Mendolonium

One of the typical symptoms of depression is a “loss of interest in normal daily activities”.  True to my typical form, my depression seems to be atypical in that I cope by being insanely (literally) productive.  I am sure that more sleep and relaxation would help my depression, but seeing as how that just isn’t going to happen I am rocking the Independence Days challenge:

Plant something:

• Tarragon seedling
• French thyme seedling
• Lemon thyme seedling
• Curry plant seedling
• Burgess Buttercup squash seeds x12
• Waltham Butternut squash seeds x12

Harvest something:

• Potatoes!  They were beautiful and crisp and so much fun to dig up and harvest with Thomas.  I loved seeing the look on his face when he realized that the earth was full of potatoes – it was as if he found buried treasure with every spud.
• Carrots
• Leeks
• Blueberries
• A few strawberries.
• 2 blackberries (Sounds unimpressive, I know.  But they are only the first two of hundreds on our bushes.)
• A few raspberries.  Fresh raspberries are amazing, must plant more.

Preserve something:

• Two batches of laminated dough for danish.
• 16 cups of marinara sauce.
• A lot more breastmilk.  Freedom in the freezer!

Reduce Waste:

• We threw a get together for some fellow parents and kids as well as a nice relaxing Memorial Day party and rather than succumb to the temptation of disposable or even compostable dinnerware we simply used our everyday plates and silverware.  Thank goodness for the dishwasher.

Preparation and Storage:

• Regorganized my baking ingredients to give me better storage and access for those that I use most.

Eat the Food

• Tonight I made a potato casserole using our leeks, our carrots, and our potatoes.  That simple meal made me feel that we have entered a new realm of self-sufficiency:  we can now make an entire meal using food we grew.
• With a nursing mama there is certainly a lot of eating in our house!  I don’t have as much time to make dinner as I used to so I have been trying to reduce our food waste by chopping up the veggies for a couple of nights worth of dinner when I have the time so that the vegetables don’t languish in the fridge and go bad because I don’t find the time to use them.
• Thomas and I have been having a ton of fun baking – with eggs.  We made scrambled eggs and Belgian waffles for dinner on Sunday night and also baked the “Best Fudge Brownies Ever”.

And it doesn’t fit into any category, but it is the most exciting development of all:   tonight the bee man paid us a visit.  Next week he is going to set up a device to remove  a bee colony from our chimney (that’s a story for another post) and then transfer that colony to a new hive in our backyard.  And you know what we’ll have then…HOMEGROWN HONEY.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 1:07 am and is filed under Independence Days, Thomas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.