the company we keep

Ed and I worked so hard this morning (before breakfast, before the heat set in) that we hardly noticed the time.

He concentrated on watering our 67 baby trees (not easy, given that the hose, even in its doubled length, doesn't reach nearly far enough) and me -- I weeded and watered some of the new babes in the Big Bed and did the Monet lug of water to the meadow. (What's blooming there right now from last year's planting? Lots and lots of lovely flax flowers.)

 

At 11 we stop. Ed has a scheduled Zoom call and I want my breakfast. Because we dallied, I will now have to eat alone. Or so I thought. As I step out on the porch and set the table with breakfast foods...

I notice a chipmunk scrambling for cover in the corner of the porch. How it got there is a puzzler. How it should leave is an even greater puzzler. I call Dance over. She sniffs and is poised to chase it. The chipmunk takes to the screen and scrambles to the top. Dance is no fool. What comes up must come down. She settles in at the base of the screen and waits. 

Well this wont do! I quickly swing open the door to the porch (remember: there are no nasty mosquitoes yet!) and tap the screen with a broom. The hope is that the chipmunk will go down and head out. But of course, Dance is fast. Chasing chipmunks is serious business for this cat, second only in importance to chasing mice. She's been training for years! So she catches the chipmunk (sorry, chipmunk!) and now the little vermin is dead. I close the door on the both of them and settle down to my solo breakfast. But it's not to be. Dance brings the dead rodent back inside the porch (using the cat door) so she can do her favorite thing: toss it around like a toy, just like the little stuffies she likes to toss around inside. I eat breakfast as the cat bounces the dead chipmunk about, finally tiring of it all and retreating to her resting post under the flower pot. The chipmunk, hopefully RIP, stays in full view, showing its chipmunky teeth at me, as if to chastise me -- you let this happen, you meanie!

Sigh... Farmette life can be brutal.

In the intense heat of the day, I turn on the oven. It seems strange, for sure, but I need to do something with the mounting pile of rhubarb. Yes, I could freeze it, but I still have last year's crop in the freezer. Better to bake with it. I triple the recipe's rhubarb load and slide the yogurt based cake into the oven. It comes out just as it's time for me to pick up Snowdrop.

We do play some (outside and inside!), and read some (weird new chapter book, my fault), and eat some (mango, strawberries, cherries, oranges, watermelon, and of course -- rhubarb cake)... 

 

 

And as it is a Thursday, we make sure to pick up our CSA box of veggies for the week. The farmers have had a tough few days. Indeed, a tough spring season, with temps jumping from warm to cold to hot to freezing. Last weekend, they used all available strategies to keep their crops alive as frost struck south central Wisconsin. Seeing their photos of iced over strawberries was heartbreaking, but at lest the berries survived. Some of the peppers and their young corn crop? Not so much. And now it's hot again.

But first, I drop off my sweet companion at her home and say a quick hello to the two brothers waiting for her.

And now the sun has almost set and I finally turn to dinner prep. And I just do a repeat of foods I've cooked a million times here at the farmhouse. Is it time to add more unusual dishes to our rotating menu? The pandemic had us eating at home, foods cooked by me, every single day for more than a year. Aren't some of my recipes sagging a little from old age?

When I cook for Ed and the kids, I want to prepare stuff that I know they'll love. This is what keeps me from innovating in the kitchen.  Or is it that I'm blaming those at the dinner table for my own unwillingness to get creative in the kitchen once again? Sure, cooking something new risks their rejection. Still, with the pandemic receding a little, I'm thinking it's time to get unstuck. Time to try something new. Tomorrow. I'll start tomorrow. Today? I stay with our usual dinner of fish and asparagus. And rhubarb caked baked a million times already this year. So old, but so good!