Category Archives: food and cooking

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.

Cherry Tomatoes Then and Now

food and cooking, garden, tomatoes

Today I had a hankering for soup, so it was lucky that I found in the freezer a quart of the Cherry Tomato Soup I concocted last summer, or fall, to be exact. It seemed to want to go with the quart of Ham and Bean Soup that I also found in there, and after that, it was only natural to throw in the leftover green beans that had a smearing of pesto on them. Yum.

Here is what last year’s soup looked like before freezing. When I went back to find the post to link to, I noticed Anita’s tale of how her curried tomato soup happened, and it sounds like something I’d like to try this year, if my eight plants produce. But–I’m afraid they might have blight!

Here’s the biggest picking of tomatoes I’ve made so far. The green one is a Green Grape. It looks more like the Green Cherry I had last year, compared with the red one there, a plain Grape. The dark ones are Black Cherry, and the yellow are Yellow Cherry.

Thank God for cherry tomatoes, which ripen fairly quickly. Even they are three weeks late, and we are still waiting on the big tomatoes.

Bread with Sorghum

books, bread, food and cooking, housework, people

I made some more bread this week. The bread pans and dough hook were still in hiding, but I enjoyed the kneading, and the free-form loaves do look more rustic, even if they are a bit problematic for B. when making his lunch in the mornings.

This time I used a lot less oil and sugar, and for flour I added some oat and sorghum to the mix. Sorghum? I picked up a small bag of the stuff somewhere, sometime, toward the goal of always-increasing variety in the diet. I didn’t really know where sorghum comes from, but while the dough was rising I read on the bag that it is a grain. This morning I read more about it online and find that it has been used for a long time by humans, more in other parts of the world than here in the U.S., but is gaining popularity here, too.

When it was time to put the loaves into the oven I quickly tried to think of what styles of decorative cuttings I’d seen on commercial artisan breads, but it was too late to do a good job of being creative in that department. So far, my experiment shows that the simple and traditional architecture is nicer.

I have a dear friend N. who is about my age. Neither of us gets to make bread the way we used to 20 or 30 years ago, when The Tassajara Bread Book was one of our bread bibles. Tonight I talked with her on the phone and told her about making bread twice in one week. She was surprised, and said, “You must be avoiding something you should be doing instead.”

That’s one way of seeing it, and how wonderful to have a friend who understands me! Another aspect of the phenomenon is that breadmaking is a relatively small and particular task that I know how to do. None of the little decisions about how closely to follow the recipe comes with very many options, and if the whole batch is ruined for some reason it wouldn’t have much consequence. Baking a loaf or two of bread takes only a few hours, and makes me feel homey, useful, and accomplished.

The tasks I am “avoiding,” on the other hand, consist of three whole rooms, each of which will require at least a day’s worth of work, consisting of one hard decision after another about whether to keep one item or who among my friends, or among thrift shops, might want  another one. If I keep it, how will I store it so I can find it? Etc. Everyone knows how that works.

Now how did I end up talking about sorting junk when I started with homemade bread? The subject is like the clutter itself, creeping in when you are busy doing doing good work. This next week is my chance to tackle one of those rooms, where I hope to lodge a wedding guest if I can clear off the bed. And this afternoon I found both my dough hook and my loaf pans, so it’s even possible I might be inspired to make bread again, too.