Thursday, August 20, 2009

Wow, it's already Thusday...

I haven't done much. Just tidied up some loose ends and cleaned my bookshelves. I'm pretty rested. Those 80's turned into 3.5's, which totally amazed me. I'm still not sure how to use it, but I'll figure it out when I get there.

I've watched a lot of TV--I blame my son. He knows I have a weakness for The Penguins of Madagascar and he tivos it. Skipper is my kind of penguin--totally in his own reality.

My deck has been calling me. Seattle has cooled down, and 70 degrees is perfect deck weather. I made kal-bi ribs and when that turned out well, kal-bi chicken--some beets and roasted corn. I love beets. The cheap man's artichokes.

There's a farmer's market up the street from my house. It just started, so it's not very big. But all the King County farmer's markets are throwbacks. I totally freaked the first time I saw the one in Federal Way. "Dirt?" I said. "There's dirt on the vegetables? And the corn is how much?"

I bought some honey. The lady had a whole bunch of varietals and I'm a honey snob, but maybe huckleberry blossom was a bad choice. It's got an almost blackstrap overtone. Not a bad thing, but I'm not a fan of molasses-smelling honey. I should have gone with the fireweed. And I bought corn. Big fat ears of bi-colored sweet corn. 4 for a dollar.

I gave some to Emma, my line partner. She sort of stared at me. "For me, Yodi?" "Of course," I said. "I was at the farmer's market, and I love sweet corn."

My kid told me Hispanics aren't big corn on the cob eaters. I felt pretty stupid. I didn't realize I was giving her an ingredient. She came in the next day with little corn cakes and went around handing people spoons.

I sat out on my deck this evening, listening to the breeze whisper through the maples and Italian Cypress. My house is halfway up a hill, and the land rolls away from us like an Oklahoma corn field. A sea of green. Distant firs and the occasional dead pine. Little frogs chirp from between the potted lavender. There's enough land between houses to make neighbors seem very far away. And the clouds sheet across the sky like whitewash.

4 comments:

deanna said...

Beautiful description of your view. We've got a little fruit and vegetable stand near us now, too. :o) But right now my parents' garden is providing us plenty of their extra squash, corn, and so on. Yum.

Unknown said...

it is yummy. :) I love summer squash.

Kaige said...

I'd never heard of fireweed before you posted this, then it started popping up on one of my mailing lists. Wild.

Sounds like you have a great view. It's been too hot here to enjoy ours this summer.

Unknown said...

Hi Kaige, fireweed is a type of wildflower that grows over on Mt. Rainier. I always just thought of them as lupins, because Weyerhauser has an enormous campus (much prettier than Microsoft) up here and they grow whole fields of lupins in the springtime so people driving past can enjoy them.

I admire Weyerhauser, they have the most beautiful office buildings I've ever seen. With huge cascades of flowers and planters almost covering the outside walls, so they look like green glass.