chromedome

The fun part of being away for (most of) a week is prowling the garden once I get back, to see how things are coming along. Yesterday was the first of what I'd consider a typical high-summer harvest, with lots of chard/beet tops, kale, and the first big meal from my jungle of bush beans. Also we're starting to get a few winecap mushrooms from the small bed we'd inoculated (on a substrate of wood chips). These are the greens (that's oregano on the left, it was starting to bolt so I harvested a bunch of the flower stems to dry): ...and the beans, a few last snap peas, etc. There were actually a half-dozen cherry tomatoes, but I took a few straight in to my GF before taking the photo. Here's the aforementioned jungle of bush beans. I've planted them more densely this year to see how that works: last year I planted four rows in a 4-foot wide bed, this year six rows in a 3-foot wide bed. Once they hit their stride, the weeds didn't stand a chance. What you're seeing there is actually two beds with a walkway between them, though you can't really see the walkway. The nearer bed is planted with a yellow variety, Monte Gusto, and the farther bed with a green variety called Provider. They both bear heavily, and are currently just dripping with almost-mature pods. Today or tomorrow I'll go back through those beds and harvest 4 or 5 times what I got yesterday, and I'll do that for the next month or more. My French-style beans (Moscotte) were planted a bit later, and haven't caught up (you can see the original planting on the right, and the second planting on the left; I'd run out of seeds initially). A convenient thing with this cultivar is that the beans are borne above the foliage rather than beneath, which makes them easier to pick. My snap peas are just about done but my shelling peas are just hitting their stride, and I'll be harvesting those soon. That will make my GF happy; she's had a strangely specific fantasy from her earliest childhood of sitting in her rocker shelling a bowl of peas while surrounded by grandchildren who call her Granny. The peas are the only part she didn't have yet. I've been putting my peas down the middle of a bed, and planting other things on either side. This one has fennel to the left and bell peppers (Red Knight) to the right. The first peppers are starting to form. Tomatoes are coming along. These are my Black Krims. They're an indeterminate variety, and the tallest of them are now up to my eyebrows. These are melons; Sugar Baby (an "icebox" watermelon), and Halona (a cantaloupe). I don't know how they'll do, but I can cover them to extend their season when the time comes. So yeah, things are coming along. Probably going to harvest my garlic this weekend, it's looking about ready, and then I'll replant those beds in something else (I haven't decided yet what that will be; maybe cauliflower and a second planting of snap peas). I'll cut my first head of broccoli this week as well; it's pretty small but this cultivar generates a lot of side shoots if you harvest the central head early and ultimately gives a higher yield/plant. That wouldn't work for a commercial grower, but for me it's ideal. On a side note, for those who are interested, I interplanted my broccoli with marigolds this year because of their reputation for deterring the cabbage worm moth. It seems to be working; I've had to pick worms and hose eggs from my kale and cabbage but not (so far) from the broccoli.

LOL Yup, butter cheese and cream are essential to any low calorie meal.

On Saturday I was on my way to my aunt's birthday party in Nova Scotia, and stopped into a Sobeys (one of Canada's two main grocery chains) to pick up some potato chips as our contribution. As I walked in there was a couple standing in front of a big display of corn, packed in threes on styrofoam trays at $2.99 ea. The man was boggling at this and grumped that "A buck an ear is highway robbery!" "No," I told him, "It's...piracy." His wife/girlfriend got it right away and laughed, but it took him a few beats. What can I say, Dad Jokes 'R' Us.

I've had it on both coasts and it's very much the same experience. I've never been in a position to do a side-by-side comparison of equally-fresh specimens from each coast, given the obvious logistical difficulties, but I suspect the differences between species would be no greater than the individual variation between one specific fish and another.

Blueberries in milk was one of my favorite in-season childhood breakfasts. I still do that occasionally.

An update on this recall: https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/various-brands-caffeinated-drinks-recalled-0?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

SSS brand enoki mushrooms are being recalled for listeria (Ontario only, at this point). https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/sss-brand-mushroom-enoki-recalled-due-listeria-monocytogenes?utm_source=gc-notify&utm_medium=email&utm_content=en&utm_campaign=hc-sc-rsa-22-23

Score!

Me too. Except for one of my cherry tomatoes, which has given us a few ripe ones already.

