Big news at the Carter house: we’re getting chickens.

Isn’t that just so femivore of me?

All we need is the coop. Which usually runs a few hundred bucks, even if you’re building it yourself.

But thankfully, my husband is a cheap and resourceful man (really sexy traits — and I’m not even joking — when we started dating a dozen years ago). He found out that BigCar, a local arts collective, is unloading quantities of industrial shelving from an old auto-parts store that’s now the Service Center for Contemporary Culture to people who have a specific project in mind for up-cycling. He figured it would make great framing for our chicken coop, and hey, it’s free.

So here’s a shot of the beginning stages of our coop (via an Instagram from last week):

The top part will end up with plywood and siding, and the whole thing will be wrapped in chicken wire (bottom too, as predators like to dig under coops to get to the chickens), and they’ll have an enclosed run that’ll extend about 15 feet. My favorite part is the ladder they’ll walk to get into their house, which is ready-made from a steel auto-parts shelf.

His prediction is that the whole project will cost him about $70. That man, I tell you. Be still my beating heart. More pics of the progress will come.

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In other news, it’s cherry season! Only about 3 weeks early!

I had my first-ever experience of cherry-picking a couple years ago, when my friend Shannon discovered a sour cherry tree in her new yard. We picked like mad, probably after the cherries were a little over-ripe, fighting against birds and worms and gravity to get the largest harvest we could. Last year the tree was dormant and produced no fruit — so we were eager last month when fruit began to appear. Because of the crazy-mild spring in Indiana, the cherries are very early, and I was shocked to get the call last week that they’d likely be ready within days. I picked this afternoon, with Shannon, her girls, and Emily:

Don’t we look gloriously happy to be picking cherries? I think it looks like an ad for some sort of pharmaceutical that has nothing to do with cherries. In reality, one of us had undoubtedly said something unbearably funny, since we are just those kind of girls who say unbearably funny things with every exhale.

And if I’m smiling, then what you can’t see is the fear in my eyes: that rung was as high as I was willing to go on the ladder. And every so often I’d look down and wonder what it would feel like to not just fall, but fall through the limbs of a cherry tree, scraping  exposed skin along the way, to the hard ground below. The smile was all a nervous facade.

There is a reason someone invented a cherry picker. A person-sized bucket with sides & hydraulics sounds like the way to go.

But all that living-dangerously did paid off with a quart & a half of cherries. And don’t think I won’t be out there again in coming days — dropping necessary activities for more opportunities to take my chances on a ladder in a (relatively short) tree.

Related posts:

1. What to do with two gallons of tart cherries,
   part one: dry them.
2. Unpacking, unschmacking.
3. What to do with two gallons of tart cherries,
   part two: freeze the juice.

Yesterday was a long day in my kitchen, but not one of those blissful, satisfying days where nightfall leaves you with a beautiful layer cake, or a cleaned-out pantry, or 30 sealed jars of something preserved. It was one of those days that happens, one where you’re really just getting caught-up, doing the un-sexy things that simply need to get done (hello, stock-making!), and scattered in there are a couple of botched experiments. By nightfall, after washing the 100th dish, it’s hard not to loathe the very sight of your kitchen.

Everybody has those days, right?

One of my failed experiments wasn’t a total bust — just a disappointment and therefore a lesson learned (optimism! it can be mustered!). I picked up a pound of rhubarb at the Broad Ripple Farmer’s Market last weekend, with hopes of making my first jam of the season — one that skips the sugar. You’d think that the whole no-sugar thing would be the challenge — but the recipe actually came together quite nicely.

It was the aesthetic realm in which I missed the boat. My rhubarb was mostly green, with just a couple inches of bright red at the very bottom of the stalk. I became concerned when I chopped it all up and noticed I had a pot-full of green. And then, when I cooked it, while the flavor was sweet-tart and punchy, the essence of coming summer, the color was a chilly autumn day.

I realized very quickly why rhubarb is often paired with strawberries: it’s not only for their sweetness, it’s for their color. When I think rhubarb, I expect pink. When I look at this jar of jam, my tastebuds expect something different, something maybe pear.

But, as is usually the case, we’ll eat it. And enjoy it. And make a note to try and buy the mostly-red rhubarb next time (or add a least a small amount of bright-red berries to punch up the color — this recipe utilizes this trick!).

