I wish I could report that we’ve made progress in renovating the Red House but unfortunately at this stage in the game (meaning the complicated stuff), we’re very dependent on our contractor to finish our upstairs bathroom. This means while most of the plumbing has been installed, the insulation needs to be put in the walls before the sheetrock and then tile are applied. As you can see not much has changed in this room since the last time I photographed it!

Apparently since our contractor has a lot of outdoor jobs that he’s scrambling to get finished before the weather takes a turn for the worse, I do have to give him some slack. He has assured me that I’m #1 on the top of his list when he finishes with everyone else. Being me (frighteningly straightforward and to the point), I also reminded him that last winter he complained that he couldn’t get into the house without shoveling a path to the door because of all the snow. (I don’t have anyone who plows for us and don’t intend to incur that expense either!)  I also suggested since he obviously didn’t want to spend half of his day shoveling when he could be inside working on a room, he may need to speed things up a bit.

I would also love to start working on the dining room. But since all the materials he needs to complete the bathroom are sitting in the dining room, this room, too, has to wait.

While the leaves are turning, the marigolds seems to be thriving in the garden, the weeds even more so and with all the asparagus ferns cropping up, I’m thinking I’ll have a very nice asparagus harvest in the spring indeed. I’ve decided however, after planting two seasons of garlic in the fall, I’m going to wait until the spring to do it this year and see how that turns out. Reason being: Lynn is busy trying to finish our master bedroom (that means even though he took off all the moulding around the room and put everything back up, there is still a lot of patching that needs to be done as well as taping, spackling and finally painting.

To pull him away from this to get out the tiller (I’m afraid of the tiller it kind of drags me across the field) to plant some garlic seemed dumb. So the garlic will wait until the spring to be planted along with whatever else we can manage to grow in hopes that the deer, rabbits, squirrels and even a local cat or two won’t devour everything we’ve planted.

What is particularly nice about living up here especially in the fall are all the farmer’s markets as well as field after field filled with pumpkins in lovely shades of orange.

Last year I was lucky enough to grow a couple of pumpkins. This year I had to buy one.

Since the weather is turning colder (it was barely 55 degrees when we arrived this Columbus Day weekend), I’m also thinking of food that will warm us. That would be soups (pea and lentil), stews (goulash and chicken paprikash in particular) and lots of carbs like mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese! And while I do try to stay away from sweets as much as possible – I have been thinking of making cinnamon rolls (no, not the kind you bang out from those icky cardboard containers in the refrigerated section of the supermarket) but cinnamon rolls made from scratch.

For those readers who have children or other instances where your household size shrinks from 4 to 1 or 2, I can say that I’ve finally mastered cooking for just the two of us without a huge amount of leftovers. And if we do have have leftovers, it’s because I’m usually trying to make sure at least one of us has something to take to work for lunch the next day.  The problem with this cooking for 2 instead of 4 (or more) thing though is that there are simply dishes (particularly desserts) that just don’t get made anymore. Why bake a batch of brownies or oatmeal raisin cookies if there aren’t any teenagers around to eat them all in a single sitting? Did I mention I’ve been craving cinnamon rolls?

In the meantime, I picked the last of the tomatoes (still green) from the Red House garden.

And admired not only the meadow but how pretty the marigolds still looked in the garden.

And since it was rather chilly, I also decided to make some Braciole stuffing the meat with slices of mozzarella and some smokey ham.

I managed to find a few (albeit slightly bruised) leaves of basil still growing in the garden and found a bag of potato gnocchi we buy at a little Italian deli near the Red House for under $3 a bag that was still in the freezer from the summer.

Did I mention even as I was cooking the gnocchi and Braciole I was craving cinnamon rolls?

On a completely different note. We have a neighborhood cat who shows up like clockwork between 5 and 5:30 on the weekends we are here. He or she slowly meanders to the back of the property seemingly looking around for maybe a tasty little mouse or some other morsel to eat. Now, this cat is really the slowest cat I’ve ever seen so it was particularly funny when I tried to take a picture of the cat and suddenly the cat took off at an amazingly fast pace.

I followed the cat as it walked the length of the property and found myself staring at the stainless steel rolling cart we’ve been using in the kitchen as a table/work counter since we still don’t have countertops for the kitchen cabinets. Wouldn’t that surface be just fine for rolling out dough?

Since I also don’t have any cookbooks up at the Red House (I know that’s old school but I still use them!), I dragged out my laptop and followed a recipe from the Pioneer Woman for Cinnamon Rolls 101 online.

