The house in Connecticut is still out of power, and ETA puts power coming back on in 7+ days. Most of the traffic lights in our neck of the woods are still out, and while they’ve cleared some of the roads, others are still blocked– mostly by downed trees, moreso than flooding.

My grandparents had to be evacuated in Delaware due to tornado threats in their town. Several homes in my aunt’s apartment complex were destroyed, although hers is intact, thank goodness, and she spent the night in a high school that was serving as a shelter. My grandparents went to my cousins’ house. One of my other cousins lives in a trailer park where she said that her trailer and three next to hers were all right, but everything after that was destroyed by a tornado. I am just so relieved that everyone in my family made it through safely.

At around 2 am Saturday-into-Sunday, I shut down my computer, ready to go to bed, and the power blinked out. I laughed, certain that my timing had just been impeccable– but two minutes later, the power came back on.

So I started turning off lights, when I heard the most tremendous noise coming from outside. The wind was loud, but it wasn’t the wind. It was the chickens. Crying. Now the chickens were as safe as they could be, in a storm pen inside the stable, with things to climb on if the stable flooded (unlikely, since it’s at the highest point on the property). But they were crying so loudly and so mournfully, it was like nothing I’d ever heard. Screaming chickens. For a second, I considered going outside to see if they were all right– I feared the worst, a problem with the stable or a wild animal that found its way in. But common sense told me that going outside in the height of a hurricane to check on chickens was not the wisest choice I could make, so I went to bed (in the basement, as my bedroom is just beneath two massive old sugar maples).

I woke up at 12:24 pm to discover no power and the storm more or less dissipated– it was still rainy and windy, but there were patches of sun, and it was perfectly reasonable to go outside. We made some scrambled eggs on the grill, ate some blueberry pie that my mother had made the day before, and made a lot of headway on de-cluttering the room that is eventually going to be our bar, let the chickens out, and hunted down the cat, who was hiding in a ball in the loft in my bedroom (my bedroom used to be a hayloft). It was probably the point closest in the whole house to the wind, so possibly not the most intuitive choice for hiding, but whatever she wants to do, you know.

The chickens, by the way, were totally fine, if their feathers were a bit ruffled (literally).

We went to the neighbors’ house, and helped get things ready for their daughter’s wedding next weekend, and had some quick dinnery things along with copious amounts of delicious homemade wine, and used their generator to re-charge our phones and check the mass transit situation. The train line I usually take home had downed trees on it, so it was pretty apparent I was not going to get to work today, even if the roads got cleared (most of the roads out of our neighborhood were blocked by trees). We munched on some quickly-melting gelato, and went home. I called Brendan, who had already come to this conclusion on his own, and told me that out neighborhood here was totally fine– we live about three blocks apart from each other on top of a hill, so it seemed pretty good.

When we got home, though, we discovered that the chickens’ coop had been blown shut by the wind, while they were all outside doing chickeny chicken things (all but one), and they were all huddling in a pile on top of the coop all shivering and cold and awwwww poor chickens. My mama picked them up one by one and put them in their nice warm coop, and they cuddled against her for warmth.

By then, it was getting too dark to see, so out came the battery-operated lanterns.

I read for about two hours until my lanterns all started to fade, and then went to bed at around eleven, and woke up at nine this morning– to a distinct lack of any power.

So my mother and I cleaned out the fridge– but left the freezers shut tight, in the hopes that maybe the power would come back on before the food defrosted completely. And then we made up this delicious lunch:

That is some delicious gnocchi with brown butter and crispy fried sages, and some yummy wienerschnizel. I am quite pleased with the fact that this is what we managed to cook on our outdoor grill (since the stove in the house is electric).

We did some other cleanup chores, then chased the chickens around to get them back in their coop– they hate going in in the middle of a beautiful day! And left to get home.

