My Basil Tin Can Garden

Is there an herb or spice (or two) that just say summer to you? For me, that would be basil and dill. I love using both of those herbs fresh from the garden in my summer meals.

I grow basil in pots on our deck. It just seems to do better that way. In recent years I've planted two pots with several basil plants each. Since those pots will now be on my front porch this year, I had to come up with alternate planters.

The painted cans I used for a couple of herbs last year held up well. So I thought I'd expand on those and add 4 more painted cans.

As a support, a corral, and to keep the cans off of the deck surface (where they could leave a rust ring), I used 2 old fence pickets and 4 used bricks from our property.

It's been a cold and wet May this year, so I've delayed potting my basil seedlings out. Some of them suffered some damage in the waiting. I tried hardening them off on two occasions, only to have to bring them back inside full time until the weather warmed again. 

Although it was raining again today, I set out to pot the largest of the seedlings. I worked on the kitchen floor and made a huge mess, but oh well. You know when you're confident that you can do something neatly without laying some newspaper down on your work surface? That was me this morning. I'll be careful, she said. I'll be neat, she said. I don't need newspaper. Let's just say potting soil, a top-heavy and tippy watering can, and a clumsy gardener turns a clean kitchen floor into a muddy mess.

I filled 5 of the can-planters with 4 or 5 seedlings each. I have 2 more cans to plant and will do that when my next batch of seedlings are ready. After seeing the damage to the very earliest batch, I started another 9 cells of basil seeds under lights.

I will continue bringing the planted cans in over night until our weather improves. From the weather forecast, that looks like it may be until the end of the week.

I realize that tin can gardening does not suit a lot of personalities.  I'll tell you why it suits mine. It gives a second life to something most of us think has only one life. It's quirky, and I'm quirky. It's one of the cheapest types of planting pots available to me. And I like the parallel between this can once holding a manufactured food and this can as a container in which to grow more food. Anyway, that's just me.

Bringing Old Flower Pots Back to Life

I have these old fiberglass flower pots, bought at Home Depot about 15 years or ago. Originally they were sage green. (It evens says so on the label on the bottom of each pot.) Over the years they have faded, and the paint has chipped in places. In the last couple of years I've planted them with basil and kept them on the back deck. The wear and tear wasn't an issue to me in the backyard.

I needed a pair of pots for my revamped front porch this year, And since I like to reuse items I already have, I chose these two pots for that purpose. But I wanted them to look refreshed.

Last week I gave them both a good scrubbing, inside and out, then left them to sit and dry out on the deck for a few days.

I have leftover green spray paint (Rustoleum Eden) from the herb pots that I made out of large #10 cans. Since I wanted these refreshed pots to be able to move from front yard to back yard as I choose in future seasons, using the leftover paint makes these pots more versatile for my use. Save money, more versatile --  Eden green it is!

The left pot has one coat of Eden green paint,
while the right pot is still weathered sage green.

Although our weekend was a rainy one, I had a narrow opportunity to spray paint outdoors on Monday afternoon. The clouds thickened at one point in the day. Fortunately the rain held off so I could give both pots a few coats of paint before getting them into the garage to cure.

One of the finished pots, with 2 full coats and 1 partial coat of paint.

The pots look great and are ready to fill with something colorful for the front porch. I have just a couple more improvements to make in that part of the yard. I'll update with photos soon.

What's been in your shopping cart lately? I'll tell you mine

It wasn't all that long ago that shopping cart meant what you pushed around a grocery store. Now I realize that it also has a meaning related to online shopping of just about anything. But this morning, I was pushing a shopping cart in an actual grocery store. And yes, it had a wonky wheel.

I was at Walmart this morning, picking up some produce and a few other things. This was my weekly grocery shopping.  I was thinking about what I've been buying in recent weeks. I wasn't going down very many inner aisles, but instead was surfing the outer edges. This has become the grocery shopping pattern for me lately, lots of produce, some milk, butter, cheese, and eggs, a little grains here and there, a few bulk bin items, canned tuna, and sausage.

