Sara’s Fave Photos

This is the plate I made for New Year’s eve to go with our ritual crab and creamcheese dip and potato chips. I love veggie platters. People only really eat raw vegetables when they are cut up pretty and on a plate in front of them. This assortment is especially fine because the carrots and purple cabbage came FROM MY GARDEN. That is so exciting to me, especially since we had a serious cold spell last month. But the cabbage waited in the fridge and the carrots waited in the ground! Their green tops were ratty from the freezing weather but the carrots are just fine, if not even better than in the summer. I will grow them again, that’s for sure.

For more ruby redness seen in photos around the world, visit Ruby Tuesday. And Color Carnival is back!

Scallions (green onions) are super easy to grow and have lovely flowers as a bonus, which easily reseed new little scallions. This post is for Thursday Challenge, and the subject this week is “Youth.” And for Think Green Thursday, growing your own food is the greenest thing I know. This photo, like most of the posts on this blog, is straight out of the camera, or SOOC.

Must be away again for a few days; see you on my return.

These Meyer lemons fell off a tree in Sonoma County, California and made their way to Seattle, courtesy of a visitor. Lemon trees have thorns but do an unusual thing: they can flower and fruit at the same time. Those flowers smell so sweet!

Thursday Challenge this week is “Food.” And Think Green Thursday is always about living lightly, to my mind, so eating extra lemons from a friend’s tree is pretty “green” to me.

I know it’s a little late, but had to share our neighbors’ Halloween display for Ruby Tuesday (go there for more ruby redness). There actually were even more spiders spread around their front yard. It was a truly creepy effect. I loved it! And visit Window and Door Wednesday for more interesting window views.

PLEASE IGNORE IF READ BEFORE: Readers arrive on different days, so I’m repeating about the 2009 Photoblog Awards. If you like my photos, please vote for me and/or leave a comment in the link  below. You have to register (name and password only) and then click on the word Vote in the upper left. Thanks very much! Photoblog Awards 2009

You’ve gotta love backyard tomatoes. It’s just remarkable how different they are from store-bought, even those “on the vine” ones with the green tops they sell these days. The complexity and magnificence of the flavor of a homegrown tomato is just . . . well, words fail me. Hope the photo helps a little.

For more fascinating macros, visit Macro Monday. For more photos with at least a splash of yellow, visit Mellow Yellow Monday. And heck, let’s get Ruby Tuesday in on this as well! Anyone for more bright colors at Color Carnival?

Well, the tomatoes aren’t too big, but in Seattle any ripe tomato is a wonder some years. The little yellow ones were from a volunteer plant in a flowerbed, unlike the started plants I bought and planted in black containers back in May, and sure enough, the volunteer is far bigger and happier in every way. It’s a puzzlement, because the plants in the ground last year refused to ripen, even cherry tomatoes. Sigh.

There’s also broccoli rabe in the basket. I planted seeds pretty early, and they were so spindly, went to seed right away, but THOSE seeds grew and now I have these huge, healthy plants, yielding like crazy. I like it steamed with olive oil, soy sauce and lots of garlic.

Happy Ruby Tuesday!

Even with the warm weather we had this summer, it’s not too easy to ripen tomatoes in Seattle. But of course, I must try. The small ones seem to have the best shot at it, but I’m still learning with tomatoes, as with so many things. These are Husky cherry tomatoes, and the plant is particularly strong and sturdy. The tomatoes aren’t bad, either. I slice them on a sandwich, even the small ones, for flavor that can’t be beat.

Interesting fact: See the little star-shaped caps at the stems? There are five points. Fruits (and tomatoes are fruits, I think actually berries) that have patterns of fives, like an apple’s seeds if you cut it crosswise, are USUALLY safe to eat and not poisonous.

Visit Think Green Thursdays for more ways to live lightly on the earth, besides food gardening, that is.

Picked these this week. Not everyone knows about lemon cucumbers, upper right. Pick them before they get bright yellow, when they really look like lemons! They are quite delicate and delicious.

