First grilling day of the year!
Marinated some boneless chicken breasts in Italian dressing while they thawed, then grilled them. Served over raw spinach with grilled sweet potato slices, grilled fresh pineapple, and sautéed mushrooms. Condiment: chunky sauce/relish made by chopping a partial jar of canned green tomatoes and peppers.
Seeing if this works. Playing around with a new (to me) app for editing/enhancing/watermarking pics.
Turkey meatballs (leftover from the other day), topped with tomato jam. Sautéed mushrooms, cucumber and cherry tomato salad, and steamed green beans. Delicious and low-calorie!
Spinach and feta chicken sausages, beets, and greens with yellow bell pepper. Delicious with a couple chunks of pickled zucchini and some tomato jam.
Turkey meatballs, veg mixture of mixed greens, onion, mushrooms and cherry tomatoes. Excellent with a little tomato jam and mango chutney.
First day planting outdoors this year!
I realized yesterday that I was using the wrong date for average last frost in my area. Which means that I am 2 weeks late getting seeds started and getting stuff out in the yard.
*gasp!*
This is not a huge deal. I am not, after all, some kind of master gardener. Not at all. In fact, I’m a huge faker. Last year was the first year ever that I had a garden, and I basically put plants in the ground and hoped to get food from them.
My plan this year is only a little more sophisticated. In that I thought about what I want to have produce-wise for canning or eating fresh, and I got seeds for those things.
This morning after I hit the gym, I headed to the home improvement store to get some garden soil and some, ahem, amendments (composted manure) to top off a couple of the beds that were used last year. Also in the pic, though it’s under the other bags so it can’t be seen, is a large bag of potting soil for a couple of the planters I have for on the front porch.
Last year, there were 3 beds in the front yard, 4 planters on the porch, a small 4×4 bed in the back and 4 self-watering planters on the deck. I re-bordered one of the front beds, making it just a little bit bigger, got one more deck container, and will be building beds in a 10×20 footprint. Hopefully this weekend. More on that at a later date.
So anyhoo, 2 of the front beds will be flowers to attract butterflies, hummingbirds and other pollinators. The other, newly slightly expanded front bed will house vegetables, and received its first residents today: Lacinto kale, sugar snap peas, radishes, swiss chard and kohlrabi. There’s some space in the bed still for something else, but I haven’t decided what yet. Maybe a small cluster of flowers to attract pollinators, and some other low attractive plant. I’ve got seeds for other radishes and chard, and 2 kinds of beets.
The little 4×4 in the back got a few seeds, too: lettuce, spinach, carrots, turnips. Less than half the bed was seeded, so there’s plenty of room for other produce or later plantings of the same so I can harvest continually throughout the summer.
Beet seeds are soaking on the windowsill for planting tomorrow. This afternoon, I pulled asparagus seeds out of their soak and put them in peat pucks. Does it make me a masochist that I’m starting asparagus from seed and not crowns?
Next steps: build the beast of a bed this weekend and then order a truckload of garden dirt (I figure 3-4 yards) to fill it. Pull out the hostas next to the deck and replace them with rhubarb. Figure out where to plant the hearty fig tree I bought. Start the other seeds that need indoor start: marigolds, brussels sprouts, okra, zucchini and cucumbers.
Sautéed cod, seasoned with curry powder and topped with homemade mango chutney, mushrooms, beets and cherry tomatoes.
Recipe for easy Pork and Sauerkraut
I grew up with sauerkraut on the table. Not every day, or even every week. But it was a part of our family meals. Usually, there were sauteéd onions, maybe mushrooms, mixed in. Or it was the filling in pierogi, or served cold on hot dogs. But it was always a side dish, something meant to play with the main flavor of the meal.
This recipe is something that I got from a recipe card at my local Penzey’s Spices. I’m embarassed to say that I never considered using sauerkraut like this, even though it’s such a simple thing. Almost not a real recipe, as much as an idea for throwing things together. I’ve made it with pork tenderloin, cut into chunks, as well as with boneless pork country ribs, and both times it’s been out of this world.
If you have it, go ahead and use home-fermented sauerkraut. Yeah, I know that’s a bit of an oddity, unless you homestead or follow some food trends. But it’s actually really easy to make, especially if you have an airlock system that keeps the oxygen out of your fermentation vessel, like Pickle Pipes. (Disclaimer: I’m not selling these. I got a set for Christmas from my sister, along with the Pickle Pebbles weights, and they’re easy to use and low-maintenance.)
