AAARRRGGGG! My Camera!

It amazes me how much I loved my camera! It was a gift from my son-in-law a few years ago for Christmas. I took it everywhere, especially when I travel. So I took it with me when I went to visit my daughters  and their families in Texas for Christmas. I noticed that the camera began acting a little odd while I was taking pictures of our traditional Mexican Chocolate party:

seems a little dark

But the next photo and several after it were okay:

When I got home I wanted to document how my little vegetable garden did with no care or water for almost three weeks:

Not too bad, except for the weeds!

But then, right while I was shooting, this happened!

What is happening?!

I thought it would recover again, but when I  went to photograph a recipe I was making for the Dark Days Challenge, here’s what I got inside the house:

Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth! The strange photos are kind of pretty in their own way but not what I want!

Guess I will be in the hunt for a new digital camera! Yes, another DIGITAL camera. I have an old manual SLR in my closet and I am pretty certain that I couldn’t get the film developed even if I wanted to use it!

The Mighty Pak Choi

It is our “winter” here in Baja; the time for growing cool season crops like lettuce, cabbage, and Asian greens. As I have been posting, I am attempting to participate in the Dark Days Challenge. This week, my post is about one of our favorite Asian greens Choi: in this dinner Pak Choi. I grow both the full size plants and the smaller Tsai Choi.  Here are some photos of each in the garden.

A huge Pak Choi ready for harvest

Tsai Choi are much more compact

The big Choi here is destined for this dinner; it is huge and ready for harvest. Before I chopped it up, it filled my dishpan.  No photo of that, but here it is after I attacked it with my chef’s knife.

Chopped up and ready to cook

Before I chop it up I soak the entire head in cool water laced with a few tablespoons of vinegar to chase out any freeloaders. I garden organically so I don’t mind a few holes in my vegies. I handpick snails and it is easy to miss those tiny, tiny babies, but they are no match for the vinegar. I am not much on homemade escargot, too much effort to clean the snails and mine are usually too small anyway; it’s the big ones from next door that are the real problem. They know where the free lunch, or should I say dinner, lives.

I matched the chopped Choi with a few other ingredients: onions and some late ripening peppers from the garden and some local pork.

Sliced pork, peppers, onion, and Choi stems

Beside the Choi, the star of this dinner is some homemade Duck Sauce from our beautiful spring Santa Rosa plums. The sauce is way good and wonderful over rice.

Hmmm, rice… Not exactly local, since it doesn’t grow well here; it’s too arid. It does grow in central California just beyond my 150 mile range, so I am going to use it anyway. I do buy it in San Diego, so does that count? I could have just not admitted it but I wanted to show off the secret flavor of the day: homegrown lemon grass.

Steamed rice with crushed lemon grass

This represents a triumph of a sort for me: it is my third and only successful attempt at growing it. The two previous attempts met their demise at the overzealous weeding hands of Mr. M. After all it is lemon grass. I actually had to plant it in my vegetable garden because he is forbidden to weed there. (NO, don’t pull out those nettles! I need them!) But that is another story.

I steam the rice with homemade chicken stock, a bit of Kosher or sea salt and few smashed stalks of the aforementioned, highly prized lemon grass.

The Bok Choi stars in the stir fry:

Ready to serve

Here is the simple recipe:

2 locally grown boneless pork chops, or chicken thighs

1 Tbs fat or oil (I used some reserved fat from making stock)

1 Tbs dark sesame oil (I’m counting this as a spice)

1 large head of Bok Choi or other preferred greens, sliced crosswise

1 medium onion, thinly sliced

½ large green or ripe sweet pepper, or a few small ripe sweet peppers, thinly sliced

Several cloves of homegrown garlic, sliced, or chopped

1 pint homemade Duck Sauce (a half pint would work if less sauce is desired)

½ to 1 Tbs Cornstarch dissolved in 1 Tablespoon cold water, optional

Semi-freeze and thinly slice the meat. Heat fat and sesame oil, add sliced meat. Cook, stirring constantly, until the meat loses its pink color. Add onions, sliced stems of the Choi, and peppers and fry until the onions begin to soften. Add the garlic and sauce.  Add the leafy part of the Choi and cook until the leaves wilt. If the sauce is too liquid from the moisture in the leaves, thicken with the cornstarch.

