Garden Update - Spring is in the Air

Several months ago, I wrote about the hope that gardens bring. For many of us, we are starting to experience the benefits of that hope. For my friends in the southern hemisphere, your hope is quickly dying with the coming winter months. I'm sorry, but now you get to begin hoping for spring in the next six months. Such is the circle of life...

I figured I would share an update with everybody on the state of the garden. My family and I have been hard at work, and we have experienced many successes as well as some failures. Here is what we currently have growing in our yard:

Trees - orange, lemon, pomegranate, apricot, blood orange, Pink Lady apple, Einsheimer apple, Clementine tangerine, and peach.

Fruits, vegetables, and herbs - grapes (two varieties), carrots, tomatoes (five varieties of grape/cherry tomatoes), cucumbers, sweet peppers, hot peppers, artichokes, watermelon (three varieties), strawberries (two varieties), rosemary, cilantro, basil, lavender, sage, peppermint, spearmint, oregano, and some sort of volunteer squash (uncomposted seeds that sprouted in the compost).

This seems like quite a bit, and it is. Like I've said numerous times, I love being outside gardening. I love watching my kids get dirty. I love the look of joy when they find a ripe tomato and eat it. I even somewhat like it when they get impatient and pick a tomato to eat before it is quite ripe. That childlike excitement is something that keeps me somewhat normal and balanced. Somewhat...

Here's the deal. This list of what we have growing in our garden is what continues to give me hope. We have started harvesting tomatoes, but several of our fruit trees won't bear fruit this year. This is the year to help their roots develop, to keep them healthy and growing, and to sow into the future harvests that I'm looking forward to. Perhaps this is a metaphor for providing my children with a quality upbringing so they can take care of me in the future?

To those of you who are beginning to enjoy the harvest from your gardens, congratulations! Your hard work is starting to pay off. Enjoy what you grow and let it be an encouragement for future plantings.

To those of you who are just getting out from under the snow and cold weather, be encouraged! Start enjoying the warmer weather and get excited every time you see a bloom, blossom, sprout or bud.

To those of you who are getting ready to experience winter, I hope it was a happy planting season. Hopefully you learned a little more about your garden, your climate, and the things that you grew.

And finally, to those of you who have never experienced gardening, give it a try! I wasn't much of a gardener until I saw that 12-year-olds could grow things at school, and that encouraged me to see what I could do. That experience proved to be life changing (for the better), and I have thoroughly enjoyed my time outside ever since then. Find a little patch of ground, put some seeds into it, and see what happens. Gardening is one big experiment. Sometimes you get what you're looking for, and sometimes you end up with a garden full of squash. But as with most endeavors, the joy comes in the journey and not solely the outcome.

Happy gardening, friends. And may the soil conditions be ever in your favor!

Italian Feast: The Best Meal You Will Ever Have

Warning: The pictures in this article will invoke hunger pangs, salivation, and a possible sudden urge to go to Italy. This is normal, but if you do not want to experience any of these sensations, you may want to go back to the gardening section.

Everybody has memorable moments in life - those events or experiences that stay with us, that define us, that change the way that we look at the world. My wife and I had one of those experiences when she was pregnant with our oldest daughter. We took a pasta making class in Italy. Yeah, I said in Italy. After I took my first bite of freshly made pasta, I looked at my wife and said, "Just think, for the rest of our lives, everything that we eat will be worse than this meal." It was that good. However, that statement was not entirely accurate, as we continue to make homemade pasta. And now I am going to share that experience with you.

Our Tuscan guide, Enzo, was extremely knowledgeable and opinionated about all things Italy, food, and wine. As we prepared to make pasta in the cellar of a 15th century Tuscan villa, Enzo said, "Before we do anything, we need two things. Wine, and Italian opera." There is something about a good Chianti and Pavarotti that can make even a Red Baron pizza taste like authentic Italian cuisine (my wife hotly refutes this statement). And the one- two- punch only further enhances actual Italian fare.

This is a complete Italian Feast!

There are a couple of items that you will need. First, you will need a pasta cutter. This is the machine that rolls out the pasta and cuts it. It is essential. We used an Atlas cutter in Italy. Since Enzo said it's the best, we bought the same one when we got home. It has been making pasta for the past six years and is still going strong. You will also need a pasta drying rack (see picture below). You can get by with some creativity with this (coat hangers, your kids' fingers, string zig zagging in your kitchen). However, after a few months of hanging our pasta on a clothes drying rack, we broke down and bought the real thing, and we've never regretted it.

