Contentment

I seldom reach a point of contentment, especially where food is concerned. I discovered swai in the supermarkets a few months ago and finally took a chance that, as it's a fish (Iridescent Shark- a fresh water catfish), I'd probably like it. I did, as long as I marinaded it in a Greek salad dressing for at least 8 hours before coating it and deep fat frying it in a mix of canola, olive and sunflower oils.

I let my factory thinking screw up a pleasant meal. Reduce costs and time. Tonight I skipped the marinade.

An international meal my mother would never have been able to prepare when I was a kid. The swai is from India, the paprika from Hungary, the sea salt from France, the sunflower oil the Ukraine, and the pepper corns from Southeast Asia? The canola/olive oil was bottled in Baltimore near as I can tell. Though I've not heard of olive trees growing there. Everything else looks to be a product of the USA.

Seasoned and floured. Waiting for the fry pot to finish a batch of french fries.

Ha! I forgot to mention the paper lined dish is from Poland!

Okay, I suspect Merlot doesn't go with fish and fries, but the ketchup suits it well enough.

Next batch of swai I fry will be marinaded. Son Jack and the Mad One both love the fish flavored that way. Now that I've had it without the marinade I have to agree. Somethings I should be content with. Greek marinade for this fish is one of them!

Making Blueberry Mead, sort of

I don't know that I'm a mead maker. I do manage to take honey, water and yeast, and occasionally turn them into something tasty and always alcoholic! Today, I got around to a blueberry mead recipe I found online. DW likes blueberry anything and I promised her a year ago I'd make this mead for her. Only when a 2.5 gallon plastic jug of spring water sprang a leak in the kitchen did I finally get started on this mead.

The recipe called for 5 pounds of frozen blueberries. Urr... the plastic bags of berries had been shuffled about the freezers for at least a year and somehow got holes poked in them. I figure the dogs will enjoy them and modified the recipe so it now requires 3 quarts of blueberry juice. $21 worth! I don't know what we paid for the berries. I hope the dogs like them.

The gallon of clover honey I'm using cost about $40. Add another $3 for two packets of wine yeast and a few teaspoons of yeast energizer and nutrients, and pectic enzyme and I've got about $65 (if I count the part of a jug of spring water) tied up in this 5 gallon experiment.

As DW tends to like a sweet wine and I, a semi-sweet mead, I'll have to add at least another 4 pounds of honey to the ferment over the next 4.5 months. That's what, another $12? So I'll have $77 invested before I bottle this one!

If I manage to actually bottle 5 gallons of this mead I'll have 25 fifths of it at a cost of about $3.o8 a bottle. I recycle the bottles and have corks from a previous experiment that went horribly wrong.

Blueberry juice with a packet of yeast and the other dry ingredients getting air whipped into it. I whipped the honey/water and spring water the same way. One of my mead books ("The Compleat Meadmaker" by Ken Schramm) recommends getting as much O2 into a must as possible before adding the yeast and sealing the fermentation bucket against the world.

DW said it smells heavenly. Blueberry people!

Filled to slightly above the 5-gallon mark, covered and air-locked for the next 14 days, maybe. I seldom manage to resist the urge to see all the yeastie bubbles popping on the surface and filling my head with the must's intoxicating fragrances. Just a hint of what the fermentation will do to my head about a year from now! Though the recipe recommends I wait two years before popping a cork. Riiiiight.

DW says she might, might wait until it's 6 months old!

She also says we need to plant an acre of blueberries!

12/5/11 Update. The yeast started working faster than I've ever seen it do before. Within two days it's bubbling the airlock at full throttle!

Planting the 2012 garlic

It was the first week of November before we could get onto the garden to prepare for the garlic planting. I hate planting in November. I'd much rather have the beds ready by mid September and the garlic in the ground no later than mid October. November planted garlic tends to frost heave as it isn't in the ground long enough to grow roots to hold it in place as our soil freezes and thaws many times in most years. We didn't have much choice with planting time this year. It started raining in late August and has kept it up often enough since to keep me and the tiller out of the gardens!

