Yard Goods - Saturday 5/2/2009

Why do I always forget to take a before photo? This is the middle photo.

Trust me, I spent about half of the 3 1/2 hours I spent on the yard was right here. I took out most of the rocks in order to get the neighbors' leaves out from between them. And then, yes, I put them back.

Tomorrow I want to replace the African daisies with fresh ones.

I enjoy digging, planting, even weeding. I am less enthusiastic about cleaning up afterward.

The whole thing of sweeping a sidewalk is kind of mystifying. I mean, isn't the whole point of the outdoors to have a place to keep your dirt?



I picked up 249 apricots from the back yard. The other day I picked up 118. There are maybe 3 dozen left on the branches.

Big winds in spring: boo! hiss!

Newhall Farmer's Market - Thursday 4/2/2009

The last time I stopped by toward the end of last summer, this was a bedraggled little market being held in a parking lot. Now they close off Market Street (aha!) and there were already several vendors this early in the year.



I can't remember what these gorgeous little tomatoes were called--not tomato, not plumb--but they are delicious. They must be lovely in the field.


I've been reading Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, which is an account of her family's efforts to eat only locally grown foods for a full year. This should be easier for me here in California. She keeps bemoaning the produce she can't have because it's shipped in from here!

I can tell, though, that I've pushed beet season to it's limits. The beets were smaller than those I've had in the past couple of months, and the greens were not as tender.


Dodger poses with some "unsprayed" (no pesticides, but they probably aren't certified organic) tomatoes. Specialty fruit for only $1.oo a pound!


What I did on my mini spring break: made a steamed beet green salad with roasted beets, cauliflower and carrots, fresh tomatoes, crumbled bleu cheese and pine nuts.

Mmm mmm mm-mm-mm!


And for dessert: Trader Joe's French Village Creamline Yogurt and fresh Oxnard-grown strawberries.

Life's good in the SoCal.

Shrouded Oranges - Thursday 3/19/2009

Not sure why these particular orange trees were covered, while both younger trees and trees with blossoms on them were not covered. Thought at first it had to do with a frost threat.

It just struck me that it might have something to do with pollination, and keeping random bees from visiting.

Near Fillmore, CA, where we went to camp for the weekend. Beautiful!

Oops! It's Spring Already? - Wednesday 3/4/2009

Apparently the apricot thinks so!

I didn't get around to pruning again this year. The fruit trees are a little spindly.

Yet More About Food - Friday 12/26/2008

Royal Riviera pear courtesy of Mishegoss. Perfectly cored fruit courtesy of Kitty. The melon baller works perfectly for this.

A few seconds later I scattered bleu cheese over one of the pears. Mmmm.

Good Night, Sweet Quince

Here's the end result of the quince experiment!

The syrup is very lightly flavored and thick. I think it would be great over finely crushed ice, like in a Sno-Cone.

I pureed the fruit with my handy hand-blender. It's such a pretty color! And it tastes great on a La Brea Bakery bread roll with a little bit of butter.

Quince-tessential Fall Fruit

Consider the humble quince. Not really edible in it's natural state. It won't actually harm you, it just doesn't taste nice.

On the way home from the doctor's office on Saturday (allergies became a sinus infection, hence the long absence from Any Given Sundry,) Kitty and I stopped at Sanchez Produce and I saw these. I'd read about them in How to Pick a Peach.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I can't stop talking about that book!



By Wednesday I was beginning to feel human again... You know, that sense of life being worth living you sometimes get when emerging from a bad cold or flu? That was me.

It was Kitty's last day in California, so I wanted to get around to cooking this up. I may have become a bit over-excited. Russ Parson's recipe for poaching quince was so simple that I thought he hadn't given me the proportions for simple syrup.

So I went online and the first one I found recommended 2 parts sugar to 1 part water. I was thinking I was going to try to poach the quince whole, so I used two cups of water and four of sugar.

Then Kitty pointed out that the instructions said to slice the quince. Well, shoot. Of course.

We dropped the slices in with the seeds still intact, just to see what would happen. The seeds contain a lot of natural pectin, which is what helps fruit jelly become jellified.

At some point I noticed--or Kitty read--that Parsons actually said 1 part sugar to 1 part water. Too late, buster. You have to get my attention and you have to hold it.




It took a lot longer than 45 minutes for the quince slices to turn rosy and look really cooked. But oh my, what a delicate and lovely flavor.


