Tonight's Sumptuous Repast

My Darling B began to bring in the bean crop about a week and a half ago, and the damned plants just won't stop producing beans.

Since it looks as though we'll be eating beans for a while yet, B's always on the lookout for new ways to prepare them, and this is what she came up with tonight: chicken, potatoes and beans in a lemon sauce.

There's no recipe, sorry. Or, rather, there were several recipes, from which B took what she needed and relied in inspiration to supply the rest. There's a little basil and garlic in there ("Not enough garlic," My Darling B mused as she ate) and I don't know what else.

And there was plenty left over for lunch!

Tonight's Sumptuous Repast

Pesto pasta with tomatoes and zucchini! It's quick & easy, and it goes well with a bottle of Botham's X vin white wine.

It's making you drool, isn't it?

In the steamer

There was a time, not so long ago really, that I would have brayed with laughter if you'd suggested I might enjoy a dinner made with zucchini. But that's what we were having tonight.

All the ingredients come from the weekend farmer's market, so they're no more than a few days old.

The toms were deliciously sweet.

... and the secret ingredient is:

The pasta bowl!

Purchased for only seventy-five cents at the Saint Vincent de Paul thrift shop, this is one of those prizes that makes the meal, because presentation counts.

This just in ...

One of our next door neighbors has the most amazing raspberry patch. We've looked on it with envy for years, and were delighted when a few of the plants nearest our yard migrated over the lot line and began to grow in our garden. This summer they even produced berries for the first time. B would bring them in a cup at a time, happily snacking on them.

And then last weekend our neighbor invited us to wade into her patch and pick as many as we liked. "I'm tired of picking them," she said. So tonight B hung a basket around her neck, braved the mosquitoes for the better part of an hour, and brought this bounty back to the kitchen. She's soaking them for a while to encourage the little bugs to quit the scene. Sometime, maybe next weekend, these could become raspberry jam. Or a tart.

It's an ice cream maker ... duh!

My Darling B bought an Oster multi-speed food-chopper-upper with a half-dozen attachments back in nineteen eighty-something and, as far as I know, she's only ever used the blender.

But last week while trolling the many and varied offering on e-bay she went for this impulse purchase, an ice cream making attachment. Pour the cream and other ingredients into the central barrel, pack it with ice and salt (does anybody know what the salt's supposed to do?) around the sides, lock the cover down on the contraption and turn the motor on.

After about ten minutes of mixing she poured the nearly-finished ice cream into single-serving bowls and stacked them in the freezer. But she sampled a bit of the mix by licking the mixing paddles clean with her tongue, making happy yummy sounds all the while. How could it be anything but delicious? It was cream and strawberries!

She could hardly wait to scoop a bit out this morning to see how it turned out. And what do you know? It was ice cream!

Adventures In Plumbing

My Darling B caught me seated before the kitchen plumbing as I was putting a new blade in my hacksaw.

"Oh-oh, it's time for the cursing to start!" she observed.

"Can't do it without lots of cursing," I answered, and got to work.

Adventures In Plumbing

Here's what I was finally getting around to fixing: I cobbled together this drain pipe from pieces I had on hand when I discovered that I wouldn't be able to install the sink disposal, as I thought I could when I put in the new sink back in December.

Although the drain worked fine, but My Darling B wanted her disposal once again. My task was to figure out how to give her one.

Adventures In Plumbing

And here's why I was unable to attach the disposal in the first place: The sink's drain ended up directly over the sewer pipe, which sticks out from the wall so far that the butt-end of the disposal would be in the same spot, spatially, that the sewer pipe is now occupying. So I had to cobble together the Rube Goldberg drain pipe while I mustered the motivation to do what had to be done.

Today, I finally had my motivation ready to do the job.

Adventures In Plumbing

I decided the best fix was to saw off the end of the sewer pipe, leaving about two inches still sticking out from the wall.

There's probably a good reason for leaving so much pipe sticking out. If you know anything about plumbing, you're probably wincing right now, thinking, "Don't do it!" Well, it's too late. I know nothing about plumbing and I'm not calling a plumber to fix this thing.

