Garden globe

In case anyone was curious about the results of my terrarium project...


I now have little gardens hanging in my kitchen window.

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Geeking out, BRB

I've spent the morning at various garden centers, craft shops and hardware stores collecting tiny succulent plants, moss, activated charcoal and river rocks. I'm making a hanging terrarium today in the hopes that my ceaseless obsession with miniature gardens under glass abates for at least a short while.

I doubt it though because look at how absolutely cool these plants are!


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Spring.

Such a tease.




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Yes, we canned!

I've always said I wouldn't can anything, ever. I would freeze food, I would dehydrate, but I would never can. It seemed like such a chore - a whole day spent juggling hot glass in a steaming kitchen with no guarantee that you're not just preserving the botulism for a day when your loved one decides they want some homegrown salsa.

That was before we decided to grow tomatillos. The three small plants we bought at the farmer's market in June completely took over a section of our garden. We ate them all summer, a few at a time, as they ripened, but then September came and we were overrun with the little green fruits. Bowls of them filled our refrigerator and I made a halfhearted attempt to blanch and freeze a batch, which promptly turned into a unappetizing chartreuse mush.

Fine, I thought with a sigh. Fine. I'll can some of my famous salsa. How hard can it be? I bought jars and accessories, I researched recipes and instructions, I was lucky to have Mike's help...
But that salsa? Sealed up tight & ready for chips.

Today's harvest

...and eggplants, hanging from their plant like glossy plump amethysts, which aren't quite ready for my sauté pan.

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Cuke madness

The smell of cucumber always reminds me summer - probably because everyone who gardens ends up with a surplus. After a few weeks of salads and pawning them off on the neighbors, you start searching for exciting new recipes, like cucumber popsicles and my mom's spicy Thai pickles, inspired by a lovely relish served at one of our favorite restaurants.



Ellen's Thai pickle
1/2 c. rice wine vinegar
1/4 boiling water
1tsp. salt
1/2 c. finely chopped red onion
3 Tbsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. dried red chile flakes
4 medium-sized cucumbers, sliced thin
Dash garlic powder

Mix the chile flakes, sugar, garlic powder and salt with the hot water and add to vinegar. Pour over cucumbers and onions and refrigerate overnight. Enjoy!

P.s. Mom's been talking about starting a recipe blog. I think it'd be great, don't you?

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Gosh.

I really hope that this is a shiitake.


No matter. It's going in my omelette anyway.

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UPDATE: delicious!! sliced and sauteed in bacon grease, and added to eggs with parsley and chives from the garden and grated Parmesan and asiago.

'shroom sprout!

After a week's worth of waiting and hoping, the scary looking log on my kitchen counter finally did something...


See it? Here's a closer look...


That, folks, is a baby shiitake mushroom. We noticed the bud yesterday and decided it was time to finish the instructions. When you receive the log, you have to rinse it off under cold water, put it in a plastic bag with some ventilation and then...wait. A week to 12 days later, buds are supposed to appear. When this happens, you submerge the log in icy cold water to "shock" the other mushrooms into growing. Then you put it it on a damp sponge, tent it with perforated plastic, keep it out of direct sunlight and wait some more...

Wakey wakey, little mushrooms! I need to fry you up with some bacon grease and onions!

Uh oh.

Remember our mystery plant? Well, I think we might be growing melons.


Luckily, you can get them to go vertical.

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'shrooms

Back in March, one of my Facebook friends sent me a link to this video:



Naturally, it was something of a revelation. Mushroom umami! Pseudobacon! I've been wanting to try this technique ever since, but the price of shiitakes at the grocery store was a bit prohibitive.

Then I realized, hey! I could grow my own mushrooms, right? I was up for a little experiment. So off I went aGoogle-ing to research shiitake kits and discovered that mushrooms grown on logs are far superior in taste to those grown on those sawdust blocks. A bit more hunting and I found this place. I ordered myself a kit, envisioning a cute little log I could keep on my countertop in a porcelain saucer while I patiently waited for the little shroomies to sprout. Instead I got this...

It looks like a turd.

I'll keep you updated.

my distraction

I could spend all day blogging about how horrible the news is, our failure of a president, or guns and shooting but really? I look out the window of my back porch, see this

and it's all over. All I want to do is get outside, get my hands dirty, and feel the sun on my neck. We've got our little garden planted - a few tomatoes (even a delightfully odd heirloom purple), lots of peppers (hot and not), and the usual wide variety of herbs. I put in a few sweet peas, some tomatillos for my salsa, and what I call the great eggplant experiment. I've never attempted to grow them before but the varieties, which produce a black and a white fruit, were called Hansel and Gretel - how could I resist?

We also have a squash type thing growing. Or it could be a cucumber. Or maybe even pumpkin! The seed snuck in from the compost pile and found a happy home in amongst the jalapenos. It's like the mystery grab bag plant - we're excited to see what we get.

I've planted a few flowers, too, just for the pretty.

Check out the planter I made out of a section of old hollow tree trunk. (It's the best kind of clever & lovely - free.)

And just for fun, here's a bonus photo of two naughty boy tabbies surveying their domain from the bay window.
(all photos can be enlarged by clicking on them)

the world is holding its breath

sweet & hot

A few weekends ago, Mike and I spied some tomatillos at the farmer's market in downtown Willoughby. I thought they'd be a good chance at a culinary adventure and asked the girl selling them for a recipe. She instructed me to boil them until tender ("but don't let them pop!") and then blend them with chiles, onions, garlic and cilantro for a green salsa.

Boil them? Really?

