Category Archives: food and cooking

Late September Garden

food and cooking, garden


I’ve been enjoying my own garden today, and took a few photos to document the changes going on.

The echinacea is still blooming, but you can see shoots of Dutch Iris coming up nearby. And beyond that, yarrow that never bloomed this year. That must mean this bed is shadier than ever.

We get pine needle drop at this time of year. What a mess, covering pots of succulents, campanula, sweet woodruff, and other things, and hanging from the branches of the rhododendron. If I had any grandchildren around I’d pay them to collect needles.

Here is some kind of salvia that is at the peak of bloom right now. It doesn’t mind some shade, and grows near columbines.

My Swiss chard is ready to pick. I’d like to make a tart with it, such as I ate once at an Italian restaurant. Has anyone a recipe for something like that?

This Night’s Heat

food and cooking, my garden, ,

What can one do when the garden produces only a few regular tomatoes and a thousand cherry tomatoes? It just this week occurred to me to make salsa with them.

The grocery store where I shop is a favorite of Hispanics, so it carries everything they could want, including many sorts of hot peppers. Nearly every time I go there I gaze at the boxes of peppers and lament that I don’t know which ones to buy for what.

Enough of that wimpiness–This time I took the plunge and bought Anaheims (in the picture above, next to the cilantro), which I am familiar with because we grew them in the past, and Serranos. The Serranos (dark green, at the bottom of the photo) were the experimental ones; I’ve never used them, but they don’t carry the most fiery connotation to my mind.

In the past I overdid the onion in my salsa creations, so this time I just used green onions. Also some sweet red bell pepper, garlic, and cilantro.

I’m sorry, I just had to show one more photo of my cherries before the summer is gone. Now that they have proven themselves, each with their own unique pros and cons, but mostly looking super together, I am thinking I want to plant all these varieties again next year!

Here are the approximate amounts of ingredients for this warming concoction:

September Salsa

4 Anaheim peppers
3 Serrano peppers
8 scallions
1/2 a large sweet red bell pepper
about a quart of cherry tomatoes, mixed varieties
2 cloves garlic
1 bunch cilantro
2 tablespoons lime juice
about 1 teaspoon saltIMG_6812

Chop everything as finely as you want or are able, and mix in a bowl.

Here is Mr. Glad getting ready to scoop a pile of the stuff on to his tortilla chip.

He thought it was a fantastic recipe. Also he said he was surprised at how mild the Serranos were. Meanwhile, I was enjoying the flavors, thinking it was the best salsa I’ve made yet, as my fingers were burning and beads of sweat were forming on my red face.

Power Pancakes

food and cooking, , ,

My dear husband goes to work very early in the morning, and doesn’t like to get up earlier still to fuss over cooking or eating breakfast. Nowadays I like to have some of these pancakes ready for him to easily heat and eat.

I found the original on a Zone Diet e-mail discussion list quite a while ago. A woman named Karen created and collected recipes that followed the principles of balancing protein, carbohydrates and fat at each meal or snack, and published them in a notebook called Karen’s Kitchen. Her original recipe doesn’t seem to be available online anymore.

I have adapted it and increased the quantities; I usually also double the recipe below, and freeze most of the results. I can never seem to make these pancakes come out very neat and uniform. The front of my griddle is too hot, the back is too cool, and the cakes want to get very brown from all the cheese in them. In this picture I had just put a little more butter on the griddle when I decided to take the picture; that is the butter pooling on my warped cast aluminum griddle on my not-level stove. Another thing that is not neat is my stovetop, as I somehow get little brown bits of pancake all over the place. I tried to crop them off so you wouldn’t see what a sloppy cook I am.

After years of making these, it only last night occurred to me to add some baking powder, to lighten them up. Karen’s recipe used only the whites of the eggs, and I’m sure the whole-egg version is heavier. As I made them successfully without baking powder for a long time, I put it down as optional, though I think it did help them to cook a little faster. I’m not sure if they were lighter in the end.

When I am frying these up, I find it really hard not to overindulge in testing and sampling them, I like them myself so much.

Power Pancakes

2 cups oat flour (this can be made by whirling uncooked oats in the blender.)
8 eggs or 16 egg whites
16 oz. low-fat cottage cheese
3 tablespoons sugar
4 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 tablespoon baking powder (optional)

Blend all ingredients except the oat flour in two or three batches in your blender or food processor; beat in flour until moistened. Cook on a greased griddle at a temperature a little lower than regular pancakes. They will be very brown.

When they are cool, I wrap them in waxed-paper packages of three pancakes, and freeze in a big ziplock bag. At night before bed, I set one package on the kitchen counter to defrost, and my husband heats them in the microwave in the morning and tops them with a little applesauce for a meal with serious staying-power.