Harvest!

Yesterday I picked the 1st ear of the bucket sweet corn.
Last night I boiled it and we ate buttered corn on the cob, it was pretty tasty, can't believe I grew that in a 5-gallon bucket!




























Sadly the watermelon that grew to the size of a junior football started to shrivel at one end, made an icky spot. We cut it open and it was mostly rind with a red star-shaped center and some tiny brownish seeds. Oh well.... since I picked it off the vine, a few more tiny melons have started to increase but the vine itself is dying off due to the season/weather, so I don't expect anything from them.
Also, the female flower has shriveled and dropped off the pumpkin vine before blooming, just like the last one.
I totally have to get an earlier start in the garden next year and hopefully it won't be so darn dry!

How does the garden grow?

The garden is growing very well now that the weather has cooled off a bit and it rains sometimes.







The bucket sweet corn is getting big and has a lot of ears.










I can't help but think this tuft of corn silk looks like Wembley Fraggle is hiding in the stalk.
































The watermelon is slowly expanding and the vine has made two more attempts at melons - one appears to be shriveling and the other looks to be growing. I'll start monitoring that one more closely.













Beautiful watermelon flower.




A female pumpkin flower starting to form. I'll have to watch and when it opens I'll need to polinate it with one of the male flowers. This is only the second one I've seen on the vine and I didn't try to polinate the other one and it shriveled up.

Garden again

Seems like all I do is talk about the garden!
Here I go again :-)


I'm growing corn in 5-gallon buckets on the back patio. The tassels are emerging and I'm excited! I currently have 10 healthy stalks, been having to water them like crazy due to the small-ish containers and the super-dry weather. They're pretty happy so far.





This morning I picked the second cucumber to grow on the vine in the front flowerbed. It's a fatty!

I think one of the shadier vines has a cuke the size/shape of a golf ball, will have to crawl under the elephant ears to find out.


Behold: Baby watermelon.
Cute!
It's about 3/4 inch (2cm) long.













Lastly, the mango tree growing by the patio door. It is thriving and periodically puts out a new segment of leaves.

Mango Madness

There have been some nice mangoes in the grocery lately and we've enjoyed eating them up. I, being a bit of a budding plant junkie, saved the seeds to try my hand at growing mango trees. Why not?
Let's begin.

Here we have a big juicy Mexican mango and the cleaned, dried seed from a previously eaten mango on a tea saucer. That's a big seed, eh? One of the largest in the plant kingdom.
After eating the fruit, rinse and scrape the pulp from the seed and let it dry out for a couple days - it's much easier to handle when it isn't wet and slimy.














I used a pair of pliers and a screwdriver to carefully open the hull without damaging the tender seed inside. You can feel where the seed is inside and where the "slack" places are on the hull so you can grab on with the pliers and bend the hull a bit to loosen it up/snap it open.
Once opened, you can see the seed is enveloped in a material that looks and feels exactly like parchment paper.














Here is the emptied hull, the 'parchment' and the seed, which is partially removed from the innermost encasement of a flexible, woody-type brown material. Oh yeah, I've got all the proper technical terms here, sure.



This seed had begun to sprout a thick root while still in its hull inside the mango fruit.


(note: the seed pictured here is from a smaller mango variety than the big red shown above, which will be discussed later)




Once the mango seed is free and clear of it's enclosure, I loosely wrap it in a napkin and moisten with water and place inside a zip-seal bag. Here I have a holding station of 3 mango seeds and a nectarine seed resting atop an egg carton, which has been a handy little storage solution.
Every few days I peel back the napkin and check to see what's happening inside and add a few drops of water if needed.

It has been great fun to watch the progress. Much more has happened already (I've been slow to post this) and I will be providing updates on my little mango farm as I have time, so check back!

Rainbow Cake

This week I finally had an excuse to make a cake. I've been foaming at the mouth to try making a rainbow cake as I've seen posted so many times on the interwebs (just Google "rainbow cake" and see!). I especially enjoyed this and based mine mostly on this.
Here we go:













I've never done a 'complicated' cake so this was both exciting and worrisome. I bought 2 boxes of cake mix because I didn't know if one would be enough as I wanted to divide the cake into 6 layers. I mixed just one box first to check and it looked like enough batter for my purpose. I prepared the batter following the box instructions.
The Wilton gel colors are very vibrant, it was fun shading the cake batter. The box mix created 4 cups and I divided it into 6 portions and colored each using 6 of the 8 gel colors provided (brown and pink were the other shades in the set).













I greased three 8-inch cake pans with shortening, dusted with all-purpose flour and poured in the red, yellow and orange batter. They baked for about 18 minutes at 325F and after cooling 15 minutes they were turned out and cooled on wire racks.

The pans were washed, dried, greased, floured and filled with green, blue, and violet batter.
While they were baking, I shifted the cooling cakes to plates and put them in the fridge.

After cooling the last 3 layers, they went in the fridge, too.
I was getting ready to ice the cake and they say getting the cake cold will keep it from being as crumbly and getting the icing funked up when you start working it.... seemed to be a success, not much crumbage.


