Now Norma Knits

Yogurt in the Crockpot. You Got Questions, I Got Answers

Ann asked, "What's with the powdered milk?"

It adds more body, thickness, flavor, protein and calcium. What's not to love?

Jackie asked, "What are you using for starter?"

I used Stonyfield Farms plain nonfat yogurt. It was just what David happened to buy that day, so it's what was in the refrigerator with the freshest "use by" date. I wanted to use the freshest I could, so that I'd have good strong cultures. I also had some Greek yogurt (sadly not Fage) whose brand I cannot remember. If I didn't have the more-fresh Stonyfield, I would have used that. The Stonyfield is awesome in my book because it contains so many varied cultures. From now on, though, I have my own starter -- I'll just use a bit of my previously made yogurt.  

Sandy asked, "What about sweeteners?"

One reason I want to make my own yogurt is to avoid sweeteners, though I usually do add a teeny bit of maple syrup or honey or homemade jam (rose petal jam, anyone? OMGIT'SAWESOME) to the yogurt I eat. I put a large amount of yogurt in the bowl, and put maybe a teaspoon of one of those things on the top, and sometimes have it with half a banana or a few raisins. This way, though, I can make it a TEENY bit of sweetener to suit my taste, and I can control the amount that goes on there. David always eats his plain. And there is no other crap in the yogurt like gelatin or carageenan or high-fructose corn syrup or, egads, artificial colors. Not that I would buy yogurts that have those things in them, but still.  

Sandy also asked (Sandy had LOTS of questions, and then she went ahead and made her own yogurt, heh), "How did you wrap the towel around the crock pot?"

Well, actually I didn't. I tried to, but I was all fumbly, and I was paranoid that it would catch on fire in the oven or something. I used the oven because: My house is relatively cold, and so I was worried my crock would cool down too fast for proper fermentation if I did not put it in the oven. Bread doesn't rise here anymore unless I jack up the heat especially for it, but then I don't bake bread anymore, so it's not an issue. 

But anyway, here's what I did:  I turned on the oven to preheat it to "warm."  I have no idea what temperature that is for my oven. I turned the oven off. I put the still-warm crock full of milk with culture, with the lid on, inside the now-warm oven, and turned on the light to the oven. Then I went to bed. It just so happens that I had to get up before dawn the next morning (4 a.m.) because Abigail had to catch a plane, and that was the same time I wanted to take out my yogurt (6 hours' worth of fermentation was my goal), so it all worked out well. Next time I will start my yogurt early in the morning and be done before bedtime. But anyway, when I went to get it, I felt like that oven was HOT, even with just that light bulb on all night. And I was nervous that I had killed the culture. But nope, the yogurt was perfect and I hope the cultures are still alive. I won't know for sure, I guess, until I use them for my next batch (which will probably be today or tomorrow) and see if the cultures are still alive.

What I learned: This process is super-easy and relatively foolproof. For example, the original linked post where I got the recipe and info said to leave the crock with the lid on for something like 3 hours to cool down from 180 to 120 degrees F before putting in the culture. It had already taken my milk much longer than the 2 hours 45 minutes they said it would take to heat up to 180 (I used a whole gallon of milk, instead of a half), and so I was getting impatient by that point. I left the lid off, and even stirred the hot milk with a large metal spoon to cool it down more quickly to 120 -- about a half hour or less. And I didn't use the towel around my pot. And I'm not sure what other directions I did not follow, but because it all turned out so well, I am convinced that it is quite foolproof. 

Several people asked, "So that's yogurt. What extra steps do you do to make it Greek yogurt?"

I put a coffee filter inside a mesh strainer and placed it over a bowl. I filled it up with yogurt and let the whey drain off. Voila! Thick Greek-style yogurt. 

No one asked, but I'll answer it anyway:  Do you really save enough money to make it worth the effort?

First of all, there is really no effort. Seriously, it's the easiest thing I think I've ever done in the kitchen except open a can of Diet Pepsi, and it's just soooo much better for me. 

