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Meyer lemon flowers!!!!! This is this tree's third year so I'm hoping it actually makes fruit this time. There were originally about 15 buds on one little 6" branch but I pinched several of them off to encourage more robust growth.

Little Guy spotted this morning on the patio! He's posing so nicely on part of a brick bed border I just put in last weekend. 🥰

And chili peppers! This Tabasco pepper bush is full of technically harvestable peppers, but I've now moved it into full sun to encourage them to ripen into the robust peppers I want to preserve as a sauce.

And sadly, my tomato plants just can't get a win this year. The dirt is so dead that they're all very stunted and short and slow to produce fruit. This beautiful heirloom variety was set to ripen the first fruit of the season when it suddenly rained heavily. By the time I got home the prized tomato I was keeping an eye on and anticipated harvesting that night had swollen and cracked. I ate what I could and it was so good 😭 I hope I can get a few more.

Luckily, actual farms are having better luck. I picked up blackberries and cherry tomatoes this weekend (along with local meat, oyster mushrooms, and kombucha) at the farmer's market and decided to make a good old fashioned rice casserole. With a much more indulgent twist.

I had some leftover rice in the fridge, so I warmed it up a bit. While that was warming, I sauteed garlic, white onion, and oyster mushrooms and baby portabellas in olive oil until browned. Salt and pepper only, not much else needed. I deglazed it with mother broth. I mixed the rice with the veggies and sauce and some shredded Colby cheese. Covered the top with sliced pepper jack and baked it to melt it all together.

Holy hell. I'm never gonna be able to recreate this meal.

I also harvested a bunch of dandelions a couple weeks ago-- a big bowl of them. I never thought of dandelions as having a smell, but having picked them in the morning before their nectar dried, you could really get the earthy honey sweetness of them. They smell a little sweeter than chamomile. Amazingly, once it settled a bit this big bowl is now easily stored as about 1.5 cups of dried blooms. Excellent in a morning herbal tea.

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So I've got this ugly, dry, sand/clay patch on a slope by my front door. I've been tossing compost and clippings on it for the last year, and have built up a wee bit of topsoil. Today I planted marigolds, alyssum, and a couple other flowers. They're all full sun pollinator favorites that supposedly can take poor soil. Now I'm just hoping they survive!

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So I've got this ugly, dry, sand/clay patch on a slope by my front door. I've been tossing compost and clippings on it for the last year, and have built up a wee bit of topsoil. Today I planted marigolds, alyssum, and a couple other flowers. They're all full sun pollinator favorites that supposedly can take poor soil. Now I'm just hoping they survive!

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Some small updates from around the house:

Harvested the Softneck garlic today. Softnecks often mature sooner than hardneck varieties, and this held true for me. My hardnecks look like they'll need a few more weeks. In the meantime, these lil guys came out of the dirt to make way for tomato plants. Looking closely, you can see that this is borderline early to harvest them, as the cloves aren't bulging or fully filling out their skins. But the tomatoes NEEDED to come out of their seedling pots and I really only have a 4'x10' plot to work with, so unfortunately it was their time to come up.

I planted my seedlings for Juliet, Purple Cherokee, and some hybrid cherry tomatoes I'm curious about. Still praying that my heirloom green cherry tomato seeds survived the winter so I can get them in the ground soon. I loooove a good tomato in summer. Last year I made exactly one 8 oz jar of my own sundried tomatoes-- and I'd like to repeat that on a bigger scale this year!

Also as a fun treat, I saved the zest from a couple oranges and stuck them in some sugar. I'm expecting that over time the sugar will take on an orange zest note and the peels themselves will hopefully mellify.

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BRING YOUR BUG 🐛TO WORK DAY

feel free to take your bug to the play area below so they can have fun with the others. make sure they have enough snacks as well

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Today's finds!

With zone 7's last frost coming in just two weeks, lots of spring goods are up and lively already! I've been watching eagerly around my yard as nettle, red clover, and wild onions popped up in thickets all around the yard. There was a particularly prominent patch by my front door that I've been watching for weeks. It rained overnight, so today I went to harvest them. Not a bad haul! I don't know what I'm going to cook with them yet, but a quick wash and a taste test has them somewhere between a white onion and a spring onion. A little sweet, very grassy, with a garlicky finish. The green ends are a little bit more bitter, but would sub well for chives. Lots more are still out there in the front yard, so I think some sour cream dip or stir fries might be in my future.

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My favorite (and coincidentally most photogenic) parts of my dinner yesterday. The asparagus was roasted in the oven with homemade chili oil, sesame oil, white pepper, and sea salt.

The cake was a desperate attempt at brownies, while owning approximately zero brownie ingredients. This weird thing was a mix of cocoa powder, rice flour, almond flour, eggs, butter, powdered sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, milk, and water. They're not bad at all, just kind of an odd, dense texture that's not really fudge and not really cake. But it's nice toasted and hot with a glass of milk nonetheless.

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A sauce from the other night! I've been working on trying to passively meal prep by always cooking s couple extra portoons of food to stick in the freezer. This week's experiment was pasta sauce. Sauce is a favorite of mine, because once you have a basic tomato sauce you can do a hell of a lot of other cool things with it. However, if you add me at, it has to be FROZEN, not just canned, to be preserved totally safely.

