Where did that tomato come from? I stick my nose on those plants every day, sometimes more than once a day, and I would swear there was no tomato on that plant yesterday. What a pleasant surprise to start my dreary and potentially rainy day!

I think this is the Super 100 Cherry Tomato. I say I think that’s what it is, because I don’t know which is which anymore. When I re-potted them, I put the little plastic tabs back into the pots, and sometime between Sunday and yesterday, every last one of them has gone missing. I doubt it can be blamed on critters, because they might knock them out of the pots, but they don’t usually run off with them. I suspect a two-legged critter by the name of Annoying Boy. I’ll have to compare the unlabeled pots with the labeled ones and try to figure out which is which, I guess.

I guess adding the composted manure on Sunday, and the last few days of coffee grounds and leftover coffee have done that plant some good. I have been particularly focusing on that one, because it looked really bad on Sunday with yellow leaves that were starting to curl up and fall off, and generally just bad color to the whole plant. I thought it was on the way to an early death. This morning, it’s green and perky … and it has a tomato on it!

The photo makes it look huge. I assure you, it isn’t. Right now my precious first tomato is about the size of a dime. It better not fall off or get eaten. I would be so heartbroken. I can’t wait to eat my own tomatoes.

There are also three peppers that have set on the Banana Pepper plant. Woo hoo! I am so excited!

Also, I am somewhat pleased with the above photo, so I uploaded a larger version so you can see the detail. Considering how dark and windy it is outside, and the fact I can’t use a flash when using the macro settings, I was surprised by how well it turned out … and how you can see the dew on the little hairs. I love my camera.

I have to take my tomato happy self to Walgreens, and then I have to attempt to restore the kitchen to some kind of order. I have totally ignored the dishes for far too long, as I almost always do.

But I have a tomato and some peppers! On top of the ice dispenser on the fridge being repaired yesterday, this week is going pretty damn well so far. Just wish I felt better, but I guess I can’t have everything my way.

Dinner was different tonight. It’s the first time I made these! They were very tasty.

Take that Freebirds! No more do I have to drive to your location and pay you ridiculous amounts of money for ridiculous sized burritos!

Since it’s a product I have been known to buy in the past, there has been a rather large recall of puffed rice and puffed wheat cereal produced by Malt-O-Meal. It’s sold under a variety of store and private brands as well, so if anyone reading this tends to buy the bagged cereals, they might want to check that it hasn’t been recalled. 23 people in 14 states are sick, and the culprit seems to be the cereal.

Lemon and mint fried chicken, saffron jasmine rice, and steamed mushrooms and broccoli. Mmmm. Tasty!

I increased the size of my “farm” this morning. After I finished my coffee on the porch, I started puttering around in the back yard and found two large tub-like pots. Since I still had some good dirt, some compost, and some seeds, I thought I might as well plant something. The seeds are quite old, so I have no idea if any of them will come up (I put in just about all of them in hopes four of each will germinate — I may end up transplanting some elsewhere), but it’s worth trying. So now I have cucumbers and squash that I hope will grow up and produce some produce!

I also planted one small clay pot with marigolds. Hey, I had the seeds. Maybe they’ll grow!

Also, I am thinking of putting some of our pre-compost mulch on the top of all my containers. There was already some kind of critter pawing around in one of my boxes. No damage done, but still. The neighborhood cats have all sorts of locations to paw around in, so I think they can leave my boxes alone.

I can’t believe it’s already 2 pm, and I spent the whole morning outside messing around with pots, dirt and seeds. I wouldn’t have come in when I did, but it started raining. Boo. Hiss. Though it’s good for the plants, so I shouldn’t complain. It’s a good thing the rain forced me to come in, because I really need to thaw some hamburger and get the chili for dinner started anyway. I should probably do the dishes from this weekend too. Boo. Hiss.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. I just ordered a delivery pizza from Papa John’s. Well, how long do you think I can continue to exist, at least in a state that could be described as happy, without pizza?! It’s been close to two weeks! I am having severe pizza withdrawal symptoms!

Of course, it can’t possibly be as good as homemade, but we are desperate for pizza. There were a few places that might have made a pizza closer to the ones I make, but they also wanted entirely too much gold for the precious, precious little things. Papa John’s is at least reasonably good (we ate them for years and years), is large in size, and economically priced.

I’m starving. Hope the pizza gets here soon so I can totally pig out, and believe me, after two weeks of no pizza, I will be pigging out!