And yes, I already did have all the ingredients on hand so this was a really easy recipe.  I mixed everything together and tried to follow the instructions but the dough just seemed a little bit too wet so I added more flour than called for. The dough rose, I rolled it out, layered it with melted butter, sprinkled on some sugar and lots of cinnamon just like the picture online.

Except I wanted to add some apples to my cinnamon rolls so I did just that.

Really, doesn’t this just look yummy?

I rolled the dough into a log shape, cut the log into slices, and arranged them in a pie pan. The dough seemed a bit wetter than it probably should have been but I figured it would “correct” itself when baking.

I’ve always had a problem with every oven I’ve ever owned and this one is no different. I read a recipe and it suggests a cooking time of say 15-18 minutes and when I peek at what I’m baking, 9 times out of 10 I need double the amount of baking time indicated. Since I was convinced that the thermostat in this new oven wasn’t working properly, I actually went out and bought an oven thermometer. I’d like to say the oven was off, but actually the temperature was exactly what it was supposed to be.

So back to the cinnamon rolls. The recipe called for adding “maple flavoring” to make the frosting. Ha Ha Ha. Living in Upstate New York, I don’t need “maple flavoring,” I can use the real stuff. So I did, mixing maple syrup together with some powdered sugar and milk.

The rolls came out of the oven, I frosted them, and here’s what they looked like.

Yes, they looked delicious but when we ate them in the morning for breakfast (after sticking them back in the oven to warm up a bit), they were a tad too gooey inside! So even after following the recipe and adjusting the baking time and having for the first time ever a second thermometer inside my oven to make sure the temperature was correct – these rolls needed to be baked a bit longer. (We ate most of them anyway, no worries!) So like the cat that prowls our property looking for tasty tidbits, I got mine too this weekend.

Finally, knowing that winter is literally around the corner up here, it’s awesome to drive a mere 5 minutes from the Red House and see the leaves changing, some late summer flowers still blooming and the water in the creek flowing so beautifully. What we’ve learned up here the last 4.5 years is to enjoy every minute of it.

First, while I mentioned things that motivated “me,” I need to say “us,” because the truth is my husband Lynn has been doing nearly all of the back breaking renovation work (with the help of a really cool contractor, too) and I’ve just simply been working all hours of the day (and night) trying to earn $$ to make it happen.

This winter has been a real pain. First we had Sandy, then a Nor’easter, then a snow storm (10+ inches) and this past weekend temperatures hovered in the teens but felt like negative numbers because of the wind chill factor. Consequently, cooking as an art form and as a heart-warming endeavor has been put to the way side.

Thus, on those Friday nights when we make the journey up to the Red House from Long Island/Manhattan, I’m still hauling up food to heat up on my handy little one burner guy.  Yep that’s him.

Which leads me to this. We are now approaching our third season without a kitchen and Lynn and I both came to the same astonishing conclusion — eating out is just a hell of a lot easier than eating in! A part of this decision was based on that fact that since December the town lost its only supermarket! Now, we do have a gas station that’s open 24 hours and is well stocked with basics such as bread, eggs, cheese, cigarettes, condoms, beer and of course a milk shake in any flavor, but unless you’re 18…these items don’t really have that much appeal if you’re trying to make dinner.

Now, it’s not that the supermarket we had was particularly great, it wasn’t, but at least I could manage to put together a meal if I had to during the cold weather months when there was nary a farmer’s market in sight. And, since it was small and old school, it had some items that you don’t find in big box stores like maple syrup that was made by a guy just outside of town. And they also had ham at the deli counter that I really liked because it tasted well, like real ham!

The word on the street is that a bigger, better supermarket will be taking over the space. But, two months, later this is what we’re still looking at.

A Slow Supermarket Renovation

Yes, no sign of a supermarket, no sign of activity, no people shopping, no food, no nothing. Just a big ugly tractor sitting there looking like it was going to make way for the new…but actually was just kind of killing time.

Obviously, living on Long Island we have lots and lots of supermarkets so shopping and making dinner is never a problem. One of the reasons I also cook nearly ever night is that we actually rarely eat out on Long Island. Since we find most of the restaurants around us mediocre and overpriced, we try to save our “dining out dollars” for high end restaurants in the city (as in NYC) a couple times a year.  I hate to confess this but eating out near the Red House has enabled us to eat out more frequently for a fraction of the cost.