I’m pretty sure that this dinner meets the SOLE (sustainable, organic, local, and ethical) requirements: well almost. And, if you are interested, here is the recipe for the

Duck Sauce

(loosely based on the Ball Blue Book’s Plum Sauce recipe, page 84)

4 pounds of Santa Rosa plums

2 cups grated pilonchillo sugar (Mexican cone sugar)

1 cup cane sugar

3/4 cup chopped onion

2 Tbs mustard seed (I get mine at a local Botannica,or herb store; it grows wild here)

1 chopped, roasted, peeled poblano chile

1 minced jalapeno or serrano chile

1 (1/4 X 1″) piece fresh ginger, minced or 1 tsp ground, dry ginger

3 garlic cloves

1/4 tsp ground cloves

1 cup cider vinegar

Wash, pit and slice plums. Combine the rest of the ingredients in a large pot. Bring to a boil and add plums. Cook until plums are soft. Blend with an immersion blender until smooth. Cook until the thickness preferred. Ladle sauce into hot jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace. Adjust two piece caps. Process 20 minutes in a boiling water bath. About 4 pints, but your mileage may vary.

Note: when my plums ripen, I have a lot so I double or triple this recipe. I put the sauce up in pints and half pints because it also makes a great dippng sauce.

Passing the Addiction Forward

The final product

A couple of weeks ago my daughter visited us here in Baja. She asked me about pickles. Remember that I have mentioned a few times about how much my family loves the pickled stuff. She had read my blog entry about my giant jar of refrigerator pickles and was tasting them when she asked when I was going to teach her the art of pickling, so she in turn with could do it with her younger daughter.  My chance to pass the canning addiction on! Muhahahaha!

The very next day I gave her the first lesson: Simple refrigerator pickles. I chose refrigerator pickles as her introduction because it is a basic lesson. No giant pots of boiling water, no scary hissing pressure canners , no sterilization techniques, no special jars and lids, not even a giant vat of boiling food.  Just one pot to heat the simple brine, a recycled jar some spices, and a few vegetables.

In my best cooking lesson fashion, I laid out a variety of pickling spices:

And we prepared an assortment of vegetables suitable for brining:

She then packed the vegetables into a repurposed jar. The most difficult part here is learning that a vertical pack allows the most ingredients into the jar. She then added the canning salt and the spices of her choice.

After heating a 50-50 solution of vinegar and water she poured it into the jar.

Here is the finished jar:

Put the lid on, refrigerate, and wait a week and it becomes fresh pack pickles! The photo at the top was taken today.They are ready to enjoy.

Too bad she had to fly home before they were they were ready. All the more for me! She did however return home to make another jar with my granddaughter. This weekend, they tasted their first creation, called me from Texas, and declared them to be “nummylicious”!

Have you ever made fresh pack pickles? Try it!

The Zen of Laundry

 

Looks okay to me

When I was growing up, it was the norm for families to have a laundry line in their yard. Some families even had a specific laundry, or wash, day. We didn’t that I know of, it seemed with my family we always had laundry. When I was very little I had the job of folding the wash and taking it to the appropriate room. When I could finally reach the clothesline, laundry from beginning to end was one of my jobs.

Not that I minded it. We had an electric washer, thank goodness. And not one of those wringer types that could tear your arm off either! It lived in our garage and just outside the door was the laundry line.  The lines were strung in parallel rows between two T-shaped metal poles.

