My Princess

I love my wife like there is no other.  She is the light of my life.  She makes me laugh, keeps me in check and keeps me doing charitable work.  She is the real deal, but this post isn't about her.

My princess.

Five years ago I meet my future wife.  She has two dogs, one trained and one wild.  Very wild.  She barks at full steam in the house, she bites, she runs.... she is a mess.  She had mange as a puppy and was in quarantine for months as a pup after being found on the streets, but she was three wheeled.  She walked with a limp.  When I came into the picture we found a GREAT vet who understood the dog and amputated the bad toe that caused the limp.  I carried the 60lb dog.

She had never bonded with a human, but on a boondocking trip to Panamint Valley, I had to chase her miles down Remi Nadu Road.  She realized she was loved.

She is now my princess.  Scabs, bald spots and all, she is the most proud dog you'd ever see.  She will chase rabbits miles across lake beds and still come on command.  Man's best friend, indeed.

This dog has taught me more about grace than anything I could ever experience.

The Magical Fruit

I've always loved beans.

I grew up in La Puente, a gritty suburb of Los Angeles where some of the white flight from the dust bowl in Oklahoma ended up.  We were them.  My grandfather died on the farm and my dad became the man of the house.

At fourteen.

 After untold years of drought, they came west with the rest of the Okies (I can call them that, I am one) and set roots.  Most ended up in towns like La Puente, El Monte, West Covina and Baldwin Park... any place you could have a chicken or two, the roads may or may not be dirt and the rest of the town Latino.  You stuck out like sore thumb.

Our first house was on Los Angeles Avenue in Baldwin Park, just East of Main St, a quarter mile from the drive through dairy.  We would walk there on hot nights to get ice cream made from the fresh milk.  It was always the best ice cream in the world on a 90 degree night.  The neighborhood was different than us and my Hesian uncles parked bikes on our culdasac to make a point, our neighbors all spoke Spanish.  We would Spanglish a bit but the universal language of the neighborhood was, when the goat went missing, there were great tacos to be had the next night.  Oh so true.  Oh so good.

In my teenage years I always heard, "Ah, Mijo, you are too skinny..." and someone's mom would shove a homemade tortilla with butter in your hand, or a potato and chorizo burrito, menudo, or a plate of refried beans.  I loved those beans and studied method after method, all individual to each family.

Here is my version.

Saute onions, garlic and hot peppers in oil, add beans (use any beans you've canned, they all work - recipe to follow) with liquid and simmer until soft.  Salt and pepper to taste and mash with a potato masher.  Simmer until they hit the desired thickness.  You don't even need to add fat to come up with a great product, simply cook down your onions, garlic and peppers in a bit of hot water, add your beans and off you go.

It brings me back every time.  Weewee's mom used to serve the best beans, but don't tell that to Mrs. Rodriguez...

Pressure Canned Beans:

1 C Beans of choice
Water to within an inch of the top of the jar
Clove of garlic
Teaspoon of salt

Process at 10 lbs for 90 minutes.

All basic canning rules apply.

Eat, eat!!!!  You are too skinny!!!!

Little Pot, Big Flower

My mother loved Georgia O'Keeffe paintings and had prints all over her office that we shared.  I felt like I had entered into an OBGyn office; I couldn't stand it.  I wear my manhood proudly... I weld, I scratch things, I like old rusty metal, I like smoked meat, fire is good, I climb mountains, wounds are to be fixed with duct tape, Georgia O'Keeffee made me vomit.

Fast forward twenty years and a stick that my wife's grandma gave us turned into this.

Pictorial says everything.

Maddux for $1

Somehow, there is a compound in North Tustin in which a group of hippies live.  They were nice hippies who happened to have a garage sale.  Besides selling their own art that they made clearly after smoking hippy lettuce and tied-dyed clothing, there was this porcelain cockatoo figurine.

 My sister is a rock-a-billy hipster who collects vintage porcelain and happens to own many birds.  That is why no one sleeps at her house.  One of the birds is an African Gray that mimics the fire alarm and some classless guest taught him how to say, "Hail Satan."  So you wake up at 5 am to the sound of a fire alarm and "Hail Satan."  Pleasant awakening.

