Scottish Cow

Scraps, Leftovers and Unripened Tomatoes

Fall is here, summer is over.  I can’t say I’m sad.  It wasn’t even a uncomfortably hot summer here this year, but that doesn’t change the appeal of leafpiles, frost and lots and lots of bread in our oven.  We had shepherd’s pie tonight for dinner and at the same time Tina and I came to the realization that it wasn’t a summer meal, and that was OK with us.

For whatever reason, there are a few blog-related scraps that never quite reached the level of self-actualization required for their own posts and/or recipes.  To throw out one more summer metaphor, they are like the green tomatoes that despite their unblemished and unripened bodies fall off of the vines anyway.  Was their fate always the compost pile or was someone just too rough in the garden?

This was a swiss chard galette – seems like it would be good with any kind of leafy green that can withstand some heat (spinach, chard, mustard, dandelion, etc) – it was just basic tart dough, sauteed chard with onions, and some fresh mozzarella on top.

One of the best things to do with pasta in the summer.  Cook spaghetti, dice tomatoes, chop a ton of mixed fresh herbs, a little garlic cooked in oil if you want, and mix it all together with olive oil.  Toasty bread required.

This was an experiment in homemade mustard that failed spectacularly.  I had such high hopes – mustard seeds soaking in vinegar, beer and wine – figured I’d have 3 different mustards with some additional seasonings and a great taste test.  Yeah.  Because everyone needs to have an out of body experience to share the joy of watching from above as your taste buds melt away from your tongue.  Watery poison is what I got.  Not giving up though.

These stuffed zucchini didn’t get their own recipe because they didn’t taste very good.  We liked the idea of stuffing these baseball shaped guys and the stuffing itself was great – it takes a level of skill beyond our abilities to screw up tomatoes, pesto, croutons and cheese – but the zucchini blew it.  They didn’t have that pleasant zucchini taste and the texture was bizarre – somehow managing to be hard and mealy at the same time.   Oh well…there was no one there to stop us from eating the filling and leaving the rest.

One of my favorite childhood food memories is the simple dish of fat tomato slices with a blob of mayo and some basil.  It’s just perfect.  These were good tomatoes, but they weren’t the best we’ve had (the good ones really just showed up in our garden in the past couple weeks…just in time to DIE).  Accompanying them, a shadow moving across the plate, a carrot that looks disturbingly out of place and some homemade chips with fresh herbs (more fun with the mandoline.)

First attempt at some quasi-pickled hot peppers.  There were recipes out there with any possible ratio of water and vinegar, so that wasn’t much help.  I figured 50/50 was a good place to start and these came out great.  50/50 water and vinegar brought to boil, added some green peppercorns, mustard seeds, coriander and a TB or so each of salt and sugar.  Right into the fridge.  Makes a serious addition to any sandwich (yes, that includes fluffernutters.)

Grilled fish…it always sounds so good.  It always ends up with stinky grill grates covered in charred trout skin.  This was no exception and it’s no accident that there’s no post-shot here.  The pretty uncooked trout with limes and cilantro is all you’re going to get.  Actually there’s the sauce too:

It was a twisted, pureed salsa verde (cilantro, parsley, lime, lemon and garlic) – it was good and will be back again…maybe even in that whisky glass.

The trout that did make it off the grill was actually pretty good…tips for grilling fish anyone?

 

Finally, a great use for any lingering tomatoes (works best with romas/plum) – half them, spread them out on a sheet pan, toss with oil and s/p – herbs and garlic if you want, and roast them as slowly as you feel like it.  Freeze them and save for winter.  Or make a pizza or tart out of them.  Whiz them up into sauce.  It works great with grape/cherry tomatoes left whole.

And then…

summer flies away and we wait for something else to roll in.

Paper Chef 32… The Results!

Whew.  First off, I really need to make a few of these.  All of the entrees look great, some look superb, and three of them looked good enough to win…

In judging, I tried to keep a few things in mind.  First, was the dish inspired?  Did it do something interesting and creative with the ingredients?  Did the chef really get into it?  Did they have fun with it or did they methodically attack the ingredients and bend them to their whims?  Second, how was it executed and presented?  And finally – if I had seen these dishes on a menu, which would I order?  Which looked so enticing that I’d want to race home and try to make it myself?

