I am having oodles of fun with the new kitchen. Mainly lots of baking, but some other stuff too. Richard had a writers’ group on Friday and I made lentil soup for dinner, and then decided to make a batch of pumpkin chocolate chip brownies for the group, which apparently made such a hit they were still talking about them at the writers’ group brunch the next day (Seriously, these are some amazing brownies and it is pretty much impossible to just eat one. In fact, it is often extremely difficult to not just sit right down with a fork and eat the entire pan, which is why I usually only make them when there are other people on whom to foist them. I’ve talked about these brownies in the past, but just in case you don’t feel like poking around in my archives, I’ll be nice and relink to the recipe: http://www.findyourcraving.com/craving/pumpkin-brownies).

Today we hit the local farmer’s market (there’s a huge one that meets in a big parking lot downtown, under the freeway, on Sundays). The main reason for going to the farmer’s market was to get the ingredients for corn relish, which I have been wanting to make since I checked out Laurie Colwin’s “More Home Cooking” from the library earlier this year. You stir a bunch of fresh corn, slice right off the cob, into a big pan with some diced red and green bell peppers, dry mustard, cidar vinegar, a little dash of cayenne pepper, and some brown sugar and salt. Everything is simmered together and then at the very last minute you stir in a whole mess of chopped onions, and then pour it into sterilized pint jars, which are then given a boiling water bath before the process is finally complete. I’ve never had corn relish, at least not as far as I can remember, but the recipe sounded rather intriguing, and we’re at the tail end of the season for all the ingredients, so I figured what the heck.

This stuff is really, really good. It’s a little strong by itself but that just means it’s perfect for things that don’t have much flavor on their own (like chicken or fish, for example). The recipe made a little over six pints, so I made turkey burgers for dinner and topped them with some of what was leftover. And now there’s six more jars of home-canned goodness to add my growing collection in the pantry.

Since I was in the kitchen anyway, for the corn relish, I decided to whip up another batch of pizza dough to restock the freezer. The recipe we use makes enough for 2 regular pizzas, or 12 little individual pizzas, so I let it go through its first rise, and then sectioned the dough into 12 balls, wrapped them individually in waxed paper, and stashed them all in a bag in the freezer. If we take the dough out in the morning and leave it in the fridge, it’s ready by the time we get home, and then it’s just a matter of smashing it into some sort of round, flat shape, tossing on some toppings, and sliding it into the oven for a few minutes. During the week, we are all about the quick, easy dinner options.

I made another batch of pumpkin brownies this evening, mainly because there was half the can of pumpkin left to use up and also because we wanted something sweet after the kick of that corn relish. And then I stirred up a bowl of bread dough (another recipe from Laurie Colwin’s “More Home Cooking”) which will rise overnight, get punched down tomorrow morning, and then baked when I get home from work.

It sounds like I have spent all day in the kitchen, but that isn’t the case at all. Most of this weekend I have been camped out in the living room, surrounded by cats, working on my current big knitting project. I bought a sweater kit last February at Stitches West, and my friend and I (she bought the same kit, but in a different colorway) agreed we would finish the sweaters in time to wear them to next year’s Stitches West. Knitting a stranded colorwork sweater is not something one should put off til the last minute, so I finally cast on for it two weeks ago and have been industriously knitting away at it ever since. So far I’m making really good progress – both sleeves are done and this weekend I plowed through the first few inches of the body.

There has also been a (very little) bit of progress on the home improvement front. The very last project we’d like to accomplish this year is the upstairs guest room. It’s currently painted an interesting shade of turqouise, and while the berber carpet seems like it’s good quality, the cats use it as their personal scratching zone. The style of the room just doesn’t match the feel of the rest of the upstairs. Plus, since part of the kitchen remodel included physically moving the door several feet further down the wall, it’s been looking pretty ugly and unfinished these days. So the plan is to rip out the carpet, and then either refinish the floor underneath (depending on the condition of the original wood), or replace the carpet with the same dark bamboo we used for the kitchen.  I’ve been trying to decide between a chair rail, or wainscotting for the walls, and I think we’ve decided on wainscotting, but more importantly, we have also finally picked a color for the walls themselves, since the one thing we have been sure about since we moved into this house was that some day, that turqouise had to go.

To that end, yesterday Richard and I cleared away a whole pile of stuff that’s been accumulating in that room so I could get started on the whole de-turqouisification project. While he was off at his writers’ group brunch I primed a big chunk of one of the walls, and then I painted a huge splotch of our chosen color (a green named ‘Happy Camper’) in the middle. We’ve been wandering into the room ever since, looking at the big green splotch at various times of day and in various levels of light. It’s a bit more olive than I was thinking it would be from the color chip, but I think we’re both okay with that. Plus the wainscotting on the bottom half of the wall will be all white, so it’s not like it’s going to be hideously overpowering, so…Happy Camper green it is. Now all we have to do is figure out where to put everything that’s currently *in* that room, so that I can get the rest of the walls primed and painted, and so that the workcrew can have clear access to commence with the carpet-removal floor refinishing / replacing.