My GF went through a period (of a couple of years!) in childhood where she literally ate nothing but cake, and the usual kids' ration of candy and such. Her parents had both grown up hungry, and apparently reasoned that as long as her belly was full they were doing their job; and that sooner or later she'd snap out of it. What happened instead - predictably - is that she got very sick, and testing showed her to be badly anemic. When the doctor asked about her diet they answered truthfully (because, again, they saw no issue with it). Once the doctor realized that they were absolutely serious, and not just jerking his chain, he went off on her parents in incendiary fashion. She herself was so shocked at this (I think she was...9? 10? at the time if I've got the story right) that she meekly started eating rather than have that kind of tirade directed at her on a future visit. We've often speculated that the raft of health issues she deals with now have their roots in this period (and a later backsliding year of brownies and Diet Coke in her teens). It's funny how we all have our mental blind spots: I sent her a link to a study on the long-term health effects of eating disorders, and until that very moment it had never occurred to her that she'd had one as a child.

I dunno. We have 1/10 the population of the US, so 1/10 the number of people cranking such things out. Having had it, Dejah might be able to give you a best-guess combination of ingredients as a starting point. We know the woman's got some serious chops...

Yeah, the Nagano pork is exclusive to Sobeys up here (like the Sterling Silver beef that Ann T uses frequently). Rival chain Superstore "got there the first with the most" as far as premium store brands in our market, but Sobeys is catching up.

I feel that potato blossoms are not appreciated enough. These and several others are now living in a small vase beside my GF's desk.

I doubt it. The whole point of seasoning a pan is to coat it with a layer of polymerized lipids. There just aren't any in salt. It's a great tool for cleaning a pan once seasoned, but... it just makes no sense to push that as a seasoning method. So strange. (Please understand, I'm not dunking on you. Given two methods for a specific task, one of which is messy and smelly and one of which is not, I might also have opted for the cleaner, simpler option.)

I could see it as a way to remove a factory coating before use? Maybe? But yeah, it seemed weird.

It's like that here in Canada, too. I'd read this piece just recently: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/first-person-stephen-douglas-trans-canada-oasis-1.6895820

We had those for a while in the 70s, when I was a kid, but in Canada it was called a WigWag.

Absolutely. The sauce *is* sweet, but not cloyingly so. It's garlic-forward when made properly, and balances nicely with the savoriness of the meat and onions (and provides the sweetness that's generally lacking in foodservice-grade tomatoes). But more fundamentally - and not at all facetiously - that sauce is the sine qua non of a Nova Scotia-style (really, a Halifax-style) donair. Otherwise it's just another take on a gyro or doner kebab. Not that there's anything wrong with those, either, but... you know... without the signature component, it's not the thing. Like coq au vin without wine.

I say this with respect and affection, but that's incorrect. Without the milk-based sauce it's not a Nova Scotia donair, full stop. They are absolutely a gut bomb though, especially in the oversized form that's sold in many a donair place situated strategically near drinking establishments and/or student hangouts.

With lettuce in it? Hell, no!

That's my preferred size for zucchini, tbh. They're tender and sweet, and as a defensive measure it helps avoid the stereotypical glut (you can serve 2-4 as an individual portion!). I grew Golden Nugget last year, but none of this year's starts survived the greenhouse collapse and the torrential rain a few weeks later.

Not the usual sort of thing I post in this thread, but it seemed more appropriate here than elsewhere: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/20/donair-costume-canada-snack-pita-meat-controversy

Congratulations on that first zucchini! Mine are nowhere close (looks like I'm at least close to seeing blossoms). Your garden is the closest parallel to mine, in terms of conditions (and physical proximity, I guess), so I've been eagerly awaiting each post to see how things are progressing down your way. I've had a few harvests of lettuce though less than I'd expected, because my second planting got wiped out by an untimely rain (third planting looks like it'll succeed). Reasonable quantities of snap peas, chard and kale, and as of yesterday my first cherry tomato (which went straight from the vine to my GF's mouth, six feet and a few seconds away). I'll start seeing bush beans within the next week or so, and my shell peas are beginning to blossom so they're close. Garlic is close, too. It's been a couple of weeks since I harvested the scapes, so I'll be keeping a close eye on them for another week or two until I think the moment is right. I'm just now getting blossoms on my Roma and slicing tomatoes, so they're still a month away at least. Potatoes are going gangbusters and need to be hilled again. Broccoli should start heading up soon as well.