Turn, Turn, Turn

Time is turning into another season.  This weekend has been beautiful warm Fall weather, the kind that's perfect for getting a few things done outside.  

We've already had many nights of freezing weather so the garden has pretty much died as you can see from this picture of what used to be our tomatoes.  Sigh. 

 






So my job this weekend was to take out all the dead garden plants and get them into the compost bins.  It's not a difficult job but it takes a little time.  It always makes me a little sad, though.  It's the end of our fresh garden food.  Oh, there are still carrots, beets, and parsnips for Fall food but it's time to move on.  

 Of course, like every other task around here, it became complicated.  Paul has been talking for a couple of years about making new boards for the compost bins.  The old ones are breaking and have gaps that are too big and stuff falls out of.  He decided that this weekend would be the time to take them on.  

 
Now we have lovely new boards that resemble Lincoln logs.  They are made out of old cedar siding that Paul had stored in the barn.  They really do look much better and are sturdier. 

The other offshoot of redoing the compost boards is that we had to turn over the compost and found lots of lovely soil to spread on the newly bared garden beds.   It never ceases to amaze me that all those kitchen scraps and dead plant parts turn into such beautiful dirt!  It's the ultimate recycling!

Naan

Paul is a wonderful cook.  He likes to make ethnic food...Mexican, Thai, and especially, Indian food.  Some time ago, he showed me how to make naan, an Indian bread similar to pita bread.  Now I make the naan and he makes the rest of the meal.

Naan is really easy to put together.  The base is flour, salt, baking powder, and yogurt.  This is all kneaded together and sits to rise for a couple of hours.  Once the dough is ready, it is cut into pieces and rolled out into rounds.  One at a time, the rounds are slapped onto a hot cast iron skillet for a few minutes until they begin to puff up.

Then the whole pan is stuck under the broiler for a few more minutes until the top starts to color.  When you take it out, you have a big puffy pillow of naan.

It's the perfect foil for spicy Indian food and  the leftovers make great "pita" sandwiches.
As Paul always says, "It's a naan starter."

Tomato Inspiration

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the Earth...but I haven't written anything in a couple of months.  I have no excuses, just temporary lack of inspiration.  Then the tomatoes started to ripen.  Ahhh, homegrown tomatoes.  I know I've sung their praises before but I just can't help doing it again. 

We love just about any fresh tomato pasta sauce around here but  we do have a couple of real favorites.

I made one of them just the other night.  It doesn't have a fancy name, just Fresh Tomatoes with Fettuccine or something like that.  It has a sort of Mediterranean feel to it.  It's easy to riff on but here are the basics.  Most every fresh tomato pasta sauce I know starts with 1 1/2 pounds of fresh tomatoes, diced.  This one adds 1/4 cup of finely diced red onion, 1 diced clove of garlic, 1/2 cup of crumbled feta cheese, about a cup each of chopped parsley and fresh basil, and a handful of kalamata olives.  Toss all these with 2 T. of balsamic vinegar, 3 T. of olive oil, and some salt and pepper.  You can do this in the afternoon and let it sit.  Just add one pound of cooked fettuccine when you're ready to eat.  This picture is of the sauce before the pasta was added.  

Our very favorite fresh sauce is called Penne all'Insalata.  This is another one to put together in the afternoon and let it sit until you're ready to have dinner.  I think this type of dish is great for hot summer weather.  This one also starts with 1 1/2 pounds of tomatoes, diced. Put them in a bowl with about a cup of chopped basil, 3 T. olive oil, and a sprinkling of salt.  Let it sit at room temperature...the longer the better!

In the bowl you will serve the pasta in, mash together 4 ounces of goat cheese, 2 T. olive oil, and 1/2 t. red pepper flakes.  Let it sit at room temperature, too.  When you're ready to eat, cook 1 pound of penne.  Drain it and dump it into the goat cheese mixture and toss well.  Once the pasta is coated with the goat cheese, add the tomato mixture and quickly toss.  Voila!  Dinner!

