Nom de Plume

At about 11 months or so, Fluffaluffagus finally laid an egg.

It is a very odd-looking little egg. Here it is, in all its bullet-shaped glory:

And it’s so tiny that it barely registers on the egg scale:

More of Steve’s blacksmithing:

Steve has been taking blacksmithing classes and has been doing some amazing stuff. Like this coat rack:

And this plant hanger:

A hook for my closet:

And two hooks for the bathroom:

And then, of course, there is the Japanese gate that he just built, modeled off the one at Kubota Garden:

With two very cool hinges and a latch:

When we moved in, there was a window in the bedroom closet–a closet that wasn’t terribly practical. When Steve redid the bedroom, he shortened the closet itself and built a little exposed nook. Then, he took a cabinet and built it into place. Like so:

He had originally wanted to do a marble top for it, but decided to see if he could do something that looked like marble in concrete. I think it looks pretty cool–and we’ve both agreed that it looks like a Holstein:

Yes, I cooked the tongue.

It looked like a tongue when I threw it in the pot and simmered it for a couple of hours. It looked like a tongue after I took it out and sliced the base off to give to the chickens (they didn’t care). It looked like a tongue when I peeled the tough tough membrane off it, which was totally weird; it just sort of peeled off in these almost plasticky sheets. And it looked like a tongue after it was peeled and placed in a backing dish with some mustard, apples, and onions. There were still taste buds on the inner membrane. We cooked it, and it still looked like a tongue when we put it on the table and sliced it.

But when you cut into it, the meat looks like beef, and it was tender and delicious. I personally felt the need to peel the inner membrane off entirely because I just couldn’t get over the taste buds. If you didn’t know it was tongue, you’d have no idea. Well, except for Geoff, who came over for dinner and not only raved about how much he liked tongue, but snagged the tip. “It’s the tenderest bit,” he explained.

So will I do it again? Yes. But I think I would bake it using a different recipe. I had assumed we had horseradish, because who doesn’t have a jar hanging out in the back of the fridge? We didn’t. So it was a little bland.

And there you have it.

We’ve really stepped up buying local/sustainable this year. Part of this has entailed going to Bob’s Quality Meats, a local butcher in Columbia City that features all local, pastured meats. I swear, their whole chickens are the most delicious things ever. A few weeks ago, I was perusing the freezer and came across a beef tongue. I was feeling daring that day–and thinking about eating “nose to tail”–and thus the tongue found its way into my basket and into our freezer at home.

Now my grandmother used to cook tongue all the time. I remember it as being very tender and tasty. I never really thought about it that much, probably because it generally appeared on my plate already sliced and smeared with horseradish. But this … this hunk of tongue. Any recipe entails boiling it and then peeling the skin off it. It’s been taunting me from the freezer.

Well.

Last night, I pulled it out out the freezer and stuck it in the fridge This morning, Steve took the Pyrex dish out of the fridge and onto the counter because it wasn’t thawed. We stared at it wordlessly. Finally, he broke the silence. “I’ll eat anything,” he said. “But I have to tell you. I’m not really looking forward to dinner tonight.”

The thing is, a tongue is a tongue is a tongue. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from a pig, a cow, or a human. They all look the same. (Except of course for size, which led to some fairly ribald comments as we were contemplating it.) But I tell myself: How is it any worse to eat tongue when we eat other meat? The only difference is that it’s more easily recognizable for what it is. When I was 10 or 11, I went out to a fancy dinner with some relatives and ordered sweetbreads off the menu. To be totally honest, all that was going through my head was, “WOW! I like this place–you can have COFFEE CAKE or DONUTS as DINNER!” So yeah, I pretty disappointed when I got some meat in a buttery sauce. It was pretty good. But it wasn’t CAKE. Later on, my great aunt told me what sweetbreads really were. I just shrugged. It was okay.

I’m hoping the tongue is like that.

So here I go ….

Otherwise entitled, Not only am I turning into MY mother, I’m turning into Steve’s as well.

“Zia, can you show me where those cake pans are?” Steve asked. “You know, the ones that have the sides and bottom that separate?”

“You mean a springform pan?”

“Yes, that. Where are they?”

“Why?” I asked suspiciously. “Are you baking something?”

“Kind of,” Steve hedged.

“Tell me what you’re planning on doing with it.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

“I need to mold something,” he said vaguely.

“What do you need to mold?” Foot tapping.

“Concrete.”

“No. No way. Absolutely not.”

“But you have two, and one doesn’t work as well,” he wheedled.

“They both work just fine.”

“PLEAAASSE?”

• Teabonics …. I don't know whether to laugh or cry http://www.flickr.com/photos/pargon/sets/72157623594187379/ #