I've posted before about the slightly weird chili plants that I have this year. They are still alive, and faring fairly well, even though it has gotten quite cold now. We don't heat the winter garden, so it's below 10° C in there now, and can drop down to about 3-4 ° C. That is approximately the lowest temperature that tomato plants will endure, and chilis don't like it much colder either, so there is not much growing or blooming going on there right now. With one exception - my physalis plant is flowering; it starts in autumn or early winter, and goes on flowering basically all through winter here.



With the chilis, there is slow but steady ripening of the fruits. Which means interesting colour changes in the interesting chilis:



They will eventually turn all red, but at the moment, I am totally enjoying this multi-coloured effect.

There's still some activity other than slow ripening, by the way - one stalwart fly is living in the winter garden and visits the flowers when it's sunny and thus a bit warmer. And something else is apparently also active, as evidenced by this:



Chili plant leaves, it seems, are tasty for someone!

Our little cat is growing older, and she's getting a bit more lazy every year. For her age (which is probably around 20, though it's not really known, as she was abandoned and brought to the shelter) she's still quite fit - but signs of feline aging are noticeable now. For instance, she's drooling more, the tips of her fangs are often slightly visible, and her claws are more audible when she walks, as they are not retracted fully all the time.

Also, her fur seems to be slightly lighter and more greyish. Most noticeable of all, though: her whiskers, which used to be all black once upon a time, have turned snow-white, with the exception of one or two last dark ones.



The "aaaawww"-factor when she's sleeping, though? Absolutely and utterly undiminished.

I like oat, and I like cookies, and consequently I also like oat cookies. There's the kind that you can buy at IKEA, for instance - flat and crunchy and oaty and... sweet. Very, very sweet.

I've had a bit of a fancy for oat biscuits for a while recently, but wasn't willing to buy them, because of a) their overboarding sweetness and b) plastic packaging. Then came an opportunity to bake some... so I did what I usually do when something like this comes up. I trawl the Biggest Of All Cookbooks (aka the internet), pick out about a gazillion of recipes, look at all of them and then I either mash up between two and five of them, or I take one and modify it according to my whim. Sometimes both. (In very extreme cases, the recipe that I pick gets slaughtered so completely that there's not too much over of the original... but hey, it's just guidelines anyways, right?)

In this case, I stuck with the typical modification that I make when getting baking recipes off the 'net, which is reducing the sugar contents. I might also adjust butter quantities, and I always substitute butter if the recipe calls for margarine or shortening; I also use spelt flour instead of wheat as a standard mod. That's a leftover habit from the time when I had trouble digesting wheat; fortunately, that is not the case anymore, but I've just stuck with using spelt as my standard flour. No point in overdoing it with the wheat consumption and tempting fate! This time, the original recipe called for spelt already, so no switch needed.

The cookies were supposed to go all puddle-y in the oven, as in "melt into flat thin shapes" and then crisp up. Mine didn't, which may be due to the slight modifications I made - possibly they'd do that more if the oven temperature is a little lower, and they are instead baked for longer, but the dome shapes were nice, too. I pressed them a bit flatter once I realised they would not flatten themselves, which let them turn out a bit crunchier.

So, here you go - my recipe for sweet, but not overly sweet, oat cookies:

100 g butter
100 g rolled oats
60 g brown sugar
30 g honey
1 tsp vanilla sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon, ground
120 g wholegrain spelt flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
45 g almond flakes (optional: roast these in a dry pan)
60 ml milk

Melt butter and let it cool a bit again. Mix butter, sugar and honey together. Mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then stir in the butter mixture; this will form a crumbly mass. Now add the milk to form a sticky dough.

With wet hands, form c. 36 small balls and place them on baking sheets. Leave enough space between cookie balls so they won't run together (in case they do run, which mine didn't). Bake for about 10-15 mins at 180°C, no fan. (Maybe try 160° and see if they will go flatter.)