We visited The Tailor & the Cook last spring a few months after it opened and my review at the time waxed eloquently about the fish I had that night.  We’ve had many dishes since then, taking a cue from one of my online editing jobs that people still had something called “date night,” a word combo I was not familiar with until now! Geez, people actually go out and enjoy each others company and a meal too on a Saturday night?

Therefore this past Saturday night found us once again enjoying the creative cooking geniuses of Chef Tim Hardiman and his sous chef Steve Arbogast at The Tailor & the Cook in Utica, New York.

Three years ago when we first bought the Red House, I met Suzie Jones at a farmer’s market where she was selling beautifully crafted little goat cheeses.  As I got to know Suzie, her husband Peter, and the farm, she also was able to sell me some chicken but most importantly little packages of chicken livers at a fraction of what I would normally have paid for a container at the supermarket.  These livers, since they are from the farm’s organically raised chickens, have nearly no fat on them or any of that slimy green stuff you frequently encounter when trying to clean them.  So imagine my surprise when Chef’s Tim and Steve had concocted a special chicken liver risotto appetizer that evening made from Jones Family Farm liver!

Set before us was a plate of creamy arborio rice, still-pink-in-the-middle chicken livers simply seasoned (so I was told) with ground pepper, fresh ginger, and a little cheese, then served up piping hot. I love liver and I love risotto, so this was a real winner for me.

The house salad that I wasn’t crazy about in my initial review, remains, but since they know my tastes, now when I get the salad, it comes with extra dressing on the side that is not only heavy on the vinegar (which I love) but just makes the salad that much better!

Seeing really fresh fish on a menu in Central New York is difficult. Finding a chef who really knows how to cook it in any part of the country, is even more of a challenge.  Chef Tim who I had complimented the last time about his fish cooking skills, did not disappoint this time either. On the menu that night was a lovely piece of arctic char coupled with a quinoa salad and a green pea shoot pesto. My only complaint? The skin which is great when it’s cooking in the pan and technically holds the fish together, I think with a quick flip of a spatula could be tossed (as in the garbage)  and not plated, too.

I did have another thought (sorry chefs, humor me here) of what to do with the fish skin. Lynn and I had dinner at Jean Luc Figueras in Barcelona many years ago where an amuse bouche of fried fish crisps (fried cod skin actually) was brought out to the table. At first glance the shape alone (a long thin cylinder) reminded me of those French cookies (pirouettes) that accompany many a bowl of glace or gelato in Europe. It was salty and sweet and crunchy at the same time. Thinking back on my arctic char, could the dish have been elevated ever so slightly with something whimsical (i.e., fried skin) on top?

While the shrimp and grits had been on the menu for a while, we had never tried it. And I have to admit, although it was technically Lynn’s entree that night, I ate at least half of it! Calling a shrimp a shrimp, isn’t fair if you’re cooking up fresh prawns (heads and all) that have been beautifully grilled and seasoned and serve them with fried okra and an adorable dollhouse-size frying pan filled with the aforementioned grits.

Ripping off the heads of these delicious crustaceans and sucking out the bodies, well, had a yacht cruised by the front of the restaurant rather than the hourly snowplow, I could have sworn we were having dinner on the Cours Saleya in Nice. Which I think is the whole point of good cooking, if a chef or two can rustle up a dish that is absolutely delicious and reminds you of eating a similar dish someplace else, wow, that’s real talent.

Which brings me to this part of the story. We think the kitchen will be done this summer. In order to at least believe it will happen, we’ve started picking out floor tiles. We laid the color tiles we’ve chosen so far on the (dirty) rubber mats that are currently lining the floor and all weekend we debated the merits of each and every one.

Kitchen Tile Project

I know ultimately there will be more colors added to this arrangement so hopefully when the time comes we will choose wisely. Because after this long of a wait, the Red House kitchen is only being done once in our lifetime.

And if you think I remembered the name of the restaurant in Barcelona where we ate the crispy fish skin that easily, I didn’t.  What I do have are old school composition books where I usually record nearly every single thing we eat when traveling!

Travel Composition Notebooks

I thought maybe one day I’d manage to weave into a Red House article the time Lynn waited for me at the Milan (as in Italy) train station for 16 hours so we could have a meal together. This story, I think, can be told now.

