A Day Of Toiling In The Fields

We had what we thought was a little bit of non-labor-intensive garden work to do today, but, as so often happens, it ended up being a vast undertaking of various odds-and-ends planting and tending chores.

The first thing we did was plant the Nardello and Habanero peppers in their forever homes. We didn’t bother taking any pictures of them once they were ensconced in their spots in the bed with the radish chevrons because they’re still looking really bedraggled after spending too long in a cold frame they were sharing with some slugs. The Nardellos look like they might have turned the corner on their way to recovery, but the Habaneros have us working on contingency plans. Plans that include buying Jalapeno seedlings at a nearby nursery and enjoying jalapeno poppers later this summer. Um, not that we’re wishing misfortune on the Habaneros or anything.

Next on the docket was gherkin bed. There were still some volunteer potatoes coming up in there from last year’s crop, and since we wanted to minimize how inviting the bed is to wireworms, we had to dig those up. In happier news than the fact that our old potatoes are acting like weeds is the fact that the gherkins are showing signs of life!

Our biggest concern this past week was the diseased cast the tomatoes were taking, but after consulting with a nearby garden center, the verdict was that they’re just sunburned. Who knew that tomatoes could get sunburn? We had a few laughs at their expense, suggesting they’re a bunch of southern belle drama queens that need to have parasols held over them all day long, but they look much better now after a week living out in the open. And more than that, they’re getting their first little sets of flowers.

After tending to the gherkins, it was time to plant the Calypso beans. We had a hole in the potato bed where one of the All Blues didn’t come up, so we decided to do some companion planting by adding beans, and these are just too cool-looking not to plant:

While we had the bean innoculant out and handy, we figured it was a good time to plant the peanuts, too.

We learned something about peanuts today, namely that storing them in a cool, damp place is probably a really bad idea. It’s a good thing we’re not counting on any peanut cash crop this year, as they were pretty moldy. Pickin’s were slim to find plantable peanuts in the shells, but eventually we scrounged up enough of them. Planting peanuts totally cracks me up, because you just put a peanut in the ground! It’s like planting jellybeans or something.

When we finished with the peanuts, we moved on to mounding up the potatoes. Apparently you’re supposed to keep piling soil up around the plants as they grow more than six inches tall, to encourage lots of potatoes to grow underground. We piled our potato plants just once last summer and had a great harvest, but we are at least attempting to do things right this year, and some of the plants are already well over the six-inch limit.

It’s almost ridiculous how quickly these things are coming in, and how lush they look. And I’m not sure our perfunctory pilings of soil around them are doing the trick, but hey. We’re gentlewoman farmers, not pros. We’ll just see what happens.

We had scads of scallion seedlings to be distributed around the onion and tomato beds, and once we finished that up, it was time to turn our attentions to the pumpkin patch. We put our pumpkins every year in a big, sun-drenched bald spot at the front of our yard, and despite the terrible erosion trouble there this winter, it looks like we’ve got a couple of volunteers there already.

Are they pumpkins? Melons? Who knows! Let’s wait and see!

We transplanted a few Sugar pumpkin seedlings, and direct-sowed some white Caspar and Cinderella-style pumpkins (Rouge vif D’Etampes) as well.

So yeah, just a little bit of work for us today. But all the crops are looking great so far, and, more importantly, we’re still having fun.

Pretending To Be Cooler Bloggers Than We Are

We’ve lately developed an addiction to garden and food blogs written by people who are a zillion times cooler and more talented than we are. One such blog is White On Rice Couple, which features incredible stories, recipes, and pictures. While perusing their garden posts, we came across the recipe for the So Cal Sunrise Cocktail, which I just had to try. I didn’t have any blood oranges on hand, so I used regular oranges, but other than that, I didn’t make any changes.

I mixed these up for us after a few hours of toiling in the garden — please note the sprig of lilac from our one scraggly lilac tree. We didn’t even realize we had any lilacs until a couple of weeks ago, when Pookie spotted them in the middle of a deer tick-infested brushy corner of our backyard. Boomer really earned her cocktail by venturing in there to cut those blossoms for us. Anyway, the drink is outrageously good. It’s really sweet, but not at all cloying, and very fresh with a lot of citrusy zing. I’m thinking of making up a thermos of them to sip at work tomorrow.

