Thank you, Millie.

A long time ago, in another lifetime, I used to be married.  My mother-in-law was a great cook of Italian cuisine and enjoyed eating all sorts of good things  Time passed, things changed and now I am divorced, but one of the things I have retained was her way of cooking a lot of Italian dishes.  Simple ingredients, fresh, and filling.

One of those things for which I had a hankering lately was home made pasta, or "home mades" as she used to call them.  The recipe is simple and takes surprisingly little time from start to finish.

You start out with a ratio of one egg to one cup of flour, in my case tonight, three farm fresh eggs from my CSA share (Shout out to Red Earth Farm!) and three cups of flour, add a dollop of olive oil (don't get mixed up and put in balsamic vinegar instead... just sayin'), and about a 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

Three beautiful eggs in well of three cups of flour

Put the flour and salt into a bowl, make a well in that and crack the eggs into it and add the oil.  With a fork, start beating the eggs and pulling the flour in from the sides of the well.

Pulling the flour into the egg

At some point, the dough will become too stiff for the fork and you'll have to switch to your hands.  What you are looking for is a relatively dry dough.   You might be tempted to add water, but don't.  It'll be okay.   Once you get as much as the flour kneaded in as possible, let the dough rest for about 10 minutes.  This well let the gluten relax and you'll have an easier time of it from here on.

Nice dry dough

First pass

Get out your trusty pasta machine that your son gave you for Christmas one year, find the only place in your kitchen where you can clamp it to a counter and with the rollers on the biggest opening, and run a wad of dough through it three or four times, folding it back on itself in between passes.

after running through smaller opening

Then switch to a smaller opening and run the strips through again.  This time, you will notice the dough will be thinner and smoother.  Switch to another smaller opening and do it again.  Continue this until you've reached the smallest opening.  Place the strips of dough over something to hang while you finish up the rest of the dough.


Start water to cook the noodles on the stove.  You'll want this ready to go once all the strips are cut, or the noodles will get a little gummy and stick together.  Not the end of the world, because you can stir like a maniac once you dump them in the water, but it is easier to keep this from happening.

Once you have all the strips completed, run them through the cutter.  I chose the smaller one tonight to make skinny noodles.  Hang the completed noodles up while you finish cutting the remainder of the strips.

After that is all done, dump the noodles into hot boiling water (I added salt) and cook on a rolling boil for about 5 minutes.  Home made noodles don't take nearly as long as dried store-bought noodles, so keep testing them for doneness.

When you are satisfied, drain the noodles and dump into a pan of hot spaghetti sauce (mine was also homemade from my CSA share of tomatoes.

Remove from heat and let noodles sit for a few minutes, stirring to let the noodles absorb the sauce.  (Here in Philadelphia, Italians call this "gravy")  Serve with a nice sprinkling of freshly grated parmesan cheese and a fresh salad.

Mangia!

Doh!

Why have I never thought to plant strawberries before?  Little red nuggets of mouth watering deliciousness, sun warmed sweetness... mmmmmmmm....
It makes perfect sense that I do plant them, since I generally make strawberry jam every year.

Strawberry Jam Canned in One of My Vintage Ball Jars

Most years I make strawberry shortcake from scratch and serve it with real whippy cream, 'cause seriously nothin' says summer quite like that to me.

Homemade Strawberry Shortcake

So why, oh why would it never occur to me to actually plant my own?  Who knows.  The important thing is that today I have taken steps to remedy that situation.  I bought 20 bare root strawberry plants.  There are enough growing days left to get them established this fall and actually harvest a few next summer.

Here's something I didn't know.  There are two different types of strawberries - June bearing and ever bearing.  Why decide?  Get some of both.  Yes, have some.  The names sort of tell you what you need to know.  June bearing have one big crop, usually in June of the second year after planting and the ever bearing varieties bear fruit all summer, beginning with the first year after planting.

I can't wait to get them and plant them so I can get those tasty little morsels of summer next year!  I think I may have just the bed for them.... 

NOM NOM NOM!

Another bed and some ideas for next Spring

I've wanted to get back out in the backyard last week, but laboring in a sauna is not something I was willing to do, so I did other things this week.  Mostly sitting on the couch looking up stuff on the internet.  Productive stuff.  No, really.  It was.  Scout's honor.

