Almost Wordless Wednesday

“All gardening is landscape painting.” Alexander Pope

Unfortunately, my garden would qualify more as a study in beige and brown than a landscape painting. However, I did have the opportunity to be ensconced in a forested landscape of pines and Douglas firs this weekend. A confluence of weather and driving conditions led my girl posse to the Black Canyon Campground.

Black Canyon Campground is about eight miles north of Santa Fe on the Hyde Park Road and has a one mile hiking loop. It took us about 2 hours to snow shoe the loop. We stopped for food and water, photo breaks, and to step aside for cross country skiers. And of course to lavish attention on any dog who happened our way.

Steel Cut Oats

Do you ever wonder why you do some things? A few weeks ago, I searched high and low on the internet for a steel cut oats recipe.  I used to buy it in the frozen food section at Trader Joe's, but thought I would try to save money by making steel cut oats myself.

I had read that making steel cut oats was time consuming and was looking for a shorter alternative. I had tried making steel cut oats in the crockpot a few times and was satisfied with the results. They weren't great. But I uninstalled the browser I was using and I couldn't find the crockpot recipe. I tried different search engines. I found one recipe that looked promising so I tried it that night. Yuck! It was not tasty at all. Every time, I searched for steel cuts oats, one of the first results was a recipe by Alton Brown on the Food Network website. After wasting more time on the internet than it would have taken to make steel cut oats on the stove, I decided to try to the Alton Brown recipe.

The recipe below is inspired by Alton Brown's steel cut oatmeal recipe. I usually buy the oats in the bulk section at the natural grocery store.  I've added a lot more brown sugar, vanilla and omitted the buttermilk in the original recipe.

Ingredients
1 tablespoon butter
1 cup steel cut oats
3 cups boiling water
2/3 3/4 cup milk ( I use soy)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla (optional)
pinch of salt (optional)

Directions
In a non-stick pan, melt the butter and add the oats. Stir for 2 minutes to toast.
Boil water in saucepan, add brown sugar and vanilla, and stir.
Add the oats to the boiling water and reduce heat to a simmer.
Simmer low for 25 minutes. Do not stir.

Add the milk to the oats; stir gently to combine and cook for 10 more minutes.
Stir occasionally to keep oats from sticking to the bottom of the saucepan.
Makes four servings. I like to serve with toasted almonds and fresh fruit on top.

Steel cuts oats takes about 35 to make, but most of the time is simmering so I can do other things like putting dishes away or cleaning the kitchen counters. I love this recipe. The oats are al dente. I could probably add more water if I wanted them softer since I live in a high altitude. I put the oats in one cup storage containers so they're ready to take to work and I have something nutritious for breakfast.

Lesson learned - sometimes you don't save any time by trying to save time. Oh well! 

I Won, I Won!

I hardly ever win anything. I did win $10 on the first lottery scratcher ticket I purchased and a raffle for a two night stay at a chi-chi hotel in Taos, New Mexico. I gave the Taos trip to some friends who had been very kind to me when I was having some tough times.

This week I won twice. Donna at Garden's Eye View and Bumble Lush Kitchen Garden both awarded me the versatile blogger award.

The rules are as follows:

• Post the Versatile Blogger Award to your post/blog.
• Thank the blogger who nominated you with a link back to his/her blog.
• Share seven random pieces of information about yourself.
• Include this set of rules, and
• Forward this award to fellow bloggers and inform them with a comment on their blogs.

Random Detritus

1. My penultimate favorite word is ramekin. It's a foodie word and it's also a bingo in the game Scrabble because it has seven letters. 
2. I'm a social networking Luddite. I have a Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts, but rarely use them. 
3. When I first started blogging I had a hard time thinking of comments for other blogger's posts. I've gotten better, but sometimes I still struggle especially when lots of people have already made thoughtful and insightful comments. 
4. This year I'm trying to learn one new recipe a week. I tired of making the same handful of recipes every few weeks. 
5. I learned to use an SLR camera when I was 14, when cameras still used film. 
6. I used to call my previous dog Max, Boo Boos. I call my dog Aster, Baby Boo even though she's got about ten pounds on Max. 
7. I'm making a concerted effort to eat more fruits and vegetables. 

I've met so many great bloggers this past year and feel kindred with everyone whom I've met. I've met bloggers who share my interests in gardening, photography and food. And share with me a slice of life that I would not otherwise experience. I tried to nominate bloggers who have not already won this award. 

Drum roll please! The winners are: 

• Cher at Sunray Gardens
• Giga at MÓJ KAWAŁEK PRZYRODY (My Piece of Nature)
• Susan at Ink and Penstemon
• Daniela at MIMI A JEJ SVET (Mimi and Her World)
• Patricia at Picturing Plants and Flowers
• Masha at A Rose is a Rose
• Sissy at got serenity?
• Donna at Garden Walk, Garden Talk
• Lee at Lee May's Gardening Life
• Karin at Southern Meadows

The Best and Worst - January 2012

I'm joining Bumble Lush Kitchen Garden's new meme: the Best and Worst of my garden for January. It's a post that is published on the last day of the month to summarize your monthly garden triumphs and tribulations

The Best of January or Surprise!
I’m cavalier about planting my bulbs after the first hard frost. I usually put them in a crisper drawer in the fridge until I’m ready to plant. Two weekends ago, it was warm and I thought I would plant the bulbs that I had neglected. I pulled out the crisper drawer to see my bulb purchases from fall. Surprise! I found some fall blooming crocuses in the drawer that needed to be planted immediately. Tender shoots had sprouted.

