Future garden guru!... and other lies I tell myself to get through the winter

According to sources (such as my friends on Facebook) this is supposed to be the last frigidly cold week before the weather finally starts creeping towards spring. This is, of course, based on previous years' weather history. So, history, please, for the love of ---, repeat yourself! 

I love this blanket, but I need to be able to
get out from under it one of these days! 

I'm over winter. Like, really, REALLY over winter. I like the cold weather and hibernating and snow and all that, but seriously, it's been COLD. I feel like I haven't been outside in weeks, because, well, I really haven't! Just running between the car and the indoors and that is just no way to live. I'm getting cabin fever! I'm getting seasonal affective disorder! I'm developing a vitamin D deficiency! Spring! HELP! 

Ok, ok, I'm overreacting a bit here. I know we don't even have it as bad as, say, New England, which I think is still stuck somewhere under a glacier. And it's not just the cold that I'm over. I need some sunlight in my life. I come to work and it's too cold to go for a walk outside and by the time I leave it's dark. I have a window right behind me, so I can't complain too much, but really. I just need a nice walk outside. Just a few minutes and I'll be good. 

End rant. 

Luckily, there are some fun things that happen during the depressingly cold month of February... Valentine's Day and the Oscars! In all fairness, I don't care much about either, not really. But what I do care about is a reason to celebrate. Celebrate love, celebrate film, celebrate a reason to smile in this dark, dreary month. I'll take it! 

A very appreciated box of candy from the
Employee Appreciation Committee

I try to keep a strict no junk food at work rule,
but maybe just this once...

Valentine's Day fell on a Saturday this year, which meant that Tom and I got the whole weekend to celebrate. Some people find Valentine's Day hokey and a greeting card holiday and what have you. I don't disagree with that, I just don't care. Sure, you shouldn't need a day to celebrate your love (of your significant other OR friends OR family, who needs the limits?), but what's wrong with assigning one anyway? If you are copping out on your relationships the rest of the year that's on you, not on Valentine's Day. And if you don't want to support the greeting card companies, don't buy one. No harm, no foul.

The lovely flowers Tom sent me so I could show
off to my new office mates how great my husband
is. It worked. 

We didn't do much for the weekend, but it was nice setting aside some time to ourselves. We had fun goofing off at DSW for an hour and a half while we waited for a table at the Cheesecake Factory. We were seated in one of our favorite areas, right next to a server station. I can understand why some people would not appreciate that type of ambiance, but we like eavesdropping on the servers muttering curses about their tables and the kitchen and their managers. Plus, if you ever need something, there is ALWAYS someone standing around who can help you. We had a very pleasant meal and our very ditzy, but pleasant server schooled us on how to eat a whole artichoke. We almost missed the best part! Serves us right for thinking we know a lot about food. A wise man knows only that he does not know... or something like that. 

I did get a real treat when Tom took to the kitchen to make me some raspberry stuffed french toast, which might be the best thing I've ever eaten. The pictures might not do it justice, but this was a comically large breakfast and I enjoyed every single bite of it. 

Good thing I don't diet; I'd be really bad at it

That's turkey bacon with it, because, you know,
health. 

We also played a round of Pandemic.
We lost. As did humanity. 

This past Sunday was the Oscar's! Again, I actually don't care much about who wins, who is wearing what, or all that jazz. But it's fun to keep the red carpet shows on in the background while I do my usual Sunday cooking. AND it seemed like a fantastic excuse to get some cheese-journaling on! 

The brie we had been so looking forward to

Frittata fixin's

We look ready to make crepes!
Sadly, we did not. 

Cheese journaling? What's that? Well, fun story...

Way back in the days before Tom and I were dating, I bought him a Christmas gift of a cheap little Wine Journal and an equally cheap bottle of wine. Little did I know that making a hobby of journaling about our wine drinking (and maybe the wine drinking itself) would bring us closer and eventually lead us to the old married couple we are today! Hooray for making notes! And for wine!

