and that’s the last of the summer veggies: pickled green (and unripe red) tomatoes (mostly cherry), bannana peppers, a couple of small eggplant (can you pickle eggplant?) and an okra that I hadn’t noticed. I’ll crack one of these open in a month or so and see how they taste. FWIW, the pickled bannana peppers from September are great.
I went out to the garden on Sunday and took a look at how the okra was doing. Now I’m feeling somewhat, um, inadequate… as a gardener. Really, who lets okra get that big. I should have been picking them every two or three days so that the maximum size was only 3-5 inches, not 8-12. In other gardening news, I opened one jar of the pickled peppers early (they should still be pickling for another 3-4 weeks), and they are delicious. ...
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers; A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked; If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked? When I planted the garden, I put in a couple of banana pepper plants. I seem to recall that my thinking was along the lines of, “I’ve got a great idea, I’ll plant some banana peppers - I love ’em.” Great in abstract, but I don’t actually have any recipes that call for banana peppers. I only seem to eat them pickled. ...
I’ve mentioned before that this is the first year that we’ve had a garden, and it’s been going great. In the early spring we had lots of spinach, arugula, turnips, lettuce, etc. Now that we’re in the summer, it’s time for a whole new type of produce. Last night, I went out to the garden and picked a bunch of tomatoes (yes, I prefer the cherry tomatoes), banana peppers and green beans. Later this week, I’ll pick some of the eggplant and we’ll do eggplant croquettes. Hopefully, we’ll also get some regular peppers, zucchini and maybe even a small watermelon or two. ...
For the first time in about 10 years I planted a garden. We are always drawn to shaded lots, so we’ve never had a place for one before. Even here we’ve got five acres… and they are all wooded. Normally? Great. For a garden, it’s kinda the suck. This year, I decided to plant a garden in the right-of-way/frontage and the heck with what the neighbors think. So, raised beds to avoid the clay soil problems, fencing to keep the deer out (btw - know any bow hunters? I may be a vegetarian, but the deer are getting on my nerves), and we’re set to go. ...
K and I don’t eat much meat - no red meat, no poultry, etc. Theoretically, we still eat fish, but since I won’t cook it… This weekend, we experimented with a couple of new recipes that, in hindsight, were even vegan: Vegetarian Mac and Cheese. Like a lot of people (I suppose), I love macaroni and cheese. Not the Kraft, out of the box, kind, but one made with onion, garlic, mustard powder in a homemade cheese sauce. Unfortunately, K (okay, me too) isn’t supposed to eat that much high-fat cheese. I’ve been making it with low-fat cheese, but well, that’s a little lame. Last week, a guy at my office gave me a recipe that eliminated the cheese sauce and turned out to be (possibly) tastier than the original. Start by sautéing an onion in a little olive oil. Add a drained, rinsed can of cannellini (other beans work, but cannellini are wonderfully creamy), 1.75 cups of water (or vege broth), 1 tbsp of miso paste (I used soy sauce), a little dry mustard and a half cup of raw cashews. Puree, then add a package of cooked spinach and use as the cheese sauce. It’s wonderful. We also made seitan which, as near as I can figure, is pronounced satan. It’s wheat meat - wheat gluten (which means it’s also pronounced “death to etselec and hlf”) and water (or broth) which is cooked and then used as if it was regular meat. We made ours with water, soy sauce and some Italian seasonings. Once it was cooked, we sliced it up, braised it and served it with a wine/mushroom sauce. It was great and a *lot* easier than I thought it would be.
Cooking with the world’s most dangerous* additive; or How I stopped worrying and learned to love MSG. A few weeks ago, I heard Robert Krulwich on NPR talking about umami – the fifth taste. If you didn’t hear it, go to the link above. As always, Krulwich makes the story very engaging. He describes how the Greek philosopher Democritus hypothesized the existence of four tastes: sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Everything you eat is made up of a combination of those four tastes (plus the 10,000 various smells your nose can sense). ...
One of my favorite things is really good bread. Back when I was in school, I bought a book on making bread. It started from a home made sourdough starter that had no commercial yeast. It was basically water and flour with a few grapes tied in a bag to give it some extra yeast. The bread itself also called for no commercial yeast. So the whole loaf was made using whatever yeasts happened to be in the air. A friend of mine, a German woman named Margrid Krueger, made similar bread a gave me a few of her tips on how to solve bread problems, etc. ...
I hope everyone had a good 4th of July and if you had the day off, you enjoyed it. I spent my day doing a little of this and a little of that. I picked up a low water use irrigation system that I’ve run to the flowers and the blueberry bushes. I’ll need a few hundred more feet of pipe to run it out to all of the trees, but this is a good start. ...
I made a few things I’ve never made before for dinner last night, including lemon pizza and two kinds of ice cream. The lemon pizza recipe is from the Wednesday Chef and was mentioned by someone on an IRC channel (etselec? I can’t remember – sorry). K and I don’t eat salmon roe, so I substituted finely chopped capers. Overall, it was pretty good, but we didn’t slice the lemons thin enough and they over powered the pizza. If you’re going to do this, try to get the lemon slices down to about 1mm. ...