On Sunday we cleaned the house from top to bottom and made a few little improvements. We’ve now got a chalkboard in the kitchen, a slightly–no, very–tacky tall lamp on the sugar box in the living room, and a fancy, frilly brass and marble plant …
I’d like to take time out from my England-trip posts to say how happy I was to be home this weekend. I got to do all my favorite things: play with the cats, garden, and bake cookies!
No, it’s not a hummingbird or a fairy; it’s a hurricane lily.
This is a level of frou-frou-ness unparalleled in the world of flowers.
Right now I just want to eat up the world because everything is so pretty! Suddenly we have hurricane lilies–everywhere! They come up without leaves, without warning. The bulb sends up this ridiculously fancy flower that reminds me of the Forsyth Park fountain in Savannah (the fountain is two-tiered, with Tritons, and the flower is really over-the-top like that).
Our yard was looking so boring, worn out by the heat–and then the hurricane lilies showed up. And then it rained and the temperature dropped, and all sorts of other stuff started blooming, too–ageratum (purple and powderpuff-like), cutleaf coneflowers, golden asters, Georgia asters, goldenrod, and rosinweed. I’ve been seeing lots of box turtles around the yard, and fat banana spiders. Rob said he saw a possum eating out of the cat food bowls the other night. Rob always says our cat Leroy looks like a possum, so he claimed the possum was Leroy’s father.
We’ve got a lot of our fall vegetables in the ground now. Last week we planted 64 cloves of Inchelium Red garlic, and when we looked at them today we realized that they’ve already sprouted! We planted Holland Red shallots last weekend too, and kale, collards, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and purple and white cabbage. We’re still harvesting lots of clown, habanero, cayenne, and datil peppers–oh, and some Matt’s Wild Cherry tomatoes.
But nothing’s doing as great as the sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes take the cake! Today we dug our first Beauregard sweet potatoes and we were totally amazed and elated. These things were HUGE–literally football sized!–and they were erupting out of the ground all on their own, just bulging out of the dirt. Digging them was so much fun and so easy, like mining in a magical land salted with enormous gems. Rob said that as we pulled them out “we were both squealing like preteen girls at a Jonas Brothers concert.”
Our biggest sweet potato weighed three pounds all by itself. It was perfect–bright coral pink inside and so sweet. We used it to make an awesome curry. Here is the recipe:
Sweet Potato Curry
Main Ingredients:
Olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
8 clown peppers, chopped
4 habanero peppers, minced
3 lbs sweet potatoes, chopped
2 baking potatoes, chopped
1 head cauliflower, chopped
2 cans coconut milk
1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes
1 small bag frozen green peas
2 Tbls mustard seeds
Curry Paste Ingredients:
5 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbls vegetable oil
1/4 cup fresh mint leaves, chopped
1-2 Tbls fenugreek leaves
2 Tbls cumin
2 Tbls coriander
1/2 tsp asafoetida powder
1/2 tsp paprika
2 tsps ground ginger
1 tsp garam masala
Salt to taste
Directions:
In a large soup pot, sauté the peppers and onion in oil over medium-high heat until the onion is tender and translucent. Add the sweet potatoes, potatoes, and cauliflower. Cover the pot and sweat the vegetables over medium heat until they are tender (about 20 minutes).
While the vegetables cook, prepare the curry paste. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and process with an immersion blender until you have a smooth paste.
Add the curry paste to the pot with the cooked vegetables. Then add the coconut milk and diced tomatoes. Add the frozen peas. Stir everything together until it well combined. Cover and cook over medium to medium-low heat for 20 minutes. Stir occasionally to prevent the curry from sticking to the bottom.
The amazing Beauregard sweet potato haul!
Look at the size of this thing!
Gratuitous cuteness: Becky on the screen porch
It hasn’t rained here in a long time, and our native plant gardens have turned brown and crunchy. But even in this depressing, desiccated landscape Rob and I still managed to have fun this weekend–well, at least part of the time, when we weren’t dragging …
August is kind of a dull month in North Florida–hot, humid, relentless. But September is exciting, a time to look for signs of change, harbingers of fall. I start to be on the lookout for webworm tents and ripe dogwood berries, pine cones chewed up by squirrels. (All of these are significant.)
