Relish and other goodies

Living without appliances or a kitchen sink presents certain challenges, none more so than preserving our summer bounty of cucumbers and squash.  My solution thus far has been to pull the chest freezer into the equation and freeze things instead of canning them.

This will allow me to can them later on, should I wish, and will let me put up what I need for winter.

This morning was relish-making.  I had about 10 pounds of cucumbers and decided freezer relish was something I could accomplish easily.  I used a pre-made relish base (hated to do it but, again, the lack of a kitchen loomed large) and added the pulverized cucumbers, cooking it all on the side burner of the barbecue until it was ready for jars.  Into the jars it all went, and into the freezer they went after cooling.  The plastic bags were used over the jars as a precaution in case they burst and broke, but I'm happy to say all went well and the jars held up just fine.

I may re-batch it all and water-bath can it later on, but this has at least preserved our harvest for now.  I've been really lucky that we are having an extremely late tomato season, and most of my tomatoes are set, but still green.  What a blessing.  But the tomatoes I do pick will also go straight into the freezer, to be thawed and canned at a later date.

And squash was shredded and frozen for quick breads and my famous zucchini chocolate cake.  It will be nice to have it available throughout the year, since it's kind of a family favorite.

All in all, we're surviving without a kitchen, and hopefully, we'll be back into a new and better kitchen soon!

Camping out

So life without indoor appliances or a kitchen sink is a bit like camping out.  In the last week we've seen 80 percent of the cabinets get installed, which means I've put most of our kitchen goods back into the kitchen where they belong.  But there were snags with both the microwave cabinet and the sink cabinet, which means for the time being, those cabinets remain empty and our countertops cannot be installed until the issues are resolved.

Sigh.

When this whole renovation started, I had grand illusions of cooking in my solar oven, washing dishes outside, and playing pilgrim as we made do with no inside kitchen water and cooking appliances.  In theory that was a good idea; the truth is I do use my solar oven a lot in summertime, and while we may not have a kitchen sink, we do have running water elsewhere in the house.

But that's not how things shook out, due to a failure to plan on my part.  You see, everyone who lives in this house is on different meal schedules, with me eating around 5 pm, Big Ag eating whenever he comes home (usually 6:30 - 7 pm), and then Groceries usually eating last and loading the dishwasher, usually at about 9 pm.  But you can't do dishes outside at 9 pm.  And using the bathroom for dishes got gross really fast.  After all, who wants to leave dishes in a room where you perform, well, other tasks, shall we say?

So what it's come down to is having food around that can be easily prepared and cleaned up after, like sandwiches, salads, bbq, and pre-prepared food.  Oh, and eating out.  That part actually makes me feel quite European, as we head into town for supper and then walk around, looking in shop windows and stopping in for some post-dinner gelato at my favorite gelato place.

And even with the dining out, I've still lost 3 pounds since we started, and Big Ag is down a few as well.  Not a bad thing at all.  Apparently all my home cooking really was too much of a good thing.

I can see it now...the next diet sensation:  The Kitchen Renovation Diet, or How to Lose a Pound a Week -- just by destroying your kitchen!

I may not have a working kitchen, but I DO have a pantry now!

It's a work in progress.

The Authentic Memory

I'm turning 52 next week, and I have to say I'm completely happy that I got to live my 20-something years during the 1980's.  Especially because the 1980's were the ending years of the unplugged life, right before hand-held electronics made their way into our moment-by-moment lives.

Of course it was a pain in the ass to have to locate a pay phone if you wanted to make a call, or to miss an important message because you were away from your phone, or to be unable to share good (or bad) news or a funny picture until you got home from a concert or a vacation.  But I can honestly say that during those wild, romantic, youthful years of my 20's, I was completely present where I was, doing whatever I was doing at the time, with no distractions --  no screens, no feeds and no statuses to check.

Think peak moments.  In my 20's, I had many, often in the presence with great friends or romantic partners.  We might be standing on the edge of a continent in Greece, enjoying a cup of coffee and scones at a tiny coffee shop on the foggy California coast, or witnessing a spectacular lightning storm perched on a hill in our car on a stormy late summer night in the midwest.

I experienced those moments in their totality, with whomever I was with and the gestalt of everything; the sights, the smells, the sounds and the emotions.  And even now, 30 years later, sometimes I catch a scent of jasmine, the sound of the ocean or the boom of distant thunder, and all those memories come flooding back to me, unbidden.  And they are welcome.  They bring back long-lost friends, places that no longer exist, and a time when life was a lot simpler and more innocent.

Fast forward to today, where every important moment is captured, pixelated and immediately shared. It's a huge loss, because in order to capture that moment, you must, by necessity, step away from it -- leave the real-time sights, sounds and sweeping feelings of that exact moment, in order to turn your cell phone on to camera setting, frame your shot, click away for a minute, and then get on the internet, log into Facebook or your address book and post it for everyone to see.  

It's like the time I agreed to photograph the Space Shuttle landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California.  I did my job, but ended up seeing the whole landing not simply looking up at the sky, but by squinting, one-eyed, through the viewfinder of my camera.  And I felt the loss when it was all over, because although I had the images captured on film, I missed watching the landing with my own two eyes.  I was so busy fiddling with focus, f-stop and aperture I missed the thrill of watching a spaceship come down from the sky and land.

And so it is today.  If you're standing on the edge of a volcano and have to start fiddling with your cell phone to capture and post an image, you've just diminished the primitive thrill of the volcano experience for yourself, while attempting to preserve it.

I see it at the winery all the time.  People ask me to take their picture, then spend the next 10 minutes trying to get a decent cell signal out of the winery so they can "check in" and post their photo.  And in those minutes they lose, they also lose the flow of the moment and the magic of the experience with their friends, a summer breeze and a glass of wine.

