This post brought to you by the color SUNSHINE

I’m a summer lady. I’ll spare you the whining and instead I’ll tell you that I like open windows, diaphanous white dresses and heat. I want the world to be blooming! Bountiful! Vibrant! Colorful! All. The. Time. It never gets old for me. Even in Los Angeles when it’s the ninety-fifth straight day of sun I bound out the door in the morning with a fist pump like I’ve never seen summer before.

Now that you’re acquainted with my proclivities, let me say a few things about January:
It can be grey.
The Garden looks a little…..peaked.
Sometimes rain happens (I know, I know. If we’re lucky blah blah blah)

In fact, rain HAS been happening. There were several stormy days last week and you shoulda seen the pitiful look on my face under the hood of my soggy raincoat. HOWEVER. The day after the storms I went to The Garden. My friend Leonardo and I discovered that our wildflower seeds were sprouting and the flowers were perking up and and the kumquat trees were full of luminous, golden fruit.

I’m not gonna say I like the rain, but if it brings out all the garden colors then I’ll concede the point with an eye roll.

Color therapy is real, people. This is how I combatted Michigan winters. I imagined my parka beaming winter right back outta town like a frigid Care Bear stare or something.

About those kumquats. I needed a properly reverant recipe to honor the little guys, so I concocted a variation on David Leibovitz’ Super Lemon ice cream. I added kumquat juice to the lemon juice and also used kumquats and minced ginger that I candied in whisky and sugar.

Ummm…I’m sorry to inform you that juicing kumquats is best compared to milking a cat.

You gotta have an appropriate vessel for killer ice cream. This is one of my depression-era sherbet glasses. The spoon is square at the bottom to facilitate effective scraping of the bottom of the dish.

This whole, “winter problem” has me thinking pretty deeply about garden colors, so I’m playing with plant-based dyes. Last week I cooked up batches of goldenrod, fuchsia and green (turmeric, beets and kale) and hauled them all over to the garden in jars for a Micheltorena School project. The chickadees and I spent the day talking about colors and textiles and dying wool.

Praise the lord above for my helpers Helen, Audrea and Leonardo. Without them, one hundred tiny people would have gone home covered head to toe in beet juice. I just don’t have room in my gmail inbox for that volume of irate parent memos.

I offered beet slices so the kiddos could eat the color pink. Photo credit: Leonardo Chalapuwicz

Almost no one wanted to try the beets- a lot of, “eeeeeews.” These stained lips are misleading. She spat it out!