A Note To My Readers

I will be moving my gardening posts away from my second blog on Wordpress, which I am shutting down due to technical problems with Wordpress and lack of readers. Some may not be interested in reading about gardening, just as some are bored by recipes, but excited by natural history or estate sales.

My blog is not a personal weblog. I think of it as an online magazine which covers many topics. No one reads every article in a magazine and I do not expect every one to do so on a blog.

This blog is by no means a success. It has only a handful of readers, and I have often come close to abandoning it. But I do appreciate what readers I have, and I know some enjoy my posts, so I keep on with it.

And remember that though all gardening is local, the love of gardens is universal even for people who cannot bring home a tomato plant and keep it alive.

Savory Buttermilk Pancakes with Zucchini and Parmesan Cheese

The basic buttermilk pancake recipe for these is from Marion Cunningham's excellent "Breakfast Book". The zucchini and Parmesan are my embellishments. Zucchini pancakes used to be a staple when I lived in New England. Squash there seemed less troubled by borers than they are in Tennessee, and there were always zucchini to spare.

1 cup buttermilk
1 egg
3 tbs melted butter
3/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup grated zucchini
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Grate the zucchini,then put it in a strainer and press down on it with a spoon to remove excess water. Then place it in a bowl with the egg, the cheese, the buttermilk, and the melted butter and mix well.
In a separate bowl, combine the flour, the salt, and the baking soda. Then take a fork and mix well to incorporate the soda and the salt.
Combine the wet ingredients with the flour mixture and mix together with a spatula. Do not let lumpiness concern you!


Heat a griddle pan greased with a little butter to medium high and spoon the pancake mixture on to form 3 inch cakes. Turn when bubbles have broken through on top and the bottoms have browned.

This makes 13-14 three inch pancakes, 7 five inch pancakes. Top with Maple syrup or guava jelly.

Ratatouille Pie

I made this tonight with left over Ratatouille. Simply mix 3 cups of left over Ratatouille with 1 cup of grated Parmesan cheese and five eggs. Use a nine inch pie crust, add the mixture and cook at 375 for 45 to 50 minutes until the eggs are set.

Tasty!

The Most Beautiful Clematis- Duchess of Albany

I photographed this today in the Nashville garden of a friend. I gave her this clematis last autumn as a birthday present, and it is thriving. It looks like a bloom one might find by moonlight in "A Midsummer's Night Dream". A sprite's drinking goblet perhaps-

Click on photo to enlarge.

The Tee-Tiny Experimental Kitchen-Cooking Nobody's Favorite Vegetables

I have written about turnips before, and about the Southern love affair with their greens and dismissal of their roots.

Richard Olney baked parboiled roots in cream and Gruyere, and having learned that recipe from his"Simple French Food", I have stayed with variants of it. But today, having three medium turnips that needed a sense of direction, I decided to julienne them in the food processor, then cook them as I would potato home fries. I put them in a 9 inch cast iron skillet with a little olive oil and 1/3 stick of butter and tossed them in the fat to coat them. Then, on medium heat, I cooked them until they were soft and golden, with some even crisped to brown. I tossed them frequently after adding salt and a couple dashes of celery salt to taste as they were cooking.

Next, I added 1 cup of diced spiral Honey ham and 1/3 cup grated Gruyere cheese. I continued to saute the turnips a minute or two more to melt the cheese and warm the ham. I checked for seasoning.

This is a delicious turnip treatment, tasty beyond measure. If an old timey Southern cook had invented it, she would have called it a "Feed the Preacher" side. But even I, a New England old maid, know something good when I eat it-




This should feed two to four.

Major Tom and the Two Bagheeras- The Porch Panthers

In these apartments there is a cat colony. It is a small colony since the woods surround with coyotes, and Barred and Great Horned Owls, and with a pair of Red tailed hawks who fly low over the parking sheds and the parking lots where I am certain there are no rabbits.

