A feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore

And now the song stuck in my head is Taylor Swift’s august.

It’s Emma’s birthday tomorrow and mine has “slipped away into a moment in time”. And the rest of August is going, too.

Our backyard got finished. Click the image or the link in the caption to watch the video. It starts with me saying, “OK, hon, here’s your tour” because I made it for Rach who’s spent almost as much time in Pittsburgh as me, who grew up there, and in Pittsburgh, people call you hon quicker upon meeting you than any other place I’ve ever been. 

Our exchange student has gotten all registered for school with a pretty OK schedule, and gotten started running cross country. We’re still figuring out stuff she likes to eat. She’s vegetarian, and said she really doesn’t like cabbage and won’t eat sauerkraut at all – the sauerkraut I can completely understand! She also said she’s not a real big fan of corn, so one night when I made vegetarian fried rice, I left the cabbage out and made the corn on the side. One morning thereafter, I think a Thursday after biking to Goodman, I had a breakfast of leftovers.

I made myself a birthday brunch with a menu of breakfast burritos, vegan, vegetarian, and meat. They all had roasted potatoes and onions and bell & poblano peppers inside. The vegan ones had pinto beans and zucchini added. The vegetarian and meat ones had scrambled eggs and cheese, too, and the meat ones had breakfast sausage. I also made two kinds of cimmy buns, my own giant yeasted cimmy bun (when I was getting ready to cook, I tried searching for my own recipe, and didn’t add -ai to the end of the search phrase, and the results were . . .  interesting) and some vegan ones, mostly this King Arthur recipe. I made a simpler oat milk and powdered sugar glaze, instead of theirs which is more like frosting. I over-baked the giant bun a little so I think the vegan ones were more toothsome. We lugged two giant melons home from the market and one was way too ripe – a lot of it went into the compost – and the other was close. And I didn’t take pictures of any of it. Only this quesadilla made with leftover vegan and vegetarian filling that I ate the next day. With a large bowl of the almost too soft melon on the side.

Some night in there, I guess it was Monday, I made a tomato galette for dinner. I used up all the bits of cheese in the fridge, goat cheese spread on the bottom, last 2 slices of pre-sliced Muenster, a little fresh mozzarella ripped up on top. The small leek that came in last week’s CSA is sautéed and in there, too.

Wednesday was a Jasper day. We went to the last bug class of the season, then we came home and ate some lunch. He wanted to go to “old MacDonald’s” but I decided it’d be best to just come home, where he polished off a big pile of no stripes French fries. Then we went to the dino park that’s near his house. He got some leaves for big hands. The project at bug class was making a prairie for a butterfly, so we’d all gone out for our walk around the nature center with scissors to cut plants to stick between two layers of contact paper to make a home for a printed butterfly. Naturally being a 4-year-old boy, what appealed to Jasper the most was just cutting plants, getting them out of his way, and when we got to the park he still wanted to break leaves off the trees. I let a limited amount of that happen. The trees at the park were pretty young; I figured they need their leaves.    

Another time, I’d successfully raised and baked some sourdough on a Jasper day and I thought I could do it Wednesday too. It was too hot and I think my starter is too wet, so I ended up with disaster bread. I also forgot the salt so it’s pretty tasteless.  In fact the lack of salt could’ve been a contributing factor to the disaster – maybe the sourdough rose extra fast with no inhibiting salt. I baked it and chucked the worse of the two loaves in the compost right away. I made some of the other loaf into garlic bread Thursday and it was OK, but when I ate the crust of my piece, where there was less garlic butter and  Parmesan, I could taste the blandness of the salt free bread. And there’s no room in the compost for the rest of the better loaf today because of all the melon rinds from last Sunday.  

Megan had kind of a tough day Thursday. Their car overheated. But her cats cheered her up, and seems like the car is all fixed now.

I went to pick tomatoes out at Tipi on Saturday, and Miri came along. I haven’t started the annual blanching and skinning and dicing, and making big batches of roasted tomato sauce, as yet. But I also picked flowers and they’re good to end on a happy note. Pretty.