Perspectives, Harvest Bounty, and When Food Goes Bad...

My apologies if my title ends up being a bit misleading.  You see, I had the very best of intentions of sitting down to write a lovely, informative post today, all about how a change in perspective can turn what seems like a problem into a real blessing.  I was going to start with a quote from Return of the Jedi,

"Luke, you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." - Obi-Wan Kenobi

I was then going to turn our thoughts back to early spring, when a mislabeling error prior to planting resulted in the grave imbalance (as anyone who has ever raised even one cherry tomato bush would recognize) of five cherry tomato bushes to three regular tomato bushes.  How, in the present moment of late August, the cherry tomatoes are threatening to drown us in their unbelievable abundance of red, yellow, and purple fruits.  How I've slowly been resigning myself to just letting them rot on the vine, having exhausted most ways of disposing of the bounty via recipes or charity, and how all of this changed with the serendipitious discovery of a recipe for oven-dried cherry tomatoes.  I had glorious plans to display a few choice pictures of the harvest, process, and result:

(for reference - these two bowls are only half of what I picked yesterday)

(Here's the other half)

(And the finished product)

I could be writing right now about how the tasty "tomato raisins," as someone described them, had turned my thoughts on tomato bounty from "ugh" to "hurray!"  I was even planning to make some lovely resolutions about finding uses for all the odd bounties of my garden, as well as for using my crock pot more this fall (having, as a side note, really enjoyed how much easier it is to dry things than to can them, and having reflected that the crock pot would likely make dinner preparation similarly easier).

So what's the problem, you might ask?  And why aren't you reading a post that looks like that, rather than a lament for the post that could have been?

Well - the problem is Google.  Google, and the fact that your food is trying to kill you.

It started when I, innocently, was trying to determine the best oven temperature, and how I could store the beautiful (and yummy - oh so yummy) finished product.

Some two hours later, and pages upon pages of info about Botulism! Salmonella! Listeria! and lots of other bacteria that I don't even want to think about, I began to realize a few things.

1)  It's all well and good to want to preserve food at home, to try and eliminate some of the more nasty "preservatives" present in store bought food.  There's just one catch, though - those preservatives happen to be there because your food is trying to kill you.
2)  Very well, you might say, I'll just cook my food very well after it is preserved!  Then it will be so yummy and healthy for me!  Right?  No.  Because in order to kill the food before it kills you, you have to boil it for so long, or cook it at such a high temperature, that it no longer has any nutritional content whatsover.  And yummy taste at that point is right out.
3)  And if you try to get the food by choosing to eat only raw items, the food will still win because of the pesticides.
4)  Even if you go organic to avoid the pesticides, the food is one step ahead, because the pesticides were there for a reason, to save you from all the nasty bugs (visible and invisible) that would otherwise be there, again as part of the plot for your life.
5)  You can try to freeze the food to preserve it, which works great, but it becomes dangerous as soon as it begins to thaw.  Alternately, you can cook it to high temperatures, but again it becomes deadly as it cools.  Perhaps we could eat everything either stick-to-your-tongue frozen or scald-your-mouth hot...

Of course, the real conclusion is, it's pretty dangerous for anyone with just a little medical knowledge, a hypochondriac streak, and a wildly active imagination to spend very much time on Google.

I will say that my little oven-dried tomatoes really do taste great.  They may end up killing me, but I bet they'll be good on pizza...

In all seriousness, for those who are wondering, just drying tomatoes isn't a problem, although sources do differ on how high or or low the oven temp must be.  The problem that had me searching for hours was whether having greased my baking sheet with olive oil, and sprinkled everything with garlic powder might have created a potential botulism-growing environment.  I'll store them in the freezer, and then use on pizzas or in sauce, so my logical reasoning says it will probably be ok, but in the meantime I really did learn just enough about food safety to pretty much never want to eat again. 

So maybe it really is all about perspectives: choosing a perspective that accepts the inevitable margin of risk, rather than striving for a perfect black and white of safety; balancing potential consequences with likely outcome, and holding fast with one hand to science, the other to faith.

Slowing down..

