Fall Garden

You can feel fall in the air and the pumpkins are all over the Amish market, but there are still some lovely things growing in the garden. My friend Harriet has a crabapple tree in her yard and brought these to me so I plan to can some spiced apples when she brings me the next batch on Monday. I found these amazing yams in the Amish market this morning. They are a lot more orange than what you see in the supermarket and I can't wait to see what they taste like. Bought a few for ABJ too.....

And after two weeks of pouring rain, the sun came out today so I ventured into my garden to find this lovely eggplant, huge basil leaves and a tangy baby lettuce misture, all of which seem to love this muggy weather.

Hurricane Gourmet

Something about a hurricane brewing inspired me to do a lot of cooking activity yesterday. One of my accomplishments was the lovely peach creme fraiche pie that ABJ was going to make last week when she came over. It never got made but she left the recipe and I tried it out last night. Very delicious, but the lady who adapted it from Martha Steward, made a few mistakes and, very disappointingly I couldn't taste the fresh home-grown thyme I put into the crust at all. So next time I will amp that up and hope for the best. So this morning, my inspiration continued with Fluffy Eggs - my dad's unique Sunday breakfast dish.

And continued into the afternoon as I made Jalapeno Cheddar Cheese Cornbread Ebelskivers....

And made a huge discovery that two-pronged lobster picks are the perfect thing for turning the little pancake over. to brown on the other side. Great recipe - creamy light and cheesy in the middle. Kudos to the person who adapted these from the Williams Sonoma catalogue picture (they use their own cornmeal pancake mix).

Alessi Michael Graves Bird Whistle Tea Kettle

So some nice news after a rather stressful week at work and in the garden. The first is that this afternoon Dr Ost and I figured out which of the medications that the ER doc prescribed yesterday is making loose my short term memory and hallucinate - not really awful hallucinations, more like a wavy overlay of faded shapes over the rest of my visual field, but who needs this? And the really amazing news is that I found this Michael Graves tea kettle, which was commissioned by Alessi that I have been lusting over since it came out in the early 80's, in Ebay , for $45. It is still being made and the new one retails for $175 minimum. :)

I fought the Yellow Jacket and the Yellow Jacket won........

Yes, here I am again - just back from the emergency room with a painful swollen leg, swollen wrist, a finger that looks like a breakfast sausage and feeling woozy from an epinephrine shot and IV steriods. But at least I can now breathe ok and am not covered with itchy welts from head to toe. I mean what are the odds of never having been stung by anything in 62 years and then getting 3 episodes (one only a month ago) in one year.

But who said that life was fair?

Between these varmints and the deer ticks, my life as a gardner has become life-threatening. So I guess I am going to take my allergist's advice and start getting those once a week shots that just might make me immune after 5 years. Not a happy prospect but at this point I think I would rather be alive. than dead from anaphylactic shock. Guess I will go lie down since I am having a harder and harder time doing this typing. And I should be feeling this way for a week since I have been given prescriptions that all say that they make you drowsy and prohibit you from driving. Sure - so how am I going to get to work? And where is Carol - oh she is the one who is snoring in her office.

And all my gardening tools and wheelbarrel are lying randomly across the grass where I dropped them and ran for my life. :(

Kimono Fabric - My New Obsession

Sunday evening I was browsing Ebay trying to find the right color of purple wool (which I never did locate) and I stumbled upon some amazing Japanese Kimono wool. It runs about 12-14" wide and comes in an amazing variety of abstract patterns. I ended up finally ordering 10 meters of this one for about $30, shipped from Japan for a pretty reasonable price . I am having a lot of fun thinking about the kind of dress I would make given the narrow width. And then I got this lovely much smaller wool butterfly piece from a lady in New Zealand who only ships one day a week because she has 4 kids.

And this small one as well. She is a very poor photographer and puts the little origami's on the fabric to "help focus the camera" (??) so I am sort of wondering what the rest of this one looks like.

Then I wandered into Kimono fabrics in general and turned up these completely fantastic abstract Obi's. This one is called a Suminogashi dye and unfortunately I lost the bidding on it because all the darned auctions are on Japanese time and finish up at around 3AM.

This is a small panel of Obi silk that I completely love....

And then I got completely carried away and bid on this lovely silk kimono - which I lost because the auction finished at 3AM - and sold for $31. I have to admit I had mixed feelings on loosing it because I am not quite sure what I would have done with it.

Junk

Seeing LLG's Mum's overflowing attic made me feel a lot better about all the stuff in our basement. When I saw the blog title - Garage Sale - I was wondering why she didn't refer to a boot sale, since she is English, but when I saw this I realized that there was no way this would fit into a boot.

Hot Hot Hot Birthday Weather Again

My birthday always seems to fall during some of the worst weather of the summer. This year has been no exception, with the entire western and northeastern parts of the country consumed with a withering heatwave. Last night I arrived at the gym to find that the AC wasn't working too well, but I virtuously toughed it out, racing through my workout in the 90 degree heat in record time. On the way home, soaking with sweat, I stopped at the supermarket, which was over-chilled but had half the lights out to conserve energy I guess. So here I am, getting ready for a birthday lunch with my 90 year old mom on the hottest day of the year. I made the top last weekend from some lovely Indian fabric that I had bought at John Lewis in 1998. Picture is a bit blurry, but taking self-portraits is not one of my talents.

I started the day at about 7:30 to avoid the worst heat - the temperature was already 84 - and first headed to the Amish market where I found some lovely tiny sweet plums.

When I got home, after I took the picture of the plums, I arranged my huge plum tomatoes and tiny sweet orange paruche tomatoes with a deep violet prosperosa eggplant from my garden.

It hit 102 in the afternoon and after my mom and I had lunch (transported by my highly air conditioned Camry) I found that she hadn't been to pick up her mail for three days because it was too hot for her to leave the house. So we stopped by the main building of her community and I waited outside of the door while she dashed inside. It just started raining this evening, so I hope it cools off to 90 or so tomorrow.