Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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Raised Beds From Reclaimed Wood

   A blogging friend and I are thinking alike quite a bit these days. Heather posted this weekend about making the most of your kitchen’s leftover contents and coming up with fun, new recipes following a decadent, costly, and probably calorie-heavy holiday season. First of all, her recipe for yogurt banana bread looks as delicious as it seems to be healthy! 
   Secondly, I like her approach. So much. She suggests that we make the most of what we have. Take honest inventory of your resources and make the most of that stuff, right now.

“Do what you can,
with what you have,
where you are.”
~Theodore Roosevelt

  These words convey to me such a sense of calm and resourcefulness, such encouraging satisfaction! Do they to you too? In a culture where consumption is key and having is often more important than doing, it’s easy to get caught up in the various races we all know about. Today, let me echo Heather’s mantra and offer you some additional encouragement to make the most of what you have.
   But not in the kitchen, in the garden. My favorite room in the house.
   Handsome and I spent a good part of the long weekend building garden structures. We built three raised vegetable beds and one fantastic arbor over the center aisle, all from reclaimed materials! I’m not even kidding. Seriously, with the exception of going to Home Depot (where spending temptation knows no bounds) to buy one replacement blade for his reciprocating saw and a box of long screws, we made zero purchases for these major farm improvements. 
   This kind of thing gives me happy chills, you guys. We used old stockade fencing peeled from the rubble of the kids’ playhouse “fort” in the back field. It had been thrashed by the violent May 10 tornado almost two years ago, but I have not had the heart to let go of any of it. This doesn’t count as letting go; this is re-purposing and keeping near all over again.
   We used limbs and trunks from already-fallen trees in the nearby Pine forest. We even plucked rusty nails out of old planks of porch wood and used those again, both the planks and the rusty nails. After an hour or two of collecting raw materials for free, I stood back and was fairly stunned by how much we had at our disposal.
    The sight was definitely motivating! We built and built and schemed and sort of measured and worked together like a well oiled machine, not stopping for lunch until the whole thing was done.
   What’s fun about accomplishments like this, beyond the monetary savings, even beyond the intrinsic pleasure of having been resourceful citizens of the planet (she says as she snaps her suspenders), is that our new projects have been braided together with happy old memories.
   For the next several years, hopefully, I will be gardening within these lovingly constructed boxes. These boxes built from rough, painted wood that instantly brings to mind the sound of my children laughing and the smell of sunshine in their hair.
 I will be coaxing flowering vines up heavily barked tree trunks that remind me of the first walks my husband and I took together on this property, four and a half short but historic years ago.
My adorable, deeply loved nephew and my two precious, beautiful daughters.
This was taken in the spring of 2008, almost four years ago. 
I see the mud on their clothes and those easy smiles
and remember how much fun we all had, how much love flowed freely.
I hope they remember too.
  
   Okay, off we all go to the next great thing in life. Have a wonderful rest of the day or night, friends! Take a good look around and challenge yourself to make something new and beautiful out of what you already have, right now. Because you are blessed!

