Harvest Time...

Went outside to check out the garden today and found that we are swimming in the fruits of our labor.  Not really, but we were able to harvest some fruits from the garden.  I got about a pound of cayenne (or serrano, I’m not quite sure just yet) peppers, two eggplants, and a bunch of sunflower seeds.  We also were able to pluck two whole cucumbers from our massive cucumber plant. 

Our two eggplants, Keturah's going to stuff them and bake them.  Should be quite tasty.

We've hung the peppers up  to dry so that they will keep longer (hopefully)

This is one of our biggest sunflowers to date.

Same flower as above, but this shot shows how much the flower was curved and bent.

I’m predicting that we are just keeping our plants alive through this hellish heat we are having so that they can give us at least a decent harvest when it gets cooler.  I’m hoping that’s true, anyway we plan on planting more lettuce, carrots, beans, peas, leeks, onions, garlic, and some other tasty treats when it starts to cool down a bit (probably the end of September or beginning of October).  

I am also making a couple of large vases, about three feet tall, for my mother in law.  She wants to make a fountain out of them.  I’ll post some pictures of them once I take some pictures, I’m working on them at the Fire House so that I don’t have to move them later since I don’t have a kiln large enough to fire them in at our current home. 

Clafoutis: I have it, You want it…

So I was without internet today, and I have already beaten all the games I own.  So as you can imagine I was quite bored, and when I’m bored I usually do one of two things; either work in the studio or work in the kitchen.  Since we are experiencing one of the hottest summers ever here in Oklahoma, I decided to stay out of the un-air-conditioned studio and work in the kitchen, where it was relatively cool (compared only to the torturously hot studio).  I’ve been watching Good Eats lately and I wanted to try a couple of recipes that looked quite tasty, and I needed to make another loaf of bread and some fudge for our bread exchange.  So here are the items that I made today, starting with the raw ingredients.   

First up is the fudge, the raw lineup goes like this; heavy cream, dark chocolate, peanut butter chips, light corn syrup, salt, and sugar (I just realized that instead of sugar there is bread flour in this picture, but I promise that I used sugar when I made the actual fudge).

And here is a picture of the fudge after cooking, cooling, and cutting.

Next is Clafoutis (I know it sounds like a disease, but it’s really a French dessert).  The raw lineup goes like this; eggs, all-purpose flour, milk, vanilla, and cherries. 

And here is the finished product.  I know it looks like a mess; I had a little trouble getting it out of the Dutch oven.  I’m thinking now that I should have let it cool in the Dutch oven before trying to remove it.

The next project I went to work on was making concentrated fruit syrups to make drinks out of later.  The lineup for these are; strawberries (the strawberries are pictured, but I also made some with blueberries, and cherries), water, lime juice, and sugar.

And here are the three concentrated syrups/juices that I made:

 Strawberry

Blueberry

And Cherry

I also made a loaf of Kolach to send out for our bread exchange, but apparently I forgot to take pictures of both the raw materials and the finish product.  I guess I just was so excited to get started that I couldn’t take the few minutes to take a picture (in my defense I was in a slight hurry to make it to the post office before they closed).  Anyway, it turned out to be a pretty good day with a lot accomplished, and now I get to wait for the internet to start working again so I can post this (amazing) post.

Gardening with Fish

Here’s another update this time it’s about our garden.  We have some good news and some bad.  If you remember the post about the hail storm that came through and destroyed a bunch of stuff.  It really did a number on our garden; it killed our pumpkin plant (which makes that the third pumpkin plant we lost, and now we don’t have any.  I guess I will have to buy pumpkins to get my pumpkin seeds, and hope for the best next year).  Our tomato plants really took a beating, the storm broke a bunch of stems and branches, and this week we took some clippers to the broken branches.  I also propped up the plants so that they would grow vertically instead of laying on the ground like they were.  While propping up the tomatoes we noticed that the plants were really leggy, and they were not producing anything.  So I decided on a regiment of nutrients via a spray on fish emulsion.  I’m hopeful that the infusion of nitrogen will help the plants produce more; this is the second week that I have sprayed the fish emulsion on the garden and already I’m seeing a lot more flowers and actual fruits making their first appearance since we started the garden.

 

Here are some pictures of our garden:

Here is our bell pepper plant with three whole peppers growing.

Here is another pepper plant, I’m not sure what it is but the purple flowers are nice.

I believe this is a Serrano pepper plant, and if you look closely you can see four peppers!

We let our lettuce plants go to seed, and it produced some nice yellow flowers.  We will have plenty of seeds so if anybody wants some we will be glad to send them to you just let us know.

Here is one of our sunflowers.

This is one of the taller ones that should have a larger flower.

Here's some seeds that are ready to harvest.

Here are our cucumber plants (after they were trimmed back quite a bit to make them healthier).  I put up the fencing so that they would have something to grow up on to.

Here is our first cucumber that has made it past an inch long, this one is about three inches.

This is our eggplant producing its first eggplant; it has more flowers that have dropped.  So we are hopeful that these flowers will produce more eggplants.

These are going to be the first tomatoes that we will be able to eat (hopefully).  This is also the only plant that has even attempted to produce tomatoes.

Pottery Demonstration!!

Hey everyone do you remember that post about me teaching at the Firehouse Art Center here in Norman? Well they are hosting a fair here in Norman call the Midsummer Nights' Fair, and there will be all kinds of art, artist, and live music. I will also be throwing pottery all Saturday evening (6pm-9pm-ish) so come out and visit me and Keturah anytime between those times. If you ever wanted to see how pottery is made now is the time to check it out, it should be a lot of fun. (It's gonna be hot so wear your hat and stay hydrated!)

ASAP

Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when I said that Keturah and I will be working in the studio all weekend and would post pictures of the work we did as soon as possible? Well apparently two weeks is as soon as possible in this family. We did work in the studio and got quite a lot done. On Saturday I sat down and threw some little lidded vessels, and Keturah and our friend Chelsea worked on carving and piercing some yarn bowls and orchid planters.




Later that day, after a well-deserved (probably not) break, Keturah started to turn some of those lidded vessels into garlic holders by piercing a design on the sides, this allows air to flow around the garlic so it doesn’t grow mold. I also threw some bowls with the intention of them being dog or cat bowls, and some taller vessels with the idea that they would be utensil holders. So that was our Saturday, a fairly full day I would say for a couple of people that have been out of the studio for a long while.




On Sunday Keturah started work on finishing all the yarn bowls I had thrown for her, and I trimmed and threw feet for the bowls and utensil holders I had made the day before and then made some butter bells or I should say French butter crocks, apparently “butter bell” has been copy righted. I really enjoy working in the studio with Keturah; it allows us to pass ideas back and forth and gives us the opportunity to have instant feedback on a shape or design we are working on.












Now it’s time to go shopping for some food, tonight’s dinner is Grilled Steak Tacos with homemade Pico de Gallo, Tomatillo Salsa, and Guacamole. It should be pretty tasty, my mouth is watering just thinking about it.