Blackberries up the Road

They were much better than last year, and I credit the rain. They're still well protected by two-foot-high fire ant hills and lots of poison ivy, but one morning recently after the bug left for daycare I decided to go all out and get as many as I could. I put on long pants, high boots, gloves (which ended up being too unwieldy for handling the delicate, very ripe berries), and a long-sleeved shirt. I went early enough that it wasn't too hot. I brought a long pole with a hook on the end, thinking that I'd use it to pull vines toward me, but it was more useful for shoving them out of my way and for tamping down the brambles so I could step over or onto them—the hook just made that more difficult. I took a lot of risks—jumping over ant hills and into the thick of the brambles—and at one point, surrounded by ant hills and stuck to the thorns on all sides, it occurred to me that if I lost my balance and fell the cicadas and doves would be the last sounds I heard. I worked fast, and checked my picking hand for ants every few seconds. Usually I come home with three or four painful bites and a handful of berries, but this time I had no bites and about six cups of berries! I probably dropped enough for a pie, and left enough for four. I found a back way in, though, so if we're still here next year it'll be a piece of cake. I also found the muscadines, which are behind the ant hills, through the poison ivy, and on the wrong side of the blackberry bramble—but they're there, and when they're ripe I intend to pick them.

I picked the bug up early from daycare, and we made blackberry frozen yogurt from my mom's old recipe. She used to make it every July in Georgia and Virginia. Next time I'll strain out the seeds. (I like the seeds, but others don't.)

Blackberry Frozen Yogurt

4 cups blackberries
2¼ cups sugar
3 large eggs, separated
4 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
4 teaspoons vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar
2 quarts plain yogurt

Put the blackberries and 2 cups of the sugar in a small saucepan; bring to a boil and cook, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved and the berries are broken down a bit.

In a large bowl, beat the egg yolks. Stir in ½ cup of the blackberry mixture, then stir in the remaining blackberry mixture, the lemon juice, and vanilla. Set the bowl in another bowl of ice water and let cool to room temperature, stirring frequently. Chill in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours.

Beat the egg whites, salt, and cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Add the remaining ¼ cup sugar and beat until stiff peaks form.

In a large bowl, whisk the yogurt, then fold in the blackberry mixture, then fold the yogurt mixture into the egg whites.

Freeze in an ice cream maker until it's the consistency of runny soft-serve ice cream, then transfer to the freezer until completely frozen.

Starting Over

I've taken a bunch of pictures of stuff lately and have all sorts of fun blog posts to write, but since I found out on Saturday that not only did my computer need a new hard drive but the repair shop couldn't save anything from my old drive I've been kind of avoiding dealing with pictures. Pretty much everything I've done in the last eight years was on that drive; while I don't really care about the work stuff and the two books I'd started (and abandoned), I'm sad that all the pictures and little movies we've taken of the bug were lost. I was terrible about backing up, although I did find a CD of a dozen or so pictures I burned for some reason last fall. We emailed small files of some pictures, and there are jpegs on this blog, of course, so not all is lost, but most of it is. I'm looking into serious data recovery efforts (like the people who do computer forensics)—and trying to figure out a better organizational system for myself.

Do any of you out there have any advice? How do you manage your pictures, edit them, post them to blogs, and archive them? I'm stumbling my way through Flickr and haven't hit upon a workable strategy. In the meantime, while I get this sorted out, here are a few midsummer pictures, the last of which, happily, taken with a camera smudged by little fingers with wild blackberry frozen yogurt.

Long Weekend

The other evening, the bug's new friend up the road called and asked if she could come over and play for a couple hours and have hamburgers (she's a babysitter in training, literally, with the Red Cross). As I watched the two of them walk up the road I was overcome by a desire to make a supper that included both meat and side dish. The meat was a big thin slice of beef I got at Los Compadres, the Latino supermarket on Prince Avenue—the stuff you use for fajitas. It'd been marinating for a while in lime juice, olive oil, a bit of Goya adobo seasoning (purchased for the NFL recipe-testing job), and cilantro. Grilled it hot and fast, then thinly sliced it.

