Manifold Destiny

That right there is a valve manifold. A few months ago, if you'd mentioned "valve manifold" to me, I'm not sure I would have known what it should conjure in my imagination. But planning, developing, and installing my own irrigation system has taught me quite a few things. (I won't know if I've been a good student until the new connection to the city water system gets established.) That photo above is the finished version of the second manifold I made last Saturday, which took about half the time as the first one I made on Friday.

You see, Friday and Saturday were a couple more picture-perfect summer days: moderate temps, breezes, reasonable humidity, no flies or mosquitoes, pleasant sunshine. I set up my outside yard table, covered it in a plastic sheet, and marked off my valve manifold box so I could start laying out the design of that first manifold.

I began working on this just after noon, with various breaks throughout the afternoon and then stopping for an easy supper of salad.

I made an effort to align things and to bring a measure of precision to the layout but I'm very much a novice. By all appearances, though, it ended up being a pretty workable finished product.

I got that first manifold set in its valve box near the back door and tied in most of the accompanying irrigation lines. I decided I needed to deepen the trench that runs alongside it, up to the back corner of the house, and saved that to finish on Saturday. I stopped working and put my tools away around 9:15 pm Friday night.

The weather Saturday was a duplicate of Friday, and I started on the valve manifold for the front yard zones around noon as well (photo above). I had it completed before 4 pm, although I should add that I only got as far as constructing it...I will not install it in its valve box until after the new irrigation meter and water line are installed by my utilities contractor.

The next step will be pulling the wires to the automatic valves and running them under the house and into the cellar, where I'll have my irrigation controller. This will be a whole 'nother element of my education but I'm getting a kick out of trying to pull all this off.

Speaking of valves: I decided I wanted to have a master drain with a manual valve, and I tied it in to a drain line in the front wall (as part of another project that will be in a future blog post).

To maintain the benefit of gravity and a downward slope for it, the simple ball valve I installed was pretty deep in the ground, so I fashioned an access tube out of some of my 4-inch PVC drain line.

The placement was a bit tricky because this was the same area where I'd routed drain lines from the side of the parking lot.

I actually installed two of these and designed a similar access sleeve for the other one as well.

They both required bushing adaptors in order to close them off with a threaded cap but I don't expect to be using the drain all that often, so I'm glad for it to be a solid seal:

My sister recently pondered: What did we do for home projects before Youtube? I guess we bought books or attended workshops at Lowe's...or just hired people to do it for us. One of my dad's favorite expressions was: If you don't have education, use your common sense. With this project, I've tried to be sensible even though I'm pretty uneducated about this stuff.

Quarantine Task Jar: Installing a Tie Rack

Here's another small chore completed, thanks to the latest slip drawn from the quarantine task jar, during a rainy spell earlier this month. The photo above is of the inside of the enormous wardrobe in the master bedroom, and on the door you see ties hanging on an old string. For several years now, since my acquisition of ties exceeded the capacity of my tie rack on the inside of the master bedroom closet door, this is where I've hung the newer ones that I most often reach for on my working days. Not the best arrangement, especially because of how easily they slipped down and would get creased at the bottom of that cabinet door. For years I've had a new tie rack tucked away that I had grabbed on impulse but hadn't installed yet.

Unfortunately, once I opened the new tie rack, I found it was smaller than I had remembered. I still put it up, because it fits that narrow door well, but I decided I'd better rethink this and instead get myself a larger one.

The tie rack I've held onto for years was my father's. It has been with me everywhere I've lived since moving out of my childhood home after college: Winston-Salem, Wake Forest University, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Charlottesville, and back to Winston-Salem.

It holds a lot of ties, but I also like that the individual hangers are hinged, so it's easy to "page" through the ties. Alas, I wasn't able to find anything similar, either in capacity or in design, and had to settle for fixed racks and lesser capacity. A speedy delivery from Amazon solved the issue and now I've got two racks on the inside of the closet door:

Those three ties proudly displayed on the upper rack, by the way, are the three I kept from my dad after he died in 1981: two great wild ones from the 70s plus a normal professional classic red tie. And the new small rack inside the wardrobe? Perfect for my small collection of rarely-worn bow ties:

On a related note: A quick check of the blog tells me that I've made only limited references to that wardrobe and have just a single picture of it from April 2004 in this dated blog post. (A more recent post on the master bedroom from Fall 2014 can be found here.)

