Not quite the spring garden post I'd planned.

I was going to write a totally ordinary spring gardening post. Then, at about 7:30 last night, this happened.

There's really nothing like being inside your house, a foot or two from the back wall, when you hear two gigantic crashing noises in close succession, coming directly from your backyard.

So we went outside and discovered this.

That's our pineapple guava tree.

It had rotted enough at the root for its weight to tear it at ground level. I imagine the first noise was the initial tear and the second was the impact.

This one is foreshortened, but it gives you a much better picture of the breadth of the crown. It spans almost the entire width of the backyard.

Did it hit the house? No. We were super lucky there. But it did get within about a foot of the back door. There are a bunch of branches resting on our meyer lemon tree, right behind the back porch slab. The lemon tree seems okay so far.

Needless to say, this trumps my newly planted seedlings and mole-stolen tomato plants. (This year we suddenly have a mole. I am pretty annoyed about it stealing an entire tomato plant. It was yanked straight down into the ground and the roots eaten entirely. Only a pitiful tuft of leaves were left peeking out through the top of the soil. I was too mad to take pictures. BUT ANYWAY.)

I'm happy not to have to deal with 100 pineapple guavas per day for the entirety of October and November anymore, but otherwise, this is not a great situation. Our backyard is going to be much, much sunnier than it has ever been before, even if our landlord decides to plant a new tree. This could be good for growing sun-loving plants in the back bed, but not so great for the temperature inside the house, and definitely not good for soil moisture retention. And losing this massive crown of flowers is going to be terrible for the pollinators in the neighborhood.

For those of you keeping track, here's the tally of house catastrophes in the past 5 months:

- roof leak
- furnace breakdown
- no heat for a month over the holidays
- refrigerator breakdown
- mold influx
- gigantic fallen tree
- and also we're supposed to be having a full roof replacement soon.

YAY.

In actual garden news, we have one single solitary volunteer tomato plant this year. It's a Caspian Pink, which is perfect for our partially shaded main bed. I think a couple other guys may be volunteers too, but the location suggests that they're red peppers. That's actually even better, since I didn't buy any red pepper plants and have no intention of starting any at this point. Bell peppers really don't produce that many fruits per plant -- I got four total last year. By contrast, our yearly jalapeño harvest is always gigantic in number, even if the chiles themselves are small. I'm definitely going to keep putting those in as long as we live here.

I got two tomato plants (one of which has officially been eaten by the mole) and two jalapeño plants. I may get a few more tomatoes and plant them up in gallon containers, for strategic mole-outwitting purposes. Otherwise, I think I will start a bunch of green bush beans in the next week or so. I have some scarlet runner beans and cucumbers in the back of my mind too. So it's essentially my usual garden lineup: lots of tomatoes and spice, plus a handful of bits and bobs.

Drought is still a definite and serious concern. I think a dry-farmed tomato experiment might be a good idea. This depends on the moles, though. Any tomatoes in containers are going to need water all summer, and need it seriously.

What is happening in your spring garden? Hopefully nothing this exciting.

It's still summer: tomato, cucumber, and chive salad

Okay. I hear you on the incoming pumpkin. It is September, after all. But that doesn't mean tomato season is over!

I for one am still eating quite a few plates of food that look very much like this. Fresh tomato! Fresh cucumber! Fresh chives!

They're all so good, and they're all still easily available. So let's cram our faces with the best of the late summer produce while we still can, shall we?

Tomato, cucumber, and chive salad

The best beefsteak tomato you have (Caspian Pink in my case)
A lovely crisp cucumber
A handful of fresh chives
salt, pepper, olive oil
optional lemon juice or vinegar

This could not be easier or more delicious.

Wash your tomato and cut it into half-inch-thick slices. If your tomato is particularly huge, you may want to halve it first. Slice your cucumber into thin half-moons or quarter-moons. Cut your chives into a pile of tiny bits.

Arrange a fan of tomato slices on each salad plate. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Drizzle on a few drops of olive oil.

Top each plate of tomato with a handful of cucumber. Season as before with salt, pepper, and olive oil. Garnish with a generous sprinkling of chives. If you like, finish the plate with a small squeeze of lemon juice or a few drops of vinegar.

Voila! Your salad is complete.

