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.

I said goodbye to 2012 realizing that there are quite a few dishes I never used to eat but do now (herring and sardines for example), things I shouldn’t be eating, but crave (chocolate, cheese, bread and pasta), and certain dishes I’d like to simply forget (dry chicken and grilled pizza).

Here though is my year end wrap up of what I think I liked the most.  Remember though, since I have no working kitchen, the following pictures show what I had to work with, namely my “stove,” my “dishwasher” and my “oven.”

2012 saw us eating: Fondue, Fried Green Tomatoes, Farmer’s Market Orange Beets with Jones Family Farm Goat Cheese, Peach Tart, Carbonara(!), Soft Shell Crab, Lobster Claws, Homemade Rosemary Bread, Crepes (both savory and sweet), Shrimp in Green Sauce, French Toast, Burrata, and lots and lots of tomatoes.

Reviewing this list, I realized we did eat chicken and duck and hamburgers and an occasional steak or two but they simply didn’t photograph well. The chicken often looked burnt and the hamburgers misshapen and greasy. This, I think, will please my vegetarian and vegan readers.

If you’re not hungry after looking at these photographs, you should be! Happy New Year!

I splurged at Fairway before heading up to the Red House and picked up a lovely duck breast which I thought I could cook fairly quickly on the grill.

Amazing D’Artagnan Duck Breast

I also had a hankering for crepes and thought they would make a lovely breakfast to start off the 4th.  Seeing how I don’t have a food processor or mixer up at the Red House and am genuinely too lazy to mix things by hand unless I absolutely have to, I prepared the crepe batter the night before and poured it in a container.

In the morning, I found a small enough frying pan to cook them in and before long had a small stack of crepes to eat.

Making Crepes

While I was thinking my crepes would of course be sweet with a topping of fresh raspberries and local maple syrup, Lynn decided his would be savory.  So, the smoked salmon I was saving for lunch that day, ended up being eaten with the crepes for breakfast.

Norwegian Smoked Salmon

At first I thought Lynn would eat the crepes like a “normal” person, (with utensils) but no, he ended up rolling the smoked salmon inside the crepe and making it burrito-like.

Smoked Salmon Crepe “Burrito”

I, on the other hand, stuck with tradition, and ate my crepes in a civilized manner (with a fork and a knife!) I know, I know, sometimes I’m just no fun.

Crepes with Raspberries

This breakfast for the first time since acquiring the Red House, we were actually able to enjoy on our newly built deck.  Last summer I had bought an outdoor furniture set complete with big red pillows and even a red umbrella!

Partially Finished Deck!

While I, of course, coveted much hipper outdoor furniture I had seen at Crate & Barrel, (with outrageous price tags to boot), this set (four chairs, the table and cushions) cost me a mere $99 from Walmart. And the umbrella? Well, I found that online for $39!

Comfy Red Chair!

The fact that these chairs are the most comfortable chairs I’ve ever had in my entire life (really), makes it even sweeter.

We did occasionally get up from the chairs that day, and I was about to make some crab cakes as an appetizer before I put the duck on the grill, when suddenly we heard the sump pump do its thing in the basement.  Well, that was curious I thought, since there hadn’t been any rain in days, which meant there had to be an ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF WATER IN THE BASEMENT.

Since the Red House basement is particularly scary, I sent Lynn down to investigate and sure enough a pipe had burst.  In order to get the water to stop, we would have had to turn off the main water valve.  Obviously, if we did that we wouldn’t have any water for eating, washing or drinking, so that wasn’t a viable option.  One of us (not me) had the not-so-brilliant idea we would try to duct tape the leak (that didn’t work), while the other one of us (me) thought rigging up a contraption to get the water to flow directly into the sump pump rather than pool on the floor would be a more manageable temporary solution.

It took about 2 hours to finagle some old metal radiator covers that we positioned under the burst pipe so that the water would go right into the pump.  We thought about calling a plumber but seeing how it was nearly 8:30 p.m. on the 4th of July and the water was still at a non-threatening level, we thought our “flood” could wait until the morning.

Which is why even though I managed to fry the crab cakes up relatively quickly after this plumbing adventure, by the time I got the duck breast on the grill, it was pretty dark outside. The crab cakes, courtesy of an easy recipe I found in Food & Wine, consisted solely of crab, mayo, hot sauce, and homemade breadcrumbs.

Amazing Crabcakes

And while I thought the duck cooked up perfectly fine (slightly pink in the middle), the photograph I took shows the meat swimming in a pool of grease.  This shot I absolutely cannot publish.

I will however, leave you with this, what the old deck used to look like, broken and crumbling and slippery when it snowed.

Old Porch, Finally Gone

Happy belated 4th!