Farming operations have begun at Casa de Orb! I just finished planting my two Earthboxes!

Right to left: Mr. Stripy [heirloom tomato], Sweet Red Cherry Pepper, Fajita Bell Capsicum Pepper, and Sweet Banana Pepper. Also, unseen but planted in a row behind the pepper plants are Sweet Snap Peas.

I’m excited! I hope I can manage to keep these things alive, keep the outdoor cats and other critters from destroying them, and end up with enough produce to make it all worth it. If I do well with these boxes this year, next year we’ll consider a proper garden in the back yard. We thought about doing that this year, but I didn’t want to jump in too deep. It’s been ages since I tried to grow veggies, and failing on a small scale would not be nearly ass heart-wrenching as failing on a large scale. Right now, there’s only $20 invested in this. We couldn’t even get the dirt in the back yard in good shape for so little. So this year, small, and then next year, maybe half the back yard!

50-70 days seems like forever to wait to eat something I grew myself! I can’t wait! I can’t wait! But … I guess I have to.

Last night, making dinner sucked. The oven, which had been hobbling along with my careful poking prodding and occasional banging, has, I believe, finally totally and completely given up the ghost. We were going to have pizza last night, but instead, after an hour of trying to get the stupid oven to just light already, we had spaghetti instead. I was a little too angry at the oven to enjoy it though.

Today I am going to go to the store and buy foods I can make on the stove top. My list of recipes for stove top cooking are few. Mostly I make stews, soups, and the occasional fried chicken or steak … and spaghetti. In fact, I would venture to say I don’t actually know how to cook at all without an oven, which is why I have been dreading the eventual demise of mine. It just needed to hold out a little bit longer, but it didn’t. So … I’m going to hold my nose and buy some easy-to-make boxed insta-foods. I’m imagining that a few days of Tuna Helper and other such stuff will get Lin more in the mood to figure out what to do about the oven.

He says he wants to try fixing it. I say send it to the dump and replace it. It’s old, really old, and my personal experience with old stoves you repair is they last a little longer, and then they break again. Why spend 1/3 of what a new economy stove costs to fix this one … and go through the hassle of doing so? Let it die its natural death. I want a new oven! I even have one picked out, and it’s not horribly expensive and has exactly what I want!

Well, anyway, something will have to be done about the oven, and it will have to be done this weekend or I promise you, I will go insane.

And then … the caffeine high from the coffee wore off, and now I notice I have a nasty cold again. Blech. But I did get to the store, do the dishes, and get the last of the laundry started! Thank you, coffee!

I ended up not getting any flavored creamer. I couldn’t decide, and there weren’t an small ones. The last thing I need in the house is yet one more thing no one wants to consume. I did buy a small sample package of flavored coffee: Southern Pecan. Of all of them, it smelled the best to me, and I was starting to feel some pressure to decide on one. I believe there is only so long you can stand around in the coffee section smelling things before people start to wonder about you, and I was beginning to exceed the time limit.

Anyway, I may not ever love coffee, but I sure do like the kick in the butt it gives me, so I will be drinking a cup on the mornings when I really need to get my butt in gear!

So … due to not having both of Lin’s usual travel mugs when I made his coffee this morning, I ended up having to use one of his older ones and one of his newer (smaller) ones. That meant I ended up with about a half a mug of thick black coffee leftover. Never wanting to waste anything of value, and the coffee I buy for him better be valuable for what I pay for those beans, I decided to add some milk and sugar and give drinking coffee another go.

OK, I still don’t like the aftertaste, but that likely has more to do with how heavy Lin likes his coffee made and the beans he prefers (Sumatran). The milk and sugar helped somewhat. I wasn’t grossed out by it anyway. I managed to drink it. It wasn’t the worst thing I ever willingly drank. And then … the caffeine hit the bloodstream.

HOLY COW!!!

I am feeling quite zippy. Even though only a little while ago I was dragging around feeling crappy, there is now a spring in my step. I feel like I could take on the world!!!

Now I know how it is a person I have to nag to get out of bed every morning, who drags around the house falling asleep every time he sits down, instantaneously becomes a person moving through the house and out the door at the speed of light a few minutes later. Coffee is a freaking wonder-drug. Totally kicks the butt of Dr Pepper as a morning beverage. If only it tasted as good to me.

