we both lie silently still in the dead of night

More interesting ingredients: rosehips and squash blossoms.

Squash blossoms are pretty well known now. They're often stuffed and fried, but I just didn't feel like doing that for dinner, and they don't keep for very long -- so I sauteed them in butter, and had them with a fried egg and a quick sauce of a local greenhouse tomato broken down in brown butter. Nevermind olive oil's strutting around: butter is fantastic in a tomato sauce.

Squash blossoms have a delicate flavor which is neither exactly like squash nor entirely unlike it. Aren't I handy?

Now, rosehips.  Rosehips are a goddamn pain in the ass.  They're the fruit of the rose bush, all right, and as if the thorns on that plant aren't enough, these fruit are filled with hard rock-like little seeds -- wait, we're not done -- and little hairs which can't be digested, and therefore ... cause discomfort ... if not removed before eating.

So you have to cut open each of these grape-sized fruit and scrape out the seeds and hairs, and then rinse everything a few times.

Thankfully I'm going to use half the rosehips for a liqueur, for which that won't be necessary.

So dessert, dessert was just a piece of frozen puff pastry folded around a handful of sweetened seasoned fruit -- some of those red plums I picked up this morning, some of the rosehips, a little ginger, a little fresh lavender. Lavender is tricky, you don't want things to taste like soap. But this lavender I have -- and there are lots of varieties with different notes -- has a pepperiness to it that I really like, so I'm trying to find things to use it in.

What surprised me about the plums was how very tart they became after cooking. These are the blander of the plums, which is why I was cooking them; cooked, they're vibrant and tart, almost sour, like a sour cherry tart with what would for some people be not quite enough sugar.

Very cool.