Mini-Entry Sample Plate

[bloodyrosemccoy]

-Good lord, y’all. These tomatoes I planted are aspiring to treehood. I even had one snap in half from its own weight a few weeks ago before I could get a pole for it, and that didn’t even slow it down from growing like an irradiated spider.

Dad has taken my idea of a spaghetti sauce farm* one step further and suggested that I jam a handful of dry spaghetti in the dirt. “Good point,” I said. “And the great thing about my self-watering setup is, I don’t need to worry about overwatering them! That is very important with noodle farming.”

The meatball trees may take a little setting up, though.

-There is a store for 18" doll stuff in the valley! How awesome is this? It’s actually not a doll shop devoted to scary-looking porcelain dolls! It’s got doll-size stuff (including my latest addiction, Iwako erasers), and clothes that fit American Girl dolls, including cheap knockoffs of AG styles and Shmisney Shmincess costumes. The lady said they’d be getting some slim-body clothes in this fall, too.

The one problem is, the shop is in the exact place you’d expect it to be—the middle of a village of Cozy Little Shops. The village used to be a farmstead, but now it contains a hive of stores selling country-style knickknacks and vintage farm-looking household wares for grandmas.** It’s scarily Mormon. Remember Ursula Vernon’s recent post on scrapbooking shame? Y’all don’t even KNOW from scrapbooks. Utah is a scrapbook CAPITAL. Pasty Mormon ladies LOVE their scrapbooks. And, as the lichen is a symbiosis of fungus and algae, a Cozy Little Shop hive is a symbiosis of a scrapbook shop, a quilt shop, and a knickknack emporium, and if the hive is really ambitious a doll shop.*** Couple that with a lovely old farmstead-turned-family-outing-locale, and I can totally see where the urge to grab people and yell, “It’s okay! My dolls are COUNTER-CULTURE!” comes into play.

Hmm. Maybe I should take Liz there when she visits. Just to gesture broadly at it and shout, “See, this is what I’m TALKING ABOUT!” before we flee.

-In news no less exciting to me, I have a new keyboard! I have been meaning to get a wireless keyboard for some time, just because I don’t type on a desk; I type on my knees. This is awkward with a Lappy. So now I can leave the Lappy on the chair where it lives while I type and I will not burn up my thighs or crush them. This is, in my humble opinion, the greatest thing ever.


*The idea is to get to the point where I’m growing everything that goes in spaghetti sauce. This might be slightly difficult because one of the things you can’t leave out of spaghetti sauce is cinnamon, and I have no idea if cinnamon would even try growing here. The only place I’ve seen it growing is Zanzibar, which has a SLIGHTLY different climate.

**What I can’t figure out is, why all the tea sets? It makes sense elswhere, but this place is MORMON. Tea is expressly forbidden because it was expensive to import to Utah in the 19th Century Your Body Is A Temple Of The Lord. So what the hell’s with all the porcelain saucers and sugar bowls?

***This doll shop is even called Georgell’s, which is one of those names that are short (but not too short) for “Hi! I’m from Utah!”

Comments

[bkwrrm-tx.livejournal.com]

When we moved to Minnesota from Ohio, we put in a garden. We put in a garden like we would in Ohio, which turns into a very different creature than what needed to be planted in Minnesota.

In Ohio, to get a couple good side dishes of peas, you had to plant a lot of peas. So we did.

Do you know that in Minnesota, if you plant a lot of peas, you end up with ... a LOT OF PEAS. Like, mountains of them. We picked and ate and picked and ate and picked and froze, and froze and froze. Not in little cute containers, mind you. In 5 quart ice cream buckets. We had peas coming out of our ears.

The last trip through the garden, my Mom instructed us to pull the damned things out of the ground, and toss them into a pile.

THEY REROOTED THEMSELVES AND BUILT MORE PEAS. I seriously thought it was peas by Skynet. I am fairly sure when we tossed them onto the pile, I heard a little voice mutter 'I'll be back'.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Did you also learn the horrible truths about tomatoes and zucchini?

[bkwrrm-tx.livejournal.com]

And eggplant. Although we did learn that you can make zucchini taste like pineapple, which worked out pretty well. ;-)

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

...Cinnamon? In tomato sauce? What kind of Italians do you get out there?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

The kind that KNOWS HOW TO MAKE SPAGHETTI SAUCE, my friend. I ain't sayin' my mafia ancestors (I don't know much about Dad's side of the family, but fringe relatives apparently had some mafia ties) STARTED with cinnamon in their sauce, but they knew a good thing when they tasted it.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Medieval Italian recipes call for cinnamon. Including the ones for pasta.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I learned something new today!

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Small point: the Italians didn't have pasta until Marco Polo. They also didn't have tomato sauce until after Columbus (tomatoes are a New World plant).

[(Anonymous)]

Ahem.

*puts on food historian hat*

The Marco Polo story is a myth. Europe had wheat flour noodles before he came back from China. They were frequently prepared cooked in broth, and eaten with cheese and spices.

As for tomatoes, it was later than that: http://www.history.org/history/cwland/resrch11.cfm#section2b

*removes food historian hat*

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Gah. That was me.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Huh, did not know that about noodles.

I didn't say how soon after Columbus! I probably should have been more vague and just said "after contact with the New World".

[michellerz.livejournal.com]

Makes sense from what I know about the history of Italian cuisine...when spices were rare and expensive in the Middle Ages and up to the Renaissance, the wealthy put buttloads of spices into EVERYTHING, just because they could!

[michellerz.livejournal.com]

100% Italian-American here, and never heard of putting in cinnamon, either! Sugar, yes (although I never do), but not cinnamon...

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

Won't the olive trees and wine grapes be hard to grow at your house, too?

Tea sets: for herb teas, obviously. Probably Mormon Tea. (the China tea is kept in the cupboard, along with the bourbon and coffee, brought out for good friends)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

The entertaining thing about Mormons is that no two Mormons have the same definition of the Doctrine and Covenants. One of my friends will drink herbal tea, another will use alcohol in cooking, and one refuses to drink any hot drink, or any caffeine, at all, except for hot chocolate. (Yeah, I don't know either.)

Generally, you can hedge your bets on Mormons disapproving of tea. But they do love teasets. It's weird.

[blackbyrd2.livejournal.com]

You may need to invest in a greenhouse to grow the cinnamon. Maybe the olive tree too.
However, the oregano is a self-starter, much like bkwrrm_tx's peas. It won't do much the first year, but next year it'll be all over the place. :)

I think the thing you'll have problems with is the herbed sausages. You may have to grow them from seeds, which, in this case, would be piglets. ;)

[cupenny.livejournal.com]

Apparently its possible to grow cinnamin as a houseplant- though I've never tried it. (Though I'm tempted! My dream greenhouse would be full of spices, as well as coffee and tea plants.)

http://www.logees.com/prodinfo.asp?number=R1690-8

[viizou.livejournal.com]

I think you should persevere on that spaghetti farm idea. You just need to make room for the cow (for the meatballs), and make sure it doesn't eat your plants. It could also be a good fertilizer source - and so the cycle of life begins!