Mystery Garden

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"Mom. We HAVE to put stakes or bamboo sticks or SOMETHING in there for the peas to climb."

Just before Christmas, Wyatt and I sowed six planters of different kinds of cool weather vegetable seeds. In some planters, we even planted two kinds of seeds. When we were done, Wyatt informed me we HAD to label the planters RIGHT THEN. But I didn't want to get out the label maker with him (because for every label I make, he insists on two for himself) and I couldn't find the masking tape. Then it rained for awhile, so I put him off some more because the labels wouldn't stick to the pots. And then we both forgot about labels until mid-January when we went outside to empty the saucers under the planters. Surprise! Everything had sprouted except the peas, the only planter and seed combination we remembered.

Our little mystery garden practically pleads for me to be a better planner and organizer. The saying, "A stitch in time saves nine," also occurred to me, finger waggle and all. But rather than considering how I could become someone who does things like this right the first time, I'm thinking about the possibility that I can just learn to be more free with the label tape.

Over the last few weeks, some of our mystery seedlings have begun to reveal their identities. The radishes are obvious—fast growing and decidedly radish-like by now. The peas finally sprouted and are growing taller and taller. Just yesterday, I provided a tomato cage to satisfy their grabby little tendrils. I also noticed the beginning of feathery leaves on what might be a carrot, but because everything else in that pot looks decidedly not carrot-like, I still can't reach a conclusion about those seedlings. The rest of the planters remain a total mystery.

In an attempt to get some yield from all of the mystery plants, I read the backs of all the open seed packets for thinning recommendations. But because I can't say with certainty which packets of seeds we used for planting and which we didn't, or where they are, I simply attempted to average what most of the packets advised and applied that rule to all of the mystery seedlings. I like to think that if we were relying on me to grow the vegetables we'd eat this year, I would have handled seed sowing very differently and set us up for better results.

Details are obviously important. And as much as I like to think I can keep all the details about everything straight in my head, I have now proven to myself (once again) that I can't. Luckily for all of us, though, I wrote down the date we wrapped our Camembert-style cheese to age in the refrigerator. We have been counting down the days until taste test day, otherwise known as this past Wednesday. Our cheese was delicious, and there was no question that we created a Camembert. The flavor and texture were unmistakable. We also started another batch of chèvre that we will age, hopefully without the unwanted ecologies from our last batch. Wyatt took to heart David Asher's suggestion to taste our cheese before we age it. He slurped up almost an entire bowl of fresh chèvre curd.

As of today, we have officially run out of space in the refrigerator in which to age cheese. We are aging our blues, a second batch of Saint Marcellin, and I have just nestled in a second cave to house the chèvre cheeses.

I suppose this refrigerator real estate limitation is for the best, though, because although we want to make all the cheese now, I need to focus for the next couple of weeks on the details of my knitting patterns. Believe it or not, I think I have found a tech editor, and that means I've got a deadline!



Camembert

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"This cheese doesn't smell like much...I want to wrap this cheese MYSELF. STOP HELPING ME. How much longer until we can eat this?"

When Wyatt was a baby, there was a flurry of discussion around how French parents raise their children. Most of it stemmed from Pamela Druckerman's book, Bringing Up Bébé, which I found thoroughly enjoyable. The book reviews, articles, and interviews surrounding Bringing Up Bébé often focused on how well French children eat, even in daycare. Without exception, it seemed tiny children ate multi-course lunches created from a wide variety of fresh ingredients. The children sat for the whole meal, used a knife and fork and drank politely from a glass that was made of actual, breakable glass. The whole scene sounded so perfect that it made me want to trade-in our cultural food identity. I did not want to raise a notoriously picky eater who behaved atrociously at the table. I wanted to raise a child who was, broadly speaking, French about food. I realized I stood very little chance of ever pulling this off, considering I'm an American who has eaten innumerable sad desk lunches and has experienced French food life only while on vacation. And yet, likely because I'm an American, I figured there was no harm in taking a whack at it. We were already on the fringe of standard American food life, after all. For example, before Wyatt started eating solid food, our pediatrician suggested that a great first food would be beef stew. I remember blinking a couple of times and asking, "Really?" before accepting the challenge. After that appointment, I found a great butcher, made my first beef stew, and then I puréed most of it for baby Wyatt.

Beef stew aside, I felt I needed to improve my cooking range and abilities. I started looking at what French kids eat, and I realized I didn't know what half of it was, never mind how to cook it. I read Karen Le Billion's posts of school lunches in France, and as I translated them and looked up recipes, I began to feel daunted: Variety! Balance! Sauces! Cheeses! It seemed like a lot, and at the time, I had a somewhat limited cooking repertoire. But it all began to make sense for me when Wyatt was 18 months old and Marc bought me Wini Moranville's La Bonne Femme Cookbook for my birthday. La Bonne Femme remains one of my favorite cookbooks. The recipes are straightforward, easy to prepare, and great to eat. The flavors Wini Moranville highlights make for truly delicious meals with just enough flair to make me feel a little bit fancy without extra work. Thanks to this book, I finally learned to cook meats with pan sauces, and I began to appreciate really simple salads. In a short time, I was applying what I had learned from the recipes to make widely varied lunches for Wyatt and me. I'd prep the ingredients in the morning while he was eating breakfast, and then I'd cook our lunch in under 30 minutes starting around 11:30. Chicken Calvados was one of our favorites, and all of her simple salads, including grated carrot salad and celeri remoulade, were in heavy rotation. 

I took our lunchtime cheese course pretty seriously, too. I did my best to choose small pieces of different kinds of cheese at the cheese counter so that we'd have a wide variety over any given week or two. One of Wyatt's favorites from the beginning was brie, Fromager d'Affinois, to be exact. It's still one of his favorites, and brie is the cheese he has been most excited to make since we started working from The Art of Natural Cheesemaking.

Much to Wyatt's disappointment, we couldn't start a brie (or Camembert-style) cheese for awhile because it has been simply too warm for us to age it in the garage. We did, however, start a recipe about a month ago.

We opted for two smaller cheeses, Camembert-style, over a larger brie. Our Camembert started out very much like the feta and mozzarella we made. We began with a gallon of raw cow's milk. We heated it to baby-bottle warm, and then we added kefir culture and rennet. We kept the milk warm while the curd set. Once we had achieved a clean break in the curd, I sliced the curd into cubes and we stirred the pot occasionally while allowing the curds to firm up a bit more. When the curds were the consistency of a well-poached egg, we poured the whey off and reserved some for a washing brine. We then carefully strained the curds by hand into our cheese forms on our makeshift draining table. The cheeses drained for about a day, and once they were firm, we salted them. We let the formed cheeses dry for another day or so, and then we put them in the cheese cave.*

During the first week of aging, we wiped down the rinds of the cheeses every other day with a cheese cloth dipped in the washing brine we had prepared from the reserved whey.