My sister is a 5-feet tall, red-headed, Irish and an artist - needless to say, she is always angry.  This figurine would be a great peace offering.

I ask a hippy how much they want for the figurine, to which the hippy (not sure if it was a man or a woman), "that thing?  A buck." 

Turns out, it was a figurine made by Harry William Maddux, a local Southern California artist.  He made figurines from the 1940s until the 1980s.  The year in which a figurine was made depends on the signature.  The one I found was signed "WM Maddux," so it appears it was from the 1940s.

For more information on Maddux, his art and inspiring life story, visit: http://madduxpottery.com

Free Camping Freedom!

I don't like to pay for camping.  I don't think I should have to and rarely do.  I don't need a picnic table, toilets, nature centers, chubby rangers with Smokey the Bear hats and signed trails with more and more intrusive Globberment regulation.

I used to backpack, Jeep camp and now have a slide in camper for the truck.  I come equipped for six or seven days, self contained and happy.  We camp for free on public land all throughout the desert in California.  We have a love affair with the desert, the freedom and sheer loudness of complete silence.

Where we go we have no neighbors to speak of and are a few miles from the nearest paved road.  It allows time to decompress, to explore military ruins (it was part of Patton's desert base for WWII) and search for Indian villages (we've found two).  Everyday is rewarding, even if sitting in the shade of the RV reading a book or listening to Miles Davis... or doing nothing but staring off into the distance.

The nights are inky unless you have a great big moon, then the desert becomes this amazing silvery-blue that glows for miles and miles.  The coyotes howling in the distance, it makes quite a remarkable scene and soundtrack.

Go find yourself a spot, far away from others and slow down.  Make it your spot.  Build a sundial out of rocks and a stick.  Play some no-out-of-bounds bocce ball.  Listen to the breeze.  Take photos of things that seem ordinary but really are extraordinary.

Camp for free.

Be free.

Operation Succulents

Whether you bought it at a garage sale, someone regifted it or your wife won't let you throw it away, you always end up with something that makes you scratch your head and say, "What the heck I am supposed to do with this thing?"  It could also go the other way - your husband finds an old beer can out in the desert or used up all of the oil and thinks the oil can is art.

My default is just to stick some succulents in it.  Whenever guests are over, they comment on how cool one of the succulent-holding contraptions are.  I (usually after a few cocktails) say, "You like it, its yours!"  So, here is what has survived my drunken giveaways.

Tip: best way to water is to put ice cubes in once a week.  That way you don't have to worry about over-watering or excess water staining your furniture.

In my kitchen, I tend to use kitchen-related items.  All of these copper colanders came from garage sales in Villa Park.  They are the only people who hate money so much that they buy copper colanders.

 

Add battery-operated lights into the insulators for awesome reflections in the succulent colanders.

 

Old meat grinder (note: we are not vegetarians.  The only reason this was made into a succulent pot was because we own a commercial-grade grinder.  Who do you think we are?):

 

 

Old frame:

 

 

Vase you bought at the Sky Village Swapmeet from a desert rat who had no teeth:

 

 

Cracked coffee cup:



A hanging pot that nothing else will survive in because moss doesn't retain water:

Huge, gorgeous tomato plants, but no tomatoes

Last year, we only had our community garden plot and we we're pulling a wheelbarrel full of tomatoes every week.  This is what our kitchen looked like for months:

This year, we not only had the community garden plot, but now we had a house with a lot of garden space.  We hunted garage sales and collected pressure canners and jars. 

We fertilized the hell out of the soil and really worked the soil with a rototiller.  Save your back, buy a rototiller.  We got ours for $50 at a garage sale and see them all the time at others. 

I ordered a prolific amount of tomator seeds from Pinetree Seeds.  Spent weeknights and weekends trying to find anything that would hold soil.  We had pots of dirt all over the house.  We made a greenhouse out of old windows to germinate seeds.  Somehow I had no success with the green house.  So, I threw up the white flag and took all of those pots of soil filled with seeds and dumped them into our garden.

Then, we contacted Tomato Ty in Huntington Beach.  Him and his partner drive long and far for rare tomato plants and then graft them.  Then they sell them for a whole dollar. 

