International Food, Venting & Cheers!

April 2, 2011

First, I have to apologize for the extended time between posts. There is just so much going on between our real jobs, working on the house, travel and some very needed short breaks from all of this. There will be a couple of posts in the next few days as I will have time to sit and spew what has been going on while I watch the final 4 basketball games for the men and women NCAA college basketball tournament. GO BUTLER!!!!

Let's get to the food first. Since we have most of our kitchen back (the stove, butcher block and counter space is a wonderful thing!), we have been cooking up a storm. We are so grateful to have this part of our house back after cooking on camping stoves in the garage during the last 6 month construction period. I fear that the 15 pounds I have lost during the past 3 months will be coming back to me soon :o) I will let the following photos help to tell the story.........

Rowan is our master pasta making QUEEN. Every time she makes this stuff it just gets better. Must be those European genes that give her the knack for doing this. She uses 1/2 flour and 1/2 semolina, eggs, salt, some drops of olive oil and warm water as needed ( a recipe our dear friend Nina, the Ms. Universe of pasta making gave us). The real secret is making sure not to kneed it too much once you get the dough together. The resting period for the dough is about 15 minutes and then it is ready to roll out and put through the pasta cutter.

The eggs are cracked into the top of the volcano of flour/semolina/salt. Then, very slowly you start to fold the flour into the eggs. If you are unlucky, you get a lava eruption of eggs coming down the sides of your flour volcano, onto the table and over the edge onto the floor. In the interest of time, we won't show you all of those pictures from our experience here :o)

Through some luck, this is supposed to be what the end result is. Once you have this ball of dough, cover it with a kitchen towel for a 15 minute rest and then get ready to roll.

Meanwhile, while rowan was whipping up the pasta, I was creating the Putanesca pasta sauce, literally "whore style spaghetti" in Italian. Interesting history of the dish can be found on the Internet here: http://www.foodreference.com/html/a-ladies-puttanesca.html

This is one of the most simple and delicious authentic southern Italian pasta sauces. It is simply made from olive oil, anchovies, whole crushed garlic cloves, red pepper flakes, chopped tomatoes, calamata olives, capers, chopped parsley & basil. Simple. Extremely flavorful and better the next day. This is major comfort food. Here are the sauce pics:

We had a blast making the pasta and getting flour everywhere in our new and improved kitchen. The dough is rolled through the pasta machine many times to get it nice and thin.

Once it is just the right thinness, it is put through the cutting side of the machine. The job is made easier with two people as four hands are much better than two.

The pasta is laid out to dry before going into the pot.

Our next international food adventure brought us back to India. It has been just one year since we returned from our sabbatical in that great country so we thought it was appropriate for us to make our favorite Indian dinner to celebrate. I won't give you all the details of how to make the dishes here again. If you want to see all of that, go back to the 2010 postings on the blog side bar and look at the posts from 1/31-4/25.

Here our friend Sally is helping to make the chapati flat bread.

A few of our favorite Indian dishes: Palak Paneer (spicy spinach & Indian cheese), Eggplant Bharta (a Pakistani dish), Chicken Masala, Punjabi Sukha Urad Dal (spicy lentels) and basmati rice. Yum! Yum! Yum! We even ate dinner like Indains, using our hands :o)

On to the new developments on the house..........

Most of what we have been doing since the last post is putting more of the inside of the house together - hanging pictures, adjusting furniture and working on the prep work for painting the outside of the house. We did have to do a little more constructing on the ceiling of the front porch to add some vents for that attic space. Rowan and I had fun by doing this ourselves.

Rowan remains the mathematical measuring queen, so she organized the spacing for the vents.

I, being the power tool princess that I am, cut the holes in the porch ceiling. It was really fun being up in the small warm attic space. Kinda like being 12 years old again and being in your fort, hiding from all of those grown-ups outside. :o)

The most exciting thing that has happened since our last post it that we had our first open house cocktail party for our immediate neighborhood friends. All of them have been very anxious to see what the inside of the house looks like. We invited about 20 friends from the neighborhood to this first gathering. We had professors of mid-evil studies, law, music, Spanish languages, neuroscience and assorted business people and artists from our community. We could never have entertained that many guests at once in our old layout. We look forward to having many more gatherings with our friends and family.