It's something I can't stress enough; if you want to feel those all-encompassing moments -- the ones that will still be capable of sweeping you over and under with their raw beauty and their emotions a quarter century or more after they've happened, put down the screen for God's sake, and just experience them with all your human senses, and nothing more. 

Take a picture in your brain, another in your heart, and another on your skin as the moment wraps you up and envelopes you. 

It's the only way to really keep a memory for all its worth.  An Instagram or Facebook post will never do it justice.

Getting to me

My cabinet of solace

So I found myself in the wine library while working at the winery this afternoon, polishing glassware and carefully placing it all back on the shelves after a busy afternoon.  I love the wine library; it's my favorite place on the property to be even if I don't get in there often.  It's dimly lit, has lots of warm wood cabinets and built-in wine racks, and is a nice even temperature of about 65 degrees all the time.  Perfect on a day when outside temps are in the 90's.

But it's become a favorite place even more since I've been doing this remodel at our house.  You see, my kitchen is empty and its contents are scattered throughout the house, which makes everything at home seem messy and unorganized.  I am not one of those people who deals well with disorganization; it makes me feel scattered, distracted and ill at ease.  

Hopefully this will be the last week when the contents of my kitchen are laying all over the floors of our own den, living room, dining room and guest bedroom, but until it feels back to normal, I will seek solace in the comfort of the wine library at work on quiet, late afternoons, where everything seems to have a place, and there is no clutter nor even a bottle or glass out of place.

Library ready for an event

General Update

This has been a crazy week, between getting the kitchen ready for new cabinets and harvesting a bounty of vegetables which I can't use, since I have no kitchen to prepare or preserve food in.  I'm giving most of it away, to the girls at the winery, to my neighbors David and Ray, and really, anyone who shows an interest.  Success is not a problem here, and hopefully by the time my kitchen is functional again I will still get some garden goodies put aside for ourselves.

We're also coated in a thick layer of concrete dust as we speak, because the kid who came to do the tile removal used a grinder on the entire floor and dust got into everything, all over the house -- into drawers, electronics, the ceiling and walls and of course all the furniture and flooring.  We were wearing respirator masks until about yesterday. 

The construction company has pledged to make this mistake right, and next Wednesday a team of four professional housekeepers will be arriving to clean our living areas from top to bottom. That's a good thing! Monday and Tuesday will be cabinet installation days, but as the countertops will not be installed until about mid-August, we'll be minus a working kitchen sink and food prep area until then.  But at least some of what belongs in the kitchen cabinets can be put away (after the concrete dust is washed off, of course).

In the garden, there is an abundance of cukes, zukes, eggplant and my first ripe tomatoes.  I keep up with the watering and the harvesting, but that's about it at this point.  Life's not allowing for much else.

But the best news of all is that I just found out that my two dear friends Hal and Peter are getting married -- finally -- after 21 years together.  Perhaps I'll even be able to host the happy couple for dinner soon using our new kitchen!  Keep calm and marry on, California!

A Lesson in The Law -- California Style

Today, Big Ag was outside working on the property when he spotted a family looking at the lot next to us.  We didn't know it was for sale, and while we were walking around on it, we realized our septic leach lines run across the top of the property, on the same hill our house is on, but definitely on the other property, not ours.

I can't believe we never noticed it before, nor did anyone else who helped us buy our home, including the previous owner.  So we did what anyone does when they realize there's a potentially huge and complicated legal issue relating to their land, which was 1) panic, and 2) begin research in earnest.

To make a long story short, it turns out we have a legal right to have our leach lines running across the neighboring property due to something called a "prescriptive easement."  It's a strange thing, good for us but not for absent land owners.

Basically it goes like this:  If someone encroaches on your property by putting something like a sewer line or septic system on it, or if they just walk across it every day to get to the grocery store, if you haven't put a stop to it within 5 years of it happening regularly, you're out of luck.  That's right, if its been done for 5 years, innocently, with no push-back from you, it's a done deal that it can legally continue to happen into perpetuity, without you being able to do a thing to stop it.  In fact, if you try to stop it the courts will rule against you, and you may be liable for damages.

Hard to believe, but true.  It's true in other states as well as California, but the number of years it takes for the encroachment to become legal can differ.  In Tennessee, for example, you have 9 years to complain before its too late for you to do anything.

I'm not sure how this is possible or if its even a law that I like, but in this case it works in our favor.  Our house was built in 2005, with the leach lines being put in place in that time.  That's 8 years ago, meaning it's now been legal for 3 years.

I'm thankful, but also a little perplexed as to how and why this law exists.  But mostly thankful.  It also means that our lovely 180 degree view of the Coast Range will probably remain the same, as it would be impossible to build on the other side of the hilltop without disturbing our leach lines or violating the laws that demand leach lines stay a certain number of feet away from any residences.

A victory for us, albeit a strange one.  

And it turned out the real estate shoppers were on the wrong lot, anyway.  The lot next to us isn't even for sale, and possibly never will be.

And so panic turns to relief as we watch another sunset from the back patio.

Deconstructing the kitchen

There's now real progress happening on the kitchen front.  Today Big Ag and Groceries spent the day de-constructing the  old kitchen.  There's construction dust everywhere and the entire house seems littered with kitchen items we had to remove from the drawers and cupboards, but it at least feels like we're making good progress towards a new and more functional kitchen.

Here's a couple of pics of the demolition so far:

Of course this just had to happen at the height of summer, when I have a bounty of fresh vegetables ready to be cooked, but luckily I can still grill things, cook in the solar oven, and when all else fails, give any produce we're not using to our neighbors and coworkers, most of whom don't have vegetables in their gardens.