Quiet day for the Fourth

 Today was about gardening until I got too tired, clearing dead foliage, generally cleaning up and returning the debris to the earth among the trees where it's good for the ground. It does look much better.

Lavender's fading now but will bloom again at least once. Last year three periods of bloom. And the daisies are coming along.

The thyme is blossoming now, lovely tiny flowers

 

Stella d'Oro daylilies in full swing. They're all over this development, from my stealth gardening, planting them around the dumpster areas, and giving divisions to neighbors. 

There's a healthy stand of them, and pachysandra, in the median strip of a highway in Trenton, from bags of divisions  which I gave a teacher working on the environment with her high schoolers. That was a very happy Freecycle a few years ago.

Here are the beginnings of the white chrysanthemums, just budding up, and next door is packed with bloom, some from seeds I'd collected on the sidewalk down the street, and gave him because I had no space!

After this strenuous time, not as energetic these days,  l retreated to rest (!) by making pasties from scratch. Yes, funny way to rest, I know.

Ready to steam spinach, microwave yellow potatoes, saute mushrooms and scallions and grate parmesan, for stuffing pasties using a different dough.

Bolted whole wheat and regular wholewheat

olive oil, hot water, not milk.

Stuffing under way, then mixed with an egg, the cheese, pinch of baharat, and spiced ground salt. Of course!

The dough was drier than with milk, easy to roll and manage and fill

And here's lunch,  decorated with Thai basil, which is now growing fast out there, and some Bad Food chips there.  

I think next time for the dough I'll do half water half milk, because it was just a bit sort of floury, though good. Adding milk with water will give a nice texture to work and to eat. At least that's the plan. Enough stuffing for  about six pasties in all.  

Glass of sun tea, with lemon slice.

This is pretty labor intensive foodbst the outset, but it's so good and it makes a lot. Then for several days meais are pretty fast. Dough's ready in the freezer, filling's in the fridge. Just bake.

While I'm getting all up there about my kitchen prowess, such as it is, I should show you a couple of tools.

Here's my coffee maker. Very technically advanced

Piece of ancient linen, ancient filter. I simmer coffee grounds in milk and water, just bring to a boil, then pass once through the strainer lined with the linen, into the cup. Done. Excellent coffee. Strong not bitter, snarling with caffeine as I like it. 

And my grinder cost me $10 about forty years ago literally. 

And already, already, the blades have lost their end bits, from dealing with tough chickpeas, and the lid has seen better days. But the motor still runs fine.  Two speeds -- off, or running like it's trying to get away, hold on there.

And there's a fun preschool activity yet to do, matching the lids and containers from yesterday's spiceapalooza.

I'll save that for tomorrow. Can't handle any more excitement today.

Happy Fourth, with cherries

Breakfast in bed, with cherries, which seem like patriotic food to me, probably the Washington connection. And a Charles Todd Inspector Rutledge mystery, not Bess Crawford this time.

Note the stainless steel cup, hot tea from the thermos. This is great.

Quiet day, handsome Son working full day as usual in Sunday and most holidays and this is both. But in summer he's off to the shore every chance he gets, so I may see him less anyway.

Yesterday I was so industrious that I made the curry powder and the baharat. Grinding that many spices is in fact quite buzzy. Definite high happens, a happy one, no crash.

So here's what transpired.

Getting the seeds out of cardamom pods, wonderful smell. After a bit I decided just to grind the whole pods anyway.

Here's the mixture ready to grind. Everywhere the recipe says ounce I used two teaspoons, just to keep the proportions right. Half ounce = one teaspoon etc.

Then after grinding, I winnowed a bit, then reground what was left in the sieve, a tip from Bill Veach which I'd never noticed before.

And came out to this beautiful powder.

On to the baharat, much simpler recipe

Very different from the curry powder, warm scent and taste, great for all kinds of food.

And somewhere I found a tip for cleaning the grinder. The top comes off and can be washed, but all you can do with the grinding chamber is wipe it out. Hard to remove traces of previous spices. Anyway the tip was to grind some salt, then empty and wipe.

Which I did, using kosher salt, which is a great scouring material, safe and it works, and that was a good tip. But there's more..

I realized that I now had a supply of ground salt with spice flavoring. I tasted, and the saltiness was amazingly amped up, along with spice flavor. So, frugal me, I bottled and labeled it, and it's joined the salt collection. Tiny pinch is all it takes. Happy discovery.

And, since I didn't waste, I mean spend, all my time in the kitchen, I also discovered a very funny writer, D.G.Strong, humor pieces, right up my street. 

So that's another holiday, my whole life is holiday, chez Boud.

The Law of Concatenation has struck

 After the prepping of the Misfits produce, minus the ginger which they forgot to pack, and will credit me for, though I'd rather have the ginger,  where was I? 

Anyway, at that point I noticed the spices which take up most of the small cabinet space of this not very well designed kitchen, were in total disarray.

I use them a lot, so they get knocked down, shoved around and generally disrespected.

So today, the weather being rainy, seemed like a good idea finally to Do Something. 