Why would anyone wait 16 hours to have a meal with a girlfriend one might ask? Well, first of all this was back in the Dark Ages when we didn’t have cell phones, computers, or Facebook, etc., etc., and thus, no way of communicating with each other. So, you either waited for the person or you didn’t. When I finally arrived, parched and starving, everything was closed. We ended up spending the night (on the floor no less) of the Milan train station and got the first train to Florence in the morning. And what may you ask was the meal we had when we arrived? Pasta carbonara of course! Which is the very first “real” dish I hope to make in the Red House kitchen this year. Unless, of course, I can convince one of the T&C chefs to make it for me!

I had brought up a couple of steaks to grill but also had a hankering for sweet potatoes. Since I knew sweet potatoes were going to take way too long to cook on the grill, I had to cheat a bit and pop them in the toaster oven. Since using the toaster oven any time in the house causes all the lights to flash on and off (yes, we still haven’t quite finished updating all the outlets), it’s kind of annoying.

After tolerating about 45 minutes of blinking lights, I’d had enough and decided to finish them on the grill as the steaks were cooking. We had a simple green salad, a bottle of red wine and that was dinner.

Dinner the next night I thought would be easier.  I had brought up some frozen shrimp and was thinking of making a shrimp in a zesty green sauce.  I thought I’d grill the shrimp first, then finish them in a wok with some parsley pesto (made by hand with a mortar and pestle).

The Red House "Food Processor"

Problem was I forgot to bring up some garlic but got the idea that perhaps I could dig up one of the many garlic bulbs growing in the garden. That didn’t work too well, because the garlic when I finally freed it from the soil, looked more like a large green onion (albeit tinged purple) than anything else, but I cut it up anyway and if nothing else it smelled like garlic!

Now, I think I got the original hankering for owning a mortar and pestle because I saw Jamie Oliver on TV once crush some herbs with some olive oil, a bit of salt and pepper, and voila, he had instant pesto.  Not I.  I kept crushing the parsley but it just kind of sat there and got well, mushy.

Not So Pretty Parsley Pesto

I put it aside and threw the shrimp on the grill.  In the meantime, I cheated this weekend and brought up some burrata and sliced prosciutto from the Italian deli.

Yummy!

I made a quick tomato salad with some red onions and by the time everything was cut up, the shrimp were done.

Tomato Side Dish

Shrimp on the "Barbie"

The shrimp were pretty decent even with the ersatz parsley pesto. Before we left the next day though, I decided I would grill some chicken along with a couple of potatoes so that when we got back  to Long Island we’d have dinner!

Great Grilled Chicken, Potatoes, Too

Now Lynn has some fond memories of his Mom cooking up some extra food (chicken in particular) when they went on picnics so that once they got home, she didn’t have to worry about “what was for dinner.”  It made perfect sense for me, too.

Ironically, we hit absolutely no traffic on the ride home, which meant the chicken I had double-wrapped in tinfoil was still warm even after a four hour ride! And pretty darn good.

The Red Door at the Red House

But two hours later when we decided to do a bit of a road trip up to the mountains, this is what we greeted us.

An Early Snowfall

I thought it was gorgeous actually and it made me crave heart-warming things to eat.  Since we had recently watched the French film The Secret of the Grain, I started to think of a couscous I could make that would be perfect to whip up in the wok (aka the only pan that works really well on the ONE burner).

Filled with shrimp, chick peas, fresh cilantro and grapes (because I had some leftover), it made a simple but lovely dinner.  But before we could eat it, we needed to work on one of the projects that was our raison d’etre for being at the Red House that weekend — namely putting in some insulation in the dining room.

Funny thing, the room we spend most of our time in (and cook in, too) is also the coldest room in the house!  That’s because there’s absolutely no insulation between the dining room and the bathroom/laundry room addition which in its current state is simply a shell. We went out and bought some of that pink foam board and with the help of some furring strips, managed to hang some of the foam board and a few pieces of sheetrock.

What I didn’t count on was the fact that this part of the house was falling apart so even attempting to screw in the furring strips caused a few old beams and bricks to give way.

The Mess

Lynn labored at doing this but as usual we ran out of time and finished less than half a wall.  Leaving the Red House that afternoon, I looked at the bamboo that dies each year but somehow manages to come back stronger and lusher than before.

The Bamboo in Winter

For some reason, along the way home, I started to think about making a chicken pot pie.  Why I was craving chicken pot pie I don’t know other than it was cold outside and the combination of pie crust, potatoes, chicken, peas and carrots all cooked in a lovely cream sauce just sounded really good.

A few days later, I was able to pull the dish together albeit not at the Red House. I cheated a bit and made the pie crust (flour, ice water, butter) in the food processor, then rolled it out on my slab of marble.

