Tag Archives: salsa verde

September warmed and sweetened.

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My worries about September being too cool did not come to pass. We even had a sort of heat wave for two days, and one night when the temperature did not drop below the mid-60’s. As soon as the sun set that evening, we opened the windows and started running the fans. It was cooler the next night, back to our usual marine air, and being able to leave the windows open night and day, and even to let the sun shine in.

It’s warm enough to ripen figs, and we have eaten a few, but something is not right with my tree. Most of the figs turn purple before they get any size, and fall off when they are still small and hard. The ground is littered with them. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the problem is, but I still don’t know.

At least, this year I’m happy about the tomatoes. It’s not often anymore that I have home-grown, vine-ripened “love apples” here, other than cherry tomatoes. I suppose one could make a BLT with those, but it never occurred to me. This summer I have Early Girls, and I wanted to make at least one sandwich using slices of them, lettuce and bacon. I accomplished that goal, and it was well worth the trouble.

And I used a few stems of the abundant tarragon to make the wonderful Tarragon Salsa Verde:

  • leaves from 1 small bunch fresh parsley (approx. 20g / 1 cup)
  • leaves from fresh tarragon (approx. 5g / 1/4 cup)
  • 1 spring onion including green part (roughly chopped)
  • zest of 1 lemon and juice of 1/2 lemon
  • 1 teaspoon sea salt flakes or 1/2 teaspoon pouring salt
  • 6 tablespoons olive oil

Mix all in a food processor and use as a dip, a spread for bread or on baked chicken, or eggs. It’s just wonderful. I even froze a little batch one time and used it later.

It comes to mind just now, that this salsa would probably make a nice addition to a BLT… I might try that before the tomatoes and tarragon have become a memory.

It wasn’t until last week that I got around to bringing flowers into the house, a bouquet of zinnias, with sweet peas and basil. This year I seem to be content to just stare out at the garden, or wander the paths doing little things, and procrastinating on this year’s Fall Reorganizing. Living where the winters are mild makes it possible — and often beneficial — to put off planting or transplanting until October. But extending the season has its down side; I hope next year I won’t have to do any of this moving-plants-around kind of work — but that’s what I’ve said for three years now.

I opened up one dried flower of the Queen Anne’s Lace that had self-sowed next to my driveway, and sprinkled the seeds among the Mexican Evening Primrose that grow in that arid corner. The latter needs a least a little water in the summer, and is always overrun by weeds. The Queen Anne’s Lace grows vigorously all over the place without any summer water. Maybe it will thrive, and crowd out a few of the less beautiful weeds.

On one of those hot days I did loads of laundry, and used the clothesline. The overflowing basket of items that needed special treatment in the sink is now empty! These two pillowcases that are a hundred years old are fresh and clean. I inherited them from my husband’s aunts or grandmother, and they were a little yellow in places. Now I will start using them. I’m not certain about the monogram… I think it might be FLK? If it is, I don’t know which relative that could be.

Now that Bea is living here, my kitchen is getting more use; it’s really fun to have a girl around who likes cooking and produces things for me to taste. Recently she made meringues from aquafaba! I knew that liquid from canned garbanzo beans was a versatile ingredient, but I had no idea it could substitute for egg whites in this way. She used aquafaba, sugar, and vanilla. When I was first eating the cookie, I didn’t realize it wasn’t a regular meringue, because she had made them after I went to bed. They were very nice.

Flowers, cookies, tomatoes and figs — September so far is warm and sweet.

 

The wren sings and insists.

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ebird.org

The song of a Bewick’s Wren came through my bedroom window as I was waking to the morning. I’ve never heard one of these birds carrying on so long.

If you are not familiar with it you can listen here: Bewick’s Wren

What busyness in my life all at once. June warmth makes my blood to move faster, and days fill up and empty themselves, as the thermometer on my patio rises and falls. A few of the many things:

**Half the plants in the garden need trimming already! I severely pruned the plum trees, trying to keep them small, as per Grow a Little Fruit Tree. Santa Barbara daisies, wallflower, helianthemum, gazanias, bush lupine and salvias, all needed a midsummer shearing. Then there were all those one-gallon salvias and such for which spots must be found in the ever more crowded landscape. I’ve been gardening for hours every day.

**Still seeing butterflies and wasps that I don’t know, and which I can sometimes identify. These wasps that my Seek app says are paper wasps ignore the sunflowers that are open, and hang out on the fat buds. I wonder what they are doing…

**Rats seem to be eating my garden as they did in 2016. Then it was tomatoes. This time it was the single collard plant that came up from some old seeds. After it grew back for a few days they ate it again. Then they tried the unripe Painted Lady runner beans but evidently didn’t like them. I’ve planted fresher collard seeds and am trying to figure out how to protect them when they sprout. Rats spurn Swiss chard, and all the other current offerings, though they did nibble on snow peas back in April.

So as not to attract rodents unnecessarily, I’ve been bringing the bird feeders into the garage at night. At first light finches and mourning doves and even crows are waiting for the sunflower seeds to reappear.

View from my bedroom window.