Three cabinets, the only ones away from the stove and the window, better for spices, were stuffed with containers of all sorts and materials which defeated my original idea of alphabetizing them. I'm against buying containers on purpose except for the few I have for jam. 

So I sort of have them organized by function. All the baking related ones together, more or less, the others by family, all the salts, all the peppers, that sort of thing. 

But it's ages since I took everything out and cleaned the shelves, and generally Kept It Up.

Top pic is the easiest one, cleaned up, then the middle one, horrible shape, too deep to reach in, goes to a point in the corner, things fall off the lazy Susan and you have to get a stepladder to retrieve them. 

Then the smallest which ended up with the most stuff, don't ask me, I only live here. That one also yielded all the items on the tray, needing emptying, cleaning, reassigning.

As I sorted and wiped and spilled and swept, I wondered why I had so much of some items. Cardamom seeds? Masses of cinnamon? Coriander?

Then is when the concatenation struck. It's a fancy word for one damn thing after a damn nother. Because a couple of the containers were empty. No home mixed curry powder. No baharat.

Clearly the next thing, once I'd dealt with the extraneous objects such as bags of coins needing wrappers if they still exist, totally outdated spices needing to be tossed to reuse the glass jars, the next thing is to get grinding.

Needing to retrieve the recipes, baharat in Jerusalem, curry powder in Bill Veach.

And that's when I realized it's why I have all those spices. 

Here's the set-up for the curry powder.

I rest my case.

I also rest my arms. 

While these are soaking, I'm off to enjoy Bad Food.

No grinding, mixing, working. Just chomping. Happy Fourth Eve.

Misfits box arrives

 This week's box is here

And here

And there followed the usual washing and scrubbing and peeling and chopping.

The advantage is that when I go to fix food,  I know that every piece of fruit or vegetable is already clean and ready for use. And if it's in the freezer, it's also chopped or sliced or whatever's called for. That cheers the cook who is sometimes a bit reluctant.

Tonight's supper, just assembly, needed nothing more

Heirloom tomato, sweet as fruit, no acidity at all, with fresh ground Tellicherry pepper, the wonderful stuff from Reluctant Trading, so aromatic you just enjoy it as soon as you open the container. Sea salt, chunks of sharp cheddar, the last of the Italian parsley.

Cherries, small and sweet, for dessert.

That's all that's needed on a tired Friday after a week of grueling heatwave and a tragedy. It was very welcome.

Back to Bess Crawford now. Or possibly sleep, I'm not in charge. Turns out Charles Todd is in fact a mother and son writing team. Useless piece of trivia. 

Between Maisie Dobbs and Bess Crawford I seem to be spending a lot of time in ww1 in the trenches and field hospitals. A funny way to relax when you think about it.

Cooler weather and needing to make something

Today is blessedly cooler. Out grocery shopping, then home and reading a Bess Crawford and sleeping to catch up with last night's broken sleep and general upset.

And making has resumed. Partly the weather, partly needing to stitch away the upset about poor little Bennie.

Anyway thanks to various suggestions in here about the granny squares, particularly Mary Anne's pocket idea, partly because I'm out of little note books for lists and backup for appointments, since paper don't crash, I thought aha! Why not make four squares into a little book cover for a notebook with refillable pages? Two pockets joined up, card stock inserted to stiffen. Well, self replied, why not?

There followed a brisk search for cardstock, check, paper, check, paper-cutter, check, needle, check, embroidery floss, check.

And I had a very enjoyable time stitching and cutting, happily using my propelling pencil for the measuring marks, fine lead.

Here's the upshot

The cardstock is a stiffening to slide into the pockets.

Squares back to back, wrong sides together

Here's how it fits together

And because I need to remove pages, and refill  them, I didn't stitch the pages, but tied them this way

And here's my new notebook

Front cover

Inside left

Inside right

Back cover

Better all around. 

Bad food, yay, bad news, sigh.

Bad news first. About midnight, phone rang, waking me, too dopey to answer before it went to vmail, friend next door. Vmail wouldn't load, but he called again.

He was totally distraught. He had just found his old frail Boston terrier had accidentally been left in the car.  Even at midnight air temperature still high, and humidity, too. 

Bennie didn't survive. It's too sad, devoted owner who has been dreading the end of his old dog's life, suddenly, terrible oversight, realized dog wasn't in the house as he'd thought. 

He called me to ask what to do, couldn't think straight. Bennie clearly gone, but how to proceed. So I talked with him until he was able to deal.  Talking wildly about taxidermy, which I didn't argue, figured a couple of calls would show him this wasn't practical.

Texting this morning, and they went out. Just stopped by to say they'd taken him to be cremated.  Calls had shown the impractical side of his ideas about preserving his dog Good chat, like a condolence visit.

It's heartbreakingly easy for this to happen with a dog who's tiny and hyper, all over the place at once. And Bostons are particularly vulnerable to heatstroke.

On the good news, here's the holiday Bad Food all set.

And here's Future Food potato peelings already sprouting and now planted. 

They'll move to bigger quarters when they get started.

Temperature down to 80s today so I dashed out to shop before forecast storms arrive.

So that's all the news that fits.