This, that and the other

First I’d like to thank you all for thinking of Hans and me and sending us good thoughts, prayers, positive energy etc. It really helps to know that so many people care. We’re Teflon coated by positivity now, so everything bad just has to slide off immediately.

THIS
Hubs’ case nurse, Jitty (who seems to be quite relaxed, even though her name suggests otherwise), turns out to be a little gem. She managed to twist some arms so hubs will have his MRI scan this Friday after all. In stead of a week later. So we will hear the good news (provided his Teflon coating works) Tuesday next week. The best news would be that the cancer hasn’t spread and that they’ll only have to remove a small portion of his colon to get rid of the tumour.

We’ll see.

THAT
And now for something totally different: salads. I had a salad on the menu for tonight. With some Nasturtium flowers from my vegetable patch I thought. And then this morning, or it could have been this afternoon, I visited Jabblog who had a post about a beautiful looking, and no doubt very tasty, summer salad. With Nasturtium flowers! And Pansy flowers too. Some people just exaggerate things. Anyway, I told her that we would be having a similar salad tonight and that I’d post some photos of it. So…

Salad leaves, toasted pine nuts and walnuts, Nasturtium flowers and a dressing made of extra virgin olive oil, Balsamic vinegar, mustard and honey. Doesn’t only look good, tastes nice too.

THE OTHER
Or should I say: the others. Some of the others anyway. This is part of our private zoo:

Tumtum, in half winter/half summer coat (summer coat = bald) is looking at us, Nufnuf is just in front of him inspecting the box hedge. Naloma is in the first stable, Evie in the second (from your left).

And next to Evie is Willem.

No you’re not drunk, or maybe you are, but if you were sober you’d also see the wall leaning. It’s not the wall. It’s the camera. Or actually; it’s not the camera either and I wasn’t drunk when I took the photo. I can honestly say I’m never drunk. But this is far too much information. I could have just Photoshopped the photo straight, but it is 30 degrees Celsius and I couldn’t be bothered. In real life the wall is straight. There. That’s what I wanted to say.

And look, we have a little chick. Its (we don’t know yet if it is a he or a she) mom is one of our brown chickens and she’s in there with him, just not in the photo. We’ve put the both of them into a run and their (con)temporary home is a travel box for the cats. They like it in there. Chick is too small to go up and down the ladder in the big coop yet. But when he'/she is a little bigger, we’ll put the both of them back with the rest of the family and keep them all locked up for a while in their coop and run. Hopefully it is a ‘she’, so she can stay with us. Otherwise I’m afraid he’ll end up in someone’s soup ;-(

Chard

I’m far too excited about this vegetable garden. I might have a mental breakdown if the slugs and pigeons discover and attack it. Let us all hope it will not come that far. I have bought slug and snail pellets for the first time éver and will not hesitate to use them. No more Mrs. Nice Girl!

Meanwhile, yesterday we had our second harvest from the tiny vegetable patch. Chard or perpetual spinach.

I didn’t have a clue what to do with them, so rule 3 came into operation: ‘When in doubt, make a quiche!’ Rule 1 is of course: ‘Brinkbeest is always right’. Rule two: ‘When Brinkbeest is not right, rule 1 will automatically take effect.’ It works for me.

So a quiche I made. And both rules 1 and 3 proved to be correct. Using puff pastry for the base and filling that with sweated down onion, garlic and chard, soft goats cheese, pine nuts, some fresh mint from the garden and a mixture of eggs and cream. And lots of pepper. Some grated Gouda to top it off, 20 minutes in the oven on 200 Celsius. Okay, so maybe it doesn’t look all that appetizing, but it tasted really good.

And for dessert we had something really sweet:

Noticed Snoes’s little paw resting against Phoebe’s back? You can ‘biggify’ this photo by clicking on it. One of those heavenly benefits of using Windows Live Writer. All pictures will get bigger if you click on them. Bliss! And they appear where you include them in your post, without having to juggle them and the text around again and again. And again. Until you are ready for the men in white suits to take you away… That is why the photos in this post are dotted around all over the place. Just because…

It's not easy growing greens. If you are me.

This year I've finally started the vegetable garden I've always wanted but never dared to create. Hearing stories from several different friends who dug up a part of their garden to grow their own vegetables, carefully sowing tiny seeds in boxes with clear plastic covers in order to give them the best start in life, talking to the little seedlings, playing Bach or Mozart, or whatever music they liked best, to them, fertilizing the soil in the garden, carefully planting them out, reading them bedtime stories, covering them with little blankets, only to find them all eaten by slugs the next morning or ruined by other pests of which there are a lot, prevented me from starting my own vegetable project. I don't like to be disappointed. But the idea of growing our own vegetables stayed with me, somewhere in the back of my head, popping up every now and again. So I plucked up all my courage, picked up a spade and started digging up a small part of the garden that seemed to be a good spot for a vegetable garden. Next to the shed where the pigs live (running water nearby), surrounded on three sides by hedges (sheltered spot), most of the day in the sun (if it shines), and just big enough to try out some veggie growing. I created three beds of about 4 meters by 1 meter and some muscles and backache. Dug loads of well rotted horse manure, of which we have shitloads anyway, into the soil and waited until the weather was warm enough to start sowing. In the meantime I went shopping for vegetable seeds. Preferably not of the kind that need too much nurturing and Bach. Of course I came home with more than those three beds can ever house, but I'm hoping (there is always hope) that this year's crop will be a successful one and that I will be happy to keep the vegetable garden productive for years to come. And then the day the first vegetable seeds could be sown came. It was an exciting day. I carefully read the instructions on the packages and measured out the rows in which to sow the seeds. I'm quite the neurotic and like things to be neat and straight, but I'm not good at getting things neat and straight which is very annoying, so it took some time and several attempts before I was a happy gardener. Then I opened the first package of seeds and scattered a tiny amount in every row that I had made at exactly the right depth. Marking the row with a little metal tag on which I had written the name of the plants to be. And then I waited for signs of little plants to show. And waited. And waited. And... finally, after about three weeks, miniscule little green dots popped up from the soil. We drank a glass of wine to that happy occasion. We will grab any excuse to have a glass of good red or white wine. And then it dawned on me. I had misinterpreted the instructions on the seed packages, which is why it took so long for the little green seedlings to pop up from the soil. You see, I carefully spaced out the rows at the distances shown on the different packages. And then I carefully made the rows as deep as was shown on the different packages. At the time I thought that those seeds had to be sown awfully deep, but hey... I haven't a clue. And certainly not about growing veggies. So I obeyed the instructions. And buried the poor little seeds under far too much soil. Because I understood the left-to-right-arrows to be the distance between the rows and the up-and-down-arrow to be the rowdepth. WRONG! Of course you will understand the instructions immediately if you even glance over them. But then again... you are brilliant! Still, I will not make that mistake again and I didn't sow the broccoli seeds that deep, because I saw the light before I sowed them. Lucky broccoli seeds. They would have never seen the light. They are sweet little seedlings by now and I have high expectations of them. Which I tell them and the others (beetroot, carrots, spring onions, perpetual spinach, leaf lettuce and greens) every day. The leaf lettuce however isn't doing too well. The greens are doing very good and we will have risotto with greens tomorrow. Which will be the first meal we have from our own self sown vegetable garden! White wine me thinks. Mr. RWP and Jay will be very proud that I've even sown broccoli. Once I wrote that it isn't my favourite vegetable. Jay gave me instructions how to cook it and since then I really like broccoli. Mr. RWP was shocked that I didn't like his favourite vegetable. Now I do Mr. RWP. Now I do!