Category Archives: food and cooking

While I was at the fair…

food and cooking, my garden, ,

Last weekend was the giant and truly wonder-full food festival my parish puts on every year. I was on my feet for the better part of 12 hours both days, in church or selling books and T-shirts, or just walking around. I listened to the band and watched the Balkan and Eritrean dancers, but my legs and feet were too tired to dance. I talked to friends I hadn’t seen in 15 or 20 years, trying to stretch out of my introverted self. It all wore me plumb out.

In the week previous I had baked some cakes to sell in the bakery, alongside some of the goodies I told you about last month as we were preparing some of them in advance.

At that time I posted a recipe for Pumpkin Banitsa, which had been stashed in the freezer until the morning of the event, to be baked and served freshly out of the oven and ready to sink teeth into. It’s to the right of the baklava in the photo above.

This is one of the three liqueur cakes I contributed to the bakery. My favorite was the mocha cake that I didn’t take a picture of, and which I have made many times. They were all variations on its recipe, starting with a devil’s food cake mix, adding butter, eggs, cocoa and (in the case of the mocha cake) coffee, and coffee liqueur.

The glaze is made from powdered sugar and whichever liqueur is appropriate. I used coffee, chocolate, or orange liqueur in these recent cakes. In the one pictured, I glazed it before freezing, and again the morning it was to be served, with a little food coloring in the second glaze. Then some coarse “natural” sugar went on last.

Monday morning I felt as though I had been away from home on a long trip. I went to the back yard to visit the garden and pick vegetables. I trimmed some spent flowers on my amazing zinnia, and stretched a measuring tape next to it to see just how tall it is – just an inch short of five feet high. Our summery September is predicted to give more 80° days, so I will keep track of the flower that was certainly a good investment of the $4 I paid for a 4″ pot. It’s been one of the constant joys of this summer.

I’m picking Rainbows.

food and cooking, my garden,
Persimmon tomato on placemat with Italian scene

This is the first year that I received a tomato plant for my birthday, and I was very happy about it. My friend grew it from her volunteers, from her favorite variety of the previous summer, and handed it to me in a 4″ pot. I got it into the ground within a few weeks, and it grew like crazy. Some of our first fruits came from that bushy plant – and they were huge!

But we Glad farmers like our tomatoes to be more smoothly globe-shaped, not with the big shoulders and deep grooves of these Rainbows, or Big Rainbows as they are called on the nursery websites. I have mostly dipped them in boiling water so that I could easily peel them and cut them into chunks for the freezer, but when I took 15# of them to church last week they were scooped up fast.

Big Rainbows

Our Persimmons have also been like that this year; previously they were like other gardeners’ photos on the Web. Maybe it is a feature of heirloom tomatoes that there is variation in the shape? Does any of my readers know what causes this? The Rainbows are smoothing out, now that they are past the peak of production and smaller. (I should slice up a few for dinner tonight.) But not the Persimmons.

Well, we haven’t been able to keep up with eating them fresh anyway. I have been freezing quarts and quarts. Even on the morning of my departure for the mountains I quickly scalded some Early Girls, and when I ran out of time I stashed them in the freezer whole with skins on. I figure the skins will come off just as easily when I defrost them again. I hope I’m right.

flesh of Rainbow tomato

So as not to let tomatoes take over my blog the way they have taken over the kitchen, I’ll consolidate tomato stories here, and show you my latest pot of Cherry Tomato Soup. This batch I cooked down a bit more than usual – so that I will have a better chance of fitting it into the freezer that is getting maxed-out.

After stewing the tomatoes and basil for a couple of hours, I added a little cream and chicken broth and puréed some of it before serving it with a meatloaf dinner. So yummy.

 

You will find an odd and small collection….

food and cooking

…of recipes, if you visit my Recipes Page on this blog, by clicking the link in this post or the one on the sidebar. I just updated it for the first time in many months, adding links to all the recipes (and vague instructions) that I’ve posted since last October. For an example of what you will find there, here is one section:

SOUPS and STEWS
Creamy Green Soup
Egg Lemon Soup
Indian Chickpea and Spinach Stew
Moroccan Lamb and Sweet Potato Pie
Curried Orange Squash Bisque
Roasted Fennel Soup

Cookies now aromatize my home kitchen.

food and cooking
 

I admit I have cookies on the brain. So when I started thinking about what to take along when I was planning a visit to friends in a nearby town, cookies were right there front and center calling “Choose me!” Coconut was also on my mind, and shortbread, so instead of making the stellar shortbread recipe we have recently enjoyed, I dug through ancient recipes in my cupboard to find one from decades ago called Coconut Shortbread.

Of course I had to change it a bit, by using half coconut oil and half butter, and using spelt and rice flours. I created a new cookie! But while the dough was chilling, it occurred to me that the shortbread might be a bit bland, lacking the full butter flavor that is traditional. That wouldn’t be a nice present.

So I gathered some more ingredients I had on hand and made up another recipe. The truth is, it had been a toss-up, whether oatmeal or coconut was what I personally was hankering for. And it was part of my plan all along to keep some cookies for Mr. Glad and me.

Here is what I came up with to improve on a simple oatmeal cookie:

Oatmeal Chocolate Walnut Cookies

1 cup salted butter
2 cups sugar
1 extra-large egg
1 teaspoon Frontier walnut flavoring
1/4 cup Ghirardelli unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups white spelt flour
3 cups regular rolled oats
1 cup chopped walnuts

After mixing as per usual for drop cookies, drop spoonfuls of the dough measuring about 2 tablespoons on to a greased baking sheet. Mine are insulated, and I baked the cookies at 375 degrees for about 15 minutes. 
The dough that remained after my liberal sampling made exactly four dozen cookies. They have what I consider the perfect texture, slightly crispy going in, but mostly chewy. And the flavor is wonderfully walnutty.

The shortbread dough did not cooperate with my plans, and I ended up hand-forming each cookie individually. I won’t be trying that new recipe again, in spite of their endearing tender crispness that quickly melts away into coconuttiness.

In case they were too boring, I used the Trader Joe’s sprinkles-grinder I had in the cupboard to add coarse granules of coffee, chocolate, and sugar to the tops of some of them.

And all-in-all, those little cookies were cuter than the oatmeal, so they will be memorialized in pictures, even if they will never be seen again in these parts.

I covered the scratched lid of a half-gallon jar and then packed the chunky cookies in that. And I took along some of the cute cookies, too.

The oatmeal-chocolate-walnut ones are going fast, because of our new neighbors. The house next door has been rented to college students for the last many years. One time it was a bunch of baseball players, and often it has been four or five girls. For the most part these people will not acknowledge us neighbors or look in our direction.

Recently four young men have moved in, who are all jazz students. Now we have more drummers (Did I tell you that Mr. Glad is a drummer?) and more jazz jamming sessions in the neighborhood. But the more fun thing is that these boys are friendly! They even came to our door to introduce themselves. I am in awe.

As soon as I baked cookies I wanted to give them some, so I went to their door with a plate of the oatmeal cookies, because…well, they are guys, and tender tea cookies would probably not make an impression. “Cookies!” they exclaimed, “Why would you do this??” and then they couldn’t say much else because they were chewing and dropping crumbs on the threshold.