Fall Blooming Crocuses

I saw some beautiful photographs of a fall blooming crocus on Stacy’s blog, Microcosm and thought I had to have some. Well, I did go get some last fall, but you know the rest of the story.

10 Days Later

I planted them like you would paper whites instead of the more traditional method for forcing bulbs. After the fact, I did find an article and video for next year on forcing bulbs. I also managed to get some drumstick allium (allium sphaerocephalon) bulbs planted in the backyard around my spiral.


The Worst
Alas, the grape hyacinths are still in the crisper drawer. 

No More Picnik

I didn't misspell picnic. Picnik is the online software that I use for my photo editing and collages. However as of April 19, 2012, Picnik will be defunct and a ghost of software past.

Roses at Harry P. Leu Gardens in Orlando, Florida

I mostly don't do much photo editing. I usually forego the auto-correct option that is available in Picnik so that you can see my photos warts and all. Most of the cropping that I do is prior to taking the photo or by moving photos around in a collage frame. Within a collage frame, you can slide the photos side to side and sometimes up and down for limited cropping.

Aster Before and After Auto-Correct

Picnik has a lot of free functions or you could pay $24.95 to use the premium features, which will now be refunded in its entirety. It has an easy interface and it has fun effects like sepia tone and touching up that I didn't use, but I did like the different frame features - especially the drop shadow.

Harry P. Leu Gardens

Some of the Picnik features will be available via the Creative Kit in Google+, but not the collages that were so easy in Picnik. I can download Picasa and try the collage feature in it and Donna at Garden Walk, Garden Talk recently posted a tutorial on creating collages in Photoshop.

Spanish moss on an oak tree at Harry P. Leu Gardens

Anyone can use the premium features of Picnik until its expiration date April 19, 2012 without having to pay. Check it out if you have a chance. (One caveat, Picnik has been a little sluggish since all the premium features are now free.)

Lights! Camera! Action!

Some garden blogs provide great information. Cindy at enclos*ure has written informative posts about cannas and tea plantations in Rwanda. But my posts are not literary, didactic or informative. It took me a while to appreciate blog posts that have substantively more text than photos. I'm mostly about the photos and often have difficulty cobbling words together between photos. I would have no problem with the meme "Wordless Wednesdays" becoming "Wordless Weekdays and Weekends."

Tent Rocks - 2010

With this said, I’ve been thinking it might be time to start looking for a new camera. I've noticed that the left edge of my photos is saturated with more color than the other three corners. I’ve dropped the camera a few times and the zoom has become sluggish. The first digital camera I used was a Kodak. It was so simple to use that I bought one for my Mom.

Garden 2010 - Aspen Leaves

The first camera I bought for myself was a Canon. It proved to be too complicated for me and was prior to image stabilization. So I ended up with a Kodak z712 that has 7.1 megapixels and 12x optical zoom. I'm a huge fan of optical zoom.

I’ve been eyeing two cameras, the Panasonic Panasonic DMC-ZS9 and the Kodak EasyShare z990. Below is a comparison of the two cameras.

Feature	Panasonic	Kodak
Megapixels	14	12
Zoom	16x optical 21x intelligent	30x Optical
Lens	Leica	Schneider-Kreuznach
View Finder	No	Yes
Batteries	Proprietary battery	2 AA
Weight	< 16 oz	21 oz
Shutter Speed	Not sure	Can be slow

Garden 2010 - kniphofia

I don’t think I’m in the market for DSLR. It’s beyond what I need. When I had an SLR, I had a Nikon that I loved, but I’ve never tried a Nikon digital camera. About a third of my blog photos tend to be from my phone. It’s great to have on the go.  Aside from gardening, vacation photos and snapshots, I sometimes volunteer as a photographer onsite for Habitat for Humanity. Thus, my camera needs are limited.

What kind of cameras are my fellow garden bloggers using? Does anyone have any camera recommendations?

New Year's Resolution

I’m not compulsively organized at home, but I do keep a spreadsheet of all of the projects that I’m working on at the office and I’m a three ring binder junkie. At a former job, I used to have project plans for grant writing and checklists for coordinating meetings, but at home nary a grocery list. I think I realized in the last couple of years that there is a huge disconnect between how organized I am at work and the lack thereof at home.

I read an article a few years ago about someone who endeavored to work on one thing during the course of a year instead of trying to juggle competing interests and not getting much done. I thought this method might work for me since I’m a little ADD and my mind tends to be interested in EVERYTHING. My resolution for the New Year is to focus on getting organized in the home and garden.

So, I’m taking three baby steps to be more organized at home. The first step I took was to start using my work spreadsheet to track projects at home. Duh, why hadn’t I thought of that sooner? Now, I track my blog ideas and gardening to-dos. My spreadsheet already had an Issues/Barriers field, which I appended with "Lesson Learned" so I can participate in Bumble Lush’s meme, the Best and Worst of the Garden.

The second step I took was to create a garden journal. I read in mixing creative a fast and easy idea for creating a garden journal.  charlie b. assembled a journal in a three ring binder. I love how she affixes plant tags on the pages. She also uses it for notes, ideas and seed purchase lists.

One last organizational idea that I love, Deb at Deb’s Garden uses the month of January to clear out unwanted photos from her hard drive.

I posted these ideas to my Organizing the Garden board on Pinterest so I wouldn’t forget. I’ll keep you in the loop on how my resolution is coming along during the year.  Please share any garden organizing tips that you have!