Daily meals

Some nights it's all I can do to put food on the table -- sometimes going so far as to order takeout or pick up burritos from the very nice people up the street. But I do write a menu every week and try to stick to it. I also like to try new things -- tonight is one example.

I like gnocchi. At restaurants. At home, it's hit or miss. Out of nowhere, I figured I'd give it a try, and was inspired by some pop-up recipe with spinach. So I looked until I found a recipe I really liked. Also I'm trying to clean out the freezers, and we had two half-bags of spinach waiting. Coincidentally, they were exactly the weight specified. Yay!

After I baked the two kilos of Yukon gold potatoes, then riced them, mixed in the cooked and drained spinach and two cups of flour, it looked like this.

Then the dough got rolled out into ropes. It's pretty wet, so we'll see how it goes.

I tried cutting pieces with a knife

But decided that kitchen shears were easier and squished the ropes less.

 After cutting, a quick push with a fork makes groovy places. Apparently, it helps sauce cling.

 

A test run in the afternoon.

They're. . . okay. I think they'll be better with butter, Parmesan, cream, and nutmeg tonight. How could they be worse?

Edited to add -- gnocchi were only okay. Sauce was terrific. Oh well . . .

The other first is this plum torte. Very very easy to make. I can hardly wait to cut into it. I may end up taking it to spinning to share.

Good Eats

Mark Bittman talked on the radio today about his new book, and he mentioned chopped salad. I'd been wondering what to have for lunch, and though I realized I didn't have everything I needed at home or in the garden, a couple of additions would make a tasty treat for me.

I had to stop for cream cheese for the bagel-heads at home, so I got an organic red pepper, cucumber, and zucchini on the way.

Right beside the driveway, I pulled two Italian Yellow carrots out of the front, "neighbor" bed, since no one is taking carrots out of it, which drives me crazy, but is beside the point. Added to that were three leaves of ruby chard from the same bed, and two sprigs of mint, well-washed, from the curbside bed. A lime from the tree ended the front yard harvest.

Then I wandered out back, got a few sprigs of the parseley which is busy bolting, and some leaves from an old onion plant. Too late, I realized that chives would have worked, also, but I already had my onion component.

Some tricolor quinoa, well-rinsed, went into a pot with some water and I got busy chopping. I figure that no matter if I don't love a vegetable (zucchini squash, I'm looking at you), if it's a small enough piece, surrounded by lovely bits of Things I Enjoy Eating, the less-admired things will slip right on by. So I carefully chiffonaded the green things, trying to simultaneously dilute the chard and spread the mint around, chopped the harder veggies up into less than bite sized pieces -- the absoloute largest are about 1/2" -- and squeezed the lime over them.

Quinoa done, I added it to the bowl, and topped everything with some salt and a few grinds of pepper. The bulk of the salad will be improved for waiting, but it's lunchtime, so I served myself up a bowl. Full of flavor, and with enough crunchy things to signal to my mouth that I'm really eating, I'm going to try to remember this sort of approach all summer, and keep things like it in the fridge for the kids to grab as snacks.

After they eat all the bagels.

First things first

Life with small children (okay, less small than they used to be, but old habits die hard) can often feel as though it's all reactive. You try to anticipate, but really kids are just bags of immediate wants and needs. I'm pretty spontaneous myself, but I do like some planful time. It helps center me for the onslaught of my days. If possible, I like to get up before anyone else, the time I used to run, and now I read the paper. Then I take a walk in the garden. Sometimes I hope that it's going to be a quick overview, but often I end up harvesting, doing stuff, getting happily side tracked. Today was a seriously sidetracky sort of day. The best!

I'm tickled at the bursting bounty of my bell pepper plants. I know that they need fertilization to keep going at their peak, and I have a low-tech idea for that which I'll blog about if it works, but still, just think of all the yumminess coming up:


The potato harvest seems like such a high return on investment. Somewhere the weights of the planting potatoes have to be written down. Even though I don't mean to, a visit to the potato bed seems to sneak in at least once a day. I'm not going to repeat the red and purple regular sized potato plantings -- the red ones are only good for boiling, really, and it's not my favorite preparation, and the purple ones are very . . . well, purple. Not for me.