Fresh tomato pasta is the perfect summer meal...no cooking to speak of and deliciousness fresh from the garden! 

Shortcake

It's strawberry time again!  I went out yesterday to check the berry patch and, lo and behold, there were ripe berries...LOTS of ripe berries!  What a lovely surprise.  As I've said before, a red ripe warm strawberry just picked from the patch is one of the best taste treats ever.

Yesterday's strawberry surprise prompted the baking of some shortcakes.  I have a wonderful shortcake recipe.  I don't remember where I found it but it became an immediate favorite.  It tastes great with any kind of fruit...berries, peaches...you name it and it will taste delicious on these shortcakes.  I'm including the recipe because it's that good and you should try it!

                                       

                                      Shortcakes with Lemon and Thyme

These slightly savory biscuits are a perfect match for fresh berries or peaches. The secret to great shortcakes is very moist dough so don't be tempted to add more flour.

Makes 6-8 

3/4 cup chilled buttermilk

1 tablespoon finely grated lemon peel

1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme  (or lemon thyme)

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour

1/2 cup (packed) golden brown sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) chilled unsalted butter

1 tablespoon raw sugar*

Vanilla ice cream or lightly sweetened whipped cream

* Also called turbinado or demerara sugar; available at most supermarkets and at natural foods stores.

Position rack in center of oven and preheat to 425°F. Line large rimmed baking sheet with silicone baking mat or parchment paper.

Mix buttermilk, lemon peel, and thyme in small bowl. Whisk next 5 ingredients in large bowl to blend, breaking up any large clumps of brown sugar with fingertips. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add buttermilk mixture and stir with fork just until blended (dough will be sticky). Transfer dough to lightly floured work surface. Knead gently just until dough comes together, 4 to 5 turns (do not overwork dough or shortcakes will be tough). Pat dough out to 3/4-inch-thick round. Using 3-inch-diameter cookie cutter dipped in flour, cut out dough rounds. Gently gather dough scraps and pat out to 3/4-inch thickness. Cut out additional rounds, for 6 rounds total (I got 8). Transfer dough rounds to prepared baking sheet, spacing apart. Sprinkle dough rounds with raw sugar. (This is optional)

Bake biscuits until golden, about 15 minutes. Transfer to rack; cool slightly.

Using serrated knife, carefully cut biscuits in half horizontally.  Spoon on fruit.  Cover with biscuit tops. Place scoop of ice cream or dollop of whipped cream on each and serve.

Ravioli

I love making ravioli.  It's so easy.  No, really, it is.  First of all, I use wonton wrappers for the "pasta" part.  They totally work and make it a cinch to make homemade goodness.  I have quite a few I like to make but my favorite fillings are sweet potato, butternut squash, or goat cheese with herbs.  I made the goat cheese with herbs one tonight.  It really is a stunning dish.  First of all, I mixed the goat cheese with six chopped herbs from the garden (mint, basil, parsley, tarragon, thyme, and chives.)  Then I added some grated Parmesan cheese and a little cream to loosen up the goat cheese a little.  

Next I put about a teaspoon's worth on the wonton wrapper, wet two edges, and press it together.  

 The raviolis cook in three to four minutes.  

Next they get tossed with some browned butter and laid on a bed of sautéed roasted red peppers, onion, and tomatoes.  I topped them with toasted pine nuts and some chopped parsley for color.  YUM!!

Hopeful

I think planting a garden is a very hopeful endeavor.  One puts seeds in the ground, covers them up, and hopes something will grow.  How amazing that they do!  This past week I couldn't stand it any longer.  I planted part of the vegetable garden.  Even though the sage gardeners will say I should wait a little longer, I couldn't.  I put in a hills of pumpkins, summer squash, and lemon cucumber.  I planted three rows of bush green beans.  There is a new row of parsley next to the old row that wintered over. 

