Four posts in one!

The summer is here. It was gamboling in the back yard this afternoon, fluffing up its feathers and squorking and such, so I put on my work jeans and walked out in bare feet to turn over the garden with it. We have a dirt bed full of happy-looking worms, and mint that survived the winter. The plan is to install basil, cherry tomatoes, parsley, and rainbow peppers, unless something else looks better at the farmers' market.

Perhaps this is more interesting to me, putative novel-writer, than to you, but Jeff VanderMeer has opened the briefcase containing his novel-in-progress, Finch, and strewn the contents all over his blog. I only figured out how to take notes for my own writing about a year and a half ago, and I'm fascinated by glimpses behind other authors' curtains.

There was some commentary enthusiasm for the pizza experiments I wrote about yesterday, and since they tasted just as good tonight I thought I'd post more details on the apple-pepper tart. I:

• turned the leftover pizza dough (about 1/6 a full recipe) into a mini-pizza with a pinched-up rim, then lay down a bed of mozzarella.
• cut about nine thin half-apple slices and wrapped them in inch-wide strips of prosciutto, then arranged them in a pinwheel on the crust.
• dumped about half a cup of finely shredded hard parmesan on top, followed by about thirty or forty grinds of black pepper.
• baked it for ten minutes or so in a 475° oven, until the parmesan was a brittle brown lacework.

I don't experiment in my cooking very often, but I think Top Chef has given me some confidence; the end result was cheesy and sweet and salty, and made to cohere so nicely by the cloud of pepper-flavor that surrounded the others in my mouth.

Fourthly, I'm going to try to make the 3-D double feature at the Coolidge tomorrow night. Red-blue glasses! The Creature from the Black Lagoon! It Came from Outer Space! Bostonians, you're welcome to join me.

Now to work, which I should be doing instead of this. Mulciber is being passive-aggressive; I need to get him and Scrutiny out of that tent.