Unbelievable

I bought seeds from two well known seed houses today. Four packages of seeds from Burpee cost $26.75 with $6.95 of that shipping and handling. I bought eight packages of seed from Park. $26.60 with $6.95 of that shipping and handling.

Have you ever picked up a seed packet? It is featherweight. And if I had bought just one packet of seeds would it still have cost $6.95?

I have heard the big nursery/seed companies are in trouble financially.

Now I see why-

A Freeloader at the Feeder

When I opened the blinds this morning this is who I saw chowing down on the sunflower seeds on my platform feeder. I bought this feeder two weeks ago when I relocated my other feeder off the porch to cut down on the mess the house finches made tossing seeds to and fro. I expected a squirrel or two,but I think the porch cats have deterred them.

Nothing deters opossums. They ignore cats. And they will eat almost anything.

Well- almost anything. I brought some mixed carrots and peas home from my night dinner tray at the prison clinic, and nothing would touch them.

Why I Still Use Cookbooks- A Leek Salad from Greece

This is but one of the several hundred books I keep in my cookbook reference library. It is Diane Kochilas's "The Country Cooking of Greece". Had I not been looking through it last week, I would never have thought of making a leek salad.

Leeks are a noble vegetable, and when they pair with potatoes they become close to divine. But I would never had guessed how good they would be blanched,chilled then dressed with olive oil,red wine vinegar, and chopped olives.

Kochilas collected this recipe first from a local cook on the island of Ikaria, but the version in her book is from Macedonia. Here is what I did with it.


Leeks- one per person. Cut them up like this-













Drop the sliced leeks into boiling ,salted water for 40 seconds to a minute, then drain them and chill them in ice water. Drain again, then put them in a bowl, add a tablespoon or two of olive oil, and 1/2 cup chopped Greek green olives. Drizzle on some red wine vinegar, toss again, then allow to sit at room temperature for an hour.





Delicious and unique!

*Diane Kochilas's recipe called for the white part of leeks only, but Greek leeks must be whiter than the ones I had. My salad turned out fine, even with greener leeks.

The New View From My Porch

Here is another photo of today's landscape improvement at these apartments. Note the lovely black corrugated drainage pipes. Now when I am out on my porch loafing and inviting my soul and thinking about how I am paying almost 1200 bucks a month for a one bedroom apartment, I can be thankful I live in such beautiful surroundings.


*Please see this afternoon's earlier post "Landscaping by Saruman and his Orcs" for more photos of today's landscape embellishments at these apartments.

Landscaping Courtesy of Saruman and his Orcs

Here is what passes for institutional landscaping in Nashville,Tennessee. Here is an example of how to prune foundation hollies-





And this is how we prune yew bushes.











I would weep except that I am sick from smelling the hydrocarbons and deaf from hearing the chainsaws.

And what are they going to do about these stumps? Is bushhogging next, or do they think the yews are coming back?

All this loveliness is just outside my apartment.

Bottled Sauces

At both neighborhood stores I shop at-Kroger and Publix-many aisles are reserved for sauces of all kinds. There is no end to them. From the tiny tins of salsa ranchera to the pasta and pizza sauces. From expensive little bottles of pesto to barbeque and dipping sauces.

All the world's a sauce!

Some, in my opinion are wastes of time, and any competent cook could make a better version. Diced tomatoes, garlic, sweetly softened onions sauteed in olive oil, a few tablespoons of Balsamic vinegar and a pound or so of browned Italian sausage turn into a pasta sauce that would make the angels sing. And adding a bit of cream in winter for heartiness will also keep the angels warm-

A plain, fresh salsa of tomatoes, chiles,garlic, and vinegar is not hard to make either, as long as one does not over spin it to pureed mush in the processor bowl.

And even I can make guacamole.


But there are other sauces more problematical. Sauces that require ingredients a million and a friendly relationship with a mortar and pestle. Curry sauces and creole sauces and Mexican sauces such as Mole and Salsa Pasilla. I suppose I could come up with a passable version, but why settle for passable. I would also worry that my cultural culinary taste would fail me, for my mother and grandmother did not raise me in the Hispanic or Indian traditions. (Neither raised me in any tradition, since both were awful cooks,but that is not the point here.)

I recently had Fed Ex bring me some Salsa Pasilla from Fischer and Weiser at Jelly.com. I buy all kinds of sauces from their website, for they have mango curry sauces, and blueberry chile sauces, and sweet and savory onion glazes.

Nothing I could imitate at home.

Their pasilla chile salsa is especially interesting and delicious, for not only does it have a smoky, earthy taste, it has something rarer.

The taste of mystery and exotica. See it at work here on a simple fried tortilla topped with a black bean chili-



And it is wonderful mixed with scrambled eggs as well-

What We Have Lost

Whenever I write a post about poetry, my blog readers-never numerous-disappear to the dark side of the moon. They do not want to hear about such a moribund art, and I would not want to hear it either if I did not love it so much. And since this is my blog, I will indulge myself.

Here are two examples of what we have lost.

The first are some lines by Shelley in "Adonais", his tribute to the dead John Keats:


"The One remains, the many change and pass:

Heaven's light forever shines,Earth's shadows fly:

Life, like a dome of many colored glass

Stains the white radiance of eternity".


And secondly, W.H. Auden, describing the peace of a summer evening:



"The lion griefs loped from the shade

And on our knees their muzzles laid,

And Death put down his book".


This, my friends, is Poetry-



And now to what we have found.

And I am not making this up.

I found this gem a few years back in a little magazine, and I was so taken by its

magnificent awfulness that I copied the whole thing.(I tried to read it to my mother

the other day, and she begged me to stop). I will not list the author, though I will

say she is still publishing, and has been praised by Ted Kooser and Billy Collins.



"In the scruffle tremble

world my heart is

cake batter. The world rattles

like a piggy bank".

A few stanzas later her heart is back again-



".....My heart

closes like an automatic garage door".


A bit later on she forgets her heart and the cake batter, and asks" Have you ever put

a butterfly in your mouth?"


All I can say about this is that she would not have to be eating butterflies if she

hadn't squashed the cake under the door. And I hope the butterfly was not a monarch-

This goes on for two and a half pages, and the mystery is why did she stop? Perhaps

with her eating habits her verbal diarrhea evolved to physical.



Example number two was a mini essay I read a few days back on the Poetry Magazine

website. Ruth Lilly, heir to the Prozac fortune,donated 200 million dollars to that

magazine, and I will let you decide if money can buy taste.

The young woman who wrote the essay decided to reveal the most wonderful first line

she could remember in a poem. The poem is about Hansel and Gretel, and here is its

dazzling first line-


" Shit! Are we lost?"


Comment would be superfluous. Goodnight, and good luck. And yes, we are lost.



* I do apologize for some of the line breaks. I did not see them till the end, and I am too tired to re-write.