Thanksgiving Dinner

I'm late, but oh well.

Thanksgiving was fun. Lots of people, good food, etc.


I ate a lot of vegetables, but actually did not overeat. I only had one plate of food.


(And a bowl.) I made white bean and leek cassoulet with baked-in biscuits. I screwed up the biscuits; me and dough do not get along. I'm not sure what a cassoulet is, except I think it's a type of stew. It was so-so. I probably won't make it again.


As per usual, I didn't eat any dessert, but someone complained last year when I didn't show the options on the blog. This is what I call "the dooky roll." It's yellow sheet cake rolled up with jelly, whipped cream, and chocolate, or something like that. Everyone loves it. I don't think I've ever tried it, although my parents make it a lot. This time there are raspberries on top. I love the way raspberries melt in your mouth like little fuzzy jewels. I think I was 22 before I ever had fresh raspberries. My life has not been the same since.


I think this was apple pie. Didn't try it.


My mom is a great hostess, and has a flair for making everything both beautiful and welcoming.


My parents have gotten in the habit of buying fresh flowers every week. It adds a really nice feeling to the kitchen.

Back in the South Week in Review

This week has been all about catching up on various tasks at work and home. I won't bore you with work, but at home there have been a few small but pleasing developments.

Garden. I moved all my plants (again) because they were still getting baked in the shady-ish site where I had placed them a few weeks ago. I'm beginning to wonder if most of them are permanently dead (sounds redundant, but you never know). There's one spot that's shady all day and I've placed them all there, in a long line along the driveway to see if they'll recover.

Kitchen. I started cooking again. That was the odd thing about traveling -- I only cooked twice! Something I haven't mentioned here before is that for all of this year I've been keeping a cooking diary. The librarian in me was curious about how much I cooked in a year and what I made, so I've been [mostly] taking photos of every meal I make -- and when I forget to take a photo, I write down the meal.

This was the first meal I made after getting home. It's a mushroom pie with a spinach crust (you may have noticed I've been obsessed with savory pies for the past few months) and a salad made with locally grown organic mixed greens and lots of toppings, including feta, currants, coconut, green onions, toasted nuts and seeds, and sprouts. Oh, and tahini-watercress dressing. It was taaaaasty.


Living room. I still have some straightening up and cleaning to do, but I've been missing fresh flowers in my house, so I cut a fresh magnolia off our backyard tree. I picked off all the leaves, except three, ikebana-style. It smells like heaven.

Rain

It's been raining a lot lately, which is good for the plants and aquifer. The other day I was startled by the appearance of a bright-white beautiful flower in an otherwise boring lawn. Kim says it's a rain lily, Zephyranthes atamasca. I like it.

Publish Post

Desultory Update

I finally fertilized my plants.

Otherwise I have been slacking.

Here are my winter annuals. It's starting to warm up, so I don't know how much longer they're going to last. They keep getting bigger and adding blooms. I'll be sad to see them go.


Some days after work I drive through campus to go to the gym, and when I do, I pass Lake Alice. It's always beautiful around that time of day, and I always mean to take a picture. But even going only 20 mph, it's hard to get the camera out and on and photographing within, like, 30 seconds. The thing is slow. The other day I tried to get a picture, but just missed the lake. Maybe one of these days I will just pull over and get out of my car. Revolutionary.

Flowers from the Garden

I cut some of the flowers off my geranium and dianthus for my living room.

The vase is an old milk bottle I got from the flea market. It makes me think of Neely O'Hara stealing her neighbor's milk in Valley of the Dolls.

Cold Damage

The poor camellia tree. Right when it gets going with a full head of blooms, the temperature drops. Then all the gorgeous red flowers turn brown and fall off. Then it warms up again. And the camellias bloom...and it freezes...and the camellias turn brown and fall off.


I got tired of the seesaw weather, with its endless variations on hot-cold, hot-cold, so I gave up trying to cover all my plants each time. Whatever was in the large planters definitely suffered. I have been leaving the frost-damaged foliage intact, per IFAS recommendations, to protect whatever parts of the plants may still be alive from future cold snaps. But I have to admit it's driving me crazy. I can't stand staring at the dessicated ruins every day.

What's Growing around My House, Pt. 3

In one of my planters, I took out the bits of remaining plant matter that clearly isn't salvageable and put these new Easter lily bulbs in (Emily got them for us from work). We'll see if they adapt to my "low-key" gardening style!


Hanging strawberries: I don't know why I bother--the dang birds nibble little bits out of each strawberry before I get to it. But every now and again I get an unsullied one. They're not as sweet as last year.