I loved to hang laundry. It was one of the few times when I could escape from my family and not be studying. (I worked hard for my grades) It was peaceful and I had a sense of simple accomplishment when I finished hanging it out. I could hang the clothes in an order that appealed to me. Have I ever mentioned in my blog how compulsive I am about sorting stuff? I love organization! So much so, that my kids used to think I was magic because I could direct them to the exact place where something like the scissors or tape was stored. As recently as this summer my grandson commented about how I sort the silverware when I put in the dish drainer. But I digress…

Since our retirement here to Baja, we have worked to reduce our expenses, as well as our carbon footprint. We are lucky to have a washer and dryer here in our home, BUT I have been lusting after a clothesline for a long time. It hasn’t happened, so I am trying a different tactic.

We have a series of posts that we were using to support some grapevines that we are no longer growing. I decided to put the unused posts to support some clothesline rope to make a sort of makeshift clothesline. It seems to work pretty well and can hold a single large load of laundry.  Despite the fact that it is right in front of my house, I think it still looks okay.

Today when I hung out my first load of laundry, I was immediately transported back to my teen years. I felt that same peace and sense of tranquility I enjoyed then. When I gathered the dry clothes in, I really enjoyed the fragrance of line dried laundry again!

Do you line dry your laundry? Is it a good or bad experience for you?

My New Neigh-bors

When I got up this morning I discovered these two next door:

New Neigh-bors

They are now sharing the yard with the neighbors’ pet goat. Country in the City! We are only one block away from the main street in town. Wonder if I can get their “leavings” for my gardens?

Things I Wish I Would Do

I like blogging and I like reading others’ blogs. I see all kinds of cool ideas like, say, Wordless Wednesday, when they post nothing but photos. Or the new group that has a challenge of posting a photo every day. Hmmmm…  I don’t think I have that kind of discipline… BUT, I am going to try to post more often, so stay tuned.

Here is a photo for today. It is one of my strawberry pots on my deck. I took it from this angle because it shows our inexpensive automatic drip irrigation. The yellow hose along the edge of the deck is a nine dollar hose from Wally World that we put an end cap on then connected to a timer. Then we punched holes for the 1/4 inch tubing connectors for each of our potted plants.

Sweetness in a pot

By the way, we have two of these pots and have harvested several  quarts of fruit this year already! They love the new system!

The Green Wall

Despite having a housefull of kids for several weeks, I have been able to do some gardening. Because of various things, like travel, my summer garden was started late this year, but seems to have done well so far.

In Mexico, it is very common to build right up to the property line; there are no easement or setback restrictions. My next door neighbors had a wall right on one of our joint property lines. Last summer they started to remove the attached roof and most of the wall fell down. Since they had a dog that liked to visit our yard and leave little “gifts” for us to clean up, we put up a chain link fence. This spring, I saw it as an opportunity for a new vertical garden.

I planted some yard long beans, which I have never grown before. They are just getting started:

Yard long beans growing on the fence

The bricks behind the plants are what is left of the wall.

Next to the beans I have some watermelon and cantaloupe that are just beginning to do well. I plan to support the fruit with some old pantyhose.

Watermelon vines next to the sage

The grayish plants plant next to the watermelon plant is sage. I have an abundance from my little herb garden. Apparently it is a rare commodity here, so I give cuttings to my friends so they can dry it and have a supply.

Next to the watermelons, I have some cucumbers. I am trying a new (to me) type that produces cucumber twins; it is just starting to produce. The ants really love these cucumber plants; they farm their aphids on them if they get the chance. I have to spray them pretty often with soap and the occasional Spinosad application.

Young cucumbers starting to produce

Then I have some winter squash growing along the fence. I have to go out every day to encourage the vines to stay on the fence, since they want to grow everywhere! I have three types: Kabocha growing from some saved seed, Trompetta, which can be used like summer squash or left to ripen for winter use, and Buttercup, which my grandkids call “belly button squash” because of its shape.

Winter squash flourishing on the chain-link fence

I love squash, so I also have some bush summer squash growing also. Here is a photo of my first yellow zucchini:

Our first zucchini!

MMMMMmmmm! I can’t wait to use it!