Embattled Collards

Last year's exuberant collard greens were an unqualified success in the garden. A. was delighted and declared we will grow collards forevermore. Accordingly, he bought six collard starts in April and we planted them out.

Then it didn't rain. Like, at all. 

It's interesting that not all water is created equal for plants. Our garden plants will, grudgingly, survive when watered by a hose with well water, but they don't really thrive. They want rain water. I'm guessing this has something to do with the minerals in our well water? I don't know, but I do know that there are definitely some seeds that won't even germinate on well water (notably, root vegetables like carrots and beets), and that the garden doesn't grow well until it actually rains.

The collards were displeased by the well water and just kind of sulked there, waiting for rain.

Then it started to rain! Hooray! 

And then the harlequin beetles showed up, right on cue.

Behold, the destroyer.

The harlequin beetles arrive in great numbers at the beginning of June every year, and brassicas are their favorite plants to eat. They're not that hard to get rid of, it's just that there are so many of them. When the infestation is the worst, I use a bucket of soapy water and drop them in there to drown. Thereafter, I just inspect the plants whenever I'm out there and squish the ones I find.

Incidentally, if you ever have to hunt harlequin beetles, it's helpful to know their habits. When they sense you hovering, they'll scuttle to the underside of a leaf to hide. If you grab at them and miss, they'll drop to the ground, where they can be squished quite easily. They never fly, which is helpful.

Anyway.

The rains also came with two separate nasty hail storms, about a week apart, that were particularly detrimental to the big, spreading leaves of the collard plants.

The end result of all of this is, well, sad.

Not a picture of health.

However! The nice thing about collard greens is that they grow new leaves from the center, so even when they look like that, there is healthy new growth coming. 

Of course, I'm also starting to see the first small grasshoppers coming as well, which will be the next wave of attack on these hapless plants.

Will we ever actually eat any of these collard greens this year? Stay tuned to find out.

Snapshots: Sheep 'n' Stuff

Let's say hello to the sheep, shall we? 

We had another ewe lamb born last week, so now there are three lambs, all female.

Our neighbor Ms. Amelia's daughter texted me out of the blue awhile ago asking me if Poppy would like a bike. Poppy has a bike right now, but it will be too small for her pretty soon, so I said sure. And that is how Poppy got the cutest bike ever.

It's too big for her right now, but I bet she can ride it next summer.

At our little church, when the priest processes up the aisle from the front door, he had been just saying "Please stand," before starting Mass. I thought maybe it would be nice if there were a bell he could ring, instead. He thought this was a good idea, so I had the enjoyable task of finding a suitable bell. I wanted an older one, figuring it was more likely to be heavier and therefore have a nice tone.

I found the perfect bell on Etsy.

Obviously, I couldn't listen to it before buying it, but I was pleased to find it has just the right sound.

A. has been saying for years that he was going to build a small table for next to his chair in the living room, just large enough to hold his coffee cup. I finally decided this Father's Day to just buy one for him. He is very happy with it.

Table from Amazon, tile coaster from Poppy.

We got one of the commodities boxes that are delivered to our post office on the last Tuesday of every month. There are a surprising number of things in there.

Including a watermelon with seeds, hooray!

I had one small avocado left after last Sunday's taco dinner, which meant I had the perfect breakfast.

Fried eggs with salsa and avocado, and buttered toast. So good.

This past school year proved to be the death knell for the little L.L. Bean backpack I bought for my first child's first day of kindergarten. Which means this backpack lasted through 11 years and three little boys.

The strap ripped off on the bottom and I decided it was time to say good-bye.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Kristin's Cooking School

Friday 

Short version: Tuna salad, bread, frozen peas or radishes, ice cream

Long version: The children and I went down the hill to swim with our friends this day. We do this every summer, and I know it's a long day that tires everyone out. Me included. I made tuna salad before we left, and then put that on plates with slices of bread. I put butter on the table and let everyone choose whether they wanted to put their tuna on the bread for sandwiches, or eat it separately with bread and butter.