Ingredients (meal for two):

Pasta making necessities - Step 1

Pasta
- 2 cups semolina flour
- 3 eggs
- sea salt

Sauce
-1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes
- 4 garlic cloves
- 2 dried hot peppers
- 2 sprigs of basil
- olive oil
- salt

Prep time - about 2 hours

Pasta:

Step 2

1. Pour a glass of Chianti and turn on some Italian opera. I prefer Pavarotti.

2. Start by measuring out 1/2 cup semolina flour on the counter (or plate). Add a dash of salt, and make a well in the center with the egg.

3. Crack the egg into the center of the well. With a fork, begin beating the egg, gradually incorporating more and more semolina flour. If the egg begins to escape, scoop it back into the dough. Once the dough is somewhat doughy, you can begin working it with your hands. You want this to be only slightly sticky, yet not too hard or solid. Add a sprinkle of additional semolina if necessary.

Step 3

4. Wrap with plastic wrap, set aside, pour some more wine, and continue with the remaining eggs.

5. After the dough has rested for 10 minutes, take the first blob of dough and divide in two. Sprinkle the counter with semolina flour. Take the blob and run through the pasta cutter, beginning on the thickest setting (1). Run it through on 1, turn 90 degrees, and run it through on 1 again. Gradually work your way up to the thickness you desire. Enzo taught us to finish on 7, which makes a very delicate pasta. If you're brave enough, try going up to 9. I double dog dare you.

6. Once the pasta is the proper thickness, you have a giant lasagna noodle. Cut it in half to make two shorter noodles, sprinkle with semolina flour, and run through the fettuccine cutter.Unless, of course, you want to make lasagna.

Pasta cutter - 6 years and going strong

7. Spread the noodles out on the drying rack. It is extremely important to separate the noodles and keep them from touching. With a little supervision, this can be a good step for young ones to help with.

8. Continue rolling and cutting pasta. When the pasta on the drying rack is somewhat dry, you can nest it or lay it on a plate. The drying process is to prevent the pasta from sticking, which causes large clumps of pasta. Confession time - as a kid, I loved finding lumps of spaghetti. I didn't know what al dente meant, but I liked the somewhat crunchiness of the middle of a pasta clump. I never said that I was a normal kid. Or adult.

9. Homemade pasta cooks extremely quickly. Boil a pot of water, and add the pasta for 60 seconds (2 minutes if your pasta was frozen). Drain immediately and toss with olive oil.

Meanwhile, the Sauce:

Full pasta production - stop regularly for wine

1. Pour olive oil in the bottom of a cast iron skillet (enough to cover). Add the tomatoes, garlic, and hot red peppers. Simmer for one to two hours. Note: the longer the sauce simmers, the better the house smells, and the hungrier you get. I think that Italians have been known to eat their own arms while waiting for dinner.

2. Five minutes before you're ready to eat, remove the garlic cloves and peppers and add the basil. We have cooked the sauce for a long time with the basil, but the basil develops a bitter taste if it cooks for too long.

To Serve:

Pulling out the fettuccine before hanging it to dry

Add the pasta to a bowl (or plate the pasta), and put the sauce on top. This is not a traditional runny sauce, but rather olive-oil-with-tomatoes-and-basil-awesomeness. This meal should be served with a good Chianti and some wonderful artisan bread. Also, according to Enzo, our Italian pasta cooking guide, the meal needs to end with a little limoncello ("For the digestion").

Make sure the noodles are not touching

For anybody in the Phoenix area or visiting the Phoenix area, I offer an Italian Feast class which includes all ingredients, walking through the process, the meal at the end, and of course the Chianti, Pavarotti, and limoncello. If you are interested, I am offering a discount for all Renaissance Dad followers. Please use the "Contact Form" at the bottom for more information. I will also offer a traveling Italian Feast class to any of my international readers, but you have to pay for my airfare and lodging.

A special thanks to my friend Nam Ho, who took these photos. Nam and his wife Anna visited us recently and gave us an excuse to make this Italian feast. So that's another way to experience this - come for a visit!
Buon appetito!

