"sure it's crazy"

"just keep going"

Garden Update!

Last fall, we put in a few herbs in a single bed (dill, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme).  After some trial and error, we added some mint and chives.  As you can see, the herbs have really taken advantage of the early spring rain and cool weather of the last few months!

Emboldened by the success of the herb garden, we upgraded to some vegetables. Our crook-neck squash plants are growing like crazy, and we're hoping the newly planted beans (bushy italian long beans and wax beans, no trellis required) will do the same.

We rounded out the garden beds on that side of the yard with some basil, oregano, and epazote. Between the four beds and the potato bucket, we now have a pretty respectable victory garden taking up half of our front yard.

As of this posting, Ariana is on her way back into town with a some marjoram, tarragon, and carrot starts to finish the last bed.  Once those are planted, our little vegetable garden will be complete. With a little luck (and regular watering in the evening) we will be enjoying a nice little crop of potatoes, beans, squash, and carrots later this year.

But with all these hearty vegetables, we got to thinking.  What about fruit?  To remedy this terrible problem, Sarah and I planted an dwarf naval orange tree this afternoon.  It will be awhile yet before we see any fruit, but the orange blossoms should attract plenty of bees and other pollinating insects to keep everything happy.

Kitchenanigans

• For the record, those two roses on the kitchen table are the two different colors of rose we have right now.
• Ohh, okay!
• They don't look different to me.
• No, look, one is slightly redder than the other.
• Yeah, one is pink and the other is -- red.
• Fuck you!
• Well, fuck you!
• Well, I'm drinking Sarah's kefir now. So nyehh!
  

Pie between Friends

So Marge recently came into a delicious strawberry-rhubarb pie. It was so good that by the time we took a picture, only one slice remained. Thanks to Emy for the amazing pie!

Garlic Soup: Easy and Delicious

Want an easy vegetable soup that might just heal your soul? I love this recipe because it is all about how you cook, rather than relying on specific ingredients. Many truly fantastic recipes are based on the need for good, nutritious food when resources are scarce.  This soup, a descendant of a French peasant soup, is no exception.  You can add whatever herbs and vegetables you have lying around, so long as you stick to a general outline.

Chop a few cups of fresh herbs (I used basil, oregano, and rosemary, but whatever you have around), and at least two entire heads of garlic. I went with almost three, but I love garlic. Sauté everything very briefly in 1/2 cup of regular olive oil. Then add 3 quarts of water and bring to a rolling boil. Simmer uncovered for approximately one hour.

Now add chopped vegetables and any legumes or starch. I put in a diced red onion, kale, and brown lentils. Maintain a simmer until everything is fully cooked.

Add salt and black pepper to taste, and squeeze in the juice of 1/2 lemon. If you want to thicken the soup a bit, you can add tempered egg whites egg yolks (thanks Emy!) or blend slightly with an immersion blender. Or you can do what I did, and add 1/2 cup of nutritional yeast.

Serve with crusty bread for dipping!

Sarah's Sexy (Sometimes) Sunday Bread Bake

Okay, okayyyy, as lucky as I am to live with folks who are always making delicious goodness, I can't leech off of them all the time. Y'all got me; I'm guilted into ever-so-occasional productivity. Time to look busy.

Say, what the heck is this doing in Marge's cookbook drawer? Nobody bakes bread any more. Who kneads it? [rimshot]

This basic recipe starts with a "sponge." Hmmm. Why would I start bread with a gnarly sponge, especially one that photographs with this weirdie green hue? It's making me feel ill to look at it.

The dough still photographs green after kneading. Maybe it's because it took a cup and a half more flour this time than the recipe calls for. Maybe whole wheat flour turns you green. Maybe the Wicked Witch of the West was actually vegan and loved to snack on flour late at night, making her highly soluble when that pesky Dorothy showed up with a bucket of water.

Whoa, my questionably tasty bread dough is multiplying like rabbits. Or like cancer. No one should joke about cancer. This is just a very minor, highly curable cancer with nommy side symptoms.

Final rise leaves many questions unanswered. How many pans are under that towel? Can anything worth eating possibly come out from under that grease stained rag? Hey, does the kitchen smell like gas to you, and did the pilot light in the oven go out? (The answer to that last one turned out to be "yes," but we triumphed through the power of internet forums, a long tapered candle, and sheer boldness.)

O well, guess we'll never know.

CSA Haul

Every week, we make a Sunday-morning journey to the Hollywood Farmers Market to pick up a CSA basket from our friendly neighborhood CSA, South Central Farmers.  A CSA (community-supported agriculture) farm typically sells shares of their weekly produce harvest rather than selling individual vegetables.  For $20, we get a big box full of whatever South Central happened to pull out of the ground that week.

