Finally a weekend at home

It has been five weeks since I had a full weekend at home, which is a little insane during gardening season. I guess that is why my plot looked a little rough, to put it mildly. But I created some order this morning, and I am already thinking about next year. Several crops just do not do well in the community garden, because of the hordes of pest. Cucumbers, some zucchini, and beans are very challenging to grow with organic methods when they are in the middle of forty or so garden plots. Next year I am going to bring a few selected things back to our yard and integrate them with the design of the mixed borders.

As the photo makes clear, we are getting some tomatoes now. After a month of drought, we just had a lot of rain, so I would expect that the indeterminate plants will set on some nice fruit. I sure hope so. Last night I made the pictured salad, which was just a sliced tomato on a bed of sweet onions, sprinkled with some basil, and finished with olive oil, salt and pepper. I wish that I could report that it was life-changing, but the truth is that this tomato was not very good. It was a little mealy, lacking in acidity, and it had very little tomato flavor. I wish I knew which plant it came from, so I would know not to plant that variety next year. I'll have to keep my eyes open.

Back from vacation

We are back from a vacation visiting family and friends in Northern California and Oregon, and enjoying a couple of days of "couple time." Of course, upon my return, I was greeted by an overgrown mess in both the garden and the yard. It is risky to take two weeks away just when the weeds are really getting going. On the other hand, it is nice to see real results from a couple of hours of work.

I dug the potatoes and onions upon my return, so now we need to get busy eating. I am planning to make a potato-fennel gratin tomorrow night, since I also have some fennel growing in the garden. There are still some really nice beets left, so I will probably pull the rest of those and roast them to have in salads.

Unfortunately, the pests are out in abundance. Something is laying eggs on my squash, so every day I go and scrape them off and hope that I am not missing anything. My cucumbers are wilting from some fungus, so I am starting some new ones. I am really disappointed because they are just getting ready to bear fruit, and it looks like they are going to die. I think that I am making a mistake by planting them too soon. Next year I will wait until later to start them, because I suspect that they are getting infected by something that flies through early in the season. It is frustrating.

I picked two grape tomatoes today, which is the sum total of the tomato crop so far. The other plants have quite a bit of fruit, but they are a little pokey. I guess it has just been too cool. Currently the best looking thing in the garden is a profusion of orange cosmos that I planted amongst the tomatoes and peppers; I had read that they are good companions for those plants, and they make a cheerful bouquet.

On the trip we spent a couple of days in Ashland, Oregon, where we saw plays that were part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It was great fun, and Ashland is a very pleasant little town. We had an excellent dinner at the Peerless Restaurant and Bar (http://www.peerlessrestaurant.com/index.html), which was probably the culinary highlight of the trip. We split a mixture of Washington and British Columbia oysters to start, and then I had a curried melon soup (containing cantaloupe, honeydew, some mango, and coconut milk). Glen had a salad with Asian pear and Rogue Creamery blue cheese. We split an order of pappardelle with duck confit and smoked tomato sauce, and we also split an order of butternut squash gnocchi with browned butter and sage, which helped to soak up the sauce from the pappardelle. Glen drank some pale ale with the meal, but I had a prosecco with the oysters and, with the rest of the food, a split of Cristom Oregon pinot noir, which was very tasty. I'll definitely look for it here. It had some earth in the nose that reminded me a bit of the way Virginia wines usually taste, but in a more muted way. For dessert we tried each of their four gelatos; the star was a dark chocolate with cracked pepper and cayenne. All in all, it was a very satisfying al fresco dining experience.

A Quick Weeknight Supper

Eggs are always a good choice for a quick weeknight supper, or at least they would be if I had lower LDL levels. But, as they say in France, tant pis.  I am always game to whip up a frittata, but I really prefer an omelette.  If I am cooking for the two of us, I generally make one big one and then divide it, so that we can both have hot eggs.  (One of my pet peeves is cold food that should be hot.)

Tonight I made an omelette with pepper jack cheese, mushrooms, a fresh Walla Walla onion, and beet greens, all of which I sauteed together.  My beets have great looking greens this year, so I picked a nice handful.  The beets themselves are still pretty small; it will probably be a few weeks before they can be harvested.  In addition to the omelette, we had a salad with some fresh lettuce, grape tomatoes, and nasturtium flowers.  I went a bit wild with the nasturtiums this year, so we are going to have oodles of them.  Unfortunately, I only planted one variety, so I should start some more if I want to broaden the palette.

