Veggie Stock
The purple air radish (raphanus caudatus) pods turn green when cooked and taste more or less like green beans.
I like them in egg-drop soup with edible chrysanthemum and Sugar Ann Peas, as well as my yellow pear tomatoes which overwintered in the carport.
Here is a screenshot for the NoteDex android app which is a database for 3x5 notecards. Although the program is still under development, I am getting some use out of it.
After reading a recipe on a blog called Fork to Spoon, I decided that I would try a variation of their oven-baked style oatmeal prepared in an air fryer. I had read another blog which suggested mixing egg with oatmeal to make a sort of pancake that could be cooked on a griddle and then presumably reheated, but for some reason I just could not make myself try it as much as the writer said it was good, quick to prepare, and healthy. However, the Fork to Spoon recipe claimed my attention because of the strawberries.
I simplified the recipe, and on the back of my card listed how much of what went in as liquid ingredients (which I blended all together instead of layering the fruit, and then as dry ingredients (simply stirred together in the bottom of a bowl).
The front of the card explains that after pouring the liquid ingredients over the dry one, we wait 10 minutes or so, then stir and pour into paper muffin cups before baking at 320F for 10 minutes in an air fryer. Clicking on my photo will make it large enough to read.
This is oatmeal, with less sugar than a muffin. It is soft and moist, but it holds together well enough to eat out of the paper cup, so there is no dish to wash. The egg adds nutrition, but is not noticeable in the oatmeal.
According to Fork to Spoon, after baking these will keep in the refrigerator for a few days or can be frozen and then taken out the night before to thaw in the refrigerator before doing a quick reheat in the morning by microwave or air fryer. Truly a grab, eat, and run food, and it tastes just like oatmeal.
My camellia bushes had taken over. So starting from the ground up I cut off branches until two trash barrels were completely full. The rest will have to wait until after trash pickup.
Apparently, tea can be made from any variety of camellia. I think these are Japonica, which is said to make a robust black tea, but I haven't tried it yet.
I have light pink, deep pink, and red flowers, and would like to get some Large Leafed Camellia Sinensis for their fragrant white blossoms as well as for leaves to make tea. I am not much of a tea drinker myself, but I feed it to my kombucha.
This project allowed me to try out some of the gardening tools I have been acquiring. The folding bench is not only handy for keeping my bearclaw saw and ratcheting pruners out of the dirt, but it is invaluable for helping me safely up from my rocker work seat aka Wobble Stool. I read reviews from people who said their wobble stools tipped over and they fell off. That does not sound like fun! My trick is putting the bench behind the stool and with both hands on the handles for support I can easily move up and down from the higher bench to the lower (and wobblier) seat.
This house came with some furniture that did not appeal to me, including very heavy chairs. I replaced almost all of them with wobble stools. That gave me the idea to try something similar in the garden. To my surprise they did have just such a thing, so I bought one right away and am very glad I did.
When my cousin let me have clippings from some of the succulents in her back yard, she probably had no idea how lifechanging that was going to be for me. Neither did I. This was shortly after I had stumbled across a few articles about Eco tourism at the Shamwari Private Game Reserve near Mozambique. Holding armloads of cuttings from one bush that I particularly liked, I thought back on my reaction to seeing photos of what the South Africans know as Spekboom. A world away I could not help obsessing over this apparent superplant that we call Elephant Bush hereabouts. How happy I was to suddenly get a whole bunch of it!
I haven't had it long enough to see if it is going to live, but I left some cuttings in water to root and some in potting soil, and more outdoors. Rumor has it that these are hard to kill, but only time will tell. Considering how many I planted, some of them at least are bound to survive.
This one is Portulacaria Afra Green, but a few days later I bought a pot of Portulacarie Macrophylla (Mammoth), and then one called Rainbow, which has lighter colored variegated leaves (Portulacaria Afra Variegata).
One of the big attractions Elephant Bush plants have for me is that not only elephants, but people too can eat the leaves. Whether they are delicious depends on which variety you nibble on, the time of day, and I guess the temperature. The first time I tried to eat a raw leaf from the Afra Green, it was not just not tasty, it was pretty awful. But when I cooked a few leaves they were quite pleasant as was a bit of tea that I brewed from leaves of the Macrophylla. This emboldened me to taste a leaf from the Variegata and that one was truly was delicious. I went back to Lowe's and bought another pot of the Variegata.
Apparently, Portulacaria has a nutritional profile similar to purslane, but additionally it presumably improves air quality if grown indoors.
April 4: Update on the Portulacaria Afra cuttings. Just a few days short of a month after I put a number of the Elephant Bush cuttings under grow lights to root, some in water and some in potting medium, roots appeared on both types of cuttings. It is also evident that the branches I stuck in the dirt outdoors are rooting as well, because the plants are all looking good.
I have not tried baking the traditional Spekboom muffins with the leaves of this plant yet, but I did put a few leaves in cornbread to give it a nutritional boost. I cooked the leaves first.