Serving recommendation is with a couple of vanilla cookies on the side.

I think there was so much sugar, though, that I more or less candied the quince rather than poaching it.

I'll try this again using the correct recipe with less sugar. Also will probably try this recipe found online, which looks spicy and wonderful. Ooh, or this one for membrillo.

Mango Tangle - Wednesday 9/10/2008

A perfectly ripe mango is one of the great pleasures in life. Sweet, tart, and exotic to those of us raised on apples and peaches.

When I peel fruit, I always try to cut the peel off in one continuous strip. It's something I learned in my Grandma W's kitchen. Probably a way to challenge herself as she worked her way through and endless series of breakfasts, dinners and suppers. (Yeah, that's how we called them in Indiana.)

I'm pretty good at it. I love the spirals that naturally result from this technique. My mind slides down them, back to Grandma's kitchen. When I was very little, there was a hand pump in the sink. There were blue gas flames in a little grate near the linoleumed floor. There was a Formica table with a cracker jar in the middle of it.

I doubt that my Grandma W, who died in 1979, ever tasted a mango. I think she would have liked it.

Figs and Tea - Friday 8/29/2008

I told my friend Toronto that along with not having to deal with holiday weekend traffic, an advantage of working at home today is that I feasted on figs and tea.

Her response?: "Where are you, Casablanca?"

Now that would make the day perfect. My ceiling fan was made of painted white plywood rather than reeds and I opted for air conditioning against the heat.

But the figs, oh my dears, the figs. Perfection in a fruit. What more does one need? It's all I ate all day.

How is it that I was unaware of the fresh fig until I was 35 years old and my brother had a tree in his Echo Park yard?

A newton is nice, but it doesn't hold a candle to the real thing, this fruit that feeds wasps and reveals secrets rivaling the most sparkling geode.

Figs and Russian Samovar tea that my mother sent me in the mail from exotic northern Indiana. Today I had a happy palate.

I Don't Know Scat - Saturday 7/19/2008

There have been mountain lion sightings in Acton this summer. One even took a goat from a place about a mile and a half away, as the crow flies.

We thought maybe this was mountain lion scat, but it's not. When we got home and looked it up online, we found out that real cougar scat looks like this.

Oh! We saw that all over the ridges around our neighborhood. Seriously!

Still not sure what this is. It's disturbingly large and full of juniper berries. Like bear scat, kind of. Hmm. There are bears way over on the other side of the valley, but I can't imagine one wandering all the way over here. It's very exposed.




I don't know exactly what this is, either. Maybe it had something to do with surveying the area? It looks like they mounded dirt up an poured the concrete into the bowl to make this base.


We've decided that the best place to eat is usually at our house. We went to a restaurant that was well-reviewed online yesterday and it wasn't as good as these chicken sausages and onions I cooked up for lunch.


Let's see... What goes with that?

What do I have in the fridge? Persian cucumbers. There's a ripe tomato on the patio, and basil growing on the front porch and, hmm, the plumbs I picked from the branch of the neighbor's tree that hangs into our yard.

My instincts are getting better. This was amazing together, dressed with my favorite taragon white wine vinegar and the wonderful olive oil Tomasina gave me for Christmas.

Plumbs and fresh basil. So good. I'm going to try more pairings of fruit and herbs.

Fruitful Morning - Tuesday 7/15/2008

I stood here framing a couple of shots of these--I think they're maybe an uncultivated kind of date?--until a squirrel up there pitched a fit.

It suddenly began racing around up there, chirping and chattering and rustling the fronds. Then it jumped to a neighboring tree, in a huff!


The fruit, after having been run over by a car.

Upside Down Tomato - Saturday 7/5/2008

This morning we hiked the peaks around our neighborhood and then looped down around Sundry's Mountain, where we'd never hiked before. It took an hour and a half, and we had a great time!

I didn't take my camera with me on the hike, but this tomato posed for us when we got back.



Yeah, and to think we were worried because it said you should allow 4 feet below this upside down planter for the growth of the plant. It's actually hard to keep the reservoir filled with water.


The Sweet 100 cherry tomato in a pot on the back patio is doing better...it's getting watered by the sprinklers every day. I've already eaten two little bitty gems from this plant.

Apple Progress - Sunday 6/29/2008

These are the apples we're throwing away. Sadly, the worms found our little organic corner of the earth. Need to find out what to do about them without poisoning us or the fruit.