Initially, we had no place in the garage that was cool enough (50 degrees) to keep the cheese cave. I emailed David Asher, curious if close to 60 degrees would be acceptable. He suggested that we try the refrigerator instead. So the cheese lived in its cave in the refrigerator for the first week. After that, the weather cooled a bit more, and I located a spot in our garage that was consistently about 50 degrees, so I moved the cave there.

The next challenge became how to maintain 90% humidity inside the cave. It was easy for the first week in the refrigerator when the humidity was low. I just added a bit of clean sponge that I had dampened with water in order to raise the humidity in the cave. But once the cave was in the garage, the temperature was warmer and the humidity stayed stubbornly at 99%. Even worse, one of the cheese rounds wasn't getting the puffy white mold on it. It was staying yellow and a little sticky, which wasn't good. I swapped out the cheese aging mat for a dry one, and I added some silica gel packets to the perimeter of the cave. Those adjustments resulted in no appreciable change. Wyatt and I then tried making our own packets of calcium chloride, otherwise known as pickle crisp, to place at opposite ends of the cave. The first packets we made worked almost too well, and the humidity dipped to 80%. We remade the packets with fewer granules, and that seemed to work better. Regardless, I continued to monitor the humidity levels in the cave daily because the whole process of adjustments had been so incredibly imprecise.

This weekend, it was time to wrap our cheese in cheese wrapping paper so it can continue its aging process for another month in the refrigerator. The rounds are now tucked safely in the back of the cheese drawer. And tomorrow, Wyatt and I are planning to make Chicken Calvados for dinner, for old time's sake.

*Our cheese cave is almost embarrassingly basic. I bought a shoe box sized plastic box with a lid at our little, local hardware store, and that's the cave. I place a bamboo aging mat on the bottom of the box, and I use an inexpensive hygrometer that I picked up in the garden center of a large hardware store. Because we had a mouse problem in our garage several months ago, I put the shoe box sized box into a slightly larger box with a locking lid.

Black Sheep School of Cheesemaking's Mason Jar Saint Marcellin

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"Mom. These soft mold wrinkles are just so beautiful! This is definitely the most beautiful cheese we have made."

I love Wyatt's perspective on mold. Some mold really is stunning. But to be honest, before I got into fermenting, I held my nose and flung into the compost bin whatever I found decomposing in the back of the crisper. These days, though, we spend a lot of time examining mold. Sometimes, food spoils in spectacular fashion, like when it grows "cat's hair mold." And other times, when we manage to harness the microbes we want, we get beautiful cheese.

I haven't written about cheese in awhile, but we have been working steadily behind the scenes. Over a month ago (on November 21, actually) we started making Mason Jar Saint Marcellin. Saint Marcellin cheese is from Lyon, France, and is traditionally made in little clay pots. It is a rare aged lactic cheese made with cow's milk. In The Art of Natural Cheesemaking, David Asher explains how to make Saint Marcellin in shorty mason jars. The jar itself provides the ideal aging environment for the cheese, so you don't need a cheese cave. Mason Jar Saint Marcellin seemed like the perfect cheese for us to try while we waited for the weather to cool off enough to set up our cheese cave in the garage.

Saint Marcellin starts out like the feta and chèvre we have made, except for the obvious difference that it uses cow's milk instead of goat's. We took a gallon of raw cow's milk, heated it to baby-bottle warm, and added active kefir and rennet. We fermented it until Geotrichum candidum bloomed, and then we drained the curds. After a day of draining, we added salt, and then we let the curds drain for two more days.

Once the curds had drained, it was time to pack them into jars. We sealed the jars loosely. On November 27, we placed the jars in our garage, where the temperature was about 60-65 degrees Fahrenheit. We opened and checked on the cheese daily. In ten days, we had an impressive coat of Geotrichum candidum on the surface of all the cheeses.

On December 7, we closed the jars tightly and stacked them in the refrigerator.

We check on them twice a week, wipe off any moisture on the lids, and place them back in the refrigerator.

Because the cheese should be ready in in four to eight weeks from December 7, and my parents were visiting over New Year's, we tried one of the jars on New Year's Day. Here's a photo of our cheese board:

In the back row, from left to right, we had: Dunbarton Blue, our very own Mason Jar Saint Marcellin, Fat Bottom Girl, and a lovely California Crottin. In the front row, from left to right, we had: our own homemade creamy feta, Jeff's Select Gouda, and Monte Enebro. We ate our cheese with homemade gluten-free sourdough bread, black eyed pea soup (with Super Lucky 2016 black eyed peas from Rancho Gordo), and Ethiopian-style collard greens.

The Saint Marcellin was still a little young, but it was already incredible. The top quarter inch or so of cheese had gone, as Wyatt said, "liquidy," and the rest of the cheese had begun to soften but still retained a sort of puffy, slightly granular texture. The "liquidy" section was the most delicious part--creamy like a ripe brie but with a bright, slightly sharp flavor. The rind was so thin and delicate, it was practically nonexistent. We ate the entire jar that evening. As the aging process continues, more and more of the cheese will liquify like the top layer of the jar we already enjoyed. We plan to let the remaining four jars of cheese age for another several weeks in the refrigerator, fully confident that the cheese will be worth the wait.

Meanwhile, we also have two separate cheese caves going in the garage. One is for Camembert that started aging on December 12, and one is for Crottins and Valençay cheeses. That one went into service yesterday.

And because you will never guess what we did with the last slice of sourdough bread from dinner on New Year's Day, I will tell you. We have inoculated it with a pea-sized piece of Cowgirl Creamery Rogue River Blue Cheese so we can grow our own Penicillium roqueforti mold and make our own blue cheese sometime soon.

Craft Pals

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Christmas is over. Soon we will put away for another year the tree and all its ornaments, as well as the lights that we have draped around various windows in our house. And soon, Wyatt may stop asking every day whether any boxes arrived for him.

Getting letters, cards, and fun surprises in the mail is so thrilling. The holidays brought us a fat stack of beautiful cards, many parcels, and fortunately, extra exuberance from our mail carrier, Roberto. One of the most special gifts that arrived at our house this year was for Wyatt, from his friend, Benjamin, who just turned six. Benjamin made Wyatt a needle-felted toadstool:

This most marvelous creation was the latest in an ongoing informal craft exchange that sprang up over the last year or so. The boys have never met, but Benjamin's mother, Sarah, and I became friends through a book club I joined when I moved to San Francisco. Sarah and her husband moved back to South Carolina before Benjamin was born, but Sarah and I have stayed in touch through social media and email. Sarah's cooking, canning, knitting, writing, and her joy and frustration in wrangling life's chaos inspire me.

The exchange began with homemade marshmallows. In October 2014, Wyatt and I decided to make marshmallows. I posted about it online, as one does, and Sarah commented that she wished she had some herself, but having made them in the past, she was in no hurry to experience the process (the smell, really) again any time soon. Our marshmallows turned out well, and because marshmallows are best shared, we sent Sarah and Benjamin a bag of them.

