I’ll give you a hint:  There are no wabbits on that rooftop.  But he is after something….

I know.  All super-hereos have their kryptonite, why should mine be any different?

He has a nemesis–

Do not be fooled by the banal laugh and bright feathers.  This evil bird haunts us;  every spring, sure as the unwanted snows cover the tulips,  woodpecker arrives on our roof in the pre-dawn hours to pound away like a jack-hammer on acid in hopes of attracting a mate.

He must go.  The squirrels and the robins are our friends.  But this early morning wake up call simply won’t do.

We’ve discussed my husband’s single minded dedication to triumph over the woodpecker here before.  He’s out to get that bird.  And I am totally on board.  If I were any more supportive I’d be a bra.

It’s just that there is already a pretty impressive arsenal awaiting our fine feathered friend.  Our roof currently sports a large mirror, a duct-taped reinforced line of nails, and now this –

Yup.  It’s patriotic. It’s plastic.  It spins in the wind.   And our house is officially that house.  Sorry, neighbors.  And here you were so supportive of the whole bug-selling venture.

Meanwhile, down here on the ground–

That snow was so 2 days ago.  This weekend Mother’s Day brought sunshine and daisy-chains.  Head over to Digging in the Dirt to see The World’s Longest Dandelion Chain and other garden updates.

Spoiler alert — you’ll find this Gardener’s Challenge.  Tell me, please, what on earth has gotten my rhubarb so excited?

No amount of chopping wood would have saved me from being voted out of the Frontier House.

I don’t know how those pioneer ladies did it.  They were a tough breed.

Kind of like my own pioneer babe–

Don’t let the Holly Hobby dress and sweet smile fool you.  This nine year old is brimming with teenage ‘tude that would serve her nicely should I follow through with my decision to free-range her out on the open frontier.  And since you were wondering, yes I did wear this dress to school as a suburban child of the seventies.  There is simply no denying it, when it comes to fashion I’ve always been ahead of my time.

But never mind that, food failure was so last year.  My family is on target to make it through this year, this entire year, completely independent from grocery stores.  That’s us, totally self-sufficient…at least as far as jam is concerned.

Oh shush.  Don’t tell me I can’t keep a family on jam alone.  I can do whatever I want.

I made jam, didn’t I?  See–

When we polished off the last of the jars I made back in June, I simply defrosted what was left of our strawberry puree from the picking last fall.   Then I added just a pinch of sugar.

Or perhaps it was a wagon-load of sugar.  I’m not exactly sure.  Then a dollop of magic–

And Voila!  Jam!

2009/2010 will be known far and wide as the year we made it on jam alone.  Impressive, yes, but for 2010/11 I’ve set my sights a little higher.

Welcome to my lofty goal of the year:  tomatoes.  These guys may not look like much but just you wait.  These little guys have been tapped to nourish my family throughout the year to come.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

It’s not a nice thing to say, I’ll give you that.  But it’s true.  I made Grandma’s cake, and mine came out better.

Huh, it sounds kind of obnoxious when I write it out loud like that.

Still, if she were here today I know she would be proud.  She would take one look at this beauty…

and kiss me and tell me that not only am I beautiful and talented but I am also the smartest girl in the whole wide world.

Grandmas are good like that, and yet here I am spouting off about making a better cake.  I am truly a rotten creature.

Though in my defense I did publicly admit that my sweet old granny, were she alive today, would be the odds-on-favorite to beat me at arm wrestling.  Probably she had her reasons for making the cake her way, which was a bit heftier and came in sets of two.

Which brings me to the initial reason for reworking the recipe – the mathematical fact of the situation is this:  I make 2 cakes, I eat 2 cakes.  Never mind that I don’t have a house of people clamoring for dessert.  I will eat them alone and I will eat them fast and I will eat them all and then, even though chocolate is my very best friend and would never punch me in the face like some vegetables I know, I still might end up with a touch of a tummy ache.

So no, two cakes are not a feasible option for me and my pathetic lack of self restraint.  But one cake? One cake is gooood.  Really really gooood.

