Yet Another Smorgasbord of Blogicity

PEASSSSSS!!!! Actual, live, eat 'em right off the vine sweet peas. I eat the smaller pods, I open the older ones and lick out the peas in an ecstasy of gardening goodness. The ones above will be eaten for dinner tonight. (The ones left after River got to them, that is.)


So much has been going on in our "inside lives" that we haven't spent a lot of time doing anything outside. The garden is woefully underplanted, and I'm going to have to go ahead and get some plants from the store, as much as I hate it. You do what you can, right?

A couple of weekends ago, we took a trip to a local strawberry farm to pick our own berries. I've done berries here, and they'd be fine for a novelty for the kids, but I don't have enough space for a big patch. We wound up with an enormous mass of the lovely red fruits (including Jeffrey's "magic"--i.e. "unripe" ones)

and so later that afternoon, I set to preserving them. I made one big wad of them into strawberry jam. This was my third attempt at jam--the first resulted in a thick brownish sludge, the second resulted in a thin, goopy mess and the third:


I kinda wish I had a "TA DAAAAHHHH!" sound bite right now. Or, like, angel trumpets. The jam set beautifully and I made eight half pints of it! Huzzah!!

The rest of the berries I culled and sliced for freezing. They were so pretty on the tray that I took a picture of them. After they froze on the trays, I popped them off and slipped them into some Ziploc Vacuum Freezer bags. I'd been thinking about one of those vacuum storage systems for a while, because I make ahead and freeze pancakes, muffins, cookies, biscuits, etc. and wanted to be able to preserve them for a bit longer if possible. And I hate it when my blocks of cheese go bad fast. But the price of the systems kept me from buying them, along with the fact that reusing the bags for anything is impossible. I had heard about a Reynolds product that worked on a battery and the last time I went to HellMart, I headed to the freezer bag aisle, where I found the Ziploc system. Four bucks got me some bags and a little handpump. At face, this is pretty low-tech: a handpump goes over a hole in the bag and you, um, pump the air out. But the storage potential made me go nuts. I would prefer to can our produce, but Jeffrey hates what he calls "olive green" green beans and peas that are canned. And the kids LOVE frozen berries. So the idea that I can freeze stuff without the frantic "suck-with-a-straw-hurry-to-seal-curse-the-invention-of-air" deal is awesome. The pump removes every bit of air in the bag and you can reseal them after cutting off a wodge of cheese or grabbing a few berries.

The package and website cautions against reusing the bags, although to be honest, I'll probably reuse the ones I keep fruit and breads in--at the very least, these would make great "keepers" for wet socks and clothes that the kids mess up while on the road. No more icky soured clothes!!! You can check them out here: http://www.ziploc.com/?p=b10 Oh, by the way, I got five quart bags of frozen berries. I'd like to have more, but I'm going to fill out our fruit stash for the winter with blueberries (maybe even a few from our new rabbit eye bushes below),

peaches, and blackberries from the farm in Cowtown.

Let's see...I've given up hilling the potatoes...they grew all the way up to the top of the potato bin and I couldn't see using any more soil or straw. I'm hoping all the growth will mean lots of potatoes, but you know my skepticism with this concept. I was pretty surprised to see how close the blossoms of the potato are to eggplant blossoms and interested to find out after some research that they belong to the same family: edible Nightshade. Cool.


I decided to dig a corn trough this year instead of put them in a raised bed. Corn requires a lot of water and gets so tall that a raised bed made it difficult to deal with. The trough is roughly six feet by six feet, and I was able to get thirty-six kernals planted. I put mini pumpkins in each corner. The corn is starting to come up now, so tomorrow I'll put in some Henderson limas. YUM!! The corn trough picture is bad, I know. I think I'm going to call it: Large Lopsided Square of Dirt. You might be able to pick out the corn if you squint and say an incantation.



I dug out a BUNCH of the chocolate mint when I discovered it was started to invade the raised beds. Um. No. I transplanted some of it to a different spot, but was going to dry the rest until I decided to try doing some mint jelly with it. It has such a nice flavor that I thought it might do. The only pectin I have is powdered, though, so I have to make a HellMart run for some liquid stuff. Hope I can find it...

In other, horribly disgusting news, I have stinkwort mushrooms in one of my beds. I'm not sure what sin I committed to deserve the variety I have. They're nicknamed "Dead Man's Fingers" (charming) and emit an odor that is so gross and profound that you can smell it when you walk out the back door. Topping off the nastiness is a brown slimy wad of ook that apparently draws flies, which adds to the general grodiness. (Click on the pic to get a gander at the mushroom loogy. Shudder.) A Googling of the mushroom revealed that you can actually cook with these, which makes me want to yark. I just...no. I'll have to dig them out soon, once I gather the courage to do so.