And please say a prayer for my girls and their cousin.
xoxoxo

Sopapilla Bread

   I ran across a yummy looking bread recipe on Pinterest* that really must be shared. This past weekend our fabulous little book club was feasting on Mexican delicacies while discussing Before I Go to Sleep (which is reviewed here, if you are interested). 
   I toted this along as a dessert thinking everyone craves a sugary speck of bread after a spicy Tex Mex meal but maybe not something fried. It was well received, and I’ll be making it again. The next time, though, I think we’ll serve it drizzled with honey. That’s how we eat sopapillas in Oklahoma. Do you do that where you live?
   I did not invent this, of course, but I do feel like I can simplify the approach a tiny bit just by saying this: The ingredients and process for this are pretty much the same as any standard cinnamon roll recipe, right up to the point that you would roll the dough and slice it into little pinwheels. This means that you could probably take your own favorite cinnamon roll recipe and just treat the dough differently to come up with a slightly different presentation. No biggie. 
   I am happy to report, however, that this particular filling is much more buttery and waaaay more sugary than I have found others to be. Yum. I mean, it’s so sugary that it crunches between your teeth in a delicate, state-fair-food kind of way. And it is so buttery that it stays moist. Not at all dry, even naked of icing. To illustrate this point, the test batch I made on Friday afternoon was under a cake dome all weekend and when I nibbled some on Monday it tasted perfectly moist and yummy.
   Care for the recipe?
For the Dough:
2 3/4 cups + 2 Tablespoons flour
1/4 cup sugar
2 1/4 tsp. active dry yeast (one packet)
1/2 tsp. salt
4 Tablespoons butter
1/3 cup whole milk (I only had skim milk so used heavy cream, no problemo)
1/4 cup water
2 eggs (room temp & beaten)
1 tsp. vanilla
For the Filling:
1 cup sugar
2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
4 Tablespoons butter, browned
To Make the Dough:
1. In a saucepan, melt the butter in with the milk or cream. Remove from heat, add water & vanilla, & allow to cool to about 125 degrees.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together 2 cups of flour with the sugar, yeast, & salt. 
3. Pour the warm milk mixture into the dry ingredients and mix well. (I used a wooden spoon, not an electric mixer, and it worked great.) Now add the beaten eggs to the batter as well as 3/4 cup of flour. At this point I mashed it all up with my bare hands rather than stir. It worked well to incorporate the new flour.  The batter will be sticky.
4. Place the ball of dough in a greased bowl and let it rise (covered) in a warm spot until it doubles in volume. This takes less than an hour.
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5. Knead in 2 more Tablespoons of flour, making the previously sticky dough nice and springy, replace the cover, and let the dough rise once more while you mix up the filling.
6. The filling is simple. Just stir together the spices & sugar in one bowl. And the same saucepan as earlier  heat the butter past the point of melted, gently until it turns a nice clear, brown color. Now remove butter from heat and hang on a little longer.
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7. Roll the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Spread browned butter all over it, right up to every edge, then sprinkle on the sugary mixture. (Personal note: While making the test batch I panicked a little. It seemed like an excessive amount of butter and sugar, compared to recipes I’ve tried in the past, but this turned out to be what made this recipe so wonderful. Personal opinion.)
7. This is where the cinnamon roll/sopapilla bread road divides. Rather than roll your dough into a cylinder then slice that into little pinwheels, you use a pizza cutter to slice the flat sheet of dough into long strips. Then you stack those strips into a long, skinny dough skyscraper. Then you cut that long skinny dough skyscraper into stacked squares.
8. File your stacked squares on edge into a regular bread pan and let it rise one last time, just for a few more minutes. 
9.  I forgot to mention preheating your oven. Mine heats up with ridiculous speed, so I can do it right at this point. 350 degrees is good. Now bake the dough. Bake it till your house smells amazing. This takes about half an hour, then I suggest letting the bread rest for a while in the oven, but with the oven turned off and the door open.
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   Now for a little housekeeping. As mentioned earlier* I found this recipe on Pinterest, where I was happily led to a blog called I Heart Food and So Can You. The author there did a great job illustrating every step, and her blog is lovely, so go check it out. She also credits two other previous blog posts for this recipe, Mandy’s Recipe Box and, ultimately, Joy the Baker. Credit where credit is due, I groove it. Whoever first dreamed up this particular incarnation of cinnamon-butter-drenched yeasty love, I don’t know. But it was B & K whose blog photos lured me in through Pinterest, so there we have it.
There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Mexican Food,
and Credit Your Sources.
xoxoxo
   

Another One Bites the Dust (Small Stone January 15th)

   We are speeding along the two lane paved road which is flanked by dry grassy fields and quiet groves of bare deciduous trees. Blurring anonymously through a brown and gray still life. The cold wind hisses in through the barely open sunroof and a Queen classic pounds out of the speakers. Gasoline fumes faintly poison our fresh air but it’s intoxicating. I lay my left hand on his right thigh and wait while we accelerate uphill, the force of the car’s acceleration pressing me steadily backward into the curvy seat. Through his pants, I can trace one finger along the unseen hem of his boxers. Once we reach about 4800 RPMs, his leg flexes for the trade of gas for clutch and rapidly back again, and we’re off as if before we’d been sitting still..
   My spine melts into the seat and watch him command the vehicle. I am such a goner.

