food

Always getting ready.

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It was 20 degrees this morning. About time, too: This has been a weirdly warm fall, with temperatures in the low 50s as recently as the past weekend. Not that I like shivering when I get up, mind you, but it seems appropriate to the season.

Yet while putting the yard to bed today DF harvested the last of the green and red leaf lettuce. Planted right next to the house, it escaped the freeze. We ate some of the leaves on our suppertime hamburgers.

 

“The last of the outdoor harvest,” he noted. “Eating lettuce from the yard on October 16…Most years you think you’re lucky to be eating it on September 16.”

As I said: weirdly warm. Yet I felt a pang even as I snapped the crisp lettuce ribs between my teeth. Delicious – and the last. We’ll be blessed if we eat fresh salad again in June.

 

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The quinoa whisperer.

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Our garden is coming along more slowly than last year, probably because the soil was cold. We got something close to normal snowfall this year, for a change.

Within the past week the sugar snap peas have started to take off but the green beans are puzzlingly slow. So are several kinds of squash (spaghetti, blue Hubbard, pink banana), which aren’t anywhere close to dead but have somehow failed to launch.

Gardening is a series of trials and errors. But there’s still time.

Strawberries and raspberries look glorious, albeit still really green; we hope to be picking within two weeks. Carrots, beets, leaf and romaine lettuces, two kinds of Asian greens, potatoes and rhubarb look healthy. The spinach is pretty much spawned-out, so what’s left will probably go into the boiling bag.

The real stars this year? Quinoa.

 

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Adventures in steamed bread.

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bread-steamingAs part of my low-maintenance prepper campaign, I’ve been thinking about ways we could cook if a major earthquake led to a loss of electricity. We’ve got a burn barrel and a Weber outside, and if the gas were still on we could manually light the stovetop (but not the oven).

We’ve got tons of staples on hand and could likely outlast a major emergency – even if all our shiftless relatives showed up – because we have a fireplace insert plus loads of canned goods, flour and beans. One thing we couldn’t do easily? Bread.

Thus I’ve been researching recipes like stovetop corn pone, tortillas and other relatively simple staffs of life. When I recently got a copy of “The Kitchen Stories Cookbook: Comfort Cookin’ Made Fascinating and Easy,” my eyes fell upon a recipe for Boston brown bread.

The result is literally steaming in the photograph. (DF snapped the picture shortly after the first pieces were cut.) It was the perfect antidote to a cold winter night when paired with a thick soup made from boiling-bag broth, a pint of home-canned turkey, and whatever vegetables we had on hand.

My theory is that fresh bread, or even fresh tortillas, can make an ordinary meal – or an emergency one – seem much nicer than it actually is.

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Physics and frugality.

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thRecently I had fun trying to recognize the desiccated ingredients of the boiling bag I was emptying into the slow cooker. After a few minutes of frugality CSI (cooking scene investigation), I identified the following:

Onion skins, Asian greens (they’ve gone to seed so I’m removing the last small leaves), teeny-tiny green apples (to avoid stressing our newly planted trees, DF took off most of the fruits), carrot tops and greens, potato peels, and small green tomatoes (jumpers from our greenhouse plants).

Also cucumber peels (from fruits too high in cucurbitacin to eat as-is), red romaine leaves (too bitter after bolting for salads, but fine for broth), green-bean ends, squash blossoms (from our blue Hubbard plant), dandelion greens and a little chickweed (because revenge).

After adding a freezer container of vegetable cooking water – from corn, peas, lentils, potatoes and green beans – I had quite the potage de garbage going. Cooked and drained, it smelled a lot like Campbell’s vegetable soup and tasted even better.

All this recycling reminded me of the notion that energy can’t be created or destroyed, but rather transformed from one form to another. In our home, food gets created – we grow the stuff as well as cook it from supermarket ingredients – but it never really goes away.

 

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What summer tastes like.

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GetAttachmentThumbnailThis vegetable plate represents summer in our yard and greenhouse. The red tomato slices are Czech’s Bush, the oddly colored ones are a Siberian variety called Black Prince, the cucumber is called Space Saver and the garish beets are Detroit Dark Red, pickled in a bonehead-simple recipe of vinegar, sugar, water, cinnamon and cloves.