Happy Macro Monday, Mellow Yellow Monday, and Ruby Tuesday. We are off camping and will return in a few days. Ta-ta!

This is one of my favorite garden tips.

When cooking, especially in the cold winter months when you make lots of stews and such, save those stubby bits cut off of the bottom of the garlic cloves. Really, those teensy little things! Go outside and poke them into your vegetable bed, maybe an inch under the ground. If you can, put it with the cut side up. It will grow, I swear, into a plant, and in July after the green tops wither you will have a whole head of garlic! No need to buy special “seed” garlic and waste it by putting the cloves into the ground without using them first.

I learned this after observing that the sliced off root ends of onions sometimes sprouted in the compost pile. I moved that first plant into my garden, and I’ve been planting onion bottoms and watching them turn into big plants ever since. But this is the first time I thought to try it with garlic. Look what I dug up a week or so ago! And these two dozen plants grew in maybe a square foot and a half of space, the plants just a few inches apart.

Think Green Thursday is a site about living more “greenly.” To me, growing your own food is one of the greenest things you can do.

This is a variety of Swiss Chard called Bright Lights. It’s pretty as a bouquet, with some pink stems, white stems, and here you can see the yellow and the red. Chard is so easy to grow from seeds or starts, and in climates like Seattle, actually winters over sometimes.

Chard and garlic are made for each other. Lightly steam the cut-up chard (I cut up the stems separately and start them first so they cook just a bit longer), then dump all into plenty of hot olive oil that has a whole lot of lightly browned sliced garlic in it. Cook a little more and then serve. A Sicilian way is to mix in steamed potatoes. Yum!

For more ruby visions of all kinds, visit Ruby Tuesday.

You can’t really call them green beans when they look like this. The yellow ones are called wax beans and the package on the purple ones says they will be green when cooked. We’ll see. They sure taste great just like this.

Here’s a tip: When storing, make sure they are in a plastic bag but DRY (wash just before eating or cooking). Peas like it moist in storage but beans, surprisingly, do not. That avoids the disappointing rust yuckiness. Also, you think you will remember which you picked when, but you won’t. Mark the bag with the date!

Home gardens are the ultimate in local, fresh, and hopefully organic food. And a package of seeds is so cheap, plus the seeds last many years if stored in a dry place. So grow your own! And for more GREEN ideas, visit Think Green Thursday.

UPDATE: I cooked them tonight, steamed the way I always do, and sure enough, the purple ones became green. Check it out! Top one is after cooking a bit and stirring, bottom one a bit firm but tender. No purple! They were yummy.

Seattle has an International Festival in the International District which really seems to be Chinatown, mostly. We went last year, had a great time, and were glad to see it was bigger this year, but I could do without the amplified karaoke. There was wonderful dancing on the Dragon Stage by several Punjabi groups, and the vendors included a food carver, below. Red is the color of good fortune in China, you know, so there was lots everywhere.

For even more red, visit Ruby Tuesday. And for more seriously bright colors, visit Color Carnival.

Everyone loves to grow tomatoes but not everyone knows how to make sure there are lots of tomatoes on the vines. With bees experiencing serious decline for unknown reasons (although I seem to see more this year than last year in my own garden), pollination can be a problem.

The solution? You! Assisted flower sex is the answer, and you get tomatoes for your trouble. Unless you are a farmer with acres of tomatoes, for a few backyard plants you can make a big difference in yield by going around your plants with a child’s little paintbrush, or even a cotton swab, and brushing each little yellow flower in turn. Do this every few days to catch as many flowers as possible, and you will be amazed at the results. And it’s fun!

Visit Think Green Thursday for more takes on the meaning of green.

These chive flowers are so pretty and the plants so easy to grow. I read they make a nice little hedge in front of bigger plants, but I have room only for one nice one. It’s near the kitchen door, and when I’m cooking, I just go outside and snip, snip, there you are.

