Speedy the squirrel is trouble

 

There are squirrels who lives in my neighbor’s tree. EG named one of them Speedy when the squirrels were little. I actually can’t tell Speedy apart from his bros. Speedy’s grown now and has a mate he argues with. We’ll call her Mrs. Speedy I guess.

I don’t know much about growing corn but I planted some at EG’s request. He chose a type you can dry and pop which has kernels that look like multicolored jewels. Some people use them for decoration but I don’t, because they’re food. They grew very well and I went from having no expectations to being somewhat excited about them.

But the Speedies were all over it.

It’s not like our dogs, Pixie and Dean, were laying down on the job of chasing them, it’s just that they can’t be there all the time. I picked most of it today, mature and immature, and feel like a jerk. Metal Pig said, “You can’t use the corn anyway, why not just let them eat it?” But I can use the mature kernels to grow more next year. If you’re curious about the maturation progress of corn, here it is, left to right – kernels start developing at the bottom.

I think corn silk is beautiful. This silk looks like a ginger ponytail – really, I have a ginger pony with a tail that looks like that:

Oh, and I think I’m getting better at canning tomatoes. This morning the Pixie woke me at 4:40 to go out, which is common, but I had gone to bed so early I just stayed up and processed tomatoes. There was also a cricket who had been chirping at an astounding volume for hours. When tired and quiet, at 5-ish, the cricket walked boldly across the kitchen floor. I took him outside. He’ll probably be back tonight.

These are jars of cooked and raw tomatoes, including cherry tomatoes with coriander seeds and a jalapeno and sauce processed in a pressure canner.

I don’t think zucchini “bread” is a way to get people to eat vegetables. Yeah, that’s a real thing I’ve heard. Come on, it’s it’s cake.  So I made 3 cake loaves with a zucchini about 2′ long, which is bigger than I normally let them get before picking them.  I quarter them and remove the pithy core of seeds. This is important because the seeds can taste bitter.

This is 1/3 of the recipe, just a basic zucchini “bread” recipe I veganized. Spellcheck says “veganized” isn’t a word – I say it is.

Dry ingredients:

3 cups flour

2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp salt

Wet ingredients:

1 1/3 cup sugar

1/2 cup fat (this time I used Earth Balance because it’s for my son’s lunch box, and I can’t use nuts, so I was afraid to use coconut oil)

1/2 cup applesauce

2 tsp vanilla

zest  and juice of 1 lemon

Substitute for 2 eggs (I used Ener-G; other options include bananas, more applesauce, flax and other stuff or just chicken eggs if you eat them. Duck eggs if you know people who keep ducks.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Prepare two loaf pans with whatever your non-stick method is.

1. Mix dry ingredients with a fork or whisk
2. Mix the fat and sugar until sort of creamy, then add the rest of the wet stuff.
3. Mix by hand the wet and dry ingredients
4. Pour into pans

Mine took a solid hour to bake. This recipe has not been tested much, and the moisture in zucchini and applesauce varies, so precision isn’t reasonable. Whatever, my kid loves it.