More Cooking Experiments.

Lately I've been doing some "Spring" cleaning, not "kill yourself doing it" cleaning, but fitting in something each day ... maybe reorganize/reinventory a cabinet, wash windows, blinds, carpets, etc. Today I didn't feel like fitting in a cleaning job so baked cookies and made yogurt instead.

Have had instructions published by Mary Hunt in Everyday Cheapskate saved to an Email "cooking" folder for quite a while now. It's a cookie recipe which uses boxed cake mix. For a long time (it seemed), we could buy cake mixes on sale using manufacturer coupons for maybe $.25, so we have quite an array of flavors/types in the baking cabinet. Because we're such a small family and I don't want us to go overboard on sweets, I measured half the box cake (enough for 1 dozen cookies) and saved the rest for another time. Half of Mary's "recipe" called for 1 egg and 1/6cup oil to be mixed with the cake powder and 3 oz of something like chocolate chips, nuts, etc. I chose Devil's Food for the mix and walnuts for the something.

Brought the solar oven inside to clean it of a spill made when the too-heavy glass casserole dish chosen for the BBQ chicken flipped off the "swing", shined it up and put it in the backyard this time on the patio table. The sun was pretty high in the sky and the oven quickly got to 350F. I have an almost unnoticeable little blister on my thumb because the glass pie plate I chose for a pan was (again) heavy enough to cause the swing to tip and I wasn't yet wearing my asbestos. The temp went to 325F after opening the door, tipping the plate, etc., so I modified Mary's 9-10 minutes at 350 to 15-17 at 325. I made two batches of 6, using a metal pie plate for the 2nd batch.





Em loves cookies, so I had one before he got home from work.

Finally tried another attempt at yogurt making also. We like our yogurt firm (custard-style) and my first attempt never gelled AT ALL. This time, I shotgunned it, using EVERY tip I've found online for firm yogurt: Boil it first, Add 1T of cornstarch in boil step, Add 1T of gelatin in boil step (for flavor and gelling attributes), Add 5T of nonfat dry milk after milk reaches room temperature (when you add the yogurt starter), Cook for 24 hours. So, I'll try some Monday morning.



Can't say I understand how I can measure 7 jars of milk and include 6oz of yogurt starter, dry milk, etc. and end up with only 6 full jars of yogurt, but I only got 6 jars the first time, as well. ???

Experiments in Solar Cooking.

Despite my declaration that I wouldn't be trying this, I bought a Sun Solar Oven this past month. My garden was super-sucking because it's been too damn hot to do anything in it and I decided that the sun should be put to use. So, I bought the thing and, after it arrived, EVERY day was cloudy... until yesterday.



Billed as "partly cloudy", I saw few clouds in the morning so took the pot full of brown rice and frozen mixed vegetables that I'd put together about a week ago and had to keep in the frig until a sunny day and figured out how to get the process going. It took 2 hours to get the rice and veggies cooked. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I thought, "Why not try baking bread? It's why I wanted the thing, afterall." So, I whipped up a half wheat/half white loaf recipe I'd enjoyed for making buns. Let the solar oven pretty much do the second rise, so left the bread in the oven about 2.5 hours. Wasn't sure if it's done all the way through, but it LOOKED like bread. Still thinking positively, I decided to bake the night's chicken. It was pretty late in the day already (almost 4pm), but there was still sun!

EVERYTHING turned out pretty good. The bread was perfect, as was the rice & vegetable mix. The chicken was done faster than I'd expected.



I mixed the chicken in with the rice & vegetables and put it out again to heat up. That dried out the chicken a bit, but it was still good for a first-time experiment.

6 minutes of Obama.

From Netroots Nation.

Energy Independence Within 10 Years.

Al Gore's "challenge"

Also interesting: T. Boone Pickens' Plan, which gets discussed pretty regularly here lately on Texas television.

It's as exciting (to ME) to think about people getting involved in the environment as it is exciting (to ME) to think about people getting involved in politics again.

Since it's a nobrainer, I'll categorize it using #3's "brain" category.

Honeybees and Squash in DownTown Detroit: The Return of Mother Nature

Today in downtown Detroit, on land reclaimed by the city, local inhabitants are growing grapes, asparagus, currants, and gooseberries. And they’re raising honeybees in an attempt to create the first twenty-first century green sustainable city in America.

How cool is that? Who Knew?

In other coolness, my dental checkup revealed ... ZERO cavities!!!

