Richard’s best friend had a birthday celebration dinner tonight, down in the bay area, and we’d both been planning on attending. But after the emotional roller coaster we went through this week with Tangerine, I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle being social with a bunch of people I didn’t know. I’m not the most comfortable in large group settings to start with (unless I know quite a few of them, because despite my best efforts, I will always be a social awkward introvert at heart), but I didn’t think I could do several hours of cheerful right now.

So Richard drove down to celebrate with his friend and I stayed behind in the house alone, and made bread. Somehow it seemed like the right thing to do, making bread. The dough requires a lot of focus when I’m mixing it, making sure to weigh out all my ingredients with a digital scale, setting timers so I get the kneading done perfectly, cutting the dough into perfectly equal segments to make rolls.  While they were rising, and later, while they were baking, I sat in the living room and I tried to do a little knitting. The rolls came out of the oven round and golden brown and beautiful and I ate two with some cheese for dinner, and watched mindless programs on the television and aimlessly surfed the web.

Rosie has several stuffed critters that are orange and for some reason she decided to pile them all together and I keep catching glimpses of them out of the corner of my eye as I walk from room to room, and have to stop myself from bending down to give a pet to the little orange cat that isn’t actually there. The house feels so big and empty and lost.  I think when we had to put Sebastian to sleep I could hold off a little on the grief because there were still the others to fill the house with noise and activity, but now, two of the biggest personalities in the house are gone, and it is all very, very wrong.

It has been a rather nasty roller coaster of emotion the past two days. A 6am phone call on Wednesday morning to say that Tangerine had likely thrown a clot, and was pale and having difficulty breathing, so she was moved into an oxygen tent. Another phone call to ask for a resuscitation order (just in case). Tests and consults. And then a diagnosis. She has endocarditis, which is a bacterial infection in the heart valve. It’s pretty rare in cats, according to both Dr. Google and the cardiologist. I don’t know whether to laugh about that or what. The infection causes the valve to swell, which makes it leaky, which causes the heart murmur. The bacteria itself can break away from inside the valve and float off to other places, forming the equivalent of clots, which explains the seizures – likely she had some bacteria clustering in her brain. The treatment is antibiotics, with some extra stuff thrown in just to keep her from seizing again, but it’s not like treating other types of infections. It seems so simple on the surface, except that dead bacteria clumping somewhere in the bloodstream are just as deadly as live bacteria clumping. They might not be able to colonize there, sure, but they can still cause clots. And the damage the bacteria did to the heart valve isn’t fixable. So yes, there’s treatment in the form of pills and shots, but they said that it would be months before we would know if she was out of the woods, long after the pills and shots ceased. We drove out last night to visit her, and last night we allowed ourselves the luxury of thinking that maybe, just maybe, things would turn out okay.

Perhaps if she was a younger cat, stronger, healthier, maybe she would have had a chance. But Tangerine was 14, and she’s never been in the absolute best of health, what with her chronic upper respiratory issues, and her periodic bouts of IBS, and so on. And so despite the medicines and the oxygen treatments and the fact that yesterday it seemed like maybe there was a light at the end of the tunnel after all, by last night everything had turned on its head. Richard asked the vet, when he called, the same question I had asked, three weeks ago as we stood in the little exam room holding Sebastian in my arms and trying so hard to hold back the tears. If this was your cat, what would you do? And the vet said that we had tried everything we could, and that if it was his kitty, he would make the choice to put her to sleep.

So tonight, after work, Richard and I drove out to the emergency clinic. They brought her to us in a tiny little exam room and let us hold her and pet her and tell her goodbye. And then Richard held her on his lap as the vet administered the drugs, and in seconds she was gone.

We are both feeling extremely drained, although this time Richard is taking it harder, because Tangerine was really more his cat than she ever was mine. I’m the one who fostered her and cared for her, and she didn’t mind me, but it wasn’t until she met Richard that she decided she was a lap cat (although mostly only his lap) and if she had a choice, he was always the person she chose.