David eats about a gallon of plain yogurt per week. I had been avoiding dairy for many years, because I have those sinus issues that dairy adversely affects. But over the last year I have been cautiously incorporating more and more dairy into my diet again, and so far I seem to be not suffering any ill effects. So as a part of that, I have recently taken a big liking to Fage Greek yogurt. OMG, I've been eating it every day for breakfast. Love it, love it, love it; can't get enough of it. I've been buying it at my health food store, thinking it wouldn't be available at regular supermarkets. Then David noticed it was available, in the medium-sized container, at our supermarket, but he exclaimed at how expensive it was. $5.99 for the medium (only two cups) container. I asked, How much have I been paying for the LARGE container at the health food store, then?  (I'm notoriously bad at checking prices. I just buy and pay. Sometimes I gasp at the checkout counter, but that doesn't stop me from rinsing and repeating the whole process the next time I go in.)  The next time I went to my health food store, I checked the price. HOLY MOTHER OF L. BULGARICUS. Ten freakin' dollars for the large container, which lasts me four days. I guess in the scope of things, since it is so healthy -- very high in protein and calcium and it is REAL FOOD, and it constitutes my breakfast, that $2.50 per breakfast isn't really all that bad.  

BUT STILL.

I bought another gallon of Vermont milk (not certified organic or anything like that, but local milk anyway) for $2.99 the other night, which is really criminally cheap for a gallon of milk, but I digress. We usually pay from 4 to 6 TO TENNNNNNNNN dollars per quart for yogurt. My next FOUR QUARTS are going to cost slightly over $3 for all four. The savings are huge. It is easy and fun, and so why not?!

PLUS, I'M SAVING THE ENVIRONMENT: (ha)

Until they literally fall apart and can't hold yogurt anymore, I'm using the old plastic yogurt containers we had in the house for storing and serving the yogurt. After they die, I will use quart glass mason jars. All I will have to throw away send to the recycling center is one plastic gallon milk jug per week. If I really want to pull out all the stops, I might start buying the Vermont milk in glass returnable bottles. That is more expensive, but it would still be an overall savings. In the meantime, though, I'm sticking with the plastic milk jugs of Vermont milk that I can buy at my local convenience store.

I did use one Mason jar for storing my yogurt this time, and I can't stop looking at the beautiful white creaminess in the Mason jar. It's so beautiful, I'm thinking of just keeping this jar in the refrigerator as a decoration so I can open the door and gaze upon its loveliness any time I want. Good Lord, I'm a cheap date.

So what are you waiting for? Join the Bloggers' Crockpot Yogurt Brigade! (As opposed to the bloggers' CRACKPOT yogurt brigade. That's something different.)

 

Still Eating From My Garden

This weekend was full of good eating from the garden. Since it's almost the end of November, I can hardly believe it. Mind you, if I had a larger garden and more storage, it would not be all that unusual to still be eating root vegetables, winter squashes, and maybe even some cabbages if special care had been taken in their storage, even this far up in Vermont. But for me, with my tiny little patch and the lazy methods of storage I employ, it is quite something.

Friday evening I made a spicy bean and kale soup. I didn't use a recipe, but just followed my instincts, using the ingredients I had on hand. I used the wonderful Dolloff beans that I grew and dried. These were my first-ever attempt at growing a dried bean, and not only that, the seeds were a gift from a fellow Northern Vermont (but on the other side of the mountain) gardener. I loved these beans and am very excited to grow more next year from the beans I saved for seed.  I only ended up with enough this year for one pot of soup, because it was my first experiment with them and I didn't give them a whole lot of space in the garden. Next year I will devote three bean towers' worth of space to them.  In the wonderful soup pot were onions and garlic and kale and canned tomatoes, all from my garden. I spiced it up with some Liquid Smoke and cayenne pepper, and because I was a bit too heavy-handed on the cayenne, I added a small splash of sherry and a small splash of half-and-half cream right at the end to cool the cayenne down a bit. 

It was delicious and different, and as I'm writing this I wish I had more, but it's all gone. And I forgot to photograph it for the blog.  

Then, because my kale is still growing and I know I will kick myself later if I don't use it while it's here, for lunch on Saturday I made a kind of kale pesto. I chopped and steamed two dino leaves (as Manise calls them) of Lacinato kale, then I put it in a blender with some walnut oil, pecorino cheese, pine nuts, and garlic, and poured the pesto over an omelet and sprinkled it with a little more cheese.  

