The Cedarburg Store is Open!

The Store! Isn’t it cute?

The store is open! Actually, it has been open.  For a month. It’s hard to believe. I’m late to the game here but it’s been a busy few weeks. We’re finally feeling settled in our new home, our new town and getting used to the changes that come with owning a small business.  Paul is working 7 days a week which is a lot, but he loves it! I’m trying to keep the kids occupied all weekend long, which is a lot too - thank goodness I love them. A lot has changed in our lives but as kids do, mine are demonstrating flexibility and resilience and have not skipped a beat. They started playground camp a few days after we moved and have made so many friends.  They are already regulars at the local pool, have favorite restaurants and love the outdoor concerts that are held every Friday night here in Cedarburg. This community has been so warm and welcoming to our family. We’re finding that Cedarburg has all of the charms of a small midwestern town AND there is so much going on here all of the time. It’s pretty amazing. I feel so lucky to be here and to be able to raise our family in a place like this.  

Ozaukee County Fair.

Summer Sounds.

Finally, after months of our lives being in flux and the contents of my kitchen being mostly in boxes, I’ve started cooking “for real” again. Paul and I decided that moving is not good for your health. Between having nothing in our kitchen cabinets for months after refinishing them to get the house ready to sell, being kicked out of our house for showings and all the trips back and forth between Cedarburg and Chicago, we’ve never eaten out more, or eaten as much junk. It feels so good to have my little hydroponic deck garden going full force and a fully stocked kitchen. I’ve also set it all up to promote efficiency.  When we started packing, I noticed that I had about a million glasses jammed in my cupboards when we only ever used the same two. The kids were always scaling my counters to get to their bowls and plates, which drove me bananas. We also had the weird “desk in kitchen” area that always ends up full of random junk - ours had drawers full of tools and hardware intermingled with tiny plastic toys, pens and pencils and old small electronics, cords, etc.. Ugh. Once we bought the new house, I vowed to be mindful about how I set up the kitchen, what I allowed in and where I put things. Now I’ve got boxes upon boxes of glassware in the basement that I will probably unload on the kids when they grow up and get their first apartments. I’m just glad they aren’t crowding my cupboards.  

Notice all my kids plates, bowls, cups and silverware on the second to the bottom shelf? And FINALLY a home for my appliances (other than my counter). If you told me 20-years ago that THIS would be improving my quality of life immensely, I would have been shocked and horrified. #momlife

Despite my rekindled interest in cooking, summer is not the season for it in my mind. In summer we like to grill, eat all of the tomatoes and peaches we can get our hands on, and eat outside as much as possible. But I have made a few things in the new kitchen.  For the fourth of July, I endeavored to make these amazing looking blueberry hand pies, but quickly figured out it was way too hot to make individual pies. What was I thinking? I ended up making a berry filling and an apple filling and turning the pies into galettes. Funny how sometimes failing is lucky.  If I hadn’t attempted the hand pies, I probably would have used a different pie crust recipe and never would have discovered how delicious the sour cream crust was. Maybe I’ll try to make hand pies again in the winter.

Half and half galette and one lonely hand pie.

I also made garlic scape pesto with local scapes, arugula, salted almonds and lemon. It’s good on everything. I like to thin it with a little pasta water and use it as pasta sauce or add a little more lemon juice and olive oil and use it as a sauce for grilled meats, fish or veggies.  It keeps well and makes the most simple meal into something a little bit special. Here’s how you make it. 

My dad told me not to buy this. He’s an avid gardener and thinks this is just a total waste of money. I don’t exactly think he’s wrong, but I disregarded his advice and got it anyway. I LOVE it. It probably does cost just as much as say, always buying your produce at Whole Foods (so, too much), but I having all of my herbs and so much produce growing on my deck is such a luxury. It’s hydroponic so I don’t have to water or anything. Amazing!!!

Ingredients

• 1 bunch garlic scapes (~10 garlic scapes)

• 1 cup arugula

• ⅓ cup roasted salted almonds

• Juice and zest of 2 small lemons or 1 large

• ½  cup olive oil

• ⅓ cup parmesan cheese

• Salt to taste

• Red pepper flakes (optional)

Don’t worry if you process and process and the pesto still looks a little fibrous. You’ll notice when you chop them how tough garlic scapes can be, even after blanching. But I promise these little fibers are soft, you don’t notice when you are eating.

Directions

• Cut scapes into 3-inch pieces. 