It's been a very busy couple of weeks: dress making, cake making, wedding festivities, and then a full week off for both my husband and I, which meant coming up with some fun things to do to make our vacation "count".  Towards the end of the week, my daughter came down with Coxsackie virus (if you've never heard of it, don't worry - I hadn't, either), so she was a miserable camper for a few days, and we ended up having to postpone our planned trip to the ocean.  Now I've got the same miserable sore throat that she had, and am finally listening to my body's cues to just slow down a little.  Hence the renewed quiet on the blogging front (I know, I've spent most of the summer apologizing for being quiet!)

The end of the summer always brings a particular frenzy of activity: that first burst of fall color in the trees sparks a sense of urgency, as I try to squeeze in every last one those activities planned back when summer was just an oasis glimpsed distantly through winter-sick eyes.  Complicating and adding to that last burst of planned fun, I always seem to experience a huge creativity surge as the weather gets cooler.  If you've ever played Sims2, they hit the nail on the head - the characters are more motivated to learn and do crafty things in the fall.  Not that I've had any time for such games since the stork dropped off LW, but the analogy comes back to me at times like these, just the same.

Anyway, I've got skirt patterns, patterns for LW, plans to make more throw pillows, and stacks of books that I'm gathering to read; plans to pick apples and put away crisps and butter like last year; harvesting, preserving, and also have some other ideas and projects that have been waiting for cooler weather and more indoor time.  I'm reflecting more on faith, on vocation, on who I am and who God is calling me to be.  I suppose it's always this way at the change of a season (which makes me wonder, what is it like in those parts of the world with no, or different, seasons?) - the space between seasons is a transition time, a "time-between-times" as in Celtic mythology, and as such, is a perfect time for reflecting, taking stock, and also for making plans for the future.  However, this end-of-summer cold is reminding me not to burn myself out in a frenzy of "enjoyment," but rather, to take some time just to be; to go on walks, or maybe just lay in bed and listen to the breeze (if I can get LW to occupy herself, somehow!)  In short, to enjoy the "now" of the end of summer.

So, what about all of you?  Do you experience an end-of-summer frenzy, or a burst of creative energy at the beginning of Fall?  Or how do you stay in the moment, in the midst of the always-moving busyness of life?

Final cake pics!

Courtesy of my friend Meredith, photographer extraordinaire (and, incidentally, whose car we borrowed!)

Cake in transit:

Loading into the car (also a much nicer shot of "the dress" than the ones I posted previously)

Good friend Dan lending his muscle to escort the cake safely to the reception tent:

The finished result!

The finished product (picture one)

It's a rather far off/blurry shot (and includes the happy bride and groom), but here is "the cake" at the reception:

I'll post a better picture if I get one :)

(PS - no, that is not my husband - he really does have an identical twin).

The Making of a Cake

Day one:  2:00 pm start time.

(~ 85 degrees and humid)

Materials (actually 3 boxes more than this, plus three dozen eggs and three lbs of butter)

The first layer of the day: disaster!  Panic ensues, as I had no backup plan in the case of an epic fail.

A closeup of the extent of the horror... I seriously thought about still using the layer, then realized that there was no way it would hold up the weight of the upper tier..

First successful layer, after leveling (at which point, my panic began to die down; I cooled subsequent layers far more thoroughly, and pounded the heck out of my pans before tipping them out):

Truth-in-blogging disclosure: here is what my kitchen really looked like (look for the avocado on the table - that was LW's dinner, after my cake making assistant had left for a meeting, and my husband was off to the bachelor party):

My dinner on the run:

And my other kitchen surface (banana = LW's other dinner item; note that our kitchen is quite small for this sort of project)

Here's where I finally felt like it was going to come together.  Three layers completed and leveled; a fourth was cooling on the stove, and layers five and six were in the oven (sushi and cake: that's all I ate all day):

Baking nicely...

I took a midway point break to clean up; this was around 9:30 pm, after putting LW to bed:

(This is what my kitchen more usually looks like, minus the remaining cake making tools)

A shot of the floor before I cleaned it up:

What you can't see in the above picture is the *crumbs*...

The mess re-emerged when I switched to stacking, filling, and inserting the supporting columns.