Given the ingredients, I figured there would be some spring-roll style wraps and I wasn’t disappointed.  I don’t think using the wraps for their “intended” purpose is a negative – in fact, most of the wraps had something to differentiate themselves from their neighbors.  Let’s take a look at these first:

Natashya made an incredible quantity of beautiful wraps with a southwestern-style twist and a yogurt sauce with some fresh spices – given the quantity and the quality, she’s clearly an expert with the rice paper.

Amber, of the exploding eggplant (heh heh), had the most colorful wraps and used soy paper, which I hadn’t seen before.  I liked the use of the eggplant/yogurt sauce as a binder – as a few others commented, the quinoa didn’t seem to want to stay put and that seemed to be a good approach to address that.  Lori, like Amber included some eggplant, and turned the yogurt into a really nice looking raita – the wonderfully refreshing sauce.  Speaking of refreshing, Tanna used what I think what was a statistically unique phrase in her wraps:  “cooling wasabi” Yikes!  In any event, I loved the wall of tomatoes that was visible through the wrap.

Kate (who, in the interest of full disclosure, is my cousin) did something I love -taking a known dish and turning it on it’s side – i think the “invisible” stuffed grape leaves would have been fantastic had she been able to get the rice paper, but even so, the homemade naan was an awesome touch.

Mike was the only one who took the approach of frying his rolls, which I must admit was my first thought with the wraps (being a complete sucker for fried Vietnamese Egg rolls), so I was happy to see some crispiness introduced into the contest.

All of the wraps looked delicious, all had something unique, but if I had to pick one that rose above the others, at least for me, it would be Haloo’s roll/wrap of the quinoa omelet.  The presentation was wonderful and simple.  I thought the idea of embedding the quinoa in strips of omelet was genius.  The homemade tomato/yogurt sauce looked like the perfect balance for the omelet in terms of flavor and texture and in this case, the rice paper really looked like it was used as a delivery vehicle for the really good stuff inside.

Both of the non-wrap recipes really appealed to me as well – Magnus’s deconstructed Cambodian spring roll was absolutely gorgeous – the plate just had a tremendous visual appeal, and despite his stated aversion to rice paper and quinoa (“Rice paper is about as attractive as Michael Jackson” is certainly the funniest line in all of the posts), the dish showed creativity in the shrimp package and looked like it was executed perfectly.

Finally, we have Pia’s roasted tomato soup with the quinoa croquettes.  It stood out amongst all the dishes as one that gave the tomatoes a larger billing – they became a major player as the other ingredients took a step back and the concept of using the rice paper as a wrap completely disappeared.  Visually, the dish also looked fantastic, simple and a great combination of textures between the soup, the croquettes, and 2 garnishes – one cool and smooth and one crispy.

So, in the end, it came down to Magnus, Haloo and Pia…

What would it be?  The stunning presentation and creativity of the nime chow and the quinoa omelet rolls?  Or the standalone tomato soup with quinoa “meatballs” – looking both complex and simply satifying at once?

 

In the end, it was Pia’s!

It was the one dish I kept coming back to – the one that appealed to me the most as what I would like to sit down to at my own table.  It had such appeal and the same time it appeared so simple and straightforward and really embraced the ingredients in a different way.  Each element looked perfect individually and together.

I am longing for a quinoa croquette right now.

There’s a concept in the software industry (where I spend my days) that striving for the right design is all about making it as simple as possible but not any simpler.  It’s put even better in a quote by the author/aviator Antoine de St. Exupery* that I read recently:  “Perfection, then, is finally achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”  I think this dish came close to that – so congratulations to Pia, our winner, and to Magnus and Haloo both for beautiful, creative dishes that came so damn close.

Thanks to Ilva for organizing everything, and thanks for playing!

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* Unrelated to food (unless you like snake, I guess) - you should read The Little Prince if you haven’t…

The Making of Tomato Sauce

The Paper Chef entries are in and jeez, they look really, really good (not making my job very easy.)  They are still under consideration, so stop back in a few days for the results.’

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In the meantime, let’s talk about tomatoes.  This is the first time I’ve made a good ol’ traditional tomato sauce from scratch.  It might be second nature for someone like, oh, Tina, who was raised on the stuff.  Seriously, they just put it in her bottle when she was a baby.  You should have seen the contracts I had to sign before marrying into her family. All this legalese about hereforthwith honoring and respecting the sauce.