Of course, we don't even like wine all that much. I mean, I guess we like it enough. But do we appreciate smoky undertones and notes of blackberry and a hint of chocolate on the back of the tongue? Nope, sure don't. For all the wine classes I took at my last job and all the wine tastings I've been to and all the journaling we did, I can't pick out those subtle flavors. Wine connoisseurs, we are not.

But cheese? On Tom's To-do List there is definitely an entry for becoming a fromagier. And that has been on his to-do list for quite some time. This year I FINALLY got around to remembering that at the appropriate time of gift-giving and found him a neat little cheese journal so that we could have some fun eating cheese and feeling productive about it. Can you say that about your cheese eating? 

Baked brie with honey, baguette and apples. Fancy ish, yo. 

We skipped dinner, ate a silly amount of cheese and bread and fell asleep on the couch about halfway through the awards show. Funny the little things that show you are growing up... 

Before all that happened we actually got to enjoy a fairly warm Sunday. At 40 degrees I was happy to forgo my winter coat for a little hoodie, which was not warm enough, but who cares. 40 degrees! It was like summer! Except in summer I don't usually spend the morning shoveling and salting my sidewalk. Beggars can't be choosers, I suppose. 

Perhaps it was the warm weather, but it seemed like a good day to get some gardening going! My desk at work needed some serious plantage and our future backyard needs some serious planning, so Sunday was as good a day as any to start on those things. 

Our haul from Home Depot (and some gifts from friends) 

We bought some seeds to start this upcoming weekend. I don't know much about gardening. Plant stuff, pull weeds, water it... that pretty much sums it up. I've never started anything (well, almost anything) from seeds. The last few years in our community garden we bought already started plants, which we probably will end up doing a bit of this year as well. But, I really want to try learning to garden from scratch. What a good hobby! Relatively cheap, active, outdoorsy AND it produces food I get to eat! 

Artichokes, eggplant and squashes, oh my!

What a test of patience this project will be. You may not get the results you want for YEARS. And that is on purpose! Artichokes and asparagus you aren't even supposed to harvest the first year or two. Supposing they even take to our soil, which is yet to be seen. We haven't spent any time in the back yard since the fall and I can't wait for the ground to thaw so we can start plotting stuff out. I will have to find a picture of the garden I have in my head and then post a picture of what actually comes out... I am sure they won't be quite the same. 

Just a simple vegetable garden...

For now, though, it is still too cold to do much. Hopefully the next few weeks will warm up and we can finally get our hands dirty. In the meantime, I'm working on my desk garden. I adopted two lovely plants to bring some air purification to my work space. If you have a desk, do yourself and everyone around you a favor and get a nice, low-light, leafy green plant. Plants are good chi, for one, and for two, they clean the stale, dusty, recirculated air that you are sharing with tons of people. 

My Peace Lily. Her name? I'll give you one guess

Dracaena Deremensis. Otherwise known as Drake.

In addition to a leafy plant (or two!) I wanted a nice, fragrant herb. I'm not big on flowers and I don't want anyone around me to have allergies act up from pollen (can that happen inside?), so herbs sounded like just the ticket. I really wanted mint, but there were NO seeds or plants at Home Depot! Anyone know why this is? Not even seeds? 

I found instead a nice seed packet for Lemon Balm, which is a lemony herb in the mint family. I think it must have been fate, because it seems to be just what I'm looking for. Lemon and mint scents are known to bring feelings of happiness and alertness, two things anyone could use at any job. 

I was equally excited for the beautiful pot that I am
going to put my herbs in

This acquisition is two-fold, because in addition to eventually getting some nice herbage at work, I also get some practice starting seeds and growing a plant from nothing! Well, I mean, from a seed, but it will be MY doing that the seed turned into a plant. If it works, that is. Give me a break, it's my first time doing this! 

