Fresh picked flowers, veggies for roasting

Today aside from finding the newly immigrated buffalo bur weed, I picked fresh flowers for Doll Two, sitting in the hotel lounge, waiting for a cocktail.

And assembled vegetables from the freezer to prep for roasting and stuffing into pita bread. First pita in years, suddenly thought I would, when it showed up in the Misfits list. It smells excellent.

Celery, broccoli, onions, mixed mushrooms, sweet potato. Doused with olive oil, baharat, Old Bay, cardamom, Thai basil, salt. Dash of malt vinegar. They'll sit a while 

before I roast them. This will be a couple of days' supply. 475°f, 30 minutes.

And here's a warmed pita, stuffed with the roasted vegetables.  

I think this batch will make three pita sandwich stuffings. 

This is becoming a favorite way of vegetables for me. Surprising how reduced they are in roasting. And the flavor is great. Hard to go wrong.

Roast vegggies, raspberries and respite

As you know, I don't make a lot of references in here to current tragedies, because this blog is meant to be a little respite from the crushingly terrible things happening out there.  I do a good number of active efforts to improve things, very aware of needing to do my part. But in here, it's okay to breathe, enjoy a little something now and then.

And today the respite is roasted vegetables.  I did a large amount of roasted sweet potatoes, fresh from the farm, apples, likewise, and frying peppers, from neighbor's garden, he grows them, asks me to take care of eating them.

This time, along with a dash of molasses and a sprinkling of cornstarch, the flavorings were fennel seed, Old Bay Seasoning, a red, spicy, peppery mix good with fish, seafood and poultry, and seasalt.  I tossed all the ingredients in with the seasonings and let them sit a few minutes while the oven heated up to 400F.  Twenty minutes roasting, and all's done.

One thing to bear in mind when you cook for one as I do often, but make full size recipes, with several dinners in mind, is to note which flavorings hold up the second time around.  And fennel seed does this to a faretheewell.   Really good the second time you have a dish of this mixture.   All the seasonings sort of matured and blended and it was, if anything, better than the first night I had it.

The recipe this time made for three full dinners.  If I'd been using it as a side dish probably more like six dinners. Or if Handsome Son were in the party, I'd be lucky to have leftovers at all.

And dessert is a dish of fresh raspberries, from the farm, they're still harvesting them, with a spoonful of plain yogurt, and a pitterpatter of sliced almonds.  See I can write twee with the best of them!  

Do you remember that movie about the bookstore,something Charing Cross Road, where Anne Bancroft is getting help from New York English neighbors in picking out interesting foods to send to the bookstore staff in wartime England after she realized they were nearly starving?  

One thing she lit on in her catalog was raspberries.  Her neighbor being a cut glass English Southerner, called them rahzbriz.  And she bursts out laughing saying, imagine a whole island full of people saying rahzbriz!  Well, no, only some Londoners, but nemmind. Real people call them rassbrees.  Either way, they are lovely, especially now that I don't have a place to grow my own.  You can't get them in shops, because rassbrees don't ship well, too fragile. Rahzbriz too, for that matter.
  
This dinner will cheer you up any time.  And a nice glass of Merlot to go with, too. Shopping for this was  a Fall event, now that pumpkins are out and more varieties of apples are coming in. 

I did get a little sugar pumpkin for soup.  Maybe in the next couple of days. Probably with carrots and ginger.  Carrots don't grow well in this region at all, never get them at the farmer's market or farmstands.  So those are storebought, from some other state. I try to hold down the distance between farm and my table, but have to cede now and then.  A lot of my food is grown about a mile away.

 

Lively, bluejay and Marigold goes under cover

A while since I did a book review, though I've been reading all along.  I don't review books I didn't get much out of, or that I really didn't like, not fair, just my opinion.  But when one seems really worth the energy, I do.  

And, it's Monday, not that Marigold is particularly concerned about that, more that it's rainy and she was disturbed by my insisting on a picture. But readers who had to go back to work might enjoy a suggestion of a book to check out.

So here's the current choice:  latest collection of short stories from Penelope Lively.  

 
It's a bit uneven, but has a lot of layers and levels and is definitely worth reading.  She likes to slide between real and surreal, points in history, points of view.  Her writing is a kind of rollercoaster of technique, and very engrossing.  You always feel she's pulling your leg a bit, and is really onto you.

One odd choice: usually the title is from the strongest story, and it's put at the end of the book.  Probably to keep people reading.  In this instance it is the strongest story, but it leads off the collection, which, to me, tails off a bit after that.  I think Lively really is better at following a thread or ten throughout the whole novel form, rather than encapsulating them as in the short story.    But read it, and let us know what you think.

