Early morning herb prowl and other good things

This morning I did my early herb pinch and sniff rounds, like a flourish of trumpets to the nose.

Clockwise from five o'clock, Italian basil, skip the potatoes, Thai basil, curry leaf plant, thyme, lemon balm, sage. It's a lovely journey for the senses in rhe early morning, when I'm also providing breakfast for various biting fellers.

My little patio now has this herb garden, a flower corner, an arboretum, consisting of a giant butterfly bush (which yesterday my Indian neighbor, English her third language, referred to as a buffalo bush), the ficus and the Japanese maple, now dealing with a morninglory invasion

And a butterfly sanctuary, my rapidly growing butterfly, or buffalo bush. I'm hoping not to attract buffalo.  Amazing what you can claim, even if miniaturized.

Out front, my daisies having been completely obscured from the street by the lavender plant, I've made them my picking area. See below

Less ikebana, more flowers stuffed into water, but yes, that's a tree seedling. We get loads of them, constantly digging and cutting before they take over. Around here, it's the main reason to mow.

Yesterday's yield of great stuff, out walking, first time in days because of heat, here's another mystery plant. What the heck is this? There's a lot of it

And are these wild strawberries or a poisonous imposter? 

But look at this wonderful new fungus or lichen

on a huge hollow fallen tree trunk. I haven't been able to get an id. If you know it, looking at Chris here, or anyone with an app, I'd like to know. I'm going to follow this one's progress 

Gary stopped by last evening to add one more jam jar to my collection (!) and to say the plum jam is so freakin' good he's rationing it to make it last.

Yesterday's excitement in the mail

When the arrival of a new ironing board is a source of heart-pounding excitement and tearing open of packages, you do start to question your life choices to date.

Happy day everyone, with a couple of thoughts

Very high falutin from an ironing board aficionada, but oh well.

And a tribute to the bridge busters in the process of retrieving Crimea

A Day of Small Things

 My shoulder and neck aren't feeling much better, despite the day's rest. I did a bit of weaving, and the seasonal Changing of the Sofa Cover. 

It's looking a bit Shabby Chic meets Cottagecore  around here. Nigel Slater for food ideas, old wedding ring quilt on the sofa, you see the back, which I like better, antique hooked rug, getting more and more Fred Bear as it goes, oak coffee table scored long ago at the dumpster, Freecycled lovely tray, gifted handwoven napkin.

That's it for seasonal changes, except for unplugging the fireplace insert.

Meanwhile the herb corner is doing well on the deck

Working clockwise starting bottom left, chives, Thai basil, sage, curry leaves, Italian basil. Further back is what's left of the thyme plant, and the insistent lemon balm which gets everywhere. The potatoes are here too 

In the other side of the deck the flowers are germinating nicely, so the cheapo seeds were in fact a good idea. 

I'm resisting the temptation to knit and spin, much as I'd like to, because I need my shoulder to stop hurting first , with the help of ice, and some pills I've found. Not much pain relief here because I don't get much pain. But I found a few Advil generic tablets in the bathroom cabinet. 

So that's Chez Boud today, moaning bravely, listening to a mystery audiobook, occasionally putting in a jigsaw piece, poor me!

The puzzle solution as you probably quickly found is 

CH added to each word

Making 

WRENCH

THATCH

STARCH

SEARCH

TWITCHI

If anyone found a different solution, let us know.

Happy day everyone, mind your shoulder and any other body part that's in need of TLC.

Nursery hopes, then reality

Went to the nursery for a single perennial, now that I have a bit of room to plant one, where the contractors killed a lot of ground cover.  And had a lovely time in the sunshine with the dusky swallowtail butterflies, and the resident calico cat playing in a box.

Everything seemed to be annuals, though.  So after admiring a lot of things like this

 and this

I settled on this

and a trip to the library having yielded a Donna Leon I hadn't read, this seemed fine anyway.   Rosemary, tarragon and nasturtiums. 

A lot of art emerges after trips like this, where you don't have an art related goal, but let images just flow in.