See, I found this youtube channel by a guy named  Larry Hall.  Basically, you take some vinyl rain gutters and some two by fours, some containers, net cups and some potting mix and you create a self-watering system in which you can grow amazing vegetables in containers.  Since I have an entire driveway that extends all the way into my backyard that gets sun all day long, I've wanted to do a container garden there forever.  These are cool, because it will eliminate me having to water those containers to keep everything alive.  The nutrients go right into the water, which is pretty efficient, sort of borrowing from hydroponics.  I'd probably use compost tea in mine, as I don't want to use chemical fertilizer.  The other thing is that here where I live, I would have to take steps to prevent creating a mosquito breeding ground.  Still, I love the idea - it's simple as can be, inexpensive and I can use grow bags, which are better than buckets or plastic totes since the roots self-prune instead going round and round and eventually killing the plants.

Then, in my travels, I found this guy.  Another thing I've wanted to do again is to grow potatoes in containers.  Besides having a great accent, I love what he is doing with the potatoes, even if he does use chemical fertilizers.  That's easy enough to bypass and again, watering with compost tea would work wonders.  So again, I'm filing this away for next year and in fact, I think I would combine the two ideas and grow potatoes with the rain gutter self-watering system.  I wish I found this in the spring, because I would have done it this year, but oh well.  The possibilities for next season abound!

In the meantime, I decided to start another permaculture-type garden bed with sheet mulching.  I surveyed the backyard this morning and narrowed down two possible sites.

The first site is near the fence and at the moment is a tangle of pachysandra, ivy and thistles.  Probably a few dandelions there too.  You can see the last of the phlox flowering and there is a rose bush struggling to the left.  Sterling, I think.  It doesn't get sun in the morning, because its close to the back steps of the house, but I knew I wanted to put one of the fruit trees I've ordered there.  Possibly the apple, since it would be fairly close to my existing apple tree and cross-pollination, ya know.



The second site gets a good amount of sun every day and would be a great place for tomatoes, peppers and possibly another fruit tree.  Right now, there is a type of perennial sunflower/daisy thingy I purchased at Fordhooks on a whim and it is much, much too big for that space.  I keep it cut back, but if I didn't, it would get over 8 feet tall.  This is actually what grew back after I dug it up and replanted it toward the back of the yard where the size made sense.  So, yeah... this one is going to have to go.

After mulling over both possible sites for the new bed, I ended up choosing the first one for a very simple reason.  (and this is where my youngest daughter should stop reading)  Bees.  Those yellow flowers are a bee/moth/butterfly magnet and I figured I would give them a few more weeks of luscious pollen before tackling this bed.

Decision made, I hauled out the weed whacker and discovered several new curse word combinations.  I hate that darn thing.  It's inexpensive (cheap) and the strings don't advance automatically like they are supposed to and most of the time, whirl back onto the spool.  

At any rate, a short vocabulary building exercise time later I had this

Chop and drop.  

I spread some newspapers I purchased this morning (I should have read them first, I suppose), wet them down and added a layer of cow manure and wet that down too.

Then I mixed a five gallon bucket of my compost with ten gallons of peat moss, about 3 gallons of vermiculite, two big handfuls of pulverized lime and a handful of Epsom salts.  

I spread half of that mixture over the manure, wet it down, then another layer of manure and topped that off with the remaining soil mixture, wetting each layer down.  Once I got that smoothed out to my liking, I spread a layer of pine shavings over the whole thing and gave it a good soaking.  

Here's the finished bed.  I would like to get another couple inches of pine shavings on top before winter hits, but I'm pretty happy with it so far.  No digging is always a good thing.  Time will tell whether or not the pachysandra and ivy actually succumb to this method or not.  They may just rear their heads, look in my direction and say, "Thanks for the manure, lady."  I'm also wondering if the poor little rose bush will benefit from this sudden glut of nutrients.  Hope so.

For those of you who may be wondering about the addition of lime and epsom salts, the lime is for the calcium and the salts are for the magnesium, both of which prevent blossom end rot in tomatoes, melons, peppers, etc.  It's not enough to neutralize the acid that the manure adds, but will make a difference to the plants.  The peat moss and vermiculite were added because I have a fairly dense clay soil and I wanted to aid in drainage, especially at this particular bed site, since it sits pretty close to my downspout.  

After everything was said and done, I weed whacked the walk again and then decided to take a few pics of my backyard as it is now to share with all of you, plus one of the tree well bed I finished a couple of weeks ago.

New bed and walkway  

Coral Bells in flower

Creeping Charlie.  Someday, I'll make beer with it.

Bed I did a couple of weeks ago.  I ended up planting Russian sage, lavender, Greek oregano and English thyme on this side.  The other side is all seeded with garlic, which has not made an appearance yet.

Well, gentle readers... that is as they say, that.  At least for now.