You can serve as much of this salad per person as you please. I made mine a reasonable side salad size, but if you have the appetite for a full dinner plate of huge tomato slices, I say go for it.

My brain wants this salad next to a plate of eggs, either deviled, poached and served on some nice seedy toast, or just scrambled. It would also be excellent with any number of other things, however! Sandwiches of all kinds would be a perfect plan. So would a big whack of a proteiny salad - chickpea, tuna, or what have you. So would a nicely seared piece of fish. Practically anything would be a good idea. Get what you like and eat it!

How are you relishing the final fruits of summer?

The August 2014 garden

First things first: the garden has indeed been affected by drought. It may not look like it to the naked eye, but when you compare it to the 2013 garden there's a difference. And when you compare it to the 2012 garden? Yeah.

Granted, I personally caused some of the difference. I have been watering less and encouraging deep root growth with infrequent but thorough soakings. I learned not to overcrowd the beds quite as much as usual, and I pinched off the tops of the tomato plants when they got to be about eight feet tall. I also got myself together enough to plant half the tomatoes in the side bed instead of the main bed, which obviously leaves some extra space here.

Still. I haven't had to fight with the tomatoes at ALL compared to the constant staking and tying and pinching of years past. That in itself is a big difference.

On the left: Caspian Pink tomato #1, with garlic and a volunteer potato hidden behind it. To its right, there are lots of scallions surrounding two jalapeño peppers and a red pepper. Next, there is basil, Caspian Pink tomato #2, and, at the edge of the frame, three tiny green beans. Not pictured: I also have some scarlet runner beans and cucumbers tucked into odd corners around the yard, and the other two tomato plants in the side bed.

You can see some of my anti-drought, anti-neighborhood-cat cardboard mulch on the right. I just flattened whatever cardboard boxes I could get my hands on and fit them in around my biggest plants. This was a good plan and really did help the beds retain moisture. Next year I might get some hay for mulching the more crowded scallion & garlic sections.

The scallions have been quite successful. These guys consistently get up to three feet high, no problem.

Over the winter I scattered last year's seedheads all over the bed and waited to see what came up. Then I moved the most crowded seedlings around to fill in the bare patches in the bed while also thinning reasonably. Scallions have no problem with transplanting like this, in my experience. It's a really good way to get the most out of a crowded planting.

When I harvest, I find the biggest scallion that is also in a crowded location. This lets the other scallions around it get even bigger. It's more or less late-stage thinning.

Sometimes I cut off a few greens and just leave the plant in the ground to recover, so we have multiple harvests. Not that I really need to do such a thing, considering the amount of scallions around.

I started the basil from seed inside and transplanted it into the garden at about four inches high.

The basil more or less tries to bolt as soon as I get it established every year. This year was no exception. I'm thinking I will let some of these go completely to seed and see how many baby basil plants pop up next spring.

Also, I really need to go cut a bunch of basil stems and dry all the leaves for our winter basil supply.

Here we see the two biggest bell peppers on the plant. I'm super excited for homegrown red pepper!

We only have a few fruits on this plant, though. I'm thinking this has been due to the serious amount of wind around over the past few months. All summer I would regularly find tiny baby pepper buds blown off the plant and into the dirt. Happily, a few more have established themselves more firmly in the past month or so. Crossing fingers for October.

Here you can see some of the jalapeños peeking out from in between the massive amounts of scallions. Hooray, jalapeños!

These guys have been pretty prolific, although neither plant is anywhere near as large as the one I grew last year -- the bigger of the two is about half as large. Is this due to crowding, or lack of water? Last year the jalapeños were super crowded by marauding tomato vines, but they still grew to be about three feet tall, so I'm inclined to blame the lack of water.

We aren't going to need to buy any jalapeños for the next few months, though! That's really saying something when you eat as much spicy food as we do.

I actually dug up the garlic just yesterday. This is the entire harvest. I'm curing it by just leaving it spread out in one layer in a dark yet airy place for a few weeks. "Curing" just means "drying" in onion and garlic parlance.

You can see that these guys are pretty small -- that's a full-sized dinner plate -- but that's no huge surprise, considering how late I planted them (February?). I'm frankly pretty happy that any of them had time to head up at all.

I am super excited to eat these. Homegrown garlic!!

