Heal My Life

Strawberry Time et al

What happened on Saturday?  We picked the first strawberry of the season!  mind now, this was the only one.  The plant it came from grew from a runner set last year, that somehow survived in the crack of the walk.  Sigh.  The beautiful plants we nurtured in their foam pots over the winter aren't even close to red berries.  But the plant ignored and left to fend for itself, well, it overcame great obstacles to bear a lovely, sweet berry ahead of the pampered horde. I'm sure there's a lesson in here somewhere, but I'm too darn tired to figure it out.

What happened on Memorial Day?  We went out to the garden to check the that the soaker hose was doing it's job and soak the tomato seedlings we had set out and lo and behold - look what we found, happily munching away on our imported from California, heirloom leaves!  They're tortoise beetles and we found two more this morning. These guys are seriously ugly and they open their wings to flip themselves over.  Blech!  There were also a host of little tiny black bugs that looked like the poop of the tortoise beetles but flew away as soon as we tried to pick them off.  They're so little I can't even see them well enough to try and identify them.  But they seem to be big enough to eat just fine. 

What happened today?  The A/C wasn't working which made for VERY unhappy seniors.  Anthony finally managed to fix it by replacing the thermostat with a different model.  The technician he called said "Of, that model, yeah, we have trouble with that one all the time".  So, I have to ask the rhetorical question... why in the %$#@ are they still selling it???

What's going to happen tomorrow?  The grand plan is to work on Jungle Love.  I foud a really cool book, Kokoro no Te, by Kumiko Sudo.  It has patterns for some lovely little folded buds in it that I think I'll add to Jungle.  With just a touch of luck, I'll have the time to cut and sew a few circles.  And that will be grand.

Ordinary Things

This is what happened yesterday.  I picked up Charlotte, my 4 year old granddaughter from nursery school so I could meet her mother at Costco to do Memorial day party shopping.  Charlotte is a daredevil of epic proportions and was determined to show us that she could climb a tree.  Anthony had to help her up to this perch, because there were no small branches for her to step on.  She was tickled to be so far off the ground!

This is what happened this morning.  We saw the first groundhog of the season last week, and he was a little one!  Anthony baited the trap with an overripe mango and it worked like a charm.  I have a shot of his release at the cemetery (where there is LOTS of lovely green grass to nibble) but it was blurry since I forgot to change the setting on the camera to motion.

I love that in the midst of the anguish of my father having a feeding tube inserted and the resulting emotional anguish there are these, ordinary, everyday events.  There is joy and wonder, even as there is suffering.  Thank God for ordinary things. 

Jungle Love

Since I seem to be a bit stuck on Reefer Madness, I took a new basket to my class last week.  I've been enamored of hot pinks and oranges lately, and have collected a few really gorgeous hot, tropical shades.  Not because I have some deep desire to go to the Islands, on the contrary, I have a deep seated problem with islands - they bite me.  Yep, every time I go to and island, no matter how lovely and tranquil it might be, I get hurt.  The mildest of these injuries was a painful underwater brush with fire coral on Big Cayman. The worst, or at least most debilitating, was the time I broke my leg on the dive boat on Saba.  They didn't even have enough plaster to cast me, and I ended up spending the bulk of my vacation in a splint, lying on the deck of our beautiful rental house, unable to dive except for the last day when Anthony wrapped my broken leg in a garbage bag, sealed it with duct tape and took me diving anyway.  To say the least - I'm not fond of islands.

So this tropical jungle color thing somehow reminds me of India and the bougainvillea there, or a rain forest. So I had my basket of pinks and greens and when we started out class scrumbles, I  crocheted a circle of dragon green, added a semicircle of yellows, and then a bullion ruff in a truly electric pink.  One of my students said - "Oh it looks like sherbet".  Nope I said, adamantly - it's Jungle Love - and that was her name.

I added a few bits more to her at the quilt show we did this past weekend, and while there was no yarn to buy, I did buy beads, fabric (I'll show you that tomorrow because I want to tell you about the show) and a few tools.  But I really wanted to show you the Jungle basket and the baby!

Buttermilk Herb Biscuits

I haven't really been baking lately as I just haven't had the time which is seriously unfortunate, because I LIVE for desserts and biscuits and bread and cookies and bars and donuts and anything else I can turn out of a bag of flour, some butter and a couple of odds and ends.  BUT, this morning, I got the old urge and whipped up a batch of buttermilk biscuits that I thought I might share.  Now mind, they're not the prettiest things, being a bit flatter than usual, but I was experimenting  with some whole wheat pastry flour I picked up at Shoprite (of all places).

I was figuring that the softness of the pastry flour might offset the hardness of the whole what and I was right.  The crumb came out very tender and if you didn't know there was whole wheat flour in them - you'd never tell the difference!  This flour is AWESOME!  When I want to add whole wheat flour into something, I'll usually substitute 1/2 whole wheat for for 1/2 the all purpose flour.  And that's what I did with the whole what pastry flour in this recipe. 

These biscuits are tender and totally yummy.  Be forewarned though, this is NOT a low-fat deal.  There's lots of butter in these biscuits, mostly because I like them that way. And these are drop, not roll and cut, mostly because I'm lazy. And the biscuit in the photo has a bite out of it because I realized I should take a photo before they were all gone.  Baked goods don't last long around here.

Buttermilk Herb Biscuits

Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 15 - 20 minutes
Makes: 12 drop biscuits

Ingredients:

1 cup unbleached all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour (you can use 2 cups all purpose if you can't find the whole wheat pastry flour)
4 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon each dried: parsley, dill, chives and thyme, or whatever herbs move you
1/2 cup butter chilled
1 cup buttermilk

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400, lightly grease 1 large baking sheet
2. In large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and herbs
3. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse cornmeal
4. Add buttermilk and stir just until all ingredients are moistened
5. Drop by large spoonfuls onto prepared sheet
6. Bake for 15 minutes or until golden
7. Remove from baking sheet right away, cool on racks
8. Butter and eat!

They were so good I ate two.

      

Getting to Green

I haven't been knitting or crocheting or even baking, so I have nothing to show for the past couple of weeks I've been AWOL.  I have been reading though, most notably The Omnivore's Dilemma.  I'm generally dismayed by what passes for food these days, but I don't remember the last time I was this horrified.  More on this later. 

Anyway, the reason I'm blogging today is to talk gardening.  Things are progressing very nicely in the green thumb arena here (which is more than I can say for the fiber arena, but that's another subject).  Anthony laid out the weed fabric, which is pretty cool stuff, and the soaker hose.  We turned it on ans tested it and it works a charm!  no more tomato mildew from water on the leaves.  Whopeeee!!!!  And hopefully less weeds will mean fewer bugs, whitefly in particular. 

Growing organic heirloom anything, but particularly tomatoes, is definitely not for the faint of heart.  While the fruits of your labor are so much sweeter, and therefore worth all the heartache, there is definitely pain involved in eschewing the use of genetically modified, disease and insect resistant strains.  It's much easier to spray an herbicide on bugs and diseases than to go the natural, garlic and soap spray route.  So this year we're taking extra precautions in the hope that we'll have fewer issues. 

And I thought I'd show you our first Sparkle strawberry, whch of course grew from a runner that escaped the overwintered pots and is now growing through a crack in the walk.    

And here we have the lovely, and I hope soon to be delicious, Sugar Sprint Snap Peas.  We have two pots of these.

And last but not least, are the herbs we started a couple of weeks ago.  The big gangly seedlings are morning glories that I have planned for the mailbox and my daughter Holly's garden.  They put the poor herb seedlings to shame.  Especially since I planted them a full week later!