Saturday

Short version: Toasted burritos, corn on the cob, ice cream

Long version: I just made easy taco meat and beans (meaning with salsa and spices) to put in the burritos. I did go to all the effort of frying the burritos in butter, which always makes them better. The corn on the cob was sort of an odd pairing with the burritos, but I had forgotten about it for a couple of days in the refrigerator and wanted to use it.

And then everyone had ice cream. Most of them had both black cherry and butter pecan, although Poppy agreed with me that the black cherry was no bueno. She does love butter pecan, though.

Sunday

Short version: Kristin's Cooking School

Long version: My family all left in the morning for a trip to the mountains to drop the eldest off at an FFA camp before going camping and fishing and then dropping middle son off at the camp a couple of days later.

I spent some time in the kitchen on Saturday making camping food for the travelers. This means things that can either be heated up in the coals of their fire (I wrap it all in aluminum foil), or in a motel microwave if they end up not camping one night.

Barbecue meatballs (with not-pictured boiled potatoes) and Spanish tortilla. They also took the leftover taco meat, flour tortillas, and cheese so they could have more burritos one night. 

This means I was by myself at home. Not for long, though.

Our priest, who is a relatively young guy and has become a pretty good friend, doesn't really know how to cook. I mean, he feeds himself, but certainly not well. His younger brother is living with him this summer before he goes to college, and he also does not know how to cook. He, however, wants to learn. Last time he was at our house, he was looking at my tortilla press and said he'd like to learn how to make tortillas.

This gave me the idea that he could come when I was here without so many people to cook for and learn how to make the tortillas, plus what goes in them. I figured it would be much easier to do this when I wasn't having to make such a large quantity of food, and would actually have the focus to teach someone else.

And then one of their other brothers (there are six brothers in this family) who I also know, happened to be coming into town. He came too, so I ended up feeding four people anyway.

I taught them how to make ranch dip (for the vegetables and tortilla chips I set out before dinner), corn tortillas, taco meat, and refried beans. I actually wrote out the recipe for the ranch dip, and then they were making notes on their phone for what to buy next time they go to the store for the other stuff.  Like lard and garlic and spices, which apparently they don't currently have. What a sad kitchen.

Anyway.

I also made pots de creme for dessert, but I didn't teach that one to them because I made it in the morning before they came.

Monday

Short version: Eggs and fried potatoes, canned peas

Long version: I actually was by myself this night, as you can tell by my dinner. I love fried potatoes with eggs, but rarely eat them. I just microwaved a small potato until it was mostly cooked, then chopped it and fried it in bacon fat before also frying an egg in the pan.

I still have a couple of cans of peas from commodities, and I still like them well enough that I will just eat them plain. There's no denying the power of childhood conditioning.

Although I cook my egg totally hard, breaking the yolk so it cooks all the way through, which is certainly not how my mother did it. So I guess that conditioning didn't stick.

Tuesday

Short version: Taco meat and tortilla chips, green salad, ice cream

Long version: It was almost 100 degrees this day, which made me very thankful that I did not have to feed anyone but myself. And I had leftovers.

The salad was the remainder of the lettuce, tomato, and avocado toppings from Sunday's tacos. Because there was avocado in it, I didn't even need dressing.

I had enough taco meat left over, plus grated cheese, that I just heated that up, added some sour cream, and scooped it up with chips. It would have been healthier to just eat the meat in the salad, but I do love anything eaten with chips.

I also love ice cream, especially when it's hot in the house, which it was. Just not fruit ice cream.

Wednesday

Short version: Salad

Long version: A. returned home with the two youngest children in the afternoon--leaving the older two at FFA camp--but none of them were hungry for dinner. So I just had a salad with a hardboiled egg and some grated cheddar in it and called it good.

Thursday

Short version: Cheeseburger patties, garlic bread, green salad with ranch dressing, watermelon

Long version: I had made the garlic bread and thawed the ground beef the day before, but since no one was hungry, didn't serve them until this day.

