Portakal Suyu

Portakal suyu is the Turkish translation for fresh squeezed orange juice. During the Pat and Pam Barry family trip to Turkey in 1993, we saw portkal suyu vendors on practically every street corner. If I remember correctly, we returned from that trip with an authentic Turkish orange juicer, the kind with a huge lever, and portakal suyu became a common treat in our household.

Freddy's great aunt Edna lives in Bradenton, FL and has an orange tree right in her backyard. Last year she gave us a huge bag of oranges, perfect for juicing. Freddy went out and bought the cheapest orange juicer he could find, the plastic kind that you have to twist the orange halves on with all your might, not nearly as well engineered as the Turkish variety. After his arm felt like it was going to fall off, we had a wonderful pitcher of fresh squeezed orange juice.

This year for Christmas, my parents bought us an electric citrus juicer, which works wonderfully. Good thing, because this year, Edna gave us about 3 times the amount of oranges. We gathered up whatever containers we could find, like this 1-gallon canola oil jug below, and Freddy went to work juicing. We ended up with about 3 gallons of orange juice, and are currently storing two in the freezer. I've personally never been a big juice drinker, but with the 'food pressure' these oranges are causing, I've been enjoying a glass of portakal suyu every morning.

Wildlife comes to Barry backyard

The Kestrel is back! As I pulled into the alley yesterday, the beautiful orange and blue bird shot out of the bushes with a sparrow in its talons and landed on the grape vine. I was so excited about his return; I called Pat from the car. “Quick look out the window!” By the time I got in the house the Kestrel was perched on a telephone pole devouring his catch.

That’s three years in a roll the Kestrel has arrived in February. See, this is why I keep a bird log. Though I suppose I should expand my notes to include all backyard wildlife. This is the first winter in several years that our yard is opossumless. Ugly old Oscar has been replaced by Jaws, a rather skinny looking rabbit. Today Jaws was joined by 6 squirrels, 2 Mourning Doves, several Rock Doves (sounds much better than pigeons) a pair of Cardinals and Downy Woodpeckers not to mention a flock of Houses Finches, Sparrows, Juncos and a STARLING or two.

I haven’t seen the Cooper’s Hawk for a few days. Perhaps he’ll make an appearance tomorrow.

Duct Insulation (and Risotto)

I think it's clear that I'm the least handy of the Barry men or women. Maybe that's why I'm overly proud of last weekend's project. Sheila and I (but hey - it was mostly me!) insulated all (OK, almost all) the ductwork in our basement. It took about 16 hours total and it was very dirty work.

One of the ducts even had a gap in it that I couldn't close, but I was able to triple-wrap in insulation. There was a lot of old tin up in the floor joists that was hard to deal with and I got a nice thin painful tin cut on my fingertip -- it's like a paper cut to the power of three. Very painful, especially when later in the night it was exposed to some high-grade gourmet salt.

Here are some photos to show you how authentic I am at this rehab type of stuff. Notice the cool headlamp that I borrowed from Erin, who used it on her dogsled trip. Also notice the risotto and sausages I made for dinner Sunday night after I finished the duct work.

And yes, the house is a little warmer and the basement a little colder.

Okay, this is getting ridiculous

Four of five more inches of snow today, which made for slushy and slippery footing out on the streets. On top of the few feet of snow we've had so far, and the deep freezes, the alleys are rutted iceways that make for exciting navigation and very slow approaches to the intersections.

The photo above was taken Saturday, before the recent snow. Now the piles are more than two feet tall.

Anyway, I'm starting to think about the garden. If we could just get a couple weeks of mild weather, the snow will melt and we can get the first crop of spinach into the ground.

Pam makes stone bowl Bip Bim Bop

We had a great experience Saturday at Chicago Food Corp. (aka Joong Boo Market) on Kimball, the store that Becky's family used to go to. We've known about it for a long time but had only been to the company's other store on Pulaski across from North Park Village. What a difference!

This place was like a visit to Seoul. It was jammed with mostly Korean shoppers, had a nice little lunch counter in the back (where we had some Bip Bim Bop), was basically unheated (we ate in our coats and hats) and had all sorts of wild foods like daikon radishes (in photo) and many, many things that we had never seen before.

What we had seen were stone bowls for making Bip Bim Bop and Korean-style soups, and even though we didn't know how to use them, we bought a couple for $5.99 each and brought them home along with our fresh veggies, fried tofu pouches and Korean deli items. Pam went to work on the internet, found various YouTube Korean chef-teachers and recipes, and tonight made us very authentic Bip Bim Bop.

Here's the surprise. Pam cooked the oyster mushrooms and spinach and rice, then we layered into the cold pots those ingredients along with raw julienned carrots and zucchini, and the cold tofu. I thought, no way, that can't be right. But then we put the covered bowls straight onto the burners, put them on medium flames, and cooked them about eight minutes, until we could hear them sizzling.

Perfect! It tasted just the way it should, crispy and hot and spicy with the red sauces we stirred in, vigorously, as we've been taught by Stern Face at the Tofu House restaurant. And because of the stone bowl, it stayed warm right to the last crusty morsels. So now we know how to make Dol Sot Bip Bim Bop.