At the risk of sounding repetitive, I'll say it was......

.....delicious.

And different.

And holy cow.  

At the risk of sounding repetitive again, I wish I had some more!

And I forgot to photograph it. 

I was too busy devouring it.

Then Saturday evening I made chicken stew.  In the stew pot were onions, garlic, parsley, and carrots -- all from the garden -- and the one bag of peas I froze from the garden this year. I added mushrooms, celery, sherry, frozen corn and some herbs, and let the whole thing simmer for a long afternoon while I did my studying and knitting. I treated myself to some miniature parsley dumplings on the top of the stew. 

Delicious.

And yes..... different.  And we feasted on that for two days. 

And we saw that It Was Good.

All the better because so much of it came from our own backyard. 

The inventory of riches from this year's garden is dwindling. There are a few carrots left -- enough for another stew or another two meals of buttered or roasted carrots, or the addition of grated carrots to several salads.  There is a gallon-size bag of beets. There are four bulbs of garlic. There is a basketful of yellow and red onions. There are about nine pints of canned tomatoes, and a quart of frozen zucchini and two quarts of frozen green beans. There are two jars of pickled beets, and about six small jars of rose petal jam, and one quart of frozen asparagus, and two big buttercup squashes. The kale is still growing, as is the parsley. The broccoli is, too, but it's producing hardly any florets -- still, a handful once in a while is better than nothing. And the Swiss chard is still limping along, as well. 

I'm thankful for what is there, and I treat it with great reverence. But if we had to survive on this, it wouldn't take us very far.  I wish there were some parsnips with those carrots and beets in the crisper bin. Next year I will plant parsnips. Please remind me.

I forgot to photograph all the bounty of the weekend's table, so I'll give you a sneak preview of something I'm knitting.  

Heh.  I took about 20 photos under the Ott Lite, but this is the only one that accurately reflects the colors. So there you have it. Quite the sneak preview, eh?
 

Caramelized Squash & Apples -- Somewhat of a Recipe

Oh. My. 

Sundays this time of year are often for experimenting in the kitchen. Yesterday I decided it was finally time to cut up a couple of the squashes I harvested a while back. I only ended up with two butternut squashes from the garden this year, and I've been rather loath to use them up, but really, how silly is that? I grow them to eat them, right? 

Oh, golden nuggets of wonder! This method really did them proud -- adding flavor interest, without being overly sweet. There really isn't much of a caramelized glaze to this. If you want that or want it sweeter than just a hint of sweet, of course, just add more brown sugar.

But oh, how nice it smells while cooking. Autumnal and spicy.

The two squashes were rather small (or at least I thought so until I cut them both up), so I used them both. I also cut up four small red onions, and four smallish apples from our local applefest a couple weeks ago, that had gone almost mushy (they go bad so fast). If I had had some cranberries on hand, I might have sprinkled a few of those in the mix. 

I coated the vegetables and fruit with sunflower seed oil from Rainville Farm which is about eight miles from here. I then added a generous sprinkling of cinnamon, a little sprinkle of kosher salt, and about a tablespoon of brown sugar -- just enough to help to bring out the naturally sweet flavors of the squash, apples and onions. I mixed it all up and put it in the oven, spread out on a large roasting pan, at 350F for just under an hour, giving them a couple of stirs along the way. 

I served this dish with local chicken breasts coated in maple-chipotle glaze. 

Holy cow, was that delicious. 

Sometimes the simplest of combos just totally rocks the house. 

Bonuses

When I got up yesterday morning, I found that one of the seven jars of tomatoes I canned the night before did not seal.  What sort of mischief is this?!  In all my years of canning, I don't think that has ever happened to me before. So anyway, that meant that that jar of tomatoes had to be eaten soon.  Oh, darn. 

At lunch time, I got to work chopping garlic and onions and green peppers, sauteed them up in olive oil, added the tomatoes, some fresh basil and some (dried) oregano and a bay leaf, and let it all simmer to thicken, while I put some frozen turkey burgers on the grill and went to the garden to pick a bit of Swiss chard and Lacinato kale.  I coarsely chopped the greens (and finely chopped part of the kale so Mr. Jefferies could have some -- he was teasing for it at that moment, that little health nut) and added them to the top of the simmering sauce.  They steamed there briefly to wilt.  Then I put the whole lot on the top of the burgers and sprinkled with a bit of Pecorino Romano.  

