CSA: What Do I Do with All These...What Are These Things, Anyway?
Last week kind of threw me for a loop, veggie-wise--for complicated reasons, I didn't get their regular box, which comes with an explanation. Instead, I got a special box, which contained some perfectly standard veggies plus a mysterious bunch of dark green things with crinkly leaf margins, some attractive white globes with bushy leaves, and some romano beans, which I was at least able to identify, even if I'd never had them before.

I figure (a) all leafy greens are various degrees of unpleasant, and (b) they all improve considerably when exposed to bacon and sauteed onions. So, devoutly hoping that they weren't poke salad, I dropped them in a pan with bacon and chopped leeks and let them cook down. They tasted fine, although it turns out that I should have done some more aggressive pre-rinsing and removed the midribs. Otherwise, not a problem. As we're still alive to tell the tale, they obviously weren't poke salad. (Turns out they were mustard greens.)

Then there were these nice white root veggies--very smooth and unblemished. Could they be a very large white radish? In addition to the regular red ones also in the box? This seemed like a lot of radish to dispose of in one week, so I decided to sliced up the whites and eat them for breakfast, as they purportedly do in France. They had a surprisingly tangy, horseradishy smell to them, but they were quite pleasant with a sour cream+sea salt+green onion dressing--not too overwhelming or harsh, but zesty, and with a pleasing al dente consistency--a little softer than your average radish. But I liked it well enough to do it for breakfast two days in a row.

I finally emailed the CSA to ask what the heck I'd been eating. Turnips. I'd been eating raw Japanese white turnips (AKA "kabu") for breakfast.

Never would have seen that one coming, especially since I thought I hated turnips. Maybe these little white Japanese ones are different from the big, clumsy-looking pinky ones we usually eat?

But after all, this is one of the reasons I joined a CSA. It would have never occurred to me to buy either turnips or mustard greens under ordinary circumstances. And now I've discovered a new breakfast food! (I'm pleased about the Japanese turnips; the mustard greens--they're okay, but the chard/turnip greens/kale niche in my diet--never a very large niche to begin with--was already adequately filled and then some. So not what I would call a major epiphany.)

Japanese white turnips ("Kabu") from The Omnivore's Solution So cute!

Mel's Surprising Breakfast Turnips
2 Japanese white turnips, in 1/16" slices
1/4-1/3 c sour cream
2 Tbs green onions
sea salt - to taste
freshly ground pepper - to taste

Combine & eat, preferably with a side of crusty, chewy, peasant-style buttered toast.

I braised the romano beans per this popular Italian recipe from the NY Times. The tomato sauce was really good and rich (could use some red pepper flakes, though), but next time I would chop all the beans in half horizontally--they're so big that they can be rather overwhelming and discouraging in their full size--they need to look a little more user-friendly.) I'm not now a passionate fan of RBs, but they make for some interesting variety in the ol' veggie diet every now and again.

Big, burly romano beans--pic from Stacy Snacks Online

LadyBird Johnson Wildflower Sale

Aquiduct/water garden at the LadyBird Johnson Wildflower Center

We went to the LadyBird Johnson Wildflower Center's fall plant sale today. I had actually never heard of their plant sale till this year, but I'm delighted to have discovered it. While they had a lot of the obvious things (beautyberry, Mexican feather grass, scarlet sage...), they also had some surprises.

They were selling blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium), which I've admired in the wild but have never seen for sale (check out its ineluctable adorableness), and which I'll be putting in the blue-and-purple bed.

The vibrant, trampy red of the heartleaf rosemallow (Hibiscus martianis)

They had a particularly brilliant red hibiscus that loves shade, heartleaf rosemallow (H. martianis), which I will plant at the foot of the cottonwood.

The funky green flowers of the wild shrimp plant (Yeatsia platystegia). Do click to see the picture at maximum bigness--these flowers are best appreciated close up.

And, perhaps niftiest of all, they had a "wild shrimp plant," which looks very much like a tame shrimp plant, but is green and belongs to a different genus, Yeatsia platystegia (formerly Tetramerium platystegium). This one is so obscure that Google can only find two pages mentioning the plant! The newsletter of the Native Plant Project says that it is the host plant to the rare elf butterfly. (Had you been looking for a host plant for the elf butterfly? You're in luck, if you hurry down to the LBJ Wildflower Center tomorrow.) Would make a nice, perverse pairing with the Green Rose.

