Cate Anevski

Success!

Every spring, I get the itch to start gardening, which can be tricky when you live in a small, dimly lit apartment. I always try container gardening, but there is a lot to learn about growing food in a small container, and I tend not to have a very large harvest from my efforts. Of course, the real goal is an excuse to play in the dirt, so in that respect, I'm always successful.

It's nice to be able to really reap the rewards from gardening, and this year I'm well on my way. I planted radish seeds in a window box on my porch before it even stopped snowing out here, and I already have delicious vegetables to show for it. I'm trying a few lettuces and herbs and even a tomato plant as well, so I'm excited to see how things go.

On a side note, does anyone know a good use for radish greens and the spindly roots? I'm not so sure I like the way they taste plain, but I'd love to find a way to utilize every part of my harvest.

Replacing Dolls with Daal

I decided today I'm done with dolls. I'm switching to daal! Next week it will be Dahl. Until then, a recipe for a quick, cheap, easy lunch.

Ingredients:
1 small onion
1 c. red lentils
3 c. broth (or water with bouillon)
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp curry powder
1/4 tsp Chinese five spice
Dash cayenne
Salt and pepper to taste
1/2 c. frozen peas

1. Sauté the onion in olive oil.

2. Add all other ingredients except peas (broth, lentils, butter, and spices). Bring to a boil.

3. Reduce heat to low and simmer for 30 minutes.

4. Add frozen peas, and simmer five more minutes.

5. Enjoy over tasty basmati rice!

Thank You!

I hope everyone is enjoying a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday, whether you celebrate it with copious amounts of food or not. Here's the pumpkin pie I'm taking to dinner to meet the new boyfriend's family. (Wish me luck!)

Every year at this time, I'm reminded how truly thankful I am at the wonderful art community I get to be a part of. I'm constantly amazed at the kind and generous people I encounter on a daily basis and blown away by the powerful tools that allow us all to come together.

Thank you for being a part of my community, and here's to another great year!

It must be fall...

...when you sit down to snack on a sweet potato that just so happens to look like a pumpkin. I love changing seasons.

Enjoying a Bountiful Harvest

Brownie Time!

Yesterday was one of those days where I had to spend a bunch of time just waiting for stuff, so I tried to make good use of the time by working on my brownie recipe. It's getting pretty good, so I'd like to share:

~ 2/3 cups of butter
~ 5 ounces (or so) of unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped into pieces
~ 1 cup of unrefined sugar (White sugar is fine too, but I never use it, so I can't vouch for whether it's good in this recipe. Also, I don't have a huge sweet tooth, so sugar-lovers might want to add a bit more according to taste.)
~ 1 tsp of salt (I do, however, have constant salt cravings, so maybe this isn't necessary for normal folks.)
~ 2 tsp of vanilla extract
~ 3 eggs
~ 1 cup of whole wheat pastry flour
~ 1 cup of mini chocolate chips (optional... I didn't have any in my cupboard today. I can't imagine where they could have run off to...) 

1. Preheat oven to 350°. (I never actually preheat my oven unless I'm doing something that takes ten minutes or less to bake, but I know lots of people like to preheat.) Grease bottom and sides of a 9" x 9" x 2" square pan with butter or the leftover grease from the butter wrapper you're about to use.

2. Melt butter and chocolate in a small saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly. Set aside to cool.

3. Beat sugar, salt, eggs, and vanilla with an electric mixer (or by hand, if you have a lot of endurance) for five minutes. Stir in chocolate mixture until well mixed. Stir in flour until just blended. Stir in chocolate chips, if you're using them. Spread into pan.

4. Bake 30 to 40 minutes, depending upon whether/how much you preheated the oven, until the brownies start to separate from the edges of the pan. Allow to cool on a wire rack (if you're reeeaaallly patient).

Adapted from a Betty Crocker cookbook my dad gave me when I first moved out at eighteen. It's still my favorite cookbook and never lets me down.

My, My...

Dearest Blog Reader(s),

I'm writing to send you my sincerest apologies for not blogging once in the past thirty-one days. I'd like you to know a simple fact, though: Every time I am absent from this blog for an extended period of time, please be assured I'm spending my days alternately baking and recovering from sugar hangovers. I am diligently working to improve my food photography skills (the lacking element is the diligence to take a photo before diving face-first into the yummies), but in the meantime you need not worry. I'm always hard at work, but not always on something that can be shared via pixels.

