I Need Suggestions About Local Garlic

[alfreda89]

Local folk--can anyone suggest where in Austin can I get three bulbs of garlic that still have long leaves? Dried is fine!

Would like to try a photo shoot for an Allie cover.

Comments

[originalkitsune.livejournal.com]

It's a long shot but you can ask a grocery store...ask the person putting out veggies if they have any garlic that is already sprouting a leaf that they are going to throw out..because they normally cull those.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

That's a good idea, I'll try it. Thanks for the suggestion--obvious, and I am juggling too many balls to recognize obvious this week!

[originalkitsune.livejournal.com]

naw, it's not that obvious. Normally i have plenty of garlics with a leaf growing out of it, but not today. :(

Totally OT but delicious

[originalkitsune.livejournal.com]

GF cinnamon rolls:

http://freerangecookies.com/2013/07/17/2-minute-cinnamon-roll/

I wouldn't use a microwave but I'm sure it can be done without one.

Re: Totally OT but delicious

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Looks decadent!

[6-penny.livejournal.com]

Try at a farmers market. Here in the north, my garlic is at the harvest stage, so down where you are it may be drying. I tend to hang mine up in bunches to dry so someone may have that kind of thing.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Yes, I did get some from the Farmer's Market to try and sprout, but they cut it off at four inches. Will try again--turns out a friend's boss is a garlic farmer, too, so that may work out well!

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Farmers' market?

I have long necked garlic in my kitchen right now, though only one and a half bulbs. (There were three, and the other one and a half were tasty, too.)

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Everyone's popular vote. I will see if anyone else at market has it--my usual family cuts off the leaves at about 4 inches.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

So, as I'm home sick today, and taking a brief break from sleeping, I thought I'd play around with what I have at hand.

This is both compositionally rough, and taken with my (crap) phone cam (the real camera needs to be recharged) but:

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Nice! Sorry that you're under the weather.

I'll tell you what I'd like to have to play with-- I need the garlic to place in the hands of a 11-12 year old so we can photograph that, and then ghost it over an interesting, atmospheric background to use as a wraparound on a new version of Night Calls.

The joys of small press publishing--figuring out all the pieces of the puzzle, including the covers, and being able to afford it!

Is it cloudy where you are, or is this a totally inside shot?

Hope the sleep is refreshing!

[tylik.livejournal.com]

It is indoors, though in a room with a lot of windows, if with deep overhangs. (It's on the floor of the zendo.) But most of the greyness of it is probably the color pick up on the phone - I'm running a beta community OS, and while there's a utility for adjusting to lighting conditions, it's frequently a little wonky - this was better than the supersaturated version, I promise you.

Sadly, all my students in the right age range are out of state. (One to Texas, one to Italy, one to Iceland. These kids!)

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

It's looks very restful. Do you have an aquarium of molluscs there, or only at work?

[tylik.livejournal.com]

No aquaria here - no pets at all, in fact. (Of course, with four 50 odd gallon aquaria at work, I'm hardly feeling deprived.)

It is pretty restful - but then, I live at a zendo. With slightly better color resolution, the room looks something like this:



The the "official" (er, not very official, just the one from the zendo web page) shot, with dividers, pillows and mats is this:



(But we only have it set up like that for sitting, as it's where I practice and teach, and K and I do yoga, and so on, the rest of the time.) And, of course, the hall itself isn't the whole of the zendo - the mortar and pestle from the shot usually live on one of the kitchen counters, and the book sits in my library, and so on. And it utterly misses the high back deck the feels like a treehouse, or the gardens or the basement (having a full basement was a major attraction for both K and I) or anything else.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Is this like co-op living for you and your partner? Lots of space, no clutter. I'm dreaming of it!

[tylik.livejournal.com]

So, um... what are you thinking of in terms of an atmospheric background?

I was talking to Caitlin, the daughter of the guy who grows mushrooms for the farmers' market (both of whom are among my favorite people) and a retired science teacher (Caitlin and I were going on about how to teach science right, and she decided to join us ;-) we were all very much on the same page) and happened to glance across the way to Firefly Farms, where they had piles of garlic, and it occurred to me that Caitlin is quite small for her age, whereas Allie is notable not...



I've done only the barest minimum processing here, just removing the white side of a car that we used as a neutral backdrop (and not hugely carefully, hence the edges being a bit odd). I can send you the original if you'd like. Caitlin was apologetic about her scratched up hands - she'd been helping bring in hay yesterday - so I explained about the book in question. Now she wants to read it ;-)

Anyhow, don't know if you can use it, but the opportunity seemed too good to miss.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Thank you, what a cool thing!

I am struggling to get sprouting garlic (I may have a stand-in with sprouting shallots) because of its significance in the story, but I would enjoy using this on the Allie section of the web site that is supposed to get built in here somewhere around editing mine and others' stuff, job apps, being sick, and generally losing my mind. And writing the third book.

Zounds!

She can be my Allie icon right now. Is she an ereader person or a book person? Don't know when the POD will be done, that is another project.

(Allie's hands can be interped pretty much any way people want. She ends up tall, and she's kinda a Valkyrie next to her smaller, darker mom and sister. Other than that, as vague as people want to get. Her hands are strong and she works hard, but she's not the type of person to look at her hands much so far. Puberty may change that--seeing wealthy women who don't work.)

I got your neat report on the zendo, but did not know if you wanted that info on the Interweebs, so kept it masked.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I don't know what here current reading preferences are - I was going to pick her up a copy of the ebook when it comes out - but I can ask. She might not be set up with a reader.

Physically she's much more an Idelia than an Allie - tiny with Irish pale skin and dark hair. Except I always thought of Idelia as being a bit more ladylike, and Caitlin's a budding field biologist. Well, technically she's studying for an integrated science teaching degree, but she spends a lot of her time tromping in the woods on her family's property, and her current internship is putting together a report on one of the watersheds near their home. I hope she might come and work for me some semester (though my friends in the amphibian lab who do field work might be more likely) - really, part of me thinks it would be great to lure her into research, because she'd be excellent at it, but then, it's probably even more important to get that kind of passion into a highschool classroom.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Caitlin sounds like she looks exactly like Allie's little sister (who arrives at the beginning of Book 3.) Or Cousin Esme, whom you will also meet in the new book.

She sounds like a great kid. And that's a toss-up for temptation--we need great minds in research, but also in the classroom. Of course they discourage kids with too high a grade point average from teaching HS or grade school. Or did when I went through.