New garden pic!!

Here's the latest picture of my garden! It was taken on Sunday before it began raining here. I have snap peas, snow peas, blue lake pole beans, red onions, carrots, Early Girl tomatoes, heirloom roma tomatoes, heirloom cherry tomatoes, 2 kinds of purple kale, Homestead toamtoes, spinach, Purple Beauty Bell Peppers, Red Beauty Bell Peppers, habanero peppers, jalapenos, lemon cucumbers, honeydew melon, zucchini, canteloupe, and it will have watermelon once it warms up a little more here. :) Also in my teeny tiny yard are 2 kiwi vines, a pineapple guava bush, a lisbon lemon tree, white lion edamame and strawberries. :) YAY me!!!

Tomatoes in the desert

Well, we're nearing the end of spring planting season here in Phoenix. Working at the plant nursery, I've learned a lot about desert gardening. I now have a stack of books next to my bed that I plan on reading soon, including Extreme Gardening by David Owens (the Garden Guy)

I've known for some time now that tomato plants are crazy with their hybridizations and wonky genetics, but I learned another set of tomato facts a couple days ago. The plants are classified as either "determinate" or "indeterminate."

Determinate plants produce all of their fruit at once. They tend to be the breeds that we use for making big batches of stuff, like sauces or salsas or that are used for canning. Since they produce everything at once, they grow more compact plants and are a little more shrub-like than the others

Indeterminate plants fruit out over a period of time. They're good for use as slicing tomatoes and salads. Since they produce more slowly than determinate plants, they tend to be more vine-y and require more support. They also tax the soil a bit less. since they use the nutrients more slowly.

And that, class, concludes today's lesson. :)

Outdoor adventures

I planted my first garden. I've had gardens before.... well, they were actually mom and dad's gardens. this is the first one that I've done entirely by myself. I have this overwhelming sense of pride about it. I mean:

1. I (with Dad's help) built a raised garden bed in my tiny backyard.


2. I found free dirt from some guy in the city and (with Scott's help and Jeanine's truck) moved about a cubic yard of it into the box. (The picture here has Lilo in it-- you know, for scale...)


3. Then I amended the dirt, and planted it


4. Then I got a job at my local nursery so I could maintain/improve it for pretty low cost. Oh also, they pay me to talk to people about plants, and to take care of plants. :)

I'm so exceptionally happy right now. I've been getting produce from bountiful baskets each week (or so) and have been buying grass-fed beef and other humanely raised meats. There's a dairy about 10 miles away from my house that does a csa-type thing. They have free range chickens there too and sell the eggs. So I've been getting my dairy from the source.

Until I began doing things like this (~6 months ago), I never noticed how disconnected we (Americans) are from our food. Growing up, food came from supermarkets and restaurants. We had a garden, but I never equated that to food production. It was a kind of game: go outside, play in the dirt, pick tomatoes. Even that meager education about how food is made was more than most kids get now.

It all started with a little talk about what's in our food. The professor that I teach with is big into health. He eats "right" and exercises (by riding his bike ~40 miles in the morning before riding to work) and we all know that we'll never be as awesome as him. Fine.

But at the end of the semester in one of the biochemistry classes that he teaches, he likes to have a food day. All of the students make treats and bring them in. As we eat them, we talk about the ingredients (GMO, processing, organic) and about food as it relates to health. I think that for most students, it's the first time that they really make the connection between the foods they eat and the consequences of eating it. One semester, it really got me thinking... The professor had had us read a couple chapters of The Omnivore's Dilemma. A book that I hadn't read. It chronicles a man's quest to trace the food in our supermarkets back to their sources. He finds little trouble in tracing fresh produce and meats back to the farms from whence they came, but encounters a world of trouble trying to find the origins of some processed foods. There's more to it, but just READ IT!

So, somehow, this book on this day with these people really got me thinking about food. It's a slippery slope, thinking... I started reading food labels, and other books, and I got these ideas, these notions that food should be real. It shouldn't be chemical (says the chemist). I changed the way I eat and slowly changed the way my husband was eating. We cut out HFCS (high fructose corn syrup). Then, we cut out ALL hydrogenated fats. I started going to the produce co-op and then we started buying wild-caught fish and grass-fed beef. I started going to farmers markets and buying more local foods. Husband decided last June that he wanted to start running. He's ridiculously awesome at it!! He lost 20lb in 3 months just from changing his diet and moving more. He ran his first half marathon in January and soon we will do a full marathon together. Life. is. GREAT. :)

I've been here, where have YOU been?!

So apparantly, I really need to remember that this blog exists... and post to it.

The end of last year was a little frantic. We developed a hole in a hot water pipe under our kitchen and after locating the source of the leak and demolishing half of our kitchen to repair it, we got a new kitchen!! It's funny to look back on baking pictures from before the renovation, because it's pretty now. I mean, beautiful. :) Oh, and insurance paid almost all of it. The only thing I covered was the actual repair to the pipe. not too shabby at all...

Now that my kitchen is functional again, I've been baking/cooking like a mad fool. I've made pork tenderloin (twice),

triple chocolate cupcakes,

sugar cookies,

chicken enchiladas (entirely from scratch)

ravioli

and since citrus is in season, fresh squeezed orange juice! I love food. :)

More adventures will be forthcoming, cross my heart. <3

ninety degrees outside?!?!

...and it's November!!! I can't believe how warm it's been this month. I was so excited when, in October, somebody turned off the heat outside! Apparently, it was just a glitch.

But aside from that. Cupcakes.

We've been making all kinds of cupcakes! So fun.