We Love Columbines And Our New Camera

Every Spring Boomer hopes her wee little columbine plants will bloom, and up until this year, they never did. Pookie and I would roll our eyes and mutter lots of, “That’s nice, Boomer” every time she talked about them, then we’d forget all about them. So color us shocked when, early this past week, she said, “Be sure to check out the columbines — they’re blooming!”

Of course, the columbines have been planted in a weird little nook at the back of the house, so we have to go out of our way to see them. We’re not very smart, so it took us a really long time to realize that one way to enjoy the lovely flowers would be to cut them and put them in a vase inside. It’s like a whole new world has opened up for us!

So here are Boomer’s columbines, and a bit of fun with our new camera.

A Very Boomer Lunch

Today we had a barbecue lunch for Boomer, and then picnicked on the deck while she opened her Boomer Day presents.

While the presents were really the main course, we were also a bit interested in the food. I decided to give a new recipe (for me) a try: Grilled Chicken with Tamarind-Orange Glaze. I made the sauce on Wednesday night, and it took about an hour to reduce down to a nice glaze-y consistency. It wasn’t terribly happy about having been refrigerated for a few days, but a vigorous reheating this morning cured it of its problems.

The chicken grilled up beautifully, and I whipped up some basmati rice and grilled some pineapple to go with it all.

This was a scrumptious meal. The tamarind-orange sauce was a bit too tamarind tangy on its own, but as a glaze it was really fantastic. It was fresh and zesty and a bit outside of my comfort zone (I’ve never cooked with tamarind before), so it was a special treat to try something new. But again, the main point of the picnic was Boomer’s presents, so the real test will be to see how this holds up without a party attached. I think it’ll do that well.

Happy Boomer Day!

Mother’s Day means we pull out all the stops for Boomer, and “pulling out all the stops” means a fancy-schmancy cake from Chez Alice in Princeton.

Boomer selected the “Pink Passion”, which is layers of sponge cake with passion fruit and raspberry mousses. This is kind of an adventurous choice for us, but the rationale was that we have so much chocolatey dessertage here at Maple Hoo that it was worth it to try some flavors we don’t often make for ourselves. And it was an excellent choice — the mousses are tart and tangy and fruity and fresh, and the whole thing is light and smooth and heavenly.

Good thing I accidentally ordered a pizza-sized version of this — we’ll be eating it all week!

Fancy Vanilla: Is It Worth It?

We recently got into a discussion with our friend kms2 about extracts and vanillas, and it got us wondering if our reliance on Neilsen-Massey vanilla is baseless. I’ve been buying Neilsen-Massey instead of my grocery store’s standard McCormick vanilla extract for years now because Baker’s Catalog sells the 32-oz. bottles of it, and since I use a lot of it, it’s cheaper that way. But after kms2 asked if there was a discernible difference between them, I got to wondering if I hadn’t been just assuming all this time that the “fancier” vanilla was better, when in fact it wasn’t any different. It was time for a taste test, to determine if it was still worth it to mail-order my “gourmet” vanilla.

There are a lot of ways to showcase the flavor of a vanilla extract, but the choice was easy for us to make; we went with our favorite vessel for vanilla — cookie pudding. Also known as “Toll House chocolate chip cookie dough”. We figured it would be mature of us to also see how the vanilla holds up when baked, so we suffered the additional taste test burden of eating cookies proper as well. So how did it turn out?

In this corner we have McCormick real vanilla extract. This is the vanilla extract of our youths, and this batch of cookie pudding was the first time we’d made anything with it in probably ten years.

The striking thing about the McCormick cookie pudding was how buttery it tasted. And how floury. And how it didn’t really taste like anything else. The flavors of the various components of the pudding just sat there, uncombined, and then had a slightly astringent finish. The whole thing was very dull and flat.

The cookies were even worse, with a terrible astringency. These were very harsh, with a sort of burning aftertaste to them. All in all, not a pleasant cookie experience.