But the fingerlings? They're called "Red Fingerling" and "French Fingerling" at the store where the original ones came from, and the French are buttery and fantastic. Maybe tonight we'll taste the red ones:


Can you see the "European Bell" pepper under that Early Girl tomato? Neither can I. Note to self, tomatoes are space pigs. Give 'em their own bed.


A quick tie up of a big branch and some judicious pruning freed the pepper to have at least a little light and some hope of fruiting.

The volunteer squash is doing fine -- I'm going to have to start walking over it soon. Of course, depending on what it is, I might end up tearing it out. It will be compost, at worst.


Today is the tomatillos last. The municipal green bin is being emptied today, and since I won't compost anything with this much powdery mildew, I was waiting for room for the plants. Any tomatillos worth saving will go into another batch of enchilada sauce, and then we'll just call it a day. I'm not up to coaxing them along. Maybe some year I'll fight powdery mildew, but not this one.


The Cherokee Purples are like little happy surprises peeking among the foilage.


Yesterday I managed to mostly turn under the cover crop. Now I have to find out what was supposed to follow the buckwheat, soybeans, and clover. I'm sold -- now I just have to make certain that I've scheduled cover cropping in between rotations, and find a source for modestly-priced bulk seed.


Flowers mean that beans can't be far behind, if the beetles don't eat them all. Little pests.


The other bean bed is happier with some iron slug bait. I was finding too many babies half chewed. We replanted in the empty spots, but I bet there's going to be enough for the whole year anyhow.


When I was ready to go in the house, the basket was much heavier.


Ten minutes after going inside, a freshly beaten egg and enough butter to make me feel a little guilty made a breakfast to seriously savor. That's the kind of fast food I can get behind!


Squash blossoms, Cherokee Purple tomato, and some of the volunteer tat soi from a path. Now I get to think of lunch.

Denise's spring/summer harvest totals

As the year's last Early Girls slow roast in the oven, I'm totaling the season's harvest. I thought I'd wait until all the beds were empty, but that's not going to happen: some of the Sungolds are still fruiting, plenty of kale is going strong, and both the jalapeños and the jalapas are still producing, too.

So it looks like about 430 pounds. The biggest producers were

• the summer squash: zucchini (89 lbs 4 oz from 3 plants) and scallopini (39 lbs 3 oz from 3 plants)
• the tomatoes: Sungolds (27 lbs 15 oz from 4 plants) and Early Girls (63 lbs 6 oz from 4 plants---I didn't count the bush EGs, which hardly produced)
• the winter squash, of course: butternut (14 lbs 15 oz from 2? 3? plants) and Lakota (18 lbs 13 oz from 3 plants)
• the cucs, of all things: cucumbers (17 lbs from 4 plants) and lemon cucumbers (22 lbs 11 oz from 4 plants)
• and the greens: True Siberian kale (24 lbs 2 oz) and Lacinato (13 lbs 13 oz and counting)

Like Stefani's total, mine doesn't include all the foraged food: blackberries, huckleberries, and mushrooms. I'll keep better track of those this year. In the last week or so alone we've gathered over 33 pounds of oyster mushrooms. Yippee!

Some were quite large.


All ended up sliced and fried up with garlic and plenty of olive oil, then frozen: instant dinner starter.

I'm not a big hot-pepper fan, so today I had to process over a pound of jalapeños that have gathered in the fridge. I pickled some with tiny potatoes from the garden and carrots (all prepped on the beautiful cutting board Kevin made for me of reclaimed redwood, black walnut, and cherry).

Some I just canned with lemon juice. I'm not sure the latter is officially sanctioned; I'll let you know. Pretty, though, isn't it?

And as we prep the back bed, we've given the chickens their first field trips. They're such dirt monkeys! And they left their first contributions to the soil.

Un.In.Spired.

Call me the intermittent blogger.

