I Made A Soufflé!

During the four years that I've been doing this blog, I've written mostly about gardening, with a few side trips into food, wine and travel.

I'm still going to be doing that, but I'm also planning to write a little more about actually cooking the food we grow.  Since Cindy is an excellent and very creative cook, she's always done most of the cooking, and, since cooking has always pretty much terrified me, that's been just fine with me.

But that's not really fair to Cindy, so a couple of years ago, as a Christmas present for Cindy, I volunteered to make dinner once a month, as long as opening a bag of frozen stuff was an acceptable dinner.  I did have one dish I could make with reasonable confidence, and that was spaghetti and meatballs.  Cindy showed me how to make a delicious tomato sauce for the meatballs out of our own pureed tomatoes; it was really nice to know that I was actually making something with the food we grow in our yard.

Last summer our friend Barbara came down to visit us for "cooking camp".  Barbara wanted Cindy to teach her how to use her new pressure cooker, a device that is still waaaaaay beyond my comfort level, and I wanted to learn how to make Chicken Piccata, a dish I really like (it has capers in it, who wouldn't like it?).  That proved to be within my capability, and I can now make it with some degree of confidence.

That small step led me to think about what other dishes I like to eat, so maybe I could learn to cook them, too.

With some degree of trepidation, I asked Cindy a couple of months ago if she thought I could learn to cook a cheese soufflé.  I knew it was a complicated dish, but it's one I really love to eat.  To my surprise, she jumped at the chance to teach me how to do it.  I've done it a couple of times since with her standing close by to supervise.  A couple of nights ago, I cooked a cheese soufflé pretty much by myself, with only a few cries of "Cinnnnndy, does this look O.K.?????"

So this slight increase in confidence led me to make Cindy another gift this past Christmas:  the promise to learn four new dishes to add to my existing small repertoire, which I will continue to practice.  I'm going to learn how to do fried chicken (Yessss!  Throw Brer Rabbit into that briar patch!), a salmon dish, a dish from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking that Cindy recently was given, and a dish of Cindy's choosing.  

Tonight:  fried chicken.  We'll see how it goes.

Chill Hours

We've had frost warnings for several nights recently.  That's a good thing for gardeners with fruit trees who need the chill hours for the development of the fruit, but not such a good thing for gardeners who have lettuces growing; they like cool weather, but not frost.  Because lettuce has such a high water content, the cells will be damaged if the water in them freezes.

So the garden for the past few nights has resembled a tent city, but at least the tender lettuces were protected.

"You've Got...Moss"

We had quite a bit of rain in San Diego in December; a total of 4.69 inches.  Considering that our average annual rainfall is about ten inches, that's almost half our average annual rainfall in one month.  We're very happy about that, because after several years of severe drought, we can certainly use it.

The plants love all that free water, of course, but that also means that the weeds are sprouting, and we've now got moss growing between the flagstones in the backyard and on the decomposed granite out behind the fence.

I think that's pretty cool, and we certainly hope the rain continues through the rest of the winter.

The Twelve Caterpillars of Christmas

Actually, it was sixteen or seventeen Monarch caterpillars, all chomping away at the lone Asclepia plant in the raised beds in the back yard.  Finding them was pretty funny, because I had just given Cindy a tee-shirt for Christmas that said, "Got Milkweed?" http://www.northernsun.com/Got-Milkweed-T-Shirt-%288467%29.html.

How Many Caterpillars????

The ravenous horde of caterpillars had pretty well stripped most of the leaves off that one plant, so we decided to move most of them to the Asclepia plants in the front yard.  Today I counted eight of them on those plants, but some of the caterpillars we moved yesterday looked about big enough to trundle off and find places to attach and form their chrysalises, so they may have done that.

Not Many Leaves Left

They aren't too choosy about where they attach; we initially thought they wanted a horizontal branch or something to attach their chrysalises to, but since then we've found them on vertical surfaces as well.  This summer we had one that attached to the driveway gate post and one that was unfortunately crushed because we didn't notice it had attached to the underside of the cover of the hot tub.

I hope they all survive; the world needs more butterflies.

A Little Off The Top

We had some trees trimmed recently; some had become problems, and Cindy wanted to take out one that was leaning over our property to increase the amount of light the garden could receive in that area.  Because some of the trees we were having trimmed belonged to the neighbors, who had given us permission to cut them, we hired a professional tree company with a master arborist to make sure the cutting was done properly and safely.  Since one of the major branches was above our power line, they had to have someone who was certified for that type of work.

Trees and Power Lines--Not Good Together

What we didn't count on was that it was very entertaining to watch the process from our upstairs windows.

We were amazed at how fast the work went, considering that they first had to climb the huge old Cedar tree and rig up the safety lines before they could even start work.

We also had the largest and probably oldest of our Lemonade Berry (Rhus integrifolia) shrubs taken out.  It was suffering from scorch, termites and Bark Beetles.

Lemonade Berry Shrubs

We like the Lemonade Berry shrubs because they're native, drought tolerant plants that grow slowly and their broad evergreen leaves are supposed to be "spark catchers", slowing down the progress of wildfires, but the big one was just too damaged to save, so we took it out to prevent the spread of some of these diseases to the other plants.  

Walking Sticks

We were talking to a gardening friend the other day about (surprise, surprise) gardening, and she asked Cindy what she should do to help the Walking Sticks she found in her garden.  She was carefully moving them onto her citrus trees in the hopes that they would be a beneficial insect that would control other, more harmful insects.

They are interesting looking insects that are hard to spot because they look just like the twigs and stems of the plants they inhabit.  They are so well camouflaged that I've never actually seen one and don't have any pictures of them.

So she was shocked when Cindy's response was, "kill them all immediately."

Turns out the Indian Walking Sticks that infest Southern California aren't native species and aren't beneficials at all, because they don't eat other bugs, but an infestation of them can devour quite a lot of foliage, stripping leaves down to the stems.

See National Geographic for a great photo of one and IPM Online for more information about them and how to control them.


So our gardener friend decided to feed them to her chickens instead.  Good call.

White Bird?

We've been noticing an interesting bird at our bird feeder in the last couple of months, but haven't been able to identify it.  The bird is about the same size and shape as the House Finches that flock around the feeder, but this bird has a lot of bright white feathers on its head, back and underside.  It's not entirely white; it has some black feathers on its wings, but the amount of white on this bird is noticeable enough to be startling.  Unfortunately, it doesn't appear very often and is so shy that I haven't been able to get a photo of it.

I've searched several bird books and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Bird Guide, but haven't found this bird.  The closest thing I've found is the Snow Bunting, but we are outside that bird's normal range, and the pictures of it seem to show more brown on it than our bird has.

An alternative suggestion from the Audubon Society is that it might be House Finch or sparrow that is a partial albino.  http://birds.audubon.org/faq/i-have-white-bird-my-feeder-it-albino.

Whatever it is, it's appearances have made watching the activity around our feeder even more interesting than usual.