Teh Runway

Oh yeah! Project Runway is back! The initial eps are always a bit slow, but looks promising so far. Fun to see Austin back! He was always one of my favorites. You gotta love a guy who will wear makeup and be no-holds-barred gay gay gay on national television. I see him as someone who has found his place in life to be who he really is, and it's beautiful. Sorry to get all sentimental there for a moment, but really, if you were some gay kid in East Nowheresville, suffering the jerks in high schiool (well, wait, didn't we all suffer jerks in high school? but I digress), well, I can just picture that kid seeing Austin and thinking, Man, there is hope for me. When I get to New York I am going to let it all out! I gotta be me, I just gotta be me! I hope that kid has cable.

Anyway. Tim's awesomeness continues. Heidi looks gorgeous as always, although it looked at one point like she forgot her pants. Sure, if you are a super-hot supermodel you can wear a short dress, 3 kids or no 3 kids, but somehow this just didn't work for me.

I was pretty surprised at who went home. I thought it would be the other guy. I think here we have a clear case of good-TV-potential outweighing designing talent. And how crazy is that crazy lady? She makes Ms. Spit-Mark from last season look like Walter Cronkite.

Can't wait to see what's up this week!

Noooooooo!

Such was my response to Kherington getting voted off of SY last week. Sigh. I had a soft spot for her. Oh well, gives Comfort a little more time to shake her thing, although I don't think she's got a lot more time left. Am loving the mixing up of the couples, and how about that Joshua? That man be workin' it. I realized that with Gev gone all the guys left are my faves, so I am pretty happy from now on. Especially if they take off their shirts. Not to be too shameless. I have never been a big Courtney fan, so once she is gone the other girls are also ones I like. But maybe Courtney is growing on me. They should tell her to lay off the self-tanner when she's standing next to, say, pasty-white Gev. I guess the only white (ish) guy left is Mark so at least they won't have that problem anymore. I do think the wardrobe department has gone completely insane this season. Maybe they're taking advice from Mary Murphy. (shudder)

My garden is trucking along. I'm having trouble lately with how to keep it properly fertilized without overwatering. We've had plenty of rain, but the fertilizers are designed to be dissolved in water, so I don't know what to do. A bona fide little eggplant is hanging out at the base of a stem. It's so cute! The yellow cherry tomatoes are coming along and I've harvested a few. It really makes you realize what giant farms the people who sell at the farmer's market must have, to be able to sell quarts upon quarts of tomatoes or blueberries, because from my one plant I get about two ripe cherry tomatoes at a time, once or twice a week. The red cherry tomatoes are like in stasis or something, along with the big tomatoes and my many zucchini plants. I'm hoping August will bring more production. Blossom-end rot, chipmunks, and cucumber beetles are still my big nemeses.

Speaking of Latin plurals, is there a fitness instructor anywhere in the country who knows that the singular of "vertebrae" is "vertebra"? If I hear one more person tell me to "roll up one vertebrae at a time" I am going to lose it. I don't think that would go over too well in yoga class. And the teacher is otherwise super great, so. Perhaps best not to piss her off.

"Dance" Fever

So You Think You Can Dance is on tonight. Whoo! I am typing this from the World's Hottest Guest Room (where the computer is, and A/C isn't), so I can't get into a full discussion lest I melt, but briefly: Was pretty happy with the eliminations. I think Comfort had gotten about as far as she could given her lack of training, and Thayne--he was just never my favorite. Obviously a sweet boy, but. I still love Twitchington and enjoyed the chance to see their solos. But this was a reminder that eventually everybody, even my favorites, goes home. (Well, except the winner, duh.) I'd also like to say that the krump routine was an example of how this show kicks all other dance shows' asses. OK, I never watched more than one or two eps of Dancing with the Stars, season 1 no less, because it is an affront to all that is beautiful about dance. GOD, I hate ballroom dancing, this style anyway. All the spangles and over-the-top showmanship. Don't get me started. But anyway, does that show have KRUMPING? I doubt it. And if so, do they krump to songs like 2 Buck 4 TV? I doubt it even more. This fucking rocked. I may be a white girl from NH without, alas, a drop of soul, but I LOVE krumping, and the faster and harder and dirtier the better. Compare to Step It Up and Dance, which features such gems as "Umbrella" and that dippy Gwen Stefani song. And their hip-hop dancing was repetitive and dull.

I can't wait for Will's partner to go. Mia is right, she is dragging him down. Luckily we know the judges would slit their own throats before they let him go. But did they have to torment us with shots of the divine Miss Allen? I love her. Oh well. I guess it's worth it to keep him in the competition. I totally called it, by the way, that he was just as good as the Alvin Ailey dancers. I was watching them and commented to T that although the SY dancers are very good, the pros were orders of magnitude better and you could really see a difference. Then Will came out for his solo and I said, He must have been backstage watching the AA guys and thinking, Got to bring it! And he did. Love you, Will.

Still hate the quickstep. Stop the insanity! Speaking of which, Mary's outfit was as hideous as usual. And could she visit a cosmetic dentist, because her horsey teeth and gums are really getting on my nerves.

That's all that occurs to me at the moment. Still have a deep love for Chelsie and Mark. Can't wait to see what they do this week!

Harvest!

Amazing what a few weeks of heat and sun will do. Here are the latest photos.


