A tiny dinner.

Okay, well not even enough for a mouse's dinner. This is my first potato ever (the thing that looks like red yarn is the arrow pointing to it):
The smallest potato

I hadn't even planned on planting any potatoes this year, but there were some growing vines in my cabinet so I stuck them in pots. I was planting when everyone else was harvesting, but since I wasn't going to eat them anyway, I thought I'd give it a shot. They are dying in our 110-115 degree heat, I think after checking them for miniature potatoes, I'll just turn the vines over in the pots and they can be compost for next years potatoes.

I tried some mesquite flour that I made from a neighbor's mesquite pods, which were a different type, they tasted about 100% better than that last batch. Lesson learned. I found a recipe for mesquite cornbread on the internet, and I found a cute cast iron cornbread pan/mold at goodwill for $4, I'll be making that tomorrow along with some solar oven beans.

And finally, there is a new addition to the tiny farm. It's a baby white-winged dove. My husband found it after clearing some bushy lantana in the front yard just sitting on the ground, since he inadvertently destroyed its nest (if there was one there?), I'm taking care of it. It has started to feather in, hopefully it will do okay, though it doesn't seem to think I am its best friend yet. His/her name is Jasper. I will post pictures soon.

Making flour from Mesquites

Out here we have Mesquite trees everywhere. In parking lots, around schools, medians, they are just all over. There's a little park I rode my bike through on my way to Trader Joe's last week and it had about 10-15 large Mesquites, most of the trees were kind of close to the road, which is generally not good for collecting food things, but I tried to get most of the pods from trees that were about 100 feet away, maybe more.

I took home the beans and put them in the dehydrator for a day and a half to make sure they were good and dry. You can't just put mesquite beans in a regular grinder because they are way too hard and will not grind and probably mess up your grinder. The flour is made primarily from the pods, and not the bean itself, but they are attached inside and you can't just separate them out of the pod like you can with a regular bean. Lucky for me my parents had this stone grinding thing in the backyard as decoration when I was growing up and they gave it to me recently. Grinding the flour wasn't as labor-intensive as I was expecting-- the beans just kind of separate themselves as you're grinding. From dried bean to finished flour, it took me about 5 minutes to make half a cup with not too much elbow grease.

The mesquite pods
Ready for grinding
Starting to make flour
Flour!

I tasted the flour and at first it has a very pleasant sweet taste, but then it tastes a little bitter and has a bit of a skunky aftertaste. I have heard that each tree's pods have a little different flavor, even within the same species, so it's best to taste the pods from the tree before you collect too many. I will heed that advice next time. I am going to mix this in with regular flour in a recipe and see how that tastes. I hope I can make it work, it would be a shame to not be able to use all the free flour available around here. I will wait until I use the flour in a recipe before making a final assessment. Plenty of people seem to like mesquite flour, so I am crossing my fingers.