One Down, 659 To Go

I had vowed to start cooking more Asian foods, and then I have been too lazy the last couple of weeks.  Maybe I will make up for lost time over the next couple of weeks.  Tonight I made a fish curry from Raghavan Iyer's book, 660 Curries.  The fish (tilapia) was very simple and delicious, seasoned with turmeric, tamarind, garlic, some chili peppers, and cilantro, all in a coconut milk broth.  We had it with rice and an eggplant dish called bhangan bharta, which a long-ago friend from India taught me to make.  And to top it off, I have made some vanilla pudding using the leftover coconut milk to replace half of the milk.  We'll see how that is a little later.

But here is the recipe for the eggplant.

Ingredients:

1 large onion, sliced

1 1/2 c diced tomatoes (canned or fresh)

2 T canola oil

1 t sugar

salt

2 - 3 T finely minced, peeled fresh ginger root, to taste

1/2 cup cilantro leaves and tender stems, chopped

1 good-sized eggplant

1.  Preheat oven to 375.  Roast eggplant until quite soft and wrinkly, about 50 minutes or so.  Set aside to cool.

2.  In the meantime, heat canola oil over medium heat in skillet or saute pan.  Add onion and saute until slightly soft.  Add tomatoes, sugar, and salt to taste, and cook over medium low heat, stirring frequently, until tomotoes and onions are cooked down nicely, to a jam-like consistency.

3.  Cut eggplant in half and scoop inside out.  Add eggplant to the tomato-onion mixture, and stir to combine.  Add ginger and cilantro, stir well, and correct seasonings.

For the fish curry recipe, well, buy the book!

The chicken with tarragon-cream sauce was pretty tasty, and it paired really well with the mashed potatoes.  We had that and then a small lettuce salad with radishes and nasturtium flowers afterward.  Here is the recipe for the chicken:

Ingredients (for two servings plus a lunch for a lucky person:

Three boneless, skinless chicken breasts

Salt

Pepper

Flour

1 T butter

1 T olive oil

1 medium sweet onion or two small ones (I pulled a couple of early Walla Wallas)

4 oz. mushrooms, sliced

1/3 cup white wine

1/2 cup cream

2 T tarragon leaves

1.  Lightly pound chicken breasts between waxed paper sheets.  Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dredge lightly in flour.

2.  Melt butter in heavy saute pan or skillet over medium heat, and add olive oil.  Cook the chicken until just done but still juicy, about 6 minutes per side.  Remove chicken to a plate.

3.  Add onions and mushrooms, and saute until onions soften and mushrooms are cooked.  Deglaze the pan with the wine, taking care to stir up the browned bits.  Add cream and bring to a boil.  After sauce is slightly thickened, turn heat down to low, add tarragon, and return chicken and any juices to pan.  Turn chicken in the sauce to coat both sides.

We drank a white Burgundy with it; any unoaked Chardonnay would pair well.

June 13, 2009

I braved the weeds today for about an hour and a half, and to reward myself for my toils I jumped the gun and dug a hill of potatoes.  It is a little early, but I found some beautiful starchy gems.  The hill I dug is a bit of an outlaw anyway; it's parent was a potato that sprouted in the pantry, and I decided to go ahead and plant it.

I think I will make some chicken with a tarragon-cream sauce to go with the potatoes, and maybe we will have a little salad with the very last of the radishes.  I'm a little worried that they are going to be super sharp, but a soak in ice water usually cuts that a bit.

We have had unbelievable amounts of rain, and not very much sun, over the last week to ten days.  Some things look great in the garden, especially the potatoes and beans.  A lot of other things are very pokey.  The eggplant look terrible, and I wonder if I should just start over with new plants.  It was a little too cold when I planted them (like my father, I am a little impatient about getting things in the ground), and I am afraid that they may just never thrive.   The squash and cucumber plants look pretty healthy, but they are just small.  Hopefully they will have their growth spurt soon.  In the meantime, it looks like we will have green beans in the next week, which is unbelievably early.  I guess I am lucky; the beans are arriving before the bean beetles.

Memorial Day, May 25, 2009

We had a Memorial Day cookout for some friends yesterday, one day early.  It was good timing, since the backyard looked pretty good.  The climbing rose and clematis got their act together and started blooming at the same time, which has not always been the case.  Some bearded iris also decided to open up, and the weeds had not really taken over yet.  Give them time, though.