They also had a wealth of seed mixes for different, highly specific kinds of meadows. One of the grass seed displays read, "Escape from the Bermuda Triangle." Ah, if only I could believe it! But it's going to take more than some blue fescue and buffalograss to drive the bermudagrass population off our property. Climate change on the scale of The Day After the Day before Tomorrow (or whatever it was called) might do it, but probably only temporarily. Generations from now, Mexican anthropologists excavating pre-cataclysm Texas will find dormant rhizomes of the stuff and be thrilled and amazed at its ability to spring back to life once pulled from the permafrost. Poor fools.

The graceful, delicate flowerheads of the (unimaginatively named) "giant muhly" (Muhlenbergia lindheimeri)

The display gardens had a several more interesting specimens. This one, giant muhly (Muhlenbergia lindheimeri), is all over their grounds, but was unfortunately not for sale. I love its lacey gracefulness. We don't really have any established gardens that go with ornamental grasses, but if I could find one of these, I'd make a garden for it.


I also quite liked this weird, spiky little beauty. They look like tiny purple pineapples. It's an eryngo of some kind or other. (Here is an exponentially better picture.)

Interesting mystery gold spike*

And there was this neat gold spike. I have no idea what it is (naturally it was unlabeled--there is a special subsection of Murphy's Law dictating that the plant you are most interested in at any given botanical garden will inevitably be the one without a label or the tree, herb, or water plant ludicrously claiming to be a Berberis trifoliata.) Although it the flowers don't look at all lily-like to me, the strappy foliage looked like classic liliaceae.


CSA: What Do I Do with All This... Chard and Peppers?
My CSA in Burnet, Hairston Creek Farm, finally got some rain, which means our boxes are fatter than before. This is not an unmixed blessing. You would not believe the quantities of peppers I've been receiving every week, and guess what started up again? That's right, everyone's favorite quasi-edible stringy, bitter leafy green that leaves a weird residue on your teeth! CHARD! I thought that perhaps this stuff might be more endurable since the weather is cooler (cooler weather = less bitter leafy greens). Besides, I don't like being defeated by some upstart Swiss, for crying out loud--the country that couldn't pick a side even in one of the most morally unambiguous wars in modern history.

Long story short, I tried again, and this time, I threw everything I had at the stuff. The result was actually not horrible. I call it "Chardage" (chard + sausage). It's not for the faint of heart.

Chardage
1 bunch rainbow chard, freshly washed, ribs and leaves separated
1 Tbs butter
2 carrots, finely chopped
1 small onion (~1.5" diameter), finely chopped
~1 Tbs brown sugar (I used demerara)
1/2 lb bulk sausage
2 roasted sweet peppers (rec: cubanelles or banana peppers) coarsely chopped
garlic salt to taste
1/3 c heavy cream
1/4 c grated parmesan

(1) Finely chop a small handful of chard midribs; discard remainder. Coarsely chop chard leaves.

(2) Heat butter in skillet. Add chopped chard stems, carrots, onion, and brown sugar. Saute until lightly caramelized and tender.

(3) Add sausage to skillet and break up. When crumbled, stir in chard leaves. Cover skillet and cook on medium low until wilted (~10 min.).

(4) Stir in garlic salt, roasted peppers, and cream. Cover skillet and cook on medium low until cream is completely absorbed, peppers and carrots are barely distinguishable, and chard is reduced to a mushy tenderness (~15-20 min.) Stir in parmesan and serve.

Nutritional value: can't be much left by the time I'm done with it. Still, probably contains a week's worth of stringy fiber.

I roasted enough peppers for two chile-based soups, and I still have heaps of the stuff left over. Every salad is topped with peppers. Every sandwich contains peppers. When I make eggs, I stir in or top with peppers. What do I do with all these peppers? The answer is I don't know.

Here, at least, is one recipe that made a tiny, tiny, barely perceptible dent in the mountain: Cheddar and Roasted Pepper Soup. Note that I endorse all of the recommendations make by reviewers in terms of cranking up the flavor.

What do I do with all these leeks? Wait a minute--what leeks? For some reason, my CSA never gives me leeks. In my opinion, the most useful vegetable there is after onions, potatoes, and lettuce. Perhaps we're out of season? But the chard (which no sane person would use in staple Chez M recipes like bubble-and-squeak or vichyssoise) keeps coming, mocking me, while I look in vain for leeks. Very frustrating.
________________________
* Update 16 Oct 09: I was browsing the inventory at Yucca Do when I happened upon this exact same plant. It IS a member of the lily family: Echeandia texensis, the Texas craglily. So now you know.

