Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Picnic Cake

With one of our biggest summer holidays coming up, I thought I'd post a recipe for a great picnic cake. It's one of my mom's recipes I've been making since I was a kid. With the topping baked into the cake, once cooled and covered it holds up well even tipped on its side in my picnic suitcase. It's been a hit at every potluck I've taken it to and often shows up at family camping trips, brought by one sister or another.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Picnic Cake (9" x 13" flat cake)
1 ¾ cup boiling water
1 cup uncooked oatmeal (I use rolled oats)
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup sugar
 ½ cup butter or other shortning
2 eggs
1 ¾ cup flour (I use whole wheat)
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
12 oz package chocolate chips
¾ cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven 350º. Grease and lightly flour a 9" x 13" cake pan. Put oats in mixing bowl and add the boiling water. Let stand 10 minutes. Add butter, brown and white sugars and stir until the butter melts. Add eggs and mix well. Stir together the flour, baking soda, salt and cocoa and add to the oats mixture, mix well. Stir in half the chocolate chips. Pour batter into prepared pan. Sprinkle walnuts and remaining chocolate chips over the top. Bake 40 minutes, and test with toothpick (until the toothpick comes out clean).

I won my picnic suitcase in a raffle years ago. It wasn't really my style - I was more the lunch cooler and canvas bag type So, at first I planned on perhaps re-gifting it, then thought maybe I could use it as decorative storage for linens or such. But then one day, I was getting ready for a Sierra Club potluck. Now, with a tree-hugging group like that, one simply does not take paper plates and disposable flatware. I was getting ready to dig out my camping gear when it hit me. I already had the perfect picnic/potluck set-up, up there on top of the coat armoire. My vintage cake pan fits perfectly, with even room for a bottle of wine. I'm still tweaking the contents. I've added dessert plates, and use my cloth napkins to wrap the wine glasses and serving utensils. It's now a very useful part of both my living room decor and many summer outings.

The cake pan I inherited from my mother-in-law. I figure she got it at a yard sale. Scratched onto the top it says, "Happy Birthday to Winnie from Laura, March 7, 1959" and neither of those are family names. It's obviously seen its share of past potlucks or church dinners too. Winnie Vincent scratched her name onto both sides of the pan itself. The slide-on metal top holds up so much better than today's plastic pan covers. The pan is deeper than most cake pans too, making it my go-to pan for batches of wintertme lasagna. So Ms Vincent, if you're still out there - thank you! I love it!

State of the Cellar

It's so nice to see Spring moving in, even with its starts and stops. It means fresh change for our seasonal eating choices.

The cellar has served us well through the winter, but most of those shelves are now bare. The last few carrots have been brought up to the refrigerator vegetable crisper, as have the last couple heads of cabbage. The kraut crock is down to its last inch, and as the weather continues to warm up, will be repacked into a smaller container and also brought up to the refrigerator.

The onions are gone - I ended up buying a small bag a week ago. I was very disappointed with the keeping ability of last summer's Big Daddy onions. They had grown into beautiful onions by Fall - nice size, small necks, brown skins, and then well-cured. Or so I thought. Many of them were used in the fall's salsas and tomato sauce canning batches. But as I went to use them through the winter, about half had to be tossed and others, even those that looked perfect on the shelf, were rotting from the inside out. I've ordered Copra plants for this year, and am starting seeds of Utah Sweet Spanish for an open-pollinated trial variety.

The only things left in the cellar (besides beer, hard cider, and two potted fig trees) are apples and potatoes. Both Russet and Yukon Gold potatoes have held well for me again. I have plenty left for this year's seed potatoes, and will be getting those up and going soon. The apples have softened and sweetened a bit, but there are still plenty of them in good condition too. So many, in fact, that as the cellar warms, I may be canning a batch of applesauce from some of them, and pressing out another gallon of juice to ferment into hard cider to refill my vinegar jar. Plus, enough to bring up a weekly basketful for snacking and my breakfast oatmeal until probably June. And then, of course, to make Aries' his traditional birthday apple pie earlier this week, too.

Earth Hour 2010

It's chilly but the sun is shining, so I want to get outside. But I thought I'd post a quick something now: one - because even though I've been plugging away at all the little Springtime chores, I've been very lax about getting things written here; two - because I'm going to try getting this household to go dark for an hour this evening.