So when I got home I dug out the receipts from my last 4 times in the grocery store (three weeks worth). This is what I bought:

frozen blueberries (I had a craving for blueberry muffins -- frozen blueberries are a better deal than fresh in my area right now)
heads of green cabbage
bags of carrots
fresh celery
cucumbers
bags of apples
fresh tomatoes
bananas
green and red bell peppers
green onions
bagged potatoes (I had a craving for baked potatoes and we finished our garden potatoes in February)
whole watermelon
mayonnaise

garlic powder (we're out of garden garlic until August)
cheddar cheese
string cheese
butter
milk
eggs
sliced pepperoni
frozen turkey breakfast sausage links
turkey sausage snack sticks
hot dogs (my ashamed face is on -- I know hot dogs are horrible food items)
canned tuna fish
peanut butter powder
flax seed meal
chia seeds
peanuts
frozen peas
frozen broccoli
tofu

I also got a free bagged salad kit with a coupon

For the most part, these are simply basic foods or ingredients with which to make something. It helps that we have a lot of rice, oats, cornmeal, flour, dried beans, cooking oils, sugar and other pantry items on hand. Also, we've got a lot of beef and some other meat in the freezer to use. Still, it surprised me this morning how "basic" my grocery shopping has been lately. Do you ever have these sorts of thoughts while shopping? Or am I just an over-analyzer?

So, what's been in your shopping cart lately? Have you noticed any new-to-you trends?

Recreating Restaurant Favorites

Both of my daughters love to cook. One of their favorite types of cooking is reproducing favorite restaurant menu items and commercial food products.

Many years ago on a family vacation, we enjoyed these beautiful and large tostada salads. They were served in crispy, deep-fried flour tortilla bowls. We've talked about buying the tool needed to make tortilla bowls like those, but never got around to it.

Sunday afternoon both daughters were out garage-saling, and what did they find? They found a pair of forms for making flour tortilla bowls for 75 cents. That evening they researched how best to make these bowls. (There are a couple of methods.) 

Earlier this week they tried out two methods, both using homemade flour tortilla dough, and determined that one way produced the crispiest tortilla bowl. They made a stack of these bowls to use on their respective cooking nights. So, yeah, we had tostada salads both Monday and Tuesday.

Don't these salads look gorgeous? The crispy tortilla bowl was filled with refried beans, carne asada, cheese, lettuce, green onions, tomatoes, and olives. Salsa was served on the side. The only items missing that the restaurant version had was sour cream and guacamole. For the price, our tostada salad bowls were fantastic and didn't miss anything by not having the sour cream and guac.

Do you have favorite restaurant meals that you've recreated?

Venturing into wood-chip gardening

A month ago we had two trees taken out in anticipation of having our house reroofed. The new roof is on, and after some back and forth with the company, we're pleased with how it looks. Today is the first day of rain since the roof was replaced, so we will see how well it works.

As I'd mentioned before, one of the trees was a birch tree, with lovely white bark. I've used some of the more level logs as tables and stools around our fire ring. I'm thinking of using some of the rest of those logs in the landscape near the wooded part of our property. The other tree was a cedar. I've yet to find a use for those logs. The branches of both were chipped up by the tree removal company. We asked that they leave the wood chips with us. So they dumped about 10 cubic yards of wood chips on our driveway. Initially I used about 1 cubic yard of those chips under our blueberry bushes and on a pathway alongside one of the potato beds. The other 9 yards sat on the driveway for several weeks.

One evening this last week I watched a documentary (Back to Eden) on no-till gardening that relied on wood chips as the mulch layer on top of the beds and beneath fruit trees. I was intrigued by this idea, as I had 9 yards of wood chips at my disposal and wanted my driveway back for, you know, driving on. I then watched a few other videos on wood chip, no-till gardening and gathered as much information as I needed to begin. 

