BLT

Bacon-lettuce-tomato

A great classic sandwich hat some people may not know about - a tasty comfort food for all seasons:

fry bacon however you like (usually 2-4 slices per sandwich
carefully tear several lettuce leaves for each sandwich
slice tomato
toast bread
spread mayonaise (we like Miracle Whip dressing as having the better flavor for this combination) on one or both slices of toast

Assemble sandwich of toast, mayo, lettuce, tomato, bacon slices, toast.  Press down firmly.  This wil help flatten curled bacon and help the sandwich stay together as it is eaten.  Enjoy.  We usually have two sandwiches each and nothing else except a drink for a somewhat carbo-heavy but satisfying lunch.

Kitchen Garden Notes

The green house garden is growing well.  Plants get bigger than you expect, then bigger still.  I still think doing vegetables in pots is doable, but we've bought lots of cheap pails in order to have enough big planters for the larger ones, including anything that has vines (all kinds of squash and cucumbers get way bigger than tomato plants and spread).  Most of them are now outside the green house for the summer.  The trickiest bit is keeping them sufficiently watered in their pots and transferring them to the direct sunshine: it worked better when we moved them to a place in shade part of the day before moving them to a place with direct sun most of the day.  The green house seems like direct sun, but the plastic actually filters.

Other tips:  have big pots, and for beans, start them there.  They don't transplant well.  Those thick stems are really fragile.

Putting uprighted bottles in the pots helps some: we don't have to water quite so often, but the newer plastic bottles are thinner and not effective when turned upside down.  Glass bottles work best but have to be juggled just a bit to make sure they are not too straight upside down (water won't drain out at all) or too much of an angle (it all drains out even when the soil is wet).  Fortunately, a wide range of small angles works, and you'll find out really quick if it doesn't do what it is supposed to.

We have flowers and visiting insects (mostly yellow-jackets this week, moths last week) so we have hopes of fruit/vegetables.  that would be more than we achieved with anything but peppers and tomatos in the past.  We also keep the green house door open now that it's plenty warm outside, so hopefully the insects will go visit the plants inside as well as out.

Walnut Creams again

Well, I may have found the source for part of the formatting problems.  If I'm right, this will look better though the layout issue is still annoying since i haven't figured out how to fix the default.

Usually I provide only recipes that I've tried, but I'm hoping for some comments on this recipe, to help me figure out what to do with it. Maybe later I'll post comments on what I tried and what worked or not. This recipe is from over a hundred years ago. Mom found it in an ancient letter, supposedly from a newspaper of the time (1900) and I haven't quite figured out what all the directions mean.

Walnut Creams
Take the white of an egg
Stir into it enough puverized sugar to make it roll into balls
Flavor with vanilla
Put it into a cool place for about 15 or 20 minutes
Put half an English Walnut between two balls and press them together

 Questions/observations
stir sugar into an egg white, stir? enough to stiffen? does that mean whip?
The name suggests to me whipping, at least until the egg whites turn white...
pulverized - I'm assuming powdered
vanilla and chilling is easy
How is an English walnut different from other walnuts?

Walnut Creams

Well, so far, the alternative blog sites I've found have been even worse, so I'm going with this for the moment... Or not, since it won't format correctly... this is try 2 or 3... Usually I provide only recipes that I've tried, but I'm hoping for some comments on this recipe, to help me figure out what to do with it. Maybe later I'll post comments on what I tried and what worked or not. This recipe is from over a hundred years ago. Mom found it in an ancient letter, supposedly from a newspaper of the time (1900) and I haven't quite figured out what all the directions mean. Walnut Creams Take the white of an egg Stir into it enough puverized sugar to make it roll into balls Flavor with vanilla Put it into a cool place for about 15 or 20 minutes out half an English Walnut between two balls and press them together Questions/observations stir sugar into an egg white, stir? enough to stiffen? does that mean whip? The name suggests to me whipping, at least until the egg whites turn white... pulverized - I'm assuming powdered vaniall and chilling is easy How is an English walnut different from other walnuts?

