Diana’s Think Space

So the land was cleared Monday, and now commences the clean-up.

I just got in from trying to rake the raw, sodden mess that is my back yard into some kind of shape. Oh. My. Gosh. The contractors and their machines left it so ugly. The soil is churned up in ridges, compacted down along tire ruts, vines are tangled and mud-covered and sticking up in random clumps like wiry wart hairs, brown water fills every rut and hollow, the bases of tree stumps stick up here and there like snaggled, muddy teeth.

I feel embarrassed that my neighbors have to look at it like this. They’re probably wondering whether they will ever have a pretty view there ever again.

I despair as to whether that land will ever be arable. Keep in mind that we haven’t had rain for a week so the soil should be dry by now, and then consider that the corner by the pond is so swampy that I frequently splashed myself in the face as I raked too enthusiastically. I am covered head to toe in mud, and I only managed to rake about maybe 150 sf. I marked off the corner that I had “leveled” and sprinkled it with rye, and it looks so very small.

Not only is the earth a swamp, but it’s also not nearly as cleared as I had hoped. First, the stumps are still there. Apparently “flush to the ground” really means “sticking up about a foot”. I suppose there’s only so much you can do with a chain saw.

Second, the “root rake” that the contractors had promised on the bobcat was nothing but a nub-toothed bucket that did absolutely zero to pull the vines out of the ground, even as soft as it was. That area is invested with honeysuckle, ivy, and stick-thumb (green, woody vines about pencil-thick, with wicked thorns and a tough-as-hell root system). They are all still there: broken and trampled by the bobcat, but I’m sure their pernicious root systems will recover them in no time. I had so been hoping to start with a cleaner slate. Because of my time constraints today I wasn’t able to pull any out, just attempt to clean up the soil’s appearance a bit in deference to the neighbors and get some rye seed in as fast as I could. Doubtless I will have to go back and pull them all, though they are really the only things providing the soil with any structure at all right now. Should I perhaps leave them, and hope that the rye smothers them? I don’t know if even rye is that strong.

Not only are the vines – bane of my existence – still there, but so is trash. Apparently someone in a past life thought it would be ok not only to dump bottles, bricks, pallets, and *huge* piles of cement (they barely fit in the bobcat’s wide bucket), but also to cover a big area with a bright blue plastic tarp – and not a woven one that would have disintegrated by now, but a thick solid BRIGHT BLUE piece of plastic. They never removed it and it eventually got buried beneath a layer of mud and ivy. So there I was flailing at the soil and spraying big chunks of blue plastic all around me. All but the biggest crumbled when I tried to pick them up, so obviously they are pretty much here to stay. No way am I going to pick through the earth to remove every last tiny piece, so I suppose I must resign myself to blue-speckled soil.

I was so optimistic about the state of the soil today that I went out without gloves. Ha.

Two tiers, five layers of buttermilk-peach cake with brown-sugar cream-cheese icing, drizzled with ginger syrup and stuffed with peach-meyer-lemon curd between every delicious layer. Topped with a sprinkling of crystallized ginger.

Someone at the wedding asked me if it was a health cake, because it had peaches in it. As if! I burst out laughing and let her know that whatever part of the frosting isn’t cream cheese, is butter; that the filling alone contains 8 egg yolks and 12 tablespoons of butter; that the whole cake took about two pounds of sugar and that’s not including the two jars of peach jam for the filling. And was it ever worth the calories.

You know the best part? This whole time I’d been thinking that the cake would just be part of a buffet, nothing actually all that special – but the couple liked it so much (I may have let them sneak frosting before the ceremony, but I’ll never tell) that they made an impromptu cake ceremony of it, feeding it to each other on video as the first thing that they did when the came into the reception… and they were moaning.

I’ve never claimed to be a good cake decorator, or able to make a pretty cake – and I was pretty disappointed with how this one came out. But even though it looks a mess, if the couple mmmmmed while they ate it? I think that means I did ok!

The cake, it has been baked.

Sifting. Fancy.

And I got to use my homemade organic buttermilk, too. Almost the whole quart I made fresh yesterday. I love how I don’t have to buy that stuff any more.