I did a couple of chickens on the grill (the Sicilian Grill-Roasted Chicken from the July 2008 Bon Appetit, which is available at epicurious.com).  We briefly contemplated buying a gas grill, but we cheaped out and I think that I am glad that we did.  Charcoal is just way better.  The chickens came out moist and very flavorful, and the skin was absolutely delicious.  I threw both carcasses in a pot later that evening and made a quart of nice stock.  That will be a nice risotto, I think.

We also grilled some flank steaks and had them with a roasted bell pepper relish, and I made the potato salad with gremolata from the Martha Stewart Living Cookbook.  To round things out we had a lentil salad (in case of vegetarians) and I grilled some rapini.  We had ordered grilled rapini at Buck's Fishing and Camping a while back, so I decided to try it at home.  I blanched it first and then tossed it on the grill, which I think was a little too hot.  It just tasted a little too smoky for me.  Next time I think I'll try to wait until the fire has burned down a little more.

I was excited to find sugar snaps on the vine down at the vegetable patch.  I think that this will be the big week for them, which is pretty exciting.  We still haven't eaten that much out of the garden other than onions and radishes, but this week we will get some rapini and arugula also, and I should harvest the tatsoi.  Maybe I'll add that to a risotto and we can have a fusion Asian-Italian dinner.  I was also excited to find the pole beans starting to vine up the bean tower.  In about a month they will be pretty impressive.  Hopefully we will get beans before the arrival of the bean beetles!

O.K., time to go nose around the leftovers...

May 17, 2009

Well, the tandoori chicken was pretty good, even if it was not exactly what a person would find at a fine Indian restaurant. Without the clay oven it is probably not possible to achieve the ideal, but good enough sometimes is just that. The marinade was very simple: yogurt, lemon juice, coriander, turmeric, cumin, chili powder, salt and pepper. I took the skin off of all of the chicken except for the wings, which are my favorite piece. The salad featured grated carrots, homegrown radishes, homegrown baby Walla Walla onions, grape tomatoes, and homegrown lettuce, and I decided to add an avocado at the last minute. The dressing was just some lime juice that I added to everything but the lettuce for marinating purposes. With dinner we had a nice dry Riesling from Washington State. All in all, a very tasty Sunday night dinner.

And tomorrow we will be having a very special salad...

May 16, 2009

So I have been feeling like I am in a bit of a cooking rut, making the same old stuff every week.  That's not true, of course, but most of my food is Mediterranean influenced, French and Italian, with occasional forays into the Middle East.  I love to eat Asian food, but I do not feel like I have a good intuitive sense of how the spices and herbs work, so I tend not to cook that way.  Well, I have resolved to do something about that.  My goal is to do one Asian dinner a week.  Last week I made a basic Indian meal with dal, rice, an egg curry, and sauteed okra.  Tomorrow night we are going to have a tandoor chicken (already marinating) with rice and a radish and carrot salad.  We'll see how it works.  I have just ordered the book 660 Indian Curries, which will no doubt give me some ideas for the future.  Perhaps my goal of one dinner a week is insufficiently ambitious...

Things look pretty good in the garden.  The squash and cucumbers are all coming up, and I will pick some radishes and lettuce for the salad tomorrow.  Some of the greens (arugula, spinach) are growing very slowly.  I am wondering if the problem is the growing medium.  A friend gave us some horse manure last year that we spread on the beds, but there were a lot of wood shavings in there that have not really decayed.  I'm not sure if that makes the best growing medium.  I did fertilize with some Plant-tone, so I guess we will see if that does anything.  It just would be really nice to have a fresh arugula salad...

May 15, 2009

Springtime has come again to DC, and the garden is growing once more.  Things are a little late this year, due both to some cool weather and a late start because of a spring break trip to Hawaii.  (Now that would be a great place to garden!)  But the potatoes and onions are looking quite robust.  This year I am following some companion planting suggestions from the book "Great Garden Companions," by Sally Jean Cunningham.  She suggests planting green beans and potatoes together, along with some salvia and marigolds.  It is an attractive combination.  I just hope that the beens grow up enough to get some sun...

