Peeking into the rock

I cut down the watersprout that was coming from below the graft on the almond tree in time for the gtreencycle pickup, which leaves me free to fill the can again this week, which I definitely ought to do.

I had a lot of sprouted garlic, so even though they say to plant in October, I put them in the window box with the alyssum. Also I planted snap peas, pole beans, and yellow chard, in paper egg cartons and a pierced tofu box respectively/  The kale I planted a few weeks ago is still at the cotyledon stage, but they are tall cotyledons and ought to bedeveloping true leaves any minute. Naturally, the parsley is still thinking about whether or not to sprout -- it looks like three or four have decided to try it out, and the others are waiting to see how it works out. I had a lead on free kale starts, but I have so much kale in the egg cartons and more seeds after that, so I don't think I should follow up on it.  Give the other guy a chance, you know.

Really, six vegetables is pretty optimistic, considering that most of my yard is still suffering under the piles of construction debris. Anyway, my absent-mindedness in years past is serving me well this year, because I have all these seeds to plant. And yes, they all seem to be viable.

Speaking of peas, I have a two-pound bag of shredded iceberg lettuce from Grey Bears, so I have decided to make peas, lettuce and herbs soup, especially after reading that this would be a way to use up the three cups of whey I have after converting my roommate's sour milk into ricotta (I thought I was making yogurt but I let it get too hot so I got actually quite nice ricotta, which is probably better, given that ricotta is more expensive than yogurt anyway). It's quite simple, by the way: I had three cups of sour low-fat milk, to which I added a third of a cup of natural sour cream and two-thirds of a cup of natural whole milk yogurt, and then I let is sit for a while, and then I warmed it up and tried to keep the temperature in the recommended range but it got a little hot and it separated more than yogurt ought to so I warmed it up some more and then I scooped it into a napkin spread on a sieve and squeezed all the whey out. I tried to make "whey ricotta" out of the resulting whey, but there wasn't enough left. I realized afterwards that the whey that the blogs were talking about was from making cheese with whole milk, and not low-fat milk, so not the same thing really.

Am I an insuifferable foodie? Or just bored and poor? I only make jam from free fruit. I only made my own peanut butter (at home, instead of in the machine at the hippie store) because decent peanut butter reached six dollars a pound. (it was not an unqualified success -- the nice inexpensive peanuts from Trader Joe's apparently have a lot less oil in them than regular peanut-butter making peanuts)

When I pruned the plum tree I brought in some budded branches, but they haven't advanced much. The almond tree looks like it's thinking about bursting out any moment. It's not long until other people's plum trees will be blooming, but mine is always last, and so are my plums (they are not ready until August). I had a dream about racking and bottling the wine, and among my stepmother's effects I found a half-drunk bottle of my best year's product, and it tasted pretty good.

Also: Andrew Marvell has been talking to my lemon trees. My, I have a lot of lemons. I have not counted them, but they seem as numerous as my mother in law's used to be, and she used to get a thousand lemons a year. These are not quite ripe, in general, but they have dropped a huge number of nice ones. That's unusual, and I think it is because of people trying to reach the best ones up top and knocking some off. My next door neighbor on the other side has carte blanche to use as many as she wants, and she is short like me and getting frail. Anyway, my kitchen has rather too many lemons in it at the moment, especially considering I still have a lot of marmalade left from last year.

head thing notes: I found a forty-six dollar check from the last time I was on unemployment a year and a half ago. It was good for a year. . .

It's Marvell season.

We've cleaned up the plums and apricots. The plum wine has gone from primary fermenter to secondary (that is, from a five-gallon plastic tub to a four-gallon glass carboy with an airlock). It's the color of raspberry sorbet, actually. In my kitchen right now are a large pot filled with windfall pippins: another large pot filled with fresh-froze blackberries from the good folks at Prevedelli Farm (about which more soon): and a really large bag filled with pears from some folks over on Chestnut Street who have been trying to give them away every day for a month (about which more soon). Tomorrow we are contracted to make low-sugar blackberry jam, canned pears in apple juice, pear leather, dried pear wafers, and apple-pear leftover juice jelly, one jar of which will have mint in it and one which will have rose geranium in it (like Grandma Emma used to make now and then).

