Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

adrian_turtle messaged me this afternoon "Hello again. Check your porch."

On the front porch were three small herb plants, two packets of seeds, some flower pots, and a bag of potting soil.

This wasn't exactly a surprise: we'd talked some about what herbs cattitude and I would like to grow, and she even mentioned that she had a cunning plan for getting them for me. (For coronavirus-related reasons, neither of us is going to the gardening center for a while.)

I brought the plants indoors, and quickly discovered that our tentative plan of growing herbs on a kitchen windowsill would not survive the intense interest of the cats. So, they're on a porch windowsill, and we are going to keep an eye on the forecast: the porch is enclosed but unheated, so basically at the outside temperature, sometimes with a time lag.

The porch mostly contains some overflow storage (canned goods, yams, paper towels) and boxes awaiting recycling. We want to spend time out there when it gets warm, but the coronavirus happened before we had time to shop for porch furniture.

I wanted to do something different on/with pasta. Hence, rotini and broccoli florets agli e olio, which is to say topped with lightly browned garlic and lots of olive oil. The recipe I found called for sauteeing fresh parsley in the oil along with the garlic, but we didn't have any. (I didn't decide to do this until late afternoon, well after we went out shopping.)

With that, we had little mackerel filets, cooked quickly in more olive oil and topped with fresh ginger. (Also a bit of dill, but I could barely taste that.)

Next time, maybe a bit less garlic, and parsley or maybe fresh basil.

Which reminds me, the three of us had pho for lunch on Friday (at Le in Harvard Square, "formerly Pho Pasteur" as it says on the menu), with lots of fresh basil, and it was very good indeed.