Well, getting home was a pain in the butt, since there were still a lot of roads on our usual route that were blocked by down trees, and still a lot of traffic lights out in the area. A trip that usually takes an hour took three hours, but after three hours, I was home safe in my apartment that still has power, nothing damaged, and I was able to turn on my air conditioning, and, realizing that I was probably about the filthiest I would be for a month, scrubbed the heck out of my bathtub, which was looking for a cleaning, before taking a Daenerys-Targaryen-hot shower, and scrubbed and descaled and shaved and did a nice face mask and all sorts of lovely things. And then I put on a dress! A dress, after breaking my I Don’t Wear Pants rule twice over the weekend (this is a rule I have, in which I only wear pants when I absolutely must, for things like beekeeping), and it was lovely and wonderful and I felt very grateful that all was well.

My parents are still out of power, and we found out only after we left that it may be a week till the house gets power back, and I don’t know if there’s an ETA for the apartment (also out!). I feel really badly for them; I’m not sure if they can get water without a pump since they’re on the second floor. I told my mother she could come back over here, but she declined.

So I went out to Whiskey Monday, saw some new friends, met some new-new friends, had some lovely drinks, and now I am home and so sleepy in a luscious, languorous way that is the result of hard work that makes it very satisfying.

I hope that all of you are safe and cozy and the things and people you love are intact! And that your chickens did not cry too hard.

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Had a lovely weekend with my family. Grandparents are doing well, and I got to see my cousin Jeremy for the first time in about twenty years. He has five kids now! One daughter from his first marriage, three stepchildren, and a new baby! His kids are all adorable and precocious and amazing and they were so much fun. We went to my cousin Shannon’s wedding reception (she got married in the Carribean somewhere, I forget where), and had a delicious cake which is the official state cake of Maryland, that I’d never had before. It was one of the best wedding cakes I’d ever had (traditionally, it’s chocolate, but Shannon had it in strawberry, orange, and banana. I tried strawberry and orange as bananas are my mortal enemy.)

Some sad news, though! Chick Luisi, aka Salty Bob (according to Jess) died this weekend. My dad got up to the house and found her with her neck broken in the hen yard.

At first he didn’t tell us her neck was broken and I felt terrible and horribly guilty that we didn’t do enough to prevent heat stroke, or that maybe the chickens had gotten sick and would all die.

But then he told us about her neck, and while I am still sad that we lost a chick, it sounds like it was the work of one of the bigger chickens, which, I hear happens from time to time. We suspect Chick Luisi was not really a hen but a rooster (she was showing signs of not being female) and this is not uncommon. My dad is still sort of freaking out and thinks a wild animal got into the henyard, so he took a giant Santa Claus that my parents use as Christmas decoration and set it up outside because he is convinced that will scare away the wild animals. My mother is convinced it will just weather damage Santa.

Anyway, very sad to lose a chick. :-( Here is the last picture I took of her last weekend.

Time to pack up for the train! Love you all! <3 <3 More later!

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First off, chickie update! Look at how big! They are this big!

Secondly, and this is, admittedly, not the biggest surprise, but still terribly exciting and magical and wonderful every time it happens, WE HAVE EGGS.

That egg? That egg is ten minutes old. Ten minutes! This is the freshest egg I have ever had in my whole life!

By the end of today, we had nine eggs over the course of seven days, so it looks like both of our big hens are laying.

We had eggs on Saturday morning:

And then this morning, a little after I got up, my dad came down from the hen house with the egg in the picture above. One perfect brown egg! So we cooked it right away and ate it right away and it was pretty much incredible. We split it in three, so I had a third of an egg, and I didn’t eat another thing until two pm because it was so awesome.

EGGS. EGGS EVERY DAY. SO EXCITED.

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Dear St. Anthony, please come round, something is lost that cannot be found. If you find it, please bring it to me, and I’ll be happy as can be.

I’m pretty much a lapsed Catholic at this point, and like my relationship with Judaism, I’m only there for the food. But there are two times I pray.

1) I sing (under my breath, because out loud would be rude) the Ave Maria every time a plane takes off. It’s kind of my favorite prayer (sung), and it’s a nice meditative thing, and I’ve had slight PTSD about plane rides since 9/11.

2) The St. Anthony Prayer! Why? BECAUSE IT FUCKING WORKS. Case in point:

So, I went out with justatailor and her friends. More about that coming up! The doorman at D&Co actually carded us. Now, I normally use my passport for all ID-related things. On account of, you know, not driving. I always keep it in my purse. But I couldn’t find it.

