  Fast forward to now and have the song used on an Internet Explorer commercial and you come back with an instant hit.  Just goes to show you to “never give up” and you can have a hit with whatever it is that you do in life.  I’m a prophet!  So enjoy the song and dance while listening to it.  You made it through another week…you deserve it.

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What’s Blooming – Our First Virtual Garden Tour of 2012

If you garden much, you become very familiar with transitions.  Moving from one phase to another is a pretty common occurrence when you are dealing with soil, seeds, plants, sun and rain.  My flower gardens are ending a big transition right now.  The fury of Spring blooming is coming to an end and we are now entering the Summer period when bloomers tend to act much more slowly, but the beauty seems to be worth the wait.  Take a little look at what’s happening in the gardens right now (you can click on any picture to start a slide show).

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You Reap What You Sow, So Here’s What I Sowed

First planted seed of 2012 in my garden – it’s a green bean seed.

Deciding what to plant in my two new raised garden beds should have been a lot easier than it actually was.  Given my space restrictions, it is important for me to answer a few questions on what I am going to grow and not grow each planting season.  First, I always ask:

What types of vegetables do I like to eat?

Now comes the second question:

Of these vegetables, which ones can I plant knowing they will give me a fair return?  I do not want to plant something that only produces two or three items in a season.  I want volume from the plants I grow in my garden.

Finally, I ask myself:

Is there anything exotic out there to grow that I would like to tackle this season?  This year the answer was artichokes.

A lone beet seed.

So here is what made it into my two new raised beds this year.  As was the case last year, the majority of these seeds were purchased from Johnny’s Selected Seeds and are organic and not genetically modified.  I also tried a new seed supplier this year, Fedco Seeds, and the seeds are also organic and not genetically modified.  Interestingly enough, both companies are in Waterville, Maine.  Here’s what made it:

  • Purple Top White Globe Turnips
  • Blue Lake Green Beans – Bush
  • Specialty Spring Broccoli Raab**
  • Mayfair Shell Peas – this is my first year planting shell peas.  I am going to have them grow up a piece of livestock paneling that I bought at a local farm implement store.
  • Three Root Grex Beet – multi-colored beets all in one seed packet.
  • Early Green Tendersweet Cabbage**
  • Imperial Star Globe Artichokes** – my experiment this year.  Already, the two artichoke plants seem to be the most hearty in the garden.
  • Italian Traviata Eggplant**
  • Olympus Green Peppers**
  • Celebrity Red Short Vine Tomato**
  • Green Zebra Tall Vine Tomato**
  • Mariana Tomato** – supposed to provide a superior tomato for sauce and salsa.

** = seeds were planted early Spring and grown into plants under my grow light.

I am glad to say that all of the seeds and plants are in the ground and just need to grow.  As well, I appreciated the fact that my two new beds are built so I can go on all sides of the two rectangles with ease.  My old garden didn’t allow for easy access to all sides of the beds.  Here’s hoping for a strong growing season this year!  How is your garden growing so far this season?

All lined up and ready to grow. Two more green bean seeds placed in my garden.

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A Garden With Sun…Such A Novel Idea

I’m very proud of my new piles of dirt.  Actually, this is one of two new raised bed garden plots that I’m using this season to grow vegetables.  I think it is hard to garden here in Connecticut.  Much harder than what I remember when I used to garden with my family in Iowa.  I have fought hard against all the various critter attacks on my garden, the soil filled with rocks of all sizes and shapes and the long periods of rain followed by long periods of heat.  What I wasn’t prepared for was when I discovered the raised beds I had constructed last year didn’t seem to get enough sun.  When everything just stopped growing when the trees took on all of their leaves, I knew I was in trouble.  I thought I should give up gardening.  However, I realized that even without much produce from my own garden, the whole process was a valued hobby and I enjoyed my time in the yard and in the garden.  It was time to build some more raised beds, but this time I needed to find a spot with sun.  A novel idea if I say so myself!  A garden?  With sun?  Who would have figured!

The two new raised beds are right in the back yard protected inside the 6 foot deer fence that surrounds the property.  The spot is not as optimal as the old garden site, but there is no doubt that it receives very long periods of direct sunlight.  The sun shines for hours and hours on the spots.  So it is time for the planting to begin.  Every year I’m surprised what happens along the gardening journey.  I’m sure there will be plenty of surprises this year as well…..realizing that the garden doesn’t get enough sun should not be one of them.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

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Friday Dance Party – Back Again

I just looked up the last time I posted something here on Acorns On Glen and I can’t believe that it has been close to three months ago.  A year ago, I was posting stories (sometimes almost daily) about my life here in Connecticut and now I am posting nothing.  From cooking and gardening stories to absolutely nothing.  I just haven’t felt like it.  I just haven’t had the energy.  You see, I lost my father on April 12.  You may remember that I briefly wrote about it during the holidays.  The days leading up to his leaving and all these days after have been some of the hardest of my 48 years.  I think I have learned a lot about myself during these days of despair.  I know that I have faith.  I have never really been a religious man.  Don’t get me wrong, I have always believed in a power bigger than me.  I think it’s God, but whatever you want to call it is fine by me.  But the belief that there is someone or something up there for me to talk to as well as someone or someplace up there for my father to go to has been very comforting to me over the last few months.