Pie Crust for the Chicken Pot Pie

Prior to that I had cooked the potatoes, peas and carrots and tossed them with some chicken I had boiled earlier in the day.  Mixed together with some heavy cream and some dried tarragon, this was my filling.

The Filling

I baked the whole thing in the oven at 375 degrees for about 40 minutes and yes, it was pretty yummy!

Awesome Chicken Pot Pie

And as we were eating it, I was still thinking of the snow we saw that day and knowing there is much more to come.

A Winter Wonderland

So after making the dough, I heated up a pizza stone on the grill, then gently put the dough on top, waited for it to cook a bit on one side, and then actually flipped it like a crepe.  Only after that did I spoon on some sauce, basil from the garden, and this funky log of mozzarella that when I sliced it, it was in the shape of a ring.

A Funky Grilled Pizza

Because I flipped the pizza this time around, it had more of a rustic-look to it which I liked.  What I didn’t like was there was way too much sauce on the pie.  Guess what, we ate it anyway, and it was pretty good.

Since the pizza was technically our appetizer, I took it off the grill and we nibbled at it with a couple of cocktails and then I  got down to the business of cooking Cornish hens.  Now, I know Cornish hens are a bit of an old school kind of dish and frankly I actually had trouble finding a supermarket that still carried them but eventually I did find two small birds.

I stuffed the cavities with fresh celery leaves from the garden and then sprinkled the hens with fresh rosemary and a bunch of dried spices (notably oregano and paprika),  gave them a good dose of olive oil,  and put them on the grill.  Since I didn’t want these babies to char right away, yet be raw inside, I turned the flame down fairly low and spent the next 30 minutes or so moving them around.

While they looked pretty, the reality is they were completely tasteless! ( Sigh, so much for my Cornish hen fantasy.)  Luckily, the lovely roasted beet and arugula salad (with red onion and tomato, too!) I made to accompany those ucky hens saved the day.  In hindsight, sticking with the pizza and the salad would have been a much better option.

Lovely Roasted Yellow Beets, Arugula, Tomatoes

A Very Sorry Stove Indeed

Since I wasn’t particularly thrilled about having to grill outside in the snow, when I saw a plug-in “extra” burner on sale at the supermarket, I thought I’d give it a try.

This handy little gadget became our “flame,” and with a little bit of planning and lots of creativity on my part, was the answer to our lack-of-stove problem.

The "Flame" As We Know It

The first morning we used it, we plugged it in, and since not all of the electrical wiring is done in the house, we managed to blow out all the lights on the first floor! Sigh, yes, we realized too late that we couldn’t have the toaster oven and the “flame” going at the same time.

Consequently, Lynn went down to the basement and flipped the switch that had tripped. Meanwhile, I turned the toaster oven off and we continued “cooking.”  Turns out though that we still needed to be a little conservative with anything else we had plugged in when the “flame” was on because once we turned it on high, the lights in the dining room started flashing on and off.  Wow, disco this early in the morning!

I scrambled some eggs from Jones Family Farm, went outside to get some fresh chives that are growing in a big barrel by the side of the house, and voila, breakfast was finally served.

Lovely Chive Speckled Eggs

The other thing I discovered was that the “flame” was the perfect dimension for my wok.  This resulted in my making a really wonderful shrimp curry with some green beans and onions and a couple of red grapes thrown into the mix, too.

Wok Stirrred Shrimp Curry? At the Red House -- Yes!

The only draw back was that since I was working with one single burner, the rice I had made before I could make the curry was cold by the time we sat down to eat it.  Minor details.

So far, I’ve cooked a lovely piece of salmon (which we ate with some baguette from Fairway and a creamy brie), macaroni and cheese, chicken every which way, and a really big pot of chili which we ate with a homemade pizza one night.

Nearly Perfect Salmon

Obviously, I still need a kitchen with a real working stove and an oven. Oh yeah, I need a new fridge and a dishwasher, and counters and cupboards would be nice, too.  Right now I’m entering every single contest that is offering these goodies, since that’s probably the only way I’m going to get an entire kitchen in the next few years.

However, I’m happy to know that we don’t have to rely solely on the grill to cook our food and that we’ll make it through the winter at the Red House just fine with this single burner.

So, yes, I would welcome any chef, or chef-wannabe to a Red House cooking challenge.  One burner, no oven. Try me.