I made a fresh salsa (tomatoes, scallions, lime juice, cilantro, serranos, salt). And a Greek spinach, scallion, and rice dish, which I topped with yogurt. (The spinach recipe came from Regan, who's been searching her files for good simple but somewhat unusual dishes for me to make. I added tangy sorrel to it.) It was so nice to have a meal like this—simple as it may seem—and watch the News Hour on TV without the little one yelling "Caillou! Caillou! Max and Ruby!" in the background.

Next day, we piled in the car and went to Greenville, South Carolina! For no other reason than to get out of the house. Well, that's not true. We went because going to Bonefish Grill was the closest we could get to going to Florida this long weekend without the death drive through south Georgia. We went to the Greenville Zoo, the crazy modern playground nearby, and then downtown for gelato—watermelon (Mr. Chalmers's preference) and grapefruit (mine); the bug liked both of them, but did seem to speed up when she hit the watermelon layer on the bottom.

I froze some of St. Herman's sourdough starter just to put my mind at ease—in case I forget to refresh it as I had for the last month or so. Luckily it's still alive and well as ever. I refreshed a couple times, then let it go past its prime and spread half of it out on parchment paper and froze it, then the bug crumbled it up and put the pieces in a freezer bag. I made two small loaves of sourdough today. The flavor was excellent, but I botched the technique a bit so no pictures this time. Used mostly white whole wheat flour, along with bread flour.

The first Cherokee Purple ripened yesterday. It's delicious, I have to admit, despite its sweetness. I had it just now in a tomato sandwich (with the sourdough) sans onion. The bug was excited that she got to pick some more big ones today.

We went to Whole Foods in Greenville, and I got a couple handfuls of sea beans—always wanted to try them.

Mr. Chalmers smoked a side of salmon, and I fiddled with the beans. Here's what we came up with for a late breakfast or early lunch today:

Hot-Smoked Salmon

3/4 cup kosher salt
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon honey
2 1/2 pounds salmon fillet

In a large bowl, combine the salt, brown sugar, honey, and about 1 gallon cold water and stir to dissolve the salt and sugar. Add the salmon, cover, and refrigerate overnight.

Smoke at about 200 degrees F. with liberal use of smoke (hickory) for about 3 1/2 hours, until firm but still moist.


Sea Bean and Cucumber Salad

Serves 4

1 1/2 cups thin sea beans
1 small cucumber
1 tablespoon Champagne vinegar
1 tablespoon mirin
1/2 teaspoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon minced fresh ginger
1 teaspoon sesame seeds, toasted

Blanch the sea beans for 1 minute in boiling water. Drain, then plunge into ice water to stop the cooking. Set aside in the water to soak while you prepare the cucumber and dressing.

Peel and seed the cucumber and cut it into thin strips.

In a large bowl, whisk together the vinegar, mirin, soy sauce, sesame oil, and ginger. Drain the sea beans and add them, along with the cucumber, to the dressing and toss to coat. Divide among serving plates and sprinkle with the sesame seeds.

I also made cold borscht, New York deli style.

The bug liked it a little. Not a lot, but enough.

Vacancy

Okay, so here's what I've been working on, the chicken tractor! I bought plans on eBay! "Easy instructions for the non-woodworker!" That's me! Indeed the very detailed instructions, clear pictures and diagrams, and helpful hints were well worth the fifteen bucks. My previous experience building things with wood includes, in total, a couple shelves and maybe a birdhouse when I was an adolescent. So if I could follow these plans and come up with something useable it's got to be easy. I did learn a lot in the process. For example: (1) Don't start building something on an enclosed porch if it won't fit through the door when it's done. (2) Everything goes faster if you use two drills, one for predrilling the holes and one for screwing in the screws. (3) Wood is flexible.

Here's how the chicken tractor works. As you probably already know, a chicken tractor is basically a moveable coop that allows chickens access to sunlight, grass (and weeds), dirt, and the insects they like to eat and also provides space for nesting and shelter from the elements. Because it's totally covered, it will also, it is hoped, keep predators—hawks, racoons, neighbor dogs—from getting to the chickens. Being able to move the coop every few days or every week or so means that the chickens will always have relatively fresh ground to peck at, and it spreads out the fertilizer all over the lawn a patch at a time. For more about chicken tractors, see The City Chicken.

