tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74647616553127448042024-03-12T19:34:43.325-07:00MocavoreFood, basically.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger46125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-19970133032446230922014-04-22T17:30:00.000-07:002014-04-22T17:30:05.393-07:00Vinegar Vinter<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Winter began with me leaching sugar from apples I'd already squeezed the cider from. Then, my juice-aholic neighbor gave me a bunch of de-juiced pulp. Mostly carrot and apple, I think.<br />
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Luckily for me, there was plenty of veggie-fruit sugar, and I dumped it in a bin with some artesian well water, snapped on the lid, and walked away for a while. When fermentation slowed down, I strained everything through cheesecloth, put the liquid in the big jar (above), stashed it in a cupboard I rarely open, and walked away for a while.<br />
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This is the bacterial mat that made the vinegar. The small light patches are the newborn colonies of mold, I think. The vinegar is ready, and it's time to pull off the mother floccor, strain, and bottle the product before the mold messes it up.<br />
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I like the result. Smells as bright as it looks. At about 3.3 pH, it's plenty tangy, and tastes good. I think this one may get really good with aging.<br />
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So, it looks like I can continue to wring another product from leftovers of juicing and cider-making. Someone asked where I got the "mother" (the colony of flocculants some people call a SCOBY, used like a sourdough starter to get the ball rolling), but so far I haven't used one. I decided to try an approach that is lazy (or smart), cheap (or frugal), and unambitious (or stoic, maybe zen), and walked away for a while. Unlike beer, where a wild ferment will not yield what beer drinkers want, vinegar makes itself with the microbes ranging free in the Eastside Olympia air. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-6855384114977158942014-01-08T19:13:00.000-08:002014-01-08T19:13:22.004-08:00Crapplesauce (better than it sounds)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You can tell this is not stock imagery or a fine foodie foto, because there's some dried up crap on the stove.</td></tr>
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Despite my best intentions, I sometimes end up with produce that did its producing months ago. This time around, it was cranberries I got at the Farmers' Market before Thanksgiving, and apples that my master bartering (again, not as bad it sounds) neighbor had decided were too old and dried out for juicing weeks ago when he gave them to me.<br />
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Procrastination and a healthy scientific interest in fruit mummification wanted me to just let it be, but frugality and fear of waste animated me, and I decided to combine apples and cranberries. OK, I admit, the cranberries entered the equation when my commitment to drying them waned. Dehydration by way of repeated low-heat oven exposures (while it may work out as the cheap man's way of heating the house), takes too damned long in a Pacific NW Winter.<br />
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So, core and chop apples, and toss them in with the cranberries into a pot on the stove. Add a little water, and avoid the temptation to get it done with fast. Simmer...add some water...simmerrrr...add a little more waterrrr. Listen to Hendrix (the dude grew up in Washington, so he must've eaten a lot of apples, right?)...stir. Maybe add some more water (yep, them apples was pretty dry).<br />
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After a while, the album (Are You Experienced) was over, and the apples still had not broken down, so I brought out maybe my most favorite electric kitchenland appliance ever: the immersion blender. And so red-smeared chunks of apple (complete with their old leathery skin) became the paste you see pictured above. It's amore interesting color than you can see on your screen. The flavor is slightly tart, and I added no sugar, so that in addition to being frugal, I could count myself smug over the healthfulness of this concoction.<br />
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I the tradition of the Mocavore Blog, I now offer to the gullible world a recipe for something that does not need a recipe: <br />
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<b>Recipe for Crapplesauce (I should find a better name)</b></div>
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<b>Ingredients</b> <br />
Apples - however many you feel like coring and cutting up<br />
Cranberries - enough to turn the apples red <br />
Water - small additions to keep from burning the fruit<br />
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<b>Preparation</b><br />
Combine all of the above and simmer until tinder, adding more water as needed and stirring occasionally. When the apples can be cut easily with your spoon, and you are bored with stirring, blend the cooked fruit until it qualifies as "applesauce," rather than "chunks covered in red."</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-48789656384011999432013-12-27T21:41:00.003-08:002013-12-28T13:32:55.251-08:00Cobbled-together Kimchi<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Farmers Market Napa and Home-grown Daikon Greens</td></tr>
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Late in the Fall, I finally got around to a couple of things. One was admitting that the daikon I planted was never going to make roots. Most of the summer planting bolted almost immediately, and the few plants that didn't never managed more than cracked, deformed, and undersized chunks underground. The second thing was realizing that I had a head and a half of napa cabbage yet un-used in the fridge.<br />
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So, kimchi.<br />
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There are plenty of recipes online, a suprising number of which make no sense. Some, because they are in Korean, which I do not read. Others, because they are in American, and are fake or wrong. <br />
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So I searched some more, and dredged up old emailed advice from a Korean friend of an Irish friend. This boiled down to: sweet rice flour is a good aid to fermentation, and you should use the greens you have.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rinsing away the salt</td></tr>
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So I stripped the greens off the straggling remnant of my failed daikon crop, a couple of stray mustard plants, and cut up the napa cabbage, then tossed it with kosher salt. Pressed out the liquid and rinsed repeatedly to get rid of (most of) the salt.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">And so it begins.</td></tr>
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Then I chopped in a mix of home-grown garlic and chilis (cayenne-ish, although NW peppers never seem to get as hot, and these were old), some store-bought dried ancho chilis (with their tobacco-raisin dimensions), and...maybe that's it. Except for the rice flour porridge, which I'm guessing is food to kick-start the microbes. Mexican anchos, Japanese rice flour, and bastard mustard may not be authentically Korean (also, I guess people used to fermenting in an onggi might look askance at my salvaged crock-pot), but somehow I imagined that using what was handy and seasonal would be acceptable to a fair proportion of Korean grandmothers, so I went with it.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The non-photogenic end result.</td></tr>
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And before too long, I had the above. Not tongue-blisteringly hot, and oddly smoky due to the anchos, but tangy and tasty. These greens will not go bad, or be wasted. It's not bad, and that is good. It's probably even good <i>for</i> me. Hope so, because I've got a half gallon of the stuff. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-22437648144193945762013-12-01T22:00:00.000-08:002013-12-02T15:22:11.438-08:00Vinegar Time<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mother-floccor</td></tr>
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Now that Stoic Week is done (in the time zones where it applied, anyway), a procrastinator like me can get around to writing about taking the world as it is. Putting things off makes sense, a lot of times. Like: I've put off writing blogs lately, getting things done, having more time with my family, playing in the real world, and dealing with the bounty of Fall.<br />
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Not that the more chore-like of these accomplishments haven't got some delay built in. I should have dealt with the garden a month ago, for instance. And the subject of today's post--vinegar--evokes among many Americans all things sour and past due. There's a Cracker song about a downer of a person, who sees "Roses and wine" as "Thorns and vinegar." I've been accused of being that person, not always without reason.<br />
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Wine, cider, and any number of fruits, however, aspire to vinegaration. Humans arrest this development for their own tipsy ends (myself included), but there's no sin in letting the process keep going a bit further (especially with headache-inducing red wine). The <i>Acetobacter</i> microbes feast on alcohol, and piss vinegar. And if you are stoic, seeing that this cycle wants to happen, you can embrace the waste, wringing from it something sweet...figuratively if not chemically.<br />
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If I had the extra cider, I would have let some turn to vinegar. But I am a stoic who has also been accused of being cheap (Must I utter it? Not always without reason), and so my eyes turned to the pomace, the "spent" wheel of packed pomes pushed from the press. This year instead of turning it upon yon <a href="http://urbangreenstead.blogspot.com/2013/03/open-heap-o-worms.html" target="_blank">worm-heap</a>, I dumped pomace into bins, poured in a bunch of Olympia water, and let them steep. Sure enough, bubbling ensued, signalling the emergence of alcohol from the old time + sugar equation.<br />
