So I got up this morning, my mother and I picked all the vegetables that were ripe to pick and at risk of being destroyed, and we have this incredible bounty of stuff to pickle and make jam from– there’s going to be a LOT of grape jam, yessiree bob, since there aren’t enough grapes to make wine and we really had to get them off the vines.

We weighted down the beehives so that they would be secure in the wind (we hope!) and moved the chickens into a storm pen in the stable, although as soon as we did it (in torrentially pouring rain this morning), the rain died down and now the chickens are angry they’re indoors. OH WELL, CHICKENS. IT IS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD.

liret, I should mention, helped build the storm pen, so I took some pictures so she can see it in action:

My grandparents down in Delaware have been evacuated because there is a tornado watch in their town. My cousin brought them up to her house which is outside the evacuation zone…of all the things in the house to save, my grandfather insisted on bringing his beer with him. Now you know where I get it from. My aunt is in a shelter at the local school.

I am mostly just worried about the garden and the animals at this point. Planning for possible loss of electricity and copious abuse of my liquor cabinet. We have tons of food and tons of water. I brought a whole bunch of books, too. The news out of NYC sounds like everything is shut down and I sort of wish I were there to see all the fancy department stores with their windows boarded up. It also sounds like the mass transit may not be back up on Monday, so I don’t feel bad about the fact that I was sort of expecting I might not be able to get into work.

Love to everyone! I have my phone and my mother’s iPad well-charged so if the electric goes down and we need to get a message out, we’ll figure it out.

I leave you with my pre-hurricane breakfast:

ETA: If you are in New York and can volunteer, here are some ways to help via an email from Assemblyman Paul Newell:

2) The Mayor’s Office is looking for volunteers to staff the evacuation/hurricane centers at Seward Park HS (Grand St. & Ludlow St) and Baruch College (E. 24th St. & Lexington). They are asking for any willing volunteers that live in these areas to please help out if they can. Any hours today would be greatly appreciated. Overnight staffers are particularly important. Anyone interested in helping during this difficult time, please contact Leland M. Dyer at 347-844-3309 or via email at LDYER@CITYHALL.NYC.GOV.

3) The city needs volunteers (preferably in four hour shifts) from now through Monday. They would be especially grateful to those willing to volunteer for the Sunday shifts. The 311 facility is located on Maiden Lane and Williams street in Lower Manhattan and the 311 staff will provide training. If you can volunteer, please email Christie Huus at chuus@cityhall.nyc.gov. You can also fill out the city’s volunteer form at http://bit.ly/nycvolunteer.

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Here’s our nifty little strawberry patch:

They are covered, as you can see, with a little tent of netting that is high enough for people to go inside to pick the berries, and also high enough to keep birds away from all but the berries very, very close to the outer perimeter. We still get some slugs this way, but it is the best way to keep your berries from being eaten before you get to do the eating! Notice also that the wide netting means that bees can get in to pollinate! They are good at that.

When the strawberries are ripe, you go under the netting and pick them. Here’s a ripe strawberry along with some not-yet-ripe ones!

So pretty and red!

So far, we are getting tons of strawberries this year:

We got about 3-4 quarts the first week of strawberry picking, and 4-5 quarts the second. And they are big and ripe and juicy. We’ve had strawberries for a couple years now, and each week, we’re getting as many strawberries as we’ve ever gotten in a year before, which is pretty exciting!

We made a whole lot of things with strawberries in them! For two weekends!

Let’s start with a cocktail. I’m going to give you three variations on a similar recipe. I made one for my dad, who pretty much only drinks highballs and punchy drinks with a very little liquor in them, and then I’ll show you how to make a stronger and more sophisticated drink in two ways– one sweeter, one less sweet.

