Author: Liz Braithwaite

Spinach Riccotta Pie

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Last month was horrid on the food budget. I had to restock the kitchen, and I wasn’t exactly the most frugal. I still cringe at how much I spent on food. So this month, I have decided to be better. Part of that was using food that I already have. I had picked up a huge bag of spinach from Costco, and looked in one of my favorite recipe books for a recipe involving spinach. The recipe book was borrowed from my mom and I love it. It’s the original Moosewood Cookbook (the link is for the new one, good luck finding the one published long enough ago to be given to my mom as a wedding present), and features a variety of vegetarian recipies. I’ve loved everything I’ve cooked out of there, and it usually involves lost of vegetables and no meat which is nice.

So this is what I cooked last night for dinner. It was delicious, so I thought I would share it. This is exactly what I did, not necessarily what was in the recipe book.

  • 1 cup flour
  • 1/3 cup cold butter

Cut together in a food processor. Mix with 3 Tbs. cold water. Chill for over an hour, then make a crust in a 9 inch pie pan.

  • 1/2 lbs spinach (or just an approximate amount that was a really huge pile that cooked down a ton)
  • 1 small onion

Sauteed onions in butter with pepper, salt and basil, add spinach until wilted

  • 1 lb cottage cheese (it’s supposed to be ricotta. But I had cottage cheese)
  • 3 beaten eggs (I dropped the eggs from the grocery store. All but 4 broke, although more were salvageable)
  • 3 tbs. flour
  • 1/2 c. grated cheese

Mixed together everything, put in pie shell. Top with 1 c. sour cream (that was too much, I would use half that next time) and paprika.

Here’s the link for an updated version from the author

USDA Follow up

Just a few links that were interesting :

An interactive version of the map, where you can zoom in and see the details of the zones here.

Half-way through this article is more information about how the map was created.

The old 1990 version for reference of changes.

Another old version if you want to get even more confused:

Also, my main gardening website is down. I spend several days getting it all fixed up, only to come back to it and have it not working again. This is frustrating, because I haven’t touched it in the meanwhile. The blog seems unaffected luckily. In many ways I don’t care: this year is turning into a sabbatical from gardening work. With a baby coming and less family around to help out with the other kid, that’s fine by me. If I don’t post here that regularly, just know I’m enjoying kids and focusing on other things.

Cats

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I finally feel like I’m finally settling into our apartment. The entire living area has pictures up (although some frames still need to be filled). We had a couple of friends over for a while and they’ve left now, allowing Peter to go back into his normal bedroom. And I also paid my first month of regular rent.

I’m enjoying my apartment. I already had to get an appliance repaired. I was cooking a carrot cake in the oven and heard a strange noise. Upon further investigation, it looked like my oven was trying to time travel, with a bright white light coming out of it. Part of the heating element burnt through. Luckily, the carrot cake was saved by the toaster oven, and the oven was repaired in a couple days.

We do have a couple of horrid neighbors that have managed to keep us up at night. One morning I was going about my business and heard a strange noise. I couldn’t decided if it was the wind, an animal, or a baby being horribly mistreated. I opened the window and scared away a cat. There are these two cats that will stare each other down and start this kitty chorus of meows and howls and all sorts of strange cat noises. This can happen in the middle of the night, right outside the bedroom. My husband has contemplated anti-freeze. I think it might be useful to at least have a bucket of rocks we can throw from the patio. The kitty chorus only deserves boos and rotten fruit, but occasionally ends up with a captive audience that would much prefer sleep.

USDA Hardiness Map

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The new USDA Plant Hardiness map is out. The old version was from 1990, so now there is added information from almost two decades, plus better interaction and more detail. You can see it and read about it here.

This measure the average yearly temperature for an area, and is usually used for determining what plants will survive the winter.  The current map bumps many places up by a zone. (You can look at this map here. They are comparing changes for a map made in 2006, not adopted by the USDA, but it should be similar.)

I am currently living in a zone 7b. Previously I was in a 7a. Doesn’t sound like I’ve changed much, but winters are very different in both locations. Utah county looks like it’s mostly in a 6b situation. I’ve always said a zone 5/6, so it’s just a little warmer. Where I lived before, Cache County, has changed quite a bit. It used to be mostly 4/5, now it’s all in zone 5, even with pockets of zone 6.

I still believe in being a little reserved in choosing plants. I know a zone 5 plant will survive about any winter in Utah county. But if I decided to strically go off of the USDA map I can suddenly plant something hardy to zone 7. I might go ahead with some perennials, but I would always recommend being on the safe side with larger, more expensive plants including large trees and speciem shrubs.

For instance, last winter was pretty cold and the temperature pattern made for a lot of winter kill. Boxwoods, peaches, roses, and similarly tender plants saw a lot of damage. The hardiness rating on these plants are in the zone 5-6 range, which is well within the current USDA hardiness rating.

Because the map is based on average temperatures not lows, cold winters and different weather patterns can result in winter kill for what was supposed to be a hardy plant. There are many plants growing here that would not survive the winters back in Utah, even though I’ve apparently only changed half a zone. Experience and knowledge is much better than strict numbers.  Still, the map does provides a good starting reference point for determining plant hardiness.

