Potato Gets Naked

Naked Potato

It was a strip with no tease.  A sudden, muffled pumpfff came from the corner of the kitchen.  Investigation revealed the maker of the noise.  Just a  potato getting undressed.




Perhaps it was the potato's way of telling me it didn't want to be cooked in the microwave.  I should have known better.  Not too hard to guess what cleaning Things I get to do today!  

Buttah, I Love Buttah

Melting in the hot pan

Pretend I'm Julia--Things I get to do today--because I, too, love butter.

Anything added to butter is better!

The sound of butter as it melts and does its own little sizzle to release the moisture--that's the sound I listen for.  Then it's ready.










And don't crowd the mushrooms!

Really Good Dirt

My sister was under the weather.  But the weather was actually brilliant sun and blazing blue sky with shocks of yellow and orange-leafed trees thrown in for gaudy good measure.  Talk about insult to injury--not feeling good enough to be out puttering in the extravagance of a fall day!

In our family fresh, still-warm tapioca pudding is a comfort and get-well sort of food.  So I would make a pot just for my unfairly, under-weathered sister.  She would get most of it at least.  Cooks need to sample some of the wares for flavor balance and, well, just because it taste so wonderfully good.

Holds 3 cups and has no hole in the bottom

While the pudding cooled, I searched for the just-right container for transporting this feel-good "medicine" with an eye for a delightful and uplifting presentation.  That bowl is too big;  this one is too small.  That's a flower pot, not a bowl!



Indeed a lovely white flower pot from my favorite store had just come out of the dishwasher and was waiting on the counter for me to put it away.  Perfect size!

Pot filled with tapioca pudding.  Calendula (edible flowers) waiting to be "planted"

Very happy flowers "growing" in warm "dirt"

Perfect  uplifting presentation.  Oh, the Things I get to do today!  Here's a "Be Well" pot of flowers with Really Good Dirt.*










*After thought: cover the white "dirt" with 1/2" of crushed dark chocolate sandwich cookies for a more real black/brown "dirt" effect.

A Gathering of Greens

My favorite fresh salad is different and the same every time I make it.  It's the same because the list of ingredients is always the same:  whatever is currently growing in the yard.  It's different because whatever is currently growing changes just a little everyday.  "Gathering greens" isn't but could be on the "Things I get to do today" everyday.

If your pockets are empty and you want a feeling of tremendous abundance, take your kitchen container and wander around the garden/yard and pick a little from here and there until you have enough:  some tips from the fall-planted pea vines, a few sprigs of the fennel planted by Lynn a couple of years ago, leaves from the sorrel--a gift from Teresa before she moved, a handful of purslane (a common garden weed), a fistful of kale, a good-size bunch of Arugula that volunteered, a bit of dill (also a volunteer), blossoms from the calendula that grows wherever it's not actively pulled up once it is seeded,  blue borage blossoms (they are new in my garden this year, but I understand they do the same) and a whole color wheel of tomatoes.

Only the tomatoes took any care on my part to grow and even half of them were gifts from friend Susan.  Nearly everything came from the good heart of another person or just grew up on its own (volunteered).

Dinner from one the possible combinations of gathering greens.

The exquisite end result feeds much more than the body.  There are nutrients in this salad that will never exist in store-bought produce.  Plants grown with love feed us in a way the food grown for money never can.  Get out there a gather your greens*.

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*(Use your head.  Don't pick or pull up poisonous plants for your salad).