Lunch.

De-frickin-licious.

Later in the afternoon, after I got home from the gym, there was an email from Marcia who asked if I was doing any fall crops.  Well, I hadn't really thought about it. In the past they have not been all that successful for me.  I think the angle of the sun truly compromises the ability to grow vegetables here after September 1st.  But I did have an empty grow bed that was all ready to go -- the one that the yellow wax beans had been ripped from. And though it was raining, I was all wet from the gym anyway, and it's not like it was a cold rain. And I did have the seeds... so I went out and threw a packet of mixed lettuce seeds into the bed and gave it a good water. Despite all the rain, that bed was bone dry.  Go figure.  So we might have fresh lettuce in September -- you never know.  And wouldn't that be a bonus!

"Hey Mom......

....could you make me one of your oven omelets?"

"Sure. What would you like in it?"

"Um, whatever you have that's ready out in the garden."

"Broccoli, maybe?"

"Yummmm.  Do you have any spinach?"

"Maybe."

"Do you have any asparagus?"

"I'm not sure.  I'll look.  Would you like some cheese with it?"

"Mmmm, goat's cheese!"

Yup, I can do that.

 

 

Individual Oven Omelets

Spray small, single-serving quiche dish (or something similar) with nonstick spray, preheat oven to 375F

2 eggs, beaten

Stir in 1/2 Tablespoon of half & half cream or milk

Coarsely chop about a half cup of veggies of choice (This one has broccoli, asparagus and spinach.  Another favorite is zucchini, tomato & basil.)

2-3 tablespoons of crumbled or shredded cheese of choice (chevre, cheddar, feta, parmesan, Swiss, etc.)

Add veggies and cheese to egg mixture, stirring lightly to mix.  Pour into quiche dish.

Bake about 30 minutes.

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Eat for breakfast. 

Then, if you are incredibly lucky and have the day off and the sky looks like this for one of the first times all summer:

...drive to Stowe for browsing and dining, and then drive home through Smuggler's Notch. 

 

Homemade ice cream, not from Ben & Jerry's, but a place called I.C. Scoops in Stowe.

 

Mine was ginger-peach.

Yummmmmm.

277. Phallus Against A Stormy Sky

Honestly, when I look at the water tower, it doesn't seem that phallic to me.  But I've taken about 13 break photos of the water tower at UVM over the last few weeks. I take them on my BlackBerry, and I email them home to myself.  When I get home to find them on my computer....well, I don't know.  Is it just me?

Anywayyyyy, in case sexy water towers are not your thing, how about I show you progress photos on something that might be:

I'm making Central Park, from Knitscene Magazine Fall 2006, in Peace Fleece Sheplova Mushroom, and it's moving along quite nicely. 

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This week has been all about the yoga (Twice this week. Go me.), the green drinks* for breakfast every day, and the hot stone massage I had last night.  Things could be worse, I'll tell ya. 

* Here's a recipe...or a loose approximation of a recipe.  Each one was slightly different this week, but they've been uniformly good-tasting (To me.  Your mileage may vary if you are not open-minded about such things.) and, I think, extremely invigorating and healthful.  I'm sure they violate some sort of international breakfast rules, but I'm all into living on the edge like that.

    8 ounces of yogurt (I variously used my ginger yogurt or plain goat's milk yogurt)

    a little bit of maple syrup or honey

    a large handful of raw greens from the garden (beet greens, broccoli, kale, Swiss chard, baby bok choi)

    sometimes I added a half a banana, sometimes some pumpkin.  In the pumpkin ones, I added a generous sprinkling of cinnamon.

I put all this in a blender, pulse it for a while, then blend it 'til smooth.  Drink.  It makes me feel all devastatingly sexy and beautiful like Rene Russo in The Thomas Crown Affair, and I imagine that Pierce Brosnan is going to give it to me (the drink!  the DRINK!) in bed. 

It's the water tower.  It's getting to me.