Pulled a crop of radishes the other day. I cut both the radishes themselves and the greens up for a delicious salad I've been eating all week. They're spicier than store-bought radishes--tasty.

What's Growing around My House, Pt. 2

When I moved into my house a couple of months ago, I started a compost pile. Since then I keep waiting for something I discard to sprout, 'cuz when the compost sprouts, I get free plants.

It's easier--and cheaper--to try to grow new things this way, rather than go to the store and pick some plants out. At the old house, I got all kinds of seedlings, some more successful than others. But I've been sorely disappointed at the new house, as my compost has remained singularly barren.

So I watered the compost, and I added more leaves, and I stirred it up, and I waited patiently. Finally, the other day I went to dump my food scraps and voila! Some seedlings had emerged. But I didn't recognize what they were. My compost had never sprouted such plants before!

I carefully dug out one of the plants and looked at its origins. A kernel of corn! Exciting. One of these days I may pull up all of these seedlings and put them in pots. Until then, I just admire them as I dump my scraps.


One of my uncles gave me this ivy plant over the holidays. He had a bunch of them hanging from the pergola on his patio in Ft. Myers. There was some story about some teachers he bought them for...I don't know. Anyway, he had a bunch and offered me one. I loaded the thing--it has vines at least six feet long--into my hatchback and went to St. Pete for a few days. When I drove home, the cooking I had subjected it to in the hatch didn't seem to have affected it.

So naturally I concluded the thing it was invincible (I do test my plants awfully, I know), so I brought the ivy into my bedroom. I was super stoked because it's my first bedroom plant. Imagine--a plant in your bedroom! I never had imagined that, so when it finally occurred to me it blew my mind. I stared at it lovingly every day.

The only problem is that my bedroom is like a cave. It's some shade of dark 24/7 and always kind of cool. I put the plant up and forgot about it for a couple of weeks. Then I started noticing it was shedding a lot of brown leaves. I took it down and realized that the wall-facing side was dying. So I put it in the ICU, i.e., the backyard. I've been leaving it there to soak up some sun and rain, and hopefully it will pull through.

I do like having a bedroom plant. Maybe when I bring it back in, I'll rotate it more frequently so all the sides can suffer equally. "Nobody puts Baby in the corner!"


My Florida violets are thriving, although one much more visibly so than the other--don't ask me why, since they get the same amount of light and water. This native plant is sadly considered a weed in most people's landscapes. But I love it--my favorite plants seem to be considered weeds by most people--and am looking forward to the delicate blooms in later spring.

What's Growing around My House, Pt. 1

It's been alternately cold and rainy, or both cold and rainy, a lot lately. I guess I can admit without shocking anyone too much that I have also been lazy. So I haven't done much new planting in the past month or so--but I do check on my plants every few days to see if they need water, if the weeds are taking over the pots, etc.

In December or January Tom gave us all beautiful bromeliads. I know Kim gave me some instructions about planting the one I got, but to get it off the floor of my bedroom I just plunked it down into one of my planters that was otherwise filled with the brown, frost-killed remains of ye olde plants. The bromeliad seems to be doing ok, even though I haven't protected it during the cold snaps we've since endured.


My cyclamen has been loving the weather recently. I've been surprised that this puppy has survived at least two Florida summers--by all rights it really should have died of heat stroke by now. But I've been pretty careful to keep it in the shade.


My winter annuals are geeked about the weather, too. I love these things--they require no maintenance whatsoever. I planted the plugs in pots willy-nilly two or three months ago, and they've been growing and growing and growing and blooming ever since. I park in my driveway right near where I have them, and so I stop and admire them every day. Granted, my design skills are non-existent, but I don't care. It's all about the color.

I gave one of my pots (missing from this photo) to my grandmother to keep her company when she was in the hospital recently and was surprised by how excited she got about the pansies. "They look like they have little faces, Sarah," she said. I think they brightened her day a little.

Winter Annuals

My winter annuals are thriving, and I finally took a photo of them. From what I recall, there are dianthus, pansy, viola, and snapdragon. (My co-worker Jen kept hers all organized and labeled, but mine were randomly planted in containers. I like bright colors all mixed up.) They're getting bigger and more of them are blooming now.

Native Flowers

Thursday I picked a bouquet of native flowers from in front of the office. They looked so nice on the dashboard of my car on the way home that I took a photo (while stopped at a red light):

There's swamp sunflower (ours is over six feet tall!), gaillardia/blanket flower, firebush, scarlet salvia, and muhly grass.