Under this cardboard are two rows each of carrots and parsnips.  A friend of mine told me how to get carrots and parsnips started in this climate.  She was told by an old gentleman farmer and that has to be a great source.  After planting the seeds, I water them down well and then cover them with the cardboard (or grain sacks or something like that.)  I have to put the pieces of wood on top to keep the cardboard from blowing away.  It keeps the soil moist so the seeds will germinate.  Apparently carrots need that moisture in order to make happy little sprouts.  Once the sprouts have come up, the cardboard goes away and yummy carrots and parsnips grow.  I love stuff like this!

I planted greens a few weeks ago and some lettuces, spinach, and arugula are poking up their little leaves already.  Sadly, the little slimy slugs ate off the snap peas that were coming up.  I have taken measures to assure that doesn't happen again.  I actually bought snap pea plants to replace them but I haven't put them out yet.  We are supposed to get a rather hard freeze tonight so I'm waiting.  


I really enjoy getting out and planting the garden every year.  It gives me great satisfaction to know that those little seeds I'm putting in the soil are going to produce lots of luscious food for us this summer and fall.  And it makes me smile.

The Pile

I've been busy.  This huge pile of bark mulch has demanded most of my attention of late.  
This is ten cubic yards of bark mulch, not a small amount.   I'm not sure how many wheelbarrows full it takes to make a cubic yard but I'm guessing around 4-5.  That means that I filled, moved and spread out about 50 wheelbarrows of bark mulch.  No wonder I'm tired! Thankfully, Paul helped toward the end when my energy and enthusiasm were flagging.

All this mulch went everywhere around the place.  

In the beds around the house, out the back, down the side and in between the garden beds...oh, and on the flower garden, too.  It was a lot of work but worth it in the end.

See how great everything looks?  All clean and nice.  It had better last for a while because I'm not planning on doing this again for a long time!

Com-post

Well, I don't write anything for a month and here I am, the third time in a week!  I'm nothing if not inconsistent!  

Today was a beautiful spring day.  The temperature got up to around 60º, the warmest day so far this year.  It was a perfect day to work on the compost.  We're big composters here.  Paul built three compost bins about nineteen years ago from old cedar siding taken off this house.  We keep all three of them busy during the year.  
 
During the winter they are all cooking compost.  In the spring, we dig down to find the good compost and spread it out on the garden beds.  

 


Actually, first, we have to rake all the leaves off the beds so they can be added to the compost bins.  It's a process of moving and transferring compost materials a couple of times, but it is totally worth the trouble. 

In the spring and summer, one bin is dedicated to growing Palouse Pomodoro, a tomato Paul sort of developed.  It all started nearly fifteen years ago when Paul noticed tomato plants coming up in his compost bin.  He realized that the tomato seeds left over from saucing tomatoes the fall before sprouted in the compost.  So he let them grow.  Every year, he picks the tomatoes and makes sauce from them, saving the seeds for the next year.  

He planted this year's crop in that lowest bin.   

The other two bins still contain compost.  One is usually filled up (the tall one) and left to make more luscious compost.  The other is the one we add to until fall.  Then the shifting and moving happens again as the fall leaves get raked up and put into the bins and onto the garden beds.  It's a circular process, just like the seasons and the gardening.  Each in it's own just-right time.

When Life Gives You Lemons

I have written before about our Meyer lemon tree.  It is doing well in it's sunny spot even though it only produced two lemons this year.  However, those two lemons are huge!  Meyer lemons aren't usually too big but these are large. One is still green but the other turned a lovely ripe yellow and I picked it last night.  


Besides tasting wonderful, Meyer lemons smell delicious.  They have their own distinct smell...lemony but sweet at the same time.  The smell is different that a regular lemon somehow.  Zesting this lemon was a delicious olfactory experience.  Paul could smell it 10 feet away sitting at the table.

The lemon was zested, juiced, and used to make Meyer lemon scones, a new recipe to me.  They were quite tasty.  I added a little glaze for sweetness and that was a perfect addition.  We decided that lemon scones are now in the top 3 Meyer lemon experiences.  

The lemon tree is now covered with blossoms and I'm hopeful that we'll have more than two lemons next season.  There are just too many yummy lemon treats to make!