Once cool, store in an airtight container if you like to keep them crisp.

Enjoy!

While I'm at the (winter-)garden pictures - here's some more:



This, according to the seed packet, is a "Tenessee Teardrop" chili plant. It's also supposed to have these light fruits, at least at the start. They should turn proper yellow later, then purple, then orange and finally red as they ripen. I'm looking forward to that. (And yes, I have a thing for chili peppers that have purple or violet fruits at some stage. Or black - black is fine with me, too.)

And it's now the time of the year that the physalis plant is starting to flower:



The plant is several years old now, and it stayed in its pot in the wintergarden all this year. It could theoretically move outside during summer, but I was too lazy to lug out the heavy pot with a very long plant support in it, and then lug it back in again.

The plant needs quite a lot of water, and will grow much better with regular doses of some kind of plant food, but otherwise it's rather uncomplicated. Apart from needing some support that you tie the very long stems to, that is. I prune it back vigorously after all the fruits have been harvested; that's usually the case in late spring or early summer. Flowers start again in autumn, when it's getting colder outside. The fruits stay smaller than those you can buy in the supermarket (though with enough water and fertiliser, they do get bigger than without). There's lots of them, though, and no transport for them - if you don't count the very short way from off the plant and straight into me!

I've blogged before about my chili pepper plant shenanigans - after sadly killing off all my Ecuador Purple chili plants, I tried to grow new ones from my seeds, but alas, they were too old and didn't germinate anymore.

So I threw seeds from a spice jar into soil. They were taken from my own chilis, so there would have been a chance of them being Ecuador Purple, but I had no luck there. In parallel, because I wanted to make sure, I mail ordered some chili seeds, and some tomato seeds while I was at it. Those, obviously, included Ecuador Purple seeds.

Well. The spice jar plants all have rather similar upright, slender, pointed peppers in a boring green, maybe with a hint of black in one or two plants. Some have a curved fruit here and there. Altogether... rather boring; I'd have expected some more variation, because they were taken from different plants that, by all rights, should not have been true-to-seed (yet). Anyways, one of them at least now has produced a single fruit that is sort of dancing out of line:



Possibly that is an effect of cross-pollination; our place and the chili plants were definitely well-visited by insects working hard to pollinate. If it is, the same effect may be the reason why this oddly-shaped fruit is growing on an Ecuador Purple plant:



This is definitely not the shape you'd expect it to be. However, I suspect that the guy I bought the seeds from does not grow his plants well-separated from each other. There was a lot of variation between the individual pepper and tomato plants regarding their size and growth shape. One of the tomatoes and several of the pepper plants were also very far away from the breed description.

Also, there's this, which is also supposed to be an Ecuador Purple chili:



The plant has several of these weird winged fruits.

I don't mind too much, since I mostly want the chilis for their decorative value, and that is certainly quite decorative - but if I had wanted 'proper' breed seeds, I'd certainly be very disappointed. I am a bit disappointed about the tomato seeds, in that regard. I'm also not really happy with the germination quota (which was not very good - and yes, I note down how many seeds I stick into the soil, and how many plants come out). So I'll definitely not order seeds there again.

What I will do, though, is grow plants from those odd fruits, and see if anything even odder will come out!

It's Friday, and for this Friday, FFF have planned to take up protests again - because even though we're all still in the grip of the pandemic, and numbers are unfortunately going up about everywhere in the world (gaah!), our other issue, the climate change, is not going to go away. Especially not with all the extra single-use plastics that are currently necessary (more or less...) due to hygiene requirements.

I'm hoping that the extra restrictions placed on vendors will peter out quickly now, or get lifted, but I'm not getting my hopes to high. It's time to make it possible again to fill customer's containers, in order to save single-use packaging. Germany used to be at the point where it was finally possible at most bakeries and butcher's shops to bring your own bag for baked goods, and your own boxes for meat, and get those filled. This has largely been stopped by the extra measurements taken due to the pandemic. Which I can understand - but now that we know more about the virus and how it spreads, and especially that touching items is not the primary vector of the virus by far, it's time to get back to more sustainable ways of shopping.

