Shift of Tow

Jalapeños are something else I’ve wanted to grow for a long time. I confess: I want a salsa garden. I haven’t grown cilantro, garlic, or onions yet, but next year. Oh, next year, we’re going to grow so many things. This year we’ve got the jalapeños, though:

Look at all of them! I’m surprised at how well they’ve done, given that we’ve got two huge, staked plants in one pot, but they’re really thriving. They’re doing better than the tomatoes, even. I imagine that’s because jalapeños love heat, and we’ve had a really hot June.

Chile peppers come from South America, originally, though they quickly spread to Central America. They were used as currency by some natives, or so I’ve read in a couple of places on the web.

I already knew that capsaicin is the stuff in peppers that make them hot; you can’t really watch food television these days without learning that. I did not know that capsaicin is a pain reliever for birds (rather than an irritant), which helps with the spread of the seeds.

There’s a big section in the Wikipedia article about capsaicin all about the medical uses, which I won’t quote, but if there is an apocalypse, I am going to be relying on our jalapeños to make a pepper spray to deter the zombies as well as to contribute a spicy, fruity note to our salsa.

We’re going to have so many of these things.

We get a farm share every Saturday from Harland’s Creek Farm. This week we have chard (with pretty stems), leeks, butter beans, cabbage (that’s the green stuff at the left), and fennel.

We have a shade garden out back.

Henri will not look at me until I give him treats.

Rosemary, lavender, mint.

When we first noticed the big, bulbous things growing on the tree in our side yard, we called it a zucchini tree.

I actually thought they were just alarmingly big flower buds, but then I got around to looking through the Southern Living Garden Book loaned to me by a friend and found out we have a fig tree! The leaves are unmistakable in their Dr. Seussian shape and size.

I’m super excited this week because our figs are starting to turn colors:

Figs produce two crops of fruit a year, the first on the old wood and the second on the new growth. The first picture is from the same tree at the same time as the second picture; the smaller fruits will be ready in September or so. The first fruits ought to be ready sometime in July, though I’m not actually sure what they’re supposed to look like when they’re ripe. My guess is that this is a Brown Turkey or a Black Mission fig tree, judging from the areas where they’re grown and how common they are, but I imagine we won’t know until we have some ripe fruit to compare to photos I can find online.

We have a fig tree. I think it’s the coolest thing in the world to have plants that give us food. It provides a weird sense of security. Plus, figs are insanely fraught with meaning (though our particular variety isn’t the famous one):

• Figs are the first plant mentioned by name in the Bible–Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves.
• According to the Torah, figs are one of the foods you’ll find in the Promised Land.
• Figs were probably one of the first plants deliberately cultivated by humans, possibly even before grain.
• The Buddha found enlightenment while meditating under a Sacred Fig tree.
• That same species is the World Tree of Hinduism.
• And it’s one of the two sacred trees of Islam.

Goodness. I got all of that from Wikipedia, which also tells me that the fig fruit is more properly the flower of the tree. I feel vindicated for thinking that the fruit was a big flower bud at first.

I read Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire recently, so I also have to point out that each kind of fig can only be pollinated by a specific type of wasp, which is a crazy kind of co-evolution.

I’m growing to really love this tree.

Popcorn is one of my favorite snacks, and has been since I was about eight and went through a phase where I only wanted snacks that began with P. I’m not a big fan of microwave popcorn–I’d actually rather have the bagged, stale stuff from the store than microwave popcorn–but I love popcorn made fresh. I only mastered making it without burning it last year after Alton Brown suggested making popcorn in a big metal bowl on Good Eats. Thus was begun a new popcorn-eating period of my life. My popcorn never turns out burnt anymore. Here’s how I do it:

For ingredients, you need some kind of vegetable oil (don’t waste olive oil on this, though), salt, and popcorn. Put about a fourth of a cup of oil in a big metal bowl:

You could probably use less oil; I’m pretty liberal with it. Oh, and see how burned up my bowl has gotten from making popcorn like this? I guess you should know about that.

I usually cook between a third and a half of a cup’s worth of popcorn:

Then I add a whole lot of salt. It diffuses a lot during the cooking, so you can be pretty free with it, though I have been accused of loving salt too much. You can also add some cayenne or other seasoning at this point, but I highly recommend not adding a lot, because you’ll breathe it in while the popcorn’s cooking. I didn’t add any this time.

After everything’s in the bowl, cover it with tin foil and poke little holes in the foil with a fork.

Turn your stove on to high (if it’s electric, you might want to heat it up way earlier), and don oven mitts.

Yours can be more (likely) or less (unlikely) attractive than mine and your popcorn will be mostly unaffected. Once you have the gloves on and you hear the oil sizzling in the bowl, start shaking it. Be super careful about your gloves if you have a gas stove; I caught an oven mitt on fire doing this once.

The bowl is going to get very hot, and eventually the popcorn will start popping. Keep shaking it and letting it pop until it slows down almost to nothing. When that happens, take the bowl off the fire and pull up the tinfoil.

A bunch of really hot steam is going to come out, so be careful. Really, just keep the oven mits on until you dump the popcorn into another bowl. You don’t have to put it in another bowl, but the cooking bowl is very hot and the popcorn might start to singe if it stays in there while everything cools off. Plus, this way you don’t have to wait to eat it.

I almost always add hot sauce and a little more salt to mine, but parmesan is also super tasty.

