fill the house with flowers

 last year at this time i was moving, cleaning, packing away--i started moving in to this house just over a year ago. it didn't leave much free time for my usual obsessive spring routines: seed starting, prepping the soil, trying to control the weather with my mind-powers. this year i'm settled and ready to experience ALL THE SPRINGS.

 the ladies are one year old at the end of this month!

 the other day i ran into an old friend of mine who i hadn't seen in six years. turns out we live just a few blocks away, work across the street from each other, and we both have chickens! (and we're both named emily...but that's always been the case.) similarities end there, though, we're pretty different people. she came over one night to catch up. talking to her was such a trip. familiar/unfamiliar.

 i added another pet...actually, a few hundred of them. a couple weeks ago i SUDDENLY, DESPERATELY *NEEDED* sea monkeys. like no one has ever needed sea monkeys before. i can't explain it, it just happened. so i called every store that might possibly sell sea monkeys and no one had them. instead i went to an aquarium store and bought a packet of brine shrimp. they've been living happily on wheat flour and nutritional yeast.

 my mouth is already watering for spring salads. i have a pot of mixed lettuces going, and four of the five dwarf tomato plants i started mid-january are growing baby tomatoes already.

 yummy herb pot, basil and parsley mix.

 doing lots of cooking lately...this is one of the best things i've ever made:

 egg pizza! homemade down to the crust. topped with vegan pesto (fresh basil, cashews, pistachios, nutritional yeast, garlic, olive oil, salt), basil-tofu ricotta (tofu, fresh basil, nutritional yeast, salt, pepper, olive oil), sauteed mushrooms and zucchini, kalamata olives, eggs, and some seasonings.

 i'm making another one tonight, but this time with regular marinara sauce, just because i'm lazy. my mom's coming over--my parents are getting major renovation work done on their house so it's all torn up, and my dad is in maryland for a few days, so my mom's joining me for dinner and dropping off scout. i'll be pugglesitting until tuesday. three pups! madness!

 this is gyeran jjim (korean steamed eggs). i used olive brine in place of salt, topped with scallions, toasted sesame seeds, garlic and chili powder. the texture is a lot like silken tofu.

 basil-tofu ricotta stuffed manicotti, with sauteed asparagus and spaghetti squash, and spinach.

 spaghetti with vegan pesto, tomatoes, garlic bread, and a poached egg on top.

 hard boiled eggs marbled with beet juice. i didn't use enough beet juice so the coloring is pretty faint. i'll try again. the eggs peeled nicely though--i left them in the fridge for a couple weeks, because fresh eggs do not peel well at all.

 i made a fritatta-ish dish with tons of delicious veggies for crafting day with cam last week--she got a glass cutter, so we were cutting glass bottles and making drinking cups and self-watering planters, like this one:

 we made dozens, it was lots of fun. we had another fun time this weekend, involving much creative cooking and seed starting, and she informed me that "the internet needs to know about this"...and it will, but that'll have to wait for another post.

 this is happening! i am so excited! neutral milk hotel has been my favorite band for the better part of a decade. i never thought i'd get to see jeff mangum live. he's playing at the egyptian theatre:

 i was there wednesday night shooting photos at a reading (firoozeh dumas, author of "funny in farsi"). it's a fabulous venue.

why are french omelettes made with only one egg?

because one egg is un ouef! my chickens have been feeding me very well. minnie is amazing--she's laid an egg every single day since she started! i can tell because she's the only one whose eggs are brown.

 on november 1 she will have laid 90 eggs. we'll celebrate with a big bowl of their new favorite treat--cooked oatmeal.

 lately i've gotten more adventurous with my egg recipes. here are some of the things i've made:

3-egg pesto veggie omelette with rainbow tomato salad

 first i made two batches of pesto with homegrown basil. one with regular sweet basil, one with purple basil:

 sadly the purple basil did not make purple-colored pesto like i had hoped. but it was even more delicious than the regular basil batch. i blended the leaves with garlic, pine nuts, olive oil, salt, and nutritional yeast for the cheese-y flavor.

 this was the best omelette i've ever eaten. i added a mini tomato rainbow side salad, and homegrown onion and bell pepper for the filling. the pepper was rainbow too:

 oeufs en cocotte

 my first attempt at oeufs en cocotte failed big time. i read somewhere that you can cook them in the toaster oven. lies. the eggs bulged out of their cocotte sockets like swollen orange eyeballs, and they were tough and rubbery to eat:

 what worked for me was cooking them on the stove in a shallow water bath. this might be the best treatment for showing off those gorgeous orange yolks.

