Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Strawberry Rhubarb Bread

I'm dialing in on the recipe :)



1-1/2 cups flour
5 teaspoons baking powder
pinch of salt
3/4 cup milk
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 eggs
bit of honey (although I forgot it today)
Couple stalks of rhubarb
A little more then a pint of strawberries

Mix the dry ingredients
Mix the liquids
Mix the liquids with the dry

Cut the fruit then mix it into the rest.

Bake 375º for 40 minutes.
Around 20 to 25 minutes cover the top with Reynolds wrap to prevent the crust from burning.

Reminded me very much of raisin bread. I think with the honey it would've tasted more like a desert.

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Garden Updates:

Had the first peas from my garden today. Looks like a lot of pea shelling this weekend! And then I have a huge crop of Tall Telephone peas setting up. I need to tie those up tomorrow, they're not following the trellis too well.

Corn is up. A few of the Soldier beans have broken through, and the yellow squash planted near them.

Planted the kidney beans and green bush beans today. Hope it isn't too late for them.

Monday, June 14, 2010

Garden Updates

Insomonia sucks. I did have ~ 8 ounces of diet Mountain Dew at 2pm...that couldn't possibly be the cause?!?!? So anyway I'm doing this post at 3am.

3" of rain since Wednesday!

Got about 4 hours of work done in the yard and garden today, including a real wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am putting up of the long back side of the fence, then had to get ready to go up to my niece's birthday party...which I got to after everyone else left...then stopped at my other sister's on the way home and mooched dinner off of her.

Made a rhubarb (my garden) and strawberry (supermarket) cake to bring to the first gathering. Similar to the Blueberry Something the other day, except I did this with flour instead of Bisquick. The flour didn't raise quite as much as I would've liked, and it browned much faster -- had to put Reynolds Wrap on top to keep it from burning!


Trimmed the deadwood, and some living, from the raspberry bushes. Hmmmmm...I think there's raspberry bread in my future sometime in July...


Need to hand weed around the Asparagus and Rhubarb. And manure. And mulch...


Blueberry bushes and some daylillies. Needed to hand trim around the blueberries, fertilize them with the Miracid (one of my few non-organic concessions), shovel a good amount of manure on them, and haul in a thick mulch of leaves from the woods. Ah...gardening...


The back of the fence is up, good enough for this year. And the Tall Telephone peas are coming in really thick. I need to get some twine in there and tie them back for better support!

Interesting weight loss article

Good article in the Globe.

What intrigues me most is this part:

The total amount of food adds up to four pounds, but it’s only about 1,600 to 1,800 calories, a far cry from the 5,000 calories or more he used to consume every day.


That ties into a line in Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma that the typical adult can only eat 1500 pounds per year...which is basically four pounds per day. What can vary, among many other things, is the energy density of those four pounds.

But darn it I like my salad dressing and butter :p

Also makes you think about the wisdom of stomach stapling -- which essentially reduces that four pounds per day capability, but lets people still eat very calorie dense foods. I have a friend whose wife underwent the procedure, and it did a world of good -- but I also know he lost his mother to complications from an early stomach stapling back in the 1980s.

Friday, June 11, 2010

That was good!

A blueberry something...

About a cup of Bisquick
About 1/2 cup of milk
1 egg
Some honey...2 or 3 tablespoons, wasn't much.

Mix

Mix in a pint of blueberries, sorting out the ones with stems as you first pour them in.

375º for about 40 minutes.



Next time I'll try without the Bisquick...the substitute for 1C of Bisquick is: 1 c flour, 1½ tsp baking powder, ½ tsp salt, 1 tbsp oil

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Beautiful Day!

More like a beautiful week in September then June!

Spent a good four hours putzing on the yard and garden, starting to catch up just a little on the yard work. If I can keep up this pace, it may actually look decent by Sunday (and I have a good forecast through then!).

Garden:
Made a couple more ~ 30' rows in the lawn.

Beans:
Jacob's Cattle: 30' row

Squash:
Early Prolific Straightneck, 42 days. July 27th. $1.63 for two packets @ Ocean State Job Lot.

Tomorrow I'll plant the last of the Soldier beans.

Mixed a strong Crown & Coke (err...diet decaf Pepsi since it was on sale for $1 for 2 liter bottles...), think I'll have another while I wait for the season finale of Glee to download :) Had insomnia last night so I'd like to sleep soundly tonight.

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Cool cold frame design for me to build this fall:

http://inmykitchengarden.blogspot.com/2010/05/do-it-yourself-kitchen-garden.html

Monday, June 7, 2010

Garden Updates

Sunday:

Corn
Early Choice, 67 Days, Aug 21st
Incredible, 83 Days, Sept 7th
Silver Queen, 92 Days, Sept 16th
...I sooooo have to plant earlier next year.

Cucumbers
Straight Eight, 60 Days, August 14th.

Monday:
Rototilled a strip of the lawn for a bean row. Planted part of it with Zukes (nearest road), still have to finish planting rest of beans plus rototill a shorter row for the Jacob's Cattle beans

Beans:
Soldier Beans, 30' row

Squash:
Black Beauty Zucchini

Sunflowers:
Grey Stripe, by back fence.



Sunday, June 6, 2010

VJ Day in Hawaii

Cool link with color film of VJ Day in Hawaii. VAJerry stumbled on it today looking for D-Day stuff and posted it on the antique tractor board.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Baked Beans & Books

So I decided I wanted to grow some dry beans this year, with the goal of making baked beans on the woodstove this winter.

Agway didn't have any (plenty of greenbean varieties though!), and Putnam Co-Op was already closed. I need to plant them ASAP, so no time for mail order.

So I took a trip up to Old Sturbridge Village which sells heirloom seeds in their gift shop.

Picked up a packet of "Soldier" beans and their last packet of "Jacob's Cattle" -- two of the several varieties suggested to me on a thread I started at the organic gardening board I like to hang out at.

Those added up to $5.69.

And while I was there I picked up $65 worth of books:



*sigh*...that's going to take an awful lot of baked beans to capitalize out that expense. But I should have lots of good reading this summer.

Not sure yet were the beans will get planted, I may need to till up a strip of my lawn near the house as a new "bean patch" for this year. Next year I can plan for them inside the fence where I already planted tomatoes this year.

Just counted them up -- 100 Jacob's Cattle Beans, at 4" spacing that's 32' of row, while there's 260 Soldier Beans which will need 86' of row. Hmmm, might not be planting all of them :)

On the plus side, beans are probably the easiest of all seeds to save so you don't need to buy them in the future. They don't hybridize easily naturally like squash, and heritage varieties like these are not hybrids themselves like most tomatoes or corn. So I may add some new varieties next year, but I shouldn't need to buy more Soldiers or Jacob's Cattle.