I’ve been taken by the nigella damascena since I first noticed it while walking around the yard with a friend. My friend called it (along with the penstemon digitalis–that’s the stuff with the burgundy stems in the first picture) a “fairy garden,” and it absolutely is. It’s a place for tame, pretty fairies that wear tiny white dresses and show up in picture books, frolicking with little girls. That area of one of our sunny back yard beds is practically Victorian in appearance and feel. If we ever re-enact the croquet scene from Alice in Wonderland or have a spring picnic while wearing boaters in the back yard, we’ll have to make sure these flowers are in the background.

The common name for nigella damascena is Love in a mist, though it’s also gone by devil in a bush or devil-in-a-cage. Ours were white, blue, and lavender, though I guess sometimes they come in pink. The scene above is long gone; all of the flowers turned into pods in early June.

These pods get used in dried bouquets a lot. A few gardening websites recommend dead heading the flowers so they’ll bloom for a little longer than the two months (May-June) than is usual, but I let nature take its course and maybe I’ll dry some of the seed pods now. Love in a mist is an annual, but it reseeds itself. There are tons of them in that one bed, but they popped up all over the yard this year and I hope that by leaving them alone, I’ll see them again.

I have a slight obsession with herbal lore and I’ve been looking up medicinal uses for all of the plants in our yard. Love in a mist is an expectorant, and you can distill an oil from it to use in perfumery–weird, since it didn’t have much of a scent. I guess that means that if we have an apocalypse any time soon, I can eat tomatoes and use these to deal with any stuffiness or smellyness.

When I was a little girl and lived in the swamp, we always had a vegetable garden out in the side yard. My earliest food memories are of summer vegetables, by which I mostly mean tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet corn, red potatoes, spring onions, and yellow squash. We grew a ton of other things, but I was a picky child, and there were times when I wouldn’t even eat fried squash.

I’d always eat tomatoes, though, and tomato season is beginning around here. They’re still my favorite summer food. Sometimes all I want is fresh salsa. Sometimes I’ll eat tomatoes with bread and cheese for every lunch for a week. I’ll eat tomatoes sliced with some salt alongside any meal, and it’ll make that meal better.

I’ve tried to grow tomato plants a few times in my life, and it has always ended in sadness. There were the scraggly little cherry tomato plants I tried to grow on a balcony in Michigan; they didn’t get enough sun or water. I tried to grow a couple of tomato plants last year in Baltimore from seed, and while the seedlings were beautiful, I was too slow in transplanting and too irregular with watering, so I ended up with some super-leggy plants that produced all of two or three tomatoes for the whole season. It didn’t help that our yard didn’t get much sun.

Here, Poor M. and I have a big sunny patch out back and I have plenty of time to water them properly, so our tomato plants (given to us as a housewarming gift) are thriving. We have two of them. Here is the Rutgers as a baby:

“Rutgers” is an heirloom variety, and this plant is determinate*, though “Rutgers” also has an indeterminate variety. The tomatoes will be medium-sized, and right now there are baby tomatoes all over it:

The plant is around four feet tall, now. We coo at the little tomatoes to help them grow, and one of our household activities is “going outside to look at our plants.”

The other tomato plant we have is the “Patio” variety; it’s about three feet tall. The tomatoes will be salad sized:

I am going to be deliriously happy when we start harvesting these. I bought five tomatoes at the farmer’s market this past weekend, and they’re already almost gone.

*That means it stops growing at a certain point and doesn’t just grow all season. I just learned that this year. You would think that my obsession with tomatoes would’ve led me to read a little bit more about cultivating them before now, but you would be wrong.

Tonight I made flour tortillas for the second time. This was also the second time I got to use my pastry cutter.

I originally bought it to use to make biscuits, but I found that my hands work better for biscuits. Happily, the pastry cutter is perfect for this.

I followed the tutorial here, though if you look at the pictures over there you will be less able to appreciate the misshapen things I made. Both times, my tortillas have turned out very, very tasty, but not at all round. Take a look:

See? It’s kind of… oblong, though you can see the cool bubbles in this shot. We made quesadillas with the tortillas tonight, and with each quesadilla I had to go through the pile to find matching shapes. I am completely spoiled for store-bought tortillas now; these are really easy. Here are my tips to add to the tutorial I linked above:

• My first tortilla didn’t turn out right either time. There weren’t any bubbles. I’m not sure if that’s because of the thickness, or the pan just not being warm enough yet.
• If I put my stove on “medium,” it would take five minutes a side for each tortilla. You’ll have to figure out what works for you; mine has to be on medium-high.
• You really do have to use a lot of flour to keep everything from getting sticky while you’re rolling out the tortillas.
• They need to be rolled out pretty thin; I do it until I can see my blue counter through the tortilla.

I still haven’t mastered the shape, and when I cook them I don’t end up with many pliable tortillas, but I don’t mind them being crunchy since I’m not wrapping them around anything.

Even my weird tortillas are totally worth the effort, though.

Introductory posts are so awkward. Why don’t I just sum up? On this blog you will find:

• Pictures of and posts about my garden, which is huge, fantastic, and unfamiliar to me since we just bought this house.
• Posts about my cooking, along with pictures. I am a stay-at-home Shelly right now, so I’m doing a lot of cooking.
• Posts about other house things, like the furniture I’m repainting and the bunnies that nap in our back yard.
• Cats. This is the internet, after all, and we have five.

I hope that clears things up!

Oh, and an administrative note due to guilt: Yes, there are ads over there on the right. I want the pennies. If you don’t like the ads, I highly recommend adding Shift of Tow to your RSS reader. If you aren’t using a reader, you really ought to be.