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Related posts:

1. Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb baggage pie.
2. Small batch jam #2,
   and my femivore failures.
3. What to do with two gallons of tart cherries, part three:
   Plan to make a rustic tart,
   fail miserably,
   and end up with aptly-named
   “Cherry Surprise”

I have a story coming out in this week’s NUVO, about a new food cart in town that sells handmade popsicles (I love this company, by the way — they are making really amazing popsicles, use recyclable materials and are conscientious about giving back to the community — if you live in Indy and run across their cute retro-styled bicycle cart, give your support!).

They have a list of interesting, not-your-run-of-the-mill flavors, and one of them was avocado. When I saw it, I was immediately reminded of the avocado ice cream from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop — I made it a couple years ago, and then turned it into an avocado licuado con leche (Español for avocado milkshake) — resulting in an amazingly creamy and delightful summer drink. I immediately had in mind to figure out my own honey-sweetened version of an avocado pop.

I had a few duds before I found a winner. The losers all included dairy — I started with David’s ice cream recipe, which includes sour cream, and replaced it with yogurt. But it was a bit muddy in flavor, so I ended up ditching the milk and keeping it simple — just the avocado, honey, water, and lime juice. I love the results — very creamy, not-too-sweet, and a perfect refreshing and healthy afternoon treat.

Full disclaimer: this flavor is unusual. The avocado is very present, and I can see how it could mess with your head a little, being cold and sweet. These are not a favorite for my kids, they eat them about half the time, and the other half turn up their noses — but that’s fine by me, since it means a four-pack of pops lasts me more than just one afternoon.

If you’re looking for more homemade popsicle recipes, check these out:
Raspberry Sherbet Popsicles
Mango Popsicles
Chocolate-Coconut Popsicles

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This post was linked up to Simple Lives Thursday, via GNOWFGLINS.

Related posts:

1. Raspberry sherbet popsicles
2. Homemade popsicles: Let’s move beyond freezing apple juice.
3. Avocado Licuado con Leche

Grant Achatz, shot slyly with my phone as he made dessert at the next table.

A year ago this coming weekend, Tim and I were celebrating 10 years of marriage. We marked the hard-earned decade by taking an unexpected sum of online poker winnings and spending every last dime of it on a dinner for two.

But not just any dinner. We dined at Alinea, in Chicago, a 3-star Michelin restaurant (there are only about 80 in the world) — home of progressive, tongue-cancer-surviving chef Grant Achatz (who just won a James Beard Award for his newest restaurant, Next). It was, by giant leaps and bounds, the most expensive meal we had ever eaten (or likely will ever eat again).

I never wrote about that dinner.

The words just never came to me. I tried a few draft posts, passed my laptop with hope to Tim to read and tell me I’d done the evening justice. But he (rightfully, thankfully) never gave his approval — my mind, vocabulary, word-crafting-skills just couldn’t adequately paint a picture of what it was like to spend an evening at Alinea.

When I think about it now, it feels other-wordly, like I dreamt it all. From the moment we entered a dark, red-lit, low-ceiling hallway, our eyes adjusting from early-evening sunlight as a Star-Trek-like pocket door hissed open to a group of four well-dressed servers waiting for our arrival, to the moment during our final dessert course when Grant Achatz stood at our table and painted chocolate and blueberry sauces in a balanced asymmetrical composition directly onto the silicone tablecloth placed specifically for this purpose (we scraped the table clean with our dessert spoons) — it felt as though we were the only patrons in a dining room with 10 other guests. The serving staff was impeccable, simultaneously professional and approachable, meeting our every need before we knew we had it.

It was like the first time you go to Paris. Or the first time you see, in person, a work of art you’ve only seen in textbooks. Or your first trip to the mountains. It was, for three hours (and 22 courses) a place in time and space that we could have never imagined. So out of my realm of what’s normal, I cannot begin to communicate it.

But I can communicate our new conundrum: unless you are a person of such means as to eat like this on a regular basis (I’m thankful we’re not, or else the magic might fade), it’s hard to follow that up when it comes time to celebrate year eleven.

But, when you think about it, we sort of set up all of marriage to be that way. We have a big party, and invite all of our friends, and do this whole pomp and circumstance thing with a ceremony. And then we go on a well-constructed vacation for a week (ours was low-key, jaunts to two delightful cities within driving distance of our wedding and home). And then, you get home, and real life begins. The life that has two people trying to live together, love each other, even when you can no longer agree to disagree. When eventual sick babies have you both sleepless. Even as you grow older, and your bodies change, and your interests change, and things aren’t the way you thought they’d be (and when are they ever?).