Anyway, Tina has some fond and some not so fond memories of the annual sauce making as a kid.  Being the one relegated to chief tomato-washer (there was only one), she woke on the mornings of sauce days with a sense of disappointment – the knowledge of losing her Saturday – and not from a warning the night before, but from the rich smell of the first batch of simmering tomatoes already filling the house.  Time to head to the cellar and get scrubbing.

Now, I think the reminisces (new noun, just for me) are mostly happy and she jumped at the chance to take a bushel of tomatoes from her father’s garden this year to make sauce in our kitchen (in the interest of full disclosure, we committed two of our tomatoes to the process as well.) 

Our final output was about 12 qts.  We decided to freeze it.  Her family used to make 10 times that amount, and they would be canned and processed.  The scale of the operation was clearly different but the tools were the same.  We inherited the food mill with the same ancient wood-handled corer and a butter knife in the box that Tina remembered from 20 years ago, used then and now to clean out the skins and seeds from the mill’s “exhaust.”

The operation itself was carried out according to the plans that were laid out  (I was legally prevented from any alterations, and in hindsight, I can assure you I doesn’t need any.) 

I have to say – and this is coming from someone who is admittedly not a huge fan of the “red sauce” and spaghetti and meatballs – this stuff is fantastic.  It’s an extremely flavorful, lightly seasoned, not-too-thick wondrous tomato concoction that would be great for sauce, soup, braising, stews and baths. 

Here we go:

1) Get some tomatoes – these were not “sauce” tomatos, typically Romas.  These were a mix of plain old round tomatoes with some beefsteaky-heirloom big ugly mothers thrown in too.  Much juicier than normal – but homegrown, that’s the important piece of information here..

 

2) Wash them there tomatoes.  The easiest way – fill up the sink, let them soak, pick one out and get to work.

 

3) Use a coring implement, or other spoon/knife type device to scoop out the core from the top

 

4)  Just soaking…

 

5)  A batch that has been washed and cored.  We had three of us working (well two adults, one kindergartner).  It worked well with someone continuing to wash and core while we got some of the tomatoes moved on to the next step.

 

6) Quarter the tomatoes (with a glove if you have cut) and collect them in a bowl.

 

7)  Behold the juice!

 

8)  On the stove, over medium/high heat, with a little water in the bottom of the pan to prevent burning.  Get them to a nice simmer, and stir every so often.  The goal is to soften them up and release some more juice.

 

9)  Once they were cooked down, we dumped them into a strainer and got some of the liquid out.  I’m not sure how much – we may have retained more than it needed.

This is what they looked like right before they met their destiny.

 

10)  This was their destiny.

 

11) The food mil in operation…What a fantastic machine.  The tomatoes go in the top, You turn the crank, it turns an auger that’s spring-loaded inside of a perforated tube.  The junk that doesn’t fit through the perforations (the skin and seeds) comes out the end of the auger.  The juice and pulp come out of the perforations and down a separate chute.

Molly had a blast pulling out the skins and seeds.

12)  Providing some motivation for the tomatoes…

 

13)  The mill in action…

 

14)  Once you’ve collected a big batch of skins and seeds, send them through again – lots of juice and pulp still hiding in there.

15)  The amazing powers of a pot of sauce.  Well, it’s not sauce yet.  Got all the collected pulp and juice back on the stove over medium low and let it hang out for awhile.  It cooked down a bit and thickened up.  I suppose you could let it cook all day if you want.  Ours ended up on the stove for a hour or two.

 

16)  Time for some flavor.  Big pile of basil with some parsley from the garden.

 

17)  Lots of olive oil, chopped onions, 2 heads of garlic and salt.  Cooked for a few minutes to soften.  Added the basil, stirred it up and ran it through the food processor until it was pretty smooth.

18)  Back on the stove.  Cooked it for a few minutes over medium – it was bubbling lightly.  You know you always wanted to make some green lava.

 

19)  Pesto up close

 

20)  Finally, we stirred the pesto into the sauce, added salt and a little sugar to taste, cooked for a little while longer and that was it.  Let it cool down and got it in some plastic containers for the deep freeze.

The flavor/seasonings are not overwhelming.  It’s still mostly tomato and can be customized for whatever you want to use it for.  So far we’ve done two things – last weekend when we made it, we immediately poached/fried a few eggs in a pan of it for dinner.  With some bread to sop up the sauce, it was ridiculously good. 

Yesterday we had some fish stew in it.  To bring this post full circle, it was similar to my Paper Chef 31 dish, but with halibut that our friend D.G. brought back from Alaska (he caught it when he wasn’t busy riding a motorcycle around the wilderness).  Outstanding!