The other day I spent about 5 to 6 hours hauling wood chips to various parts of our yard. I primarily used the chips under our fruit trees and on our pumpkin patch. But I also topped the tomato bed and cabbage/Brussel sprout bed with some chips. 

The idea is that you don't till these wood chips into the soil but allow them to break down slowly over time, releasing nutrients at a very slow pace and eventually improving the soil texture. New wood chips are added every year to maintain a good mulch that will hold in moisture and suppress weeds. The speaker in the documentary also said that wood chips are not the only kind of mulch that can be used in no-till gardening. Stone mulches and rotted compost mulches will also work. 

I chose to use the chips under fruit trees and on the pumpkin patch as those two areas are the most needy in my garden and orchard. Our pear trees have suffered tremendously over the last 5 years. Last year and the year before, I mulched under both trees with compost, hoping to improve the vigor of these trees. We all noticed this spring that the pear trees do indeed look better. I don't think there are very many pears on this year's trees, but the trees themselves look healthier. The only thing different that I did for these trees was to mulch them well two years in a row. I'm hoping the wood chip mulch will help them even more. Some of the wood chips also went under the apple trees and one of two cherry trees. This is simply anecdotal, but a few years back I put a wood chip mulch under the other cherry tree and we've since had more cherries each summer. When I get more wood chips, I'll spread some of those under this other cherry tree, too.

After spreading a thick layer in the orchard I spread an equally thick layer on the pumpkin patch. The two issues I've had with the pumpkin patch is lack of water retention and overall poor soil. On the hottest days of summer I've needed to water the patch twice a day. I'm hoping to reduce watering and increase yield in this gardening space.

We will see how wood chip, no-till gardening works out for me. For more information on this method, I recommend watching Back to Eden. You can watch the entire film on You Tube for free.

Anyway, the other part of all of this that I wanted to share with you is a way to get free wood chips delivered to your property. Not all of us will be taking down trees soon for our own wood chips. But there is a website that coordinates arborists (tree trimmers) with folks who want the chipped-up wood. Sometimes logs (to use for firewood) can be gotten for free through this service as well. The problem for arborists is that after pruning or taking out a tree, not all homeowners want the residual chips or logs. This leaves the arborist with the job and expense of disposing these by products. 

ChipDrop is a service that matches up arborists and homeowners. You register at the website for wanting wood chips, fire wood, or both and the site hooks you up with an arborist in your area. Arborists pay for the service, but the recipients don't, although there's an option to make a donation if one desires. I had heard of ChipDrop before. I believe one of you mentioned it a while back. I'd never really looked into this service until recently when one of my neighbors got a huge load of wood chips through them. My neighbor was using the wood chips on his ornamental beds and to make a long pathway through the yard to the kids' play area. So this isn't necessarily a service that would only be applicable to folks with orchards or large vegetable gardens. Any gardening space one has that is in need of a natural mulch layer could benefit from a truck drop of wood chips. 

A couple of good tips for using ChipDrop:

