Category Archives: food and cooking

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.

Tomato Trio Salad

food and cooking, my garden,

Two years ago when it was tomato-planting time, we knew that later in the summer several grandchildren would be in the garden and swimming in the pool. I planted a “Grape” tomato bush thinking that it would be fun for the kids to pluck the 1-2″ fruits for snacks.

It turned out to be quite a resource to have right in the back yard, miniature tomatoes that were nearly all perfect, and all very sweet and flavorful. They appeared in large clusters and ripened quickly. Not only that, they came off their stems with the slightest nudge, and a clean break. Any meal I prepared seemed to benefit from a few of these pretties on the side of the plate or filling a bowl of their own.

The top pic is of the “Grapes” in 2007. The grandchildren didn’t particularly like to eat them. But Grandma ate tons–well, maybe just bushels. And I planted another “Grape” last year with equal success and savor.

This spring there were no Grapes to be found. Oh, there are various cherry-type tomatoes that grow in clusters like grape clusters. But on all the long wooden shelves at the best nursery (I finally made the drive after several nearby were found lacking) no one could help me find the plants with that proper name and the oblong shape of a Thompson Seedless grape. The kind that make the fruits we buy in little cartons at Costco, and again this year they are for sale there.

I found many interesting tiny-tomato plants, but was so disappointed I couldn’t think straight to decide which one would be the sorry substitute. So Ibought three. They are Juliet F1, Sun Gold, and Green Grape.

On the right are some Sun Golds just getting ripe last month. They are tangerine-colored.

It has turned out to be fun indeed to have three colors of little love-apples. Sun Golds are definitely the most flavorful. Juliet F1 is so big, it’s on its way to being a Roma. No great flavor there. The Green Grape has been o.k….it’s just hard to know when it’s ripe! The fruits get a bit yellowish, and then you know.

We also have some large tomato varieties this summer, Early Girl and Mule Team. The mules are a very slow train, just now starting to pink up. And the Early Girl plant is a runt, with few baby girl fruits. Our reputation as awesome tomato farmers has gone down the drain the last couple of years.

This week we got some hot weather! Yay! Down with fog, Up with sunshine! That means plenty of cherry tomatoes, and a hankering for salads. So I made a tomato-basil salad tonight.
Started with the tomatoes, as many as B. and I could eat, because this salad won’t keep. As soon as I cut the green ones in two I began to be fond of them just for their looks.
Early in its growth I just pinch the flowers off the basil every week or so, to make it get bushy. Tonight I pruned it above new buds, and then used scissors to get the leaves off, before chopping. If I were making pesto I wouldn’t be concerned about getting a bit of stem and flower. I didn’t know how much to put in–maybe it ended up being about 3 tablespoons?

Some goat cheese went in, in little gobs or crumbles, whatever form I could manage. They all sort of melted into the tomato juice in the end.

 

 

 

And I toasted some pine nuts to put on top. Didn’t use half of these in the end, so I put most of them away in a jar in the fridge.

The biggest challenge for me posting pictures of food on my blog is finding a place to stage the picture. The kitchen is a complete mess, and the table has the wrong color of placemats on it. The living room is too dark….At least tonight, I could be glad it was salads I was photographing (ah, yes, I made another one I’ll tell you about later) so a hot dinner didn’t get cold while I scurried around trying to set up a nice environment for my creations.

Husband B. really liked the salad, and so did I. He sprinkled a vinaigrette dressing on his but I take mine neat.