I made a double batch and it just baaaarely fit into my big mixer. It turned out five layers: three 9″ and two 8″.

So I have options, again. Do I go wedding-fancy and do a 3-layer 9″ tier under a 2-layer 8″ tier? I really want to, because when am I ever again going to get a chance to bake a cake this fancy? I just don’t want to be presumptuous, all like “here I made you a wedding cake because I am so awesome”, or have it come across as my not thinking that they weren’t married before… so maybe I should scale back a little and only bring a 2-to-1 layer cake? Or just a single, 3-layer, 9″ cake, like a birthday cake?

But that means I would be left with leftover cake layers at home. All day. Unsupervised. And boy did the batter taste good.

Well, they’ll chill all night and I can decide for good in the morning, when the time comes to assemble them. At which time I will also (still) have to decide what kind of filling they get! I’m thinking of wimping out and just going with a ginger syrup and a curd made of peach-nutmeg puree. I probably shouldn’t experiment on someone else’s cake!

More thoughts on the wedding cake – first off I’ve got to decide what to make.

The couple asked for the peach cake with the brown-sugar cream-cheese icing. That’s a fairly straightforward cake; I could just make it several layers high. It’s a simple, light, summery cake that could probably hold its own just like that. But while it tastes delicious already, for this particular cake I’d like to raise it to the next culinary level by adding a third flavor note to the peach-brown sugar duet. But… what?

I’ve been searching through sites all evening to try and get some ideas. Epicurious, gourmet, food&wine, Smitten Kitchen … they’ve all yielded lots of ideas for flavor notes that go well with peach. Here are some options:

• Caramel
• blackberry/raspberry
• rum
• almond
• lemon
• ginger
• date
• spice-cake
• brandy
• vanilla
• honey

Some of those I can discard right away. Dates would be too dark for this particular cake, and honey and caramel might be too sweet with the brown sugar already in the frosting. I adore almond, but can’t picture it blending well with brown sugar or cream cheese.

Once I figure out what flavor, I need to decide how it will present itself. There are two elements that I can play with:
1) a soaking syrup. It doesn’t actually soak, but it does moisten the cake and add some flavor. It’s most necessary in lower-fat cakes like white cakes, to lend moisture. This cake doesn’t really need it, so it will be used sparingly.
2) a curd, jam, or other thick filling. (For those of you not in the know, a “curd” is basically a super-rich custard. It’s made with your flavor base, say a bit of lemon zest and juice or pureed peach, cooked with egg yolks and sugar. It can be made in any flavor, I think.)

So there are lots of options. Between layers, a brandy syrup may be topped by a raspberry coulis, or a lemon curd could be dusted with crystallized ginger. I could even make a vanilla buttercream, stud it with blackberries, and drizzle it with caramel. You know, if I wanted to. Though I wouldn’t.

I could also make a whole different flavored cake and alternate its layers with the peach cake layers. Like with the spice cake. It would be pretty.

Right now I’m kind of thinking a four-layer peach cake with lemon-ginger curd alternating with blackberry jam between layers. But then I have to think of the frosting – would brown-sugar cream-cheese frosting go well with either of those? HMM.

Maybe I could echo the brown sugar with a dark, salted caramel sauce as the soaking syrup, and add that bright note I’m looking for with a not-so-tart lemon or blackberry curd. Or maybe a lemon soaking syrup would be enough lemon flavor, and I should just delineate the layers with a simple peach curd. Or blackberry jam.

Good gracious I love complexifying.

And I am having SO MUCH FUN!

Suggestions, please!

I just talked a couple into letting me make their wedding cake.

Two of our dear friends (we were pregnant together) are getting married in DC, on the first night that their marriage will be officially recognized. They will be getting married along with several other couples from their church: each couple will have a private ceremony, but the reception is for everyone and goes from the afternoon until late in the evening. It’s going to be fairly casual; no wedding dresses or fancy flowers or bridezillas (we hope). Each guest is going to bring something to eat, and this cake – while the only actual cake that we know of so far – is not going to be the only dessert. So it’s not really that big a deal. I’m not really that crazy.

