Port Potager

Now that it's cold and the furnace is on for the season, we've decided to take another look at the thermostat settings. It turns out that we can comfortably Turn down the thermostat by another 2 degrees while we're at home. As you may recall, turning down the thermostat to save some money on our heating bills was our very first Trim the Fat Tuesday exercise. Since then, though, we've insulated the house , and that has made an enormous difference in our comfort level. This house used to be a drafty wreck , but now it's consistently comfortable. No longer are the upstairs bedrooms a full 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house, and our November heating oil top-off was under 25 gallons, which is far less than what it's been in the past. All this plus an oil price of just $2.89 per gallon (for now, anyway) bodes well for this winter. I should note that the insulation did right by us in the summer, too. We never even bothered to put in the window A/...

Something magical happened last weekend. Tiegan got a cookbook out at the library on Saturday morning and announced that she would be preparing dinner on Sunday. She did, and it was delicious. Check out her adaptation of a chicken pot pie from The Children's Baking Book by Denise Smart. Making the Pie 1. I made a creamy sauce with butter, flour, chicken stock, milk, sour cream, and spices. I chose salt, pepper, and dried savory and oregano from the garden. 2. I cooked the chicken in a frying pan with some oil and chopped onions. They made me cry a lot. 3. I mixed the cooked chicken, frozen peas , and frozen corn into the sauce.  4. I divided the mixture into four individual pie dishes and let it cool for a little bit. 5. I cut out puff pastry circles and put them over the dishes.  6. I put them in the oven for 20 minutes at 400 degrees. The original recipe had ham in it and no corn, but everybody enjoyed it anyway. It wasn't too har...

With the holidays coming up, now is the perfect time to take a look at our budget for gift-giving. Luckily for us, this past summer our children (at the time, ages 10 and almost 12) finally admitted that they no longer believe in Santa Claus. Woohoo! That frees us up to Cut Santa presents out of the gift budget. During our conversation, it became clear that these slightly greedy little children haven't believed in Santa Claus for some time now, but were afraid to come clean about it. Not because they were worried about hurting our feelings or ruining Christmas for the other sibling, though. Nope. The motivation here was straight-up fear that the gravy train of an extra present was over. And they were right. Being Santa for the last decade was fun, but also increasingly challenging. Check out a fairly recent letter to Santa from the oldest: As you can see, requests are either incredibly hard to find (thanks for the weird flute, eBay guy!), or on the expensive si...

November always strikes me as the end of something. The World Series is over and baseball is done for the year, despite my best efforts to hang on to summer. Halloween and its accompanying burst of creativity is past. Daylight Saving Time has finally ended, thrusting us headlong into the dark days. Temperatures have dipped below freezing, ending the active growing season and leaving us casting about for something to do in the garden besides peeking under the tunnels and raking up leaves. Although we haven't technically had a frost, we did have some snow yesterday, so our remaining summer fruits are dead and gone. This was our last harvest basket: Tonight we ate the very last fresh tomato (in salsa form). There are no more cucumbers, and the supply of peppers and jalapeños is dwindling. We still have some eggplant, but Saturday's eggplant parm luncheon had some bitter bites, and we had so much of it this year that I think we might just compost the last few on the c...

While scrolling through some photos on my phone this afternoon, I came across this one that I took back in August: This is a weed I pulled from the garden when I was working my way through the backlog of chores awaiting me upon my return from Costa Rica . As you can see, it is shallow-rooted but quite tall, with a sturdy (but not woody stem). It looks like a small tree, especially with its broad leaves:  But it's obviously not a tree, given the soft stem and shallow root system. It also has some white flowers that look like morning glories and smell very sweet, like a vanilla honeysuckle: They were closed when I pulled the weed in the afternoon, but you could still smell their strong perfume. But weirdest of all is the fruit: That thing is a killer! I had to wear gloves to pick it off the plant and handle it (and I never wear gloves). Those spines are for real . Fruit might not quite be the right word. Maybe it's more a seed pod, since ...

For the last entry in this month's grocery series, the kids are going to take another one for the team. They might not notice, though, since all we're planning to do is Swap out expensive cereals for their generic counterparts.  This, then, is our last box of Cheerios for awhile. They will be replaced by Market Basket Tasteeos, which taste pretty much exactly the same and have all the same nutritional stats. Speaking of nutrition, the part of the cereal maneuver that the kids are likely to notice is the part where we stop buying them sugary cereals. We usually provide them things like Frosted Mini-Wheats and Special K Red Berries, and that shit is expensive . And they go through it like it's nothing, scarfing it down for every breakfast as well as an after school snack. Well, no more. We're thinking that if they only have (fake) Cheerios, they'll be bored enough to eat something else for their snacks. Like, um, vegetables from the garden, maybe. Or a...

Sometimes, Sundays are about slow roasting meats and veggies and hanging around the house, enjoying the aroma. And sometimes Sundays are about running half-marathons and going to baby showers and playing with the neighbor kids until the sun goes down. This kind of Sunday is fun, too, but it doesn't leave much room for a big, beautiful dinner. Enter tarts: I've sung their praises before, because they work in the summer  and they work in the fall, they work with veggies and they work with fruit . They are like fast food for gardeners, and tonight they helped us use up a lot of extra Swiss chard that we had to cut to make room for our greenhouse tunnels earlier this week. (They also helped us not blow our entertainment money on junk food when we didn't much feel like cooking.) For our quick dinner, Kirk made two tarts: The  Red and Blue beet tart  we've had before, but the Swiss chard and feta one is new. To make it, he steamed about a dozen chard...