Meal No. 2576: Lamb, Bacon, & Harissa Flatbread Pizza

It's been a very long time since I made pizza or any variants of it, and that might have upped my enthusiasm for making lamb and bacon flatbreads with sautéed peppers and onions on a crust spread with a harissa sauce cobbled together from some ingredients from a recently preceding meal. Yes, that includes the Michael Symon steak sauce (about a tablespoon) and the homemade beer ketchup, both of which were dipping sauces for the homemade french fries earlier that week.

With a mix of cheddar, mozzarella, and goat cheeses, these flatbreads were quite the treat last Saturday night.

The quarantine task jar drawing both that day and the day before were rather kind to me. Last Friday, the task that was drawn was resetting one of the cement benches, situated in the area we call The Grove, that I'd inherited from my mother. I had placed it between the Bradford pear and the front retaining wall but, over time, one side of it had sunk rather badly into the looser soil where I'd dug up rotting cherry tree roots from a tree long ago removed. (Here is an even earlier post when I just dug up the below-ground stump.)

I thought I had a "before" picture to show its dramatic listing like a tanker taking on ocean water. Instead, you'll have to amuse yourself with this accompanying "after" pic, that veritably drips with precision.

The Saturday task that was drawn left me a bit giddy, because it was for another yard chore but it was one I'd already completed: digging up dead bushes. Last summer's meager landscaping efforts included a mix of shrubs: a replacement azalea, two new rhododendrons, and three Petite Plum Ninebark bushes, among others. Those specifically listed in the preceding sentence are the ones that didn't make it so they were dug up and tossed.

Meal No. 2575: Boogaloo Wonderland Sandwiches

A fun recipe that I made three times in 2018 sort of fell off my radar...until last Thursday night. That's when I whipped up a batch of Boogaloo Wonderland Sandwiches to the pleasure, amusement, amazement, and entertainment of the Roediger House. They might have been even better since I was using homemade beer ketchup and homemade steak sauce as ingredients in the sauce, which is incorporated both into the meat mixture but also gets slathered onto the buns. It took incredible restraint not to eat a second one that night...they were exceptionally delicious.

While I was carrying over last Wednesday's "Pack Up the Library" chore, I still drew a new task slip that Thursday morning: "Driveway Root." And glory hallelujah, it was a task I'd already completed the week before, and I rather liked the feeling of being ahead of the game.

There are two trees along the back of the driveway/parking area (shown in the photos with the recent blog post for Meal No. 2570), and the roots had worked their way under the pavement. Years ago, it was a mere ripple. "I better tend to that," I'd think from time to time...and then do nothing. Now that chunks of pavement have popped up and the knob of the root is poking up, the critical need is more poignantly presented. I dug into the tangled mess that pretends to be a strip of yard back there, chopped up all the roots large and small that I could, and got it all covered over.

Yet another necessary item that I kept putting off, I'm afraid, and I let it go on long enough to really cause damage to the asphalt of the driveway near the back of the property. Score yet another victory thanks to the quarantine task jar!

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"Boogaloo Wonderland Sandwiches," by Bryan Roof. In Cook's Country, April/May 2018, p. 4-5. Recipe has also been reproduced and tinkered with a bit by Kristen of The Simply Delicious Kitchen. Link to "Boogaloo Wonderland Sandwiches." [Published 23 February 2018]

Meal No. 2574: Not So Cajun Chicken

Last Wednesday night was a chance to return to a much-loved Roediger House favorite, the very first meal I made in the new kitchen once the addition was finished in 2009: Not So Cajun Chicken. I've almost always served it over rice...but I try to mostly avoid rice these days. So I tried it over linguine instead, and it was still terrific and tasty.

The weather that day was glorious and gorgeous and just on this side of a bit cool...making it perfect for me to be inspired to take on a somewhat sizable yard project (more on that in a future blog post). That ran counter to the chore pulled that morning from the quarantine task jar: "pack up the library." I didn't get to that task at all last Wednesday so it carried over to Thursday, which was sort of perfect since it was a dreary drizzly day, all the day long.

The original structure of the house is four rooms over four rooms, and those upstairs rooms have had rotating purposes and uses over time. The front room on the south side upstairs was initially a guest bedroom, and then it became the TV room. The long-term plan now for about five years has been to dedicate it to serve as the library but, when I got some estimates for building shelves and cabinets several years ago, the price was just beyond the pale. So it's held a temporary (multi-year!) status as a book room, copier/printer room, and junk room...which gets easier to live with the longer one lets it go on. That's also why it was a purple slip in the quarantine task jar. I can't get it renovated into a library if the room is full of stuff. Plus it looks terrible and is hard as heck to keep clean.