The last time I made this, I was out of whole fennel seed, so I just tossed in 1/2 teaspoon of ground fennel instead.
Accompaniment suggestions: prepared horseradish for the meat; beets or carrots as side veg; crunchy roasted potatoes are a nice texture contrast
Brain dump for week ending April 9
Woah. It’s been a week since I put anything out here. I guess this week hasn’t been very interesting.
No, that’s not completely accurate. I’ve been too busy to pull out the computer and type something, and it’s just too much of a pain to type anything of any length on the tablet. Dinners this week have been either really boring or intended for recipe posts that have yet to be written. And I finished no knitting, though I did get a bunch done on a shawl for work and some significant progress designing a shawl from scratch.
This week, I finally got my rear in gear to start some seeds for the garden! I’m only a couple of weeks “late” on some of the flowers that should have been started 10-12 weeks before planned planting out. (I’m in zone 6a; average last frost is early- to mid-May; typical planting date is last weekend or so of May.)
Monday I pulled out a starting tray, watered the peat pucks, and grabbed my big ol’ box of seed packets. I started Fountain Lobelia, Shasta Daisy, Gloriosa Daisy, mini sweet peppers, mixed bell peppers, Jalapeños, Impala (cayenne) peppers, Habaneros, Black Beauty eggplants, and a few Black Magic Kale. Yes, I know I could plant kale en situ right now, but I still have to build the beds and fill them, and I’m not sure if I want to put the kale in one of the existing beds in the front of the house. When I checked the moisture on the pucks today, the kale had already germinated!
There have been flurries in the air intermittently all day today. And it’s cold enough that I don’t want to go outside to plant some of the perennials and summer bulbs that could go in now. Maybe Monday/Tuesday, if the air temp is better and it’s not so soggy out.
Knitting-wise, I’m working on the Lilla shawl from Berroco, intended as a class in June on knit-on edgings. For class, we’ll work edging onto a swatch-sized piece because I know there’s no way that people would come to class with a huge piece of knit done already. It’s a simple-enough piece, though I’m still working on the body so I can’t speak about how the border will actually work up yet. We don’t carry the recommended yarn at work, so I’m using a lovely apple green shade of Berroco Ultra Alpaca.
The original design is going fairly well. Last week at work we took delivery of some gorgeous hand-dyed linen blend yarn from Interlacements. It’s not expensive, on a yard by yard basis. But the hanks are quite large. I wanted to create something original that would use a single hank but be compelling enough to make people crave the yarn. The tricky part is designing it to be interesting to look at and to knit without being so fussy or difficult-looking that our customers won’t even be willing to attempt it. That’s a fine line to walk.
The eyelet work I’m using (more solid fabric than holes, so I don’t consider it lace) is basic enough, primarily diagonal lines. But I’m changing directions and adding secondary rows of eyelets, so there’s a sense of motion and curve. The pattern evolves, and will have beads added in the last section to give the outer edge some weight.
Enough of my brain dump. I’m off to edit a couple of pictures and put together a recipe post.
Crescent Shaped Shawlette
My boss at work gave me a printout of a pattern a couple of weeks ago. Someone had worn one into the shop earlier in the week and BossLady said it was really nice.
I’m not someone who feels compelled to knit things only in the yarn indicated by the pattern. But I actually had a couple of skeins of the specified product, languishing in a project bag.
Not a bad knit. Most of the shawls I knit start at the top, which is the neck edge. This one starts at the bottom and works up. The patterned band is worked first, then the body of the shawlette, with short rows to make the whole thing crescent-shaped.
I can hear you groaning now. Short rows! Yuck!
Au contraire! These are what I think of as “Sock Heel” short rows – no wraps. Just turn the piece, then work a decrease to close the gap from the previous turn. Easy peasy.
I added a few bands of garter and eyelet for interest. They match the top of the border and, I think, make the body a little more texturally interesting. There’s an i-cord bind off to provide a little stability and a nice finished edge.
Pattern: Labor Day by O/C Knitiot Designs
Yarn: Crazy by Stonehedge Fiber Mill
(all links go to Ravelry)
InTheMitten 
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