Warning: I push cakes like thugs sell drugs.  If you feel vulnerable you should step away now.

Because Grandma’s cake (gloriously updated) is delightful. It’s light, it’s fluffy, and it’s low enough in sugar that it’s (heads up, pun ahead) a piece of cake to convince yourself that 4 helpings a day is reasonable. (That’ a small piece after lunch, a nice piece for after school snack with the kids, a piece for dessert after dinner, and one nice slice with a glass of wine after the kids go to bed.)

I’m not going to tell you that you’ve got to make and eat this cake.  No, scratch that, I will tell you exactly that:  Make this cake. You won’t be sorry.

Trust me.  I’ve spent the last few years researching the healthy way to eat.  I know vegetables are good.  But sometimes veggies turn on us, and we need another choice.  And that choice, my friends, is cake.

Still not convinced?  Here are the indisputable facts:

1. Nuts are packed with protein
2. Dark chocolate is full of antioxidants
3. Eating cake makes us better human beings*

*this is true but let’s not demean the research but disclosing something mundane like supporting facts.

This is my Grandmother’s cake, updated and renamed because, really, who wants to eat something called Yeast Cake? Sounds like some kind of home remedy for something that should not be discussed on a recipe page.

DO NOT BE PUT OFF BY THE TIME NEEDED FOR THIS BABY TO RISE.  IT IS WORTH EVERY MINUTE, I PROMISE YOU.

Ingredients:

• 1 Tbls of Yeast, dissolved in 1/3 cup of warm water
• 1 stick of butter
• 2 eggs
• ½ cup milk
• 3 cups of flour
• 1/3 cup of sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 ½ cups of ground walnuts
• Unsweetened cocoa for sprinkling
• Canola oil (or other mild flavored oil) for sprinkling

To Do:

1. Dissolve yeast in warm water, set aside for 5-10 minutes
2. Warm the milk over low heat and melt the butter in it.  Don’t let milk get too hot.
3. Mix together flour, sugar and salt
4. Beat eggs lightly, then add to the flour mixture.
5. Add the milk/butter mixture to the flour mixture.
6. Blend with wooden spoon until it starts to come together.  Make an indentation in the center and pour in the yeast water.
7. Mix, adding more flour if dough seems too sticky.
8. Cover loosely and let rise for 2 hours, or let it rise in the fridge overnight.

Once dough has risen:

1. Punch down the dough and knead a little bit, no more than a minute or two.  Roll it out into approximately an 18” square.
2. Sprinkle the ground nuts over the entire surface of the dough.
3. Sprinkle cocoa powder to cover the nuts – not thick, but covered
4. Sprinkle sugar sparingly over the entire surface.
5. Drizzle oil, kind of like a Jackson Pollock. About 4-5 Tbls total should do the trick
6. Once the surface is covered, roll the dough along the longer side to form a tube, applying a little extra oil if needed to get the edges of the tube to stick together.
7. Bring the ends together to make a circle.
8. Put the whole thing into a kugelhopf form (round pan with a hole in the middle) and allow to rise 1/2 hour more.

Finally….

Bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes, or until the top is golden brown.

Note: as soon as I devour the current cake I will make another, and try to stop and photograph the process. The resulting pictures will be smeared with chocolate, but will show that it’s not as complex as it sounds. Really.

This year the holidays gave me a wallop by way of a sudden and tremendous recognition that my Grandma, all four feet ten inches of her, was an ass-kicking strong man in disguise.  She was strong, not as in, wow, she overcame so much when she moved to this country with nothing more than the snow in which she’d walk both ways up hill to her destinations.

No, I’m talking strong as in, this is an actual un-retouched picture of my Grandmother, taken long ago in the old days–

(Anyone know what happens when you call up the spirit of Jack Lalanne twice in four months? I’m guessing it means I can skip the gym today, right?)

Anyway, Grandma was strong.  I base this retrospective assessment on a recent attempt to recreate a recipe from our ancestry for my daughter’s class assignment.