For this particular sauce, I decided to go in a spicier direction. I started by browning some of the hot chorizo I bought at a local co-op last week. Pulled that aside, and then used the chorizo fat to saute onions, garlic, bell pepper, carrots, and mushrooms until the onions were translucent and the mushrooms were golden. I added tomato paste and plain tomato sauce to the pan at this point along with some salt and smoked paprika.

Then I let it simmer for about 7 hours while I was doing stuff around the house, and it turned out truly fantastic. I've eaten it as is, with pasta, with rice, with sauteed cabbage, and on toast. A nice variation also included mixing in some Greek yogurt for a paprikash effect over cauliflower or with cream cheese for something a little bit richer.

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Today was a pantry/freezer clean out day, so I decided to make my favorite sort of jammy reduction: miscellaneous. Today's concoction included almost too frozen strawberries from last year, an out of season nectarine, dried cranberries from the bottom of the bag, apple cider on the edge of being thrown out, the last of my lime juice, a past expiration lemon, hardened brown sugar, fresh ginger, and balsamic vinegar.

And then I just turned it on low for 4 hours and let it do it's thing, stirring maybe once an hour. I left it on while I did most of my other work for the day, and now it's cooling in the fridge in a jar. I'm probably going to put it on ice cream tonight, but it's generally also excellent in yogurt, pastries, toast, roast, or whatever else you can think of. I put a previous concoction (most of the same but sub blackberries) on an attempt at almond flour and cornmeal pastry crisp. (The pastry mostly worked.)

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Making stock today! And I am currently crying laughing at the size difference between my hot plate and my 20 QT stock pot. The giant pot is necessary to make anything in bulk instead of the old system I did with multiple smaller pots that took much much longer, but it certainly looks pretty silly!

Luckily stock doesn't take much effort and I can just leave it simmering in the background while I get other work done today. (And wait for my lunch in the tiny pot next to it to be done.)

Stocks are one of the simplest items you can make at home-- the main cost is time to wait for it to cook and cool. Stocks and broths are very similar, but the main difference between them is whether or not they're seasoned, with primary "seasoning" being salt. Once you add salt, you've got a broth on your hands.

But stock? Baby, that's free food. Save any bones, shells, or other scraps from meats, or various peels, ends, and bits from vegetables, and soon enough you'll have a pile of odds and ends that you can turn into gallons of free flavor booster. If you've got rinds from hard cheeses like parmesan, you can even throw those in (though personally I save them for pan sauces)!

I learned how to fabricate meat years ago, and it's been one of the most useful skills I've gotten when it comes to helping me save money at the grocery store. I can buy a whole chicken for the price of a couple pounds of plain boneless/skinless breast, and get not just more variety of cuts out of it, but bones, fat, and skin that can be used for other goodies. But even if you're just buying a precooked rotisserie chicken for $6 at Walmart, saving the bones can get you a lot of extra value.

A basic stock is just bones (and/or vegetable scraps) and water, brough to a boil and then down to a simmer for a couple hours. It requires very little effort, and honestly, my main concern when making broth these days is having enough freezer space and containers to 1) cool it effectively and safely and 2) store it effectively and safely. Last time I made stock I was a fool and overfilled some of my jars, leading to broken glass and lost broth in the freezer. :( So that's something to be careful with!

Vegetable stocks are even easier! Because I'm typically only cooking for one person and don't produce a lot of scraps at once, I keep a bag in my freezer with the ends of carrots, squash, herb stems, onion tops, pieces of past-use peppers, edamame shells, woody asparagus stems, and so on. When I need more stock, all I have to do is put those scraps in a pot, cover them with water, and boil em for a bit to get all that good flavor out! The soaked vegetable scraps can even be incorporated into compost for extra value!

Please keep in mind that safely cooling stocks is a whole other equation. Typically you don't want to put boiling hot broth directly into the freezer. The rapid temperature changes can break storage containers, but more importantly you'll also just effectively bring the entire freezer into the Temperature Danger Zone (41-135F) because your standard home freezer is not equipped to cool hot liquid efficiently enough to keep it out of that range. This can put the entire contents of the freezer at risk for spoilage. Typically I allow my stock to cool for about an hour at room temperature, strain off solids, and then make a homemade "cooling paddle" out of plastic containers filled with frozen water (if I think ahead) or ice, which I then submerge in the cooling pot. No glass, just plastic containers or plastic sealable bags. That will cool it without diluting the stock and will keep it in safe handling conditions!

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Worm castings, or vermicompost! Every couple months I clear out the worm bin that lives in my front entryway. Last week I popped off the lid, aimed my grow lamp at it for half an hour to get the worms to vacate the surface layer, and then scooped up my lovely harvest! A good cup of the stuff diluted beautifully in a gallon of water and all the plants got a dose of sweet black gold.

Then it was time to trim back some of the potted darlings, harvest herbs, and feed the worms in return. :) I took all my other older nonedible scraps (coffee filters/grounds, eggshells, fruit cores etc) and churned them up in my food processor and then mixed that into the remaining worms base in the bin. Then it was just time to put the lid back on and put them away to do their work!