Lemon trees from seeds

I've been making the most delicious iced tea lately that verges on lemonade.

* two random Celestial Seasonings tea bags

* three regular tea bags, Luzianne, Lipton's etc.

* 1/2 cup sugar

* 1 whole lemon

I heat a small pot of water nearly to boil, add the sugar to dissolve. Put in the tea bags.  

Entire lemon squeezed into the 2 quart pitcher. Cool.

Usually I drink the entire two quarts in one day. Rarely does it last longer than that.

So that's a lot of lemons.

They're purchased by the bag-full from different sources. Some have a lot of pips and discarding them causes some vague nearly undetectable unease. I cannot quite put my finger on it and in a few moments of unfocused thought I allow free form association and I am briefly transported visually and by feel to a period between kindergarden and first grade.

I see a picture of my father, as a video, turning over to me dozens of tiny clay pots. I recall that, like it was an event. They were delightful little toys -- the way they stacked so perfectly. I was intrigued by their red clay coarse perfection. I stacked them different ways. Smashed a few, of course, com'on, I'm a boy, we must see how things break. I wondered why they each have a perfect little hole on the bottom. Wouldn't they be better without a hole? It didn't make sense.  The contents would fall out. I objected to them having holes. I filled them all with dirt, and sure enough, the dirt fell out through the holes. And sure enough they were a mess because of that. I planted every seed that I encountered. Apple seeds. Orange seeds, grapefruit seeds, watermelon seeds, peach seeds, plum seeds, grape seeds, everything good that I like except vegetables.

The house had an oriel window with a built-in bench that faced  the front street. It was akin to a greenhouse extension. My parents tolerated me lining the whole window with the little clay pots. There were dozens of them. I think, nearly fifty. Now, can you imagine having a child such as myself with such continuous childish experiments  interfering constantly with your own sense of interior design? I can not imagine that myself and that's why I adore my parents so much for that. They were true parents to me and very supportive and encouraging in every instance I can think of.

But we moved frequently, and that overturned a lot of things by fiat. I was always being undermined by the fait accompli of relocation. In this case, the plants survived one relocation but failed a second move when we transferred overseas.  I turned over to my grandmother whose neglect caused them to freeze. She wasn't into it and she didn't have the heart to tell me. It was an imposition on her and I did not know that. Fact is, she didn't know me, didn't love me, didn't care about the plant or about having a relationship with me, I understood all this from that tree-neglect, and I was never really able to regard her the same since.

Back.

Well then. I should plant the lemon seeds.

The seeds went directly into the dirt. So too the seed of the next lemon. And the next lemon. And the next lemon. And the next lemon. And so on until no more seeds fit in the pot. Covered with plastic.

Weeks elapse. Nothing happens.

The seeds do not germinate and I do not understand that. ?

Turns out, the seeds are somewhat protected apparently to delay germination.

I peel the seed, carefully with an X-acto knife, like a banana, and get to the seed which is really underneath the denser outside coating.

This discovery motivated a second round of lemon seed planting. 

The seeds shorn of their outer coating and planted showed me that I probably wasn't going far enough. By accident I ripped off the brownish outer shell of the already shorn pip to reveal  innermost seed. It is very easily broken and I believe this is the portion to aim for.

This is a little trickier to get at. I learned that by making careful slash through the length of the seed then using my fingernail to strip off the shell, like a banana, except how a monkey peels a banana, not how a human peels a banana, that is, straight through a center break like the alien bursting through a victims chest. This is where fingernails take over, and ah got no fingernails, see?

So if I can do it with these short things then you should be able to do it with whatever fingernails you've got.

White fish, sauce vierge

My heart is filled with joy and warmth toward all of humanity.

Today at the fish counter I go, "That white fish next to the wild salmon looks muy delicioso."

Guy behind the counter, a handsome chap, looked a little out of place there, "It does look muy delicioso," in pitch-perfect gringo-accented Spanish. I love it when people echo my mixed language. It connects us instantly.

"What is it anyway?"

"Dunno. Just got here and it wasn't marked." He shuffled fish-tags as one would examine a deck of cards. "I have no idea what it is."

"Whatever. I'd like to take the one nearest you."

Still looking for a tag, becoming distressed because other people were waiting. He paged for help. Another guy arrived but by then the other customers dispersed so now it was me and those two workers. One of them goes to the back to look for a similar package, comes back empty. They concurred to give me the fish for free.

FREE, I said.

But I have no idea exactly what type of fish it is. It doesn't matter. It's tender, flaky white.