So. Last year we ran out of jam. So the nice fellow wants to make sure we have every kind of jam we make this year. And for some reason we're making largeish batches of it. So the California Cooler (for those of us who haven't had to sit through this explanation before, it's a cupboard built into a lot of older California houses with ventilation to the outside. They're usually not big: ours isn't, it's about a foot wide, a foot deep, and starts at counter height and goes maybe four feet up. Make it four cubic feet, I guess. Anyway. They work on the principle that in a mild climate, air movement will keep staples cool enough for medium-term storage. I find it inconvenient to store stuff like flour in it, and I suspect it's not dry enough if you put anything really delicate, though I've had no trouble with it. We keep breakfast cereal on the bottom shelf and preserves all the way up. There's also three 24-oz. jars of dill pickles in there, and there will be, in a couple-few weeks, a very large number of jars of "chili sauce" which is an old, probably Midwestern, word for bumpy catsup, and also tomato chutney, both of which have become necessary staples in the house.

The Prevedelli farm: we got our strawberries at the Gizdich pick-yourself farm down at the southern end of Watsonville, sort of by Aromas. But when we called about blackberries we found out that they were done with all berries July 31st. I will tag this so we know next time. But we were undaunted and headed out to the Farmer's Market and asked the Prevedellis about bulk berries for jam and learned that we could get frozen "seconds" from them for $3.00 a pound. I guess what they do is when they're packing up berries for sale, they toss the squishy ones into a bucket and then put them up in bags in the freezer. What they do with these ordinarily is make jam. But they'd sell them to us. When we got down to their farm, which is way out in Corralitos at the north end of Watsonville, they were labelling the little cartons that sell in the grocery stores or the farmer's market. They seemed very nice. Years ago we bought apples and quinces from them a couple of times and it looked like grandma was doing the selling, and I now know that she was suffering from dementia -- in retrospect, that's what her struggling with the money was all about. I forgot to ask about quinces this time.

Then we drove around Corralitos, Freedom, and Pleasant Valley (not to be confused with Happy Valley) looking for a barn where the nice fellow used to buy fresh squeezed apple juice ("we have apples," I said, but not forcefully because our Pippins are a little tanniny when you juice them).

More about the pears:

So I walk down Chestnut street on my way home every day. There's a house which has been lifted up to make two stories where there were once one, and where the front yard is dominated by a plum tree and an angel's trumpet. For weeks now there has been a box or two of free fruit out front of their gate. Plums, and then pears. Yesterday I stopped to talk to an old friend who lives on Chestnut Street and is a relatively successful teacher (as opposed to me), and then I stopped at the free fruit house and thought: "dang, that thing with my friend's windfall peaches worked out so well, I think I'll do something with some of these free pears." Then I thought: "it's almost as much work to make a little as a lot, and these nice people keep offering their fruit to the neighborhood, why don't I make them an offer?" So I left them a note offering to dry and can some pears for them, and they called back and tonight I went over and showed them what I did with the peaches -- they have two small children, one of whom loved the peach leather -- and we agreed I would take their pears away and come back with a bunch of pear products. They thought there was something more they needed to do, but honestly, they already did their part.

They're nice young people: early thirties, I think, teachers, with the right books on their shelves (Rebel Girl, the biography of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, for example). And she's going to be working with another old friend who's a teacher, too.

Oh, those old friends who are teachers? I met the first-mentioned when we were doing the Early Childhood Education program at the community college, before we went to teacher school: and the second when we were both working at the freezer plant that is no longer there around the corner from where I now live, and were also both participating in the Neighborhood Coop (grocery buying club), and various political things. Also the first-mentioned friend's son went to school with Frank.

Who bought his ticket to Prague today. Priceline British Airways: it turned out that with Easy Jet, he couldn't get a guarantee on a return flight.

And he finished off the peach leather.