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After the action subsided, I strained out the fruit, and let the liquid keep doing its thing. The result was a jug of apple water, and a tub of pear syrup. I didn't stir either as much as you're supposed to, but after a couple or more monrths of inattention, I got to them in the slack time after Turkey Day and before returning to work. The results are a gallon of clear-ish sharp apple cider vinegar and 3-4 gallons of amber pear product.<br />
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The pear vinegar, coming in such quantity, led me to step in and halt to process for part of the batch. I pasteurized a bunch and bottled it in re-used and sterilized beer bottles. The rest is in half-gallon growlers in the fridge and garage. So if anyone wants a trade, let me know via the comments section or an email. I'll be hanging on to a fair amount, though, since my goal next summer is to make pickles with my own vinegar.<br />
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So yeah, sometimes I put things off, and sometimes I am sour. But one thing spoils and a new one emerges. Recognizing that the process will do what comes naturally and suspending belief that there is a hard and fast expiration date, allows time to keep flowing, to make December as fruitful as Summer. <br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-52052366395870700252013-10-16T18:26:00.001-07:002013-10-16T18:26:47.603-07:00Salt-Dried Garlic Update<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In the beginning.</td></tr>
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Back in January, as knobs sensed the lenghtening post-solstice days, I got around to <a href="http://mocavore.blogspot.com/2013/02/preserving-garlic.html" target="_blank">preserving garlic</a> for the rest of the year. As much as I love cutting into a fresh clove, there's no way I know of to extend that in the period from Winter til Summer Solstice, when the fresh snap softens and the white cloves develop a green core bent on autophagy.<br />
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As usual, I peeled a sizable portion of the crop and dropped it into olive oil. Over the years, I've occasionally read that this method carries a risk of botulism, but it's never happened to me--beware if you intend to eat some home-cooked garlic-rich meals cooked in my kitchen--and my main objection is that there's a bit of sulfur phunk to this technique.<br />
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This time, though, I took some of the peeled cloves and nestled them in layers of kosher salt. Seemed like it could work, but not knowing, it was a gamble.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">At the end.</td></tr>
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Just this week, after 9 or 10 months in the jar, I peeked at the result. The garlic dried to a pliable leathery texture without making the salt gooey or brown. Bite into it, and it's clear that some of its own bite has fled, but the result is a mellow richness, more of a complex flavor. Like replacing raw jalapeno with dried ancho, maybe. Sliced and cooked into a meal, it tasted like,...garlic. I have yet to taste the salt, but I have to think it will be pretty damn good.<br />
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So as experiments go, I'm happy how this one turned out.<br />
Does it preserve my home-grown garlic? Yep.<br />
Is it easy? Uh-huh. <br />
Did the garlic sprout? Nope.<br />
Is there a side benefit? Salt. <br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-33529094477216395412013-08-14T20:07:00.002-07:002013-08-14T20:07:54.875-07:00Land Tobiko - Poppy Roe<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's a little late to tell you now, but you can haz pappy roe. Like many esocteric gustatory treats, this treat is only available for a few weeks in any one place. This photo is a month or more old, and shows immature poppy seeds spilt 'pon yon plate. The green seed pod of the breadseed poppy (<i>Papaver icannotrememberensis</i>), can be split asunder to yield these seeds. In sushi or salad, or on top of a hotdog for that matter, the unripe seeds lend snap with a bitter crackle with a flowery aftertaste.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Leave 'em out, and they will begin to yellow and harden, and then it's too late.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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The only way to eat these (other than blind-stupid early harvest) is to willingly sacrifice the promise of bagel or pastry with the black-seeded crunch of poppies. The pod cut open to free this caviar will not mature, cannot recover. Scoop out all the seeds and add them to whatever it is you have going that needs a light plantiferous crunch. There will be thousands, but not many.<br />
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You cannot buy this, and must grown it. A cold February casting seed. April thinning the progeny. June watching for the big-but-not-mature heads to offer up the bounty. Harvest only what you will eat within the hour. No prep time, but no shelf life either.<br />
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The unique snap of exocarp full of liquid so small in volume that it only regesisters as the snap against the skin. Like flying fish eggs - tobiko - this plantiferous roe gives the raw dish a crunch unlike almost anything else. <br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-20549171333891350472013-07-27T07:19:00.000-07:002013-07-27T07:19:20.660-07:00Ozettes! (and Other Potatoes)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This has been a good garden year here so far, and mid-July brought with it a good harvest of potatoes. But I have a garden blog somewhere else, and it's the food that interests me here. Especially since this year was my first attempt at growing the Ozette potato.<br />
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Ozettes are what people call a 'fingerling' potato, mostly smaller than what you see here. This one has side sprouts, and looks as much like a Jerusalem artichoke as a potato. But that's the beauty of potatoes--a beauty hid from me for decades, growing up on nothing but Idaho Russets--that they come in so many shapes, sizes, and colors.<br />
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This variety gets's it's name from a place called Ozette, which also happens to be an archaeological site of huge significance. It's a site because Makah people lived there, and they've been growing these potatoes for centuries. Unfortunately, I don't have their origin story, but it's likely that Makah territory was one of the early landing points for the great Peruvian Potato Migration that spread tubers across the globe once Spanish ships started plying Pacific waters. But if the potato has not been here as long as the tribe, since time immemorial, it's been adopted by them for long enough to be a part of the culture now.<br />
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So yeah, it's a good variety for an archaeologist to grow, and it did well down here in the South Puget soils. And now that I have about 4 gallons of them, I'll get to try them in all sorts of ways. Ozettes, coated in olive oil and sprinkled with salt, roasted just short of crisp, chewy with a tough caramelized outer layer and a rich interior, mmmm. Simple can be best. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0B3R0j2HE6Y/UfPO9J8TZbI/AAAAAAAAB0Q/P1CkEJURorI/s1600/IMG_3290.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0B3R0j2HE6Y/UfPO9J8TZbI/AAAAAAAAB0Q/P1CkEJURorI/s400/IMG_3290.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">There's gold in them there hills.</td></tr>
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The other varieties I grew this year were less interesting. Yukon Golds (above) were one of the first "other" potatoes available in regular American grocery stores of the late 20th Century, but to be honest the only reason I grew them was because I had some extra space and tubers that were sprouting. They're doing well, it seems like, but I haven't harvested them yet. When the time comes, they'll be the workhorse potato, boiled, mashed, roasted, whatever. Hopefully, they'll taste a little better for having been homegrown, but they're not exciting.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e6JYv_XJsk4/UfPQYhy8GqI/AAAAAAAAB0g/smo207_ThKY/s1600/IMG_3401.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e6JYv_XJsk4/UfPQYhy8GqI/AAAAAAAAB0g/smo207_ThKY/s400/IMG_3401.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A basket of mascots.</td></tr>
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The other kind of potato this year also came about as the result of profligate potato purchasing and the oversupply of aging tubers that follows for unambitious cooks like myself. This time, it was the only non-russet potato that I can remember way back into childhood: the Redskin. Yes, football fans, this is the way to use this word without being a racist asshole. I know, you don't want to walk away from your proud tradition (which has lasted, oh, not even 1/100th of the time Native people had their own traditions along the Potomac), and sports fans are not to be bullied by political correctness, but its mean and racist to keep calling your team that.<br />
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But yeah, redskin potatoes are fine. I'm looking forward to eating them. At least a few will go into sour cream and tarragon style potato salad. Tastes like summer. <br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fWxljwNudSk/UfPUw__ML0I/AAAAAAAAB0w/Aqu-ovpw7eQ/s1600/IMG_3381.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fWxljwNudSk/UfPUw__ML0I/AAAAAAAAB0w/Aqu-ovpw7eQ/s400/IMG_3381.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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And finally this year, there was a stealth russet, flourishing despite me. Potatoes actually came up unbidden last year from a previous renter's garden, but even though I hilled them up, they didn't produce. This year when it happened again, I ripped the shoots and thought no more. I did notice a survivor lurking among the raspberries, but didn't bother pulling it. Of course, I didn't bother helping it any, either, no weeding or hilling.<br />
