A few more days of sun, and the peas are germinating! Caitlyn, of course, is taking this as a sign that she doesn’t need to wear a jacket anymore. This morning, as we were leaving for school, she insisted, “But it’s not freezing!” Well, yes, but it’s also not 70 degrees out, yet. Mama’s going to insist on a jacket for a few more weeks, I think. The seed potatoes have arrived. This is their “before” portrait. I’ll take an after picture before I plant them… The onion seeds have germinated, as well. Now I have to decide how long …
Category: homesteading
I was going to rant about Daylight Savings Time, but then I remembered that I already did. We have run out of one of our stored foods. The apples were gone in January and this weekend I used the last of the frozen spinach. Turns out Caitlyn loves crispy filo but doesn’t think so much about feta or about spinach, and both together are inspiration for all sorts of “Eeeewww” faces. I expect the baklava will meet with more approval. Anyway, I’m not too worried about the end of the spinach. My pantry notes say I put up 3 quarts …
Today’s results: yogurt, Irish potato brown bread, an almost-spanikopita (to be completed tomorrow), and Monterey Jack cheese. We should have made this cheese for our first hard cheese instead of the gouda we made last November. This was easy, if hugely time consuming. There’s a lot of waiting that happens in cheese-making. Bring the milk to temperature, add something, wait, repeat. Cut curds, wait, repeat. Curds and whey. Drained and salted curds. We got 6 quarts and 3 pints of whey out of this. (Local people: want some?) And this is where it’s at right now, pressing at 10 lbs, …
I try to avoid impulse buys. Usually the stuff around a cashier station is just junk, except for all the chocolate you can pick up in the checkout lanes at the Seward Park PCC. And shopping at my local Lowe’s tends to me make me cranky enough that I refuse to buy extra stuff at the registers as a matter of principle; they made everything I was looking for so hard to find, why should I buy this just because it’s here? But it’s spring. They’ve rearranged things to put the vegetable gardening stuff up front (or at least on …
I think it was the word “kale” in the title that grabbed my attention. I’d recently added 101 Cookbooks to my Google Reader and while browsing along found Pan-fried Corona Beans and Kale. And suddenly I knew what Tuesday’s dinner would be. We are, after all, still trying to eat the kale in the backyard before the seed potatoes arrive. Ok, so it wasn’t the recipe from 101 Cookbooks, but the similar one in Heidi’s book, Super Natural Cooking (which I bought on the recommendation of an old school friend and which I’ve admired regularly but hadn’t gotten around to …
I always seem to forget how pleasant mornings can be. Clear sky, the sun creeping slowly down the south side of the house and around the garage. Birdsong and crow conversations. The occasional neighbor, with and without dog. The train dinging it’s way down MLK. It’s peaceful in a way that the afternoons are not. I generally like all the kids running through our neighborhood, and I’m grateful to live in a place where they can get out and play. But sometimes it’s nice to have the quiet. Hopefully, Caitlyn will forgive me for not having enough gardening tasks for …