Simmering sauce (aka salivation machine)

Homemade Heirloom Wood Toy for Less Than $10

When I was in college, I spent several school breaks visiting my roommate's family in Ohio. One time at Swartzy's parents' house, he showed me some of his old toys. They were mostly wooden and handmade by the Amish (if any Amish are reading this, you can sponsor my blog for a rocking chair and/or a jar of apple butter). Even at that time, I remember thinking that it would be really cool for my kids to have wooden toys like those. And then I thought that it would be even cooler if it were something that I made. More than a decade later, I made this for my daughter when she was 18 months old.

It started with a visit to the local lumberyard. When I say "lumberyard," I am not referring to Lowe's or Home Depot. This was a visit to a lumberyard that has a wide variety of woods in many different sizes. They have a bin at the front of the store with scraps - pieces of wood that are too small for many projects. But these are ideal for most toys, and because they are scraps, they are quite inexpensive. I purchased five different pieces for $1 each. In addition, I used some scraps that I already had in my workshop.

First, I made the base. I cut and sanded the shape that I was looking for and determined where the stackable pieces would be centered. I then drilled 3/4-inch holes, and glued in 6-inch pieces of a 3/4" oak dowel.

Next, for the square pieces, I measured the largest dimensions and cut that square, drilling a 7/8" hole in the center (I wanted it to be easy for my daughter to place on the dowel). I then made the next square 1/2 of an inch smaller, and repeated for the next four squares, with a total of 5 stackable squares.

Next, I made circular pieces using the same method. I used a compass (remember the wonderful instruments from Geometry that we used to poke holes into our shoes? They actually have a real life purpose. Aside from poking holes in shoes). I used a ruler to find the radius of the first circle, and then made each subsequent circle 1/2 of an inch smaller in diameter, for a total of 5 circles. Finding the center was easy, as I had a mark from the point of the compass already in the wood.

I made sure that all of the pieces were sanded smooth. For this particular project, I did not apply any finish, since I knew that my kids would inevitably chew on it. Actually, once everything was smooth, it looked so good that I took a bite. 

Finally, I wanted this to be a pull toy, so I installed wheels. I used wooden knobs from the hardware store (about $.75 each), and used wooden pins to hold them in place. The wooden pins were glued into the base, making sure that the glue did not get on the wheels. I then tied a decorative piece of rope through a small hole in the front, and I had a wonderful toy that has brought my children years of joy!

As a woodworker, this was a fun project because I used many woods that I never would have bought. The platform is made from purple heart, which is normally an expensive wood. But using the scrap allowed me to get away with an expensive looking toy at very little expense. The basic shapes also made this a project that I would recommend for most beginners. It requires nothing more than a drill and bits, a jigsaw (you could use a circular saw if you keep the cuts to squares only), and sandpaper, although an electric sander really speeds the sanding steps up.

With a little time, you will have a project that will be handed down from generation to generation. I would love to hear from you if you have similar projects that you have made for your children or grandchildren, or if you remember a handmade toy that somebody made for you when you were a kid (i.e. I'm looking for new ideas of things to make).

Ceramic Mosaic: Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose

In 2007 I refloored our house. And by "I" I mean my wife, my mom, and me. We tiled approximately 1000 square feet. It was the first time I had ever installed ceramic tile, and as I cut the pieces that needed to be cut and broke pieces that made me angry, I was left with a pile of ceramic discards that I couldn't quite bring myself to throw away. I looked at the pile, my mom looked at the pile, and inspiration hit.

Pantry floor with mosaic threshold

We had a pantry and a closet that needed to be tiled, and I really didn't want to make all of those cuts. So I decided to free form mosaic floors for each, a la Frank Lloyd Wright. These two closet floors became my favorite part of the entire project, just in front of the mosaic thresholds that my mom and I did. I do believe that the artistic tile work was a significant selling point when we moved.

I still had tile pieces left over, so I kept them. Now let me set the record straight. I am not a pack rat. I do not have closets and closets of junk that I just can't bear to get rid of. I do hold onto things when I have a vision for them, and when I might possibly have a vision for them in the future. Or when someone else might have a vision for them. Don't look in my workshop.

Mosaic transition threshold

In addition to the tile pieces, I had two footstools that didn't fit in our house. My wife and I made the footstools years ago. I built the boxes, and she upholstered them. I wanted to figure out a way to incorporate them in our new house. Then it hit me - I could pull off the cushioned, upholstered tops and make side tables with storage for our patio. I could use the tile pieces left over from the tile project, along with some other broken tiles that were left in our new house, and let my inner mosaic beast out.