View from Above

Oh, I was so virtuous! I researched egg-intensive recipes to use up the overabundance of eggs from our CSA! (Lemon-basil popovers--good--and--not so good--"Floating Islands"--alarming poached foam blobs bobbing in a sea of yellow custard. Along with brains in aspic and Jello salad with marshmallows, Floating Islands is one of the food textures I ardently hope to avoid for the rest of my days.) I biked to HEB instead of driving! (Better for the environment! Better for my health!) And I risked life and limb to apply more roofing goo to the garage roof. From which sticky and tar-encrusted perch I took this picture.

The Rose Garden Grows Up
Doesn't the rose garden look pretty? (The bit that isn't blocked by my car, at any rate.) It makes me so happy these days. Things are blooming all over the place. Matt's been weed-whacking the property aggressively, so much of the summertime shaggy brownness has been replaced by a trimmer greenness. The roses are putting on size and filling in nicely. The passionflower keeps blooming away with its big extravagant purple flowers. That particular cultivar is our only answer to the gorgeous, jewel-colored, luncheon-plate-sized clematis that people grow in England (those jammy bastards!) Our "Maggie " propagule (earlier known as "Mystery Red Cabbagey Rose"--propagated at the 11th hour from a hand-me-down shrub with a terminal case of Horrid Fungus--is small, but its three or four little limbs bloom constantly. The trellis, up which two '4th of July' roses are slowly climbing, gives the pleasant illusion of a modicum of privacy, as we had hoped.

And we sit out in this newly temperate weather, watching hummingbirds and herons and painting buntings (well, technically, just the one painted bunting), eating the sometimes tasty and sometimes foamy and disasterous products of our recent adventures in local food, and admiring all the blooming things. And life seems good.

Roofing Goo
Our shack/garage has always leaked, so for ages now we've been meaning to seal up all the seams in the metal roof with roofing goo. Hooo-wee! that's a messy project! Roofing goo is this thick, rubbery sticky mass, like a cross between melted mozzarella and tar. It's so cohesive and springy that it doesn't want to stick to the places you smear it, but it does make ineradicable and self-propagating messes on any other surface that comes near it. My clothes were full of it, my arms were coated in it, and I had to cut some out of my hair.

You may have wondered, how much roofing goo (technically, "roof patch") do you need to seal the seams of a battered old metal garage roof? Well, it took me three cans to seal up one side (i.e. one-quarter) of the part of the roof over the original 1-car garage-shack. Mind you, I was also applying seriously copious quantities to the valley where the old shack's roof and the new(er) 2-car shack's roof meet, so without the valley, it probably would have taken 2-1/3 (1-gal.) cans of goo.

Extrapolate that over the entire garage minus the ~2 cans Matt had already applied, and it comes to about 16 cans of goo for the rest of the project. Leapin' lizards, Daddy Warbucks! That is going to take a very long time to complete. And at ~$15/can, it going to cost around $240.

And, depressingly, when we're done, our garage is going to look like a monochrome Mondrian. Which means we'll need to paint it silver with some sort of metal roof paint.

Oh, sigh....

Or maybe we should just paint on some red and blue and yellow squares and do the thing properly. Why be bourgeois?

Biking Around Elgin
I've meant to do more biking now that we live in a small town and can actually run errands on our bikes--and without getting run over, either. I need a new bike (mine is a boy bike hand-me-down with one of those awful bars right where one's most delicate parts are. It is also 2-3 inches too tall for me, which makes stopping at intersections a real production), but I first need to ride my old one enough to justify the purchase. (I'm going to get one of those endearingly dorky-looking 1950s-style cruising bikes with a big metal basket. My current model is a torture-machine of a mountain bike.) On top of that, now that it's actually pleasant outside, I find, to my amazement, that I actually want to go biking. It's kind of fun.

So I bought a new, extra-cushy granny-seat, a new set of lights, and, to Matt's infinite amusement, a pair of padded fingerless biking gloves. Oh, yeah.

Water--My Favorite!

We got a surprise rain shower yesterday. (I say "surprise"--technically, we had a 40% chance of rain; but for the past two years, "40% chance of rain" has meant "pack sunscreen.") I was hiking with my friend Keith and there was some promising greyness, so we followed Matt's rain-summoning approach, which is to insult the weather. I opted for blasphemy: I shook my fist at the clouds and said, "By Jove!"