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Then last week, because I wanted to clear some space for fall spinach, I did pull it out, and found about 7 pounds of potatoes hiding under the now luxuriant vine. I might not choose russets intentionally, but when a few meals worth drops in my lap, I'm grateful.<br />
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Now, all these potatoes (about 6 gallons and I have no idea how many pounds) are sitting in my archaeology screens in the garage, curing a bit before I stash them in the darkest coolest spot this hacienda has.<br />
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-62694778740782612362013-07-13T10:29:00.000-07:002013-07-13T10:29:05.560-07:00Homegrown Lion's Mane<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This Spring, I got a Lion's Mane mushroom kit at the farmer's market. It's a bag about the size of a fat gallon of milk, loaded with sawdust impregnated with mycelia. Having failed before, I tried a new set-up, consisting of a 5-gallon bucket with a rock in the bottom for the shroom-bag to sit on, just above an inch or two of water. Sitting on top of it all was my broad-brimmed field hat, holding in the humidity.<br />
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All you have to do is poke a few holes in the bag and set it in a humid place (well, you also need a certain amount of free airspace around the bag, and not too much water, heat, cold, light, or spores of more aggressive fungi, slimes, molds, and bacteria). When they reach baseball size, the instructions say, it's time to harvest. But I let one go to see what would happen, which turned out to be pretty interesting.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--Gs6hET01pI/UeGEGyiCM6I/AAAAAAAABxA/Xa8FsjnaAZA/s1600/IMG_3248.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--Gs6hET01pI/UeGEGyiCM6I/AAAAAAAABxA/Xa8FsjnaAZA/s400/IMG_3248.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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It goes fractal. More like sea-life than a lion's mane. There's still a core (the cut 'stem' at the center of this photo), but branches proliferate, more and thinner with each iteration. <br />
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After cutting them loose, I did what I do with most fung-food: sauteed with butter and garlic (or onion, shallots,...all alliums). Next time around, I'll try some other preparations. Those tendrils in broth would work like egg-drops in soup, weaving well with sprouts and delicate vegetables.<br />
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The center, or the whole mushroom if you follow instructions and pick it small, is meaty. To me, there was a chewiness beyond what portobello achieves, and I'd like to try using these for burgers. Slices in the sautee ended up more or less like meat. I'd use this in stir-fry in place of chicken--the texture was better than tofu or other mushrooms in that respect.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-16234700280939447112013-06-23T21:02:00.000-07:002013-06-23T21:02:06.367-07:00Accidental Yum.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Somehow yesterday, I moved slowly at everything and allowed myself to become distracted so many times that it was nearly 10:00 before I got to cooking dinner. There were some potatoes sprouting eyes and begging to be eaten, <a href="http://mocavore.blogspot.com/2013/05/metric-beans.html" target="_blank">a few hundred cc's of beans</a>, and not a lot else. But at that point, culinary creativity and gustatory inspiration were far less important than filling my gut, and I set to cooking.<br />
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The beans only needed heating, so the first thing I did was dice the potatoes and throw them in a hot skillet with some oil. Every few minutes, some spatula action and maybe a toss or two to avoid the raw-on-one-side crispy-on-the-other syndrome. In between spatulations, I'd scatter some <a href="http://mocavore.blogspot.com/2013/03/northwestest-salt.html" target="_blank">salt</a>, grind some pepper, shake on some powdered garlic, or dump in some taco seasoning from <a href="http://www.culinaryexotica.mybigcommerce.com/" target="_blank">Buck's</a> (one of the few plug-links you'll ever find here--they are so good I suspend my fatwah against commerce here on the blog), an Olympia treasure. For some reason, I decided that a dash or two of cinnamon would be a good idea. <br />
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Even with the creative outlet of adding another spice at each turn, shallow-frying potatoes takes a while. During that while I decided that the increasing difficulty of scraping softened starch and a growing amount of spice-skudge, not to mention the desire to get the still crunch-raw tater-centers to cook, dictated a switch to braising. So I readied a couple cups of chicken broth, and let the potatoes sit and fry until on the brink of burning, then deglazed with the liquid.<br />
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As this came to a boil, I dolloped in some sour cream, and dropped in a handful of homegrown tarragon. As the sauce reduced, a couple of samples told me that this time, my near random addition of ingredients had worked. By the time it was thick, the potatoes were done.<br />
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I'd write a recipe, but none of the amounts were measured, and I've described the process. Now that it's posted, there's a fair chance that I won't forget this discovery, which is enough for me. If any of you try it, I'd be interested to hear how you like it.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-5340493846145846442013-06-03T20:54:00.000-07:002013-06-03T20:54:06.611-07:00Morels Now and Later<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fruit o the Morel</td></tr>
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The "naturals" come before the wild-fire borne morels, so says the picker, and I have no reason to doubt them his expertise, although I did walk away shaking my head as he continued to rant about Obama and what "they say" are his impeachable offenses.<br />
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The guy's politics are not enough to make me pass on the fresh mushrooms in a bin propped up under the shade of his pickup canopy. (If it were a Dodge, I'd pass, but it's a Ford, so OK.) Also, his price is 33% below that in the stores and farmers market, and they're clean, firm, not too old or bug-eaten at all.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Q1H4eGztxYM/Ua1fbPFKgcI/AAAAAAAABpE/_FqqeUcg1h8/s1600/IMG_2970.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Q1H4eGztxYM/Ua1fbPFKgcI/AAAAAAAABpE/_FqqeUcg1h8/s400/IMG_2970.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shallot Scapes</td></tr>
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Not irrelevant to this decision is the fact that I felt the need to go harvest shallot scapes and make use of them before they got too big and tough. And so it was that a few hours later, an age-old skillet that got my dad through grad school many long years ago got a taste of allium-mushroom-butter. Attacked by a bout of forethought, I decided to slice up the bigger (less likely to quickly dry) morels first. Here is what that kind of fresh looks like: </div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BqXnTdGdDT4/Ua1kccsOE_I/AAAAAAAABpo/VmELi6aYlh0/s1600/IMG_2980.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="262" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BqXnTdGdDT4/Ua1kccsOE_I/AAAAAAAABpo/VmELi6aYlh0/s400/IMG_2980.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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But the kind of deal I got feels too good to fritter away on a few ounces of fungal goodness, and I purchased a pound. Which in turn is too much to fritter away on a meal eaten alone. With all the big scapes cut, I could've tossed the shrooms in a paper bag in the fridge and reapeated this gistatory goodness in a few days, but the cheapskate in me has touble eating that high on the hog twice in a week. So the tuna can came out of the cupboard and the remaining morels went into the oven to dry out.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ss6xEK0yhnU/Ua1haUYyACI/AAAAAAAABpY/JBNMUgrQlfQ/s1600/IMG_2986.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ss6xEK0yhnU/Ua1haUYyACI/AAAAAAAABpY/JBNMUgrQlfQ/s400/IMG_2986.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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You may have guessed by now that I am not the kind of guy to have a food dehydrator, and the day in question was cloudy with intermittent rain, so sun-drying was not an option. So into the wee convection oven they went. Various web pages dedicated to mushroom-drying advise against exceeding 175 degrees fahrenheit, lest the psychoactive chemicals degrade, and even thought I am in a different genus, interested only in food, I figured 150 was good. The fan keeps the air circulating, and a fork propped in the door lets moisture escape. This particular oven shuts off after 30 minutes, and I just kept rpeating the process until the mushrooms were hard little nuggets, like this:<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-C_c3Jm_l5Tg/Ua1hTSuolMI/AAAAAAAABpQ/-2ZFUg8vk_g/s1600/IMG_2989.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-C_c3Jm_l5Tg/Ua1hTSuolMI/AAAAAAAABpQ/-2ZFUg8vk_g/s400/IMG_2989.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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Drying morels this way realeases and maybe bakes the spores, causing this nice pattern to appear on the pan. The cooled morels went into a mason jar for later use. They smelled intense, no hint of burn, and it seems like my ad hoc dryer worked just fine. <br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-73155940461035900782013-05-23T19:43:00.000-07:002013-05-23T19:43:05.897-07:00Metric Beans<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Do this once.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Beans are simple, and so is the metric system. Put them together, and eat simply, cheaply, low on the food chain and carbon emission spectrum.