The Pizza That Broke The Coffee Machine

Is it possible to break something in the kitchen without dropping it?  Well, I now know that it is.

I was making another pizza dough yesterday morning.  I had mixed all the ingredients in a glass bowl, and was shaping it into a dough in the same glass bowl.  Everything was coming together nicely.  I grabbed one end of the dough, folded it over, and dug the heel of my hand into the folded dough.  I repeated this a couple of times, and on the third folding, it happened.

I must have dug in with the heel of my hand a tiny bit too hard, because the force of my hand pushed the bowl (with the dough in it) about a foot across the counter, towards the coffee machine.  The glass bowl made direct contact with the glass carafe part of the coffee machine.  The glass carafe that was still half-full with coffee. 

What followed was definitely not one of my shining moments in the kitchen.  The carafe instantly shattered into pieces on impact, and the coffee gushed out of the broken carafe, spilling everywhere on the counter.

What the &$*% (#1).

After the mess was cleaned up, Keith and I drove over to Target to see if we could get a replacement carafe.  The coffee machine was a cheapie Mr. Coffee that Keith had paid $15 for at Amazon.com.  We thought we could get a replacement carafe for pretty cheap.  Well, we thought wrong.  At Target, the same coffee machine was $17, and the replacement carafe was about $15.  What the &$*% (#2).

We ended up walking out of Target with a brand new coffee machine of a different brand.

And a toaster, because we didn't have one.

And a nice set of measuring spoons, because my plastic ones were falling apart.

And a pizza cutter, because Keith wanted one.

And a head of garlic - an impulse buy.

Lessons learned: 1) don't make pizza dough near the coffee machine; and 2) it's impossible to walk out of Target with just one item.

Here is a picture of the pizza that broke the coffee machine.  This time, I topped the pizza with turkey kielbasa, red onions, green onions (garden), Early Girl tomatoes (garden) and fresh basil/oregano/thyme (all garden).  Oh, and lots of garlic.  It was a delicious pizza, but I'm still wondering if it was worth the coffee machine sacrifice.  Oh well.

Indoor Grow Box Update - Nasturtium

Here's a quick peek at one of my garden experiments.  My garden experiments may be rather unscientific, usually with a sample size of just one, but I'm still having a lot of fun playing garden scientist in my own backyard.

Nasturtium growing in our indoor grow box

Nasturtium growing outside

What a difference a grow box makes, eh?  I think it's just been too hot outside for the nasturtium plants, even though I put them in a place with some shade in the afternoon.  I've never grown this flower before, so I don't know if they are supposed to be grown in full sunlight.

Speaking of sunlight...

With daytime temperature hovering over 105 degrees F every day in Texas this week, I just melted every time I went outside. It was just so HOT.  I was so happy to return to Indiana last night, and I'm looking forward to some sub-90 degrees "cool" weather here this weekend.  I might even do some work in the garden!

8/2/10 Harvest and First Homemade Pizza

Harvesting was really fun this week, with six tomatoes, five cucumbers and a bunch of small but still edible onions.  The green beans are still trickling in a few at a time, and basil is mass producing at a rate where we can hardly keep up.

We also pulled up three carrots for the first time, and they were teeny tiny - only about 1 inch long and thinner than an infant's pinkie.  They are Burpee's Short 'n Sweet variety, with 68 days to maturity and full size of up to 4 inches.  I sowed these carrot seeds about two and a half months ago, so I don't know why these carrots are not getting any bigger in our garden.

If you want to see other gardeners' harvests, head on over to Daphnes' Harvest Monday.

* * * * *

This weekend, I decided that I was finally going to learn to bake bread-y things using yeast.  Up until now, I have always just skipped recipes that included yeast because I somehow thought that they would be too difficult.  But heck, if I can learn to grow my own vegetables, I can certainly learn to use yeast, right?

So I made a pizza from scratch. I did everything by hand the old school way, since I don't have a stand mixer or a bread machine.  I learned to make a pizza dough, double rise and all. I wanted to incorporate as many garden vegetables as I could, and ended up using homemade basil pesto, green onions, onions, tomatoes, green beans and oregano.  Other non-garden ingredients included chicken, mushroom, garlic, and mozzarella cheese.  The result was a oh-so-delicious pizza that came out the oven perfectly hot and crisp, not even a tiny bit soggy.  Success!

A question for those of you with more baking experience: are there any bread recipes where a stand mixer or a bread machine is a requirement, or is it always just an easier alternative to hand-mixing?

Feast Your Eyes On Our Basil

We have basil growing everywhere this year - in the herb garden, in a container outside, in the SFG bed next to the tomatoes, and even indoors in our grow box.  To my delight, just about every single plant is growing spectacularly well, despite some challenges with Japanese Beetles, leaf miners and other bugs I haven't identified.  In an effort to keep our garden as organic as possible, I haven't sprayed any insecticides.  I just pick off any bugs I see and discard the damaged leaves.

This container holds about 8-10 basil plants.  I'm sure they are crowded in there, but since I don't really need any more basil, I haven't attempted to transplant any out. 

This is our guinea pig basil - our first attempt at growing basil in our indoor grow box.  We transplanted a small plant (about 5-6 inches tall at the time) from the herb garden into this container about a month ago. It is now ginormous, and probably needs a bigger container. 

The size of some of the leaves from our indoor basil is just mind boggling.  It's exactly the same variety as the basil  growing outside, but the leaves seem to be at least 2-3 times larger.  I did read somewhere that basil grown in full sun tends to grow smaller leaves than basil grown in part-shade.  I don't know if one is necessarily better than the other, but we've got both, so it's all good.