So far all we have eaten from the garden are some radishes and one green onion, but hopefully that will change soon.  Lettuce, arugula, and rapini are on the horizon.  The sugar snaps may be a little late this year, so hopefully the hot weather will hold off for a bit.

This past weekend I decided to have fun with a duck.  One of my pet peeves is how hard it is to find duck in the grocery store.  Whole Foods used to carry duck breasts and duck confit, but now they carry only whole ducks.  And I have never been able to find duck legs sold separately.  So, I decided to go ahead and buy a whole duck.  We had the breasts seared on Sunday night.  I pounded them out a bit and marinated them with some shallots, olive oil, and crushed peppercorns (black, white, green, and pink).  A quick pan saute and they were ready to go, along with a wild rice pilaf and a beet and watercress salad.  The next night I roasted the leg quarters, which I had rubbed with a mixture of cumin, a bit of coriander, pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg (easy on the last two).  We had it with cous cous and roasted carrots.  And then I made some stock out of the miscellaneous carcass parts, along with other duck and chicken parts I had in the freezer.  I used a bit of the stock in a lentil-mushroom-and chard pasta, but I have frozen the rest.  It might be a good base for a really savory risotto.  Ultimately, I was pretty pleased with all of the mileage I got out of that duck.  Maybe I'll be inspired to make my own confit...

June 19, 2005

I finally complete digging up my entire plot in the community garden yesterday. Overall, things are looking good. Tiny green beans have appeared on the plants, the first tomatoes are growing on the vine, and the squash and cucumber vines are growing by the day. Pictures to come...

Tonight was another salad night...I picked some really nice lettuce, and augmented it with a garlicy, mustardy potato salad, a corn and red pepper salad (accented by some fresh basil), and a red cabbage and carrot slaw, dressed with olive oil and some of my precious balsamic vinegar.

So here's the story on the vinegar. For my birthday, Glen gave me a completely extravagant gift card to Sur la Table. While I did buy some practical stuff, I was seduced by a $50 bottle of balsamic vinegar. (See the Villa Mondori balsamic at http://www.surlatable.com/common/products/product_details.cfm?PRRFNBR=13092) It really is true, that as far as vinegar is concerned, you get what you pay for. It is just really a different product, and it makes a very nice salad. Not to mention a nice accompaniment to strawberries, or a hunk of good Parmesan.

I have heard somewhere that, in Italy, there are people who carry tiny bottles of balsamic vinegar on chains around their necks, and they dole the precious contents out with an eyedropper. I don't think that I'll ever go that far...but I do understand where they are coming from.

June 12, 2005

Tonight we are having the first lettuce from the garden. Because I did not take over my plot until relatively late in the spring, and because it was full of weeds when I finally did take it over, I really did not have much of an opportunity to put in a spring garden. I did, however, plant some lettuce, so that I could have some fresh salad. For me, that is one of the most important things to grow in the garden, because it is a pain to make a special trip to the market just to buy lettuce.

I am planning on making a "bacon, lettuce and tomato salad." Here's what I'll do:

Thinly slice a shallot and saute in olive oil with some diced pancetta. After everything is cooked, let the oil cool a bit and add some sherry vinegar. Toss the dressing with some fresh lettuce and tomatoes.

We're going to have that with a roasted chicken and potatoes and what I'll call zucchini carpaccio. (Thinly sliced zucchini dressed with olive oil and lemon juice and sprinkled with salt, pepper, and freshly grated Parmesan and then baked for a bit.) We're going to drink a French Muscadet (Domaine de la Quilla), which is a very nice dry white wine. The Wall Street Journal wine columnists highlighted this wine in their column on Friday, and the Domaine de la Quilla was their top rated version. I was excited because I found it at our local discount wine place for a dollar less than the Wall Street Journal quoted as the average price. I ended up buying three bottles. (I find that the Wall Street Journal columnists are very good at recommending unsung heroes in the wine world, i.e. more obscure varieties that are pretty good buys. They also don't pull punches about what isn't a good value, e.g., cheap American merlot. We end up drinking a lot of French wine because it can be a pretty good value for basic, everyday wine. Of course, that is because the French tend to drink wine every day.)

And finally, in the "why didn't I ever think of this" department, I'll mention a very guilty pleasure I had yesterday: peanut butter melted in the microwave over vanilla ice cream topped with hot chocolate sauce. Wow. So good. And probably not so good for you. But every once in a while...it probably can't hurt too much. I can't remember where I encountered this idea; I saw it somewhere recently. The source escapes me, though thankfully the idea does not.

