Making this salad table was kind of a spur of the moment thing. I was flipping through Martha Stewart’s web site, when they happened to have set-up a section of their web site just for spring gardening/planting. Well one of the things that they were showing on her site was a salad table. Personally I’d never heard of nor seen a salad table before, so it kind of piqued my interest. Continue reading
Month: May 2010
Garden Damage Aftermath – 05-03-2010
Turns out that my hunch from last night was right, and I basically lost an entire row of white cups in the salad table. But it turns out that I was a little bit lucky, in that I had tossed all the extra seedlings that I didn’t transplant onto a dirt pile in the basement. I really don’t know which is which among the seedlings in the pile. So I basically just dumped out the contents of the hail damaged crop cups, sifted out all the destroyed seedlings, and mixed the wet potting soil with some potting soil that was bone dry to equal out the moisture level of the potting mix. Continue reading
Potato Chip Review – Lay’s – Garden Tomato & Basil
All I can say is: BORING. I will give Frito Lay the benefit of the doubt, in that they didn’t recycle one of their other flavors to make these chips. But their really wasn’t anything exciting about this flavor. More or less it tasted like tomato soup with a hint of basil, with the ironic part being that on the back of the bag is a recipe for making tomato basil soup.
For some reason I thought that these chips were going to taste more like a caprese salad, which is usually what I think of when I see tomatoes and basil put together. But instead I got a mouthful of crunchy tomato basil soup. Overall I’m indifferent to this favor. Would I get them again, maybe. But I can tell you that I won’t be going out of my way to get a bag of these chips.
Potato Chip Review – Better Made – Red Hot Barbeque
After a number of years, I finally got to do a head to head comparison of Better Made’s Red Hot Barbeque verse their regular Barbeque chips. At first I liked the regular barbeque chips from Better Made more. But after trying the Red Hots, I can now say that I’m a Red Hot Barbeque convert.
The thing is, its not that the Red Hots are that much hotter than the regular BBQ chips from Better Made. But with the addition of paprika and smoke flavor in the Red Hot’s, it really adds something different to these chips that you don’t get with Better Made’s regular barbeque chips.
Though I wouldn’t necessarily have these chips all the time, since I can only take so much barbeque chips. But if I still lived in Michigan, every couple of months I’d place these chips into the rotation to mix things up. But since I’m not in Michigan anymore, I’ll just have to settle for picking up a bag whenever I’m back in the state.
Damn Hailstorm! – May 2, 2010
OK, talk about a freak hailstorm. On Saturday night, I finished transplanting almost everything from flat #1 into 10 oz white plastic cups. The only things that I didn’t transplant from the flat into cups were the Aji and the El Jefe, and thank god that I didn’t. Because on Sunday afternoon around 1:30pm, the sky turned dark and hell was than unleashed for about 30 mins. And during that 30 minute downpour of marble sized hail, the hail basically destroyed all the seedlings that I had left outside on a salad table that I had built.
Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have to go through all the cups to see what is salvageable from all the plants. But so far it looks like the only survivors are some of the cucumbers and zucchini. And maybe some of the bell peppers. Man this sucks!
Kegged the Irish Red Ale
After months and months of sitting in the secondary fermentor, I finally transferred the red rye ale to a keg for consumption. This beer was ready to go at least two months ago. And with a FG of 1.020, the extra months in the second really did nothing to drop the FG into the target range of 1.010 to 1.014.
I could only resist about 24 hours, before giving this beer a small taste. And I have to say; this has to be my best beer to date. It actually tasted pretty close to something I might have at a local brewpub, which is pretty amazing to me. Overall, I’m really digging on the hint of rye flavor that you taste in this beer. So the recipe for this beer is definitely a keeper in my book.