Sunday, May 01, 2005

Garden report 05.01.05

It's been quiet here lately. Life has been busy and discouraging lately. I haven't been motivated to cook anything special.

The garden continues along, though I have yet to harvest anything from it. The big success story so far is the spinach, which is growing well. The two mints are also very rambunctious. This week I moved most of my plants out onto the deck to stay, since nighttime temperatures have risen out of the 30s. The mitsuba is still inside because it seems a bit frail. I repotted it a few days ago. The lettuce is also not as far along as I had hoped it would be, but it finally seems to be doing better. Some of the red lettuces are getting the red color in their leaves.

About a week ago, I planted some snow peas, and today I planted some seeds from an Asian stir-fry mix, as well as cilantro. The stir-fry mix includes bok choy, mizuna, komatsuna, mibuna, red romaine lettuce, red kale and celtuce. Since I haven't tried most of these greens before (at least, not knowingly), I look forward to finding out which I like best.

My indoor starts have been slow, but I finally saw a seedling in one of the pots today. I neglected to mark the pots when I planted my starts (oops), so I'm not completely certain, but I think it may be a hot pepper.

Tonight I plan to make some porcini marsala fettucini. Something so easy and delicious is always a morale-booster.

1 comment:

Winslow said...

A late comment on the fettucini: I used up all of my marsala on this and still needed some more alcohol, so I added Shao Xing rice wine. It made a dramatic difference in the sauce's taste. The sauce had a much sharper or "brighter" taste. This is probably due to the fact that the rice wine is drier than marsala.