Category Archives: House

Spaghetti & Meatball Soup

Posted on by

Believe it or not, we actually do still cook. The rules have, however, changed a bit. We do lots of cooking on the stove, because my oven’s heating power is the wattage and consistency of a 100 year old incandescent lightbulb. There is also the fact that we are country folk now, and our corner market is the local restaurant supply warehouse – which is like an odd combination of Costco meets Grocery Outlet meets The Dollar Store. Meaning, when you run to the market for milk you also come back with 6 pounds of bacon and a sleeve of 16 oz paper cups.

Meal planning these days usually involves harvesting a hunk of meat from the new chest freezer, and figuring out a way NOT to cook it in the oven. This soup has become a regular around our house because Porter could pretty much subsist on nothing but spaghetti, and Stella’s got mad skills at rolling meatballs.

Spaghetti & Meatball Soup

–from good ol’ Ray-Ray

spaghetti soup

Serves 6

3 Tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 bay leaf
1 large onion, chopped
3 carrots, chopped
You can also add zucchini, mushrooms, peppers, spinach or whatever additional veggies you can sneak in
1 15-ounce can tomato sauce
1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes
1 quart chicken stock
1 1/4 pounds ground beef sirloin
1 Tablespoon Worcestiershire sauce
Generous handful of flat-leaf parlsey, finely chopped
1 egg
1/2 cup Italian bread crumbs
1/2 cup grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, plus more for serving
Salt & Pepper
1/2 – 3/4 pounds spaghetti, broken into thirds (we usually use whole wheat)

Heat a soup pot over medium-high heat. Add olive oil, garlic, bay leaf, onion and carrots and saute 5 minutes or until softened. Season with a little salt and pepper then add the tomato sauce, crushed tomatoes and chicken stock. Cover pot and bring to a boil.

Place the beef in a bowl and add the Worcestershire sauce, parsley, egg, bread crmbs, cheese, salt and pepper. After thoroughly combining everything with your hands, roll the mixture into balls the size of a large walnut and drop into the soup pot. Once all of the meatballs have been added, wash up and stir the broken spaghetti into the pot. Cook 7 minutes more. Season soup with salt and pepper to your taste, and serve topped with grated Parmigiano Reggiano.

Another weekend at the Walston Labor Camp

Posted on by

This weekend we removed and disposed of 3,380 pounds of green waste.

To clarify: the “we” being Steve, myself and the latest round of suckers visitors, Steve’s parents. Consider yourself warned: if you come to our house with the intention of “helping” you will be automatically issued a project, a Walstonling and your very own bottle of ibuprofen. Come to think of it, our house has become much like that of the Hotel California: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

You see, in our day to day lives we are deprived of any sort of productive activity that doesn’t involve the counseling or redirection of two emotionally volatile children. So you can understand how it is that we lose our ability to think rationally when it comes to getting to focus on actual task oriented activities. Activities that can be accomplished without having to stop every 5 minutes to keep someone from, say, drawing on an inappropriate person or thing with a Sharpie pen, or hauling the contents of the sand table into the kitchen.

The name of the game this weekend was berry abatement. As in, gone. Period.

We started with this:

house

house

And ended up with this:

house

house

As a matter of course, we all also ended up looking like this – basically, like we have been in a scratch fight with a badger:

steve

Not only were our guests kind enough to deal with the daily toil of yardwork, but they were also here to experience the magic and wonderment that is time-change-sleep-transition. I can say with some certainty that the idiot who came up with time changes DID NOT HAVE CHILDREN. This household already gets up at dark-thirty. Now, thanks to the lame time change, we get up an hour BEFORE dark-thirty. So not only did Bill and Judy get to give up a perfectly good weekend wrenching their backs and pulling their muscles and being ordered around by Porter the Angry Dictator, but they got to have the equivalent of the WWE in their bed by 5:00 a.m.

As I have been reflecting on all the work-vacations people have been providing lately, I think I have realized that we are missing the bigger picture here. One of my former professors from school started a B&B where people come to get the “farm experience”. As if. I remember thinking it was the most ridiculous idea in the world. What crack-smoking maniac would pay to go on vacation and actually pay to work? Oh. Well. I think I have just answered my own question.

Git ‘er Done

Posted on by

Do you smell that? That, right there. It is the smell of progress. And higher on its fumes I could not be.

My parents arrived Friday night at dusk looking like something straight out of the Grapes of Wrath. Missing from this post will be the photo of my father’s 80’s model flat-bed Chevy loaded down with two 10-foot cabinets covered in blue tarps and yellow rope, miscellaneous hefty bags containing tools & luggage and two cases of wine they picked up in Ukiah. The only thing missing was a rocking chair on top.

We got more things done in 48 hours than we have since that insane week when we moved in over two months ago.

First thing Saturday morning, as I was putting on my make-up, the mirror (that hangs on the wall adjoining the dining room) started gyrating violently, and I heard the muffled sounds of, “Okay, now to the left, okay, okay, umph! Got it, got it.” This meant one thing: Game On. From that point forward was just one continuous blur of getting stuff done. By the time the dust settled at the end of the weekend my father was limping, my husband hadn’t showered and I had reduced the inventory of unpacked boxes by over half. As of that moment, my prerogative to bitch and moan about not being able to get anything done was summarily revoked.

