Hi! A New Chapter

Wondering where I've been?
I'm here and there, very quiet and apart.
It's almost Easter time with the grandchildren. I think all holidays are more fun with small children to enjoy them with.

The garden is just waking up, here at the end of March.
I'm still working on my goal to "eat from the garden" and decided to include more flowers and color right along with the edible vegetables. I need to pull up the overgrown lettuce and plant some new things. Maybe over the weekend, if the rain stops long enough.

A year ago I added a screened-in porch to the side of the house, with a deck and brick patio. I spend a lot of time sitting on the porch, watching the birds. Reading a book. Crocheting an afghan. Relaxing.

I've been doing some bookbinding, with handmade papers and embellished papers decorated using a Gelli plate, acrylics, watercolors and colored pencils. I'm crocheting and knitting quite a bit, because it's fun and gives me a restful break.

I just got a delivery of some jewelry findings, so I can make an intaglio necklace I've had pictured in my mind. If it turns out well, I'll take some pictures to share. It will be the first jewelry piece I will have made in a long time, if I do. And I think I will.

I've given myself permission to do whatever thing creatively that I enjoy doing. Or as little as I feel like doing. No production pressures, or pressures for deliveries. Just doing things that I find fun and fulfilling.

And that make me feel creative and productive. And just plain happy.

In Ground and In Pots

 I have a section of the garden that has small pots full of herbs next to the raised beds. The pots allow me to move things around as the season changes. And hopefully, when winter comes I'll be able to move some of the pots indoors, for fresh herbs all winter.

Here there's thyme, cilantro and purple basil. I want lots of purple basil, so I can use the leaves to make glorious basil jelly!

This container has my special "On The Deck" corn seeds sprouting. This type of corn is supposed to be able to bear well even in a half whiskey barrel. I have this one that's sprouted already, and a second one that is planted but not sprouted yet, to extend the hoped-for sweet corn  harvest. 

I've never grown corn before, my little raised beds are kind of small for it to be successful, but I'm hoping these new seeds from Burpee will turn out well in this container.

This raised bed has all herbs, onions and garlic. Some herbs are perennials, like rosemary, so this bed doesn't get changed out every season like some of the others. This is the bed the harvested garlic bulbs came from. See how some are lying on their sides? It's probably time to get them out, too.

It's so nice to run out to the garden, snip some parsley and rosemary, cut some cilantro and thyme, and run back in to the kitchen and use it! I used to dread it when recipes called for "fresh parsley" or "sprigs of fresh rosemary" - but now I love it!

I have onions, garlic, cilantro, two kinds of sage, rosemary, parsley and bee balm in this bed. I hope by summertime it will be tall and fragrant and bushy with fresh herbs for the kitchen. It is 4 foot by four foot in size.

It's a Yogurt Thing

This is what happens to fresh ripe strawberries. Loaded up with homemade yogurt on top of almond cake. Tastes like springtime, tart and creamy. Sometimes with a drizzle of local honey on top.

I make my own yogurt every other week. I never liked yogurt much, until I tried making it at home and tasted it. It's fantastic when it's freshly made, nothing like the store's yogurt, with its long list of ingredients.

For a starter I use 2% Fage Yogurt because it has 4 cultures in it, and for the milk I splurge and get a gallon of organic milk.
I make the yogurt in the crockpot. I've never had a batch fail, and it really doesn't take that much time.

Before I do anything, I boil water in the kettle and sterilize everything. The crockpot and its lid, the ladle and whisk. Anything that's going to touch the milk gets a boiling water bath, to make sure only the good bacteria get a chance at the milk.

This is 10 cups of organic milk in the crockpot. I turn it on high and cover with a dishtowel, checking every so often until the milk is 180 degrees F.

I check with a candy thermometer until it reaches the right temperature. I try not to boil the milk, turning the crockpot off when the milk reaches 180 degrees.

I like a thick yogurt, so I add 1/3 cup of powdered dry milk per quart. I take some of the hot milk out of the crockpot with the ladle into a sterilized two-cup measuring cup, add the dry milk to that, and use the whisk to mix together. It's too hard to get all the lumps out if you add the dry milk directly to the whole crockpot at once.
 

Sometimes I add the dry milk in two batches, to make sure there's enough milk to really mix them together well before putting the hot milk back into the crockpot with the remainder of the milk.