So that's how our garden is going. I feel pretty good about the amount of food we're producing, certainly. With the garden plus the CSA box, we haven't had to buy very much of any other vegetables in months. But at this point drought is just a constant specter, hovering. We'll see what happens in January.

How is your late summer garden doing?

Homegrown garden tomato harvest!

It is finally tomato season! HOORAY. The plants are all doing fairly well, even with limited watering.

These guys are Caspian Pinks, the same variety I grew last year. They're large, heavy pink heirlooms with some ribbing at the top and a lovely intense flavor. I got a few volunteer seedlings, transplanted two of them for reasonable spacing, and let them go to town.

Some of the blossoms bloom and then dry to a crisp immediately, but plenty of them go ahead and set fruit too. Considering how big these tomatoes tend to get -- both plants and fruit -- I'm fine with that. The flavor is worth it.

As you can see, they also tend to split a bit at the top. It's nothing too serious, though.

Evidently tomato splits are caused by lots of different things, from irregular watering to lack of calcium to lack of mulch. The shape of the varietal also makes a difference. I'm certainly guilty of irregular watering, since, you know, there's a drought, but I have plenty of calcium via eggshell soil supplements, and I mulched with cardboard, at least. In any case, the fruit is reasonably well yielding and delicious.

My two other tomato plants are new-to-me heirlooms from the farmer's market tomato guys. These are Dona tomatoes, which are evidently a standard in French markets and prized for their balance. They're medium-sized and a classic orangey-red, and are by far the most prolific tomato I have this year. Look at that huge cluster of fruit!

Most of these are not quite ripe yet, so I can't report back on their taste. I can say that the stakes and cage are intent on falling over at every single opportunity, however.

Next we have the Green Grape. Check out those striations!

This guy is a large grape tomato, maybe two inches long, that starts out green and ripens to gain a crown of orange stripes. Very nice. The fruit grows in smaller clusters, much like actual grapes.

They're excellent for snacking, but not as full-flavored as some other grape and cherry tomatoes I've tried. So the next best idea is to make all the tomato salad in the land. It's clearly time to cut a big handful of them in half, sprinkle with with salt, and go to town. And, of course, since they're so strikingly colored, they would be a perfect addition to a mixed tomato salad.

Tomorrow: the rest of the garden!

Spring garden 2014

You guys, it was over 90F out today: the hottest day so far this year. For now, it's a novelty, but let's get real. Summer is almost on us. We have about a month or so until the temperatures stop bobbing up and down and settle into a steady 80-85.

You've probably heard about (or experienced) the near-total lack of rain in California this spring. Shit is serious. The entire state is in drought for the first time in 15 years. Just look at this map from the US Drought Monitor. YIKES. Water rationing hasn't started yet; evidently rationing is more complicated than it appears.

Outside, you can see the effects of the drought really easily. The grass is crisp two months before it should be. The ground is hard. The lemon balm and mint, both of which are usually super rampant, only take up about 2/3 as much space as they did last year. You can sit on the ground with no threat of damp pants. So although the plants themselves look pretty good so far, I am feeling concerned about the garden.

Let's have a tour.

When you go out the side door of our house, this lemon tree nearly clocks you in the face. It's full of both mature lemons and new blossoms. The branches bow really dramatically under the weight of the fruit. When you pick a ripe lemon, they spring back and bounce up and down.

In the side bed, there is indeed a bunch of lemon balm and mint. The darker, smoother leaves are the mint. These guys normally make themselves seen in late January, with the first rains. This year they came up in March.

I know what to do with mint: dry it and make all kinds of iced mint tea. The lemon balm is a little harder. I did make a batch of fresh tea with some the other day, but I'm not sure whether I like it yet. It was surprisingly vegetal, almost like a spinach-lemon tea. I think I need to try it iced.

The chives are doing really well, although those blossoms are pretty early. They are usually a pretty early herb in general, though. I like to make chive vinegar out of the blossoms and throw the chives themselves in practically everything I make.

If you go around the back of the house, you run smack into a bank of pineapple guava blossoms.

There are a million of them. I may be exaggerating just little, but not much. The tree overhangs our entire backyard, and it is entirely full of flowers. The bees LOVE it. We have a bee-loud glade in our backyard right now, is what I'm saying. It's really nice not to have to worry about not attracting enough pollinators. There is no shortage.

You can eat pineapple guava blossoms, but we usually don't. They're soft and faintly tropical-fruity.

