Garden Journal #10

Edition Peppers! Some known as chilis, chiles, capsicums. Spicy peppers. Red peppers. Everyone seems to call them something different.

Our peppers produced all summer and into the fall. We basically planted one box with a huge assortment and we got a little of everything. Look at the spread we picked last week and then a few examples of each kind:

Anaheim: we only had one plant and it barely produced.

Mystery peppers: we have no idea what they are but they have NO SPICE!

Jalapeños: they just keep coming. They start green and turn red on the bush.

Cayenne: we think....or Mexican chilis....not sure....either way, plenty of spice for dried seasoning, whole or crushed.

Bell: did not produce very well, before they got big they turned dark and had thin flesh.

Bananas: surprising good producers but we had little use for them.

Garden Journal #8

Late summer in the garden has been a little slow compared to some of the busy weeks in midsummer. I will try to post some pics from back when the produce was really cranking.

Learning: I never would have thought that okra plants would grow 5 feet tall. They started out as the tiniest little things and it took until the heat came on for them to really start growing. They ended up being quite woody and had a very well developed root structure.

Confusion: I have no idea what kind of peppers these are. They have absolutely no heat to them but they don't look like any of the others we grew. It was a mix called "salsa peppers" so who know what they are. Do you know?

Fall Reprise: The idea of a fall garden sounds neat but it terrifies me. I went a head and took a leap of faith and emptied out the packet of radish seeds leftover from the spring. They popped right up and continue to grow. (I was able to use some of my second batch of compost in the soil!)

An Old Enemy Returns: The rabbit(s) that live(s) under the deck previously feasted on the soya beans though we got a good crop out of them. Now the food of choice is a fall batch of Kyle's "granny" bean and my very late experiment of sweet potatoes. I worked in some of the second batch of compost into this late planting.

Fall Surprise: We pulled our onions after heavy rains when the tops started looking really bad. One box had some onions that a friend planted and they never got as big as the others, but they just kept growing. The tops had rotted off and I decided to pull whatever remained. Most small, but a few bulbed out. I was not expecting them at all!

Cafetière à piston

Making coffee shouldn't take a recipe or directions, right? Then again millions of people pay $4 per cup every day at coffee shops around the world. Granted, much of that is espresso and it helps to have a nice machine and all kinds of sweet additions handy. People buy the plain drip coffee though as well...I know I do!

On Kyle's last trip to IKEA he brought me an awesome surprise: a french press. It was such a thoughtful surprise because he knows I like coffee and hate dragging out a coffee pot to make just a cup or two. It is a great addition to our kitchen.


It got put into a cupboard and was not used until I came back from my trip to Richmond to see my friend Gary. He swears by his french press and since I had not used one before I asked him to teach me. It's not hard, but not being familiar with one is just enough for someone like me to avoid it. So now I pass on the knowledge.

1. One tablespoon regular ground coffee per 6 ounces cup of water. (A "cup" of coffee is 6 fluid ounces, not 8.) Straight into the bottom of the beaker.



2. Pour in BOILING water. A coffee pot does not have the right temperature water going over the grounds. This is important for best flavor.



3. Place plunger on beaker (do not push down yet) and allow to steep for a few minutes (no more than 4 or 5 minutes).

4. Slowly push plunger down to trap grounds in the bottom of the beaker.

5. Pour and enjoy! (If you brewed more than a cup, be sure to pour coffee into a different container. If it sits too long with the grounds it will get bitter)

More info from Wikipedia:

Because the coffee grounds remain in direct contact with the brewing water and the grounds are filtered from the water via a mesh instead of a paper filter, coffee brewed with the French press captures more of the coffee's flavour and essential oils, which would become trapped in a traditional drip brew machine's paper filters. French pressed coffee is usually stronger and thicker and has more sediment than drip-brewed coffee. Because the used grounds remain in the drink after brewing, French pressed coffee left to stand can become bitter. For a 1⁄2-litre (0.11 imp gal; 0.13 US gal) French press the contents are considered spoiled after around 20 minutes.