So, now we have tons of space, super-fertilized soil, 50 planted tomato plants and then those darn seeds that wouldn't do a damn thing in the green house (3 months later) are growing from the soil dumped in the garden. 

Look closely.  What is missing from that picture?  Tomatoes?  Yep.  Apparently, you can over fertilize your soil.  I put too much nitrogen in the ground and so now these huge, gorgeous tomato plants do not think they are going to die.  If they don't think their lives are threatened, they don't produce tomatoes.  The same at the garden plot.  We maybe got one medium-sized bowl a week.

You can add mulch which takes nitrogen out of the soil, but the tomatoes have taken over such that there is no soil exposed to add mulch to.

You can add potassium to try to neutralize the soil, which I did do.  High-potassium supplements promote blooms.  That did help, we did get some blooms, but unfortunately there is still too much nitrogen in the soil.

Our solution: rip them out and plant Siberian tomatoes that can tolerate our mild, California winter.  Pictures and results to follow.

Baseball-bat Zucchinis

If you turn your back to your zucchini plants for a few weeks, they will produce baseball-bat-size zucchinis.  Usually, I like to ding-dong-ditch extra large zucchinis in my co-workers' in-boxes, which is a very professional and adult thing to do, especially as a member of the Bar. 

The issue with such large zucchinis is that they get rather tough.  That is why you see only small zucchinis in your super markets.  Besides leaving a two-feet long zucchini in the inbox of someone in accounting, we have found that if you grind them up, you can make sausage and patties.  Also, as long as you cook them for quite some time (45 minutes), they're great sauteed.

As of late, most of our baseball-bat-size zucchinis have been used in our homemade dog food.  Like everything else in our lives, our dogs get the right of first refusal.  "Honey, Chuie wants to sleep in our bed."  "Where will I sleep?"  "Well, the bed in the camper is awfully comfy."  No wonder they don't bark (let alone lift their heads off of a pillow) when visitors enter our house, take a shower and find a guest bedroom at one in the morning. 

Chuie (one of our tough guard dogs):

Mindy (the second guard dog, so much for pitbulls being aggressive):

Back to the matter at hand.  Dogs can eat zucchinis.  So, we take a zucchini, leftover chicken bones, whatever vegetables are about to perish (except onions - no onions), beans and/or rice, top off with water and let in all cook in a crockpot for a day or two.  Remove the bones and let cool.  Bon dog appetit!  Add a splash of milk so the dogs get calcium.

Because we have two fat dogs to feed:

The Stinking Rose

My favorite crop of all time is garlic.

That lowly thought of item for your garden, purchased in bulk at the local Von's as a California Early or Late is the easiest thing to grow in your garden and is by far the most rewarding.  Growing it opens up a world far beyond the supermarket isles with varied flavors, heat and nuance.

We've found that red hard neck garlics seemingly grow best in Southern California and are the most powerful in flavor and heat.  Heat like chili peppers when you try them raw, powerful in your Caesar salad and your breath afterwards.  Oh so good.

We are fortunate enough to have a community garden plot across town that used to be our primary source of produce for the year.  Sadly, a professional farmer from South Africa moved into the plot next to us and decided that weeds are a cash crop and grows them by the bushel, which blows seed onto our plot.  This has changed our strategy of water thirsty crops to berries, grapes and garlic.  We are heading there today to pull up the last of the tomatoes, till the soil, kill the water timer and prep for garlic.  In the ground in October and out by July, we had great luck with sexy types like Red Janice, Amore and Early Red; each with their own bouquet.  Sexy.

It is as easy as take a good sized head, break off a clove and into the ground butt side down (pointy end up).  Cover with an inch of soil and let it go for the season.  We didn't have to purchase a single head and were into the conversation each night before dinner of, "What type do you think would go well in....?"

Plant garlic, you won't be disappointed.  Filagree Garlic Farm linked at the right. ;)

How to Kill the Christmas Spirit. One Easy Step...

Volunteer.