So it’s eleven years this Saturday, though I could swear it was just last week. And since we are not Alinea people, we plan to celebrate by having a good friend come keep our kids (babysitters are a luxury) while we go for dinner and a movie. This year we’re hitting up a local place we’ve enjoyed before and qualifies as a “special” dinner out. And then we’re going to see Avengers (before you scoff — I’ve not set foot in a movie theater since moving to Indiana almost three years ago, so in watching something other than Friday Night Lights or Madmen on a very large screen while wearing something other than pajamas, I’ll be doing something exotic).

It’s funny for me to think that in our stage of life, dinner and a movie is momentous-event-worthy. But just like Alinea isn’t what eating out is always supposed to be, whirlwind trips alone to Chicago isn’t what marriage and anniversaries are always supposed to be. Eleven might only be momentous in that it is 365 days past 10 — but it’s still another year in a life we are continuously building, tearing down, and rebuilding together. Another year worth marking.

Just me and my man. With plenty of support from Iron Man, the Hulk, and Captain America.

Related posts:

1. Carnie for a day, via Instagram

Welcome to the inaugural edition of my new blog series: Tip Tuesday (not to be confused with Tipsy Tuesday, which *should* be a blog series sometime in the future).

Why the new series? Well, let’s see. (Any given) Monday came and went, and I faced one of the following conundrums:

1. I had absolutely nothing to write about.
2. I had plenty to write about, but no photos to go along with.
3. I had an entire post written, but deleted it in a fit of dramatic self-loathing because it was boring, pretentious, redundant, or all of the above.

Tip Tuesday solves the no-post problem, and creates a purposeful arena to briefly share some of my favorite kitchen tricks. I have at least five of them, and I’m sharing two today, so that means I can use this series for roughly three more Tuesdays.

We’ll see if I can come up with a few more, just enough to make it worth this shabby introduction.

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Tip #1: Freeze those bananas (alt title: Tell me something I don’t already know, Katy)

Got a pile of over-ripe bananas creating a cozy b&b for your rapidly-reproducing family of fruit flies? Don’t change your afternoon plans in order to whip out a half-dozen loaves of banana bread. Just peel them, cut in half cross-wise, and pop them in a quart-sized freezer bag. When it’s smoothie time, grab a frozen banana instead of a fresh one — it will add thickness and chill to your smoothie, and you’ll never have to starve a smoothie craving because you’re out of bananas.

Tip #2: Freeze the skins of your juiced citrus for future zesting.

Need the juice of a half-lemon for a recipe, but no zest? Rinse off the leftover peel, dry it quickly with a towel, and pop it in a freezer bag kept for this purpose. When you need lemon, lime, or orange zest for a recipe, you can reach for a peel and zest it frozen (it’s actually easier to zest this way). If thick frost has accumulated on the peel, just give it a quick rinse under water first. You can do this with any citrus — I mostly freeze oranges, since that’s a fruit we rarely have on-hand. (Note: this isn’t ideal for zest used as garnish — but in any cooked recipe it works great.)

Related posts:

1. Guilt-assuaging smoothie
2. Fruit fly trap
3. Pick of the Month, December ’07

Eating fish is tough. Not in a flavor sense — I could likely eat it every day (though we all know what happens when you get what you wish for in that department). But financially, it’s difficult to get enough into our diet. Fish is one of those things where you get what you pay for — I’m no longer a fan of my old-standby bargain tilapia (for reasons such as these), and I’d like to buy wild-caught. For a while I thought I’d found a solution by purchasing mostly at Trader Joe’s, but then read this, and have since avoided that supply (insert mantra here about something seeming too good to be true, and therefore likely being so).

So instead, I wait for big sales at Whole Foods (some friends like Costco fish, but we aren’t members) and buy when the price is right. While we occasionally get the rare treat of bright-red wild-caught salmon, I most often buy cheaper cuts like cod (used in our fish sticks) or other inexpensive whitefish.

I like to use mild white fish in dishes with amp’d flavor — cod especially needs help beyond the simple lemon-dill roasting that lets a good piece of salmon shine. A few weeks ago I had purchased cod on sale, and brought it home, only to realize I just wasn’t in the mood for fish sticks. The thought came to me that it would likely hold up well in a curry, and the strong spices would lend a hand to its inherent blandness. Using other curry dishes as a base, with the added color and flavor of canned tomatoes, I believe we’ve found a way to get more fish on our dinner plates without breaking the bank.

As a bonus, my kids (ahem… 2 out of 3) actually love it. And Tim says it should go under the “Slap Yo Mama” section of my eternally non-existent cookbook. Taken as a compliment, and not as a passive-aggressive directive to my children, we’ve labeled this curry a keeper.

