Feasting from my garden

There’s something so satisfying about cooking dinner with food from my garden.

Dinner tonight – currently bubbling away on the stove — features tilapia (from who knows where) cooked in a tomato and pepper sauce. The tomatoes, red pepper and herbs all come from the garden. The green pepper comes from our CSA (I love getting organic peppers in my bag each week!) and the garlic is from Seven Bridges Farm from the South Wedge Farmer’s Market. The only other seasonings are salt and pepper — I brought back the salt from a trip to France and the pepper is freshly ground from organic black peppercorns.

It will be accompanied by brown rice and broccoli (conventional, both – but at least broccoli is now on the “12 Foods You Don’t Have to Buy Organic” list.)

I’d better get back to dinner, but I snapped a couple of pics with my camera phone.

Here’s dessert – home made peach pie. The pastry is an oil pastry recipe and the peaches, while conventionally grown are at least from a local farmer, bought on Saturday morning at Gro-Moore Farms in Henrietta.

What do I do with the worms in my compost?

I love my compost bins, tucked away behind the garage. It’s so quiet and private back there (a big thing in a city backyard) and smells of leaves and rain and the forest.

I finally got around to screening my compost. Oh, what beautiful stuff. It’s not such good work for my back, but good for the rest of me (thigh muscles, spirit, etc.).

This was the best batch of compost I’ve made yet. Full of worm castings, hummus and rich black stuff. And worms. I’ve never seen so many worms (except maybe on RIT’s sidewalks after a heavy rain).

What am I supposed to do with the worms in the compost? Put them back into the pile? Put them in the garden? Eat them for dinner?

I tried hard to sift the compost lightly, to reduce the likelihood of grinding any worms on the hardware cloth. I probably cut a few in half as they desperately tried to wriggle through the holes into the lovely black screened compost beneath. Most of my worms went into the screened compost and then into the garden. I figure the garden can always use them. And, since I didn’t put any worms in the bin to begin with, they migrated from somewhere on their own and more worms will find the bin again for the next batch.

In order to answer my question — so I know what to do next time — I turned, as always to the Internet. Not, say, the Cornell Cooperative Extension, a reliable source of knowledgeable information. Why do that when you have Google at your fingertips?

What I found? Not much.

In worm composting (where you have a couple of pounds of worms in a bin!), you put the worms back in the bin. Gives me the heebies just thinking about it. I can touch worms, with gloves on. But I don’t want 2 lbs of the them in a container, thanks.

According to compostinfo.com:

Screening Compost

Your composting system may not break down all the larger materials, such as corncobs or wood chips, in the first batch of compost that you make. When you screen your compost, any material larger than your screen size can be removed. These materials are called “overs” which can go back into the compost system the next time that you build a pile. The overs provide bulk for aeration and microbes attached to these pieces will help jumpstart the new composting process.

Yes, nothing about worms.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has directions on how to build a free-standing compost screen, but, again, no worm info.

Surely I can’t be the only person with this question? I guess I’ll have to ask the Co-operative Extension folks at the South Wedge Farmer’s Market this week after all.

How to peel a hard boiled egg – use your hands

My mum sent me a link to the “Four Hour Work Week” guy peeling a hard boiled egg by blowing through a hole in the top. It sounded very interesting.

I buy free range organic eggs, usually directly from the farmers (rather than the supermarket). Their yolks are so rich they’re almost orange, they taste delicious and they’re very fresh. Being very fresh makes them hard to peel. So any technique that will help me retain the most egg — instead of the outer layer of white staying stuck to the shell — sounds good to me.

Of course, I had to immediately try this out. We had 4 eggs left in the fridge, so egg salad sandwiches for lunch it was.

I put the eggs in cold water and set it to boil. I then promptly went back to whatever work I was doing and forgot about them until the sitter reminded me. Not to worry. I turned them off, put them into cold water and added some baking soda.

A few minutes later, we all gathered around as I attempted to make little holes in either end and blow the egg out of it’s shell.

No go.

I assure you that I blew well and hard. I created suction around the top of the egg (and got little bits of shell in my mouth. Yum). The egg did separate a little from the shell. But they didn’t pop out like in the video.

Oh well. They were much easier to peel the regular way, though (with your fingers). It’s the baking soda that does that trick — and a tip I will remember for every subsequent hard boiled egg I make. So I learned something useful after all.

Keeping birthdays naturally colored

I had so much fun at Duncan’s birthday party that – as exhausted as I was – I had a hard time falling asleep last night. This morning, even though Kevin has Berry downstairs and Duncan is still sleeping, I can’t get back to sleep for thinking about it.