A few weeks later, Benjamin sent Wyatt a tin of homemade pumpkin pie spice. It smelled heavenly. We used it to make pumpkin custard. The tin has long been empty, and the label is a little stained with vanilla extract. But we keep the tin because it was such a fun gift, it smells good, and we might even refill it one day.

Once the spice was gone, we thought and thought about what we could make for Benjamin. Wyatt decided on hand-rolled beeswax candles. Wyatt rolled, I mailed, and Benjamin loved. The day Benjamin received the box, Sarah sent us a photograph of him enjoying his dinner by candelight. 

Some time went by, and then one day there was a surprise parcel for Wyatt. Benjamin had made him a garland of felted balls. Benjamin explained in the accompanying card that the balls reminded him of planets. Wyatt was delighted and immediately asked if he could hang the garland in his room. It hung on his toddler bed for awhile, and when he moved to his big bed, we hung it over the window. The garland arrived wrapped securely (and untangled!) around a toilet paper tube that Benjamin had painted. Wyatt kept that tube, too.

This summer, we made some felted soap for Benjamin.

We went to Rainbow Grocery and bought some soap that smells like creamsicles taste, and we set about giving that soap a woolen jacket.

Wyatt wrapped the soap in wool roving, and we knotted the roving-wrapped bar in a nylon stocking. He rubbed the bar of soap in as hot water as he could stand, and then dipped it in cold water, and then went back to rubbing it in hot water, then cold water, then back to hot. The bubbles grew thicker and thicker as we worked on the soap for about ten minutes. The wool shrank and felted to the shape of the soap. We let the soap dry so we could pack it for mailing. (Wyatt made a bar of soap for himself, too, because why not?) Wyatt thought Benjamin's soap (the blue one) looked like a map of England, so we mentioned that in the card.

Around the same time as we felted the soap, I finished knitting a lace scarf from teal alpaca yarn. I sent the scarf to Sarah. She's worthy of hand-knit gifts any day, but at that time she was extra deserving, having recently given birth to Benjamin's little brother and having just gone back to school for a master's degree. The scarf seemed like something she would enjoy when the weather grew colder.

A couple of weeks ago, Benjamin sent Wyatt the excellent toadstool and a handmade autumn-themed card. Sarah told me she painted the tree and Benjamin added the leaves with a q-tip.

The timing of this gift couldn't have been better. Just two days before the gift arrived, Wyatt had been cross-examining me about why, OH WHY! could he not do needle felting? I have no idea why needle felting occurred to him. It's not like I had ever done needle felting myself. We didn't even have any tools for it. I told him he could do it when he was older because of the needles. He might stab himself, and stabbed, bleeding fingers would feel very bad. He was unmoved by my explanation. When he learned that Benjamin had made the toadstool himself, he immediately confronted me with the reason why it was totally appropriate for him to start needle felting: "Benjamin does it!" After marveling at the toadstool for an entire afternoon, Wyatt carefully re-wrapped it in its golden tissue paper and placed it in his basket, saving it for when we got our Christmas tree. We shopped for needle felting tools the next day.

Once we had our tools, and then our replacement tools because some needles broke, we made Benjamin a needle felted ornament. Wyatt was very clear that it needed to be made of hearts.

He was careful to have me write in the accompanying card that Benjamin could put the ornament on his Christmas tree, but he didn't have to. We also sent some caramel popcorn clusters because the only thing nicer than sending Sarah the recipe was to send the popcorn itself.

There are so many reasons why I love this little exchange of treats and crafts, not the least of which is the way it sprang up so spontaneously. There has never been any pressure to send anything, never mind by any particular date. It's just really fun. We've also made some pretty great items with our boys. I am mystified why crafts are so often considered and almost always marketed as an activity for girls. After all, who among us wouldn't enjoy a good roving-stabbing from time to time? Seeing Sarah and Benjamin's creativity has inspired us to try new crafts. And the joy and appreciation that Wyatt has in receiving something that his friend has made for him, a couple of thousand miles away, with his very own hands, is truly wonderful. 

 

 

 

Christmas Breakfast

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We started planning this year's Christmas breakfast around the time we started planning Thanksgiving dinner.

During one dinner planning conversation, I told Wyatt the story of the year I joined my best friend, Debbie, and her parents in Palm Desert for Thanksgiving. We had such a fun holiday weekend, and I made a peanut butter pie. That pie was so deliciously memorable that for the next several Thanksgivings, when Debbie and I would phone each other to trade "Happy Thanksgiving!" greetings, I would hear her dad's voice call from the background, "Ask her where my peanut butter pie is!" And Debbie would repeat into the phone, "My dad wants to know where his peanut butter pie is."

Wyatt found that story very, very funny. "Where's my peanut butter pie!" he shouted over and over, and then dissolved into giggles. Suddenly, he stopped, and said, "What IS peanut butter pie? It sounds DELICIOUS. I love peanut butter. And pie! I KNOW! We should have peanut butter pie for Christmas breakfast."

I don't remember how the tradition started, but this year will be our fourth Christmas where we have "Whatever We Want" for breakfast. So far, "Whatever We Want" has translated into "Dessert." Dessert for breakfast is basically forbidden, so it's an awfully special annual experience. In addition, there's something spectacularly satisfying about responding to a sullen child who says, "I want candy/cake/pie for breakfast!" on any other day of the year by saying, "Oh dear. Let me check the calendar. Nope! It's not Christmas."

Because we're us, it's not like dessert means a break from cooking or baking. We make all of our Christmas breakfast treats. Last year, we baked gluten-free Florentine cookies and served them with sweet potato ice cream. If you're ever at Mitchell's Ice Cream in San Francisco, try the purple yam ice cream and you'll understand why we went with David Lebovitz's sweet potato ice cream recipe. For the two Christmas breakfasts before that, we made apple crisp and vanilla ice cream.

This year, we are planning on peanut butter pie and ice cream. The ice cream flavor will probably be chocolate. I've found a four-fork-rated peanut butter pie recipe on Epicurious, and I have the already proven Joy of Cooking recipe. Whichever recipe we choose (Joy of Cooking), we will need to make some gluten-free graham crackers so that we can have a graham cracker crust. Wyatt just informed me he cannot wait to smash the crackers into bits with a mallet.

Christmas Eve is slated to be our cooking day. We will make the pie crust and the pie, and prepare the ice cream batter, which we will freeze in the ice cream maker on Christmas morning. We will also make Christmas Eve dinner, which will be latkes, recipe courtesy of Debbie's mom, of course.