News of Spring being sprung, some travel and more protesting coming next...........

The Inside Story & A Mighty Wind

March 13, 2011

So, our house development reports have been delayed since the urgent need came to go out and fight the hate and discrimination that exists in our state government and the current national political environment. You would think that in 2011, we could get beyond all of this and get on with caring for all of humanity instead of just a few (what WOULD Jesus do??). I will stop there with all of that for now and get you caught up on the last 3 weeks since my last post (but don't think for one minute you won't see/hear more from me on fighting for what I believe is just and fair).

We have been working on some little project every day to get the inside of the house finished. We figure if we keep doing this, we may be finished with this project in early 2012! :o)

Here are the photos that tell the story:

After trying at least 6 colors, we FINALLY decided on a color for the new dining room. We have been working with a retro line of craftsman bungalow colors. The base color is 'bamboo reed', a very pleasing green/earth color. We will trim the room in a buttery Craft White.

So, because we love to paint and then re-paint walls :o) we have now changed the entry wall color because this no longer goes with the new dining room color. Here is the old color:

.........and here is the new color, Pompei Orange. More of a terra cotta color.

Our next project was to build a bench seat with coat hooks for the entry nook just inside the front door. Sort of like a mini mud room. Here, I am building the base frame for the seat.

....putting together the seat framing.

If it can hold me, it can hold anyone.

Installing the birch plywood backing and clear pine trim.

Rowan wanted to help, so I taught her how to use the mitre saw to chop the 1x4 pine trim boards. Being a math nerd, she makes the most perfect measurements and cuts. Another reason she is a keeper. :o)

We are building the seat in the craftsman style, so there is lots of simple decorative trim to the piece. Here I am using construction adhesive to stick the decorative trim pieces to the ply backing. Once they went up with adhesive, they were also nailed down.

We pre-primed the trim pieces before we installed them.

Here is the finished piece. A perfect addition to the space and will provide an important function.

Here is the view with the front door.

The next BIG thing we added to the house was this FANTASTIC dining room table. Believe it or not, a friend who was here for our friend Sally's birthday party told us he had the perfect table for our new style in the house. He told us not to go buy anything else until we came over to look at it. He said he helped build the table years ago and would give us the table if we liked it. So, we went to have a look and almost passed out when we saw it. It is in the classic Green & Green craftsman style. Built out of solid mahogany with amazing detail. We brought the piece home and it is just a FABULOUS addition to the house. We are so grateful to Charlie and Sandy for this amazing gift.

Here is a photo of the table with the new lights Rowan hung (she is also an electrician on top of everything else!). The lights are hammered copper and bronze.

Our first dinner at the new table. We sort of feel like an old royal couple sitting at either end of a really long table in an old stone castle (well, sort of).

.........and of course Lulu had to be present at the table too!

If you have been following the blog over the winter, you know that we have had unusual snow this year. Well, now we are having a CRAZY early tornado season. In the early morning hours of Feb. 28 (about 3:30am) the tornado warning sirens went off. We could hear the extreme thunder, lightening, rain and strong winds. That episode passed and there was calm for about 30 minutes. Then, suddenly out of nowhere there came a huge wind and more thunder and heavy rain. We heard a HUGE crash and the house shook. I leapt out of bed and Rowan looked at me with wide eyes and we both thought that something bad had just happened. I went to the guest room to look out the window and I was looking into the middle of a TREE!!!. SHIT! A huge silver maple tree from the other side of our neighbors yard had just come down in the wind and landed against the side of our house. Our neighbors shed was half crushed and one side of the tree was resting on their roof, just over their bedroom. Rowan and I sprang into action and got dressed to run over to see if they were OK. It was pouring rain and thunder and lightening was everywhere. As I went through the tree to our neighbors window to yell at them, I didn't yet have the nerve to look at our house to see if there was a hole in our new roof. Ugh!

Our neighbors were OK (thank god!) and our house was OK too. The tree was resting on top of our AC (it is OK too) and the very top of it was resting against the side of the house. We and our neighbors are soooo lucky to come through this OK. If our house was one foot closer to the neighbors, it could have been a very different story. Whew! I hope this isn't a sign of a hard spring for us.

The view out of our window when daylight came.

View from our neighbors yard looking toward our house.

We escaped damage by the skin of our chinny-chin-chin!