The house feels painfully empty now. It’s hard to look in the living room and not see Tangerine planted on *her* pillow right in the middle of the couch. It’s hard to sit in the computer room and not have her wandering around our feet, giving her almost-silent squawk, or jumping up on Richard and then settling down on his chest, purring her squeaky, raspy little purr. And it will be especially hard tomorrow morning, to wake up and know that I will never be met at the foot of the stairs by an impatient little orange kitty, waiting for us to follow her up so that one of us will immediately sit down and provide her the attention she demands, ever, ever again.

Tangerine: 1995 – 2009
Goodbye little squeaky purred nose licker. How much we are going to miss you!

Today was the sort of whirlwind day that I do not like, and would prefer to not have to repeat very often, if ever. We were sitting at the table eating breakfast and I heard Tangerine coming toward us, so I turned my head, just in time to see her start to slowly sink to the floor, legs scrabbling. I flashed back to the way Rebecca died, jumping up on my bed and then just slowly keeling over onto my head, and Richard and I leapt from our chairs toward her. Her legs twitched and she peed a little, and it felt like the seizure lasted forever, when I’m sure it was only a minute or so. And after that, her balance was wobbly and she couldn’t walk in a straight line.

Richard called the emergency vet, because we didn’t know what else to do, and made an appointment for later that morning, and then he arranged to work from home so he could take her in. They kept her for several hours, to take blood and do x-rays and generally keep her under observation.

He picked her up mid-afternoon and things seemed fine. We shut her into one room so we could keep an eye on her. She was annoyed about being confined and generally inclined to sulk about the situation and wanted nothing to do with either of us. So I headed off to the first session of the three-week class I’m taking on landscape design (an aside here for the humor in this, considering that I am extremely design challenged for pretty much anything domestic – interior or exterior – but I’m hoping that even someone as hopeless as me can be taught). Naturally I put my phone on vibrate as soon as I sat down in the classroom, so I didn’t hear the series of text messages and voicemails coming in, and didn’t get them until the break. She had another seizure, and this time they had him take her to the emergency clinic that’s further away.

There are tests they need to run to figure out exactly what’s causing the seizures. The most likely candidate – and probably the one we should most hope for – is heart disease. She’s got a heart murmur – something that wasn’t there the last time she was in for a check-up – and those two symptoms (the murmur and the seizures) appear to be classic symptoms, at least according to the hasty research we’ve both been doing online since this started.

We’re both feeling pretty drained right now. It’s one thing to know that this is the sort of thing you have to be ready for when you have pets; it’s another to be smacked upside the head with it twice in less than a month. My eyes are puffy from crying – or alternatively trying not to cry all day. She’s 14, which I know is old for a cat, but with everything else she’s been through in her life, somehow this is the last thing we expected.

This weekend, Saturday was non-stop busy. We got up, gave the house a thorough cleaning, and then spent several hours huddled around the dining room table with half a dozen friends playing a good old fashioned AD&D dungeon crawl. The game had to stop at exactly 5pm and no later, because the minute the last guest was out the door, Richard and I had to dash downstairs, change, and then head off to Dixon for a friend’s wedding. It was a lovely, low-key wedding – the church was packed to the rafters with people, and they couldn’t have asked for lovelier weather for an evening garden reception in the Sacramento Valley in August.

Today, however, there was nothing whatsoever on the calendar. And I must admit that I have been eagerly looking forward to this, if only because an entire free day meant that I would be able to spend the majority of it in the kitchen (Have I mentioned lately how very much I love my kitchen?). This is because lately I am finding that if I have some free time approaching on my calendar, I start immediately start pondering what I am going to cook, or bake, or can. Half a Saturday available? Plenty of time to whip up a batch of our (current) favorite sandwich bread (yes I know, we’re not kids, but hey, it’s really good bread!). Nothing planned on a weeknight, and the CSA box came with yet another pile of zucchini? How about a rustic lasagna tart (I’ve made it twice now, once with yellow squash and once with zucchini, and it is awesome, although I have to admit I am not a fan of ricotta, so I use cottage cheese instead). Faced with a pile of strangely shaped little little summer squash? Whip out the cheese grater and turn them into these. Manage to get my act together the night before? How about getting these incredible pancakes started, so the dough’s ready for the next morning.

