I finally found a wordpress theme for the free wordpress that let me change the header. Truth be told, I don’t think I looked terribly hard before. Unfortunately adding it has undone some formatting in the older posts. Sorry about that!
Community garden update
For those of you counting along, there are:
2 growing brandywine tomatoes
4 growing cherry tomatoes
9 huge tomato plants, including the one that got chomped right after planting
5 or 6 growing peppers
48…onions? green onions? One bolted and had to be harvested today–it didn’t form a bulb and was more like a green onion. Weird.
LOTS of lettuce. Constant salads!
Lots of growing spinach. We put some on pizza this weekend.
Growing chard.
Growing carrots. Does anyone know when I’m supposed to know/how I’m supposed to know
when to harvest them?
Three growing zucchini plants, finally getting some buds. There were supposed to be four,
but chipmunks took the seeds. Twice. Little buggers.
Two growing winter squash.
5 happy hills of growing cucumbers.
Zinnias and snapdragons.
And two broccoli.
Pictures to come–I forgot the camera today! Boy, four days of sun and things are just growing by leaps and bounds.
Breaking the Hostess Habit: hand pies
Back when we lived in Boston, the Mr. and I could walk to 7-11 in about 3 minutes. At our last place, CVS was a 5 minute shuffle. We developed a bit of what you might call a Hostess Habit: every so often, we’d have a terrible sweet tooth descend and off one of us would go to the store to get Hostess cupcakes (orange-yellow for me, chocolate with vanilla for him), Twinkies, and the most decadent of all, the Hostess Pie. Apple was our go-to flavor. None of these were especially tasty but they did the job when nothing else was around. The pies in particular were really not as good as I remember them being when I was a kid, which I’m sure is a trick in the old memory. Do you remember the pudding pies, too? They had some marketed as a tie-in for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don’t think they make pudding pies at all anymore.
Anyway, we both knew this little habit wasn’t terribly good for us. Even if we don’t think about the calories themselves, there were all those trans-fats, all that high fructose corn syrup, that lack of actual food, to think of. So that was one of the reasons why we made our own Twinkies last winter. And last night, after Mr. Pea had a particular craving for a pie which could not be sated (nowhere in walking distance to get them and I’m not driving to Stop and Shop for a fake pie) and ended up sleeping it off, I prowled the internet for information on making one’s own hand pies. Really, they are just glorified turnovers, and not hard to make at all. We now have a stash of pies in the freezer, ready to pop into the oven when needed, equally calorie-laden to their fake brothers but much, much tastier. Ours feature a buttery pie crust filled with cinnamon apples. You can’t beat that with anything wrapped in cellophane! Sure, they took more time than running to the store, but now that a store isn’t quickly reached, this just makes more sense.
My recipe featured a pie crust you can find here, only I swapped in regular butter for vegan butter: Pie Crust
I made a filling by peeling and chopping two red delicious apples (happened to be what we had on hand) and cooking them over medium-low heat for about ten minutes with a couple tablespoons of water, a good sprinkle of cinnamon, and a teaspoon or so of sugar. Because your pies won’t bake as long as a traditional one, you have to get the apples started ahead of time. You just want them to soften up a little and have a little bit of sauce.
I rolled out my dough in small portions. I had enough filling for eight pies, but I rolled my dough quite thin (1/16″ or so) and had enough for probably 12 or 14 crusts. Each one was cut about 6″ wide (I just used a lid to a tupperware container and traced around it with a sharp knife). You can adjust all of these measurements as needed. Place each crust on a cookie sheet and drop a little over a tablespoon of filling on one half. Again, how much depends on your crust size. Then fold other half over, roll up edges, and pinch closed. Repeat.
Brush each one with milk, dust with sugar, cut a couple steam vents, and pop into a 375 degree oven. I started checking them at 18 minutes and the ones that were not crowded on a pan (I had 2 on one, six on another) were about done then. The other sheet took about 10 more minutes to brown. In other words, just keep your eye on them. Allow to cool, eat one, and freeze the rest. I’m guessing they can be heated through in a 350 oven in about 20 minutes, again, depending on size. A toaster oven would be great for this, but I don’t have one, so the microwave and perhaps the broiler will have to do.
