Holly Homemaker breaks a sweat.

I spent as much of the the weekend in doors as possible, baking and doing laundry and generally being Holly Homemaker. Holly did not care for the humidity outside or the heat. She especially did not care for having to change her clothes every time she as much as peaked outside.

During my brief visits outside to play with the garden, I learned things. Learning  is good, we like learning. We do not like learning about plum sized black watermelons because they are a hard, sad lesson is horticulture. I also learned that it is important to harvest green beans before they form  beans because after they have formed beans, it leaves them with a bitter and woody flavor which causes a bitter and woody taste. In the future I will harvest the beans in a more timely manner - in my defence before this weekend I didn't know I even had beans of pick-able age even there at all, much less growing progressively  more woody and bitter.

Another lesson I learned was that next year the tomatoes will be caged. They are growing out of control and trying to take over the garden! That is the job of the watermelons and green beans! Its clearly written out in their job descriptions!  I do not need another out of control vine eating my yard, granted, the tomatoes are a very productive vine, but I did not want more  vines, I planted plants and I would appreciate if they would stay that way. Next year I'm going to be  Diana, Gardner with a Whip.

Every time I got tired of the heat, I went into the kitchen, first I baked two peach tarts . The recipe as written is good but not great. I leaned that after I  made an initial change in it by making it a peach/ blueberry/raspberry tart. It was after tasting that, that I decided that it would be even better if  the dry, white ingredients were cut in half and everything else was doubled or tripled ( it calls for eight sliced peaches, depending on the size of the fruits this could be cut in half, unless you want to make a lot of twelve inch tarts). I also think that it would be even better if you added vanilla and or almond to it because as good as it was,  the nutmeg and ginger were completely lost ( after I made two stops for that ginger, I had better taste it in the tart!).

Then I did some sexy, sexy laundry . And then changed clothes because even that caused me to break a sweat.

Saturday night I was trying to remain complelty still as to not have to change clothes again, watching cooking shows, What? what do you do Saturday nights?  I was watchinga twelve year old episode of Two Fat Ladies - a show I watch primarily for the Food Porn, because they use ingredients I can't get to make meals I won't eat. In one of the episodes, however, they made something with ingredients I can get to make a meal I would eat:  Robert May's salmon . All it is is salmon, oranges, a bit of nutmeg, orange juice and red wine. Done! you cook it on the stove and you don't even have to heat up your kitchen turning on the oven. And? its really good!  more telling, it was good with a Sunday-Afternoon-at-the-Grocery Store cut of fish and cheap, grocery store caliber red wine. I would imagine with fresh salmon from a fish monger, the not-in-my-grocery-store blood oranges and a decent red wine that it would be excellent.