60. Daylilies

I fried daylilies last night. I picked a bunch of blossoms and a few unopened buds. I dipped them in a tempura batter:

1 c flour
1 c water
1/4 t baking powder
1/4 t salt

And I fried them. I didn't have enough canola, and so I had to resort to some olive oil, and therefore they weren't as crispy as I would have liked, but they were yummy. So weird.

The buds were the best. I may try them again in other ways. And I hear the tubers are potato-esque. The daylilies in my alleyway are weeds. I like to eat weeds.

59. Guest Room

My mother-in-law is coming tonight. She's staying, which she usually doesn't do, mostly (I think) due to our cats. But I need to leave the house at 7 tomorrow for canoe training and water rescue certification, so it makes sense for her to come tonight and just start the day in the morning. This meant I actually had to clean the guest room, which is my Dorian Gray Memorial Room, frankly. It falls apart so the rest of the house can appear clean. These days it has been covered in my dining room--all the stuff from the walls, the cabinet, and so on. Plus it is also my sewing/craft room and therefore creeps towards chaos at every moment.

To top that all, the cats love this room. They love sleeping on the bed and leaving giant mats of fur. The older two are fond of barfing on the rug. So I had to dig the place out, change the sheets and blankets, and vacuum the heck out of it.

But now it is done. Still cluttered and definitely my sewing area, but the bed is clean and made, the two dressers (Leo's and a blanket chest) are tidy, the table with my sewing is explainable instead of shameful.

Time for the rest of the house to promptly fall apart.

58. Last of the Radishes, First of the Potatoes

Two of my 12 potato plants up and died. I don't know if I hurt them as I hilled them up, or if they got too dry (a few others looked sickly yesterday and I saved them by watering the heck out of them--that wet spring spoiled me!). So I dumped out their containers and found enough potatoes to serve as a side dish for dinner. I love yukon golds. Especially new potatoes that are yukon golds. Especially new potatoes that are yukon golds that were planted for free and hilled up with grass clippings and compost and cost me nothing but time (and only recently that, frankly). The radishes got chopped into a salad, but the greens were cooked down in a bit of bacon grease and served as well. Radish greens are not Daisy's favorites. That's ok, though, because they happen almost never. More radishes in the fall, but for now they are done.

57. Radishes

We planted a ton of radishes in the garden this year just to get something going out there before I could plant the things I really like (cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers). They grew. I had never grown more than 3 or 4 before, in a window box, to show Sophia the miracle of plant life back when I was going to homeschool her. I'm just not a big enough fan of radishes to waste precious garden space on them. But this year I decided, through research and gambling, to plant in succession many things one after another. And so the radishes had a place again. We harvested several times, large bunches. There's still a few out there.

And this salad, until I added a few hothouse tomatoes from the CSA, was all from our garden.