EcoMommyo's blog

All that drippy sounding stuff I said in April about spring being here? Forget I ever mentioned it. It proceeded to snow again amidst the usual punishing wind of a New Mexico spring. The only good side to that is that I can make soup without feeling like I’m clinging to the wonders of winter cooking. I really can move forward when situations change, really I can. But soup is so wonderful, what can I say.

The birds are singing, La! The fruit trees are blossoming, La! All this April is busting out all over, but the bummer of taxes due remains. And what a bummer it was. We wrote checks, we crammed forms into envelopes, we raised our voices in thanks for TurboTax, and then off to the post office and the bloody things were off. We have made our contribution to civilization.

I have two pounds of sunchokes in my refrigerator and I'm scared of them.

Oh, I'm sure they will be delicious but the cleaning of them puts fear in my heart. Perhaps, like many things in life, if I just had a stiff drink before facing them with vegetable scrub brush in hand, it would go a lot easier.

It's January and the holiday decorations are finally coming down. However, while tucking away our modest festive decorations won't take long, getting back to a normal diet will. Who knew that a steady diet of panettone, peppermint Jo-Jo's, and duck would make soup and salad pale in comparison?

Thursday, December 10, 2009
Pickup bag of produce. It is naturally chilled and I look over the bounty. My mind starts churning with ideas. Everything gets looked over and put away once I get home. The persimmons get a special nest since they are quite soft. I’ll have to think of a good use for them quite soon.

I have a produce bin full of pomegranates. This would probably be great if I was a Middle Eastern pasha but I’m just a gal who always puts her lunch together in a rush in the morning. I’d love to eat pomegranate seeds as a steady part of my diet but…they take too much time. Oh, now that we’ve been working our way through them, I’m getting faster but until they are bred so that the seeds just pop out in neat groups, this beautiful fruit is a lot of work.

The only good news to come from the end of Gourmet magazine is that now I have time to catch up with the recipes I ripped from its pages.

This past weekend, we found out how the neighborhood tastes...to a bee. I finished my fine beekeeping class series at EcoVersity and started thinking about how to wrap up the beekeeping season on my hives. That meant it was time to deal with honey.

It's Labor Day weekend and summer has begun winding down. I can only hope that it won't be winding down too quickly because it was just in the past few days that I noticed little proto-green beans on the vine. However, people are back in school, it is cool in the morning, and the scent of roasting green chile has permeated the northern New Mexico air. As the days get shorter, I feel this mad desperation coming over me to preserve what I can of summer.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have canned. It was a hot, sticky, dirty dish producing business. However, I have two lovely sealed jars of apricot butter waiting for my use some time this fall or winter. It better be this fall or winter, because I did not go through the processing step and hope that I kept everything clean enough to avoid botulism for awhile.