The possibilities here are endless, though I read that if you use something especially juicy, like berries, you should place some parchment beneath the pies so they don’t leak and become impossible to remove without destroying them.
Working with leftovers
As a rule I prefer to eat leftovers over sandwiches or anything else for lunch. Sometimes, though, leftovers are kind of odds and ends–a bit of chicken, half a zucchini, whatever. On Saturday night, rather than order pizza, we worked with what we had in the fridge and cabinets to make dinner. This isn’t anywhere near ‘pantry eating’ as Molly at mommycoddle has done (that’s intense–a whole week without shopping), but it got us through the evening. Course, then we spent all of Sunday visiting and had to order the pizza that night, but better that than take-out two nights in a row.
On this particular occasion, this is what we had handy: half a cooked chicken breast from a previous night’s dinner; some carrots; onions and garlic; some leftover wine from dinner a few days before; half-and-half and butter; and the usual array of spices/oils. Oh, and frozen peas. Plus we had a quarter-box of spaghetti and a little less of linguine. See where this went? We boiled the water and cooked the pasta; in the meantime we sauteed half a thinly sliced onion in olive oil, adding some garlic, diced carrots, and eventually peas, adding wine to the pan and swirling in some cream (1/4 cup, I’d guess?), a sprinkle of dried basil, and salt and pepper. The chicken was added, diced, near the end to just warm through. Pasta was then tossed into the pot, tossed around. Bowls were topped with plenty of grated parmesan.
Some people are terrified of this style of cooking, as I guess they lack the confidence to just pull stuff out of cabinets and call it dinner. Some folks feel they need a recipe or risk messing up a pile of ingredients. Working with what you have, though, is a skill worth cultivating and a confidence worth working on. Once you have it, you eliminate the problem of throwing away a lot of leftover bits, can make dinner on the fly, and save money (I, being cheap, think that’s the best part). Heck, if there had been more to work with I’d have done it again on Sunday. The lesson, I guess, is that sometimes when you think you’re all out of food, if you look around, you’ll find out otherwise.
Strawberry city!
Know what happens when you get nearly 7 pounds of strawberries? You have to come up with ways to use them–quickly. That day I sliced about a pound or so and sugared them, baked a shortcake, picked up some whipped cream, and we had strawberry shortcake for dessert after dinner with the neighbors.
As an aside, I want to tell you how wonderful it is to have nice neighbors with whom you can have dinner and dessert, rather than drug dealing who-knows-whats whom we recently enjoyed.
But that meant we still had about 5.5 pounds. I left them on the counter overnight, and lost probably a quarter-pound as some which were superripe molded. Then I knew I had to move. I had to make jam. Or try.
I’d hoped to make jam without extra sugar–you can buy certain kinds of pectin for that. But Stop and Shop, the only store in my area that carried pectin at all, didn’t have any, so I opted for the regular stuff. We made a half-batch, carefully following the recipe inside the Sure-Jell package, which used up a loosely-packed 5 cups of unprocessed berries, or about 2.5 cups of puree, made by mashing washed and hulled berries with a potato masher, a job Mr. Pea enjoyed thoroughly. The jam seems to have set ok–it’s still not as thick as store jam, but I’m ok with that. We ended up with three half-pints, three quarter-pints, and just some we put in the fridge.
Still, we had lots of berries left. Some we made up to make sure we ate the end of the shortcake, but today I turned about a pint–a cup, sliced–into Strawberry Bread. My recipe is a slightly modified one from a cooking blog–one that’s new to me–called eat!craft!live! Clearly these are my people.
The recipe there sounded fairly healthy, even, than others I’d seen–swapping some oil for applesauce, some white flour for wheat. My only change was to swap out some of the applesauce, which I didn’t have, for yogurt. I learned today that in place of oil, you can use 1/2 of the required amount plus 3/4 of the rest. So, if you had to swap out a half-cup of oil, you could use a quarter cup plus 3 T of plain yogurt. Or something like that. Since I made some yogurt last week that was still in the fridge, I put it to use.