I've always believed that boiling ruins the flavor and nutritional value most vegetables. Take, for instance, beets - once you boil them long enough to make them palatable you've got squidgy, bitter mush that no one wants to eat anyway. The solution is roasting. Slow roast beets with some extra virgin olive oil, rosemary, and balsamic vinegar, giving the natural sugars a chance to carmelize, and you'll be shocked at how good they are.

So I searched the internet for evidence for tomatillo roasting, found it in a recipe by Rick Bayless and set about making a salsa of my very own. (I wish I had taken photos of the entire process, but alas...)

I husked and washed about 18 little tomatillos and put them under the broiler until they were starting to get blackened and soft, about 5-8 minutes. I then turned the oven down to 450°F and added some chopped vidalia onion, garlic and chiles (2 jalapeños and 1 serrano, right from my own garden) to the pan to roast alongside the tomatillos which had been transferred to a foil packet to save the juices.

When everything was all toasty brown and tender, I added some cilantro and dumped the whole mess into a blender. A few quick presses of a button resulted in this...


It's so good, I can't begin to tell you. Sweet, hot, a little green and tangy...and the texture, after being chilled, of a lovely marmalade. Nothing I can say would do it justice, so you'll just have to find some tomatillos and make your own.

cleaning up

In an attempt to make the most of my (somewhat pathetic) garden this year, I've been saving as much of everything I can manage to find out there among the weeds. Into our little Ronco dehydrator go hot peppers, tomatoes, herbs - my entire world smells like sage. In fact, I just picked so much of it, I can now taste it in my mouth - the essential oils that make the stems and leaves so sticky have managed to work their way into my bloodstream. The parsley is next, and then perhaps the lemon verbena. I pureed the leftover basil leaves with some extra virgin olive oil, put it in mini muffin tins to freeze and transferred them to a freezer bag. Chives are fairly resilient and will winter over - in the past I've been able to dig through the snow to find some still fresh and green, ready for a steaming, buttery, baked potato.

There's always this hopefulness at the end of the year - a wish for just one more sunny day that will grant us that last ripe tomato before the first snowfall.

from the garden...

A red and yellow striped tomato with balsamic vinegar and fresh basil. Poblano peppers grilled and stuffed with cheese. A steaming cup of lemon verbena and peppermint tea, a single chamomile flower bobbing cheerfully on its surface. The fresh snap of the first green bean.
Magic.

stuck.

You ever go to the grocery store and get completely stymied in the cereal aisle? You stand at one end, with the rest of the shelves stretching out into what seems a sugary carbohydrate infinity, trying to decide. You notice that even the simple, wholesome Cheerio has devolved in to limitless variations: honey nut, banana nut, multigrain, berry burst, yogurt burst, apple, fruity, even cheerios crunch and then there's the flakes (bran or corn?)...and the cocoa (puffs or pebbles?)...and the fiber (clusters or buds?) and...it's overwhelming.

This is the exact feeling I've been having lately. I'm stuck. The Great Ammo Crisis of 2009 has put a damper on my shooting, the library is like an unchanging Twilight Zone of putting up with other people's crap for a laughable wage, and despite my certifiable news junkie status, everything just seems so miserable that I can hardly comment. I could probably write an hourly blog post on the upcoming and ongoing horrors of the current administration and the Democrat-controlled Senate (which now includes Stuart F'ing Smalley, for heaven's sake) but others do that far better than I could and besides, my head would probably explode in a fit of rage anyway.

So I tend to sigh a lot, look out the window at the beautiful golden days of yet another short Ohio summer and decide to read a book or go play in the garden instead.

The herbs are coming along nicely.

teamwork

(I don't remember if I've already posted this video, but if I have, watch it again - it's good for you. It will make you smile, guaranteed.)

I hope everyone is having a lovely Saturday. We have sunshine and blue skies so I'm outside with Mike - the salsa garden is coming along nicely, as are the freckles. I'm sipping some lemonade at the moment, cooling off and tracking dirt through the house. But, hey, it's my house and my dirt so it's good.

Now back to work - those hot peppers won't plant themselves!

here comes the sun

Northeast Ohio has a history of strange springtimes - either we get a week of perfectly mild days which leads directly into the full heat of summer or a seemingly endless string of rainy days. This year has been cool and wet, which leads to a great rush of gardening activity when the weather breaks and the sun comes out from behind the clouds. By the time that day arrives, the garden is overgrown with weeds and the perennials are already up - makes for an amusing game of "Did I plant that or...?" The labels are usually long lost and by the time you yank the bee balm out of the soil it's too late...

Anyway, yesterday was one of those days - I pulled weeds, planted nasturtium and chamomile seeds and had a little celebration with Myra. It was her first day outside since last year.

sweet & spicy

our first peppers of the season

How my garden does grow

"...Christopher Robin gave me a mastershalum seed, and I planted it, and I'm going to have mastershalums all over the front door."

"I thought they were called nasturtiums," said Piglet
timidly, as he went on jumping.

"No," said Pooh. "Not these. These are called mastershalums."

- A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

The nasturtiums were started from seed and have just begun to bloom this week. Beautiful and delicious, they're most likely doomed from the start. I planted them in all hopefulness and have been cheering them on since they poked their tender green heads out of the soil but charmed as I am by the idea of spicy little edible flowers, they're irresistible to insects. I'll taste my first bright blossom tonight.

I'm a lazy gardener. I like to dig little holes, play in the dirt a while and then leave the plants to fight it out with the weeds. Every year, the herbs end up going to seed long before it's time because I love to see things grow into their wildness. The dill, taller than me now, has bright green starburst seedheads that nod in the breeze and the basil's deep glossy leaves whisper promises of fresh pesto.

Summer passes so quickly and I'm always left yearning for flavor.