Herb report

[muckefuck]

Today was not a day to stay at work. My underlings all skipped out early in the afternoon, so after they were gone I did, too. I met monshu in the slightly-too-trendy café at Hollywood and Clark and then we killed a little time until I could eat dinner.

Friday some weeks back, we had wanted to check out Pizza Antica here at the thrusting edge of Andersonville, but the Old Man was just too tired. I'm glad we came back. Crisp oil-drenched bruschetta, generously-loaded Neapolitan-style pizza from the wood-burning oven, and a juicy golden pancetta-covered chicken breast was just about as much as we could stuff into ourselves. monshu was astounded when the tab came to under $50. Granted, there's no liquor in that bill, but at those price I'll lug over my own damn wine.

Next we took advantage of Gethsemane's longer spring hours and dropped another $60 bucks or so in that place. So worth it! The herb garden finally looks complete, if still quite sparse. The expanses of recently-turned earth are all broken by diminutive plants which with any luck will swell to fill them. Here's what we added:

• lemon verbena at foodpoisoningsf's recommendation.
• french sorrel--two plants, 'cuz they're small and I want enough for soup before it bolts--if it bolts
• french tarragon, mmmm--real béarnaise, here we come!
• rosemary, which shouldn't have the same problems getting enough light out there that it did inside during the winter

I also repositioned the borage because it's struggling. Actually, I meant to pick up a fresh plant since it turns out I got the runt of the litter last Saturday: when I went back the next day, there were beautiful seedlings four times the size. We also filled out the mint box with applemint and lime mint; together with the peppermint planted last week, this gives us almost a full complement of flavours. (IME, most other varieties are close variations on one of these three.)

But the real thrill was coming home with four sweet woodruff plants for the shady north yard. I tried to position them strategically in order to determine where the conditions were best, since this is a field test. If it thrives, I want to convince the association to plant the whole damn area with sweet woodruff. I'm already dreaming of next year's Maiwein! Well before then, however, I hope to make my own woodruff syrup for echte Berliner Weiße grün. Nichts erfrischenderes zur Sommerzeit!

Resting on the porch afterwards, I determined it was the proper occasion to reveal the objective of my crazy Mother Day's mission: The St Louis Herb Society cookbook. My mom had heard about it on some radio programme and thought it would be a nice text for monshu to leaf through during his recovery. Only trouble was, she hadn't been able to track it down yet, so she enlisted my help in a mad dash through Forest Park.

Driving up Art Hill at the brunching hour would be a tedious endeavour on any ordinary warm sunny Sunday; on Mother's Day, it was simply ludicrous. Mom circled the block while I ran in to the gift shop, only to be told that they'd stopped carrying cookbooks some time ago. She was very reasonable about it, though, accepting that we would make one more attempt at the Historical Society bookstore (which you can see from the top of the hill) and then surrender to fate.

Fortunately, they still had two copies left. Mom also had a potted dill plant to go with it, but I managed to leave it behind at my sister's in our push to leave later that afternoon. No matter: we're not huge dill fans anyway. After all that, Mom will be pleased to hear how monshu enjoyed perusing it tonight and within minutes had found a half-dozen recipes to try as soon as our tender plants are large enough to be savagely ripped apart. Ah, how I love horticulture!