It's Earth Hour time again this evening. Beginning at 8:30 p.m. your time, can your household go dark for an hour? Turn everything off - the computers, televisions, even the lights? As usual, this event pretty much passes northern Nevada by - just a tiny little paragraph in today's newspaper, buried on page 8. But I hear the Las Vegas Strip will again go dark for the hour, so maybe this state will get pulled into the 21st century one of these days.

I really shouldn't be one to talk, though. Once again, I'm a bit conflicted about the concept. I've managed to get Aries to turn off the lights and the glowing screens in the past, only by enticing him out to the hot tub, the biggest energy-sucker in our house. And justifying it because our nighttime temperatures are still below freezing. Shutting that thing down for a night is a difficult decision. Do I chance destroying the it, plus incurring my husband's lack of cooperation, or do I just reconcile the thoughts of my own hypocrisy in the spirit of compromise? Our house will probably be dark this evening, but the meter still running, if somewhat slower than usual (and I do want to point out that it will be during the regular filtering cycle time - it will run then whether we're in it or not). At least, it does mean some quality time with my sweetheart, and his full attention for an hour, under the stars. And that's not all bad.

Making Milk Kefir

My latest kitchen experiment is making milk kefir. Kind of like a liquid yogurt, it's easy to make in a jar on the kitchen counter - no messing with maintaining a constant warmth like with yogurt.

All you need to get started are some kefir grains. I got mine by posting a request on my local Freecycle network, but they're also available via the Internet. Tomorrow, Oz-time, is my day to post on the SGF Co-op blog, so I've written about the kefir-making process. You can read about it here.

Something Gardeners Should Read

When I was about eight years old, and visiting my Granny on her farm in Texas, I stepped on a rusty nail while exploring around back of some old sheds. I limped back up to the house, the inside of my shoe squishy with blood. Mom washed my foot with soap and hot water, checking to make sure no debris was left inside the deep puncture wound. Then Granny sat me down in the kitchen, my foot soaking in a pan filled with hot water and a heaping handful of Epsom Salts, "to draw out the toxin," she said.

"Lockjaw!" I heard from every adult relative that came in and saw me sitting there. I'd seen The Wizard of Oz. I imagined the rust from the nail creeping up through my body, freezing me up just like the Tin Woodman, until I couldn't even utter the word, "oilcan" . . .
Anyone planning on working in the garden should read "The Rest of the Story" (RIP Paul Harvey) in my post over at the Simple Green Frugal Co-op blog, here.

Since I was writing about Texas, I dug out this old photo of my Uncle Emmett and me. One time, early in the morning at Granny's, I heard a gunshot. I ran outside, barefooted and in my pajamas, to find my Uncle holding an armadillo he'd shot when he and his old hound dog caught it digging under the chicken coop.

Not For Amateurs

Aries grew up in a home heated with wood, up at Lake Tahoe. When he was eight, he was considered old enough to go out with his dad and grandfather cutting wood. When he was twelve, he was big enough to hold a chainsaw to cut downed trees into sections, his grandfather helping pick the saw up each time afterwards. By sixteen, they let him start felling trees. He knows what he's doing, and he likes it when he gets the chance to play with a chainsaw.

Last month, he had the chance to help out a couple friends of mine. We live just above the valley floor. Our native vegetation is desert chaparral - sagebrush and other shrubby plants. But the hills rise steeply just west of us, and the change in altitude is just enough that tall conifers thrive. My friends live just a couple of miles away, up a canyon, but it's enough to be a completely different environment.

One friend had some pines infected with some kind of root fungus. In order to save the surrounding trees, the infected ones were marked to be cut down. She doesn't burn wood, but her next door neighbor, another friend, has a wood stove and she needs the wood. So we headed up to do a bit of woodcutting (well, ok, Aries does the cutting - I'm there in case of emergency and as laborer after the tree is down).

He cut two then, and left one dead, broken, leaning one as too unsafe to cut - that one will have to be chained up and pulled with a tractor enough to drop. When we went back later to cut the last two, I remembered to bring my camera. For the first tree that day, the only place to drop it was right down the driveway towards the house. In the top photo (click on any photo to see better), I've got my back to the house, standing right about where the top of the tree should land. Next photo, you can see the tree bounced a bit left when it hit, but overall it pretty much went where it should. Of course, we then had to get it out of her driveway - Aries cutting, I dragging limbs away to slash piles, rolling cut sections over to another pile.

