Sunday Morning: Nearly Perfect Breakfast

Yum, soft boiled eggs, tangerines, toast with sweet lime jalapeno jelly and Tour de France tea (like Earl Grey but with jasmine added).  Plus a lovely interiors magazine.  The only thing that would have made it better would have been enjoying it on a sunny terrace on vacation in a foreign country.  Happy + relaxing Sunday to you!

Garden Update: Pears

My lunch today featured a pear and a tomato both from our garden.  Yay!  Finally, some harvest.

Curried tuna with carrots and tarragon, pear and tomato from the garden. 

When we bought our property one of the things that we liked about it was the abundance of mature trees.  The history is a little fuzzy, but the front house (mom's) was probably built in the 20s or 30s and then added onto in the 50s and 70s.  The back house (mine) was built in the early 50s according to a neighbor, and added onto in the 60s and 70s.  In the early years someone with a good sense of design and proportion laid out the property with a nice angled driveway that limits visibility from the street.  They also planted a lot of trees.  Since then many weed trees have sprung up along fencelines and such, and now we have dozens of trees.  Unfortunately post-70s the property wasn't very well cared for.  I think elderly people lived here, then a woman who got divorced and lived here alone until she set up some trailer hook-ups and rented out trailers.  Yeah, weird.  Almost two acres though, of county jurisdiction means some strange allowances when it comes to zoning, thus informal trailer park.  The post-70s neglect meant that the irrigation system went all to hell and by the time we moved in during the winter of 2001, several of the trees were completely dead and almost all of the others were in need of serious TLC.  Some of the big trees that we lost were short lived species, but several were fruit trees.  Two big cherries were completely dead, as was one pear.  The other pear hadn't been pruned in years but was still alive, probably because it was near a big leak in the irrigation piping.  There were also three apple trees which were getting crowded out by a giant mulberry, but were still alive.  

This post is really about the pear tree though.  It's huge, probably 40 feet tall, and with a trunk diameter of 21.5 inches (68 in circumfrence!).  Due to its lack of pruning many of the old branches reach for the sky and just to taunt us, that's were the majority of fruit forms.  That is until a couple of years ago when some new growth sprouted out just above our heads.  After a couple more years we're starting to get more fruit at pickable levels.  The pears are small, and we don't spray anything for bugs or to keep away birds, so they tend to have little marks.  So tasty when ripe though!

The pear tree.  The ladder is six feet tall for scale.  There is lots of dead growth that needs to be cut out, but we always prune in winter and sometimes can't tell which limbs are dead.  You'd think we'd remember to mark them, but we never do.  Oh well.

Some of the ripe pears out of reach above my head.  The animals are the biggest recipients of the fruit since the dogs eat fallen pears as desert after their regular meals and as snacks at any point in between.  We also gather the fruit in a bucket so that we can take a few pears back to the neighbor's horses when we walk to the back.  The dogs help themselves to the fruit in the bucket too.  

Small pears, but mostly unblemished.

A much better representation of their color.

Culinary Chronicles: A Quick Lunch

I was in the throws of an Illustrator drawing this morning, lost in the details that only I can see when zoomed in to 800%.  As a result I kept putting off lunch even though my stomach was telling me to eat.  By the time I read my friend Deirdre's post about her search for the perfect fish taco, my mind was clearly open to culinary suggestion of any sort.  Not having any meat in the house that wasn't frozen, I was left to concocting these veggie tacos.

They went perfectly with a glass of agua de jamaica and my kitchen curtains in the background.

Friday Musings

As it threatens to storm here (thunder!), I give you the following things that have entertained me online this week.

Leave it to Spain to bring opera to the flash mob.

Rent control combined with two professional incomes can make for some mighty nice apartment dwelling. (via door sixteen).

One of my New Year's resolutions was to learn how to make croissants.  My first attempt was this morning, and while they tasted good and had the required buttery layers, they looked ugly as all get out.  This guy makes shaping them look so simple.  Can't be to hard on myself, since it wouldn't have been a resolution if I thought it was going to be easy.  Also on my cooking challenges for the year-- pie crust and english muffins.  Ever made any of those?

And finally, in order to get the acequia water from one side of the property to the other, I wish I could have a channel like this built.  That's the L'Occitane garden, so you just know it smells deliciously like lavender too.  Maybe L'Occitane can just ship me the materials when they break down the garden.  The Chelsea Flower Show doesn't last that long does it?  (via Fennel & Fern).

Friday Musings

As a follow up to yesterday's post about Jamie Oliver, this speech he gave for TED is a condensed version of how he sees the problem (of obesity), and what we should do about it. Definitely worth 21 minutes of your weekend. (Discovered via Gala Darling's weekly Carousel post. She always has really interesting links- this week she also linked to the article below, and the articles about happiness via Sandra Bullock and the article about Polyvore were both really interesting too).

This snippet from the NYT was referenced by several of the blogs I read, so I'm not going to link to any particular person, but it interested me because the author, Dominique Browning talks about how she was constantly hungry at one point after losing her job as the editor of House & Garden. It made me wonder about the correlation of obesity and unhappiness in America. (She's not overweight, it just triggered the thought in my mind). If we are the fattest nation in the world, are we also the unhappiest? Why do people eat so much and so badly? I know that I eat to make myself feel better a lot, and that the fattest I've ever been has also been the unhappiest-- and not because I thought I was fat, it didn't help, but it wasn't the core reason, while the thinnest I've been was also the happiest.

Hmm, now that I think about it, I shop to make myself feel better too. Maybe that's the reason that our nation is so consumerist? (You know, because I'm totally indicative of all Americans).

What do you do to make yourself feel better when you aren't so happy?

Food Revolution?

Have any of you watched Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution? Apparently it airs on Friday nights on ABC, but I just watched the first two episodes on Hulu. It's somewhat sensationalistic, being a TV reality show, but based on the data regarding obesity and diabetes related deaths in the United States, and the food that is typically being eaten on this show, it should be sensationalistic. There is not a green or fresh vegetable eaten in the first episode, and in the second only grudgingly, and this is amongst adults and children. Its really appalling, but not all that surprising. I watched it with my mother, and about half-way through I turned to her and thanked her for always having been a good cook, vegetable gardener, and natural foods co-op shopper.