Here’s the Daddy Version:

Daddy Version Ingredients:

1.5 oz vodka
.5 oz limoncello
6 strawberries
Lemonade or Pink Lemonade to top

Daddy Version Instructions:

1) Put vodka in glass with strawberries cut into chunks and muddle well until strawberries are thoroughly pulped.
2) Add ice, limoncello, and lemonade

Here’s the Lady Version:

Lady Version #1 Ingredients:

2.5 oz Dogfish Head Brown Honey Rum
.5 oz limoncello
.5 oz cognac
4 fresh strawberries, plus one for garnish
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon thyme

Lady Version #2 Ingredients:

2 oz Dogfish Head Brown Honey Rum
.5 oz limoncello
1 oz cognac
2 fresh strawberries, plus one for garnish
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon thyme

Lady Version Instructions

1) Add rum, thyme and strawberries (cut into chunks) to shaker with ice
2) Muddle well until strawberries are fully pulped.
3) Add cognac and limoncello
4) Shake!
5) strain into chilled cocktail glasses and serve with a whole strawberry.

But that is only Strawberry Cocktail #1!

Fraise

Ingredients
2.5 oz Rogue Pink Spruce Gin
.5 oz Ramazzotti
.5 oz Domaine de Canton
3 ripe strawberries plus one for garnish
2 dashes Fee Bros Whiskey Barrel Bitters

Instructions
1) Add gin and strawberries (cut into chunks) to shaker with ice
2) Muddle well until strawberries are fully pulped.
3) Add Ramazzotti and Domaine de Canton
4) Shake!
5) strain into chilled cocktail glasses, add two dashes bitters, and serve with a whole strawberry.

This past week, I had the sublime pleasure of having quizzicalsphinx in the house. The thing is, when it comes to our imbibement habits, we could not be more dissimilar. In that I drink copious amounts of excellent liquor and she drinks non-alcoholic beverages only.

So I made her her own very special strawberry drink:

Red Beer

Ingredients
6 strawberries, cut into chunks
3 oz GUS grapefruit soda
.5 oz grenadine
.5 oz pomegranate molasses
Newman’s Own Pomegranate Lemonade to top.

Instructions
Put strawberries in glass with ice and crush with muddler.
Add all other ingredients and stir!

And finally, the last drink, which is a more negroni-style one.

Fragola

Ingredients
2 oz Comb 9 gin
1 oz Carpano Antica Formula
.5 oz Fernet Branca
4 strawberries, cut into chunks
2 dashes Bitter Truth Grapefruit Bitters

Instructions
1) Add gin, ice and strawberries to shaker.
2) Muddle until strawberries are fully pulped.
3) Add Carpano and Fernet Branca, shake.
4) Strain into short glasses, add bitters!

But that isn’t all the strawberry things we made!

My mama also made strawberry shortcake. Let’s talk about strawberry shortcake a little. This is one of my favorite foods. When I was a little kid, there were a couple years when I asked for this instead of for a cake-cake on my birthday. Excellent, huh?

It doesn’t really need a recipe, because all you need to do is whip some cream, make a batch of your favorite biscuits, slice open the biscuits and there you go. Beautiful and delicious!

I also made strawberry ice cream. I’m not as good at fruit ice creams as I am at chocolatey and herbal and caramely type ice creams, but this one came out really well!

Ingredients
2 3/4 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup half & half
1/3 cup sugar
4 egg yolks
2 cups chopped strawberries

Instructions
Whisk the egg yolks and the sugar together until frothy and pasty.
Mix 3/4 cups of the cream and the half & half together in a saucepan, cook just until boiling, remove from heat, wait until it stops bubbling.
Add 1 Tb of the hot cream to the sugar and egg mixture, whisk quickly to keep the eggs from cooking.
Keep adding the hot milk to the sugar and eggs in small increments, whisking and pausing between additions, until 3/4 of the hot milk has been added.
Pour the milk/egg/sugar mixture back into the saucepan, heat over medium heat, stirring frequently until mixture thickens.
Remove from heat and chill for at least four hours.
Once chilled, add heavy cream and stir until well mixed. Stir in strawberries.
Put entire mixture in ice cream mixer and follow instructions for your ice cream mixer until frozen. Put finished ice cream in freezer.
Chill for at least two hours in freezer.
Serve with strawberries, whipped cream, or just plain!

That is the end of the strawberry adventure! FOR NOW!