We now have 12 quarts of summer, caught, bottled and preserved for when we’ll need it most…

Buffalo, mid-February, it’s been snowing for a week.  We’ve considered burning the TV for heat and Tina is walking around the house with 3 pairs of socks on and is wrapped in blankets like a mummy from Pottery Barn.

Hello Tomatoes.

Braised Lamb Shoulder

Just in case the sheer number of vegetables around here lately has been overwhelming, it’s time for some meat.

This was my first encounter with a lamb shoulder.  I’ve had nothing but good times with legs and shanks in the past.  Chops are good, but for whatever reason (probably price), they never get made at home.  I was looking forward to trying the shoulder, and hoped it held the same promise as the other shoulder cuts – the pork butt and the chuck roast. 

A quick review:  Shoulder muscles – strong – lots of movement – lots of exercise – tougher meat – fat and connective tissues.  Think of the exact opposite of a pork chop or a beef filet. 

These cuts (not the pork chops and the filet) are far and away my favorites when feeling carnivorous. They don’t require anything fancy – in fact, I think they are at their best when done simply.  And the best way to cook them is undoubtedly the braise.  Cook it long and slow with some liquid in the pot and you’re braising, and you’re probably going to end up with something good.

The options, of course, are endless – to brown or not to brown, what kind of liquid, what kind of vegetables, flavors, aromatics and herbs.  The sauce at the end – strain, reduce, puree, remove?

Lovelier than the sheer number of options are the overall pace of the preparation and the results.  Braised dishes are perfect for evenings and cold weekend days (so I really had no business doing this in August) – you do some initial work to get the dish going, you get it in the oven or at a simmer on the stovetop and you walk away, coming back every now and then for a whiff or a stir.  I almost always make them the day/night before, as most braised items refrigerate really well, often in the same pot, and usually taste better the next day anyway.

So, back to the lamb.  I figured I would go with the simplest preparation of all to get a sense of the flavor and behavior of the cut.  It was a 3 LB piece of boneless lamb shoulder that had been gathered up into a butchers twine net, but I released it from those shackles before cooking.

The following approach could be used as a nice pattern for any braisable item.

1) In a nice, heavy pot (with a lid) – heat some oil – just enough to coat the bottom – over medium high heat.

2) Dry the lamb off as well as possible, rub with salt and cook until all sides are well browned. The oil is going to sputter and make a mess, but it’s not only worth it, but necessary.  The outside of the meat should look completely done when you’re done browning it.  Keep flipping it until all sides are done.

3) Remove from pan – if the oil looks nasty, dump it out, add some fresh, and add a chopped onion and some salt.  Cook over medium heat, scraping up the bits from the bottom as you go.

4) When the onion is soft and taking on some color, throw in a couple cloves of minced/sliced garlic and cook for another minute.

5) Add the lamb back in and pour in a dry-ish white wine about halfway up.  You could use some chicken stock, red wine or even water instead.

6)  Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and then either get it on a gentle, steady simmer (this is where a heavy Dutch oven pays its dividends) or put it in the oven at 300. 

7) Cook for as long as it takes to get completely tender.  I didn’t want the oven going, so I had mine on the stove and it took about 4 hours.  You can flip the lamb every now and then.  I left the lid tilted off toward the end, to let some of the liquid evaporate.  No idea if any did.

8) Take the lamb out, pour the liquid into a tall glass – when it starts to cool, all the fat will come to the top and you can spoon it off.  You can add salt/pepper at this point as well.  I added some chopped marjoram and lemon zest. 

You can stash it all in the fridge or eat it right away.  I shredded the lamb, and ate it gleefully over some egg noodles with the sauce and some minced parsley and more lemon zest.

The results?  I wasn’t disappointed at all, although I didn’t think I’d be.  The cut braised beautifully – there were still a few grisly bits left at the end, but they were easy to remove when shredding.  It was tender, juicy and full of flavor.  The sauce was ridiculously good – it was fresh and concentrated, not muddy at all.

Molly, my official taster/new-kindergartner loved it, requesting more “lamb juice” at one point – it was both gross and appreciated.

Paper Chef 32: Game On!