Makeshift greenhouse in our Green Room

Grow, my pretties! 

I'm really looking forward to the warm weather and throwing myself head first (not literally) into our garden. It was fun working in our backyard before it got too cold to even think of stepping outside. We've made some great strides in turning our house into a home and I'm ready to take that creativity and energy outside. And, in case you hadn't picked up on this, I'm just ready to BE OUTSIDE!

One last thing. I've hit the three month mark at my new job, which doesn't mean much except that it's not really such a NEW job any more. Now it is just my job. And it is official that I am done with the Legal Seafoods company, as I finally got my last paycheck from them (don't ask why it took so long). Thank you, Roger Berkowitz, for the not-even-fifteen-dollars. I'll try not to spend it all in one place. 

Don't worry, you'll get one more chance to
screw me over at tax time. 

Sheridan's To-do List 

- plot out garden

- read gardening book so I know how to plot out garden

- find out if "plot out garden" is the right way to say that

- start seeds

- talk to seeds in hopes they grow super huge!

- plan some summer camping trips (like, a LOT of them)

- start training for the Broad Street Run (did I forget to mention that little thing?)

- pray to the weather gods that I will be able to run outside soon

- take a picture of my new desk with my new lovely plant babies

- write another blog post sooner that this one took me

So what are your expert gardening tips? Any successes or failures you would like to share? I have this picture in my head of subsisting solely off of the food I produce all summer and canning everything I can't eat and maybe never having to set foot in the produce section of a grocery store again... perhaps I am getting ahead of myself? 

If you don't have gardening tips, share what you are MOST EXCITED to do once the weather warms up! I'm overwhelmed at the possibility that winter is wrapping up and there is so much to do! So much that... that I can't even think of anything besides gardening and camping and living outside ALL THE TIME. So what warm thoughts are getting your through these cold days? 

Until next time faithful readers... keep calm and garden on.  

Plenty of sunshine coming in today

My tidy work space

"A girl should be two things:
 who and what she wants."
~ Coco Chanel 

Both people who sit in front of me were out today
so I managed to take a picture of Lily without also
taking a creepy picture of the backs of their heads

Let's get cookin'

We are nearly a whole month into 2015 and I don't even know where the time has gone! I don't know because, to tell you the truth, I haven't done much. That is mildly intentional ; I was ready for a nice relaxing, boring introduction to the new year. Last year was so exciting that I'm still a little tired from it, but I'm waking up. Slowly, but surely. 

I've been starting and re-starting this blog post for two weeks now, because I felt like I should be providing a really epic start to a new year on Sheridan's To-do List. And I started working on a truly epic to-do list for 2015. It was coming along beautifully. It has headings with sub-headings and bullet point lists. It's specific and measurable and timely and all the other SMART things your goals should be. It's categorized and alphabetized and prioritized and... and...

And it is sitting unfinished between my laptop, my tablet, my work computer and my scattered notebooks. Oh well, it's a beautiful work in progress.

So here I was, waiting and waiting on myself to finish a lofty to-do list just so I could come on here and talk to you about this grand to-do list that has taken me away from actually getting things done because the first goal was to make the goddamn to-do list! A vicious cycle if ever there was one. 

Spinning my wheels on this year's to-do list is just a symptom of the larger issue, of course, which is that this year the sky is kind of the limit in terms of what I want to accomplish. The past few years (my whole life?) has been very straight forward on certain to-dos. Finish thesis. Graduate. Get married. Get a job. Check, check, check and check! So now, what I want to do is a much vaguer and more exciting question. Not that those previous things weren't exciting. They were amazingly exciting in ways I wouldn't have even guessed at the outset, but they were easy to focus on because it was easy to decide that I wanted to finish grad school. I wanted to marry Tom. I wanted a better job. 

Now what do I want?

Instead of taking even longer to detail every single thing I want to do this year, this decade, this lifetime, maybe I should just take some advice I got while working on my thesis and just start writing. 