All considered, everything went well. It rained practically all day, then stopped for 1hour and 55 minutes of the party. Pouring recommenced at 5:55 p.m. But it worked out OK as almost all the kiddos left, a few people and family stayed and we opened presents. Opening presents took an entire hour. Were there a lot of presents? Yes. Was he totally focused on thoroughly playing with the present he’d just opened, showing no interest in opening the next one? Totally. Bless him.

So Duncan is now 3 years old. Both he and Berry have a love of the Little Einsteins TV show, so we decided to use that a theme this year. In prior years (both of them) we went for a small, family party with “birthday” as the theme. But, as Kevin says, “you’re only 3 once.”

To go with the Little Einsteins table cover, plates, napkins, party hats and balloons I decided to make a Rocket cake. There were several obstables to that.

1. Um…a cake that’s not just round? That defies my cake making abilities.

2. How do I get red and blue icing without using Red No. 40? Artificial food coloring is banned in this house (along with MSG, artificial sweetners, high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oil *).

So Kevin and I (mostly Kevin) set about experimenting with natural food colors. For Berry’s birthday, I found a bottle of natural food coloring at a local health food store.

Seelect 100% Natural Food Coloring, Red/Strawberry, 2-Ounce Bottle (Pack of 4)

But it didn’t turn the icing strawberry red. It make it…well…kinda purple-y red. The cake was good, anyway.

For Rocket, I wanted RED red.

First Kevin tried boiling down some rhubarb from our garden. Then he added lemon juice to…um…change it from a base to an acid or something. There was an actual scientific principle at play.

(Must pause here, Duncan has woken up.)

Rhubarb made a pink color. Rhubarb + lemon juice made an orange-y pink color. Crushed cherries made a nice dark red shade — but cherry red (duh!), not Rocket red.

Next I tried melting and reducing a strawberry fruit pop. According to the ingredients, those are colored with the strawberries themselves, beet color and turmeric. I guess the yellow of the turmeric is supposed to turn the purpleness of the beet color into red. In any case, boiled down a bit it turned into a murky brownish orange. Not something I want to frost a cake with.

Finally, I decided to simply puree some strawberries. Mmmm…a nice red at last. Unfortunately, when mixed into dairy-free buttercream icing (earth balance margarine instead of butter), it turned a lovely shade of pink. Since it had a bit of an orange tinge, I added our red-purple natural food dye. It darkened it up a bit, but remained quite pink. The icing was also a bit soft.

The blue (for the windows and belly) was fairly easy to figure out. Crushed blueberries. I can’t remember if Kevin cooked them a bit first. Then he added baking power (or soda) — again to do something chemtastically scientific with the adic/base composition. It made a nice light blue/grey.

To actually make the Rocket cake, I found these instructions online (they’re down at the bottom of the page). I went one step further and made a bottom for Rocket as well. Since I wasn’t about to buy Twinkies, I used some extra cake for the engines.

And here it is – the edible, melting, pink finished product. Not as good as the creations on Andrea’s Recipes (her husband made it, no less), but did I mention that it was edible?

* Disclaimer: there are some MSG-containing soups in our pantry, but I will not be buying any more after a recent declaration (I believe I proclaimed: MSG is evil! at the dining room table). Kevin still drinks soda. Ugh. And, occassionally, we eat foods with hydrogentated oil, but as little as possible.

Garden news

I’ve been woefully ignoring my blog again. Must be too busy picking weeds out of the garden.

OK, so I’m not yet a master composter. I was a bit desperate for soil to fill in a new bed, so I used compost that hadn’t been properly heated, and was full of maple tree seeds, and so ended up with about a million weeds to pull out of a 9 square foot space.

In other garden news, my garden is lush, green and delicious. After making 5 rhubarb cakes — and still givin some rhubarb away — I’ve moved on to sampling lettuce, spinach and herbs. The spinach is so good I like to pick a leaf and eat it right off the plant. I’ve got to keep my energy up for all the weeding, after all.

My pole beans didn’t come up well — too much cold, wet weather right after I planted them. So I replanted and only half came up. So I’ll replant the other half. Again. The straw potatoes are growing like crazy. I’m not sure I’ll be able to build an enclosure high enough for them to keep adding straw to! Pictures would help to illustrate what I mean.

I don’t think we’ll be getting much from the strawberry plants this year. I’ve picked a dozen juicy, sweet berries, and I see a few more forming, but it doesn’t look like much. Shame. They’re lovely.