'Tis true, though, that even while I am enthused to be tackling long-delayed chores and tasks, it is a corresponding reality that not all of these are simple or one-day projects. That's part of the reason they've remained undone, which only makes sense. So I got a great start on boxing up the library but this project joins with a couple of others to be in process but incomplete.

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"Not So Cajun Chicken," a dish I regularly enjoyed at Crowley's Old Time Favorites restaurant and bar on Medlin Drive in Raleigh, NC.  (Another version of the recipe can be found here.) A heap of thanks is due to Jimmy Randolph for tracking  down the recipe for me.

Meal No. 2573: Platters of Homemade French Fries

Well, the random nature of the quarantine task jar strikes again! I have appreciated that it has thus far compelled me to tackle a number of chores (those are the purple slips) and gotten me busy with some yard tasks (the green slips), but it has also allowed me some fun in my kitchen (the blue slips). The irrational hope in a lottery approach is that there is a reasonably even distribution based on probability, that I'd have to do two or three purple chores and then maybe a green yard chore, and perhaps once a week a fun blue slip would appear so that the monotony could be broken or I could be rewarded for diligence! But random also means there's a good chance of repetition of types, or a clumping of types, and I get that, especially since we're not operating on the order of hundreds or thousands of slip chances. All that is a prelude to say: on Sunday a week ago I drew the slip that said "Chocolate Cake" (and it was an absolutely amazing chocolate cake); on Monday I skipped the slips since I had that much-needed root canal; but then that Tuesday morning task jar drawing brought out another blue slip: Homemade French Fries.

Over the years I've added a handful of recipes for french fries to my collection but I think I've only ever bothered to make 'em a couple of times: once as pommes frites (for Meal No. 138), and another time to go with Boogaloo Wonderland Sandwiches (for Meal No. 2048). But who doesn't love french fries? As long as I was traipsing down this fatty diet-busting trail, I decided to go all the way: no other fixins for the meal, just platters of fries, but how about an assortment of as-yet-untested dips and sauces that would be worth sampling?

I settled on four: comeback sauce, steak sauce, cheese sauce, and homemade beer ketchup (made only once, but on another occasion for those wonderful Wonderland Sandwiches). The fries were cooked in two batches, so dinner was eaten in two batches. I had seconds on all the sauces except for the cheese...it was tasty but I can also easily do without.

And how were the fries? Oh, they were pretty good as well...but they ended up as very short stubs. I'm thinking I must've extended their initial salt-water-and-vinegar water boil beyond what the recipe had called for, so they became quite fragile. Were they better than the other homemade version of french fries that I've done, or better than the bags of frozen french fries that are so convenient? Hmmm....I'm not sure they were. I went to a lot of trouble to make these (it's why they had to be a quarantine task jar item, because I was unlikely to mess with 'em otherwise): the peeling and cutting and boiling and initial frying and chilling and then the second frying. Clean-up was a bear, and I learned the hard way that the only method I have, in spite of a wealth of various appliances, for getting a 400°F deep fry temp is to use my cooktop and a Dutch oven. My countertop induction plate and my official deep fat fryer top out at 375°F, and my electric wok at full blast can only get oil up to 360°F. These are useful lessons but I do not like having to pour 360°F oil from a wok that's falling short of the intended mark into a Dutch oven so that all the dinner machinations can proceed with minimal delay.

Still, though, there's reason for more than a few of you to feel jealous as you read this particular blog post, because they were still mighty fine fries. I bet at your house on that same night, you'd've been laughed out of the room if you'd asked to have a dinner made up entirely of platters of fries. The Roediger House is living large and reckless in these strange quarantine-like times.

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"Perfect Thin and Crispy French Fries," from J. Kenji López-Alt, Chief Culinary Consultant of SeriousEats.com. [Published 28 May 2010]

"Homemade Beer Ketchup," by Russell White. From Ugly Stick Brewing. [Published 28 June 2016]

"Comeback Sauce," from Robyn Stone of addapinch.com. [Published 11 June 2013]

"Steak Sauce," from Michael Symon on FoodNetwork.com.