In the actual garden bed, the key players are the two tomato plants. They're both volunteer seedlings from the Caspian Pink tomato I planted last year. They may have gotten cross-pollinated with the other tomatoes, but I don't care. As long as there are a bunch of home-grown tomatoes, everything will be fine.

Of course, with tomatoes you have to worry about water. These guys are in partial shade--Caspian Pink is a partial shade tomato, which I got especially for that purpose--so the water will have a fighting chance not to evaporate instantly. I feel fairly hopeful there.

Otherwise, the bed is filled with a mishmash of delightful things. This guy is a red bell pepper. There's a jalapeno pepper plant which is looking partially eaten and may need a replacement, and a volunteer potato, also a bit eaten. I have a bunch of scattered scallions and garlic looking like random blades of grass. The peppers at least should be happy on water restriction. Otherwise, I can mulch.

Yeah. I like my garden. I would like to keep it alive. We'll see how it goes.

How are your gardens going this spring?

Whole wheat jalapeno cornbread

Yes, even though I pickled a boatload of jalapeno peppers the other day, we are still supplied with plenty of fresh ones. It's a good thing we like spice. Of course, that's why I planted the jalapenos in the first place, so overall I think things are going pretty well.

Next year I'm definitely going to have to plant a couple different kinds of hot peppers. If only there were more space! Maybe I'll finally get my act together and finally dig out the side bed--currently full of rampant mint, lemon balm, and weeds galore--for an extra-sunny pepper patch. At that point I'll probably have to look into stringing and drying peppers as well as pickling them. I can't wait.

In the meantime, we are throwing fresh jalapenos not only into the pickling vat, but into soups, sauces, pastas, and now, cornbread.

Spicy cornbread is the best possible accompaniment to a huge vat of chili--for instance, this fresh farmer's market chili. Eat it on the side! Crumble it over the top! Ladle some chili on top! Any way you choose, it's all good.

Our backyard jalapenos are sufficiently spicy and vibrant that one can flavor an entire pan of cornbread. If you have milder peppers, you may wish to use more than one. If you aren't as spice-tolerant as we are, you can either use less jalapeno, choose a milder pepper, or give your chopped pepper bits a quick saute to mellow them out before adding them to the batter. It's all good.

Whole wheat jalapeno cornbread

1 1/4 cup cornmeal
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
3 tbs sugar
3/4 tsp salt
1-2 jalapenos or other hot peppers
1 egg
3 tbs butter, melted
1 cup milk

Preheat your oven to 425F. Grease and flour an 8x8 square pan or a loaf pan. You could also make this in muffin form if you reduce the cooking time to 8-10 minutes.

Mix your dry ingredients together in a large bowl.

Mince your jalapenos finely. I only used one because our harvest has been pretty hot, but you can always add more if you're working with milder peppers. Or you can choose to go for less if you have a lower spice tolerance. It's all good.

Gently toss your minced jalapeno with a spoonful of your dry mix. You just want to barely coat the pieces. In theory, this will keep all your pepper bits from sinking to the bottom of your cornbread. In actuality, I doubt that it would be very easy for anything to fall very far through a thick cornbread batter like this, but hey.

Add your egg, melted butter, and milk to your bowl of dry ingredients. Mix until well incorporated. Fold your jalapenos in at the very end.

Pour your batter into your prepared pan and bake for 15 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Eat with chili, tomato soup, or a full Southern spread with the collards and barbecue of your choice. It's all good.

Are you buried in an overabundant harvest? How are you using it up?

Pickling, saucing, jellying

The scope of my preserving has been broader this year than ever before.

The backyard jalapenos have done amazingly well. Who knew that if they actually got sun they'd be super happy? Everyone? Yeah. So I stripped all the ripe jalapenos off our single plant, sliced them up, and proceeded to pickle them for future consumption.

I used the basic jalapeno pickle recipe from Food in Jars. It's really easy: sterilize jars, make brine, slice jalapenos, pack jars, process. I did not use gloves, but you probably should, since capsaicin burns are no joke.

Look at all those slices! A huge pile of seeds settled to the bottom of the pile as well. I didn't add quite all the seeds to the jars, but there are certainly enough to pack a punch.

