June 02, 2011

a recipe for sweet relief

June 02, 2011/ molly balint

Prepare yourself. Now begins the season where I need to discuss the weather constantly. Good-bye Maryland Spring, hello Maryland heat and humidity. We obviously have no air conditioning in this little gem of a farmhouse. I find myself relentlessly checking the weather, the weather maps, the hourly forecast, hoping for a break in temperatures, a drop in humidity, a good strong storm. (And dream about slipping off to an air-conditioned condo in the city. I've said that before, haven't I ?)

So we learn to make-do and deal with the heat.

As little Jane Fonda here can attest, it has been pretty wicked the past several days. I'm in survival mode. I'm not above a sno-cone break in the middle of the afternoon. Cereal for dinner when it's too hot to cook or even eat.

But one good thing that has come from this recent heat wave is my adaptation and (near) perfection of my grandmother's iced tea recipe.

You must know that the rule in my grandmother's house was that you had to be 13 to drink the tea. It has twice the caffeine and all the sugar, so you practically need a license to drink it. But a glass of that tea, full to the brim, overflowing with ice, is enough to momentarily keep even the worst hazy humidity at bay.

Now my grandmother had 15 children. Her version of this tea was brewed on the stove top, and poured into a giant stainless steel pitcher in her industrial-sized refrigerator. With the constant flow of children (over 13), visitors and guests, she always kept two pitchers going at the same time.

Well, my family, with only 2 of-age drinkers, doesn't quite need the same volume of iced tea.

I also didn't want to boil water. I'm that lazy in this weather. And I wanted to see if I could make a small concentrated version as my starting point.

So my recipe is your recipe. You can thank me later.

ICED TEA FOR THE OVER 13 CROWD

Fill a quart canning jar with cold water.

Add 3 large tea bags. ( I generally use Lipton and the bags I used are the jumbo-sized ones about the size of your palm. But any bag will do, you'll just have to tweak the amount.)

Screw the lid on the jar, securing the bags and set in a sunny spot outside.

Let your tea get a good sun tan. No really, a long steep is critical to this tea. I put mine out in the afternoon and bring it in the next afternoon. Almost a full 24 hour steep. You want it nice and dark.

Remove the bags and dump your tea concentrate plus 2 more quart jars of cold water into a pitcher.

Add 1/2 cup of sugar

Add a generous 3/4ths of a 12 ounce can of frozen lemonade concentrate**

Stir well.

Get a large glass of ice, a sprig of mint and thirst be-gone!

**I hate to waste that last little bit of lemonade concentrate in the bottom of the can. Dump it into your quart jar, fill it up with cold water. Put the lid on and give it a good shake. And take it out to your husband--who's dripping in sweat while chopping wood for WINTER!

May 20, 2011

I carried a broom

May 20, 2011/ molly balint

I woke up in the middle of the night last night to the sound of a fox. Really, it's not that uncommon. We hear them all the time out the front windows of the house, in the fields across the road. But this time, the fox was much, much closer. In fact, I could tell it was in the back of the house and sounded close enough to be in our yard. I listened a little longer to be sure it wasn't just a dream or the breathing of the person in bed beside me.

You'd think I'd be desensitized by now, but I seriously HATE the sound of these foxes. They send chills down my neck and make me want to revert back to my thunder-storm-panicked childhood with hands clamped over my ears and covers pulled up to my eyeballs. But, I must put on a brave front for the little people in my house.

I coo to them, "It's just a sweet little fox. We're safe inside. There's nothing it can do. Just listen to it. Doesn't it sound so neat?" I'm such a faker. If they only knew.

Last night however, its proximity to the house had me a little panicked. I had visions of those little barn kittens scampering around the garden shed. I worried that we hadn't done a good chicken count before locking the doors of the coop for the night.

So I did the only brave thing a farm girl could do. I woke up Dan.

There's a fox!

It's in the yard!

The kittens!

Did we lock in the chickens?

What about Maggie????

Thankfully, Dan loves some good fox drama so half-awake he bumbled downstairs to listen more closely. Finally he opened up the mudroom door and Ruby went tearing off across the yard--whether it was after the fox or she just really had to go the bathroom, I don't know. But the fox either quieted down, or disappeared. Hopefully, the later.

Dan came back upstairs to find me and Mary standing in the hallway waiting for a full report.

Unlike many nights in this house lately, we'd played musical beds at some point in the nighttime hours. We stopped for a moment in the hall, discussed the fox, my concerns over the animals, maybe it was time to get some bullets for his gun, the fact that the little person sleeping in bed with me had slept through her need to go the bathroom, and was sleeping fitfully and kicking, and did I set his alarm for 5:30?

A small family meeting in the hallway. I felt like we needed to smack high fives and do a secret handshake before we returned back to our stations in seperate bedrooms with children needing to be snuggled.

