Category Archives: food and cooking

The Balm of Home

food and cooking, home, my garden,

The mister and I have been camping and hiking and wearing ourselves out in the mountains, and I do plan to post detailed travelogues pretty soon. In the meantime I am my usual post-travel self, however that may be described; I’m too tired to try right now.

 

 

 

It was a blessed day today, with time to give a drink to the flowers, wash sheets and bake a pie. The green beans are coming on — I think I’ll pick a few tomorrow. The begonia is brightening a space several yards in diameter, and the ancho peppers look like small trees.

Even I am surprised at how soothed I am just to be in My Place.

Cherries the birds didn’t get

agriculture, food and cooking

Thanks to blogging friends, I was prompted to take notice and learn about my food today. Strawberry Lady suggested we eat cherries, so naturally I took a picture first. The Rainier cherries I bought at a roadside stand this week in the land where we also grow asparagus, artichokes — and yes, strawberries! — were selling for $6 for a large basket, the same as Bings.

But in Japan, they have been known to pay for Rainiers (gulp) $5 per cherry…? And birds eat as much as a third of the crop before it’s picked, so they also must think they are pretty special.

Now I’m glad I bought the Rainiers and got such a good deal. The small hut with the big signs was just off a four-lane highway, and the trucks carrying all our luscious California produce were speeding by. As the wind blew me across the dirt toward the fruit it took all of one second for my hair to become a tangled web across my face, but I found my mouth and sampled both cherries — and that’s how it all happened.

I bought strawberries, too, Mags, but in this case,

They can’t compare
To the Rainier rare.

Ascensiontide Showers of Blessing

church, food and cooking, friends, my garden, other gardens, , , , ,

This short season between Ascension and Pentecost — it just seems natural to call it Ascensiontide, even though, until we get to Pentecost, we are still in Eastertide. These ten days are a subset, maybe. All this is The World According to GJ, and probably not kosher — oops, I’m getting more faith traditions mixed up in there.

That I am confused is not surprising, considering how wild and unusual my last two weeks have been, with a heavy amount of visiting with several friends and great busyness leading to brain fatigue. Thank God He gave me the strength to enjoy all the extra love and liveliness in the house. So much has been going on, I wanted to give a brief report of highlights.

plants still waiting to go into the ground….

Rain. It kept us from going on the walks I had anticipated, and also relieved everyone of irrigation duties.

blue lake pole beans

Very odd to get so much rain here in California the first week of June. Most plants don’t mind it, but the basil looks nigh unto death, waiting for summer. Here are the happy beans instead.

flannel bush

Hard as it is to believe, it appears that the rain has finally ceased. No one dared complain about last week’s lack of blue skies, here where an excess of water can can only be counted a blessing, and where tornadoes are rare.

My friend May and I drove over the mountain several times to see our elderly friend Jerry.

close-up of bush

Hail battered my car on one of our trips to his house, but on the way home later on we saw a bush we didn’t recognize by the side of the road and stopped to get its picture. Can anyone identify it right off? [I since have learned it is flannel bush.]

Jerry’s walnut tree and vineyard

Jerry and his late wife lived all over the world before settling in wine country to try their hand at being vintners, and they brought seeds and plants from many countries to plant here. It’s sad, though, to see the garden in disarray, lacking the care of Mrs. Jerry.

Some flowers and trees keep going in spite of neglect, like these orchids, which grow outdoors through the winter.

toasted sesame seeds

I had fun cooking for extra people. We ate Lemon Pudding Cake with Raspberry Sauce, and some Sticky Rice with Mango. Also fresh oatmeal bread, and Duk Guk, a soup whose name does not make you think nice things, but Guk is the word for the odd Korean rice cake ingredient that I like a lot — so much that I probably should not keep it in the house.