I think that growing herbs and other food crops are a great way to garden, and good for the planet also. If you’d like other ideas about being green, visit Think Green Thursday.

My recent trip to New York included a truly wonderful trip downtown to Chinatown and Little Italy, which is right there alongside of it, although smaller than it used to be. There are sidewalk cafes everywhere and the best place to go for pastry and sweets is Ferrara’s. Here is a street scene, and the outside of Ferrara’s where they serve yummy gelato (Italian ice cream) and my favorite, the pastry display. This is only a small section of what they have! If you go, try the Baba au Rhum. A plain looking but completely fabulous experience, but not for teetotalers.

This is not my garden; again it’s from the Bronx Botanical Garden in New York City. This section was to inspire and inform the home gardener. While I have planted vegetable beds with flowers in them, I have never seen the plants planted in diagonal rows. So simple, but such a great idea. If you are going to have neat rows, might as well be at an angle, for pretty.

I like this photo for Think Green Thursday because to me the idea of growing your own food is about as green as you can get, especially if you do it the simple, cheap way with kitchen compost to enrich the soil, seeds, and there you go. No expensive supplies needed, just a bit of know how. Just ask a gardener and you’ll learn enough to get you going.

Just for the heck of it, here is a photo of the raised beds from October of 2007 in my last house. The string trellis at the right is for the flat peas which were already done by then. It was a nice garden, but the current one will be even nicer, eventually.

We went to Chinatown when I was in New York and it was so fun. I had never seen fresh lichees in their shells, only canned (looking like eyeballs but tasting heavenly) and dried, in rough, thin brown shells. I had no idea in the world they looked like this! Well, actually I thought they were lichees, but no, readers tell me they are rambutans! Here’s a link with the difference.

I’m participating in a new photo meme, Color Carnival. If you like color, and I sure do, check it out!

Food is like dance, in a way. So beautiful, and so fleeting. This beautiful brunch spread was created to celebrate my visit to the East coast. The smoked fish (you can just see the lox plate in the upper left), the fruit salad, and the veggie plate were joined by scrambled eggs and mimosas. And bagels, of course. A perfect meal, as far as I am concerned.

For more red visions, or to post your own (do! it’s fun), click HERE.

The story in our family is that Mom would make the requested strawberry shortcake for a birthday, but since it had to be kept refrigerated until after dinner, when we saw it there after school she would pretend that we were dreaming and say, “Cake? What cake? There’s no cake there,” so that we could all enjoy the “surprise” later. Mom is gone now, but What-cake lives on. Here’s the one, almost exactly like she used to make, from my recent birthday.

For more ruby redness in photos around the world, click HERE.

My daughter brought some Meyer lemons from her friend’s lemon tree in California. We gave lots away and still had plenty. They taste stronger and sweeter than regular lemons. And so beautiful, as well. For more interesting shadows from all points of view, click HERE.

I just heard that the Shadow Shot site’s muse, Tracy AKA Harriet, is having computer trouble. Oh no! Hope it’s solved soon.

Another post from the archives for Ruby Tuesday. This photo is one of my top faves, taken at a small town Northern California farmers market years ago. Hope you enjoy this depiction of abundance and the brilliant beauty of summer, which will come again! For more rubiness around the world, click HERE.

It’s winter here in Seattle and the two weeks of snow is gone, but summer is far away and seems almost impossible, somehow. But here are strawberries from July, sweet as sugar, to feast the eyes on, at least. For more ideas about the color red, click HERE.

At the Farmers Market late in the summer, what could be redder than these peppers? Click HERE for more Ruby Tuesday possibilities. Thanks to all those who leave comments; I really appreciate it.

Today is Ruby Tuesday! I took these the other day and saved the photo for today. They are Tristar and so sweet. The daughter plants seem to produce more than last year’s old, tired plants. For more Ruby Tuesday photos, click here.

We’re having a housewarming party tomorrow for the new place in Normandy Park. Can’t have a party without a vegetable plate. Isn’t it pretty?