Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

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.

Well, I couldn’t let them rot, so yesterday I went out and picked, not a peck, but maybe a half gallon (0.25 peck) of peppers and spent part of the afternoon pickling them.  I’ve got two pints of whole peppers and four pints of sliced.  We’ll see how they taste in a few weeks.

Before and after:

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.

The best part for me has been that we’ve gotten a good amount of produce with a fairly minimal amount of work.  I planted densely, but in raised beds.  I haven’t weeded and the whole thing looks like an overgrown mess, but it produces quite a bit:

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.

I started planting late winter/early spring crops back in February and they’re starting to come into harvest.  The picture below is from a week ago and the plants have since grown significantly larger.  Last week we did an arugula [1] and basil pesto, this week it’s been a salad and probably spinach quiche [2].  I think that by the time everything starts to bolt, it’ll be warm enough for summer vegetables.

Let’s see, clockwise from the bottom right, the boxes are growing: 1) spinach, arugula and leeks; 2) kale, lettuce and a mesclun mix (not to be confused with mescaline – that’s a completely different plant 🙂 ); 3) broccoli, beets and fennel; and 4) peas, carrots and turnips.  Yeah, I went a bit overboard.  I figure that we’ve got about a month for harvest, the kale/lettuce/mesclun will wrap up first.  Last will be the broccoli/fennel/beets plus the leeks which won’t finish developing until late summer.

Footnotes:

[1] It seems like every liberal type I know who has planted a garden is growing arugula.  FWIW, I suspect there are two reasons for this: 1) it’s awesome, and 2) it’s a big FU to the republicans who thought that “arugula eater” was an insult.  If it makes you happier, call it rocket – the southern corruption of roquette.

[2] Yeah, don’t give me that “real men” b.s.  We’re talking about a meal with a pie crust, cheese, cream and 3 or 4 eggs.  It’s a heart attack waiting to happen, which as near as I can tell is what makes it something a “real man” would eat 😉

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.

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.

Inspired by hsarik, I made some beer and cheese bread. We used that to make veggie-sausage poboys. That, some onion rings and some fruit made for a great holiday dinner.

Finally, I may have a new favorite song: “Future Soon” by Jonathan Coulton. How can you not like a song featuring love, lasers and robot wars whose chorus contains the lines:

And I won’t always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away

Okay, I’m a bit of a nerd

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.

We also made a couple of ice creams.  In general, we like to do different types of ice cream and to try new things.  Strangely enough, we had never made fruit ice creams (chai – yes, cinnamon – yes, fruit – no).  Fortunately, I had picked up a pint of blueberries and a pound of cherries.  So, two different flavors: blueberry and cherry!  They both came out well in their vanilla ice cream base.  Now if I was slightly more adventurous, I would have made the cherry in a chocolate base; and if I was really adventurous, I would have ignored the fruit and made rosemary ice cream as described by a friend last week 🙂