My ideal plant is one I can forget about completely, and then, when I remember it again, it’s ready to eat. Asparagus works this way, for instance, and we were lucky enough to move into a house with asparagus already established. Last year, to add to our no-maintenance bevy, we planted some rhubarb crowns my dad picked up from a neighbor. We then ignored them while it didn’t rain for two months and the grasshoppers decimated them. So we figured they were shot. Until yesterday when we were bushwhacking our way to the prairie and discovered them. Huge and healthy and ready to harvest. So it’s rhubarb quick bread this morning. And a great feeling of hope and success that perhaps our garden will produce after all.

For all the frying we do, and all the baked goods we make, we had never made doughnuts until this morning. There’s a couple of big reasons.

1. Neither of us are huge doughnut fans. BUT… I’ve been craving Top Pot lately. You see, we used to live around the corner from a very good doughnut shop. These were the doughnuts that made me realize I did, in fact, like doughnuts. And they played good music and it was warm in the winter and their coffee was pretty good and did I mention it was right around the corner? Really, I was craving the whole experience and had no intention of imitating their doughnuts (although, if you would like to, they have their own cookbook). It was just enough inspiration to get me to try making doughnuts. Turns out, it didn’t quite satisfy the experience craving, but I was totally satisfied with the doughnuts. I should point out, Top Pot makes beautiful, diverse doughnuts. But I only ever ate the cinnamon-sugar old-fashioned ones. The doughnut holes we made this morning, easily replace those for me. I doubt that they will satisfy your need for chocolate-frosted raspberry-filled doughnuts though, if that’s your thing.

2. Our deep fryer oil usually smells like falafel. BUT… Despite not using fresh oil in the deep fryer, the doughnuts tasted fine. Not at all like turmeric. Granted, we haven’t cooked falafel in there in a little while, but there were no lingering egg roll or samosa flavors from our more recent frying either.

So turns out warm doughnuts (in this case doughnut holes because they’re even easier) are really good and really quite easy to make (easier than the doughnut muffins that you bake and then dip in butter and roll in sugar) and really not effected by previous frying.

To keep it authentic, we used the recipe from the deep fryer cookbook that my grandma passed down to me. It’s the one that came with her deep fryer way back when and always refers to cooking in fat, not oil. It includes gems like Liver in Batter, Ham and Corn Fritters, and how to “bake” an entire potato by deep frying it. We figured that was maybe a time when they knew a thing or two about making doughnuts at home and they didn’t steer us wrong.

Doughnut Holes
adapted from the Dormeyer Fri-Well cookbook

makes 18-24 1-inch doughnut balls

1 3/4 cup flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup water
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 TBS butter, melted

Begin heating at least 2 inches of oil in a deep fryer or medium saucepan. Meanwhile, mix dry ingredients in a medium bowl. Whisk together the wet ingredients in a separate bowl. Pour wet mix into dry mix and stir until well blended. Scoop small spoonfuls of batter (if you dip your spoons into the hot oil first, the batter slides off better) into the hot oil* and fry for about 3 minutes, turning to brown all sides. Remove from oil and drain on a cooling rack set on top of a cookie sheet. To sugar coat, add a few spoonfuls of granulated or powdered sugar to a paper bag and shake a few doughnuts at a time in the bag.

* The recipe recommends your oil be 365°F. Our deep fryer doesn’t have a temperature setting, which was not a problem here.

These weren’t tomatoes from last year’s garden (we didn’t really get any tomatoes – or anything else, for that matter – from last year’s garden). These were from the year before, our first summer at HQ.

By the end of that season, our freezer was packed with quart jars full of them, our cellar shelves had row upon row of them canned, and we had a stockpile of salsa and tomato paste as well. Not to mention bag after bag of cherry tomatoes frozen for tomato cobbler*. And finally, almost two years later, we’ve eaten it all.

We have a few months before we can expect fresh tomatoes again. K’s tomato seedlings are doing great so far, and for all our plans to keep the garden small and simple this year, there are over thirty of them. Which could be brilliant. After all, our freezer is looking pretty empty.

*I forgot we dried some tomatoes, too. And we still have about a quarter cup of those left.

Something about snow in the forecast and the way March and April whipped by makes it hard to believe.

None the less, the new May desk calendar is ready to go! You can download it here.

I love laundry in the spring. We hang all our laundry out to dry on a clothes line, and the spring winds whip it dry so fast! And for those of you familiar with line drying, you know that things can get stiff and crunchy on the line. Not so with all the agitation the wind provides.

In winter, we still have the winds, but the combination of cold air and wet clothes makes hanging things out not much fun. And by summer, the winds have mostly disappeared. Spring is the perfect in between.

A hard-core paper cutter. Also known as a stack cutter, this thing can cut a 1 1/2″ high stack of paper. Wow. It also breezes through notebook trimming, a rather onerous task around here. My affection for this piece of basic machinery is so great I believe it will soon find itself endowed with a more personal name.

When you fold a pile of paper in half (to make a notebook) the paper flares out along the edge. In order to make a tidy notebook, I trim about an 1/8″ off the outer edge. Also, A lines up the paper along the bottom edge of the notebook as she assembles it, but I trim off the top edge to clean up any jaggedness due to unevenly cut pages. Previously, all that cutting was done with an X-acto knife. It takes a certain amount of skill and a lot of patience to trim a 40 sheet notebook with a straightedge and an X-acto. To be clear, one stroke with an X-acto cuts a little over 1 sheet of paper. So it takes some 30 strokes to trim one side of one notebook. I sort of dreaded people ordering our notebooks.

Now I trim them with our new paper cutter. That wheel on the side clamps the paper in place so the stack doesn’t pull in as it is cut and make some pages smaller than others (this will sound familiar if you’ve ever tried to cut too much paper with one of those big straight arm cutters at a school before). Then that big lever arm is pulled down to bring the giant blade through the paper. It has an extra articulation in its mechanism so the lever is fairly easy to move and you’re not just cutting through the paper with brute force. Then voila! you have a trimmed notebook.

All this wholesaling means we’ve continued to get faster at turning out an order. These bigger orders have taught us how to speed up our process and inspired/funded some new equipment (more soon!). We also think it’s pretty neat that our notebooks and cards are in real live stores, though we are yet to see it in person.

Assuming they still have some of our merchandise in stock, you can find our products at these retailers (so far):

Librairie Drawn & Quarterly - Montreal, Quebec

Ellyn Lilly – Toronto, Ontario

MADE – Jackson, Wyoming

Let us know if you have the chance to see our goods in person!

Well. I’m assuming mice. Because I’d rather believe that mice are willing to eat seedlings than believe that I have something else living in the upstairs of my house. You see, normally, my seedlings don’t get decimated until we plant them outside for the rabbits and deer to sample. But this year, they disappeared, right out from under the grow lights in the studio, over a matter of days. First went the peppers and eggplants. Then the brussel sprouts, kale, cauliflower, and broccoli. Apparently though, after a few bites, it was decided that tomato seedlings are not edible. So I do still have some 30+ healthy tomato seedlings. I guess that’s not such a bad thing to monocrop.

But I have to admit my confidence/hope/expectations in this year’s garden have been shaken. And I may be getting a little bitter about this whole endeavor. In contrast, my respect for farmers continues to grow, and I think they should charge every penny they can get at the markets because they deserve it.