Scones!

I baked apple-cinnamon scones today. They just came out of the oven, and the apartment smells great. I did it differently than usual, instead of grating the apples and getting all that juice in the mix and having to add lots of flour to make up for all the liquid, I just diced them instead and tossed them into the Kitchenaid. Going to spread some raw honey (More on that later!) on them and try them just as soon as they cool, and if this way turns out to be better I'll take pictures of the process next time I make them. For now, here's the recipe I use, taken from Allrecipes.com and adapted for the apples:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup sugar
• A few dashes of cinnamon, I'd say about a tablespoon (more if you like, though!)
  
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 8 tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled well or frozen
• 1 large cooking apple, like fuji or granny smith. If you really like apples, use 2 of them and mix the varieties.
  
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 1 large egg

1. Preheat the oven to 400, or 375 if you've got an electric oven that runs hot like I do.

2. In a medium bowl (Or in the bowl of a stand mixer if you have one), mix flour, 1/3 cup sugar, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Now, the original recipe called for freezing the stick of butter and grating it, but I just slice it into fairly thin slices and then add them in. Work the butter in with your fingers or a fork, or just set your mixer to "stir" (or the lowest setting depending on what mixer you have) and let it do all the work. The end result should be a mixture that resembles breadcrumbs.

3. Now, you can go ahead and peel, core, and slice your apples. If you get one of those things with handles that cores and slices your apples all at once, so much the better! Go ahead and dice those babies up into fairly small chunks, and toss them in. After that comes the sour cream and egg. If you're doing the mixing by hand, you can beat the sour cream into the egg and mix it in at once if it's easier for you. Otherwise, just toss it into the mixer and set it on "stir". Don't overwork it, you want it to be just mixed.

4. At this point you can take the whole lot out of the bowl and slap it onto a floured surface. Form it into a round with your hands and pat it kind of flat, so it's a few inches thick. Slice it into 8 wedges with a sharp knife, and then gently transfer those wedges to a well-greased baking sheet (You can use parchment paper if you have some, but I don't.)

5. Brush milk onto the tops and sides, sprinkle with some more cinnamon and some sugar, and throw them into the oven for about 15-20 minutes. The tops will get a little browned, and when they're done they'll be slightly crumbly and a knife stuck in the middle should come out clean or with a crumb or two stuck to it. Let them cool a little while on a rack and enjoy!

Now, for a note on honey. I recommend these spread with raw honey. Not the crappy store bought kind! Get some good honey. My favorite is Gentle Breeze Honey, but you can only get it in Wisconsin since they have no online store. It's hard to describe how good this stuff tastes on scones or better yet, on cornbread. Think of how a field of the most beautiful flowers smell, and then imagine that smell as an explosion of taste in your mouth. That's raw, unfiltered honey. (I was going to put a fake disclaimer here claiming no responsibility for any addictions resulting from this advice, but you know what? I'll go ahead take full responsibility for it, because I'm doing you a favor. :P Go now. Buy some raw honey!)

Hyperfocus to the rescue!

Now that I'm not working such a crappy job I find myself much happier and much more motivated to deal with household drudgery. Before, even doing the dishes was a monumental task, but lately I've been doing them every day. I still use the dishwasher sometimes, of course (why have it if you're not going to use it after all?), especially when I've been cooking or baking since it's easier to load all the utensils, baking pans, cookie sheets, and my kitchenaid bowl into the dishwasher than it is to leave it all sprawled out on the counter while I wash it in the tiny undivided sink we have.

I digress. Wasn't meaning to go into extreme details of my dishwashing routine. Anyway, having the entire morning to myself and not stressing about the next disaster I'm about to walk into at work really has taken a load off my mind. I think the onset of warm weather has contributed to this too, it seems like sunshine and a breeze through the open windows really does a lot to get me into housecleaning mode. The only thing I don't like about the job is that since I'm gone most evenings, I rarely cook dinner any more. I suppose it's a good opportunity for Trevor to learn some cooking skills himself. He has talent, but he doesn't have the drive that I do. When he gets a bug up his butt and has to cook something, it usually turns out pretty good if not downright delicious. I'm off today though, so tonight we're going to have lemon pepper chicken and spinach wraps with italian dressing and a few handfuls of grapes on the side.

