The first chicken I decided I wanted to own was a Buff Orpington. I watched several YouTube videos about selecting good starter chicks, and these golden beauties were highly recommended. They were described as being fantastic layers of large brown eggs, tolerant to climate extremes of both hot and cold, and getting along well with other chickens. They have a tendency to go broody – my neighbor has a broody Orpington on fertilized eggs right now – but, we shall see! I do think they are very friendly and sweet chicks! Continue reading “Tuppence: the First Six Weeks”
Cheesy Carmelized Onion Pizza
I love Fridays! I always have, since I was a teenager. Then, it most likely had to do with the arrival of the weekend, and the opportunity to hang out, see my boyfriend, the usual teenage stuff. But, I admit that I still get that excited feeling in my stomach most every late Friday afternoon — and I’m usually doing nothing that evening different from any other!
Over the years, we’ve developed the same habits as many others, kicking off the weekend by going out for dinner, or enjoying takeout — most often, pizza. It was the perfect way to relax after a busy week, and for many, many years, it was, “PAYDAY!” Unfortunately, leaner, less profitable years happened, as well, and many weekends arrived without the Friday paycheck. Now, as small business owners, we are the last to be paid each week — and only after a long list of bills has been paid. So, Friday too often means, “we’ll eat what we have in the fridge”.
The good news is that I have become really good at making “something out of nothing”. I have developed a real talent for throwing together bits of this and bits of that and making something really delicious. The downside is that I can never duplicate the dish! When my children were young, I used to jokingly call this type of dinner “blue stew”. I confess that I loved to tease them by telling them I used all the unidentifiable “blue” items in the back of the fridge to create a new dish!
Maybe I can’t recreate the specific dishes, but I have decided to remember some of them in this blog. Being able to create interesting dishes using items I have on hand is really the secret to handling a bountiful garden. So, it seems appropriate to begin with a pizza … Continue reading “Cheesy Carmelized Onion Pizza”
Tomato Pie
Well, there ain’t nothin’ in the world that I like better
Than bacon and lettuce and homegrown tomatoes
Up in the mornin’, out in the garden
Get you a ripe one, hey, don’t get a hard one
Plant ’em in the spring, eat ’em in the summer
All winter with out ’em’s a culinary bummer
I forget all about the sweatin’ and diggin’
Everytime I go out and pick me a big one
Homegrown tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes
What’d life be without homegrown tomatoes
Only two things that money can’t buy
And that’s true love and homegrown tomatoes
What’s the buzz?
“Upside-down trees swingin’ free,
Busses float and buildings dangle:
Now and then it’s nice to see
The world– – from a different angle.“
— Shel Silverstein
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When I was a young girl, one of my favorite activities was to hang upside down and watch this other topsy-turvy world. I often, also, tried to catch glimpses of the life Beatrix Potter described down the rabbit hole or follow bird village life in the tallest of the neighborhood trees. I loved to lay on a quiet hillside and listen for the giants walking across the clouds in the sky high above me. I was a true believer in the Luscious Layers of Life.
What happened that caused me to foolishly believe otherwise? I am suddenly reminded of the song, MacArthur Park, and Jimmy Webb’s symbolism of something wonderful and sweet that has been destroyed because of neglect:
MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!
I did think my beautiful, bountiful garden had been destroyed because of my own neglect. The late fall gave way to my yearly overly-scheduled event list and holiday rush, and the new year brought on a long anticipated massive home remodeling project. My so-called “winter garden” never stood a chance. By the time early Spring came and went, and late Spring turned into an early Summer, we hurriedly stuck a carload of nursery plants into our raised beds that had been given too little attention (and too little compost) over the winter.
Some of the plants thrived, but our tomato crop suffered through the summer, no plant ever giving us more than a handful of fruit, and there was never enough to make into salsas or sauces to can for winter enjoyment. We had a very small zucchini crop and we ended up tearing the cucumber vines out long before they produced any fruit.
Our hearts ached with guilt that something so beautiful as our garden had been, just one year previously, had been allowed to wither and die — “all the sweet, green icing flowing down”.
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While it’s true that we suffered some real disappointments in the garden this year, we did find a few pleasant surprises tucked into the precious layers there. The tomato plant in the photo, above, was not one of the pitiful nursery plants, but a “volunteer” – a “gift” from the neighbor’s chickens, no doubt, who spent many happy hours digging and scratching at this spot in the front yard.
It is never a good idea to expect life in the garden to be the same, year after year. The garden is the heart center of the Luscious Layers of Life, with many magickal worlds both above in the trees and below the sweet, renewing earth. We had a basil plant that had nearly taken over one of the raised planter beds, that had been heaped with flowers, year after year, and full of happy, appreciative bees.