Seed Catalog Fantasies

   This is the month for gardening catalogs. No doubt about it, every year January’s slow rhythm and cold climate join forces to draw me into colorful, papery daydreams about how my flower beds and vegetable gardens will look in the coming months. If I am a willing slave to  list making and reVolutions, then I am a love struck teenager when it comes time to dream up the new year’s lushness. 
That is a heckuva lots of carrots, you guys.
Do not forget to thin them once they sprout to about an inch of green fluff.
This makes all the difference in the world.
My Grandpa has always grown it, and I agree it performs really well in Oklahoma.
   Between farm chores, ironing Handsome’s work shirts, sort of doing P90x, cooking meals that are NOT chicken-lime-cilantro-tortilla soup, and reading for our fabulous little book club, I have been salivating over the myriad possibilities held teasingly in the pages of two truly gorgeous catalogs: Burpee and Gurney’s. Click on those links just to browse, but also do yourself a favor and request their free catalogs. 
Some like minded soul somewhere in the world painted this. 
It made it to the internet without a source. 
And now sits on my lowly Pinterest page, 
inspiring and reminding me to dream big green dreams.. 
Three cheers for Audrey Hepburn.
As well as for the neat and tidy, anonymous artist 
who loves gray paint as much as I do.
   This year we’ll be tackling some major improvement projects around the Lazy W. And just so no one thinks I am throwing around the Victorian “we” too loosely, it is true. I am one of the lucky women whose husband is happy to do some heavy lifting in the garden. In fact, he freaks out a little if I do certain jobs myself. Another way I am spoiled, I know.XOXO
   We’ll be building raised beds in the largest (and also enclosed) garden plot which is on the west side of our house, sort of the way to the pond and back field. Within those raised beds we’re installing plastic and/or cardboard weed block, infilling with layer upon layer of horse and buffalo manure, chicken litter which includes  shredded paper, hay, dirt, chopped leaves, you name it. This lasagna process has already begun, thankfully, several weeks ahead of our first seed sowing. Between those raised beds I hope to grow something short and fragrant but also mow-able. We’ll see how THAT pans out. Any brilliant ideas?
   The bald spots in the east facing flower bed are gradually diminishing, each season since we’ve lived here bringing with it more “kept” plantings and bigger, prettier shrubs and perennials. But there aren’t NO bald spots yet, so flowers will be planted. Big flowers this year. Really big ones.
Can you see the sparse garden over there? It’s the east facing one.
This is how we first saw the house back in September 2007.
Let me just say that the previous owners had been renovating the home’s interior
 and had great ideas for the garden but ran out of time to implement them 
before being relocated by the military.
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Since 2007 we have replaced the roof with a really pretty dark charcoal shingle,
following a vicious hail storm which was followed by an equally vicious tornado.
We have replaced the front door and picture window 
because of a pretty devastating house fire,
and moved back then replaced that chain-link fence with three wire.
Also, that is not our horse, but she was a sweetie.
This is more or less how the flower bed looks now, 
when viewed standing at the front door. 
I think this photo is from November 2011.
   I am only planning to dig two new beds in 2012, and they are both small ones, and I have already started amending the soil to make the job easier. One is the space near the chicken coop, where a few things like butterfly bush, cedar, and Rose of Sharon have gone wild. The other is a curvy spot right outside my kitchen window, which this year will be my very own potagerie. A place to grow heat-loving herbs like basil, oregano, and mint. As well as those little food stuffs that a cook needs quickly while preparing meals. Cherry tomatoes, strawberries, carrots, hot peppers, etc. Smaller crops that require less real estate but more attention.
   Thanks for listening to me ramble about farm improvements and for joining my little garden fantasy. We’re approaching the end of January soon, so the time to stop dreaming and start working in earnest is upon us. I’d love to hear what your garden plans are for 2012!
Slow Food is the Best Food
xoxoxo

Thursday Potential (Small Stone January 12th)

   After what might have been the deepest, most solid sleep I have enjoyed in weeks, maybe months, I sit here on Thursday morning facing a long, solitary day that pulses with incredible possibility. It is thrilling.
   Snow covers the ground, not deep and fluffy, but crusted and bitterly cold, probably something closer to ice. Yet the sun is bright, loud in his brightness, defiant of the single digit temperatures. I feel grateful to not have to drive anywhere today, fortunate that my place in this world is a cozy one, a safe, happy, meaningful one. 
   Over the next eight or nine hours, what improvements can I make in our little corner of the world? What reaching out can be done? How much can I strengthen our foundations and adorn our dreams?
   Choosing how to funnel my abundant energy is often my biggest daily challenge, and today is no exception. but today it is a motivation, not a burden. Today the possibilities are potential.
   I cannot help but wonder how much of this feeling has to do with my hair being freshly washed and blown dry.