Kitchen Solutions
Sunday: What to do with a lot of nectarines and very soft plums obtained in the farmer’s market?
Make an upside-down cake of course!
From Instagram
From Instagram
Category Archives: food and drink
Bounty
Last Saturday at the Aspen farmers’ market (which seems to have got larger than in previous years) was pleasant. I found several tasty things that formed the bulk of my dinners over the week:
The heavy leaning toward Summer squashes is maybe partly attributable to not […] Click to continue reading this post
Dark Red and Orange
These are lovely. The dark ones are very unusual, perhaps. They are Purple Russians, usually thought of alongside the Black Russian varieties that I think are usually more round. There’s a whole black tomato category in the tomato-growing world, and this is one of many. (Click for a larger view.) These were the second of the clusters of handsome green tomatoes in a previous post.
The garden continues to produce a variety of tasty things. These were from a little over a week ago. The downside is that one part of the garden is under attack from […] Click to continue reading this post
Red Results
…And the green of a few posts back is now a tasty red: Very tasty, it turned out. -cvj
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
Green Anticipation
The tomatoes are coming! Here are two of several clusters of tomato-ey goodness about to go from garden to table. The benefits of having remembered to plant early this year… (Click for larger view.)
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.
* * *
Give Us, This Day…
Ok, so it is last week’s Sunday bread, but you get the idea. This week’s is actually in the oven this very minute. I feel that all is more or less ticking away alright in my life’s day to day scheduling if I am getting bread made each week. I … Click to continue reading this post
Bread and Marmalade
The hankering I had for some marmalade on fresh bread on Sunday last was satisfied a bit later by simply making some. It was a lot of fun. I always like making bread as it […] Click to continue reading this post
Orange in Green
Yesterday I had a hankering for marmalade. Perhaps with bits of ginger in it. Maybe a bit of whisky. On fresh bread. […] Click to continue reading this post
Picnicking
I 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 
made 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
While 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.))
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.
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