"Cheese Sauce for Fries and Nachos," from J. Kenji López-Alt, Chief Culinary Consultant of SeriousEats.com. [Published 17 September 2010]

Meal No. 2572: Sausage, Fried Egg, and Cheese Sandwiches

Last Monday, I drove in the rain over to Cary, my most extended departure from the homefront since the coronavirus pandemic shut-down began. Sure, I got to see my old college buddy Jeff Kearney, but only because he's still pretty much my dentist and I had a cracked and abscessed molar. Start to finish, it was close to a 2-hour root canal, but the previous week's multiple-days-of-pain made it all worthwhile. And Jeff's actually always been really good, from the shots he gives to how he drills to the ease and comfort you feel in one of his dentist chairs.

And I still got some supper on the table that evening, a new trial of a basic idea: sausage, egg, and cheese sandwiches...but I decided to enhance it with a double fried egg and buttered toasted brioche buns. It was all mighty scrumptious. And please note that I am not obligated to draw a task from the quarantine task jar on days that I undergo root canals.

Death by Chocolate Cake with Caramel Fudge Sauce

Last Sunday, the latest slip drawn from the quarantine task jar was a lovely shade of blue. I welcomed it after putting in a lot of time on the other tasks that had been drawn in the preceding days. Blue means the day's task will be a pleasurable activity of some sort, versus the purple slips which are often a drudgery or grand chore, or the green slips that pertain to some outdoor yard work or routine. "Chocolate Cake," it said. My April 19th task, completed after suppertime, was to try one of several recently acquired recipes for chocolate cake, all purporting to be exceptional, out of this world, or a cut above all the rest. After looking at what was involved in a few of them, I decided to give Ashley Manila's Death by Chocolate Cake the ol' college try...and there was certainly no disappointment at the result. A towering 3-layer cake with a deeply chocolatey intensity and an incredibly moist crumb, and a terrific buttercream frosting that was complemented by a homemade chocolate caramel fudge sauce. I couldn't finish my trial slice that night, in spite of...or perhaps because of...how fantastically delicious it was.

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"Death by Chocolate Cake," from Ashley Manila of BakerByNature.com. [Published 15 September 2016]

"Chocolate Caramel Fudge Sauce," from Ashley Manila of BakerByNature.com. [Published 19 February 2019]

Meal No. 2571: Pasta with Sausage, Basil, and Mustard

On Saturday a week ago (I'm either ahead or behind on blog posts, depending upon how you want to spin it), it got to be time to use the pound of Italian sausage chilling in the fridge. I don't yet have a great repertoire of dishes that depend on that protein, so I was basically deciding between sausage and beef manicotti, pasta with mustard and basil, lasagna, and baked ziti. I thought I was headed for the baked ziti on that night but time ran out and I needed something quicker at suppertime.

I've got a couple more quarantine task jar items to report on. On Friday, April 17th, the task slip simply said "Panasonic TV." When the Roediger House got its first flat-panel big screen television back in 2012, all the buzz was about plasma and 3D and I jumped right on board with it. And I suppose for four or five years, it was a perfectly decent television. Initially, it was on the second floor landing/main hallway. Then, it got rotated around the house, while plaster was restored and floors were refinished. Once the attic was finished out and became the entertainment center and man cave in 2015, it was mounted on a swingarm on the wall but, after about a year, we went through a period where that fine plasma 3D Panasonic TV would randomly power off and occasionally be wonky.

Then, in 2018, it fritzed out completely. I moved quickly on replacing it, as noted in this blog post. I'm bringing back a picture from that entry, as shown above. You can see that the new LG went on a stand but the Panasonic TV was still mounted up on the wall. And here we are four years later. So taking down the Panasonic plasma screen was on the to-do list to get me to finally go to the trouble to move everything out of the way, unbolt that puppy, take down the swing arm, and put it aside so that I can take it in for possible repair. That was the task that Friday afternoon.

Panasonic TV and mounting bracket removed

The next day, on Saturday morning, another slip was drawn, but it was a bit of a bear! Let me give the fuller explanation.

The house is overdue for exterior painting. The last coat it got was with the renovation project in 2008/2009 and, not to put too fine a spin on it, I'd say it was done with the cheap stuff. Paint was flaking and peeling within the first year on some of the trim, and of course that's only gotten worse with time. I managed to have an exterior washing done in 2017 but the mildew is starting to reappear this spring. Part of my hold-up on taking care of painting the house has been clinging to the idea of having a historic color consultation done before making color and design choices. The historic consultant can't do his best work if I don't give him as much information and imagery as I can...and I get these ideas in my head about how to put that sort of info together and how to present it and then I can't ever get it done.

