Seriously?

"Last published on April 29, 2010"

I can't believe it. I mean, I can, since the evidence is right there, but that kind of updating (in)frequency is downright embarrassing.

This summer has held so many great food experiences, and my garden (I have a kickass garden!), but... in May I got a puppy who, in the course of teething, decided to chew through the photo uploading cable. And my camera needs a silly proprietary Casio cable, not a mini-USB one like, oh, everything else. And I have been too poorlazy to order a new one. Though a quicker solution would be to buy a USB memory-card reader. Sigh.

Once I've got pictures, I'll post. Promise.

"Gardening" update

Well, we've been in the house a month this week. There are still boxes to unpack, but during the bouts of dry weather we've had, I've been able to work a little bit in the yard.

The lone length of fence that seems to get the most sunlight was overrun by maple seedlings and saplings, so it's taken some work to clear that out. As soon as I cleared one section, I mixed some potting/garden soil in with the dirt that was already there, formed the dirt into mounds about 2 inches high, and got my peas in the ground. There were frost warnings the past two nights, but 1) peas should go in the ground as soon as it's workable, and 2) because we're so close to the (temperature-moderating) river, we can usually disregard the frost warnings after April 15.

If you know me, you probably won't be surprised that *I* was surprised that "pea seeds" are nothing more than dried peas.

The week before we moved, in late March I guess, I started these little Home Depot seeds in a mini-greenhouse plastic-eggcrate-looking kind of kit. We bought one "kitchen herbs" one, with basil, chives and parsley, and one "pepper selection" (or something) one, with two hot peppers and one kind of sweet pepper. Each species got two pots. On one end of the herb container, the basil is growing and is overdue for transplanting... One chive sprouted on the other end, but has since withered. In the middle, where I thought I'd see parsley, nothing so far...

With the pepper one, two pots on the same end are doing really well and are probably ready to be transplanted. The middle pots have slightly smaller sprouts bursting through. The third set hasn't seen any activity yet. I actually have no idea which peppers are which, because although I wrote the plants' names in Sharpie above them on the lid, I rotated the lid at least a few times in the watering process... So I guess we'll see how those turn out.

I meant to start lettuce like, oh, I dunno, maybe two months ago. I still haven't done it. It's frustrating, but I hopeknow it will get done when the time is right, after I feel like I've contributed enough to getting the house in order.

Other things we've bought that need to get in the ground: asparagus shoots(?), two kinds of grapevines (this will require more clearing of the baby maples), and seeds for purple green beans (ditto), tomatoes, squash (I think?) and bell peppers. Maybe I go a little crazy with the seed-buying... but I get excited and can't help it! We've been looking at dwarf fruit trees, too. But we can't do those until the hulking, behemoth trees in the front get taken out.

In other kitchen news... Haven't been cooking nearly as much as I'd like. Especially lacking in kitchen time are new-to-me dishes, and some of the good stuff I made during my last months in SLC. (I'm lookin' at you, lentils, onions and rice. I'm lookin' at you, teriyaki chicken.) I keep saying it'll happen once we're settled in — seriously, there's no shelving below head height in the pantry — but I just need to make that happen. A few days ago, I cooked an entire meal from things we had on-hand, and it felt like a big accomplishment. How sad is that?

One of B's relatives gave us a $100 Williams-Sonoma gift card. It may take a while to get used, because I want to save it for something "good." I'm not sure what that means, really, but I just want to make sure that it's not wasted on froufy dish towels or gourmet croissants, when we could really use "x." Does that make any sense? What would you get with it?

Happy New Year!

I wish I had some kind of exciting food-related resolution to share with y'all, but I don't. I wish even more that I had some kind of exciting culinary accomplishment to share too, but alas, I don't.

BUT! In the great battle to do more on the weekends so I don't have to do as much on weeknights, I had small victories yesterday. B and I did massive groceries, and it was awesome to see how few of the items on the conveyor belt were NOT processed. (Is beer considered "processed" food? Kraft doesn't make it, so I'm going to go with NO.) I made lasagna (with lots of extra veggies) that is more than a week's worth of lunches. I started Jenessa's vegan bread last night, but it went in the fridge because I decided to not wait hours for it to rise. While cutting the veggies for the lasagna, we chopped the ones for tonight's chicken curry. They're in a bucket, just waiting to be dumped into my birthday saucepan.