In making that plate I flashed back to the covered-dish suppers of my youth. Each table in the church basement had a cut-glass dish of pickles, olives and pickled beets (or something quite like it). The suppers tended to happen in fall and winter, so freshly sliced tomatoes and cukes weren’t on the menu.

After an unusually sunny June and July, we’ve been treated to near-constant clouds and rain. “State fair weather,” we call it. Great for the rhubarb and raspberries and other outdoor crops. Not so much for the greenhouse tomatoes, which are bursting with fruit but ripening more slowly than we’d like.

 

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Can she bake a berry pie?

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thToday was a true Sabbath: We kicked back and  didn’t do anything we didn’t want to do. In fact, DF and I didn’t leave the property once he’d returned home from early Mass.

It was a day for naps, a bit of gardening in between rain squalls, reading and eating stuff from our own yard: cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans, raspberries and rhubarb.

It was also a day for pie. Although I love the confection dearly I rarely make it. Today I decided pie was the perfect way to get rid of some of last year’s raspberries, some of this year’s rhubarb and all the blueberries that DF got in prison.

All the best stories include the word “prison” in them, don’t they?

 

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Frugal hack: Pack a snack

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thI drove a friend to an outpatient procedure today. The appointment was for 1 p.m. but we left at 11:15 a.m., which timing was awkward: It was too early for me to have lunch and the procedure didn’t take place until 1:30 p.m.

Even if it hadn’t been too early, eating in front of someone who’d been fasting since midnight would have been cruel.

Even though I’d had oatmeal and homemade yogurt before the appointment, I was hungry long before it was over. Fortunately, I was also prepared.

 

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A pullet surprise.

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thMonths and months ago I wrote a post called “Ask me (almost) anything.” Among other things, it invited readers to send questions that I might (or might not) answer.

The questions came in, and remained unanswered. Sorry ’bout that.

Also sorry about maintaining radio silence since May 6. My book project plus an issue to be explained later have kept me from doing any writing for fun.

Today I’ll kill two birds with one stone (plus one really unappetizing picture).

 

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The promise of spring.

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IMG_20150622_182817When I got back from Phoenix the house smelled like dirt. In a good way: While I was gone DF had started dozens of seeds in egg cartons and repurposed pots.

The containers completely cover a table in the utility room and a three-shelf unit that has displaced our dining table. We can eat anywhere, but baby plants need the south sun.

After a week of seeing flowers and orange trees and fully leafed trees, I came home to a typical Alaska breakup: gray skies, brown lawns and bare branches. The scent of soil helps make up for that.

So does the Renee’s Garden media kit, which arrived shortly before I left to visit my daughter. The 2016 New Introductions Sampler kicked off a response most Pavlovian. My mouth actually watered as I looked at things like Five Color Rainbow beets, Italian Pandorino grape tomatoes, Ruby & Emerald mustard, French Mascotte container beans and Harlequin Mix rainbow carrots.

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How to cook 12 meals in 48 minutes.

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th-1I figured that might get your attention. The headline is semi-disingenuous: What you’ll be doing is preparing 10 to 12 meals in an hour or less, but not actually cooking them until you need them.

Specifically, you’ll be turning 48 to 60 minutes’ worth of kitchen work into a dozen future dinners by using Erin Chase’s new FreezEasy meal plans.

Recently I wrote about her Grocery Budget Makeover plan. Chase is the founder of $5 Dinners and a series of cookbooks, and also the co-founder of “The $5 Meal Plan.” This time around she’s created a series of meal plans, shopping lists, kitchen prep tips and videos to churn-and-burn future meals (both meat-based and vegetarian).

Since I know her in real life, I can attest that she dreams up recipes in both the exotic and everyday realms. (Hint: She has four kids.) However, her recipes share several attributes: They are affordable and they are simple to prepare.

Beta testers report that Chase’s plans takes “the overwhelm” out of the equation. You know, that feeling of “What are we (or what am I) going to eat today, tomorrow, next week…?” that can ruin your day – and, maybe, your budget. It can also create an unhealthy relationship with food.

 

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