Another thing that is really fun about this plant is that while it is drought tolerant, if it wants water it lets you know by shriveling up its little leaves which plumb back up again when it gets enough. Growing in pots, good drainage is necessary. I suspect that Elephant Bush stems can be grown indefinitely indoors in water the same as other succulents, since if the water is kept clean (and maybe aerated once in a while) there would be nothing to rot as in soil that is too wet. In any case, I will try it.
This rest area is about six miles east of the Morongo Resort Casino on HIghway 10 between Palm Springs and Banning. For me it is always a happy site as when I see it I know I am only about 5 minutes away from an In-N-Out Burger!
If I have to miss that one, there is another just a few miles further east in Beaumont.
Here are some shots from the other side of the mountain.
I wanted to see if the ChargePoint EV in Palm Desert really had a fast charge for free. It was a good excuse to drive my peppy little Hyndai Kona EV over the mountain.
It was too late to attempt going back the way I came, not on a snowy night. The day started out sunny and bright, but storm clouds gathered here and there over my descent. At one point on the way down the sky was completely overcast, but when I got into town it was all sunny and bright again.
There were families with young children playing in the snow up on the mountain and many of them piled snow on top of their cars where it remained packed. This was a sight to see at lower elevations.
The City of Palm Desert was well-named and here are some of its famous palm trees.
Nuts about this desk!
I have finally gotten 99% of the ancient carpeting pulled up in a space that will one day be my art studio (combined with an ambitious indoor garden). The floor is still unsealed and has zillions of staples and nails to pull up before I start decorating it. At this stage everything is everywhere and my biggest challenge has been to find a place to put my tools while I am working.
I have been tearing apart unwanted sofas and chairs that were too big for me to lift and broken them into pieces that fit in my trash barrels. I have flowering and edible plants in all stages of development and these take up most of my time as my plant experiment took on a life of its own.
So I scoured the internet for some functional multipurpose furniture to use first for temporary storage of most often used tools and then down the road as work space for people and plants. Aizservice163.com* sells this desk on Amazon for under $70 and it has great reviews.
I don't sit down a lot, so I had been looking for a suitable stand-up desk for a long time. It had to be portable enough for me to wheel it around easily all by myself, narrow enough to fit anywhere, tall enough to be ergonomic, and very easy to adjust.
I like how smoothly the lower shelf goes from flat to tilted and back. If I am drawing at this desk I can adjust the tilt without getting up. It is great that I will also be able to wheel it over and use it alongside my drafting table.
This desk was very easy to assemble, with all necessary tools, directions, and extra screws. It is perfect. I would like a couple more to hold grow lights for some of my plants.
*By way of disclaimer, I paid the regular price for this item and do not know the sellers personally.
Lately I have been making my own breakfast cereal. It was not something that I thought about consciously, rather it just happened. One hot dry day I accidentally left half of a home made blueberry muffin out on the counter in the mug I had baked it in. The next day it had formed a crunchy crust, so I poured milk into the mug and ate it.
"Voila," I exclaimed, "This tastes like breakfast cereal, only better." Much better, in fact. So lately I have been leaving a few crumbled muffins out on purpose, only with a large strainer inverted on top to keep them clean. Today I finally got around to looking online for "DIY Cereal" and learned that other people are indeed making their own cereal, but differently.
I like my method because it is portion controlled, always fresh, nothing to store, and minimal clean-up using only 1 cup or mug and one spoon per serving. Also, there is infinite variety using whatever ingredients are on hand.
For people who don't have time or don't like to make everything from scratch, a very simple version of this can be made using muffin mix, although I seldom use the mix straight, preferring to "healthy it up.)
Basics: Muffin batter will rise to about double, so dry ingredients would be needed to fill up to the bottom of the handle on the cup above. Then I add some condensed milk (to take the place of an egg), cooked raisins (and/or applesauce) and 3 TBSP of liquid. I stir it right in the cup and microwave the cup 1 1/2 minutes.
One Example:
To make the muffin pictured above, I used just a little bit of commercial blueberry muffin mix and added to it some ground oatmeal flakes, half tsp of baking soda, a TBSP of condensed milk, and 3 T liquid from my cooked raisins plus a few whole cooked raisins.
My first squash flowers in 2021. Oh! A pretty and tasty New Year's greeting from my garden.
YAY, pollen is on the way!
It's a girl!
Chicken with greens, pepper, and squash blossoms, all from my winter garden.
I am eating way more almond soaks having recently figured out an efficient way to peel them!
Just lightly score with a curved paring knife. This one is a bird's beak made by Sabatier. It was a gift from my 99-year old friend Rex.
It isn't really necessary to score the soaks as the skins usually pinch off from one end, but there is a learning curve to doing it that way. Did you know that soaking the almonds may reduce tannins and other compounds that inhibit the digestion of nutrients in these nuts? Some people believe that and others do not, but for myself, as they taste more delicious after soaking I am likely to eat more of them, which is a very good thing.