Orange on the Table

One day a few days ago I decided to make a quick meal from some things I’d find in the garden: Two orange food items were available – some crookneck squash and a few small orange tomatoes. Excellent.

How did the meal take shape? Quickly, simply, and tastily.

I chopped an onion, diced the squashes, crushed a few cloves of garlic, and chopped a red tomato into small pieces too (the three tiny orange cherry toms were not enough). I also finely chopped a small piece of ginger. I heated a tablespoon or two of olive oil in my large deep (high-sided) frying pan (another All-Clad treasure), and […] Click to continue reading this post

Little Green Courgette

(I think that perhaps Prince ought to write a song with this as the title. Hmmm…)

So to accompany the other types of squash that have begun to appear (see previous post), I’ve some courgettes (or zucchini) coming along nicely. It seems I have two plants of these this year (with a bit of leaf mould infection that I ought to see to), and so in the next few weeks I should have some nice additions to various meals…

Still to be unveiled are some Mystery Squash plants that I put into the soil a bit late. I grew them from some seeds that […] Click to continue reading this post

Gourdy Goodness

Ok… So that was a bit unexpected. I was not expecting these when I planted them. Crookneck Summer squash.

I’ve got several of them coming along in three clusters… They look very much like tough, inedible gourds, and I imagine that they can be like that if picked at the wrong time. So I’ve picked a few small ones and the bigger one in the second photograph (below) and will see how they deal with being tossed into a stir-fry.

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Picnicking

picnic_packing_1I love packing picnics. It has been a while since I’ve done it**, and so this morning, upon seeing sunshine behind my bedroom curtains, I decided to take the visitors off for a picnic. After breakfast I set about giving them a time to get ready to leave, and busied myself in the kitchen. I made sandwiches (mustard, pastrami, tomato), cut slices of the delicious Christmas fruit cake my mum made two days earlier, put in some fruit (grapes and satsumas/clementines/tangerines/Idontremember), and picnic_packing_2made two thermos flasks of tea (mint and honey, and ordinary black tea with milk and sugar), and a couple of kitkats for emergencies.

My smaller Sainsbury’s shopping bag (imported) is just perfect for carrying all this, I discovered.

Our destination? Santa Monica beach and pier! It was a perfect […] Click to continue reading this post

Waiting, Planning

20101207-134312.jpgWhile waiting on a phone call and various other things in my errand-run over to the West side in Santa Monica, I find myself sitting in one of my favourite places for coffee or lunch, eating my favourite thing on their menu. It is a branch of Le Pain Quotidien, and it is their ricotta, fig and honey open faced sandwich. Food of the Gods.

I have a few hours of interlude on this away mission, and so I’ve brought a bit of work with me since I don’t know exactly how long things will take. I’ve made some decent progress on The Project in the last few days, and although I need to do a lot more, I’ve been planning another stage of it, sketching out ideas and expanding on them. Some of this process was begun some time back on the iPad, and I’m now adding to the ideas on actual real paper, and pushing one of them to a slightly more refined level. It is a fun process, and certainly nice to be able to call up old scribblings wherever I am, since I now try to have everything on the pad. (see my earlier posts here and here for more on how I use this excellent tool for work, and I’ll be saying a bit more soon in relation to The Project.)

The teaching part of the semester is over. At least, the classroom […] Click to continue reading this post

Thanksgiving Offering

… and then I assembled it all together with more ingredients:

Round Three (continuing the work of the night before(click images for larger view.))

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So here is another group of ingredients. These are largely the vegetables that will accompany the polenta and the salsa roja I made the night before. Notice that the polenta has been sliced into 24 triangles, ready for the next step. Those are red bell pepper choppings in front, along with majoram and cilantro. Mushrooms being suatéed in olive oil- what a lovely smell that always produces! After some minutes, half of the garlic is added, and then after another 5 minutes or so I put everything aside in a bowl. Then on to the zucchini (or “courgette” – I used half a yellow and half a green, for variety), suatéing again for about five minutes with the remaining garlic […] Click to continue reading this post

Thanksgiving Preparation

Last night, after a long day and some time recovering from it on the sofa, I got up and went back to the kitchen. It was time to prepare some of the food I would need in order to assemble the dish I am taking to some friends’ gathering for Thanksgiving dinner. It was very nice of them to invite me and so I am making something special to take along to contribute. It has been a busy semester, so it is nice to put aside a bit of time to do some slightly more elaborate culinary endeavours than normal. (Click any photo for a larger view.)

Round one.

thanksgiving_cooking_1

First off was a preparation of a salsa roja, which I prefer to make from scratch and have a fresh warm flavour to it. You can see in the photograph most of my ingredients laid out, ready to go for quick assembly. This is all about intense flavours combining together and letting each other shine through, and not making something that is overwhelming in one aspect, like too much of one type of pepper or another. I’ve ground some cinnamon (actually, cassia bark – see recent post) to simmer into it as well, which I think will help the salsa bring a lovely component to the whole dish once it is assembled later today. One starts with sautéing of the onions for a while (in olive oil), later adding the salt, cumin, cinnamon, and so forth. Then once that’s all nicely […] Click to continue reading this post

On Bark and Bite

20101122-005024.jpgWell, it is a bit after midnight, and I’ve a long day tomorrow, but somehow instead of going to sleep, what am I doing? Taking pictures of tree bark and blogging. The things I do for you, Dear Reader 🙂 …

Let me explain. I learned something the other day that sort of clears up a little mystery that has not really been at the front of my mind, to be honest, but just sort of off to the side, if you know what it mean. It has to do with one of my favorite spices, cinnamon. While it has been a bit of time since I’ve done an Asymptotia Goes To The Kitchen sort of post (which reminds me, I did almost do one about six weeks ago, and took photos and everything, but somehow it did not get written), you will surely have noticed that cinnamon is a spice that gets featured a lot in my culinary endeavours. I had, I am sure, noticed that cinnamon seems to vary a bit in its appearance and texture depending upon where I am, by which I mean that the type I recall in the UK is a bit different from what I get in the USA, (well, maybe slightly), and certainly different from the softer, flakier sort I remember from the Caribbean. But I never really tried to make something of this. It is just one of those things you notice but don’t really get bothered by enough to want to dig further.

Well, I accidentally found out that the reason they are different is because […] Click to continue reading this post

The Dining Society

dining_society_october_2010_2

Not having hosted any dinner gatherings myself this Summer, for one reason or another (I seemed to have had a lot in the previous two Spring/Summers, so perhaps this was a good rest), last Sunday I was delighted to go along to one of the underground dining phenomena that some are whispering about excitedly in Los Angeles in recent times (part of, but different in spirit to, the pop-up restaurant movement). I was a bit tired and poorly (and had spent a big chunk of that day and the one before holed up, interviewing candidates for our new Provost. Announcement of the -fantastic- result here) but was determined to go and take up the spot I’d promised to fill.

The Dining Society has no fixed abode and pops up in a variety of interesting places […] Click to continue reading this post

Off to CicLAvia…

Getting ready to disappear off to explore. the route. Should be fun, although it is a tad too hot a day for it to be perfect for cycling and wandering long in the sun. On the other hand, that will bring a lot of people out to enjoy their Sunday outdoors, I hope, walking, cycling, rollerblading, skateboarding, running, etc. […] Click to continue reading this post