After a brief respite Paper Chef is back!  The little vacation was well-planned.  The international commission that oversees P.C. decided it would only be fair to take the month of August off to allow our lesser known sibling have some time in the bright lights.  Now that the Olympics are over, we can retake the headlines as the cornerstone competition of international acclaim, amazing demonstrations of athletic prowess and yes, well, maybe some controversial wardrobe choices too.

Hey, what you wear when you’re cooking is your business…and maybe your neighbors.

In any event, in Paper Chef 31 – July’s round – it was a first time for me and it was a blast!  I was inspired by the ingredient choices and the dish cooked by Hank, the previous winner.  It seemed like it would be fun and challenging and there was no disappointment whatsoever.  I can only hope that there are some other new folks and returning competitors alike this time around. 

Without further delay, the ingredients!  Chosen randomly from this month’s list are the first three:

Yogurt

Quinoa

Rice Paper or Other Wrapper

And to this, from the list I added:

Tomatoes

I know that tomatoes weren’t the most interesting or unusual judge’s choice, but taking a cue from the season, it had to be done.  Those of us in tomato growing climates know that there’s nothing that compares to a ripe, warm tomato grown in season, somewhere near your plate.  So there you have it.

Yogurt, Quinoa, Rice Paper/Wrapper and Tomatoes

(Secretly, the folk music lover side of me was cheering for Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme)

Clearly, there’s some leeway with the rice paper.  I would think eggroll/wonton wraps would be fair game, along with tortillas of varying shapes and sizes.  But rice paper wraps are the goal if possible.

I’m excited for the quinoa and will be the first to admit that:

a) I’ve never cooked with it – have 2 bags of it in the pantry and it’s near the top of my list of recipes awaiting birth, so please, inspire me.

b) I was totally pronouncing it wrong until I read Melissa’s post last week.  Oops.  Good thing I hadn’t actually said the word to someone, just lusting after it in my mind.

Finally, the rules:

Design it, cook it, take some nice photos and write it up on your blog.  Send a note to paperchef [at] gmail [dot] com.  Ilva, our illustrious Paper Chef organizer will roundup the entries and the judging shall begin.

Entries need to be in by midnight DST* on 9/9/08.

Feel free to leave a note here or email Ilva with any questions or comments.

Are you still here?  Get cooking!

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* Deliciousness Standard Time

Roasted Eggplant Dip

I hesitate (just a little bit) to call this Baba Ghanoush because I’m not positive what authentic Baba is – and I’m sure there is plenty of discussion about that already – so Roasted Eggplant Dip seemed safe and plenty descriptive.

Two things:

1) If you love eggplant, you’ll love this

2) If you don’t like eggplant, give this a try.  It’s a little different from your everyday eggplant.

(How’s that for equivocation?)

It’s not just me hedging my bets though, as the flavor is certainly eggplant, but the texture of this is so light and silky – and I think it’s the texture that gets to most aubergineophobics (yeah, not a real word, I checked).  But I do wish that we called them aubergine here in the US and not eggplants – it’s a beautiful word.

Onto the dip:

Step 1:  In your oven, or in a heavy pan on the stove, or best yet, in the grill, cook the eggplants fairly slowly until the skin is charred and they basically collapse into a pile of mush.  I did 2 eggplants, as we had a bunch coming in from the garden, but 1 would be fine, just less dip (duh).  I put the grill on medium low, and just left them in there, turning every 10 minutes or so until they were done.* 

Step 2:  Once off the heat, slice the skin open and let cool for a bit.  It should be completely soft inside.  When you can handle them, scrape all the eggplant guts out into the food processor. 

Step 3:  Add some yogurt – you can add as much or as little as you want.  Less yogurt and the dip will be more eggplanty.  I used the Fage (Greek style – thick, flavorful, wonderful, worth every penny) yogurt.  You can get a similar consistency with regular yogurt by leaving it in a strainer for a little while.  Add a clove of garlic, minced, and pinches of salt and pepper.  Squeeze half a lemon in.

Step 4:  Run the processor while drizzling in some olive oil – you don’t need a lot.  Stop taste and add more of anything.  Sorry, you can’t subtract.

I went easy on the garlic (against every single bone in my body) and left out the fresh herbs (again, at this point of the summer, also feat of willpower) – this was intentional, as I guess I wanted something pretty mellow and smooth, and not too rich - I’ve had some very, very creamy Baba Ghanoush and was shooting for something different.

That’s it – eggplant, yogurt, garlic, lemon, s/p and oil.

I actually did stir some minced marjoram (or it might have been oregano) into the leftovers on day 2, and that was really good as well.

