Pearls' Garden Update, Basil Pesto & Another King Arthur Flour recipe Homerun July 18, 2008

A quick garden update: there is the slightest of orange blush on a few of our Roma tomatoes! It can’t be far off now for sweet juicy tomatoes. We can hardly wait!

We harvested some of our basil yesterday, since it was beginning to flower. I’ve never made Pesto before, but found this terrific website & recipe complete with lovely photos for Basil Pesto at Spatulas, Corkscrews & Suitcases blog. It turned out perfectly. We hope to use some on a Pesto Pizza.

And we were planning on grilling cheeseburgers last night (a Pearls favorite!), so we tried out another recipe for homemade “Beautiful Burger buns”from King Arthur Flour’s website. They are super easy to make, especially if you have a bread machine. All you do is combine all the recipe ingredients in the order as called for by your machine and use the dough cycle. After the cycle is complete, remove the dough, punch down, form into 8 rounds, and allow to rise under a damp towel until you’re ready to bake them. Try these, you’ll never want to go back to the store-bought, loaded with preservatives variety buns! And a thank you to PJ Hamel, test baker from King Arthur Flour, for your kind comments on our blog and the wonderful responsiveness to customers that your company demonstrates.

We made these with half White Whole Wheat and half Bread Flour and also added the vital wheat gluten again. Father of Pearls declared these a resounding “excellent”! These were so good even the next day, steamed a bit, and used for sandwich buns.

Pearls’ Garden Adventure #1 – Starting Seeds Indoors – A Pictorial May 1, 2008

This year, we figured it would be a great year to start our very own vegetable & herb garden. Father of Pearls & I imagined it would be a fun project to share with the Pearls and help us to get more veggies into our diets. Do remind me of this when it’s 100 degrees and I’m weeding on my hands & knees all summer long while the kids have happily abandoned our little project… All kidding aside, I think they’ll enjoy it. We experimented with some tomatoes last year and they had a ball plucking and eating them warm and sweet off the vine!

But preceeding the actual planting, we decided to try a little science experiment of starting two varieties of seeds indoors for later planting in our garden. We adore the Burpee Super Sweet 100’s, a tiny, sugar-sweet cherry tomato, and we tried a packet of Broccoli as well. The Pearls were quite enthusiastic about helping to get the little seeds started. Here they are hard at work!

Look at this! Two weeks later and we are patting ourselves on the backs for having such green thumbs! “Reach for the light, little seedlings!”

Fast forward a couple of weeks. I walk upstairs to find the door to our sunny guest bathroom ajar (it’s where we were keeping them safe & warm) and with horror, I see mostly brown dirt in the flats.

GONE.
ALL.
GONE.
Only a few pathetic stems left.

Wanted: the herbivore feline in connection with this heinous crime. I don’t know which one of you pesky felines did the crime, but rest assured, you’ll do the time. What a tragic end to our little science project.

Ah, but stay tuned for more Pearls’ Garden Adventures as we plot out our Garden and get ready to plant very soon!