I feel like I should have some great recipes for what to do with my bounty. The spinach I’ve mostly been making into salads (with the lettuce), although I did sneak a few leaves into grilled cheese sandwiches one lunch time. Yum. I have secret plans for all the herbs, but mostly I chop them up into sauces and salad dressings. Not very thrilling to read about, but very good to eat.

And that’s about it for garden news for now.

Rhubarb Cake

At the bottom of our garden in my childhood home in England, we had a large rhubarb plant. Every now and again, my step-mum used to send me down to pick a few stalks, which she’d usually make into rhubarb and apple crumble. I loved its tangy sharpness.

As soon as I had a garden of my own, I got a rhubarb plant. The first year, I didn’t harvest it. The second year, I picked a few stalks. And every year after that, it just grew huge and I felt overwhelmed by the amount of rhubarb it produced and didn’t know what to do with it all.

Last spring, I offered some to our new neighbors, who were delighted. They made rhubarb cake. And gave me the recipe.

Perhaps I was already overwhelmed with rhubarbness (or a new baby) last year, but I didn’t make any rhubarb cake. This year I have. Twice. Plus I gave the recipe to our babysitter.

I think the recipe comes from a Moosewood cookbook. It’s called Erma Mabel’s Rhubarb Cake. My version is dairy-free (for Kevin):

1/2 cup earth balance margarine

1 cup sugar (you can use a little less than 1 cup)

3 large eggs

1 1/2 cups organic white flour

3 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup organic soy milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 1/2 to 3 cups rhubarb chopped into 1-inch pieces (4-6 stalks, depending on their size)

Preheat oven to 350F. Spray the baking dish with spray oil. (I use an oval baking dish, but something about 7×11 is the right size).

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after adding each one. Sift in the flour, baking powder and salt, alternating with the milk and vanilla.

Spread a little more than 1/2 the batter in the baking dish, Sprinkle on the rhubarb. Add the rest of the batter, spreading evenly. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Eat! Eat! Eat!

This is one yummy cake — even dairy-free. It comes out golden brown on top. The cake itself is sweet, and the rhubarb is perfectly soft and tangy.

Growing herbs and supporting community

My herb garden is growing.

The blog article I posted a link to the other day reminded me that I do like growing herbs. They’re very satisfying – easy to grow and offering an almost immediate harvest.

So far, we’ve eaten asparagus and rhubarb from our garden this year. Maybe I should make a side bar widget with what we’ve harvested. I expected to get more asparagus than I got, but what I got was good. Even Duncan ate some. And knowing that I grew it and that it was full of fresh organic goodness made me smile inside.

I’ve had chives, thyme and oregano growing in the herb garden for a while. The oregano always does great, even though it’s swamped by the rhubarb plant. I need to figure out if I can separate the rhubarb and, if so, when. The thing is monstrous and it gets bigger every year.

The thyme…I think I’ve replaced it a couple of times. The winter seems to do it in and I’m not sure if it’ll come back this year. I saw a pot of it at Wegmans yesterday and got one for my windowsill herb garden. I find I don’t actually go out into the yard when I’m cooking to cut fresh herbs. So I decided to grow basil, thyme and garlic chives in a pot on the front porch. I can bring it inside in the winter, too.

Cooking dinner is hard enough sometimes, with a one-year-old clinging to my legs and fussing for me to pick her up. Getting outside in the yard to snip herbs becomes almost impossible. Because then the almost-three-year-old will want to come out too. Which means putting on shoes, bring various favorite items and never wanting to come back inside again. One day I’ll be able to send him out by himself with a pair of kitchen scissors.

I also got some purple sage at Wegmans and put that out in the outside herb garden.

The latest addition to the herb bed came from the South Wedge Farmer’s Market today. Plain leaf Italian parsley. I don’t usually cook with parsley, but I have a secret plan for it and the sage. I can’t reveal what it is yet, though.

I love the farmer’s market — especially when it’s about organic, local, sustainable food. I know the “About Me” section of this blog says I’m getting “greener one environmentally safe product at a time,” but I’m really more about the food than the products. I need to change that. Knowing where my food is coming from — and what’s in it and not in it — is very important. Plus, sustaining the local economy is just a common sense good idea.

After a long day at work, getting outside and hanging out with the kiddos (Berry LOVED the music and made the whole stroller dance with her) was refreshing.

Food, “glorious” food

A decade ago (or more) I got interested in pesticides in food. I read Diet for a Poisoned Planet: How to Choose Safe Foods for You and Your Family and made some changes to what I eat and how I think about food.

One of the things that struck me was reading about how children can be harmed by pesticide residues in fruits and vegetables–and that the harm outweighed the benefits of eating them. That blew me away.