Making Granola

I had been wanting to try homemade granola for awhile. I finally got some inspiration after reading this blog recipe, but I settled on Alton Brown's recipe instead. I will try the other recipe next I guess. Here is Alton Brown's:

Ingredients
3 cups rolled oats
1 cup slivered almonds
1 cup cashews
3/4 cup shredded sweet coconut
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons dark brown
sugar
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons maple syrup
1/4 cup vegetable oil
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup raisins
Directions
Preheat oven to 250 degrees F.
In a large bowl, combine the oats, nuts, coconut, and brown sugar.
In a separate bowl, combine maple syrup, oil, and salt. Combine both mixtures and pour onto 2 sheet pans. Cook for 1 hour and 15 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes to achieve an even color.
Remove from oven and transfer into a large bowl. Add raisins and mix until evenly distributed.

Yes, I didn't follow the recipe....I doubled the batch and did one cup raisins, 1/2 cup sultanas (golden raisins), and 1/2 cup cranberries. Just for a little variety. Don't let the "rolled oats" fool you...they are just "old-fashioned oats". NOT INSTANT OR QUICK COOKING OATS. This is what it looked like:





It was a little salty, probably from the cashews, but we devoured it. Warning: with oil, nuts, and coconut, granola is not a low-fat food. It certainly has great fiber and lots of micronutrients in all the good stuff that goes into it, but this should be considered a fat (with some fiber).

Chili Mac

So...chili-mac. Someone told me that every knows how to make this. I disagree....if everyone knows how to make this, why don't more people cook it? It seems everyone has some bad memory of too much of this as a kid, but there is probably a reason: it's easy, and if you try you can make it pretty healthy as well. My chili-mac is never quite the same, but I am committed to two absolute things: add vegetables and spice.

Sometimes the base of my recipe is a box of store brand macaroni and cheese. Sometimes its dry noodles. Either way, I always add Velveeta as well. I know it isn't real cheese, but this is one of only two dishes I ever eat Velveeta in. Give me a break.

This time, I had whole wheat shells to start with. The homegrown contribution to this meal was tomatos, garlic, bell pepper, jalapeno, and cayenne. I am kicking myself for not having grown more onions! So this is what the ingredients looked like:




Peppers (of all sorts) and garlic started off in just a bit of olive oil.

Then fresh tomoatos.

This is where my method probably breaks from others': I add the chili and cheese to the vegetables. (yes, I know, it looks like a typical chili cheese dip)

If you can't cook noodles, you have a problem.

Then it all comes together for a hearty meal. I recommend more onions and bell pepper, but I was short on these. If you eat it with a nice salad and keep the portion small, it really is a nice, healthy meal.

Garden Journal #6

Okay, prepare your self for pictures and short explanations. Nothing amazing, but do skip down to the bottom and read about my garlic! I am so proud!

Normal view of our counter
This summer there has always been random vegetables just sitting on the counter.

Okra
I am still amazed by the flowers. And they have been producing very steadily. Did you know theses plants grow 4 to 4 ft tall? I made gumbo..........mmmm.

Eggplants
We had quite a bit of difficulty with these. The started off very slow and were totally eaten up by these very small bugs that looked like fleas or something. We finally powdered them with a pesticide and they finally started to grow. The eggplant fruits looked beautiful, though small. That is what they looked like a week ago. After some heat they have started to wilt. They have lost their firmness and shine. We are trying to salvage them with heavy watering. Perhaps they will just end up as baba ghanoush.



Cayenne Peppers
These have been producing prolifically, but we have done NOTHING with them. Some are rotting on the plant and a few have rotted inside the kitchen. I used a few in a few dishes, but we have yet to really dry them. So I gave a bunch to my friend Fillan. He is better about things like this. He will dry them and crush them I am sure. We may actually give them ALL to him and let him process them and get some back from him. It will be nice to have dry flakes for all kinds of cooking.

