My New Heroes are the Hummingbirds

This is a great site with lots of wonderful facts and information about hummingbirds.

The World of Hummingbirds

They are so feisty and fearless.  I love to sit on our deck overlooking the wetlands and watch the hummingbirds in the edge of the woodlands and on the feeder in the flower garden.

After the rain

After the rain of the past few weeks, the garden looked downright jungly.  Tomatoes needed feeding, and sundry tasks, like pruning the forsythia and the wiegelia (spelling?) loomed large. For some dumb reason, I thought I could take care of everything in an hour.

Two hours later, I am sweating (changed shirts once), thirsty and tired.  And more work remains.   Found lots of string beans ready to eat, and harvested some dill.  Cut back the sage and the oregano, which is going nutso.   Garlic is HUGE and looks like it may bloom.  The garlic rose? 

I have to feed the flowers and some of the plants in the wild flower border.  Changed the hummingbird water.  Ant City.  Cheeky little guys were back within the hour.

We are spending like a dollar a day on suet for the birds, and they are insatiable.  Saw tiny frog the size of my thumb nail.  Incredibly cute.  Plenty of vitamin D had for the week.

Tonight we cooked swordfish is an incredible  3 peppercorn/parsley/garlic/butter sauce.   Salad with lettuces and beans from the garden.  Broccoli because we always eat our veggies.  Tiny potatoes steamed to go with the swordfish.

Shrimp salad tomorrow night.  We do eat well.  Onward.

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Nature Notes from our Backyard

Out planting yesterday, and I thought that the giant bumblebee that hang around out in front was attacking me.  No!  I was being "buzzed" by the hummingbird who thought me too close to the newly put out feeder.  Eeek!  He took off after a rival.  So happy to see my birdies back.

Yesterday late afternoon the bad hawk was right out in the woods looking for my birdies and I went out and shouted and clapped my hands at him.

Young chipmunks still popping out of their hole like jack-in-the boxes.   Goldfinches on the feeder.  Suet robber still in evidence.  Life is good.  The hummingbird's ruby throat was very red.  Just lovely.  

Next Food Network Star

The garden, lush and colorful. The bag of impatiens has been particularly good this year, and the geraniums are loaded with blooms. The red nasturtiums have also been fine. The tiny hummingbird visited the new feeder and also the purple sage (not visible) where he went up and down the blooms. The blasted ants just won't leave the feeder alone.

My small guest watched the Next Food Network Star with me and we didn't think Melissa had a chance but she suprised us. Last night I tried her four step dinner plan: bread the meat and saute, add aromatics, add liquid, return meat, swirl in butter and serve. I had some chicken tenders and I used an egg then panko for the breading. Sauteed in half-butter, half-canola oil, the yin and yang if you will. When the chicken was cooked, I put it in a warm oven and added 4 split green onions to the pan, 2 big cloves of garlic, slivered, and 2 home grown plum tomatoes, sliced. Added white wine to get up all the "fond," then returned the chicken to the pan and swirled in the butter. We ate it on a bed of microwaved spinach. Yum! I just used the ingredients on hand, which was Melissa's plan, too. It really works. Would have never thought of serving on the spinach, but we are in light-diet mode, and carbs are carefully chosen.

Tonight, I'm making shrimp with tomatoes, olives, herbs and feta. Another low-carb affair. We have discovered that grissini, thin breadsticks, have few carbs and calories. A salad will round out the meal. We're doing either soup, salad or diet fare the rest of the month. I'll report in on how much weight, if any, was lost.

The plum tomatoes appear to have avoided the blight, as have the cherry and some in a pot on the other side of the house.

The herbs are in full swing, and I need to replant cilantro and dill. We love cucumbers in dill and cilantro in anything. Thinking some tortilla soup would go down easily. Bon appetit.

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Deja Vu all over again

We just completed our annual trip to Nantucket. I liked how the Hi-Line called the slow ferry the "traditional" ferry and the high speed, of course, was the high-speed. Both were full on Friday morning. Windy and cool, but warm on land.

We ate, as is our wont, at the Rope Walk, right on the water, and the fish and chips were so good and the wine, a Pinot Grigio "Oggi" was fab. A walk up Main Street with some things the same and others different. Lots of "blingy" jewelry stores and less art galleries, a comment on the kind of money that has moved into town the last fifteen years.

I love the cottage gardens and the funk and that Murray's Toggery hasn't changed much in 40 years. Arno's still there, still crowded. The movie theater has been rased, where there is unfortunately a missing plaque commenorating that Grapeshot questioned the proprietor as to whether the popcorn contained "real" butter and was told of course. Never mind that the so-called butter was orange as a tropical sunset. The entire family agrees that the last movie seen there was The Posidon Adventure.

We had ice cream at the Juice Bar and it wasn't beach weather, so we didn't go, but we prowled thru the town and our small guest bought a few souvenirs and I found a brown t-shirt, so practical but hard to find. That's Murray's for you.

Traffic terrible, and people on cell phones and otherwise clueless. (see next post).

I was very tempted by a big-assed wind gong at the Whaling Museum that sounds like the bell buoy coming into the harbor, but was fearful the neighbors might object, as it was damned loud.