Cilantro (Coriander) and Parsley Going to Seed

We have herbs going to seed!

Cilantro/coriander

Our cilantro bolted almost as soon as the seeds germinated in mid April.  I think it was just too hot for them this spring.  Three and a half very long months later, we finally have some seeds that are turning brown

Parsley - still mostly green flower heads

Parsley - these are brown, probably almost harvest-ready?

We had both curly and flat leaf parsley planted next to each other, and now I can't tell which flower heads are from which plants.  I've read that they readily cross-pollinate with each other, so I guess these seeds will give me some sort of hybrid curly-flat leaf parsley next year.

For those of you who have harvested herb seeds before, how do you know when they are ready to be picked?  Are they ready as soon as they turn brown?  I don't want to run the risk of them not being "ripe" enough by harvesting too early, but I'm also worried that they might all fall off one day while I'm not looking.

7/26/10 Harvest and Indoor Grow Box Update

Presenting, our very first tomato!  The variety is Early Girl, and the tomato plants were grown from seedlings bought from a garden store before we figured out how to start our own seeds.  As far as the taste is concerned, I would say that this one tasted slightly sweeter than an average store-bought tomato, with that good wholesome home-grown flavor.  I'm sure there are many other tomato varieties with better flavors, and I hope to grow more varieties from seed next year.

We also harvested a few more green beans, but I think we're done with these bean plants for the season.  They have been under some sort of a beetle attack - I think cucumber beetles, but there may be other bugs involved as well - and the leaves are getting rather lacy and ratty-looking.

Cucumbers are continuing to produce.  We harvested four more this week for more cucumber salad, and the vines promise many more in the upcoming weeks.


Indoor Grow Box Update

Our homemade indoor grow box has been performing beautifully, and we harvested some baby lettuce from our first trial run.  Three weeks ago, we planted a variety of lettuce seeds in a Jiffy mini greenhouse and a re-purposed container (one of those clear plastic containers that hold supermarket strawberries).  They started germinating after 2-3 days, and three weeks later, we already have some edible baby greens.

Encouraged by our success, we constructed a few more lettuce "beds" from doubled-up aluminum lasagna pans.  The bottom pan was filled with a layer of pea gravel to hold up the top pan.  We poked some drainage holes in the top pan and filled it with Mel's mix (equal parts peat moss, vermiculite and compost).  Now we'll be able to grow cut-and-come-again lettuce all year long indoors without worrying about them bolting in the heat or freezing in the cold outside.

The few seedlings in the pictures below were transplanted from the Jiffy mini greenhouse into one of the new lettuce beds after some of the bigger leaves were cut for our first lettuce harvest.

At the same time that we started our lettuce seeds (three weeks ago), we also started some jelly bean tomato and cayenne pepper seeds in the Jiffy mini greenhouse.  I know that's too late to start tomato and pepper seeds, but we wanted to experiment and see how seeds would germinate and seedlings would grow in our indoor grow box.  There's also a transplanted basil growing in there, too. So far, everything seems to be growing pretty well.  The tomato and pepper seedlings were transplanted into separate containers last week.

Inside of the grow box before the first lettuce harvest

If you haven't yet, do you want to see how we built this indoor grow box ourselves three weeks ago?

Check out Daphne's Harvest Monday for everyone else's harvests!

Growing SUPERmarket Cantaloupe

Out of sheer curiosity, I planted seeds from a generic cantaloupe from the grocery store.

Before I started my Great Cantaloupe Experiment, I did some reading on the internet and came away with the following information:

• Many store-bought melons are hybrids, unless marked otherwise.
• Some hybrid melons are sterile.
• Some sterile hybrid melons have seeds that won't germinate; others will grow into plants that will never bear fruit.
• Some hybrid melons will bear fruit that will not resemble the parent melon.

After reading all this, I HAD to try this out for myself, even if I didn't get any melons out of it.

I bought a cantaloupe from a local Kroger in Texas.  It sported a sticker bearing the "Majesty" brand name, which I think is some mega corporation, giving me a near-certainty that I was dealing with a hybrid melon.  I harvested about 10 seeds by picking them out from the slimy inside seed cluster and and patting them dry with a napkin.

The seeds traveled back to Indiana with me in a small zip-loc bag.  They were planted in my square foot gardening beds on June 26, 2010.  To my surprise, ALL of the seeds germinated within days.  On Day 7, I transplanted two seedlings into two separate containers.

Take a look at their progress below:

July 3, 2010 (Day 7)
Two of these seedlings were transplanted into separate containers after this picture was taken.

July 10, 2010 (Day 14)

July 11, 2010 (Day 15)

July 17, 2010 (Day 21)

July 24, 2010 (Day 28)

July 24, 2010 (Day 28 Transplanting)

July 24, 2010 (Day 28 - transplanted into a new bucket)

As you can see, one of the two transplanted seedlings just took off and is growing like mad every day.  Keith has dubbed it the SUPERmarket cantaloupe.  It's even flowering, although I've spotted only male flowers so far. 

 July 25, 2010 (Day 30)

Next step: cross my fingers and hope that this plant ends up with some female flowers and bears some viable melons. 

Has anyone else here tried to grow any store-bought melons from seed?  Do you want guess how many melons, if any, I'll get out of this plant?

NEW UPDATES:

• First Cantaloupe Harvest (9/27/10)
• Waiting for Lupe the Cantaloupe
• When to Harvest Cantaloupe
• Lupe the Cantaloupe (Day 57 and 58)
• SUPERmarket Cantaloupe - Melon on Day 51 
• SUPERmarket Cantaloupe Update (Day 43)