To The Surbiton Manor Born

 It isn't a very kindhearted name for what is a pretty astounding little single cell critter...who occasionally sends out a chemical signal to other slime molds and then they become a giant single cell full of nuclei or a temporary multicellular critter.  I think they are fascinating and as a budding mycologist,  I welcome them!  They have intelligence without having a pesky brain or even nervous system. Studies have shown they can solve complex transportation problems - they know how to find the most efficient way through a maze to get to the food on the other side. They also have some way to mark the passage of time and can anticipate routine events ...and they can learn to like stuff they don't normally like . But even more cool than that? Once they are habituated to something and then become hooked up with other single cell slime molds? They share that knowledge and all of them behave the way the wise one does.  We have been lucky enough to host TWO slime molds this summe

  I had grand designs for today. I did an early morning run to the massive big-box hardware store, rented a truck, and purchased nearly $300 worth of supplies for building a raised bed and painting inside.  I had this deluded idea that because we now own a skill-saw, it would cut down the time it takes to build a new raised bed to almost nothing. Two hours, I thought. It will be easy, I thought. I'll remember all the old tricks from last year, and then there will be time to paint inside, I thought. It turns out that I thought wrong. Up and out the door around 8:00, I didn't complete construction until nearly 4:00. A full day's shift of carpentry. A full day's shift of carpentry in the mud. The 7" of rain we've had over the past week made things a little dampish. As it is said, "Everything hurts and I'm dying." That said, it was nice to be outside all day. We're getting to the end of summer, and every nice day needs to be savored.  And it seems

 Order some vegetarian cookbooks from Better World Books . I did. They are an awesome source for books and they donate a book for every book you buy.  I got a slow cooker book and used it to make marinara sauce. It is a fairly simple recipe and yet, chopping up 4 pounds of tomatoes is a really time consuming and messy job. I still have all 10 digits so I call it a success. I made it last week and it really was an excellent recipe. The book is called, "Easy Vegetarian Slow Cooker" and you can see the photo below. I got it for just over 3 dollars.  I also made some sundried tomato and fresh basil bread. I had planted some herbs out front with the pretties. Next year, a proper herb garden is on the list. The bread recipe was an amalgam of several I'd been reading through- I will say, the addition of a little tomato paste was great for giving it color and added flavor.   

 Whatever the reason, the rain or the cold front moving through, we've had a lull in the harvest. Whew. With Tom out of town and me being of only one belly, this is a most welcome development. 

 More obnoxious, but still. I think I am going to go by my newly coined (or maybe it has already been thought of) adage, "if the birds don't even want it, yoink it!" I did the morning garden walk, followed by a bike ride, followed by placing my already stinky self into some previously stinky garden overalls, long sleeve shirt, gloves with rubberized hands so I could finally remove the bittersweet nightshade that had been running free along our fence, under a tree, and up another fence. I had read that it is not as poisonous as its name suggests but we've let this go for two summers and there are no creatures who are remotely interested in the bright red berries. I read that you don't want to compost it either. Nobody wants it. I had called it a "Viking" plant because of its purple and bright yellow flowers but it is considered an invasive. For good reason- the root system is a long runner type- you can pull and pull and it just keeps coming. Be prepared

 A local woman was forced to actually cook for herself when her husband's garden exploded Friday. According to eye-witnesses, the local woman had already forced her daughter to take a couple bags of squash, zucchini, and tomatoes to work but was still left with far too much produce to eat anything else. In an act of desperation, Ms. Good sliced up one of the many summer squash, screaming, "When will it end?! Oh, when will it end?!"  She then dredged the slices in flour, egg, and finally panko crumbs. She'd already prepared a med high pan with a bit of oil. She placed the slices in the pan, cooking until crispy and delicious on the outside and soft and hot on the inside. She salted them and used some bottled Mongolian Garlic sauce (cut her some slack, she can't make everything!) to pair with it. At last report, she was very full, satisfied and cleaning the mess she made. 