Garlic
Okay, this is something I am truly proud of. Though they didn't get a full 220 growing season, I pulled the garlic up last week. The tops were turning brown and the necks had gone soft. They are small, but they are as done as they will get. Tried some the other day and it tasted just fine....in fact it smelled great! In searching online how to braid garlic, I discovered the BEST blog about gardening and cooking. Thy Hand Hath Provided is a blog written by a early 30's Mennonite (though modern) mom. They grow and preserve almost all their vegetables and cook so much amazing food. I am very very jealous. Strange for me to feeling such long distance, anonymous friendship with a conservative Mennonite family, but I devour her blog. Thanks for the lesson on braiding garlic, though mine did not turn out perfectly.

Garden Journal #5

That's right people...drool...experience envy...hate me if you want.....but that is from my garden! I have been away from it for nearly two weeks and it's killing me that I can't see and pick and eat it. Kyle actually harvested that haul and posted it on Facebook. He managed to completely leave out my participation in the garden....out of sight out of mind I guess. Oh well.

Onions, tomatoes, squash, soy beans, jalapeños, banana peppers, pears, fennel, cucumbers zucchini, tomatillos. I wanted the onions to get bigger, but Kyle tells me that a week of rain while I was gone really challenged them. If only all that rain would have come in June when we had to water almost every day! For now I am not eating the fruits of our little piece of earth......if Kyle is letting this stuff rot I will kill him. At minimum he should be giving this stuff away.

Garden Journal #4

It only makes sense that these garden journals speed up in mid-summer. It's when things start getting ready for harvest and eating. I suppose I could have written heavily about all the hard work of bed preparation and seeding, but those things just don't seem as exciting. Plus I didn't have my nifty phone with camera capabilities back then!

So this the Potato Journal. Potatoes were a complete experiment/accident for me. I had a few grow up in my compost pile and I decided to give it a go. They were put in pretty late if I understand what I have read about potatoes. They should have been much further along before the heat of summer. I will remember that for next year.

I read about mounding potatoes, so I knew what to do. I decided to start them low in one of the boxes and mound up as they grew. I didn't think about the fact that I was planting them in the worst clay soil at the bottom of the bed. They grew tops at first and I hilled up some new good soil around them, but then they seemed to quit. The summer heat hit and I guess they were just done. The tops slowly died off and I finally got impatient and pulled them this morning. This is what I got:

I am a little disappointed after my great success with the green beans. As an experiment and accident though, I should be happy. I have a few small potatoes that I coaxed from the earth. I will use what I have learned for next year: start earlier, have nice rich, fluffy soil below them and more to mound with, and have patience.

Garden Journal #3

I guess all the garden really needed was the heat to turn on...and turn on it did! Though I had some faith that these things work themselves out, I was skeptical that my yard was going to produce something worth eating. Some things have not worked out the way we envisioned, but other things have surprised us.

Green beans are surprising me right now. Kyle "let" me have a 12 foot row in the yard. He doesn't care for green beans, but I think they are the perfect reason to garden. I will eat green beans out of a can, but nothing beats the fresh ones. They are pricey at the farmer's market, so it makes sense to grow them yourself. Green beans are BUSH beans, not pole beans. And no, they are not string beans...breeders bred the strings out years ago. We turned over a 1 foot by 12 foot strip of yard and worked in a bag and a half of Scots garden soil amendment. That's it. Stuck the beans in the ground. Watered. That's it. We didn't even weed the row, as the beans grew faster than anything could have tried to get into the good soil.

Result?