Apparently, Jove is much touchier (and more active) than I had ever imagined, because first there were a few intermittent drops, then there were more drops, then there was steady drizzle, and then there were violent gusts and great cracks of thunder.

I got soaked to the skin, which was lovely, and I was even (briefly) chilly enough to shiver. It was like living some place else entirely.

All of this has injected new life into my belief in this fantastical Shangri-La of which the old timers speak, called "Autumn." As a result, a young girl's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of... foundation plantings, winter recipes, and cool-weather vacations. I can actually imagine the seasons changing, the weather improving, and the need for warm clothes, flannel sheets, and hearty stews.

Where will we take our fall vacation? Last year we went to the Comfort area of Central Texas--maybe we'll do that again. And what will my CSA produce? Will they have bok choy? Mizuna? Oyster root?

As we're to be in the 100s all next week, these are not, I suppose, truly burning questions.

The park where we were hiking (in Webberville) got a good 40 minutes or so, but back home, the rain didn't entirely penetrate the mulch in the shade bed. Still, the plants look perkier.

And speaking of the CSA...

CSA: What Do I Do with All These... Eggplants and Cucumbers?
I made the CUCUMBERS into a cucumber yogurt soup and into Julia Child's Concombres Au Beurre (baked cucumbers; transcribed here). The former just didn't coalesce. Maybe it needed more salt, maybe less yogurt and more milk, almost certainly it should have been blended (grated cucumber floating in your yogurt matrix is unsettling)--anyway, no great favorite.

I kind of liked the Concombres. They were sort of like an incomplete pickle--a little vinegary, a little dilly, a little crisp, but without the intensity of most pickles.

Last week's EGGPLANTS became Greek Shepherd's Pie. I didn't even try the cucs on Matt--in marriage, as that bearded dude reminds us, you have know when to hold em and (more importantly) know when to fold em. But I did have high hopes for the shepherd's pie. The recipe called for 10 (TEN!) cloves of garlic, 3 cups of diced onion, 1 cup of red wine, 2 lb ground lamb, and a cup-and-a-half of parmesan. Plus, I threw in a can of whole hominy because Matt likes hominy. Then I boiled everything and subsequently baked it under a continental shelf of mashed potatoes. I should have been able to serve sauteed skunk in that concoction without him detecting it.

So. The moment of truth. How does he like?

(With a moue of disgust) "It tastes like eggplant."

My husband--the culinary equivalent of the Princess and the Pea.

To be fair, he quite sportingly faced down the eggplant a second time in the form of leftovers the following day. Perhaps he is developing a taste for eggplant?

CSA: What Do I Do with All These... Eggplants, Zucchini, and Beets?

Not much news on the exterior. It's hot. Yuck.

On the interior, we've been continuing our adventures in vegetables.

EGGPLANTS are, to my mind, fairly easy to manipulate. I made an eggplant parmesan using the breading from Saveur and the fresh tomato sauce from Epicurious. I was pretty pleased with the result. I asked Matt, "So what did you think?"
"It's all right."
"Yeah, I thought it was pretty good."
"It was all right."

When it came time for leftovers, he favored beetloaf over eggplant parm, which I guess isn't all that surprising.

I'm running out of ideas for ZUCCHINI--I've already made them into bread and cookies--I can't really think of any more baked goods to hide them in. And we still have a loaf of (very tasty) chocolate chip zucchini bread in the freezer.

So I made my very tasty and hearty Spicy African Peanut Soup to eat for lunches (Matt won't touch that one--too vegetabley; very similar recipe here), and gave up and fried the rest. As there is a limit to the fried zucchini I can eat at a single sitting, I'm afraid many a zucchini spear went straight to the landfill. Also, it transpires that I prefer my zucchini sliced paper thin on the mandoline rather than cut into hefty, squishy, zucchini-textured spears.

On the BEETS, also, I raise the white flag of surrender: I can barely scare up a new beet recipe that I'll eat, let alone one Matt would endure. So I cooked them just for me. I roasted them and sliced them for beet-gorgonzola panini. I'll tell you: not a bad idea. A hearty, nutty bread is essential, however, to mask the beet texture and tame the flavor. I've got two left that I shall attempt to turn into carpaccio. And then attempt to eat. No promises on that one. I'm hoping the capers distract my tastebuds sufficiently so that I don't notice what I'm eating.

This week, mercifully, the beets, zucchini, squash, and chard seem to have given out. In fact, owing to the drought, I think, this week's box was a bit lighter than last. As I still have about 8 Oriental cucs from previous boxes to use up, and a bag and a half of okra, I'm really okay with that. Plus, everything in this box was stuff I like or can readily use: potatoes, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, onions, garlic, and eggplant.