Now I have 2 children. I think about these things even more.

I was looking to see if there was an updated version, and there is. I haven’t bought it yet, though. Why? 2 reasons:

I don’t have much time to read.

I’m scared to find out what it says.

When Duncan was a baby, he got only organic food. It’s easy to feed kids organic baby food. But as he started eating what we eat…well, we don’t eat organic all of the time. It’s the same with Berry. And it troubles me.

The Environmental Working Group has info about what fruits and veggies are best and worst when it comes to pesticide residues. But what I loved about the Diet for a Poisoned Planet book is that it also talked about the effect of canning and freezing on food. In some cases, it helped remove pesticides (for example, from the peel of pears), making them OK.

So it’s on my wish list. Maybe I’ll get it for myself once I’ve finished A New Earth.

The gift of food

For two full weeks I was given the gift of food. And you know how I love food.

In what’s called a “food train,” my friends took turns bringing us dinner every night since Berry was born. Some people made home-cooked meals, some people did take-out, and some even brought wine. It was all delicious.

When Duncan was born, I opted out of the food train due to Kevin’s dietary restrictions — because I thought it’d be too hard for people and I didn’t want to impose. Asking people to cook and bring us dinner seemed like imposition enough. This time, well, this time my mum is here for almost a month (because I knew I’d need the help) and I have a toddler to take care of as well. So, I was all about the food train. Maybe I’m finally learning to ask for help from the people who care about me. Maybe. Not entirely sure about that one yet.

Sadly, the food train has ended. Which means we need to start ordering takeout ourselves. Hahaha. But it was good while it lasted. It was great. And I have 2 weeks of food memories to dwell on–the fire-roasted red pepper burritos, the heartwarming mac-n-cheese, sushi, spinach pasta with goat cheese and mushroom sauce, pizza, eggplant parmesan, rotisserie chicken and potatoes… ahh, the tastes and remembered eating satisfaction lingers.

I’m all stoked about cooking for my next mommy friend now. I’ve delivered a bunch of meals myself in the past, but now I truly realize the importance of extra helpings (lunch the next day) and side additions (wine, bread, salad). Oh, and disposable containers, which people were excellent about – I only have about 4 containers to return to people, one of them being a crock pot that was full of meatballs and spaghetti sauce that we’re still eating.

Of course, all this food consumption doesn’t really help with post-pregnancy weight loss. I’ve got the breastfeeding hungries, too and am still in the I-can-eat-anything pregnancy mindset where I really do eat anything (and everything). I am down 24 lbs, though (15 of those disappeared in giving birth). Which in less than 3 weeks isn’t so bad. But there’s another 23 lbs to go until I can fit in my size 8 jeans again.

I was debating (with myself) about whether or not to post Berry’s birth story or not. I put Duncan’s on the blog. But Berry’s is really long (4 pages in Word) and…well, I do talk about poop. It might me too much info.

Speaking of poop, a certain toddler just did one and is pretty stinky. Better go refresh his bottom.

Mmmm…cookies

I’m making chocolate chip cookies.

My friend, Sharon, gave me a fantastic Christmas gift — a mason jar filled with chocolate chip cookie ingredients (minus the egg, massive amount of butter and vanilla extract) with directions on how to make them on the label.

I’m so stealing that as my crafty Christmas gift idea for 2007. I didn’t manage to come up with anything this past Christmas. I was going to make chocolate bark, but realized it was just beyond me. Not the actual melting of chocolate and adding of toffee and peppermint pieces. Just the coordination and time consumption. The only Christmas decorations I managed were my traditional cards-on-a-ribbon hanging from our dining room entrance.

Next year, though, when I’ll have a 2 1/2-year-old and a baby just about to start crawling, I want a Christmas tree and to get back to my craftiness.

Anyway. So I’m making cookies. Mmm…cookies. I ran out of cookies that other people made and have had to resort to making them myself. Which isn’t a good thing.

Cooking I can do. Baking apparently involves too much science. All that exact measuring and timing.
On an un-related note, I spoke at church on Sunday. The theme for the month was “Angels” so I talked a bit about some of the everyday angels in my life. And then launched into New Year’s resolutions. (No, I’m not sure how the two go together, either. I used some segue involving Duncan to tie them together.)

My resolution for 2007 is to empower myself. Or, rather, to continue the empowerment that I’ve already begun.

After all, I’ve started my own business, expanded my family, put a new roof on the house. OK, we paid people to do the roof. But I still lived through the 3 days of pounding and sounds of the world crashing down over my head.

I feel good things coming. Challenging things, perhaps. But good challenges. Empowering.