September evening

It was cool for the first time, last night. We took our supper up there - a chicken, a salad, some bread, and ate it with the earlier sunset, and a breeze that meant business, off the water. We wore sweaters.

Downtown Brooklyn behind us in the east, and later, as it grew dark, heavy Venus in the west.

Ungovernable

The rowdy Etoile Violette.

A climber with chutzpah.

September on the roof

Cocktail menu for a new book

Today, 66 Square Feet - A Delicious Life is officially released. If you pre-ordered it, it should be on its way to you, or in your possession.

Here's a peek at the cocktail menu I am planning for its launch party on Saturday at Book Court. Yes, you should come!

The pork belly (transformed into rillettes in this case, not served whole, as a roast) and the avocado cream are from the menus in the book. The black currant chutney is the result of my headscratching regarding what to do with all my gin-soaked currants, after straining the gin off, recently. The crunchy phyllo triangles are a celebration of things wild and green. And because I have to be nice to vegetarians!

The Rhus Hour (...get it?) is a sumac-based cocktail from the book.

(And for a chance to win a copy of 66 Square Feet - A Delicious Life, visit Gardenista and tell them about your favourite garden-to-table recipe)

A new flower is discovered - you could name it

New Hermannia species. Photo: David Gwynne-Evans

I received an email from botanist David Gwynne-Evans - who also calls himself The Naked Bloganist.

It spoke of something he called Road Reserves and a new species of flower that he discovered growing in one: dolls rose; better known to me as Hermannia. Two weeks after discovering this new species, it had been mown down by road crews.

But what, I asked, is a road reserve?

It's that strip of land beside the highway, subject to mowing. Oh. That perked my interest. Recently my friend Glenn Switzer, a Minnesotan nursery owner and landscape designer, ranted about watching the wildflower strip being mown down heedlessly, beside a nearby highway. (Then he intervened and saved it).

Road reserve, Minnesota. Photo: Glenn Swizter

In South Africa, Vince and I have stopped countless times, on the N1, the N7, the N2 - arterial blacktops, so that I could backtrack and photograph a flower I have seen, growing right beside the tar.

                                                Road reserve, Northern Cape, South Africa

                                                Stateside, there is a similar squealing of brakes:

Coltsfoot in the Catskills

Road reserves, it turns out,  are a perversely rich area for unique flora to survive.

David writes: "... many of the plants that otherwise succumbed to agriculture and urbanisation have survived in fragments along roads. These delicate ecosystems are being systematically degraded by municipalities throughout the country, acting on insensitive, misguided and outdated legislation."

David took samples of the plant to acclaimed silversmith, Nic Bladen who had them cast in sterling silver. Only one flower cast successfully, and was transformed into a pendant.

To raise funding to document and protect these roadsides and to raise awareness of their role in species diversity, David decided to put the silver flower up for auction, along with - wait for it -  the right to name the new species.

Think of it: Hermannia estorbensis. Hermannia frenchmanii. Hermannia hanginthereianthus, Hermannia uptheweedwackus...

To contribute to his stellar cause and win the right to name a flower, please visit his online auction. The last day to bid is September 7th.

It seems like a perfect, substantial - and eternal -  birthday present for someone you love.

What would you call this hitherto undescribed and beautiful flower?

Alpine strawberries

In the spring I potted up a baby Alpine strawberry. It was growing apart in the main Alpine pot, after a fruit had dropped and self-seeded.

It has grown. And now there are lots of long, sweet strawberries. They taste like the artificial strawberry flavour of Marukawa gum

Someone - here - once suggested that artificial flavours are really memories of the original and now forgotten flavours of real fruit.

Their pot is also host to a small ant colony. Every day the ants send up a midden of fine soil in the middle of the strawberry plant.

Every day I water it down again. They don't seem to mind. Sometimes, rarely, they eat a strawberry.

Green tomatoes and no ham

We are in the thick of it. Tomato sandwich season.

Actually, I overdosed: a couple of weeks ago I had such a good tomato sandwich, made with toasted bread, that I made another, at once. It had been almost a year since the last one.

It was a sandwich too far. (Kind of like that night at the Mexican restaurant and the shots of tequila, a hundred years ago.)

So I took a break.

But I was ready again.

The blogger-across-the-river and I share a love of Hellman's. I don't think too deeply about Hellmans. Some things must be taken at face value. I just eat it. Almost everything I eat is made-from-scratch-locally-sourced-humanely-raised-or-organic.

'Sept the Hellmans.

The bread for this superb sandwich came from BK17, Sarah Owen's community supported baking enterprise*. It is sourdough, and this particular loaf was almost blue with buckwheat. It keeps very well, too. (In the fall edition of Edible Brooklyn, out in September, look for the story I wrote about Sarah and her bread.)

The tomatoes? Green Cherokee, perfectly ripe, grown by Wilklow Orchards, and sold at the Borough Hall Farmers Market.

* Sarah will be bringing her bread to the book party on Saturday...I am very happy about that.