240. Green Bean Heaven

My mom dropped by on Sunday morning as I was processing the latest peck (or it could have been a bushel or a metric tonne -- I don't know -- some quantity, anyway) of beans that I had picked.  I know she doesn't really like, nor do I, the ones that are a bit on the large side, but that's really all I had on offer at the time. Still, as I had demonstrated to myself over and over all week, MY overgrown beans are still tasty and tender and wonderful.

Anyhoo, my poor mom.  She declined to take the large beans, and said maybe she could come by for my next picking.  Her loss, but I understand.  There is nothing worse than tasteless, tough, stringy beans.  But I reiterate:  Mine are not that way!  Honest! 

When she was here, I was in the middle of making The World's Best Green Bean Casserole, which totally lives up to its name.  The idea of this would also be a concept that is slightly foreign and ridiculous to my mom. "If you've got Campbell's cream of mushroom soup in the supermarket and canned beans," she would probably wonder, "why the hell are you going to all that trouble of making your own sauce from scratch?" 

She came of age, having moved from East Armpit, Quebec, to West Groin, Vermont, in the '50s and '60s, and she had four kids in cloth diapers and a dead husband and a town-clerkship that she inherited from my father to manage, and a garden and house to take care of, I think all before she even became an American citizen -- what can I say? In her shoes, I would have been the first to say: "Bring on the frickin' Campbell's!"

Anyway, make this casserole. Though we have never been a "green bean casserole" family, I remember the time when Sandy did a poll something along the lines of "What dish do you consider essential to be on the Thanksgiving table?"  (I think it was Sandy, anyway...) and I remember it seemed that 90% of the comments were "green bean casserole!" so apparently our family is deficient in some way.  I will have to put this on the Thanksgiving table and just see what happens. I'm guessing there will be requests for the recipe from my family members.  I used spelt flour for the thickener. I did not have any of those french fried onions in my pantry, and the writer of that blog says they are mandatory, but I only used a slice of the ever-present-this-week Jewish rye bread and 1 tablespoon butter for the topping, and I have to say, her addition of a touch of sherry and my addition of the rye bread and caraway seeds.... it is so good I'd almost be willing to enter into a bake-off competition with her over this. 

Amazing.

239. The Great Cinnamon Experiment and More About Why Captioners Make Mistakes

A while back when I talked about a fungus attacking the stem of a tomato plant, Sue wrote that she had successfully used cinnamon to stop a plant fungus.  I had read this assertion before, and have read it a couple times since.  Well, the other day I decided to give it a try on my powdery mildew problem on the squash plants.  I didn't know what would happen, but I figured what the heck.  I went out and used a ginormous bottle of Costco cinnamon (next time I will go to the dollar store, because even Costco cinnamon is not cheap!) all over those giant squash leaves.  I didn't do the entire pumpkin patch, because those leaves looked too far gone, I thought. 

I noticed a few things when I did the cinnamon-sprinkling:  Well, it's a well established fact that cinnamon is a female aphrodisiac, and I gotta tell you, when sprinkling about a pound of cinnamon all around me, well.... Fact.  (Excuse me -- I'm off to Costco to buy another pound of cinnamon so I can take a bath in it...)

Okay, I'm back.  What was I saying.......?

Oh, yes.  So apart from that physical effect on me, it seemed to upset the bees that were pollinating the summer squash.  They seemed upset and maybe even disoriented by the strong scent.  I don't know if that is a lasting effect, and I hope it's not harmful, but one of the reasons we are losing our bees, I've been reading, is that the pesticides that are being used in "traditional" agriculture are making the bees somehow disoriented and unable to find their hives.  So that worried me a little bit. 

Also, this has been a rainy year here, and I am practically eaten alive by mosquitoes whenever I go out to my garden, even in the full sun.  But when I was coated with cinnamon, not one mosquito bothered me.  Or maybe I was just so blissed out by the love powder that I didn't notice if they did.  (What?  That was NOT ME with a straw up my nose doing cinnamon lines!)

I wasn't able to go to my garden the day before yesterday, but when I got home from work yesterday I went out and I found this:

Perfectly perfect, unblemished by powdery mildew, squash leaves.  All these leaves were coated with powdery mildew the other day, and it even rained the other night and much of the cinnamon washed, or was blown, off.  The leaves I missed (because at that point I needed to ....well, you know, I got distracted) still have a little bit, but otherwise we're all good.  I sprinkled more cinnamon on the untreated spots yesterday, though I didn't have enough to get everything. 