That's the first picking. 14oz and pretty good looking. The second picking had ever better looking beans and was 3lbs. The next was 2lbs and was a little rougher looking. There is probably one more good picking out there. If I had known how easy it was going to be, I would have planted three times as many and provided everyone I know with beans. I did give some to my mother...after all, it was her mother that was big on growing beans and making great dinners out of them. Speaking of dinner:


This is why God created the green bean. Green beans and potatoes. I cannot think of a better way to eat green beans. This was always one of my mothers's best dishes and my grandmother's as well. It is pretty simple. Unlike my girl Misty with her detailed recipes over at Popcorn on a Skillet, I only give rough estimates of what went into my dishes.

1 pound of fresh beans
Some potatoes, peeled and quartered (I was trying to get rid of old ones and used too many this time)
4 oz black pepper ham (the nice stuff...like $7 a pound nice)
1 clove garlic
Salt and pepper
Water

Clean and snap beans. Put beans, crushed garlic, and enough water to half cover beans into a wide skillet. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 30 minutes. Add diced ham, potato, salt, and pepper. Add more water if you need. At this point I went out for a run, and came back about 45 minutes later to a perfect dish. The potatoes should be cooked, but not to the point that they totally fall apart with a fork. Now, in my family we eat this as a complete meal, so this amount should only feed two people.

So my little bean row has done me proud. Nearly six pounds so far, and more to come. Because I have been too busy to cook lately and because Kyle doesn't eat them, I actually had too many to eat. Though I hate the texture of frozen green beans, I did freeze a pound or so. Clean, snap, and blanch for three minutes, then three minutes in an ice water bath. Into the freezer in a ziplock. They will be stirfry I suppose.

Garden Journal #2

Produce in the Kitchen

Bit of a stretch here, but half the greens are from the garden and the cilantro in the naan is as well. Radishes in the chholey from our garden and Kyle's mother's.

Pulled my first green onion to go into this and decided it would be an Italian flavored soup so in went dry basil from the garden.

Blooms in the Garden

Green beans are blooming. I can't wait for huge pots of green beans!

The mimosa in the back yard is just divine. It makes me appreciate the South.

Garden Journal #1

(This was written about 4 weeks ago, waiting photos for posting)

Kyle's Ambitious Garden Plans
I knew that Kyle wanted a vegetable and herb garden. We talked briefly about it last spring, but decided we were too late to really get started, especially with the work that needed to be done on cleaning up the ice storm damage and putting a new roof on the house. For myself I imagined just one big, long row of something along side the fence. I don't care what it would be, but I had collard greens on my brain I guess. Just a bunch of stuff that I could give away to my friends to prove that I could grow something and to subtly encourage healthy eating habits. Little did I know how grand his plans would grow!

Kyle had something quite different in mind. I should have suspected when he came home with seed packets galore and starter kits. Then came the spreadsheets tracking germination and planning the beds. Oh, the beds! Raised beds! A whole bunch of them! I didn't volunteer to dig out all the grass turf for them, but I have helped a little here and there. As always little side projects distract us from on-going projects or chores. For example the lawn been rarely mowed this spring and taking out the back fence took priority over finishing the soil prep for the raised beds.

Current (May 30th) Garden

My Little Victory

I am probably too impatient to be a successful gardener. I want immediate results that will not fail. The idea of starting from seed and only having 20% of them germinate and survive is nerve-wracking for me. My preference would be annuals in six packs and for sure bulbs like daffodils. Same for vegetables. I was letting Kyle worry about all this seeding business knowing full well that when the time comes for results, I will be buying peppers and tomatoes that have got a good head start in the nursery.

While Kyle has been fooling with the seeds, I had a little surprise that has turned into a small victory. As you have probably read, I have an active compost pile. About two weeks ago I was out turning it when I spotted some new green growth coming out of it. I was not thrilled about this until I realized what it was. GARLIC! I had thrown out some small bulbs that had sprouted and not even thought about them taking root. I did a little research and decided that I was going to grow garlic this year. They should have been started back in about November for a long growing season, and they recommend starters that are certified disease free, but any kind of green growth makes me happy. So I grabbed a few more of the old garlic bulbs that really are past their prime, and planted them in my little hill of cooked compost from last year. They all rooted just fine and now they have been transplanted in the newly prepared raised bed.

