December 22, 2019- Week 4 of the Picture contest

Celebrate the Solstice.

The days will now get longer.
The first seed catalogue arrived yesterday.

This was the sunset Friday evening in Iowa City.

My sister reports she had a wonderful sunrise yesterday morning in Arizona.

I guess it was the same sky.
It traveled.

That was remarkable.

In Iowa City

No snow.

Plenty of sunshine.

Temperatures were 50 yesterday, with several more days in the lower 50's to come.

My predictions of colder weather made a week ago came to nothing.

In the next few days I will be looking for the tiny points of green in the garden
 from early bulbs.

We have had snowdrops before on New Year's day.

It will get cold at some point.

There will be snow.

But for now there are dry roads with lots of cars going to the car washes.

We would have gone yesterday but the line was too long.

Aside from the weather

it was no ordinary week.

Our daughter Katie was ordained a deacon a week ago.

All week Katie and Christopher stayed with us here in Iowa.

They left yesterday at 6am.

We took them to the airport in the complete dark.
Christopher was actually wide awake.
He really likes planes. He takes a foot long plastic airplane to bed with him.

So now let me talk about flowers and the contest.

Last week in week 3 there was a runaway winner

It was the Monsella tulip.

The result was somewhat predictable. Color always does well in the contest. I voted for the bloodroot.

The full voting was
Pasque flower   5
Monsella tulip  21
Double bloodroot   3
daffodils   6
yellow tulips  4

Week 4

#1  Ruby Spider (July 9, 2019)

This picture is particularly nice as everything is now brown with occasional spots of white.

Ruby Spider is a daylily. She is a focal point. She is amazing.
A daylily flower  will bloom for one day. (Actually if the plant reblooms in the fall and it is very cool-under 50- they will bloom for 2 days.)
There were maybe 20-30 scapes on this plant. (There was a point at the peak  of my daylily obsession where I recorded the number of scapes each year. I was younger then. ) Each scape will have 6-10 flowers. You can do the math. Well let me do the math.  That is somewhere between 120 and 300 flowers, over maybe 2 weeks.
Ruby Spider blooms during high summer, when the garden is at its best. (Well maybe late April is also the best.)
This summer (2019) the deer really hit the daylilies hard. I sprayed early with this plant. The plant was also not on the deer path which runs down between the two houses on College St. (They still use that path, even now. See the odds and ends.)

Ruby spider is not really a spider daylily. But it is bigger than most.
It is right a corner which makes it an idea focal point.

#2  Pink Dogwood (May 14, 2019)

I absolutely love this picture.
We have had the pink dogwood for maybe 25 years. It was a birthday present for Julia. It now reaches our bedroom windows which is on the second floor. Pink dogwoods are somewhat unusual this far north. At least we were told that when we got the tree so long ago.

#3 Leocojum  (May 4, 2019)

This spring bulb is sometimes called a tall snowdrop. It is almost 15 inches tall.
It blooms in the second half of the spring bulb season, along with the camassia and bluebells. It is sometimes called the summer snowflake.

I struggled picking between this image and the larger image  in the bonus section. In the end, the interest in showing those wonderful green tips led me to pick this image for the contest.

They are in a genus all by themselves. There are only 2 species. This one is leucojum aestivum.

#4 Yellow hellebore (April 7, 2019)

Hellebores are an important part of the early Spring garden.
They come in all colors.
This lovely yellow is in the front yard.
I have had it long enough that it has a seedling which has now bloomed.

#5 dark trillium  (May 1, 2019)

I love trilliums.
I am not certain which one this is.
It has that wonderful center part.
I see a dancer with arms extended over the dancer's head.
Please see the bonus section for all the trillium from start to finish.


Vote away.
Invite a friend to vote.
We are moving through this winter.

Bonus pictures

Here is the larger image of the leocojum in the contest.












Here is the larger image of the trillium contestant.

Was this a better image than the one I put in the contest?






























Here is the trillium in pictures for 2019
They are in order that they were taken.
The first picture was taken on April 6.
The last was May 4.









I like this picture as you can see the seedling coming along. Maybe next year it will bloom.
Next year is getting closer.

Here is a single flower of Ruby Spider.

Right now

We had a celebration for Katie's ordination last Sunday afternoon at our house.
I made sure the orchids that were blooming joined in.
There were 8 different kinds that were blooming.

Here they are:

Julia's Recipe

French Apple Cake with Meringue

I first made this cake many years ago when I wanted to make a fancy dessert and I came upon this recipe in the Joy of Cooking. More pretentious than Betty Crocker, but still I have cooked (and baked)many many things out of this cookbook. I like the older editions better than the new, and I have 3 old ones. This perplexes Philip, but he does not judge.



For the cake: 3 or 4 apples (enough to yield about 3 cups, peeled, cored and sliced); 3/4 cup of white sugar (divided); 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon; 1 teaspoon lemon juice; 1 cup + 1 tablespoon flour (also divided); 4 tablespoons butter (again, divided) 1 teaspoon baking powder; 1/4 teaspoon salt of any kind; 2 eggs (yolks for the cake, whites for the meringue); and 1/4 cup milk.

I turned on the oven to 400 degrees, and I lubed up a deep dish pie pan which I think was 9" across. You could use an 8" square pan. Lube whatever you use well.