This tractor is about 3 feet wide and 8 feet long, enough space for two or three smallish hens. There's a door in the front for putting a feeder and water bucket inside. (I'll probably try to rig up hanging ones so they travel with the coop as it gets moved around the yard.) A little ramp leads up to the nesting box area. I want to trim the nesting box door in white, because it just isn't cutsy enough as it is; I haven't found anything around the house to use as molding yet. Also I'll put a branch or dowel across between the center studs as a roost.

These are the wheels in the down position, in which the tractor sits flush to the ground when it's not in motion.

When you want to move it, you lift the back of the coop with the handles (they could stand to be about six inches longer, but these were the longest pieces of 1x1 I could find at the Home Depot or Lowe's; did I mention I had to rent a pickup truck to bring all the lumber home?) and kick the wheel assembly, which is on hinges, up underneath the back of the coop. Then you go to the front of the coop and use the longer handles to push or pull it like a wheelbarrow. Even though it's incredibly heavy, it rolls easily and smoothly (you could do it one-handed, to give you some idea), and it can turn on a dime. When you find a good spot, you just hook your foot under the wheel assembly and flip the wheels back out.

The back door leads to the nesting box, where the chickens will lay their eggs. I made the nesting box for three hens (though I'm thinking we'll probably only have two; the full-height center divider just looked cozier to me). Note the very bad paint job. I've learned that there are a few things I'm constitutionally incapable of doing, and one of them is using masking tape; another is putting two coats of paint on anything.

The whole nesting box slides out for (presumptive) cleaning.

The plans called for special thin, lightweight cedar shingles, which were then painted. I could only find these rough, thick underlayer shingles, which I think work fine. I didn't paint them because I like how they look all raw, and I think the cedar will weather nicely (cedar resists rot). Unfortunately I realized, just after I'd spent a couple hours screwing them all on in the blazing sun, that the shingles should've been staggered. If the roof leaks too much (there's a painted plywood base underneath) I'll take them off and redo them.

And that's it. Now back to copyediting.

Mom's Pickles

The chicken tractor is done, as of 2:30 today. Pictures to come as soon as the Mr. comes home and helps me get it down off the sawhorse.

I stopped in at the produce farm today, and they had—along with the expected zucchini and yellow squash, onions, potatoes, melons, corn (well, it was being picked), and tomatoes—several kinds of pretty cucumbers. This is just what I needed, although I'd gone there looking for okra. (I did—gulp—put in an order for three pounds of okra, not knowing that the heavy bag of squash and potatoes I was preparing to buy was only three pounds. I'm not very good with weights. Good thing I have one or two ideas for how to use okra.)

Anyway, I came home and looked up my mom's recipe for Persian pickles, which I think are the most delicious pickles this side of the Lower East Side. The comparison is inapt, because they're not dill pickles but tarragon-flavored mostly; also they're refrigerator pickles, which means you have to keep them in the fridge, but that's okay because like most pickles they're best cold anyway. My mom and her friend, who's from Iran, wrote a little book of Persian sweets and sours, as yet unpublished; this recipe comes from there. I halved it: 1 pound cucumbers, 3 garlic cloves, a few tarragon sprigs, 3 or 4 clusters of fresh coriander seeds (or 1/2 tablespoon dried seeds), and 2 dried red peppers in a leftover pickle-barrel-type jar (sorry, I forgot to check the volume; I'm not very good with volumes); 3 1/2 cups water, 1/4 cup kosher salt, 1/4 cup cider vinegar.

Persian Pickles

2 to 3 pounds small crisp pickling cucumbers
5 cloves garlic, unpeeled
5 sprigs fresh tarragon leaves
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
2 fresh or dried chiles
1/2 cup salt
1/2 cup cider vinegar

Pack the cucumbers, garlic, tarragon, coriander, and chiles into a 1-gallon jar.

Bring 7 cups water and the salt to a boil. Remove from the heat and let cool completely. Add the vinegar and pour the mixture over the cucumbers. Put the lid on the jar. Refrigerate for 6 weeks.

Slice the pickles lengthwise to serve. Use within 2 months.

Makes 1 gallon.

