Got To Be A "Double-Yolker"

The egg on the left was laid one day before the egg on the right (by the same chicken), but is HUGE! I predict that it's a double-yolker, but we'll have to wait and see.

This chicken happens to have gone broody too, so last night I started trying to break her broodiness. I took away the plastic decoy eggs and gave the hen a "clutch" of ice cubes to sit on. Hopefully this will cool down her bottom enough to stop the broodiness. If that doesn't work, my next tactic will be to dunk her bottom side in some cold water. I don't really want to have to resort to the "tiny metal cage" tactic because it sounds uncomfortable, plus I don't have an appropriate cage. Hopefully the ice cubes will do the trick!

Loving the Library

Here's a quick rundown of the books I've been browsing through lately from my local library:

 I haven't actually read this one yet, but it's next on my list (I just finished the nearly 1200 page "The Shelters of Stone" by Jean Auel, so I can finally move on to something else).

 I think I have checked out every single canning and preserving book in the library system. This one didn't stand out that much, but I was happy that it covered drying in more detail than most books.

 I also haven't gotten through this one yet. I'm a sucker for glossy photo-heavy books, but this isn't one of them.

    These two books I've checked out several times before, but I wanted to read up on plant breeding a bit. I have started a small tomato breeding project that I'm really excited about (hopefully I can find time to blog about it soon).

 My oldest brother suggested this book to me. He seems to cook nothing but amazing Indian food lately, and I'm hoping I can learn a few recipes myself.

 I love all the books by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio (Man Eating Bugs, Material World, What The World Eats, Hungry Planet) and I was waiting for this one on hold at the library FOREVER! It has a series of interviews with people around the world on their typical daily diet (including specific lists of what they eat, and how many calories they consume a day). It is very interesting because based on culture, poverty level, and career, the people they interview range in caloric intake from about 1200 calories (in a high poverty area) to 12,000 calories a day (a meth-addict from the U.K.)

 I'm pretty excited about this book because it has a nice thick section on each kind of farm animal (not just chickens and bunnies). If it were legal in the city, I would probably have pigs, ducks, turkeys, and goats, but so far, only chickens are legs.

 I'm a fan of sriracha, but I was a little disappointed with this book. I feel like most of the recipes weren't particularly original. Many of the recipes just took a normal recipe and added sriracha or substituted an ingredient with sriracha. Nonetheless, it was an interesting read.

 This book has a lot of beautiful photography (the kind of photography that I both love and hate at the same time). While the photos are gorgeous, I sometimes get annoyed with over-posed and over-produced photographs. You know, the photos where the garden is completely weed free, with jet-black soil, and every single vegetable is somehow miraculously at the peak of ripeness at the same time. Or the food photographs where the food looks haphazardly yet perfectly arranged, with antique serving implements laying nearby, coarse salt scattered over a hand-hewn serving platter, and scraps of raw ingredients visible in the out-of-focus periphery...kind of like this blog (I love this blog by the way and I only dream of taking such gorgeous photos). While I love these types of photos (and I wish I had a photo studio so I could take photos of this caliber), they do kind of misrepresent how things actually work sometimes. Gardening and food preparation and presentation doesn't "just happen" like that in the real world.

 This last book was one I read in preparation for one of my written comprehensive exams. It was a really pleasurable read and got me kind of angry and concerned about the state of the world. It discusses a number of arguments for incorporating more native plants into the landscape and has some pretty convincing arguments. I actually felt kind of bad for all the "unnatural" plants I've filled my yard with!

Delicious Delicious Yogurt Popsicles

My friend Gina (a popsicle fanatic) inspired me to start making my own popsicles. Ironically, soon after she told me about her popsicle-making escapades, Jamie Oliver posted a recipe for Yogurt Pops on his Food Revolution website. While I didn't exactly follow his recipe, I did get the idea from him.

It actually took me a while to find a popsicle maker. I ended up finding one (and it was the very last one) at Target on 50% clearance (only $1.99)! What a great find!

