I haven’t yet embraced the summertime heat.

By “embraced” I mean: boldly ignore the 90 degree Managua-esque weather and go outside to work in the garden anyhow.

By “embraced” I mean: be accepting and submissive about my skin sliming up with sweat and stink and stick.

Nope, I’m not there yet. I’m still rebelling against the extra early, hot, hot, HOT summer, trying to stay as cool as I can for as long as possible. This involves parking my rear in front of fans, gardening at dusk or dawn, and swigging iced beverages.

Normally, the people living in my happy, un-airconditioned household drink water and that’s about it. Smoothies happen, but they are a food, not a beverage (in my book), and the kids sometimes get little teeny-tiny glasses of milk at breakfast (which is crazy considering that they are eating milk-drenched granola at the same time). In fact, the kids are fond of telling me how at Grandmommy’s house, they can drink all the milk they want. Wow, I say flatly. But guess what. I’M not Grandmommy. So get over it. (My kids live such repressed lives.)

(My twice-daily coffee is A Saving Grace and counts as neither food nor drink.)

I don’t usually think twice about our water-only beverage lifestyle—it is what it is—but it get’s brought to my attention each time a foster child came/fresh air child comes into our home. The kids may not say that much, but I can tell (by their body language and the odd comments) that drinking just water is kind of weird. I like being weird though (not that I have any other option), so I take it as a compliment.

(Weird is good and here’s the proof. One of our foster daughters was on the heavy side, so I was required to take her to see a nutritionist where we learned that she had super high blood sugar levels. No surprise there, seeing as she reportedly drank large quantities of soda in her previous life. At our next appointment a month [or two?] later, her bad blood sugar scores had dropped dramatically and the nutritionist was gratifyingly shocked. Soda is evil, I tell you! Water is good!)

Lest you think I’m a saint (I humor myself to think that the thought might possibly ever cross your mind):

1. My son acquired some bottles of (sick-looking) blue and red Gatorade at a baseball game the other night, so yesterday morning after breakfast (I did insist on waiting till after breakfast), the kids indulged in Gatorade chugging contests. Then I banished them from the house. They ran shrieking down through the field and back and forth across the property as though possessed. (However, they do that even when they don’t drink neon beverages, so I guess I can’t really blame it on the drink).

2. I’ve been craving a rum and coke. I get this craving about once every three years. From past experience, I know it’s not going to go away till I go out and buy myself a coke and that then I won’t even like the drink enough to finish it. But buy the coke I will.

Anyway, as part of my beat-the-heat plan (you thought I’d never find my way back to the main topic, didn’t you!), I’ve been stocking the fridge with iced coffee and tea.

Oops. What’s this? I say I only drink water and then I go on to rave about iced tea (and coffee, but that’s A Saving Grace, remember)? I’m making no sense whatsoever. I could try to remedy the situation, I suppose, but I think it would be a futile endeavor. Onward ho!

I’ve made iced drinks before, but never before have I made them without the use of heat. Aimee of Simplebites is the one responsible for my new cold drink enthusiasm. She’s the one that taught me about cold-brewed coffee and tea, all in one neat, tidy post, and it was so wonderful, every little bit of it, that now I’m going to do the same for you!

It’s so simple, really. For the coffee, just mix grounds with cold water, set the mixture in the fridge for the night, strain it in the morning, and voila!, you’ve got iced coffee concentrate!

It’s cleaner-tasting than coffees made with heat, and less bitter (and reportedly with more caffeine, though I haven’t noticed).

The same method is used for the iced tea: cover some tea bags with cold water, set in the fridge overnight, strain, add fixings, and serve. The iced tea tastes lighter; it’s very, very delicious.

Tea, after a night of chilling

(As I was proofing that last paragraph, I knocked over my thermal mug of [this time] hot coffee, spilling it all over the green sofa. Whoops.)

So now, finally, I introduce to you real iced tea/coffee, cold from start to finish, authentic through and through. Serve it up and chill out, dudes!

Cold-Brewed Iced Coffee
From Aimee of Simplebites

1 cup coffee grounds
3 cups cold water

Put the grounds in a quart jar and top it off with cold water. Give the slurry a stir, screw on a lid, and slip the jar into the fridge for the night (at least twelve hours). In the morning, strain the coffee (I pour it through a cheesecloth), and return the strained coffee concentrate to the fridge where it will await, ready to gracefully save you from whatever it is you need saving from.

To serve: Mix equal parts coffee concentrate with milk, water, or cream. Add sugar (sweetened condensed milk, liquor), if desired, and serve over ice. Or, use it to make a coffee shake by blending with vanilla ice cream. (I haven’t tried that yet, but I plan to.)

Yield: Enough concentrate for four to six coffees, depending on the size and strength of the drinks. At first I thought that was a small yield for a full cup of grounds, but then I measured how many grounds I use for my regular cup of coffee (more than a quarter cup of grounds!) and decided it was a pretty good yield after all.

