Radishes come to those who wait

I planted radishes in the spring.  They are supposed to be a 30-day crop.  So plant them, and harvest a month later.  I spent late spring and early summer pulling up a radish each week to see if they were ready.  No dice.  No radishes, just skinny roots.  Probably I planted too late in the season.  Better luck next year.

Today I thought I would see if the radish bushes had any radishes.  They were very large plants, with little white flowers.  I pulled them all up.  Mostly they were still skinny-rooted.  But I did find these (with, of course, Buzz’s head for scale):

Note the one towards the bottom of the photo – very *ahem* suggestive.  You want to see it close up, don’t you.  OK then.

Interestingly, the largest radish was hollow and contained water.  Now you know how to find water in a radish if you are desperately thirsty.  Radish-flavored water, to be sure, but probably potable.  Here’s the inside of the radish:

I’m not sure any of these will get eaten, as we also have radishes in the fridge from the CSA.  But who knows?

I win!

I was declared teacher of the week this morning on the morning announcements!  I think it will also be announced at tonight’s football game.  There is a box in the main office at school, and you can put in nominations for teacher of the week or student of the week.  You fill out a form with your name, the name of your nominee, and why you nominate them.

Two students told me they nominated me.  I was commended on my spirit and creativity…in other words, my spirit week costumes.  It was nice to be honored.  No prize, though, just the announcement.  That’s OK, I treated myself to a “blood orange margarita” at dinner at Bertucci’s tonight.  Not a real margarita, but tasty and definitely alcoholic.  A reward for all the hard work grading I did this week.  I put in a lot of hours, and ignored other things…and this weekend I will need to put in the hours on other things.  Starting with the several days’ worth of dishes that haven’t gotten washed.

Ah well.  I win!  And I get to wash dishes!

Queensland Blue

This is a Queensland Blue squash, which we got (of course) in our CSA share.  This particular one seems more green than blue, but I was able to get the blue tinge in the photo by using bright overcast daylight lighting.  This photo does not show the size well, so here is the squash with the universal squash size indicator, Buzz:

He’s clearly thinking, “another squash? Gimme a break!  I’m trying to nap here.”

I decided to make soup with this squash, and I found a recipe on Messy and Picky’s blog. Picky (the author of this particular post) neglected to mention that the seeds are very tenacious in these things, and I think he grossly underestimated the time needed in a 400-degree oven to become soft.  If that was 40 minutes, I’m a shoe.  Here are the chunks before cooking:

In turn, I neglected some of the steps in the recipe (stopping to take photos of chopped veggies) and I used an immersion blender instead of a food processor for pureeing.  I have done the food-processor method, and I have done the blender method, and I can tell you that getting hot pureed soup all over the kitchen and oneself is doubly bad: both painfully hot and tedious to clean up!  The immersion blender is AWESOME (thanks mom and dad!)!!!!

Finally, I topped my soup with some toasted seeds from the squash and from the pumpkin I carved earlier (see previous post).  My husband is not a big soup fan, but I LOVE soup, and this stuff is indeed delicious!

Jack O’lantern

This year, I built a Larson scanner from the EMSL kit, and installed it in my pumpkin.