So, I had a slight panic moment but managed to recover and have a lovely evening, reminding myself that I had recently taken a bunch of crap out of my purse, and probably inadvertently removed the passport. I did notice that I had misplaced my work ID as well, but since I needed to use that to get into my office after gorging at Bomboloni for lunch, I am pretty sure I just left it on my desk.

I got home and looked around. Note, I will say it now, the first place I checked was in my backpack that I use to lug my laptop around. I put away a whole bunch of shit that was in piles around my apartment. No luck.

No luck. I called my mom. She looked around on the coffee table where I usually leave my purse at the barn. No luck.

So I walked over to the grocery store and the little Chinese take out place I’ve been eating at since my stove broke (it’s fixed, by the way!) No luck. On the way home, I started chanting the St. Anthony Prayer.

Dear St. Anthony, please come round, something is lost that cannot be found. If you find it, please bring it to me, and I’ll be happy as can be.

Dear St. Anthony, please come round, something is lost that cannot be found. If you find it, please bring it to me, and I’ll be happy as can be.

Dear St. Anthony, please come round, something is lost that cannot be found. If you find it, please bring it to me, and I’ll be happy as can be.

I walked in the door. I looked around a bit more. I reached inside my backpack one. more. time.

And pulled out my passport.

HELL YES, ST. ANTHONY.

So, yeah, things about today!

1) OUR CHICKENS LAID FOUR EGGS SINCE SUNDAY. EEE. We have eggs! They are beautiful and brown and I can’t wait for the weekend when I will get to eat their eggs for the first time! Oh my goodness.

2) Like I said, epic awesome drinks and food with justatailor and crew. I have never been in the presence of so many gin-swilling ladies before, and that was excellent. Plus, all very friendly and open to sharing food and drinks which is the best kind of pepple to go out with. Between the five of us, I got to have some pulled pork slider, a fried crab thing, lobster rolls, and pork belly with polenta that was to die for. And some mighty delicious drinks.

So, good day, slight panic about the passport RESOLVED. I win today, thank you, St. Anthony!

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But this was not the case! We opened the coop to THIS!

SO BIG. Look how big! They are seriously more chickeny than chickie now, which is kind of exciting, even though they have a good four months before they’re full grown. CHICKIES.

Now, our chickies have been out of doors very little. Most of their experience with the outside has been in a large plastic tub with a screen over the top, because they have been very tiny and our cat has been very transparent in her plot to attempt to eat them. But now they have a fenced-in coop, surrounded by sturdy chicken wire that is actually being used for its LITERAL purpose! So, for the first time, we opened the door into the henyard to let them out into the world!

The chicks were very suspicious and/or skeptical of this new freedom, and they hovered cautiously at the door to the henhouse for a while. A long while. Long enough that I took a shower and got dressed and came downstairs and they still hadn’t come out.

Two of the chicks, the little redheaded one who is my chickeny avatar because her hair is the same color as mine (we don’t know that they are ladies yet, but we are using female pronouns to encourage them in that direction since ladies can lay eggs and roosters just break zoning laws), and a brown speckled one which the second graders named “Chick Louisey” seemed to be the most likely candidates for “first out of the henhouse.”

In the end, it was Chick Louisey who came out first!

The little redheaded hen came out pretty quickly after, once she knew it was safe. THEY ARE LIKE PENGUINS!

Here’s just what I thought was an exceptionally adorable picture of Chick Louisey sunning herself on the, er, gangplank. Is there a chickeny name for it? I don’t know! Little Redheaded Chick hopped right off and went to work pecking the dirt as chickens are wont to do, but Chick Louisey seemed mostly content to sit where she was. One step out was quite enough, thank you!

Ever since we got the chicks, my dad has been talking about how much he really wanted Rhode Island Reds, which our chicks are not, so, for Father’s Day, my mother and I went to one of the farms up the road and came back with…

Four birds! Two pullets (young hens who have not started laying yet) and two year-old layers! The older hens are Not Amused by the little chickies antics, but I suspect they’ll survive. I do keep expecting one of them to should “GET OFF MY LAWN!”

That is all! Hooray for chickens!