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">I've written about it before, but that was a while ago, and for new readers, here's the logic: cook a big mess o' beans in the crockpot, and you've invested minimal effort in return for several meals' worth of protein. </span> <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Do this twice.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">In case the photos are not obvious enough, here's the recipe:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1000 cc beans (cc= cubic centimeters, because volume's the quickest measure to make)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">2000 cc water</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Put all this in a crockpot with a metric toss o salt. Turn it on. Wait til the beans are soft before you eat them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">That's it. </span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-77769483244929040852013-03-30T20:19:00.000-07:002013-03-30T20:19:32.267-07:00Northwestest Salt<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aDM56O15Wyg/UVefd0vKDyI/AAAAAAAABcU/dl156erNtb0/s1600/IMG_0316.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aDM56O15Wyg/UVefd0vKDyI/AAAAAAAABcU/dl156erNtb0/s400/IMG_0316.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A few weeks ago, I worked at Point Roberts, which is a landform (not a 5-4 decision written by the SCOTUS Chief) that is part of the Canadian mainland, but part of the US. It's the western end of Boundary Bay, and because it noses south of the 49th Parallel, is part of the Lower 48, if not the contiguous United States. It is the northwesternmost part of the US outside of Alaska, and therefore I resolved to make some salt from this place. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Because I was camping, and because making a couple of international border crossings with a bag of white powder seemed like not such a good plan, what I brought back to Olympia were a couple of growlers filled with sea water. [Growlers being jugs--half a gallon in this case--that we Cascadians keep handy to fill with beer at the brewpubs spaced and conveniuent half-mile intervals throughout our land.] Customs and Border Patrol are unconcerned with this, although in the line-up I was wondering if I'd have to explain why I was transporting seawater.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Making the salt is pretty straightforward, as I've figured out <a href="http://mocavore.blogspot.com/2012/06/salish-sea-salt.html" target="_blank">before</a>. It looks something like this:</span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vgo-BFavGOo/UVek7jnccaI/AAAAAAAABck/vuKGMigiaL4/s1600/IMG_2233.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vgo-BFavGOo/UVek7jnccaI/AAAAAAAABck/vuKGMigiaL4/s400/IMG_2233.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This time around, I learned a couple of things. One is that you can burn salt. Set it to boiling, and get sidetracked by a phone call, and you end up with this:</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Add caption</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The grey crust at the bottom bothered me, so I scraped off the good part, added water, and filtered it before starting over, paying more attention to the boil this time. Eventually, enough water boils off to leave a bubbling white paste, which with some stirring can be relieved of most of its water.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But not all. The penultimate phase is paste. This goes onto a stone tile that I use for baking and pizza:</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EImLb7vFwAo/UVemGGVsQaI/AAAAAAAABcs/a1W16HgTPN8/s1600/IMG_2294.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EImLb7vFwAo/UVemGGVsQaI/AAAAAAAABcs/a1W16HgTPN8/s400/IMG_2294.JPG" width="400" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">My favorite salt shot yet.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> I've kept salt (from South Carolina, in that case) at this paste stage before, and it' s actually a nice texture to work with. Fine grained but cohesive, easily dissolved into water or sauce. What makes salt at the penultimate drying phase best and most unique is that it is spreadable. Excellently easy for salt-crusting a piece of chicken.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But for whatever reason, I wanted this northwesternest US salt to be totally dry. So I spread it on the stone and cut furrows through it to maximuze surface area and make the drying quicker and more thorough. Popped it in the oven on the lowest setting, and when it felt dry left it in with the door open. It didn't take much. I'm pretty sure if I'd brought it across the border looking like this, I would have been arrested:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0vVIQX6jnvo/UVeoYjI8ZfI/AAAAAAAABc0/Iw2IntlWci0/s1600/IMG_2296.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0vVIQX6jnvo/UVeoYjI8ZfI/AAAAAAAABc0/Iw2IntlWci0/s400/IMG_2296.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So, that's the story of making salt from the Salish Sea west of Boundary Bay. It's good,...salty. It came with less grit and arthropods than some of the salt I've made. Maybe not a fancy gourmet salt, no color or extra flavor, just the good clean merroir of the northwestest salt I could reach.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-28428441575813153362013-03-25T22:32:00.001-07:002013-03-25T22:32:37.006-07:00Bottom of the Barrel<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bj2HdVwauT4/UVEsh_wloWI/AAAAAAAABaE/gIW3KX_b38w/s1600/IMG_2208.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bj2HdVwauT4/UVEsh_wloWI/AAAAAAAABaE/gIW3KX_b38w/s400/IMG_2208.jpg" width="400" /> </a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Most of us buy our food, and have little or no connection to times of plenty and famine, cycles of harvest and lean times. Often as not, modern people asked to name the hungriest time of year will name Winter. But before global transport of food from wherever the harvest is coming in to suburban USA, before food preservation technology took hold (nostalgia for canning gets us, oh, a fraction of a percent back toward the dawn of the human appetite), Spring's beauty was draped over the harsh reality that the livestock were yet lean and the crops were mere aspirations, months from fruition. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Stocking a larder and avoiding losses from it, therefore, was a matter not just of avoiding guilt over waste, it was crucial. I've availed myself of canning, a bit of freezing (I may have bouts of nostalgia, and experiment with ancient foodways, but hey, I'm not gonna forego modern conveniences entirely), and have transformed part of my garage into a cellar with hanging mesh sacks of shallots and onions hanging, potatoes stashed in dark places, and crates of apples. Recently, the Winter Solstice a fading memory and sunlight growing every day, the apple scent experienced a slight change, the sweet lilt got a tangy edge, mellowing turning into fermentation and, if I did not move, outright rot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Sure enough, the last milk crate of apples purchased just before the Farmers Market shut down for the Winter had a few bad ones. Many of the remainder had bad spots, and passive preservation clearly could not continue without spoilage loss. </span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-atEY3QZVyI8/UVExcXTFLfI/AAAAAAAABaQ/4aYIv-TY94A/s1600/IMG_2214.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-atEY3QZVyI8/UVExcXTFLfI/AAAAAAAABaQ/4aYIv-TY94A/s400/IMG_2214.JPG" width="300" /> </a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">So I did what any reasonable person would do. Handed my eight-year-old a knife and told her it was time to learn how to cut. She's had some practice with avocados, but even an old apple is harder than that, and we worked together, me teaching her how to hold the knife and the food, pointing out when she was about to risk slicing herself instead of the fruit, and how to avoid that. Adding blood to the applesauce is no way to get your iron.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">We had a great time, and in the end we had a bunch of applesauce, which can be put in the fridge, the freezer, or even canned so that the apples season of 2012 can last past the lean months. The compost got a meal of scraps, and we got enough delicious sauce for a bunch more meals. </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-32324118876731929352013-03-12T23:19:00.001-07:002013-03-12T23:19:33.914-07:00Carb Dogs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br /></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hCC05yYO0hk/UUAVUQngz4I/AAAAAAAABZ0/Rm39SUt20gA/s1600/IMG_2182.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-hCC05yYO0hk/UUAVUQngz4I/AAAAAAAABZ0/Rm39SUt20gA/s400/IMG_2182.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Back off!</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Recently, scientists published the <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/dog-s-dinner-was-key-to-domestication-1.12280" target="_blank">results of a study</a> on the canine genome. One of the crucial differences between dogs and wolves, it turns out, is that only the dogs can digest carbs. For a very long time, scientists and common sensists have reasoned that the domesticated dog as originally a wolf that followed humans around and fed on their middens or kill sites. A few people, sly as foxes, reasoned that both humans and wolves congregated around kills and carrion, and that the domestication process may have been more commensal than unidirectional. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">But now the genes tell us that the domestic dog can consume carbohydrates to some benefit, whereas los lobos cannot, and we move from an understanding of mutual carnivorism or scavenging to four-leggeds hanging around two-legged gatherers or farmers. [Eventually, I have no doubt, I wil learn of the legend in which farming is just a trick that coyote plays on humans so he can eat for free.] Whether it was people growing grain or digging roots, odds are that this imputes a greater role to women than the meat-eater model would have suggested, since women have long dug the wild roots and tended the gardens while men went off to hunt, or whatever it is they did when game was scarce and beer was not yet been invented.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The dog-carb connection comes as no surprise to me. I have a dog that is healthy, and a huge fan of bread. Serendipitously (or, honed by evolutionarily), the mutt likes her bread stale and hard. She is a huge fan of old bagels, and the photo above is her eating a burnt and aged loaf of soda bread, inedible to humans. In that shot, she is slightly blurred because she senses a threat and is springing into action, she feels like the photographer is coming after her precious lithified loaf. Never have I seen a dog of my acquaintance so viciously protective of something not made of ham. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">So thank you, scientists, for vindicating my non-obese, non-diabetic hound. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-27827600625220159942013-02-03T21:26:00.000-08:002013-02-03T21:28:33.179-08:00Preserving Garlic*<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JFqI1n2J4hU/UOYxSlQmA9I/AAAAAAAABPw/T3JZTAz9zxM/s1600/IMG_1719.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JFqI1n2J4hU/UOYxSlQmA9I/AAAAAAAABPw/T3JZTAz9zxM/s400/IMG_1719.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Garlic Unclad</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">If you tuned into the <a href="http://urbangreenstead.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-year-according-to-garlic.html" target="_blank">Garlic Calendar</a>,