So when Mom and Dad came up to visit last weekend, I wanted to show them my “stuff.”  I started by grilling some chicken thighs and brushing them with BBQ sauce.

BBQ Chicken Thighs

Then I picked some yellow squash from my garden and wrapped it in some tinfoil, but not before putting some butter and brown sugar on it. When I opened the package, the brown sugar had formed a nice little pond which would be oozing sweetness when we cut it up into chunks.

Home Grown Yellow Squash

The red potatoes however, were a bit of a challenge.  Since I started dinner later than I wanted, (we decided to go for a spur-of-the-moment afternoon swim), I knew that simply plonking them down on the grill would take hours, if not days to cook.  I decided to boil them a bit first, then give them a good dose of olive oil, salt and pepper, and some dried tarragon, too, and put them under a piece of tinfoil to cook, but keep them peeking out so every once in a while I could move them around a bit.

Half Boiled/Half Grilled Potatoes

On the side burner I put a skillet pan filled with peppers and onions but truthfully, at that point, it was cocktail hour and I forgot about them.  Luckily, Lynn loves all things burnt, so he was more than happy with their outcome.

Peppers and Onions

I thought the meal came out nicely; we ate outside, even with all the mosquitoes biting our ankles and elbows and toes, and everyone seemed to enjoy just being at the Red House. And if you are wondering whether I still need an oven, the answer is if I am making bread pudding for dessert I do!

Using leftover hero rolls that I tore up and added some milk, cinnamon, sugar and an egg to, I popped the mixture into muffin tins, stuck it in the toaster oven, and plated the whole thing with fresh raspberries.  I want to say it was yummy but actually it was kind of dense, which leads me to think, maybe I should have tried making a “grilled” bread pudding?

Next time.

Red House Bread Pudding

Now it’s not like me to give up cooking even when I’m flying solo but the truth is I was working from the Red House and was actually welcoming the idea of just having some granola for breakfast, a yogurt or cottage cheese for lunch, and salad for dinner.  Plus, I’m at the age unfortunately, where I, too, could stand to lose a few pounds.

It started out fine, at first. I poured myself some granola for breakfast one morning and sliced a banana on top.

Banana And Store Brand Granola Breakfast

After sitting at the computer for too many hours, however, and feeling like my eyes were in the back of my head, I got up and decided some cottage cheese with perhaps a few sliced cucumbers and tomatoes would perk me up. It didn’t. The cottage cheese was bland and the tomatoes and cukes (both hot house) had no taste either.  I ate it anyway.

Not That Tasty Cottage Cheese Lunch

Coming off a crappy lunch, I decided dinner would have to be better so I decided to make myself a version of a “chef’s” salad.  I picked some lettuce from the garden, cut up a few slices of ham, fresh mushrooms, more tomatoes and some thin slices of real Parmigiano Reggiano.  I dressed the salad with a homemade mustard vinaigrette and it was really good!

Chef's Salad, My Way

The next few days I did a few variations on this theme –sometimes having a slice of toast for breakfast and a yogurt with granola for lunch.  One day for lunch I decided to go “Scandinavian,” making myself an open faced sandwich of a sliced hard boiled egg with a plum for dessert.

Scandinavian Polka Dot Egg Sandwich

And for dinner one night, because I was bored, and also because I started to think of what my life would be like as a single girl (just kidding, Lynn!), I made myself a tuna fish sandwich but kicked up a notch as a tuna melt.

This lasted for about three days, these simple breakfasts, lunches and dinner but then came Day 4.  Day 4 you see, I made the mistake of walking into town because I wanted to pick up a few things for the weekend and I went to the market.  Sitting there, staring at me under a big heating lamp was a roast chicken.  It looked at me (I swear!) and said, “Miss your oven, huh?”

I bought the chicken.  And I bought an entire jar of applesauce.  Why, I don’t know.  It just sounded like a good thing to eat with the bird.

I walked back home carrying my chicken and my applesauce and decided I would make a salad from my garden and top it off with some leftover gorgonzola cheese.  Since it was  Bastille Day, and I like all things French,  I opened a bottle of white wine, too.

I ate standing up, welcoming a break from sitting and staring at the computer screen, and looked at all the sanding and spackling and painting that still needs to be done. In between I took bites of chicken, salad and huge spoonfuls of apple sauce.

Lovely Lettuce Greens With Gorgonzola Crumbles

Surely this was one of the best store-bought roast chickens on the face of the earth I thought as I was licking my fingers….or was it just my boring meals for one would make anything taste delicious?

