Wednesday, April 25, 2012

The temperature's rising, it isn't surprising




We've had a couple of very warm days here and so have been doing our best to keep ourselves cool. Hanging out in various stages of undress seems to work pretty well for Silas.  I decided that the rest of us could use something cool for dessert and so set to experimenting. Happily, my efforts were successful. This is about the easiest thing ever, it's cold, and it tastes good too. What's not to like?

From the Recipe Box




Peach Granita


You'll need:
canned peaches in syrup (I used a quart jar and it filled a 13x9 pan - you could put in more, but it will take longer to freeze)
a blender/food processor/immersion blender
a 13 x 9 pan
a fork
a freezer

Dump the peaches and their syrup in the blender and blend until smooth. Pour the puree in the pan and put it in the freezer. After an hour, check it and use a fork to scrape up the ice crystals all along the sides and bottom and incorporate them back into the puree. Do this again every 20 minutes, until it is uniformly slushy/frozen to your liking. I imagine that it would keep for at least a couple of days, covered in the freezer, but I couldn't say for sure . . . I think it might also be nice as the base for an margarita/daiquiri, just add some tequila/rum and maybe a little lime juice to counter the sweetness.

Whoops - I forgot to put this in the original post

Sunday, April 22, 2012

I'm young and free, and suddenly it's spring


We've definitely shifted into full spring mode this week. Here are some sights of the season:

Silas enjoys the last the last beets and carrots from our root cellar

Tomato seedlings have been transplanted to their secondary containers

A delicious gift from one of Tres's growers



We're looking forward to our first salad tonight -
the volunteer arugula (closest plants in photo)
has gone gangbusters!

Tres and his pop are currently hard at work on this (more details once it's completed):

Monday, April 9, 2012

They're juicy and healthy and cute

sprinklers in action on the back "lawn"

Tres has been hard at work on our yard these past few weekends. Now, when I say yard, I should specify that up until this point we have done no landscaping, other than putting in the garden last year. After the house was finished, he put out some grass seed and we've had a lawn that's about the equivalent of an adolescent boy's facial hair  up until this point. Now that the weather's getting nice and it's a more appropriate growing season (and he actually has a spare moment), Tres is getting serious. For the past month, he has spent most of every weekend installing a sprinkler system, which will automatically water the lawn and plants around the house. It was  a pretty Sisyphean task (yay, digging in the sand!), complicated by the fact that he was working by himself, but he did a wonderful job and now we can get to the (mostly) fun part: adding plants! Our landscaping hopes/requirements are twofold: anything we put in should be easy to maintain and functional whenever possible.

 forsythia (up close to the house) and peach

Our first addition was one of my spring favorites, a forsythia bush. Aside from being just pretty to look at, I love that forsythia are one of the harbingers of spring, providing a burst of color just when you need it the most. They're also quite easy to maintain and do well in our climate. I've joked that buying our first plant from a nursery has made me officially feel like a grown up and (while I know that some of the other experiences of the past year  have been perhaps a bit more life-changing) I'm really only half kidding - there's something very adult feeling about planting things that will take years to mature and become useful.

 blackberries (look for the bright green tags)

 raspberries

Which brings us to our acquisitions of the past two weekends, fruit trees and berry bushes! Well, berry sticks, really, but, assuming all goes well, they should grow into bushes. These fit our requirements perhaps a bit better than the forsythia (although I would argue that improving aesthetics is useful too, so long as the plant is low maintenance) and we are really excited at their prospects. Of course, as I mentioned above, we will not be seeing the fruits of our labors (so to speak - heh) for a few years. We're looking forward to D'Anjou and Bartlett pears, Redhaven peaches, three varieties of cherry (VansMontmorencies, and Black Republicans - it's a  super neat grafted tree), blackberries, and raspberries someday.


 cherry

pears (D'Anjou on left, Bartlett on right)

Tres has done all of this work himself and it's been quite the job, made all the less pleasant by the fact that he'd much rather be working in the garden. I'm so admiring of his hard work and excited to do my part as harvester, preserver, and eater in the next few years.


Silas is excited too

Thursday, April 5, 2012

I lost my poor meatball when somebody sneezed

From the Recipe Box


Meat sauce for pasta is one of the first things I learned how to cook and has been an oft-used recipe in my repetoire every since. It calls for basic ingredients that we pretty much always have on hand (onion, garlic, canned tomatoes, ground meat, spices), cooks up in 30 - 45 minutes, and it tastes good. When I came across this recipe the other day, though, I was intrigued by the sauce and thought I'd give it a try. The recipe below is what I ended up making - an amalgam of it and the meat sauce that I've always made. As usual, the changes are mostly due to my laziness (Clean the food processor? No thanks!)/limited by what I had on hand (drained tomatoes are close enough to tomato paste). The result is, I think, substantially more flavorful and intense than my former (ok, let's be honest, more delicious), without really much more work. The trick is just to start things early enough and to be available to check on the sauce periodically throughout its cooking period. I don't know if it will entirely replace my meat sauce of old (there's something to be said for being able to decide what to cook an hour before you eat it), but it really is in another league.


Meat Sauce
olive oil
one medium onion, diced
2 carrots, diced
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1/4 teaspoon celery seed (the actual recipe calls for celery, which you can certainly use)
2 pounds ground pork (beef would be fine too, this is just what we have around)
2 quarts tomatoes, drained
1/2 cup red wine (I'm sure it would be great with the full 2 cups she suggests, I'm just stingy)
2 bay leaves
water
herbs of choice
salt
pepper

Heat about 3 tablespoons olive oil in heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat. Add onion, carrots, garlic, celery seed, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook until nicely browned, stirring often, about 10 minutes. Now, set the veggies aside and do the same thing with the pork (you could do this concurrently in 2 pots, if you'd like it to go faster; I preferred dirtying fewer pots). Mine started out frozen, so I can't really give a time estimate here. Once the pork is nice and brown, add the vegetables and tomatoes and cook about 4 more minutes. Add red wine and cook 5 more minutes. Add water (she says until it's an inch above the meat, but my meat, etc. floated, so just estimate - I think I added about 2 cups to start, but I didn't measure), bay leaves, and any herbs that you like in sauce and have on hand (I just put in some dried oregano), stir to combine, and bring to a low simmer. Simmer for the next 3 hours, adding 1-2 cups of water every time it cooks down. Taste for spices and adjust appropriately (mine needed more salt). Serve on pasta or polenta, with some parmesan/romano/hard, salty cheese grated on top.

I think I may double the recipe next time, as we'll only get about 2 meals out of the above (to be fair, they are pretty generous portions and it would go further if you served it with sides, of course).