Garlic bed as of May 30th

My victory is that with basically no work, I have green and growing plants that are bigger and prettier than anything Kyle has. Of course they will not produce the best results because they need a long growing season, but hey, they look pretty! (UPDATE: Garlic is in a normal bed now)

Now the question is should I transplant the three potato chunks that have sprouted in my active compost pile as well? It wasn't in the plans for the garden, but perhaps I should just try them out! (UPDATE: I did transplant the potato starts)

Sexual Predator/Offender

On April 17th 2008, I came home to a plastic bag hanging on our doorknob. It contained a notification that a sexual predator/offender had moved into the neighborhood. One Gary L. Whipple now lived just two short blocks behind our house, facing the park I run around. Reading this sheet set off my frustrations with how "we" handle sexual offenders in the U.S. justics system. Why do I need to know about this 53 year old black man (very large black man) whose crime may have been committeed 20 or even 30 years ago?

Now, I am usually in the vast minority when I speak up in conversations opposing more restrictions on the lives of those convicted (or even suspected) of a sexual offense. Most of my objections come from the fact that many crimes can easily be described as a sexual offense and this be imprinted upon the person for life. Yes, sexual molesters do tend to have higher rates of recidivism, and yes I understand the fear a parent has that their child may be harmed. But remember that many people get statutory rate charges in cases of a mutual relationship. Imagine the 16 and 23 year olds, especially if mom and dad don't want little Bobby sleeping with that 23 year old man. Slap rape charges on the 23 year old that was doing exactly what the 16 year old wanted. That will teach little Bobby to not be gay, right? What about dater rape? Do those offenders get branded FOR LIFE as sexual predators?

Now let's look at the punishment. It varies by state, but many offenders have rules that go beyond correction or rehabilitation. In the name of protections of children, many offenders are forbidden from living within 500, 1000, or 1500 feet of schools, libraries, parks, beaches or other public spaces. Some may not even be able to walk their dog in a park ever again! In many compact cities these laws could be quite onerous to someone just trying to get on their feet and live a normal life. Secluding criminals in common ghettos probably doesn't creat the positive atmosphere needed to alter the course of these people's lives.

Okay, so I have these opinions in my head about the justice meted out to "predators", "perverts", and offenders. It seems we treat them in all together different ways than other offenders of other laws. People who send thousands of young American men to death in war using lies and coercion, sure they get legacies and libraries, but one screw up with biological impulses that may be quite natural (though prohibited) can sully your name for your entire life. What's consent in Britian is an offense in the U.S. Go figure.

My opinions on this once case changed, though, as I read down the notification. His qualifying offense was Sex Battery, Coerces by threat. His victim was an adult male! Whoa now! Okay, now visions of Casey running shirtless (hey, I like to get a tan while I run) in the park and being confronted by a big, scary black man with one thing on his mind. I know I am playing into stereotypes and racism, but that is where my brain first went. The irrational, or perhaps perfectly rational, fear that parents feel about their children just ran through me, about myself.

So I remain torn on the issue. Thanks for the note, Pinellas County Sheriff's Office. I hope everyone is safe, but that there is a way to not terrorize this many long after his crime. I don't know all the details so I can't judge it though.

Should I change my habits to make me safer? Sure, but not because of this, but because this is a just a reminder that things happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime. My neighborhood is rough, but I refuse to lock myself away. Participation in everyday life in a neighborhood is necessary to improve the feeling of community. Kids need to see good role models. They need to see adults excercising, walking the dog, picking up litter near their house, communicating respectfully, with out fear, and in a friendly way with their neighbors. Plus, I am probably safer if the folks on the street know who I am and respect me.

Just another day in the (neighbor)hood.