Mmmmm, icing. This icing is really good. I ended up having to run out and buy a 2nd can of it, not because I ate a bunch! but one just wasn't enough to spread between 6 layers AND cover the whole outside. I kinda knew I'd need 2 but I didn't want to risk only using one and then having a tub of icing sitting in the cabinet haunting me, calling me.
I have a horrible icing-binge memory.... don't ask. *urp*


This is the 'dirty icing' step, to get everything mostly covered with the frosting then put the cake in the fridge to let the it harden and contain the crumbs. I'm a total novice with an icing spatula but did a fair enough job. I used the trick of putting 4 strips of wax paper between the bottom cake layer and the plate so when you're done frosting you just slip them out and the plate is clean. Super cool.

After it chilled for a couple hours, I frosted the cake with the rest of the 2nd can of icing, then removed the wax paper strips. I'm so ready to cut this thing! But had to wait several more hours *omg suspense*
It doesn't look too exciting hanging out in the fridge, just a plain homemade cake. But that's part of the surprise :-)
Another part of the surprise was that the blue candles also had blue flames - yahoooooo!

Finally the moment arrived..... time to cut the cake......



Wheeeeeeeee! It's perfect! Ok it's not *perfect* perfect, but it is a perfect surprise.
And it tastes really really good, too.



Somebody reported pooping a rainbow this morning but there were no witnesses to substantiate this claim.




All this thinking about cake...... I'm off to have another slice :-D

Growing onions

Somebody tweeted a link to this Instructable: Grow Onions from Discarded Onion Bottoms and it looks easy so I'm going to try it.
I've cut and dried a couple of onion bottoms and think they look like 'onion roses'.... pretty.













They'll be planted root-side down in small pots I got from the dollar store and kept in the kitchen. I don't know if they're too dry or not, but it'll be interesting to see what happens!

Hearts All Around, pt.3

I do a fair amount of cooking and while whipping up a batch of shami kebabs I noticed a bit of red spice shaped *exactly* like a heart stuck on the side of the mixing bowl. How sweet! The rest looks kinda gross this close up.... but it tastes good :-)

Football and food

It's been a rainy, cold day and we've stayed at home - one of us watching nonstop football and the other in the kitchen, nonstop cooking. The outcome was an impending grudge match between us, AKA The Vikings (boo/hiss) vs. The Saints (geaux!!).........as well as a loaf of strawberry bread made using this recipe...
It turned out nicely, it is drier than the apple-banana bread I made recently, more like a traditional crusty bread loaf.





....and a batch of vegetable pakoras with a side of tamarind chutney:








I'm ready for a nap.

Now that's a bean

I think it may be time to harvest these pole beans. These vines are the result of 2.5 months of growth since I planted the seeds. They're pretty impressive growing in the kitchen. And I think these pods make the ones at the market look puny. There's only 5 big ones, but the quality makes up for the lack of quantity. The ones closer to the ceiling probably don't get enough sunlight and are much smaller. And 7 flowers/tiny pods fell off and didn't mature at all.

How should we eat them?? Can't decide.....

Tiny discovery

I was checking out my pole bean vines growing in the kitchen today, counting up the pods. There's 5 skinny ones as long as my little finger, a few flowers.... and then I saw this itty bitty pod lying on the floor. It is 1/2 inch long (1.27 cm). Not sure why it fell off the vine, perhaps it was 'rejected'. But on the bright side, it offered me great photo ops.


After a couple hours off the vine it was starting to get limp and bruise easily, might as well slice it open with the exacto knife and get a look at the inside.....
seven tiny beans the size of sand grains!
ohhhhh, sweet :-)

Bumper crop

We bought a strawberry plant a couple months ago. It had about 15 flowers and I imagined a big fat juicy crop. I wanted to put it outside but was discouraged by deer, rabbits, and masses of tent caterpillars. So, the little guy sits in a pot in the kitchen and doesn't get as much direct sunlight as needed.... I started putting it outside on sunny afternoons and we were lucky enough to get two perfect little strawberries. The rest of the flowers shed their petals, the centers (what would become the berries) grew slightly in size and now appear dormant.

Bread report

Last night I baked two loaves, using a simple recipe for basic white bread with honey and milk. It turned out fine but is quite heavy. In fact, "deadly weapon loaf" would not be an out-of-line moniker. Regardless, the bread is quite tasty when toasted and spread with butter and local honey (which is just divine on its own!)

After doing a little 'net research I believe multiple things may have contributed to the heaviness:
First, I probably used too much flour, even though I still used less than the recipe called for. Second, I didn't check the temp of the milk before dissolving the yeast, it was probably too warm. Third, I used my hand mixer to get things going, which probably wasn't a great idea and was *over*mixing. Fourth, I probably didn't knead long enough. Fifth, although the bread seemed to rise ok, it was pretty cool in the kitchen yesterday and I didn't really find a warm place to put it while rising.
If you have any input or suggestions, I'd love to hear them :-)

Anyway, I felt like a fine peasant chef while fussing with it and I love the crusty, rustic look of my little home baked loaves.
It will be fun to experiment further with this bread baking, maybe using different flour and buttermilk next time. I may even make a sourdough starter, although part of me shudders at the prospect of it living and breathing and lurking around my kitchen at night while I'm sleeping....