Ah, but then came the power of the quarantine task jar. That's where I had to gather the key pictures I'd taken over the years to try to show various sides of the house but also finer architectural and trim details. The historical color consultant would need to see how the house was finished and adorned so that some pretty specific and reasonably accurate period recommendations could be made, right down to small bits of molding and all. I had two ways I wanted to get these pictures up and labeled on the RoedigerHouse.com website: as a slideshow, and as an individualized indexed list, with large pics of the house marked to indicate where some of the finer detail photos are coming from.

The slideshow was very nearly a breeze to assemble. It was done before lunch. But it took most of the afternoon and all the way up until about 9 pm to get the other representation like I wanted it. I'm including a couple of screen shots here but the link is this: http://www.roedigerhouse.com/galleries/paint/.

The idea to seek out an historical colors consult came from Phil Lamachio, the master plaster restorer who did all the work and painting for the plaster restoration during 2014. That's when I looked up some highly-regarded experts and bookmarked those who seemed most qualified and well-regarded. And then I sat on this and never moved on it. Let's not be surprised that one of those consultants closed up shop (or at least let go of his website), and the other one has gone into semi-retirement as of the start of 2020. A professor at the University of Michigan, he was my first choice. And I've missed calling on him by just a matter of months, doggone it.

So back to the search pile to see who might be called upon instead!

In the meantime, I'm mighty glad the quarantine task jar compelled me to get the photographic guide together so that it should be a cinch to share and get feedback from a paint expert!

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"Pasta with Sausage, Basil, and Mustard," by Nigel Slater and published in Food & Wine, September 2002.

Meal No. 2570: Sous Vide Chicken Thighs for Chicken Salad

I'd bought a family pack of bone-in chicken thighs, half of which were used for the braised chicken over Brussels sprouts at the start of Easter weekend. A few days later, I seasoned the remaining five thighs and tossed them into a Ziploc bag, along with a cache of sage and thyme from my kitchen garden, to cook in a sous vide bath. Then I stored them overnight and brought them out to finely dice and mix with a homemade dressing in order to have delicious chicken salad sandwiches last Thursday evening.

My quarantine task jar slip drawn earlier that day gave me an outside task: clean up the back wall area. The house itself and the parking area take up a lot of space on this quarter-acre downtown lot, and I've not yet gotten around to getting a Dutch barn, so there's limited space for storing planting and yard maintenance stuff. Over time, I have a tendency to let it start looking pretty junky along the rear property wall. There's only so much I can do to make it look better, or at least less junky, but that was on my to-do list and here is the result:

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I followed the cooking instructions for sous vide from "Crispy Sous-Vide Chicken Thighs with Mustard Wine Pan Sauce," from J. Kenji López-Alt, Chief Culinary Consultant of SeriousEats.com. [Published 27 July 2015 / Updated 29 August 2018]

Meal No. 2569: Roasted Salmon and Broccoli

A week ago tonight, in ordinary times, I'd've probably been making a terrific celebration dinner out of relief that I'd gotten my taxes done. But the current coronavirus crisis means tax filing deadlines have all been delayed and I'm taking advantage of that. Instead, I defaulted to my healthy-choice dinner that I'd made only three meals previously: roasted salmon and roasted broccoli. I continue to depend on my BBQ Guru wifi temperature probe to help me achieve the perfect baking time for the salmon, and I think I've also gotten pretty good at getting the broccoli seasoned just right but also roasted to a crisp-tender stage. You just have to remember that, during cremation, there's a point where the meat is perfectly cooked.

Mississippi Mud Pie

Somewhere along the way, in the last year or so, I was bound and determined to try out a Cook's Country recipe for Mississippi Mud Pie. I'd gone so far as to start this very blog draft and already appended the recipe source to the bottom of it. But it stayed in the "drafts" folder on blogger.com since I failed to follow through. And the more I think about it, I'm fairly certain that I didn't get it done because I was having trouble finding one of the ingredients: Famous Chocolate Wafers from Nabisco. Plus, the recipe itself was a bit intimidating and involved. Anyway, that's how this pie ended up on one of my quarantine task jar blue slips, whereby blue represents a handful of a few fun tasks, enjoyable pastimes, or (quite often!) a recipe or kitchen creation I've been hankering to try. It's the slip that was drawn Saturday a week ago. After a pretty full day of working in the yard and a supper of tasty leftovers from the previous couple of meals, I got busy on this pie.