In the other corner we have the Neilssen-Massey, the vanilla of our adulthoods.

The pudding wasn’t as buttery as the McCormick version, but the flavors were far more united. The flour wasn’t as present as a flavor, and the salt was more smoothly integrated into the combined tastes. The vanilla itself was more flowery than the McCormick, and had none of the alcohol astringency from the first taste test.

The cookies were also smoother, and had none of the awful burn of the first batch. Maybe it’s just us, but there seemed to be no contest at all in this taste test. The McCormick vanilla (and again, this was real vanilla extract, not artificial or anything heinous like that) was a far inferior competitor. That might be because we’ve been adjusting to the flavor of the Neilsen-Massey for the last ten or so years, but whatever the reason, I’m going to keep buying my 32-oz. jugs of it through mail-order without guilt. It just tasted better.

A Skewery Favorite

Last Sunday, when I was trying to come up with my menu for the week, Pookie kept jumping in and suggesting the chicken and feta skewers that I’ve made a few times in the past. As I always do when Pookie makes a dinner request, I rolled my eyes melodramatically, informed her that it would be impossible to make such a thing, let her know as witheringly as I could that whatever dish she’s talking about is so much work, and then glared at her until she said sadly, “That’s okay then. Never mind.” About five minutes later, though, I thought, “Huh. Chicken and feta skewers sound delicious!”

This is a recipe I got from either Gourmet or Bon Appetit about five years ago. For these I combined 1 cup of plain yogurt, about 3.5 oz of crumbled feta, 1 large clove of garlic (minced), 1 tsp. of chopped fresh rosemary, and salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste. I then tossed 1 1/2 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breasts (cut into skewer-sized pieces) in the marinade and let it refrigerate for 30 minutes. Then I cut up a couple of red bell peppers, and threaded the chicken and peppers in an alternating pattern onto my skewers. I have huge skewers, so I like to cram as much as I can onto each one and figure we can divvy up all the pieces after everything’s cooked, so tonight I had just four mondo skewers to be grilled. They cook up on the grill in a jiffy, although the original recipe called for broiling them. Whatevs, broiler. When they’re cooked up, you then serve them with more crumbled feta sprinkled over them.

For sides, I tossed some cut-up new potatoes with a couple of minced garlic cloves, some more chopped fresh rosemary, sea salt, pepper, and a liberal glugging of olive oil. Then I roasted them as the skewers were grilling.

I made these specifically for Pookie, because our other side was… farm-fresh asparagus! The farm stand on my way home from work is selling it now, and while I was a little crushed to realize it isn’t grown on that particular farm, it looked a lot more farm-fresh than the plasticine asparagus at my grocery store. I drizzled these with olive oil, gave them a sprinkling of sea salt and a grinding of black pepper, and then grilled them up.

I’ve mentioned before in this space that I’ve become a much more frequent griller since moving to Maple Hoo thanks to the eponymous maple in the backyard. We’ve got a couple of benches underneath it and we all sit beneath the leafy canopy while dinner is cooking. It’s heavenly.

So, after all my whining about how miserable making these skewers is, it turned out to be quick, simple, delicious, and gave me an excuse to loll in the suddenly lushly green backyard. Fantastic times!

The Great Tomato Transplanting

The traditional time for planting one’s tomatoes around here is after Mother’s Day. But we like to thumb our nose at tradition and we’re overeager to get our garden going, so after studying the ten-day forecasts, we decided the temperatures weren’t going to get below 50 degrees again after this weekend and gave the tomato transplanting the green light. Our wee baby tomato seedlings have become towering giants of strength and are totally busting out of the cold frame. They’re also busting out of their little peat pots:

The time has come for them to get into the garden beds and get growing!

Benny the bunny showed up to observe the proceedings as we worked some bone meal into the soil where the tomatoes were going, and then dug some nice, deep holes.