Still. I am making. A. Wedding. Cake.

IN TWO DAYS.

Okay, I’ll reassume the “crazy” title. Especially since I won’t be able to work on it much tomorrow since the land will be cleared and I think I’ll probably be tied up supervising that for most of the day.

I’m not so much overwhelmed by the planning or baking. Those are the parts that I adore. The part which I do not adore – unfortunately the part that is most important with a wedding cake – is the presentation. How on earth am I supposed to assemble it in the first place – I’ve no idea how to use those pillary-thingies you usually see stuck in wedding cakes. And I’ll have to frost it without it looking disgusting too. Not to mention transport it!

I think this necessitates a quick, crazy trip to the baking section of our local craft store. Cake boxes and bases and pillary-thingies ahoy!

My husband just loooooves his junk food… and he harbors a very special addiction to a certain neon-cheese-powder-coated-tortilla chip. Salty, unnaturally orange and loaded with MSG, their siren call seduces him with every trip to the supermarket. Unpronounceable chemical ingredients aside, these babies also cost about $4.50 a bag – fairly expensive for one evening’s-worth of snack food, I’d say.

So I’ve been experimenting with making some addictive crunchy carb things of my own. Since I often cook Latin food, I am rarely without tortillas (corn tortillas, thank you very much), so why not make homemade chips?

I tried baking them – you know, so I could indulge too? Ugh. They were awful – hard, wooden, tasteless. So not worth the calories.

Then I had to fry some up in order to make chilaquiles the other night, and tried some… ooh, delicious! They didn’t even need salt, the toasted-corn-flavor was so good! I had to be vigiliant about swatting hands away from them in order to have enough for the intended dish.

The best thing was that they took less than 10 minutes to make! (I’d even say less than 5, except I wasn’t timing myself and wouldn’t want to mislead you.) And at $2 for about 100 tortillas, these aren’t going to break the bank any time soon. Even if Josh does ask me to make them every single night, as he has for the past week.

Pour about 1/8-1/4″ of canola or veggie oil into a pot or deep pan. The amount doesn’t matter as much as making sure that the bulb of the thermometer is touching the oil. Cut a stack of 10-15 tortillas into eighths or whatever – don’t make them too small because it’s hard to get them out quickly anyway. Use a pizza wheel or if you don’t want to dirty a cutting board, a pair of scissors. (10-15 tortillas will make one-two generous American-sized servings, maybe 2-3 Mexican-restaurant-bowl-of-chips’ worth.)

Keep a very damp (but not dripping) cloth towel right next to the pot. If you have a gas stove your oil might catch fire if it splashes. Turn off the flame, cover the flaming pot with the damp towel and the pot lid, and remove the pot from the heat.

Line a baking sheet with a couple layers of paper towels for the finished chips. Stick it in a 200* oven.

Heat your oil to between 340 and 360. Take it off the burner if it gets too hot, and lower the heat accordingly. Splash! In they go one by one (to avoid sticking). If you’re using a shallower pot, don’t be as enthusiastic as I was.

Turn them as soon as the edges get golden. Use metal tongs, not plastic.

Fish out the chips with a deep-fry spider and spread them on the baking sheet. Return the sheet to the oven to keep them warm until they’re all done.

Left to right: raw tortillas, chips done between 340-360*, chips done between 380-400*.

Sprinkle with kosher salt, garlic powder, cheese dust, and whatever else your heart desires. NOM.

I got my soil tested today. I went local, because the Farmer’s Coop is 6-10 minutes from my house and they do it within 5 minutes. Quick and dirt-y.   (I do kind of wish I’d sent away for the more detailed tests – they can tell you exactly how much magnesium, calcium, etc. is in your soil, and how to get each up to optimum levels – but you get what you get if you wait til last minute).

Long story short: my soil is below par, but not as much as I’d expected. While Sofía was napping I took several samples in two categories: one from the lower, marshy, humus-y part of the site and one from the suspiciously-backfill-looking hill-part. I figured they’d be different and boy, were they.

