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.

Around the time the first buds of garlic started to appear in the Red House garden, my daughter decided in her final semester of high school that although she had already been accepted to a very expensive college, she thought (incorrectly) that she could blow off going to class, not hand in work that was missing, and last but not least, decide she wasn’t going to take any more tests! (The latter she tried to rationalize with the following logic: why take a test that you know you are going to fail anyway?)

While I would have preferred to spend my days thinking about the Red House rather than to test or not to test, suddenly during the months of May and June, my cell phone number  became the #1 speed-dial option on my daughter’s guidance counselor’s phone. He, in turn, gave me a serious reality check that I had a daughter who was in real fear of not graduating from high school.

To say that I was embarrassed about this turn of events (me, the high school honors student and college graduate), was putting it mildly.  In fact I was horrified; I tried to pass off her sudden ennui as a phase of “senioritis,” but then realized it was much more than that.  For the first time in her 18 years, her father and I started worrying about her grades.  This was particularly uncharted territory for us since we both believed that grades didn’t matter much as long as you learned something.

By the middle of May, we also realized she wasn’t going to get enough funding to attend the expensive college in question. Her father and I had also made the decision earlier in the year that we were not going to pay for an education that was so costly, especially when the promise of a job at the end of  four years was not a given. This proved to be not as heart-wrenching as it may sound since her grades spiraled downward and she actually had shown little interest in a field that was supposed to be her major. I decided she had better think about a back-up school or she may end up with no place to go. So she put in a few late applications to a couple of schools in the city, we sent in another application fee, and waited to hear back.

I, in the meantime, went up to the Red House to deal with my ever growing crop of garlic.  I visited a local farmer’s market one Saturday and eyed a bag of scapes that someone was selling.

Two Bucks at the Farmer’s Market Gets You A Bag of Scapes

Since I remembered seeing plenty of scapes growing in my garden but failed to cut them, I realized I had already made my first garlic mistake.  Theory is, you need to cut the scapes when they appear so all the energy gets diverted back to the garlic bulbs still in the ground.

I began to wonder somehow if the mistake I made with the garlic was reflective of the mess I was facing back home.  Should I have been able to change something in her life to divert her energies back to her studies?  While that was probably me channeling some existentialist theories, ultimately she, not I, was responsible for her (in my opinion) bad choices.

So while I thought the scapes that I failed to cut earlier in the summer looked lovely, ultimately they wouldn’t amount to what they could be. I have to admit, this correlation between the two (the stunted garlic, the stunted daughter) was haunting me.

Garlic Scapes in the Red House Garden

Both of us forged ahead.  She did graduate from high school as my previous story revealed but somehow failed math.  While she didn’t “technically” need math to graduate from high school what she failed to realize is that she needed math to get into college. Suddenly one of the back-up colleges that she applied to, sending her a conditional admittance letter, rescinded their decision when she went to take a math placement test and failed it.

I meanwhile, working off of a recipe the farmer selling the bag of scapes had given me, put my $2 worth of green shoots in a food processor and attempted to make pesto.

An Artfully Arranged Scape

I suppose she and I both felt at that point that we had been through the grinder. I didn’t particularly like the scape pesto I ended up with and she didn’t like the idea she couldn’t get the money to go to her first choice school.  Like the scape pesto I made, everything was wrong; in my case it revolved around the texture of the dish, plus it was just too green. Somehow though I just couldn’t bring myself to throw it out; it had to be eaten even if I could only manage a little bit at a time.

Scape Pesto

My dislike for this new-fangled pesto mirrored the increasing distastefulness of our family life.  We moved to Plan C which we realized was the only option left after my daughter didn’t get into any of the city colleges.  She and I begrudgingly filled out an application to our local community college and I managed to find a kind soul who had summer duty in her high school guidance office who was able to pull all the paperwork together that we needed, again.

I decided this painful ordeal was similar to me trying to harvest my first head of garlic.  Now, I’m the last person to believe everything I read online, but I did come across an entry from someone who claimed garlic can easily be dug up with a little bit of elbow grease and a fork.  Here’s what happened when I tried to follow his advice; my garlic broke in half and the fork was dented, too.

Not The Way To Harvest Garlic

The nearly-broken-fork and barely intact piece of garlic probably should have given me an idea of what else the summer had in store for us.  Apparently, having a daughter who could barely get through high school wasn’t enough, I needed to have said daughter’s  on-again, off-again boyfriend be behind the wheel of her car one afternoon and get into a car accident.

Now while no one was hurt and the boyfriend technically wasn’t at fault (other than not being quick enough to get out of the way of a driver who wasn’t paying attention to avoid the collision), what we didn’t realize was that the boyfriend was driving the car with a suspended license!  This coupled with the fact that the car sustained over $11,000 in damages resulted in our insurance company immediately cancelling our policy after writing a really big check to the auto body repair shop.