This is not to say, mind you, that we do not still keep our favorite local pizzeria on speed dial, or that some days we end up eating bagels and cream cheese for dinner because neither of us is feeling inspired by a single thing in the kitchen cupboards. But I am having more and more fun in the kitchen, the more time I spend in it, and every recipe I try gives me just a touch more confidence in what I’m doing.

That being said, this weekend was all about pickles. I’m not a pickle fan, myself, but Richard is, and if I’m going to be canning, at some point, pickles have to come into play. We wandered around the farmers market and found one booth with piles and piles of perfectly sized thin-skinned, seedless cucumbers – just the thing for pickles. Loaded down with cucumbers, grapes, white peaches, wild blackberries, and a huge bag of English peas, we headed back home and while Richard ran off to the store to pick up various pickling spices, I washed and quartered all the cucumbers and set them to soak in boiling water and tumeric, and then when he returned with dill seed and dill weed, I crammed five pounds of cucumber spears into six pint jars and processed them in a hot water bath, and every single one of them sealed (huzzah!) Oh, and by the way, in case you were wondering, tumeric will stain (your fingers, the towels, and oh yeah, the granite countertop. oops).

I also put together a half batch of these Sweet Pickled Cherry Tomatoes because we are still swimming in cherry tomatoes. I have to admit I wasn’t impressed – in fact, I thought they were kind of disgusting. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but somehow tomato and candied ginger flavors together just do not translate into “edible” in my mouth. But hey, they used up two whole pounds of the little suckers (I am doing my best to ignore the fact that there’s about twice that many still lurking in the fridge, and who knows how many more still on the vine – sob), and Richard, at least, thinks they were really tasty, so the effort wasn’t totally wasted. Hmm…think I can convince him that since the pickles and the disgusting cherry tomato things are all his, that the peach jam I made a few weeks ago should therefore be all mine? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Richard definitely lived up to his Best Husband Ever status this afternoon, since he ended up having to run to the store three times throughout the entire pickle-making session. The first trip was planned – we knew we needed dill, so the plan was for me to start work on the cucumbers while he went to pick that up. The second trip was to get the yogurt I needed to start the bread (technically this one is not my fault because I tried calling him, twice, but he’d forgotten to turn his phone on). The third trip, however, was all on me. Somehow I got it into my head that I needed way, way, WAY more dill than I actually did. By the time I figured out that actually, the amount he bought originally was just fine, and called him, he was in the checkout line, paying, massive quantities of dill in hand. Ah well. Look at it this way. Should the world’s economy collapse tomorrow and pickling spices become valuable tender, we will be RICH.

The July Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.

I am fairly ambivalent about marshmallows – they’re a critical element in making s’mores and hot chocolate, of course, but beyond that, I really have no use for them. Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano cookies, however, are one of my very favorite store-bought cookies, so it was a no-brainer which type of cookies I’d be making this round.

The original recipe calls for a whole lot of orange extract, and the addition of lemon zest. I realize there are many people out there who like the combination of citrus and chocolate, but I am not one of them. And while I adore the mint milanos, I knew that Richard wasn’t as big a fan. So my compromise (which mainly consisted of opening the cupboard where I keep my small collection of flavor extracts and seeing what was left): almond it was!

This was a bit of a challenge for me to make, mainly because, well, let’s face it. My piping skills leave a lot to be desired. The cookie dough is not at all like regular cookie dough – thick enough to just spoon up and plop on a pan. This required piping. I don’t own a pastry bag (add that to the steadily growing list of Things I Need) and the only icing tip I could scrounge up in the dusty recesses of the cupboards was one of those little plastic wedge-shaped ones that comes in the set when you buy little tubes of cake icing. But I am nothing if not resourceful, so I snipped a hole in a ziploc bag, spooned the dough inside, and except for one brief mishap that involved the bag bursting, dough spilling everywhere, and no small amount of swearing under my breath until I’d assembled a new bag and cleaned up the mess, it worked out just fine.

