Bastard kept gleefully smashing my poor plants with his asteroids!
[Image description: board game at the end of the game, after counting up points. Cards and pieces are splayed all over, and a red and a blue player markers are sitting on the same square on the scoreboard.]
For me, it's kompe. It's a dish that's eaten in southern Norway, which consists of a little ball of salt pork surrounded by a potato dumpling. As the dumping is boiled, the flavor of the pork spreads through the potato, and it's a way to make a very poor meal feel like much more.
Most often eaten with butter, sugar, and lingonberry jam, I think the leftovers fried up on the second day are the best!
[Image description: split image, kompe cut up on a cutting board, and slices of kompe browned in a frying pan.]
So I'm a geologist, but this happened a ways back when I was still in school. One of my classes had recently taken a trip to see an outcrop of igneous intrusions in the local hills. I got invited as a plus one to my fiance's cousin and her now-wife's wedding, and as he and I were driving to the venue, I said "oh hey I know this place, there's dikes everywhere around here!"
He looked at me with this shocked expression, and realizing what I just said sounded like, I hastily explained the geologic definition. He made me promise not to speak a word of it at the wedding.
I've seen the two of them at the occasional Thanksgiving in the years since, and though I find humor in it, I've never felt like I could judge if it would be in poor taste to mention the geology beneath their wedding venue.
(Geology fun fact: if you look at the vertical veins of darker rock, notice the gradient spreading out into the lighter rock. That's where the heat of the intrusion literally baked the older rock, and the pink right at the contact is where the silica actually melted into a glassier form.)
[Image description: ridge of a sand dune at sunset, a shadowed mountain in the background. Numerous footprints along the dune ridge, with wind ripples in the undisturbed sand.]
She was a tiny little thing, barely the size of my pinky nail. The movement of her jumping was the only reason I spotted her on the asphalt. I considered tossing her down into a treatment pit where I could hear her compatriots croaking, but I knew their time was limited, as the whole area was scheduled to be demo'd.
Having always wanted a pet frog as a kid, I did a quick check to make sure I hadn't just grabbed an endangered species (nope, most common kind of frog in southern California), and decided to take her home with me.
Fun fact, the distinctive "ribbit ribbit" heard in movies is the call of the Baja Tree Frog.
[Image description: a close-up of a mottled brown frog sitting on a branch. The frog has its front feet tucked together underneath its belly.]
Located in inland southern California, zone 9b.
[Image description: split image, the top photo is four tomatoes on a cutting board, the bottom photo is hundreds of multicolor heirloom tomatoes covering a kitchen counter.]
[Image description: a blue bowl with fettuccini pasta with meatballs in an orange sauce, topped with grated parmesan and diced sage.]
Rough recipe:
-Start your pasta (I used fettuccine) and broil your meatballs. I was lazy and used pre-cooked meatballs from Costco that just need a little browning.
-Saute thinly sliced shallots in oil until they started to brown, added in diced garlic, pepper, and some dried Italian seasoning blend.
-Once those cooked to golden, I pushed them to the edge of my pan. I'm using a pan that's really too big for the burner, but by moving where the heat is at, it allows me to keep the onion/garlic mixture warm without cooking further. A normal recipe would say remove from pan, but I'm lazy and don't want to clean the extra dish.
-On the hot side of the pan, add a bunch of oil and a small can of tomato paste. Fry the paste in the oil until the excess water is driven out. You'll know it's ready when you start seeing little brown caramelization patches as you stir the paste.
-Start adding splashes of vodka to the paste, stirring and adding until the mixture has cooled enough that the alcohol isn't immediately boiling off.
-Turn the heat down and add chopped fresh sage, oregano, thyme, and a little bit of rosemary, and mix back in the onion/garlic.
-Add a splash of heavy cream until it reaches the right shade of orange.
-Once your pasta is al dente, add it to the pan and mix into the sauce. Add ladles of the pasta water to loosen the sauce as needed.
-Add the meatballs and serve, topped with grated parmesan and diced sage.
[Image description: A brown and white tabby cat on a couch near a window, cat has one paw out towards the camera with spread claws.]
Yep, it's pretty darn dry where I'm at. The drip irrigation I use doesn't fall under our current water restrictions, but I still try to not use excessive amounts. I also mulch everywhere and add increasing layers as the weather heats up.
This is my soil from when I was weeding yesterday, plenty moist and look at all those worms!
Yep! Some previous owner of my house put in an absolutely massive pool that takes up 95% of the backyard, so I smothered my front lawn with mulch and built my garden there!
The bermuda grass is tenacious though, really have to stay on top of yanking it where it tries to reestablish. You'll see patches of it if you look in the background of the lower photo, but it's a war of attrition I think I'm slowly winning.
It looks like you've got multiple tomatoes in each pot, I'd thin them to one per pot, lest they get crowded. You could also fill the pots further and bury the stems of the tomatoes, they'll sprout roots from the stem and be even hardier!
I'm in inland southern California, and I've never thought about growing bay leaves. I don't think I've seen it at my local nursery, where did you get yours?