I spent the next few days looking at the garlic growing in the garden and fielding phone calls (no pun intended) from insurance agents who said they were unhappy to inform me that we were suddenly placed in a high risk category because of this mishap and that we could possibly be looking at premiums as high as $12,000 per year for car insurance.

A Field of Garlic

Thoughts of every project I wanted to do on the Red House in the next two years started evaporating, right before my eyes. And while the garlic growing actually looked ok, attractive even, I knew it was  just not right.

I thought about all the healing properties garlic was supposed to have and wondered how I was possibly going to dig it all up by Labor Day weekend. It would be naive of me to think if I perhaps ate enough of it everything both inside me and around me would get better. I suddenly remembered breastfeeding both of my kids when they were infants and trying to avoid eating foods (like garlic) that might wreak havoc on tiny babies tummy’s.  I had to think, perhaps if I had eaten a clove or two, then nursed, perhaps I could have increased her stamina to not just coast along and barely make it, but to finish proudly.

I picked one final clove before I left the Red House and went back to deal with getting new insurance, a car repaired, and the results of yet another placement test at the local college. It was a nearly perfect bulb. Let’s hope that’s how she turns out, too.

Nearly Perfect Head of Garlic from the RH Garden

Suddenly, however, trying to find a college that 1) interests her and 2) that we can manage with the help of lots of student loans has become nearly a full-time job for me.

While this article may not seem relative to post on the Red House site at all, in fact there are some instances when it actually is the perfect place to rant, I mean, talk about a college road trip. Why?  Because,

#1 Doing a college road trip involved being able to stay at the Red House (thus saving $ on a hotel room).

#2 One of the colleges (note the use of the word one, as in single, as in uno, as in the only one) was a mere 1.5 hours from the Red House.

Which is how at 6:30 a.m. on the Sunday morning before the Thanksgiving holiday, we found ourselves in the car and heading towards Rhode Island.  But first, we needed to stop at the local bagel store.  Unlike, one of my fellow bloggers (that would be you, Dad), who does not like to eat while driving, I’m quite happy with noshing as I drive.

It turns out that this would be quite a day for noshing, since after we finished our bagels, Rachel curled up in the back surrounded by enough pillows and blankets to keep her warm in sub-zero weather, and fell asleep. But when she woke up, she reached for a box of Ritz crackers and pretty much ate the whole thing herself!

Lots of snacks on this road trip!

Since we had left so friggin early in the morning, we got to college #1 (in Rhode Island) in under 3 hours.  We walked around campus and it was eerily quiet which led me to think the kids were already on Thanksgiving break.  This however was not the case since when we ventured into the student union, a friendly staff member told us that the kids simply like to “sleep in” on Sunday mornings.  Oh yeah, I had almost forgotten what that was like (at least to “sleep in” past nine anyway).

We continued on.  It was still early and we decided before we drove to see college #2 in Providence we would make a detour to Newport.  I love Newport! When the kids were little, Lynn and I would often visit the town when we needed a quick getaway.  Rachel had been to Newport before (we had taken her to see The Breakers) but alas, she didn’t remember it.

So although she was impressed with all the mansions she was seeing in Newport (Mom, why can’t we live in one of those?), she wasn’t too keen on getting out of the car.  I persuaded her it was a gorgeous day, let’s do the cliff walk.

The Cliff Walk in Newport

I even saw her sneak a picture or two of the ocean, so I knew even though she had complained, she thought it was pretty.

We kept driving. And got lost once we hit Providence.  Now, Lynn and I have been to Providence a couple of times, hitting a particularly good restaurant one afternoon, but this day it seemed we kept driving in circles and the town seemed kind of dead.  All three of us  wanted a cup of “chowda” and maybe a lobster roll if we were really lucky.  We were! We stumbled upon a bistro-type of place that made a decent New England clam chowder and did a Lobster Club sandwich with fries that was pretty darn good.

After lunch we visited college #2, were not terribly impressed, and got back in the car.  We had planned that night to stay at the Red House and once again, overestimated our driving time.  But I have to segue here just a bit. I know I’m probably the only mom ever to take a cooler filled with food on the college road trip circuit. (And I’m not talking about lunch!)  That’s because I had visions of us reaching the Red House after 10 p.m. (when nothing would be open). We, in fact, arrived shortly after 6 p.m.  That meant we had ample time to finish the few remaining Ritz crackers Rachel had not consumed in the car and a nice piece of Brie.