Aside from a lot of other things going on, some too soon to write about in the art side of life, I've been observing the feeder, kept supplied with suet put together in Minnesota and NJ birds seem to think this is the best thing ever.  The feeder is mobbed and I get to observe a lot of interesting and some comic avian capers.

There are about three or more bluejays feeding regularly.  One has got the hang of clinging to the side of the feeder, one is dedicated to standing on top of it, even when the food is so far down he can hardly reach.  And the third, my favorite, tries to hover under the feeder and snatch food which he eats on the deck.  You get to know birds as individuals if you observe them enough.

Here's a pic of him trying to flutter up to the bottom of the feeder.  He's a bit off course, feeder being over there on the left, in front of the lantana on the fence. Which attracted the first hummingbird of the season a couple of days ago.  Just a flash of a sighting.

Then there was a standoff between a female cardinal and the red bellied woodpecker, neither conceding until they feed at the same time before flying away at the exact same moment.  And a real fail from a male house sparrow going beak to beak with a little downy woodpecker.  Sparrow had no hope of holding on, eating, and fighting all at once, against the downy, small, but with that tail that enables them to hang on to trees.  Sparrow eventually basically fell off, chuntered and stomped around the deck, catching the crumbs that the downy dropped.

But it's not all birding.  Cooking is happening, too, since I got back the gumption to do a big shop, vegetables and tofu and parmigiano, and all kinds of good things.

So today, I roasted vegetables.  Sweet potatoes, white potatoes, carrots, squares of firm tofu, all tossed in olive oil, mustard seeds, fresh ground pepper, kosher salt, turmeric, home ground curry powder (from Bill Veach, let me know if you want the directions). Then roasted at 425F for thirty minutes, sort of stirred about a bit, then another 25 minutes and all was done.  And very good.  You can make a whole meal from this mixture.  Which I did.  And three more meals to come.  Probably next time Handsome Son gets here for a dinner, he'll get some of this.  Maybe with sausage or chicken or something.

Here's the before:

and the after:

As you see, they shrink a little, but everything was just right.  A bit crisp and spicy on the outside, tender on the inside.  Highly recommended on a day when you can tolerate a hot oven.

Bite Club brings me back to my roots..

This month's cook is Nigella Lawson, and the book I've been into is Nigella's Kitchen.  Since Handsome Son is expected for dinner this evening, he will be my official taster. First course: Sunshine Soup, using red bell peppers and corn from the farm

Seen here at right, her poshed up picture at left.  But it's very good even if mine isn't quite as sunny as hers.  I had a red pepper, she used both red and yellow.  But I also had lovely whey in the freezer from yogurt cheese making, great in this sort of soup, and a chicken broth. So I have hopes of this one.

Then roasted vegetables (not Nigella, just general principles) with roasted salt potatoes (thank you Deborah Madison) and winter squash, plum tomatoes, shredded cabbage, all from the farm, and chicken sausage from Aldi, one of which we now have.

Then a nice seedcake (this is what I'll take in to Bite Club next Wed, since it will keep, if there's any left, that is).  I notice, cattily, that mine didn't sink in the middle as hers did...

The seedcake amused me because I'd never had it in my life, but saw references to it in Miss Marple, where she was at Bertram's Hotel, and it was supposed to be a big deal afternoon tea item.  And there's Jane Eyre, to whom it was evidently a huge treat, not that that's saying much when you think of her life at Lowood, but moving right along.

Anyway, I thought I should honor my roots and do a seedcake, if only to amuse my fellow Club members who think I'm a bit dotty anyway. 

So there's tonight's menu.  HS rarely looks at my blog, so he won't get the surprise spoiled.  Also a glass of merlot if required, and homemade lemonade if not, HS being a rather abstemious man.

English Breakfast pot of tea afterwards when we move to the sitting room. That's the other side of the room from the dining room.  But not the stitching area, which is the far corner of the same room. Or the conservatory, which is the part behind the sofa in the sitting room.  Just so you don't get lost in here.

The glass pans earn their keep

Late July, height of the farmshare season, needing ingenuity to make meals of veggies as well as prep and freeze them, to keep up with the supply.  Roasting is a great way to do this, particularly since I've been using balsamic vinegar to sort of sprinkle over.

And the salt potatoes I learned from Deborah Madison's book on farmmarkets, redskins boiled with a ton of seasalt, took their place in this dish. I had Handsome Son come to dinner the other night, and help me eat the zucchini quiche with a big side of roasted potatoes, squash, onions and corn, and the rest of the frozen lima beans from an Ottolenghi recipe.  