We are now the proud owners of 5 half-pints of pickled sliced jalapenos grown in our backyard. These guys are going to be amazing on all the tacos and burritos we eat all winter.

The plant is still producing, too, so we aren't hurting for fresh jalapenos while the pickled ones cure. Hooray!

Then there are our tomatoes.

These guys--caspian pinks and boxcar willies from the backyard--got skinned, cored, and processed into sauce, along with some grocery store romas, using this tomato sauce canning method. Hooray for 5 more quarts of tomato sauce!

Right now I have about this many garden tomatoes ready and waiting for another batch, so that should happen fairly soon.

And then, at the weirdest possible time of year, my next-door neighbor showed up on our doorstep with a gigantic shopping bag of tangerines from her backyard tree. So I juiced about fifty of them, chucked out ten times as many seeds, and made the resulting 4 cups of juice into mimosa jelly from the Food in Jars cookbook.

Every single picture I took looks like this: clouds of steam and big bubbles frothing everywhere.

The recipe is pretty similar to this earlier recipe for orange jelly, but with the addition of champagne. I actually went out and bought one of those little cubes of Coppola Sofia champagne, so I wouldn't have to use up an entire bottle of champagne, only to find that the single-serve cans hold only 7/8 of a cup. I guess I could've just used that, but I'd never made jelly before, so I went ahead and opened a second one to make up the full cup. And then I had to drink the remaining champagne. How terrible for me.

I overboiled the batch a little bit, so the resulting jelly is quite firm, but overall: success!

Next on the docket: 4 pounds of nectarines.

What are you guys preserving this week?

The August garden

Gardening in California is a little surreal when you compare it to anywhere else. This is especially the case when you're gardening in a bed that lay fallow & covered with compost for who knows how many years before we moved into the house. This is the third year I've gardened here, and the results are still this crazy.

The top fence is eight feet tall. Yes, that does mean those tomato plants are ten feet tall.

Garden contents are as follows:
- 1 Caspian Pink tomato plant (main left body)
- 1 Boxcar Willie tomato plant (main right body)
- 1 jalapeno pepper plant (middle)
- 2 basil plants (left front)
- 3 scallions that have been in the ground for over a year at this point (middle front)
- 2 volunteer tomato plants from those that fell to the ground last year: Cherokee Purple and Sungold Cherry (indistinguishable from the rest of the tomato vines)
- 1 volunteer potato vine (invisible in the back left corner)

This is the first year the squirrels have realized our tomatoes are edible, so occasionally I go out to water the plants and find THIS. I've started heading them off by picking not-quite-ripe fruit and finishing the ripening on my kitchen windowsill.

They definitely won't touch the jalapenos, though. These guys have been ultra productive and delicious: super spicy and shiny and firm and perfect.

It's the best thing ever to go break off a jalapeno on a weekend morning to make a batch of migas. OH MAN.

The basil has been bolting practically since I put it in the ground, which isn't such a surprise when you consider that June was the hottest month of our summer. I've been pinching off blossoms for two full months, but now I'm starting to just let it go. Hey, why not get this corner of the bed self-seeded with fresh basil while also attracting pollinators? That sounds pretty good to me.

In the meantime, I've definitely been harvesting big handfuls of basil, chopping them up, and tossing them with homegrown tomato.

Of the two intentional tomatoes, I like Caspian Pink by far the best. It's a shade-tolerant heirloom pink medium-to-large beefsteak, and the flavor is just amazing: sweet and floral and fragrant. Boxcar Willie is good too, but it's a lot more ordinary-looking. If you picture the typical tomato, you'll get a Boxcar Willie: also an heirloom, but medium, round, and orangey-red. I like to cook with Boxcar Willie and eat Caspian Pink raw. The split works pretty well, but I think I may want to go for a serious paste Roma for cooking next year.

The volunteer tomatoes haven't yet produced any ripe fruit, but I'm not too concerned there. The Sungolds pretty much took over the yard last year, so it's good that they're getting dominated by bigger plants this time around. And Purple Cherokee is close enough to Caspian Pink in size and taste that I'll be fine if I only get a few late-season fruits there.

In the meantime, I get to go foraging for ripe and near-ripe heirlooms nearly every day. The plants are huge and viney, so the greens look dominant from afar, but if you explore you will find big clusters like this:

Do you have a garden? How's your harvest coming so far?

