Cultivating Patience

I've reached the hurry-up-and-wait stage of gardening.

In the early spring, I'm busy and filling my time with planning and prepping - drawing out half a dozen possible layouts on graph paper, reading up on what might grow well in our area, calculating and figuring what will grow best in which beds next to what other plants. Even though there's no physical garden yet, there's progress in my mind and in my ideas.

Later on, near the end of spring, comes the actual dirty work. I love that part - weeding the beds from last year, wandering around the garden stores picking out seeds and seedlings, kneeling in the yard in the sunshine digging out spaces for transplanting. Dirt under my fingernails and the smell of fresh growing things everywhere and feeling like I'm accomplishing something. And for a week or two, every day something new happens. Roots spread, seedlings grow, seeds start to poke their heads out from underground and creep up taller and bigger every day.

And then we hit the slowdown. In a month or so, we'll be overrun by cucumbers and green beans and peas and tomatoes and zucchini and half a dozen other fresh vegetables, and I'll be swamped trying to harvest everything and find ways to eat what we can and put up what we can't. But at the moment, there's nothing left to do.

The raised beds mean little to no weeding, which is wonderful, but also means that I don't have any reason to interact with my veggies on a daily basis. The plants are growing, slowly, but day-to-day there's no perceptible change. And while I love to go out and look at them and make sure everything is fine, there's a serious feeling that as long as I'm watching, nothing's going to happen.

The herb bed is doing fine, and I can use that to my heart's content. The blueberries are *almost* blue. One of our tomato plants has a teeny, fingernail-sized tomato starting to develop, in spite of the general lack of sunlight that feels like it's stunting all of the plants. Soon, I'll have work to do in my garden again.

Soon. Just... not now.

Cookbook Project, Books #65 and 66

"Big Flavors," Jim Fobel

This is yet another of umbran's books. He's had it for as long as I can remember, and it has been sitting unused on the top shelf of the cookbook collection for that entire time. I think I glanced through it once or twice, but I never managed enough enthusiasm to actually pick out a recipe or use it. It's a little too generic to be used for specific purposes, and a little too focused to be a good generic cookbook.

There were a few recipes that sounded interesting, though, and Crunchy Louisiana Catfish won, at least in part because catfish wound up being on sale at Whole Foods. And, while the recipe selection in the book may be a bit oddly distributed, this one recipe, at least, was excellent. Well-written and detailed, straightforward, and the finished project was great. I've had too many catfish recipes where the coating wound up either falling off, dripping, or getting soggy. This was none of those things, and the flavor was pretty darn good. It may be worth finding ways to use the rest of this book....

"Skinny Comfort Foods," Sue Spitler

This was a gift from my mother. When I first went away to school and found that cooking was a barterable skill, I asked her for some cookbooks so I'd be able to figure out some things to make. She gave me this. I glanced through it, did my best not to take it as a veiled slam at my weight, and never used it - it's full of "lightened" recipes that call for fat-free cheese product, Cool Whip, fat-free half and half, and other non-food products.

But a project is a project, and that means not skipping on a book just because it's challenging. And I needed a side dish to go with the catfish. I've found that some of the cookbooks that seem impossible when it comes to finding main dishes are better at yielding up an edible side dish. So we made Corn Pudding, and it wasn't too bad. Nowhere near as good as my mom's corn casserole, which has actual sour cream and butter and stuff, but worth eating. Dunno if I'll ever make anything else from this book, but I'm glad that I found something from it that was good.