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    Entries in grow your own (8)

    Monday
    May212012

    Extreme DIY

    I'm not cooking.

    Well, I am. Last night we grilled crooknecks, reduced some wine, added butter, and tossed it all with pasta, chicken breast, basil, and cheese. Tonight, pork filling for tacos. I do like pork in tacos.

    I also made date muffins again (turns out the recipe actually works and wasn't a total fluke), and sauteed chard to go into biscuit pastry for lunchy spanikopita-type things.

    But I didn't take a single picture.

    But I did take pics of food. It's just that it's food in a somewhat less familiar format.

    The garden.

    Yes, food comes from dirt.

    And while Taneasha and I are fans of DIY cooking, Recipe Guy has gone one step further and is DIYing his own food.

    I've had gardens in the past, but right now I'm trapped in my student apartment without even a balcony on which to grill things. Man, I love food cooked on fire.

    So, as I said, we grilled crooknecks last night. But first we had to harvest them. Squashes are fuzzy, and the fuzz is sharp and sticks in your fingers like fibreglass.

    Tasty things always have ways of protecting themselves. Note that the broccoli has no thorns, no fuzz, no dangerous parts to navigate around. That's because it's not edible. Contrary to what his housemates seem to think.

    Behind the broccoli is the remnants of the iceburg lettuces. There was romaine too. There's red leaf on the way. There's also chard.

    A lot of chard. I'd already taken 2-4 leaves off each of those plants. That got me about 4 grocery store sized bundles of chard. Sautee that shit in bacon fat with a bit of browned onion... goes perfectly with fried chicken. Holy yum.

    I need to make fried chicken.

    Some would recommend frying these little green tomatoes,

    but I think I'll wait until the sun turns them red (better them than me) and then eat them warm off the vine.

    TIP: As soon as your tomato plant starts fruiting, defoliate it. Pervert, it means take the leaves off. If you remove the leaves around the fruits, the sun will ripen them faster and the plant will put more energy into fruiting since it no longer has leaves to feed.

    And, if you let your cilantro go to seed, you'll attract all kinds of flying insects that will help pollinate the rest of the garden,

    and those little green burrs in the bottom left are actually corriander seed, a component of garum masala. Let them dry, harvest them by putting a paper bag over the seed head, turn it upside down and shake; all the seeds fall into the bag. This works for dill seed too.

    If you're lucky, you'll have a neighbour with honey bees

    (can you see the bee butt in the flower?) who shares the hibiscus scented honey that results from his bees spending all their time in your bushes.

    Of course, if you have a garden you need a compost heap.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04Zz-GRPAzA

    (still don't know how to embed vids)

    Now, you may not end up with a blues-singing, advice-giving heap, but what you might get are a few volunteers. I don't think I've ever seen a compost heap that didn't have things growing in it.

    We're pretty sure this is a butternut squash.

    There are onions just to the left out of the frame too. Which is good because Mowing Man keeps mowing down the wild onions in the horse pature.

    Speaking of wild things, remember the wild beans that appeared last year during the drought? Well, if you let wild beans go to seed in your garden, they will happily come back and demand trellises the next year.

    How does your garden grow?

    Tuesday
    May312011

    Mayhem, the Musical!

     

    Beans are not a fruit.

    It is officially the end of Mayhem. Taneasha is almost home, and I’ve almost remembered to get stuff for dinners each day this week. Srsly, I eat way too much cereal.

    I’ve got one more recipe from my time in the south, and it’s a true southern dish that starts with "the trinity". Now, of course with anything this quintessentially part of a cuisine, there will the various and assorted variations on ingredients, methods, and opinions on how to make it properly.

