Zucchini in the Salad

I have been spending a lot of time at Orchard House every chance I get. I am trying to prepare the property for either a sale or a rental, and it looks as if we may have found a good tenant. Meanwhile, as I spend time there, I notice all the beautiful flowers.

Some of the flowers are the result of meticulous and effective landscaping by the owners who preceded me. Although nobody is tending them, the flowers come out every year, each at its appointed time and station. Some were placed there by design.

Others are wild and spring up unbidden in the woods.

First I spot them as a flash of color from afar.

Then I come in closer for a better look.

If you look very closely at some flowers, you can actually see the pollen spilling out.

Pollen is a feast for insects. Eating alone at Orchard House, as it was my day off, I spread out my own  feast.

Lunch consisted of a peach, some cherry tomatoes, blackberries and fried chicken.

With it, I had club soda in a can. The food was good and better out in the open than it would have been inside.

The blackberries were fresh picked from the Orchard House grounds.

Later in the day I went to visit musician and piano and voice teacher Jill Dabney. She is helping me with the music for the Debt Collector. Before I left, she gave me some zucchini from her garden. This pretty much determined what sort of salad Bow and I would have with our supper.

First I sliced the zucchini. Then I added tomatoes, sugar snap peas and cauliflower.

Then I generously sprinkled on sesame seed oil.

When the salad was ready, I presented it to Bow.

Bow enjoyed the salad, though the zucchini was not necessarily his favorite vegetable of the bunch.

More About the Salad

The truth is: I was planning to write more about the salad yesterday, but I got distracted by the butterflies! Sometimes the feast for the eyes is so overwhelming that we forget about food. But you might have been asking yourself: did Bow enjoy his salad? How did he eat it? Which morsels did he pick out to eat first?

The reason I like this kind of salad better than the traditional kind is that you get to see what you're eating, and even though the different vegetables are all sitting there together in the bowl, and they're all going to be together in your belly, you still get to experience each one individually, with its own texture, flavor and smell.

Bow seems to like that, too. Even though he ate the entire salad, he was very picky as he chose one morsel at a time to put in his mouth.

You can see the selection process in all its stunning detail in the following video:

You can actually imagine the different textures as you watch this video, because each vegetable makes a  different sound when Bow eats it. The radishes are crunchy, the scallions are secretive and whispery, and the tomatoes are full of juice. And the peas in the pod make two sounds, one for the pod and the other for the peas!

Life is in the details. Enjoying the diversity of experiences offered to us is what makes the meal before us a feast.

The Feast Outside

For lunch today I prepared an alternative salad for me and Bow. It consisted of cherry tomatoes, sliced green onions (scallions to some), sliced radishes, and English peas in the pod. I prefer this kind of salad to the kind that is mostly lettuce and coleslaw.

After lunch, I went for a walk with Teyman.  We had Bow's blessing, with the understanding that I would take pictures and get video footage, so he could see what we saw when we were out.

We saw leaves falling from the trees, heard the birds singing, and even observed butterflies enjoying a feast of their own on the wild flowers that pass for weeds by our shot-up rural mailbox.

Teyman allowed me to watch the butterflies for a long time. When we got back, Bow seemed a little impatient. But he calmed down and watched all the footage with me.