First, the rest of the red bell pepper, cut into strips, burnt briefly in a trace of oil, and removed to a plate. The pan is now ready to toast the crushed peppercorns and coriander seeds.

Sauce vierge, literally, virgin sauce. So-called because it's pure, no mucking about. Chosen for this fish because I, myself, am so pure and simple.

You're supposed to use a couple plum tomatoes, I used one heirloom tomato.

* black peppercorns + coriander seeds crushed in a stone smasher. Mortar and pestle, that's it, except I don't know which is which. At any rate, there's more control over granular size than there is with the coffee grinder. Plus dragging it out builds up one's arm muscles. Extra plus you get to pound and make a bit of noise. Heat this in the pan the bell pepper strips were singed .

* 1/4 cup olive oil, to kill the smoke from the heating seeds. Give it a minute to flavor before adding the allium members, whatever you've chosen.

* Shallot segment + garlic clove, finely diced. Just to heat through. No point in sweating them to death. Sufficient to flavor the oil and to take the edge off the garlic, about a minute.

* tomato, finely diced. Heat cut off, warmed through, not cooked. See? It's a virgin and it stays that way, diced yes, heated yes, but not cooked.

Man, I'm tellin' ya, French people sure have strange ideas about virginity. Anyway.

* lemon. It must be lemon. It cannot be lime, It cannot be citron. It cannot be rice vinegar, or champaign vinegar, or cider vinegar, or wine vinegar, or raspberry vinegar, it MUST be lemon. It must be a perfect lemon, or just forget about the whole thing.

Kidding.

* basil + flat-leaf parsley, at the very very very end. I used cilantro because that's what I have, and I'm not that big on parsley anyway, so disinclined to have it on hand. I know, I know, it's fundamental, but so?

I love the way this coats my lips like melted lip-balm. I like it so much I'm reticent to wipe it off, and so sit there with a milk-mustache except it's flavored olive oil. It's unctuousness coats the entire mouth on contact and the delicate fish slides right through, but that unction is cut with lemon and it carries the flavors of spice and herb, the aromatic herbs having prepared the way. It is wonderfully simple, it is simply wonderful. I resist the impulse to lick the empty plate -- because what you think I am over here, unmannered?

Fish pan-fried in olive oil. It tightened up and was it taking too long to suit me so I brought out the lid, dumped 1/2 cup water into the pan, and covered it. Let it steam for a minute, then removed it. It was cooked perfectly, if I may say so. But only about half the people I know would accept that determination. The half that wouldn't agree, frankly, do not know whereof they opine. Inlanders, I say, without the first clue how seafood is to be treated.

This is so easy to eat, honestly, I could consume ten times this amount and not be full or tire of it.

Is it worth the trouble of making the sauce? Yes. No trouble at all. I tasted the fish by itself, and I must say that it's nothing special, but this sauce alters everything amazingly.

Green salad, Asian dressing

Where sauce = dressing.

I've been making this dressing, or some version of it, ever since I was a little bitty bouncing boy … twenty-one years of age. Hey, I was a waif, ah-ite?

I couldn't be arsked to measure anything because, numbers, eh, they're not my bag, Man. But if I would break down and measure sometime, say in my dotage carefully reading along scripted instruction, it would turn out like this:

There was about half the dressing remaining in the bowl after I tossed the salad. So this makes an excess for one decent sized salad, and by decent I mean huge, and by huge I mean huge for one person not huge for ten people.

I LOVE those red peppers burnt in a pan. Done in strips with a little oil, it's no problem at all. Takes only a minute. Do not peel, leave the black on for FLAVAH!

As a kid I would have rejected that idea. Burnt, ick. But now as a Western chile-eat'n guy I'm totally cool with it. You have to hand it to those Central Americans and Southwestern EE.UU. Americans, they sure do know how to handle chile peppers and not just the hot ones. This is best done on an open fire but that technique is discouraged by city ordinance and the apartment lease agreement where I live downtown.

The same pan and oil can be used to put a singe on the courgette, zucchini if you like. I prefer to roll it while I'm cutting so the discs come out at irregular angles and with areas of uneven thicknesses on each disc. That is so cool! The result is a tossed and tumbled carefree cut that is thoughtfully achieved.

Speaking of cuts, I lost a chef's knife. Now I ask you, how does one lose an 8" chef's knife? This confounds me completely. Today Melody and I looked e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e for it, even in illogical places. Finally Melody concluded it was accidentally thrown away, and I must say, it's beginning to seem like that must have been what happened. So I bought another one. A much better one.