I keep the Fage yogurt out on the counter so it can reach room temperature. It isn't time to add it to the milk yet, but that way when it is time it isn't refrigerator temperature when it's added in.

If honey, sugar or vanilla extract are added, this is the time, and they are added the same way as the dry milk. Then the cover goes back on the crockpot and it cools down until it is 110 degrees F. That can take an hour or so depending on the temperature of the room.

When the thermometer reads 110 degrees F, some of the milk is taken out and put into the 2-cup measuring cup, the starter yogurt is added and whisked in well, and all of it is added back to the main crockpot mixture.

Wrapped in a large beach towel, the covered crockpot is put into the oven with the oven light on overnight. The oven light puts out just enough warmth to maintain the 110 degrees for 8 to 10 hours in the oven. But don't forget and turn the oven on!

I usually put the crockpot in the oven before bedtime and take it back out the next morning. The yogurt has firmed up, and it's ready to be ladled into sterilized mason jars. If I plan to make frozen yogurt, I will use a quart jar and make the full gallon of milk. With 10 cups, I like to use the small mason jars with lids, and use one per day at breakfast and on desserts.

Here's a week's supply or so, depending on how many I eat each day, and whether I use a recipe to cook with some of it. It's sweet, tart and thick like cream. Super deluxe on anything you add it to.

With vanilla wafers on the bottom of a bowl, bananas cut up in the middle, a generous dollup of homemade yogurt with local honey drizzled on top - it's just like banana pudding!

Cooking With A Green Thumb

This is the first yellow squash of the season. It was raised from seed started in February, and already it's fruiting, here at the very beginning of May.

The garden is varied, with raised beds combined with containers and hanging planters. The main idea is to maximize the amount of food coming out of a small space, including herbs, fruits and vegetables. The raised beds are either 4 foot by 4 foot or 3 by 3, to make it easy to reach inside the beds and take care of the plants. The cedar planks separating the beds are walkways, and keep the weeds down. Plus, they look nice next to the cedar raised beds.

The lettuce is doing really well. We eat a fresh garden salad almost every night. I planted more mixed lettuce seeds yesterday, hoping to get more started before the really hot weather starts.

I've never raised strawberries before, and last October I found two of these strawberry jars on sale and bought them. This spring I filled them with strawberry plants. And look! They are making fruit already, and turning red! These strawberries are nothing like what you find in the store - they are sweet and red all the way to the center of the berry. Strawberries are perennials, so I hope to get even more plants going soon, now that I've seen what I need to do to raise them.

This is the pole bean tee-pee. They have reached the six foot high top already, and are trying for the sky now. I need to cut the growing tips off the tops, so they will bush out more from the bottom. They are blooming like crazy, and baby beans are starting on them. I planted them in February and covered them with a mini-greenhouse until they sprouted and got several inches high. They are Fortex and Kentucky Wonder pole beans. I hope to be harvesting some fresh green beans soon.

And the zucchini is starting to bloom. It always amazes me how huge their leaves get. They are inside a frame with a bug netting over them, to keep the squash bugs off of them.

Tonight the low is going to be in the lower 40 degrees. Chilly for the first week of May. But the garden seems to like the cooler temperatures. With raised beds to grow in, and containers, it's easier to cover them if the temperatures dip down too low overnight.

Eventually the squash, strawberries and beans will be harvested like the lettuce and end up on the menu!

Bulbs of Flavor

In October, the garlic bulbs went into the ground in the garden beds. Not having grown garlic before, there was a sense of discovery in planting it. Over the long winter, it grew big stalks and kept an area looking alive and green in the winter garden beds in the months of short, cold days.

The garlic is called "Kilarney Red" - but the planted cloves were white. The books say that when the stalks start to fall over and the lower leaves turn brown, it's time to pull up the garlic. So a few were tentatively dug up, to find fully formed cloves underground.

Growing from October until May from a single clove each, these bulbs are now drying on a rack so they will keep for later use. The outer skins will turn papery and thin, and the bulbs sweet and mild.

It's easy to see now why the bulbs of this garlic is called Kilarney Red!

Pasta From Scratch, Garden Style

Have you ever tasted fresh, homemade pasta noodles? They are so good, you really don't need much of a sauce. A little butter and salt is enough, and a fresh basil pesto can be like noodle heaven.