• share the bounty. If you don't need a full truckload of wood chips, offer some to your gardening neighbors.
• best time to sign up is immediately after a large storm passes through your area, damaging lots of trees.
• worst time to sign up is in spring (like now) as homeowners are getting their yards fixed up for summer. Once summer is under way, there will be fewer competitors for those truckloads of wood chips.
• you can make some requests, such as "no fruit trees" or "no conifers" or "wood chips only, no logs" or "logs only" if you're concerned about tree diseases spreading to your own trees, or you want only chips or only logs.
• be prepared to have a dumping on your driveway without warning. When you sign up, you're agreeing to accepting any delivery, the entire delivery, at any time. Of course, if your situation changes, you can always unenroll or cancel your request.
• once you get one delivery, your information is automatically removed from the listings, so you won't receive more than one delivery. If you want more, you need to list yourself on the service again.
• wondering if ChipDrop is in your area? On the FAQ page of the ChipDrop website there's section that can tell you if they are active in your area. I entered a bunch of random cities and states, just to see, and all that I entered had active users of this service. It might be helpful to understand what is involved with this service by reading that FAQ page in its entirety, for both the arborists and the gardeners.
• while this service is free to the homeowner/gardener, you can increase your chances of receiving a delivery sooner rather than later by offering to pay the $20 fee that the arborist would have paid to the service. $20 for a truckload of wood chips is a bargain. However, if you're more like me, you might want to wait until near the end of summer, when utility companies are trimming trees in the way of power lines and homeowners are assessing the trees in their yards that should come down before fall storms begin. Later in summer is when the bulk of tree trimming and removal usually occurs, resulting in an increase in arborists needing a spot in which to dispose the wood chips. 
• If what you're hoping to receive is logs to use for firewood, most folks aren't really thinking about burning wood for heating their homes in spring and early summer. Now would be the time of year to sign up for the service to receive "logs only".

Have you used ChipDrop before? If you keep a vegetable garden, have you tried no-till gardening? Any tips to share?

Serious Frugality

The nasturtium baskets are looking good. The leaves are big enough to pluck to add to salads.
I grew these plants from seeds collected from the previous year.

Serious frugality (as opposed to casual frugality) takes a lot of work and energy. 

My lavender container garden. The left square pot is the one I spray painted.
The right round pot used to be beige. The sun bleached it over the years.
I had peppermint growing in it until a week ago.
I transplanted all of the peppermint into 4 pots and will hopefully
harvest even more peppermint to use for tea.
The little bird figurine was from a free pile last summer.

DIY repairing and maintaining a home or car also takes a lot of knowledge. Cooking from scratch requires time, work, and energy. Keeping clothing and shoes in good repair takes work and time. 

One shelf of my lettuce bins. I think the 8 inch deep bins are
producing better than the milk jug pots from last year.

Growing one's own food, whether in the form of a vegetable garden, a fruit orchard, or livestock, requires a huge amount of work, knowledge, and energy. 

The last of this year's tulips in pots, sitting on a birch tree log table.

Canning all of that home-grown bounty requires knowledge, time and energy. Even thrift store and yard sale shopping is time-intensive.

Nothing terribly frugal about this photo, except maybe that the pot is about 28 years old. 
I hope to gather seeds from the creeping Jenny for next year's pots
and restart the begonias again next spring after a winter in the garage.

What I'm getting at is sometimes I disappear from this blog for a week at a time. Most often the reason is I am in the midst of practicing some serious frugality. The last couple of weeks have been labor intensive, to be sure. I'll update you all on some of my projects later this week.

Till next time . . .

Up-cycling Clay Pot Shards

Still using limited data on my phone.

In my region of the US, clay planting pots sometimes fracture in winter, leaving me with small piles of shards. I hate to just throw these bits away. Instead, I use the shards as mulch around the base of potted Mediterranean plants to hold moisture in the soil over the dry summers, without adding to the risk of fungus or rot. 

Like lavender plants, rosemary benefits from a rock-type mulch (as opposed to wood chip or compost mulch). As I showed you a week ago, I used a marble chip mulch around the base of my lavender plants. In a similar approach, I use the clay pot shards around the base of rosemary plants. 

I have 2 baby rosemary plants new this season. This morning I broke apart a bunch of clay shards to mulch the top surface of the soil in these planters. Small pieces went directly onto the soil. I broke up the larger chunks with a hammer on cardboard.

I think this is not only practical, but also an attractive look for my rosemary.

Broken and unrepairable items can be given new use with a little imagination. Up-cycling clay pot shards into planter mulch keeps those broken pieces out the landfill.

What’s been your favorite up-cycle?