Recipe?  Said I.  Oh no, we can do better — we’ve got the actual cookie press from my little old cookie-making Grandmother.

Note: The 2000 in the name refers to number of humans on the earth at the time this was manufactured.

My grandma made cookies with this gem, which is basically a caulking gun for the kitchen.  The dough goes in one end and, with the ease that one would birth a thirteen-pound baby, out pops the cookies.

PUSH!

Breathe.

PUSH!

Breathe.

My children, not yet being of cookie-bearing age, left the toiling to me, though they did step in to add a teaspoon or twelve of sugar to the globs that I managed to produce.

In the end all I got for my efforts, for those hours of shoulder-twisting wrist-jarring pain, was a lousy batch of sugar cookies.  That’s like going through 3 days of back labor to birth a dart frog.  Cute, yes.  Sweet, sure.  Just not exactly what I had in mind going in.

Things were tough in the old days.

Maybe sugar cookies were all that they knew.

Maybe Grandma didn’t have easy access to chocolate.

But I do.

Chocolate is the best.

And it never makes me work this hard.

You can’t do much about the crazies other than learn to love ‘em.  But the rest of it can be avoided if you do what I do: schedule Thanksgiving for whenever the heck it works for you.  Trust me, if you roast it, they will come.  For us, Thanksgiving was this past weekend.

I cooked this sumptuous meal–

Pictured: smattering of little people who would consume the turkey.

Not pictured: the actual turkey.

Thing is,  I can’t figure out how those fancy-shmancy bloggies do it. I don’t know how they manage to bring home the bacon, fry it up with grease splattering everywhere and photograph it at the same time.  I get the camera into the kitchen, but when I’m up to my elbows in turkey butt with onion-induced tears streaming down my face I always forget to reach for it.

It’s probably a good thing.  Should I happen to remember one day I have no doubt that said camera would land itself right up in there with the onions and the apples and that would be no good. No good at all.

Posterity will have to wait.

Trust me when I tell you that the turkey was golden and gorgeous.  I started out with a deep muscle rub-down, a nice buttery-sage-cider massage which relaxed him enough to climb into that oven and do his job.

Mmmm, check out this golden roasted turkey–

If by golden roasted turkey I mean a haggard bunch of related turkeys posed on the front stairs.  Which I do.

This year for faux-Thanksgiving I took an atypical laissez-faire approach towards dessert.  Not eating it, of course, but making it.  I handed that duty off to my sister, who made a yummy pumpkin cheesecake, and my brother, who under pressure and duress from the wise woman-folk in his life agreed to make the cool, free-form apple pie we found in our new Pioneer Woman cookbook.

Baby brother delivered. Check out his results.  Err, I mean, Look! It’s Grandma and Grandpa with some of the kiddies at the park.

Hang on a second.  With someone else bellying up to the old oven, I was freed up to snap some real live food pictures–

Viewing this lovely picture one might think that the most enjoyable part about forcing a brother to bake a pie would be eating it.  But that wasn’t so.

The best part of this pie was the post-game debriefing provided by his supportive family. We lovingly went through every step of his process to point out where he went wrong and what he could have done better.  It was very kind of us, and although he bravely declined my offer of a pad and pencil for note taking,  I know my brother was thankful for the feedback.

At least on the inside.  And because my heart is just that big, I will give him another chance to redeem himself.  Aren’t big sisters the best?

And now, with our holiday feasting behind us, let me be the first to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving.  I know, I know it’s early. But that’s the way I roll. Oftentimes I find myself ahead of the curve.

Setting the pace.

Dancing on the cutting edge.

But it’s all to your advantage dear reader.  I may completely rearrange the calendar to meet my needs, but that does not mean I’m selfish.  Just for you, you poor souls for whom the pressures of Thanksgiving still loom large on the horizon, I offer you this–an already planned, tried and true Thanksgiving menu–

My Thanksgiving Menu: The Recipes

• Sage and cider glazed Turkey
• Cheater’s gravy
• Caramelized Onion and Cornbread stuffing
• Homemade cranberry sauce

Bon Appetit!

