The garden... more progress

Pictures of course, and who doesn't like a before & after?  Befores taken  3/17 & 5/8, afters taken last week.

Peas, carrots, carrots, lettuce, lettuce, kale, kale, zucchini, zucchini.

Kale, butter lettuce, carrots, peas

Tomatoes, eggplant, jalapenos

Artichokes, winter squash, pole beans

Garlic, brussels sprouts, winter squash, bush beans

Rhubarb & winter squash with potatoes & horseradish in trash cans

Beets, spinach, random kale, kohlrabi - I was about ready to scrap this bed about a month ago.  It finally got its shit together and started growing.  I think it must read the blog and saw my threats.

Here's a couple tomato plants that I couldn't fit in my bed that I constructed a self-watering planter for.  They're both super early season - under 60 day varieties.

I also have a few other beds growing strawberries, nasturtium, shallots, onions, and more brussels sprouts.  Plus my potted herb garden.


Oh, and I took this last night.  My honeysuckle is in full bloom.  Smells awesome on our deck right now!

Father's Day Menu Plan

- OR - "Oh SHIT!  I didn't make reservations in time!"

I was hoping to take our dads out to breakfast or lunch for fathers day.  We usually go to a beer festival for fathers day, but they moved the location way further from our house, and it seems like too much a production, so we settled for having a meal together instead.  I've been cooking a lot of food from scratch lately... like pretty much every meal we've been eating, and I'm feeling a little burnt out on the whole creativity spectrum of things as I've made a concerted effort to be trying lots of new dishes.  So I was hoping that we could just go out, sit down, decide what we each wanted, enjoy each other's company, eat, then give the restaurant some money and be left with a clean kitchen and a slightly lighter wallet.  But I procrastinated, and now we can't get reservations at the few restaurants that we'd like to go to.

So now I'm cooking lunch on father's day.  And everyone in the family has widely varying likes and dislikes in the realm of food.  And I'm a people pleaser.  So I have made the meal needlessly complex.

I want to make this grilled flank steak with roasted jalapeno chimichurri sauce.  I've been dying to make this since I found the recipe, but that much steak is a lot for 2 people.  So decided that we will enjoy it on Sunday.  But my father in law doesn't like garlic much, and LOVES spicy things.  So I'm making a second chimichurri sauce that's light on garlic and has habaneros instead of jalapenos.  And my mother in law doesn't like beef unless it's cooked until it's grey and every last bit of moisture is gone from it.  So I'm making her chicken breasts, which she also likes super dry, but it bothers me less to destroy a $3 piece of meat over a $20 one.

Photo from Serious Eats

And I was going to make a panzanella, but my in laws will be bringing "stuffed breads," the recipes for which came from the old neighborhood in New Jersey, they'll be pizza bread and hot dog bread.  So no need for any additional bread as a side.

Instead, now i'm making a zucchini ribbon salad, with (you guessed it) zucchini ribbons, carrot ribbons, yellow squash ribbons, probably some of the snow peas from the garden, and whatever we happen to find at the farmers market on Saturday.

For dessert, we have some greek yogurt to use up, so I'm going to try my hand at Smitten Kitchen's Yogurt Panna Cotta, but instead of honey and nuts, I'll top it with honey and fresh blueberries.  Because I want fruit in my dessert.

Photo from Smitten Kitchen, link above

And for drinks?  Stout, of course.  That's what the dads like.  And the kids.  I also have some coffee cold brewing as we speak, and I think I'll throw together a quick batch of white sangria with some rhubarb simple syrup (recipe coming later).

So to recap:
Grilled Flank Steak
Grilled Chicken Breast
Roasted Jalapeno Chimichurri
Habanero Chimichurri
Zucchini Ribbon Salad
Yogurt Panna Cotta w/ Honey & Blueberries
Cold-brewed coffee
White sangria

I'm not bothering with appetizers this time.  It's lunch.