Then on to the last tree - probably the tallest one Aries had ever cut (Aries is 6'4" for scale). For this photo, I'm standing between the house and garage, a low wall in front of me - the tree would more than reach to where I'm standing. Aries wants the tree to fall to the left, and is just starting the throat cut on that side. There's no wind, the tree is growing straight on level ground, it's symmetrically shaped - it should be no problem, and then we're done for the day. Wrong!

The throat cut lined up perfectly, Aries moves over to the other side. I usually watch for the top of the tree start to sway. But this time I'm zoomed in, watching him through the camera lens, thinking I'll snap an action photo when it starts to fall. Suddenly, he raises his right arm out straight, pointing the opposite direction, signalling to me this tree is breaking backwards. I lower the camera, watching him back away with the saw, still pointing, and start backing up. Open-mouthed, I watch as the tree spins more than 180º on its stump, and then falls away to the right. Amazingly, it landed completely in the clear - just not at all where it was supposed to.

Aires said he felt the saw suddenly go dull in the last couple seconds of cutting. Upon examination, he found wire inside the tree on the side where it spun instead of breaking. It turns out the previous owner, decades ago, had run an electric fence by just nailing the insulators to the trees. This tree, growing quickly next to the leach field, had engulfed the wire so he'd just cut the wire, leaving nail, insulator, and wire hidden inside. We were so lucky the tree didn't fall towards the house, didn't hang up in any of the surrounding trees, and Aries wasn't hurt.

Grassroots Volunteering

I belong to Muscle Powered, a small, grassroots, pedestrian and bicycle advocacy group. We had our annual planning meeting/potluck brunch this morning. Reviewing the past year's activities, our small group of volunteers accomplished quite a lot. This year's planned activities include Bike to Work events in May, leading weekly community walks (and maybe bike rides), a Kids' Bicycle Rodeo, a booth at an Earth Day fair, and our on-going efforts towards improving connectivity of access here in town, and more recreational trails in the surrounding open space.

The President of the Carson Valley Trails Association, to the south, brought information on their efforts too. They'll be having their annual meeting next week, and I'm thinking I'll join their group too. They work on a lot bigger scale than we do, so I'm looking forward to learning more about dealing with federal, interstate, and private property trail easements (the California state line angles across Lake Tahoe, and continues southeast, just south of here), and volunteering on their trail-building projects.

Very interesting too, at our meeting today, was the house of our hostess. She has taken a small house in the older part of town, and remodeled it to make it as green and sustainable as possible. This was her chance to show us her work of the past year, giving us a tour before the meeting. Her initial efforts included gutting and reconfiguring the entire place - moving walls (she said one closet door is the only door inside that was still in the same place), moving and replacing all exterior windows and doors, and replacing all flooring with sustainably harvested wood. The gorgeous counters in kitchen and baths are made of recycled glass, and all appliances are energy-efficient. A photo-voltaic array on the roof provides electricity, and the solar water heater, via a heat exchanger and pump system, provides both domestic hot water and heats the house through baseboard radiant heaters (she does have a gas hook-up as a backup for cloudy days, but with our 300+ sunny days annually she hasn't had to use it much). It's a beautiful home, with some technology so new and different for around here, the power and insurance companies haven't quite figured out how to deal with her yet.

Happy New Year!

I'm visiting my sister, in California's San Francisco Bay Area, for a couple of days. I drove out of a blue sky day where our snow is quickly melting, over an icy pass through the snowy Sierras, down through the foothills where some trees are still dropping their fall leaves, and then down into a thick tule (pronounced two-lee, named after the reeds that grow along the river banks) fog where the citrus trees are heavy with fruit. In less than four hours drive, I'm in a completely different world.

So we're eating the last of the Christmas fudge, sharing a bottle of champagne, watching movies, fitting in a couple of trips to the gym (those New Year resolutions, you know), teaching my nephews to play poker (we're only playing for chips - Auntie Sadge had quite a pile raked in last night). I'll be back to write more in a couple of days. If you really need a fix of more Sadgey wisdom before then, I researched and wrote a post about recycling your old electronics over on the Simple Green Frugal Co-op blog. Especially if Santa left a new electronic gadget under your tree, it's something you should read. Check it out - and do the right thing for Mother Earth and our future generations!