This morning, as I often do, I pulled on my robe and went out to hang their “chapel” feeder on its hook above the patio, and then I looked up into the redwood tree, because I could tell that the wren was broadcasting from there at that moment. But I couldn’t see him. A junco and titmice and a hummingbird flew back and forth from that tree, to and fro across the yard from tree to rooftop to tree; but the wren followed his routine of staying out of sight while visiting in turn every tall tree in the neighborhood, making sure he communicated to each household, insisting on joy.

**I’ve been cooking a lot. I love having fresh tarragon with which to make the Tarragon-Parsley Salsa Verde. This time I used walnut oil instead of olive oil and it’s great. The yellow in the picture above  is lemon zest.

I took all the remaining Painted Lady beans I’d stored and soaked them together. The older they get, the more they turn dark and red and shiny. The older beans took longer to soak, and longer to cook to tender.

**My computer comes and goes with my Computer Guy, and while he’s always interesting to talk to on almost any topic, the other day when he came merely to pick up the PC he wanted to talk for an hour before he even unplugged it. He has lots of ideas for how to improve the state of the nation. I told him he’d need to be king so he could make unilateral decisions.

new shower curtain

**The construction workers came back! The new bathroom is perfectly usable now, though it has a couple of details unfinished. I soaked in its tub the night after my most strenuous day of pruning. Lovely. My master bedroom walk-in closet is almost done — maybe tomorrow I will be able to start moving into it, after more than a year of shifting my belongings from one room to another. This was the closet that I basically wanted to get unextravagantly spiffed up before the major remodeling was begun. And it has been the biggest inconvenience. That is sometimes most aggravating to think about, but on days like today, the wren makes me laugh aloud.

**I pulled this weed out of the germander and was impressed by the little black seeds. I think it is Black Medick.

**Yesterday morning I was surprised by daughter Pippin appearing in my front garden and calling “Mama!” up to me where I sat by a sunny open window. Such a familiar voice and word… ❤ How she happened to be here is too long a story, but we enjoyed the best hug ever — well, at least since I saw them in March. And then we sat in the garden and chatted and it was so good for our mother-daughter hearts. She and I are not phone-talkers at all; we really need to be together in person to be fully satisfied.

Violas surviving in the shade of asparagus.

**I don’t like to write much here about things that are expected to happen in the future, because they aren’t real yet. But the excitement I feel is terribly real, over the imminent arrival of Kate and her family; they will stay with me for several weeks! She is my youngest, whom I went to India to see, and whose two babies I was blessed to see come into the world, one in India and one in DC last summer. Her family actually contracted the coronavirus and got over it while cooped up in their DC apartment; otherwise they would have been leery of coming to California to see all the grandparents before they go abroad again.

We’ll see what kind of blogging communications I will be able to accomplish in the next while — maybe it will be the little boy voices that wake me morning by morning to the important realities of this particular summer season. That will also be music to my ears.

“Their voice has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the end of the universe.”
-Psalm 19:4

How I saved my greens.

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I’m ashamed to think of how much cilantro has gone bad in my fridge over the years. I love it, and so I buy a fresh bunch from time to time, which isn’t usually that pricey, but still, when it goes into the trash slimy and blackening, it’s a sad waste. 😦

Today I was busying myself cooking up vegetables that came in my CSA (community supported agriculture) box, and I came to the bunch of cilantro… Hmm… Maybe I had planned to combine that with tomatoes and peppers to make more Indian Egg Bhurji. But — No tomatoes were in the house, and I didn’t want to spend time de-stemming cilantro anyway. (I must need a special prayer to pray while I am doing that perfectly lovely job that seems so tedious. That’s what Kate told me to do about my boring floor exercises.)

An idea came to me when I saw the bag of arugula I’d bought yesterday — also something that I love, which I probably thought I’d put in a green salad, if I could get around to washing the lettuce… When I was a child, the task of preparing the large, leafy-green salad that without fail was part of our evening meal always fell to us children. I always wonder if I am harboring a childish rebelliousness deep in my psyche, that makes me resist salad-making, too.

The thought that occurred was, Could I make a sauce or pesto by combining arugula and cilantro? I’m not confident enough as a chef to go right at it, so I looked online and found that many people had done just that, with great variations. I customized mine to be fast-friendly (vegan) and not too lemony, and to use more arugula than cilantro, because I had a lot more of that leaf on hand. I kept the ingredients list short, and didn’t add garlic or pepper because the greens are both pretty flavorful already.

Here is what I came up with. All the amounts below are approximate. Many people like their pesto less thick, and will add more oil. Before washing the cilantro, I cut off the longest stems while they were still tied together in a bunch, but left the rest of the stems for the food processor to deal with. No de-stemming by hand!

SAVE the GREENS PESTO

3 cups packed cilantro
4 1/2 cups packed arugula
1/3 cup sunflower oil
3/4 teaspoon salt
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 cup toasted walnut pieces

Grind the walnuts in the food processor and then add the other ingredients to make a paste, adding more oil or salt or lemon to taste.

Until today I never paid much attention to all those “pestos” made from everything but the classic basil-olive oil-Parmesan combination, but recently I learned how to make Tarragon Salsa Verde from Jo, and found it very adaptable and always delicious. (I have planned to share my results with you but this recipe pushed ahead in line.)

I think its versatility gave me the hope that other green things could work together the same way. And they did indeed form something easy that saved us, greens and human, from possible shame, and added another tasty and healthy item to my menu options. Now I can spread my salad on crackers!