Finally, all three tiers were leveled, filled, supporting columns were in, and ready for stage two the next day.  Day one end time (with cleanup): 11:30 pm.

Day two:  9 am start time

(~75, cool, windy, comfortable and thankfully not humid)

Crumb coating the layers (a light layer of icing to "seal" the crumbs onto the cake, then back in the fridge to crust before the thicker, "real" layer of frosting went on):

All tiers crumb coated (note: my fridge also is not really big enough to accommodate this type of project, along with our regular foodstuff):

Frosted the cake (neglected to take a picture at this point - it became clear that time was going to be of the essence), and then practiced a pattern for the sugar pearl border:

My good friend and cake-making assistant, moral support, and general girl-Friday - Beth - putting sugar pearls on the cake (I did most of the rows, but towards the end we put the pedal to the medal and started working in double-time - it took about four hours of individually placing the sugar pearls with tweezers to do all the borders):

 

The completed cake, minus the ribbon and topper: this was our pre-transportation shot.  We popped it back in the fridge for about 15 minutes while I got dressed for the rehearsal (to which we were about 45 minutes late :P), then loaded it in the car and took off (the top was not actually crooked - just the angle was a little weird).

At the rehearsal, we applied the ribbon, which immediately soaked up grease despite the completely crusted icing.  However, this is basically what the cake would look like the next day (Beth modeling the cake topper, just for picture taking purposes:

Day two end time ~ 5:15 pm for frosting/bordering, plus an additional 15 minutes or so to apply the ribbon, an unsuccessful late evening trip to the craft store for replacement ribbon (they were all out of that particular color and texture), followed by late-night Googling for ribbon solutions (real end time: 11:30 pm).

Day three: immediately after the wedding Mass, we quickly took the ribbon off the cake, applied shortening to the backside of the ribbon to make it *evenly* grease saturated (which darkened it slightly but was otherwise unnoticeable: thanks Google!), and reapplied.  Loaded the cake into the car again, after which Beth and another friend took it off to the reception.  There they added an inspired touch of rose petals scattered around the base, and officially put on the flower topper.

I didn't make it to the reception until about an hour later, due to needing to pick my daughter up on the other side of town, etc, and thus didn't get a picture of the finished product.  However, I'll post it as soon as I get one from one of the various other people at the event.

Anyway, I received many compliments, everyone seemed to like the taste as well, and no-one died after eating it, so I call the whole affair a success. Oh yes, and my brother-in-law and new sister-in-law were very happy - with the cake, but much more with the celebration of their marriage, which was, after all, the important thing about the day :)

Old friends, marriages, and the slow patterning of life..

I'm working on getting the cake post up, just trying to get pictures organized first.  Suffice it to say that, after much toil, it was a huge success, and I'll have finished and unfinished pictures up soon!

In the meantime... I stumbled upon this reflection that I wrote quite a long time ago now, and it resonated with the events of this weekend: seeing old friends, witnessing a marriage, watching the transitions of life and seeing the emerging pattern of our lives a little bit more clearly, so I thought I'd share.

~~~~ The Master Knitter ~~~~

If we trust Him to be the Master of All, it shouldn't surprise us to find that He is also the Master of the Particulars; for instance, the Master of a particular discipline that He designed us to design.  Yet even so, when early women learned to knot string into garments by the use of sticks, and then later, when the first woman on the coast land of a seafaring country discovered that dropping a few stitches for awhile and then later integrating them in a different spot created unexpected and unmistakable patterns, who would have guessed that they were all merely imitating what the Divine Knitter had been doing all along with the strands of our lives?  For that is exactly what He does - joining a new color here, making two into one there, zigging where we expect a zag, and yes, putting stitches aside for awhile, only to bring them back in unexpected places, thus crafting strong cables, lifelines out of the blue.  And the most surprising part of it all is that these life-cables become in His hands not only functional, but beautiful.  The dropped stitches are never lost, nor is He merely fudging over mistakes, but rather masterfully making ever more intricate designs which, like those Aran sweaters, identify us as us, and even more splendidly link and twine us, each to each, in the grander tapestry that stretches unbroken across time.

~~~~

Prayers for my brother-in-law and new sister-in-law this week, as they celebrate their new marriage!  May our Lord bless their love richly, with fruitfulness, joy, and holiness.