Tomorrow is a planting day! Woohoo!

Girl Gourmet Cupcake Maker OR Satan's Cupcake Maker From The Hot Stinky Place

I am planning, some year, to do green reviews here. Or reviews of catalogs. Or fun household products. Something. What follows is a kind of review of something that's neither green nor a catalog and which didn't even work correctly. However, we learned some stuff and wound up having a good time.

Jeffrey asked for one of those cupcake baker thingies for Christmas. Then he saw a commercial for them and realized it was called Girl Gourmet and lost his mind. (Pause for a mini-rant about why in the heck with folks like Emeril and Bobby Flay and that dude in orange plastic clogs do we still have baking toys marketed only to girls? Why?) Will and I explained that it was perfectly fine for him to ask for the cupcake baker thingy and he would have a grand old time with it. Well, Nana hooked him up and a few days ago, I broke it out.

And by "broke it out," I mean actually got out my pocket knife and jimmied that sucker out of all of the plastic twist ties and flat holdy pieces and tape and...is all that mess necessary? I washed all the silly little bowls and spoons (pink and teal as the 80s, y'all) and waited with bated breath for the Bug to get home.

He was excited to try and pour out the packets of mixes by himself and measure out the water. I bit my lip practically through, but I kept my hand still by some miracle and let him do his thing:

River was clearly as skeptical as I.

We got the cupcake in the cupcake cooker mahoojy and then waited the requisite minute and a half until it was cooked. Jeffrey sneaked a lick of batter out of the bowl and immediately gagged. I reasoned that uncooked batter isn't always yummy, although...honestly, have you ever tasted bad cupcake batter? Yeah, me neither.

The cupcake cooked and Jeffrey was impressed by the whole thing. I personally thought the cupcake looked like a piece of poo. And smelled odd. Jeffrey was very proud.

While we waited for Jeffrey's cupcake to cool, we mixed up one for River. Her's, while not looking like poo, gave off the distinct odor of sweetened Play-Doh. More concerning, it sort of tasted like that, too.

*Can I pause here to comment on the loveliness of my bebes' hands?*


When the cupcake was cool, Jeffrey and I started mixing the frosting per the instructions. It must be said that it smelled like artificial strawberry death. Also, the amount of water recommended by the instructions rendered a bowlful of small pink pellets but not anything even remotely resembling frosting. More water had no effect at all until suddenly, I was stirring a puddle of pink ooze. It was like a magic potion gone terribly, strawberrily wrong. The only thing to do was to add a bit of the vanilla frosting powder.

Now, I've been baking for a month and a half straight, using good vanilla and pure chocolate and freshly shelled pecans. That must be the reason why that frosting smelled (and tasted...holy egg beaters, the taste) so...wrong. As in, "This frosting is not of this world and must be sent back to whatever alien factory produced it." Still, I was going to do this thing. So I stirred and mashed unholy vanilla lumps and finally produced a frosting-ish substance that we spooned into the cupcake frosting mechanism.

Here's where the fun began. The purpose of the frosting mechanism is to produce puffy swirls of frosting atop the cupcakes. Our frosting wasn't puffy to begin with, but even if it had been the right consistency, it never would have swirled while riding along on the cupcake holding tray doojywhopper. Our cupcake looked sad, my friends. And then Jeffrey discovered that if you pumped the mechanism with any kind of enthusiasm whatsoever, it splattered frosting EVERYWHERE in swirling arcs of fake pink sweetness.

For a moment, Jeffrey and I sat in silence as frosting dripped off River's ears.

Then we burst out laughing. I laughed so hard with my boy that the entire thing became worth it, especially when River joined in with a few artificial "hahaha"s of her own. We sputtered over the definition of "gourmet" and generally acted like fools all over my kitchen.

The cupcake, when "frosted", was hideous.


Jeffrey ate it anyway.

Rivers was only marginally prettier, probably because I used less water and the frosting looked like fat white caterpillars versus oozing pink death-ooze. But it smelled like vanilla-flavored Play-Doh and tasted the same. In fact, it sort had the same texture, too. Shudder.

To sum up: the Girl Gourmet Cupcake Maker does not produce gourmet cupcakes, although Jeffrey and I have now taken to calling any disgusting sort of food gourmet. It doesn't produce gourmet frosting, either. I'm thinking, though, that if one used a homemade butter cream in the mechanism, it might work as long as you didn't get too excited while pumping the mechanism.

Or, hey, get a can of ready-made. Cupcakes are pretty easy to whip up from scratch or from a box and really, that was the whole purpose of the cupcake maker in the first place: to spend some fun learning time together.

And we DID have fun.

Speaking of, must go...I need to to scrape some more frosting from the walls.