i have diminished, and gone into the west
Apr. 28th, 2019 09:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7ok i'm just being dramatic. drove back out to buffalo today. left in a light drizzle, arrived in bright sunshine. It's always funny when the weather patterns don't come through evenly and i escape whatever the system is, one direction or the other; three hundred miles is sometimes enough to get past the edge of a weather system, but often is not.
yesterday was the monthly potluck for the CSA. it's only a few families that are regulars in the off-season like this, and it winds up that they're mostly the ones with little kids, which is GREAT for Farmkid, who gets a playdate out of it.
We dithered over what to make; something that uses a lot of eggs, I suggested, and VegMan decided to make some sort of spinach and egg confection. I said I wanted to make pastry cream, which I never had, but then I didn't know what to put it in. "Cream puffs," he said, and I said I didn't know how to make those, and he said "well, they're tricky, but I know how," and clearly thought it over, and then came back and said "Ok, here's the deal, I'll make the pastry part if you make the cream part," and I eagerly accepted.
And so I made pastry cream for the first time in my life, and it worked beautifully, and I saved the whites and made meringues.
I will never do that again, not precisely that way. For one thing, the reason a usual recipe takes three or four egg whites is that that makes a fuckton of meringue. I saved nine of my ten egg whites, and the KitchenAid bowl was so full it went up over the beaters, and then it took me literally three hours to pipe and bake them all.
But, it was worth the experiment.
The cream puffs came out great, but I won't be making the pastry part, because VM described it and I was like "that sounds like a huge pain in the ass" and he was like "well, yeah."
He remains one of my favorite people in the world, and I'm so glad my sister has basically adopted him, by the way. His apartment adjoins their house and he just comes in all the time, and while I was making the meringues he was playing a game with Farmkid that involved kicking a ball, and the ball ricocheted off the wall and hit my bowl of meringue and i barely saved it and I turned around and HOLLERED at Farmkid and he was like ".... oops that was me," and I apologized because clearly he already knew what he'd done was wrong, and then he took Farmkid back to his apartment and cooked his spinach thing while she took every bit of Tupperware out of his kitchen cupboards and spread them around the floor.
He doesn't ever babysit, that's not his gig, but he's known Farmkid since she was a couple of months old, at this point, and they're buds, and he's not a hugger or a people-toucher, ever, but she sits on him sometimes and he puts up with it because she's his bud and sometimes your buds do things you just deal with because it makes them happy.
They really do have, like, the Millennial dream living situation, because everyone gets private space but there are so many people around.
The second of the apprentices for this season started work, and VM admitted to Sister and me on Thursday, while they were on a break from transplanting thousands of onions, that he's now the most talkative person on the crew; both of the apprentices are quiet young women who just don't talk much, and he is used to being the one who rarely contributes to the conversation. "So we're mostly just working in silence," he said. And then went on, "Sometimes I have to try to make small talk. It's weird."
(One of the apprentices later said, "Oh, VM asked me if I had any hobbies, and I had to admit I didn't. Listen, I was a three-season varsity athlete and also a farmer, I never had time to do stuff for fun." She is, I think, nineteen. The other one is like 33, and has had a fascinating life so far, and just came back from a year in Thailand, and will contribute to a conversation with some really interesting insights but will absolutely not start a conversation.)
Had to drive over the Petersburg Pass into Massachusetts twice in three days, because the farm truck developed brake problems over there and had to be abandoned at a garage, and we had to go first to make the garage look at it, and then second to pick it up. It's a lovely drive, and I had lovely conversations with BIL both times, but I'm all set on mountain switchback roads for a while. The funniest part is, I think, when you cross the state line and the road suddenly drastically changes in quality. It's shitty in New York and great in MA, for the record.
I have a rose thorn tip embedded in my thumb, from making what I hope are the last dried arrangements of the season. It'd be okay if they sold and we had to make more, I guess, but my point was that we're definitely going to move on to fresh flowers soonish, starting with peonies, and so I spent hours on the dried ones to hopefully eke out the rest of the season. It'd be nice, is all. I had another rose thorn stuck in my index finger but I managed to tweeze it out with no trauma. The thumb one is way in there, though, so I might have to wait for it to get infected so my body will push it out. If it doesn't get infected, well, I guess it can just be part of me, I'll live like that.
I guess I'm glad to be back in my own house, but I always feel like I'm missing out on cool farm stuff when I leave. At least the season's not in frantic full swing; Sister got the house cleaned up a lot on Saturday and was feeling pretty good about things, and when I left it all seemed under control. It could be illusory, but it seems nice at the moment.