Internet Woes

Hi friends,

My landline and internet are down and may not be fixed for a couple of days. My cell phone has limited data, so I’m needing to prioritize how I use it. Our house is being reroofed and my husband thinks a wire got jiggled loose. Neither one of us know much about wiring, so we’ll wait until our service provider can come and fix it.

An interesting thing— when we lose internet, we all have trouble adjusting at first. After some moments wasted complaining, I finally got busy with jobs I’ve been wanting to do. I potted another lavender plant into the planter that I spray painted white, I’m baking another batch of French bread, I swept the patio near where my container lavender garden sits, and I spray painted several #10 cans lime green for planting my container basil garden this year. So I guess I’ve now adjusted to minimal internet access. 

What do you do when the internet goes down?

Sigh . . .

Another morning in the dentist's chair. But I see the light at the end of the tunnel. They prepped for my final crown. Woo hoo! And next I focus on my endocrine issues, followed by preparing myself for surgery in June. It's been a really long haul. But I'm at least getting done with this batch of dental work. Any progress feels good.

On another topic, I've been buying green onions, cucumbers, green peppers, and Roma tomatoes all spring to add flavor and interest to our usual budget veggies and the small amount we can get from the garden. The green onion, cucumbers, and green peppers are priced per each or per bundle, while the Roma tomatoes are the least expensive fresh tomatoes I can buy this time of year. I can use a single green onion, half of a cucumber and a single Roma tomato to freshen up a family meal of leftovers, for only about 90 extra cents added to what would have been ordinary leftovers. 

Tonight I've added the tomato and cucumber to our homegrown container salad greens and the green onion to some beefy gravy that I'm serving over slices of homemade bread. I needed an easy but tasty dinner for tonight, and this seemed to fit the bill. I used some old and hard scratch biscuits from last week in a bread pudding for dessert. I'm topping this bread pudding with scratch rhubarb sauce. A budget meal made easy. 

How was your day today? I hope you are enjoying some beautiful weather with moments for you to get outside in it!

What's on your plan for Mother's Day?

What do think? Did you believe these were real ,or did they look fake at first glance? Real tulips don't last very long once cut. I've been enjoying these faux ones for several weeks now.

Will you be hosting a Mother's Day gathering? Or will someone else be taking on that role so you can relax? Will you dine out or eat at home? Do you prefer brunch/lunch Mother's Day events or dinner ones? What will the weather be like in your area on Sunday? What are your favorite menu items for a Mother's Day meal?

Our plan for my family

Before brunch, we'll go to church. I don't know who all will join my husband and I. 

My mother, stepmother, and mother-in-law have all passed away. So it will be just my little family of 6 for Mother's Day. I don't really care what we do. It's enough just to see all four of my kids. But, that said, my daughters will make a late brunch for us to have here at home. My kids asked what kind of food I like best, and my answer was brunch foods. So even though we won't get together until around 2 PM, we'll still do brunch.

The weather is expected to be very nice on Sunday, with highs in the upper 60s. This means we can set up a place to eat outdoors. We have a table on the deck. However, I like to be in the yard if it's warm enough. So we may set up a place to eat down below on the grass.

I wanted to help my daughters simplify the cooking work for themselves. I think we've come up with a menu that will be somewhat easier for them, especially if they let me make the waffles.

Here's our quasi-easy menu:

this baked Denver omelette

turkey breakfast sausage patties

homemade mini waffles (I'll do these)

waffle toppings: 

maple syrup (organic maple syrup, Grocery Outlet, 12.68 ounces, $6.99) 

raspberry jam-silken tofu 

a cut fruit bowl, pre-cut fruit from Fred Meyer

fruit juice

coffee and tea

After brunch we may play a game or two. 

Having a Mother's Day brunch instead of dinner will mean we can all have a fairly normal evening routine and get to bed on time. I love my sleep!

How about you and your family? What are your plans?