The soil samples of the lower part of the site looked just beautiful. Fine-grained, sandy, and black. Earthworms flailing all over the place (except in the wet bits). It looked like absolutely perfect garden soil – except that every slice I dug out soon filled with water. Sigh. Turns out its pH is very high too – 5.1 – and it’s actually low in nutrients. I’m not sure what the Coop guy meant by “nutrients.” He didn’t seem to know exactly himself, he was just pointing at a results number on a sheet – but he said that highly organic soils easily leach them into the water table and thus often aren’t as healthy as you’d think. Hm. Still, the texture (when it’s not soggy) must be like chocolate sugar.

The other samples, taken from the “hill” section, were as different a texture as you can get. It’s peppered with chunks of white clay and nearly impossible to dig, as it’s chock-full of what look like river pebbles. Keep in mind that that area’s the only well-drained area on site and thus will have to be quite thoroughly dug up and planted, and heave a big sigh for me. The pH was 5.5 (better), however, and the nutrients were higher as well. Coop dude said that clay doesn’t release them as easily.

What a bipolar gardening site. If only I could mix the two parts together. Or if only the good part weren’t halfway underwater.

The plan that the guy outlined for me involves the application of calcium chips every spring and fall for a couple years until the acidity gets up to 6ish, at which point we’ll switch to a slower-acting lime dust. His main solution for each site seems to be a thick application of topsoil; both to cover up the clay part and to raise the level of the humus part.

I suppose I could raise the lower level significantly bit by bit with a few cubic yards of good soil delivered each year. I could leave the swampy parts be for now, just smothering them with sturdy cover crops to build up the soil more in the mean time. But then – wah – more than half the site would be useless for years!

Or maybe I could fix the marshy part by borrowing someone’s front loader to scrape up all the humus, raise the soil level with fill dirt, and then reapply the humus on top. That might be cheaper. If I knew someone with a front loader.

Whatever happens, it all really makes me wish we’d bought one of the other houses with the ready-to-go yards!

Got my fruit trees from Stark Bros yesterday.

Cast of characters upper left to upper right: Jonathan apple (because it pollinates the Honeycrisp), sugar maple, Honeycrisp apple (best eating apple ever), 2-in-1 sweet cherry (VanSweet and Golden Stark Gold), Canadice seedless grape, and Redhaven peach. Below in the long black box are three pink rugosa roses, two blueberries, and 6 Kiowa blackberries (whoops – I was looking specifically for a thornless blackberry variety, found one, then got excited about this one’s size and switched it, not noticing that this one’s very much not thornless! Ouch!)

Of course the directions say to plant immediately. So why are these guys populating our sunporch, crowded two and three into too-small containers? Well remember, because of the snow the forest clearing was delayed from Feb. 9th to the 23rd. Then because all the snow melted and turned the site to swamp, we had to delay again, to March 8th, next Monday. So I am not prepared at all! I’m just praying that the site will dry out some more before Monday – though there’s more rain scheduled for tonight.

It’s ok though; nighttime temps are down in the 20s this week, so if I had planted them outside, I’d spend all this week running back and forth with sheets and blankets to swaddle them up every night and undress them every morning. Besides, I’m sure these guys can survive a week as sheltered, potted princesses. It may even give them something of a head start, who knows?

Unlike previous years, the quality of this shipment was a little spotty. The rhubarb was completely dry-rotted, and the maple sapling has barely *any* roots – they look chopped off. I’m really dubious as to its potential survival. And one of the roses was straight-up crispy. Customer service promptly and courteously offered to send new ones, and placed a watch on the peach tree (I noticed dead leaf buds) so they’ll know to replace it if it dies later.

Other than that, though, things looked really healthy. The Jonathan apple had such a huge root system that I’m pretty sure it’s a 2- or 3-year-old tree, not just a 1-year whip.

I’ve got another two grapes and a fig sapling coming later this month from a nursery out in California. Depending on how advanced we are with the site preparation, I may call to delay that shipment as well. Durned snow!

Blackberry cornbread, hot chocolate, and beans-n-weenies.