So there you have it.  My little garden cinnamon experiment. 

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And a little funnism from work:  There is a very knowledgeable presenter who is featured heavily in this multi-week section of work.  There is just a leetle problem:  He has a heavy Indian accent. 

The first day he was talking a lot about the epicardium of the heart, which he pronounced A.P. cardium.  All right, fair enough.  I caught on to that one about ten minutes into this talk after I saw "epicardium" written on the PowerPoint, and adjusted my steno writing accordingly. 

Yesterday one of the pronunciation gems was, "Al Wheeler gas exit change." 

Any guesses?

Anyone? 

Bueller?

How about "alveolar gas exchange"? 

Eek. If it weren't for all that talk about alveolar gas exchange I had in the courtroom for all those many years in DUI cases, I wouldn't have had a clue WTF he was talking about.  You should have seen the hearing students cluster around my screen, too.  And they looked at my face like, "How did you know that?!"

But just when I was smugly basking in the glow of being The Most Amazing and Intelligent Human Being on Earth, "infarct" started translating "infarmer's market."  I made "FARKT" a brief form for "farmer's market" during the Michael Pollan talk.  This is exactly why I hate brief forms -- they lurk in there in that steno dictionary, forgotten, until they come out at the most inopportune moments.  Thankfully, I have a wonderful working relationship with my medical student, we both had a great laugh about it, and I fixed it quickly on the spot.  But geesh. 

Then followed two hours of a speaker who talks no less than 7 million words a minute.  I was a puddle of quivering goo at the end of it.  My student asked me, "Which do you like better -- a slower speaker with a heavy accent, or a too-fast speaker without an accent?"

.....

I asked if I could see a different menu. 

.....

And speaking of inopportune moments, next week we have a return visit from the "I Heart Female Orgasm" people, and you may remember that I got caught out by a brief form following that event last year also, so that I went and orgasmed right in the middle of my work. I know that to some people this will not come as much of a surprise, but still, I do try to maintain appropriate decorum whenever possible.

All those who wonder why captioners make mistakes or want to quit their jobs, or why court reporters won't caption in the first place, raise your hands.

201. Please Leave a Message After the Beet

I've been slaving in the garden and the kitchen -- from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. yesterday. My back and feet ache, the beds of my nails are blackened, I'm hot, and I missed yoga. But it's all worth it for the beets. 

Here's my family pickled beets recipe:

Pickled Beets

6 lb. beets (not counting the leaves in the weight)

(Note: My aunt's original recipe, which I printed in the blog previously, said "2 lb." of beets. That just can't be right. I had much more than 2 pounds yesterday and got 7 pints. I didn't weigh the beets, but I feel like it has to be at least 6 pounds.)

------------------

Syrup:

2 c. apple cider vinegar or white vinegar
2 c. water
2 c. sugar
1 lemon, sliced thin
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon Mixed Pickling Spice (available in the spice section of your supermarket) placed in a muslin bag (the muslin bag is very important unless you want to get unpleasant crunchy things in your mouth when you're eating your pickles...)

Cook the beets.  To cook: Cut the leaves off with about 1/2 inch of stems left on. Leave the skins on.  Boil the beets 'til tender. Drain off hot water and let them cool until you can handle them.  Then take a little paring knife and cut off the tops and the bottoms. The skins will slip right off in your hand. Discard the skins. If the beets are small, leave them whole.  If they are large, slice vertically or horizontally, or cut in chunks to suit your mood. 

Put clean jars and lids in a large pot of hot water and keep hot until ready to use, but do not boil. 

Combine all syrup ingredients, bring to a boil, and boil for 5 minutes.  Add cooked, prepared beets to the syrup and simmer for 15 minutes.  Remove lemon slices and spice bag. 

Pack beets in hot pint or quart jars.  Pour hot syrup over, bringing the liquid close to the top (with about 1/4 inch headspace).  Put on lids and screw bands; tighten.  Allow to cool. 

I like to let my pickled items cure for a few weeks before serving, and pickled beets are best served chilled. 