2008 Gardening, etc.

Purchased a few tomato plants and one pepper (jalapeno) from Home Depot this year and good thing I did, because all the tomatoes and peppers (save one which I forgot to photo in its dwarfedness) died. The weather got way too hot here way too soon, so the tomatoes and peppers were planted in pots on the patio because I still hadn't had the deep rain I'd needed to carve out a bed in the lawn, and it's my intention to carve out a number of beds from the lawn this year, keeping the bed along the fenceline mostly for herbs and more permanent things.



After carving out the rectangle (which turned out to be 5.5' x 10'), I lined the sides and bottom with wet newsprint.





I then took the bag of dried weeds shown on the patio with the tomatoes, along with everything on the two piles I'd made in the back of garden refuse, kitchen waste, etc., along with the humps of now dried up sod/soil, along with clippings from the lawn and dumped it all into the lined hole.



Killed a little grass letting the dug clumps lay in the sun for a week or two on it, but my goal was not to save the grass, but begin the Food Not Lawns transition period in time to engage in the discussion this month at Crunchy Chicken's Bookclub. My goal wasn't even to start a garden, now that I think about it. Summer is not the best time to garden here in North Texas. I guess my goal was to see how hodgepodge I could throw this thing together working with the stuff I have and a timetable of my choosing.

I still haven't planted anything in the carved out garden and probably won't for a few more weeks. I'm gonna let the sun bake the living daylights out of the stuff that's in there for a while, toss more stuff on it, soak a newspaper "icing" for it and THEN plant stuff in it.
New, as well, this year is a first sweet potato bed. It's a circle that we AGAIN cut out of the lawn in the back and holds the FIRST of what we hope to be many circular sweet potato beds. Sweet potatoes LOVE heat and we have a LOT of heat here.

Made that bed about 12" deep instead of the 6 of the more "general" garden area, but both go another 6 UPWARD. The sweet potato bed is actually a HILL about 4' wide in each direction to accommodate the sweet potato vines (which are edible, BTW).

In other news, #1 and I went to Thrifttown for their July 4 50% off clothing sale on Friday while Em worked the weekend from hell at the Racetrack. She got some nice things while I played dressing-room "helper".

Been looking into another video game since I won my current game. It's nice and (sometimes) fun to go back under other user names to play the current game, but I miss the struggle of figuring out how the game works, and for an old girl it's THAT stuff that grows the new gray matter, NOT the frustration of breaking through the chains once you know how.

My northern California cousin and her husband will be breakfasting with us here this month on their way through town. We're really excited about seeing them again.

It was time to take out the garbage. Good Riddance to Bad Garbage.

Fruit Farming, Thrift Store Shopping, and Greenwashing.

The peach trees we'd planted last fall fruited this Spring and FINALLY, just this week, the fruit ripened enough to eat.

Only one of the two trees fruited. I don't know why. It doesn't look like it takes two trees to make peaches, but if the Eastern tree wants to pretend to be the dad, I'm not gonna argue.

11 peaches showed up one day on the Western tree, not very big by peach standards, but these trees are only 3-4' tall.



Realizing that I'd have competition for peaches from insects, funguses, and critters, I made some little "coats" from some knee-highs on sale at Walgreens for close to nothing.



Trying to close with twist-ties resulted in the loss of two peaches, so I just accepted that I couldn't close the coats at the stem.

As they changed color from green to "peach", we wondered how we'd know when they were ripe. Southern peaches tend to ripen by end of June, early July, I read on the internet, but this week the first peach fell off the branch to the ground. It was undamaged, so I checked the others and picked one that looked just as ripe. We ate both mid-day and they tasted just like peaches ... GOOD! The NEXT day, however, birds found the peaches. I found one on the ground with peck-marks and two on the tree with peck-marks, so picked the two, picked UP the one on the ground, and set out bird-chasers in the form of CDs hung to the tree:

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The CDs catch the light of the sun and mirror all kinds of bright lights and reflections at the birds, scaring them away. I noticed yesterday, though, that the neighborhood squirrel was in the yard snooping around. I'd not seen him/her venture off the top of the back fence previously, and I DO NOT want him in my yard messing with my gardening, so I'll be looking for ideas on cheap, sticky stuff to keep him/her away from my treasures.

After I'd hung the CDs, I noticed black insects apparently trying to mate on the bark of the trees. Who knew peaches had peach borers? I checked the trunk and neither tree had been affected by the larva, so these adults had come from other trees in the neighborhood, kindof like the other insects that somehow find my plants in their travels.