March Madness

I have felt so lazy lately.  I haven't written anything.  March has been a bit insane.  It started out like a lion with stormy, windy weather.  Somewhere in the middle, we got a few days of relatively warm sun.  I did get to mud in some sweet pea and snap pea seeds and do a little messing about in the garden.  Not enough, though, before the wild weather came back.  

We did have a wonderful St. Paddy's in Palouse on the 17th.  Paul started St. Paddy's in Palouse about 9 years ago because he couldn't find a good place to play Irish music on St. Patrick's Day.  The Palouse Arts Council gals made wonderful food...corned beef, colcannon, and Irish soda bread.  I, personally, made all ten loaves of soda bread for the event!  We served dinner to about 100 people.  Paul's Irish music band, Potatohead, played great music and we had Irish dancers as well.  It was a wonderful time in our small town and a highlight of this otherwise dreary month. 

Yesterday was the first day of spring and we awoke to snow!  Today it snowed ALL day...big, fat, wet flakes of the stuff came down and came down.  Luckily it was warm enough to not accumulate much although I think we had about 4" at one point today.  Sigh...now the snow has turned to rain.  I can hear it pelting the window next to me.  More snow is supposed to fall tomorrow.  I may cry. 


March came in like a lion and it seems to be going out like one, too.  I hope Spring kicks Old Man Winter out pretty soon.  He's overstayed his welcome!

Bickies

The oven is finally fixed!  It's been thirty-seven days since I've been able to bake anything!  The whole family has been grumpy and going through withdrawal for bread and scones and, most of all, biscuits.

We love our buttermilk biscuits around here.  They are probably everyone's favorite breakfast treat.  We all have our favorite way to eat them, too.  

Peter likes his with a different kind of jam on each piece and then stuck together like a sandwich.  I like to put either jam or honey on mine but I like them separate, not sandwiched. 

Paul likes to eat his sopped in an over easy fried egg.  Any way you eat them, they are delicious. 

Here is the recipe:  

Buttermilk Biscuits

Preheat the oven to 450º.  

Combine 1 3/4 cups of flour, 2 t. baking powder, 1 t. sugar, 1/2 t. baking soda, and 1/2 t. salt in a bowl and stir until blended.

Cut in 1/4 cup butter until the mixture resembles very coarse cornmeal.   A pastry blender works best for this.

Add in a generous 3/4 cup buttermilk and mix with a fork until the ingredients just come together.

Pat out the dough to a 1" thickness on a lightly floured board.  Cut biscuits with a 2" cutter (I use a 2 1/2" size).  Push the dough together and keep cutting out biscuits until you've used  all the dough.  Try not to handle the dough too much or the biscuits can get tough.  It will make 8-10 biscuits depending on the size of cutter you use.  Transfer the biscuits to a baking sheet and brush the tops with cream or some more buttermilk (This is what I do).   Bake until puffed and golden, about 10 minutes.

At our house, biscuits for breakfast is one of life's lovely pleasures and we went without them for way too long.  Thankfully, they're back.

Blah, Blah, Blah

Not much has been going on around here lately.  I think I have the blahs.  My oven is STILL not fixed.  It's been over a month now although the repair person is coming on Wednesday.  We're all keeping our fingers crossed that this time it's the right part.  We miss our baked goods!  Especially the biscuits.  We love buttermilk biscuits for breakfast around here.  I'll do a post about them as soon as I can make them again.  Sigh...

And it is still winter.  As someone I know posted on Facebook, "stupid groundhog."  Just last week I saw snowdrops poking up and pussywillows emerging and heard the redwing blackbirds chirping.  Now the robins are shivering in the cherry tree, puffed up to keep warm and snow is coming down as I type.  

I've been doing some long overdue reading.  I love to read but have found that I don't do as much as I used to.  I think it's because when I read, I get lost in the book, whatever it is, and hate to be interrupted.  But this household is full of interruptions, that's just life.  I've been reading a book of short stories; The Red Convertible by Louise Erdrich.  I really like her writing.  The nice thing about it is I can stop easily because they are short stories.  