Actually, I thought up that title a couple weeks ago but was so uninspired I couldn't bring myself to post. I'm less uninspired now, as opposed to more inspired, which might be an overstatement.

In July, I sing the praises of Early Girls, my very favorite tomato. By October I can hardly be bothered to pick them. The squirrels apparently feel the same way.

I have harvested many pounds, though. The last two batches became slow-roasted tomato sauce, just because it's easy. I discovered if you forget about the sauce in the oven, what you get is more like slow-roasted tomato paste, which is pretty, um, intense.

The squash gets big points for beauty.

I've never eaten a Lakota. Considering the poundage, I hope I like them.

Late-summer blues isn't the only thing sapping my gardening energy right now. We've done a lot of big-ticket work lately, like thinning and topping the 30-plus-foot bamboo to allow more sunlight.

That apartment building is such an eyesore, and it feels strange to thin our optical barrier. The difference in the garden is noticeable, though, and that means more to eat. We have our priorities in order.

The other big change is the wisteria, which grows vigorously over an archway of three cement-footed 4x4s. The original idea was that it would form a kind of doorway leading from one "room" of the yard to another.

The effect, while lovely, was also sun-blocking, so off came the branches, out came the 4x4s, and up came the tree.

It now lives near the remaining bamboo closer to the fence. Since it stretches toward the light, we're hoping it'll reach back toward its original site, again forming that lovely archway, but without stealing light from the garden. I love the carpet of lavender blossoms underneath in the spring. Fingers crossed.

The result of all this work is that the yard currently looks something like this:

We have lots of 20-plus-foot lengths of bamboo to build with---heck, maybe we can refloor the house---and a lot of cleanup to do.

The summer garden is slowly ending. I've pulled up all the squash, saluting the ridiculously productive zucchini and scallopini as I went, except for the butternut that has three tiny, probably ill-fated squash on it. I pulled most of the beans, but couldn't bear to cut the one that's still blossoming and climbing the apricot tree.

And finally, to the planting. Yippee! So far I've planted about 80 onion sets and transplanted 50 or 60 spinach plants, which is what dragged me out of my gardening malaise, I believe.


And after Kevin's egg joke, it was gratifying to return from a weekend away to find this:

And lastly, a surprise treat in the harvesting basket:

That's Dodger, our pest control. I've been on him to get the rats that have been scuttling around outside our bedroom window, belittling his paltry mouse offerings. I think he finally took it to heart, because last night he showed up with two startlingly large bite marks under his arm, and this morning we're off to the vet.

Nourish beginnings

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.
Muriel Rukeyser


Sometimes the beginning seed comes from the ending plant -- these are Lacinato Kale from last year.

And sometimes it's the promise of moving-around new life (notice how nicely the mama ladybugs placed their children near a buffet?).



We're going to have grapes, and this year, I've committed to regular watering, so they might be bigger than last year's quarter-inch ones.


The rasperries are so beloved that a strict set of protocol has grown up around the picking of them. One picks, then figures out how many people want them, then offers them around, making sure that mama gets some. At least that's the theory. Hopefully the new berries out front will spread out the joy.


I thought I'd have room for a zucchini in this section of the bed, but I had lazily snapped the True Siberian kale off instead of pulling it. Now it's resprouting. How could I rip it out now? We actually had kale for dinner last night.

This may be the truest indicator that spring is really here. Tomatoes. . . yummm. Even now I'm amazed at how much plant comes out of such tiny seeds.


Speaking of dinner last night, yesterday was one of those cheery "make lots of food" days. A new pan of granola:


The artichokes are from the front yard. With pine nuts and parmesan, they ended up stuffing the chicken breasts for the dinner party. They're so young that they were butter-tender.


More seeds and seedlings await downstairs. The fun just never ends. As I was pulling weeds by the garden bed today, and taking them to the chickens, I realized that I'll be doing this next year, and the year after that, and so on, unless something terrifically unexpected happens. That makes me happy. I always thought that you'd (I'd?) have to move to the country to feel linked to any land, but it's apparently the working of the land that causes connection.