mystery herb

Here's the plant. Who knows.

childhood memories

japanese jello!
Originally uploaded by itslynzee.

i've been wanting to post this up for awhile but, well, i'm a blogging slacker. a little while back a friend and i were reminiscing about the the 'good ole days'. just sitting around talking about all the gatherings that we remembered and all of the good food that was at them. because, of course, every conversation comes back around to food!

one thing that we seemed to get stuck on was the layered jello that always seemed to pop up at the japanese potlucks. it went like this...

lo: remember that rainbow jello? with that white stuff in between? what the heck was that white stuff anyway?
lf: ohyea! with the layers! peel apart the layers and eat it one layer at a time. fun!
lo(shuddering): what IS that white stuff?! **
lf: we should totally make it! it'd be fun!
lo: EW...

i'm lucky enough to have an auntie that could provide me with a very detailed recipe for what i now call 'japanese jello'. her directions were SO good that i was able to put it all together in the first try! the only thing missing from my pantry was lemon jello, so that's why there are two layers of red.

JAPANESE JELLO

Ingredients
4 - 3 ounce jello boxes one of each flavor
(lime, lemon, orange, cherry)
6 - 0.25 ounce envelopes of unsweetened gelatin
1 - 14 ounce can sweetened condensed milk
6 cups water (5 cups hot, 1 cup room temperature)

Equipment
9X13 inch pan
7 bowls
Nonstick cooking spray

Spray pan lightly with nonstick cooking spray. In four of the bowls, combine one package of flavored jello, one envelope of unsweetened gelatin and one cup hot water. In another bowl, combine one cup hot water, two envelopes gelatin, condensed milk and one cup tap water (if you combine the ingredients in that order it will be a little easier). Divide milk mixture evenly into three bowls. You will have about 1 to 1-1/4 cups of liquid in each bowl. Pour lime gelatin in pan and place in a level part of fridge for approximately 20 to 25 minutes. Alternate layers of milk and flavored jello mixtures, always letting each layer set for approximately 20 minutes before pouring the next layer. If the jello mixtures harden too much while you are waiting for your other layers to harden in the fridge, put the bowls in the microwave for 25 seconds and mix. After all of the layers have hardened, turn the pan upsidedown on top of a large cutting board and slice into squares.
VOILA!

**lo has a fear of white and creamy foods**

lychee sorbet

This recipe makes a soft sorbet, which is too soft for popsicles, but excellent for scooping.

In other news, I bought a mystery herb plant. I thought it smelled kind of like oregano and citrus. The checkout lady thought it was oregano, but it's definitely not Mediterranean oregano and doesn't look like the pictures of Mexican oregano, so at this point it's anyone's guess. Thyme??

words to live by

"nothing anyone does ever surprises me anymore." hk
ahhhhh... so wise...

hulu

hulu rocks!
they are now streaming DOOGIE HOWSER, M.D.!
woohoo!

a day in the life...

to set the scene:
lf and friends have been up all night working on a deadline. at an obscenely early hour and with about three hours of sleep lf stumbles out of the hotel to move her car from a metered spot to a garage suggested by hotel personnel. after following the sign in the garage that reads "please pull forward" lf pulls forward and into a spot behind a parked truck. she is wondering where the parking attendant is when suddenly the reverse lights on the truck in front of her light up and the truck starts backing up (seemingly in slow motion). lf tries frantically to hit her horn to alert the driver but motor skills are lacking at this early hour and AFTER the truck hits her car her hand finally makes contact with the horn. it sounds sort of like this.

*CRASH!*BEEP!*

guy in truck (gets out of truck and looks angrily at lf): shit!
lf: wtf! you hit MY car!
guy in truck: oh yea. well there's no visible damage. it's $45 to park your car for the day.

garden photography

I brought my camera out to the garden with the best of intentions. I was going to take pictures of my plants and then write interesting blog posts about them. When I got back and uploaded my photos, I realized the sad truth: my plants are not very photogenic. Instead, I had taken pictures mostly of other people's plants.

There are a couple of reasons why my garden is not very exciting to look at. The square foot gardening/intensive gardening method means that all my plants are rammed together, so it's hard to get a clean shot of one plant without trampling on another plant. I also don't have very many flowers, and those took up the bulk of my shots too. The final reason is probably that my plants are all still really small. The macro on my camera is not that great and I'm not sure how exciting it is to look at puny vine #2 and compare it to sprout #3. Whooo.

Anyhow, here is a volunteer tomato plant that grew in an untended planter box. I rescued it and it's now probably the largest tomato plant I have. The leaves are huge and the stem is thicker than a size 15 knitting needle. As you can see, though, the tomatoes are still rather small. Oh well.

garden update

I managed to charge my camera batteries, but then forgot to take the camera out to the garden. Next time...

A couple of months ago, I tried to rescue a dead plant from the office. A sad looking shriveled stick in a self-watering pot was in a garbage heap outside of someone's office. I guess the protocol around here when you are cleaning out your office is to leave things in large piles outside your door. This includes things like books, old student papers and exams, file cabinets, and technology. This can get confusing, since people also leave new exams and other random items outside their doors, but somehow this is still the common practice.

One day, I noticed a self-watering pot with a sad brown stick coming out of the dirt in one such pile. It was there a few days in a row, so eventually I brought it back to my office. I was thinking that I could compost the dirt and use the pot, but as I was carrying it back to the office, I noticed some green bits on the plant which indicated that it might still be alive. I decided to try to revive the plant and gave it a good watering. For awhile, it seemed to be doing better, but then spring break hit, and a bunch of conferences, and then I was hardly in the office at all.

I finally brought the pot out to the garden today and gave up on the poor plant. The roots had all grown in the shape of the self-watering reservoir, which seemed especially sad. I added some compost and tried to plant green shiso for the third time. I have never even gotten sprouts. I think I put in at least 30 seeds, so hopefully at least one will grow. Yeah!!

My other plants seem ok. I have tiny, marble-sized tomatoes (immature) and tiny, corn kernel-sized strawberries (they can't seem to get bigger). The heat wave took out my asparagus pea plants, so there is only one left. Things don't seem very promising on that end. I also planted more Thai basil and garlic cloves for green garlic. I recently read a bunch of articles about larb gai and green papaya salad and sticky rice and tried not to get out of control. Sometimes it's hard... I now want to grow lemongrass...