Fresh coriander seeds—before they've dried into what we normally think of as coriander. They're tender, and the flavor is dead between coriander and cilantro. They're good sprinkled on top of a bowl of dal. I'm not sure how they'll work in these pickles, but I'll bet they'll be fine.

Produce and Panzanella

This was our first tomato from our plants, an oversized grape:

The bug picks them as soon as there's a hint of orange on them, and eats them one after another straight off the vine. Sometimes I can wrestle them out of her grip and put them on the counter out of reach to finish ripening.

All of our tomatoes this year will be on the sweet side—these grapes, the Golden Egg, and the Cherokee Purple. (Not sure about the Manalucie.) I'm actually not a fan of sweet tomatoes, much preferring ones that have an acidic bite, which to me tastes more like tomato than the fruity varieties popular among tomato fanciers. I've realized, though, that while the sweet tomato has no place in a traditional tomato sauce for pasta, or on a pizza, or in a salsa, and is just barely acceptable in a tomato sandwich as long as there's a thin slice of onion to balance it, there is one excellent use for them (besides eating out of hand, for which they're just fine), and that's panzanella, the beauty of which I was recently reminded of by a friend. Somehow the sweetness is less cloying here?

I was able to save from the bug enough tomatoes for a lunch of warm panzanella yesterday. I used a dark, seedy multigrain bread (storebought) instead of the usual Italian bread, and it was perfect.

Warm Panzanella

Serves 1 or 2

2 thick slices bread, cut into cubes
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large clove garlic, sliced
4 plum tomatoes or 5 large grape tomatoes (or whatever), chopped
4 sprigs fresh basil, torn
2 sprigs fresh flat-leaf parsley, stemmed
Large handful of fresh spinach, stemmed
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 slices fresh mozzarella, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

Put the bread cubes on a baking sheet and toast under the broiler, turning the cubes to toast both sides until well browned. Set aside.

In a sauté pan, cook the oil and garlic over medium heat until the garlic is soft but not browned, about 2 minutes. Raise the heat to high and add the bread cubes, tossing to coat with the oil. Cook, tossing frequently, until the garlic is golden brown, about 1 minute. Add the tomatoes, basil, parsley, and spinach and cook, tossing frequently, until the spinach is wilted and the tomatoes are just heated through, about 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and add the mozzarella. Cook, tossing constantly, until the mozzarella is just starting to melt, about 1 minute. Serve immediately.

The other night I had a supper of corn from the Comer farmers' market. It was only $2.50 a dozen, but the ears were very small and exceedingly wormy, and the corn was not very good. Still, with Plugra and salt I'd ground very fine in a mortar (for better sticking) it was a nice meal. The bug and I ate ten ears, just because it was corn. I'm hoping for better as soon as it's available from the farm on Sorrow Patterson Road. That is, I hope the corn I get there this year is as good as it was the first time I got it there last year—subsequent batches were underwhelming.

In other news, but still in the production category, the bug has been helping me with the chicken tractor. Here she is painting one of the door studs or whatever they're called:

I neglected to take any in-progress pictures, but you can see it in the upper right corner here. Damn thing is all lopsided and out of alignment (to put it mildly; I realized too late that I was building it on a slight incline), and in its almost-finished form it is extremely heavy, but I think it'll work okay. I still have to put wheels on (no way can it be moved without wheels) and do a little bit more futzing, then I'll finally be ready to think about actual chickens. (Honestly, I've been more excited about building the coop than having chickens to put in it. I mostly think of them as fertilizers so I can have a decent garden next year. For good corn.)

End Game (or Overtime)

For the last three weeks, I've been embroiled in a recipe-testing and writing job that has taught me much about how people in this country cook and eat—and by people I mean selected NFL players and NBC on-air talent. I learned that with very few exceptions they don't do acidic foods or anything with top notes, and also that my can opener was not top-of-the-line enough for meals prepared entirely with products from the center aisles of the grocery store. I learned, too, that some of that food can be really delicious and satisfying—although I guess I always knew that. Shrimp Creole made with frozen cooked shrimp? Surprisingly good! Kahlúa cake made with boxed mix and instant pudding? I ate the whole damn thing! Sheet cake (from a mix) with peanut butter and chocolate chips? A new family favorite!

