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Making It Like Martha: Cooking, Sewing, Gardening Through the Pandemic, Apt. 11D, April 10, 2020
Hi all!
Some time in the early 90s, I discovered Martha Stewart. I was captivated by her pastel pictures of chicken eggs, collection of jadeite dishes, and perfectionist cooking shows. I bought her paints and sheets from Kmart. I started my own collection of jadeite dishes, which I still have in a box in the basement.
Martha taught me how to cover a dining room chair and the correct way to roast asparagus. When I got married, a heavily post-it noted edition of Martha Stewart’s Weddings was responsible for everything from my bouquet to my headpiece.
By the time we got to the Oughts, Martha and I had parted ways. I was too busy with young children and jobs to think seriously about a béchamel sauce. While Steve and I still maintained a backyard garden and probably spent more time making homemade bone broth and pickled jalapeños than most people, we had also started outsourcing jobs, like the yard work and housecleaning. We went to restaurants more often. Like other professionals, we grew more distant from the means of production.
In recent years, DIY home chores became so unfashionable that Martha Stewart became more well known for her strange celebrity partnership with Snoop Dogg, than her awesome home in Maine. I was fairly apologetic when explaining to others that I still held opinions about cooking delicata squash and organizing recipes.
As we approach Week Three or Four of social distancing, I’m leaning into my Martha background. We’re expanding our backyard garden with a new raised bed. Steve and Jonah are sprouting seeds under a florescent light in the family room.
“Make more! More!,” I demanded. I am channelling my anxiety into food production. There will be some euthanasia of tomato seedlings in a few weeks, because our garden is finite, but I just want to make sure that every square foot of backyard dirt is used.
Without much happy news to write about schools at the moment, I’m writing more leisurely about other topics and ramping up my weekend hobby of book selling. While all that is going on, dinner is bubbling away in a dutch ovenfilling the home with the smells of beef, red wine, and thyme.
I don’t have a sewing machine, so I chose to buy face masks from the crafty website – Etsy.
Yesterday, I pulled out my stash of picture frames and old prints in the basement. I’m slowly dusting off the ones that still work, reprinting some old snapshots, and upgrading other frames.
I’m also taking charge of my own health. Three or four different apps are monitoring my exercise and food consumption. I rarely remove my fitness tracker. I bought some new sneakers yesterday.
These apps all tell me that I really need to stop eating the “fun cheese” and crackers at 5:00 and should keep the wine for weekends. But one needs a reward, after a full day of home making during a pandemic. So, smoked gouda happy hour will be happening at my house tonight at 5:00. Feel free to join our zoom cocktail party!
(More links below for cooking, gardening, and fitness.)
Be well! Laura
Apt. 11d 
Martha Stewart’s house is not my style, but I want a flower room and a kiwi covered terrace.
And, to see pictures of your new frames and your wedding!
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My family has been doubling down on the DIY/home exercise/cooking/gardening/etc. Some snapshots:
–The 9th grader has new raised beds. I believe we are expecting a shipment of strawberry roots soon.
–Husband and 1st grader made and painted a birdhouse and we’ve been feeding the birds (and probably the squirrels).
–We are seeing a lot of nature. Yesterday we got to see a green anole lizard on our patio transitioning between bright green with red neck pouch to greenish/brownish and then very brown–and then back to bright green.
–Husband made a couple of masks on the 12th grader’s sewing machine and hemmed some worn-out khakis into shorts for himself for tennis. He and the 9th grader also cut my husband’s hair.
–The four senior members of the family have been doing more regular heavy cleaning than in our entire lives. We have a household cleaning schedule and I keep noticing dirty things and cleaning them.
–We accidentally wound up with a 10.6 lb. spiral ham from Aldi. The 9th grader is planning to make a ham-cheese-potato pie with Pillsbury crusts.
–Husband and 9th grader are exploring every conceivable racket/paddle sport. They just got a set for crossminton and they like to clear our kitchen table and play ping pong on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_badminton
–Husband also made a set of wooden paddles for goodminton.
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Not to be nosey… well, actually, yes, being nosey…. how in the Hell do you accidentally end up with a ten pound ham???
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ds said, “Not to be nosey… well, actually, yes, being nosey…. how in the Hell do you accidentally end up with a ten pound ham???”
–Husband put it in our Aldi delivery order.
–I told him that we don’t need or want a 10-pound ham.