I toasted sesame seeds to make Lemon Sesame Dressing for the piles of green salad everyone consumed. Maybe after Pentecost I can post some recipes.

through the monastery gate
koi pond at monastery

In the evening of the Sunday between Ascension and Pentecost, I went to the Holy Assumption Monastery for a Family and Friends event.

First there was a lecture on “The Power of Bones,” referring to all the Bible references to the health that can be in our bones, and to the proper and reverential treatment of human bones. It was a prompting for us to consider in light of Holy Tradition our often irreverent modern funeral practices; I’m sure that in the future I’ll have more to say on this general topic that pertains to all of us.

Not long ago Gumbo Lily posted a blog about where her blog name comes from — it’s actually the name of a flower that grows on the prairie. For her I am putting up this picture of the cousin to her gumbo lily, our Mexican Evening Primrose that grows happily in a rocky spot between our driveway and the neighbor’s. It gets by in the dry summer with only a couple of waterings, but it didn’t mind the good Spring soaking.

Mexican Evening Primrose

I can’t tell about Ascensiontide without mention of the rejoicing to my spirit from having the festal hymns playing in my mind ever since last Thursday. In our daily prayers we have left off beginning with, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death…,” and we aren’t yet returning to, “O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth…,” because we are still looking forward, liturgically, to the descent of the Holy Spirit.

So we are singing, during these ten days, about the event described in this way: “And it came to pass, while He blessed them, he was parted from them and carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” (Matthew 17) The troparion hymn goes like this (now imagine me waking to it and falling asleep in the same joy!):

Thou hast ascended in glory, O Christ our God,
Having gladdened Thy disciples 
with the promise of the Holy Spirit;
And they were assured by the blessing
That Thou art the Son of God,
the Redeemer of the world!

I made flan!

food and cooking, ,


Ever since I met him, my dear husband has spoken very fondly of flan. Perhaps it has something to do with the associated memories of a trip he took to Mexico with his family when he was a teenager.

Until this moment, when I was looking for a link to post, I didn’t realize that flan is just the word Mexicans and some others use for crème caramel. Perhaps because we have so many Hispanics in California, I always assumed it originated in Latin America.

I’d never tried to make anything of this sort fancier than cup custard, from milk and eggs. But recently Mr. Glad came home from work with a recipe gleaned from the many Filipina women he works with, and when we were next at the market together we bought the main ingredients, in three cans.

Before removing from baking dishes

I did some more research before attempting to make this dessert. It was the sugar-melting-to-caramel that was new and frightening to me. The cans sat on my counter for a couple of weeks until I could also lay in a supply of eggs and find myself with time to cook on this rainy and cold day.

There are so many family recipes out there, and so much advice about techniques, I think I’ll just post the ingredients I used, which were pretty much according to one of the “Mexican Flan” recipes. I noticed disagreement about whether to stir or not stir the sugar when it is caramelizing; I stirred. I ended up filling one small pie plate and four ramekins with the quantity I made, which, by the way, would not fit at one time into my blender. I used:

1 cup sugar for the caramel
1 12-oz can evaporated milk
1 14-oz can sweetened condensed milk
3 large eggs
3 egg yolks
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup canned Nestle Media Crema (Mexican food aisle)

I thought the finished custard should be smoother on the sides. One has to run a knife along the sides to loosen the custard before turning it out on a plate, and that seems to rough it up a bit. Maybe a ramekin is not the best shape of baking dish? Also, a lot of the caramel stayed in the bottom of the ramekins as hard as candy, so you don’t see the flan sitting in a puddle of the syrup. That’s o.k. There was plenty of sweet stuff on the top. I haven’t turned the pie plate out yet to see if it is smoother.

The caramel wasn’t difficult. I was sure I would burn it or spill it when my husband came into the kitchen and started asking me a stream of questions at the crucial moment, but it survived even that distraction.

I baked the custards for about 40 minutes. I ate mine when it was still a little warm, but firm, and it was one of the best flans I’ve ever eaten. It wasn’t watery as they sometimes are.  The husband also pronounced it Very Good.