Things were heating up.

I mean they were really cooking.  It was something special; a romance that had the kitchen hazy with steam.  My bosom heaved.  My hair fell in soft tendrils around my flushed face.

It was working.  It was hot.

Then, it was not.

At least I know I tried.  I gave it my all and it could have been a beautiful thing. It was a beautiful thing.  But now it’s an over thing.  And I’m washing my hands of the whole gloppy mess and moving on.  After all, the chemistry is gone, and you simply can’t make something work if there isn’t any chemistry.

You just have to know when it’s time to say goodbye.  Time to hitch your dreams to another day, turn to a better man.

You know, like a man who knows which way his chaps go. A man with a tractor.

Oops, sorry.  I digress.  Thing with chemistry is, without it homemade cheese is nothing more than lukewarm milk with stinky clumps of curds and whey.

Ewww.  Curds.

Once upon a time I turned milk into mozzarella with a flirty twist of my wrist and Ricki’s homemade cheese kit. It was easy. It was delicious.  But I was living in a dream world, a world in which cowboys with burnished arms pull me down in the hay, and milk willingly transforms into cheese.

Back here in this world all I get is a gloppy mound of curds and whey the likes of which would have Little Miss Muffet gladly vacating her tuffet for any old spider that happened by.

Ahh, cheese. The kit was simple. The directions straightforward.  So when my (not ultra-pasteurized) milk decided that it no longer wanted to change into cheese I didn’t give up without a fight.  I consulted the cheese hot line.  I added extra citric acid.  I checked temperatures.

But hot or not the chemistry was gone. And without chemistry hot milk is just that.

Hot, clumpy, stinky milk.

Squelch.  Squish.  Ick.

And you thought the spider was the scary part of that nursery rhyme?

I’ve been under lock-down.  House arrest. For eight eternally long days.  No, you’re right. I shouldn’t exaggerate.  Why just the other day I was allowed out to bolster our stock of Children’s Tylenol and decongestants.

I wouldn’t dream of complaining.  Nope. Not me.  After all it’s just the flu.  The feverish, coughing, whining, icky flu.  In the scheme of things, it wasn’t all that bad.  At the very least it is over.  And just when a shimmer of bright lining hovered within reach, when sanity seemed possibly to be lurking around the next bend; just when it seemed safe to let the children venture out of each other’s company and into the world at large, this happened–

You can’t hear it, but that’s the sound of Mother Nature laughing as she dumped snow all over my plans to air out the children.  By which I mean dangling them by their germy little ankles in the branches of our glorious autumnal trees where a gentle clarifying breeze might blow on through.   Breathtaking, right?  As in, they will be so busy gulping in lung-fulls of fresh air that they will have no voice to complain that so-and-so spit on me when she brushed her teeth and SHE TOUCHED ME and ahhhhhhh, I’m so over house arrest.

Breathe in. Breathe out.  I can do this.  If Mother Nature throws me freezing temps and whiny children, I just have to reach a bit deeper into the old parenting tool box.

And so we made a cozy fire.

And drank hot cocoa with little marshmallows.

And I let them make their own baguettes.

Before you toss too much credit my way, I should confess that this bread is not only delightfully tasty and good at distracting unruly children, but it’s also unbelievably simple to make.  It’s a one-bowl, no kneading kid-pleasing kind of recipe.  I got it from my Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day cook book.  Don’t be alarmed; I’ve come a long way since my initial attempts based on a hastily transcribed recipe from my mother resulted in that Not-So-Consumable Crusty Shards of Glass Bread.

Here is the basic recipe.

And just 20 minutes later, we had our warm, aromatic results.

I also had two smiling children, mouths so full of homemade bread that their ability to bicker was drastically reduced.

And like the softly whirling, sparkling twinkle of the fresh falling snow, peace, sweet, silent peace, at last descended upon our home.