Spray Painting Plastic Planters

In yesterday's post on May Day flowers and what's in my garden, I talked a little bit about my lavender container garden that I'm starting this season. I want white planters for this. I have a couple of white or almost white planters that I'll use, but I also have this terra-cotta colored plastic container whose shape I find appealing for my lavender plants. It's just the wrong color.

If you recall from last summer, I spray painted some #10 cans a muted lime green to use for potting some small herb plants. 

I used 3 coats of spray paint on each, I think. For the most part, they over-wintered nicely. There's a little bit of rust at the base of the cans. I could have minimized the rust by clear-coat sealing the bottom inside of the can as well as painting the bottom of the outside of the can. I've saved another 5 #10 cans to spray paint with the same green paint. In total, I'll have 8 of these green painted cans to pot my deck basil container garden this year. 

I've seen YouTubers spray painting plastic for outdoors, including plastic planters. The paint they recommended was this Rustoleum 2X paint. The can says it's good on plastic, metal and wood. So I thought I'd give it a try on my square plastic planter. 

I bought a can of Blossom White satin finish Rustoleum 2X. After scrubbing up the pot really well, I then gave the outside and bottom 3 good coats of this paint. 

The pot sat in the garage overnight. The next day I turned the pot over and gave the top 3 coats, painting about 3 inches down into the inside of the planter. I will use the Rustoleum 2X clear coat sealer that I have leftover from last summer's projects both inside and out in a day or two. My plan is to allow the paint  and sealer coat to cure for 24 to 48 hours in the garage (recommended 24 hours under optimal conditions here for plastic) before filling the planter with soil and my next lavender plant. I'm hoping this works as well for me as it has for all of those YouTubers. Worst case scenario, I need to touch up the planter next year.

Other outdoor items I've seen YouTubers paint include resin chairs, metal or mesh and metal chairs, clay pots, fiberglass planters, and exterior vinyl shutters. I see some spray painting mania in my future.

Have you used spray paint on outdoor items? What was the longevity of the paint job? Were you satisfied with the final outcome?

Flowers for May Day

Do people still secretly give flowers for May Day any more? This is a fond memory from my childhood. 

My mother helped us make cones out of construction paper and tape, then we'd cut flowers from our yard for the cones. Afterward, we girls delighted in leaving these make-shift baskets on neighbors' front porches. While leaving flowers on doorsteps was beginning to fall out of favor in my childhood, it was a happy tradition that my sister, best friend, and I looked forward to each May 1.

Anyway, my husband cut a sprig of rhododendron for me this morning when I was out, leaving it in a small glass bottle on the kitchen table.

Here are some of my other happy flower moments from the day, some more frugal than others.

Marigolds that I grew from seeds collected from last year's marigolds, which were grown from seeds that I collected from the previous year's marigolds, which were purchased from the store. Never ceases to amaze me that I can collect my own seeds for planting flowers the next year.

More flower plants, just no blossoms. These are petunia plants that I grew from seeds that I collected from 2023's flowers, which were grown from seeds I called from 2022's flowers, which were flowers that I collected from 2021's flowers, which I bought at the store in 2021. With petunia's you really never know what you're going to get. I began with solid red, white and dark purple flowers in 2021. So far I've had dark pink, violet, dark purple, white, striped, solid, and spotted blossoms. I wonder what they will be this year?

I added Creeping Jenny to my hanging baskets of begonias on the front porch. I'm getting a lot of blossoms on the begonias already.  Creeping Jenny does flower, so I'm hoping I can collet seeds in late summer to start my own plants next year.

This is the beginning of my container lavender garden. I love lavender. My whole family knows I love lavender. My son and daughter-in-law gave me this planter for my birthday specifically for lavender. My daughters gave me 3 tiny lavender plants, as well. This English lavender plant was a tiny one three years ago and needed a new space this year. I've used marble chips as mulch on the soil surface. I love the look of lavender against white, both the pot and the rocks. 