The whole fox thing threw me off and I had a hard time falling back to sleep. My mind recalled stories of my mother's bravery. Of the night when she heard something attacking our guineas and raced down the steps and outside in her nightgown with a broom, a broom, swinging wildly in the dark at whatever was on the attack. She came back in and said something brushed past her legs and was gone.

I like to think that if neccesary, I could step up and have that kind of bravery. But for now, if Dan's available, I'll gladly default to him.

I did eventually fall asleep and my dreams involved a large mother bear and her cub which had gotten into the house. Dan and I were racing around upstairs dropping our children out of the windows to keep them from being gobbled up. A short fall obviously better than a bear attack. Maybe it had something to do with the bedtime story being The Biggest Bear, or the fact that Dan mentioned he left the mudroom door open so Ruby could come and go in the night.

All I know is that in my dream, I was brave. And I carried a broom.

photos? backside view of the house I grew up in. + my brave mother holding baby me.

May 17, 2011

on raising chickens and embarrassing your children

May 17, 2011/ molly balint

At ten this morning, I found myself hiking up the road--in my pajama pants and boots, carrying a big stick. I was walking behind the neighbor's teenaged bull, (who was once again in our yard), coaxing him back up the road and into the neighbor's pasture where he belonged. Mind you if this was the real deal, grown-up bull, I would NOT be doing this job. But this guy was young enough to not put up much of a fight besides a little head tossing and chomping of grass growing longer around the telephone poles.

Thankfully, my children are not at that age yet where the sight of their mother walking up the road, in her pajamas and boots doesn't completely mortify them. I know that day will come. I remember the days of mortification over the outfits my mother would wear to drive us to school. Even worse? When she'd have to drive us in the cattle truck--with its random outbreaks of a vibrating steering wheel you could hardly control and muffler that could be heard from two miles out. For now, I like to pretend that my children think my bravery and toughness is kinda cool, and they don't notice what I'm wearing. Please, just let me think that. Don't burst my bubble, yet. I have years of that ahead of me, I'm sure.

But this post is a chicken update! Enough with the bull...

Just days after I wrote about the joys of chickens in your bathroom I apparently reached my limit. I crossed my fingers and prayed that the temperatures were warm enough and the chickens feathered enough, and we moved the little girls out to a pen that sits at the back of our coop. If you ever find yourself building a coop, this pen is a great thing to have. It provides the perfect way to introduce new birds to your flock and allows them to get acquainted with their new digs before you let them go free range.

And did you know that the best time to introduce new chickens to your flock is after dark? Just slip them into the coop and when the next morning dawns, the original hens are less likely to make a big fuss over the newcomers. Apparently, chickens have some serious short-term memory issues.

The chicks did fine in the coop. We bedded them down with extra straw on a few nights when we worried about overnight temps, and tacked old yard furniture cushions over the window.

Not attractive, but effective.

Last week, we decided to give them complete freedom. We opened their door and let them see the true light of day.

Each day they get a little braver and now two or three of them are starting to venture outside of the coop, but still not very far. They still scurry back to their pen if I startle them. But curiousity always gets the best of them and they come out to see what goodies I might be offering.

It also turns out, just like last time, we're not looking at the addition of six new HENS to our flock. Turns out there's at least one rooster, maybe two.

Here we go again.

May 09, 2011

the hesitant gardener

May 09, 2011/ molly balint

Our garden is going in. Each night a few more things get planted. Each weekend, I stop at The Mill for a few more packets of seeds.

I have to admit, I'm not doing much gardening. Dan is the master-gardener in this house. My main job is chief errand-runner, chief "what to plant" decision-maker.

My work doesn't really kick-in until mid to late summer when things start appearing, needing to be harvested and cooked up and frozen and canned.

I'm guilty of being very ambitious in the cool, crisp days of Spring when anything feels possible and enthusiasm is at its peak. Unfortunately when my work really begins to matter we are in the dredges of hot, humid, sticky summer days when the last place I want to be is bent over a steaming pot in my sticky, non-air-conditioned farmhouse kitchen. Summer tends to suck the life out of me.

So each year we try to make a few adjustments to what we plant. Last year, we (probably me) made the mistake of putting in way too much corn. Even with staggered planting it was too much. In summer's heat I was never very enthusiastic about a large pot of water boiling in my kitchen and I lost all enthusiasm for slicing corn off ears, blanching and freezing.

So this year, there's no corn. I'll simply get what I want, when I want it, from a local farm stand.

This year there are more grean beans. More onions. More potatoes. There will be tomatoes, despite last year's disastrous crop that was almost a complete loss. There is spinach. And cabbage (for my cole-slaw loving child), and brooccoli.

I am no green thumb. In fact, I wear green gardening gloves just so that I can pretend to have one. Each year, we learn something new. Adjust, change our plans, make vows for next year's garden.