Oh yeah, and since Lynn and I always look forward to ending our day together with a nice meal, I was talking to him on the phone as I was eating.  Had he been there, enjoying the chicken with me, he would have been able to pull the other side of the wish bone.   Breaking the wishbone in half myself, I knew we would still both wish for the same thing.

I can’t. My colander does many things. I use it as a bowl when I’m picking fresh produce from the garden, as a strainer to drain potatoes or pasta, and when I’m done prepping, to carry whatever fruit or vegetable peelings I’m left with out to the compost bin.  My other absolute must-haves when grilling and cooking outdoors are a few decent knifes, a cutting board, and pans that can double for many uses.

The Colander I Can't Live Without

The one thing we both agree on, however, is that while getting the food and prepping might be cumbersome when you’re camping outdoors, the real problem is when you are relying on a grill (or any kind of outdoor flame for that matter) to cook your food, it takes a really, really long time.

Consequently, if I add up the time spent trying to put breakfast, lunch and dinner on the table at the Red  House, you’ll understand why the renovation is taking so long. (Because I’m cooking, not hammering!)

Breakfast:

My husband never had a steak for breakfast in his life until he met my Dad and my brother.  The family ritual was to have steak and eggs on Christmas morning.  Maybe it was a guy thing, since I’ll take some smoked salmon and a hard boiled egg with a fruit salad chaser over a steak any day.  Up at the Red House, though, steak and eggs just sounded like a really good breakfast to have if you were facing a grueling day of sanding a wall or two followed by a few coats of primer.

Thing is the grill we have kind of slants to one side (even after moving it around to different parts of the driveway), and instead of fussing with it, we just lived with the fact that everything we put on the grill pan always slides to the left.  Now, perhaps in certain circles this might have some sort of political connotation — at the Red House it simply means we have to fix the driveway!

See how the steak and eggs just cozy up to one another?  I love it. And yes, they were tasty, too.

Real Steak and Eggs

Lunch:

Remember the scene in The Company Men where Kevin Costner tells Ben Affleck to pick up two pieces of sheetrock the next time he’s carrying something into the house they are renovating?  Well, that’s kind of how I’m feeling about this house renovation right now; we need to both work harder and faster. Consequently, I feel that if Lynn and I are both doing a fairly decent amount of physical labor (he more than me, I will confess), it at least justifies eating hearty meals.  Well, sort of.  This probably explains why my husband didn’t even blink when I suggested we have pasta with broccoli rabe followed by barbequed chicken AND country-style pork ribs for lunch.

However, to make the broccoli rabe, I needed to put up a pan of water on the grill’s side burner about an hour before I wanted to eat.  After about half an hour of waiting for the water to boil (it never did; there were simply a few bubbles and a lot of steam emitting from the pan), I simply threw the macaroni in and stirred it a couple of times.  But here’s the thing, pasta that sits in warm but not boiling water like this and desperately tries to get itself  “cooked,” has a slightly different, kind of gummy taste.

Brings New Meaning To Cooking Outdoors

When I figured it was done enough, I strained the pasta into my beloved colander, then sauteed the broccoli rabe with some olive oil and threw the pasta on top of it.  I had forgotten to buy garlic but did have some red pepper flakes and a chunk of real parmesan cheese to grate on top so it wasn’t a total disaster.

Elbow Macaroni with Broccoli Rabe

Chicken and Ribs

Any sane person eating this much food for lunch (with a couple of bottles of Canadian beer no less) should have taken a nap.  I went out to weed the garden and Lynn got on the Troy Bilt to mow the lawn!

Dinner:

Well, I confess, I did cheat a little since I brought our first course from downstate — lovely balls of burrata that I plated with some grape tomatoes (store-bought, sorry!) but with fresh basil from the garden.

I do need to segue just a tad here for two reasons.  #1 I love burrata and when I’m feeling particularly flush (which is hardly ever), I buy the real stuff that comes in little plastic bags and is flown in daily from Italy.  The key word in that sentence, so you have an idea how outrageously expensive authentic burrata is, is ‘flown.” (As in there are lots of darling little burratas flying first class on Alitalia.)  Better option: Trader Joe’s makes a decent product  for under $5 that I’ve become slightly addicted to.  #2 I love burrata so much that when I read Gabrielle Hamilton’s book, Blood, Bones & Butter, and she talks about digging spoons into a big platter of lovely rounds of burrata instead of a boring old wedding cake, I thought what a brilliant idea!