With eggplants ripe and ready to eat, this is the way to go.  It works well with the ones that are getting a little tired and wrinkly too, since they are being obliterated anyway.

What to do with it?

• Veggie Dip
• Eat as pictured, spread on toasted pitas, topped with tomatoes, some herbs and oil
• Sandwich/wrap filling or spread
• Dessert topping (and floor wax, of course)

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* This post was delayed a bit, as during my first attempt I put the eggplants on the grill and left them there.  For almost 3 hours.  When I remembered, at midnight, I ran out to discover they had turned it to crispy black shells, completely hollow, all of the flesh long gone.  I touched one and poof, like that, it was gone…turned to dust.  Don’t do that to your eggplants, please. :)

August Vegetable Pie

Alternative titles considered, but ultimately rejected, for this post:

1)  Roasted Vegetable Tart

2)  Pile of Healthy Stuff, Surrounded by Cheese and Butter-Ridden Crust

3) The Pie That Shall Not Be Named

We’re left with “August Vegetable Pie,” which in all honesty doesn’t really sound so hot, but here were are.  It’s August after all, and we’ve finally got some fantastic eggplant and tomatoes, and although the zucchini is heading on its way out, our kitchen table was overwhelmed with a pile of those three (lazy centerpiece?) - so that’s what went into the pie.

I’m not quite sure whether to call this a pie or a tart, but I suppose it doesn’t matter so much.  It requires a single batch of your standard pie/tart dough.  Any all-purpose and especially any baking cookbook will undoubtedly have a recipe for it, if you don’t have a favorite already. If you’re feeling fancy, Google (or even better, use Food Blog Search) for “Pate Brisee.”  Lazy?  Check out one of these recipes.  I usually use something similar, all butter, with an egg, nice and flaky and easy.

The inspiration for this came from a tart my mom used to make that consisted of a pie crust, a layer of mustard, tomatoes, basil and cheese.  That just wasn’t going to plow through our pile of veggies though.

The zucchini and eggplant got sliced, tossed with oil/salt/pepper, and roasted in the oven (at 350) on a rack on a cookie sheet until they were soft and starting to brown.  The tomatoes got the same treatment, but after they had been lightly salted and pressed in paper towels.  A lot of work, yes, but have you had a vegetable tart that was overrun with liquid before?   Sogged out crust and watery filling?  Yeah, me too.  Those suck.

So all the vegetables get cooked ahead and layered into the pie crust.  As extra water-insurance, I tried baking the crust for about 10-15 minutes before putting the veggies in, with a layer of grated parmesan sprinked in.  I would have pre baked it anyway, but the cheese seemed like a good idea as well.  It didn’t work out so well – normally when blind (pre) baking the shell, we’d put some foil in it, and fill it with old beans to keep the crust in place.  Well, I couldn’t do that with the cheese in there, and just to prove a point, the crust completely collapsed.  Not sure how I’d approach it next time, but pulling it out a little early, smushing the dough back up the walls and letting it finish the pre-bake worked out all right.

After it’s baked, the veggies get layered in.  I didn’t want to clobber it with garlic, which is my usual M.O., but we had some pesto left over, so a thin layer of that ended up in the middle, and it worked well.

First, the layer by layer photos and then an outline of the overall plan..  I do believe just about any vegetable would be great, so go for it.

 

- Make pie crust, refrigerate at least 1 hour, maybe overnight (let warm up for 15 minutes if you do that)

- Roll out crust, get into pie dish and bake with or without cheese and/or weights (you’re on your own here) for 10-15 minutes until it starts to firm up and get a little golden

- While that’s baking, slice and prep veggies.

- While pie crust is cooling, roast veggies.

- Layer everything in.  This one was as follows:

1) Parmesan (baked in)
2) Eggplant
3) Pesto
4) Zucchini, sprinkled with a little more parm
5) Tomato, little more parm
6) Big pile of shredded basil
7) Melting cheese – fontina.

Back into the oven until is bubbly and you can no longer withstand the urge to burn your tongue on the cheesy, stewy tomatoes.

Molly (quickly becoming master of the well timed one liner) decides to make a statement between bites of this very meal: 

“I’m done with veggies.”  She says, with a little nod of her head to confirm it. 

“Just candy from now on.” 

And continues eating her vegetable candy pie.