My very own yogurt pops were made with 1 cup low fat strawberry yogurt mixed with 1/2 cup Jumex mango nectar (look in the hispanic food section of your grocery store).  I was just guessing, but the mixture I made was the perfect amount to fill my four-at-a-time popsicle maker. I froze the pops overnight and then ran them under hot water to release the popsicles. They taste really great! Creamy, sweet, and a little tangy from the yogurt.

Jumex makes quite an array of different fruit nectars, so I'm going to experiment with different flavors. I also made a couple popsicles with just mango nectar and they were also really tasty. 

I also may play around with making a chocolate strawberry popsicle (strawberry yogurt and a little chocolate syrup). Mmmm...sounds so good!

Keeping Up With My Speed-Of-Light Life

I've been up to all kinds of gardening and cooking-related mischief late last week and over this weekend! Hopefully I'll have time to write about it all soon.

In the meantime, here's a quick rundown of what I've been doing and making:

• Acted as a tomato matchmaker (I can't wait to share this with you)
• Foraged for about 9 pounds of wild black raspberries (and I have the scratches to prove it)
• Scouted out some potential wild grape foraging locations
• Pitted cherries (I don't even want to know how many more pounds I have done)
• Made both black-raspberry and black-cherry vinegar
• Made both black-raspberry and black-cherry shrub
• Made both black-raspberry and black-cherry jam
• Made both black-raspberry apple and black-cherry apple crumble (can you guess what I'm overloaded with?)
• Made a yummy garden cucumber salad
• Collected an egg that I highly suspect to be a double-yolker (we'll see)
• Started hand pollinating my hard-shelled gourds (it's a nightly ritual)
• Ate the first fava bean of my life (and I don't appear to suffer from favism)
• Got a great idea for a new blog (that may or may not come to fruition)

Dried Cherries

I recently procured about 12 pounds of sweet cherries from a woman a work. She is in charge of all of the IPM (integrated pest management) and pesticide application in the teaching and research greenhouses on campus. Throughout the summer, she regularly gets crates of produce leftover from various research projects and brings them in to work for everyone to share! The latest item was sweet cherries. I originally took a 3 pound bag home, but I noticed that there were still some hanging around going into the holiday weekend. Cherries don't have the longest shelf-life, so I "rescued" a couple more bags. 

My boyfriend and I ate our fill of cherries for several days, so I'm putting the rest in the dehydrator so we can use them later in baked goods and in salads.

My friend and colleague Cathy gave me this great tip for pitting cherries. Use a paperclip! The trick is that you have to get just the right sized paperclip. I think there are about 3 standard sizes and I ended up using the smaller end of the largest size paper clip.  I enjoy picking Cathy's brain about cooking, canning, and gardening because I always learn something new!

I looked in the instruction manual for the dehydrator and was surprised to see that cherries had the longest drying time of any fruit listed (18 to 26 hours). My homemade beef jerky only took like 6 hours! The long drying time is actually kind of nice though because I have been able to start the cherries in the evening and leave the dehydrator running all night and all day during work.

Snow Peas Coming In

I'm really happy my snow peas are finally coming in. The plants got really tall this year, flopped over during a rain storm, and now they're finally forming pods.

I'm going to sauté these with butter and garlic. Mmmm

Since the plants all flopped over, I decided the easiest way to pick the pods was to sit on the ground. 

Garden Panoramas

Upon request by my brother, I have put together some semi-aerial panorama shots of my garden taken July 3rd. I've been wanting to put together some photos like these for a long time, but I always forgot. It was actually surprisingly easy too!

Garden facing east. The chicken run is vacant because the ladies are taking their afternoon siesta.

Garden facing north.

Garden facing west. The wild and untamed bed on the far right contains my strawberries, raspberries, and black berries. The three small plants at the bottom left corner are my rhubarb plants I started this year from dormant roots.