then you know that the cloves sense the Winter Solstice, and commence
to sprouting, threatening your year's supply of homegrown flavor. But
I'm such a procrastinator that I cannot follow my own advice, and it was
only in the new year that I got around to peeling and storing the
dozens of cloves that were sitting in the garage. Just these couple of
weeks had the garlic doing this:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u1OzgtLWG98/UOYy3laVtiI/AAAAAAAABQA/v6Ywt_msFzA/s1600/IMG_1715.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u1OzgtLWG98/UOYy3laVtiI/AAAAAAAABQA/v6Ywt_msFzA/s400/IMG_1715.JPG" width="386" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Hot erotic</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> garlic</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">, or just reproduction?</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">While
they're starting on the new cycle that would birth a new plant, the
cloves are not yet too far gone (besides, I kinda like the look of
slices with the green circle in the center). But before the sprouts get
as long as the cloves from which they spring, before the flesh gets
soft, before pungent aroma becomes putrid regret, I need to somehow stop
the process. In years past, this has been a matter of dropping peeled
cloves into a jar and drowning them in olive oil. I did that again, but
this time I'm trying a couple of other methods.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CZLw4LuWdkg/UOY0q7haWLI/AAAAAAAABQQ/BIibq3NDlLY/s1600/IMG_1720.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CZLw4LuWdkg/UOY0q7haWLI/AAAAAAAABQQ/BIibq3NDlLY/s400/IMG_1720.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Salt and the earth.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Here's
experiment #1. Good old fashioned salting. Pour pickling salt into a
jar, put in a layer of peeled cloves, then bury them in salt, then more
garlic, more salt,...you get the picture. The cloves are firm, and I did
not irrigate, so I don't expect osmosis to create a saline slush, but
it's an experiment. For reference, the majority of the cloves in the
first photo and a bunch of salt filled a pint jar. I'll check back in
later to let you know if this is a fail, but I suspect that what will
happen is that the cloves stay intact, and I get a batch of garlic salt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Experiment
#2 is yet to be done. I had a bunch of large-cloved heads of garlic
this year; some are elephant garlic, but not necessarily all. The plan
is to roast them, smoosh the result, spread it out on parchment paper,
and dehydrate it. I'm aiming for something like fruit leather, a hide of
garlicky goodness that I can snip into strips or drop into the pot
whole whenever I want that twice-roasted garlic flava.</span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P9ODtdZmOw8/UOY2Pfb5VYI/AAAAAAAABQg/bC1wKOodymg/s1600/IMG_1739.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="311" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-P9ODtdZmOw8/UOY2Pfb5VYI/AAAAAAAABQg/bC1wKOodymg/s400/IMG_1739.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Winter Morning Sun Dawns on Evening's Leavings</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And
then there's this, the old standby: cloves in oil. Chopped or pureed
garlic tastes harsh and goes bad quicker. Drowning while cloves in oil
and keeping them out of direct sunlight seems to halt the sprouting
process. I'll remove the rubber gasket from the jar above so that the
occasional fermentation fart can escape. In time, the cloves will soak
up the oil and become beautifully translucent, edible amber. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">There
are other ways to preserve garlic, but I don't like them (pickling? I
just throw some in the cuke pickles I make, and that's plenty for my
taste), or I don't know them. If you want to write in with others, I'll
listen. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So if you have not yet dealt with your garlic, do it now! </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><i>* [For whatever reason, it took me a month to think of my <a href="http://urbangreenstead.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Greenstead</a> post as food-ish, and post it here.] </i></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-53303309946494359752012-12-29T23:05:00.000-08:002012-12-29T23:05:27.100-08:007 7 7 Marmalade<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-raI_yscCsA8/UN_OEPChnAI/AAAAAAAABMY/c-hT0UKeXQs/s1600/IMG_1699.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-raI_yscCsA8/UN_OEPChnAI/AAAAAAAABMY/c-hT0UKeXQs/s400/IMG_1699.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Last Winter, I made marmalade and <a href="http://mocavore.blogspot.com/2012/01/lord-marmelade.html" target="_blank">wrote about it</a>. The marmalade was great, the recipe acceptable, and the writing kinda bad. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Last
week, I made another batch, because Cara Cara oranges were on sale for
88 cents a pound. A lucky double-eight smiles on fate in many cultures,
so I took it as a sign that I should fill a couple bags and get to
cooking. Even without mystical callings to make jam, cheapskates like me
know that 88 cents is about half the usual sale price, and that it's a
good bet the citrus is dead ripe and they're in a hurry to move it. Deal
lapse and fruit rots, but every once in a whole fate smiles and if
you're alert you can capture it in jars, preserving it til you need it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">With
enough for a couple of batches, I had opportunity to improve on last
year's operation. So here I am again, reporting, but this time not
burdened with writerly pretensions.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">It's
called 7 7 7 Marmalade because there are 7 pounds of oranges, 7 cups of
sugar, and it makes 7 pints. The amount of water isn't 7, but I'm gonna
ignore that. Here's the recipe.</span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">7 7 7 Marmalade</span></b></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Get <b>7 pounds of oranges</b>, (Cara Cara is what I use, but the main thing is to get something with an aromatic skin.)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Peel
the zest from 3 oranges, and then halve and slice the whole batch. Make
the first cut from naval to where the stem was, and the slices should
be a half centimeter thick. (That's a skinny quarter inch, Americans.)
Cut up the zest however you want. I go for a random chop that yields
everything from slivers to uncut pinky-sized pieces (That's over 5 cm,
everyone else in the world; in the US, "pinky" is your small finger, and is an acceptable unit of measure.) Put the zest aside. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">If you're smart, lazy, or both, you'll be sliding the orange slices directly into a 12 quart stock pot, which will be about full when you finish. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Pour <b>4 cups of water</b> into the pot and start cooking.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">I
start at the low end of Medium High on the stove, and once the boil
begins, start to inch it up to high Medium High. (That's, uh, nobody
really knows what temperature stove knob units correlate to. Sorry,
citizens of earth.) Let some of the water evaporate, but the goal is not
to boil off the liquid; go for a long low boil that dissolves the pulp
and a lot of the pith. The end result will remain liquidy and most
un-jamlike.</span><br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5-4w2DcBp24/UN_fCcaDZYI/AAAAAAAABMo/m2eacqBGjcE/s1600/IMG_1694.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="246" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5-4w2DcBp24/UN_fCcaDZYI/AAAAAAAABMo/m2eacqBGjcE/s400/IMG_1694.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">After the first boil.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Now,
let it sit til the next day. It gives you a break, and I think it helps
maximize the natural pectin. Yeah, that's right, don't add pectin to
marmalade. It makes its own. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">When
it's time, get your canning set-up in order, and be sure you're ready
to stand at the stove and stir for a while. Put on "Blowout Comb" by
Digable Planets, or some other hour-long album, and then put the pot back on a low Medium High stove. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Add <b>7 cups of sugar</b> and the <b>zest</b> and stir them in well. I also experimented by grating half a nutmeg into one batch at this point, and about an inch of ginger root into the other; not sure if I really taste it.
Watch and adjust the temp as necessary until you have a hearty simmer.