Here is the recipe from eat!craft!live!, with my adjustment.
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 pint strawberries, washed and sliced (about a cup)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup canola oil
2 T plus 2 t (approximately) plain yogurt
Mix dry ingredients, except sugar; blend wet ingredients, including sugar. Add wet to dry and scrape into a greased loaf pan. Bake at 350* for 45 minutes.
We were a little skeptical at first, having never had strawberry bread, but the aroma wafting from the oven was pretty fantastic, and the bread itself is quite divine. I had a tiny bit of the bottom stick, which was too bad, but meant that I had an excuse to eat those bits of berry and bread before I could wash the pan. I bet it’ll be even better tomorrow, with a cup of coffee.
Berries!
Finally New England got some sun today, for the whole day. We have had more rain than we need lately, and it will return for four days or so starting tomorrow, so we took advantage of today’s lovely weather and went berry picking at Dondero Orchard, a wonderful multi-fruit and veggie outpost! Not only can you pick your own strawberries, blueberries and raspberries but they also have peaches, plus a bakery. They make killer apple donuts. I’d eat another one now if I had it.
I haven’t picked strawberries in years, and nor had Mr. Pea. Really my only memory of strawberry picking was when I was a little kid and my brother even littler, and he put his hand in a berry plant that happened to also contain a bee’s nest. He was stung all over and puffed up like a balloon. We lived in the sticks and had one car, and his allergic reaction was the reason we ended up with two cars shortly thereafter. Sometimes one needs benadryl in a hurry.
We picked nearly 7 pounds of berries today. Already some are sliced in the fridge with sugar, getting ready for tonight’s shortcake. Some are sitting in a colander, drying, in order to be frozen. Then there are some 5 other pounds, sitting in their box, wondering what they’ll be. Some we’ll just eat in our granola. Many are going to end up (gulp) as jam. Wish me luck.
The Mr., picking berries
Buyer’s remorse: cookbook edition
I am prone to buyer’s remorse. I don’t even need to spend very much to get it. One time I splurged $60 on some makeup I’d wanted to try since I’d seen an infomercial years before–and promptly returned it. This time, though, my buyer’s remorse is about this book.
It’s not that this book is bad, by any stretch–I think it’s just more book than I need right now. I was sucked in by a modern book on canning with pretty art direction. I’m such a sucker for pretty art direction. But the book itself contains recipes that are well beyond my needs–sometimes complicated preserves made of things I don’t have handy, or am not interested in. I don’t know. It might be just my lack of $24 talking, but I feel kind of torn about it. I was kind of hoping for an updated primer on canning–and it has that–but with very basic recipes that every home-preserver should have. But the author points to that source–the Blue Book put out by the Ball canning company–and lo, I forgot I’d bought that, years ago, when I started canning but didn’t do more than applesauce. So now I feel like I have the book I need–have had it all along–and should send this one back to the bookstore.
But then I think wow, this new book has a recipe for making your own bacon (I love me some bacon) and apricot-amaretto preserves, which sounds tasty…..I just don’t think I’ll be making my own tuna fish (fish are gross, see) or pickling asparagus (asparagus is too tasty to pickle, and too expensive!). Je ne sais pas.
Are there just some things you should not make yourself?
I’m not talking about cars, conducting your own surgery, or anything serious, of course. But more generally–are there some things that are just better left to other people? This is a point of contention in our household. As you readers might guess, I answer “Let’s try making (whatever it is)!” and the Mr. responds, “Can’t you just buy that?” A month or two ago this was about candles. Mr. Pea’s point, and it was fair, was that I’d have to buy a bunch of ingredients and that we have limited storage. Plus I have ten other projects I’m working on. Agreeing with his point, I bought some on Etsy. But this week, the debate was about deodorant. That’s right. Deodorant.