I stayed up a bit later than usual in order to complete the pumpkin butter process. I used a recipe from "The New Vegetarian Epicure" by Anna Thomas. I cut the recipe in half to match the weight of the pumpkins I'd roasted. I even added the optional molasses. It worked.  I did so while watching the last segment of the Ken Burns, "Hemingway" series on my PBS Passport. Damn, poor Papa. He really, really suffered. Repeated head injuries combined with years of alcoholism do terrible things to a person. Anyway, it was another excellent Ken Burns series and it kept me company while I prepared my pumpkin butter.  After scooping out as much of the pumpkin that I could, I cooked it and all the spices and sugar and cider vinegar down before putting it all in a blender (blenders are SO cool) to puree it to a smooth and buttery consistency.  I look forward to putting it on some toast after I walk the garden and go for a bike ride. It made a bunch so I looked up methods for

 You know, there's a new saying, "When you cut into a pumpkin, you get what you get." I was all prepared to make a small batch of pumpkin butter. I was using an actual RECIPE...and I'd read it before hand! I had weighed the two smallest pumpkins and figured I could use them to make it, only one had a sort of a black cut on one side, like a sneer, like a pirate sneering at me. Yeah. But I had already cut the first pumpkin -- the game was afoot!  So I  sunk my knife into old Jack O'....sparrow...what a funk!!  and what a nasty inside the pirate pumpkin contained!! I should have known. He was sneering at me, for cripe's sake!  One pumpkin headed for the compost, I still had two more pumpkins on the shelf. While they were both slightly larger than the pirate pumpkin, I decided to go ahead and make a slightly larger batch...but the pumpkin I cut had a very pale inside and a even a ring of green just under the rind. Rats. But like the saying says, "you bake wit

 Tom is on a much needed respite from farming. I have the controls now...I feel like Sulu. I've only been doing the slow steady countdown and suddenly I'm in command. Or maybe it is more akin to the credits of the Holy Grail. (due to copyright laws, I am unable to share a clip of the llama takeover. You can recall, can't you?) Rest assured, the garden will be taken care of in an entirely different style, at great expense and at the last minute. 

  This is a really gorgeous time of year. The sunflowers are playing host to hundreds of bees and a flock of goldfinches. The garden is spitting out a lot of food - enough to feed us just about every day. It's been sunny and warm. The summer continues to be short on rain, which I'm sure has tamped down yield. 41 tomato plants, you'd think you would need to be canning some. But it hasn't happened yet. We have five zucchini plants, but only two fruit in on the table and none discernable on the vine. The cucumbers have slowed. The yellow zucchini is threatening to blow up  on us (I can see nine little ones on the vine), but we seem to be at a pause.  So, time to build another bed. We wanted to do it this weekend, but, like many other things, we were disappointed. We were just a minute too late to rent a truck at the local big box hardware store. Like - seriously - just minutes too late. There was a guy who got to the counter just before us and snagged the last one.  The we

  This morning, this unsuspecting zucchini was minding its own business, growing bigger in the shade of its own leaves, watching the bees go about their business in the big orange blossoms after the rain (!! YES! Rain! ~ another inch!!) overnight.  Then BOOM!! Out of nowhere, plucked. Ruthlessly dragged to the house, placed on a counter for a few hours, and then grated and put into this recipe: A kind of cool thing about this recipe is that it is in my grandma's handwriting from who knows how long ago. I have been eating zucchini bread made with this recipe for my whole life. Weird. Anyway, I made it with whole wheat flour, because I couldn't find where Kiki had placed the regular flour. It actually turned out super well. I have remembered it being a little wet - in many cases having a soft center. But not today. Delicious.

If Vlad the Impaler had only staked his tomatoes, he would have gone down in history in a completely different way. It turns out that tomatoes desperately need staking. If you don't stake them, the minute tomatoes start appearing, they're going to drag the vines down onto the ground. Ask me how I know. But I'll bet that you don't have to ask, because you can guess. Before After about 1.5 hours of sticking stakes in the ground and tying tomato vines to them with jute twine. See any resemblance?   

  I thought that we would be inundated with vegetables right now. I'm not complaining, because we have a steady take of food almost every day. However, there's been a slowdown. I haven't seen a new pumpkin starting in weeks. After an initial swarm of massive English cucumbers, there are just a couple on the vine now. The tomatoes - all 41 plants - are, so far, not producing more than we can eat on a given day.  It might be the complete lack of rain. It might be the consistently high temperatures. It might be the smoke from the Canadian wildfires that has been inundating the city regularly.  But the fact remains that we're not exactly buried in veg.  We have tried some new dishes. We ate stir-fried zucchini 3x last week. We're eating lots of cucumber sandwiches with dill & cream-cheese. I put up two jars of refrigerator pickles. Last night we tried a tasty summer squash curry (we put a can of garbanzo beans along with two smallish summer squash in a blender with