A wall of delicate-color’d blossoms with the perfume strong I love

The end of May speaks in purple blossoms heavy with sweet scent: Lilacs bloom this time of year, and I love them.

I distinctly remember the lilac bushes in the alley of the home in which I grew up. One May afternoon when I was about 14, I grudgingly performed the chore of taking out the garbage and, to my delight, discovered the aromatic flowers crowding out the scent of potato peels in the garbage can. Being the trash man that day was a gift.

I encountered a glorious wall of lilac bushes earlier this week and discovered it was part of a lilac “fence” all the way around someone’s yard. Surely this homeowner feels as I do about this time of year.

In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the
white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped
leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with
the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle — and from this bush in the
dooryard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped
leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I break.

~ from Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

As close to ‘spring in bloom’ as you’ll get in these parts

Look what a little Miracle Grow gets you. I’ve never seen so many blooms on our Christmas cactus!

Blooming hibiscus

This gentle bloom’s short life beautified my day today. Now it’s beautifying yours.

It flourishes in the tropical sun

Its colors radiant

A burst of sun.

~ Kaila George

Oven-dried cherry tomatoes

Since there is no such thing as too many fresh cherry tomatoes, I’ve gotten creative on how to use them: By themselves, in salads, with cottage cheese, with shrimp over polenta, with pork tenderloin over polenta, in frittatas, with pesto gouda, crackers and red wine …

Despite eating them three times a day, I had a lot of cherry tomatoes left to consume. Here’s a new way to preserve them: Oven dried.

Here’s how they look, before and after:

Before: Fresh cherry tomatoes.

After: Dried cherry tomatoes.

There are a lot of versions of this online. Here’s how I did it.

Oven-dried Cherry Tomatoes

Ingredients:

• 4-6 cups cherry tomatoes
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees. Line a large baking sheet with foil.
2. Cut tomatoes in half and arrange side-by-side on baking sheet. Sprinkle with salt.
3. Bake in the oven for 3 hours (avoid opening the door repeatedly). Turn off oven and let sit until cool.
4. Store them in a sealed bag in the fridge. Serve on salads, pizza or pasta.

Pesto pizza with oven-dried tomatoes.

The gift of the third week in August

Cherry tomatoes are my favorite garden vegetable. I eat them all year long, but they’re at their sweet, delicious peak from my garden in the third week of August.

It’s the time of year for the annual ode to cherry tomatoes. It was “Home sweet tomato” last year, and “A good time to appreciate good things” in 2010. In 2009, I was “Enjoying harvest meals.”

Besides picking them, they represent almost no work for me. My Beloved chooses the plants and plants them, and then the summer sunshine takes over. I thought the withering heat was going to do them in this year, but for the most part, they’ve bounced back in the more temperate weather of late. I must have picked three or four cups each of the past two days.

Yesterday, I enjoyed a tomato-basil frittata for breakfast, today I had cottage cheese and cherry tomatoes for lunch and then for supper, I roasted a whole bunch of these sweet red orbs and poured them over a dish of spicy shrimp and cheesy polenta. Wow! I love how the fresh ones pop in my mouth, and I savor their enhanced sweetness when roasted. Mouth-watering delicious!

Good things come in small packages indeed.

Today’s culinary experiment: Chive flowers

My chive plant is blossoming like a wedding bouquet. It’s really quite beautiful (unlike the rhubarb shoots my Beloved planted a couple of weeks ago), but I know chive flowers are edible, so today I beheaded my chives and picked a bowl full of purple potential.

I found a couple of recipes on the internet and combined them to make a tasty Japanese-inspired side dish. Chive flowers, like chive stems, have a mild onion flavor, and I imagine they’d taste quite good in a salad but I was afraid of the chewiness factor so I wanted to try cooking them.

Upon being presented his pretty but ungarnished plate, my Beloved, ever skeptical, even proclaimed, “It’s like a gourmet restaurant around here!” (He liked it.)

I served this dish with salmon and orzo, flecked with more snipped chives and sun-dried tomatoes. However you serve it, enjoy.

Chive Flower & Asparagus Stir-fry

Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons chicken broth
• 1/2 teaspoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon cornstarch
• 1/2 pound asparagus, trimmed and cut diagonally into 1-inch lengths
• 1 tablespoon peanut oil
• 1 tablespoon sesame seeds
• 2 tablespoons snipped chives
• About 15 chive flowers, prepared

Directions:

1. 

   Snip stems from blossoms to release petals.

   Prepare chive flowers by rinsing lightly so as not to remove the tiny droplets of nectar contained in each blossom. Remove primary stems to separate flowers and release individual petals.

2. Prepare sauce by whisking together soy sauce, broth, sugar and cornstarch.
3. Blanch asparagus in lightly salted boiling water for about 3 minutes or until crisp-tender; do not overcook. Remove from heat and refresh under cold water; drain well.
4. In wok over medium high heat, heat oil. Add sesame seeds and stir for one minute. Add chives and stir an additional minute. Add asparagus and stir frequently for 2 minutes. Reduce heat, add sauce, cover and cook for 2 minutes.
5. Remove lid, sprinkle chive petals over asparagus, cover and steam for 1 minute. Stir lightly and serve hot. Serves 2. If you remembered to save a couple of whole blossoms, garnish each plate.

Quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

May the 4th was planting day at Minnesota Transplant’s house.

We invested in whole bunches of flowers, herbs and tomatoes, and my Beloved played in the dirt all day today to give them new homes.

The bag of potting soil looks like it was eviscerated:

But the deck looks festooned for a big event. Here are the rail planters, complete with greenery that looks like raindrops:

And the pot in the corner of the deck:

And the hanging planters:

And the planters at the foot of the deck stairs (one’s a tomato plant):

He worked out front, too. Here are the hanging planters on the porch:

That geranium in the pot on the walkway looks like it needs an extra dose of Miracle Grow. Here’s hoping all the new plants fare better than the rhubarb seedling we planted a few weeks ago. Here’s how it looked today (this one’s for you, Mom):

Prayer for rhubarb

We may be pushing the limits of Zone 5, but my Beloved got his hands dirty yesterday planting things.

Here it is, late April, and we’re putting seedlings in the cold, dry ground and hoping for the best.

In a testimony to our commitment to this underwater house, we invested in a rhubarb plant.

I didn’t know one could plant rhubarb. I thought this strange flora just grew in certain places, situated there by luck or happenstance. Nope, it turns out your can plant this fruit? vine? bush? as long as you have the patience to allow it to grow for a couple of years before your intended harvest.

I had a rhubarb plant in the backyard of the first house I bought. I still own that house but it’s occupied by renters. I wonder if I could appear on the porch of that abode, claiming rights to the rhubarb in the back yard.

I only need a few stalks. One makes rhubarb crisp but once a season.

In any case, my Beloved has a yen for rhubarb pie (he’s getting crisp, not pie, but we can argue about that in three years hence) so here it is, struggling for life:

Impressive, isn’t it. Those spindly pink stalks? Squint — they’re the things with little green leaves on the end. Not a weed but a rhubarb plant. Trust me. It said so on the package.

He also planted a couple of raspberry plants in the “federally protected wetlands” beyond the fence in the back yard. I suspect the deer may find them irresistible, but we’ll see. Like the rhubarb, it’ll take a couple of years to harvest the fruit of our investment.  The raspberry plants sit beneath the mulberry tree, which looks dead to me now but yielded several cups of mulberries last June.

Looks can be deceiving.

In any case, a prayer for the little plants is in order. I found this stanza in a prayer titled “The Refuge of the Glen” from my book of “Graces: Prayers & Poems for Everyday Meals and Special Occasions” book by June Cotner:

I search for fruits from vines and trees
As I walk among the falling leaves,
I watch an eagle as he glides,
And think what wonders God provides.

Thinking pink for the berry patch

Pink blueberries are the hot trend in gardening, according to my mother’s garden club.

Bear in mind that woodchucks walking down main street of the town where I grew up also make the club’s meeting minutes but in any case, a quick Google search reveals dozens of entries for a variety called Pink Lemonade Blueberries.

There’s a lot going on in that name: “lemon,” “berries,” “pink” and “blue.” Why not simply pinkberries?

My Beloved cleared some space in the brush outside our back fence yesterday  with a goal of making space for berry plants of some sort. Sorry about the smoke, neighbors. The smouldering bonfire of twigs and leaves added even more confusion the seasonal schizophrenia around here.

Tyler is thinking of planting raspberries, not pink blueberries, which might be a nice complement to the mulberries already growing back there. I’m not casting a vote, but blueberries in any shade wouldn’t be my first choice.

And without all the brush, we shouldn’t have to worry about woodchucks either.

Don’t throw away those green tomatoes — eat them

Plundered the garden yesterday and snared a colander full of peppers and green cherry tomatoes. This last harvest took place fully two weeks earlier than last year; last week’s weeping rains didn’t help matters.

I also had eight ears of hickory roasted corn in the fridge after Sunday’s Bears football game. The neighbor hosted a shindig in his mancave, complete with all sorts of treats for carnivores (chicken wings, Italian sausage, chicken tenders, hot dogs, etc.), but as the single representative of the female persuasion, I think I was the only one indulging in the corn on the cob (yes, fresh corn on the cob on Oct. 2!), so I got the leftovers.

Hmm … green tomatoes and roasted corn equals … Green Tomato & Roasted Corn Salsa!

I roasted the green tomatoes first to bring out their sweetness and soften them a bit (raw green cherry tomatoes can be a bit like ping-pong balls). Halve the tomatoes, drizzle with a little olive oil, salt and pepper and roast in a 450-degree oven for 35 minutes or so. I enjoyed the salsa on a cheese omelet this morning, but look out, here comes shrimp tacos with Green Tomato & Roasted Corn Salsa for supper. It’s also delicious with corn chips. Here’s the salsa recipe:

Green Tomato & Roasted Corn Salsa

Ingredients:

• About 2 pints green tomatoes, roasted
• 2 ears of roasted corn, cut from ears and roughly chopped
• 1/2 red onion, diced (I roasted the onion with the tomatoes to soften)
• 2 jalapeno peppers, seeded and minced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/8 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
• Juice of one lime (use two limes if you like less chunky salsa)
• 1-2 tablespoons olive oil

Directions:

1. Combine ingredients. Chill in the refrigerator overnight to blend flavors.

You might also like:

• Roasted green tomatoes
• Home sweet tomato