So here we go. First thing on To-Do List 2015:

Be a better cook

Now, I love to cook. I like to eat and I'm an almost reformed picky eater, so cooking became a natural hobby since I get to control exactly what goes into the food I eat. And I'm a pretty good cook, if I do say so myself. Not amazing, no Top Chef here, but I can cook from scratch and it doesn't always come out terrible. 

But I'd like to be better. One of my long-term I'll-probably-never-reach-it-but-I-might-as-well-try goals is to cook all of our food from scratch. I know, I know, that is a REALLY lofty goal, but sometimes the journey is the destination, man. So to work towards that nearly impossible goal, I'd like to get some more skills under my belt. 

Because I can cook. But I don't cook efficiently. I've got NO knife skills. And considering I've been spending more and more time cutting up produce and such, it becomes quite time consuming. Do you know how long it takes to dice something, anything, when you are lousy with a knife? Painfully long.

This past month we have tried a few new recipes, because isn't the best way to develop new skills to just go for it? 

One recipe we tried was a roasted butternut squash soup I got out of Self* magazine. It sounded great! Roasted butternut squash, golden beets, garlic, onion, all blended together on a cold winter day. What could be better? 

Our first attempt

Well, what could have been better was that I could have NOT burnt basically all of the vegetables. I followed the recipe, I think, to a t! What happened? Who knows, but that dark brown color above is certainly NOT what was supposed to be in our bowls that night. We doctored it up with goat cheese and sausage and red pepper, but to little avail. We sopped up the burnt mess with some good bread, but as soon as that bread was gone, so was any pretense that we were going to choke down more soup. 

Fail. 

Luckily, we had to buy such a quantity of root vegetables for this recipe that we decided we would split it into two batches. So we had a whole giant Tupperware full of all the fixings we needed for a take two as well as a little know-how to avoid the burnt disaster that was take one. 

Success! Notice the drastic difference in color?

And so it was that we managed to produce an edible soup a few days later. I won't go into detail about how I avoided the initial pitfalls of the recipe, but I will tell you that I took the LONG way. This was supposed to be a quick, easy soup and maybe one day it will be, but it was not on that fateful winter day. It was delicious, though, and it will be made again. 

Fortunately, I am not one to get dismayed at culinary catastrophes as I always enjoy a good "emergency pizza" when they happen. And usually the food we produce is edible if nothing else. Usually. 

Our next adventure last month was pho. You ever try pho? Do it today. It's rainy. It's a good day for pho. Really, EVERY day is a good day for pho. It is a Vietnamese beef noodle soup made with fresh and dried herbs, thin and delicate rice noodles, served with a side of heaven. I'm not exaggerating; it's one of the best foods maybe in the whole world. GO GET SOME NOW. 

Eating it at a restaurant is a pleasant, warm, homey experience. A steaming bowl of broth and noodles, some finely shredded beef, a plate of sweet and savory and tangy additions to make the soup your own. Ahh...

We did NOT make this pho

Making it at home sounded easy. It's all in the broth, really. Get some good beef bones, the right blend of spices, a big pot and a whole day to smell the amazingness of gently simmering deliciousness. We had all of that and yet... 

Tom looking so hopeful at Assi

Our cart looked like a place you'd want to live

And yet something didn't come out quite right. We got the right bones (we think). We got a perfectly portioned spice packet (hopefully?). We let it simmer for the right amount of time. We followed the recipe. Didn't we? Didn't we??

The spices that, if nothing else, kept our home
smelling crazy good all day long

The broth was too fatty. That was for sure. There must have been an inch of oil floating at the top. We skimmed it off, several times actually, and it still seems to be a little more oily than we've ever had at any restaurant. The color was too dark, not the nearly clear brown broth we wanted. The taste was just... Not. Quite. Right. 

Our pho. Not bad at all, but not money.

