welcome to camp telophase

Or Sunday, rather. We bought an upright planter thingy and Toby painted it with water sealant and then put it together for me yesterday. Then Sunday morning we hit the shops and bought a couple of extra tall pots, plus dirt, rocks for drainage, and seedlings, then I spent the day getting that all set up.

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Remember how Sora feels about the white fluffy carpet in my office? (If you don't: he hates it and does his best not to step on it.) It's not just that carpet--he doesn't like our brown bathmats, either. We recently got a cat mat, which has two different surface textures and a ball attached to it. He's adopted the mat as his own, but...

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Also, our first harvest!

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We trekked up to the Keller Farmer's Market this morning and purchased 18 pounds of grass-fed, dry-aged beef from a local rancher. myrialux seared a package of the short ribs, and they've been slow-cooking in a low oven all afternoon and smell HEAVENLY.

The unfortunate part? They won't actually be finished cooking until tomorrow. :) It's a two-day recipe - okay you CAN cook it in one day, but we usually do it over two days - prepare the short ribs the first, then cut up the onions and potatoes and braise them with teh ribs the second.

We're also changing it slightly - I bought some spicy ketchup (that is far more tangy than spicy) from a guy at the local farmer's market a couple of weeks back, so we're using that instead of the tomato paste and vinegar in the recipe. The paprika we're using is a smoked sweet paprika, which we found tastes really good in it the last time we made it.

Something else I bought today at the Keller farmer's market was a mesquite olive oil. There's actually a farm in Texas that grows olives, and makes olive oil in several varieties. They had little tasting cups for it, and wow the mesquite stuff was good - it's basically smoked olive oil. :) It'll taste good when used to marinate meat or brush on it for searing, and myrialux thought we could probably come up with a Texas bruschetta using it.

After we got home, I went outside and carefully dug around the roots of my potato plants and harvested about ten potatoes! All small, but hey. There probably won't be any more potatoes this summer, since the heat's now hit, but I'll plant more this fall after the temps go down. I dragged myrialux outside to help me put bird netting over the tomatoes, and unfortunately right then I got slammed with a migraine from overheating. A cool shower and a Relpax didn't help much, and I eventually took another Relpax (if your migraine gets better and then gets worse within 2 hours, you can take another one), and I think I finally kicked it.

Anyway, it's close to time to take the short ribs out of the oven, drain the liquids, and put them all in the fridge until tomorrow, and after that's done we're heading off to A-Kon to hang out with friends.