The lettuce in the salad is my lettuce, yay! I tried growing a romaine variety this year for the first time, thinking it might not bolt as fast. I am very pleased that it doesn't. The green leaf variety I have in the garden is inedibly bitter by now, but the romaine is okay. It's a little bitter, but certainly not inedible. 

The commodities delivery this month included a LOT of watermelons. There was a whole pallet of them in the bigger village, apparently, and the lady at our post office (where some of the commodities are left for people in our vicinity) kept giving us watermelons when we went there. We ended up with three. And they have seeds. Yay!

Refrigerator check:

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

To Each Her Own

I was at the grocery store with the oldest son last week and I told him he could choose an ice cream flavor. He surveyed the options for a minute before deciding on black cherry.

That was pretty much the last flavor available that I would have chosen. 

These were the small cartons of ice cream, so I also got butter pecan for the rest of the family. All of them like that one, although again, I don't care about it at all. It doesn't actively repel me like black cherry, but I still won't bother eating it.

I did choose one for myself, though: chocolate moose tracks. Chocolate, peanut butter, and more chocolate? That's more like it.

A tale of two ice creams.

A. has always preferred fruit-flavored candies, ice creams, and desserts. I have always preferred chocolate. Preferably with peanut butter. He does not understand this. I likewise do not understand why anyone would eat black cherry ice cream when they could have chocolate moose tracks.

Variety is the spice of life, they say, and I guess that means our lives are plenty spicy.

So tell me: What kind of ice cream do you pick, given the choice?

Snapshots: Granola and a Walk

I had an unfortunate incident with granola this week. I had some in the oven when Poppy came in to tell me about the very boring passage in her children's Bible, in Exodus, that described the Ark of the Covenant in great detail. I told her those details had allowed people to re-create the Ark, and then we got to looking at pictures, and then . . .

Boooo.

Luckily, granola browns--and burns--from the edges in, so I was able to salvage about two-thirds of it from the center.

The actual burned third on the right went to the chickens.

The four pigeons we got from the wagon tramp have been released into the wide world. Every morning I see them take off about sunrise to wheel and glide around our almost-ghost-village.

Resting on the barn roof before their sunrise flight.

And then the dogs and I went down the road to check on the horses' water in the pasture they're currently in.

Hi, Cora.

And Bill.

Milkweed buds have such an interesting shape.

The children and I went down the hill on Friday to go swim with our friends who work on the giant ranch with a pool. It's the only pool in the county, and can only be used by employees of the ranch, so we're very lucky they invite us along. It's one of my children's favorite days of the summer, and I always take the opportunity to get some below-the-hill flowers.

All yellow.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Delayed Pizza

Friday 

Short version: Chicken, biscuits, tomato/cucumber salad, apple/pear crisp

Long version: I had enough chicken left from the bag of leg quarters I had thawed earlier in the week to separate them into thighs and drumsticks and roast them. Which is what I did.

Standard baking powder biscuits that went in with the chicken.

Standard biscuits, non-standard shapes. As ever.

The salad had cherry tomatoes and cucumbers from the store, which are never as good as garden tomatoes and cucumbers, of course, but good enough with homemade ranch dressing and pickled onions.

Saturday

Short version: Wedding food

Long version: This was the night we were at the giant ranch wedding. The food came from a local (-ish, maybe 130 miles) Mexican restaurant. It was beef or chicken fajitas with flour tortillas, rice, beans, chips and salsa, and, of course, dessert. Way better than most wedding food. The cake was even pretty good. I didn't try the vanilla/raspberry cake, not being a fan of fruit in cakes, but I did like the German chocolate cake.

Because I didn't have to cook dinner, I spent some time canning apricots and rhubarb. All of our apricots got killed by frost, but my friend down the hill in a much warmer town has a couple of trees at her place. She told me last week they were starting to drop their fruit, so I made a trip to town on Wednesday mostly just to pick apricots. It's a long way for fruit, but these are the only apricots we're getting this year, and a year without apricot jam is a sad year indeed.

