Category Archives: food and cooking

Turkish Green Beans

food and cooking,

Here is the recipe for the green beans I wrote about in my post on vegetable stews. I have seen versions of this recipe that don’t use a pressure cooker, but if you are comfortable with this kind of cooking it’s very convenient, especially when you have a lot and would like to save them. Most ways of preserving green beans end up with a product that I find lacking, but these are quite good after being frozen. Traditionally they are served cold, but we enjoy them at all temperatures. I put my adjustments in parentheses to the original recipe.

I tried making them with less oil, or with a different type of oil, and the result was mushy beans. But one commenter on my first post (who has a blog dedicated to pressure cooking) said to try pressure-cooking them only four minutes.  I may do that next summer, but this year’s pole beans are about done.

Turkish Green Beans in the Pressure Cooker

2 pounds green beans, trimmed and bisected lengthwise (I didn’t read this carefully and have always cut mine crosswise into 2-3″ lengths.)
1 medium white (I used yellow) onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, slivered
5-6 Roma tomatoes, peeled and chopped (or 1 16-oz can diced tomatoes)
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 heaping teaspoon Turkish hot pepper paste (or 1 tablespoon Louisiana hot sauce)
1 to 1 1/2 cups water, divided
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 cup olive oil

Place the beans, onion, garlic and tomato in pressure cooker. Dilute the tomato and pepper pastes in 1/2 cup water and pour that over the beans. Add the remaining water, salt, sugar and oil. Cover and cook; once the pot is at full pressure, cook for 18 minutes.

Quick-release the pressure under cold running water or with the quick-release mechanism. Serve chilled (or warm, or room temperature).

Summery Cucumber Story

California, church, family, food and cooking, garden

Before the summer is past, I want to share a true story I wrote more than ten years ago, when it appears I was already developing my habit of complaining about my garden, and trying to break the habit, too.

SURPRISE CUCUMBERS
This spring I was grumbling more than ever about the less-than-ideal gardening conditions I work in. Here, close to the San Francisco Bay, it never gets hot enough for this lady born and raised in the San Joaquin Valley of California, where most of the fruits and vegetables all of you eat are grown, where tomatoes and melons and peppers and eggplant all thrive. Rather, we have fog many mornings in the summer, and a few hours after that burns off the cool afternoon breeze comes through, followed by the fog again. I wear flannel nightgowns all summer.
Our back yard doesn’t have a lot of space, and half of it is shaded by our trees and the neighbors’, which get bigger every year. My bean and zucchini crops shrink annually. But in spite of my discouragement, I planted again in April. I have had nice lemon cucumbers in the past, so I planted some again in the usual place. Well, not quite usual. Whereas in the past the vines could crawl across the concrete patio, now they would have a big sandy square where my husband had jack-hammered out the old cracked pavement with plans to replace it eventually.
Before my cukes poked up out of the ground where I had poked the seeds in, big round leaves sprouted up in a few places in the sandy square. They were not the true leaves yet, but I could recognize them for cucumbers—oh, goody, I thought, some volunteers! And I carefully sculpted some bowls around my “hills” so I could water them efficiently. You know, it doesn’t normally rain in most of California in the summer so we have to irrigate everything.
The expected cucumbers came up, too, though not so many. I was glad for the “drop-ins” and was happy to see the space filling with healthy green foliage and vines running off in every direction. Along about July I walked by my sprawling cuke bed and saw…..what was that?…a watermelon!
I could not have been more stunned; to think that I had not recognized their distinctive leaves, so different from the cucumbers growing close by. But there is the power of a foregone conclusion: I had never really looked at those leaves. I simply knew they were cucumbers. But when I thought back, I remembered that the previous year we had enjoyed watermelon on the Fourth of July with friends, and the many children had sat on the  edge of the deck spitting seeds into the sand.
So now what was I to do? There was no real likelihood that watermelons could get sweet here in the Land of Fog and Shade. I have grown melons before in another place. I know they need months and months of heat, Real Heat. But I had been nurturing these plants for months, and they were so healthy and green…and our water use isn’t metered! It was not possible to turn my back on these babies, so I kept watering them, and sheepishly telling visitors about my confusion and enlightenment, as we gazed at the multiplying fruits, some of which grew large.
August was cool. My children asked me many times, “When are we going to pick our watermelons?” and I told them I would wait as long as possible, until the season of possible heat waves had surely passed…just in case. But I didn’t wait that long. I thought I would try one per week, and I started on Labor Day, the First of September. We picked a big melon, and weighed it: 25 pounds. We hacked it open and it was pink inside. I tasted a slice. It was juicy, it was SWEET. A miracle, but true. Better than what we have often bought at the store. Our neighbor heard us exclaiming and peeked over the fence, so we gave her one. We picked a third (32 pounds) to share with our married children, and found out today that it is sweet, too.
Now the children are saving seeds and hoping that Papa will not replace that concrete just yet. And I am smiling to myself at God’s sneaky kindness, giving me in the midst of my grumblings, of all things—watermelons!