Because some of the players were less, um, detailed in their approach to recipe-writing, I got to create a few dishes basically from scratch, which was fun—especially the turkey necks dish, which I developed based on a conversation I had with a very old black woman as I was standing stupidly in front of the turkey section at the Kroger and wondering how in the hell I was going to cook them. I understood only about every fifth word, and this being Georgia I had to assume she was saying "boiled" and not "broiled," but I'm pretty sure that what I came up with was in the right spirit and that the fullback or tailback or whatever in question would be proud. (Turns out, though, that the Chalmerses don't really like turkey necks apart from the amazing gravy you get from them.)

Another fun thing about this project was that I got to write a bunch of short "regional food" sidebars. I didn't know about the Indiana specialty sugar cream pie before last week (Dad? Have you been holding out on me?), nor did I know that 49ers were also once called sourdoughs. And my brilliant husband helped me out of an excruciating mind block by writing a bit about the Black Panthers' Free Breakfast for Children Program (it works in the context of the Oakland sidebar, if maybe not in the context of a book largely funded by NBC; we'll see if it makes it in).

In the middle of all that middle-America stuff, I was asked to test a Top Chef season-four recipe (I was a tester for the Top Chef cookbook that came out a couple months ago). Not surprisingly, it featured rack of lamb and mushrooms (last October I made about sixteen racks of lamb, and the fridge was overflowing with every kind of mushroom imaginable), and required about $98 worth of ingredients. My plating was haphazard at best—I was tired, and I didn't know exactly what to do with the two different blackberry sauces—but it was a wonderful respite not only from the casseroles and cake mixes of recent days but from my usual easy one-dish, one-pot suppers. It was almost inspiring.

It's been great work, but I'm very happy to be (almost) done with it for the time being, if only so I can cook whatever I want to cook. (Stay tuned for sugar cream pie.) On Friday, we went out with a couple friends to the Five and Ten, and I took it as an opportunity to eat kind of the opposite of football-player food. We had lots of oysters. I'd been wanting to try Kumamoto oysters for about a decade, ever since reading somewhere about them being topped somewhere with a cucumber gelée, and the nice cucumber mignonette they came with here meant I could basically fill that gaping culinary void. With a dry rosé. Continuing with the top notes, I insisted we order the appetizer of marinated white anchovies with grapefruit and little peppery herb shoots, one of my favorite things to eat anywhere. I had a perfectly pan-roasted Scottish salmon—it was pale, almost white, with extra-crisp skin—with sautéed cucumbers, Red Mule grits, and a caper and lemon cream sauce. We had dessert, too, a not-too-sweet Earl Grey panna cotta with another lemon sauce and lemon cookies (which were good themselves but totally unnecessary). Oh, and continuing with the smoke notes, I splurged on a Lagavullin, neat.

Anyway, that's what's going on here. Mr. Chalmers brought flowers home yesterday for my birthday, and he played the guitar for us, and the bug has been an unbelievable pleasure to work and play with lately (she's good at stirring, among other things . . . like taking naps). She had a special visit from her grandma from New York last week. And she was excited to go with her dad to daycare this morning so she could play with "Abby, Abby, Abby!" I miss her already.

Water Bug

I watered the asparagus for the first time since, well, since the bug learned how to walk and it became more of a chore to go out there while she got into trouble in falling-down outbuildings. By now, though, she's realized it's way more fun to stay close to Mummy and, more important, the hose.

In Case Elberton Attacks

I've been using serranos from the garden, and the sorrel and herbs are producing quite well despite my ridiculously haphazard planting method (throwing seeds out on the ground and hoping something grows somewhere). The eggplant is starting to bloom, and the epazote that finally came up from seeds looks nice—I've already used a bunch in tacos:

The tomatoes Jane gave me are incredibly healthy. I don't know what variety this one is, but it looks good so far:

Even the grape tomatoes I started from seed myself are growing crazily. They're almost two feet higher than the top of the metal trellis frame thing:

With some stray cilantro that sprouted from last year's dropped seeds, and a bunch of African basil and sweet basil.

