introducing Sirikit

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Boy, has it really been this long since anything happened or just no time to blog about it? Well, time to get back at it because I’d like you to see our new chick, Sirikit.

We hope she’s a she and not a he, but at this point you really can’t tell. The guy I bought her from a couple of days ago gave it his best guess…fingers crossed. She’s a Black Copper Maran and will grow from being adorable to being quite a beautiful bird, with black slightly iridescent body feathers, possibly some copper on top, feathered legs and laying extremely dark brown eggs. Marans are a breed originally developed in France.

For now, she’s in her warm vivarium right next to my desk. She thinks it’s great fun to climb up and down me while I’m sitting here and runs up to perch on a shoulder when I’m walking around the house. For such a young chick, she doesn’t seem to ever get cold or especially tired. And what a chatterbox! She has a few distinct noises: “where are you?!?!”, “get me out of here”, “isn’t this fun”, “I don’t like this”. She’s met her aunties, Wilhelmina, Amanda and Hildegard, who after three days still don’t know what to make of her and find her somewhat alarming. Milton, of course, is head over heels in love and she seems to be returning some of it. Oh, and she’s completely fearless and curious about everything.

Here’s a couple of more photos from yesterday afternoon:

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2-day onion soup

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January 27-28. Onion soup is not something I’d normally order in a US restaurant because (1) it’s likely to be too salty for me and (2) it’s hard to justify spending restaurant dollars on a dish made of such thrifty ingredients. Still, Tom loves “French” Onion Soup, so I give it a stab from time to time here at home.

A recent article by Michael Bauer in the SF Chronicle on notable restaurant versions got me thinking. Some of the versions he described were made over the course of days. What could be taking so long? Most cookbook versions take an hour or two at the most, the bulk of the time being taken up with the careful, long, and somewhat tedious task of caramelizing the onions. Having a hunch that the caramelization process was taking all those hours, I decided to play around with how to make the soup. For once, it turned out that better is is also easier.

The other main component of onion soup, the stock, was due this week to our dog, Milton. We bought some thick beef joints for him and since it’s unpleasant for us to see the dogs gnaw on raw bones, I put them in the pressure cooker for an hour with an onion, carrots, cloves and celery and wound up with the most delicious beef stock. (I’m sure a more luxe stock made with marrow shanks for depth and oxtail for gelatin would be great as well.)

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new seedlings

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The spring peas are twining up their supports, all the citrus are ripening, and the inedible privets are providing branches of decorative berries, so it’s time to start seeds for this summer’s garden. By the time we start putting plants in the ground in May, there will be hundreds of plants raised from seed waiting in the greenhouse.

I’m always looking for ways to keep track of the plants while being able to move them into the sun as soon as possible. This year I noticed that cutting apart paper egg cartons leaves a little peak that accommodates a written identifier as well as providing a handle to move the cups around. The big advantage should be the possibility of taking each sprout out of the dark, heated starting box as soon as it breaks the soil surface.

Eggplants and peppers dawdle the most before coming up so that’s what went in first. The plan this year is for 12 kinds of eggplant, 12 of sweet peppers, and 18 of hot peppers. To see variety tables that I made for reference, continue reading after the break.

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