First! Zucchini! Harvest!

Look at these beauties! I still can’t believe I actually grew something. As you can see these are the eight ball zucchini, whose shape I am completely in love with. Such cute little balls. I started these from seed and had them under lights until they were ready to put outside. I read somewhere that you could use your compost pile to plant zucchini in since they are such heavy feeders, so I made big piles of compost where I wanted the plants and just put the starts in the center of the pile. It’s worked wonderfully and I will continue to do it this way.

I also learned that each zucchini plant produces both male and female flowers. When your little zucchinis rot and fall off the plant, it means they were never pollinated. I was hand pollinating my flowers and found out that I was doing it wrong, actually*. I was essentially too late to the party. You see that flower in the top right? How it’s all curled up? Once your flower is like that – it’s too late. Either your plant got pollinated or it didn’t. See the flower in the bottom right? How it looks like a tube? This is what you need. That is of course, if you are interested in hand pollinating.

The flower on the left is a male. Peel back the flowers and you can see the pollen covered stamen. The flower on the right is a female, you can tell by the the wee little zucchini at the base (not shown, of course). Peel back her flower and rub the pollen on the center pistil. Smoke a cigarette, perhaps take a shower.

It’s an oddly intimate act, and I felt a little funny when I first started doing it, like I was invading their privacy or something. The guilt is over and now all I can think about is eating their babies! And I’ve been so consumed with the copulating that I forgot about stuffing the flowers with cheese! Yum!
*My info came from Caitlin, an awesome person at the Olympia Seed Exchange.

White Gazpacho

I have been wanting to experiment with chilled soups since last summer, when I never seemed to get around to doing it. So, like the hash, I am going to make one cold soup a week. To kick us off, I chose to make White Gazpacho with Pickled Shrimp from Food and Wine magazine. I got gorgeous local spot prawns, and was actually able to find marona almonds at a local store.

This was an amazing soup, I have to tell you. Seriously decadent and rich, I don’t think I could eat too much at one time. I think it would be perfect as a small bite. I served it in these awesome rolly polly shots glasses, which was perfect. I also still a little wary about the “chilled” aspect of these soups …”room temperature” might better.

Do you like chilled soups?

Tiling…it’s not that hard

Tile is on the wall! I was so afraid to start this project…the fact that I kept putting it off for, um…MONTHS is evidence enough. I finally got to the point where I couldn’t put if off any longer, staring at the backerboard day after day was making me crazy.

It’s messier than I thought it would be. I didn’t realize that the mastic would get everywhere, This is definitely a goopy finger project. I highly recommend having a bucket with rags and water next to you if you are going to tackle something like this.

Before I began I reread This Young House’s entry on their bathroom project, and it was really helpful. I also had a tiling book on hand to get me started.

There also might have been a panicked call to Dad to reassure me that I was doing everything correctly (which I was). Thanks Dad!

The most time consuming part of this project so far has been measuring and cutting the end pieces. Several times I mis-measured, cut tiles, realized I mis-measured, swore a bit..got glue all over the place…you know, that sort of thing. I kept forgetting to take off the measurement for the grout line. I would measure the space and cut the tile according to that measurement. D’oh!

I won’t be making that mistake again and I think the rest of it will go smoothly. I hope.

Hash: The Bacon Edition

This week’s hash is a trifecta of bacon, inspired by the bacon sausage sold at Uli’s Famous Sausage in Pike Place Market. We went a litte sausage crazy there, and my eyes about popped out of my head when I saw the bacon sausage. I knew immediately that it would be going into hash.

Bacon shows up again in the cheese. I think it’s made locally, but unfortunately the label on the cheese disappeared long ago and I can’t remember who makes it.

Last but not least, pure unadulterated bacon was cooked and then pulverized to make a bacon “powder” to use as a garnish.  A gloriously greasy garnish.

Mushrooms, potatoes, eggs, and a beautiful yellow oregano complete the dish. I totally overcooked the eggs, AGAIN…I make myself crazy sometimes. You would think that I would not forget that I have something under the broiler.  But I walk off to go do something else…la la la…tasty bacon bacon bacon hash anyway. Add your hash to the flick pool!

“Mmm…bacon.”

-Homer Simpson

The Perfect Towel Hook

The bathroom makeover has slowed to a painful crawl after the initial frenzy of activity. This is mainly due to the fact that the people who know what they are doing are no longer here (parents) which leaves just Jeffery and me.

Everything is functioning, the tub/sink/toilet work, it’s just the cosmetics. Like tiling. I have a three day weekend ahead and I have already declared it to the universe and anyone within range that I WILL BE TILING THIS WEEKEND. There. Now the internet knows!

We had to take all of the towel racks off the walls to fill in the holes in order to repaint the bathroom, which has left us without a place to hang our towels,

and as a consequence, they are scatter all over the house, draped on chairs, doors, and the elliptical machine. I don’t want a towel rack, I want hooks and it’s been a little difficult to find the perfect hook. I have narrowed it down to two, both from Anthropologie and I think I am going to go with # 1 as the blue and black with fit with the color scheme.

I actually have hook #2, and while I love, love, love, the black and white stripe…the hook is just a little too big for the space. I think it could live on the back of the door perhaps.

So..yeah..tiling..I’m scared! Wish me luck!