This week: chilled cucumber-dill soup, baba ghanoush, and baked cucumbers a la Julia Child.

Happy Fourth

We were feeling lackadaisical about the Fourth this year. Matt is never highly motivated by fireworks; just as he endures Christmas rituals as an indulgence to me, so he resignedly lets me bribe him with fried chicken to attend the occasional municipal fireworks display. But whether it's simply an off year for me, or whether the heat just crushed all enthusiasm out of me, I found the notion of battling traffic, trekking picnic accoutrements all over creation, jostling for a spot, and being hemmed in by hot, seething, boisterous crowds deeply unappealing this year. So we decided to stay home.

I vaguely remember having a surprisingly lovely Fourth last year: a brief burst of unseasonable cooler temperatures allowed me to lounge about in a hammock reading while Matt plied me with alcoholic beverages, and then we attended the relatively fuss-free but not insubstantial display in Taylor.

This year was not like that. As a last-minute tribute to the holiday, I decided to grill some hamburger meat that needed using up. We didn't assemble on the shade patio for grilling until 8ish, and even then, it was asphyxiatingly hot and heavy there on the coolest part of the yard. The intermittent breezes felt like the air from an oven door--instead of cooling, they just redistributed the heat rising out of the ground.

No sooner had I placed the top bun on my burger than we gave up on any pretense of celebrating the Fourth and fled with our picnic dinner to the air conditioning.

Halfway through dinner, though, we heard some loud bangs--Elgin hosted its own fireworks display for the first time since our residence, and they did it, conveniently, from the parking lot of Southside BBQ, which is less than a mile from our house. There is a tree-filled park between ourselves and Southside, so we only saw the top half of the modest but enjoyable display, but we felt that was a fair trade-off. I hope other, more motivated citizens attended the event in person so that Southside will feel encouraged to repeat it... so that we can watch it again next year from our back yard.

Perhaps we'll buy dinner from them by way of thanks. Did you know that they sell barbecued mutton? I find that intriguing and quaint. I wonder, is it a relic of some distant, mutton-eating phase of Texas history? Did the Southside owners immigrate here from some more sheep-centric locale? Or is it just that mutton is cheap, so that if you can render it palatable, the profit margin would be high?

CSA: What Do I Do With All These... Beets and Tomatoes?
The beetloaf (adapted from this) turned out quite well, I thought. Very moist, and to me the BEET presence was undetectable. Matt felt that it was on the edge--he claims that he could taste the beets. I slathered mine with steak sauce, so that may have helped.

Had better luck with the TOMATOES. I've been taking the cherry toms to work for lunch, but I just can't keep up with the inexhaustible flow of tomatoes from the CSA. So I made salsas to go with our 4th of July dinner (and to go in this morning's migas). Matt liked the pumpkin seed-pasilla salsa best; I lean more toward the fresh chipotle-lime salsa.

Pumpkin Seed-Pasilla Salsa (adapted from here)
Medium heat
10 'Black Plum' tomatoes or 5 regular plum tomatoes, halved
2-3 jalapeños, halved and seeded
a little olive oil
10 dried pasillos and anchos
2-3 tsp ancho powder or other powdered chile
1 Tbs kosher salt
1 tsp sugar
1-1/2 c water
2 Tbs roasted, hulled pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
3 Tbs white vinegar
1/2 c scallions
1/4 c cilantro, chopped

Heat the broiler on high. Drizzle a little olive oil in a baking pan. Place tomatoes and jalapeños in pan, cut side down. Char tomatoes and jalapeños until skins are slightly burned, ~7 minutes (check after 5).

Remove tomatoes and jalapeños from the oven and place them in a stainless steel pot. Add ancho powder, dried chiles, salt, sugar, and water. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook for 20 minutes, stirring often.

Add vinegar to tomato mixture and cook for 1 minute. Add toasted pumpkin seeds. Place mixture in a blender, and blend until smooth (it make take a while to get the pumpkin seeds sufficiently fine.)

Briefly whiz in scallions and cilantro. Refrigerate for several hours before serving.

Smoky and complex.