Between now and Christmas Eve, we will be busying ourselves with activities, because it is Christmas Break. We're planning to head downtown to ride a cable car and see the giant gingerbread houses at the Fairmont Hotel one day. We've got years of experience building our own little houses thanks to kits and extra candy that Wyatt's grandparents send:

Another day, we'll head to the Exploratorium. And if it's not too rainy, perhaps we can fit in some ice skating at some point.

Just a few days left of the crescendo of Christmas excitement. And then, maybe we can relax? Wishful thinking, I'm sure.

Holiday Treats

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"Mom. I love Christmas carols. And Christmas trees. And presents! The only thing I don't love about Christmas is waiting for it to come."

Christmas is coming! Wyatt reminds us about it every day.

Before Wyatt was born, our house was not usually very Christmas-y around the holidays. Sometimes we got a tree, and when we did, it was usually a very manageable car-trunk-size. The years we decorated a little tree, our other Christmas decorations would stay boxed away because one of the worst parts of Christmas decorating is putting it all away for next year. In fact, the Christmas a few months before Wyatt was born, we consciously opted out of getting a tree or decorating our home in any way. We figured it would be our last chance for awhile to get away with such a stripped-down holiday.

Our instincts about holiday decorations were absolutely correct. Like every child I've ever met, Wyatt loves holiday lights, decorated trees, treats, and of course, presents. So we're now five Christmas seasons into CHRISTMAS!

And having CHRISTMAS! while striving for "less is more" in our lives can get tricky. Acquiring only great items we know we need or will really use and enjoy has helped make our home livable, our lives less cluttered, and, with any luck, the earth a tiny bit less of a waste dump. Of course Wyatt disagrees 100% with this approach to consumerism and complains bitterly every time we tell him, "No, we are not buying that."

Some of the best gifts we have received over the years have been memberships to museums or gift certificates to favorite restaurants. These types of outings have helped us create connections in a way that unwrapping a thing, no matter how thoughtfully chosen, doesn't. It's tough to beat having a terrific time on a loved one's dime while you recount fun (and funny) stories about times you have all spent together.

And while Wyatt would swear he absolutely prefers toys over fun excursions, there is a small chance that on a given day he would choose a day of ice skating or a dinner out over a toy truck. Not a fire truck or anything fancy, mind you, just a frills-free one. So we do our best to strike a balance for him between experiences and things. We try to minimize overlap with toys he already owns, choose things we think he will use a lot in a variety of ways, and include items like art and craft supplies that will spark creativity and get consumed.

Let's face it: Gift giving is challenging. Most adults we know would prefer less stuff in their lives. But I've noticed that almost everyone welcomes a homemade, edible holiday gift. So, like any good urban homesteading family, we started working on certain gifts awhile ago.

In mid-November, we started a giant jar of preserved lemons with rosemary. My friend, Maja, shared the idea with me, and the lemons were easy and fun to make.

The only issue we had was that salty, juicy lemons can make your hands sting like crazy if you have even the tiniest "owie," as Wyatt always does. Using disposable food service gloves helped keep his little hands sting-free. We checked on the lemons every few days to see and smell how they changed with time. They were a bright and sunny addition to our fermentation corner.

Yesterday, we repackaged the giant jar into two smaller gift-sized Fido jars for Wyatt's teachers. And thanks to Marc, who commented, "Wow. If someone gave me that, I would have no idea what to do with it," I included some recipe ideas in the card.

In the just-in-time edible gift department, we made four batches of caramel popcorn clusters. We made three batches with peanuts and one without, because as Wyatt pointed out, "Some friends might be allergic to peanuts." Wyatt assisted with some measuring, stirring, and of course he carefully tasted every batch. I packaged the popcorn clusters into treat bags.

Once Wyatt had tasted our caramel popcorn, he found it very difficult to give it away, or even look at it in the pantry without complaining that he wanted to eat all of it. But giving it away is becoming easier for him. The other day, he happily presented our most favorite Recology driver with some gift cards and a bag of caramel popcorn. Wyatt informed him, "I helped make this popcorn. It's really good. You'll want to eat all of it all the time, but it's only a sometimes food."

The recipe we used for our caramel popcorn clusters is here. We have a hot-air popcorn popper, so we use it for this recipe and skip the first paragraph of instructions. Lately, I substitute brown rice syrup in an equal amount for corn syrup. Having made the recipe over the years with corn syrup and other years with brown rice syrup, I can honestly say that the substitution doesn't seem to affect the recipe or outcome at all. I seriously doubt that the substitution makes the popcorn healthier. But it does make me giggle to think that, thanks to my careful shopping this year, I could honestly slap an "Organic, Gluten-Free and Corn Syrup Free" label on our treat, and still send someone into orbit on a sugar high.

And finally, we did some unexpected baking this weekend because Wyatt's classmates will be working on "gluten sugar cookies" at school this week. Thanks to Molly, my friend of a quarter-century or so, who is an extraordinary cook and baker with years of gluten-free experience, Wyatt and I made our first batch of gluten-free roll-out sugar cookies. At Molly's suggestion, we used this recipe, and substituted Cup 4 Cup gluten free flour, used only 6 tablespoons of butter (1/4 less butter than the recipe says), and added some lemon zest. Yum.

 

Cheese Tasting

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One downside of a blog is that it's not the greatest place to post little updates on things like cheese that have just been coming along at their own pace for the last couple of months. But the cheese has indeed been coming along, as you can see.

   Homemade Creamy Feta, Shankleesh and Classic Style Feta in the back; Fern's Edge Feta in front.

   Homemade Creamy Feta, Shankleesh and Classic Style Feta in the back; Fern's Edge Feta in front.

As you may remember, we started a classic style feta, a creamy (or Bulgarian) feta, and a middle-eastern yogurt cheese called shankleesh. We then did our best to forget about them. Benign neglect, really. The shankleesh lived in the garage, and the jars of feta lived in the back of the refrigerator.

Over the past many weeks, our three cheeses have been aging and we have been tasting, and now that the cheeses are gone, I can honestly say they were great. Maybe they were even outstanding, if you consider that they were our very first attempt at aged cheeses.

And we were very patient. After I had counted, Wyatt put a sticker on the calendar to mark the day that our creamy feta turned 30 days old. When that day arrived, Marc, Wyatt and I tried all three cheeses. The shankleesh was really full-flavored thanks to the tangy yogurt and herbs. Wyatt claimed it was sour and didn't enjoy it. The fetas, on the other hand, while definitely fetas in texture and appearance, were still pretty mild and frankly a little boring in flavor. So all the jars went back to their aging locations.

A month later, we tried the cheeses again. But we were even bolder than just tasting them ourselves. We carried them with us when we flew to visit friends in Los Angeles. I packed the cheeses in containers in Wyatt's lunch bag (without brine or oil, lest they be confiscated by TSA) and guarded them in my carry-on. We enjoyed all the cheeses with our friends during lunch at their house the day we arrived. Fortunately, the cheeses had either remained the same or improved somewhat over the last month. The shankleesh tasted the same, but the fetas had definitely changed. The more classic feta had become softer and saltier. The creamy feta had become drier and deliciously tangy, but remained only slightly salty in flavor.