This year was no exception. We didn’t mind the bees, because they didn’t seem to mind us and tolerated us reaching in to gather fresh leaves for dinner. But, one day, my husband noticed rather a large amount of bee activity at one end of our garden gazebo. He noted it, and then realized the number of bees going beyond and under the gazebo floor was rising at an alarming rate! We soon had to give up using the gazebo at all and decided to contact some bee movers before the situation really got out of hand.
The nice man from Guerilla Beekeepers in Santa Ana arrived to remove, rehabilitate and relocate our 30,000 honeybees from their home under the gazebo. He taught us a lot about the bees and explained they live half their lives in the hive before ever coming out into the garden at all. Apparently, these bees had been building this home for quite a while. If we had been able to wait another month, we would have had loads of honey from the, then, estimated 50,000 bees, instead of the small amount we were able to harvest.
He remarked, several times, that these were the gentlest bees he had ever worked with, as not one even attempted to sting him. He was using a small amount of smoke to calm them, as was the usual practice, and a thought occurred to me that I just had to ask: Could they be calm because of their regular exposure to marijuana smoke? The guys behind the fence tucked my bees into bed each night with a little toke, it seems, making for some sweet, peace-loving hippie freak bees! He thinks that could well be the case, as these were definitely some peaceful, easy feelin’ bees. The Guerilla Beekeeper Guy just put them in his car and drove them up the freeway to Santa Ana — he must have been quite a sight with 30,000 bees buzzing around inside his car!
Well, they’ll stone you when you’re tryin’ to be so good
They’ll stone you just like they said they would
They’ll stone you when you’re tryin’ to go home
They’ll stone you when you’re there all alone
But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned
— Bob Dylan
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My husband was walking past the pool one quiet afternoon, when he spotted a “hand” reaching up out of the water, to the deck above. He stopped, just in time to notice an iguana climbing up the pool wall! WHAT?!! We called the guys over from next door, asking if it was theirs, and we were able to get these photos. Apparently, the iguana belonged to someone down the street, and had been missing for several months. We all believe this little guy had been living in one of our trees all this time, taking a dip in the pool and sunning itself on the pool deck when no one was around. It had grown a LOT since leaving home.
Our Golden Retriever had NO reaction (he was there in the yard with my husband) to the iguana, which leads me to believe he had seem it many times before. Fionnlagh, why didn’t you tell us there was an iguana in the garden? You never asked me.
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I think this is my FAVORITE part about gardening, the little surprises I find here and there. It’s my favorite part of life, too. If life turned out exactly how it was planned, how boring it all would be! I plan on spending a lot more time sitting in my gazebo, watching and listening for all the surprises my garden has to offer.
Grilled Heirloom Tomato Pizza
The absolute happiest day for us each summer is the first time we get to grill an heirloom tomato pizza. There is absolutely nothing on earth that compares with it, especially if we are fortunate enough to have a nice assortment of juicy heirloom tomatoes and a bounty of fresh basil.
We grill pizza quite often in the summer. I posted a recipe for Grilled Zucchini Pizza, in July 2013, which is made the same way as this pizza. We make our own dough, but any pizza dough will work. All the magick is in the fresh ingredients and the hot grill. Continue reading “Grilled Heirloom Tomato Pizza”
Goodbye, Old Friend
“I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello.”
— Paul McCartney
These zucchinis had to go.
They were wonderful while they lasted and gave me more than I ever thought possible, hundreds of pounds of fruit, dozens of delicious meals.
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I have finished posting the last of my cucumber recipes for the season. Truth is, we couldn’t take any more of this determined plant. We’ve eaten more cucumber dishes this summer than I may have eaten in the last 5 or 6 years combined, and I was anxious to plant something new in its place. While tearing the vines off of the (very successful!) trellis experiment, we noticed several cucumbers that had been hidden away beneath the thick vine cover, now beyond the eating stage and well into the seed-curing stage.
I must admit that I am somewhat fearful about the prospect of saving my own seeds. While I fully embrace the concept, and I have had a few small successes with saved tomato seeds, I find it hard to imagine that I could do something, myself, that I have been relying on Burpee — for years and years — to do for me.
A change is slowly coming over me. Having lived in southern California for more than half of my life, I find that it has taken me nearly this long to overcome the prejudice, ingrained in me by my home state of Pennsylvania, that we do not have “true” seasons here. I was taught that Spring was for planting, Summer for growing, Autumn for harvesting and Winter for resting and planning for the next garden.