A Really Nice Brie

From the cooler I took out a couple of steaks I thought we could put on the grill, a tupperware container filled with roasted rosemary-flavored potatoes I had made the night before, and some lettuce for a salad.  The potatoes I was able to warm up in the wok, and the steaks we put on the grill.  What we didn’t realize is since we had been grilling all summer, our propane was seriously low  — so low in fact that we decided to only light one side of the grill, thinking we could conserve a little fuel that way.  It was too dark outside to see what we were doing anyway, so we just left the steaks on the grill until we were really hungry.  Let’s just say, they were done enough.

We ate, we drank and then it was not even 8:30 and there was nothing much to do.  Remember, at the Red House, we have no TV, no DVD player, and believe it or not, I had not brought my computer up with me. (A real vacation!) It was too early to go to sleep, and since Rachel had slept most of the time when we were driving anyway,  I figured she was good for another 6 or 7 hours! That’s when I was introduced to “Words With Friends” which is kind of like playing scrabble except you play it on your i-phone!  This lasted about an hour and as you can see from our scores, Rachel was very determined to beat me. Oh yeah, note the words “poor” which is what we will be after this college experience but hopefully not “poor” enough so we can still “eat”!

Our Only "Game"

Road Trip Day #2

For some reason, breakfast just tastes better at the Red House.  I made a huge ham and cheese omelet for the three of us to share, warmed up some mini bagels in the toaster oven, made a big pot of coffee, and it was a late enough breakfast to last us through a visit to college #3.

I absolutely have to mention that this is the outfit Rachel slept in at the Red House (this year’s Halloween costume) and wore to breakfast! “Mom, it’s warm and fuzzy,” is what she said to me.

Daughter as Power Ranger?

Obviously, we were having way too much fun here. Perhaps she should pursue acting? Why were we looking at colleges with Criminal Justice/Psychology programs anyway?

When we finally left the house a few hours later, I have to admit I cheated a little.  I really want her to go to college #3 (state school, lovely campus, nice town) so I took the scenic route.  That would be the one that goes past lots of pretty little lakes and charming towns filled with antique stores.  She slept the entire way.

We were early for our tour, drove around town, then walked around most of the campus ourselves.  We stopped to have a cup of coffee and split a piece of cake.  We finally had the tour (us and only one other family), and this campus was empty, too, not because the kids were sleeping, but in fact everyone had already gone home.

It was nearly 3 p.m. when we got back on the road when Rachel decided she was hungry (again) so we stopped at a Mickey D’s (don’t tell anyone!) and got fries and cheeseburgers for the road.

After our trip, I felt as turbulent as the waves I had seen on the cliff walk 24 hours prior.

Ocean View From The Cliffwalk

I was wondering how many more colleges we would be visiting in the next few weeks…and all the money we would need to come up with to make this happen for her. Because I’ve realized one really simple equation:

College = No Money for the Red House

But I’m good with that, who needs a kitchen anyway?

P.S. This week we found out Rachel was accepted to a college which was not one of the three we visited that weekend.  It is also the most expensive one.

P.S.S. Have I ever mentioned how very much I like my one burner?  I think so.

The "Flame" As We Know It

That elicited this response from her. “No , I’m serious!” she was practically shrieking.

“OMG,” I said, which since the Oxford English Dictionary now includes as a “real” word, I felt I could justifiably use to counter her statement.  What I really wanted to say was “WTF!”  Why exactly wasn’t there a “food writer” category on the college application?

Instead, I countered with,”Well, how about writer?” I asked.

Apparently, that wasn’t an option either.  My choices were to be  classified as a business owner, self-employed, management, middle management, or laborer. Further down on the form, she was then asked to identify the field in which I was employed, with the good old standby choices of accounting, medical, or education. Luckily, there was also a category for non-profit which considering the amount of money I’m making as a food writer these days, I figured would be the appropriate box to check.

This conversation left me in a particularly wicked mood and the only thing that was going to improve it was to make my favorite dish.  Pasta Carbonara.  Since this is also the perfect dish to make and eat up at the Red House, (one pan, easy ingredients) I did just that.

But since I really wanted an appetizer (also known as the “Vorspeise,” the thing you eat before the meal, for those who speak German), I made my own version of tuna nicoise — searing a piece of tuna on the grill pan and plating it with some tomatoes, arugula, and of course, green beans with lots of freshly ground pepper.  I won’t reveal how much I paid for said piece of tuna but I figure if I’m looking at paying tuition again soon (she’s my second child), I better splurge now while I still have a couple of nickels left in my wallet.

Tuna Nicoise

After that I made the carbonara.  What I like to refer to as an “adult” carbonara because I threw in lots of pancetta, mushrooms, eggs, an ENTIRE container of cream, freshly grated parmesan and some arugula. Dare I mention I mixed it all together in a Wok because that’s the biggest pot I have up at the Red House.  Yes, and it was delicious!

Adult Carbonara