Oh, I forgot to mention. Cilantro and mint again. That is one great combination there, so great I enhanced it further with double the amount of basil. So the greens in this salad are bib lettuce, I think it's bib, kind of thick for bib, and all those herbs. It's so aromatic you get high just smelling it. Okay, that's a lie, you don't get high, but you do get a lot sweeter. I feel so perfumy with minty-fresh breath. That's my one super power -- minty fresh breath.

Mung bean crackers, mango salsa

As stated, I'm all about sauces now. Crackers without sauce? Inconceivable!

Salsa = sauce, gravy, dressing, relish.

Incidentally, "mole" mo-lay, also means sauce, mole being the generic name for several different sauces, the most famous containing chocolate. It's Mexican Spanish from a Nahautl word for concoction. It could just as easily be called "brown sludge" because that's what I always see, no matter how delicious.

Mango salsa:

Mango chopped finely
diced onion also chopped finely
grated fresh ginger
lime, but I got no lime, so I used lemon
cilantro
mint
scant 1/4 teaspoon sugar
scant 1/8 teaspoon cumin
my house mix of Brittany sea-salt/tellicherry peppercorn, and cayenne pepper.

Now how 'bout that? Mint and cilantro. Wow! Is that stuff ever good. I want MOAR!

I went to the bulk bins at Whole Foods and rummaged around for odd grains. I love those bins but I must admit to being a little bit disappointed with my local Whole Foods. They seem big on rices. I was looking specifically for triticale, a cross between rye and two types of wheat. Blasphemy! Frankenfoods! Genetically manipulated! Oh wait. We've been doing that in slow motion for millennia. Never mind then, all is well. I see Triticale on Amazon in grain form, flour and flakes. But all that makes me wonder, as far as crackers go, how different could it be from just mixing rye with wheat?

I was also looking for teff but the neighborhood WF is also teff-less.

I bought Quinoa flour (keen-wah). After I bagged the flour I then noticed the grain. I'd prefer the grain and mill it myself. Flax flour, azuki beans (red, Japanese) and mung beans (green Chinese) and something else. Oh yeah, kemet wheat grain.

The kemet surprised me. The grains are huge. I figured they'd be tiny considering it's an earlier version of wheat. Egyptian wheat. Not like spelt or anything, actual genetic wheat. The size of the grain makes me think it's a modern hybrid version of the earlier grain. You know how they do, to make each grain stalk more productive.

Did you know Kemet is the Egyptian word for Egypt? Well it is. Trust me, I know these things. Imagine, naming Egyptian wheat grain "Egypt." Why, the audacity! Here lemme break it down for ya, it goes like this: I drew that myself. The zig-zaggy thing is a piece of crocodile skin. It stands for the consonant sounds "k-m." The owl means a lot of things but here it stands for the consonant "m." This type of redundancy is characteristic of hieroglyphic writing. It's reaffirming the m in k-m, not repeating the sound. You just have to know when the letter is repeated and when it's not. The little half circle stands for the sound "t." It is supposed to represent a loaf of bread, in fact, it's first in category X, loaves and cakes, in Gardiner's list of Egyptian signs. Just to show you how fundamentally it's thought to be bread. But I dispute that categorization. That's right, I said it. I dispute the sainted Gardiner whom every English-speaking Egyptologists who followed has studied and at whose feet they worshiped. Here's why I am so bold. The sound t is indeed used for the word bread, in fact, that is the word, t, probably with some unknown vowel either in front of or behind it, and so it's used quite often because bread figures so broadly in offerings, and offerings figure so importantly in Egyptian life, but the sign itself never does represent bread pictorially in art. All the other bread signs that follow in Gardiner's category X, also pronounced t, do appear pictographically in art, not just in words. As hieroglyphics blend into art painted on walls and on papyrus, and chiseled in stone, you could expect the sign to at least be stacked up with all the other breads on the offering tables, but it never is. Moreover, color is also a symbol. Egyptians had three types of black and all three types mean different things. One type blending into blue, means something entirely different from the shiny jet black of the universe void. And those two mean something different still from the soft flat matt black of the Egyptian mud. In Egyptian painting, when all the colors are used, which isn't always, that sign is inevitably painted black. Not a toasty bread-brown, but black. And not just any ol' black either, the dull flat black of mud. The color that tends to fall off the walls and leave a blank spot that sometimes appears unpainted. This group of signs for Egypt, k-m-t, means "the Black Land" and that t is colored the black of Egypt itself. The Red Land refers to the desert. So. that little half circle, I believe, does not represent bread at all, rather, it represents a mud mound. The type of mound one can reasonably expect to appear as the annual flooding recedes, a welcome sight indeed. The primordial mound. Nobody knows what the vowels are that go in-between the consonants so it's anybody's guess. Generally guessers guess "e" except in those cases where a better guess is available through some other cross reference. The full circle with the cross in it that looks like a wagon wheel means "town," or "city," or "state." It's a determinative sign meaning "a named place." It is not pronounced. So there you have it. Kemet means Egypt in the ancient Egyptian language.

