This weekend we did most of our spring vegetable planting. Rob planted 17 tomato plants in brightly colored cages. He planted four Romas, one Arkansas Traveler, one Japanese Black Trifele, one Sweet Baby Girl, one Park’s Whopper, one Red Grape, one Yellow Pear, one Red Brandywine …
A few weeks ago, Rob made up this delicious, healthy kale stew so we could use up our bounty of greens in the garden. Today we picked almost seven pounds of collards, so we used collards instead of kale in our enormous pot of stew. …
Here are some pictures I took of the house the other day:
In the lower left side of the cabinet, you can see our latest decoy, an eider with a mussel in its beak.
I really like that little painted chair.
That’s June Baxter on the bedside table.
The chiffonier was the first piece of nice furniture we ever bought.
The urn on the sideboard is a Christine Sibley piece. We got it when Urban Nirvana was going out of business.
Our other cats are trying to make us feel better about Jammer. They’re trying to distract us with their wrestling matches and enjoyment of sunbeams and such. Carl is keeping us busy, making sure we’re on track. …
Last Sunday when Jammer was still with us, when he was still resting in his little bed next to my desk in the Little House, we harvested a couple of fine cabbages, glittering with raindrops, and we made a cabbage salad. We’d check on him, …
I thought I’d post some candid shots of Jammer, most of them taken by Rob, just so I could remember and think about how funny Jammer was and how he liked to spend his days. He liked to “take the air,” as we used to say when he’d lie in the breezes on the screen porch. He liked to drink water from a clean, just-filled bowl. He enjoyed cuddling with Josie, hugging her with his front arm and with a long white foot too (it would be draped softly over her small back). Sometimes he’d go and sit in Rob’s wardrobe and we’d say he’d “moved into his bachelor’s quarters,” because it really did look like he’d taken up residence in a well-appointed cat-sized apartment.
Jammer, great Jammer, died on Monday morning. He was almost 17. After he died, Rob and I spent the day talking about him and looking at pictures of him. I found his kitten pictures, and I said, “See, he always had sad puppy eyes, from the …
Last week, we had our first big freeze of the winter. The weatherman predicted it would get down to 18 degrees on Tuesday night, so that evening Rob and I went out and picked all our kumquats—20 pounds of kumquats—so they wouldn’t be damaged by the cold.
Since we had 20 pounds of kumquats sitting around the house, we decided to make marmalade. We’d never preserved anything before, so this was a pretty big deal. Sunday was entirely devoted to marmalade madness. We didn’t know what we were doing, so we had pots boiling over all day, and sugar caramelizing on the stovetop, and we kept contaminating our jars and having to re-boil them. The floor became unbelievably sticky, and kumquats were rolling around underfoot. The air was perfumed with burned sugar and citrus.
But in the end, it worked! We made marmalade, and it is so delicious! It’s sunny and sweet and tangy, and it has the power to turn ordinary toast into a wonderful, exotic dessert. I wish you could taste it.
