stem

While making the apple weekend cake yesterday, I used up the last of the white sugar. This is a (not quite) tremendous set back to my list of baked goods I intended to make. So today features just a tomato soup plus some garlic bread.

how do chefs/food bloggers swirl in pesto so nicely?!

This is very simple to make and actually perfect for my situation as my mom planted a ton of larger tomatoes this year. Also uses basil and thyme which I also have an abundance of.

I ate it more as a dip for bread:

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More bonus flower pictures, this time I made a bouquet for myself:

so hard to think of an interesting composition for flowers...

I tried to deliberately position the flowers and leaves, but don't remember much from the ikebana book I read. That book plus this chabana thread is creating a fledgling interest in me about flower arrangement.

bees

Day 1: garden pasta and apple weekend cake

 featuring radish leaves, basil, and cherry tomatoes from the backyard 

Pesto pasta topped with tomatoes is so much easier than tomato sauce with basil. Although according to my mom cooking tomatoes make its nutrients more bioavailable. 

The apple to cake ratio is more like my chocolate chip cookie's chocolate to cookie ratio, aka a looooot. Its good for you :D

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Bonus photos of my non-edible favourite part of the backyard:

crumbs

Since I'll be soon without access to a full kitchen, here's my overly ambitious list of things I want to cook / bake before I leave. Alternative motivation is to use the peak of this summer's bounty. Will try to report back on the results.

• Peppers stuffed with rice and beef: if I go home later and get my hands on some peppers from Sky garden
• Tomato soup: more tomatoes!
• Milk bread: to make grilled cheese for the tomato soup above, and also for BLTs 
• Carprese and Greek salad: if I remember to buy some cheese before I head home 
• Burrata lentil salad: if I can find good burrata at the same shop I find the above cheese
• Miso rosemary beans: to use the rosemaries that I've been growing
• Rosemary-buckwheat crunch: see above, plus buckwheat that I've brought back from Atlanta
• An apple cake from Dorie's cookbook, as requested by mom
• Russian honey cake: to use the jar of buckwheat honey that taste too strong to be eaten on its own. I had this recipe saved for years, but after seeing some positive results by redditors, I'll give it a go.
• Rosemary shortbread: about time that I tried baking a butter/flour cookie
• Pesto pizza rolls: to use up basil. I saw a bumblebee whizzing around the basil flowers and didn't have the heart to trim all the flowers off. So now I gotta use up a ton of basil before the plant decides to die. 

burst

I have not eaten enough tomatoes this summer :( especially the little golden ones

nibs

Going home means making desserts and drinking tea everyday. In fact I motivate myself to get out of bed every morning by making desserts first...and also for practical reasons of things needing time to chill.

This time I made chocolate creme caramel, which is the only "pudding" (I recently discovered that pudding is what desserts are called in the UK, but I'm using it here as a custard dessert) in Baking Chez Moi that doesn't require 2 additional egg yolks, and Smitten Kitchen's cocoa brownies, because I've been craving brownies but the sea salt caramel brownie has been sold out on the two most recent visits to Jimmy's.

Previously I've made mochi cupcakes (the easiest recipe I've ever baked), salted caramel chocolate mousse again, and a blueberry cornmeal cupcake from Baking Chez Moi that there was inadequate warning about using coarse cornmeal (the language was similar to "it'll be gritty" whereas it should really read "it'll be really fucking gritty, don't even think about it").

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Been drinking the free sample of spring 2017 Alishan oolong I got from Floating Leaves Tea and holy it's delicious. Delicious in a...restrained way, is the most accurate description I can give. "Soft and floral" is how FLT describes it. Best brewed with a lower leaf to water ratio and flash steeps to accentuate the softness. I like this so much that I'd buy some every year.

The unintentional benefit from these tea sessions is that I finally found a use for this duanni teapot! It'll be dedicated to high mountain / greener rolled oolongs. I originally intended to use it for red teas, however the narrower opening makes it an absolute pain to remove the leaves afterwards. This is much less of a problem with rolled oolongs, and the dome shape allows the leaves to expand. So here is this little pot's blog debut, although an extremely shallow DoF photo is not the most descriptive. The bamboo motifs are what caught my attention.


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rosemary

An exercise of walking barefoot in the backyard:

The experience of walking barefoot in grass is kinda strange...I don't recall the last time I've done such a thing. There's a slight cushion to each step as the blades of grass buckle under my feet. The ground feels cool, and consequentially damp, whereas the wooden deck still feels warm from being in the sun the whole day. When there is a breeze, I can smell the honeysuckle. It's pretty nice.

shards

ITS JAY CHOU'S LYRICS IN A MANGA, AND THE TRANSLATOR DIDN'T EVEN LEAVE A NOTE ABOUT IT ;_;

"最美的不是下雨天　是曾与妳躲过雨的屋簷" from 不能说的秘密

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