Finally, let me note that the idea behind the quarantine task jar, which cranked up back in March with the initial shut-down orders at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, was to entice me to a measure of qualified productivity regarding tons of chores that were languishing on my grand to-do list. It really worked fantastically well to carry me through the rest of the winter and into the early spring. But with the good weather and the relative enormity of some outdoor projects, I haven't needed the discipline or incentive, and draws from the task jar have been few and far between.

The WORST EVER Chocolate Chip Cookies

I could have been outside working more last Wednesday evening after the southwestern Caesar salad supper...and instead I made cookies. These are a basic chocolate chip cookie, perhaps, but there's nothing basic about how delicious and addictive they are. Perhaps in a rare show of enforced self-control, I limited myself only because I committed to giving away samples to various neighbors on the street...still, though, I greedily hoarded a few, if you must know.

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"The WORST EVER Chocolate Chip Cookies," from Sam Merritt of SugarSpunRun.com. [Published 28 November 2018; Updated 13 November 2019]

Meal No. 2613: Southwestern Caesar Salad with Grilled Chicken

I continue to be mighty happy that it's not yet the yucky days of summer. Wednesday brought another glorious dawning morning with incredibly pleasant temps and light breezes for enjoying coffee and a quiet start to the day with Sumner at my feet. It also allowed me to get an earlier start in the yard that took me up to lunchtime. Then I ventured to City Hall to see about placing the order for a second water meter for the irrigation system and then I fell into a nap! By late afternoon, a less pleasant humidity had rolled in and I decided to worry about dinner instead. On the menu: Southwestern Caesar salad topped with sous vide chicken thighs that I finished on the grill. Adorned with diced fresh tomato, corn, and black beans, it was a creamy and spicy abundance of flavors.

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Southwestern Caesar Dressing was my creation but was based on:

• "Southwest Caesar Dressing," by CookingONtheSide. From GeniusKitchen.com
• "Southwestern Caesar Salad with Chipotle Dressing," from the Hyatt Regency at Gainy Ranch (Scottsdale, AZ). Published in Bon Appétit, March 1997.

Meal No. 2612: Sheet Pan Beef Nachos

Once again the dinner menu on a recent evening was dictated by the sell-by date on a meat item in the fridge. That's what led me to throw together a quick batch of sheet pan beef nachos last Monday night, as a brief interruption to a very full yard work day (that didn't end until about 9:45 pm!). Oh, but they were ever so good, enjoyed on paper plates in the camp chairs in the nice breezes of that early summer evening.

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Taco-Style Meat Based on "Crispy Beef Tacos," by Hilah Johnson. From HilahCooking.com.

Seasoning was based on "Taco Seasoning I," from Bill Echols on AllRecipes.com.

Quarantine Task Jar: The Broken Chair Leg

A couple of summers ago, when the Roediger House played host to the family of an old Wake Forest grad school chum of mine, the leg of one of my parlour side chairs gave way. It's another of the small items on the long-running to-do list that ended up on a slip in my quarantine task jar. It was drawn at the end of May. I discovered belatedly that the picture above was terribly misfocused, but it'll still do as a "before" shot (along with this zoomed out view, below).

I do not pretend that there was anything expert about my repair efforts...

...and I'll not be surprised if they fail at their first serious test of stability and strength. It's a chair that doesn't get a lot of action, and I'm just glad it's no longer sitting at an angle in the comforting environs of the North Parlour.

Meal No. 2611: Roasted Salmon and Broccoli

Sunday was stunning for the first full day of summer. It was a long stretch of coffee and reading and a bit of computer work as the morning proceeded, in the camp chairs out on the driveway. I made reasonable efforts with the ongoing yard projects (including initial installation of eight out of 16 sprinkler heads!) and was happy to put roasted salmon and roasted broccoli on the dinner plates that night. It was a fine day.