So here's what I did after removing the fabric and cushion from the top of the footstools, being left with a bare plywood top.

My mom's piece de resistance

• Step 1 - Lay out the design with no adhesive. Figure out how the pieces will fit together. Move them around until you get what you're looking for. Break large pieces with a hammer as needed. This is also a great chance to bring kids into the project. Give them the rare thrill to smash tile, as long as they know this is a one time shot and they should not begin to smash tile in the house with a hammer. (Please be sure you are wearing the proper safety equipment, including gloves and eye protection, when smashing pieces of ceramic tile.) 
• Step 2 - After finding the layout, transfer the pieces off of the plywood and onto the floor, keeping them in order. 
• Step 3 - Mix up thinset mortar according to package instructions. Spread the thinset onto the plywood with a notched trowel.
• Step 4 - Transfer your pieces. This is the part that can be frustrating. Due to slight shifts, the pieces will not be exactly the same the second time around. That is okay. The world will not end. Life will continue. Consider this an opportunity to smash more tile to find the tiny pieces to fit into your large spaces that you originally didn't have.
• Step 5 - After the thinset cures, use a sanded grout to finish the piece. 
•  Step 6 - (Depending on the piece, you may not need to do this step). With the tabletops, I needed a border, so I used composite lumber, hiding the edges and giving the tops a tie-in to the garden beds in my yard. 

  

  Mosaic tabletop

  

  Mosaic tabletop #2

My family put together a lot of puzzles when I was growing up. Inevitably, at least one of us, and more often several of us, would hide a piece, wanting to be the one to put the last piece in the puzzle. Mosaics are kind of like a puzzle with many possible solutions. With no one correct

solution, you can finally be the one to complete the puzzle.

So take that, brothers!

How To Be A Real Lifelong Learner

Most people in education hear the phrase "lifelong learner" on a regular basis. This term refers to the ongoing pursuit of knowledge, and it is something that teachers and administrators hope to instill in every student who comes through the doors of the school. A long time ago I believed that the term referred solely to the pursuit of book knowledge, but I now understand that it refers to intellectual curiosity and openness to new experiences. And this is the environment in which I thrive.

Food is gone and she's still being milked, obviously not happy with me

Enter Pebbles. Pebbles and her friend Lady are cows that I milk regularly. I didn't grow up milking cows. I don't remember ever thinking, "You know what I want to learn to do? I want to learn to milk a cow. And I hope that along with milking comes scooping up cow poop!" But in January, as my wife and I found a new farm to buy our raw milk, I started talking with the farm's owner, Sheri, who also runs The SupUrban Farm. We came up with a plan in which I would help Sheri and Bob on the farm so they could get out of town together every once in a while. In addition to getting delicious milk from Pebbles and Lady, I have the added bonus of catching people by surprise when they find out that I milk cows. It's funny that we are so far removed from our food that we don't think of this as something that people do on a regular basis.

My turtle

But the point is that I learned something new. This was an opportunity that I didn't go looking for. It found me, and I was receptive. I find that I am almost always open to learning new things. An acquaintance recently offered to teach me to work with stained glass. Of course I said yes! I'm no expert, and I've only made a single turtle (which, consequently, would have impressed Michelangelo). But it is a new skill that I would like to continue to develop, and I made a new friend in the process. I think this is what lifelong learning is all about. Adding new skills, new hobbies, new interests, and allowing new people to input into our lives.

Twelve years ago I owned two power tools - a drill and a jigsaw. The drill was a gift from my wife, and the jigsaw was a gift from my father-in-law. That was it. My handy skills were very limited, I had very little experience with building, but my interest was piqued with the gifts of these two tools. I now have shelves and shelves of power tools. I have accumulated these tools over the years as I have developed my skills. As my passion and learning increased, so did my tool collection.

Please note the order of events leading up to my current tool collection. My interest, passion, and skills increased, and then my collection increased. In the past I have sometimes thought that I wanted to start something, bought the supplies, and then realized that either I lacked the sustained interest or the necessary talent to pursue that activity. Lesson learned. I did not go out and buy a cow and milking supplies in order to learn how to milk a cow. But when the opportunity presented itself, I gratefully grabbed onto those udders and milked away.

I encourage you to learn something new today. Listen for opportunities, and when they present themselves, grab onto those udders with both hands (figuratively, but perhaps literally as well).