Mr. Pea uses a Tom’s of Maine stick; I have one from Kiss My Face. I’ve stolen his and used mine and to be perfectly frank, neither is terribly effective if it’s hot and I actually move. I end up putting it on over and over and it’s kind of gross. Amy over at Angry Chicken, as part of her stick-it-to-the-man, ‘dirty hippie’ mission, swears by the one she made using cocoa butter, shea butter, and a bunch of other stuff. I’m not about to go that far–I don’t want another pile of project ingredients, after all. But doing some googling yielded a very simple option, using stuff I already had, and I figured I’d try it. The recipe for this diy deodorant was equal parts baking soda and cornstarch. That’s it. I put 1 tablespoon of each in a covered bowl, shook it up, and voila. You can put it on using a damp cloth so it sort of sticks, or do it dry, using a cotton ball or something. Mr. Pea thought I was insane, as he put it, putting bakery ingredients under my arms. But I was undeterred and we’re on day 3, with no reapplying. That said, it’s been cold and dreary here so the true test has yet to come, but so far, so good, and much cheaper than all-natural deodorants.*
*In case you’re wondering, most deodorants we use contain an aluminum-based anti-perspirant, which, besides being a chemical I don’t really need combined with a bunch of others (I never had great luck with regular commercial deodorants, either), is what makes your shirts turn yellow when you sweat. Aluminum ‘pits out’ your shirts. Now you know! Natural deodorants generally don’t come with an anti-perspirant (I can live with this), and thus don’t turn your shirts all yellow in a week or two).
Spinach and artichoke pizza
The past several days have been kind of busy; whatever happened to lazy summer vacations? Beats me. I made some new valances (see below–it’s the first project I’ve started and actually finished in recent memory), am planning new classes for the fall, and am teaching a summer course. And I live in the garden. The weeds grow faster than the plants, I think for spite.
At any rate, when I asked Mr. Pea last Saturday what, if anything, he’d like for meals in the coming week as I made our grocery list, he snarkily responded, “Spinach and artichoke dip.” What a kidder. Not that I couldn’t eat that as a meal, but it would be kind of wrong. Keeping it in mind, though, I dug around the old internets for something else I could do on that theme and came up with this Spinach and Artichoke Pizza, based on a Food and Wine recipe. It’s an easy pizza to make, but I don’t think I have ever made a pie with so much topping. This one pie–about 10 or 12″ across–had an entire sauteed red onion, a 10 oz box of frozen spinach, and a drained can of artichoke hearts all on its little self. Oh, and a little cheese–only a quarter cup. I wasn’t sure I would even be able to slide it off of the pizza peel and onto the stone.
It was delicious. It’s filling, and actually probably the healthiest pizza I’ve ever made. If you have a craving for spinach and artichokes, you should give it a go. Here’s the link to the recipe.
And here are my valances!
Nectar of childhood: homemade iced tea
When I was a kid, you knew it was summer when my mom cleaned out an empty milk jug and began to use it for iced tea. It was a ritual in our house; the recipe was pinned to the inside of a cabinet door so that by the time we were ten or so, we could make it, as well. As a rule we made it with Red Rose teabags–the big boxes came with little enamel animals inside that my brother and I collected. My mom doesn’t make it anymore, and I don’t very often, but I decided this summer to begin to keep it in the fridge. Sure it has some empty calories, but it’s still better than lemonade made with high fructose corn syrup or diet soda, which I usually drink and which is filled with god knows what.
My memory of the recipe is a little bit foggy; we used to make it with bottled lemon juice, and I’ve been using fresh lemons, which seems to impact the flavor. But here’s the original as best I can recall:
10 teabags–you put these in a glass two-cup measure, fill it with water, and microwave for four minutes. Let them steep at least an hour, preferably more.
1/4 c lemon juice
1/2 c sugar
water to fill
After the bags have steeped, pour the tea into a clean gallon jug. Add lemon juice and sugar, cover, and shake to dissolve. Add water, shake again. Keep in the fridge.
My half-gallon batches have been kind of weak–I think it’s because I’m using 5 teabags in the two-cup measure, which means that the strength of the tea is more diluted than when we made it with ten. I consider it a work in progress for the summer.