Fresh Chipotle-Lime Salsa (adapted from here)
Medium heat
1/3 cup fresh lime juice or more, to taste
4 cloves garlic
3 canned chipotle chilies in adobo sauce
1 Tbs adobo sauce from the chipotle can
2 cups peeled, chopped, and seeded tomatoes (boil whole tomatoes for ~1 minute first to loosen skins)
1 cup coarsely chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
salt and pepper to taste

Squeeze lime juice into a blender and add garlic cloves. Blend until smooth.

Add chipotles, adobo, tomatoes, onion and cilantro. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Whiz briefly in the blender.

Refrigerate for an hour or more before serving to allow flavors to marry.

Limey and refreshing!

But I Had Scheduled a Weekend of Utter Slothfulness!

Against all my principles and my better judgment, I worked outside this weekend. It started innocently: I just wanted to dump a few bags of mulch over the dead bermudagrass in the rose bed. Just to make things look tidier. It won't take a second...

But the new mulch was so much darker than the old mulch that one corner of the bed was black, while the rest was light brownish-grey. And thus one thing led to another, and I ended up buying 20 bags of mulch from our nursery-around-the-corner, Bloomers. So I spread a lot of mulch yesterday. And then today, I felt (grudgingly, unwillingly) morally obliged to help Matt out with the water on the 'Mutabilis' bed--my part of the effort took till around noon (his took till about 2:30). Among other things, I learned that I have no talent for trench-digging; mine meandered and veered all over the landscape, while Matt's cut from Point A to Point B with the precision worthy of a Roman civil engineer.

The whole thing was a massive pain, but we hope to see ecstatic, lush plant growth towering audaciously toward a harsh blue sky. And then it will have been worth it.

Some Blooms
In other news, our Mystery Pink Globes rose bloomed recently. The oddest little pink balls of flowers--unlike any other rose I know, yet also completely unidentifiable, so far. This is how they look at full bloom.

Mystery Pink Globes rose

Also, during one of my many trips to Bloomers this weekend, I happened to spot the same unknown plum-colored perennial that I bought at Finch's Farm a month or so ago. Its name is Angelonia, possibly 'Serena.' You know what's amazing about the Angelonia (and its buddies, the little leadworts)? They aren't dead, despite having been planted in May/June in our meanest flower bed. Good little Angelonia!

Our tough little Angelonia

Requiem for Four Pines
Finally, a refresher on why I hate drought:

Sad stumps of once-proud great big trees

This, of course, is not our house--it's an utterly adorable little bungalow "downtown" (i.e., two blocks away). Until last summer's drought, it had 5 massive, ~50-year-old pine trees in its front yard, of a stoutness that is pretty rare for pines in our area. Then four of the them succumbed to drought after surviving decades of scorching Texas summers. You can see the effect that the loss of those trees has had on the lawn, and you can imagine the effect it's had on their electric bills. It's drastically changed the feeling of that block of the street, as well, which went from a shady green tunnel to a bleak and exposed bit of desert. Hence our watering efforts. And hence the need to water even very established, adapted specimens in the midst of a really ghastly drought like this one. Do you have a tree that you take for granted, that's always been there, unobtrusively providing shade and cooling your yard? For the love of Mike, water it!

In the midst of prolonged dry spells (let alone a really vile drought like this one), I always think of the passage from Out of Africa, in which Isak Dinesen describes a drought that felt "as if the Universe were turning away from you...

Everything became drier and harder, and it was as if all force and gracefulness had withdrawn from the world. It was not bad weather or good weather, but the negation of all weather, as if it had been deferred sine die. A bleak wind, like a draught, ran over your head, all colour faded from all things; the smells went away from the fields and forests. This feeling of being in disgrace with the Great Powers pressed on you. To the South, the burnt plains lay black and waste, striped with grey and white ashes...

Our droughts are a little different from Kenya's, I think, but the sense of joylessness and blight--we know that all too well.

CSA: What Do I Do with All This... Zucchini, Chard, and Beets?
I made another attempt at CHARD, the vegetable that loathes me. This time, I boiled it with a little red wine vinegar, browned some butter and then browned a cup of leeks in the butter, and then stirred in the drained chard (A variation on this recipe). Matt, when pressed persistently, gave this one 3/4 of a star out of a possible 5 stars. But, he hastened to emphasize, it's way better than my last attempt at chard. Well. Progress is being made.

Also, I'm making some ice cream cookie sandwiches as a treat to my hard-working Spouse, and I folded in a cup of finely grated ZUCCHINI. These were double-chocolate Andes Mint cookies (mentholated and adapted from here), and the zucchini gave them an interestingly cakey texture. We'll see how they react to being frozen and slathered with mint chocolate chip ice cream and then frozen again.