Emboldened by my timid foray into vegetable gardening in Georgia, I'm now considering putting in a real garden next spring, part of my plan to make us completely self-sufficient by 2012. (I don't have such a plan, of course. But gas prices, plus living half an hour from my beloved Publix, plus produce prices, plus blah blah blah . . . and I'm thinking we should get a chest freezer and some chickens and plant a garden and drill for oil.)

Have any of you readers tried "no-till" or "weedless" gardening? I was given a book about it years ago (to review for Amazon, back in the good old days of the Internet boom), and have been rereading it this weekend. It kind of makes a lot of sense, although I'll need to start working on our plot now if the soil is going to be good enough by next spring. Here's where I'm thinking about putting the garden, in front of the mulberry trees, but not close enough to the road that everything will be covered with dust all the time:

The right end is shady until about 11:30. Mom: thoughts? Will I have to fence it in?

This morning during a lull in my freelance work I made some old fencing into two compost bins—I think that will work better and be more efficient than my random spreading pile system that seems to attract egg-shell-eating neighbor dogs.

Oh, and I do think we should have a couple chickens—that is, if we can figure out how to keep them out of sight of Cooper and Wagner, who have a barking problem that chickens would only exacerbate. To that end I've actually purchased detailed plans for a chicken tractor that will accommodate two or three hens.

Mr. Chalmers thought it was funny that I planted fifty asparagus crowns, and once explained to some guests that it was for when Elberton attacks. Heh.

Movie Night Becomes Garden Party

The Chalmerses had a party in our front yard the other night at which we'd intended to screen The Super Cops on an old 16 mm projector I'd been repairing piece by piece for the last year or so—finding and buying and replacing random parts, super-gluing broken pieces, replacing lamps, getting the sound to work with the Mr.'s amplifier, et cetera, ad nauseum. We hung up the screen (slipcover material) early in the evening . . .

And tested out the setup: all systems go: it looked and sounded fantastic. When it got dark, however, the projector suddenly would not work. At all. Not one frame of The Super Cops made it to the big screen that night, but that just meant we got to have a normal party, with conversation and drinking and food and music, and we were spared having to watch a probably not-so-great film in less-than-perfect (cinematically) conditions. I wasn't too disappointed, but I do want to know what the hell is wrong with that goddamned machine.

Moving on . . .

I hung battery-powered paper lanterns from the magnolia tree, and put citronella candles all around. We had smoked chicken wings that Mr. Chalmers made, potato salad with lovage, deviled eggs (our neighbor had just given us about four dozen eggs from her hens), a big apple crisp and banana bread, vodka sours and Pimm's cups, popcorn, and so on. I was especially happy with the mulberry drink the bug and I made. Just a cup of mulberry juice tinted it a beautiful deep pink, and the mulberry flavor was surprisingly pronounced—these mulberries are extremely sweet, but the acidic lemon and lime helped brighten things up:

Mulberry-lemon-limeade: Puree 2 cups mulberries in a food processor with a little water, then push the juice through a sieve and discard the seeds.

You should have about 1 cup juice. Pour it into a pitcher and stir in about 1 cup each of fresh lemon and lime juice, and water and simple syrup to taste. Chill.

The bug and I had lunch in the front yard the day of the party:

I didn't take any actual party-in-progress pictures, but I think this was taken the morning after, in the middle of the clean-up:

The bug stayed up with us until midnight, taking short little breaks in the teepee throughout the evening. She burned her fingers holding a sparkler—just as our friend was saying that he'd had to show his ID to buy them. She didn't seem too bothered by it, though, and would probably say the sheer thrill of being allowed to hold her own sparkler was worth it.

Calm before the Storm

I've been trying to pack everything fun I want to do into the few days before my next big freelance job starts. My mom stayed on several days after we got home from our vacation, and helped out a lot. Us girls went to Pinebush Nursery in Ila—by far the best place to get perennials and trees around here (they also have some herbs and vegetables, but their focus is great prices on the larger stuff)—and my mom helped me pick out some bushes and trees to plant as a screen in the shade between our house and the neighbors'. I got three large (seven-gallon, I think) Cryptomeria japonica "Yoshino" and two beautiful anise bushes, and a tall camellia (for $7.50 because it was a little spindly). My mom convinced me we could fit them all in my car, a big old gas-guzzling Oldsmobile. We came home and dug holes the rest of the day; Mr. Chalmers smoked meat for lunch and spelled me on the shovel.

