Jalapeno vinegar

When I tell people that I garden in the SouthWest most ask if I grow tumbleweeds, cactus and peppers. My usual response is only the first two, for some reason peppers just do not like my garden. I will be honest, I am pretty cool with that since peppers are not high on my must have list but it still stings to admit that there is an entire vegetable family that I just can not get to grow.

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Meet Lucy

When it rains, it pours even in the desert. I am an animal person but primarily a dog person. I have been back in Arizona for nearly three years and up until 2 months ago my solitary pet was Suki, a 6 pound silver tabby cat.

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Milk-cicles

I am lactose intolerant so milk is not something that I keep around the house. That said, it still has uses in occasional recipes that I put together and it can be frustrating to have to buy one of those little bottles of milk at premium prices just to make up one meal.  I have tried dry milk in the past, and there is nothing wrong with it but the up-front cost is high and my dry goods storage is very limited so it somehow never makes the cut when I am doing groceries vs budget. Evaporated milk is even pricier and I am not too keen on having to deal with portions left over in the can after using what I need (and again dry storage space issues). So that leaves good old milk in a jug, and my roomy chest freezer.

I started reading on how to freeze milk and most posts deal with full jugs, removing an inch or two of the milk for expansion, and freezing them as is. While useful for normal people, there is no way I can ever use a full jug before it goes bad so I decided that pre measuring and freezing in small batches would work better. In one of the comments I read, it was suggested to use silicone measuring bowls to freeze liquids then just pop them out of the silicone and store in freezer bags which seems brilliant... then I remembered I have no silicone measure bowls.


A dig through the kitchen, however, did turn up some silicone muffin pans and some individual silicone cupcake cups (shaped like flower pots no less) which I guessed would work just as well.  I placed the silicone cups in regular old muffin tins to give them strength, filled them with measured amounts, then placed them inside plastic cake carriers to help keep out any dust and freezer smells.

Really old, hard water spotted muffin tins...

The carriers were stacked in the freezer to solidify for a day then the frozen milks were popped out and put in freezer baggies and marked them with an exp date of three months from now.  I have to say that I am very happy with these new, handy milk-cicles.

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Zucchini Overload

Ok so maybe I got a little carried away this spring. I have about 150 feet of retaining wall that circles my front yard so I thought gee wouldn't it be neat to have sunflowers going all around the yard. A couple pounds of black oil sunflower seeds later, I had thousands of new sprouts (ok so I seeded a bit thick) and I looked at them and thought gee if I am going to be watering these anyway why not put some zucchini along the row to keep the soil shaded and use this wasted space.

One thing I should admit to up front is that I am a bit of a seed addict. Between what I have bought, harvested, and traded for on Gardenweb back in the day, I have hundreds upon hundreds of varieties of seeds laying around. Some of these are getting a bit old and their germination rates are declining as a result. I tend to take these older seeds and mix them up together by type into mystery mixes that I then sow liberally in any open nooks and crannies in the garden. There is something about waiting to see just what a plant is going to produce that adds even more magic to the wonder of growing fresh veggies. So I grabbed my jar of mixed zucchini seeds and popped a seed into the ground every foot or so along the row of sunflowers and called it a day.

A month or so later, once things had started to fill in a bit I took a few minutes to walk the yard and take a head count on how many of the zucchini had actually come up. By the time my count hit 89 plants it occurred to me that I was in a little bit of trouble and that maybe I had planted a few too many. This would probably be a good time to mention that I am allergic to zucchini plants. Every time I touch the little spiky bits on the stems or the hairs on the squashes themselves I break out in an annoying itchy hives in that spot for the rest of the day. So picking zukes while digging through monster leaves that can be a foot or more in diameter is a bit of a nightmare, doing it 90 times a day was not something I was looking forward to. Washing those zukes is even worse as I have to lose the protective gardening gloves. Oh yeah, did I mention I am allergic to latex too and have yet to find those long yellow rubber gloves in a vinyl so I have to bare hand it.  So harvesting dilemma aside, I was looking at a yield of 20 or more zucchini a day give or take.

On the bright side, I live in the middle of town so there are people nearby who always welcome fresh veggies. I have about a dozen friends and family at last count that get random bags of zucchini about twice a month and that really helps. Bunnies and ground squirrels also help themselves regularly, and I lost 5 or 6 plants to a persistent pocket gopher. My chickens and turkeys have become squash snobs and now are so uninterested in getting any more that they barely touch the stuff unless it is chopped fine or cooked. My aunt visits regularly (I have internet and she doesn't) and is a good sport and will pick for me if I have not forced myself to yet. We disagree over what is picking size though and she only cuts those with a withered blossom so I get a lot of monster squash on her watch.

There is a moral to this story, I promise, I think it has something to do with moderation and finding really good zucchini recipes. So keep an eye out on this blog for ideas on what to do with your spare summer squashes, I am sure to come up with a few!

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