Walking in the Rain

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We went on a walk/hike yesterday to a local greenway. I forgot the camera, so no pictures, but it was lovely and you can try imagining it for yourself. The weather had scattered thunderstorms, so I brought an umbrella, but didn’t think much else of the weather. Scattered thunderstorms back in Utah usually means you might hit rain, but you are probably going to be okay and I never worry too much. The drive there was fine, but the sky continued to deepen in color as we pulled up to the parking lot. We exited into a slight drizzle and headed out along the greenway.

Within ten minutes it was pouring rain and we were huddling under the one umbrella I brought. I remembered that I had thrown a couple of ponchos into the van while I was at my mom’s back before we moved here. I thought they might come in handy and after putting them in had I promptly forgotten about them.  With the three of us huddling under one umbrella, they were quickly brought back into mind and we walked back to the car to pick them up.

At this point, we decided to go to a different starting point of the greenway and on our drive there found a covered pavillion and had a little picnic. Then we took off again, this time better equiped for the still pouring rain with our ponchos. There wasn’t a poncho for Peter, so he got the umbrella. This resulted in a lot of funny moments of a parent running after him trying to keep an umbrella over his head, while he didn’t care one way or another about getting wet.

The greenway headed off into a wetland and the majority of what we walked was a wide board walk. We did pass a few other people, one runner who was as wet as if he dunked himself a pool but still going at it anyway, and the rest with appropriate variations of rain gear. Mostly it was pretty quite and we were by ourselves. In the wetland something was making a terribly loud mating call or other sound. I wish I knew enough to know what it the world it was. Combine the mating call, rain, and mossy surrondings, it was quite an enjoyable walk.

It only lasted about a half mile, and then we all were sufficiently done with getting various exposed parts of our body wet and headed back home. But I’m glad the rain didn’t stop us from having an enjoyable time outdoors. With all the rain here, I think I might find myself indulging in a pair of cute galoshes for Peter.

*For all those interested we hike the Ivy Creek Greenway in George Pierce Park.

Georiga

There are evergreen deciduous trees and I have no idea what any of them are. Huge evergreen deciduous trees just don’t grow in Utah. I also found this shrub in flower. In January. So super incredible for Utah-grown me.

Being in an apartment, I doubt I’m going to actually work in the soil. But it intrigues me. Not good soil, but it also has some of the opposite problems that Utah soil has–acidity and quick weathering due to humidity and heat.

Another thing that I’ve noticed lately is using pine needles as mulch. It’s always been on my list of items you could mulch with, but I didn’t realize people actually buy pine needles in large quantities and use it for more than just around a pine tree. Here are some bales they just spread out all over around my apartment complex.

Some landscaping blunders are the same, however. My apartment complex has some landscaping that is trying to be fancy, but is really just the overuse of hedge clippers. Even the trees are hedged into nice little prickly squares. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, it could be the desired result of intensive formal landscaping. But that requires a lot of knowledge and work. More often it’s done by people just imitating that, and results in these hedges:

The bottom of the hedge is starting to die out. When pruning a hedge it has to be pruned in an gradual, upside down V shape. That way, light can reach the lower branches and they won’t die back.

Wall Decorations

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I have 10 foot ceilings in the living room of my apartment. The walls looked pretty barren without any pictures, and I came with a total of two pictures to stick on the wall. (Neither of which are up yet, but I have plans for them.) I really wanted to come up with something that would fill up the space, look great, and not cost a lot. So here it was I ended up doing:

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I found a stencil design I liked online, scaled it to the size I wanted, and printed it off. I used the printed pages as stencils on colored paper. The pieces were then laid out on a large piece of foam board and mod-podged on. It worked great, except the foam board warped, so the end product was curled. I mod-podged the back and held it down flat with books while it dried and that worked to fix the curling.

I made the large one, and then cut up another couple pieces of foam board to do smaller ones. I made seven panels in all, and it cost me under $30. All the cutting ended up taking a lot of time–a simpler design would have made it a lot faster, but I like how it turned out. As seen in the pictures, my wonderful husband helped with some of the massive amount of cutting. (For a bonus you get to see some pictures of the apartment too.)

Review: The Invisible Garden by Dorthy Sucher

I received this book as a Christmas gift off of my ever-growing Amazon wish list. (That probably means it was recommended from another blog at some time, but I have no idea where.) It made a great diversion during a busy few weeks moving into a new place.

This isn’t a how-to at all, but a reflection on some of the author’s memories associated with her garden in Vermont. In some ways it made me a little envious…I would love a garden that I could work in for years. Right now, I have no garden and more moves in my future. This book made me look forward to that day when I will actually have a garden and be able to work on it for many years.

Because I have not had the experience of owning my own land, this book was a great look at what goes into changing a property into a garden. Many of the sketches were humorous, others more serious (I was devastated when a horrid wind storm came along later in the book), and all carried a great sense of connection between the gardener and her garden. I enjoyed every page, and read it almost as quickly as a novel. No free copy with this posted, but you can get it for a penny plus shipping off of Amazon. (And it is worth reading.)

Outside

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The weather is warmer than Utah. Of course the weather everywhere has been warmer so I’m sure about that, but even the cold days here aren’t like the cold days in Utah. We’ve enjoyed the parks around here. Peter also got a bike from goodwill that he’s been enjoying. It’s nice to be able to go outside a lot, even in January. I will post pictures of the new place, but I’m working on decorations for the walls. Which has been fun, but also a little time consuming so I’m not done yet.

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