And this evening, I'll make my BEET-and-beef meatloaf (a beet-ified version of this). I'll let you know how it goes.

107°F is TOO MANY DEGREES

Here's how the Seasonal US Drought Outlook describes conditions in Central Texas this summer:

It purportedly reached 107F today in Austin, though it was only a balmy 104F here in Elgin. IN JUNE.

Concomitant bad plant news: the new weeping yaupon crashed this week, the baldcypress that's been struggling grimly ticked several notches toward "mostly dead" and away from "partly alive," and the Montezuma cypress, hitherto so blithe, is suddenly full of rusty leaves--oh, it's not good, not good at all.

Bright spots in the crispy, sere gloom: Some plants that are practically never watered seem perfectly unconcerned about living in the heart of a neutron star* (I just threw "neutron star" in there because it sounded good--what I'm really trying to convey here is that it's quite, quite hot. Are neutron stars very hot? Or are they sort of wussy little failed stars? Because we're like a raging inferno of nuclear fusion--not like a chilly old has-been of a star. We're talking greater than 3,700 degrees Kelvin in my backyard.) The troopers are Lacey oaks (Quercus laceyi), the antique rose 'Georgetown Tea,' the antique-ish rose 'Belinda's Dream,' and the Eve's Necklace (Sophora affinis). Honorable mention to the Tilia, which does get some water, but grows and thrives far beyond the effort put into it.

So. More water.
This weekend, the 'Mutabilis' roses and the 2 oaks on the south side of the house. And the Chitalpa as part of the blue-and-purple garden. The 'Mutabilis' don't actually need water the way some of our plants do (O, baldcypress, nothing we do is good enough for you. Why? WHY?), but they are plants with a mission--to make a big, dense hedge for privacy--so Matt really wants to give them every possible advantage. The oaks, children of that blissful rainy summer 2 years ago, need next to no supplemental water, but I'm becoming tree- and shade-obsessed. I'm desperate for some relief on the barren, exposed southwestern sides of the house. So we're giving the oaks a steroid shot, metaphorically speaking. Grow little oak trees. We need you.

Of course, it's too hot to work (or think or breathe) outside when the sun's up, so Matt & I were out between 9 and 10 this evening doing yardwork, pruning the moribund baldcypress, and watering with the zestful abandon of a freshwater Poseidon. Meanwhile, Elgin's got a festival going ("Western Days," I believe this one's called), and the music from the park--of the "Margaritaville" and "All My Exes Live in Texas" variety--wafted across the backyard. Not the accompaniment I'd have chosen, but I suppose it's local color. (There is an inevitable repertoire of songs played by bands at street festivals. And sure enough, before too long they were covering "Brown-Eyed Girl," which will be stuck in my head for the next three days.) Anyway, there's something oddly decadent about doing yardwork in the dark.

And there is also something peculiarly liberating about being completely hot and sweaty and disgusting, at least at night, when the sun's gone down. You pass beyond all hope of keeping up appearances or maintaining a genteel pretense of hygeine. You abdicate all responsibility and just glister wetly in the moonlight: reechy, humid, and torpid. You are the wetness and the wetness is you and everyone is completely feral and gross and unlovely and no one cares. I suppose it's the sort of defiance of les convenances that nudists find so intoxicating.

CSA: What Do I Do with All This... Okra, Beets, and Chard?
The BEET risotto went well. I roasted the beets for an hour, then finely diced them and cooked them into the risotto. Also added a handful of chopped prosciutto. I thought the taste was pretty good, though I had some slight qualms about the discernable texture of the beets. Matt didn't have "qualms," as such--he just hated it. A texture issue for him too.

I made OKRA beignets (substituted 1 c boiled CSA new potatoes for the 1/2c rice) to use up about half of the okra--wow--very tasty! Very crisp and delicious and creamy and tangy, and they improve after sitting in the fridge and then being refreshed in the skillet the next morning. I struck out here too with Matt, which didn't surprise me. You could taste the okra and the slices were very apparent in terms of texture. No slime, though.

Shall be trying seared leeks with CHARD and stealth beetloaf--meatloaf with grated beets mixed in. Here's hoping both the flavor and texture are subsumed by the beef. I don't want to send Matt into despair or anaphylactic shock or something.

Thus saith Wikipedia: Neutron Star - "The temperature inside a newly formed neutron star is from around 10¹¹ to 10¹² kelvin. The neutrinos it emits carries away so much energy that the temperature falls within a few years to around 1 million kelvin." Yeah, that metaphor will work.