• 3 cups of lukewarm water
• 1 ½ Tablespoons yeast (less at altitude.  I use 1 1/4) T)
• 1 ½ teaspoons salt
• 6 ½ cups of all purpose flour

Directions

This makes enough for about 4 loaves. The dough can be refrigerated and used as you go, so you can have fresh bread for dinner anytime.

1. In a large bowl of very large tupperwear add the water, yeast and salt.
2. Mix in the flour, using a wooden spoon until the dough just comes together and is uniformly damp without dry patches.
3. Cover loosely and allow to rise for 2 hours.

Baking Time—

1. Dip your hands in flour, and generously dust your work surface with flour.
2. Pull off a chunk of dough—about a softball size makes 2 medium sized baguettes, or a nice round loaf.
3. Manipulate the dough into the shape you want, incorporate enough of the flour so the dough is not sticky.
4. Put it on a baking sheet, dusted with corn meal or another granular flour.  Let it rise another 20 minutes.
5. Preheat oven to 450 , with an empty broiler tray on the lowest oven rack. ***NEVER USE A GLASS CASSEROLE INSTEAD OF A METAL BOILER TRAY.  YOU WILL END UP WITH THIS NOT-SO-TASTY RECIPE INSTEAD!
6. Put the bread in the oven, and pour one cup of water into the boiler tray.  Let bake for about 20 minutes—less for thin baguettes, more for thick round loaves.

As your friend I’m telling you, don’t do it.

Trust me. In the time it takes you to rummage through that drawer for a coupon that we both know has expired you could have made your very own gourmet pizza.

Really, you can do it.  You need a little convincing?  No problem.  Let’s start out with some visualizing.  Close your eyes (nope, that’s no good. Open your eyes and keep reading.)  Good.  Now, let’s count to three.  In English. Or Spanish.  Or Japanese.  Heck use your fingers, whatever it takes to get you to say this:  I CAN make a tasty healthy pizza in this dinky old kitchen of mine.  YES I CAN.

Here’s the thing.  Making your own pizza means not only do you get to eat pizza, which is yummy, but you also get bragging rights, as you should creating something so pretty and tasty and healthy and homemade and all.   And lest we forget, coupon or no, it’s cheaper to make it at home.

Excellent.  Glad to have you on board.  So you can make your own pizza.  Dough and all.  And it is QUICK AND EASY CHEESY and the kids will eat it and you will be elected king or queen of all you survey.  Good–now click over here, grab the recipe, and start those ovens.

Wait a minute.  Welcome to America.  What good is pizza without french fries?

Let them eat fries, I always say.  Homemade fries, that is.  You may still not believe me about the easy pizza, but trust me, it really doesn’t get any simpler than this.   And with the mounds and mounds of potatoes we got this year, my kids have packed up and moved to french fry town.  Where, it just so happens, I was crowned Queen.

Next up: Homemade twinkies! They’re easy, low-fat, and packed with antioxidants. Oh, and they’ll also do your laundry and make the beds and complement you on how thin you look in those super cool new jeans.

No, not really.

Who lived in a shoe the suburbs,

She had so many children melons,

She didn’t know what to do wanted to hurl them off the roof for a satisfying splat.

Watermelon has never been my favorite fruit. It’s ok.  It’s fine in a fruit salad if someone else has cubed it and dealt with all the wrangling of the thing and the resultant sticky elbows. But frankly a 20 pound piece of food represents more of a commitment than I’m willing to make.

Thanks to the CSA, I was at my watermelon-y wits end.  I didn’t know what to do.  I was sighing and mopping my brow and wringing my apron strings when all over a sudden help arrived–

Yes, ladies it’s true. I was at a loss until Jack Lalanne came along.  Not in this form, exactly. Climbing that mountain barefoot and naked and waiting 50 + years for my melon distress would have proven too much even for that manly man.  Nope, this is the form that Jack Lalanne took when he came to my rescue. My neighbor’s Jack Lalanne Power Juicer–

While I was absorbed with the complex assembly of Mr. Lalanne, the girls and Dave determined that, based primarily on the fact that our actual apple tree didn’t fruit, the “not crab” apple tree could play the part of a real apple tree this year. The fruit was beautiful,

but despite the new marketing campaign it still tasted like bitter dirt which in my book is a dead giveaway.  That, and the greenish tint to its hard flesh. The children were not deterred.