Coming next, a long over due food posting. We have been cooking now that we have our kitchen back :o)......................

Raising a Fist

February, 22

It has been a while since our last post. We have been very busy working on the inside of the house and those photos will be coming along shortly. First, I need to give you the latest on some political activity here in our state.

Unless you live under a rock or are maybe some of our friends from India, you have been hearing about and watching the events unfolding in Madison, Wisconsin. As you know the republican party is trying to strip the rights of labor unions to ultimately weaken the democratic party and the working middle class in the US. Well, being from a union family, my dad was in the sheet metal workers union his entire working life, I was lucky to have health insurance until I finished college because of that. He retired with a good pension. Nothing fancy, but enough to provide a comfortable life for him and my mom. We had some security for our family. The American dream, right?

The standoff taking place in the Wisconsin House of Representatives is now having the ripple effect across the Midwest. I went up to our statehouse in Indianapolis on Tuesday this week to join in the protest of our republican sponsored 'Right to Work' bill. Of course the bill has nothing to do with the right to work, it basically strips away all union rights and basically destroys the unions and the middle class. Being from one of the large Auto Workers Union states, we have a number of auto factories here, the fight is HUGE. It was invigorating to be in such a large group of real working folks who are very passionate about this issue.

Here are some of the photos:

Our state capitol (file photo)

My good friend Bob, who is a retired teacher, came along with me to the state house. The teachers unions and school budgets are also being completely destroyed by a whole list of bills in the house. The republicans seem to like everyone except their very rich big business partners to be uneducated and poor. Easier to manipulate that way. Here we are standing in the very long line to get inside.

Once inside, we were very impressed by the large crowd already inside by 10am.

We followed a huge crowd to the senate chamber where their session was just starting. The republicans have a majority in the senate, and as we stood outside the chamber windows chanting and yelling it could clearly be heard inside the chamber.

The hallway just outside the chamber windows

Here is a photo of the inside of the senate chamber taken through the window

They have speakers on the wall outside of the chamber so we could hear what they were talking about. Our democratic senator, Vi Simpson (D)Bloomington, spoke passionately about the issues being debated. After she spoke, she was the only senator who came out to the crowd and spoke in support of our cause. She said they could all hear us loud and clear inside.

We worked our way through the crowd down to the House of Representative member offices. Anyone could go in and sign up to speak with their representative. The place was packed. I'm sure they were all getting an ear full.

An AFSCME union member, Tim, who works for the City of Indianapolis as a mechanic, struck up a conversation with me about the issues on the table (AFSCME represented me at UC Berkeley and also does at IU). I loved hearing how educated he is about the issues. A lesson in no matter what a person looks like, one can't assume they are uneducated. This guy was absolutely delightful and a lifetime democrat. He even rides a Harley!

A huge crowd made it's way to the house chamber as they were getting ready for their session. This was the most passionate moment yet. The labor bills were written by the republicans in the house. As they were taking roll call we noticed almost half of the chamber was empty. We suddenly thought, oh my god!, the democrats have left the state in protest. Well, that is EXACTLY what they had done. They could not vote because there was not a quorum present. The crowd went absolutely NUTS! We found out our dems also went to Illinois.

The huge crowds, well over 1000, began to move to the main atrium and began a big rally with speakers from various unions making statements.

All in all, the protests have been taking over the state house since February 18 and plan to go on until the labor bills, as written, are defeated. The collective bargaining rights are the thing they will not budge on. As I spoke to various people from different unions, they all said they are willing to make some consessions - no raises for the next couple of years, pay more for their health care benefits, etc., but they absolutely will not give up collective bargaining. Why the republicans can't compromise too is unbelievable. They have been trying to create bills and then have a vote on them with less than 2 days for public comment. How can the people possibly have time to read and understand them in that short time. It is truly evil. This is why we protest and why the democrats have left the state. The people of our state, democrat & republican constituants, are now having time to understand exactly what the bills will do if passed. This is why the crowds are getting larger every day.

I decided I would take pictures of all the different union t-shirts I could find so you all could see how many unions are being represented.

My dads union

The United Auto Workers. My favorite tee.

And, we can't forget some of the teachers.

Be prepared because this issue will be coming to your state too.

What a time in our history. We won't give up the fight!