Rivenrock Gardens Cactus Blog

From an inquiry I got from a customer… I sent this reply:

   Well, when you freeze them, they reconstitute kinda mushy. It’s pretty repelling to me, and I cannot recommend it on the site, although if you put the cactus pieces into a mash or soup or burritos it’s not a real big issue.

  Prepare them, pat dry, and then dice, then lay out on a cookie sheet not touching each other and freeze. Once fully frozen shake them into a freezer bag, and thaw as needed.

   I’m so used to fresh leaves, and they store well lightly wrapped in the fridge. So we get plenty of folks who order monthly, and eat just a bit of a leaf every day… or feed just a bit to a tortoise. They say that after three weeks, it is still in good shape.

   As the season progresses and the leaves we pick are more mature, they last longer also, because they have a thicker skin and waxy coating. The fine tender ones are more perishable. Also the older thicker ones give you more food value per amount of cleaning, because they have more internal mass compared to the relatively large external surface of the thin ones. Same amount of cleaning per leaf, just the thick ones might be three times as weighty.

  Yeah, it’s for sure I prefer fresh foods over frozen or otherwise prepared foods in general.

   There’s a time and an item for freezing or preserving here and there… I for instance love freeing fresh corn from the garden whole in the husk and unblanched. When you take it out and thaw, you can then pop the whole thing untouched in the microwave and heat through, and you can have some corn that tastes like and has texture like it was just harvested the day before.

   Corn is a great example of  food that is worthwhile to freeze, peas, beans and some other seasonal foods also come to mind.  Tomatoes are great made into pastes, or diced and canned for great salsas through the winter.

  But our cactus is so good and crunchy when fresh, and usually we have good production except for a few months in the winter…. so I just can’t bear to bring myself to can or freeze cactus when we can have it fresh through most of the year…. you know, you just can’t bottle sunshine.

Yep, one of my favorite looking columnists Ann Coulter has a really nice article, that I think in the next thirty years will be held up as right and true….

An excerpt…

“But no one notices when 9/11 doesn’t happen. Indeed, if we had somehow stopped the 9/11 attack, we’d all be watching Mohammed Atta being interviewed on MSNBC, explaining his lawsuit against the Bush administration. Maureen Dowd would be writing columns describing Khalid Sheik Mohammed as a “wannabe” terrorist being treated like Genghis Khan by an excitable Bush administration.”

   Write on Babe!

 From the YouTube info page…

Vladimir Bukovsky spent many years in Russian labour camps and psychiatric prisons for defending human rights. He came to Britain in 1976. He lectures and writes on the old Soviet system and the EU. 

 

Lil Rob… Summer Nights

Lil Rob has a nice old Motown or R and B influence.  But he wraps it with Hip Hop currents.
He’s from San Diego, and this song really pulls you into a summer night in some parts of California.

The Rose
~Joe O.~

Blond, handsome, tall, blue eyes
Strong and proud in his uniformed guise
Proud to defend the “Fatherland” and Rhine
Walking back from the village
In the bright Bavarian sunshine
To his unit not far away
A smile in his heart
A girl on the path not far ahead
Standing near the old castle tower

“Guten morgen! A beautiful day.”
They speak their names, so much to say
An hour seems a minute on this day
“I must go.” he says. “Will I see you again?”
“I will be here tomorrow at ten.”
She gave him a rose from the bush nearby
They said auf wiedersehen, goodbye
They meet again, and again, and again
Giving themselves to each other in time

One day something new is on her dress
A star on her shoulder
To show her pride, they told her,
In being a Jew
A sign of unspoken foreboding, they knew.
“It does not change us.” they said.
“We will always be together.” they said.
We will meet here in secret
You will know I am here
When the rose is at the tower door
And the candle is in the window there.

They came in the night to take her away
To a place where she’d be happy, they’d say
He came the next day and there was the light
The rose was there, but the girl not in sight
He waited, and waited, and waited more
Until there was nothing but to go in the door
And the soldier was never seen again.