I really ought to bake some bread, and I have a cast iron pan that needs seasoning. It's cool today, so perhaps I'll go ahead and season that pan. I might bake the bread today, or I may just wait for some other cool day. I'm not sure how long this "Do lots of stuff" hyperfocus thing is going to last. I sure love them when they come along, though. I just blitzed through the bathroom, cleaning the sink and counter and decluttering the cabinets both under and over the sink. I wiped down the mirrors, then I cleaned the tub, wiped off the grungy-looking rubbermaid drawers in there, and cleaned the toilet. I should have done the floors but meh. Ran out of steam, and got distracted by the wood polish (My kitchen table is dust-free and shiny now though!) Spending an hour and a half cleaning with no getting side-tracked is a huge thing for somebody with ADD, let me tell you. When these little whims pop up I've learned not to ignore them, it really is a huge opportunity wasted.

Well, I'm hungry and we have fixin's for turkey sandwiches that are beckoning to me from the fridge. Hopefully Trev didn't eat all the potato chips.

More balcony and garden

Here is the view from our balcony, taken today. We're on the third floor so it's pretty nice. It's usually very quiet out save for the occasional loud car or nearby construction, so I sit out here often to enjoy my breakfast or read a book. Lately we've had a problem with wasps, but I got rid of them. Normally I leave bugs alone, but paper wasps are aggressive and like to get into the house, and none of us want to be stung. I wish I'd taken pictures of the nest after killing the queen wasp, it had larvae and eggs in it, which is pretty cool if you like bugs (I do.)


This is the tree just outside. I love this tree, it provides me with plenty of birds and a place to hang my feeders. I put them out into the branches using a long pole, and bring them back in again when they need refilling. Currently the wooden feeder there is empty due to Red Winged Blackbirds raiding it nonstop. I've just taken to filling a tray and setting it on the edge of the balcony for now, so the seed isn't knocked onto the ground and wasted by these giant birds trying to land on it. I get mourning doves, cardinals, chickadees, american goldfinches, robins, and the occasional blue-jay here on the porch. In the winter there will be dark-eyed juncos, but you never see them in the summer here.

These are new berries starting to form. I'll get a few stragglers like this until fall, when the second bigger crop should come in. It won't be enough for preserves or anything, unfortunately. I think when we get a yard I'm going to plant a big patch of June-bearing varieties so I can have a bumper crop to make preserves out of. But that's a story for another day.






Look at all the flowers on these tomato plants! I can't wait to see this thing loaded down with fruit later on this summer. I've been trying to ensure pollination by shaking the branches, apparently that works well with tomatoes. I do get the occasional fat little bumblebee up here but not much else in the way of pollinators, so it's up to me. You can see my finch sock there too. There are almost always at least two birds hanging off that thing.




Here are more tomatoes. That red one still has a couple of days to ripen before I'll bring it inside for Trev to put on his sandwiches. This plant also has plenty of flowers and is growing well. A few sunburned leaves, but otherwise it's a healthy plant.








Pole beans! These are Kentucky Wonders. They absolutely flourished during the hot spell we just had, and are like twice the size they were a week and a half ago. I was planning to just let them grow up the little trellis I have staked there, but I'm considering letting them grow all over the railing on the balcony as well if they want to. The only problem there is if a storm comes I won't be able to move them back out of harm's way, so we'll see about that. I'll update when I see flowers on these.



This is an Anaheim pepper plant. It's doing pretty well and has a couple of tiny flower buds that still seem to be forming. Hopefully they'll bloom soon. I'm really hoping to get a good harvest from my peppers so I can dry them and make my own chili powder.








This is my chili pepper. This poor little thing was doing very well until some aphids decided to move in. Well, I wasn't about to have that, so I bought a squirt bottle and filled it with dishsoap and water. It didn't really deter the aphids completely and caused the poor plant to wilt and become stunted. Trev's grandmother kindly gave me some insecticide powder and I promptly came home and rained aphid death upon the plant, but it never really recovered. I'd have replaced it by now but Lowe's doesn't have any that look much better, unfortunately, and it's way too late to start one from seed.

These are my little runners from the strawberry pot. The wilty one on the right there is the newest one to be planted, once it gets established more it won't wilt during the heat of the day. The others are doing well, but I'm not putting them into full sunlight just yet. Once their root systems are better established into the soil, I'll start hardening them off to sunlight. Hopefully these babies will produce well next June.





This is spinach. Well, it was spinach. We ate it all. It was delicious. Unfortunately, it's now too hot for spinach, so we'll have to rely on store-bought until things cool down in the fall. Then I'll plant a whole bunch more and we can enjoy fresh spinach in every sandwich and salad again.








This is my monstrous basil plant. The aphids have also attacked this but they're unable to hurt it, apparently. It's just growing too fast. The bumblybees love the flowers, and we love the leaves. I'd be giving this away if I knew anyone who wanted any, since it's obviously growing way faster than we're using it. Once it gets too cold for basil I should see about making pesto.






