The garden

Hi Natty!  Oh wow, it looks like you're having a lot of fun!  You look like you're foraging.  That area must have a lot of wild foods available, if one knows where to look.  I hope you have a good teacher- some of those wild foods can be poisonous.  It looks like you're digging for clams.  There are so many different kinds of shellfish available locally here.  The trouble is, they all live in mud.  Yeah, the local coastline is all mud.  It's teeming with life though.  That beach looks like an awesome swim at night, especially this time of year.  I used to go swimming at the beach at night when I was a kid, not really swimming but hunting for crabs.  Coastline crabs around here are small and don't have much meat in them.  But if the crabs are small enough (nickel or quarter size), you can just eat the whole thing crispy cooked.  I used to buy this Japanese snack of crispy fried baby crabs... so good!  Tastes like crab!

There is a prayer to say whenever you enter the garden to harvest, or do any gardening work period.  Say, "By the Will of Allah!  There is no power but with Allah!"  This is actually a mandatory prayer.  You will find the garden to be a very "random" place.

A nice day

Hi Natty!  How are you today?  I hope you are having a nice day.  I'm having a nice day.  A nice, easy-going day.  Any day without labor is a great day for me.  Well, I cleared out the dust in my house and scrubbed the bathroom floor.  But that was it.  The menu isn't that special.  A tofu omelet for lunch.  That's healthy food, you know.  I had to get something at the pharmacy, and bought some glutenous rice for dinner to go with the last of Ramadan's beef jerky.  The rest is computer work and lots of napping in between.  Yeah, a nice day.

Breathtaking

Wow Natty, what an awesome view.  Are you sitting on your roof?  That was a beautiful full moon recently.  The moon was so bright over here, the night was white.  What's that burning on the water?  It looks like a love letter.  You must get a lot of that.  I don't get any love letters, Natty.  I do get a lot of innuendo.  It's gotten so bad that I can't take a shower in peace, people think I have an ulterior motive other than personal hygiene.  So I often run errands first then take a shower later.  Nothing stifles innuendo better than body odor.  That's what fame is, right?  People want to smell you more.

Little Lily is looking so much better!  The poor thing was not a very cute kitten.  Her face was so dirty, her face and ears were caked in fungus.  But after medication, she seems to be improving.  Now she's finally looking like a cute kitten!  She's growing fast though, there wasn't time to be a kitten.  The adult cats absorbed the fungus, now I have to treat them as well.  They don't take easily to being fed pills, so I hide the pill in their chicken every feeding time.

It could have been beef jerky time

Hi Natty!  How are you today?  I hope you are healthy and happy, and having a marvelous time.  It's Sunday over here.  I clean my mother's bedroom every Sunday plus all the other stuff I have to do, so Sundays are usually pretty busy for me.  I bought my lunch so I didn't have to cook, just some rice from a local woman by the roadside.  I bought some cheap beef recently to make beef jerky.  It has a lot of gristle and tendon, but even that breaks down if you cook it long enough.  In fact after marinating and slow cooking it down, it tasted great.  I had planned to make "serunding" (beef jerky or beef floss):

But I didn't have some ingredients, and put in too much of another, and I ended up with "rendang":

It tasted OK.  Alhamdulillah.

Chicken tenders and fries

Hi Natty!  Whatcha doin'?  Are you back at your beautiful little cottage in the Vancouver mountains?  You love it, huh?  It's so much better than an apartment in the city, right?  There's no place like home.  I hope you are healthy and happy, and having a fabulous time.  What did I do today?  I cut the grass, and harvested more of the fruit that I don't eat.  But other people eat it, I suppose.  What I did have for dinner, was chicken tenders and fries.  Let's face it folks, for cooking fries at home there's no beating the frozen fries.  Sure some frozen fries are better than others, but all are better than peeling and slicing up potatoes then frying them up.  Home made chicken tenders though, can match or beat anything you can get at a restaurant.  It's simple: slice up the chicken breast into strips, coat with flour, then coat with egg, then coat with that orange bread crumbs stuff.  Then deep fry in hot oil, yeah the same oil as the fries, and don't overcook the chicken.  Just a couple of minutes!  So simple, so good.  If you folks (you local folks, that is) are dipping the chicken in that bottled extra hot hot sauce that you find on the supermarket shelf, then don't use too much of that!  A little bit goes a long way.  If you douse your fried squid or whatever in that sauce until you use up half the bottle, of course you're going to get a stomach ache.



Happy 4th of July!

Friday

Hi Natty!  How are you today?  I hope all is well with you.  Not much going on here with me other than the usual.  It's Friday.  I went to attend the Friday prayer after a long break.  It rained both to and fro, but I had to go and leave quickly to attend to Mary Unknown7's session.  I got soaked but I was wearing a hat, so my head didn't get wet at least.