My mom also told me about how to make my dogwood seedlings grow the way I want them to, with the branches spreading out a little instead of straight up. Apparently all you do is tie the branches down with string, and tighten them every couple weeks until they're growing that way on their own. I'm now thinking about doing something similar with the cut-down pecan tree that's sprouting crazily in the front yard. The bug likes to stand or sit on the stump and hide inside the branches, and I think I could accentuate the bowl effect and prune the leaders off at the top to keep it small and round, then make it into a little chair with woven honeysuckle or something.

My mom also pointed out that the two trees in the side yard are not basswood as I'd thought, but mulberries! There was no fruit on them the last two years as far as I remember, but right now they're loaded. We took the ladder out and picked some. The bug calls them "sweets," which is what she's saying in this picture:


I started a moss garden under the magnolia tree. It mostly gets covered up with leaves.

We collect bits of sparkly mica from the gravel under the tree and put it in the holes in a log (which I'd made as a birdfeeder last year).

Am I the only person who comes home from a trip and sets about making a souvenir? In New Mexico and Arizona you can't turn around without getting tangled in a tacky, mass-produced dreamcatcher, but instead of spending a fortune on one for the bug I bought some pretty beads in Bisbee (the bead and paper store was open late for some reason) so I could make a more personalized one for her myself.

Most evenings lately before bed she and I go on a little walk around the yard, always stopping to taste the nectar in the honeysuckle blossoms and pick some seed pods from the weeds at the edge of the woods. Yesterday we went out and clipped some of the older vines, then boiled them for about fifteen minutes so the bark could be rubbed off easily. Twisted them into a circle (or "O"), then followed these easy directions for the web in the center, using heavy-duty button thread in place of the traditional sinew. I added the beads (some of which are made from date pits, dates being one of the bug's favorite sweets), a feather my mom had sent to the bug a while back (I think she said it was from a loon), and some twisty dried seed pods. I think it looks nice next to the Japanese-style paper lantern hanging from the blue bandana-print canopy over her bed. It certainly won't do anything to alleviate the night terrors our little boo has been having, but making it with her out in the teepee was a wonderful way to spend a windy Sunday afternoon (even though much of that time was spent searching for the beads she had spread around the yard).

This morning, early, the bug and I went out and picked some greens from the yard: two kinds of sorrel, three kinds of basil, and a bunch of tarragon.

Quick frittata with greens: Preheat the broiler to high. Roughly chop a few handfuls of greens and herbs. Whisk 4 or 5 eggs together with a bit of water. Melt a bit of butter in a skillet over medium-high heat and pour in the eggs. Spread the greens and herbs over the eggs, sprinkle with salt and pepper and some crumbled feta. When the eggs are set around the edges, put the skillet under the broiler to set the top. Cut into wedges and serve.

With an English muffin and fig jam my mom made, the frittata is a fine start to a breakfast for a growing little girl. She ate about twice this much, plus some dried lychees, some popcorn, some Monterey Jack cheese, and two chocolate chips—we have to spell out "chocolate" in this house now.

Next project is a slipcover for the orange couch. Yes, I still like the orange, but something about the texture of the upholstery makes it extremely difficult to get dog hair out of, and I thought that a slipcover could at least be taken off and washed. I got the cheapest fabric I could find, a 100 percent cotton bull denim (11 ounces per square yard, which is heavy), and it's white at the moment—Mr. Chalmers thinks I'm crazy to try to solve a black-dog-hair problem with white fabric, and he may well be right. I ordered the fabric online (from Fabric Masters—it was $1.75 a yard, plus about $17 to ship FedEx overnight: an incredible bargain), and here's what 22 yards of it looks like:

With a flip flop for scale.

I expected it to be more "natural" than white, and the project for today is to see if I can make it more off-white by dying it with tea. I hope it really is 100 percent cotton. In any case, though, I think the white will be fine as long as it's washable. Grandma went back to Washington State yesterday, unfortunately, before she got a chance to make the slipcover for me. So it's me and the bug and the sewing machine—and 22 yards of heavy denim . . .