Month: April 2009

East of New Jersey Challenge: French Toast

This is the best, best french toast ever! EVER! These little toasts are so good I wanted to call people up and invite them to my house to behold the yumminess of the toast. Instead, I will blog,
Sorta based on a Martha Stewart recipe-
3 Sub rolls- Catania Bakery
Vegetable oil- Florida Ave Warehouse area
1 cup of milk- Timor Bodega
2 eggs- Timor
smidge of sugar- FL Ave area
1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon- FL Ave
1 1/2 tablespoon of Grand Marnier- Bloomingdale Liquors
1 teaspoon of grated orange zest- Timor

Beat eggs into milk and add sugar, cinnamon, Grand Marnier, and zest and beat well. In a pan heat oil and dip slices of bread in batter, covering both sides. Fry in oil, turning over when one side has a nice brown. Do in batches.

I like to put butter and maple syrup (Timor) on them while hot. These are really out of this world.

Carter G Woodson, and a broke agency

Yesterday was a nice activity filled day. Did some gardening in the morning. In the afternoon got some dancing in at the Afro-American Civil War Memorial as part of DCLX. Lastly there was a meetup with Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and some other local bloggers. My hearing is bad because of the background noise at the coffee shop I didn’t make out all that she said.
A topic of interest was the National Park Service and parks. Park-parks, with open space and stuff. However I asked about the NPS and the Carter G. Woodson house on 9th St. The short answer was the NPS did well enough to get the money to buy the Woodson house and the adjoining houses. They don’t have any money to do anything else.

Small Spaces

When looking at the house at 1708 4th Street NW, which has an open house this weekend, I remarked how small space design requires talent. That idea was strenthened when I was reading the comments on the Tumbleweed Tiny House website when someone wondered why something so small could cost so much to design. An answer was that there was not as much wiggle room with measurements. You have to take in acccount how things fit together.
I love Apartment Therapy’s annual Small Cool Contests. I am really digging the Teeny-tiny (0-300 sf), Tiny (300-600sf), and Little (600-900sf) categories. The submissions in this contest prove you can live big in a small space, and the good life can be lived in less than 1,000 sf. Too bad the guy who designed the house on 4th Street didn’t study sites like AT.

More Tomato Posting

I got an email from a marketing company and after some light investigation figured it was worth passing on to y’all.

For the first time in its more-than-100-year history, Campbell Soup Company is making available to the American public specially cultivated seeds used to grow tomatoes for its iconic Campbell’s® Tomato soup. The effort is part of Campbell’s goal to grow more than one billion tomatoes across the country and to support American agriculture. Campbell also is teaming up with the National FFA Organization and Urban Farming Inc., each of which will use the special seeds to help create five community gardens in urban communities.
To learn more about this please to go http://akamediainc.com/SMNR/tomatoseed.html

Campbell’s on their own site appears to be giving away seed with the purchase of soup. At “Help Grow Your Soup” you can click and donate seeds to their project and get your own seeds.
I already bought all the tomato seeds I’m going to use this year. I tried a new to me seed company “Totally Tomatoes” to get indeterminate and determinate tomatoes. Indeterminate just go all over, determinate tomatoes like the balcony hybrids, are a bit more bush like. Totally Tomato had more of a choice with the determinants.

Other Seed Sources of Interest:
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange– Virginia based and mid-Atlantic focused.
Pinetree Garden Seeds– Smaller packets of seeds. Seems a bit cheaper than some other suppliers.
Cooks Garden– My personal gardening rule is if I can’t eat it, I don’t need it. This is a seed supplier who factors in taste.
Nichol’s Garden Nursery– She wrote the book on container gardening and I bought seeds from her site.

A tax category I’d like to see

I was walking by three different vacant lots on my way to work. One is used as a parking lot occasionally, but for most days of the month lies vacant. The other lots are fenced in, and there are a few other lots I know of along alternative routes to the metro, also fenced in.
Anyway, I was thinking, it would be great if these lots were community gardens. About half of part of the lots get full sun. Even better a couple have southern exposure. A way to encourage this could be a reduced property tax rate for owners who lease green space to gardeners. In the city center, where there are more apartments, condos and townhomes with non-existent yards there is a demand for greenspace. If there was an environment that encouraged this sort of land use, it would be great.

Death and Taxes

I was going to write up properties getting the Homestead or Senior Citizen Homestead deduction with owners names that are listed in the Social Security Death Index, but that was too much work. I didn’t get past 3 northern Truxton block before I got bored.
Instead I’m going to complain about the Senior Citizen Homestead deduction, two dead people and their real estate taxes. I don’t get it. One dead person, who has been dead for over 5 years, but who has been dutifully paying their real estate taxes is charged less than my aunt (alive) receiving the same deduction. Both properties have the same square footage, the dead person’s house doesn’t have AC. Auntie does have AC, one less bedroom and has a bigger yard. However, according to the City, Auntie’s house is worth $100K less than the dead person and the difference in taxable assessment is $80K. Even though being dead is worse, Auntie is blind and suffering from dementia.
I said two dead people, one is our dead tax payer. The other is my late Uncle R, husband to blind Auntie. They are pictured here back when they were young. Sometime in the 1950s they bought a house in SE DC, and lived there. In the 1990s Uncle R died. Currently Auntie is listed as the owner and it is a logical assumption that previously the house was in Uncle R.’s name, if not both their names. Did that transfer or change in name bump up the taxable amount? Even thought my aunt has been living in the house for nearly 1/2 a century? As far as I can tell dead person in Truxton was there from the 1940s or sometime after the 1930 census.
I can’t see why my demented blind widowed aunt pays more in real estate taxes than a dead person for a house worth less.

