A whole month!!

Here's what we've been up to since I last posted (in September! Sorry...)

We tore down the bookshelf/door between our living room and the front room. I did most of the crowbar work and then Bill kicked a hole in the sheet rock.

I've been painting the room purple with some random stenciling throughout. It will be my craft room very soon!

We picked a wheel-barrel full of pumpkins.

And stuccoed the top portion of Bill's oven. The bottom will get a brick facade some day.

We've also been canning ripe tomatoes. What?? Wasn't there a frost in Indiana weeks ago? Aren't all your tomato plants dead? Yes, they are. But we picked 10 gallons of green tomatoes just before the frost and have been ripening them in a basket (previously two baskets) in our kitchen.

Last week we canned 6 quarts of tomatoes in their own juices and will likely do so again in a few days. Every 5 days or so, I go through the basket and pull out the tomatoes that are turning red (or yellow or purple as the case may be) and put them in a bowl where we can keep a closer eye on them. When they are ripe, they go into a pot of progressive tomato sauce (that is, we start it when it needs to be started and add tomatoes as they get ripe. It's usually 2-3 sessions of cutting and boiling over the course of one week). When we fill up the pot, we can them up.

We've only lost a 5-6 tomatoes to mold or fruit flies and it only affects individual fruits, not their neighbors in the basket. We read about this "method" on a favorite blog (How To Ripen Green Tomatoes Indoors the Really Easy Way) and highly endorse it. The cans we get from these 10 gallons will represent about 20-25% of the tomatoes we preserve this year, so it's well worth it.

"You can blog about the oven if you want"

As you may recall, Bill finished his masonry oven a few weeks ago and we did a test burn. He found that he really liked it and yesterday he did a longer burn and some serious baking.

That's 4 pizzas, 6 loaves of bread, a dozen muffins (those were mine!) and some granola. Starting at about noon, Bill fired the oven for six hours, actively adding wood and keeping the flames going. Then he let it rest for an hour, without adding more wood, so the temperature could become more even throughout the oven.

The first thing to be cooked were the pizzas. They're done in about 3 minutes and can be cooked by both direct heat (from any remaining chunks of flaming wood) and the indirect heat that is radiating out from the very, very insulated oven walls.

Then he cooked the bread. I think it was done quicker than it is in our house oven, and the masonry oven has much higher capacity. 6 loaves were a piece of cake and Bill is confident he can probably double that comfortably. This is good because we like to eat bread!

The muffins went in next and then finally the granola.

As we were sitting there, daylight and oven heat fading, Bill said "you can blog about the oven tomorrow if you want." I'd been waiting to post an update about it in case he wanted to share his excitement with you. But, I think his mood is better captured in photos than in words. He's pretty proud of his work and glad to be reaping the rewards.

(That's an excited face. Not a creepy I-want-to-eat-your-head face. FYI. In case you were confused.)

The final stages of the process involved framing the dome in metal, plopping up some board stuff (the stuff that goes under your hearth - wonder board??), filing with vermiculite and adding a roof.

The very last bit is the decoration. Probably stucco on the top and bricks on the bottom.

Oh - and see that door? The wooden one?

Yeah, that caught fire.

Fooood!

Yesterday morning, I tilled an area of land bigger (far bigger) than our last apartment.

Hells yeah I had a beer with lunch. Tilling = blech. But I'm excited to plant tons o'pumpkins in that area. The front half is for popcorn.

Bill fired his oven on Sunday (more on that to come) and we ate really well on Monday as a result. He made pizza and bread with the "crappy" flour because he wasn't sure how it was going to all turn out and he didn't want to waste the good stuff on his first experiment. We ate French Toast for breakfast:

...and leftover pizza with an arugula salad and homebrew wheat beer for lunch. This meal was very, very exciting because we could see it all coming together. The pizza is all from scratch - bread, sauce and cheese made by Bill. Someday the sauce will be from homegrown tomatoes and we'll get some goats to milk for the cheese. Bill also talks about growing wheat, but I think that will be more of a fun experiment than a long term, sustained project.

The salad is arugula and radishes from our garden with a simple balsamic vinaigrette (I already lost the recipe. ooops!) homemade croutons (a great way to use up substandard bread) and a young Parmesan cheese. The cheese is not supposed to be done until November, but Bill couldn't wait. It tastes young, but is very good. Check it:

A very satisfying lunch!

For dessert we had some blackcaps.

Already.  

In May (in 2009, we picked at the end of June). I'm sure we've eaten a quart already and they've only just begun. Some day I'll show you the madness that is our blackcaps. They are probably some sort of horrible invasive here in Indiana, but I don't care!!! We let them grow wherever they'd like and are happy to share them with the birds.

Speaking of sharing with wild animals...there is a family of three red squirrels living in our basement. We see them in our mulberry tree every morning and every evening. They don't even wait for the mulberries to get ripe before chowing down.

Here's one of the babies:

Too cute to be evicted, right?

What's this??

Four giant bowls full of dough?

 

Could someone be preparing to use a recently completed masonry oven for the very first time???

 

"That's a heckava thing to have."

Our neighbor - the street gossip - stopped by last night because he was out charging the battery of one of his 8 cars and noticed we were working in the garden. He had a lot of questions about what's been going on here - what's that fence for? Is it electric? Is it on? What's it protecting? Is your garage door broke? What's that brick thing?

When Bill explained it, our neighbor commented that it was "a heckava thing to have" (like we found it in the basement, perhaps? Under a layer of dust and old National Geographic magazines?). And then he left.
  