It is late evening, summer 1961
I walk from the village to the old castle door
I see a candle in the window above
As I get closer I meet an old man there
Tall and handsome his blue eyes show despair
“I’m waiting for her” is the first thing I hear
As he points to the castle door
I looked and a beautiful rose is there on the floor
I looked up and the candle light no longer shone
I turn to speak and the old man is gone
Was I dreaming? I rub my eyes
I turn back to the castle door
And there at the entrance sits the forlorn rose
Now clearly long dead on the floor

I have often seen a light in the tower
And I thought I heard boots on the stairs
I never saw the old man again
But always the rose is there.

    Santa Maria was originally known as ‘Central City’ due to the Central location it occupies on California’s coast. The name was eventually changed to Santa Maria because there were mail misroutings with another Central City in Colorado.
    Santa Maria has an old part of town with buildings built of brick which is generally not used for building material in this area anymore. Cruising through an alleyway behind a custom truck shop, I saw this old door, with it’s weights to help move the doors. It was such an old style and design, yet obviously functional, and made me think of how in the old days folks used ingenuity to help them accomplish tasks. It is a little snapshot of a time a hundred years ago.    My Dad used to have a cellar on their farm in the Missouri Ozarks, when he was a kid he enjoyed slamming the door of the cellar which was a ‘trap door’ style on the floor. It had a weight stack also to help one lift it since it was huge and heavy, but when slammed down would slam into the frame with much force and a terrifically (for a kid) loud slam. One day he did this not noticing the cat was sitting on the edge, with his tail over the frame. The door chopped the cat’s tail off, the cat screamed and ran off into the woods, but came back a few days later with the stub healing well. For the rest of his life that poor cat was a stub-tail, but it did not seem to affect him adversly after he healed.

People often mention to me of buying a jar of cactus at the store, and when they made the recipe, it was not as tasty as they’d imagined.

  I say that when you eat canned spinach the effect is the same, yet fresh spinach from the garden can be a very tasty dish.

   Yes, fresh is better when you can get it.

  But I did find a fine article with a recipe using canned cactus, but I’d say the substitution of Rivenrock Gardens Fresh Organic Cactus will greatly enhance the delectability of the meal.

From Walgreens came this great recipe for bell peppers, onions, corn and cactus sauteed together. I’ve eaten cactus like this so many times, it is just great…. What is also fine is to make a raw salad of the same ingredients with tomatoes added. Yummy… hold down on the onions maybe when eating it raw. And in both dishes, I’d suggest cilantro instead of the parsley/cilantro suggested, and another spice I usually use with cactus is cumen, and salt and pepper also.

yes, the Discovery Health article is informative and seems to have nothing but good info, so I thought I’d pass along the link!

  When I was a young kid I was raised with the old American work ethic that actually had much of it’s roots based deep in the old Prussian/Germanic concepts of morality, family and working hard and honestly for family and society. This concept took hold in the USA with a vengeance, yet after WWII in Germany the liberal concepts of social reform and ‘looking after others’ took precedence over working hard. Hard work was rewarded with punitive progressive taxation, and the worker saw his labor going to reward the welfare system and it’s layabouts and the administrators of the system who have much to lose if their ‘clients’ became productive citizens. For several decades now Germany has been mired in liberal idealism, fighting to show itself more ‘progressive’ than the highly vaunted Scandinavian societies (to whom they have always felt a little inferior in a racial sense). Now the German economy is in the doldrums with massive unemployment, high taxes, and a raft of people unable to resign themselves to working for about the same amount they would get on welfare.
   This is a system that the old Prussian dictators would see as intolerable, and in the old days they would line a few thousand people up to walls and have them shot, and the rest of the population would see the value in ‘honorable work’, the economy would rebound, the people would be happy workers, and society and the state would benefit. But now the liberal societies are having to perform a re-molding of character with a massive public relations and information campaign. This campaign is called You are the wings! You are the tree! You are Germany!
   I support the German government in this endeavor, Germany needs reforming, and the German character needs to find itself again. So long after the ruins of WWII have been scattered, and the smoking ashes have gone cold, still the ravages of that great conflict to liberate the people are causing suffering. This is the way of all wars, and Iraq will be no different.
   This is a little bit I took from the article.