No lid this time, because you do want to cook it down. At first, no need
to stir constantly, but by about Track 7 (titled "Dial 7," see why this
CD fits this recipe?), you should see the marmalade beginning to
emerge. I've been using a large metal spatula for the stirring, because
it's long handle keeps my hands away from the sugary lava, and it's good
for scraping the bottom so nothing sticks. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">There
are all sorts of recipes that say the jam must reach specific
temperatures, or recommend tests like dropping some jam on a cold plate
to see if it is thick enough. But the risk of burning yourself to get
thermometer readings or the hassle of another dish to wash are not
necessary. Here's how you know it's ready:</span><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">You see the jam getting darker, and that more of it is sticking to the side of the pot.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">You hear the boil change from simmer to thick ploppy bubbles, and finally to a rumble bubble that explodes each time you stir. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">You feel your arm muscles burning as you stir through thickening glop.</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Cut
the heat and get the jars ready. Make sure your canner water is boiling
before you put anything in the jars. I usually start that at the same
time as the marmalade boil, dialing down once it reaches its own boil,
and then crank it up again along with a smaller pot of water to sterilize the lids when the marmalade is ready. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Leave
a centimeter or a skinny half inch of headspace as you fill half or
whole pint jars. (I put a spoonful of bourbon in the bottom of two pints, but will wait a while to sample those.) Screw on the lids loosely and process for, you guess it, 7 minutes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">For those of you who cannot abide stream-of-consciousness recipe format, here's the listy version:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><u>Ingredients</u></span><br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">7 pounds oranges, sliced thin after removing the zest of three oranges.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">4 cups water</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">7 cups sugar</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><u>Directions</u></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Boil 1: oranges and water until pulp dissolves and skins soften</span><br /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Wait overnight</span><br /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Boil 2: and sugar and zest to the mix and slowly return to a boil, stirring increasinly often</span><br /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Use your sense and the done-ness list above to know when to stop.</span><br /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Boil 3: process half or one-pint jars in boiling water canner for 7 minutes.</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Yields 7 pints. </span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-91008955663079734932012-11-03T23:25:00.001-07:002012-11-03T23:25:28.266-07:00In the Pantry, 2012<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5KgqSC1TBtA/UJYCgqdQMpI/AAAAAAAABG4/1sbSntHfbC4/s1600/IMG_1266.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5KgqSC1TBtA/UJYCgqdQMpI/AAAAAAAABG4/1sbSntHfbC4/s400/IMG_1266.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Last Fall, I made <a href="http://mocavore.blogspot.com/2011/10/in-pantry.html" target="_blank">a list of what I had canned</a>. Some of it remains on the shelf, testament to the facts that I do not particularly like pepper relish and that there are limited uses for rose hip syrup. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">This year, I have these things:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">18 quarts - tomato</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">17 quarts - dill pickles (4 from last year)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">5 quarts - sweet pickles</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">4 quarts - sour (fermented) dills</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 quart - dill pickled beans</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 quart - dill pickled red cabbage</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">9 pints - pickled beets</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">7 pints - plum syrup (to be re-processed into jam)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">4 pints - pepper relish</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">5 pints - blackberry jam</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">2 pints - strawberry jam </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">2 pints - marmelade</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">2 pints - smokes salmon</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 pint - serviceberry</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 pint - sauerkraut</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 pint - "hot jam" marmelade</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 pint - pineapple-mandarin marmelade</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 pint - pickled pimento</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">3 half-pints - rose hip syrup</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">2 half-pints - serviceberry</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">2 half-pints - cranberry sauce</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 half-pint - hot jam</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 half-pint - cranberry-blood orange marmelade </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">In the freezer:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">2.5 quarts - nettle</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">2 quarts - spot shrimp</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">2 gallons - hops</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Sitting in boxes in the garage: </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">A few pounds of homegrown taters</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">A year's supply of homegrown garlic</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">A grocery bag of black moss</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">A smaller bag of homegrown tomatillos</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">On the herb shelf:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">2 gallons - dried mint </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 quart - dried oregano</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 pint - dried thyme</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 half-pint - tarragon</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">1 half-pint - poppy seeds</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">This is not so different form last year, except that I obviously did not get to freeze a salmon, and I got a deal on beets. Also, I moved into fermentation, which reminds me that the list should include:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">>1 sesqui-gallon of sauerkraut in the works, bubbling desultorily until it's time to jar it up. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">If I can get some Chinese cabbage at the farmers market, I may add kimchi to the list by year's end.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">This year was no good for mushrooms, and I still didn't get a fishing license, so I don't see the larder getting any fuller. Circumstances did not allow a real garden this year, so mostly I canned stuff that other people grew. I am about as far from being self-sufficient as ever (which is to say, for garlic and oregano alone), but once again I can look forward to pickles and tomatoes fairly regularly without exhausting my stash. And probably kraut. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Not sure in which way I will expand or experiment next year, but there's plenty of Winter yet to figure that out...</span><br />
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-36638978837898459632012-10-18T17:47:00.001-07:002012-10-18T17:47:30.180-07:00Kosher or not, Smoked Meat for Breakfast<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sT04REzGRuI/UICZq2yQybI/AAAAAAAABCk/ScFtkMNcnSI/s1600/IMG_1186.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sT04REzGRuI/UICZq2yQybI/AAAAAAAABCk/ScFtkMNcnSI/s400/IMG_1186.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">With the warm dry summer this year, Northwest gardeners (or the people who buy from our farmers) got to have delicious tomatoes. Short days, cold nights, and wet marine air have shut down further ripening, but the memories are delicious. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">One of my flavorite reminisces has to do with the aroma of toasty bagel mixing with smoked salmon. The dance of cool tomato and warm bread on my tongue, of smooth cream cheese and poppy seeds vying to please, makes my mouth feel happy. The religion I was raised with is confusing enough, so figuring out whether mixing fish and cheese is kosher is way beyond my expertise; the fact that all my Jewish friends are fine with lox and bagels does not really convince me, since most of them are all about as devout as my own pagan, shiftless, skeptical self. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Back East, I'd have lox and bagels now and then, but even in the '80s, tomatoes available in delis had begun shedding their flavor, and the lox was a cold damp minislab not so different from the other cold cuts. Here, I've finally been exposed to real smoked salmon, and as luck would have it I received a few jars of primo smoked salmon at a couple of tribal give-aways this Spring. Alder-smoked wild salmon crumbled over local cream cheese is to what I used to get in delis as a Northwest IPA is to a can of Bud...I'll take the latter over an egg mcmuffin or a coors light, but it ain't the same thing. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-87izduhMezY/UICfEFdKQ8I/AAAAAAAABC4/MUuAAH8hXmQ/s1600/IMG_1175.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-87izduhMezY/UICfEFdKQ8I/AAAAAAAABC4/MUuAAH8hXmQ/s400/IMG_1175.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Not so Kosher, the Joy of Goy.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">And then there's the other thing. Pork. At the Olympia Farmers Market, now and then you can get bacon made from organic pasture-raised piggies. No parev work-around on this, it's just straight-out not kosher. Damned delicious, I guess that's how I would describe it. Mix it with a bagel and cream cheese, or eggs, whatever. Blow the thin blue tendril of skillet-smoke out the kitchen window as an offering to whatever gods you want to please.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Too much of these good things may not be good for your body, never mind your spiritual health. But to deny yourself these deliciousnesses on the basis of archaic laws is a bit too much sufferation for this heathen, and maybe of other people with taste buds. But if an ancient law forbids you from eating this way, I wish you well, and will help dispose of your share. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> </span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-55651711770005615732012-10-17T12:36:00.000-07:002012-10-17T12:37:02.972-07:00Cider Days<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xjU0ltimoE4/UH75rrwEF3I/AAAAAAAABB4/7WOetfNv14A/s1600/IMG_1592.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xjU0ltimoE4/UH75rrwEF3I/AAAAAAAABB4/7WOetfNv14A/s400/IMG_1592.jpg" width="300" /> </a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">This week, I'll squeeze another batch of cider. I inherited a big press on my way out to Washington, an 1870s monument to cast iron and oaken framery that saved my life by weighing down the pickup bed across miles of Wyoming ice. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Apples started dropping early and dry this year, but there are still trees laden with fruit still sweetening as the weather cools off. A neighbor let me pick from his tree, and I have two boxes sitting in the garage ready to go. Earlier, the first apple tree I ever planted yielded enough fruit for a half gallon of cider, and I got some more from a neighbor's windfall.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">I'm not what you'd call real particular about the quality of fruit, but the windfall stuff has enough worms and incipient rancidity that it needs some surgery before making cider. Blemishes and outright ugliness don't matter, and old timers will tell you that some bruises are a good thing when it comes to cider. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">I wash all these pomological freaks in a galvanized tub, and then it's time to call in the help. Kids are perfect. I get the crank turning til the flywheel is spinning along nicely, and the little one starts tossing in apples to be crunchewed between teethy drums that spit bits drunkenly into and all around the bucket below. Immediately the air turns sweet, but for some reason this fall we were not beset by yellowjackets or bees.</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-M4vaFurPcSk/UH8G7eBRo7I/AAAAAAAABCQ/OpEfNFFX91k/s1600/IMG_1582.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-M4vaFurPcSk/UH8G7eBRo7I/AAAAAAAABCQ/OpEfNFFX91k/s400/IMG_1582.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">A bucketful of chomped apples is now ready for the pressing. The long and increasingly difficult turning of a giant iron screw that presses the apples while they sit in a slatted bucket on a slatted table. Juice flows out the sides and the bottom, hitting the drainboard and flowing into a container as the littler daughter makes sure nothing is lost. The bigger one uses a big ironwood stick to gain leverage, squeezing every last drop from the thinning wheel of apples crushed inside the bucket. Meanwhile, I sit back and enjoy a break. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">Someday, I'll get serious enough about hunting down apples (pay for them? perish the thought!) and gathering gear to make a big batch and ferment it. Or maybe not. But I'll always treasure fall afternoons with the girls doing cider alchemy, turning the ugliest apples into nectar, using brute force to craft delicate tastes. </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-41818152426442207952012-10-08T23:46:00.000-07:002012-10-08T23:51:44.940-07:00That's It? (DIY Butter)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zBOSSCyTf68/UHO6amipKeI/AAAAAAAABBc/qkYbVMVjnoQ/s1600/IMG_1152.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zBOSSCyTf68/UHO6amipKeI/AAAAAAAABBc/qkYbVMVjnoQ/s400/IMG_1152.JPG" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Shake it!</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Yep. Get a jar o milk and shake it for a while. 20 minutes? I dunno, you just gotta commit that once you start, you don't quit until there's butter. It'll appear when it's good and ready, but when it does, it's pretty obvious (once the foam settles), like this:</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-f8oqwpORELQ/UHO7qILMCFI/AAAAAAAABBk/zwqL59HGBcU/s1600/IMG_1154.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-f8oqwpORELQ/UHO7qILMCFI/AAAAAAAABBk/zwqL59HGBcU/s400/IMG_1154.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Mmmm...rich creamery cowagulant. </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Simplicity may just be deviousness, though, and of course there are a few guaranteed ways to fail (and infinite opportunities to elaborate, but that's somebody else's blog). I shouldn't have to say so, but since this is the internet, "No skim milk." Not even 2%. You need whole milk or else all the butter embryos have been stripped out and sold to the highest bidder. Better yet, get that old-school glass jug from a local organic dairy, the one that's already got cream adhereing to the head-space. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Do this after they put the stuff on sale, because the stuff is expensive. Maybe you can snag them on cheap at the expiration date, which most milkologists will agree amounts to a discounted head start on buttermilk and sour cream. (Maybe I jest. Please to not consume what could be spoiled food on the basis of a blog post. Let us now return to the proper focus of the internet, which is money:) But don't make butter to save money, because it's a hell of a lot cheaper to buy it than do this, unless you have a friend with a cow.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Which brings us to the matter of yield. A half pint turned into less than what a pancake restaurant plops on your flapjack stack. Which can still be a lot, but if you're planning to slather it on bread or melt it in a mountain of griddlecakes, you're gonna eat this butter in less time than it took to make it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">You still have the de-buttered milk, though. Not being a calf, I don't drink milk, but cooking with it is fine. It's still got enough body to cream up a soup or a sauce. Seems like it would be good for baking, but again, don't take web-based musings as valid kitchen guidance. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In fact, I've done this just twice. Some fluke may rank this page higher than some poor butter-churner who has labored for years. Based on my meager experience, I would say only that you should not go nuts with vigorous shaking, which actually leaves you with lots of small curds instead of the one big ball you get if you start to just swirl the liquid once they start appearing. </span><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">DIY Butter Recipe</span></b></span></div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Put less than a jar full of whole milk in a jar, and screw the lid on tight</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Shake it until there is butter</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Take the butter from the milk</span></li>
</ul>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-7771271808417468302012-07-11T20:15:00.000-07:002012-07-11T20:15:06.474-07:00Punk? Not so much.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The new groups are not concerned<br />
With what there is to be learned<br />
They got Burton suits, ha you think it's funny<br />
Turning rebellion into money</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>from "White Man in the Hammersmith Palais" by Joe Strummer (I presume)</i></span></div>
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The clogged blogosphere of foodies, locavores, urban homesteaders, DIYers, and OTHers* renders my offerings invisible. I could try to gain a wider audience by joining the pinterested, or by linking to one of the other sites that aggregates such blogs, but I am too lazy and egotistical, not to mention dis-inclined. The ramps to fame, or at least garnering large numbers of eyeballs, prove too steep for my shiftless self. Make a logo, develop a not-off-the-shelf design, pay for a domain, suck up to corporations so they'll give me some swag to review or re-gift, and most dangerous of all, fall into the pond of self-deception, in which this platform can somehow become a revenue generator or a stepping stone to a book contract. </div>
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Among my bookmarks is one such site, where people turn in their recipes, DIY tips, and so on. There's actually some useful stuff there, and I do check it out fairly regularly. The name of it is "Punk Domestics," which appealed to me before I really began to understand what it is. The name, which rings oxymoronic to begin with in my book (I grew up in a time and place where "domestics" were servants, usually darker than the, uh, dare I say, masters?), also fails to live up to anything like the spirit of punks, much less the "hardcore" ethos their blurb claims they embody. </div>
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For starters, to submit anything, you're supposed to log in, get your ID, join the queue. And yes, submission is the name of the game, oddly enough, for any posting must comply with a list of rules. You are then encouraged to get a Punk Domestics "badge" to display on your blog, so you can funnel eyeballs to their site, which has a lot of ads.</div>
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But not just ads. Entire blog posts that are plugs. Like the William Sonomas give-away. A post that waxes eloquent about how this upscale mall denizen is embracing the DIY movement with darling canning jars and such, marketed as the "Agrarian" line. [Clever name, I will admit, harkening to a simpler time, a garden-ey feeling, and of course for the baby boomers with fuzzy memories and their kids with vague historical understandings, it evokes the rhyming Aquarian age.] All you have to do to win it is drive up the site's numbers with comments, or post something on twitter or pinterest, whatever it takes to increase revenue at Punk Domestics, which just happens to admit that they've "done some copywriting for Williams-Sonoma, including for the Agrarian line." If you can stomach it, visit <a href="http://www.punkdomestics.com/content/williams-sonoma-agrarian-giveaway#.T_4kLnDzcTU" target="_blank">the offending link </a></div>
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I'd rather wallow in non-commercial, self-righteous, obscurity. Even if the readership consists mostly of myself, trying to recall how I made that meal or canned those things, it feels better than shilling for a company catering to privileged dilettantes. Those people have people to cook for them, and mostly only take it upon themselves when it will create a show. I'm more interested in food, basically.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*Other Things Homespun-ers</span></div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-32381236277652730682012-07-05T06:34:00.000-07:002012-07-05T06:34:28.329-07:00Strawberry Jam. So simple you should learn some Hawaiian while you make it.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Mmmm...splattery goodness. Maika'i</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Back by the Chesapeake where I grew up, strawberries have long since been picked or baked by the unrelenting sun, but here in the Northwest, they're going strong. This year, I was lucky enough to get enough from the home garden to make a batch of jam without curtailing my daughters' grazing. Like most foods I really love, jam is pretty simple to make. So simple, that maybe you can learn some Hawaiian while you do it. Here's a dictionary to help you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Dump the following into a big steel stock pot:</span><br />
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<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">11 cups of berries (hap-hazardly & half-heartedly smash 'em down prior to measuring, but whole-heartedly ku'i da buggas with a potato masher once they’re into the kettle)</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">4.5 cups of sugar</span></li>
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<br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I brought this up to a low boil while distracted by other tasks, so it coulda been done faster, but longer only means more time for everything to come all miko (your dictionaries tend to speak of salt with this word, but I've heard it used to convey the idea of something marinating, sitting together while flavors blend and soak through), which I think for jam means a better chance of it coming pa’a, and not all he’e.</span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Speaking of which, it was around this time that I added</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Pectin (powder kind) - 1 regular and 1 of supposedly no-sugar-needed [given my results, maybe you should add another]</span></li>