Now that summer has officially begun, as of this past Saturday, I can stop and marvel at how this month of June seems to be proceeding, which is proving to be rather a balance of gorgeous and amazing days and no small number of wet ones. Given how awful the mosquitos and flies were the last couple of summers, it was interesting to note that neither has been much on the scene just yet. Last week granted me the privilege of seeing the first goldfinch of the season, unable to compete with the teeming crowds of other birds at the front feeders. I also spied—briefly!—a hummingbird, attracted by the bee balm my sister had given me a few years ago. Lightning bugs showed up a couple of weeks ago. The daylilies are still bursting with beauty. The petunias in the planters are growing and glowing and spreading. The clarion call of official summer burst forth late afternoon on Sunday: the first cicada with its glorious song. Although I am still pretty dedicated to my yard labors thus far, I do dread when the heat and humidity of the real summer overwhelm me. As of this moment, though? Life's pretty darned good in the mini-universe of the Roediger House.

Meal No. 2610: Glorious Beef & Mushroom Stir Fry

With beef tenderloin on a better-than-usual sale, which I appreciated all the more given how meat prices have surged during the coronavirus pandemic, I brought home a moderate-sized one to carve into steaks (prepped for later sous vide cooking) and for making a couple of meals right away. Friday night's beef tenderloin tips was immediately followed by beef and mushroom stir fry over rice noodles on Saturday night. This meal is one of two that I consistently have made over the last 12 years, after I got my first useful wok cookbook, and it always satisfies.

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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. 2609: Beef Tenderloin Tips

The expected rains held off last Friday and I was mighty happy to get to be out in the yard, trying to make more progress on the latest tasks and projects. As noted in yesterday's blog post about the discard pile, I put in time cutting down a huge stretch of invasive reeds along the back end of the southside property line. Then, I shifted my labors to the front yard so that I could employ some revisions to my irrigation set-up, which involved digging up one of my zone lines and adding a couple of lateral lines with fresh T-junctions. Anyway: I knocked off the outside work late afternoon, showered, and headed for the kitchen. For dinner, it was some pretty darned good beef tenderloin tips on homemade mashed potatoes, with a shallot and port-wine demiglace sauce and roasted asparagus. Oh me oh my!

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Sauce adapted from "Sauce Poivrade alla Marsala or Madeira," from MoreThanGourmet.com.

Not Missing the Massive Dirt Pile

One of those long overdue projects in the yard realm of the Roediger House was getting all the excavated clay, rocks, roots, brick, concrete, and soil scooped up and hauled off. Over the last eight years, I had created an enormous and long hill of discard as I've dug out various areas of the yard, mostly for planting beds and landscaping.

This is the northwest Piedmont, after all, with plenty of deep dense red clay, and this house is old and a lot has been dug up and covered up on this downtown plot.

The rains held off enough last Wednesday that this was kind of a perfect quick afternoon job for them while other projects were having to dry out a bit. With my pile of discard having grown to about 25 feet long, 10 or 12 feet deep, and as much as 6 feet high, it took the good guys of Superior Lawn and Landscaping six loads to haul it all off, including a return couple of trips the following morning.

After they left, I set about trying to cut back all of those invasive reeds that have come over from the neighboring back yard and now I have quite a pile of those down by the curb. That carried over into Friday as well but I knew it would be quite a job!

Before a quick and brutal storm blew through at midday on Saturday, I was able to rake and hoe and smooth it down, albeit roughly, and then fertilize and plant some shade grass. It's not a particularly sexy part of the yard and for now it's still pretty rough looking. Nonetheless, I am really enjoying the feeling of progress!

Giant Salted Espresso Hot Fudge Cookies

It was rainy and cold Tuesday, an absolutely miserable weather day. When it came time to take a break from inside tasks, chores, and endeavors, the distraction I pursued was for a somewhat involved cookie recipe that had just come out from Tieghan Girard, who is responsible for the Half-Baked Harvest blog. Behold: giant salted espresso hot fudge cookies. Generally not really my thing, this kind of cookie, although it seemed interesting enough to see what happened with it.

I just made eight of 'em, and used the rest of the batter for a toffee cookie instead of this stuffed hot fudge thing she's got going on. I liked the toffee cookies better, but the hot fudge cookies did manage to pull off a pretty interesting and appealing flavor. They're just cumbersome to make and a bit of a mess to manage once you are ready to eat one.