 eggs baked in stuffed squash

 i hollowed out two peter pan and one ronde de nice squash and fed the insides to the chickens, then rubbed the squash shells with garlic olive oil and baked them until soft. i stuffed them with a mixture of wild rice and homegrown peppers, onions and tomatoes, cracked an egg on top of each and baked again until the eggs were cooked. the trickiest part is leaving the right amount of space at the top for the egg to rest. i had some overflow issues. i used summer squash but this could be tweaked for winter squashes--i bet acorn squash would be tasty. or even little pumpkins!

 double yolk hard boiled eggs

 i bought a pack of "as seen on TV" contraptions for cooking hard boiled eggs without the shell. they're basically plastic pods that you crack eggs into and then boil. i think i remember seeing the infomercial years ago and thinking, wow, what idiot would buy those. well...they were on clearance, and i thought they would be helpful since my chickens' eggs are impossible to peel after being hard boiled. the chambers are huge, so i fit two eggs in each and cooked them up.

the oyster plate belonged to my mom's mom. i misremembered it as a deviled egg plate and asked my mom to dig it out for me. it works perfectly for eggs too though.

 bread pudding

this was my first time eating bread pudding. i refused to eat it as a kid because i thought it involved liquified bread. i've always had serious issues with certain food textures, and liquified bread is about the worst thing i can imagine. but bread pudding is delicious!

 sunday brunch casserole

 i altered this recipe to make it veg. i sauteed tofurkey slices to stand in for the bacon, and used daiya cheese for the topping. also, i pre-cooked the hash browns rather than just thawing them. this is serious comfort food.

 egg salad--another comfort food. my mom taught me a trick to make egg salad extra creamy and delicious: use a microplane grater to shred the eggs. i smoosh them up with a small dollup of veganaise, some minced parsley and salt.

 banana bread

i prefer using egg replacer for quickbread. i have such a good vegan quickbread recipe worked out that there's no need to mess with it, but i tried it with eggs anyway.

 mediterranean scrambled eggs

 onions, tomato and a bunch of basil in scrambled eggs. i made this on saturday with all homegrown veggies, which is quite a treat this late in the year. i still have pounds and pounds of tomatoes left.

fungi fun!

one of my xmas gifts this year was a mushroom kit. i’ve wanted to try growing mushrooms for a long time, but the kits are semi-expensive (usually around $40), space-hogging and potentially messy, and mycelium plugs (which you drill into logs to colonize them) require more work and space, plus they take months to get going. but i found this compact little BTTRventures kit, only $20 and with a cool story:

We like to think we’ve mastered the art of waste reduction by transforming used coffee grounds into the substrate for this mushroom kit. After the mushrooms have been harvested, the leftover roots enrich the coffee grounds, turning them into premium compost for your plants and thus closing the loop on your BTTR Gourmet Garden.

BTTRventures stands for “Back To The Roots” and reflects our belief in 100% sustainability. We’re a team that’s passionate about refocusing the global economy towards the local community and creating a brighter, BTTR future.

BTTR kits grow pearl oyster mushrooms, and supposedly you can harvest up to 1.5lbs from one kit (although realistically i expect the yield to be much lower.) these will undeniably be the most expensive oyster mushrooms i’ve ever eaten, but it’s totally not about saving money, it’s about the experience of watching them grow. it’s an edible science project.

my first batch grew during the week jason and i were in mccall, so both of us got to watch them double in size practically every day. both of us checked the kit first thing every morning when we got up, then randomly throughout the day, and every time we looked i swear they were bigger. i don’t know how i’ll go back to growing tomatoes now--mushrooms are instant gratification by comparison.

here’s a timeline, with a gap of a few days because i kept forgetting to take pictures before it got dark out (camera flash can make mushrooms look really nasty.)

1/10:

1/11:

1/12:

1/13:

1/18:

i harvested them on the 18^th, about 10 days after the very first sign of growth. you’ll notice they look nothing like oyster mushrooms, and they turned a little brown, which i think is because they got too dry--i misted them way more than the instructions said to but they dried out fast. i’m starting a second batch now and i’m going to try draping a loose plastic bag over the kit to hold in humidity.

the dryness didn’t affect the taste one bit. i sautéed them in olive oil with salt and pepper, and they were delicious, better than any oyster mushroom i’ve eaten before--meaty, chewy, flavorful, and very substantial.

now that i know these things really work i’m feeling more generous about putting up the space and money for another kit. once this one’s finished producing i’d like to try this organic “trumpet royale” mushroom kit.