Citrus Heaven

Gropius and I have spent the past several weekends on a major landscaping project that has involved quite a bit of manual labor, especially on Gropius's part.  We have taken out the sidewalk that went around the side of our house, along with the roses.  Gropius used a 10lb sledgehammer to bust up the concrete sidewalk and then he, Lulu, and I carried buckets of it over to the garden in the backyard.  (she's big into the "monkey see-monkey do" phase right now and started spontaneously helping)  Why?  To use as the base for some pebbled pathways (eventually).

We are letting the larger pieces settle into the dirt before we will in the spaces with sand and smaller pebbles.  We are just excited that we no longer have to get muddy to walk around the garden!

Once that was done, the side of our house looked like this:

The more astute of you may notice that we also took out the rose bushes that were there along the sidewalk, too.  Gropius and I (mostly Gropius though) broke up the hard-packed clay soil and we amended it with "soil-buster," compost, fertilizer, etc. so that our trees will grow more easily:

Lulu helping shovel

Gropius planting the Moro blood orange tree

Lulu was a very interested assistant in the proceedings as you can tell from the fact that she's in almost every picture:

We went and got some 24" square paving stones, pea gravel, and a creeping thyme as a groundcover so that the finished product looks like this:

Hopefully we will be enjoying Moro blood oranges, Palestinian sweet limes, St Teresa lemons, and Rangpur limes.  I'd still like to persuade Gropius to plant a Mexican key lime in a large pot on the back patio, but that may have to wait a while...I think he's through with planting trees for a while!

Dinner.

Our friends Trent and Aimee sent us Thomas Keller's cookbook Ad Hoc as a thank-you for letting them stay with us when they were here last month. The book arrived the day before we were leaving to be out of town, so our first opportunity to really peruse the recipes wasn't until we got back this weekend.  I must confess that the possibility those recipes presented was taunting me all week long....

We cooked three recipes from it for dinner:  chicken with tarragon, buttered farro, and rainbow swiss chard.  Wow, was it tasty!  The chicken had sweet paprika and curry powder that added an interesting twist to the usual, classically French pairing of tarragon and chicken.  And the swiss chard had serrano ham and wine-soaked raisins that presented a salty, sweet undertone to the chard.

But the true winner was the buttered farro.  OMG was it good!  Ironically, it was the simplest of the three recipes, but the integrity of the ingredients really shone.  Gropius and I both commented that with farro that tasty, it's a wonder why more people don't cook with it more often!

Thanks, Trent and Aimee!  Come back to visit and we'll cook you something....farro, anyone??