–He thought he replaced it with a smaller ham in the order, but apparently the change didn’t go through. (There was probably yet another button to click or something like that.)
It’s about a dollar a pound, so we’ve got that going for us. But SO MUCH ham.
In our previous order, we thought we were getting 4 cans of garbanzo beans and 4 cans of kidney beans for adding to curries, but (thanks to a combination of accidentally adding 4 cans and some pretty free substitutions by the order person) we wound up with about a dozen cans of pork and beans/chili beans/beans with bacon/etc.
Very important Aldi’s online order note: you’ve got to stay by your phone during the shopping process in order to nix unfortunate substitutions.
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In our house we used to make a dish we called Ham Yoganoff, just like Beef Stroganoff except substitute ham for the beef and yoghurt for the sour cream. I liked it a lot, my wife soured on it and we haven’t made it in several years.
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ds said, “In our house we used to make a dish we called Ham Yoganoff, just like Beef Stroganoff except substitute ham for the beef and yoghurt for the sour cream. I liked it a lot, my wife soured on it and we haven’t made it in several years.”
Oh, man.
We had ham and boiled egg sandwiches for Easter lunch. We’ll have ham/cheese/potato pie for dinner and a German mix poppy seed cake for dinner.
I have encouraged the kid who is making the ham potato pie to use as much ham as he can.
(I’m sure everybody knows the line about how eternity is two people and a ham.)
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Well, I have no idea how much ham 10 pounds is, so can easily imagine having made this mistake. I ordered something like a pound of ginger accidentally in one of my online orders. A pound of ginger is a lot, but not, I think, if you think it has amazing medicinal properties (which I do not).
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bj said, “I ordered something like a pound of ginger accidentally in one of my online orders.”
Oh, wow.
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Ginger tea is great – peel it, chop it up, and boil it in some water for a half hour or so. (Zest some extra in to kick up the ginger flavor even more.)
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I think this sounds like a delightful use of the family togetherness. Being around to see something like that lizard and share it with everyone is one of the kinds of things I find to be a high point in living.
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I read a recent article at the Urbanist blog I frequent in our city — which was complaining about the weekend closure of our destination parks. The frustration expressed at the blog brought home how much better it is to weather the stay at home orders in a big house, with a reasonable yard, and fabulous views. This situation we find ourselves in really privileges the big house.
I think the blog is wrong about the park closures, which I did consider necessary. The Urbanists are trying to advocate for street closures, which seem like a possibility to me. With traffic reduced, some streets would be closed. But, fundamentally, this stay at home is about creating the maximum physical distances we can among people. The easiest way to implement is to tell everyone to stay at home, or in their yards, and potentially to stay inside. Street closures might help with distancing, but they might just provide places for people to congregate.
But I did start thinking about how one would try to support people who live in smaller spaces if this kind of order was frequent or even longer term. Could we give people park passes that limited the number of people in a park?
When we were walking this morning, we encountered a jogger in our neighborhood who asked, “what is this neighborhood called? I’ve never been here before, but it’s beautiful”. She referenced a more urban neighborhood she lives in (which might have gotten boring, or, she was just looking for something new).
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bj said, “This situation we find ourselves in really privileges the big house.”
It does!
I saw a twitter post from a (NYC?) guy. He tweeted something like, buy a studio they said, you won’t be home anyway, they said.
Even a balcony could really help.
“Could we give people park passes that limited the number of people in a park?”
That seems pretty doable.
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Apropos of nothing in particular, the companion to “Friends don’t let friends read David Brooks” is “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbug write.”
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OK, final note on the 10 lb. Aldi’s ham episode.
Husband looked up our receipts and it wasn’t our fault at all.
–We started with a 10+ pound $11 ham in our online cart.
–We switched to a 4+ lb. ham that was more per pound.
–Aldi’s substituted us to a 10+ lb. $3 a pound ham.
Ouch!
On the bright side, we’re going to be eating this thing all week and it is a very good ham.
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I made a ten pound ham (bone in) yesterday. Not worried at all about consumption.
Today, take the pork that you don’t think you’ll eat in two days, divide it up into meal sized portions, and freeze it (if it wasn’t already frozen. Can’t do it twice.)
Create smaller portions that can used to flavor for eggs, sauces soups, beans. Put those portions in sandwich baggies. Then put those baggies into a proper freezer bag with a date and a label.
Freeze the bone. It’s great starter for lentil or black bean soup.
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Thanks!
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