A few weeks after our Los Angeles trip, we brought the cheese out for another tasting, this time with some local friends. Once again, the shankleesh didn't taste much different. But with the fetas, the same flavor trend had continued. The classic feta had become almost too salty to enjoy on its own, and the creamy feta was still tangy, showed even more complex flavors, and remained only slightly salty.

During this last tasting, we tried our homemade cheeses beside a commercially available artisan goat feta, Fern's Edge, that I had found at Rainbow Grocery. The Fern's Edge feta was amazing, of course, but what shocked me was that it wasn't actually better than the creamy feta we had made. We achieved some wonderful flavors in our cheese that weren't present in the Fern's Edge. And even though I had mentally downgraded our classic feta because it had taken on so much salt, after trying some commercially available sheep's milk feta last weekend, I found myself stunned at its saltiness and its similarity in texture to our classic feta. I started to think that there may not have been anything wrong with our execution of our classic feta after all.

These successes have been more than enough to encourage us to continue trying to make aged cheeses. Now that the weather is cooler, we have started to think about trying aged goat cheeses and camembert. We are even ten days into aging a mason jar marcellin from The Art of Natural Cheesemaking.  Here's a photo of our cheese so far, with Geotrichum candidum well-established on the rind. The cheese smells a lot like camembert, and I find its wrinkles adorable, the same way I find wrinkly Shar-Pei dogs adorable. I am still astonished that this remarkable little pot of cheese started out simply as raw milk and kefir culture. But more on the story of this cheese later, in its very own blog post.

Meanwhile, this jar and its four siblings went into the refrigerator today. We'll check them again in two weeks to see how they're doing.

 

 

Small Kindnesses

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Sitting among hundreds of little humans at the Davies Symphony Hall Concert for Kids this morning, waiting for the concert to begin, I started to think about climate change, refugees, mass shootings, and what being an American may mean today. I thought about how we all need to do so much better, in so many big ways. And I realized that my sphere of influence had never felt smaller.

As we left the concert, Marc (who was still in Cincinnati) called to say that our elderly neighbor, Ed,* fell in the bathtub today, and his wife, Helen, couldn't help him up. I immediately called Helen. She explained that in addition to calling Marc, she had gone across the street to a neighbor she saw was home, but who didn't answer the door. Helen said she continued down the street to another neighbor who fortunately came right over, with his tiny daughter in tow. He helped a shaken and exhausted, but seemingly unhurt, Ed out of the tub and into bed to rest. As Helen said, "It was really scary. It has been an awful morning."

Wyatt overheard my end of the conversation, and he became visibly concerned about Ed. I explained what had happened, and that Ed seemed okay now, just tired. Wyatt supposed, based on his own experience, that Ed had been standing up and playing around in a wet bathtub with the water running when he fell. I put on my best serious face and opined that it was probably just an accident.

On our Muni ride home this afternoon, Wyatt and I talked about Ed and how we hoped he was feeling better. Somehow during this discussion, we decided to bake Helen and Ed an apple pie. Maybe it would improve their day. Or maybe they would just have pie. Either way, we figured it was worth doing. The pie turned out beautifully. We carried it over while it was still hot. Helen beamed at us when she opened the door, and she said the pie would really brighten up the instant chicken soup she was having for dinner. Ed was still resting and didn't feel like eating. She mentioned how lonely she had felt during the day, so we promised to stop by tomorrow, too.

Wyatt and I walked back home and after dinner, as Wyatt dug into his own slice of pie (yes, we made two pies), I noticed a missed call and voicemail on my phone. It was Helen, calling to say how much she and Ed had enjoyed the pie and had eaten the whole thing. Just kidding! They only ate some of it, and "Kelly and Wyatt, you did a great job!" Wyatt grinned, made me play the message three times and asked me to save it so he could listen again. We talked about how it feels when you do something kind for someone and then hear a message like Helen's, and the answer is "REALLY GOOD."

I think the kid's heart grew at least one size today. And while our neighborly pie baking and delivery is a very small thing, especially in light of all the big things that need doing in the world, it's something.

I can't be the only one who feels like she affects so little. But it doesn't mean I shouldn't try. Perhaps all of our small kindnesses in all of our communities could add up to something big. In the worst case, there will be more kindness. Or more pie. Either way, we win.

*Neighbors' names have been changed, because if I fell in the bathtub, I might not be thrilled about someone writing about my mishap on her blog.

Gooey Food and Gratitude

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"Mom. I'm hiding my eyes because when I look at that gooey food on my plate, it makes my body feel weird."

I wasn't planning to write a post about our Thanksgiving. But on Wednesday, a lovely friend of mine texted that she was looking forward to reading about what we had for Thanksgiving dinner. I thought to myself, why not write about it? It was going to be an amazing meal; I had already spent hours working on it.

For years, our traditional Thanksgiving meal has centered around Dungeness crab. But this year, crabbing season has been postponed because "potentially deadly levels of domoic acid have been found in Dungeness crab."  We needed a new plan, and we decided to go with Winter Vegetable Pie from the Fields Of Greens Cookbook. I had never made the recipe before, but it was the reason for adding the cookbook to my Christmas wish list last year. A vegetarian foodie friend had told me that this time-intensive pot pie was the ultimate in delicious, vegetarian comfort food. The recipe suggests that a salad of bitter greens, pears and walnuts is great with it, so I planned to make that salad. I decided we should also make some gluten-free sourdough bread to eat with our homemade cultured maple butter. And Wyatt requested crème brûlée for dessert because "we always have that." I think we may have only had it last Thanksgiving, but who was I to argue where a cooking torch was involved.

On Tuesday, I spent the entire day cooking while Wyatt played astronaut (and other wonderfully imaginative games that I don't recall) at the other end of the kitchen. I began by making crème brûlée. Next, I simmered mushrooms and other vegetables into stock for over three hours. Finally, I made the dough of my first ever gluten-free pie crust.

On Wednesday, we took a break from cooking and went to the Exploratorium.

Thursday morning arrived, and it was time to bake and cook again. Wyatt and I started the bread on its final rise around 7:30 before I headed out for a class at the gym.

When I got home from the gym, I found Marc and Wyatt just hanging out, and I felt myself getting really annoyed. With just the three of us having Thanksgiving together, it felt like a regular weekend day, only with a whole lot more preparation and cooking than I wanted to do. But instead of expressing those thoughts directly, I demanded that we clean up our messy house. Marc, suddenly irritated himself, pressed me as to why I was "leveling edicts" about tidying-up when no guests were coming over. I am pretty sure I responded that I had been planning for days and cooking for hours, and I would really prefer that today, Thanksgiving, which he didn't seem to care much about, be different from all the other days when I plan and cook all by myself and we eat surrounded by clutter. I like to imagine the wonderfully evolved adult I would be if I had said all of that in a calm, eloquent and loving way. But as the person I am today, I remain grateful to Marc for quickly understanding my point of view, forgiving me for "leveling edicts" before explaining where I was coming from, and immediately getting on-task after our discussion.

