Pork Sale = Chorizo and Dumplings

Last week I coarse-ground a 4lb chuck roast because I craved a fat, juicy cheeseburger. Instead of that, I made sweet and sour meatloaf immediately. It was so good that when it was gone the next night I made another one. And quickly froze all the rest of the beef so I'm ready for chili when the next cold front hits.
Friday night, with Christmas carols by dead people blasting from the radio, 3lbs of pork sirloin was handled more efficiently. It was ground coarse then ground medium to make chorizo and pork dumplings.

Today's lunch was a chorizo burger on honeywheat/oatmeal/chopped almonds/sesame seed bread that was spread with whirred pintos and mayo, topped with live Romaine and arugula. Mmmm-mmmm, this was my fat juicy hamburger.

All I forgot was some pickled carrots but chunks of them were cooked in the pintos. Will try some in chorizo and scrambled eggs in the morning.

Offensive as decorations and sales are this week, Friday's Christmas tunes helped with the next stage which becomes tedious (like old music redone by young people who scream the lyrics!). At 1 heaping tsp per dumpling, you can see I'm going to make 100. 80 will be frozen. Costco's are very good but why pay $20 for 60 of them when homemade are $6 per 100?

It's like a tamale line but less intense.

Dinner was a double order but I had to test a few. Yes, that's salsa in the ginger sauce. So?

Sunday is Funday

5 days til Thanksgiving, today's high was 80°, and rainfall for November is 1/2" over the average. Everything's back to normal! Even with a warm day I can tell it's Fall because this is the only sun the courtyard gets all day. But chair cushions can stay out all day (if it's not raining) with no worry about them fading.

Turkeys are 29¢ a pound with $25 purchase and so much else is on sale I'll make two $25 trips before Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, the garden is bountiful. The mustard, bok choy, chard and peppers below were sauteed and then piled with garlic on a pizza. Green beans steamed.

Tomorrow starts salad twice a day to keep up. Always with a garlicky Caesar dressing and three-day old bread toasted with herbs as croutons. Left, red tip lettuce, window box is cilantro, Romaine, arugula.


Harvest time for lemon basil. Too much lemon taste for pesto but dried leaves are a tasty addition to tortilla soup and pintos. Didn't plan ahead, tho. The humidity's so high lately the salt is clumped in my shaker and why didn't I think there's no place to dry basil leaves in this climate? (Also note how the weeds are back all over the courtyard with weekly rain. Arrggh)
The ceiling fan is on 24/7 but they're still moist. Wonder if tying the branches with twine and hanging them in my winter coat closet would be aromatic or a disaster..
For the longest I've wanted to make a seafood dish with cubed crab, tomatoes, cukes, mango, and avocado stacked in layers inside a can with the bottom removed so it can be pushed out in place on the plate. If you've noticed, almost all cans have rounded bottoms making it impossible to open the bottom with a can opener. Found the perfect cans for appetizer and entree sized seafood stacks.
One of the biggest lessons a farmer learns is patience. No one rushes Mother Nature. I planted 24 garlic bulbs a month ago. None were sprouting so I didn't expect them to break ground until Dec. One came up within a week and 3 weeks later, still the only one, was 10" tall so I feared they had been treated with a non-sprouter I'd heard commercial growers use. I can fix that. I searched the bin and came up with these three sprouters to plant next to them (not on top of them because Mother Nature bats last and loves little tricks).

On this morning's walkaround I found 11 of the bulbs have now broken ground. I have plenty of room elsewhere (those bell peppers will stop bearing eventually) and one can never have enough garlic.

It's Time for Gardening in Texas

Jed Clampett would call my 2011 summer garden piiiitiiiful. Here are my green beans in early July and I watered them twice a day. Houston averages 2.3 days over 100° and this year we had 46, beginning in June. They didn't have a chance.

But now it's Fall and hope springs eternal. (Ignore the dead St Augustine. I am until Spring.)

Bed 1 already gets no sun so we'll start with
Bed 2
Back row: brussels sprouts, next row: cauliflower with garlic top and bottom along the strings, next row: bok choy, cauliflower, and a row of radishes along the string below, front row: 2 squares chard, collards, mustard greens.


Bed 3
Left: 1st skinny row is carrots, 2 rows of Romano green beans with beets in front, "empty" row is green cabbage, last row is bell peppers with 2 squares of red cabbage behind them.