Things which are autumnal.

Our lovely old honey locusts have shed most of their yellow confetti compound leaves and are now dropping the leaf stalks.

It's not quite as magical as a rain of gold.

Bill's oven now has a pretty arch and the start of a chimney.

Wood fires are autumnal, right? We had our first fire-to-heat-the-house-and-not-just-look-pretty last week. Note to self for next year... clean the outer surface of the living room wood stove before Bill makes the fire because burning dust smells awful and it's really, really difficult to wipe off a 350 degree stove.

I've been feeling really guilty over the poor quality of my Rhinebeck purchases photo. I got gorgeous tops and rovings which were loving dyed by brilliant people and I showed them to you illuminated by a CFL. Terrible. Here they are in the sunshine. I clearly had fall colors on the brain when I was buying.

Lastly, nothing says autumn like sweaters! ...also pumpkin ale, but I don't have any of that at the moment. So you get a sweater. An unraveling sweater.

I got this sweater ages ago and it never ever really looked good on me. I think people would describe my fashion preferences with the same sorts of words used to describe potato sacks. This sweater was the definition of that. Brown. Loose-fitting. Unshapely. Garlicy.

Mmm...maybe "garlicy" describes mashed potatoes more than potato sacks...but if a sweater can be garlicy, this one was.

So, I'm ripping it apart and getting yards and yards of cotton which I'll dye into less potato-sack-like colors and reknit into something a grownup might wear. Unraveling this $20 sweater is way fun and the amount of yarn I'm getting would certainly cost more than $20. I have grand plans to do this with $5 sweaters from Goodwill too, but the people who donate to Goodwill 'round these parts really like acrylic. Ick. I might have to seek out a fancy Goodwill for sweater unraveling adventures.

Happy Fall, y'all
(it says that on the big window of our grocery store. I couldn't resist.)

Ooooovvvveeeennnn (and Rhinebeck)

I feel as if I am running out of clever post titles for the oven construction. If you've got any suggestions for future titles that say "Oven progress" in a more interesting way than "oven progress" lemme know.

This is roughly where Bill is at:

He added the two additional arches of bricks and a slanty thing up front. To the very right of the photo is the red brick arch that will be visible in the final product. In between the slanty thing and that arch is where the chimney goes.

An interior view:

That's where the fires will be built and the pizza and bread and cakes will be cooked. Bill is a little further along than these photos show, but not much. This is because we drove hundreds of miles to go to Rhinebeck this past weekend...and visit family. Very important the family visiting (Hi Krista! I know you are reading this in bed...and now all the internet knows too!!).

However, as we didn't bring any of the family back with us, I only have photos of wool to share with you.

Aside from one lovely skein of alpaca, I focused mostly on all sorts of food for my wheel. On the right is a Border Leicester fleece. And then all the rest is tops and roving of various wools...some merino, corridale, finn, cheviot, rambouillet...and a sheep I've never heard of - masham. There is also a silk cap which I'm planning to knit right into mittens (ala the Harlot).

I am clearly in some sort of red and green phase.

These purchases represent only about half of my Rhinebeck budget. Though my plans were big when I started saving money, I don't think I could have actually spent it all - even a wool freak like me can get overwhelmed at the wonder of Rhinebeck. Fortunately (?) I brought a man with me who likes food. Within 20 seconds of seeing the Italian guys from Brooklyn with their tables full of bread and salami, we had a bag bursting with pepperoni, salami and cheese.

It was a good trip!

Oven walls

Bill's epic oven build continues.

After laying the hearth slab cooking surface, he built three oven walls.

He also made this edgey part. As the chair of the oven decorating committee, I assisted in the selection of these bullnose tiles. These are the first parts of the oven that will still be visible when it's all done. All the rest of this stuff will get covered in insulation, concrete and eventually a pretty facade.

The roof of the oven is built on top of an arch form. There will be three rows of bricks when the roof is done.

The rows have to be built one at a time, though and they have to cure before the form can be removed and the next row added. Bill is working on row two today.

It's starting to look more like a pizza oven every day!

The oven is being built just outside our kitchen, about 15 yards off our concrete picnic table and grilling area. We selected a flat, open area as close to the house as was feasible.

And, naturally, Bernie had to approve the site before we started construction.

Fortunately, he likes pizza too.

All the mundane updates

In news that shocked the world (or 5 people), I recently deleted my Facebook account. I realize that this leaves a giant void for all the people in the world (5) who have a keen interest on the mundanity of my days.

As such, I bring you an update of all the things that have happened since I left Facebook one full day ago.

This morning was garbage day.
This evening for dinner we ate garden potatoes for the first time this year.

Whilst we were eating, an autumn leaf fell from a honey locust on to Sugar Pie's fuzzy ear.

Bernie slept through it all as cats are wont to do.

Bill has gotten to this point in his oven building.

I have gotten to this point in my hat and glove building.

(Also, since leaving FB, I have turned into a hard core rocker chick. Hard. Core.)

We received another delivery of wood.

I know, it looks like the last delivery, but I assure you it is not. See the wood in the shed? We stacked that. Also, please note our propane tank has been downgraded from 1000 gallons to 300 something. We use significantly less propane than the previous owners and the huge tank was unnecessary. Wood is the heating source of champions!

Finally, the turkeys want you to know that their tails are growing in for the season and they don't look nearly as silly as they did over the summer.

They want you to know they are handsome again. Image is very important to turkeys.

Very handsome turkeys.