rerouting

Google has screwed up the blogger software and rendered it slow as molassas, so I will not be posting here any more except to direct readers to whatever new blog I set up. For now, I still post at my old blog, mostly writing, but temporarily on other issues to make up for the loss of my blogger blogs. It is at http://home.earthlink.net/~wyverns/

Gooey eggs

Channel surfing (day time television is no better than I remembered from the last time I tried), I caught what might have been the end of a cooking show. They focused a lot on the dish they were serving, anyway. I believe they called it egg and cheese ravioli, though it looked more like a large tart made with pasta dough, certainly larger than any ravioli I have ever seen. They showed people cutting into it and oohing and ahhing and all I could think was ewww yuck because what squeezed out looked like raw egg. I like a little bit of underdone yolk when I have fried egg on top of corned beef hash or hash browns, but just a little, and it needs to be heading toward done. This looked like the egg had barely been heated before the dish was served, which considering how done the pasta looked, had to have been a special trick, or a special quick-cooking pasta. My recommendation: cook it longer unless you have guests who you know genuinely love 3-minute boiled eggs.

Personally, I would have mixed the egg into the cheese, which looked essentially like lasagna ricotta. Take the ricotta, mix in an egg (or several, to give more protein to each dish), add spice. My lasagna recipe calls for allspice. They used nutmeg, according to one of the comments. I imagine hot sauce, tarragon, or dill would also work though I would pick just one with such a mild dish. A sprinkle for a serving for one, a teaspoon for a batch for three or four (with three or four eggs).

Pasta or pastry... I imagine either one would work. Pasta if well sealed would allow boiling the resulting tart, but make sure it can handle more cooking than whatever they did, to actually cook the egg and cheese mix inside. A pastry or biscuit style dough, either wrapped all around a big scoop of the cheese mix or shaped into a dish for the cheese would be more traditional for a breakfast dish but require longer baking. Toppings might include salsa, parmesan cheese, saute'd onions, or whatever your favorite pasta or breakfast sauce might be. I give them that, the dish is versatile in concept and use, even if I didn't care for their particular results. If I have some time to cook this weekend, I'll give it a try. Meanwhile, I invite you to share whatever you come up with. This is a great chance to make up your own favorite recipe.

Gardening Time

With the unusual weather, its' hard to knwo when to start with which vegetables but we have our greenhouse this spring so we're hoping that will help smooth over any irregularities to come in the weather. We've gathered every small pot and starter ot and wide plastic trey that can served as a watering trey and are trying a bit over everything,

including some dwarf trees that came in the mail (apricot and tangerines or something, I think). The only tree we've had any luck with to date is bay leaf, and kafir lime (the leaves are the lime flavor source for many Asian dishes); no actual limes, yet, though. We're also trying to get some flowring trees to becme bonsai trees without really knowing what we are doing. We killed several plants (upstarts form the yard, mostly, or free tiny starters) but a few have leaves coming back in the smaller size they are supposed to have as bonsais, so I figure we must have finally gotten the hang of it.

For vegetables, it's beans, cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, beets, mescalin, cantalope (musk melon), and pie pumpkins, and spaghetti squash (yes, the pots are going to have to come out of the green house this summer if only because the vines will make it impossible to move inside the little greenhouse, assuming they survive our imperfect skills with annuals). Sunflowers are most of the flowers and I think we picked up some sort of summer bulb. A few things might make into the ground but most will get moved into bigger pots because the plantable areas of the yard are all shaded.

I don't know if we'll get enough out of the many plants to be worth the cost of the seends, but the effort required is more pleasant exercise and more strenuous (a good thing) than walking so I figure it's worth it for that even if we don't get a single melon or bean out of the deal.

Cook's challenge: grow something for the kitchen. Oregano is about the easiest herb: try it in a pot on a window sill.