Next visit, I'll get the yurt up. I'm just not sure when the next visit will be.
yesterday was the monthly potluck for the CSA. it's only a few families that are regulars in the off-season like this, and it winds up that they're mostly the ones with little kids, which is GREAT for Farmkid, who gets a playdate out of it.
We dithered over what to make; something that uses a lot of eggs, I suggested, and VegMan decided to make some sort of spinach and egg confection. I said I wanted to make pastry cream, which I never had, but then I didn't know what to put it in. "Cream puffs," he said, and I said I didn't know how to make those, and he said "well, they're tricky, but I know how," and clearly thought it over, and then came back and said "Ok, here's the deal, I'll make the pastry part if you make the cream part," and I eagerly accepted.
And so I made pastry cream for the first time in my life, and it worked beautifully, and I saved the whites and made meringues.
I will never do that again, not precisely that way. For one thing, the reason a usual recipe takes three or four egg whites is that that makes a fuckton of meringue. I saved nine of my ten egg whites, and the KitchenAid bowl was so full it went up over the beaters, and then it took me literally three hours to pipe and bake them all.
But, it was worth the experiment.
The cream puffs came out great, but I won't be making the pastry part, because VM described it and I was like "that sounds like a huge pain in the ass" and he was like "well, yeah."
He remains one of my favorite people in the world, and I'm so glad my sister has basically adopted him, by the way. His apartment adjoins their house and he just comes in all the time, and while I was making the meringues he was playing a game with Farmkid that involved kicking a ball, and the ball ricocheted off the wall and hit my bowl of meringue and i barely saved it and I turned around and HOLLERED at Farmkid and he was like ".... oops that was me," and I apologized because clearly he already knew what he'd done was wrong, and then he took Farmkid back to his apartment and cooked his spinach thing while she took every bit of Tupperware out of his kitchen cupboards and spread them around the floor.
He doesn't ever babysit, that's not his gig, but he's known Farmkid since she was a couple of months old, at this point, and they're buds, and he's not a hugger or a people-toucher, ever, but she sits on him sometimes and he puts up with it because she's his bud and sometimes your buds do things you just deal with because it makes them happy.
They really do have, like, the Millennial dream living situation, because everyone gets private space but there are so many people around.
The second of the apprentices for this season started work, and VM admitted to Sister and me on Thursday, while they were on a break from transplanting thousands of onions, that he's now the most talkative person on the crew; both of the apprentices are quiet young women who just don't talk much, and he is used to being the one who rarely contributes to the conversation. "So we're mostly just working in silence," he said. And then went on, "Sometimes I have to try to make small talk. It's weird."
(One of the apprentices later said, "Oh, VM asked me if I had any hobbies, and I had to admit I didn't. Listen, I was a three-season varsity athlete and also a farmer, I never had time to do stuff for fun." She is, I think, nineteen. The other one is like 33, and has had a fascinating life so far, and just came back from a year in Thailand, and will contribute to a conversation with some really interesting insights but will absolutely not start a conversation.)
Had to drive over the Petersburg Pass into Massachusetts twice in three days, because the farm truck developed brake problems over there and had to be abandoned at a garage, and we had to go first to make the garage look at it, and then second to pick it up. It's a lovely drive, and I had lovely conversations with BIL both times, but I'm all set on mountain switchback roads for a while. The funniest part is, I think, when you cross the state line and the road suddenly drastically changes in quality. It's shitty in New York and great in MA, for the record.
I have a rose thorn tip embedded in my thumb, from making what I hope are the last dried arrangements of the season. It'd be okay if they sold and we had to make more, I guess, but my point was that we're definitely going to move on to fresh flowers soonish, starting with peonies, and so I spent hours on the dried ones to hopefully eke out the rest of the season. It'd be nice, is all. I had another rose thorn stuck in my index finger but I managed to tweeze it out with no trauma. The thumb one is way in there, though, so I might have to wait for it to get infected so my body will push it out. If it doesn't get infected, well, I guess it can just be part of me, I'll live like that.
I guess I'm glad to be back in my own house, but I always feel like I'm missing out on cool farm stuff when I leave. At least the season's not in frantic full swing; Sister got the house cleaned up a lot on Saturday and was feeling pretty good about things, and when I left it all seemed under control. It could be illusory, but it seems nice at the moment.
Next visit, I'll get the yurt up. I'm just not sure when the next visit will be.