I think that's it for today. I need to shower and eat something so I can be to work at 4 PM. I currently work as a waitress at a little restaurant within walking distance. As a matter of fact, the place is actually so close that if I go out onto the balcony in the morning the smell of bacon often wafts over from there. I don't make particularly good money ($40 or so on a good night, $15 on a bad one, in between any other time) but it's not a stressful job at least. It's something for now, and when it's time to move on something else will pop up. I'm trying to learn to drive by then, and Trevor might be moving from his deli job at store level to a graphic design/marketing sort of position at corporate. We're really crossing our fingers for that one, we need to start building up the spare cash for a down payment for a house. Anyway, I'm out. :)

In which I introduce my kitties, boyfriend, and garden.

These are my two cats. The one on top of the doors is Tarquin. Tarquin... likes to do dumb things. This is clearly demonstrated in this picture, where he has opened the closet, climbed through all the junk in the closet, and pulled himself onto the top of the doors. I don't know why Tarquin does these things, I just know that when he gets it in his mind to get into something he's probably going to do it whether we try to deter him or not. If we keep him from getting into the closet, he'll just go under the sink and get stuck, or behind the entertainment center. Or on top of the bathroom door. The little one on the floor there is Sebastian. Sebastian loves me very much, and rubs on my legs while I'm cooking and asks me to pick him up so he can purr and lick my arm. He bites Trevor. He bites any company we have. He bites my mother. He bites everyone else who tries to pet him. Hell, he even bites me sometimes. But I loves him anyway. :3

This is Trevor. He's my boyfriend, hopefully soon to be fiance, hopefully eventually to be husband. We've been together going on 3 years now. He works hard and puts up with a lot of crap from his girlfriend, who has ADD and random bouts of depression (not to mention horrible PMS.) I love him just because he's Trevor, but I especially love him because he praises my cooking, tells me how pretty I am, and no matter how clingy and pouty I'm being he'll always hug me until I get tired of it. Trevor loves video games. No, really, I mean he loves video games. If he's home from work, he's probably playing a game unless we've got company over. And even then they're probably playing something that has multiplayer.

And now, the garden. These are all early pictures, I'll post current ones in my next post. These here are Quinault strawberries, an everbearing variety. The little flowerheads I'm holding there eventually turned into fat little strawberries. They were a little bitter, which was disappointing, but these plants are only in their first year so they still need time to get established. Next year's first crop will probably be bigger, fatter, and more delicious.





More strawberries, this time in a hanging basket. I'm up to 7 strawberry plants now since the other pot put out 3 runners.











These are tomato plants that I foolishly thought would have enough room to grow in one of these little containers. They're actually doing okay now; the top one has lots of flowers and a tiny tomato and the bottom one at least has a few flowers. When these plants are done I'll reuse the container, but not for tomatoes I don't think.







These are tomatoes that were growing way back when I first bought the plant. This is one of those $10 container tomatoes from Lowe's. Trevor has since eaten some of these tomatoes and declared them to be good. I'm not a fan of raw tomatoes, unfortunately, so I'll have to take his word for it.








Ah, my poor peas. I overfertilized these, so they unfortunately never flowered. Too much nitrogen in the soil makes for lovely green foliage but you sort of need flowers for produce. I should have given them phosphorus. So, I had to pull them up to make room for my pole beans. These will be planted again in the fall since the summer heat is way too much for them. I actually had a couple spring back up from the pot I pulled them out of, and decided to let them grow along with the strawberry runners I had started there since they were such little troopers. Well, that was before the 93 degree three-day hot spell we had. Farewell, ye peas, we hardly knew ye.

I am late to the blog party.

But that's okay. I'm late to most things that get wildly popular because I want nothing to do with them while everyone's in the "Not going to shut up about this really cool thing" phase. Then I discover that, for example, the Harry Potter books were actually a pretty good read and a blog might just be a good way to document my little container garden out on my porch and the other Suzy Homemaker-type things I like to do.

I've been thinking about making one of these for a while, at first because I just wanted somewhere to post some pictures and keep track of how my plants are growing, and my learning process as I get better at the hobbies I've taken up. I could have used LiveJournal for that, since I already have one. But, if I'm going to be learning these things I think it'd be nice if other people could read this and learn them too. After all, baking a loaf of bread for the first time is one thing if you're just reading a recipe but another thing entirely if you're looking at a step-by-step guide complete with pictures (by the way, I recommend goonswithspoons.com for this as well.)

If anything I post helps, entertains, or brightens the day of even one person out there then I am happy.