14 July 2014 Garden Photos

Bill and I left town for about two weeks. When we came back, our garden had gone kind of wild. Others were watering for us, and may have harvested a few things. I don’t know. I did, however, take a bunch of photos. There’s a sample below, including a tomato I’d like diagnosed, please! If you’d like to see more, just click through any photo to get to the image within the flickr set & poke around!

After we took all these photos, we went to dinner. Then we came back and harvested a ton of green bell peppers. I’m going to demand Jen share her stuffed pepper recipe.… Continue reading →

More Garden Photos

On Sunday, I called my father and he accused me of only calling out of “an overdeveloped sense of obligation.” This was a load of crap, of course. I called him out of a perfectly tuned sense of obligation. Eventually, we both agreed we could maybe call one another more often.

Then he asked for garden photos and I said he clearly wasn’t reading my blog. To which he admitted, but then pointed out I could be more aggressive about sharing. So, I’ll do that. And I’ll put up a few more photos, because I love him and I think he’d enjoy them. Also, because I enjoy sharing them.

This isn’t my usual view walking in, as I tend to enter from the southwest, not the east.… Continue reading →

Gardening 2014

I’ve started a bit of gardening again. Previously, I’ve done kind of a lot of container gardening, but I’ve been pretty clear that it’s more for the joy I find in growing things than any sort of self-sufficiency. This is pretty good, because sometimes I only get three tiny tomatoes.

But I’ve taken to gardening on a larger scale. Sort of. I got a plot in a community garden near-ish my home. And then I promptly agreed to share it with a new friend, John. John promptly filled his half of the plot with tomatoes, peppers and basil.

My half of the plot promptly got a couple of mustard greens. And the sage cut back dramatically. But it still basically looks like this:

My friend Toni has sent me some seeds, as a gift.… Continue reading →

Now I’m pretty sure I never want a wall to be “pesto” green

It turns out that Bill’s mother has a far more impressive food processor than Bill and I do. Very big, decently liquid-tight, strong motor. I am sure of this, despite having never seen her food processor. How do I know?

Well, I made her pesto recipe Monday night. I made a half batch, because that’s all the more basil I had. Guess what a half batch of Rosa’s pesto in my food processor looks like?

Yup. And that’s just a half batch! I can clearly never make a full batch.

I did figure out how to clean all of that up, and then finish making the batch without further disaster on my walls. It involved considering growing a third arm & hand to hold the towel around the food processor, but I did it.… Continue reading →

Surprise! Dinner was delicious!

Tonight’s dinner was supposed to be vegetable risotto. I was still just going to throw it together, but I had PLANS.

However, Bill worked late and is about to go work some more. So risotto wasn’t going to happen, because it was going to take too damn long.

So, on the train ride home, I started trying to figure out some faster meal. The worst case scenario, in my head, was that we ate out. We have too many veggies in the house for that to work for me at all. We’ve been inundated by tomatoes, you see.

My train thought process went about like this (truly – all crazy thoughts included):

“We’ve GOT to use up some of those tomatoes. And didn’t we get like a pound of basil in the last share?Continue reading →