Our Garden

A view from the kitchen window

It should not surprise anyone that the view from our kitchen window could only be a disadvantage in cooking. I mean why not just perch yourself over the sink and stare out? We don’t know what those blue nodding flowers out there are but according to Helvi ‘whatever they are, I am sure it is a herb and edible’. They come up each year and flower for months on end. They are over two metres high and are competing hotly with the indoor tree on the stairs. Perhaps you dear reader could throw some light on it. If they are edible, why cook anything? There is enough there to feed an entire dinner table for six weeks.

But, that’s not all. There is more. Look at the dark background. A forest of edible goodies also. They are bay leaf trees as high as our house. I don’t know if one can cook up a storm just by baking bay leaves but I don’t think it would kill anyone. Bay leaves have been used to add aromatic flavours to food even as early as during Grecian times. When dried and sprinkled it can be handy in food larder or laundry to keep out insects and other vermin.

I was shocked to read in Wiki that when bay leaves are packed between tissue paper and put together with beetles, cockroaches and other insects in a glass jar, the insects soon become docile and become easy to mount. I had to read it twice, thinking they must be talking about large animals such as cows and bulls. I know from our farm experience with mating animals that docility is not a pre-requisite for mounting each other. Not on our farm anyway. Then I thought, surely no matter how perverse or decadent, no human being would be lusting after a docile beetle or dragon fly having been drugged deliberately by some fiendish pervert?

It then came to me that people have all sorts of hobbies and obsessions, and that the mounting of insects must mean tacking them on a piece of paper or cardboard sheets, all part of an admirable science in collecting the various insects and possibly cataloguing them for future reference. Doesn’t most of our medicine come from those people that study the world of animals and plants?

I really have to pull myself together and resist seeing evil where there is none. That’s why I love looking outside my kitchen window.

Tags: Basil, Bay leaves, Grecian