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?

And so begins the Mayhem!

Last May, we had a wee bit o' the crazy going on. Taneasha was eating nothing but road food as she was being chased across the country by tornadoes, I was posting about ice cream and toads (and dumb fuck june bugs) and neighbours with guns and really, we barely made it out alive.

So, this year, we decided to do it all over again.

Of course the first thing that happens is I get locked out of the website while Taneasha is trapped in a car crossing 5 different state lines in 12 hours. And so, No Post For You! (today? yes, Tuesday? no)

We're pretty sure she's not going to be homeless in the middle of the month, but I'm evicting her from Fridays for a while.

Carrot Cake Cookies with White Chocolate Cream Cheese Icing

(Yes, that whole thing is the name of the recipe. Yes, I'm a freaking genius to mix white chocolate and cream cheese)

What you need:

• 2-3 carrots (~1 1/2 c once grated)
• 1 c butter
• 1 1/2 csugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp cardamom
• 2 1/2 c flour
• 1 tsp baking powder

not shown, but also worth adding

• 1/2 tsp allspice
• 1 tbsp orange zest

What you gotta do:

Preheat your oven to 350.

Grate the carrots. If you do this by hand, you are insane and you probably have no skin left on your knuckles.

Since you've already got the food processor dirtied, may as well go all the way. Switch from the grater blade to the regular blade.

Dump in the butter and sugar and let the sharp things do all the work.

I was going to continue the whole recipe in the food processor, thinking I could save dishes that way, but I wasn't convinced that it would be able to hold the whole recipe's worth. Cut this recipe in half and do the whole thing in the food processor. It makes a lot of cookies anyway and you can save a few dishes.

If you're doing the full recipe, dump the sweet carrot butter into a bowl and add the egg, vanilla, and spices (and orange zest).

Mash this all together then start adding flour. I did a cup at a time and mixed well after each one.

This gradual-addition-and-lots-of-mixing method will result in a cookie with a cakier texture.

You should have a stiff, but sticky dough.

And you also should have added the baking powder with the flour... dammit.

I sprinkled about half a teaspoon of baking powder over the dough and mixed it for a couple more minutes. Seemed to work.

There are a couple ways you can make these cookies.

You can just drop spoonfuls of dough onto the cookie sheet and bake them, but they don't spread like most drop cookies. They hold their shape. So you'll probably end up patting the tops down a bit so they aren't so blobby.

You can also chill the dough for about half an hour and then roll it into balls and poke them until they're shaped like eythrocytes. (word of the day, bonus points if you know it, google it if you don't)

Bake them at 350 for about 14-16 minutes. They should be barely browning on the bottom and look dry on top.

This recipe makes 5 dozen cookies! I really recommend cutting it in half. Good luck with the egg.

Now, you could eat these as is. But no one eats carrot cake because they like it. They're all after the icing.

• 1 c cream cheese
• 1 c icing sugar
• 4 oz white chocolate

Cream the cream cheese and icing sugar together.

Melt the chocolate in the microwave on 50% power 30 seconds at a time until you can stir the last of the lumps out of it.

(yes there are only 3 oz in the bowl. I added the fourth after I decided I wanted it)

Pour the melted chocolate into the sugary cream cheese and mix well.

Making the icing is never the hard part. Icing 61 cookies with what I'm pretty sure is the world's stickiest icing is the hard part. It never really sets, and it stays sticky, even after an hour in the fridge.

But they taste damn good.

 Did you know what an erythrocyte was??