The corn went in the dish raw, but I steamed the others, and boiled the potatoes in the saltwater.  Tossed the veggies in a mixture of olive oil, seasonings, black cherry balsamic vinegar.  Roasted them at 475F for about 45 minutes.

Dessert was a peach crumble, fresh farm peaches, done the way Rose Levy Beranbaum does them in her Bible of pies and cakes, this month's Bite Club selection being desserts. 

And HS pronounced the potatoes great, were there any more, the squash okay, the quiche hm, is there any  ketchup.  But the peach crumble vanished in short order.

The different way Beranbaum does the fruit is to macerate them for a while in sugar, drain off the juices to make a reduction, while mixing the drained fruit with a mix of spices and cornstarch, mainly ginger and cinnamon.  Then the reduced liquid goes back on the fruit and into the pie dish.  I didn't want to make the fancy pastry shapes for the top, so I used Martha's old standby oat crumble, and very good it was.  Not too juicy, but very flavory.

This week there were, among other exciting things, peaches and peppers and corn,  berries in the farmshare -- farmer explained apologetically that they ran out of cherry tomatoes the previous day, and had to sub with berries.  NO problem here with that!

So here's a berry and Granny Smith apple crumble, as per Beranbaum, using ginger and cinnamon, and the crumble part as per Martha, using oatmeal and ground oats.  

This is the kind of thing that's making me lean toward investing in a second little freezer for the kitchen, so I can have this sort of thing in the winter.

Since we are in a heatwave, with those heat index things zooming past 100F there are those who might question the sanity of a person who bakes on such a day, but I had to use the fresh fruit, and well, I was just needing activity indoors.

I finished the window sail for my neighbor, who came over last night to see, and was mad with joy, big hugs and thanks and it went down well.  His house is in an uproar, with wiring and tiling and workmen all over, so he asked me to hold onto the sail for the moment until the dust settles, literally.  I'll post a pic when it's installed.

And the dyeing is moving on, with black walnut dye on what was linen pants and will be a linen skirt with pockets, but that adventure's in Art the Beautiful,  here  http://beautifulmetaphor.blogspot.com/2015/07/transformation-from-linen-pants-to.html

Sunday Lunch in July, perfect!

Lunch today was roasted vegetables, zucchini and onions from the farm, plus carrots, with sprigs of rosemary and a couple of sprigs of dill, plus a pinch of spice mixture from Ottolenghi.  Seen here before going into the oven, 350 F for about an hour.

The dill is a foster plant, staying with me while her parents are away, and having a good time with my herbs, flourishing in fact.

Dessert zucchini bread, zucchini from friend's garden, made with sliced almonds and chopped walnuts, wholewheat and oat flour, top is plain yogurt, raspberries from the farm and a large pinch of brown sugar.

This afternoon I'm invited to two art openings, one further away, one near.  Guess which I might be found at..and I'll do pix if I make it there, because it's an exciting show of felted art which I've seen and liked.  Great fun for a summer event.

Yogurt returns to my kitchen

For the second time the Asian store was out of the yogurt I like, only had a bit of that Greek stuff, which tastes too much like candlewax for my taste.  So I heaved a sigh and pulled out the thermometer, and here's a home batch of yogurt in the making.

 Simple stuff: heat milk (I used lowfat here, since my usual skim doesn't make good yogurt) to 180F, see the thermometer clipped on, then move it off the heat, let it cool to 110F.  

Ladle some warm milk into your starter -- in this case the bit I had left of my previous yogurt -- and stir in thoroughly. Then pour the now warmed starter into the pot of milk. Stir to mix in.

The foil stuff you see there is one of those people warming blankets, never used for a person, but it seemed like a good idea for this purpose, because yogurt needs to be maintained at a low steady warmth for about 7 hours or more, and my stove would be too hot.

So I wrapped the lidded pot warmly in its foil blanket,  and set a timer for this evening, when it will go off and I'll be wondering wildly why, why, what have I forgotten, why are those bells chiming etc.  Then I'll finally remember the yogurt, pour it into smaller containers, and they'll go into the fridge overnight.  Tomorrow all being well, they'll be ready to eat. Or to make into yogurt cheese if I'm in the mood.

Another reason I didn't use the stove for the gentle warmth is that I was busy roasting veggies at that point, at 390F.  

Asparagus, red bell pepper and zucchini sticks, with tons of spicy stuff shaken over, 30 minutes roasting did it nicely.  With some left for tomorrow, to go with mashed potatoes.

Dessert was, what else, a tiny apple turnover. The turnover rate on these turnovers might be faster than planned.