The rain it continues to rain every day
Sep. 11th, 2024 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anna_wingFor weeks, now. Monsoon season, plus a string of typhoons. Floods and people displaced in large numbers all over South and Southeast Asia. Pacific Ocean typhoons seem to be bigger than the ones in the Bay of Bengal, while packing the same punch per km/h, I suppose because they have more space to spread out and grow. There's another one spinning itself up east of the Philippines right now, on the heels of Shanshan and Yagi. And then next month the second Bay of Bengal cyclone season begins...
There's been a lot less sun this monsoon season, so the dragonfruit plants only managed to produce five this year, despite an initially promising crop of buds. The papayas seem to be happy, and everything else is growing like mad, including the homicidally slippery algae on the drive. Everyone has to walk very carefully right now. The Heliconias and the Marvel of Peru and the species Torenias are flowering intensively, grabbing every little bit of sunlight they can. My swimming-pool pump broke down, turning it a brilliant shade of green before we managed to get it fixed, and is currently overflowing (into the overflow drain, so far, fingers crossed).
Housekeeper made fabulous pineapple jam from a load of juicy but non-sweet pineapples, which was variously given away and used for jam tarts, and we grilled a couple of leftover fruits with a smidgen of sugar, which came out very well. We experimented with hot-water pastry for the jam tarts, which came out very well indeed, light and crisp, even substituting butter for lard, which is not available in processed, conveniently usable form here (and we are not going to go about rendering it down ourselves). We'll be using that recipe in future, for savoury dishes too.
There's been a lot less sun this monsoon season, so the dragonfruit plants only managed to produce five this year, despite an initially promising crop of buds. The papayas seem to be happy, and everything else is growing like mad, including the homicidally slippery algae on the drive. Everyone has to walk very carefully right now. The Heliconias and the Marvel of Peru and the species Torenias are flowering intensively, grabbing every little bit of sunlight they can. My swimming-pool pump broke down, turning it a brilliant shade of green before we managed to get it fixed, and is currently overflowing (into the overflow drain, so far, fingers crossed).
Housekeeper made fabulous pineapple jam from a load of juicy but non-sweet pineapples, which was variously given away and used for jam tarts, and we grilled a couple of leftover fruits with a smidgen of sugar, which came out very well. We experimented with hot-water pastry for the jam tarts, which came out very well indeed, light and crisp, even substituting butter for lard, which is not available in processed, conveniently usable form here (and we are not going to go about rendering it down ourselves). We'll be using that recipe in future, for savoury dishes too.