Fresh corn and basil schmear

Summer produce is everywhere. What better way to eat it than smashed into a whack of cream cheese and smeared on the toasty bagel of your choice? Welcome to another round of homemade schmears: summer edition.

This time I cut the kernels off an ear of fresh white corn, sliced a big handful of basil leaves, and threw them in a bowl with several thick slices of cream cheese and a little pepper. Voila!

I left my corn kernels uncooked because I like the freshness, flavor, and subtle crunch of raw sweet corn, but a quick saute with some finely diced shallot would be an excellent variation. Bonus: this method will also work well in the middle of winter, when all you have is a bag of frozen kernels. Throw in a spoonful of pesto and you're in business.

Obviously, you can choose to make these totally vegan with the cream cheese substitute of your choice. And isn't that better than having plain hummus yet again at the bagel shop?

Height of summer schmear
(aka: Fresh corn and basil schmear)

1 ear fresh corn
10-20 leaves fresh basil
half a brick of cream cheese
pepper to taste

This makes enough to cover two bagels.

Husk & de-silk your ear of corn and cut the kernels off the cob. I find that the easiest way to do this is to lay the ear down horizontally on a cutting board and just slice down along the side, then rotate & repeat. This way the corn mostly stays put instead of flying all over the kitchen, and you don't have to break out a giant bowl or anything.

Wash a big handful of basil leaves and slice them finely. I did a chiffonade and then cut across the pile several times to make small bits.

Cut your cream cheese into rough slices and put it in a mixing bowl of your choice. Add your corn and basil, grind in some pepper, and mash the whole business together with a fork until mixed well. Evaluate your schmear and decide if you want to add more veg of any type. I think some finely minced red bell pepper or shredded zucchini that's been salted and drained would both be pretty great here, but the simplicity of basil and corn is pretty amazing all by itself.

To serve, toast a halved bagel or two. Spread your schmear on the bagel halves and top with a few slices of fresh summer tomato. This particular tomato is a Caspian Pink heirloom I grew in my backyard. ZOMG SO GOOD. I may be growing one or two of these every summer for the next rest of my life.

Since tomato is slippery, it's best to put your bagel halves together and secure them with a toothpick or something similar before you try to eat them. I did not do this, which meant that I ended up squirting tomato slices and cream cheese halfway across the kitchen table. But then, the whole business was so good that it almost didn't matter.

More seasonal summer schmears!

- Baby beet and carrot schmear: grate and mix with cream cheese for a crunchy, sweet, and violent fuschia schmear.
- Zucchini bread schmear: grate, salt, & drain a fresh zucchini and crush in some toasted walnuts.
- Pungent pepper schmear: chop some roasted red pepper and a kalamata olive or two, and top with lots of crispy romaine. Feta optional.
- Fruit and herb schmear: dice up some firm nectarines or peaches and a big handful of fresh basil and mix them up. Do you want some crunch? How about adding some toasted pine nuts?
- Homemade jam schmear: are you surrounded by beautiful jars of freshly made summer jam? Mix it into some cream cheese and hold on to your hat!

Previously on the schmear show: all the herbs.

What new & interesting vegetable or fruit combinations do you want in your next schmear?

May garden update: tomatoes, jalapenos, and herbs

For once I feel like I have a jump on the garden for the year. Usually I am frantically trying to remember to go get some tomato starts right about now. This year I planted my heirloom seedlings nearly a month ago. Hooray for me! Head pats all around.

I got two kinds of tomato: Boxcar Willie and Caspian Pink. Evidently Caspian Pink is supposed to do well in the partial shade, which is what we have, but Boxcar Willie is the one actually setting fruit so far. Go figure. They're both a respectable size, so I feel pretty good about them.

I also grabbed a jalapeno seedling, which you can see in the background on the right. It's maybe 1/3 as tall as the tomatoes, but that makes sense--jalapenos are hot-weather plants, and we haven't yet fallen into the real hot weather of summer for more than a day or two. There have been a few flowers, but not too many yet. We'll wait for the outburst of July.

The herbs are doing well. This guy is my delightful oregano plant, which has been super excited to be out in the yard for the entire winter. It's about a foot and a half in diameter, which is pretty gigantic. I suspect bolting, which is ok, considering how long it's been in the ground. Herbs!