    Optimism and confidence are based on the principle of achievement, which the campaign constantly calls upon. People who are confident that their efforts are constructive in some way create self-confidence, they are, as the campaign demands, prepared to take risks, they are mobile and flexible. But this is an experience many Germans have been incapable of having for a very long time. The principle of achievement is being overridden. There are - as everyone knows - too few jobs which allow people to prove their mettle and move upwards. Alternative job structures are at a very rudimentary level still, aside from the black market. And even among the employed there is a widespread suspicion that the future is in no way dependant on how hard you slog. In a situation like this, a call to give yourself a kick up the arse and start ripping up trees means little more than a call to vandalism. Because ripping up trees as a metaphor for performance no longer has much currency in most people’s lives.

   If liberalism gives us the ruined economies of Western Europe and the obliteration of the work ethic and defilement of the environment as happened in Eastern Europe, it is a wonder that there are people in this country who espouse liberalism.
   Thankfully we have not yet totally succumbed to these concepts, I hope we never do.
   If you wish to see the German Version for the internet of the campaign click here. I did, and I must admit, it made me miss Germany some.

   Sideways is a different kind of movie. It won high awards and acclaim from many major movie critics and independent film reviews.
    But locally it is very popular due to the fact that the majority of the filming was done in Santa Barbara County in the Buellton/Lompoc area. It also features wineries quite prominently, and the beauty of the local wineries and the scenery of the miles of vineyards in the area cannot be beat.
    The main character of the movie talks throughout the movie of his love of a particular wine grape and the resulting wine; a locally-grown grave vine called Pinot Noir. I am no wine aficionado, yet I found it interesting to hear the ‘Wine talk’ in this movie. I felt like I learned a lot about wine, but what’s the use since I don’t really go for wine? (I’ll take a good stout brew over a wine any day).
    An interesting thing about this Pinot Noir wine grape that I learned from the movie, is the fact that it is a thin skinned grape, and as such it responds more quickly to environmental changes. The warm days (for months the daytime temps have been in the mid eighties, and the cool nights on the Central Coast (in the mid fifties, even down to the high forties here in the canyon). This quick reversal of temperatures causes the grape to fill to bursting with rich juices, making for a richer full-bodied wine.
    That is what is explained in the movie, and it’s a good lesson. But there is another side to this movie. It is a story about ‘Jack’ (played by Thomas Haden Church) who is getting married in a week, and desires to spend a last week with wine aficionado ‘Miles’ (played by Paul Giamatti) who is an aspiring writer. These two unsavory characters careen along on a wild orgy of wine tasting and partying with the ’soon-to-be-married’ man on the prowl to find women with whom to spend his last days of ‘freedom’. This bothers the hero of the story, but why I don’t know. He already had proven himself to be a low-life by stealing money from his little-old-lady mom while stopping by to say hello on his way to peruse the wineries of the Santa Ynez area.

    If one is easily offended do not watch this movie. It has a fair amount of cursing and some lewd and raunchy behavior with the occasional foray into criminal misadventure. But when one watches the whole movie one sees that this is not a paean to an immoral lifestyle, for both protagonists suffer damage as a direct result of their actions.

    But the highlight of the movie was the scenes of businesses I have been in, roads I have driven. To watch the evening haze coming in from the Pacific as the sun sets is a marvelous sight. But to see the same scene on television and knowing that what you see every day millions across the world can now see, that is an exciting prospect. The people here all know of the special scenery we have that we drive through daily, but when one passes beauty daily it can become commonplace. It is nice to see that beauty out there for all others to admire.

    All-in-all I enjoyed the movie immensely (mostly due to the local scenes). But young children might perhaps be better off when shielded from this language and behavior.