• Blanch garlic scapes in salted boiling water for 1-2 minutes and immediately plunge into ice water. Drain scapes.

• Add scapes, almonds, Parmesan and lemon zest to the bowl of a food processor and pulse until roughly chopped. 

• Turn food processor on and slowly pour oil, followed by lemon juice and salt while continuing to process. 

• Taste and add salt as needed.

This photo makes me sad. I wish I had more!

Rachel Allen’s White Bread and Coming Soon...the Irish Boutique of Cedarburg

After living most of my adult life in Chicago, moving to another state with four kids in tow feels like a huge change. Monumental. Talk about logistics. And paperwork. New schools. New doctors and dentists. New friends (please!). But wait, there’s more. SO MUCH MORE!

We’re opening an Irish Boutique in our new town, Cedarburg, Wisconsin!!!!

It’s exciting, and scary and because it’s the family business we already know how much work it will be. But if there’s one thing that has really hit home for us over this last year is that life is short. We’ve thought and dreamt of doing something like this, not this exact thing, but something similar, for years. I don’t think there is ever a perfect time to take a leap of faith like this, a time when you feel really “ready”.  It feels kind of like having a baby for the first time, “Here goes nothing!” Ha. At least that’s how that felt for me. But I think we are as ready as we’ll ever be and thrilled to be opening a store in our new community.  So there you have it, hopefully this is it on the change front for a while. Cross your fingers for us! 

No front teeth! But he doesn’t let that stop him.

We’ve been lucky enough to have both houses for a short period of time which has allowed us to do this move in stages, thankfully, becauseI cannot bear the idea of living in a house full of boxes. Too chaotic! And it’s funny because living like this makes you think about what you really need and what you use on an every day basis. In terms of kitchen appliances, all I have left is a mini-food processor, my toaster and my bread maker. Thank goodness I still have those. The mini-food processor for making meatballs with “invisible” vegetables in them so Isla can brag that she ate a bunch of zucchini without actually confronting one in it’s natural form, and also for making frosting because Eve’s birthday is the weekend before we move-move. The toaster, um, for toast. And the bread maker, for the bread that we put in the toaster. Specifically, plain old white bread.

I mean, what do you want when everything about your life is changing both rapidly and drastically? Comfort. Carbs. White bread. My kids LOVE white bread. We all do. It’s so fluffy and soft. It makes the house smell amazing.  I swear my son can smell it from the front porch. None of us can refuse a slice of fresh bread, still warm from the oven (or the bread maker). There’s something magical that happens when you add yeast to simple ingredients: flour, salt, sugar, butter. I could bake a loaf a day for the rest of my life and still be awestruck at the power of yeast.  

So fluffy!

As you may have guessed, I bake white bread all the time. At least a couple times a week. I normally use a very simple recipe from the cookbook that came with my hand-me-down breadmaker. I’ve memorized it and could throw it together in my sleep. Today, not in the mood to leave my comfort zone, I decided to mix it up just a little. I looked up Rachel Allen’s White Bread Recipe and saw that it was very close to the one I normally use. Feeling confident that it too would be easy to throw together and, like all of  Rachel Allen’s recipes, comforting and delicious, I got to work. And by work I mean, collecting the ingredients and putting them in the canister of my breadmaker - so not that much work at all. I halved the recipe to make just one loaf but I’m including Rachel’s full directions because I’m the only person I know who owns a breadmaker. 

White Bread 

(adapted slightly from Rachel Allen’s recipe which can be found here. )

Ingredients (for one loaf)

• 1 tsp sugar

• 7.5 fl oz warm water

• 1 tsp dried yeast

• 2 ¾ cups bread flour, plus extra for dusting

• 2 tsp kosher salt

• 2 tbsp butter, or 2 tbsp olive oil

• vegetable oil, for greasing the bowl

• 1 free-range egg, beaten (optional)

• poppy or sesame seeds, for the top of the loaf (optional)

1. Mix the sugar with about 1 oz of the warm water and yeast and let stand in a warm place for five minutes, or until frothy. If using fast-acting or instant yeast skip this step.

2. Sift the flour and salt into a large bowl. Rub in the butter and make a well in the centre. (If using olive oil instead of butter, pour the olive oil into the remaining water.) Pour in the yeast mixture and most of the remaining water (and the olive oil, if using). Mix to a loose dough, adding the remaining water if needed, plus extra if necessary. 

