Happy Fourth, with cherries

Breakfast in bed, with cherries, which seem like patriotic food to me, probably the Washington connection. And a Charles Todd Inspector Rutledge mystery, not Bess Crawford this time.

Note the stainless steel cup, hot tea from the thermos. This is great.

Quiet day, handsome Son working full day as usual in Sunday and most holidays and this is both. But in summer he's off to the shore every chance he gets, so I may see him less anyway.

Yesterday I was so industrious that I made the curry powder and the baharat. Grinding that many spices is in fact quite buzzy. Definite high happens, a happy one, no crash.

So here's what transpired.

Getting the seeds out of cardamom pods, wonderful smell. After a bit I decided just to grind the whole pods anyway.

Here's the mixture ready to grind. Everywhere the recipe says ounce I used two teaspoons, just to keep the proportions right. Half ounce = one teaspoon etc.

Then after grinding, I winnowed a bit, then reground what was left in the sieve, a tip from Bill Veach which I'd never noticed before.

And came out to this beautiful powder.

On to the baharat, much simpler recipe

Very different from the curry powder, warm scent and taste, great for all kinds of food.

And somewhere I found a tip for cleaning the grinder. The top comes off and can be washed, but all you can do with the grinding chamber is wipe it out. Hard to remove traces of previous spices. Anyway the tip was to grind some salt, then empty and wipe.

Which I did, using kosher salt, which is a great scouring material, safe and it works, and that was a good tip. But there's more..

I realized that I now had a supply of ground salt with spice flavoring. I tasted, and the saltiness was amazingly amped up, along with spice flavor. So, frugal me, I bottled and labeled it, and it's joined the salt collection. Tiny pinch is all it takes. Happy discovery.

And, since I didn't waste, I mean spend, all my time in the kitchen, I also discovered a very funny writer, D.G.Strong, humor pieces, right up my street. 

So that's another holiday, my whole life is holiday, chez Boud.

Happy Fourth, says nature

Nature is  great company. Big rainstorms last night, and everything's happy and washed. The maple tipped a leaf full of rain down my neck while I was focusing. Good morning to you too!

The daylily, the plant goes on for decades while each blossom lasts barely a day. You can see all stages in this picture. Descendants of my daylilies are in bloom all over the neighborhood. It's a natural parable.

Seeds gift of Quinn, the candy roaster squash

Japanese maple rescued from a neighbor

and flourishing

And, back among humans, doing my part toward a more perfect union. I'm finding that even small gestures supporting people of color, especially women, is proving to be significant.

I just found out yesterday that a tweet of mine,congratulations to a woman who'd just landed a significant public radio job (replacing a mediocre white man who had to be fired for inappropriate behavior) was very important to her.

 She's kept it as encouragement on tough days. She tweeted it again to say so. Just one little tweet from an old white lady she doesn't know from Eve.  One thing that mattered was that I wrote it immediately on seeing the announcement of her hire. The timing didn't escape her.

So you never know. My part at this point is to encourage and back up people whose lives continue to be a struggle, despite their obvious talent and fearless work ethic.

Just sayin'.  Rock on, blogistas. Stay safe. Stay well. Find stuff to love.