Of Non-Deadly Nightshades, Part the Second

As Far as pruning is concerned  Clovis Sangrail I only cut off what is drooping not getting light. We will leave the pruning question to the professional pepper growers here.

For your baby Pepper plant You can BOAB. Break out another Bounty. I am going to go back to back with some of mine so why not it will give you more room.  I loaded 1 Bounty with 9 sponges and wound up with 17 toms. I did cut 1 the Cherokee Purple cause more than 1 of those and I would need a new room addition. That's why only 17 ,I figured yank them out put them in a neighbor Bounty and most of those wouldn't live cause I yanked them out. No such outcome.  Now pretty much the house glows like Chernobyl did. I will be sharing Cherry Toms with the whole neighborhood come November. 

Your Pepper plants are looking good carry on.

Love the trellis on the jar, nice setup.

Thanks.   Those Etsy guys make a lot of handy stuff.

Most folks call them green onions, but they're really Three Mile Island scallions.

I like chives better than scallions. I like them better on eggs; I like them better on potatoes; and they are my favorite green thing to chop up and add to Chez Clovis House Dressing.

But I haven't re-started any yet. Same thing -- space problem, but things are clearing out. You are right -- they do go for a long time once they start.

In a lot of ways, scallions are kind of a poor man's chives, what you use when you can't get chives. And shallots -- I can remember when no one in a Kansas grocery store even knew what a shallot was, so the white end of a scallion was a good substitute. 

But when you grow them in an AG, you don't get the white end, just the greens. Plus, scallions are cheap -- dollar a bunch, buck and a half if you want organic. 

So I have moved away from growing scallions in the AG. That valuable real estate will go to chives. 

But if you have some chicken tenders that you don't know what to do with, try dusting them with some flour, then sauteing them in a mixture of clarified butter and EVOO with some chopped scallions, and then finishing them off with a big ol' splash of marsala. Nummy. Feel free to toss in some 'shrooms if you want, and if you don't have marsala, but do have some sherry or tawny port or anything else of the fortified wine ilk, don't let the lack of marsala hold you back. It will still be nummy with that cheap-ass port from the bottom shelf.

(Speaking of no one in Kansas knowing what a shallot was -- Years and years ago, the restaurant I worked at was catering wedding reception, and the client wanted fresh guacamole. This being at least a couple of decades pre-internet, I had to go to the library and look up how to make it, then I had to find a produce supplier who could get me a case of avocados, then I had to stuff them all in brown paper bags in hopes they would ripen in time. I am proud to say that they got their guac, and it was good.)

Or << shudder >> this stuff --



Here's my canned green bean story from back in the seventies in Kansas -- We were catering a dinner for about 70 - 100 people, and the vegetable was to be green beans, which back then meant opening a few #10 cans of green beans and dumping them into a deep steam table pan and sitting it on the flat top to heat up. Aside from the cheap-ass green beans, which were a staple in restaurants in the Midwest back then, the rest of the meal was top-dollar, and there was a hyper eager manager-trainee hovering over everything, fretting. 

Comes time to bring everything onto the serving table, and one of the line cooks comes up with a foil-covered steam table pan and drops it into a well. 

"What's that?" asks the manager-trainee.

"The green beans," says the line cook. "They were kind of bland, so I chopped up some bacon and tossed it in. Lots better now."

Did I mention this was a bar mitzvah dinner?

Manager-trainee started to throw a little manager tantrum, when the cook said, "Gotcha."

He knew better, and I knew he knew better because we had both been there when the rabbi put the bless on the kitchen to make it kosher. 

Manager-trainee never really recovered, and some time later, after we put him in the dumbwaiter and sent him for a ride, he started to decide that being in the exciting and fast-paced food and beverage industry was not for him.

Anthony Bourdain was right. Running a kitchen is a lot like having your very own pirate crew.

(And I should probably mention that we did not physically put the manager-trainee into the dumbwaiter. He got into it under his own steam. We just shut the door, then pushed the send button and threw the breaker.)