Happy over Vegetable Stews

food and cooking, music

Cooking makes me happy. Having a lot of vegetables to cook up and eat, with extra to freeze, makes me especially content.  B. plays various fun R&B tunes at the computer, and I bounce around the kitchen chopping and singing along with James Taylor or Eva Cassidy, clapping sometimes when I put down the dishtowel or knife on my way to open the fridge or oven.

On the way home through the fertile Central Valley last week I bought some okra, not having a plan for it, and this week I happened to see this recipe for Green Gumbo, which I made with deviations from the letter, but keeping the spirit. How could I go wrong with all those favorite ingredients like kale and okra, sausage and bacon? We ate it on rice as suggested, with corn on the cob alongside.

Summertime gardens always make me want to cook up a pot of Ratatouille, a classic that is not complicated but requires a lot of chopping and mincing. I also had to take time to go out to the garden at the last minute to get the parsley and basil to go with onions, eggplant, peppers, zucchini, garlic and tomatoes. My version mostly stews in the oven.

The picture shows it the first time I stirred the stew, after an hour or so. When I opened the oven and took the lid off the pot, the aroma skipped quickly on the evening breeze across the room to B., who cried out in a swoon. Normally this recipe takes three hours in the oven, but this time it was done in two hours flat; must have been the new convection oven.

Turkish Green Beans come out surprisingly and deliciously intact even though they are cooked in a pressure cooker for 18 minutes. It is probably the generous amount of olive oil that helps them keep their integrity, while tomato, garlic and hot pepper add to the flavor.

I’m sorry to say that the store-bought green beans, young and thin as they always seem to come these days, did not turn out as well as my homegrown pickings. I guess even the additions to the pot can’t overcome the blandness of those wimpy beans. I put half the recipe in the freezer right away, because their flavor and texture are just as nice after being set by frozen for a few months.

Right now I just want to get this post up, so the recipes will have to come later, and also will be included when I create a page on my blog — soon, I hope — where I can link to all of the recipes I’ve ever shared, including these beans and ratatouille. There are a few that I haven’t written down anywhere else, and I need the reference at least for myself, so I can know whether I’ve already written about a particular dish, and also to remember how to make some of them that were sudden inspirations.

Berry Pies

family, food and cooking, , ,

It’s traditional for Mr. Glad to have homemade blackberry pie for his birthday, which arrives at the peak of the wild blackberry season here in Northern California. As a young couple we did our first picking up near the Eel River when we were just making hopeful forays northward, thinking about where to move to when our college days were done.

Later we had the bushes growing like weeds in our back yard and neighborhood, and the children could bring in plenty, so much that there were many more berries than I could bake into pies.  I developed a recipe for blackberry syrup to process in jars so that year by year we had it to pour on pancakes.

Twenty years ago we moved to a less rural part of the county and now have to make more of an effort to collect our pie ingredients. In the last few years it has twice happened that one or two of the children made heroic efforts against busy schedules and blazing heat to collect buckets full enough for me to bake the customary pie or two.

One year I carted one of these pies up the mountain for our Yosemite family camp experience, and forgot the birthday candle. Someone carved a sort of long matchstick from a twig to use instead, but it was pretty much a failure.

Just above is the time I baked a blackberry pie at the high mountain cabin where I like to go for solitary retreats or for family gatherings where cooking is appreciated.

This busy-busy summer, there was hardly time for a spark of thought about going berry-picking, so I picked up two bags of mixed frozen berries at Costco with plans to make four pies for the big party that the children would give.

 

 

I’d used this berry mix once before, to make my usual blackberry pie recipe, the result being a kind of gummy candy wrapped in pastry. As the berries are individually quick-frozen, I speculated that they lose a lot of moisture in the process and must need less thickening than what I’d automatically put in the bowl.

So this time around, I used less than half the amount of tapioca granules called for in the original Joy of Cooking recipe. A little runny would be better than globby. And the pies were a little runny, so if I do it again I’ll use exactly half the thickening.

Getting the edge of the crust to look nice is not the easiest part of pie-making. It took me quite a few failed attempts in my youth before someone showed me to hold the top and bottom layers of crust together as one, while you fold them under, against the edge of the plate. Now you are all ready to flute the edge, if you want. My pinching technique is shown at right in a photo I had Mr. Glad snap for me. Click on it if you want to see it large.

It seems hard to bake a berry pie without the blue showing through the top crust. Two of the pies I put an egg wash on, and two not. Two had a little less butter in the crust. But they all came out looking about the same.

 

 

 

What was really different was baking them in a convection oven. With the first two pies, I experimented and used the foil collar on one and not on the other, and they baked equally, beautifully brown. So I may not use foil collars ever again!

 

The flavor was excellent, a composite of blackberries (Marionberries, to be precise),  blueberries, and raspberries, with butter seeping in from the crust, and a bit of cinnamon with the fruit. I go lightly on the sugar so that the sweetness doesn’t overwhelm the taste buds.

 

It was a wonderful party the children had for their beloved father, and he was very pleased not to have to go without his pie.