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"Giant Salted Espresso Hot Fudge Cookies," from Tieghan Girard of Half-Baked Harvest. [Published 12 June 2020]

Meal No. 2608: Breakfast for Dinner

Being cooped up inside all day on Tuesday, while it rained constantly and never got much warmer than the upper 50s, put me in the mood for an early meal and for something comforting like breakfast. It was a chance to fry up some sausage patties and sunnyside up eggs, along with cooking a pot of creamy grits that just tasted glorious.

After all, it's been a whole month since I made this, right?

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Guidance for making the creamy grits: Luquire Family Stone Ground Grits, milled in Greenwood, SC.

An Aerial View of the Roediger House

Here's something that doesn't present itself every day: the Winston-Salem Fire Department's (relatively) new KME tractor-drawn tiller aerial ladder truck parked in front of the Roediger House. It was a day of testing fire hydrants, apparently, and the spaces in front of the house were perfect for that behemoth to slide into. You can regularly see this rascal cruising through downtown, expertly navigating the tight turns at intersections.

Here's to hoping this is the only reason it ever appears in front of the house, if not when staging for a downtown parade.

In case you were hoping for something else with the title of this blog post, I seem to have never gotten around to posting this drone shot shared with me by the guys from Way Up Media, from summer 2016, when they lived down the street:

Meal No. 2607: Supper-Sized Baked Beans

After being introduced to beefy baked beans on an early trip to Winchester, VA, when I regularly visited friends who used to live there, I have simultaneously found myself thinking they were awesome and also forgetting to think about them. Their appearances at the Roediger House have been next to nil, except for just last fall and maybe one other time way, way back in the old kitchen days. With temps having weirdly topped out in the upper 50s Monday afternoon, with mizzle and drizzle and generally greyed-over blah, the hearty bowls of this beefed-up recipe were just about ideal to the evening's mood.

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"Baked Beans," from Redith Mozelle Newman Quesenberry (1927-2019) of Carroll County, Virginia, via Cindy Coulson of Cana, VA.

Meal No. 2606: Braised Chicken over Brussels Sprouts

Years ago, when friend and colleague Donna Whitley-Smith shared a set of recipe magazines with me, I doubt she had any idea how fixated I'd become with the second recipe I tried from it: braised chicken over Brussels sprouts and shallots (the first recipe from Everyday Food that I tried was Bull's Eye Eggs in Toast). This dish makes frequent appearances at the Roediger House, mostly because it's so simple and yet ever so good. It was the ideal choice this past Sunday night.

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

The Morning Coffee Work Routine

I have many, many reasons to love the summer season, not least of which is the joy of starting most days with coffee in the pleasant mornings before the heat or humidity kick in. With a camp chair and its helpful side tray, Sumner at my feet, birds on feeders, and neighbors throwing up hands in greeting, it's a relaxing beginning of a new day and a chance either to work on tasks or just to enjoy sitting and thinking. For instance, although I left behind many of the trappings of university life when I stepped away from my faculty role at Wake Forest University, I've kept active as a reviewer for professional journals. When I'm assigned an article, it sure is nice to take it with me in those early morning hours and spend time in careful consideration of the author's submission. Unfortunately, of course, sometimes the manuscripts need a lot of work, as might be indicated by the picture above.

Meal No. 2605: Roasted Salmon

I'd let a bit of time pass since I last made the house favorite of simple spiced roasted salmon, together with a pile of roasted broccoli, which helped make it extra good to me last Friday night on a glorious June evening...before I went back to yard work until well past 9:30 pm!

The Red Wheel Barrow

XXII

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

- William Carlos Williams, 1923

Salted Caramel Skillet Brownies

After the weekend when my quarantine task jar compelled me to create three sweet concoctions in a row, I've been taking a break on the desserts front. But an otherworldly compulsion overtook me Wednesday night and in an almost out-of-body-experience manner, I looked down at myself making a batch of salted chocolate caramel skillet brownies, and then promptly ate an excessive portion of them.

And they might have been the best they've ever turned out, so there's that.

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"Salted Caramel Skillet Brownies," from Maria Lichty of the Two Peas and Their Pod blog. [Published 29 April 2013]