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:

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:

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.

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 ….

“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?”

Anyway, one of the perils of researching recipes online is the fact that one gets easily sidetracked. For instance, I went online this morning to get the proportions of beef bones to water to make stock. And before you know it, there I am on a page on how to make butter.

Well.

Why not?

Here’s the page (complete with an explanantion of why you shouldn’t feel guilty eating butter). His directions are nice and lucid, and include complete pictures. Should you not feel like clicking, the process of making butter is as simple as throwing heavy cream into a KitchenAid and whipping it until the fat sticks together

So here we are at the buttermilk whooshing out of the butter stage.

We just happen to have an antique butter mold and paddle.

With a nice little pattern inside the mold.

Pressed it in

And now it’s resting in the fridge, waiting to be unmolded.

*Update: It behooves one to read up on how to use a butter mold before one actually uses it. To wit: Apparently, you are supposed to soak it in water for 30 minutes before using it. Otherwise, the butter won’t pop out. Sigh.

Well, okay, not 100 percent finished. We still need to get a new fridge and hood for the stove, but those are last on the line. We’re also getting new curtains for underneath the sink. But the bulk of the work? DONE.

It’s amazing.

Here’s a recap of the kitchen’s past.

Here’s what it looked like completely gutted.

And now, here’s a panoramic set of photos of what it looks like now.

Well, I’m not totally serious. It’s nice to be baking and listening to the Messiah, but there’s just too much to do, and too little time in which to do it. Need to get presents wrapped and mailed. Which is a daunting task in and of itself.

But, there’s a hafla tonight at the bellydance studio, and I’m taking my Little Sister. And the house is clean–well, relatively. I still haven’t figured out how I can spend three hours cleaning, and then the cleaner arrives and unearths yet more grime. Sigh.

But seriously, it’s going to be gorgeous. We’re both pleased, and, despite our WANTING concrete, still pretty surprised at how good it looks.

Here’s the mixer Steve rented from Home Depot:

Mixing the concrete:

Steve built the molds more than a month ago:

The, um, vibrator. After you dump the concrete into the molds, you have to vibrate it to get it rid of all the air bubbles and make it even. This was my job.

Making it all smooth:

Now they have to sit for four days.

But that wouldn’t fit in the title area. And it probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense. Not that the name Kiyoshi Saito necessarily makes a lot of sense either, unless you’re a fan of sosaku hanga.

Anyway, I have a Kiyoshi Saito woodblock print of two roosters called Competition for a Charm. I love it. There are other prints of his that I covet fiercely and can’t afford, but I remember this one from my childhood, when it hung in my parents room. It went with me to college and it has been with me in every place since.

And of course, now I have become a crazy chicken lady with a boyfriend that has too much time on his hands. Not, you understand, that I’m complaining. “We need some chicken art on the back of the garage,” he said the other day. “I know what I’ll do!”**

**Steve credits his inspiration to Joy Wants Eternity. If anyone should feel so inclined, he would love free tickets.

(If the above grosses you out, read no further.)

So I checked their vents. This, for the unititated, basically means running around after chickens who don’t want to be caught, rounding them up and herding them into the coop, and lunging at their feet–at which point you dangle them upside down. The hens don’t like this, but at some point, they give up–and just kind of go stiff, like they’re dead. Which made life much easier.

And which made it much easier to see that they were crawling–CRAWLING–with lice. There were eggs crusted around their vents, creepy crawlies scurrying over their skin. It was gross, and those poor hens must have been miserable.

Now I had dusted them before they went into the coop in the first place, but obviously it didn’t work. So I dusted them again with diatomaceous earth (which, by the way, totally kills any chicken poo smell in the coop and I’ve started adding to their feed as a dewormer), and went down to Del’s to get a permethrin spray. I would like to be all natural and everything, but sometimes you just need to use chemicals. Came back, cleaned out the coop, sprayed it down. Caught ALL the chickens, sprayed them down too (though no one else seemed to have lice). This was Sunday; yesterday, they were clean and clear.

So what I think is that they just had a bad infestation and stopped producing–and that’s why they went at auction. Could be wrong, but it’s a working theory that allows me to the luxury of thinking that one day they will produce.

Oh, and I battened down the hatches of the run yesterday. The buttercup and Stubbs both gave me an egg. So there’s a clutch of eggs somewhere out there in the yard ….