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This post was linked up to Simple Lives Thursday, via GNOWFGLINS, and Seasonal Eats at Delectable Musings.

Related posts:

1. Tofu Curry, inspired by the Box of Produce
   that Was
2. When you find yourself with 25#
   of lentils: make a new curry
3. Make your own:
   fish sticks (regular & grain-free)

To market, to market!

It’s that time of year again — summer farmer’s market season. While we in Indianapolis are abundantly blessed with a wonderful Winter Farmer’s Market that gives us access to local food from November through April, many towns only have them in the summer season. Our warm-weather markets will be starting up next weekend (we had a single weekend past with none, and I began showing withdrawal symptoms by mid-afternoon Saturday). It seemed a good time for a post to get everyone ready for fresh, local produce shopping.

But not everyone wants the same thing out of a farmer’s market, right? And some cities have lots of markets to choose from while others have just one option. I’ve caricatured a few different types of shoppers below, with tips on finding the best market to suit each of their needs.

• Just looking to support something local rather than a big box store, plan to visit occasionally.
  If this is you, then you might just want to hit up the market closest to you. Make a walk or bike ride a part of the trip, and you’re getting your exercise at the same time you shop. It’s a win-win. Take a good walk through the whole market, making notes of prices before you buy — that way you’re sure to get the best deal from your very first visit. Make friends with your favorite farmer, and she might hold a quantity of hot-ticket items on a day you know you’ll be behind the crowds.
• Wanting to try and get most of your produce at the market, eat more seasonally, and transition away from the grocery store as much as possible.
  You’re gonna really want to get to know your market options. Start first with one closest to you, but if it’s not large or diverse enough you might want to try others around town as well. The bigger the market, the bigger the price competition and potential diversity of offerings. You might even consider shopping at more than one market to get the best items (I shop at two markets every Saturday!)
• Concerned with buying local, but also prioritizing organic and/or sustainably-farmed.
  This is where you need to be prepared to research all market options, and ask lots of questions of the vendors. Some farmer’s markets have across-the-board standards for vendors (our market in Georgia required all produce sold to be sustainably-farmed, so we knew that anything we bought was going to be chemical-free). Some only require that produce be produced within a local radius, and others still have no requirements at all. So you’ll want to pay attention to signs that say “chemical-free” or “sustainably-farmed,” and don’t be afraid to ask questions on top of that (many vendors will not be “certified organic” even though they are growing food organically — this is simply because certification is a time-consuming and expensive label to garner).

One thing that many people don’t realize is that some markets pretty much let anyone sell anything — a vendor could go buy produce anywhere, and sell it as their own. They’re not necessarily being dishonest — they’re just not advertising that they didn’t actually grow the food. And in most cases, their produce is sold at the same price as the farmer a few booths down who grew everything himself and did so without using chemical pesticides. It definitely pays to ask questions of your farmers — and the best ones are more than happy to talk about their growing practices (they usually have signs advertising those practices as well).

If you live in Indianapolis, you can look here for a comprehensive list of options. If elsewhere, you can give farmersmarket.com a try, though I believe they can only show locations that have registered on their site.

But the most important thing is to enjoy getting out of the house on a Saturday morning, shopping outside, and supporting something local. Most markets open around 8 am so you can beat the heat in the heart of summer — and the vibe is always much better than the produce section of your local Kroger. Grab a cup of coffee, put on a hat, and make it a regular part of your weekend.

Related posts:

1. Scenes from the Indy Winter Farmer’s Market, Saturday Nov. 19
2. Locally grown

My dreams are of cheese and yogurt and ice cream. Great pools of them all — I swim in currents of dairy.

Ok, I haven’t actually had that dream — but maybe I can tonight, if I think hard enough about it? I certainly spend enough time during my conscious hours, pondering a list of cheeses I miss most, ordered in various arrangements of preference according to menu and quality.

And last night, after both our kids read their poems at the downtown library, I talked Emily and her family into a celebratory ice cream jaunt to Goose the Market instead of the chain frozen yogurt shop. I wasn’t even going to eat it, but darnit if I wouldn’t rather vicariously eat some good local-ish gelato over a cup of trucked-in frozen reconstituted powdered milk that oozes out of a spout in the wall (I know — they have toppings — and wisely so, because by the time you choose a bunch, weighing in at 49¢ an ounce, your ice cream cup costs about $8).

See? I even have strong opinions when I can’t eat the stuff.

Dairy-free ice cream is tough. The store-bought attempts I’d had years ago did nothing to satisfy my primal ice-cream needs — and these days I pretty much make all varieties of this dessert in our house, using my trusty thrift-store Cuisinart and David Lebovitz’s ice cream book.

