Outside my window, the world is a sea of green. They don’t call Seattle the Emerald City for nothing! And inside my kitchen, freshly snipped mint waits for its symphony partners: pistachio and lime. This green trio is perfectly accompanied by–just about anything: drizzled over roasted vegetables; mixed into pasta, rice, or tabouli; plopped on […]
Garden
Pampers and Pakhlava turns four!
“When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.” ~Roger Ebert Dear readers, April has nearly come and gone without a post to celebrate the 4th anniversary of my blog. On April 13, 2009, Pampers and Pakhlava went […]
Rare bird
Big Papa was looking out the window into our little back yard when I heard him call: Come see this bird! He (or she) was standing on a branch in our Greengage plum tree next to another bird who looked just like him…except that he was a shade of cream and the other bird was […]
When you wish upon a star
This morning I read Baby Bird a new book, Olivia and the Fairy Princess. She loves the original Olivia and I’d heard great reports about this book too. In this book, Olivia is having an identity crisis. There are too many ruffled, sparkly princesses around. She wants to do more than just fit in. She […]
Tooting our tubers: Potatoes in a garbage can 2012
Four years running, Big Papa and I have grown potatoes in a plastic garbage can. This year, our crop of rose fingerlings produced 62 fine looking potatoes. I get so jazzed when we are about to dump the can, because you never know how many potatoes you’ll get. The whole tuber process seems magical: seed […]
Dilly Dahlia: Volunteer Park Dahlia Garden
For many reasons, dahlias hold a special place in my heart. On Tuesday, Baby Bird and I headed to Volunteer Park to lounge in the sunshine. Of course we couldn’t resist walking through the rows of beautiful blooms in the dahlia garden, created by the Puget Sound Dahlia Society. Want to dally over more beauty? […]
Visualize whirled peas: Pea-mint risotto
Peas are plentiful at the Urban Cabin. And so is mint.Visualize all that gorgeous greenness in a bowl and you have pea-mint risotto, the perfect summer meal for Seattle, aka the Emerald City, a green-filled city if there every was one. A lovely local fume blanc (thank you Facelli Winery!) to sip on, and herbed […]
One leaf is all it takes
I love vegetables. When I was a little girl my father had an enormous garden behind our home in upstate New York. He grew it all: carrots, corn, asparagus, raspberries, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, cabbage, cucumbers, radishes, dill, peas, beans, squash, pumpkins, rhubarb, apples, pears. And we ate it all. Some of my earliest memories are […]
Jeepers creepers, where’d ya get those peepers: Chickadee fledlings
We’ve got babies! Three of the chickadee babies nesting in our birdhouse fledged yesterday. They are absolutely adorable: fluffy and puffy with tiny yellow beaks. First we found two, and then three, amigos taking voyages of short flight, and hopping around the yard. We are also hearing a lot of plaintive peeping because, unhappily, Mama […]
A slice of heaven in my own backyard
Right outside my back door, a private sanctuary awaits. Our garden is the spot we go to recharge, a space where we can watch plants grow, listen to the birds, and claim a few moments away from the hustle-bustle world that lies outside our front door. Just a tiny slice of heaven, but it’s all […]