. Spinning .

With Hurricane Earl due in this weekend, and September starting tomorrow, I decided it was time to harvest some of the crops.

These are cherry peppers, grown a bit beyond the neat tiny globes I expected. Jim does a great thing with them, stuffing them with Fontenella cheese and anchovies, but I need to figure out how to preserve them first. At their size, I can’t get more than about a half dozen in a pint jar and I don’t want them overheated to soften the crispness we like.

I need to pick the basil, but really wanted to get the peaches picked. Don’t bother zooming in on this image; I had put the slightly nibbled peaches on top, bad side up, and forgot that when I took the picture and Photoshop didn’t help much.

I’m also knee-deep finally in cherry tomatoes. The plants are succumbing to late blight, but they’re still producing good fruit. Time for Gazpacho again I think

There comes a time when the work started in May gets tiring by late August. While I’m not yet hoping for the first frost, I’ll be glad to wrap up this summer’s bounty soon.

Well if the plants can hold on long enough through the tomato blight, the crop’s really starting to come in:

aka “Harvest.”

I’m thrilled that my first crop of bell pepper produced enough early pickings to set up a whole dish of stuffed peppers.

I don’t always make these the same. Today they’re all beef, rice–and since I only had white rice, didn’t include the high-carb garbanzos or other beans I often put in, onion, chopped yellow squash, a hot cherry pepper, eggs and herbs.

No grapes this year, but I finally picked some grape leaves. Here, they’re stuffed with ground beef, chick peas, rice, and egg as binder, and herbs, then simmered in tomato sauce.

Grapes are a phenomenal gift from nature. You can use the fruit for wine, juice, and jelly. The leaves are for stuffing, either Polish style like this, or in the sweeter form as the Greeks make them. The vines themselves can be wound into plain or decorated wreaths; baskets if you’ve got that kind of time and expertise.

Well I learned the difference between a male squash blossom and a female blossom. The male have a stamen which is pinched off before dipping in batter and frying. Good, not outstanding. Very light and airy and I think there’s more batter than blossom being tasted here.

What I might try next time is to stuff the blossom with cheese, mushrooms, something spicy perhaps, then dip and fry.

So that’s how it starts: 10 bags of manure, 6 of peat moss, a couple of lime and some seeds.

I planted the garden over the Memorial Day weekend–that’s a tradition that comes from living exactly in this area for long enough to know that we’ll still get a frost in May and even if we don’t, stuff knows better than I about growing conditions. Planted too early, it’ll just sit there and wait for the right time.

I love watching a garden grow. From lotsa brown dirt and a spreckling of green to green that almost takes over. The squash certainly have. I knew better than to crowd them in like this but I started out right to left with peppers, then tomatoes, then beans and lettuce and herbs, then almost ran out of space.

What’s neat about this new garden area is that it’s small, limited by the size of the pool that had stood there when we bought the house and taken down when we put in air conditioning.There’s still some deck that has to be cut down but I won’t let the guys near the garden now that it’s growing.

There’s still some problems: only a couple of inches of decent soil before we hit solid sand, which means constant watering; the early tomato blight that I thought I conquered is slowly creeping in again as late tomato blight; the late-planted Swiss chard and Chinese cabbage just sort of sprouted and bolted; and the millions of blossoms on the yellow squash are somehow mainly just male. They will be eaten as fried squash blossoms as soon as I go through and pick out the boy blossoms.

I think that aside from strengthening and rewiring the fencing that I threw up in a hurry in May, the removal of the deck, and a ton of topsoil, I think that once the production is done, this will be a good spot for a few years.

My last alone meal, salad with grilled filet mignon, sun-warmed tomatoes, eggs, fresh-killed lettuce, onions, celery, slivered broccoli stems, and blue cheese dressing. I usually do this with chicken breasts but didn’t have any in the freezer and found a small end piece of filet so I used that.

