Tomato Sauce

It all starts with tomatoes. Lots and lots of tomatoes.

They don't have to be perfect, you just need to pick a whole bunch of 'em (I assume you also have a million tomatoes this year, it being such a wonderful tomato year and all.), and dice them up, thusly:
I wish my honey wouldn't bite his nails. Doesn't seem to interfere with his knife skills, though.

And throw them in a big pot:

And let it cook.

Then put on a silly hat


And take pictures of the steam rising.


And voila! Tomato sauce! At least that's my experience of it. The problem with not doing it myself is that I miss some steps, what with all my documenting and wine drinking resonsibilities.

Our trip back in time, to the grain store in the Model T (a hipstamatic photo essay)

Pears!

There are real live, honest to goodness PEARS growing in my yard. What? You don't believe me? Here's proof:

But that's not the only one. He has friends. Lots of friends.

A treeful of friends.

I've always known this was a pear tree. But I put it in the same category as the choke cherry and the crab apple. A tree that puts out pretty flowers in the spring and feeds the bees and then might bear some kind of fruit, but nothing edible. Nothing sweet and crisp and delightful.
Did I mention it's in my yard?

Shades of Tomato

Fixation of the week: Synthetic Corp's Hipstamatic iPhone app. Oh joy and rapture. I don't know enough about photography to understand what it does, but let's just say there are different lenses and films and flashes to choose from, and pictures that would normally look like this:

End up looking like this:

Fantastico!
Oh I just love enhancements, don't you? I wish there were a writing enhancement app.
Any-hoo, a few days ago, I took a walk in my garden, and was struck by the variety of tomato color. So I thought I'd share.





Pics of fried greenies and tomato basil salad to come.

Um... what?

Trippy.

Talk about your plenty

This summer is just going too fast for me. Case in point: I have to go back to work in exactly three weeks. What? What happened to all my summer projects? All the blogging? All the organizing things so that life will be so much easier when we go back to school? All the lazing about on the beach, reading trashy Swedish novels and drinking Coronas? At least I got SOMEthing accomplished. Okay, so I did some gardening and harvesting and cooking, too. But this whole summer seemed like a hot, sweaty race against time. Quick! Eat the lettuce before it bolts! Pick the green beans before they get tough and stringy! Turn on the irrigation before everything dies! Even our summer squash isn't doing well, as if it's too hot. For summer squash? And yet, there it sits, stunted and dying on the vine.
Luckily, at Camp RunAmok, we can repurpose our gone-by veggies. Piggies just love anything that vaguely resembles foodstuffs.

And I love to watch them grunt and root and munch.

Sunflowers

I need a new camera. Seriously. Is this the best I can do? I play with the settings and try and try and try, and then end up with nuttin'. Whatever. The point here is to document my thrilling farm life, not to post amazing pictures. So here I am, showing you the kids' beautiful sunflowers that are so much more beautiful in person (in flower?) than they appear in this picture. Until they start to die.

And then your kids start nagging you about how maybe you should have just left them in the garden, where they belong, rather than picking them and MAKING THEM DIE. 'Cause you really shouldn't pick flowers that don't belong to you, Mom.
Where did they learn to nag like that? Oh, right...
Anyway, I'm hoping to inspire them to enter some in the Fair, because they are just lovely. But in the meantime, can someone tell me why dying sunflowers smell like pee? 'Cause damn.

Noses

So here's my current obsession (hopefully it gets along well with cilantro and Lady Gaga and the other objects of my obsession roaming around inside my little brain): noses. Animal noses, to be exact. Like pig noses, for example:

And also sheep noses. Here's Daddy:

Do I smell really good or what? Oh, I suppose it all has something to do with the heat, or my being the bearer of tastey treats. But maybe the rapid nose sniffing is how they show their love. Which is what I will continue to think until one of my blog followers proves otherwise. Oh wait, no one reads this stupid thing. Perfect! I can continue to live in my fantasy world. And upload poor-quality video of knucklehead ram lambs who like to butt and run and kick.