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I am sitting and sipping some delicious jasmine iced tea with honey courtesy of our bees. It has been a good weekend, full of things like marigold planting and making pulled pork on the new grill.

Chick update:

They are starting to look like tiny chickens! They’re developing colors and markings and itty bitty chicken wings. That red one is my favorite, if we are going by looks. So cute! The cat is getting a bit angry about the presence of small animals she is not allowed to eat though.

Whilst gardening this weekend, I made a new friend:

Oh my god! He is metallic! I love him so much. He ran away, though, I think largely for fear of the cat. The cat caught a luna moth last night. A luna moth. A huge honking luna moth.

We were watching last night, and the cat was looking up at this gigantic thing as it swooped through the air. She jumped up once, and clearly did not come even close to getting it, but then the moth started diving closer and closer to her. It was seriously like it was playing “nyah nyah you can’t get me,” with the cat! I wish I had a picture. Then the thing literally swept right above the cat’s nose, and that was it, pounce, the moth was toast. She trotted off happily with this giant moth swinging from her teeth to do I know not what to her prey!

Today, I went to the sporting goods store with my mom to finally buy a bike helmet. My parents bought me a new bike for Christmas, now that I live in Queens and not Manhattan, and I am super excited by it, but no helmet! And even Queens is not safe enough to navigate without a helmet. So I went and got one!

Eee, hooray! Now I get to ride my bike. This is going to make getting between Queens and Brooklyn super shiny, at least for the summer! I got a mega awesome looking bike lock of Man in the Iron Mask proportions, and a hand pump, too.

So that’s it for now! Later or tomorrow, look forward to strawberries!

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That’s a two-egg omelette, 1 Tb half & half, with fresh baby onions, herbs, and asparagus from the garden.

I’d like to talk to you about asparagus.

It’s crunchy, it’s tender, it’s sweet, it’s bitter, there are pretty much limitless things you can do with it and it is freaking amazing.

When I was a kid, I didn’t eat asparagus. I haven’t the faintest idea why; I was never a picky eater in the typical little kid way– my favorite foods were liver, okra, brussels sprouts and tabouleh, and I suspect that had something to do with how unpopular I was in nursery school.

But asparagus didn’t do it for me. I mean, I’d eat it if someone put it on my plate and told me to, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to touch the stuff. Sometime when I was nine or ten, I read an article in the New York Times about how male asparagus was preferable to female asparagus, and I developed this spiel about how I was boycotting asparagus consumption due to sexism in the industry. I think it was funny and precocious for a ten year old, or something.

But sometime in my college years, I realized the joke wasn’t funny anymore, and I actually liked asparagus on account of it being an amazing vegetable with lots of delicious applications.

The thing about asparagus is that it’s insanely easy to grow, and my personal experience has been that growing it at home, provided you have the space, yields bigger, more beautiful, and more delicious asparagus than you will ever find in a store.

Anyway, when my mom started the garden a few years ago, asparagus was one of the first things we planted. This is our third year with asparagus, and to be truthful, it’s the first year that the yield is impressive enough that I want to brag about our asparagus.

Which is typical. When you grow asparagus, you’re making a commitment to a future of delicious, asparagus-laden feasts with zero in the instant gratification department. It’s never edible the first year. The second year, you’ll get a few delicious, tender, sweet spears. The third year, it will rock your world.

Okay, that’s sort of a very simplified explanation. The first year, asparagus is good for something.

You see those fine, light fronds that are in the foreground of this picture? That’s first year asparagus. It is fragile and fragrant and bitter as wormwood. What people don’t seem to grasp is its application as an herb. Those fronds are amazing on salads, or fried up in some butter and mixed into scrambled eggs, and I’ve mixed two or three gin cocktails with them. They have a flavor like nothing else you will ever eat.

