Dreams of Vegetables to Come

Sorry - lots of pictures this week, so not quite the usually organized layout that I prefer.  But the good news, it is stressing me out more than you probably - but that is the fun of OCD (or as I prefer - CDO since the letters should so be in order).  Anyway I diverge, the weather is finally turning warm and with the spring rains we are starting to see some growth in our garden.  The peas are starting to climb their fence, the lettuces are getting settled in and, most importantly, the beans are starting to pop out of the ground.  It is always such fun at the start of the season to see your hard work result in green shoots.  Certainly, come late September I'm always ready for the garden to be done as I do tire of the weed pulling.  But as they say, "Hope springs eternal" every May as for now all I see is the potential of a large bounty to harvest later this year.

As Wisconsin begins to open up this week, we are continuing our home bound hibernation which means no gym visits for us for quite a while.  We are still enjoying our daily morning walks to make up for the lack of gym time and I thought it would be fun to share the social distance reminder signs that the UW has installed on several of their walkways and paths.  It is always good to know how many milk cartons (twelve) and pink, plastic flamingos (apparently four) you need to keep between you and strangers.  One scientific and cautionary note, we have not independently confirmed that twelve milk cartons, four plastic flamingos, three terrace chairs, or one Paul Bunyon rivalry axe actually add up to six feet.  So please use caution when laying out your milk cartons (or flamingos, etc.) when spacing yourself for your social interactions.

Jo is continuing her quarantine driven, culinary explorations with sourdough and this week's treat was home made, sourdough, hamburger buns.  They both looked the parted and tasted great when combined with a well grilled burger (thanks to our Christmas purchase of a food thermometer) and, of course, some good Wisconsin cheddar.  We are continuing our work on expanding our waistlines and enjoying the season by starting to make home made ice cream on a regular basis.  

Sourdough and then Some More Sourdough

As everyone else in the country is doing, Joann started some sourdough starter several weeks ago.  We have made several loafs of sourdough bread, but once you have the starter you need to keep coming up with things to make with it - since there is no way my frugal wife is going to through away starter whenever it needs to be fed again.  Therefore, we have a couple rounds of sourdough pancakes and are about to try sourdough pizza dough.  But this week's sourdough event (yes we are having almost one of them a week) was sourdough english muffins.  The good news is that they turned out looking and tasting better than store bought english muffins.  We still need to work a bit on the right stove temperature to balance cooking them all the way through without burning the outside, but I'm guessing there will lots of opportunity to experiment since the starter remains chugging away in the refrigerator.

The enforced isolation has provided lots of time to experiment in the kitchen and fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your thoughts about waistlines and blood sugar levels) many of the experiments have involved desserts.  Last week, oatmeal cream cakes were on the agenda and it was a smashing success.  Certainly one of my top favorites, but that could be the buttercream filling - short side note - sometime I think we should just make a big vat of buttercream icing and keep it around to improve various foods (e.g., apples, bananas, kale?).  We have also made two batches of home-made ice cream already including our favorite chocolate variety.  I may be shooting for a Covid-38 instead of the more mundane 19 pounds many people are talking about.

We did manage to get outside for some garden work which helped the waistline, blood pressure, and stress levels to get all of our garden seeds in the ground.  We already have a lettuces and peas coming up so now just need the weather gods to cooperate and provide the optimal amount of sunshine and rain.  

It is Snowing Outside

May 10 and there is snow coming down - and not just a flake or two, some serious snow.  Really???

 I want to be planting my garden not dealing with snow - in May.  

It Just Kept Growing

It was finally time this weekend to let Jo get out the clippers and scissors and have at my hair.  Fortunately, I keep it fairly short and my do isn't too complicated - one of the joys/challenges of having very straight and fine hair and oh yeah, being a slowly balding guy.  We didn't get a really good before photo, but here is it afterwards.  She didn't do too bad of a job although she definitely had more of a calling for HR than cosmetology.  My hair is sort of a cross between what Moe from the 3 Stooges had and a bowl cut.  Jo really needs to work on her feathering techniques.  But it is shorter and since we did it on our very windy deck no clean up was necessary.  I have been told that Jo plans to work on her skills during her next attempt on my hair - fingers crossed that salons are reopened within the next 6 weeks.

For our outdoor activity we have been working on our garden.  We helped lay out straw in the pathways at the community garden we are now using and have planted some lettuce, peas, and onions.  Now we just need the temperatures to warm up to get some green shoots going.  We have been struggling to get to the 50's this week.  Other than that, we continue to get a long walk in every morning and this week got to enjoy Bucky practicing good hygiene practices along with some new Canada geeselings (gooselings, baby geese?).  Quite cute, but Mom and Dad weren't too happy with us as we tried to get a photo.

Other than that, our spirits are still up and we can laugh ourselves silly at the things we are doing to stay virus free - especially the hour long sterilization process that our groceries now have to endure to move from our car to our refrigerator or shelves.  But I'm sure everyone has stories like that now.