I've never put basil in our actual garden bed (mostly because it's always been way too full of tomato vines to cram much else in), but this year I did. Is two plants enough? Who can say in this brave new day and age? They seem to be doing well so far, in any case.

And of course the plum tree is full of baby plums, and the pineapple guava tree is covered in flowers, and the backyard is regularly full of clouds of rampaging birds and bees and squirrels and even neighborhood cats.

Hooray, garden! I'm so excited to see how many tomatoes I get this year.

What are you planting in your gardens?

Weekend tacos

On Saturday I went to the park to read a book and discovered a young woman sitting in the grass straight-up sobbing for a good ten minutes.

Afterward I walked up the street, passing two guys in their 50s playing basketball in a driveway. The ball got away from them, and one guy went after it, while the second made small talk with me. "Hi! How are you? Nice weather." I agreed that it was very nice weather. Then, as I continued to walk away, he said, "Don't get yourself killed." I immediately & without batting an eye agreed that I would try not to.

It turned out that he was actually talking to his friend, who had chased the basketball into the street, but still. That's what the week was like. I am more than willing and happy to accept wishes that I not die from a random person on the street.

I don't have a whole lot to say about food today. I transplanted the tomatoes a few days ago: Boxcar Willie and Caspian Pink. I stood around drinking Modelo and weeding and watering for a good chunk of the weekend. The jasmine is still in bloom. Overripe oranges keep falling off the tree, and I find them on the ground, smashed, half-eaten, and filled with ants.

Last night we made tacos. Onion, carrot, jalapeno, black bean; long-grain brown rice; chopped lettuce and grape tomato; corn tortillas charred over the flame; hot sauce. I put cream cheese on mine, because that was the cheese we had in the house. Later, for a midnight snack (ok, a 9:30 snack), I charred one more tortilla, filled it with leftover beans and cheese, folded it in half, and set it to toast over the gas. It was warm and tasty and comforting, and I ate it and played some puzzle games and went to bed.

Pineapple guava ice cream

Well, we are still buried under a mountain of pineapple guavas, aka feijoas. I ate a bunch of them plain. I gave a big bagful to my friend Jen, and put another couple bags on the curb with a FREE sign. Those vanished overnight. But I still have a backyard completely carpeted with pineapple guavas, and hear the thumps of even more falling from the tree in the dead of night when I should be asleep.

So I made pineapple guava ice cream, and it is good.

I've had this ice cream recipe from Laura at Hungry and Frozen in the back of my head since April, when it's pineapple guava season in the southern hemisphere. Now that we've reached the right season in the northern hemisphere, it's time to go to town. All you need is pineapple guava, condensed milk, Greek yogurt, and lime juice. There is no custard-making of any kind involved. Super simple.

Also, look how beautiful the top of my condensed milk can was!

Pineapple guava ice cream, aka feijoa ice cream
by Laura at Hungry and Frozen.

15 ripe pineapple guavas, aka feijoas
1 14-oz can condensed milk
2 tbsp lime juice, aka the juice of 1-2 limes
1 cup plain Greek yogurt

Start by halving your pineapple guavas and scooping the insides out. Chop them up, either by hand or in the food processor. I don't have a food processor, so I just used a knife. This worked admirably.

Put your pineapple guavas in a bowl and add your can of condensed milk, lime juice, and yogurt. I actually decided to use labneh--Middle Eastern yogurt cheese--instead of Greek yogurt, because 1. I love labneh and 2. I had a container of it already. Since it has the same tart flavor as plain yogurt, and an even thicker consistency, it worked very well indeed.

Once you have everything mixed well, all you need to do is freeze your ice cream. I put mine in our ice cream maker, but you can also just freeze it as-is in a container. It's all good.

When your ice cream is all frozen, eat up! The result is very smooth, and packs a deceptively strong pineapple guava punch. This recipe makes about a quart, although I can't say I actually measured.

I had my ice cream in a bowl, like you do, but I think what I really want to do is make some ice cream sandwiches. Ginger cookies or lime meltaways sound like they'd match with the tropical-floral-pear-pineapple flavor, but I also think a simple butter shortbread would work admirably.

I hope everyone is doing ok in the wake of the hurricane! I would feed you all plenty of ice cream (in sandwich form or otherwise) if I could. That obviously won't put the power back on, but still. Good thoughts!