March Update

Its been a busy month so far, and I've definitely failed at updating my blog. Here's a little update (with pictures coming soon).

The beginning of the month was spent researching and planning a perennial herb garden for the UCSD neighborhood community garden. The plan is to create a spot with 30+ different herbs that can be used for food, fresh flowers, tea, potpourri, etc. With the idea that everyone can harvest from it and free up precious real estate in the plots, and somewhere down the line the Garden can sell fresh cut herbs.

Tuesday night I tried making marmalade. I made a lavender meyer lemon marmalade which turned out pretty tasty, very fragrant with the perfect touch of tartness. (I've been eating a lot of lemon marmalade and peanut butter sandwiches since). The batch of blood orange marmalade I attempted to make never thickened and turned into a syrup. :/

Wednesday I signed up at the Pacific Beach community garden, and I'm super stoked about my plot. It's 6ft x 6ft, but it gets a LOT of sunlight and the soil is so rich there from the years of cultivation and fertilization. There's also a meyer lemon tree :) that we can pick from. I went by yesterday morning and helped myself to some. Ended up eating 5 lemons and handfuls of rosemary for breakfast... weird.

Friday was our lab happy hour so that ended up taking the majority of my Thursday night shopping and prepping for it. It turned out absolutely fabulously. I made pulled pork & beans in a manchamantel sauce baked in banana leaves, Guasacaca Pasta Salad (think cilantro pesto with cotija instead of Parmesan), Mustard Green Salad (With several different mustard greens, poppy greens, lettuce tossed with pieces of my zucchini mint pickles [juice and oil]), and fried Plantains w/ a Sweet Chili Dipping Sauce. Fab T made her famous tomato fried rice and I helped make a cilantro fried rice which I think is going in my cookbook cuz it was fantastic!

Saturday was spent at the Surf Club clearing trees, totally opening up the side yard. And giving the chickens an upgrade so that they could be let out daily without us worrying about them getting in the garden. Its really awesome... pictures coming soon. Then I cooked up a meal centered around fried banana flowers (which I did all wrong and came out bitter and unedible.) But the lime New York steaks and cilantro fried rice came out really well.

Ken D and Israel (aka the Jew) butchered 6 of the 8 bunnies, and I still have to take care of the other two. Both the mama's had a litter 3 days apart from each other, so in about 10 weeks we're expecting to harvest at least 20 rabbits! (Fyi we're taking orders starting now.)

Sunday was a fun day. Started my morning with a cup of coffee (8am), ran a few errands, stopped by the NC Garden, then stopped and grabbed a tall can of budweiser (10:30am) on my way to the Love Shack (aka the Walley Homestead). From there we all headed up to Temecula to Namaste Farms to get some more chickens. Stopped by Buffalo Wings for some AMAZING wings and beer (noon). Got our chickens. (I got me a black orpington.) Back to the Love Shack for cocktails (4:30pm) and a lesson in canning from Dior. Yeah it was a pretty amazing day. I learned a LOT about how to can and process your jars properly.

Since then it's been nonstop work for me. I'm going to try to break down this post into separate postings and go in-depth. So keep reading and keep commenting. Thanks.