Last time, I told you that we were making Blackberry cabernet cupcakes. We did. It was okay... I'm pretty sure the problem was some combination of not enough cocoa and the red wine... I'm pretty sure that the purpose of the cocoa in these cupcakes was to cover up the oxidation of the wine. I learned this when the wine was added to cupcake batter containing too little cocoa and it turned grey. It looked so much like clay that E and I talked about using it for facials... delicious, cupcakey facials...

But we didn't, we baked it and it was still grey. It was not appetizing looking, and it didn't taste like much. Oddly enough, a couple days later, they turned a nice chocolate brown... weird.

The color could be covered up by the frosting. We made a reduction of cabernet sauvignon with blackberries in it. Then we mixed it with butter and sugar to make a buttercream frosting. Even though the alcohol had been boiled away, the wine lent a tangy flavour to the frosting that was really unexpected and made the frosting pop! And the color.... it was a gorgeous magenta! But, alas, even awesome frosting can't save all cupcakes... I ended up baking another batch of cupcakes (this time a chocolate sour cream recipe) and brushed them with cabernet after they were baked-- liberally applied, of course!! Topped with the tangy, sweet, fruity, boozey frosting, deliciousness ensued.

...two months later...

Holy sabbatical Batman!

Okay, after an impromptu leave of absence which I spent enlightening young minds, I'm back. And I have a new goal. A close friend of mine (my husband's best friend's girlfriend) is obsessed with cupcakes. Not in a bad way, but she loves them. Passionately.

We began holding cupcake baking nights at my house as a kind of girls' night bonding time while the boys played an online game with each other-- this new game called Aion. As recovering WoW-heads, apparently, this new game is good-- which means E and I babysit each other. A lot.

So 2 weeks ago, we made an attempt at Guinness cupcakes with Bailey's frosting. (Sounds tasty,

right?)

I've made them before, (picture above)but the recipe was on my now-dead computer and I didn't have time to make it up again.

So, we used Martha Stewart's recipe from her Cupcake Book. The recipe is pretty much a spice cake with a guinness glaze (right). That is almost nothing like the cup

cakes I made back in

March. Those were chocolate Guinness cake with Bailey's buttercream frosting. Oh well, we made them

anyway. They were alright, but I was disappointed in the lack of chocolate.

So last week, we decided to stick with a booze trend and we made "Smudslide cupcakes" (The term "smudslide" came from a drink-a-day-athon in which a mixed drink was made for each day of the week-- for example, "Margarita Monday" Sunday was a really hard day of the week to assign, therefore, "Smudslide Sunday was born")

Our Smudslide cupcakes were delicious!! We decided that we are going to make a cookbook dedicated to cupcake versions of alcoholic drinks (and possibly with alcohol still in them...)

Our cupcakes had coffee, Bailey's and coffee liquor in them along with a LOT of dark chocolate. Once baked, they deflated like sad soufflés... This may have been due to the amount of time that the batter sat around while we made things that we hadn't anticipated. Like coffee. I had the GENIUS idea to make french press coffee so it would be strong and delicious and add LOTS of flavor to the batter. This, of course, meant boiling water and then steeping the coffee and THEN finally(!) adding it to the batter...

The silver lining to our concave cupcakes was that the indentation allowed more frosting to be added to each cupcake. Which, by the way, also had liquor in it. Our frosting was basically a buttercream base with melted dark chocolate, coffee liquor and Bailey's added in for deliciousness. They look fine, right?

Rich and decadent, I do not foresee an end to this escapade any time soon. Next on our list is Blackberry Cabernet cupcakes... stay tuned!

The Gossip Mill

I'm as likely to spread a juicy rumour as any other 20-something girl with a voice. But cheese-and-rice, does the gossip fly when Apple even hints at the idea of a new gadget or gizmo.

The specific electronic device of which I am speaking is the highly anticipated, exceedingly blogged-about Apple tablet. Most of it is speculation, of course, as Apple hasn't even shown prototypes at any of the electronics shows yet.

I've always been a PC girl. I grew up with the old-ass IBM desktops and got my first laptop (a Dell Inspiron) when I came to college. Windows is my comfort zone, although Microsoft hasn't always made it easy on me...

Then, in 2008, I lost my cell phone. At Six Flags. On X2. Totally worth it. My contract was almost up with Sprint and my husband and I were looking for new phones anyway. I wanted a Blackberry and he wanted a touch screen phone. I let him choose where he wanted to go since EVERYONE carries Blackberries.... we looked at all the provider stores in the mall, then just for fun, we went to the Apple Store to check out the iPhone. It won hands-down over all of the other choices. I even changed my Blackberry-loving mind and went over to the dark side.

I've never looked back. Apple made a stellar product that was exceptionally customizable. I could make my phone reflect me and work the way I wanted it to. I could make it look the way that I wanted. I could organize and reorganize and categorize. As I found more and more apps, I became more and more satisfied with my product.

Now, as a shopper, I'm conflicted. I love to spend money, but I feel guilty doing it. Consequently, I often feel buyer's remorse when I spend >$200 in a clip. Buying 2 iPhones at $200 each +service and activation should have brought me to my knees... it didn't. That says a lot about my satisfaction that the money I spent was worth it.

So now, Apple is coming out with a tablet that's rumoured to be like a large iPhone. There are tons of artist predictions out there on the interweb of what it will look like and what functionalities it will have, but the best prediction? The price point. It's supposed to be available for <$1000. Win.

I'm still on my laptop PC, but I'm thinking I could become bi-computer-ial (?). After all, Macs are a little better for graphic design and even some lab work.... I'm keeping my ear to this gossip mill so I can once again get a toy that I won't regret buying.