My wife's crazy grandma who is old as dirt, slightly A type (she was the leader of the Women's Federation of the Republican Party in OC up until a few months ago), cranks out on coffee all day, works until three in the morning on hoos-a-fudge and ran for city council in Villa Park at the age of 80 to regulate where people park their motorhomes, and lost, finally realized that she might be human. She caught a bad case of poopy pants, you know, the time you ventured to Mexico for the weekend and had that last margarita on ice... and it caught up with you two days later. Well, she had some infectious disease like that and realized she isn't teflon any longer (I, however, still am and in my head I'm still 13, though my wife kicks my ass and tells me different. I digress).

Crazy Grandma, now known as as CG, has been the lynch pin of the family for years and was quite a breeder in her younger years with 8 kids and an untold number of grands. The Catholic faith was good to her. Up until now she has hosted the family Christmas of 50 or greater, working herself into a frenzy for weeks. She just can't do it anymore and I have been trying to relieve her of it for years as none of her kids will step up, let alone bring a dish to the event. So I was able to to convince her to let me do the event and she can simply enjoy it.

She agreed.

I was shocked.

After I picked myself off of the floor and guzzle the swill they serve as wine at their house, I went into planning mode. What to grow?

We've already put up enough chard to feed the starving. We are making loaf after loaf from scratch for stuffing and into the deep freeze. Cabbage from spring, check. Green beans on the vine now... got it. Sausage... need to find pork butts on sale to do a grind. Salad greens go in the ground when the weather turns. Turkey and ham on sale after Thanksgiving and then smoked on one of three smokers for the day and one turkey in the oven.

What did I get myself into?

All of the nutty aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews in my house at once. Add booze and I'm sure I will be called the devil again by that one crazy aunt... no, not that one. The other one. Hell, they are all nuts.

Take it from me, as I sit here sipping another American Pride Vodka cocktail and wondering why I make such mistakes, go to Denny's instead.

Tomatoes going nuts?

During the heap of the tomato season, when you've got more tomatoes than you can eat or give away, I keep a small crockpot on my kitchen counter at all times.  In that small crockpot, I constantly keep stewing tomatoes.  I found that if you always have the crock pot out and going, very few tomatoes go to waste.  It forces you to look at your tomatoes every 2-3 days so you can catch those smashed or overly ripe tomatoes before they rot.

8-10 tomatoes can do the trick.  They don't have to be Romas or San Marzanos.  Any tomatoes will do.  Cherry tomatoes work too.  Whatever is about to go bad is best.  Turn the crockpot on low and let them go for a day.  If you want to make the foundation for tomato sauce, I add garlic (amount of garlic depends on the variety) and basil.  If not, just the tomatoes will be perfect.

About halfway through the day, smash the tomatoes.  They'll naturally burst, but this speeds up the process.  At the end of the day, let them cool, throw them in a jar and freeze it.  It's a great and easy way to spend a few minutes each day and ensure you'll have tomatoes all winter long. 

I'm not big on canning, because then it feels like its an all-day production in which you need to do many cans to make it worth your while.  Plus, the one jar every couple of days method semms to be a great purpose for smashed or about to rot tomatoes.

This is also a good back-up in case your winter tomatoes just don't produce.

Whale-shaped napkin rings - success!

Tabatha did quite a number on the old truck.  $30k-worth of repairs later and 5 (probably going to be 6) times back to the shop, we've finally got the truck back, which means it is junkin' time. 

It's been a few months since we've been junkin', so I expected I be out of shape.  In order to train, I started hagglin' with my husband over everything.  On top of being my usual indecisive self (indecisive - I'm an attorney, afterall.  I'm paid to be paranoid.), I've been negotiating with my husband over who gets the last rib, what time we're going to bed, etc.  He's been loving it.

So, we finally went junkin'.  We we're totally prepared (I had a ziploc bag of coins and we both reaked of booze from the night before).  Had the truck all ready to be filed with rusty treasures.

Sadly, we struck out.  I found whale-, squirrel and duck-shaped napkin holders out of monkeypod.  Not bad for 50 cents.

Grant found a huge outdoor light that plugs into your car's cigarette lighter.  Next time we decide to go Jeepin' in the middle of the night after 10 too many, now we can find camp!