3. Knead for about ten minutes or until the dough is smooth and springy to the touch. (If kneading in an electric food mixer with a dough hook, five minutes is usually long enough.) Put the dough in a large oiled bowl. Cover the top tightly and place somewhere warm to rise until doubled in size. This may take up to two or even three hours.

4. Preheat the oven to 425F.

5. When the dough has more than doubled in size, knock back and knead again for 2–3 minutes. Leave to relax for ten minutes before you begin to shape the bread.

6. Shape the bread into a loaf or rolls, transfer to a baking tray and cover with a clean tea towel. Allow to rise again in a warm place for 20–30 minutes, or until the shaped dough has again doubled in size. When fully risen, it should leave a dent when you gently press the dough with your finger. 

7. Brush gently with the beaten egg and sprinkle with poppy or sesame seeds, or dust lightly with flour for a rustic-looking loaf. I did neither and just popped it in the breadmaker. 

8. Bake in the oven for 10–15 minutes for rolls, or 30–45 minutes for a loaf, depending on its size. Turn the heat down to 400F after 15 minutes for the remaining cooking time. When cooked, the bread should sound hollow when tapped on the base. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

This was amazing fresh with a generous lashing of butter. I’m sure it would make lovely toast, if it lasted that long.  I’m not going to find out this time, but I will definitely make it again. 

So there you have it. Life changes. Comfort food. And more to come about the new store soon! 

We're Back with Big Changes and Fish Fry-day

Hello there! It’s been FOREVER since I’ve been here. So much has happened. We bought a house. In another state. We are in the process of selling our home that we love so much. We are moving to the new house soon. We got VACCINATED! Because life as we know it has not really resumed, at least not the full swing of it, it’s hard to recognize all the ways things have gone back to normal. I was just reading through some posts from about a year ago, looking for the lemon pie recipe that Emmett wants to make, and those old posts kind of floored me. No one was going to school, or leaving the house for that matter, the timeline for a vaccine was totally unknown. People were hoarding toilet paper. We didn’t know if we would even have jobs through the summer. Crazy times. We have so much more stability now, which is a huge relief.

For us, the big changes coming up are self-imposed. Like so many people, we re-evaluated our lives and what we wanted out of them during the past year. We decided that a more flexible post-pandemic office schedule would allow us the freedom to move further away from downtown Chicago. Ever since we had kids, I’ve longed to live in a small town, away from the hustle and bustle of the city, the traffic, the frenetic energy that I get more than enough of at work. We knew we didn’t want to live very far from Paul’s family. So when we found a small town just outside of Milwaukee that seemed to be the perfect fit for our family, we decided to look for a house there and miraculously (really, it was, given this housing market), we found one!

Look at us! Fully vaccinated! We went to church for the first time in AGES to celebrate Emmett’s first communion. It felt so normal (I’m pretty such normal has a new meaning now, more like fantastic).

I’ve always wanted an old farmhouse and after many months of searching Paul found her. She’s beautiful, with so much character. Well, right now she’s loaded with unpacked boxes in every room but she’ll be back to her old splendor soon. I couldn’t help but notice when we took a moving truck over how different it was from last time we moved, ten years ago. Yes, there is so much more stuff. But also, it was so much more exciting and fun, the kids were running all over the house finding hiding spots and checking out every room, laughing uproariously the whole time. It really hit home that in the last several years we made all these happy little kids. We made a family. So it seems it will never be quiet in the new house the way it once was in our current one, before the babies. And there will be so much to discover in our new community. I'm really looking forward to this next chapter and feel lucky that we get to have this adventure together.

That said, two real estate transactions, an out-of-state move, a job change (I’m still at the same company but in a new role) and the ongoing global pandemic have taken up a lot of my time in the last several months. Which is why I haven’t been here. Oh, and also all of my pots and pans are in boxes at the new house though we are still living in Chicago most of the time through the end of the school year. Moving y'all. It’s a process. I’m still cooking though, growing little people demand it. And I’m really looking forward to having people over for dinner again now that we are vaccinated. It’s been so, so long.

I made batter-fried cod today because it’s Emmett’s favorite food. Even though I hate deep frying at home, I wanted to know how to make it, just in case (of what? I do not know). It was so simple, really good and not messy at all. I’m not sure why I always tell myself deep frying is messy, because it never really is in the end. I followed this recipe but instead of making sandwiches, we just ate the fish with hash browns (I’m trying to make sure we eat everything in the freezer before we move), coleslaw and tartar sauce. It was super easy and quick - perfect for a Friday night. The fish came out crunchy without being overcooked inside. I was so proud of myself.