Beggar at the door

This weekend I attended a service at a local church with friends and as we were exiting a woman AfAm about 5’3″ short hair and 250ish lbs was begging us for money at the steps. She said she was hungry and wanted to get something to eat. I said I didn’t have any money (totally true) but stood for a moment trying to catalog what in central Shaw served food to the homeless on a weekend night. She asked again, and I told her I was trying to figure out what services could help her because I didn’t have any money, but I had information. She didn’t want that, she said those places were closed. Why the frak am I supposed give to the Can’t Get My S* Together Fund?
In the Shaw neighborhood (NCPC borders) there are a dozen non-profits and churches that have some sort of outreach or feeding program for the homeless that I can think of. One church may do a free breakfast once or a few times a week, a non-profit a daily dinner, and the like. Then along the southern borders of Shaw, in the more downtown areas of town are the food van stops by the Salvation Army’s Grate Patrol and the odd church.
When my group had walked on down the street, one member of our party mentioned that he had already given her money at the beginning of the service. And even after he handed her a few bucks she was still bugging him. Just then I remembered I’d seen her before begging at that church, on several other occasions. It’s the perfect place to throw on the guilt trip.
Also this weekend I spotted a fellow on the 1500 block of New Jersey with a sign and a basket. I was traveling to the Giant, had forgotten my wallet, and traveled back along that same route so I noticed him. When there was someone stopped at the light he’d trundle over and ask for money. I couldn’t read the sign as he must have used a fine point marker.
Lastly, at my own door a woman, slightly frazzled knocked on my door about over a month ago. I’d never laid eyes on her before. She had some story that her aunt or niece died and a whole bunch of them (whomever they are) were trying to get up to somewhere in PG County and she needed a few dollars. A few days earlier I found a Smarttrip card laying on the sidewalk, okay in the gutter. I pick stuff up. It had 2 or 3 dollars on it when I checked. So I reached in my coat pocket and gave it to her. I try not to give money, but totally okay with giving away stuff, food, found objects.
Do I believe the story about the dead relative? No. Do I believe the beggar at church door? Answer- insert cruel fat joke here. Not really.
It seems that dealing with people begging you for something is part of living and working in the city. Be it people on the street or social service organizations that keep sending you mailers for more money than what you’re already donating them.

Gentrification re: Loaded

Frozen Tropics mentioned it first. Sankofa Video and Books up on Georgia Avenue will be ‘exploring’ the issue of gentrification this week. According to them:

The panel discussions will allow the community to thoroughly examine the implications of gentrification, gentrification and racism, the institutionalized gentrification, the economic implication of gentrification, the implication of culture gentrification, the appropriation of African American cultural icons for the benefits of the ‘gentrifiers’, and the following questions will be addressed:

Have they come to live with us or displace us?
Who owns the planet?
Gentrification: Latest stage of colonial power – or – it’s relationship to colonialism?

I see a bunch of loaded questions and statements. Yes, the word gentrification is loaded, but you can additionally pack it with more explosives and how you pair it with other loaded statements.
I’m going to take a wild guess and say the answer to question one will be displacement. Maybe the idea of living with people you’re implying are colonial oppressors may be batted around for a minute. But seriously, colonialist oppressor is not a nice title and you damage your radical whatever cred by coddling ‘those people’. Does one become a colonial oppresser by virtue of simply living east of 16th St NW? Is this an opportunity to rail against the Fair Housing Act, which allows people to legally live wherever the heck they want.
Here’s a question, is the ideal located in places in DC (parts of NE & SE) where gentrification is not occurring and probably will never even bubble slightly in the next decade or two?

Frost Free gardening

April 10th was supposed to be the last frost date for Spring, so I got out this weekend and played in dirt.
Inside the house I’ve been growing tomatoes from seed in the window. I took a few of the balcony hybrids and replanted them in larger pots. I also have some not-exactly red type tomato seedlings growing in the window as well as I love the odd varieties, the yellows, the green stripes, the orangish and whathaveyou.
Last year, some heirloom varieties we (we being me and neighbor B) grew were duds, producing nothing but lots of vines. I’m going to blame the light, or lack of it, in the rear yard. The front yard produced a bunch of rudely shaped San Marizano (?) plum tomatoes suffering from mild blossom rot. There were tons, and tons of cherry tomatoes that were great for snacking and I’ll do them again this year. The Russian heirloom variety tomato was a late season type that produced these huge monster tomatoes that most of the time I did not let ripen on the vine because one part would look 1/2 way to rotting. Having them ripen in a sunny window (to fight whatever mold-like thing growing on one side) was my best bet.
Besides tomatoes I planted some bean seeds. I’m doing the french string bean thing again. I really enjoyed similar beans I had grown before and a meal at Corduroy featuring buttery string beans reminded me of how great this vegetable is.