Molly and the Earth

The happiness and excitement that Molly exudes when she’s running through the grass to get to the garden is something else.  Trying as carefully as her little hands can manage to cut some lettuce leaves with the purposefully dull pre-school scissors.  Filling the basket, flipping the still-growing yellow and red stemmed chard leaves back and forth, it’s obvious she’s wondering when we get to pick some more.  They are crowding each other out, and we need to make some space where we carelessly planted the seeds too close together, weeks ago, together.  The pride in painting her own little terra cotta pots with pictures of tomatoes and peppers and then getting a seedling into each one, with only a few casualties.  The tears shed over her worm collections, the first of which had its population devastated in what’s come to be known as “The Flood” – the night their screened-in “house” was left outside, presumably for some fresh air, only to encounter a downpour.  There was no ark.

 

It’s gotten to the point where we can dispatch her out to the herb garden with a request for a few cilantro sprigs or some mint, and she’ll usually return with what was requested, usually without dirty roots hanging on, but not always.

She redistributes toads around the yard to the gardens, thinking they’ll be more comfortable there, like a force of nature.  She’s the fifth wind.

It makes me smile when she asks a question that I don’t know the answer to.  “How many cabbages will be on that plant?  Where do the eggplants come out of?”  There’s something to be said for a 31 year-old learning the same things at the same time as his almost 5 year-old.

She’s obviously going to be a better gardener than me some day.  More than that, the building, the digging, the dirt under your fingernails, seeds breaking from the soil – I feel like we’re starting a family tradition – and a wonderful one at that.

She’s learning to work, to have a bit of self reliance in a world that seems to encourage otherwise at times.  She’s learning how good and simple food can be and how annoying it is gritting on dirt between your teeth when you try to eat something straight from the ground.  She’s getting slightly less afraid of things that creep and crawl.  Her pride is a sign, I think, of her feelings for her surroundings.  She may not know it, and certainly has trouble expressing it sometimes, but she cares.  Not just about her family, and her toys, and getting a nice plate of cheese & crackers to snack on in the afternoon.  She cares about this little skewed rectangle of ours, 96 feet wide, and 300 feet from the curb to the weedy fence all the way at the back that we alone are responsible for. 

Good for her. 

So, what to do with all the vegetables…A few ideas, you know, aside from just eating them straight:

1) Better salad dressing – try something different.  One of our favorites is a miso based dressing that was born to be customized.  The dressing gets its body from oil and miso (usually just white) – add some sweet, some sour and herbs and you’re all set.  You really need a blender to get it emulsified and a food processor is probably too big, unless you’re doing a huge batch.

In a blender – a couple spoons of miso, some chopped up chives, scallions or a little minced onion, a spoon of honey or sugar, a little bit of vinegar/lemon juice, a handful of fresh herbs (nothing too strong, hold the rosemary), and give it a blend.  If it’s really thick, add a little water.  While the blender is running, slowly pour in some oil.  I like grapeseed or canola for this (something plain).  The dressing will thicken up as you go.  Stop, taste, fix.  You can add more water if you want it thinner.

It would be great on steamed/grilled veggies as well as the basic green salad.

The picture isn’t fantastic, but then again, it’s just a bowl of dressing.

2) Wrap it – I’ve said it before, wraps are great for kids.  They are excellent for using up leftovers, and hiding ingredients that might be cause for strife (kale, I’m looking in your direction.)  If you don’t have any ingredients to hide, you can set up a big pile of stuff like this, and everyone can build their own (the fruit wasn’t going in.) 

3) Eggs:

Again nothing new, but a little different.  We had some left over spaghetti with pesto.  It ended up getting cooked into a frittata with zucchini, shredded chard leaves and a whole bunch of herbs.  Hard to go wrong with that.

…

 

Lemon on Pizza, Endless Rain and the Coriander Snail

 

Here’s the deal – I have a bunch of stuff to say about vegetables.  Two posts worth probably, this being the first.  There will be lots of pictures I’ve been saving up.  There’ll be me babbling about the garden and about the CSA and about summer things in general.  There will be complaints about weather and some overflowing pride in Molly.  There will be some ideas for recipes as well, but you’ve got to sift through the above to get to them.  I’m not trying to alienate all the carnivores out there, but it’s that time of year.  Here we go…

That first picture is a zucchini and roasted tomato pizza.  First, everyone who knows anyone has zucchini right now.  It’s unavoidable.  We’ve been eating alot of it, but this is the first time I’ve had it on pizza.  I ran it through the recently acquired mandoline (so fun, so fast, so threatening to the livelihood of my fingers).  I salted it, tossed it up and put it a strainer for a good hour to get out as much water as possible.  Moisture + pizza = problems, and I was picturing the rest of the toppings building an ark after seeing zucchini show up.  The salt and strain helped, but the pizza was still juicy coming out of the oven, so it went on a cooking rack and I used a meat thermometer to poke it full of holes – yes, drainage holes in your pizza.  It worked.