Pepperidge Farm milanos are beautiful oval cookies. They have a slight, soft crunch to the outside and aren’t very cakey. My cookies had a tendency to look more like Attack Of the Blob and even though they were quite thin and browned perfectly on the edges, they had less of a soft crunch and more of a cake-like texture. When they were all baked, I called Richard in to help and he assembled ‘matching’ pairs as best he could, sort of like some grand cookie puzzle.

The good thing is that if you carefully select out the most attractive cookies and then stack them neatly on a plate and angle your camera just right, it looks as if your result was far more impressive than it actually turned out (heh).

Verdict – eh. Richard really likes them. I think I might try it again some time, and leave out all the vanilla extract completely – there was barely any almond flavor and the vanilla was really a bit overwhelming. I could also see adding a touch of cocoa powder to the cookie dough to make chocolate cookies, and then adding a little bit of mint to the ganache in the middle. Or maybe instead, if I’m in the mood for Milano cookies, I’ll just leave it to the experts and buy them from the store.

I am sure it comes as no surprise that I have been doing a bit of canning lately (did the fact that I have been attending preserving demos give it away?). There were a few things I knew I would need to make no matter what – another batch of Spiced Plum Jam, since the three batches I made last year have either been eaten, or gifted to friends and family, and a few batches of jalepeno pepper jelly, because I like to keep a few jars of that on hand for any time I need to whip up a snack for a large crowd (pour one jar jalepeno pepper jelly over a block of cream cheese; set down a bowl of crackers, and then stand back and watch the crowds descend and devour every last bite). But we have lately been inundated with alarming quantities of cherry tomatoes from our garden, and the regular tomatoes are finally starting to look as if they might give us a fairly decent crop this year. And ever since the demo in June, I have been wanting to put up peaches.

I’ve done two stints of putting up peaches so far; the last and largest was this weekend. This morning at the farmers market I picked up a giant box of huge yellow peaches for only $15. We zipped off to Dixon for lunch with my parents and my older sister and her family, but the instant we got home, I immediately headed for the kitchen and proceeded to spend the rest of the day processing peaches.

I tried some peach jam first, since jam is nice and easy – two batches of this jam. The first batch I followed the original recipe and added the cinnamon, but for the second batch I decided to leave that out, since the combination of just peach and vanilla was delicious enough on its own.

Next on the list was some peach nectar, which is really nothing more than a whole mess of peeled, sliced peaches tossed into a pan with a little water and cooked until soft and mashable. I used my immersion blender to puree them, then I ran them through my food mill to remove any lingering chunks. I didn’t add any sweetener to my nectar because I’d rather do that when I use it.

By the time I was done with all that, I was pretty worn out, but there was still half a box of peaches left to deal with, so I just peeled and sliced and cold-packed all the rest.

From left to right, peach nectar, sliced peaches, vanilla peach jam, cinnamon peach jam

End result of all my peach preservation so far this summer: 16 half pints of jam, 1 1/2 pints of peach nectar, and 11 pints of sliced peaches. Not too bad for two long afternoons of work.

Last year, when we decided to put in a tiny little garden, we planted four regular tomato plants and four cherry tomato plants. We ended up planting all the tomatoes far too close together in the raised bed, so we only got a handful of tomatoes (mostly Green Zebras) from the regular plants, while the cherry tomato plants kept Richard in a steady supply of lunchbox snacks through most of the summer.

This year when we put in all of our tomatoes, we spread them out more. The four cherry tomato plants went into the raised bed, while the regular tomatoes were planted along the wall of the old garage in the back. They didn’t get as much sun at first, so they didn’t have nearly the same amount of growth spurts the cherry tomatoes went through, but they’ve been picking up pace as the weather has gotten hotter and hotter, and at this point there are enough huge green tomatoes on the vine that I am thinking my hopes of making at least one batch of sauce straight from our garden might actually come to fruition this year.