So. Fridays For Future protests today. Here in Erlangen, it won't be a single one, intending to be a huge central protest, but there's several smaller ones taking place - so that protesters can keep their distance (plus wearing masks). If you're up to something like this, you can find protests taking place near you on klima-streik.org for Germany, or on Global Climate Strike for all over the world.

See you there!

Because the Forststeig trail is a true multi-day hiking trail, there's no rubbish disposal along the route, apart from the one regular campsite in Ostrov (which is after the second day of hiking or so). This means, and you are explicitly told about that on the website, that you have to carry your rubbish with you until you reach the end of the trail.

Our home-made bars, and the mostly home-made other foodstuffs, meant that we had a very manageable amount of rubbish accumulating on the trip. Also a good thing, because you are required to take everything along with you for the whole journey, there's no waste disposal along the trekking route. Because I was curious, I weighed our rubbish upon our return... and it was 140 g of plastics. (That's not counting the ziplock bags we had at home and brought along, which will be re-used.) We had thrown away about 10 g previously, at the camping place in Ostrov, and of course there was a good amount more of it when preparing the things at home, in form of the packaging for the ingredients used. It was not much in comparison to some of the other hikers on the trail - due to the homemade bars, and not using convenience food, regular or hiker-specific. It was still quite a bit, though.

So many things are still sold in plastic. Even organically grown stuff - which is especially hard for me to understand. I can sort of get it when it's soggy stuff that is being sold, or moist and oily things, but dried beans, or grains, or pasta? Please, come on. These can very well live in paper packaging.

This feeling of it being too much plastic by far was reinforced when we came back home: Indra Starke-Ottich's book "Mein Weg aus der Plastikfalle" had arrived during our time away, and was waiting for me on our table. I confess I bought the book mostly because I wanted to support Indra's cause, not because I thought I actually needed it.



Well. I now know that I did need it, and a lot of other people might also need it. The book is written in a very nice manner, with a wonderful voice that pleased me throughout. It was a gruesome read, though - and really drove home the necessity to change our ways, and our consumption, as much and as quickly as possible. I did know that plastic is not good, but did not realise how big a problem plastic poses for the environment. It basically never degrades, only falls apart into smaller pieces, which can then be consumed easily by animals and people... with the result of the average person eating about one credit card's worth of micro- and nanoplastics per week. Per week! Eeek!

Reason enough for us to look over our lifestyle again, and make a few more changes. One of them, for me, was installing an app called "replace plastic", which aims to show the makers (and packagers) of things that their customers do not want everything plastic-wrapped. Once you have the app installed, you enter your name and postcode. Then, whenever there's an item you use, or would like to use, you can scan the barcode; the app will pass the request on to the manufacturer once 20 people have scanned this item or after about 4 weeks, whatever happens earlier. That is a very quick, very pain-free and easy way to ask for a more environmentally-friendly packaging!

Another change is that I will be much more consequent in getting foods without plastic packaging. Foodstuff packing is, like probably everywhere, where the bulk of our plastic waste comes from, even though we've been trying to reduce that for a good while now. We've switched to milk in glass bottles and, more recently, we're getting our milk as raw milk directly from the farmer, and we found a source for quark in deposit glasses. (The quark costs more than twice as much as the plastic version, but it's organic as well, which means the cows do get better treatment. Our milk is actually cheaper by about the same factor now, as it's sold directly by the farmer, who will earn more per litre of milk sold at that price than for selling to a dairy factory.)

For the other food things, there's fortunately a few online shops offering plastic-free things that are hard to get locally, such as poppy seeds. Finding those involved some internet surfing, and some checking and comparing of prices to get an indication of what is sensible, and what is not. And now it's just getting those changes done, one step at a time, until they are the new and comfy way of doing stuff...