Pet Peeves

I've been accumulating piles of things that bother me for a while now.... This is more of an ongoing list than anything else, but it's gotten long enough that I figured it's probably time to post it, and start over 

Word signs - When people put words/phrases all over their house. Your "Live, Laugh, Love" art is not original, and do you really need that in your house to be reminded to do so, or does it truly make you happy?  To me, it looks silly and generic.  It says "I didn't know what to put here, and since I have no creativity or vision at all, I bought this pile of shit from Marshalls so my house looks exactly like every other mid 00's tract house inside AND outside.


The "family" stick people stickers on the back of cars.  If you have more than 3 children, I'm probably judging you. If you family is zombies, it's still not funny. I see a PT Cruiser on my commute with a vinyl grumpy cat cutout that says "Grumpy cat hates your stick family."  I have tried multiple times to get clear photos to no avail.  If I can find a sweet deal, I want to get one woman, and like 20 cats and put them on my back window.

I actually took this photo... I walk by this house every now and again when I'm out with the dogs.  It amazes me every time.

People that mumble things multiple times.  When I ask you a third time what you said, please make an effort to say it a little more clearly.  I'm uncomfortable asking you to repeat yourself multiple times but I'm also unable to proceed with the conversation until I understand what you said so I can reply without looking like an asshole.  It's called common courtesy.

When you act surprised that I got out of the car I was sitting in to let you know that I noticed that you slammed your car door into mine.  Either you're so oblivious to the world that you didn't notice the door that you heftily swung open coming to an immediate halt upon hitting my paint, or you did and you're lying about something that both you and I noticed... which doesn't get you anything and serves to make you look like an imbecile or a total douche.  Neat.

When you come ask me for help with a phone/computer problem, then proceed to speak over me supposing what it might be while I try to give you a few ideas/ask you questions to get a better understanding of the issue.

Your Pinterest pins that link to nothing more than a hastily uploaded photo (not a blog or website) or a google image search. I could see if it's just a picture of a blue room (which is still annoying because I obviously want to know WHAT COLOR blue it is!), but the most annoying ones are for stuff like baked goods that require recipes or something like "DIY Black Bean and Twine Coasters" which obviously necessitates some level of instruction.

Is it that difficult to remember the sex of the animal you're dealing with?  Generally dogs and cats have gender-specific names.  Even if they don't, use your brain.  It becomes instantly obvious that you are so self-involved that you cannot devote even the smallest amount of brain power to remembering whether the dog you are talking about is a boy or a girl.

Red Velvet Cake.  Lightly cocoa flavored buttermilk cake with a gallon of red dye?  Why not just have a lightly cocoa flavored cake that doesn't turn your mouth, plate, and poop red?  I'm sure anyone would be happy to make you a chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting.  I abhor how many people seem entranced by something as stupid as artificial red dye.  Red Velvet Cake is nothing more than the Blue Raspberry Slurpee of the pastry world.

Fabulous Flowers Friday

Or - Astounding Alliteration Achievement.

Our rose is blooming.  I generally don't like rosebushes, because they're finicky, prone to disease, pointy, and don't look all that good when they're not covered in flowers.  Oh, and most roses don't smell like much. Most Junes, my dad & stepmother will spend a week or so camping when school lets out.  This happens to be when many of the flowers in their yard are blooming, the strawberries are ripening, and the carrots are just getting ready to eat.  Because they're not around to enjoy it, Kim often asks me to come by and cut as many flowers as I can, pick and eat strawberries, and collect some of the magical sweet little carrots.  Naturally, I oblige. They have an awesome yard.

A few years ago, I caught the tail end of blooming season for one of the roses.  It was situated in the back of the yard and getting a lot of shade, so not doing as well as it could have.  On my lunch break, I headed over to their house and cut the last bloom that was on it, and tossed it into my car with a myriad of others and headed back to work. The entire inside of the car became so heavily perfumed that I nearly had to roll a window down.  It was epic, unlike any rose I've ever experienced. So I begged Kim for a cutting of the rose.   The next year, I wasn't working and they paid me to do some yard work, and she had me take the entire bush home.  I am pleased to report that it survived the winter and is doing quite well.

