Stormy Summer

Much has happened. Our community garden is having a strange year... Rob and I made a stellar bean teepee which was covered in romano beans until we had a stellar wind/thunderstorm and 500 stellar lightning strikes a minute, (true!) at which point our stellar teepee hit the dirt, crushing my super chili and eggplant along the way. Super sad true story. Boo hoo.

We're probably going to try to prop it back up but all the bamboo poles are broken so we might not succeed. While we were there, mourning our bad luck, I pulled most of our soybean plants. Rob stuffed them into a panier bag and we rode home looking like farmers from another continent, soybean plants waving in the wind. We ate edamame until we had eaten enough, for the first time in my life. They were fantastic, slathered in olive oil and sea salt. The rest, I froze.

I grew okra for the first time this year, on the promise of a hot summer. Not hot enough, I'm afraid; the nights have been too cool and the okra responds by dropping leaves and blossoms. We get a few pods every few days. Meh. Weirdly, I'm already tired of it being added into other vegetable dishes. The blossoms, however, are fantastically beautiful; large and butter yellow with maroon throats.

The eggplants were doing alright until the romanos fell on them. They were supposed to be white and egg-shaped but are instead long, white streaked with mauve. Lovely and delicious.

In other news, I have been accepted to chef school and will start on the 6th of September! I'm excited about it. One day while feeling at a bit of a loss, I was talking to an employment counselor and mentioned that I love to cook and am really interested in food, nutrition, foraging, etc. He said, basically, "You know about the chef school a few blocks from your house, right?" and some doors opened up.

Also, I've been doing some foraging of note. Lately, red clover blossoms are everywhere and I've been gathering them for infusions. Herbalists say that red clover, while closely related to soy, is superior in every way, super rich in bio-available phytoestrogens, calcium, and other good things. I've been rotating infusions of clover, stinging nettle and oatstraw and I must say that I think I notice some benefits. Menopause is a terrible disease and I need all the help I can get in my valiant battle against it.

The black walnuts are beginning to fall and I've picked up a few. As I write this, Hurricane Irene is bludgeoning the eastern seaboard and we might get the tail end of it sometime next week, in which case, there may be lots of walnuts down. I'm wanting to make black walnut fudge, using maple sugar. If I sell any of it, I will have to charge a thousand dollars a pound.

But it will be worth it.