I ended up with about eight pints of apricot jam. And then, since I had everything out and the kitchen was all sticky already anyway, I made some rhubarb jam, too.

I know this is not eight pints of apricot jam. There was an un-canned quart jar in the refrigerator already.

Sunday

Short version: Chicken tetrazzini, apple/pear crisp with vanilla ice cream

Long version: It was quite chilly this day, so that simmering the chicken bones from Friday's meal to make stock provided some welcome heat to the house. With the meat I pulled off those bones, plus the stock, and then spaghetti, onions, garlic, cream, milk, peas, and cheese, I made a casserole of something like chicken tetrazzini. No mushrooms, though.

It was quite tasty, and very filling.

I used one quart jar of canned apple slices and one quart jar of canned pear slices for the crisp. Canning fruit is always worth it, even though it's a huge pain at the time.

Monday

Short version: Sloppy joe sandwiches, leftover pasta, carrot sticks, ice cream

Long version: We were supposed to have a guest join us for pizza, but then he re-scheduled for Thursday. Since the main reason he was coming was to try sourdough pizza, I decided to bake the already-prepared crusts with sauce and then freeze them in the pan so we could still have it Thursday. This meant I needed something pretty last-minute for dinner.

Luckily, I had cooked some ground beef earlier in the day just to have on hand, so I made some of that into sloppy joe meat to have on the bread I had baked in the afternoon. One child had the last of the pasta.

Tuesday

Short version: Steaks, mashed potatoes, green salad with ranch dressing

Long version: While I was organizing the big meat freezer a bit, I found some packages of steaks. I thawed one package of rib steaks and one of sirloin steak. We haven't had steak in awhile, and A. was inspired to grill them. This happens very infrequently, but grilling really is the best way to cook meat.

Dad plate.

Wednesday

Short version: Leftovers, green peas

Long version: We had enough leftover steak for everyone to have some, and then I had leftovers from a random lunch I had made a couple of days previously with ground beef and rice.

Thursday

Short version: Pizzas, green salad with vinaigrette, crispy rice treats

Long version: We were supposed to have pizza on Monday, when a guest was coming who can only eat sourdough and had never had sourdough pizza. But then he had to cancel, but asked if he could come Thursday, instead.

Since the whole point of him coming was to try the pizza, I decided to save the pizza for Thursday. The way I did that was to bake the crusts until baked through, then top them with the pizza sauce, let them cool in the pans, and then wrap up the entire thing in plastic wrap and aluminum foil to freeze. So all I had to do this day was thaw them, top them, and bake until the cheese was slightly browned.

I was baking bread again this day anyway, so I also made one extra pizza in my smaller pan, because we ended up with another guest coming, too. So one big pizza was just cheese; one big pizza was Italian sausage, bacon, and pickled onions; and the smaller pizza was bell pepper, onion, tomatoes, and collard greens.

So pretty.

Ready to bake. The only one that had any leftovers was the plain cheese.

Refrigerator check:

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

A Shortage of Wildflowers

Last year was such a great year for wildflowers. We had multiple kinds for months, starting in May and going through until about September.

This year? Not so much.

We just didn't get rain. At least, not early enough. It was so dry in the spring that nothing grew. No grass, no flowers, no nothing. The rains finally started, but too late for most of the flowers.

What has been coming is late, small, and underwhelming. Last year at this time, the roads were lined with exuberant yellow clover, vibrant orange globe mallows, and lots of other things. I made so many arrangements. For the dining room table, for the bookcase in the living room, for wherever I felt like putting flowers.

This year everything is stunted, sparse, and limited.

But still! I do have some flowers.

Early-morning arranging.

I do appreciate that the silver nightshade (the purple flowers) has finally recovered after getting mostly eliminated during a poorly-timed hailstorm a couple of years ago.

 

The bookcase flowers are harder because they have to be taller.

The yellow clover and apricot branches do most of the heavy lifting.

Even in lean years, there's always something. A good lesson in general, I guess.