Cold-Brewed Iced Tea
From Aimee of Simplebites

I use four extra-large Lipton tea bags, but this last time I used just three and added two regular-sized bags of Red Rasperry Zinger which added a delightful dimension.

6 tea bags
1 gallon cold water
½ cup sugar
1 lemon, juiced

Put the tea bags in the water and put in the fridge to steep for the next twelve hours. Remove the tea bags, squeezing them to release all of the flavor, and add sugar (or honey) and lemon. Serve over ice.

About one year ago: In honor of Father’s Day: the giant green slug

In an effort to get The Baby Nickel to stop napping during rest time, I’ve taken to keeping him downstairs for his quiet time, in the only separate room (except for the bathroom) in our open downstairs. (When you see pictures of the kitchen/dining-living room, you are seeing the vast majority of our central living space.) But still, he falls asleep.

This wouldn’t be a problem, except that then he is wired at bedtime, sometimes not going to sleep till 10 or even 10:30. I like my quiet, kid-free evenings, so this is a serious problem.

I have to keep reminding myself that this, too, shall pass.

Kids grow up, you know. It’s the funniest thing. Yo-Yo used to wear diapers and now he mows our lawn. On the zero-turn mower.

The kid loves the thing. He begs to mow the lawn.

Hey, Mom, come out here and look at this! See how high the grass is? It comes all the way to my ankle! Don’t you think it’s time for me to mow again? How about I call Papa and see if he’ll let me mow tonight? Huh? Huh? Can I? Can I call him? Huh? MOM! I NEED TO MOW THE LAWN NOW OR I’LL DIE!

Okay, so he doesn’t actually say he’ll die, but that’s how he acts. And he’s pretty convincing. The kid has a flair for the dramatic. Trust me on this one.

He does a pretty decent job, too, with the mowing thang, now that he’s learned to aim the spraying grass away from the lettuces and spinach, to drive around the yard in a systematic pattern (not all loopy-like), to get closer to trees and shrubs without chopping them completely off (to be fair, that only happened once, I think).

He’s such a little Mr. Handsome, what with his ear and eye protection, work gloves, and his calm manner and intense focus. The machine scares the crap out of me, it’s so touch-sensitive and fast, but he’s cool as a cucumber on it, zipping about like he knows exactly what he’s doing. Which I think he probably does.

In a couple years he’ll be able to do the whole lawn, start to finish, including the weed-wacking.

The kid ain’t in diapers no more, that’s for sure.

Strawberry season is over in these here parts, but I’m still going to talk about them. See, I took pictures and jotted notes for a post on the little lovelies but then time turned tail and ran and when I finally caught up to it, strawberries were done.

But these days I’m kind of frittered in my head, not sure what/how/why to write, so I’m going to toss out this little bit of old news any-old-how, in hopes that it gets my brainy (ha!) juices a-flowin’. Once I get this strawberry load off my chest, I hope I’ll feel freed up to talk about other things, like, um, all my deep dark secrets (shh), or maybe just peas. (Which I picked this morning, after a spat with Mr. Handsome and before my coffee, and after all that I was rewarded with only a few pathetic handfuls of shelled green goodness. I’m feeling dubious about the whole pea-growing endeavor, so tell me, is it crazy to grow peas? Discuss, please.)

In the strawberry patch

Jam
My favorite recipe for strawberry jam is the basic freezer jam recipe, the one that comes in the pectin box.

I, however, buy my Dutch gel (same as sure-jell) in bulk and use ½ cup for each recipe.

This year I kept up my relationship with traditional jam and flirted with danger. My mother gave me two packs of low-sugar stuff to make freezer jam: the recipe called for four cups of mashed berries to 1 ½ cups sugar. The resulting jam was more preserve-like and less sweet (duh), but very delicious. Because it’s softer, it’s a great addition to plain yogurt, stirring in like a dream. (I forget the official name for The Stuff, thus the reason for my weird, hush-hush behavior.)

Freezer jam

Freezing
I employ three methods. All good, all different. Thus the reason there are three of them. See?

1. Crushed: mash up the berries, stir in a bit of sugar (one or two tablespoons per cup), spoon into containers (leaving room for expansion), label, and freeze.

2. Whole: spread topped berries on a rimmed cookie sheet that has been lined with wax paper, freeze for an hour, then dump all the berries into a big bag and return to the freezer. The berries don’t taste that great thawed but are excellent tossed into fruit smoothies in place of ice cubes.

3. Sliced: my favorite way to freeze berries is to top and slice them, pack them into plastic quart-sized containers, and sprinkle a scant quarter cup of sugar over top.

I label the lid “fresa” (Spanish for “strawberry”) because it’s faster to write and because I’m in no mood for making extra strokes by the time I’m packaging up the food.

And that’s it for strawberries. One year I canned some (the resulting berries are gross-looking, only good enough for smoothies, but the juice is spectacular, dark red and clean-tasting), and I usually dry some—a full dehydrator load yields 2 1/2 quarts of dried strawberry slivers, delicious on granola or in baked goodies.

About one year ago: Swiss Chard Rolls.