Dreamflower's Mathom-house

Today we had an adventure! The DH and I had a little business errand in the northern part of the state, and decided to make a day of it.( Read more... )

(Posting here because poor LJ seems to still be under the weather.)

Actually, bed by bed-- my garden is growing. And tonight at supper we had the first bit of its bounty this year.

I made mashed potatoes with fresh chives and parsley from my herbs, and chicken parmesan with fresh basil and oregano.

Our salads consisted of red oak leaf lettuce, mesclun, and green onion from the garden.

My radishes and potatoes are coming up, my carrots have begun to sprout, and the cauliflower, cabbage, and Swiss chard I bought as nursery plants have not died. The green lettuce is iffy-- it doesn't look too good, but I'm hoping it will come back after a few days of regular watering. But the red lettuce was great!

I have some tomato plants in my little front porch greenhouse: Early Girl and Brandywine. I just repotted them in slightly larger peat pots-- it's still too soon for them to go outside.

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Well, my internet is not entirely cured, but it's much better today. The Cable Guy did some kind of speed test on my connection, and so it's working faster, and I'm able to navigate better. But he said it may still go out in the evenings when the temps drop (along with our upper TV channels and our phone) until they can get an outside crew to our neighborhood to do something to the box, which is apparently getting too MUCH signal for some reason, messing everyone up around here.

I'm off work today and tomorrow, but the DH is working, won't be home till after 1AM. The house is very quiet with him gone, except for the furnace popping and snapping. I've done some writing and knitting today, and uploaded some new fanfic onto my Nook.

The other day, I heard an interview on public radio with the editor of the new Essential New York Times Cookbook and she was talking about it covering 150 years of recipes. I found it at the library shortly afterwards, and have been enjoying reading it. I tried my first recipe out of it...( Read more... )

This stuff was delicious, especially with those biscuits! I'm going to see if I can find the walnut oil in the supermarket here, so I can see how much difference that makes. There are a few other recipes I want to try as well-- especially a couple more soup ones. But I have not even gotten a quarter of the way through this book--it's the size of a dictionary! So I'm sure I will need to re-check!

I'm going to reheat some leftover baked chicken and half a leftover baked potato with a salad for my supper tonight.

So, anyway, that's what's up!

My cucumbers have been incredibly prolific. I've been putting them in salads and frying some for the hubby.

They keep on coming and coming. The other evening I put up a big batch of bread-and-butter refrigerator pickles just to get some of them used up. (I have a great old recipe I've been using for years that's very simple.)

But still they keep on coming, so I had decided today to put up a batch of sweet pickles. All I have are jelly jars, so it's going to be lots of small jars. Then I couldn't find my jar lifter. I *thought* it was out in the garage with my water-bath canner, but nooo... So I'm making do with barbecue tongs. NOT the same thing at ALL. I did find my magnetic lid lifter, though!

The first batch is processing now, and I am going to put some more in when they come out. But I think I will STILL have some cukes left.

In other garden news, we've had two tomatoes so far. The rest are still green. We have an eensy baby canatlope, and teeny-weeny little beans. And after having squash almost as prolific as the cukes, it is finally coming to an end. But I still have several squash left.

Oops! There's the timer. Need to see if the barbecue tongs will get those jars out!

ETA The barbecue tongs worked OK, but not as good as my jar lifter. But I didn't drop any and I didn't scald myself, so that's all right. And it's so lovely to hear the pop!pop!pop! of the lids, letting me know that all my jars are safely sealed!!!