This sort of offsets the rock lobster tails, escargot and artichoke hearts with clam sauce over linguine, and fried shrimp of the past couple days. And yes, there are ice cubes (and sugar) in the wine; homemade wine is super strong and it was still a bit too harsh for my tastes. It’s also a bit cloudy–but that was the last bottle siphoned off that I left open for immediate use. And since I’m the only one here…

Finally bottled last year’s wine, 24 bottles of grape and 24 of crabapple. I didn’t make the same mistake I made two years ago with adding the sweetener without vitamin C to stop fermentation from starting again.

I’m getting a little bit neater at bottling. Though I made a mess when I first started, the siphoning process seems a bit beyond me and took a while to realize that if I raised the bottle above the level in the five-gallon jug, I could smoothly stop the flow and fill the next one. Once I got the hang of it, things went more smoothly. That is, after I sopped up wine off the floor, sprayed on the cabinets, and all over me.

Every year I swear I’ll never make wine again. Then the crop comes due, peaches turn rosy, crabapples sparkle on branches, the grapes hang in heavy bunches, and I don’t have it in me to let it all go to waste. Wine, believe it or not, is still easier to make than jelly or canning the fruit and when you get a bumper crop, that’s the fastest way to handle the load.

After a bit too much tasting of wine, I made a mess of fried shrimp for dinner and luckily read the recipe this time to find that you dust the shrimp (or fish) in the dry mix first, then add a cup of cold beer to the rest of the mix to make a batter that will stick and not simply slide off.

This was perfect with a onion and garden tomato sliced into balsamic vinegar as a summer meal.

Oh yes, and a civilized glass of wine.

Big elections coming up in November and already, in the heat of July, the lies fly. It’s all bullshit, always has been, always will be, but I’m seeing that this year, more than I’ve noticed before, the political ads and interviews are completely useless in choosing your candidate. Unless, of course, you’re of the vote-your-party-mind or the new kid on the block which is the vote-out-every-bastard-holding-office opinion. Personally, I’ll likely do as I always do, dig into their past achievements. Since the Democrats are singing the same song as the Republicans that all of a sudden the most important thing on the agenda (particularly in Connecticut) is creating jobs and cutting taxes, there’s little to be gained by listening to the campaign speeches. Cripes, we’ve got everybody pulling for the middle-class, maybe even for the middle-aged instead of the usual front-runners, the poor and the kids. This may well be a first. At least they’re all smart enough to recognize the importance of what’s going to decide their political careers, if not holding an honest recognition of the issues. And as always, all they have to do is convince voters that they believe what they’re promising.

As you know, some of the best meals come from simply pulling stuff out of the refrigerator.

This started with about a pound of leftover shrimp, using the cocktail sauce but adding a bit of hot Thai sauce and oyster sauce along with some garlic, baby bella mushrooms, broccoli, and shredded carrots for a stir-fry over brown rice. Yummy!

Note the crummy old Lodge iron pot–I’m never prepared to take pictures when I’m cooking. I have a whole set of LeCrueset yet I seem to like the iron pots and oddly enough, the old white Corningware cookware for most meals. Actually, yes, that’s the rice in the Corningware on the burner behind the shrimp.

Despite the cool and trendy anti-American sentiment that’s too abundant these days, I think July 4th weekend is a good time to look into our historical roots and see exactly what brought the citizens to revolt against an oppressive government and make sure that the intent of the Revolution is still in the hearts of our people. So I made a turkey on the grill.

I just can’t seem to do anything wrong when making a turkey. In thirty years no matter what, my turkeys always come out excellent and moist and I think maybe this should be carved on the rock out in the woods that will mark my resting place some day. “She never made a bad turkey.” Well maybe his little feet were burned off because I put him in a small pan–and he did turn gold brown and crispy after I took off the tinfoil cover, but he was moist and delicious and made the best gravy.

I should have taken a picture with the appetizers on the table but as always, I forget about everything else but food when the food’s out. Deviled eggs, three pounds of shrimp, grilled hot Italian peppers with anchovies, fresh bread dipped in garliced olive oil, jalapeno dip, and cheese. The white wine was exquisite, from Chile, Luis Felipe Edwards Savignon Blanc and our own homemade grape. The turkey, mashed potatoes with cheeses, and gravy were the main meal served with a salad and homemade dressing. Nobody had room for the peaches and frozen yogurt, which is why I really didn’t bother with a big dessert. Jim and I aren’t big on sweets and never order dessert in restaurants, so I always plan something light anyway. Unless it’s one of our dessert focused do-it-yourself crepe extravaganzas with four fillings and four sauces and fresh-whipped cream.