As you can see, I had a bit of a problem finding the room to get in there to do the job. I had to knock out a partition, then ask My Darling B to pull all the mixing bowls out of the cupboard because by this time my hands were covered in muck. Finally, I yanked a shelf out and crawled into the cupboard so I had the reach and the angle I needed to hack away at the pipe.

After working behind a desk for three years, I've gotten flabby and have no stamina for this kind of thing any more. It took me three-quarters of an hour to saw that damned pipe off. The last quarter-inch took at least fifteen minutes. If I ever have to do this again, I'm going to put in a request with the chief financial officer to buy the power tool that does this.

Adventures In Plumbing

I had planned to reuse the old disposal. It seemed to work just fine, but its butt end was so big that the base of it still crowded up against the sewer pipe even after I cut the end of the pipe short.

I would have to either cut some more off the sewer pipe, or I could drive down to the hardware store to see if they had a smaller unit. Hmmm. That's a tough one.

This unit was a little bit smaller, and it was made in the USA. All the rest were made in China. I've heard the Chinese have fallen on hard times over there, but so have we, and I'd rather keep Americans employed, or whoever it is in America that's making these things. Damn, got up on my soap box without even noticing. Sorry about that.

The butt end of this unit still crowded the sewer pipe, but there was enough flex in the rubber adapter to make room for the disposal.

Just FYI: I managed to get through this entire project without cussing, a first for me.

On the Shelf

Trying to improve the storage available in our tiny kitchen, I finally finished this shelf by staining it and installing it today.

It came together almost exactly as I imagined it would, with just two flaws easily visible: The grain of the closest bracket is vertical, while the others are horizontal, and there's a gap in the shelf under the third bracket that's wider than the one between Letterman's front teeth.

But it looks pretty good otherwise, and holds all our pitchers and a few other odds and ends. I have to admit I'm well chuffed with the results.

Hang 'Em High

Today's Home Improvement Project #1: Give My Darling B a place to keep her stemware.

The china hutch is full, there's no room in the cupboards for them, and there's no room for shelves anywhere.

The solution? Find a place to hang them. I've seen these stemware tracks on the underside of shelfwork in wine bars. The only trick was to find a place to hang them, but B suggested the underside of the counter end, which worked out fine.

Then I ran to the store to buy some wooden cleats and some pine lath, cut it to length and tapped it into place with some finishing nails. The most rewarding home improvement projects are the ones that are easiest, yet still produce impressive results. I'm going to get a kiss for this one, I can feel it.

Adventures in Plumbing

Success! It took all day to get the water running again and, more importantly, to get the waste water to go where it was supposed to go, but I finally had everything hooked up in time to hand the kitchen over to My Darling B, who planned on a pizza for dinner tonight.

Look at the size of that thing! It looked nice and big in the store, but once I got it installed it looked even BIGGER! I could probably climb in there and take a bath! And I needed one, after taking apart the drain pipes and playing in the muck.

Adventures in Plumbing

Time for Adventures in Plumbing, where I take apart some vital piece of our house's waterworks, then try to figure out how to put it back together again.

Today, I tore out the kitchen sink. It was made of stainless steel, divided down the middle, and the faucet began to make an annoying knocking sound about two weeks ago that has gotten worse with each passing day.

The sink also had a garbage disposal attached to it, just to make the operation more interesting.

I planned to replace it with an enameled cast iron sink that was divided into a large and a small bowl, but when I went to the store to buy it, I found that it was made in China. Whoops. My Darling B would never have allowed me to bring that through the door, so I quickly re-evaluated the choices.

Everything was made in China except for a selection of divided stainless steel sinks much like the one I was trying to get rid of, and a number of acrylic sinks. I wasn't crazy about them at first, but found one in stock that had a single, huge bowl we'd be able to wash even our largest frying pans and platters in, and went with that.

Even though I got what I thought was an early start, I ended up working on this project until dinner time. It should go without saying that I've never removed a kitchen sink before, nor installed one.