I baked the bread while we ate a light lunch, and after lunch, it was time to start cooking the pie. I assembled the many vegetables we had gotten from our farm share box, the additional vegetables I had bought from Rainbow Grocery, as well as herbs and one little carrot from our garden. I then realized I had miscalculated how many pounds of mushrooms we needed, and Marc dashed out to the supermarket to get some more.

I started rolling the pie crust.

Next, Wyatt and I started chopping. Soon, Marc returned with more mushrooms and joined the prep party.

I made an actual gravy out of a roux of homemade mushroom stock and gluten-free flour. I could hardly believe the gravy worked, never mind its hearty flavor and smooth texture. I assembled the pie, and while it baked, we enjoyed cocktails, washed the various salad greens, burned the walnuts, substituted sliced almonds, and crumbled some bleu cheese into the salad. When the pie was finished baking, our dinner looked like this.

When the pie was cut, our dinner looked like this.

And the verdict? Well, our 10-hour Winter Vegetable Pie was met with mixed reviews. Marc thought it was fantastic. I thought it was fine, but I was expecting something more amazing for the time spent on it. Wyatt hated it. I hadn't realized until we sat down to dinner and he said, "looking at that gooey food makes my body feel weird" that we never, ever cook gravy or classic American comfort food. Wyatt never got past the gooey brown factor. Instead, he ate bread with maple butter, some salad, and he asked every three minutes whether it was time for crème brûlée yet.

The crème brûlée was perfect, thank goodness.

And even though Wyatt didn't say it, it was pretty obvious that he was grateful we had stuck with tradition for dessert.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homemade Cultured Maple Butter - Part 2

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"Mom. Does everyone in this family have a Christmas list? Or just me? You really should ask for a chef's hat that way we can be chefs together."

On Saturday, we began testing Dave Arnold's ideas about improving our maple butter. As he explained on the podcast, the problem with getting maple syrup into butter is one of water. To get the maple syrup into the butter, you have to either replace as much of the water as possible in the cream with maple syrup, or make the maple syrup more of a solid and knead it into the butter. We tried both approaches.

We started with two pints of heavy cream, kefir grains, maple syrup and salt.

For the first jar, I cooked two cups of cream on low heat, stirring continuously, until the cream had been reduced to 1 1/2 cups. I stopped there because the cream was starting to look a little grainy and weird, like something irreversible was about to happen. I also reduced 1/2 cup of maple syrup to about 1/4 cup. I stopped cooking it when the temperature reached about 245 degrees. Once again, I stopped because the color appeared to be starting to darken and the smell was starting to change, and it seemed that at any second, there would be no turning back. I let the syrup cool down, and I mixed it into the cream. I then cooled the cream mixture, stirring continuously until the mixture was about 90 degrees. At 90 degrees, I found myself so bored with stirring that I just refrigerated the bowl until the mixture was about room temperature. I added a tablespoon of kefir grains and left the cream to ferment overnight. In retrospect, I probably should have just added a tablespoon or two of active kefir so we wouldn't have had to strain the grains out of the thickened cream the next day. I recall considering this option and then going with the grains themselves for a reason I don't remember. I did not hold back later, though, when tweeting my questions about the health of my mapled kefir grains to Amanda Feifer of Phickle. She confirmed that prepared kefir would have been a better way to go, but assured me all would be well with the grains. She's the best.

For the second jar, Wyatt poured the pint of cream into the jar, we added a tablespoon of kefir grains, and we left it to ferment overnight.

On Sunday, we made the crème fraîche in the two jars into butter.

For the first jar, we strained the crème fraîche, whipped it into butter, drained it, rinsed it in cold water, and kneaded in salt. Let me just tell you that the maple-flavored buttermilk that resulted was incredible. Really amazing. 

For the second jar, we made the butter the same way. We also made Dave Arnold's recommended "snotty xanthan gel" of maple syrup. I made a 1% fluid gel by first dispersing the xanthan into water because, from what I had read, maple syrup is about 66% sugar and xanthan doesn't hydrate well in liquid that is more than 60% sugar. 

As Wyatt said about this preparation, "Try it, Mom! It tastes WAAY better than it looks." The gross-out goo level on butter bits was pretty high, so I actually rinsed the butter bits in cool water in the sieve. Only then was I able to get it all merged back into one ball of butter. 

Marc was our taste tester. He concluded, "These both taste really good. But maple? I don't know if they taste like maple. They may be circling maple. They taste sweet to me."

I think the xanthan preparation resulted in stronger maple flavor, but it was still pretty mild. The cream and syrup reduction preparation was even lighter on the maple flavor. After all, much of the maple flavor ended up in the best buttermilk ever created. While the flavor was more robust in the xanthan preparation, the butter unfortunately ended up with little blobs of maple gum throughout. The butter spreads well, but my kneading of that mess was apparently not thorough enough. 

There is one more idea that we may eventually try: adding maple sugar to the cream before culturing. Maybe that would work. But before we go there, we will need help eating our way out of the current round of butters.

 

Homemade Cultured Maple Butter - Part 1

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"Hang on Mom! I need to change into my jeans, put my tools in my pockets, put my hard hat on, and Halloween beads. Then I will be a real construction worker. And we can start mixing the butter!"

With an eye towards homemade holiday gifts, we began experimenting with flavored butters. Delicious kitchen experiments are the best.

We started with cultured maple butter. Our first attempt tasted good. It could definitely use some improvements, but before I get into the issues, I'll describe what we did.

We started with a quart of homemade crème fraîche, and turned it into butter by whipping it gently in the stand mixer. We gathered all the butter bits, drained the buttermilk, and then washed the butter in cold water. Wyatt wore his Canobie Lake Park hard hat and sparkly Halloween beads for the occasion. 

Then we added salt, cinnamon, maple syrup, and mixed it all up by kneading it.

As I mentioned, it tasted good. But the maple flavor was not very robust. Also, the maple syrup that we were able to get into the butter (you can see from the photo that there is a fair amount left in the bowl) never fully integrated with the butter. As a result, the syrup continuously collected in little droplets on the surface of the butter and in the butter container, like the butter was weeping syrup. Weeping butter is weird. To me, it seems to require excuses, or at least an explanation.

I emailed Cooking Issues, my favorite cooking podcast, to see if Dave Arnold had any thoughts on how to improve our maple butter.

The Tuesday after I emailed the show, I listened live to episode 227. There was no mention of my question. As a result, Wyatt, my defeatist attitude and I started a giant jar of preserved lemons so that we would have some homemade gifts ready by Christmas.