Big red lines have been drawn through the following items on the never-ending scroll we refer to as The List:

  • Replace original, 1964 thermostat. The existing thermostat would only ever get you within an approximate, 10-degree range of your desired temperature. It was replaced with new and lovely programmable model that will allow us not only to hit our target household temperature without guessing, but might actually produce some cost savings in the process.
  • Replaced original, 1964, yellowed, broken-cased smoke detector, and added 2 more. Another testament to the complete apathy of the previous owner, who sold this house to us at the absolute bare minimum of stated legal requirements by the State of California.
  • Replaced existing conventional light switch in master bathroom with a new dimmer switch. This particular modification was done to counteract the effect of the previous owner’s installation of a mirrored light fixture with 5, 100-watt vanity bulbs that produce so much heat that they have actually scorched the paint on the ceiling above them. And although the switch is now a lovely almond colored lever with a white switch plate, I no longer have to choose between showering in the dark or burning out my retinas.
  • The highly anticipated barn door installation was brought to completion, save for the finishing trim to cover the hardware. One of the very first thing removed from this house was the lovely set of sliding, mirrored doors. It boggles my mind who ever would have made this design decision…then I look at the rest of the house, and I am reminded.
  • Last, but not least, the new dining room cabinets and lighting were installed. Don’t even get me started on the kitchen, or it’s endless lack of storage. Fret not, there will be many posts in the future on it’s myriad inadequacies. But until we are able to re-“remodel” it, the Mount Everest of cabinets was mounted in the dining room. 10 feet of lovely, lovely storage.

All this, AND we managed to fit in a trip to the brewery.

Thanks Mom & Dad. Our sanity depended on this.

Apple Bandits

Posted on by

We have had a continuous stream of wildlife through our yard out here at One-Eleven. From the best we can tell, it’s the same cast of recurring characters: The same little skunk, a family of raccoons (mom, dad and three babies), 2 deer (big one and little one), 1 fox and an array of of red-headed woodpeckers that are systematically turning every single apple tree into a piece of swiss cheese.

Although I had nothing but disdain for the urban wildlife we endured at B Street, I have actually enjoyed this ongoing parade of woodland creatures. Probably because nowhere in that list is there included a nasty, rat-like possum. And although they have the definite potential to be little menaces – and probably will – we are content to continue to make sure the trash can is secured, and the cat food put away, and all landscaping decisions are preceded with the words ‘deer’ and ‘proof’.

Here are Cinderella and Ariel. (2 guesses who named them)

raccoons

raccoons

Perspective

Posted on by

If I were to give a brief assessment of the last month, I’d say that we have been moving forward, but in a sort of bumpy and uncomfortable is-anyone-having-any-fun-here? kind of way. Unfortunately, it is this state in which our lives currently exists that prohibits me from being able to write a post without quickly digressing to a boring rant. Although I write this blog as much for myself as for anyone else, even I don’t really feel like coming back to read a sniveling diatribe about how tired, overwhelmed and depressed I am. Booorrriiiinnngggg.

One of the things I have learned in writing these pages however, is that in order for me to write about my life in a way that isn’t whiny and sour, I need a certain amount of perspective. The humor is born from the pain not during, but after. Periodically, I’ll look back through these pages for something and stumble across a post where I didn’t give myself the appropriate emotional recovery time-frame. These are the posts whose subtext reads: GET THIS WOMAN SOME PROZAC.

So here I am, unsure if I have enough perspective, but trying to get something down anyway. I am well aware of the fact that I have gone far too long without posting anything, during a time when there is more going on than ever, and I am compounding my stress by feeling as though I am missing my opportunity to write about some of the really the good things – because even in my spiral towards total insanity, I can see that there are some good things. I know this because they are the reasons that we have not given up entirely and knocked on the door at B Street asking, “Can we just have our house back, please?”

As for our new house, well, if I have to hear myself tell one more person how much POTENTIAL it has, I am going to have to personally tell myself to shut the hell up. Blah, blah di freakin blah. It is this perpetual need to not seem ungrateful and unappreciative that has been so tough. Yes, we are fortunate enough to have two wonderful children that are trying to kill us , and a new house that looks like it was remodeled by a blind person , and yet all I want to do is tell people how insanely overwhelmed I am. This new house of ours? Yeah, it’s kind of like having 10 newborns all at the same time. And, if having children has been any lesson to me, I have learned that the same things that bring you the most joy and happiness in the world can also bring you the most hair-pulling, scream-into-your-pillow, sobbing-on-the-bathroom-floor frustration. So I guess you could say it’s kind of like that.

In between the regular, day-to-day shuffle of kids and house projects that don’t get done, we have been inserting side-trips here and there. Steve’s father turned 70, and we traveled to the booming metropolis of Redding to celebrate in the festivities. Additionally, the season of Eskra has officially been kicked off, beginning with separate bachelor and bachelorette parties in Lake Tahoe that killed not just a handful of brain cells, but entire sectors of our frontal cortex. I think it was the altitude. In all cases, it was nice to get away from here for just the briefest of moments and to alleviate the pounding need to accomplish something.

There are a set of photos that Steve took the day after our offer on this house was officially accepted. For those who have not already seen them, you can flip through to get an idea of where the crazy begins. I have taken only a small handful of photos over the last month. You’ll note that there are no rhyme or reason to the subject, or even the quality for that matter. But for those of you suffering withdrawal, it should get you over the hump.

Now, where’s that Prozac?