Second year, you’re going to get something more like this:

It’s like a little tree! Once those branches develop, asparagus is too bitter and tough to eat, and on second year asparagus, they develop really quickly, but that’s okay, because you leave them, and they re-seed the trench. If you want to eat these babies, you have to watch them like a hawk and pick them at just the right time. But really, what you want to wait for is third-year asparagus:

It’s thick, and dark, and oh so tender and grows pretty high (about 18 inches and sometimes two feet) before it develops branches and is off-limits. It is sweet as can be and it will be a hard thing to not eat it raw out of the ground, and your reaction will be “holy crap!” because it is asparagus and you are eating it raw and goddammit, it is one of the most divine things you’ve ever eaten. But if you manage to bring some of it back to the house, you get this:

So awesome. So freaking awesome.

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What! The Easter Bunny is bringing grills now!

What is that, Easter Bunny!

Holy crap, that grill is bigger than my last apartment.

We made hot dogs for lunch, and then my mama and I went to the garden and weeded the shit out of that thing. We have so much asparagus this year; I am so excited for the asparagus. We also moved the mint to its own home so it stops killing my much more tender herbs– it was strangling the tarragon, which is not okay. A load of herbs made it through the winter, which made me excited– the horehound, the sorrel, two kinds of sage, the tarragon, lavender, mint and oregano. I’ve decided mint is like the insidious evil mastermind of the herbal kingdom. It smells and tastes delicious, so we don’t dig it out like the weed it is, and instead we let it come perilously close to murdering our tarragon. Evil!

Then I picked like a bajillion violets to try to make creme de violette, but after macerating the shit out of them, I think I need to pick a bajillion more tomorrow. The base for this stuff doesn’t taste even remotely violet-y enough. We will see how this goes. I may split a bottle of good vodka in threes and do a batch with fresh violets, a batch with violets macerated in syrup, and one with dried violets, and see if one is better than the other. If I have enough violets! Seriously, I picked like a hundred and fifty of them.

Then we decided to play with the Easter Bunny some more and made these:

That’s got blue cheese, mozzarella and bresaola with fresh arugula.

That one is smoked gouda, beer-steamed clams, and bacon. Yum!

Oh, the Easter Bunny also brings things for my father:

That is bright pink Burnett’s pink lemonade vodka. It smells and looks like nail polish remover. It tastes like nailpolish remover mixed with Crystal Light. I feel like I should make a post about the drinks I make for my father sometime. In case any of you want to drink like a fifteen year old girl.

Okay, time to check on my violets and then sleeping!

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The bees are so friendly and happy! I love having them in the garden! They buzz around all day working hard and then they sleep at night and when you open the hive, the honey smells like cinnamon!

We will have honey in September! In the meantime, we still have honey from the people who gave us the bees!

I used the honey to make three cocktails this weekend! Here they are!

1) Ginger Bee

Ingredients for Two Cocktails
6 oz Pyrat XO Reserve Rum
1/2 oz honey
1 oz Cointreau
Ten leaves Cinnamon Basil plus two sprigs of flowers for garnish
1-2 oz candied ginger chunks plus two chunks for garnish

Instructions
Add honey, ginger and basil to shaker with ice and muddle well
Add rum and cointreau, shake
Pour into two chilled cocktail glasses, add basil sprigs and ginger

2) Bee Leg Fizz

(This is a variation on a Bootleg Fizz, but with bees! And de-highballed!)

Ingredients for Two Cocktails

6 oz Greylock Gin
Juice from one Meyer Lemon
1/4 cup chopped lavender plus two sprigs lavender for garnish
1/2 oz honey
1/2 oz lavender syrup
1/4 cup stiffly whipped egg whites

Instructions
Add honey, syrup, lemon juice, and lavender to shaker with ice, muddle
Add gin and egg white, shake like crazy
Pour into two chilled cocktail glasses, garnish with lavender sprigs.

3) Spicy Bee

Ingredients for 2 drinks
6 oz Dogfish Head Jin
1/4 cup fresh chopped mint, plus two sprigs for garnish
1/2 oz honey
1/2 oz dry vermouth
6 rings oil-packed deep fried hot peppers, plus 2 for garnish

Instructions
Add mint, honey, and peppers to shaker with ice and muddle
Add gin and vermouth, shake
Pour into chilled cocktail glasses, add mint and pepper garnish

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