Next, I peeled and cored and sliced the apples. I used farmer's market apples whose names I forget. Use softer-cooking apples (ie, not Granny Smith) that taste good (ie, not Red Delicious). I think apples of different kinds are nice - something from the Jonathan family plus something from the yellow Delicious family plus something from the MacIntosh family. Or whatever you have - Gala, Fuji, Pink Lady, Cameo. You want about 3 cups. Eat the leftovers.





I poured the applies into the lubed-up pie plate and then sprinkled the apples with 1/2 cup of sugar plus the cinnamon and the lemon juice. Note that you will not use all of the sugar at this point. Some goes into the cake batter.

Then I melted 4 tablespoons of butter in a little saucepan.












Next I separated the eggs and put the egg yolks in a cup. I spooned 1 tablespoon of melted butter out of the little saucepan into the cup with the egg yolks. (I put the egg whites in another little bowl for the meringue stage.)

Next, I sprinkled the apples with 1 tablespoon of flour and the remaining 3 tablespoon of melted butter.

I put the pie plate aside and turned my attention to the cake batter which would go on top of the apples.






I mixed the 1 cup of flour with the 1/4 cup of sugar, the baking powder and the salt.

I measured 1/4 cup of milk into the cup with the egg yolks and melted butter and mixed that up.

I added the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mixed it up. I got a thick batter.














This is a thick batter dolloped onto the apples. Note that it does not spread. Thick, like I said. It's okay.
















I baked the cake for about 30 minutes, checking after about 25. I wanted the cake to be done in the center (using the no-goop-on-the-toothpick test) and the apples to be soft - that is, not to offer resistance to a toothpick or skewer or table knife.

Having the cake and apples get done at roughly the same time is the reason not to use really hard apples like Granny Smith.




When the cake was done, I set it on the counter to cool for about 10 minutes.




Then I used a paring knife to loosen the cake from the pan and flipped it out onto a serving plate. That is, I put a serving plate on top of the pie plate and using potholders, flipped the whole thing over.

A few apples fell off the edge and I put them back where they belonged.

I turned the oven temperature down to 325 degrees.






Next: the meringue. I like lemon meringue pie (or lime). But meringue toppings can be temperamental. They can "weep", a polite term for oozing. They can get rubbery on the second day. Unattractive. But I have found a meringue which neither weeps nor gets rubbery. I may have included this recipe with lemon meringue pie, but if so, here it is again.






Ingredients for the meringue: 2 egg whites (from the cake above); 1/3 cup water; 2 teaspoons cornstarch; 1/3 cup sugar (divided); a pinch of salt; 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla.















I started by mixing the water with 1-1/2 tablespoons of the sugar and the cornstarch in a little saucepan. I put it on the stove on medium-high (not really high) heat and stirred it while it came to a boil.  When it came to a boil, it turned clear. I turned it off and put it aside.















Next I beat the egg whites with a hand-mixer. I know one is supposed to be able to do this with a whisk, but one never has. Use an electric mixer. As soon as the egg whites were foamy, I added the pinch of salt and the cream of tartar (which help egg whites achieve stiff peaks. Something about acidity.)

When the egg whites formed soft peaks (which can be observed by turning off the mixer and lifting the beaters out of the egg white mixture), I started adding the rest of the white sugar (1/3 cup minus the 1-1/2 tablespoons that went into the cornstarch mixture). Then I added the vanilla and lastly I added the cornstarch mixture in dollops.





Here is the meringue near the end of the beating process.
















I spread the meringue on the top of the apple layer and put the serving plate in the oven. I had taken the precaution of using a serving plate that can go in the oven.





















Here is the meringue-covered apple cake in a silpat-lined rimmed baking sheet. Easier to put in and out of the oven.


















I baked the meringue for about 10-15 minutes, until it was pleasantly browned.

Then we let it cool.

















Here is the cake on the plate. A chipped plate, I notice, part of a set of original fiesta ware which was a gift from the children.

Note that the meringue holds it shape. There was some leftover cake which we ate the next day and the texture of the meringue was as lovely as it had been out of the oven.


One might substitute peaches or pears for the apples, and it would be delicious.

Odds and Ends

Here is the  star magnolia tree this Friday. We took the ornaments out and put them around the garden.
I took a closer look and saw this deer damage.
In 37 years of being here I have never had this happen.
I know some people protect their young trees.
This tree is 15 years old.
I have now sprayed it with some of that really potent deer repellent.
We will see.

They are suppose to be hunting deer going on in Iowa City right now.





Speaking of worrying...
There is a statistic I can get that measures audience hits on the blog.
The weekly total shows on the right hand side of the computer screen.
At the moment it is only 376.
On Monday or Tuesday it spiked to over 900.
The stats can be broken down by where they come from, by country.
When I looked at where the audience was today there were my usual 50 Italian bots.
They are there almost all the time.
But earlier this week there were over 300 just from the Ukraine. What?
Right now as I write there are 99 from Russia and 81 from the Ukraine.
Somehow I do not think these are friendly bots. I also do not think the ones earlier in the week were really from the Ukraine.
Spooky.
During the Democratic convention in 2016 there was  a spike in hits from Russian bots.
They are out there, looking.



Christmas is in 3 days.

We got our tree yesterday.
We will decorate it Tuesday evening.
Some of the crotons have had to move for a few weeks.



















Have a quiet week.
Enjoy the good weather if you get some of it.
The days will only get longer and brighter.
Philip