Who's the boss?

Heard in our house last night:
5-year-old son: "Mom, can I have a cookie after dinner?"
Me: "That's up to Dad, he's putting you to bed while I'm at the PTO meeting."
Son: "What?! I thought you were in charge of everything around here, and Dad just helps you out with stuff. You know, like you are the principal and Dad is the assistant principal."
Me: (huge grin)

Pimm's Cup: an aperitif and appetizer in one

If you haven't been across the pond, you may have never heard of a Pimm's cup. It's based on a British liquor known as Pimm's No. 1., a slightly herbal, tea-colored concoction. It's probably best known as the beverage of choice at Wimbledon. I first had it at the horse races in New Zealand among British expat friends.

I bought a bottle a Pimm's months ago, but never got around to making anything with it until this weekend. After a day of sweaty, super-glamourous garden work like installing weed mat and gutters in 95+ degree heat, we were in need of some serious refreshment as I worked on dinner. I looked at the late summer garden's bounty of cucumbers, mint and strawberries and remembered I had some lemons in the fridge too. All the ingredients for a Pimm's cup! Now there are several variations on the recipe that can be tweaked to your liking. But what I like about it is you can put as many "add-ons" as you wish and it only makes the drink better.

The basic mix is:

•  2-3 parts Pimm's No. 1, depending on how strong you want it
• 1 part lemonade or lemon-lime soda
• 1 part seltzer

Mix that up in a pitcher. Fill your glasses with ice. Add cucumber slices or spears, lemon slices, strawberry slices and a sprig of mint. I think basil would also work too. Pour the pre-mixed drink into the glass and add a cucumber garnish and another splash of soda. Cheers!

Be sure to munch on the cucumber and fruit as you drink. Somehow it makes the drink seem infinitely healthier and more refreshing.

In a jam, almost.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade right? Well since moving into our house nearly years ago, a set of overgrown grape vines has been the bane of our backyard.  They cover the entire side of our garage and encroach on our postage stamp sized city backyard, sending shoots out every which way.  

This year I decided to take action using some skills I picked up at the vineyard I worked at a few years ago in New Zealand. I hacked away at the vine, cutting it down to its canes in spring and kept pruning it back every time it strayed into backyard territory. As my old boss, the vitaculturalist would say, when  you take the excess shoots away, you force the vine to put more effort into the fruit rather than the leaves. He was right. 

This year for the first time we got a bumper crop of juicy, sweet grapes. I'm guessing they are of the Concord variety, so not exactly winemaking material. With a million little seeds they were too fiddly for the kids to eat, so there was only one thing I could do. Make jam.

I didn't want to buy any special canning equipment for such a small amount of grapes, so I searched for a super-simple recipe that wouldn't require me to skin or seed the grape or invest in new equipment or a box of pectin.

I found what I was looking for at Good Food Life, a recipe that only had three ingredients: grapes, sugar and an apple. Even I could handle that. Other recipes called for two to three times as much sugar, but I already knew the grapes were sweet, and I wanted to feel good about my kids eating this. 

After some help sorting the grape harvest from my son, 

I destemmed them and boiled them down with the cut up apple. 

Next, I pressed the juice and solids through a fine mesh strainer to get rid of the seeds while getting as much of the pulp as possible. After all, it's contact with the seeds and skins that gives red wine so many healthy antioxidants, so I wanted as much of that crimson pulp and juice as possible. My goal was to have something more jam than jelly-like in the end. After adding the sugar and simmering the mixture for another half hour, viola! 

We had jam, or at least something jam-like that will keep in the refrigerator for several weeks. It's a little thinner than store-bought, probably due to the lower sugar content. But on a slice of homemade bread or tucked into a PB&J, it's divine. It even showed up as a dip for whole-grain French toast sticks over the weekend. Not bad for a rookie effort. I am already planning my attack on the vines next spring in hopes of a bigger batch. We've already gone through one of the three jars of grape "jam" we got from our first batch. I don't think canning will be necessary at the rate we're eating it!

Here we go

Woulda, shoulda, coulda... Yes, you may have heard me say that before. I've been writing this blog in my mind for years now. But now I'm actually doing it.

If my 5-year-old son is brave enough to get on a bus and go to kindergarten where everyone speaks a different language, I should be brave enough to put it all out there.

I've done personal blogs before, mostly a record for friends and family. But this is more than that. For years I was anti-blog, twitter, Facebook, you name it. I'm just not narcissistic enough to think everyone wants or needs to know what I'm doing 24/7. Anyone can open a blogger account and call themselves a "blogger."

Some of us went to college to learn things like media law, creative writing and investigative reporting. Then we cut our teeth in low-paying or even free internships in newsrooms around the world to learn the craft of reporting and writing.

I guess you could call me old school in that respect. I've been a professional journalist for nearly 20 years for WebMD.com, ABC News, Time magazine and others. I've called Chicago, Moscow, New York and New Zealand home.

Now I'm in Minneapolis, the most surprising little midwestern city, with two boys big enough to not need diapers anymore but little enough to still need Mom. So why should all the mommy bloggers have all the fun?

What if there were a blog by a real journalist who just happens to be a mom that's obsessed with food, family, health, wine, DIY and more? Well, you're about to find out.