Acadia quickly put on her cowboy boots, a halter top, and a wrap-around skirt and clamored up the ladder. What? It may not be a real apple tree, but we would never consider wearing anything less to a harvest.

As it turns out the tart “not crab” apples provided a nice balance to our juice plans. Here, some of the fruit awaits it’s fate–

The girls, along with Mr. Lalanne, made short work of 50 pounds of watermelon and 100s of “not crab” apples.  At the end of the day our melon problem had been solved. No more melons.  However, we now had a bit of a juice problem.  Gallons and gallons of juice.

There was green juice

And pink juice

And green juice with a pink stripe

And pink and green juice with penny loafers and little alligators with their collars up.   Wait, wrong decade. For a minute there I was transported back to seventh grade.  That’s just how powerful Jack Lalanne can be.

We drank some juice.  We sent some juice to the neighbors. We spilled enough on the floor that Kira may remain routed to that spot for a couple of years.  We filled pitchers and loaded up the fridge.  Then we pretty much hit the juice wall and so we froze whatever we could fit into ice cube trays.

And muffin tins.

And plastic cups.

And toilet paper rolls.

And old dolly heads.

Sure, the tomatoes are tantalizing

And yes, the raspberries are remarkable,

And I suppose we are enjoying the piles of purple potatoes,

But it’s not enough.  Remember Big Bertha?  That feminine nugget on which I pinned all my butternut hopes and dreams?

She is no more.  She was my lone female, and now she’s gone before the bees even had a chance to do their business.  It’s not good.  There comes a time in every woman’s life where she has to draw the line.  She has to say Enough is Enough.  That time, my friends, has come.

Incensed, I marched inside and called the extension program over at Colorado State University and left a message about the peculiar gender trends taking place in my back yard.  Surely there is a PhD student out there just waiting to tackle my plight, restore balance to my backyard, and write an award-winning thesis to boot.

Surprisingly, no student was readily available, so I spoke instead to a master gardener.  Now perhaps under other circumstances she’s a decent human being.  But good intentioned or not, she had the audacity to suggest that perhaps my soil was nitrogen-heavy.  Or phosphorous-light.   She doesn’t even know us and here she casually insinuating that my garden has a chemical imbalance?  Pah-lease.  At least she didn’t second the opinion of her colleague, the scientist who gently offered that some squash, not necessarily mine, but some do show hermaphroditic tendencies when they get toward their terminus.  Really? You want to go there, do you?

It was hard to hear at first, but I am nothing if not a caring and nurturing mother gardener.  And so I will ship off a sample of my sweet innocent, albeit potentially imbalanced, soil.  I’ll send it out there into the science world to be judged.  I will do whatever my baby needs to be make it in this cold, dark, mean world.  Especially if that means my garden is happy.

Because if my garden is happy, then I am happy.  Mmmm, I am just about as hungry happy as a clam with a mouthful of my favorite butternut squash pasta. Have you tried this ambrosia of a dinner yet?  It is time. It’s delicious. It’s easy.  It’s wonderful.  And if the squash gods aren’t shining down on you, it’s ok.   Someone, somewhere is having success growing the gourds.  Pick one up at the farm stand.  It’s even, gulp, worth a trip to the market.

Without peaches to pave the way down memory lane, I’ve got a bit of lost time to recover.  And so I baked this incredible cake.

It’s so wholesome looking I had no problem calling it lunch and serving it to my friend Leslie.  I spruced up a recipe from Gourmet magazine called Stone Fruit Tea Cake, which sounds rather British and unappealing, don’t you agree old chap?  I call mine Shortbread Cake with Peaches and Berries, which is much better and as long as the children aren’t around, it does make the perfect lunch.

