Last night I made salad! Food that I had raised right up from the ground! I don’t know why that is so exciting. Of course after I picked the lettuce I packed it in plastic, rented a truck, drove it 200 miles (100 hundred miles away from my house and then 100 back) and then I put it in my refridgerator for 3 days and THEN I ate it. I mean, I just was nostalgic for that mass produced taste…
I looked at my pepper plant and I actually seem to be growing peppers! I am perhaps overly impressed by this, but there you go. Also I noticed when I took the picture that I am kind of proud of my pepper plant for having grown a pair. The lettuce also seems to be becoming more lettuce. Two points for me!
Well it has only taken me three years to get around to doing this. It looks like my time-line is pretty spot on. Realize, what should be done, wait three years, act! So I am in the extremely hands-off process of making the No-Knead Bread recipe from the New York Times article, adapted from Jim Lahey’s Sullivan Street Bakery. I used active dry yeast instead of instant yeast. The adaptation suggested using 1/3 teaspoon of dry yeast instead of 1/4 teaspoon of the instant. I now realize that I need a more extensive set of measuring spoons because I have no 1/3 teaspoon. Instead, I measured 1 teaspoon and then using my very scientific eyeballs, divided that into 3 equal piles. We’ll see if that works. I also realized part-way through taking these pictures that I needed to change the settings on my camera so that everything is not blue.
So it’s 3 cups regular flour (sub wheat flour if you wish)
1c. + 5/8 c. water
1 1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. instant yeast or 1/3 tsp. active dry. Mix and wait.
Whilst I wait, I put a note on it alerting my roommate that it has the potential to become bread so that he doesn’t think I have gone insane and just forgot my goo in the pantry for 18 hours.
I also took a picture of the endless endless rain. This is further proof that my project of learning lifes kills is not in vain since it is clearly arc-building time outside. So someone build an ark and invite me on because I will be really useful!
Okay, so it’s not incredibly impressive, but last year I bought a bunch of herbs and proceeded to kill them. The very fact that things are growing seems to me to be a miracle. If I ever have an actual yard I now feel a sense of hope that I will be able to make food come up from out of the ground.
Unless you water them so much that they can’t breathe. Apparently in an effort to be very diligent and take care of the tomato plants I watered them. I watered them often. Perhaps I failed to let the roots ever get dry enough that they could breathe and take in the water and nutrients from the soil. OOPS! I will now attempt to grow plants without waterboarding them.