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Anyway, I have something like six cocktails in the backlog, three of which are made with fresh strawberries, and some strawberry photos and stuff, but for now, we have CHICKIES.

So, this weekend, the chickies were getting a little too large for their box:

You can see just how big they are getting compared to last week! Oh my goodness, they look like tiny ostriches! Here they are playing on the porch:

Excellent, no? So we decided it was time to move them to the chicken coop (yes, we have a chicken coop).

We went to Agway! It was exciting, because there is a whole Poultry Section full of things for your chickens. This is my new favorite store!

Here is a waterer and a feeder! We got these things for our chickens!

And here are the mealworm treats I wanted to buy for them. Don’t they look delicious? My mother, on the other hand, said “Ewww!” and we did not purchase these.

Here’s our car, all full of chickeny stuff to take home to the babies!

And here are the babies in their new house, hooray!

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I am sitting and sipping some delicious jasmine iced tea with honey courtesy of our bees. It has been a good weekend, full of things like marigold planting and making pulled pork on the new grill.

Chick update:

They are starting to look like tiny chickens! They’re developing colors and markings and itty bitty chicken wings. That red one is my favorite, if we are going by looks. So cute! The cat is getting a bit angry about the presence of small animals she is not allowed to eat though.

Whilst gardening this weekend, I made a new friend:

Oh my god! He is metallic! I love him so much. He ran away, though, I think largely for fear of the cat. The cat caught a luna moth last night. A luna moth. A huge honking luna moth.

We were watching last night, and the cat was looking up at this gigantic thing as it swooped through the air. She jumped up once, and clearly did not come even close to getting it, but then the moth started diving closer and closer to her. It was seriously like it was playing “nyah nyah you can’t get me,” with the cat! I wish I had a picture. Then the thing literally swept right above the cat’s nose, and that was it, pounce, the moth was toast. She trotted off happily with this giant moth swinging from her teeth to do I know not what to her prey!

Today, I went to the sporting goods store with my mom to finally buy a bike helmet. My parents bought me a new bike for Christmas, now that I live in Queens and not Manhattan, and I am super excited by it, but no helmet! And even Queens is not safe enough to navigate without a helmet. So I went and got one!

Eee, hooray! Now I get to ride my bike. This is going to make getting between Queens and Brooklyn super shiny, at least for the summer! I got a mega awesome looking bike lock of Man in the Iron Mask proportions, and a hand pump, too.

So that’s it for now! Later or tomorrow, look forward to strawberries!

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By Monday, the chickens were much fluffier and were developing more adult feathers!

Also, our new hive was really seeing some activity. Hive #1 has so much honey we are going to be harvesting next weekend, hooray! It’s crazy, you can smell the honey in the air from like ten feet away. Our new hive is a hive of blonde bees, and they are very pretty and redder in color than our other bees. It’s neat because you can tell them apart by sight.

Yesterday, my mom made the most awesome nachos and salsa ever. I can take zero credit for any part of this meal except that I dumped some of my pickled hot peppers on the nachos, so good. Oh, and I picked the asparagus, but I’m going to post another post, probably tomorrow, about cultivating asparagus in your garden!

The nachos have steak, cheese, black olives and peppers on them, and the salsa is black beans, grilled corn and grilled onions, tomatoes, avocado, garlic, cilantro, lime juice, and a little cumin. Yum!

Anyway, here is the cocktail I made to go with the nachos and salsa:

Happy Accident

Ingredients
2.5 oz Depaz rum
.5 oz Elisir MP Roux
.25 oz cognac
about 6 sprigs of oregano
about 4 sprigs of chamomile, plus three chamomile blossoms for garnish

Instructions
Put rum, oregano, chamomile,in a shaker with ice and muddle well
Add MP Roux and shake
Coat chilled cocktail glass with cognac
Pour drink into glass, add blossoms

And here is the drink I made today. This is my first drink using Boyd & Blair, which is the vodka I’ve been waxing poetic about to everyone I speak to. And you can consider this my first entry into the “drinks that absolutely require the flavor of vodka” category :-P