I don't know how good a palette I have, which I'm going to guess means not that good. When we did wine tasting at my previous job, I never picked up on the notes of blackberry or toasted tobacco or whatever I was supposed to taste. It tasted like wine. Dry or sweet, I could tell you, heavy or light, but nothing about defining the flavor. Luckily, I don't care much about wine. I do care about food so it is frustrating that not only can I not get the recipe right, but I don't even know what exactly went wrong. 

I'm being hard on us, of course. Pho is one of those recipes that sounds very simple, but if you don't know what you are doing, especially when it comes to picking out ingredients, you're not going to get the results you want. And it was only our first time. It was a lot of work and not the cheapest recipe to make (in part because it produces A LOT of broth) so I don't know how soon we will get to it again. Rest assured you will hear all about it when we do. 

We've had this bag of condiments for years
and I finally got to use it when I realized we
had no soy sauce for dumplings. Boom. 

While I keep on adding recipes to our repertoire, I hope to keep adding on to my skill set. As I mentioned, knife skills top the list on things-I-suck-at-that-I-wish-I-didn't. It doesn't end there, though. It's going to be a long winter and there's no better place to be than your kitchen during the doldrums of February and March. 

2015 Cooking To-do:

- learn to use a knife, faster, but safely 
- get a few sauce recipes under my belt (dipping sauce, pasta sauce, hollandaise sauce, all sauce all the time)
- utilize our pizza stones (yes, plural) for more homemade pizza. A LOT more homemade pizza
- finally use the yogurt maker I was so excited to get (and has been sitting in the closet since our wedding)
- make vegetable stock with all the leftover produce trimmings I've been saving
- learn more one-pot or crock pot meals so we don't have as many dishes to do all the time
- keep a well stocked pantry 
- cook a cake from scratch
- make homemade bread
- perfect our dumpling recipe
- more soup! 
- figure out what went wrong with the pho. Fix it. 

That is just a small smattering of the culinary accomplishments I'm striving towards this year. I'm constantly coming across new recipes and snack ideas that I want to try. Pinterest is my favorite time-suck and I've actually gotten some great recipes there. Check out my page if you want to lose an entire afternoon of your life and not even mind: https://www.pinterest.com/sherideez/ 

If you ever want any of the recipes I talk about, just leave a comment and I will post them. I'm too lazy to put them all up here and to be honest I don't follow them exactly all the time, so I can't promise our results will come out the same. But I'm good for lots of extra tips! Here is an extra tip, on the house. When you are looking at recipes online and really want to make them well, READ THE COMMENTS. You will learn everything you need there. Sometimes the people posting recipes haven't even made them, so the comments section is where you get your real info on what works, what doesn't, if there is too much sauce, not enough, freezes well, isn't worth your time, etc. Live in the comments section. At least on recipe sites. 

Well, here we are, the end of the first post of 2015. I'm getting all misty eyed... oh, wait, no, I'm just getting hungry. What are your cooking aspirations? Learn a souffle? How to filet a whole fish? A grilled cheese? Tell us! We have a lot to learn from each other and maybe another reader has a helpful hint on how to make that coq au vin you've been struggling with really shine. Or not. You won't know if you don't ask. 

One more hint before I go stuff my face with my scrumptious if not that ambitious peanut butter and jelly sandwich.... If you are new to cooking, or just looking to expand your standard skills, I cannot recommend this book enough:

Everything you need to know is in there and every recipe comes with helpful hints on prep, flavor profiles, time savers, etc. I've read this book so many times it is falling apart, although you can still borrow it if you want. Really, everyone should have a copy. I've only made a few recipes in the book, but the advice I've gotten in there was worth every penny... that I didn't spend because my mom gave it to me for free. Whatever. Get the book. 

And have a fulfilling and exciting day!

*Another goal of mine is to get more use out of my fitness magazines. Actually using the exercises they recommend or the recipes is the main part of that goal.