Cake: day one.

11 boxes of cake mix, 3 dozen eggs, a couple of pounds of butter, one trip to the store for more supplies (after the first layer I baked split in two coming out of the pan), and some 8 hours of work later.. the "pieces" of the cake are in place.  I've constructed the three different layers, leveled, put the filling in, put the support pillars and cardboard circles in, and now they are sitting in my fridge overnight, waiting for cake: day two (i.e. frosting and decorating). 

A few (very few, as I am *exhausted*) thoughts from today:

- I definitely used every skill I ever learned in 4-H, and I don't just mean baking and decorating.  I used my sheep fitting skills, my carpentry skills, even my "stay calm under extreme pressure and adverse circumstances" skill.  I'm not sure which was harder - smiling at the sheep show judge as a teenager, after about ten gallons of water dumped on my head as I entered the show ring (the tent let go of a whole pocket of water that had been collecting), or smiling at my husband as he went out the door to party it up with the guys for the bachelor party, leaving me home alone with a cranky one year old and three layers of a cake to bake (I'd already been at the task for over four hours at that point).

- As I predicted back when I made LW's birthday cake - the weather was hot, humid, drippy, sticky, and awful.  I've been told that it is supposed to be cooler tomorrow, which is good news, because otherwise either the frosting, or I, am going to turn into one big puddly mess.

- My kitchen is clean again.  But I will post some "truth-in-blogging" photos that will hopefully scare the rest of you away from ever volunteering for a job like this.  It's for your own good that I will do this :)

- Deciding to bake the cake two days before the wedding, and frost it the day before, rather than doing the whole thing the day before, was a very. good. idea.  In fact, this entire escapade would have likely ended in disaster (or an all-nighter worthy of any procrastinating college student).  With the extra time, though, I really do have a hope of pulling it all together.

- "Baking the cake" sounds so simple when you say it, or even mentally envision it.  That's because you confuse "baking a cake" (i.e. the regular process for a regular cake) with "mixing up 11 boxes of cake mixes and repeatedly baking, and baking, and baking, because you only have three pans and you need six layers, and don't forget some of them will break".  In reality, there is a world of difference between those things... or more accurately, about 7 hours difference.

- No lunch, random bites of "discard cake", and one grocery store serving of sushi doesn't really cut it for a nursing mom as far as food intake.

- My daughter really, truly, was an angel baby today.  She was patient beyond belief on a hot day.  That is her small, or big, success for the day.

And now?  It is past time for bed.  Cake: day two awaits me tomorrow; fortunately, I am taking the day off from work, so don't have to (as I did today) work three hours and *then* tackle 8 hours of cake (plus all the nursing and putting down for naps and changing of diapers, and just plain loving that LW needs to thrive each day).  Prayers would be much appreciated - I am going to enjoy such a sabbath day of rest come Sunday!

Sewing project: completed!

Thank heavens, the dress is done.. just in time for me to turn my eyes to the cake project instead (starting tomorrow).  The big weekend is ahead of us... which has somewhat overshadowed the fact that Monday was Jim's and my big weekend (our two year anniversary!).   More on that sometime next week, when I finally take a long-awaited vacation.

The dress (don't mind my poor modeling skills and the door in the background - it's pretty hard to get a good picture via a timer, and I didn't have anyone around old enough to work a camera)

Also, a picture of the dress plus wrap for Mass:

A closeup of the wrap and pattern material (even prettier in person - it's a light blue linen with shiny, raised embroidered flowers in a slightly darker blue):

For those who asked, I used a "New Look" pattern - I hadn't used that brand before, but was quite pleased with the clarity of the instructions and the fit (granted, like always, I had to take in a bit at the zipper to get the sizing right).  I also disregarded their instructions which said to do a bodice lining with the spaghetti straps only attached in the front, then hand sew them on top of that lining; I instead left the back seam undone until I was ready to attach the straps, then sewed them directly into the seam for a more polished appearance to the final project.  I'm just sort of a 4-H sewing snob like that :)

Anyway, I would write more, but LW is done with her lunch, and therefore my time is up (why do my posts always have to end that way...)