B's folks gave me this saucepan for Christmas; it was too, too generous. But I love it already, all the same.

The holidays were fine; ate a lot of good food. B made eggnog from scratch — raw eggs and everything! It was good. He used this recipe (not the gorgonzola one). It was a hit with the neighbors, with whom we spent Christmas Eve. It was fun to make it, just for the novelty, but what a pleasant surprise when it turned out tasty!

Sorry, I sucked all month. No pictures. Oh wait, there's one. But it'll have to wait. Suffice to say: I found the elusive mangosteen.

A victory, of sorts

That looks so gross. But it's *my* gross. Thyme and parsley from my little pots that sit on the kitchen floor. The rest of it is fixings for chicken stock, which will become chicken soup tonight.

Last night, I finally got the chicken (his name was Gary, by the way) in the slow cooker with onion, carrots and celery. The recipe called for a parsnip and another vegetable I can't remember. Didn't have them, so I ignored that part. I feel really ridiculous for needing a recipe to make chicken stock in the first place. I mean, really. It's hot chicken water. How do you screw that up?

The recipe also called for a bay leaf, parsley and thyme. Alright, I thought. I have a package of bay leaves that have been in the back of the fridge for almost a year. It's dry in there, and they still look great, so I used a couple. You can sub extra bay leaves for a parsnip and that other mystery vegetable, right? Totally.

It was exciting though, to find that the parsley that hadn't been growing so great outside has really done better since I moved the pots inside about two weeks ago. So that's in there, kinda hugging the right side of the slow cooker insert.

The thyme, well, it hasn't done so hot since the move. It was in a pot with some insane, ravenous chocolate mint, and I think the mint might have screwed things up for the whole pot. Roots running around the perimeter of the pot are a bad thing, right? At any rate, the mint seems to have burned itself out, and there were still teeny sprigs of green thyme. They're in the mix too, right on top. Poor baby thyme. You get your own pot next time.

So it's all sitting and stewing as I type. Hopefully the joint's not burned down when I finally get home tonight, and making soup is easy. At least I don't need a recipe for that.

More fermentation education. (Guess I really like the rhyming.)

photo source
A kind soul gently pointed out today that a few posts down, in my rambling tale of the sauvignon blanc trip to the wine store, I incorrectly said that a Sancerres wine I bought was from the Bordeaux region of France.

Sancerres ≠ Bordeaux.
Sancerres = Loire Valley.

I have no doubt the woman at the wine store told me the correct one, but it got lost in the overwhelming amount of geographical information she imparted attempted to impart.

I could have gone into the post and edited it to be correct, and just pretend I never got anything wrong ever, but how lame would that have been?!? I started this blog as I was learning about cooking; now that I'm learning about other ingestible substances, I might as well document this process too, right?

Of course.

I Googled the wine today and this blog came up:
brooklynguyloveswine.blogspot.com
I love this guy, and not just because we have similarly constructed blog names. He has this to say about my not-Bordeaux Sancerres:
The 2007 Christian Venier Touraine Le Gautrie Sauvignon, $17, Savio Soares Selections ... was lovely, although not as stunning an example of Loire Sauvignon Blanc as Venier's VdT is as a Cheverny.

Brooklyn Guy described Venier as a Loire hipster-natural-wine-biodynamic-producer.
Anyone who can use "hipster" in a serious discussion about wine has my vote.

Time to go make dinner... Tonight's wines are from Whitecliff Vineyard, just up the road in Gardiner, New York.

Turns out....

Turns out that in the following sentence, from the last post, I was merging two fruits:
I remember seeing some spiky melon that I think ends in -iya when I lived in San Diego.

Thanks to flickr.com user Mixed Masala, we can see them side by side:

On the left, the thing that I thought ended in -iya but is actually -oya (cherimoya). On the right, some spiky melon (kiwano).

I didn't see these strange, exotic fruits while in the city.

(Insert big eyeroll at my expectations...)

I found them yesterday at my supermarket in the 'burbs.