This bowl of pasta is what I like - fresh peas and basil and baby broccoli from the garden in a light cream sauce. I picked and shelled the peas right before lightly steaming them, so they still had that garden-fresh green taste. Nothing compares to things picked right before eating.

 I haven't been able to find semolina flour locally in the grocery store, so I ordered a pound of it and had it shipped to me. It arrived this week, so I had to take it for a test run. It really doesn't take all that long to make homemade noodles from scratch, and there aren't many ingredients.

This is my pasta-making setup. I use a large bowl and my pasta machine to make homemade fettucini. It's not a fancy pasta machine, I got it on sale, and it does everything I need for pasta making. You can use a rolling pin if you don't have a pasta machine, it's just a bit tricky to get the thinnest dough. You'll need a large area and a long, skinny rolling pin. Here are the simple ingredients:

Fresh Semolina and Egg Pasta Ingredients 

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 cups semolina flour

1 pinch salt

6 large eggs

2 tablespoons olive oil

(use the good stuff if you have some)

Thoroughly sift together the all-purpose flour, semolina flour, and pinch of salt. I've made it many times without the semolina, and I wondered if having both types of flour would make a difference. It really does! The dough is stiffer and the noodles roll out better. The texture of the noodles is better, too. So if you don't have the semolina, make the effort to find some. It really is worth it.

In a deep bowl, make a mountain out of the sifted flour mixture then make a deep well in the center. Break the eggs into the well and add the olive oil. 

Just think, if I get hens in the backyard someday, I might be using my own eggs for this! But that's a while down the road. For now, these will have to do. 

Whisk egg and oil mixture very gently with a fork, gradually incorporating flour from the sides of the well.

Here I was using a whisk, and really a fork works much better. So ignore the whisk in the picture and just use a regular sized fork.

Or if you're really in a hurry you can put everything in the food processor and whizz it up almost to the point it's ready, and finish it by hand. But doing it by hand doesn't really take very long, and you can get the feel of the dough as it gets silky and ready to use. So try it with your hands, like this.

When the mixture is too thick to mix with a fork, begin kneading with your hands. Knead dough for 8 to 12 minutes, until it is smooth and supple. Dust dough and work surface with semolina as needed to keep dough from becoming sticky. If dough seems too dry, moisten your hands and continue to knead with wet hands rather than adding liquid to the dough. Your moistened hands will get the water into the dough much more easily.

I set a timer and really give the at least 10 full minutes of kneading. That way I know it is well-kneaded and I don't have to guess if it's ready or not.

Wrap the dough tightly in plastic and allow it to rest at room temperature for 30 minutes. This is a good time to prepare your sauce, get your pot of boiling water set up, and get your pasta machine assembled and ready, if you haven't done that yet.

After the dough has rested for 30 minutes, cut off 1/4 or 1/3 of the ball, and re-wrap the test in plastic wrap. Flatten the cut off piece with your hands so it's a ribbon shape. Then roll out the ribbon of dough with a pasta machine to the desired thickness and cut into your favorite style of noodle. I start at the largest opening, number one on my pasta machine, and roll through a couple of times. If the dough is silky and not sticky, I start going through smaller and smaller roller settings, down to number 6. I usually cut the ribbon into two pieces before I cut it with the pasta machine into fettucini noodles, so they aren't too long.

These noodles are a little too long, so I had to hang them over the edge of the counter off the drying rack.

To eat immediately, bring water to a boil in a large pot, then add 4 teaspoons salt. Cook noodles until tender but not mushy, 1 to 5 minutes depending on thickness. Fresh pasta doesn't take very long to cook, so don't overcook it. The noodles will swell up and get nice and thick.

I don't drain and rinse the noodles when they're done, I take them right out of the water and put into the saucepan with the sauce, to let them get lots of flavor. Just toss well with your favorite sauce right in the pan the sauce is simmering in. That means you have to prepare the sauce while the pasta is resting, and let it simmer so it's ready when the fresh pasta is cooked. To dry and store for later, hang noodles on a drying rack and leave overnight.

The noodles will be brittle when dry, so store in a tall spaghetti jar with a hermetic seal, or in a large bag sealed with a twist-tie. This is my homemade pasta storage jar.

I'm so glad my semolina flour came, it was well worth it to make these great, tasty homemade noodles. You'll have to try for yourself to see how easy it really is - and how great they taste.