West fence
Green trellis to left is sugar snap peas with Romaine in front, next trellis pickling cucumbers with yellow squash in front, next trellis sugar snap peas with zucchini in front, invisible chicken wire trellis snow peas with 2 rows of turnips in front.


Chain link on garage
Salad cucumbers and Blue Lake green beans. Faces west and I don't think they're going to make it since they don't get enough sun each day. Beans are flowering tho, so we'll see.


My favorite genetically modified plant is this bell pepper. It has red, yellow, and green peppers all on one plant. The second amazing thing is those eggplant colored peppers turn green when they're ripe.



Baby cucumbers, baby zucchini


Green onions, parsley. Waiting 2 wks for them to get big enough to spread out.

Brrrr!

When it's this cold at 7am....

You need hot coffee and a hearty fried potato, fried plantain and egg breakfast
(Asta got 1/3 of that plate.)

You need to bake some doggie bones to heat up the kitchen. (Note the cake mix, almonds, and pineapple at the side for Marvelous Morning Muffins next).

And start a gallon of smoked turkey gumbo.


Hard to believe dinner the night before was a leisurely harvest from the garden: Romano beans, salad of Romaine, arugula, and cilantro, served with storebought red onions and and chile rubbed pollock filet. Not enough salad to use dressing but the live arugula and cilantro kept it from being bland.


The courtyard salad bowl, front to back: arugula, Romaine (to be transplanted), cilantro.

Bottom left bowl above is shallots I'd hoped to have in December/January but Asta had other plans. Here they were last week, when I thought they were safe on the ground.

In another week there'll be red tip lettuce for salads.

Yes, I Went There

I bought this 4lb can of tuna (equals 11 regular cans of tuna) at Costco. The price matched a sale price - but it didn't slosh with liquid when I shook it! For 3 months I put it on the counter when someone came to visit. Priceless.

Remember when you were little and cans of chunk tuna were just that with some liquid to keep it moist? Nowadays there's as much liquid in the can as there is tuna mush. This is a can of chunk tuna like the old days. I had to break it up to make tuna salad.... which I did for the next two days. It was marvelous with only mayo, onion and celery, no relish or hard boiled eggs.

Here's what it looked like after I'd made 2 bowls of tuna salad from it. I vacuum packed and froze the rest of it. Girl Scout Tuna Wiggle is in my future!

Like Gardening in Phoenix...

In the last week, 2 of my favorite Texas garden bloggers announced regretfully they were giving up on their veggie gardens... and the second one is a farm!

Harvests hardly justify a water bill quadrupling. Even with mulch, no trees on the west side mean it needs water twice a day and temps hit 104-112 out there daily the last 3 weeks of June. If I'd known this was coming I'd have hung shadecloth from the house to the fence but this year is just an anomaly, right? At least I didn't install gutters and rainbarrels as planned.

Here's why I'm not giving up just yet. With summer cucumbers and green beans turning brown and dying one by one, the collards, mustard greens, chard, bok choy and brussels sprouts from winter are thriving on the west side. I would have bet money nobody could grow those in a Texas summer, much less this one. Brussels never reached harvest size by May but I left four of them to shade the cantaloupes and they keep growing. I could roast a mess of them tonight... if it weren't so hot. Ready to try more "winter" veggies during summer.

When the first cukes died, I started a small garden on the courtyard because, with shadecloth over the concrete area, it only gets direct sun from 10am - 2pm and needs watering once a day.

Left: courtyard Dec 2010 when Houston was still a muggy tropical paradise. After several days in the mid-20s, and 1" of rain since the end of Feb, pulling those 12" tall weeds is no longer a monthly chore.

Lost the palm on the right in an unpredicted hard freeze. Sad because it's the last pup of one I bought the day before our '98 trip to Italy. Never put it in the ground because of freezes.

Below is today, with evidence of Asta's passive-aggressive fight (this was done while I was grocery shopping) over what I see as beets and turnips to the left of the lemon basil, and she sees as her 3pm napping site. In the middle are radishes, green onions, chard. On the right is Genovese basil. The tomatoes in 3 pots full of pure MiracleGro garden soil are outperforming the organic fertilized ones on the west side. All are still producing flowers and 2 nights last week lows were 75 which is the miracle point when they'll set fruit. I'm still babying and watering them and waiting for Fall.