Whether the colony began when renters left their cats behind, or whether it started with refugees from the Great Nashville flood I do not know. I do know that I once fed chipmunks, then a possum, then a raccoon trio,( and with such delicious kibble), that it was natural the cats would come.

Last summer it was a gang of four, three black and one slate gray. They were at the kittenette stage of life and slept on my porch daybed on summer nights.Over the winter I put blankets under the day bed for them to shelter. By this spring the slate gray, who was possibly too conspicuous for its own good, had disappeared. As did an old tabby.

Now the colony is run by two sleek young Bagheeras with lustrous black fur and yellow eyes. They are as flirtatious as houris in a Sultan's harem, and their Sultan is Major Tom, who looks as though he could use a box of band aids. He is Chandler's Moose Malloy, and the females are his Velmas. As chic as Chanel models they charm him and rub him with their tails and drive him to distraction.Sometimes their charm overwhelms him and he will grab one by the neck and pin her to the ground. If a man tried that with a woman he would have had a cast iron skillet come down on his head, but the Bagheeras are there to serve and seem not to mind. Of course there are consequences to being so accommodating, and a month or so three of them arrived.

I saw them first on a weekend when Nashville had a 6 inch rain. Whether the colony lives in the drain pipes or under the foundation plantings that much rain was dangerous to kittens. The Bagheeras came streaking onto the porch with kittens hanging by their necks. Under the day bed they went. The next day they were back to where they hide.

Over the next two weeks I began to see them more often. They started to eat soft cat food and started playing through the railings with each other and with the leaves of summering house plants. All was well until it wasn't.

Two days ago I found a small chewed bone of some small animal on the porch. I feared then that the coons had gotten one of the kittens. I did not see them again until today, and there were only two. The coons come every night and by morning the kibble cupboard is bare. But maybe it was not the coons. Maybe it was Major Tom, with a preemptive strike
on a male rival to be. Tom cats have been known to murder.

I have failed to mention the third female in the pack, who I think may be the mother-in-law. I call her Shaky Cat, for she shakes and walks every which way but straight. She still manages to find the food bowl. Perhaps a hawk got her then dropped her, and ruined her life as a diva. With her long black hair and addled attitude she seems like
an old actress gone to seed.

I am more of an observer than an admirer of this colony, but I cannot say the same of my little dog Poppette who watches them by the hour from the living room window, growling and shivering. If I call out "Where are the cats?'
he will even leave his warm bed for a glimpse.

Feral cats have their admirers, though some people want to poison them with Tylenol. Not long ago the Times had a story about an Audubon Magazine columnist who proposed this, and almost ended up in Witness Protection.

As for me, I am now conditioned. The Bagheeras raise their tails and saunter toward me, and the next thing I know, I am off to Kroger at 3am for bags of Tender Centers.

* For those who have never read Kipling" "The Jungle Book", Bagheera was the black panther in the story.

Evening by Evening

I went to an estate sale last summer in Nashville's Green Hills suburb, and since I was out of pocket as I usually am these days, I allowed myself only 25 dollars to spend. I came home three dollars under budget, having bought only a Dutch oven and a small antique book.

The book was "Evening by Evening" by the English Protestant preacher C.H. Spurgeon. There was an inscription inside the cover dated 1909, for that was the year this book was given as a gift to "Dear Janice".

The book has evening meditations for each day of the year, and these were meant to be read at the the evening fireside where the family would gather.

Spurgeon was a mesmerizing orator and writer, and his essays have the serene and sonorous dignity I associate with the King James Bible. Here is a sample-

"The hours of the declining sun are so many quiet valleys in the garden of time wherein man may find his Maker waiting to commune with him,even as of old the Lord God walked with Adam in Paradise in the cool of the day".

And here is Spurgeon on how we live our lives-

"To leap from day to day like a mad hunter scouring the fields, is an omen of being delivered over to destruction; but the solemn pause, the deliberate consideration- these are the means of grace and ensigns of an indwelling life".

What a treasure of a book-