Not so! We very much have seasons, here in Orange County, and each is a special time for planting certain crops, growing certain crops, and harvesting certain crops. It is the cycling of crops that is important in my garden, now. Now, more than ever before, the lessons I have learned through studying the Wheel of the Year are realized in my own hands, with my own seeds, in my own dirt, by my own spirit.
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Did you ever have to say goodbye to a friend? We have all lost loved ones to death, but I am speaking here of losing a friend — who just left. I am speaking of the intense kind of friendship — have everything in common friendship, do everything together friendship, be together always friendship — that you sometimes feel you have searched and searched your whole life to find, that just — without warning or explanation — totally and permanently ends. You wake up one day to find your best, truest friend is gone, because they have chosen to go.
I have had that happen several times to me, probably not surprising over the period of sixty years I have lived. It is sometimes easy, after the pain has lessened, to understand why it had to be so. But, not always. Sometimes, it remains one of life’s so-called “cruel lessons”.
Every once in awhile, I get the idea that I might reach out to that old friend, let them know how much I loved them and how much I’ve missed them, and ask if we might try and rebuild that once-beautiful friendship we had. But, that would be nonsense, I realize. What’s gone is gone. What’s dead is dead.
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And then I look at my garden. These are the last of the King Kong Zucchinis for this year. Three zucchinis, totaling most of 16#, each close to a foot-and-a-half long. Truth is, we couldn’t take any more of this determined plant.
These zucchinis had to go.
They were wonderful while they lasted and gave me more than I ever thought possible, hundreds of pounds of fruit, dozens of delicious meals.
But, I couldn’t take any more. I longed for a new plant to grow in its place — kale, beets, cabbage, anything but zucchini!
We will eat what we can of these, and allow the ripest one or two to cure for a week or so, and then harvest the seeds. Hopefully, the seeds will retain the same strength and vigor as the Mother Plant, and King Kong will return to my garden next year, or even the next. This garden friend is not gone — permanently and totally — as long as the seeds remain. The friendship may not be the same, the plants may be less productive, the fruit more commonly sized. But, as long as I have seeds, I have the promise of many new, delicious, zucchini memories to come.
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I’m not going to call my friend. As tempted as I am to know that I was, also, loved and I have, also, been missed, I fear that this is not so. I fear that I grew in a garden that was allowed to whither and die, left to ruin after one, final harvest.
But, because of this death, I have grown into my own special King Kong variety of friend. I am so much more than I was then, and a much better friend to myself than I ever knew how to be. As long as I hold onto the memory of my friend, I hold onto a seed that may grow, once more, should I choose to plant it. It may not be the same as it was, but — who knows? — it may even be better.
Zucchini Corn Fritters
Every once in awhile, you come across a marriage between two vegetables (or fruits) that just SCREAMS amazing. Zucchini and tomatoes is one such combination, used so often in Mediterranean dishes, and that is always delicious. But, my new favorite vegetable marriage of this season is zucchini and corn. And this recipe, adapted from one published in Food Network Magazine, is one that I could eat nearly every day. Continue reading “Zucchini Corn Fritters”
Chocolate Zucchini Cake
I don’t make desserts very often, but this is an exception! I have made this cake three times — using the excuse that I “forgot” to take pictures — because it is a winner of a recipe! The cake has a nice depth of chocolate flavor, probably due to the addition of a small amount of coffee in the recipe, and a terrific moist texture from the zucchini. I will admit that I have frozen a few slices, to enjoy later, as a special mid-winter treat. I hope they last that long in my freezer! Continue reading “Chocolate Zucchini Cake”
Blueberry Zucchini Muffins
This recipe was lifted right off the internet. I would love to give credit where it is due, but I can’t find the original link. I believe it is an adaption of several different recipes, but it is in no way my own original creation. It has a nice flavor, not too sweet, and as I am still working my way through my freezer stash of last year’s blueberries, I had all the ingredients on hand. That is enough to make an ordinary day special! Continue reading “Blueberry Zucchini Muffins”
Zucchini Meatloaf
Yes, I know. Meatloaf? You are either a meatloaf lover or a meatloaf hater; there seems to be a sharp division between the two. I am a meatloaf lover, and I have met very few meatloaf variations that I did not like. I do admit to liking the simple versions — ground meat (usually beef), onion, eggs and some type of bread (or cracker crumb) — I especially like to use oats — for binding it together, and simple seasonings.
But, every summer, I love to make zucchini meatloaf. It’s a great way to lighten up the traditional dish (and make it a healthier version), and this variation tastes especially good when it is served cold on a hot, summer day. Continue reading “Zucchini Meatloaf”