Listen: this version is a pretty fussy pie to make. In contrast, an "Editor's Pick" on food.com relies on two kinds of instant pudding plus a tub of Cool Whip, as does a 13x9 version elsewhere on that same site...if you want to go the easy-peasy route to make this sucker. Not so for a recipe from Cook's Country, by god! By the time it was done, it left a surprising and discouraging number of bowls, measuring cups, measuring spoons, spatulas, and whisks to be washed. There were two different kinds of chocolate to chop and by golly you had to be somewhat precise about the heat of them after you'd melted them...not to mention getting a portion of the heavy cream to a precise temp for part of the mousse. It's a homemade crust, homemade brownie layer, a somewhat intimidating mousse layer (that I do think I nailed, if you must know!), and even a baked chocolate topping to crumble on it for the final crowning touch. It took much of one evening and part of the next afternoon to put it all together. You won't find this puppy on the dessert table at a church social, no siree.

Oh, but when the time came to dig in after that Easter night supper...well, let's just say you would have broken quarantine to be here.

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"Mississippi Mud Pie," by Christie Morrison. In Cook's Country, June/July 2016, p. 22-23.

Meal No. 2568: Glorious Beef and Mushroom Stir Fry

For my birthday back in 2006, I received a perfect and simple gift: a slim wok cookbook that not only had a range of great recipes for sauces, marinades, and meals, but also succinctly captured for me the fundamentals of stir-fry cooking. Over the years, the Asian wok meals I've made have almost always satisfied and pleased. A few years ago, there was even talk of committing to making at least one wok meal a week...but it never quite came to that.

Alas, since I shifted my diet almost two years ago, I've found that rice is seldom a good idea anymore. Nonetheless, I have to bring it back from time to time, appreciating its rarity all the more. Easter Sunday's supper was a return to the filet mignon and mushroom stir fry that is one of my favorites in that realm of cuisine...and which I hadn't made since August 2018! Was it good, you may ask? Of course it was. This is the good stuff.

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"Glorious Beef with Mushrooms," in Wok Fast by Hugh Carpenter and Teri Sandison. Ten Speed Press, 2002, p. 87 (recipe) and p. 26-27 (marinade and sauce).

Meal No. 2567: Braised Chicken over Brussels Sprouts

Back on Friday April 10th, when I'd kept mostly inside because it was pretty nippy and terribly blustery, the dinnertime endeavor was a house favorite: braised chicken thighs over Brussels sprouts and shallots. Not only was dinner most excellent that night, but it always has this nice added bonus that I get to be thinking about dear friend and colleague Donna Whitley-Smith whenever I make it, because she is the source of it.

That Friday was also marked by yet another slip drawn from my quarantine task jar: "Master Bathroom Mirror." Another example of a somewhat minor house chore that I just kept avoiding or overlooking, this small project was simply about rotating the bathroom mirror from landscape to portrait orientation. Look, when the renovation and addition project of 2008-2009 was completed, and I now had four and a half baths that needed to be finished out, I wasn't exactly smart or strategic about mirror placement. I'm pretty sure I thought the same general principles of hanging art applied, which results in mirrors that are simply too high to be fully useful.

So, for 10 years now, I've had to go stand on the bottom step of the raised tub in order to see if I'm tying my tie correctly in the mornings. Well, that's no longer a problem. It still took closer to two hours from start to finish, since I had to keep dashing about the house to gather and deploy the tools that were needed to get this done...and done perfectly, I might add, according to my measurements and handy dandy levels. This mirror, by the way, is not strung with picture wire but instead I was attaching it via the two installed hooks on either side. Sturdier that way, but also requires a lot more precision! My accompanying picture and wall art might not be quite so symmetrical but I really like the finished look. And the much improved functionality of a much more useful bathroom mirror.

I didn't earn the nickname "Mr. Precise" in eighth grade for nothing...and here's that very eighth grade shirt to prove it, which I was able to still wear after I overshot my weight loss goals and got everyone worried about me.

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"Braised Chicken and Brussels Sprouts," in Everyday Food, Issue 97, November 2012, p. 22.

Quarantine Task Jar Slip: Irrigation Plan

Once again during this coronavirus pandemic and its accompanying stay-at-home orders, I wrapped up my morning coffee on April 9th and turned to the random selection of a to-do chore from my quarantine task jar. The slip that was drawn directed me to work on my plan for landscape irrigation, something I'd started researching and plotting last summer but which fell far short of any real progress.