Lovely Burrata

Meanwhile, back on the range (literally),  I had a fire going under some lamb chops topped with fresh mint from the garden.  In fairness, it looked pretty as it was cooking, but imparted absolutely no mint flavor whatsoever, which was actually perfectly fine with me since I’m not a big mint fan anyway.

Lamb Chops with Fresh Mint from the Garden

Earlier in the day (when I was weeding the garden actually), I had picked some yellow squash to eat with the lamb chops as well as some lettuce.

Freshly Picked Squash

Amazing Lettuce

I felt lucky that I was able to put together a few side dishes courtesy of my new garden but it did make me pause and think about the Red House and what it was like as a working farm a hundred years ago.  What were the people who were living here cooking, growing, and ultimately eating?  I’d love to know.  One thing I’m absolutely positive about, even 150 years later, we were both washing dishes at the end of every meal the old fashioned way — by hand!

Old School Dishwashing

Yep, true to his word, my contractor finally decided my stove had to go.  Reason being, since we are tearing out the sixth bedroom (I mean really who needs that many bedrooms?) we decided that by eliminating the space over the kitchen (the aforementioned) sixth bedroom, we could have a really awesome, double height kitchen.  Since he actually couldn’t rip out the sixth bedroom with the stove in the way, it had to be removed.

A Very Sorry Stove Indeed

Now, last summer when my sweet son, Nick, came up to visit, he, of course, claimed the sixth bedroom as his because even though it was remote and had no access to a bathroom, unless you went through four other rooms, it had the best view.  He’s not an idiot.  And because he thought this particular bedroom would be his forever and ever, he also decided to start painting the room in the colors that he liked.  At the time, those colors were purple and black.

Wow, A Purple Room!

Looking at the picture now, it doesn’t look that bad, kind of quaintly Victorian with the black trim and such, but painting or no painting, the room had to go. The room before the purple room (a.k.a. the 5th bedroom) had been the previous owners smoking den.  The walls were stained with nicotine and since even the 5th bedroom is not very convenient to get to, I actually can’t even imagine exactly what anyone would do in there.  Well, I can imagine, but since I do try to keep this site borderline R-rated,  I won’t fantasize about the possibilities.

Smokers Den

So, the dormer room is stripped down to the rafters as is the room that’s going to be demolished.  That’s when we found some really cool beams.  Kind of like the beams you see in 5th grade when you’re visiting a house that George Washington slept in!  Well, maybe not that old but you get the idea.

But since the guy who is working on this project is really cool about this house renovation (really), these were his exact words, “Jules, we’re saving that right,” he said pointing to a beam that in my opinion was probably Smithsonian-worthy.  A type of beam one would find in a George Washington-era dwelling? These beams looked like they came over with Christopher Columbus!

Really Cool Beams

But enough history. I didn’t realize how dependent I was on a stove.  Without a stove, you can’t make scrambled eggs, or saute a lovely piece of fish, or steam some vegetables!  Nor can you boil water for all those good things I like to eat – like pasta or mashed potatoes.  I’m not weeping…yet.

When I came up last summer for the first time to try my hand at camping up at the Red House, I rummaged through the garage on Long Island before I left and found some discarded houseware items that Nick had stashed after moving from one apartment to another. For the Red House I was able to claim dishes, pots and pans, and low and behold a toaster oven that an ex-girlfriend’s father had given him when he had been kicked out of the family home for whatever reason.

This is the toaster oven I was dealing with.  It was old and whenever I plugged it in at the Red House, my ceiling lights started flashing on and off.  Cool, I thought!  So, what exactly was I going to make for dinner with that one basically useless appliance?

Toaster Oven Cooking

Well, I brought up some leftover chicken rollatini and put it in the toaster oven to warm up. Unfortunately, I didn’t plan for any other meals and after I ate, I was well, still pretty hungry.  Things didn’t get any better the next day.  I had brought up some hard boiled eggs, stuck a piece of toast in the toaster oven and had some coffee.  Lunch was a yogurt, a banana and when I was hungry a couple of hours later, I made myself a pseudo grilled cheese; two slices of American on white bread in the toaster oven.  I ate it not because it tasted good but because it was hot when I took it out and I was trying to pretend I was eating soup.  Not really, but whatever.

So going forward, yes, we do have the summer to look forward to where grilling will be a viable option, but since the purchase of a new stove to outfit a new kitchen is still Far Far Away, we’ll have to be creative.

Stay tuned.