This morning my cute little hummingbird was at the NEW feeder, and he ate and ate. Fighting the tomato blight. Most seem all right. First the rain then the fungus. Weird orange stuff growing in the wildflower garden. Pretty but deadly looking.

I went to Kate's Mystery books to help pack up the store which is closing. The end of an era. Alas and alack.

The Dewy Morning Grass

My mother-in-law, bless her, claimed it was healthy to walk barefoot on the lawn when the grass was still wet with dew. I can't recall what health properties this wetting of the tootsies with the dew had, but it is a pleasant sensation, and I think of her whenever I indulge, which was this morning when I performed garden grooming, a chore that I do at least twice a week.

Grooming the garden is like cleaning up the kitchen after a meal. Do it regularly and it's small potatoes, Wait until you have a backlog and eeek!

Pulled up the spent green pepper plant, trimmed the dead leaves off the tomatoes, and cut spent blossoms off of practically everything. The nasturtiums are enjoying a second growth, and I have dozens of moss rose which reseeded themselves from last year and are blooming like mad. It's like, free plants!

The sun has shifted and some things are still doing well, while other flowers seem a bit forlorn. The dew may have benefited my general health, but I've been sneezing like mad since I went into the garden. We hope the hummingbird has begun her long migration. Say a little prayer for all the tiny birds that travel such long distances. They need our "bon voyage."

My mother-in-law had other beliefs that are non-standard. She thought it was bad luck to do laundry between Christmas and New Year's, and she also stated that if you put a few scales from the Christmas carp (ewww!) into your wallet, you'd always have money for the coming year. I tried that one, and it worked. Or was it because I stopped smoking? That will certainly put money in your pockets.

Whatever, it's way cool to pussy foot through the wet grass in bare feet.

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Clematis

This morning while I stood by the garden, the hummingbird arrived and, ignoring me, drank long from the sugar water. So charming. Later we fed the ducks and one ostrasized white goose at Glue Factory Pond.

Here is a photo of my clematis. Half of it died, but the other half thrives.

The tomatoes continue to exert theirselves in growth and leaves and blossoms. Last night we had fresh dill in the salad, and tonight there will be a wealth of chopped cilantro on the chicken.

Herb gardens rock!

Salade Niçoise

We had company this weekend and due to working around a theater curtain time, etc., I decided to make a Salade niçoise, I chose the salad in Julia Child's The Way to Cook as my recipe.

Now we all know that Julia is not the short-cut queen, no recipes in 30 minutes from the French Chef, so I was prepared for a bit of work. My only "shortcut" if indeed it was, was to cook the small Yukon Gold potatoes whole and peel them. I also omitted anchovies since I don't like anchovies and when you are the cook you can do what you damn well please.

O.K. second substitution was to buy three small beautiful tuna steaks and grill them. I made Julia's potato salad, cooked the beans, S.O. grilled the tuna, and I boiled some eggs, and pounced upon a beautiful red tomato, capers, black olives, lettuce, the works all laid out beautifully on a big ceramic platter.

The dressing was a lemon-garlic affair, with both lemon peel and lemon juice and raw garlic pounded to a paste. A bit of work but well worth it. The whole was greater than the sum of its parts and we had a feast.

At the other end of the spectrum was dessert. I know our friend likes strawberries, so a strawberry dessert seemed optimal. I recalled back in the first years of marriage I had been on a Bavarian cream kick, making various flavors of a French dessert called Bavarian cream.

I looked in the old New York Times cookbook and lo, there is was, but it was the shortcut version--Julia would have disapproved big time. I measured out all the ingredients including a heaping cup of chipped ice and dumped them into the blender in the prescribed order, and blended the prescibed number of second, and lo, strawberry Bavarian cream in less than a minute, no cooking. Raw eggs, too. My bad. I licked the spoon to test whether the eggs were safe and I guess they were.

We ate it with sliced strawberries from Wards Berry Farm, altogether lucious with no hard white centers, but red berry all the way through.

So this was yin and yang of meals, but lovely.

As for lovely, the garden looks and smells lovely. The white carnations bloomed and have sent a fragrance over the yard and now into the house as I picked a few and added the sage blossoms, favored by the bumble bees.

The tomatoes, heirloom beets, pepper and herbs are growing apace, and the flowers are blooming, even the new white lupine, and the clematis has huge purple blossoms. The hummingbirds come to the feeder regularly and one looked at us in the window this morning. We had a fantastically large butterfly, all yellow and black, and of course the dragon flies swoop and land on the flowers. So life is good on the edge of the slough.

Big goldfinch battle yesterday. They are territorial little guys. Catbirds have discovered how to get into the suet feeder for small birds.

We had a good rain this morning and everything is lush. Looking at the garden puts me into a good mood, which is a good thing, because Festival Madness has two more rejections. We looked at the beginning again, and it read pretty good.

The New York Times Book Review today had many of the same books as the WSJ. Not my cuppa tea. The Globe's list is more literate, but Boston readers are obviously not typical.

Tonight I'll do a few more pages of the new book. I really need a working title.

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