We try to be as ignorant as possible about gardening in general, perhaps hoping to catch some of that beginner’s luck we scored our first summer as gentlewoman farmers, but one tip we couldn’t avoid learning was to help your tomatoes overcome their naturally shallow root structures. The idea is that if you bury your leggy seedlings up to their leaves, they’ll develop roots all along the buried part of their stalks. Another, probably better way to do this is to dig a trench and essentially plant your seedling sideways, but we can’t be bothered with fancy stuff like that. Just digging a deep hole and dropping the seedling, peat pot and all, into it was intense enough for us:

We decided to get tomato ladders this year instead of using cages or building tomato teepees or whatever.

Our crops this year will include five San Marzanos and four Black Plums, scattered in a few of the beds, and also in two barrel planters we moved around from the deck into the garden.

The little guys made it through their first few nights with no seeming ill effect, but one of the San Marzanos is looking troublingly diseased. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that being in its permanent home in the sunshine and Springtime warmth will nurse it back to health.

Lessons Learned #1

Dear Gentlewoman Farmer Pookie In The Future,

This is Gentlewoman Farmer Pookie Of The Past, here, giving you some gardening advice. You should be reading this letter in January. It’s cold out, the garden beds are all covered over in straw. You’ve been nose-deep in the Seeds of Change, Sand Hill Preservation, and Seed Savers Exchange catalogs for weeks. You’re starting to get antsy to plant some stuff but if you’re anything like I was this year, you’re going to rein yourself in. You’re going to be dreaming of fresh, crisp Spring lettuce but you’re going to say, “But it’s too early! It’s too cold!” NO! No it isn’t!

Look at this:

Isn’t it beautiful? This is what image has been dancing around your head, right? A cute little bright green Butterking lettuce head growing bigger and tastier every day. Looks great, right?

Wrong.

Because I waited too late, because I was scared of a little thing called “before the last frost”, the rest of the lettuce looks like this:

It’s May. And all there is is dirt. Dirt, dirt everywhere.

What I’m trying to say is PLANT YOUR LETTUCE EARLIER. I could be earmarking next weekend for an early Spring greens salad, but nooo-OOO-ooo. I’m going to be eating a bowl full of dirt. Don’t be like me. Put those lettuce seeds in as soon as the soil can be worked. You won’t regret it.

Hugs and Kisses,
Gentlewoman Farmer Pookie Of The Past

A Muffin Dress Rehearsal

Boomer’s birthday is in November, which makes it difficult for us to shower her with gifts and then still have ideas (and a budget) left over for Christmas. Recently we solved this dilemma by taking to treating Mother’s Day like her birthday instead. On top of getting her heaps of fun presents, we get her a fancy cake from our local gourmet bakery, cook up her favorite meal, and this year, at her request, I’m making blueberry muffins. Yeah, I know — it’ll be tough to gag them down.

Because I had muffins on my mind on Monday when I did my grocery run, I picked up some frozen blueberries, but then couldn’t wait for next weekend to make up the muffins. I decided to have a bit of a dry run this weekend, just so we can be super-sure that they’re what Boomer’s going to want on her special day, right?

My favorite blueberry muffin recipe comes from the America’s Test Kitchen Baking Illustrated. It’s moronically easy:

In a medium bowl, sift together 2 cups of unbleached all-purpose flour, 1 tablespoon of baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

In another medium bowl, whisk 1 egg until it’s well-combined and light colored, then whisk in 1 cup of sugar until it’s homogeneous. In two or three additions, whisk in 4 tablespoons of unsalted butter (melted and cooled slightly), and then add, in two additions, 1 1/4 cups of sour cream. Whisk it all to combine.

Add 1 1/2 cups of blueberries (frozen or fresh) to the dry ingredients and gently toss to combine. Then add the wet ingredient mixture to the dry and fold until the batter comes together and the berries are evenly distributed.

Divide the batter into a standard 12-cup muffin tin (either grease the tin or use muffin/cupcake papers), then bake for 25-30 minutes in the middle of a 350-degree (F) oven. Once they’re baked, let them cool for a few minutes, then gorge yourself.

I think I screwed the recipe up and put in too much butter today. Good thing this was just a dress rehearsal! I’ll have to make them better next week. (Oh, and they were still delicious. I can’t wait to make them right, to see how much more delicious they can be.)