I didn't bother attempting to listen live to the next episode of Cooking Issues.  I just listened as usual, later in the week, while doing cooking-related things. This past Thursday evening, I had time to listen to Episode 228 while cleaning up dinner and making Wyatt's lunch. And at minute 47:30, I had to sit down because I was too stunned and excited to do anything else. Dave Arnold read my email on the show and he had suggestions of things to try to improve our maple butter! 

That little bit of encouragement-via-podcast was all I needed. Wyatt and I spent time this past weekend trying two improvements inspired by Dave Arnold's suggestions. The details of those delicious and weird messes will be included in another post, "Homemade Cultured Maple Butter - Part 2." And because I am so grateful to anyone who is reading about this maple butter experiment during this Thanksgiving week, I'm planning to break with my my recent tradition of one-post-per-week and publish that story tomorrow.

 

So Much Pumpkin

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Did you know that the warty pumpkins are supposedly the sweetest ones? With that trivia nugget in mind, Wyatt and I set about finding the biggest, wartiest pumpkin in the store. And then we roasted it whole for over an hour in a 400 degree oven. 

I didn't weigh this beast, but I should have. From this one big, warty pumpkin, we made pumpkin custard (which took about two cups of pumpkin), pumpkin bread (another cup), pumpkin soup (five cups), pumpkin muffins (one cup), and we still have have one cup of pumpkin purée left in the freezer.

After roasting the pumpkin, we quartered it, scooped out the seeds and strings, and then removed the flesh from the skin. We then puréed the pumpkin in the Vitamix until it was smooth.

To make the pumpkin custard, I followed Against All Grain's Maple Pumpkin Custard recipe. My only recipe changes were to use cream instead of coconut milk, and to bake the custard in one 9 inch x 12 inch glass pan instead of in individual servings. Using the larger pan nearly doubled the recipe's estimated baking time for me. And no surprise, pumpkin custard baked in such a casual way is not very photogenic, so there are no photos of our final product. But I promise that we ate it the first night with whipped cream on top, and later in the week, we enjoyed it plain.

Wyatt insisted on wearing his chef's hat to mix the custard. The hat seems to give him focus and determination while cooking or baking. He keeps telling me I should get one so that I can be a real chef, like him.  

Our pumpkin bread recipe came from Elana's Pantry: Easy Paleo Pumpkin Bread. We used the Cuisinart for this recipe. 

I made several changes to the original recipe. The volume of spices for this recipe sounded heavy for our taste, and I don't have a tiny loaf pan. So I doubled all the ingredients except for the cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. I omitted the stevia because I can't stand the taste of stevia. And I baked the bread in a regular sized loaf pan. Baking a larger recipe in a larger pan extended the baking time. The bread was done after about an hour in the oven, and it was delicious.

Our last pumpkin product (before deciding to freeze the rest lest we overdose and never willingly eat pumpkin ever again) was pumpkin soup. I followed the spirit of my Really Good Butternut Squash Soup recipe. Because we had already processed the pumpkin, I didn't have any strings or seeds to brown in the pan for flavor this time. But I did a really good job browning the onion. The soup was great, and we garnished it with sprouted pumpkin seeds.

We then took a pumpkin breather for a couple of weeks. 

Next, with an eye towards baking some gluten-free Smitten Kitchen pumpkin muffins, I defrosted one of the remaining cups of pumpkin purée.

Keeping in mind some of the lessons from America's Test Kitchen's cookbook, How Can It Be Gluten Free, I substituted, in a ratio of 1:1, my current favorite gluten-free flour blend (I mix it at home, but you can also buy it pre-mixed) for the all-purpose flour called for in the recipe. I also used a full tablespoon of baking powder, and I allowed the batter to rest at room temperature for a half-hour before baking.

I've been calling these muffins "cupcakes." Their snickerdoodle tops certainly elevate them over any regular muffin. But the real reason for my sleight of language is that they'll be Wyatt's treat at an upcoming birthday party. Because this recipe made a dozen muffin-cupcakes, I have also tucked several away in the freezer for another day.

Chèvre. Twice.

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After listening to David Asher on Cutting the Curd and Fuhmentaboudit!, I was inspired to make his favorite cheese: chèvre. As he promised in The Art of Natural Cheesemaking, this cheese was very straightforward and required very little active time. 

Look at this beautiful chèvre! We got about a pound and a half of it, too, which is terrific. We ate it for snack on some crackers, with apples and honey. I also put some into a vegetable frittata for lunch yesterday. 

For as simple as this cheese is, would you believe that we may have had another cheese fail along the way? Here's what happened.

On Wednesday, I set up our kefir to culture so we would be ready for cheesemaking on Thursday. Thursday, morning, I went to Rainbow Grocery to buy four quarts of Claravale Raw Goat's milk. The milk was delivered that day. In fact, I had to wait for it to be taken off the truck. I brought the milk straight home, refrigerated it, and after school, Wyatt and I set to work making cheese.

Right away, we noticed an issue. The milk smelled strong. And while the milk didn't taste horrible, it didn't taste good. It had a strongly acidic and goat-y flavor, and there was no way either one of us would have even entertained drinking it. But this was only the fourth time or so that we had purchased goat's milk, and I wondered whether it was just we who had a problem with it. Maybe this milk was within the acceptable range of goat milk flavors. Or maybe the idea of doing another hour-plus round trip to the store with drippy milk bottles was just more than I could handle. We decided to move ahead with the cheese to see what would happen. 

As usual, we poured and heated the milk, dissolved the rennet, added the kefir culture, added the rennet, and then left the cheese to ferment. The period for this cheese to ferment is 24 hours at room temperature.

The cheese that resulted was definitely weird. The curd was firm, full of holes and spongy. You could actually wring out the whey from it. It looked nothing like David's photos, and it tasted strong. The flavors were more like the milk had been clabbered, so maybe there was something that had happened with refrigeration during the milk's transit to Rainbow. I emailed Claravale to find out what might have happened, but they never responded. We ate some of the cheese, crumbled on tacos on Friday. None of us suffered any ill effects, but we weren't that eager to eat more of it. 

On Saturday, I bought more goat's milk and we tried it again. This time, the milk tasted good and only mildly goat-y. And the curd we achieved looked like David's photos. Even better, the cheese tastes amazing.

I think the (admittedly obvious) lesson I have learned from this recipe is that we should trust our noses and taste buds, regardless of when the milk was delivered. If there's something off with the milk, the cheese will be off, too.

If anyone has any experience with goat's milk and can let me know what may have been wrong with the first batch we tried, I'd love to hear it. Please leave a comment!

Our Little Elephant

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Let me present our little elephant. He will be very cozy this Halloween!

(In case you are concerned about how Wyatt can see through or around this hat, don't be. He was looking down for this photo for full elephant effect. The hat does not cover his face.)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we started working on the hat for this costume in June. June may sound like a crazy time to start working on a warm, wooly hat, but we live in San Francisco, and for the last two years, June has been the absolute perfect time for Halloween hat making.