I bought the marble chips in a large bag (50-lb) at Home Depot in the outdoor garden and landscaping section for $6.47. They also sell smaller white rocks for indoor plants in the house plant section in 5-lb bags for $6.78 each. I knew I would need several of the smaller bags if I wanted to put a white rock mulch on top of my soil in all of these pots (which will be 5, in total), so I went for the larger landscape bag of marble chips. Rock or gravel mulch is recommended for lavender plants to aid in combatting humidity.

Here's a small English lavender plant that I bought last year. It's needing a larger pot, as well. I'm working on that pot this afternoon. More to come on that.

And then I have the 3 tiny lavender plants that I'll pot in a few days. There aren't any lavender blossoms on any of these plants right now. Their fragrant leaves will have to tide me over until early summer when they bud and bloom.

Are May Day flower baskets a part of you childhood memories? Did you mark today with flowers in any way?

Happy May Day, friends! If I could, I would leave a May Day basket or cone on each of your doorsteps.

There's no prize chest for grown-ups at the dentist! What gives?

Yesterday morning was a rough one for me. This was the dental (unexpected) discovery from last week, an old filling with a crack in the side near the top that didn't show up on x-rays but could be seen when the neighboring crown was placed. My dentist was really kind when informing me and even said I could put this off for a bit, if I wanted. I think she's beginning to feel sorry for me this spring.

Anyway, although this was just a re-do on a filling and not a crown, it was especially rough on me. Perhaps it was due to no breaks during the drilling and refilling, or perhaps it was because it was an extra early morning appointment so they could squeeze me in soon, or perhaps it was because I didn't sleep well the night before due to back and shoulder pain. Whatever. It was a tough one.

When they finished, I had a hard time standing up. I made it out to the car and just sat for a while before I drove myself home. I got home, put comfy clothes back on, and crawled back under the covers. I got nothing accomplished all day except the dental appointment.

Over the weekend I had mentioned that it's such a shame that dentists don't give out prizes/rewards to the adults getting treatment. Well, my two daughters wanted me to have a "prize". They went to Goodwill Outlet and bought this cream-colored Ann Taylor LOFT pj/loungewear top for, get this, 74 cents. Goodwill Outlet sells clothing and housewares by the pound. Lightweight clothing can be a steal. Furniture is also a deal, usually half price from what it had been tagged in the regular Goodwill store. Last spring, I got a sewing table from GO for $7.50. Just takes patience and lots of checking back to find what I seek.

Anyway, a "new" pj top was my prize for all of these dental appointments. What thoughtful daughters!

A Birthday Gift That I've Wanted for Several Years

 

If you like to bake French bread, you may know what this gift is.

Several years ago I was researching baking better French loaves, specifically keeping the loaves from flattening out. That's when I came across these baguette pans.

Instead of rising dough and baking on a flat baking sheet, these scoop-shaped pans support the dough along the edges, allowing for a taller and narrower finished loaf.

Baguette pans come in two, three, four, and five loaf versions. Mine is a two loaf pan, but you can imagine  five of these "scoops" joined together.

All of the tiny holes in the pan help crisp up the bottom of each loaf. And yes, the pans' holes leave markings on the bottom of each loaf.

My kids asked me a while ago what I'd like as a gift for my birthday. Over the weekend, my son and daughter-in-law came over to celebrate both my and my husband's birthdays (our birthdays are 6 days apart). That's when I was presented with my very own baguette pan. 

I made a batch of baguettes this afternoon. I shaped my dough on the countertop then transferred to the pan. It was actually very easy to move the thin lengths of dough into the pan without over-stretching. I basically rolled each length into its "scoop."

I bake French bread about once every two weeks. I'll be using this pan from now on. It kept my bread's shape, and the pan itself was as easy to clean as a baking sheet. I found no down sides to the baguette pan.

This was a practical gift that was also fun for me. For years I couldn't justify buying one for myself. But I was super pleased to receive one as a gift. And I think my family is happy that I'm putting it to use already.

What's the best practical gift that you've ever received?