June 6, 2005

It is even hotter today than it was yesterday, so I suppose that my tomatoes are even happier than they were. Glen and I are not so happy, because our air conditioning has not been functional as a result of some remodeling work in the basement. These are the times that try relationships with contractors.

I did take a stroll over to the community garden this afternoon, though it was too hot to work. I felt a little guilty, because I have the day off from work, so I probably should have tried to accomplish something. My mission, however, was to take a few pictures.

Here's the view to the south from my garden plot:



And here's my forlorn little plot itself:



As you can see, it needs some work.

Much to my dismay, I found that my garden plot was a crime scene. Sometime in the night, a creature had come along and helped him or herself to a fair quantity of leaves on my green beans. My guess is that it was a deer. (That's not as crazy as it sounds...the District is actually home to a fair number of deer in Rock Creek Park and Glover Park, which starts just a few blocks away from the garden.) If this keeps up, I suppose that I'll have to put up a fence. I was just distressed because I love haricots verts, and I'll be unhappy if I don't get any.

June 5, 2005

It is hot as Hades in D.C., but at least the tomatoes are happy. When I went over to the garden to water tonight, they actually looked a little perky. And the green beans are growing nicely. So, too, is the crab grass that infests my plot, which has suffered from a severe lack of tlc. Oh, well, I'll try to make some progress every weekend.

My challenge last night was to make dinner without having gone to the grocery store in a week. My theory is that there is always at least one more dinner that can be pulled together. Last night's ended up being very simple: a pair of salads served on some still passable romaine.

Salad 1: Cannellini Bean and Tuna Salad

Combine one can of drained cannellini beans, one can of tuna, some minced vidalia onion, some minced parsley, and 4 or 5 sliced oil packed sun-dried tomatoes, and then toss with some good olive oil and red wine vinegar.

Salad 2: Potato and Green Bean Salad

Dice a few cooked potatoes and toss with steamed french cut green beans, some minced vidalia onion, and some chopped carrots. Toss with a mustard vinaigrette.

Heap both of them on the lettuce, and you are ready to go.

At least I resisted the urge to use more of my life-changing balsamic vinegar. More about that later.

May 30, 2005

So, what's for dinner tonight? I picked up a whole black sea bass at Whole Foods, and I'm planning on roasting that with a salsa verde I made to use on skirt steak, which never got grilled. We'll have that with some roasted Yukon Gold potatoes tossed with some persillade (finely chopped parsley and garlic) and some sauteed zucchini and carrots.

I got the recipe for the salsa verde, which is almost a pesto, out of the current issue of Fine Cooking, which also had a great recipe for a Berry Buttermilk Cake. I made that yesterday for a party we were going to last night...it was really good, served with some sweetened creme fraiche. The only bad note was the vanilla I used in the cake and the creme fraiche. I had run out of the good stuff and the only thing I had in the cupboard was McCormick's, which smelled unpleasantly chemical. I stopped at Sur La Table today to pick up some Nielsen-Massey Madagascar Bourbon vanilla extract, which has a much nicer flavor.

I didn't do a lot in the garden today, either here at home or in the community garden, which is where I am growing my vegetables. I put my name in for a plot at the community garden last year, fully expecting that it would take a while before I ended up with a space. Much to my surprise, I got the call this year. Apparently there is a new regime in charge, and it kicks people out if they aren't taking proper care of their plots. Use it or lose it. Needless to say, my plot was just about the worst looking one in the place; the weeds were dense and tall. I'm doing my best to make the desert bloom, but I think that it will take a few seasons to really get things going, especially since I have a lot of work to do around the house. I am focusing this year on the big things, e.g., tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini, with some green beans thrown in. Next year I'll work on establishing some of the more permanent things, like berries and maybe asparagus. I tried asparagus in the back yard a couple of years ago, when I had raised beds, but it was choked out by the over-aggressive roots of a maple tree.

The community garden is in an interesting spot, cheek by jowl against what is either a reservoir or (according to the conspiracy theories) a missile installation. Glen and I live in Northwest D.C., just a stone's throw away from the Department of Homeland Security and not much farther from the Vice-President's house. Who knows what sorts of security installations are around? Nothing would surprise me.

Well, time to go check on the potatoes...