    I think with a dish like this, there will also always be variations based on the ingredients at hand. I mean, this is not some kind of haute cuisine concoction that requires specifically harvested delicacies that only grow in one part of the world. This is budget food at its finest. Most recipes I’ve seen also call for a small amount of precooked meat added at the end. That there is called using up the leftovers folks. Basically it’s a vegetable protein and carb that were advertised as healthy in afterschool public service announcements.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heKYNWFBkW8

    (nope, I don't know how to make html tags to insert a video, deal with it)

    The Schoolhouse Rock Gang were right! It’s damn tasty.

    And cheap. And freezable. And infinitely variable.

    (As usual, since I cook for one 90% of the year, the recipe I have written down is for as small a batch as possible. I‘ve found that  it’s much easier to double a recipe than to cut one in half. What you see us make is a quadruple batch!)

    Red Beans and Rice

    What you need

    • ½ lb small red kidney beans, washed
    • 6 oz pork sausage, diced (or, leftover ham, as you'll see)
    • 4 C water or stock
    • 1 med onion, chopped fine
    • 1 stalk celery, chopped fine
    • 1 bell pepper, chopped fine
    • 3 cloves garlic
    • 1 bay leaf
    • ½ tsp cayenne pepper
    • ½ tsp thyme, dried, or a bunch of fresh from the garden (what? me measure?)
    • ¼ tsp salt
    • black pepper, pinch
    • curly parsley, fresh

    What you gotta do

    Do not soak beans.  That’s right, I said “do not.” I realize that some people are having hairy conniption fits right now but I’ve never understood this whole bean soaking thing. I mean, you’re going to cook them anyway. Besides, soaking beans requires way too much forethought. They take hours to cook as it is, which is more planning than I put into most meals (see reference to cereal, above). To soak them would require that I know a whole day ahead of time that I’m going to want beans for dinner.

    Really the rest of the procedure can be summed up in the following sentence:  Put everything but the parsley in the pot and cook it all until the beans are done.

    But I have a bunch of pictures and I figure you should have something to read in between them.

    So, you start by chopping stuff. And checking through the beans to make sure everything in the package really was beans.

    You put the beans in the pot and add the liquid.

    We used 8 cups of chicken broth and 8 cups of water (quadruple batch remember) and... the Easter ham bone. Water alone will make a tasty batch of beans, but if you can get your hands on a ham bone… holy crap, these were some freaking awesome beans.

    Put the bone in the pot and chop more stuff.

    A nice glass of iced tea (or just tea as they apparently call it in the South where no one drinks "tea," or hot tea as they call tea) is handy to have during all the strenuous chopping.

    Add the herbs and keep chopping. There really are benefits to cooking for only one person.

    Add the spices and stir it all up.

    You see that lovely deep burgundy bean colour? You’d totally lose that if you soaked them first.  Now, instead of throwing away that colour, it’s going to end up in your food and give the resulting broth a rich beany colour.

    So really, all you have to do now is put it on the stove and walk away.

    If you check after 45 minutes or so you’ll see that the beans are already starting to give up their colour.

    After an hour and a half, maybe 2 hours, they’ve definitely changed colour.

    After a few hours any meat left on that bone will be either in the pot already or perfectly willing to come off it.

    And there was so much meat left on the ham bone that we decided to save the sausage for the next day and just use the ham. Look at us stretch the family food budget. ;)

    So while I was picking the meat off the bones

    which, for some reason, I find strangely soothing and will offer to do after every holiday dinner, Recipe Guy was mashing a few cups of beans and putting them back in the pot. Mashed beans are a fabulous way to thicken any gravy.

    We added the ham back in,

    chucked the bone, and added a little more salt. It’s really best to start this dish with as little salt as possible and correct at the end.

    A scoop of rice, a scoop of beans, a handful of parsley and a dash of hot sauce. Or, if you’re me, 8 dashes of hot sauce.

    And if you find a crawdad (aka land shrimp) hanging around on the property, make sure you cook them before you try to eat them.

    They fight back.

    Man, the amount of wild (aka free) food down there is just awesome for the family food budget. What’s your favourite budget meal?