oomph.

Blueberry picking this morning. It's the end of a very dry season so the pickings are slim, only four cups in two hours. That isn't enough for jam, so I made it into the beginnings of cordial.

We found "Cordials from Your Kitchen", by Pattie Vargas and Rich Gulling, at our favorite antique shop and I have been itching to try some recipes. While I was reading the blueberry cordial recipe, I noticed the cranberry recipe on the adjoining page. Yanked out the lonesome bag of cranberries from the back of the freezer and started that as well. It will take about two months for both of them to reach drinkability.

Our massive harvest of shallots would be too much for the three of us to eat before they rot, so I have started brining about one and a half pounds of them to pickle. It is a two step brining before I can even get to the pickling part. Miss Critterpants helped me peel the cloves for the second step brine.

When I pulled the cranberries out of the freezer, I discovered the strawberries I had mashed and frozen last year to make into jam during the winter. Why not? Made strawberry jam laced with a little bit of grand marnier and finished at 11pm. Tired. Hands are a little sore and stained purple and red and I am a little sticky from all the sugar. Off to bed.

Pickles

Here is one day's worth of cucumbers from The Garden. It is about 4 pounds of mixed variety and sizes. I used the Spicy Crock pickle recipe from "Joy of Pickling" by Linda Zeidrich. It will be almost a month before the pickles are ready to eat, but if they are as good as she says they are, I'm willing to wait.

In two days, when more cukes have ripened, I am going to attempt my favorite pickle of all times. Half sour dills. I dream of pickles from the Lower East Side from barrels and from vendors whose families have made pickles for generations. They don't travel well, spilling brine onto my kind friends' luggages. This is my small attempt to get a piece of NYC back into my kitchen.

Also, I found a neglected and enormous cucumber hiding under the leaves. We ate it with dinner and it was good.

Shallots!

I clumsily planted shallots this spring. Chucked the whole head in, as opposed to separating the heads into cloves and planting the individual shallots. They grew anyway despite drought and poor planting, and look at the bounty of onion-y goodness! When they were yanked out of the ground, each head was surrounded by earthworms and sometimes even had a slug hiding at the base of the greens. Maybe with all the hot and dry, the plants kept the soil around them damp and pleasant for the critters?

I may be a real kitchen nerd and braid them into ropes and hang in the kitchen. Or maybe pickle some of them for eating with Thanksgiving turkey! Or maybe roast them and freeze for soups. What would you do with six pounds of shallots?

off to grandmother's house

Beets, cukes, pattypan squash, carrots, zucchini with the blossoms still on and baby leeks. Baby leeks may be one of the most wonderful things I have ever eaten. Use them in soup, fried with potatoes or thinly sliced in salads, delicate and amazing texture.

In a pickle

This is my first garden, and there is a big learning curve. This week has been a lesson in quantities. It turns out, 24 cucumber plants can be frighteningly prolific. Here is the haul from one day. The previous day was just as many and there seem to be more cukes forming faster than I can pick. It's early in the season and one of the four types I planted hasn't even begun to set fruit yet. These that you see are (from left to right) Calypso pickling cucumbers, General Lee slicing cukes and de Bourbonne Cornichon picklers. The Lemon cucumbers, which are the size, shape and color of lemons, haven't started up yet. The cornichon pickles are supposed to be picked when pinky sized, but grow so fast they are generally larger. The big vines are so covered in flowers you can barely see the green for all the yellow.

What is wonderful is how many bees there are flying around the garden, it makes me feel a little less panicky about bees disappearing off the face of the earth.

SoCal

Going to San Diego and the Land of Avocado between SD and LA was like walking on the moon. Mountains that were giant piles of rocks. I didn't recognise any of the flora. There were things that looked like aliums but huge and spiky like yuccas. Trees that resembled sycamores. sort of. and just the general desert-ness of the place caused a shift inside my head that I still am unable to shake. And there were lizards. And My Guy wore a tuxedo. weird wild place.

New Neighbor

Here, hiding in the broccoli and cabbages, is our newest neighbor.

Birthday Girl

Last night, Miss Critterpants planted a lollypop in her garden box. It grew beautifully. Happy birthday to My Favorite Girl!

Tile

We went to Monson to get slate tile. There is a quarry there and the slate is beautiful and costs the same as tile at the nearest "big box store". The company, Sheldon Slate, has been in business for four generations, and is in the same town as a delicious bbq joint. It was a good day.

one weekend's worth of growth

Before going away for a long weekend


After we came home. Summer has really kicked growth into high gear. We haven't had any rain for a while and that combined with 90 degree weather make the plants either grow or keel over and die. I have been doing a lot of watering, which makes me mad at the sky. Taking water from a well only to spray it all over the ground is dumb, but I have used up all of the rain water that we had caught in buckets from the roof.

Miss Critterpants has a naturally green thumb and everything she plants grows. She's like my Mom.