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<br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Then I let it boil quietly for a little while longer, until one time when I took out the spoon, the sugar-red clung well enough, and I began putting out the jars. </span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Did I mention that I was sterilizing jars in the canner this whole time? No? Well I was, but not to turn around and plop them back in the boiling bath for processing. My grandmothers sealed strawberry jam with molten paraffin, using a can with a bent-rim spout to pour the wax onto the jarred jam; the can sits in a small pot of hot water, so that drips won’t burst into flame. </span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The yield is 7 pints, maybe a little less. There was not all that much foam to scrape off the post-pectin boil, and some jam managed to find its way onto the kettle, the jam-pouring big measuring cup, the spoon, the counter, my sweatshirt, and some other place that I will only discover weeks from today. So the yield would be a solid 7 pints to a cook whose frugality extends to actually being neat. </span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Now, 7 pints of jam is a pretty small amount, but it came from a 3rd-year patch of my own planting, so I’m pretty happy. A day’s easy picking from 27 square feet, give or take, mellowing and softening in the fridge for a couple of days, working toward miko, and now it’s jam. Not a bad small side project for a weekend.</span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">How was this jam? A little he'e, to be honest, but I couldn’t be bothered to do more than throw in whatever pectin was at hand, and it didn’t end up as syrup, at least. A day in the fridge before serving helps, and it’s possible to make a sandwich with it, which satisfies the kids’ main criterion. If your own requirement is to have a thicker jam, the find another recipe, or throw in another pack o pectin, and maybe more sugar,...whatever works.</span><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The flavor, on the other hand, is ono. I have no idea what variety the berries are, but they are medium sized, and red to the core, no pulp, all juicy. Mmmm. If you’ve been comparing recipes, you’ve noticed that I don’t use as much sugar as some people, because my tongue likes a tang, but it’s plenty sweet. </span></div>
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-63458906321081304872012-07-03T23:47:00.000-07:002012-07-03T23:47:27.310-07:00A Nice Slice<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Has the quality of Hass improved, or is it the shipping time, or could it have just been so long since I've lived in Kona that my avocado aficionado qualifications have expired? Regardlessly, happy am I over the state of grocery store avocados in the northwest in this year of faux-Mayan doom, 2012. Is the Thriftway avo as fine as a mayan? Mebbe not, but it's a slippery treat of a slice, that tastes mighty nice.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Say you're a working person. It's the pen-penultimate day to Cinco de Julio, and you forgot to put the puerco in the crock-pot this morning. You've jammed at work to make your holiday free of worries, and you come home later than usual to no supper. You could steam some rice, saute something to go with it, or maybe go the noodle route...Or, you could skip carbs and remember that jumbo avo sitting behind the onions in the bread bowl, further obscured by tomatoes and a half of a demi-baguette. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Your thumb flips the stem-nub off with just enough resistance to tell you that this alligator pear is nott en-rotten, the your other hand sinks knife through skin and down-to the ridiculous testiculous seed of this most cyclopian scrotumly of fruit-packets. Cut the Greenwich and it's opposite longitude, pull half the fruit off and swack the blade into said seed, then twisting to remove it from remaining half. Fling it wherever suits you. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Then you cut slices onto a plate. Splash some hot sauce (Ingredients: water, chiles, salt, vinegar--anything more is an abomination), and squeeze some lime (from a fruit, dammit! Not an abominalous plastic thingy). Yumm. Hot-tangy slipperyous goodness. Healthier than pork-fat, and nearly as tasty.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"> </span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-7515089592019154672012-06-01T21:12:00.000-07:002012-06-01T21:12:46.043-07:00Salish Sea Salt<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">One of our most basic ingredients has made the passage from salt of the earth to gourmet accoutrement. Sea salt has even fallen to what I call the Chipotle Effect, a food once considered exotic, known primarily to epicures (who do not credit masses of Mexicans that knew first), that jumps into the mainstream and becomes commoditized to the point that it is featured in Applebees and the snack aisle at Walmart. When sea salt becomes commonplace among the lumpen-pretentious, sending gourmands to ever more specialized and expensive salts. If you have a connection, you can now season your food with salt from all over the world, seasoned with everything from alder to Veruca.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Ironically, some of this amounts to a return to days gone by, when salt was dug and dried from various sources, each with its own texture and flavor and character. Once, all things were artisinal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But even long ago, salt's fundamentality in the human diet and its non-perishability made it a commodity (and money...thank the Romans for your "salary," working stiff). Saltworks seasoned trade before the other spices, I would bet, even though I'm a pepper man in my soul. Squeezed from the ocean, dug from old seas, alchemied from ashes, salt favors every cuisine, but in many places it is not available, despite the creative ways hominid cooks procure it. It was inevitable that something so unevenly distributed and valuable would become an article of commerce, and as societies became industrial, so too did salt production, and no place more than where it could be dug from geological domes and layers, thus the doleful workingman's epithet for a hard job: "working in the salt mines."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Throughout my childhood, salt flowed fine and easy from cylindrical canisters decorated with a MidCentury OldFashioned girl with an umbrella, distractedly wandering around in a salt downpour. Salt mines were bad and Soviet, we were told, while ours was delivered by kindly capitalists. It was iodized (For Health!), and it was pretty much your only choice other than pickling salt (Kosher!), which decent people did not put in the shaker. Now, afflicted with hardship and unaffected by outmoded (Modern!) prejudices against homespuntineity, we can make our own salt again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">For a sun-drenched six months that I spent mapping a Kona village, I made salt. The people of old had hollowed out bowls all over the pahoehoe, mostly a foot or two across, not deep like the bait-pounding cups. There was salt in them when we arrived, as well as kiawe twigs, crab bits and various other crap you don't want to eat, not to mention the hefty deposit of saltish-looking sand, which hurts to eat. So we swept out a few and poured in some fresh kai (ocean water). Then some more, and then again, because the thirsty lava, parched since the previous Winter's storms, drank til all the vesicles were full and the water could finally pool.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Then we'd wait. The top would dry, and at lunch we'd flip flakes to the edge to expose thicker brine, and then come back the next day to do it again. Sometimes, rain would come in during the night, drunk, reeling up the coast, ruining days of the sun's work, pissing away the salt. Or a bird would drop a carapace or a crap. But eventually, I ended up with a couple of mason jars full of beautiful salt and only a few pieces of sea urchin.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But there's an easier way for you to make salt, and it goes a little something like this:</span><br />
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<u><b>Salish Sea Salt</b></u></div>
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<li>Go get some Salish Sea Water (unless there's another kai close by)</li>
<li>Boil it in a stainless steel or enamel pot, stirring occasionally once salt starts sticking to the bottom.</li>
<li>When it gets thick, and the popping bubbles burn your arm, put the brine into a glass or ceramic baking pan, or even a plate. Put it in a 150-200 degree oven and then turn the oven off. You're going for evaporation, not boiling heat.</li>
<li>Go do something else for an hour. </li>
<li>Repeat, scraping any crust (Yum!) that forms to the edge each round, until there's no water. </li>
<li>Honing your new scraping skills (and maybe your new Solingen steel salt-scraping tool), scrape the salt into something suitably pretentious or functional, depending on your needs.</li>
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7464761655312744804.post-3809547471796076442012-05-28T10:09:00.004-07:002012-05-28T10:09:53.831-07:00Locavore Granola Bars<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">As the sun returns, so too do the hippies come out of hibernation, and it seems like Oly has more than the average population. If you add the vegan tribe, macrobioticians, locavores, organicists, and other groovy eaters, we are what the rest of the country often calls "crunchy," or "granola." I guess I fit in there somewhere. So when I had to make a bunch of stuff for a bake sale, it only made sense to a basic guy like myself to make granola bars. Take the label, bake it, make it something useful. The world needs a little de-meta-fication now and then. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Another thing the world needs is to stop eating globally so much. If every meal makes an epic journey from field to table, then our food is overly seasoned with petroleum. And that ain't good. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This concludes my sermon. You've heard it before and are either a member of the choir I'm preaching to or have already left this post, grabbed the keys, and headed for Applebeast. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A locavore recipe on the world wide web is oxymoronic, I guess, but there are a couple of local readers, and maybe Olyblog will send more, so I'll continue. But if you're not in the Northwest, don't follow this recipe faithfully and call it 'local,' or you will be a fool or a fraud, relentlessly mocked, and the keys to your hybrid confiscated. With any luck, my having stretched the concept to include flax seed and canola oil from a few states away won't earn me the same treatment; I'm growing flax to make amends, and the rest of the ingredients are from Washington or Oregon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b>NW Locavore Granola (makes 50 granola bars)</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">5 cups Oatmeal (from eastern Washington)<br />3 cups Flax seed (from North Dakota, this time)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">6 cups Chopped nuts (I used a ix of hazel and walnuts from Burnt Ridge orchard)<br />1 tsp Salt (fresh-squeezed from the Salish Sea)<br />3 cups Berries (I used saskatoon--aka serviceberries--picked near the Columbia)<br />2 cups Choco (OK. Obviously grown elsewhere, but made in Seattle)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />Mix all of the above in a big bowl. Then warm up the following:<br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">5 cups Honey (Pixie honey from the farmers market)<br />1 cup Water (Olympia!) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br />Pour this in the big bowl and work it over until everything is coated, the mixture is stiff, and your arms hurt. Maybe add some organic canola oil. I did, but don't recall exactly how much. Just a little.<br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Spread to about one finger thick on parchment onto the big cookie sheet. Cook at 350 for 15 minutes or so (until top is browning), then turn off oven and remove promptly. Slide parchment onto bread board, cut bars and spread out, and return to oven with door open to cool and consolidate.</span><br />
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