I milled all those grains and beans including the kemet one at a time in the Nutrimill. I'm a little self-conscious using that thing when people are around because it sounds like a gigantic vacuum cleaner. Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. It takes a long time to wind down and then sounds like a jet aircraft when the milling chamber is empty. Now I have bags of all kinds of off-the-wall grains to experiment with making crackers.

These are mostly mung bean crackers and they're, er, a little bit different.

I love them. Not everybody will.

2 cups mung bean flour
1 cup brown rice flour
1 cup white A/P flour
1/2 cup vegetable oil
pile of cilantro
4 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons Sriacha sauce
3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons toasted sesame seed oil
2 level tablespoons wasabi powder (the harsh fake kind)
1 level teaspoon baking powder
1 cup water.

This produced a sticky dark green mess that bogged down the processor and required adjustment. I added another handful of A/P flour and 1/3 cup more water on the work table. Abandoned the processor and kneaded the mass there on the work surface.

The first tray was a little bland for my taste. Insufficiently salty, insufficiently hot. The following trays I sprinkled liberally my house S/P/C mixture. and pressed it in with the rolling pin. That fixed it nicely.

The crackers forfeit their lovely green color through baking.

The aromatic quality of cilantro, so outstanding fresh, all but disappears when baked.

I thought maybe last time the wasabi was undetectable in the crackers because it was added to the surface of the crackers without being moistened first. So this time I doubled the amount and mixed it in with the dough. Two full even tablespoons full for four cups of flour and it is still barely detectable. I did catch faint glimpses of it, and I'm sort of glad it wasn't much stronger because it doesn't add much that is pleasant to the finished cracker. It tends to dominate the profile of anything it flavors or otherwise warp it unpleasantly. I'm glad the bulk of the flour held it in check by deadening it. I don't think I'll use it again. (Except maybe if I fell like it.)

I over baked the first tray. Threw out about 1/3 the tray. Took me by surprise there how fast they cooked. Boy, you gotta watch those things because they go: Not cooked. Not cooked. Not cooked. Cookedburnt. Just like that.

The first cracker was disappointing. But then the flavor developed in my mouth after it was gone and I was soon craving another one. Then another, and another. They don't hit you as super duper right off but they sure do grow on you. This became my dinner -- mung bean crackers and mango salsa. I abandoned my original idea for dinner and settled for this. I couldn't be more satisfied.

Sourdough bread, Denver slow

That does it! ))) WHAP (((

I'm disgusted. We bakers are a temperamental lot, and I'm totally owning it.

This is the bread from the sourdough starter that was problematic from the very beginning. Babied along, it stayed slow. Slow and weak. It was born as a dud, showed its dudliness early, and stayed a dud throughout. I threw it all out. No point in wasting any more time with it. It tastes good enough, sure, but that's only due to fermentation, and it's nothing to write home about. The crumb is all wrong, it didn't rise properly, its crust dominates the loaf rendering it useless as bread, it tends to crumble, and as stated many times it is impossibly slow. I hate it. I'm not having it. I ate a few bits and tossed the loaves and the starter. Pfft.

There were two loaves. I ate about 1/8 of one. It was awful. The sauce, I'm all about sauces now, was butter and olive oil with Italian herbs. I photographed all that but then in confusion of transcribing lessons and uploading them, I erased the card on the camera before uploading the photos. So I went back and took the one shown above. It's all part of my disgust.

Even though I refuse to think about this any further, a portion of my brain automatically analyzes what went wrong and devises a plan to correct it all on its own. That corner of my brain made conclusions and devised a plan even though my overarching outer thought-shell hasn't given it permission. I'm aware of this dark cogitation: The next bread-making session will be non-experimental revivification of an earlier reliable starter. The loaves will be entirely refined white AP flour. Water and salt. That's it. Back to basics. That lower-consciousness analyzer determined all this messing around with whole wheat extra load-carrying is unsatisfying. Like training a dog and going back to earlier successes in order to override the difficulty of new tricks and reaffirm with things known and end on happy notes.

Well. So my brain thinks of me as a dog does it? Why, I outta ...