The cherry tomatoes, however, have gone a bit, well, insane. The bed they are in is ten feet long by four feet wide. They spill over on both of the short sides by at least a foot in either direction, and combined, they take up at least eight feet of the length of the bed. Our cucumber vine is steadily losing ground (which is frustrating, because for a while there, we were harvesting beautiful cucumbers from our garden, and I was happily turning them into cucumber salads and taking big containers of them with me to work for lunch every day). The peppers are still limping along, although we’re watering them a lot more now, so it’s possible that they might still surprise us and produce an actual pepper one of these days. But the cherry tomatoes are doing their level best to bury us in fruit.

The first few harvests we only got a handful; few enough that we could cheerfully report ‘harvested 7 cherry tomatoes today’. But then things got quickly out of hand. The worst of it was earlier this month, shortly after that nasty hot spell we had, when in one week we harvested over eight pounds of the little suckers (yes, we have been weighing them). Oh, and did I forget to mention that we had a ‘volunteer’ tomato plant sprout from the compost heap, and naturally that turned out to be a cherry tomato as well.

There are only so many cherry tomatoes Richard can eat. We’ve tried foisting them on coworkers but unfortunately we both work in small offices. I tried making sauce with them, but peeling cherry tomatoes is pointless, so I had to filter the resulting pulp through my food mill, and it was a long and messy procedure. The sauce was…okay, but not worth all the effort. So one of the reasons why I was just so completely frustrated by the lack of tomato-related info at the Master Preservers demo this month was that I had really been hoping to get some pointers for how the heck to deal with the mountain of cherry tomatoes slowly accumulating in our fridge.

Roasting them in a shallow baking dish with a little garlic and olive oil, and then serving that over pasta, worked out pretty well. But there’s only so much of that we can eat before we’re sick of it. So this afternoon I decided to at least clear out the current overflow, and I canned them.

Four beautiful pints of cherry tomatoes. I canned them whole. They look so pretty in their jars, all the different colors of all the different types of tomatoes (we’ve got purple ones, pinkish peach ones, red pear-shaped ones, big fat round red ones, and green ones with dark yellow skin). Considering the number of still-green cherry tomatoes still lurking in the midst of the massive cherry tomato jungle in our backyard, I suspect I’ll have more than enough to add a few more jars just like these to my pantry shelves.

At some point back in May, a few of us in my knitting group got to talking about canning and preserving. There’s three of us who’ve done a little bit here and there (my massive jam-making fest last summer being a prime example) but we all agreed that even though it’s a lot of fun, there’s a lot we still have to learn about the process. So it was a nice surprise when one of the knitters noted that there is such a thing as Master Preservers in our area, who offer demonstrations on a monthly basis.

Similar to Master Gardeners, the Master Preservers are a group affiliated with the Sacramento County/University of California extension cooperative. The rest of us having the chat had never heard of these folks before, but it turns out, they’re at a the farmer’s market every weekend (naturally the very next time I went to the farmer’s market, I saw their table immediately; I am sure I have walked right by in the past and never realized what they were), and they do offer two types of demonstrations – basic demos, which are free, and more in-depth demos, which cost $3 for the materials.

The class offered for June was on stone fruits, and so a friend and I decided to check it out. It was absolutely wonderful. They demoed several different recipes using various stone fruits (plums, peaches, apricots), talked about the differences between types of fruits, gave a short but extremely informative overview of drying (including how to sulfur-dry) and in general provided a wealth of information about canning in general. Considering how incredibly useful all the information was, I came back to my knitting group all excited about the demos, and encouraged my fellow knitter/canners to come to the July demo with me as well.