These are the small apples Hydra is going to attempt to eat without getting a stomach ache. Pacing is probably very important here.

Yeah, I counted them. We pulled more than 80 off the tree so that they wouldn't break the branches as the continue their march toward ripeness.

They should arrive around October, I think.

Basil growing tip: I finally figured out last year that in spite of the little directions that come with the basil, it's really happiest out of the kind of direct sunlight we get here in the high desert. It likes the relative safety of the shaded front porch, but it wants more moisture in the soil that is easy to maintain due to the high temperatures and almost constant breezes.

My mom told me about her trick of putting a strip of rag from a pan of water into a potted plant when she goes away for a few days. I thought I'd try this with my basil plant. Seems to be working!

This is the Way We Bake a Pie - Tuesday 6/24/2008

Okay, so I still haven't perfected rolling out the dough and getting it onto the pie, but at least I figured out what I did wrong last time when the top crust didn't cook right. (Covered the whole thing with foil when I was only supposed to cover the rim.)

Remember I picked all the peaches last week? Well, by today they'd spent enough time ripening in a paper bag in the pantry and needed to be dealt with.

Tomorrow we're celebrating my birthday at work. It was in January but we were on strike, so it was postponed. Two others are celebrating their birthdays, too. We'll go out for lunch on the company and we'll each get a gift card that our coworkers all contribute to. It's a nice tradition.

I decided to make a fresh peach pie rather than us buying something. Hydra pitched right in and cut up peaches while I made the dough (from a boxed mix) and cut up a watermelon so we could fit it in the fridge.

He continued cutting up the extra 10 cups of peaches that we froze while I put about 4 1/2 cups into the pie. His pieces are so nice and uniform. Mine tend to be kind of wonky.

It overflowed a little while cooking, which set off the smoke alarm. Which set off the parrot.

He does love a loud noise.



Pie's in the oven. Kitchen's cleaned up. Dishwasher gurgles in the background. Smoke alarm has been subdued.

We're watching season 2 of Weeds on DVD and enjoying dessert: red raspberries in Sauvignon Blanc for me and watermelon for Hydra.

Summertime!!

First Watermelon - Sunday 6/8/2008

Fabulous sweet watermelon from Trader Joe's. A squeeze of lemon from Ann's tree. Freshly scissored spearmint from my yard.

Amazing!

Ann's Lemons - Friday 6/6/2008

Now they're mine!

Picked from the tree in her back yard during the break in the hoot.

Music and lemons. Mmm.

Apple Update - Wednesday 4/30/2008

Remember those apple blossoms I showed you a while back? They haven't been just sitting on their duffs!



These are maybe an inch long.

It May Be Spring - Sunday 4/13/2008

Yum! Strawberries and blackberries from Costco. I've never had blackberries as sweet and flavorful as the ones they've had at Costco this year.



Desert primrose in our yard. These bloom several times during the year, never have to be deadheaded, and are drought tolerant. I want a few more of them for the slope.


The neighbor girl seemed to wonder why I was kneeling before our palm tree. Hey, I don't question the mess she made of her hair.



Up close and personal with the inedible fruit of the fan palm.

One of those weekends that make me glad to be alive and aware of my surroundings.

"I knew, of course, that trees and plants had roots, stems, bark, branches and foliage that reached up toward the light. But I was coming to realize that the real magician was light itself."
Edward Steichen (1879-1973) - A photographer whose work and philosophy I'm a little infatuated with right now--in spite of his orneriness--because I'm reading about him and seeing his work.

Expanding Joy - Saturday 4/5/2008

I know, I know! More flowers?



But consider this gorgeous little miracle: in a few months these will be apples!

"There are those who give joy, and that joy is their reward." Kahill Gibran (1883-1931)

Weens Sure Has a Nice Pear - Thursday 12/6/2007 BONUS!

Weens' hands are small, true-- But this is a whopping big Korean pear. It was like fishes and loaves when she cut it up to share around the office. Everyone left satisfied.

Tastes like a cross between a pear and jicama, if you ask me.



This amazing cloud was hovering over the horizon as I drove home last night. So glad I carry my camera everywhere!


I pulled off Sierra Highway by Agua Dulce Vineyards to get these shots.


Just another view. Just a few months ago Mom and I were looking over the vineyards of Champagne. Sigh.