Spicebush cookies. Basic pâte sablée: flour, butter, powdered sugar, egg yolks, and the wild card of ground spicebush (Lindera benzoin) berries. Packed for the Brooklyn Bridge Park Walk I led on Saturday.
I was expecting just 15 walkers, but we had 40, thanks to the very warm, spring-like weather. So... the cookies had to be stretched a little! I think I had 34.
Today it rains and later this week we will dip below freezing, again. In the garden I am: thinking about making a discrete bug hotel (boutique size), using all the viburnum trimmings from late last year when I tried to impose some order and encourage a sense of form in the very shaggy corner shrub; considering keeping bees (don't tell the Frenchman, yet - Hi, Vince!); pondering possums, and whether they will squash my garden or eat snails... there are two that eat cat food two doors down and I think they visit us; wondering when to add my collection of powdered egg shells to the vegetable plot (calcium to raise pH, to supplement the crushed oyster shells already dug in); looking forward to unfurling the beautiful (white!) umbrella from Patio Living, still packed in its very long box; and wondering whether the Zika-tide will prompt Brooklyn parents-to-be to demand city spraying against stripe-legged mosquitoes. I did not christen this Carroll Gardens garden Chez Mosquito for nothing...
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am also considering bees for the yard. the local beekeepers group meets 5 minutes away, so will at least join for a year. I think this is a project that takes a LOT of planning and new knowledge, but am strongly leaning that way. hope you will check it out... city rules and all. Bzzzz!
ReplyDeleteI'm just up the way from you in Cobble Hill, and the mosquitoes drive us crazy. We had them into December! I'd love a blog-style symposium on safe mosquito control when the season rolls around. All the well-known precautions that I have taken mean nothing if one's nearby neighbor has standing water in their yard.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you are about as ready for spring as I am! Glad I don't have the same problem with mosquitoes that you are dealing with down there...of course we have plenty of other bugs up here in the mountains.
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