Drink Me

Ingredients
2.5 oz Boyd & Blair Potato Vodka
1.5 Tbs chopped wood ear mushrooms, reconstituted if dry
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
.5 oz black pepper-wood ear syrup (basic simple syrup with 2 tbs wood ear mushrooms, 2 tsps black pepper added)
.25 oz Dolin Blanco vermouth
6 drops white truffle oil

Instructions
Crush peppercorns slightly
Leave vodka to sit with mushrooms and peppercorns steeping in it for about 5-10 minutes
Strain vodka into a shaker with ice, add syrup and shake
Coat glass with vermouth, add contents of shaker
Add of few of the vodka-soaked mushroom pieces back to the glass
Add truffle oil in little drizzles

The best thing about this drink is that not only is the drink yummy, but you end up with vodka-soaked mushrooms that are freaking amazing. I’m actually going to save them to use in other stuff.

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Actually, let me just show you.

Do you notice anything special about that picture? Like, say, the presence of two hives instead of one?

Well, that is because my parents got up at the crack of dawn to ACQUIRE A NEW QUEEN. And now we have two hives! So exciting.

The bees are producing crazy honey. Like, we put in some empty spare frames with some comb they made last year but never got around to filling, and it was full within about eight hours. Crazy! I’m excited to see what this honey tastes like compared to the goldenrod honey they made last autumn.

Bees are the most awesome. Check them out!

Love them! That last one was a bee on my leg. They kept landing on me today. At first it was because I was wearing crazy madras shorts which make them think I am a beautiful flower, so I changed into whites and I think then it just meant that they love me. D’aww.

Anyway! I got a ton of work done in the garden today. We went to three garden centers and picked up a bunch of stuff, including a golden raspberry bush and Vietnamese coriander, which is one of my favorite drink-worthy herbs, but we couldn’t find it last year.

Here’s some of my gardening work for today:

That is my mom’s bed of eight basil plants in seven varieties. We bought SEVEN varieties of basil. Who does that?! So now, we have an entire bed of basil. Excellent?

That one is carduni, which is another thing I love (fried!), but that is pretty hard to find. We couldn’t get it last year. Then it’s collards, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t have another vegetable that began with the letter “C” to go in that bed, but it’s cool because I do love brussels sprouts.

Yesterday, Jess came up, and we got invited to a barbecue at the neighbors’ at the last minute. It was fun, but I got massive horrible asthma pretty much the whole time I was there, and ended up sitting on their sofa in their living room the whole time. I felt really badly about it, but there wasn’t much I could do.

Then, this morning, we got up and went to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It’s sort of crazy, because the last two I went to opening night in costume, and this one, I was only vaguely aware that it had opened. It says something about how my life has changed, and something about how disappointing the last two movies were. This one was cute. It wasn’t as good as the first one, but it was much easier to follow and not as overwrought as the second and third ones. It didn’t actually ever feel like it was a long movie, which is good when something is over two hours.

Then was gardening and beekeeping, hooray! I wore the bee hat today and everything, which I usually don’t do.

Jess was in Chile for a while, and she brought me back a bottle of really good pisco.

Jess tends to like sweeter, fruitier drinks than my mom or I do, and we have a ton of berries in the fridge right now, so I made this for her and then added the pickling liquid for me and my mom.

Ingredients
2.5 oz pisco
1 large strawberry or 2 small
10 blueberries
1 tsp basil jelly
Juice of 1/4 lime
1 tsp pickling liquid from a jar of pickled hot peppers
1 slice lime

Instructions
Cut strawberry into chunks
Add strawberry, blueberries, and pisco to shaker with ice and muddle until fruit is well crushed.
Add jelly, lime juice, and pickling liquid and shake
Pour into chilled cocktail glass and add lime slice

We also dumped the leftover fruit from this into our wine tonight :-P Yum.

Last but not least, I leave you with pictures of the chicks, who are fluffier and cuter than they were last time two days ago!

And our scallop appetizer (with bacon, brown butter, and scallions)

And the second batch of salt & pepper ice cream (made with more brown sugar and less white sugar), served with a 12-year balsamic

Are there ice cream flavors anyone would like to suggest I try? As long as it is a flavor that appeals to me and for which there are ingredients available, I will consider pretty much anything.

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