The tomatoes were the last of last years.  Towards the end of the summer we were talking all the cherry/roma/grape tomatoes we could get, tossing them with oil and salt (and optionally garlic and herbs) and putting them in a real low oven for a few hours in the evening.  Vacuum sealed and frozen, they made for some kick-ass pizza toppings and pasta sauces all winter.

Finally the lemon.  In the middle of Mark Bittman’s 101 picnic ideas list (a list full of inspiration) was a comment to try some squeezed lemon on leftover pizza.  Needless to say, I was intrigued.  Forget the leftovers, it seemed like it would be great with the zucchini and it was nothing short of incredible.  In fact, I think it made the pizza what it was.  It brightened up the entire thing.  Just amazing.

 

Simpler zucchini:  Mandolined thinly the long way, sauteed in oil with sliced garlic, salt and pepper.  Chopped mint and basil once it was cooked.  Simple, simple, simple.

 

I had never really put 2 and 2 together between cilantro and coriander.  I mean, I knew they were from the same plant, and that coriander was the seed, but never thought about it more than that until our cilantro grew so far out of control that the seeds showed up on the top.  Neat.  So they got collected and seem to be drying out well on the windowsill.  An unexpected harvest.  A fisheye-looking self portrait above, along with some rare blue sky.  Below, I had to include the photo, as it appears that one of the coriander seeds has decided to go snail and grown some eye-stalks (click and check it out bigger – bizarre).

Here’s the herb garden from a few weeks ago.  It’s completely out of control at this point.  It seems like I throw a few herbs in just about everything we’re eating, but still can’t keep up.

What are your favorite uses for fresh herbs?

Our weather has been truly bizarre.  I always complain that we get shortchanged on the spring and fall here, but it appears that late July and August are a little lazy this year and we’re all about fall.  We’ve had more cool, rainy days that I can count.  I don’t think there’s anything in the world better for sleeping than 65 degrees and thunderstorms, but for tomatoes?  I don’t think they’re too happy.  We have an awful lot of guys that still look like this…

In fact, aside from our sun gold cherry tomatoes (awesome), we haven’t harvested a single full size tomato.  On the other hand, our lettuce is doing fantastic and hasn’t crapped out on us yet.

The carrots I was previously drooling over – I ended up making, as promised, a shredded carrot salad.  Peeled and grated several carrots.  Ate several more,(What’s up, Doc?), toasted a handful of cashews and crushed them up and added them to a carrots.  A little salt, pepper, oil (I used avocado oil) and half a lime’s worth of juice.  Finally a pinch of chopped mint.  I thought it was fantastic.  Tina thought it might be a little too minty…which I could see – so if you add mint, really just a little bit.  It was definitely best fresh, as after a night in the fridge nothing was quite as crisp, especially the nuts.

Finally, if you’re you’re the one person that found this site after Googling for “Chunky Scottish Snowball” – congratulations!  That’s the best search ever.  I hope you found what you’re looking for.

Deliciousness in the Key of Orange

A quick revelation…

I will admit that I’ve never had a nice, small carrot just hours after it was pulled from the dirt.  A supermarket carrot can’t even compare to it.  It’s not even close.  In fact, we had a bag of supermarket carrots in the fridge when these new guys arrived, and they huddled themselves in the back of the vegetable bin, glancing nervously over their shoulders.

The supermarket carrot:  Dry, tough, and a woody center.  A few days after being in the fridge – floppy.  Have you ever had a flaccid carrot?  Is there anything more disgusting?

These carrots:  Sweet, juicy and tender all the way through.  There weren’t two different textures, just a single, perfect orange crispiness.  Abby was in bed, but the 3 of us sat there, each eating our own. Molly neglected to stop and ate the stem end and all, with whatever was left up there that I hadn’t trimmed.

We’ll do something good with these, something befitting that can show them off.  A simple shredded carrot salad maybe.  Stay tuned.

Thank you carrots, thank you dirt.