This recipe makes about 6 pints.  I squeezed a 7th out of it because that's how many beets I had.  I had to make a little extra syrup to pour over the 7th pint. It doesn't seem like much for the amount of beets I started with and the amount of work I put into it, but next winter I will have forgotten all that. I have enough beets still growing to result in at least two more batches like this, so that by the time winter rolls around, I'll have quite a nice little store of these pretty, delicious jars, and enough to share a few as gifts. The remaining beets needed to be thinned out so they could have room to mature. I always plant many more than I think I'll need, because I practice this sequential thinning technique, using the ones I harvest as I go along.

178. Friday's Blog

It's Friday, and you know what that means, right?  It's garden-along reporting time.  So let's hear it.

Me?  I've got boatloads of pea pods on both rows of peas.  The Amish ones look close to being ready to pick, but I wish they were a bit more green -- I sense a yellowish cast to them, or maybe I'm just imagining it.  They don't seem to be the same shade of green that my nana's peas used to be.  Still, as is true with the spinach this year, I've finally gotten peas to grow after years and years of trying with no success, so it's a big step in the right direction. 

I've harvested two of the eight heads of Romaine lettuce in the large square pot and left the remaining six to get bigger.  I had a most excellent salad with it yesterday.  (with arugula, salmon, and dijon-honey vinaigrette)

The summer salad mix and red Romaine and red ruffly lettuce (I can't remember the actual name of it) are all doing well, as is the stir fry mix.

The asparagus seems to have a new lease on life!  I fed it bone meal and watered it, and then we had a nice cool spell while I was gone, I guess.  It's more productive now than it has been all spring! It sure does love that bone meal, I guess.  It took me 15 years to realize that the gardening book was wrong, all wrong, about "just put the asparagus crowns in the ground and forget about them."  Turns out, asparagus loves to eat just like every other plant on the planet. Why are the "experts" always such idiots, and why do I follow their advice even if my intuition tells me they're wrong?   

The summer squash and zucchini (second sowing after the first one succumbed to the beetles) are up and doing well.  I just couldn't feel right about the white fabric over them, so I took it off.  They don't seem to thrive that way -- they don't get enough light, and they look a bit anemic to me.  I'm too natural a girl for that, I guess.  But then, I've resorted to being quite vigilant with sprays of Pyola.  I don't like to use anything at all, even if it's supposed to be organic, but desperate times call for desperate measures.  The beetles are exhibiting signs of clinical depression now, and are confused.  I find them hanging out on things like the lettuce, which is to say their GPS is seriously malfunctioning.  There aren't very many of them left at the moment, and they don't seem to be eating or mating. Yay. If there's one thing I can't STAND, it's the squash-beetle (and Japanese beetle) orgies. Not on my watch, you bastards. 

Now they're leaving my cucumbers and squash alone, mostly.  At least I'm keeping ahead of them, I think.  I'll have to stop with the spraying once the plants flower, though, because it's also toxic to my beloved bees.   And now it's the uphill battle against the moth that will lay the eggs that will become the squash vine borers.  It's always something, I tell ya.

The pears look like they're doing great, and the black raspberries are in the red stage.  Black and ripe will be next.  I can't wait!

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I've got a Swiss chard recipe for you. 

Swiss Chard With An Italian Flair

1 large bunch Swiss chard, coarsely chopped or shredded

1 or 2 T. olive oil

2 cloves garlic, chopped

3 or 4 large fresh basil leaves, chopped

Salt & pepper

Gently heat the olive oil 'til hot but not TOO hot.  Add the garlic and stir 'til it's aromatic and starts to get tender. Careful not to burn it! Then add the basil and gently cook. 

Toss in the Swiss chard and cook 'til just tender.  Add salt & pepper to taste.

I served sliced Vermont hydroponic tomatoes on the side, and they were delicious, but I wondered how much more delicious it would be to have turned them, chopped, into the Swiss chard mixture until the tomatoes were just warm.  The flavors side by side were delicious, and I think together they would have been even more so. 

We had this with local grass-fed beef burgers and fresh local mozzarella with more fresh basil and olive oil.  Really gooooooood. 

Pinch me. Am I awake? It's not even July 4th yet, and I'm eating copious amounts of basil and Swiss chard from my garden. 

Harvest Photo of the Day

Swiss chard, Five-Color Silverbeet