Doesn’t my Coke look frosty and delightful there in the background?
On Saturday we made the most delicious tempeh-bacon sandwiches using this recipe I found on 101 Cookbooks and tweaked just the tiniest bit. We piled some hearty whole-grain toast with mashed avocado, baby spinach, homemade tempeh bacon, and Matt’s Wild Cherry tomatoes roasted in olive oil, brown sugar, and salt. The tomatoes were fresh from our garden, so tiny and sweet, more like currants than tomatoes. They turned even sweeter in the oven after roasting in brown sugar sauce; they provided a very nice contrast to the spicy tempeh strips (marinated in adobo). But I think the most important element of the entire sandwich was the mashed avocado. That was the glue that held everything together.
I spent Saturday afternoon weeding and weeding and weeding while Rob built a truly professional compost bin conveniently located near our vegetable garden. I saw lots of hummingbirds and skinks as I worked. It’s the season of Turk’s caps, colorful mushrooms, bright purple beautyberries, and big fat banana spiders.
In the evening we watched old Alfred Hitchcock movies and popped popcorn. Rob also taught Elroy (our most babyish cat) to play blackjack–well, that’s what we pretended. We always talk for our cats, simply vocalizing what they are so obviously thinking. Elroy was terrible at blackjack, Rob said, because he just kept saying, “Hit me! Hit me! Hit me!”
Elroy is a complete baby. (He squeaks.) So is his twin brother, Leroy. I like to say that Aunt Buntin (our craziest cat) took Elroy and Leroy to the Fun Station and they got really scared because she drove the go-kart really fast. I have pictured this scene so often that I kind of believe it really happened. Of course Buntin would be the craziest go-kart driver. She’d be speeding and swerving and running other drivers off the track. And meanwhile Elroy and Leroy would be screaming, holding hands in the passenger seat.
I’m including some random pics I took around the house this weekend. They don’t have anything to do with what I just wrote. I should have gotten a shot of Elroy and Rob playing cards.
Tempeh Bacon, Spinach, and Tomato Sandwiches
Ingredients:
Tempeh Marinade
3 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons brown sugar
3 tablespoons adobo sauce from a can of chipotle peppers
Other Stuff
8 ounces of tempeh, cut into 1/3-inch-thick strips
2 cups cherry tomatoes
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon brown sugar
½ teaspoon salt
Baby spinach
2 large avocados
4 slices hearty, whole-grain bread
Directions:
Whisk the marinade ingredients together in a medium-sized bowl. Pour into a baking pan and add the tempeh strips. Let the tempeh soak for at least an hour in the refrigerator.
Meanwhile, get your tomatoes ready to roast. Mix together the olive oil, brown sugar, and salt in a medium-sized bowl. Cut the cherry tomatoes in half and add them to the bowl. Stir until the tomatoes are well coated with oil.
Spread the tomatoes out on a baking sheet and roast in a 450-degree oven until slightly browned.
Put the tempeh and the marinade in a frying pan and boil until the marinade cooks off. Then add a little olive oil and pan-fry the tempeh until it’s slightly browned and a little crispy on the edges.
Mash the avocados with a little salt.
Toast the bread and spread two slices with mashed avocado. Top the avocado with a few spinach leaves. Then add roasted tomatoes and tempeh strips. Top with the remaining slices of bread.
Clown peppers, basil, and eggplant
Our lovely front porch. So glad you can’t see the mildew from this distance.
Handsome Greg. He’s mad because I interrupted him. He was stalking a giant grasshopper.
On Sunday night, Rob baked cookies, which is so comforting to me. I like to sit at the kitchen table and watch him carefully sift and measure. Rob was making vegan snickerdoodles, and our cat Carl was sitting on the table, watching too, and I was petting Carl and calling him “Snickerdoodle” just to make myself mad.