Dedication

She will brave swarms of mosquitoes to make sure her tomato plants are properly cared for.

This just in ...

We're coming to the end of this year's pea crop, sad to say. It's been a very good year.

B steamed this batch and we ate them on a bed of rice with spicy sauce.

This just in ...

We have a tree in our back yard that is heavy with mulberries ... which makes it a mulberry tree, I guess. I always thought mulberries came from bushes, but ours is very unequivocally a tree.

For the past two years we have let the squirrels and birds hog the mulberries all to themselves, but this year we made up our minds to harvest some of them and make a jam or jelly or wine or something, we haven't yet decided.

Tonight's pickings amounted to a little over two pounds, much more than I thought it might be. A couple more nights of this and we'll have plenty of mulberry jelly to spread on morning toast.

Lend me your ears

Someone I know once told me that just one ear of corn grows on each stalk. Well, here's a stalk on which two ears are very clearly growing, and there might even be a third at the bottom.

Hmmmm...

Tonight's Sumptuous Repast

Buffalo sirloin, new potatoes, patty-pan squash & zucchini, all fresh off the grill and chased with a pint of home-brewed beer. Does life get any better than this? I don't think so.

It's Time for Toms

Here's one more sign I'm turning into my dad: I'm looking forward to fresh tomatoes. I haven't advanced far enough into the transformation to slice them up and eat them in chunks the way he did, but I do love me some fresh tomatoes on my sandwich, and My Darling B makes tomato soup that I would sit up and beg for.

This just in ...

My Darling B tells me (and I believe everything she tells me) that carrots were not always orange. Once upon a time most of them were white and purple, until at some time in the distant past the Dutch bred them to be orange, and that's the color most have been ever since.

But she's not into conventional veggies. B loves "heritage" varieties and plants them whenever she can get them. Here is a selection of the carrots she harvested yesterday from the garden and prepared for dinner. I have to admit I was more than a little surprised when I stuck a chunk of the white one in my mouth and it tasted just like any orange carrot.

Plump, fresh pots

We had potatoes with our dinner last Thursday, and here's where we got them: The garden plot in our back yard, so lovingly tended by My Darling B.

Potatoes grow like weeds; there's one literally growing like a weed in our compost heap. But you have to tend to them by heaping dirt or, in our case, straw up around the base of the stalk if you want to eat the potatoes.

Then, when you want to bring some in to eat, all you have to do is root around in the straw at the base of the stalk until you find a couple nice, big ones, pluck them out, as B has done in the photo, and cover the plant up with straw again so the little ones can grow up to be dinner!

Tonight's Sumptuous Repast

It's Guy Night, and I wanted to fire up the grill, so we picked up some fresh fish at the co-op on the way home. When we got home, My Darling B rooted some potatoes out of her garden and I threw them in a foil packet with plenty of butter and dill, slapped it all over a hot fire and voila! Dinner.

That's a nice cut of fish

Farm-raised sockeye salmon, fresh from the Willy Street co-op. This is fish so good I don't mess with it much, just lay a couple pats of butter on the foil, lay the fish on top of it, and let it simmer for five or six minutes on a side.

I tried cooking it as slowly as I could tonight, just to see how it would turn out. After it cooked just about all the way through, I turned it, dropped a couple sprigs of dill over the top, closed the lid on the Weber and let it roast a little while longer.

When I could poke all the way through it with my fish turner I gave it just one more minute to finish up, then brought it still-sizzling to the table.

Don't be afraid to add too much butter. Yum!

... and the secret ingredient is:

The Weber kettle grill!

This is probably the best hundred-fifty bucks we've spent all summer. There's enough grill space to let me spread the food out and control the way it's cooked, and there's plenty of room underneath to let me build a roaring fire right in the middle of it, or bank the coals for slower, indirect cooking.

Plus, it's green.

Tonight's Sumptuous Repast

Pesto pasta with tomatoes and zucchini! It's quick & easy, and it goes well with a bottle of Botham's X vin white wine.

It's making you drool, isn't it?

In the steamer

There was a time, not so long ago really, that I would have brayed with laughter if you'd suggested I might enjoy a dinner made with zucchini. But that's what we were having tonight.

All the ingredients come from the weekend farmer's market, so they're no more than a few days old.

The toms were deliciously sweet.

... and the secret ingredient is:

The pasta bowl!

Purchased for only seventy-five cents at the Saint Vincent de Paul thrift shop, this is one of those prizes that makes the meal, because presentation counts.

This just in ...

One of our next door neighbors has the most amazing raspberry patch. We've looked on it with envy for years, and were delighted when a few of the plants nearest our yard migrated over the lot line and began to grow in our garden. This summer they even produced berries for the first time. B would bring them in a cup at a time, happily snacking on them.

And then last weekend our neighbor invited us to wade into her patch and pick as many as we liked. "I'm tired of picking them," she said. So tonight B hung a basket around her neck, braved the mosquitoes for the better part of an hour, and brought this bounty back to the kitchen. She's soaking them for a while to encourage the little bugs to quit the scene. Sometime, maybe next weekend, these could become raspberry jam. Or a tart.

A weekend in the garden

B's been working happily in her garden nearly every daylight hour this weekend.

Would you like to see what she hath wrought?

Not quite as high as an elephant's eye

On the right, corn in the foreground, dill in the middle and garlic in the background.

On the left, onions in the foreground, potatoes in the background. I'm not sure what's in the middle.

You say poe tah toe

B brought in a pretty impressive crop of potatoes last year, and this year her garden gives every indication of a coming potato-y abundance once again. She's trying the straw method of hilling the plants this year, partly because that's what other gardeners swear by, but mostly because there's wasn't enough dirt in these rows to properly hill the plants.

Sun glowing through the pea pods growing along the fence line. B just loves peas! She was snacking on them on her lunch hour at her office desk when a coworker came by to ask her a question. Confronted by the sight of someone snacking on whole pea pods she staggered back and asked, "Just what are you eating?" Maybe if they came in a foil bag and were deep-fried they wouldn't seem so weird.

Finally! All the same color!

Today marked an important milestone in our never-ending project to repaint our home: The north wall of the house is all one color. None of the primer paint is visible!

The glare from the afternoon sun doesn't make it very easy to see, but the color we picked out, Cottage Red, is looking very nice now that I don't have to make a frame with my hands to block out the parts of the siding that weren't painted.