I have also discovered from the ‘most played’ feature on my iPad, that I have listened to the same group of songs over and over during the last few months.  Songs of inspiration, understanding, hope and faith.  The one I chose for today is the one that I listened to the most.  Sometimes it made me think about myself and sometimes it made me think of my father and his battle against cancer.  I’m just glad I found it.

I think my father left us in Spring so that there would be so much for us to do after he was gone.  We’d get on with our lives in a quick manner because there would be gardens to plant, yards to be mowed and flowers to watch bloom.  He wouldn’t want us to be sad for very long and he would want us to quickly get back to living our lives to the fullest without him, just like we did when he was here.  So guess what?  Like I’ve done for so many Fridays here on Acorns On Glen:

It is time for another edition of Friday Dance Party on Acorns On Glen.  It’s the time where we give thanks for making it through another week and for being alive and present here on Earth.  How do we celebrate another week of living?  We dance.  So, are you alive this Friday?  Are you and your family safe and sound?  Take a few seconds now to be in the moment and realize what a great life you truly have.  Did you give thanks for that?

Good, now let’s dance.

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Friday Dance Party – How About The Civil Wars?

Guess what?  It is time for another edition of Friday Dance Party on Acorns On Glen.  It’s the time where we give thanks for making it through another week and for being alive and present here on Earth.  How do we celebrate another week of living?  We dance.  So, are you alive this Friday?  Are you and your family safe and sound?  Take a few seconds now to be in the moment and realize what a great life you truly have.  Did you give thanks for that?

Good, now let’s dance.

I have a bad habit of always second guessing myself.  Once I make a decision, there is this little voice inside my head that says ‘Are you sure you did the right thing?’.  Then I reach out and make people crazy by asking for their validation about my decision.  To make matters worse, if any of my family or friends tell me they think I didn’t make the right decision, I end up getting my feelings hurt and say how I can’t believe they didn’t support me.  A vicious cycle.  So this weekend, I took it upon myself to buy some furniture.  A new chair, two new bar stools and a bench to put in front of the bed.  I picked fabric, matched it to other fabric and left the furniture store confident that I made all the right choices.  Three days later, I keep thinking….did I do the right thing?  Should I have chosen brown over blue?  Is the chair too small for the space where it is going?  Is the fabric too busy on the chair?  I’ve also tricked two different people into going with me to the furniture store for validation.  Both of them know my tricks and have told me that I’m absolutely right on trend.  Even if they thought the furniture was the ugliest stuff on Earth, they validated my choices.  I know they just didn’t have the energy to deal with my wrath if they said they didn’t like the pieces.  I really need to buy a big dose of confidence somewhere.  Which leads me to The Civil Wars.  I heard them sing a part of this song on the Grammys.  They had such big voices and such a unique sound that I immediately went on-line and bought their CD.  I’ve listened to it over and over and over.  Then last night, I was told to turn my speaker volume down because folks were sick of hearing those people screaming from the CD.  What…no validation?  How could I be wrong with this new group?  A bad decision?  Honestly, I don’t think I am wrong.  Turn on the speakers and listen to The Civil Wars.  It’s a great song to pair up with a little dancing.  Remember, it’s another week down and we owe it to ourselves to give thanks for that.  Then let me know what you think.  If you disagree with my music choice, I will only be pissy to you for a week or two.  No big deal.

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My Brooklyn-Born Italians Demand Ricotta Cheesecake

As you know from many earlier posts, I am out numbered here on Glen Road by Brooklyn-born Italians.  There’s nothing wrong with that especially given my love of Italian food.  Most of the Italian cravings are taken care of by cooking from the Notorious B. I. G. (Brooklyn Italian Grandmother).  However, every so often, I am asked to cook something that the troops used to get in Brooklyn.  A good example came when I was asked if I could make “franks on club” meaning you take a hot dog and grill it, then you slice it length wise and serve it on a club roll.  This was served up in a favorite Brooklyn diner and, just so you know, I have yet to attempt this culinary delight.  Another recent request that I did sign up for was to make a cheesecake.  Not regular cheesecake made with cream cheese, but Italian style, using fresh ricotta cheese.  To be honest, I have made the ricotta cheesecake twice before the most recent request and, although it tasted good, it was not a pretty cheesecake because it had cracks on the top.  So this time I signed up to make another one and decided to try to find a way to prevent the severe cracked top that I had experienced with cheesecakes from my past.