The bed DW is weeding had potatoes left in it from the summer's failed harvest. 100F days through July and no water other than rain fall (of which there was not a drop) made the 90 pounds of taters we scattered across two gardens a waste of money. But that's how it goes if one relies on Nature's generosity, or there is no source of water and mulch for the garden.


The local newspaper readers often ask me if I do anything in the garden?


Sure I do, though as little of it as possible.


Popped and labeled cloves of 20 cultivars are being planted this year, some of them are in the plastic bag. the clip board is the garden map Wanda draws up as she planted. I mark each section of cultivars with metal stakes so they are easier to sort out come July harvest. We learned early on to count each clove so we don't mix cultivars should the marker stakes get moved. Epsoma's "Bulb-tone is the only fertilize we use. I pour a line of it on top of the raised row and DW pushes the cloves down through it. I rake the soil over the holes left behind by her planting.


DW adds a just planted cultivar to the map. Name and number of cloves in whatever row.


Bed No. 2: planted, raked and ready for rain or snow. 683 cloves made up from 10 cultivars.


Planting the last row of Bed No. 1. I don't know how she managed to stay bent over like that to plant 779 cloves! My back ached just watching her. She did complain of her knees bothering her. We're coming to this gardening after decades of standing in a factory all day. We're just not used to such work.



The garlic maps. I'll lose them if I don't put them several places on the Net!

1360 cloves in the ground and I don't care if I never see another for at least a day. I've a bowl full of culled cloves to peel and slice for the dehydrator. At least they are already popped free from the bulbs so my thumbs get a break!

The gift of an acre

This is a Google satellite photo of the acre we were gifted this spring. I picked up a deer tick as we walked around it back in April and had to go on antibiotics for Lyme disease. That set the stage for the rest of the season!

The acre was planted in alfalfa five or so years ago, but has since settled into weeds and wild turnips. It hasn't been plowed in at least 5 years!

Plowed May 15th. Our average last frost date. We got a very late start. It rained before the farmer could run a disk over it and we had to wait another week before I could get my little rototiller onto the ground. Sadly, so I thought at the time, I was only able to work up 3,000 sq/ft before the summer baked the ground too hard to till. We debated just sowing bush beans on what we had tilled and skipping gardening altogether until next summer.

The Texan homesteader argued that we had nothing to lose by planting late so why not take a chance. If nothing else we'd gain a feel for the ground so we'd be better prepared for next season. As we had dozens of tomatoes and peppers already sprouted and getting leggy we went ahead and planted everything.




These two "worms" turned up on a tomato and a pepper plant. I knew the tomato horn worm would eat anything in the tomato family, but I'd not seen one eating pepper leaves before. Live and learn. Happily I squished them both and we didn't see another all the rest of the summer.


The little garden section of the acre in it's innocence.

July was nothing but 100F days of sun. We lifted water from the ground with a hand pump and carried 5-gallon buckets to the garden's edge so they could warm to air temps over night. We'd been pouring cold well water on the plants and couldn't figure out why they weren't growing. DUH! We were putting them in shock everyday! Once we got that right the garden took off!


This was the average size of the Crimson Sweet watermelons we grew from seeds gifted by the Texan. She bought them from http://www.willhiteseed.com/

We had so many melons coming ripe that I took to doing drive-by watermeloning of friends' houses when no one was home! Later on, the recipients of the abandoned melons would force me to take cash for the best tasting melons they'd eaten in years. I guess we'll be planting lots of Crimson Sweet in the 2012 garden.


Tenderette bush beans were supposed to be used as a cover crop. We ended up only planting two 50 foot rows that managed to provide us with bags and bags of beans all through July and August. One family I supplied with veggies refused to open the door if I had beans for them! They would eventually peek out and see the melons and open the door. They'd take the beans too as they shoved money into my hands and told me "no more damned beans!"


More damned beans!


The July heat finally chased us out of the garden and the weeds began to appear.


