Box of Veggies (4 of 22)

This week we split the onions, potatoes, and beets (E&A took the beets and I kept the greens). I got the lettuce, tomato, cucumber, chard, and strawberries, E&A got the cilantro, garlic scapes, and carrots (am I forgetting something?, it seems like I took more than my share this week).



Last week I put the strawberries in scones. They were tasty, but it seemed like a waste of really good strawberries. This week, I sliced the strawberries and mixed them with a couple tablespoons of sugar and will use them as a topping. I had left over cream cheese from last week's carrot cake frosting, so I made stuffed french toast. The recipe I used called for Irish Cream liqueur which I didn't have, so I had to substitute soy milk and sugar, but I love the idea and will be pick some up the next time I'm at the liquor store for just this purpose.

The chard and beet greens will be blanched or steamed and served with potatoes as a side dish. The lettuce, tomato, onion, and cucumbers will be sandwiches.

Pride in the Park

This is Tristen; you may recognize her from her photo in the paper. She is one of the organizers of Pride Corvallis, the first (and hopefully annual) lesbian and gay pride festival in Corvallis .

When I first heard about the event a couple weeks ago, I sent an e-mail asking if they needed volunteers. Tristen wrote back and said I could help set up. This mainly consisted of unloading tables, chairs, and one ridiculously heavy generator (for the 'bouncy castle') from trucks, but constructing the helium balloon arch was easily the highlight.

I missed the actual parade (I went to the Farmer's Market instead), but after lunch I came back to the park with my juggling props and juggled, took in the sights, listened to the music, visited the vendor booths, and juggled some more.

This was the most wholesome Pride event I've ever attended. There was no alcohol, lots of folks my age, and lots of little kids (there was a kids area with games, face-painting, and that bouncy castle). If this had been my first Pride festival 20 years ago, I'd have been disappointed. Back then I was young and looking for a wild time; I enjoyed seeing people in their fetish gear with their slaves on a leash, mostly naked go-go dancers, and flamboyant drag queens lip-syncing to disco. But now I'm much more mellow and I really appreciate the family-friendly and laid-back atmosphere.

I do wish there had been more shirtless guys though.

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Tomato Update

A year ago today, I posted a picture of my first tomato.

Here's this year's tomato for comparison.

Box of Veggies (3 of 22)

This week we split the potatoes, spinach, mizuna and lettuce. I took the onion, carrots, and strawberries, and gave E&A the scallions, basil, and tomato.

The only thing new to me this week was the mizuna. It's a slightly bitter, slightly spicy leafy green - somewhere between mustard greens and arugula. It's usually used in salads. I will stir fry it later this week.




I'm not a big fan of carrots, but it's seems we will get a large bunch of them every week in the box. I can't just keep forcing them on E&A (like week 1) and I won't have a bunch of friends over for game night every week (like week 2); so I will have to find carrot recipes that I can eat. This week I made these carrot cupcakes.

I also made spinach calzones and strawberry scones. The potatoes are parboiled and ready for breakfast burritos, and the onion and lettuce will be eaten on sandwiches throughout the week.

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Quilt Project #2 - Hilbert Curve Pot Holder

The piecing stage of quilting naturally has a lot of possibilities for exploring some of the niftier properties of polygons and tessellation, but the quilting stage can have it's math appeal as well. For example, space-filling curves lend themselves quite well to quilting.


The Sierpiński curve (above left) is ideal for quilting because it is a loop , and you can start it in the middle. This is important because as you sew, the layers of fabric tend to shift. Starting in the middle helps mitigate this effect. However, for my second quilt project, I decided to make another whole cloth pot holder using the Hilbert Curve (above right) because it only has right angles (way easier).



I'm still unhappy with the binding. I spent much more time fussing with it this time trying to make it work. It's better than last time, but still very sloppy looking.

It's hard to see the fancy stitching pattern from this picture. Here's a close up:

Blogaversary

One year ago today I posted my first entry on this blog.

Last year I posted a picture of our new house. Here's how it looks a year later.



There are a couple small differences:

- There was a dead tree in the open space behind our house. The top 12 feet of it crashed into our yard after a serious windstorm last fall.

- The arch that was covered in grandmothery pink roses is now covered with grapes (much tastier).

- There is no car in the port. Chris took it to Arizona for the summer (the car-free days of summer).

I thought the name "blogaversary" was a natural portmanteau of "blog anniversary", but then I realized that by taking out the "anni" from "anniversary", I'm removing the part of the word that means "year", so what would blogaversary actually mean? Maybe anniblogary would be a more correct term.

So for the fun of it, I tried googling the terms, blogaversary and anniblogary (as well as blogiversary, blogversary and annibloggery), and discovered that lots of people have already used these words in this context (go ahead, try it).

In fact most of the results come from blogaversary posts discussing which term is the most appropriate. Can you believe people actually do that?

I love the internet.

_

Box of Veggies (2 of 22)

This week's harvest:

We Got a Fennel Bulb, and Eric and Allison took the strawberries. We split everything else: carrots, cucumbers, potatoes, fava beans, turnips, and kale.

We had friends over on Saturday night to play Diplomacy, and served some of the carrots, cucumber, and turnips as snacks

The newsletter that they send with the box suggests cooking and mashing the fennel bulb with potatoes. I might do that and serve it with the fava beans. They also suggest slicing the fennel bulb, breading it, and frying it. That sounds tasty, too, and then I can save the potatoes for breakfast burritos. I also want to experiment with making tea from the fennel fronds.

Allison forwarded me this recipe for baked kale chips that looks delicious (and more importantly, easy), so I'll probably give that a try.

I'm still looking for something to do with the turnips. I'm leaning toward this recipe for Kashmiri-Style Kidney Beans with Turnips if I get a chance put some beans in the crockpot, Otherwise I'll try this simpler mashed turnip recipe (though I'll probably skip the last baking step). This Israeli Moroccan Couscous looks wonderful, but I'm not planning on putting that much effort into it this week - I'll consider it in the future if we get similar veggies.