But this will be an extended process from start to finish, so I honored my commitment of at least an hour on the day's task, although it proved to be much longer than that, as I read through tutorials and looked at websites and even peeked at some of the potential equipment and supplies I'll need. Drawing that task from my jar also pushed me to take some very necessary first steps: (1) submitting a Before You Dig request to nc811.org, and (2) scheduling the plumber to come look at my options for getting a secondary water meter installed that would be dedicated just to landscaping. (I'd gotten the connection authorization form for this from the City last summer.)

The consult with the plumber took place the following Tuesday, which is when I learned that the city has changed its procedures for new meters, probably just after I visited and obtained my form there last summer. The requirement now is for a licensed utility contractor to do the meter install...and that shifted some of my labors into looking up contractors to call. I'll work to line up appointments and bids at the start of next week. In the meantime, over these seven or eight days, I've been schooling myself mostly via Youtube videos but also through some websites on irrigation systems, sprinkler heads, lay-out, valves, controllers, and so on.

The irrigation project itself is huge, no doubt, and updates will probably be scattered in various blog posts. But the road to completion could not commence without developing a plan, and I pretty much had that in place by the end of Easter weekend. That's yet another indication of how valuable this quarantine task jar idea is turning out to be for pushing me to get stuff done.

Giant Sugar Cookies

Perhaps with the start of Passover, it was appropriate to return to a Mardi Gras recipe that I first tried out at the end of February: Mardi Gras sugar cookies that, on this occasion, might better be referred to simply as giant sugar cookies. The pan could hold only four or five at the time, but then again, the whole batch is composed only of nine cookies altogether. They're incredibly delicious, though, and partakers might actually successfully be satisfied with only one cookie. Heck, who am I kidding? They're so good you don't care that they're, like, six inches across.

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"Mardi Gras Sugar Cookies," from Kelly of AmericanCupcakeAbroad.com. [Published 20 February 2012]

Meal No. 2566: Emeril's Skillet Beef Stroganoff

Last Thursday hunger in the house called for a very early supper: 2 pm, roughly. Steaming bowls of skillet beef stroganoff topped with shredded fresh white cheddar cheese and parsley were just what the doctor ordered.

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Based on "Beef Stroganoff Hamburger Dinner in a Skillet," by Emeril Lagasse. Found online at The Food Network.

Meal No. 2565: Roasted Salmon and Broccoli

After the three days of labor on the north side drainage project, I was ready for a decent and delicious supper last Wednesday night. That came in the form of roasted salmon with some especially delicious roasted broccoli florets. I had my fill, but it felt well-earned.

Upgrading the Side Drain Set-Up

On the north side of the house, along the kitchen addition that was finished in 2010, it was necessary to build a retaining wall because of the elevation of the foundation and how the property slopes gently upward from front to back. (Some pictures of before and after can be found within this blog post from May 2019.) Tucked in a small alcove back there are the two heat pumps. In order to properly drain run-off from the backyard and along that side of the house, there is a small drain pipe right in the corner of that retaining wall, to carry it all down to the front of the property inside the retaining wall alongside the original house structure. But over these last ten years, all this run-off seems to have gradually eroded the ground under the outermost heat pump, and it has begun to lean rather distinctly (as shown in the photo above).

Last summer I worked to build up the edge along that trough to stave off the continuing (and literal!) decline. That was just a temporary fix, and on my to-do list has been to work on a better drain setup back there...and that's the slip drawn from the quarantine task jar back on Monday, April 6th. It proved to be a three-day project! But I appreciate the challenges and the learning that go along with these do-it-yourself endeavors.

You know: like trying to determine the slope and marking it off correctly so that there is effective drainage along the new line.

And then just trying to be smart and resourceful about tying it all together. This also allowed me to connect the gutter downspout at that back corner of the house into the drain line, instead of running out free along the retaining wall.

For a number of years, I've had a loosely-buried plastic drain pipe serving to channel that water. Now I think I've got a better set-up:

I'm not satisfied with how I finished out this project and still need to do some thinking and designing to manage the backyard run-off.

The slope is much too gentle to also install a functional French drain, but perhaps I'll still dig out a gravel trough to help with issues of standing water that have developed over the years. At the moment, this second drain tray (foreground of photos above and below) is too high to receive any drainage but it does help to seal off the upper end for now. Over time, I'll figure out how to create an open drain at grade, perhaps by forming almost a mini-culvert there once I decide to toy around with cement again.