Eating What Grows, Making What Is Eaten

It's like a challenge I give myself.

How much of what I eat can I grow or make myself?

It gives me a lot of pleasure to see how many things I can grow or make for myself, without using pre-packaged or grocery store ingredients. Some things, of course, you have to buy. But as much as possible, I try to make or grow what I eat.

In this picture, I can see many things I had a hand in creating. I grew the lettuce, dill, cilantro and the broccoli in the salad.

I baked the bread, and used the cubed cut up homemade bread to make the croutons in the food dehydrator. Double-made --- don't you think I can count that twice? (Even if I used my bread machine while I was away from home to bake the bread?)

The tomato is not home grown, it is a locally grown hothouse tomato I got at the 2nd Saturday Farmer's Market. Same thing with the pastured-chicken eggs. I don't have hens (YET) but these are organic and local. I believe that at least counts as eating locally, especially since I picked up local honey and fresh-picked strawberries on the same trip.

And the salad dressing is homemade. It is an attempt to reproduce an asian-ginger salad dressing that I like a lot, from a restaurant we don't have here. It's got a sweet and sour flavor, with a zing of vinegar tanginess.


Asian Salad Dressing

1/4 cup Mayonnaise (either homemade or store bought)
4 tablespoons Rice Wine Vinegar
2 tablespoons Sugar
2 tablespoons Sesame Seed Oil
1 teaspoon Toasted Sesame Seed Oil
1 teaspoon Dijon Mustard (either homemade or from the store)

In a small bowl combine sugar, and rice wine vinegar; mix until sugar is completely dissolved. Add remaining ingredients and whisk together until well blended. It won't separate.


You can use the seasoned rice wine vinegar if you like it sweet the way I do, or get the regular rice wine vinegar if you don't. 

Look for the sesame seed oil and the toasted sesame oil in the oriental food section. You will need both, they aren't the same thing. You'll only need a small bottle of the toasted sesame oil, since you only use such a small amount for each batch.

This recipe doesn't make a whole big bottle full of dressing, more like 3/4 cup. I get two salad's worth out of it. If you need more at once, you can double the recipe.

I store it in the refrigerator in a very small jar I cleaned and saved. It doesn't last long, but there are no preservatives. And it's always fresh!

In fact, I made a fresh batch this morning for my lunch salad!

From the garden:
Arugula, Romaine and Loose Leaf Lettuces
Broccoli
Garlic
Onions
Cilantro and Dill

Saving for Winter

I'm so happy with my garden right now. The tomatoes are geting ripe! I planted for a fall garden of beans and cucumbers, as the ones I planted in spring are pretty much done right now. It had been really, really hot, but last weekend we got some nice rains. And that lowered the temperatures a bit. So what do I do with this wealth of tomatoes?

 I got myself a food dehydrator! First I dried a whole bunch of basil leaves from the herb garden. It takes about 18 hours or so, with my dehydrator, to dry those wet basil leaves. Then, I cut up some of the tomatoes and put them on the dehydrator screens, sprinkled with the fresh dried basil and some sea salt, to give them some flavor.

 I have four trays for the dehydrator, and it sits on top of the clothes dryer. It's not too noisy, and I just fill it with fruits and vegetables to make dried snacks and un-sun-dried tomatoes.

 I put some of them in olive oil, and they turned out really well. Pretty soon I'll make some spicy tomato chutney, too. Storing the summertime harvest for later, when the tomatoes are just a fond memory, makes me feel very productive!

Lots of Square Foot Gardening

New 4X4 Foot Garden for Fall

 It's the middle of July, and I'm setting up for my fall garden. This is the newest 4X4 foot bed that I put out a couple of weeks ago. It's a cedar kit for the 4X4 outside, and my husband used strips cut from our cedar fencing to make my grid. I've started the fall zucchini plants under little net cloches, to keep the borers and squash bugs off of them. There's also parsley and pineapple sage showing in the bed. What you can't see are the 4 squares of bush beans that I planted this morning on the left side, and the 2 square of radishes I planted on the right side.