I was very disappointed with the harvest of Livingston tomatoes we grew this year. They did not do well in our lack of care so I can't blame the varieties. Had we staked them, mulched them and watered them more frequently I suspect they'd have done better. The few we canned were excellent.

The peppers simply loved the acre. Dry hot summer and all!


My first attempt at pickling peppers and garlic. The peppers are mushy, but I like 'em anyhow.

There is a gardeners' saying. "Next year will be better." That goes for my pickled peppers too.

Garlicky Summer

The 770 cloves, of 16 cultivars, did better than I expected considering we had temps of 100F in May this year! We watched in delight as the scapes appeared and doubled back on themselves.

Come summer of 2012, I'm hoping to pickle at least a third of the scapes while they are tender. I'd pickle them all, but I'm not sure if it harms bulb development if I remove them too soon. I was told it is best to let them curl, then begin to straighten before cutting them from the stalks. Once they begin straightening the stems are too tough to eat. The umbels at their tops are good for flavoring salads and pizza though!

DW before the July temps hit 100F and stay there!

While I dug up our little planting of garlic DW went to work on a friend's commercial garlic patch. She and the high school boys washed 19,000 bulbs of garlic while I barely managed to lift, wash, sort and hang a mere 700 or so. I heard recently, the boys planted 28,000 for next summer's harvest!

700+ bulbs hanging outside the kitchen door. Glorious! Even if I was getting garlic "papers" and roots caught in my beard each time I went through the door!

The scapes are forming! The scapes are forming!

DW takes a break from weeding the spotty tater bed. I had to drag her away from the garlic as once she gets to pulling weeds she doesn't want to stop until she's got them all, or the sun has fallen low enough behind the mountain so's she can't see the weeds!

Tuscon. The picture backs up my notes: sloppy plant. They do look sloppy with their paler shade of green, the bent, haphazard leaves and the loose curl of the scape. Hopefully their flavor is better than their appearance.

These are Italian Red, possibly some of the nicest looking garlic in the bed. The scapes are forming tight curls and according to my notes the base of the stalks average 5/8" diameter.

Chesnok Red. It's hard to believe these were among the last to pop out of the soil this spring and then they were curled like a pig tails and hugged the ground! I believe this cultivar is supposed to rival Spanish Roja for flavor.

We're hoping to lift the bulbs in the first or second week of July. This is the first year I've bothered to keep notes on my garlic beds so I don't know how delayed the harvest might be due to the long, cool, wet spring. Just on a guess, I'd say this year's crop looks as good and on time as last year's.

I'm so not into supermarket garlic right now. Evidently my friends and family aren't either as a brother in MS is telling me I have to sell some garlic to him while friends and family in FL, SC, PA and even Bulgaria are clamoring for their share. One of the Bulgarians suggested a trade, she'd send me mushroom bouillon cubes for garlic! I still can't get over Bulgarians wanting my garlic. They tell me they still grow good garlic in Bulgaria, but it is shipped outside the country to markets willing to pay more for it. The non-gardening locals are left with nasty stuff brought in from China, just like the crap we have in some of the supermarkets here!

We've already begun next year's garlic beds (they have potatoes in them) and our garlic guru has convinced me to keep most of the cultivars we have now as seed for next year while we buy our eating garlic from her. She also thinks we should throw in our seed garlic orders with hers as she gets a huge discount when buying in bulk. I'm all for that. Some of the cultivars we have growing cost us in the neighborhood of $30 a pound when you add in the cost of shipping!

I still haven't figured out where I'm going to hang the harvest to dry and cure! I don't know what we'll do when we finally get started gardening for market on the acre and a half our dairy farmer friends have given us. I walked over that ground recently and visions of a quarter acre of garlic were in my head. Where would I hang all that to dry?!

Accidental scallions

First garlic of the year, sort of. These are garlic scallions. They weren't meant to be. They were supposed to develop big bulbs, but they turned out stunted compared to the rest of the planting so we pull them as we weed.

I've not eaten garlic in this stage, if it turns out to be as tasty as I've heard I might plant a bed of culls this fall so we'll have plenty of scallions come next April/May.