And it's fucking coated in flowers.  This is my second bouquet to come into the house this year.  I'm going to try to take cuttings and make babies from this bad boy.  It is the greatest rose ever.  I have no idea what it's called, but it has a strong fragrance, so I'm assuming it's an old cultivar, definitely not bred for disease resistance.

Anyone have any idea what it might be called?  The blooms are huge, and look peony-ish with the swirls of petals.

GMOs - Am I paranoid or just a hippie?

I honestly don't know enough about the topic scientifically to say with any actual authority whether I am right about this, but by golly, I'm going to have an opinion about it regardless!  There has been a recent news story about unapproved genetically modified wheat showing up in fields in Oregon recently.

 I know that humans have been "genetically modifying" food crops (by selectively breeding for particular attributes naturally occurring in those organisms) for thousands of years, however the newest batches of GMO foods are a little scarier(to me, at least).  Monsanto is a huge food conglomerate which is closely tied to the USDA and other governmental organizations.  They produce Round-Up, the stuff that you use to kill weeds.  A while back, they decided that it would pretty cool if you could just dust whole crops with Round-Up (they'd sell more of it, and it would be more convenient for farmers) and kill all of the weeds, but leave the targeted crop growing.  So they got to genetically modifying crops like soybeans and corn to be resistant to Round-Up.  It worked.  They patented their genetically modified seeds, and began selling them.  Then once enough farmers began using them, they began suing farmers who would save seeds from the previous year's crops and replant them, because Monsanto owns the rights to the seeds.  Ok, kind of a dick move, but the farmers DID decide to buy from them and they DID know that those were the rules.  The problem is that normal seed-buying farmers that have fields that border those of Monsanto-buying farmers have experienced some amount of genetic drift, where pollinators would spread the genetic material around, wind, rain, flooding, whatever would somehow get Monsanto patented genetic material onto the normal farmer's land.  Then they'd sue the farmers for patent infringement.   Monsanto has made a business of selling farmers seeds and crop chemicals; and has made a point of destroying the livelihoods of farmers NOT buying their products.

Monsanto as a company being total dicks and having questionable ties to certain federal regulation agencies is PERSONALLY enough for me to not want to buy their products (hence the eating clean thing), but it's the  potential health concerns the seal the deal for me.  Of course there haven't been any publicized studies relating the consumption of GMOs to many of the common health problems that we're experiencing lately, but perhaps that's because they're in EVERYTHING, and the vast majority of America is eating them.  Over the last 50 years or so, we've experienced higher than normal rates of infertility, birth defects, autism, food allergies, cancers, etc.  Perhaps it's eating foods that have been sprayed with poison, perhaps it's eating all of the pesticides, perhaps it's the genetic modification itself.  I'm not a researcher and really don't know enough about all that stuff, but I still find it scary.

And GMOs are in like... everything.  The two main offenders are corn and soy.  Corn is in everything.  High fructose corn syrup is used as a sweetener in all sorts of stuff you wouldn't expect it to be in... like bread.  Or peanut butter, ketchup, toothpaste, even whiskey and many beers!  Corn and soy are also the main contributors to most vegetable oils.  Soy isn't quite as hidden i tons of everyday products, but it's out there.  Corn and soy are also used quite often in animal feed.  Unless you're buying grass fed beef, it's been fed with corn and soy.  Pork, chickens, lambs, etc.  They're also corn and soy fed. And farm raised fish?  You guessed it!  Milk, butter, eggs?  You guessed it!

So how do you avoid putting GMOs into your body?  Organic is an effective way to do so, but it tends to be pretty expensive.  Many "higher end" but non organic foods will have markers on the labels saying something along the lines of "contains no GMOs."  At our local QFC, they don't have any organic corn tortillas, but they DO have non-GMO ones.  I either buy organic or non-GMO tofu.  Grass fed, organic, or wild caught are your friends in terms of meat.  I still haven't gotten there with meats.  We do only buy wild caught fish, and rarely buy beef, but do still buy "all natural" chicken for a few meals per week, which I'm sure is fed GMO corn.

It looks like wheat (which is everywhere) is on the no-no list now too.