If only I knew why Blogger is posting this zucchini pic portrait-style instead of landscape (as I took it and as it appears in Picasa). But here they are! They were very yummy. At left you can see a flower still attached. The female flowers become zucchini (sort of--a swelling at the flower's base becomes the fruit), and the males just grow on stalks. Then bees or other bugs facilitate the magic of pollination. These flowers are absolutely delicious dipped in batter and fried and salted. Especially with Parmigiano-Reggiano, as I accidentally discovered last night. (I guess I knew this, but I had forgotten. I gave ASH some cheese for dinner and when he didn't eat it, I thought, "Yay, I get to eat it!" and made the happy discovery of how good the flowers and cheese are together.) Marcella Hazan says use a cup of water to 2/3 cup flour (sifting the flour slowly into the water and mixing well to avoid lumps), although I find I usually need a bit more flour than this (you want it to be like thick cream, or maybe melted ice cream or something), and I halve the recipe because this is way too much. Dip the flower in briefly and let the excess drain off, then fry in a skillet of hot oil. You'll know it's hot enough when it bubbles madly when you put in the flower. Be careful. Brown lightly on both sides, drain on paper towels, salt, and serve immediately. This makes good onion rings too.

It's not the healthiest recipe, but dang, it is good. I will say that I feel faintly disconcerted about eating the pollen-covered stamen (pistil?) inside the flower, because, you know...that's like flower sperm. But whatever.

Here are my cherry tomatoes!



You forget, when you go to the farmer's market or supermarket and pick up a pint or more of these at once, that each plant produces maybe one ripe tomato at a time. At least, around July 14 they do. So that kind of stinks. But I'm hoping as the season progresses I might be able to eat, oh, 5 at a time. (And I'm a good mom and all, but I do have to fight the urge to keep most of them to myself. I'm selfish that way. But I do fight it and give [most of] the produce to ASH.) These are yellow cherry tomatoes, that's why they're so...yellow. They won't get redder. This makes it hard to know when they're really ready, though.

Eggplant! I am so proud! A little purple baby sprouts from this flower. Note our friend the bee.


Here is a yellow squash, and a flower.

Here are the overview photos.



Sadly I discovered this week that my big tomatoes are suffering, I think, blossom-end rot. I learned from this site (which I just now discovered so that I could show you all what this rot looks like), it says that the manner in which I applied calcium (as instructed by the garden center) may not in fact fix the problem. Good to know! Thank you, intarwebs. And OSU. This may be why I got the rot in the first place, since I dutifully applied liquid calcium to the leaves before the fruit even developed. So I guess it's time to buy lime.

I actually had to prune the tomatoes a little, they were taking over. And the zucchini was stealing all the sunlight from some of my basil, so it was Pesto Time this weekend. (Stop! Pesto Time!) Oh, so tasty. I had forgotten.

Well, someone is sounding very unhappy, so I think it's time I give him a bath and send him to bed. Hope everyone is enjoying a happy summer with plenty of good things to eat. And if you know someone growing zucchini, hit them up for some flowers.

ASH's first joke

As promised in my first blog post. It is probably not as funny to others as it was to me, but:

The Scene: The changing table.
ASH knocks on the wall next to the table and says, "Kna kna!" (Knock-knock.)
I say, "Who's there? (We haven't really gotten into knock-knock jokes, just the knock itself, but I make the knee-jerk response.)
He says . . .(pause): "Baby!"

I don't know if he knew this is how a knock-knock joke is supposed to go (and if so, how did he know?), or if he just has natural comedic talent. That's my boy.

Maine Fourth of July

An image that pretty much sums up our weekend. If there were a pie or some pork products in the picture it would be even more accurate. Good food, good friends, a lake--what more do you need?

Sorry you can't really see the adorable face of my son (not to mention my husband), but that is sort of on purpose to thwart creepy pedophiles, who probably are not reading this blog anyway, but one never knows, do one? If you are looking for a lovely Maine getaway, may I recommend the Union area? Beautiful hills and farms and ponds, just inland from beautiful seaside Camden, and, best of all, only a few minutes from pie heaven. Try the four-berry pie. You won't be sorry. Mm mm mm. We ate pie there twice in 3 days. That's what I'm talkin' about. Weekend highlights included much drinking of coffee and alcohol, floating on rafts in the perfect-temperature lake (OK, it is technically a pond, but we are not picky), and a campfire singalong followed by a rollicking dance party lasting until Oh-My-God it's 2:30 AM! Just to give you an idea of what a fun group this was, the singalong featured songs like Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," not so much "Kum-ba-ya." We also set both marshmallows and sparklers on fire and, happily, avoided setting each other on fire. T revealed his inner caveman by bringing armloads of wood for the fire pit, over and over. Grrrr. Be still my heart! (Aside: I see now how easily a forest can get denuded, because MAN do you need a lot of wood to keep even a small fire going for a couple of hours. Imagine if that were your only fuel source.) I unleashed my inner Patsy Cline, singing "Crazy" with all the full-throated pathos of a woman betrayed, and my campfiremates were polite enough to not throw sticks at me. One person even applauded. He might have been drunk, though. ;-)

I can't wait for next year.

Away for the weekend

So my usual infrequent posting rate will be down to nil. And I haven't even gotten to finish watching So You Think You Can Dance yet! Argh! But very happy about each couple dancing twice. I had forgotten about that. Twice as much dancing, far less rehearsal blah blah blah. What's not to love? I only saw the very beginning, but am totally confirmed in my love for Chelsie and Matt, and Twitchington. And confirmed in my negative feelings for Kourtni and what's his name (they did the white-outfits hip-hop routine). They pretty much sucked. Not enough crispness, too vague, not in synch. They did not BRING IT. It was terrible. There's a reason they keep ending up in the bottom. Plenty of contemporary dancers can do some bad-ass hip-hop, and I don't think these two have a bad-ass bone in their body. More later.

Happy Fourth, everybody!