Ice cream is one of those things where the dairy isn’t easy to convincingly replace.

Ice cream needs fat. And the best non-dairy fat I’ve found is coconut fat.

I’d made a dairy-free vanilla ice cream a few years ago — but these days, I am only allowed honey as a sweetener, and unless I want honey-flavored ice cream (not always a bad thing), strong flavors are in order. Inspired by a casual flipping through the well-worn pages of The Perfect Scoop, my bag of frozen sour cherries from last year’s harvest came to the rescue.

Sweet-tart and creamy, with just a hint of coconut. A splash of almond extract (don’t measure over your bowl — it comes out fast!) gives it the perfect finish. While I won’t claim that coconut milk can eternally replace the wonders of cow’s milk cream, this recipe will do me just fine until that glorious day when I once again swim in daily pools of dairy.

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Related posts:

1. Rich, creamy, dairy-free ice cream
2. Pumpkin Pie Jars (grain-free, dairy-free, naturally-sweetened)
3. Toasted coconut truffles (dairy-free)

I had forgotten about chutney.

I’m not sure how it happened. But it just popped back into my head one day, like I walked down into the basement, moved a few boxes around, and saw it laying on the floor, forlorn & discarded, and remembered, CHUTNEY!

(Metaphorically, of course. While there are lots of food items in my basement, there is, to my recollection, not a random jar of chutney lying at the foot of my never-used golf clubs.)

I love this spicy-sweet condiment. It was once my go-to topping for a pork roast, and a frequent side to curries. It’s one of those condiments that provides a huge return on investment — ingredients are easy to keep stocked, can be modified to your liking, and keeps for many days refrigerated.

As a bonus, people are always impressed with chutney — it’s just not something that gets made at home very often. And what are we doing when we invite people for dinner if not simply trying our darndest to impress them?

I tend to cook dried fruit chutneys, because that’s the easiest fruit to keep lying around. But by all means, if you have an abundance of fresh fruit, this is a great way to use it (you’ll need to change up the ratios a bit, a quick google search should help with that). I’ve been lacto-fermenting my jar by reducing the vinegar and adding a little whey after it’s cooked — this just adds a probiotic benefit. Read the note with the recipe to see this optional step.

I’ve served this as a vegetarian meal with my red lentil and squash curry — the fresh ginger works well with Indian spices. But this week we’ll have it with a pork roast (I’d forgotten about those, too — makes me wonder if a traumatic incident sometime in 2005 had me repressing my love for this meal?) — it’s just that versatile.

And not to be forgotten again.

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Related posts:

1. Curried lentils, Kesler-style
2. Delicious
3. Make your own: sauerkraut

When I first gave up eating grains, I searched high and low for any and all recipes that would replace bread products in my life. Pizza dough, muffins, scones, sandwich bread, crackers. I googled, experimented with alternative flours, and baked like my life depended on it.

And day after day, I was sorely, even desperately disappointed. Gluten-free is one challenge; grain-free is a whole other ball game — and when it comes to beloved sandwich bread, it’s a game I have forfeited. Nut flours are an entirely different creature than their grain counterparts, and in most cases do not behave remotely the same.

I had to learn to change my expectations. For the most part, I think I’m there (though I still long for the day when I can once again have pizza, because right now there’s nothing grain-free that compares to an airy, stone-baked crust).

So far, the thing that seems easiest to replicate is the muffin. But it’s not as simple as replacing wheat flour with almond flour — you’d end up with a crumbly, dense almond ball. My local GAPS-friend Jen shared a banana muffin recipe that called for no flour at all — just almond butter and eggs — and it had the lightest, most delicate crumb of any recipe yet. Wanting a blueberry muffin, with a little less banana, I decided to develop my recipe from that no-flour starting point. After a few failed tweaks, I ended up with a keeper (though a 1/4 cup of almond flour did find its way back into the mix). So good, my kids beg for the muffins, even though they know they are “mommy’s special breakfast,” (I *might* guilt them every time their greedy, fat little fingers unwrap one for snack — while also secretly loving the fact they want them, being the high-protein, low-carb treat they are).

Not too dense, not too eggy — these muffins are just right. Goldilocks would have gobbled them up.

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Related posts:

1. Dairy-free banana-chocolate chip muffins
2. Cranberry-Orange Quickbread (grain-free, dairy-free)
3. Pumpkin Pie Jars (grain-free, dairy-free, naturally-sweetened)