Net Cloches Keep the Bad Bugs at Bay

     I've found that pineapple sage, marigolds and radishes help keep the bad bugs off the zucchini. This time around I planted "Sure Thing" zucchini from Burpee - it doesn't have to be pollinated by bees to set fruit. We'll see how it comes along, it's the first time I've tried that kind of seed. I grew these from seed in my plant nursery area, then transplanted them into the new bed.Usually I would plan the seeds directly into the bed, but I got the seeds before I got the bed ready - so I went ahead and planted them. It all came together in the end, as you can see.
 The narrow strips of cedar lathe that my husband set up for me to use as my grid had an unexpected benefit - the net cloches fit right into them perfectly! Do you recognize what they are? I am using the small umbrella netting domes that you get for keeping bugs off your food at a picnic to keep the bad bugs off my baby zucchini plants! They will grow too large for the domes at some point, but I've already found frustrated snails and slugs climbing on the netting, trying to find the way in to eat the leaves. I was able to just pick them off and ... dispose of them.

     On either side of the 4X4 new bed are two Growbox planters with two Black Beauty zucchini in each. The Growbox planters are self-watering, which helps with heavy drinkers like zucchini plants. I put a mosquito dunk in each water reservoir. The mosquito dunks contain BT - an organic bacteria that kills mosquito larvae and also helps with squash vine borers. It's an experiment to see whether the BT in the water the zucchini take up in their roots will also inoculate them against the dreaded squash vine borer. Fingers crossed! Those little beggars are tough on squash. 

Tomato Tower and Cucumber Cube

These two beds are across from the new 4X4 bed, with its cedar plank walkway. I put them in last year, and now wish I had some cedar boards or mulch between the beds, so we wouldn't have to mow so close to the garden beds. 


These beds are composite recycled boards, not wood, and the grids are strips from plastic foam board to make the 4X4 grids. I like these grids because they let me put up the bright red 18" square 6" tall tomato towers that I order from Burpee. I like them because they last forever, look cool even with no plants growing on them, and I can fold them flat for storage at the end of the season. The bed on the right has tomato plants that are loaded with fruit and starting to bear. See the bird block netting? There are a nesting pair of cardinals that have their eyes on my ripening tomatoes!



I made a mistake and planted an indeterminate vining tomato in the shorter tomato cage, and when it grew right out of the top, I got a staking system at the garden store to keep it from falling over - so it's double-staked! Sort of like a belt-and-suspender system. Next time I'll learn to READ on the transplant's tag whether it's determinate (bush) or indeterminate (vining) and cage accordingly.

Rooting Tomatoes and Starting Melons

     The further away bed is basil, marigolds and cucumbers, with a couple of determinate tomatoes on the other side. The cucumbers have been bearing heavily all summer. I love going out and picking one, then cutting and eating right in the kitchen. So fresh! and I know exactly how they were grown. It makes me feel very virtuous to grow and eat my own salads! 

 This is where I start plants off from seed, in the plant nursery. There's a concrete slab here, probably from an old pump housing years ago, and I have another Growbox on top of it with baby watermelon and cataloupe vines getting started. That large pot has tomato rootings in it. I cut away large limbs and sucker vines off the vining tomatoes and put them in good potting soil to grow roots. When my spring-started tomatoes are all done, these will be ready to get started and bear through to the first frost.

Supporting the New Plants for the Fall Garden

 Because I'm in Zone 8 here in Central Louisiana, I almost get a chance at two gardens, Spring and Fall. The Spring-Summer plants get tired from bearing all summer, but these new baby plants are all ready to take their places and keep growing all through August and September, for a fall harvest. I plant marigolds all over the place, to help keep the bad bugs away - and to give a splash of yellow color here and there.

Peppers and Pineapple Sage

This is the other side of the tomato square foot bed - it has okra, pineapple sage and yellow banana pepper plants. The okra hasn't started blooming yet - it went in where the yellow squash plants came out when they got finished. We ate all the yellow squash, and the plants were done, so out they came and okra went in their place. That's one thing I love about square foot gardening - it has crop rotation built right into the system. I don't make up a planting chart or anything like that - when the lettuce is done, plant the beans. When the beans are done, plant something else in their place. 
     Also in this bed are some cajun red pepper plants. I've almost picked all of their peppers and used them in banana pepper relish. I like the bright splash of red in the jar with the yellow pepper rings of relish. 

 This is my second year with my square foot garden in this location - I built the beds last year. This year's crop has been much better. It's the first time I've tried a second fall garden - wish me luck!