Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
We had pizza tonight also; perfectly cooked, so crispy on the bottom and edge, soft and fluffy in the center. I used my home-made salsa as the sauce, with mushrooms, black olives, sliced red bell pepper and onion, spicy Italian ground sausage, cheddar and mozzarella. I also put some spicy hot pizza topping mix into the dough. Your pizza looks great, Len, but I'm just not hungry right now.
Some chuckles for today: We are feeding a number of birds, including a very friendly Baltimore Oriole. He sits on the handle of our door to the deck, and pecks on the glass. He does this only when my husband is sitting at the dining room table. That is because my husband is the one who puts out a cut in half orange and refills a small dish of grape jelly early every morning. When the food is gone, that bird is telling him he wants refills, now!
Wednesday dinner was taco salads.
There is another possible solution to the seed-eating chipmunk -- and that is to start the seeds indoors and then transplant when they are a couple inches tall. I think I would try that, along with making cages to cover the seeds in the garden.
I wonder if there is some form of screen that is small enough to keep the chipmunk from getting digging through, yet large enough to allow the germinating squash to grow up through? Or perhaps, he could form a "basket"/cage out of fine screening and place it over the planted seed? He would need to remove the basket as the seed germinated and grew. I had squirrels and chipmunks dig up seeds in the raised planter beds on my deck. I was able to stand plastic forks tine side up in the dirt which kept most of the critters out. We had a bear on the deck a couple of nights ago -- it doesn't mess around with the small stuff!
Two nights ago we had horrendous downpours for several hours, a total of 1.02 inches of rain. Our gutters were pretty much filled with pine needles from the winter, so the water poured over the edge of the gutter and onto the planters and pots that I had put on the deck; everything was flooded. All my un-sprouted seeds were washed away, dirt was washed out of some pots, leaving bare roots, and other pots' drainage holes were clogged so plants were floating. I spent most of today cleaning up those messes. Tomorrow I will shop for Celebrity tomatoes and replacement herbs. Then I might spend quality time in the flower beds, yelling, swearing and angrily yanking out weeds from between the clusters of columbine, peonies, and lupines. I love to weed because they don't talk back!
We had salmon and potatoes roasted on the grill, asparagus, and cucumbers with a dill sauce.
The buns look perfect, Len! Nice shape and good color too.
The bread rounds didn't come out as great as the first time I made them. My husband decided to grill all 12 rounds at once, instead of in two batches of 6. That meant the grill cover had to stay open a longer period of time to flip each one, so the temp inside the grill dropped a lot more. Cooking only 6 at a time, at a higher temperature, made more prominent grill marks and a more crispy outside. I may also have brushed on less olive oil before baking them.
Saturday night I made chicken-broccoli alfredo, with a made-from-scratch alfredo sauce.
My husband will rototill the garden a second time and put up the electric fence this coming week. We had a heavy frost here Thursday night, 24*. I covered the 5-6 pots of herb and flower seedlings on the deck with a doubled blanket, and they are fine. The radishes, beets, spinach and lettuces that had just germinated in the deck planters are also OK. No other vegetables are planted yet, not until Memorial Day weekend. However, it appears that about half of the blueberry flowers are dead, along with a lot of the ferns. I haven't looked at the apple blossoms, and the blackberry and raspberry plants don't have buds yet. Our average last frost day is May 15, but a frost in mid-May is usually about 30*, never as low as 24*. The weather has been weird here this year, with huge temperature swings from 30s one day to upper 80s the next, and what seems like constant winds of 8-10 mph.
I've only made this in a loaf pan; I'll need to try it doubled and baked in my long baker. I would also skip the wheat gluten, cut the salt and yeast. I would use the Artisan Bread Topping.
We used the grilled rounds split in half as buns for grilled kielbasa with roasted peppers and onions.
I made another batch of the grilled asiago rounds this afternoon, but this time I used shredded cheddar and 2 teaspoons of Penzey's Foxpoint seasoning. We like these better than the asiago. I'm hoping my photo is small enough to attach. Nope, guess it is not.
-
AuthorPosts