Wyatt opted for the elephant hat pattern from Vanessa Mooncie's Animal Hats book. The yarn we chose was Lamb's Pride, Charcoal Heather, in bulky weight, and I purchased it locally from Imagiknit. Lamb's Pride is 85% wool and 15% mohair, and is made by the Brown Sheep Company, a family owned and operated yarn spinning mill in Mitchell, Nebraska. The company has been around for decades, and over the last several years, they have updated their equipment and developed ways to reuse 70-90% of their waste water every day. The yarn is soft and warm, and it looks like it would felt very easily.

Once the hat was mostly finished (only the lining was left), I put the elephant costume project on pause until September.

In September, I started working on the body of the costume, the elephant suit, as Wyatt calls it, knitting it out of Balance yarn by O-Wool. 

As I neared the end of the elephant suit, I realized we would need buttons, as well as lining and matching thread for the hat. And I realized that to stay true to my plan to use sustainable materials for this costume, I would need to do some research. I first looked for vintage buttons, but couldn't find the sixteen I needed in the right size, never mind in colors we wanted. After some further poking around online, I found Honey Be Good. They sell unfinished wooden buttons (made in the USA from sustainable hardwood) and some cute, organic patterned interlock fabric.

I consulted with Wyatt on the buttons and the lining. He was excited about the buttons but really wanted me to use the light pink interlock fabric in my stash to line the hat. His plan worked for me, so I purchased the buttons and light pink thread (to match the lining) from Honey Be Good. The thread I purchased is by Gütermann creativ, 100% recycled polyester, from post-consumer plastic bottles, and is Oeko-Tex Standard 100 certified.

The next question I faced was what to do with the unfinished buttons. Beeswax polish for a natural finish? Stain? Paint? Natural dye? I considered all of it. Beeswax polish was out because Wyatt and I wanted a pop of color on the suit. Stain and paint would be fine, if I could find a less toxic alternative to what's available in most hardware stores. I looked into mixing my own paint with pigments, but a linseed oil base wouldn't cure in time. I considered milk paint, but I didn't feel willing to commit to such a large amount of paint for such a tiny project. I bought some turmeric root, but after going to two stores, I could not find the alum that would help bind the color to the wood during natural dying. In the end, I stopped overthinking it and went with the acrylic artist paints in my stash. It felt so good to get them out again.

Wyatt and I mixed the paint colors for the buttons of his suit from the three primary colors, plus some magenta and a touch of white. We also used shiny gold paint for one big button, to give the suit the sparkle it needed. Mixing the colors thrilled and delighted Wyatt, and the project engrossed him like no other project I have ever witnessed. He remarked to me as he painted buttons with tiny, thorough brushstrokes, "We're working very hard on these buttons! Let's pretend we are a button factory!" 

Later that night, I varnished the buttons after I discovered that the paint color transferred pretty easily to a damp cloth. Color transfer wouldn't do for an elephant suit that still needed to be washed and blocked!

In the morning, Wyatt helped me arrange the order of the colored buttons. The front of the suit was to be mostly in rainbow order, so I did that, and then he set up the buttons for the butt flap. 

I sewed on the buttons with gray thread I had in my stash, and I lined the hat while Marc took Wyatt out to the park.

I wet-blocked the suit and it took about three days to fully dry.  Once it was dry, I added the tail. Wyatt now spends some of most afternoons as an elephant, until he overheats. I really hope Halloween isn't that hot, or we will have a very sweaty elephant on our hands.


"What do you want to be for Halloween?"

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What to be for Halloween is such an important question in our house. Wyatt starts planning his costume early. And by early, I mean November 1. I remember driving Wyatt to school one day last year in early November, and he had a list of about seven different Halloween costumes he wanted to wear, in order: "Next year, I want to be a polar bear, and the year after that, a duck, and the year after that, a kitty cat..."

His polar bear plan lasted a few months, but after sitting down with my book, Animal Hats To Knit And Show Off, he changed his mind. And that change stuck. Just like last year, Wyatt had fully committed to his Halloween costume by early June. And just like last year, I knit his hat during the summer but waited to work on his suit until September. 

This time of year, I think back to the hours I used to spend as a kid dreaming up and crafting costumes out of fabric and trim remnants. Hot glue, pins, and stitching--we used it all in a flurry of activity.

And this is the perfect time of year to look back at old Halloween photos. We have four years of Halloween photos, because Marc and I never dressed-up before Wyatt was born. We are unusual for adults in San Francisco. Anyway, I think we may have peaked early as a family on Wyatt's first Halloween. All three of us dressed up that year, and only that year. I was the beehive, Marc was the beekeeper, and Wyatt was, of course, the bee. I ordered my wig, Marc's t-shirt, the netting for his hat, and Wyatt's costume online. I made our tiny bees out of pipe cleaners.

For Wyatt's second Halloween, he was a Great Horned Owl. I ordered his costume on Etsy, and it was ingenious. The base of the costume was a hoodie, so it was super easy to wear and very comfortable. The crafter had affixed a variety of felt and actual feathers all over the sweatshirt, very much like a great horned owl. I ordered a pair of matching sweatpants from Kohl's (the source of the costume's hoodie), and Wyatt was good to go.

By the fall of 2013, I had found my crafting mojo. Wyatt wanted to be a dragon, and I accepted the challenge. I modified a pattern for a crocheted crocodile hat, adding claws and ears. I also sewed wings from one of Marc's old shirts and the fabric of the skirt of the bridesmaid dress I wore for my sister's wedding. Finally, I sewed Wyatt a green fleece sweatsuit--his dragon suit. Wyatt made a truly splendid dragon. He still wears the hat and wings, but much to his dismay, he outgrew his dragon suit awhile ago.

Last year, Wyatt wanted to be a lion. That was pretty easy compared to the dragon. I made his hat from the pattern in the Animal Hats book, with Malabrigo Rasta yarn in Coronilla that I bought at Imagiknit. As I mentioned earlier, I finished the hat in June, but waited until September to make his "lion suit," which ended up being a purple fleece sweatsuit. I used the same pattern that I had used for the dragon suit, but I made a bigger size. As you can see by the photo below, the lion costume lends itself to accessorizing. Wyatt continues to use and wear his costume regularly.

In fact, my favorite part about the costumes that I have made is that Wyatt still loves wearing some portion of them. Hats and wings are a great way for him to dress-up and pretend, and the dragon and lion suits have been super cozy to wear after swimming lessons.

This year's costume is finally finished and drying next to me on the floor, because like a good knitter, I wet blocked it last night. Wyatt is not at all happy that it is still wet. He'd rather be wearing it everywhere. Next week, I will share the rest of the story about this year's costume. If you're dying for a sneak peek, I have posted some "Work In Progress" photos on Instagram.