Things were different this week
It’s been hot and humid here this week, rained twice, with some golf-ball sized hail the other night. Fortunately nothing got damaged. I’ve been under the weather (still not feeling all that well today), which is why I haven’t been posting.
My plants all seem smaller than usual for this time of year, I’m not sure why. My corn tasseled but didn’t make any ears, so no sweet corn. There are a couple of tomatoes forming, though, which is good. The potatoes are doing pretty well, also — some are going like crazy, some don’t seem to be growing at all.
Planted: carrots, rice (got that in a trade!), sweet potatoes, Indian corn (the multicolored kind — supposed to be good for cornmeal), and some air potatoes I bought in the fall which were making tendrils all over my pantry.
Harvested: garlic, an onion, shallots, blackberries
Preserved: curing the garlic and shallots (ate the onion!)
Resource management: more cleaning, shredding, composting. Found out the bunnies LOVE banana peels, which are hard to compost. Repackaged the beans I had bought earlier, discovered I really didn’t have very many. Went to the store and bought some pinto beans (among other things), and had a lovely talk with an old lady behind me in line about how to make beans, what it was like in the 40’s when she grew up, and so on.
New skill: I’m in the middle of a cheesemaking adventure. I’m pressing cheese curds right now. It’s been set up since yesterday, and I’ve reduced the volume of this mass of curds by well over half, so it’s going well. I realized today that I had forgotten to salt the curds, so I did just now, and tasted the spoon after mixing. It tastes a bit fruity, a bit like yogurt, and at the end a definite cheddar taste. So I think I’m onto something here. I’ll write more about this later.
I also learned that if you add wheat gluten and a cup of white flour to whole wheat flour, rolls come out much nicer. 