A Pleasant Afternoon Outside?!?

It was, actually.

Thus the astonishing power of shade. Matt's installing a sprinkler system in the shade garden to coddle some of our pickier cultivars. I'm especially concerned about the oak-leaf hydrangea, which is sensitive to drought and doesn't yet have much of a root system; the cordia, which needs to establish a root system and needs to grow quickly to replace our decrepit ligustrum; and the tiny wisp of a palmetto (one sad, scrawny little leaf), which, if it keeps a positive mental outlook, eats right, and gets plenty of exercise, could someday form a very nice component of our privacy screen. The Iris virginiana and the Japanese maples are also looking a bit dubious about life here in Elgin, so I wanted to reassure them. Eventually, this ghastly drought will end. For the shade bed, it ends now.

So, in my role as consultant/cheerleader, I perched on the porch glider and, you know, consulted. And what was really mindblowing and amazing was that it was nice. There were breezes, some of them cool. There was gently filtered light. And the temperature just wasn't particularly oppressive--maybe 85F or so degrees in the shade, compared to 95+ in the sun (this was in the early afternoon--it's probably closer to 101F now in the sun. And I'm no longer outside). And before Matt buried the system, he had to test it, which I felt wasn't reason to enough to get up off of the porch glider. I may have looked slightly crazy to the neighbors sitting blithely under the spray, but lemme tell you--the kids are on to something. Playing--or in my case, lolling--under sprinklers feels good. And all of this pleasure is due, ultimately--well, largely to Matt--but other than that, to the power of our giant cottonwood. Hail cottonwood! Long may you reign, Father of Gardens!

I'm also rather excited about having a more formal irrigation system with actual sprinkler heads--it seems so bourgeois and la-di-da. One or two paychecks down the line, I'll buy a 12-station timer as well, which we will eventually use to control irrigation throughout the property from one centralized, automated location. S-e-x-y!

That said, the hope is that after this area is a bit more established, we won't need to use the system very often. I do feel a bit guilty watching all that precious water arching profligately through the air. But we are in the middle of a drought, so even xeriscapes need water these days. And it isn't as though we're watering our lawn, anyway. Just our young trees, shrubs, and perennials that will ultimately help to cool the property, consume CO₂, and, uh, do other productive things for Planet Earth. Provide earthworm shelter or something. Yep. No rationalization here.

Surviving a CSA
Or, What Do I Do with All These Zucchini, Pattypans, and Oriental Cucumbers?
To return to what is, for the summer, my domain (the indoors), I joined a CSA (community supported agriculture) a couple of weeks ago. The interesting thing about this project--and it is very much a project--is that I'm forced to come up with ways to eat things that I--let alone Matt--would never ordinarily eat. So it's an adventure!

We get a box every week, plus eggs every other week and an extra--jelly, pesto, &c--on intervening weeks. Thus far, we've gotten some good stuff (tomatoes, potatoes, onions, carrots, and garlic), some indifferent stuff (Oriental cucumbers, zucchini), and some horrors (beets, chard, yellow squash! Bleh!)

I'm rather proud of the interesting ways of prepping veggies that I've tried. Zucchini became chocolate chip zucchini bread--oh hell yeah! Tasted like chocolate chip cookies. One batch of beets became beet-and-tasso consomme (adapted from epicurious)--which was surprisingly tasty. Probably helps that they were golden beets, so the soup didn't look like blood--always a plus. Last night I broke out the mandoline to make fritto misto out of the squash and zucchini (adapted from astray.com, plus dill and smoked salt). It was delectable--crispy, salty; so good, I didn't even make a dipping sauce--that would have obscured the flavor. The bacon-zucchini quiche wasn't half bad, either. Thing about zucchini--if you slice it thinly enough, it loses both flavor and texture, and then what's to complain about? And the squash-lemon-poppyseed muffins are okay, too (loosely adapted from a GardenWeb forum). Not fantastic, but better than a kick in the head.

And there have been the bombs. Underdone stuffed pattypans, overly charred chard, inedible chard-based eggs sardou, dreary little cucumber sandwiches--I must be the only person in the world who can't make a decent cucumber sandwich.

For this week, I've used up most of my Oriental cukes in a cucumber-based gazpacho (threw in the last of the yellow cherry tomatoes, too), and I'll be tackling a beet risotto for dinner. Hopefully, the sherry and parmesan will join forces to mask the fact that beets taste like dirt.