This month’s demo was supposed to be on berries and tomatoes, but for some unknown reason they started it off with an overview of juicing, using fruit that isn’t even in season. They then spent the majority of the next two hours going over several berry jam recipes, and did not even touch the subject of tomatoes until there was barely 20 minutes left. Considering that when they said ‘and now we’re going to talk about tomatoes’ everyone started applauding, and pretty much everyone in the class actually stayed late and kept peppering the final presenter with questions, it was obvious that everyone else was feeling just as frustrated about the lack of tomato-based information as my friend and I were. Berries really don’t take that much work (you smash them up, you add sugar, heat, and pectin; poof, you have jam), but tomatoes are a borderline fruit, so require the addition of acid (lemon juice, citric acid, etc.) to make sure they’re safe.

I think it’s a good thing we went to the June class first, because if we’d attended the July class first, we’d likely have never returned for another one. But for now, we are hoping that this month’s class was just an unfortunate anomaly and that June’s is the norm. Next month’s class is supposed to be on pickling, and they mentioned that there will be a demo on using pressure cookers in September, which I think I should definitely attend. And despite the general frustration with the lack of tomato-based info this time around, the thick packet of recipes and information they handed out will come in useful, if for no other reason than that I used it to scribble down a short list of canning-related items I will need to invest in some day, and I don’t want to lose that.

It has been a very lovely weekend. We’ve been up in Seattle, visiting my sister and her family.

We got to see my sister in her chef’s outfit at her new job.

My sister and my niece

We got to meet my niece’s hamster, Sherbet, and the new chickens (whose names I cannot remember, because eight chickens is a lot of names to remember), and the latest acquisition – a baby Flemish Giant bunny named, quite appropriately, Mungo.

(excuse graininess of photo; this was taken via cell phone)

We went to a local street fair and my niece won herself a very cute little frog, whom she promptly named George. We ate cheese fondue. I got to help my sister make a birthday cake for a friend’s little boy, and it was the very first time I have ever played with fondant and hey, that is actually a lot of fun. Also she let me use her icing sprayer thing for some of the cake, and that was fun too, although she is far better at doing that kind of thing than I am (no big surprise, since she actually went to school for that). We stayed up late and talked about all kinds of things, and did a lot of laughing.

These visits are always too short. It was so hard to get on that plane and fly away from my niece and my sister and brother-in-law. I love our house and our neighborhood and our jobs and our friends and our life in Sacramento, I know that they feel exactly the same way about where they are too, but oh how I wish there was some way to magically create a fold in space so these visits weren’t so few and far between.

Normally, when we have a Sisters Only weekend, my sisters and go away together. This year, however, things have been a little more up in the air. My older sister’s mother-in-law was diagnosed with a rather aggressive form of brain cancer back in February, so her family pretty much put everything on hold as they rallied together, to support her and each other in the months that followed. My younger sister and I decided the easiest thing to do for the Sisters Only Weekend would be to have it somewhere close, so in case something happened, older sister would only be a short drive away, and we planned it pretty low key, so there was no worry about having to deal with reservations, or rescheduling. Or in short, this year’s Sisters Only weekend took place in Sacramento, at my house.

Since the rule about our Sisters weekends is that no husbands or kids are allowed, Richard had to go find somewhere else to stay for a few nights. So he packed up his stuff and headed up to Monterey to spend a few days wandering around the aquarium, while my sisters and I took over our house and had ourselves a lovely time.

This is our seventh Sisters Only weekend and, despite the fact that we managed to schedule it over one of the hottest weekends in Sacramento yet this summer (it was 109 on Sunday), we had a lot of fun. We went to The Melting Pot on Friday night and consumed immense quantities of cheese and chocolate. We did our traditional “one crazy thing” by taking a tour of downtown Sacramento on Segways.

(my younger sister and I being a little goofy)

We ate lunch at the Tower Cafe and watched brain-fluff movies on DVD. We went to the California Museum in downtown Sacramento to see the Lincoln exhibit, and then braved the searing heat to go wander through the Capitol building. We played with the cats and updated our Facebook pages, and got highly overpriced pedicures. We got so sick of junk food by Sunday afternoon that we made ourselves big bowls of salad. We sat around and knit and read books and talked about all sorts of things, and had a wonderful time, and as it always does, the end came too soon.