Leslie, on loan to me from pioneer days, stopped by to teach me how to can peaches yesterday, a full day before Gourmet magazine’s Can Do approach to canning landed in my inbox.  I am cutting edge, in a pioneering sort of way of course.

My initial thought was that a pot that big should hold nothing but succulent lobsters, but then I remembered that we were fresh off the covered wagon and putting up our reserves for the harsh winter ahead, so I pushed away thoughts of tasty crustaceans and pulled out the peaches.  I gave them a quick boiling bath followed by a dunk in icy water.  They practically slipped right out of their skins.

We then sliced them, and soaked them in a citric acid bath (more soothing than it sounds) to prevent browning.

Next we added the slices and syrup to the jars, and while they steamed away stovetop,

we strolled through the gardens (still feeling a little British from our lunch I suppose) where I selected a much healthier snack for my unsuspecting children–fresh chard, tomatoes and sage.  I swear they’ll be thrilled (as long as I don’t let on about my own choice for lunch.)

We also dropped in on the squash vines.

So lush, so healthy looking, and yet still sporting only one tiny female.  As I watch squash in other gardens already ripening to the size of mini coopers, I worry that mine is not destined to become much of a meal.  Sad, but true, I have gourd envy.

The sound of the timer called us back to the homestead, where we pulled the 12 jars from their bath, stacked them up nice and pretty, and gloated.

We’ve got another CSA delivery today; is it selfish to hope for more peaches?  After all, we are down to a sole uncanned peach, and I am already craving more of Dave’s Outrageously Good Salsa, with ripe peaches and tomatoes straight from the vine.  Not to mention that lunch time today holds no promise of cake. How am I going to lure friends over for lunch without a cake?

In conclusion, let me paraphrase my winsome teenage self–this fruit is totally awesome.  It’s psychedelic.  It’s peachy keen, man.   There are many, many ways to enjoy a peach, so what do you say Mom? Dad?

You lived the 60s.  Give Peach a chance.

• 2 c diced tomatoes
• 1/2 c diced yellow bell pepper
• 1 large diced, peeled peach
• 1/4 seeded and diced jalapeno (more or less to taste)
  
• 1/2 c chopped red onion
• 1 tsp salt
• 3 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 1 tbls lime juice

Add all ingredients together and toss lightly.  Put it in the fridge for about an hour and serve cold.  The extra liquid can be drained off before serving.

Also standing strong was the rhubarb.  Back in June, as we were getting ready to leave town, I judged it done and planted squash right on top.  But clearly I was premature in writing off the rhubarb–

Before I get all puffed up about the glorious successes in our garden, I admit one major disappointment.  Though the vines of the pumpkin, the squash and the cucumbers are gorgeous thick twists heavy with flowers, I worry that when push comes to grow, they will not produce.  NO FEMALE FLOWERS.  AGAIN. Now, I like hanging with guys as much as the next sorority girl, but I’m begging for a nice nerdy science guy out there somewhere willing to explain why inside the house I make all girls, but outside the house it’s one bachelor party after another.  Please?

At least I have some producers to appease me while I ponder the infinite questions of vegetable sex.  Our tomatoes did just fine without us.

Even the rainbow chard that I thought would never show poked it’s head up.  In our absence the bugs had a feast, but at least I can feel good knowing that the little critters received a healthy dose of vitamin-rich antioxidants.

We got potatoes! These truly were the easiest things to grow.  I stuck one rotten looking spud in the ground, cruised around the nation for a couple of months, and Wham! Bam!  French Fries Ma’am!

And finally, after 7 weeks of gifting our CSA share to the happy, healthy Redfern family, we finally got our hands on some local, farm-fresh veggies

We started with the eggplant. According to Dave, a self-acclaimed afficienado, the eggplant parmesan I made that night was the best he’s ever eaten.  I take full credit, gracefully.  Though real credit is probably due to the fact that the eggplant was the freshest we’ve ever had.  Freshly-picked eggplant–ours was picked 24 hours beforehand–is much sweeter and holds far less water.  The less water in the eggplant, the less of a bitter aftertaste.)