So now I think I will use this burst of energy to run to the store and get beverages for the weekend, which shall include a small package of some other coffee beans for me and some fancy flavorful creamer of some sort. I am also looking forward to stopping by a Starbucks this weekend to try a caramel macchiato, which all my female coffee-drinking friends seem to agree is the bomb. I may never learn to like the flavor of coffee, but I can tell you this … the effect is worth the gross aftertaste. No really. Holy cow! It’s just amazing!

I have had it. That’s it. I have to find some way I too can enjoy coffee, because I am sick to death of all that work and no reward. Oh sure, sure, there’s a man zipping about the house sipping tall, hot, caffeinated beverages, but that’s not really doing much for me. Since I can’t very well stop making coffee for the man, unless I want the order of the entire universe to fall apart, I have to find some way I too can enjoy coffee.

Have I ever mentioned that I loath coffee? It’s true. I have never tasted any form of coffee that I liked, but I will admit, my experience has been limited. I have, for example, never been inside a Starbucks. The menu intimidates me.

Yes, I have to learn to love coffee, because the morning coffee ritual is bringing me down. Maybe a cup of coffee would perk me up!

Blech.

I would love to take a nap right now. Lin’s taking a nap. The kitties are snoozing in the sunny spot on the bed. It’s siesta time at Casa de Orb, and I don’t get to take part in it. Why? I’m making a roast.

I can hear the wheels in your heads turning. Roasts don’t require much care. They are one of the perfect foods to be making when one is lazy and feeling the need to snooze. Yes, but I have a mostly non-working oven. The roast doesn’t need any attention at all. The oven, on the other hand, has to be prodded into staying hot about every 20 minutes or so. This means the temperature in the oven drops and falls constantly, making it pretty much useless for anything that requires a constant and steady temperature … like bread, for example. But it should do well for a roast. The roast will keep roasting whether it’s 350 degrees in the oven or 200 degrees. It really doesn’t care, but that does mean I have to keep checking on and poking at the stupid oven.

I wouldn’t even be bothering, except a) we haven’t had a roast in forever (and we love roast) and b) I have a collection of large slabs of cow and pig in my freezer just sitting there not being useful as food. The one I am making today is at least $30 worth of pig, and that’s a lot of money to have sitting around in foodstuffs we aren’t eating. They also take up a huge amount of space in the freezer. So, it’s worth the extra effort to eat some of this expensive frozen stuff and clear out the freezer to make room for things that don’t require an oven to make.

Thankfully, and this has been the only thing keeping me sane while we work toward getting a new stove, the oven works great for making my thin-crust pizzas. Since I only need it to be 500 degrees for about 10 minutes, I just fuss with it once, get it hot, pop the pizza onto the stone on the middle rack, turn the oven off and that’s that. Alas, you can’t eat pizza every day though. OK, I could eat pizza every day, but Lin seems to like some variety in his meals.

I am really missing the homemade bread though. I did find a good brand of store bread that is healthy and not too expensive, but it still has that store bread texture, which I find totally unappealing. My bread consumption has gone way down. I just don’t like store bread.

It won’t be too long before we can get a new stove. I suppose we could go get one right now, but I prefer to deal with a little hassle in the kitchen than not have any money in the bank or run up a credit card. I’m crazy frugal that way. The biggest hassle has been that I don’t really know how to do much cooking on the stove-top. I have always preferred baking and roasting, so I really do miss having a fully functional oven. Wah!

So that’s how my day is going. I’m watching TV and occasionally looking things up on the internet interspersed with having to crawl behind the stove every 20 minutes to re-engage the gas flow. It’s pretty funny really, and I am laughing about it. My usual life philosophy applies. You do what you have to do in order to get the things done you have to get done, knowing all the while eventually it will get better, and you can put it all behind you.

I’m definitely looking forward to getting to the point where I can put all memory of my mostly broken oven behind me. I am also looking forward to eventually getting to take a nap, which I get to do all day tomorrow since the food will already be cooked (and probably the next two days as well — it’s a huge slab of pig).

I think I’ll go pester the cats. If I don’t get a nap, they don’t get a nap. I need to be entertained!

We’ve been watching a great show on PBS this morning called What We Eat. Food history is fascinating, and we’ve learned so much this morning! They are replaying the series all day on one of our PBS channels, so check it out or record it if they are doing it in your area too. It’s a fun and educational show, which is really my favorite type of TV programming.

At the above link, you will find the really well done transcripts/overviews for each episode. If you can’t watch it, you can read it, and it is well worth doing either … or both.