Speaking of which, I made a bonehead mistake the other day with that little purple flower.  I had a brain freeze on sansevieria because of looking up snake plant which is sansevieria.  Of course the little purple flower isn't.  It's tradescantia virginiana, aka spiderwort.  Great apologies to the Tradescants, father and son, plantsmen several centuries ago with exciting lives finding and identifying botanical specimens in some very hazardous places. 

I do realize that this correction is like that joke in Christie's A Murder is Announced, where the learned parson says to the tiny congregation of tired old ladies: I expect you thought this was about Artaxerxes the First!  Well, you're wrong!  it's about  Artaxerxes the Second!  I probably got this a bit wrong, too, but you do see.  Only an obsessive could notice and bother about this sort of thing, but that's me.  And to prove it, go here for more info about John Tradescant and his exciting life.  These guys got around.

Why Going to Seed is Not Always a Bad Thing at all

I've never understood the hysteria about not letting plants go to seed.  Aside from seed savers, who love it, there's a great emphasis on keeping plants picked, pruned, and generally nagged, so to avoid the dreaded going to seed.  But if you take your harvest and let the rest of your herbs go to seed, you get some lovely sights.

Here's the buds on a ruby lettuce, ready to open and show me what color the flower is.  

And the oregano makes an interesting flower.  

And the peppermint.  

And then this little flower suddenly appeared this week among the blanketflower, and if any blogista can identify her, I'd be pleased.   It's a delicate pink which washed out to white in the pic.

Food rules

Deliberately ambiguous title this morning.  Read one way, it's about how food rules my current world.  Read another it's about the rules I need to observe in order to stay in charge of the food and not be ruled by it!  This is not about consuming food.  This is about the logistics of liking to cook and save and freeze vs. the reality of a smallish freezer at the top of my fridge.

So I made a giant loaf of bread yesterday, whole wheat and oatmeal with sunflower seeds inside and poppyseeds on top.  This is a variation I made of the whole wheat recipe in the Healthy Bread book.  I also quit using loaf pans, and put the entire lot into one great big casserole with a non stick lining, which creates a fabulous crust. 

I bake at the usual 450 F. for about an hour and a quarter, had to lengthen the baking from the loaf pan time, but now I've got it down.  The crumb of this loaf is lovely, too, nice texture, firm, but good.  Excellent for spreading tomato lemon jam on..

Then found that when I quartered it into useable sizes, the segments  that I freeze wouldn't go into the freezer, dangit.  Those containers full of herbs I picked for pesto were taking up too much space.

Deep sigh, removed them from the freezer, put the bread in their place and set to work, forced by necessity and the rules of food to get on with pesto making.  And after all that whining and tergiversation, it only took about an hour to create flattened packages of pesto for the freezer, now in there lying on a plexi sheet to keep flat while they freeze.

Rosemary, sage, basil, English thyme, lemon thyme, peppermint, spearmint, oregano, I think that's the lot, all done.  Instead of my usual olive oil, walnuts, herb, grated parmesan, I used all the above, but subbed grated asiago for the parmesan as an experiment, so we'll see how that works out.  And I made a container of pesto water at the end, to rinse out the blender without wasting any pesto.

I also finished one bottle of oil in the course of this, just came to the end of it.  Then left it capped and upended while I got on with the newly opened one.  After a few minutes, uncapped it and as I expected, at least another ounce of oil in there still, poured that into the new bottle, waste not want not, good olive oil is expensive.

The food rule seems to be like so many other parts of life: just do it. Don't put up the ingredients and waste a lot of mental effort remembering and planning and resolving to do it.  My whole winter's pesto is now up and done.  And the bread and the pesto all fit nicely in the freezer.

Next to make soup from all the little containers of potato water and pesto water and green bean water and other bits saved up, along with all the veggies waiting their soup life.  I'm thinking of putting soup into freezer bags and squashing it flat, too, why not.  Space saving. 

Every year at this time I wonder if I should have another freezer, and the urge passes if I lie down for a while..or until I get another space saving idea like this one.  So that the cook, not the food, rules!