Yesterday, I cooked and baked all day. I hadn't made bread when my son called to ask if he could bring some friends home with him from Cross Country practice, so I had to make lunch. I made pasta and doctored up the store bought sauce with some tomatoes from the greenhouse. I have a lot of eggplant, so I sliced it thin, dipped it in beaten egg and corn meal and fried it. There was a good amount of cornmeal and egg left, so I added baking powder, mixed it together and fried that, too. For something so simple, it was extraordinarily good.
I made hamburger buns so we could have burgers last night. This was because I had heard through the grapevine (17 year olds are too busy to say anything directly) that my son wanted hamburgers. Turned out, he wasn't even home for dinner. The burgers were accompanied by baked cottage fries.
I made cookies (already gone - the whole batch - along with both pies and the three big pans of banana bread I made earlier this week - hungry teenagers!), and finally got around to making juice out of the big bag of lilikoi in the fridge.
Anyway, you get the idea - so today I decided to spend the morning outside. There is always the laundry hanging and bringing in, and there was the new garden. My husband has been dumping forest loam and compost on the clay soil that is normally there for a couple of weeks, so it was time to rake it over and start figuring out trellises. Fortunately for grumpy me, having my youngest run in to look for string got my husband out to engineer the trellises. Good thing, because he is really much better at that sort of thing. We still had some bamboo left from our massive foraging trip a few months ago, so we used that, some old waiawi sticks my daughter made a feedsack teepee out of a while back, and some old fence - waste not, want not. This save most of the precious string (we had a mild disagreement about that string; I swore up and down I bought it for just this purpose, and my husband swore he bought it, and I should not use it....anyway, we only used a little bit of it and were able to build trellises with old plastic clothesline, the aforementioned fence bits, and bamboo).
The young one got involved and we planted a gardenful: broccoli, carrots, turnips, red onion, green onion, beets, dill, basil, spinach, marigolds, kabocha pumpkin, cucumbers (not sure about those at this time of the year), snap beans, and swiss chard. I predict a lot of stir fry in a couple of months.
In the greenhouse, I also started some banana peppers, English peas, and parsley. It's about time to plant some more green peppers (I think I may have inadvertently planted some with the beets, because the seed had fallen out of the packets when the young one was carrying the gallon sized freezer bag full of seed packets. I did my best to separate them out, but I think at least 2-3 seeds got mixed in there - well, we'll see, won't we. It will be too wet for the peppers out there, but I suppose it is an experiment.
I have no accomplished most of what I hoped to do during this break from teaching. Now I have to spend the last few days planning for next quarter and getting my head out of the garden/farm game and back into the teacher game. Wish me luck!
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