Conversation went through reminiscence to current affairs and politics. Not a formal dinner by any means; just good friends. All in all, a great day.

Setting up my meal for tomorrow: Turkey done on the grill, mashed potatoes and gravy, salad, some kind of vegie, with shrimp cocktail, jalapeno dip, deviled eggs, stuffed cherry peppers, and cheese for appetizers, and vanilla frozen yogurt with fresh peaches for dessert. But I always look for last minute things to make and while I don’t follow food blogs (I have a counter row of phenomenal cookbooks) I sometimes look for a specific recipe online.

Well I happened to be on Facebook and checked out a commenter and then some of her commenters and came across a great food blog that has photos and recipes that really, really appealed. Guilty Kitchen is it’s name, and Elizabeth cooks much the same as I do, or at least the same things I do–like shrooms and such–and her recipes are simple yet seasoned in a more fanciful manner than I usually bother with doing. Nice stuff.

I wish the US would once again declare its independence and turn to and have faith in its own people and shed the shackles of global ties. Sharing and dependence are not the same thing. Let’s celebrate the intent of this holiday, and recognize and comprehend its history.

Hopefully I will never settle into a state of contentment in life. Unless, of course, I’m housed in a mansion with a Jag gleaming black and wicked in the circular drive and a housekeeper who is willing to make the dinner whenever I really don’t feel like cooking.

It seems that as we get older, we often reinforce some personality traits (good or bad) while others may mellow a bit. Sometimes we even change completely in our ways and get adamantly vocal and insistent in certain areas. I find myself more focused and aligned on political or society issues. My neighbor has become more demanding on personal service. Like yeah, you’re going to tell the cable guys that they must be there within twenty-four hours when you have service but sometimes your modem needs recycling to connect.

There also seems to be an appreciation for the things we’ve learned to take for granted. Like rain and green grass. This morning woke up with the gentlest cool breeze and a slight mist hung in the dawn after a night of running around opening and closing windows to let in air, shut out rain. I checked the garden to see if it would still need watering after last night. It didn’t, but I was overcome with beauty, order, life.

There is a sense of nature stronger in the bluer early morning than when the sun’s yellow light tinges all with a universally warm glow. Each color seems to stand out on its own in a non-competitive display. Like seeing all the pixels in a picture.

Then there’s what we leave behind that doesn’t scream but mellows into a tangle of memories. Like the old garden, now gone to weeds and flowers that pop up everywhere they find a spot to sink their roots. I wish sometimes we were a bit more like nature, but the human part intervenes. Torn between instinct and discretion, urge and wisdom. I suppose there’s something too in that.

While I’ve been weaning myself off of Facebook and twitter to concentrate more on keeping up on the weblogs, I’ve also gotten myself busy keeping up on the sidelines with the 100 Days Project.

There are some thirty or so folks involved in the project this year, artists, photographers, writers, cinematographers, poets, cooks, coders, and more all of whom are dedicating some part of each day to producing a work inspired by John Timmons’ film clips or something sparked by another artist’s interpretation of the piece.

I’m finding the early morning kick of viewing the short bits of film, the freedom to interpret, and the discipline of a deadline to be an excellent incentive to keep the imagination active and the words spilling out into mainly flash fiction–all flash fiction so far but I’m open to poetry, short story, or hypertext should that be the best path for the story.  What’s been fun to do is either find an image from my personal file or take a photo to fit the story. Maybe because of last year’s hypertext stories that I produced in the summer project it just seems strange to be done with each before night-time. That’s probably what drove the addition of images.

Some of these stories may be submitted, most I intend to hold onto and do some thinkin’ on. Not all have excited me, but there are a few that I particularly like as a more polished form of the narrative. For right now, and to prove that I’m still here and busy, they’re available here: 100 Days – 100 Stories.