Today, I finally did manage to take some photos of the process. One of my besties, Jeffrey, suggested that today be a pumpkin pie day. As you can see, he is quite the food lover.

Of course, everyone has to eat.

You were, perhaps expecting a photo of a pie? I'm far to ashamed of the mayhem that occurred in my kitchen to create our masterpieces, so you'll have to enlist the help of your imagination to envision the final product. Suffice it to say, I'm suffering from the itis, in the best possible way.

Isn't Fall Wonderful?

During fall, I always say fall is my favorite season. The same is true of spring. I love the in-between times of change. I don't think I would much enjoy living in a place with little variation in the seasons. Seeing the earth go through its transitions is just too much fun.

Besides, fall just has so many wonderful activities associated with it. I already bought myself a new pair of boots, so the next item on my agenda was to get down to some baking.

Last weekend, one of my best friends, Marissa, was in town from Chicago. She visited around the same time last year, which is when I made my first ever pie-from-scratch. This year, we intended to do the same, but her visit was curtailed a bit due to some flight issues, so the pounds of apples from the farmer's market were sitting in my kitchen, begging to be made into pie.

I used Grandma Ople's pie recipe, which was just right. The filling was super-easy to make, and it encouraged me to finally try a lattice-work crust. Mine was far from perfect, but some little butterfly cutouts made a nice camouflage. I have found that a warmed-up piece with a little bit of mild goat cheddar sprinkled on top makes a perfect breakfast, er, I mean a perfect dessert after a nutritious and healthy breakfast.

Next on the fall-fun list is sitting in my big comfy armchair stitching and watching The Princess Bride. Isn't life grand?

At Last!

This has been a rather tricky season for Portland-based container gardeners. The overnight lows throughout June were just too cold to leave a poor defenseless seedling at their mercy. Nonetheless, I'm happy to say that I have overcome that hurdle and have enjoyed the first two tomatoes of the season. Better late than never.

The tomatoes came from a regular, right-side-up planter, but I wanted to share my upside-down planter as well. I followed instructions I found on Instructables, which worked out pretty well. I made a mistake with one of the planters which resulted in crushing the base of one of the tomato plants with the bottom wire of the planter, but that will be easy to avoid next summer with a differently-placed slit in the coco liner.

All in all, despite the small harvest, I'm really pleased with my little garden this year. I grew all of these plants (a total of three) from seed, and they have survived and thrived, even through a difficult season. And, of course, I learned quite a bit, and the hue of my thumb is now significantly more green.

They're Healthy, I Swear!

One of my many favorite local Portland businesses is Bob's Red Mill. I've enjoyed their products for a long time, since I'm an avid baker and always love working with new and unusual flours. I didn't realize they were so nearby until after I moved here, so it was quite a treat when I realized I could visit the red mill itself.

The new mother at the baby shower I attended this weekend prefers not to eat gluten, so I turned to Bob to find a delectable baked treat sans wheat. I found a great recipe for quinoa fudge cupcakes that turned out beautifully. The secret (one which I will no doubt apply to many other recipes) is to separate the eggs and whip the whites into a nice fluffy meringue so that the result isn't too dense. Neither I nor the mother-to-be particularly like super sugary goodies, so I left the cupcakes unfrosted, which helps fool me into believing they're healthy. Yesterday I even had one for breakfast, which caused this to run through my head.

How can I resist?

I recently bought...

...twenty pounds of cherries, picked fresh that morning, at under a dollar a pound. Now it's a race against the clock to eat them all. Have I mentioned recently how much I love Oregon?

New Seasons is a Magical Place

Mushroom-Obsessed, I Am...

My Favorite Art Medium is Cookies

Marissa inspires me to try all sorts of baking adventures I never would have embarked upon by myself. This time, a quick AllRecipes.com search for something tasty made from both cocoa and hazelnuts resulted in the splendor of the haselnussmakronen.

As we reviewed the recipe, I noted that it sounded an awful lot like a hazelnut version of the traditional almond macaron, a treat I've meant to try baking ever since enjoying my first bite at Pix on my birthday. Upon closer inspection of the name of the cookie, we realized that haselnuss means hazelnut, which would allow us to incorporate the native Oregon filbert; makron means macaron, which would let me try my hand at a new delicacy, and en means plural, which ensured us that there would be plenty cookies to go around.

After much hemming and hawing over exactly how to execute each step of the recipe (meringue can be scary, you know), our resulting dessert was a great success.

Next stop: vanilla custard. (Gotta do something with those egg yolks, after all.)