My other fruit choices have had problems of a different magnitude. The strawberries had simply dried out too much by the time I planted them, so I'll need to replace them. The raspberries are off to a VERY slow start on the West side of the house, not suffering from any apparent insect damage, but a nitrogen deficiency which I just this week resolved by pouring my pee on them. (I'm really trying to go "organic" in my growing experience.) The blackberries looked to suffer from spider mites, but never recovered through my organic "cure", so I cut them down to the ground and they came back. The blueberries looked to suffer from red spot fungus, calcium deficiency, and maybe spider mites, but they're looking better this week, too after spraying with dish soap, milk, and cornmeal juice. Both the crepe myrtle and rose bush out front suffered from either powdery mildew or black spot funguses from all the rain we had in Spring, so I made a cornmeal juice concoction that seems to be helping.

In other news, some people are taking advantage of people who want to live more environmentally friendly by greenwashing them.

The thrift store had a 30% off sale yesterday, so I asked Em to take me before he went to work and after I had him take me to our local groceries for the weekly shopping/stockpiling. I spent $47.00, but got the most FUN clothing! Two pair of capris (one with all those pockets up the legs), 3 short-sleeved shirts, 2 long-sleeved shirts, a most delightful pair of soft pjs, two hats and another glass pantry container. With 30% off, I headed for the "better clothing" aisle, elitist that I am. No. 1 stopped by yesterday for a boggle and tried to go home with my "pocket" capris.

For those of you (family members) who have participated in forwarding the smear Emails about Barack Obama, there's a new website to address your fears.

6 ways mushrooms can save the world.

TOO COOL!

I haven't been keeping up with environmental news. This is already a month old.

Our SummerSpring Vacation.

It was almost time for Em to go back to work at the Race Track in early April when the annual Tunica, MS golf trip convened. Em likes to golf with his son there, but for the 2nd year in a row we made the trip and circumstances prevented his son from attending. Circumstance THIS year was weather. Similar to 3 years ago, golf got rained out most every day. Unlike last year, however, we drove through lots of rain, too.

Maybe adding an annual aside, we stopped to visit with my oldest brother, his wife, their oldest daughter, and her fiancee on our way to Tunica, meeting them at PearlRiverResorts. They go there once/week to game and had a coupon to get us a hotel room for lots of money off the regular rate.

Had a good time with them, but didn't get pictures. We got to talking, gaming, and having fun together and the thought of taking photos got lost in the shuffle. Having learned our lesson from that, we'd barely given oldest brother's youngest daughter and HER beau a greeting before we whipped out the camera to get a remembrance. They're living in Biloxi currently and Biloxi was our stop after Tunica and before New Orleans. Hi, girl!







From Biloxi, we went on to N'awlins. We'd been there once or twice before Katrina (in our younger days). I don't think Katrina had anything to do with it, but the town didn't seem to offer us the same excitement it once did. Might be due to us being a little tighter with our money these days, but Bourbon Street looked pretty boring to us and we found ourselves enjoying more the “off-the-beaten-path” attractions.

We stayed at The Lamothe House, which is less one house and more several houses in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

Lamothe House was kindof a cross between hostel and motel. We had a private room with bath, TV, etc. (although the furnishings were antique and kindof smelled like OLD) off this gangway:



Breakfast was offered in a community setting similar to a hostel:



We had interesting conversations at breakfast with people from Europe, Canada, and South America before going off to see the sites each day. Of course we talked politics, as they were excited about the possibility of Obama.

Several movies were being filmed during the few days we were there. This guy was starring in one of them:

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Of course, we spent a little time at the downtown Harrah Casino; we pretty much gambled our way through this whole one-week or so vacation ... an hour here, an hour there at various casinos on the way, meeting Lou and family at a casino, moving on to Tunica casinos, going from there to Biloxi and MORE casinos, and then the Harrah and even Shreveport on our drive home from N'Awlins.

We got so “gambled out” that it took us until this past week to head for Oklahoma for a day again. With the cost of gasoline as high as it is, we decided to try the blue-hair bus that takes folks to Winstar each Wednesday morning from maybe 10 minutes from our home. It takes twice as long on the bus, but there's a certain entertainment aspect to it and it's both more cost-effective and environmentally friendly.

Haven't yet gotten into too much gardening yet this year, but the time's drawing near. For some reason, spring cleaning seemed more important after vacation and I found myself washing windows and blinds, reorganizing cupboards, pantries, closets, etc. Will get to garden blogging next.