There are a lot of ways via the internet to prevent cracking.  From one post that said to spackle up the cracks with some softened ricotta to another post that said to take the cheesecake out of the oven every five minutes and vigorously shake it back and forth.  Honestly, I’m not buying these two solutions.  The one I eventually decided to try (with success!) was one that explained that cheesecake is made with lots of eggs.  In the cooking process, these eggs actually expand which is why the cake rises.  However, when taken out of the oven to a much cooler temperature, the eggs constrict so rapidly that the cheesecake cracks.  The trick to a smooth-topped cheesecake is to cool the cake off in a much slower fashion so that the eggs don’t constrict too quickly and cause cracking.  This solution starts by reducing the cooking time written in the recipe by fifteen minutes.  When the revised cooking time is complete, you simply turn off the oven and do not open the oven door.  Leave the cake in the oven for one more hour so that it continues to cook, but also slowly cools as the oven loses heat.  Let me tell you…it worked!  So here’s my recipe, modified to use my new non-cracking trick with the oven.  Enjoy!

Ingredients:

  • Unsalted butter, room temperature, for pan
  • 1/4 cup sugar, plus more for pan
  • 1 1/2 pounds fresh whole-milk ricotta cheese, pureed in a food processor until smooth
  • 6 large eggs, separated
  • 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 375 F.  Generously butter and sugar a 9-inch springform pan.  In a large bowl, whisk together the ricotta, egg yolks, flour, half the sugar (6 tablespoons) and salt until combined; set aside.

Place the egg whites in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment; beat on low-speed until foamy.  With the mixer on high-speed, gradually add the remaining 6 tablespoons of sugar, beating until whites are stiff and glossy, 3 to 4 minutes.

Using a rubber spatula, fold a third of the egg-white mixture into the ricotta mixture until combined.  Gently fold in the remaining egg-white mixture until just combined.  Pour into the prepared pan and bake until the center is firm and the top is a deep golden brown.  To avoid cracking, bake 45 minutes and then turn oven off with cheesecake still inside the oven (do not open oven door).  Leave cheesecake in the oven another 1 hour to continue cooking and to slowly cool down.

Transfer to a wire rack to cool for 10 minutes.  Take a paring knife and run it around edge of cake and the cake pan to avoid sticking.  Place another wire rack on top of the pan and invert cake onto the rack to remove from pan.  Reinvert cake and cool completely, top side up.  Cake should be eaten the same day it is baked, however, it can be refrigerated for up to 3 days.  Bring to room temperature before serving.

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Short Ribs With Tagliatelle

I really haven’t gotten out the pots and pans and did some real cooking since the New Year began, so I thought the long President’s Day weekend was the perfect opportunity for me to get back into the swing of things.  With my annual beginning of a new year diet and a busy work schedule over, the long weekend seemed perfect for me to get back into the kitchen.  Even though we’ve had a very mild Winter, the temperatures are still dropping below freezing, so I thought some comfort food was in order.  With that in mind, I settled on short ribs with tagliatelle.  Short ribs that simmer on the stove for an entire afternoon with a condensed sauce containing minced vegetables, beef broth and red wine sounded perfect.  This thick and rich sauce is then spooned over tagliatelle, which are long, thin, flat strips of pasta about 1/4 inch wide.  It is very similar to fettuccine.  This recipe is an old Giada recipe given to me by a friend and has been slightly modified from the original.  The final result can be a little dry at times, so follow the recipe and save some pasta water to moisten the dish up if it does turn out to be on the dry side.

Ingredients:

  • 3 tablespoons olive oil
  • 2 ounces chopped pancetta (about 1/2 cup)
  • 2 1/2 pounds short ribs
  • Salt
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  • 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 1 carrot, chopped
  • 1/2 cup fresh parsley leaves
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1 (14-ounce) can tomatoes (whole or diced)
  • 1 tablespoon tomato paste
  • 1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary leaves
  • 1 teaspoon dried thyme
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 2 1/2 cups beef broth
  • 3/4 cup red wine
  • 1 pound fresh or dried tagliatelle

Directions:

Place the olive oil in a large heavy soup pot over medium heat.  Cook the pancetta until golden and crisp, about 4 minutes.  Meanwhile, season the short ribs with salt and pepper, and dredge in the flour.  Using a slotted spoon, remove the pancetta from the pan and set aside.  Add the short ribs to the pan and brown on all sides, about 7 minutes total.

Meanwhile, combine the onion, carrot, parsley and garlic in a food processor and blend until finely minced.  Then add the tomatoes and tomato paste and pulse.

Once the short ribs are browned, carefully add the mixture from the food processor to the pot.  Return the pancetta to the pot and stir.  Add the rosemary, thyme, oregano, bay leaf, beef broth and wine.  Bring the mixture to a boil.  Reduce the heat and simmer, covered, for 1 hour and 15 minutes.  Remove the lid and simmer for another hour and a half, stirring occasionally.  Remove the meat and bones from the pot.  Discard the bones.  Shred the meat and return it to the pot.  Season with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 3/4 teaspoon pepper, or to taste.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat.  Add the pasta and cook until tender but still firm to the bite, stirring occasionally, about 8 to 10 minutes for dried pasta and 2 to 3 minutes for fresh.  Drain the pasta, reserving 1 cup of the cooking liquid.  Add the pasta to the pot and stir to combine.  Add the reserved pasta liquid 1/4 cup at a time, if needed, to moisten the pasta.  Transfer to serving bowls and serve immediately.