I'm still stitching, too. I'm just finishing a beautiful piece.  It will be a pillow soon.  The next two will be gifts. 

Anyway, I do have a bit of the blahs, feeling like I'm not really accomplishing much and wishing for spring.  Luckily, I know that it is on it's way, just taking its own sweet time. 

A Failure to Communicate

Monday was a frustrating day.  Well, it started out just fine.  We awoke to about 6 inches of snow.  Everything was cold and white and lovely outside.  We opted out of our friends' annual MLK Jr. Day walk on Fiddler's Ridge and stayed home to dig our way out of the driveway and our foggy brains.  Besides we had company coming for dinner.  

We had planned a nice dinner of polenta with white Oregon truffles and, for dessert, a cherry pie.  After all, I had put up all those cherries in the freezer last summer.  It was high time to use some.  So I made a nice looking cherry pie with a lattice top and stuck it in the oven and set the timer.  I was busy doing this and that around the house when I noticed a burnt smell coming from the kitchen.  I tried to open the oven door to check on the pie and it was locked!  I suffered a small bout of panic as I looked for and then paged through the owner's manual to see what to do.  I turned off the oven and pressed the cancel button.  I also learned, from the manual, that one feature of this oven is to automatically lock its door if the oven gets too hot.  Now, when I put that pie in, the temperature registered 400º and the knob was set on bake so all should have been well.  But, obviously, it was not.

To complicate the situation, I was just getting ready to leave for an appointment in town so I had to hurriedly fill Paul in on things and run out the door.  When I got home again a few hours later, there sat my pie.  As you can see, it did not look like a dessert to serve to guests.  

I called the repair shop and the person I talked to thinks its either a sensor or the control board not talking to the oven thus the oven kept heating up and up instead of staying at the desired temperature.  We're waiting for the part to come in and the oven to be fixed.  In the meantime, we're living without it, which is trickier than it might sound.  Especially to one who loves to bake.  No biscuits for breakfast for a while.  Sigh.

By the way, we did salvage some of the pie.  After removing the burned lattice and crust edge, the filling and bottom crust were in fine condition.  We ate it spooned over vanilla ice cream...and laughed.

Earth Mother

I really didn't set out to be Suzy Homemaker, honestly.  In fact, when I was in my twenties, I was what I called an "Earth Mother" type.  I baked my own bread, used honey and not sugar when baking, canned and froze food, and had a big vegetable garden.  Shoot, I even tried making my own ketchup!  Then I decided I was working way too hard!  I should add that I was also working a full-time job at the time.

And so life went on.  I never lost my love for playing around in the kitchen but did so on a smaller scale most of the time.  However, now that I am "retired,"  I have more time and have found myself going back to my Earth Mother self.  I'm making a lot more things from scratch than I ever did when I was young.   I am baking bread again, both sourdough and whole wheat.  I make raspberry vinegar and homemade vanilla extract (delicious!).  I even make bagels.  I still put a lot of food in the freezer but don't can anymore.  

One thing I tried a couple years ago was making cheese.   The first cheese I tried was ricotta.  It's very simple and tastes creamy and smooth, unlike the sort of gritty feel of the store bought kind.  Then I tried making mozzarella.  It turned out that mozzarella cheese was really difficult.  After a couple of failed attempts, I gave up but, in the process,  I accidentally made cream cheese.  It was really yummy.  

It is more rustic than the smoothed out blocks one buys.  It tends to keep draining whey in the container but that is easily drained off.  It is quite spreadable but not too soft.  And it freezes really well.  It's incredibly easy, too, although it does take a couple of days.  Most of that time it's just sitting and doing it's cheesy thing.  This is a finished batch fresh from hanging overnight in the refrigerator.  It is the perfect topping on one of those homemade bagels!

PS  If you're interested in the recipe for the cream cheese or the ricotta, leave a comment or email me.  I'd be glad to share but it's a little long to post here.