It's really fun to see how the selection of vegetables changes slowly throughout the year.  Plus, when you have a ton of local, seasonal vegetables in the fridge it makes it a lot easier to remember to eat seasonally.  After you've been doing it for a few years, you just start to associate particular months with particular vegetables.  Though I have to say, living in Los Angeles makes that a little crazy.  For instance, we were getting peppers well into December, whereas up north in Davis pepper season stops in mid September.

Anyway, we got a ton of delicious shit in our CSA basket this week, including but not limited to: celery, romaine lettuce, red-leaf lettuce, kohlrabi, red onion, chard, several different kinds of kale, oranges, lemons, and green cabbage.  Oh yeah, and we bought some Brussels sprouts at the farmers' market too because we just couldn't resist.

The cabbage has already been sauerkrauted and we made tofu dill salad lettuce-wraps with some of the romaine, but I'm not sure what we're going to do with the rest of it.  I'm just glad we're not getting turnips and parsley anymore because we still have a ton of that in the fridge from last week.

Vegan Brownies are Salad Too

Sometimes you just get hit by a sugar craving on a Saturday night.  Last night we decided that shortbread cookies were a little too fancy and out-of-reach, even though we had all of the ingredients.  Instead, we decided to go with an old-fashioned American favorite: the chocolate brownie.  Except we were rolling vegan-style.

Our favorite brownie recipe comes from Vegan Cookies Take Over Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.  Strangely, it starts out with some silken tofu in a blender and creates a creamy white sugary delicious mess.

Since we didn't really think this culinary adventure through, part-way into the recipe we realized that we didn't have enough cocoa powder to make it all the way to 1/2 a cup.  Instead, we decided to substitute some plain dark chocolate we had in the cabinet from our last trip to The Candy House in Davis.  Some random website suggested that we substitute 1 oz of chocolate for 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder.

 The chocolate mixed in pretty well and gave the batter an amazing texture.  It was hard to stop eating it long enough to stick it in the oven.  While we were waiting on our main course to finish baking, we decided to use up some our lettuce mountain.  Lately our CSA has been producing crazy quantities of gorgeous romaine and red-leaf lettuce - so much so that it's been a challenge for us to consume it all.  We put some of it to good use by making lettuce wraps with hummus, grilled veggies, and a precious out-of-season red bell pepper that we scored at Trader Joes.

 The lettuce wraps were a welcome diversion to distract us from the sweet, chocolately smell that was invading our kitchen via the oven.  In our house, we have a saying that vegan desserts are pretty much the same thing as salad.  Because they're both just made of plants... right?  So they're both good for you!  As we see it, this is a little salad-wrap appetizer for our main-dish salad.

Aww yeah... show me the inside!

After we were done with our appetizer-salad, we pulled our entree-salad out of the oven and tried our best not to eat all of it before the night was through.

Don't worry - there was at least a little salad left over for breakfast ;)

Vegetable Stock Becomes Hummus

Making vegetable stock is easy and can form the flavor base for other cooking projects.  I like to save vegetable cuttings (potato skins, onion parts, carrot greens and the like) in a bin in the freezer, then make vegetable stock every week or two. You can use most vegetable remains, so long as you don't add any brassicas (think cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, etc).  A good rule of thumb is that if it tastes bitter when eaten raw, keep it out of your stock.

Just dump the frozen vegetable bits into a crock pot and cover with water. Throw in a bay leaf, maybe a clove or garlic or some black pepper if you want.  Cook overnight or even for 24 hours.

The stock makes a great cooking liquid.  I like to use it for beans, because I can just strain out the vegetable pieces and add dried beans and use the crock pot again without having to clean it.  This time I cooked chickpeas.

But once you make a bunch of chickpeas, it's only a matter of time before someone turns them into humus!

Brussels Sprouts

They're wee little cabbages that grow on a stick!

Buckets!

We've enjoyed the fruits of a lot of home fermentation in the past few months, including delicious pickles and sauerkraut. But we're hoping to expand our operation to include kimchi, miso, tempeh, water kefir, kombucha, and even more sauerkraut. Right now all of our fermentation vessels are occupied with sauerkraut in varying stages of done-ness, which is putting a severe cramp in our lacto-fermented style.

Over the weekend a friend gave me a tip: ask restaurants for their surplus food-grade buckets. A lot of restaurants buy ingredients that come in buckets, but don't have a use for the buckets themselves. So they are happy to give them away. Well, today while buying a sandwich over lunch, I made a major bucket score at Sub King. Thanks Kelly, for the sandwich and the buckets!!!

Hot Dogs for Dinner!

Veal wieners from the market for some, vegan apple sage seitan sausages for most, and all with homemade buns, sauerkraut, and fries. Delicious!

Makin' Kraut!

Sauerkraut is easy to make and great in sandwiches or with potatoes. Since our weekly CSA box has been bringing giant heads of cabbage lately, we're making tons of delicious sauerkraut.

Just shred any cabbage and pack tightly into a ceramic or glass vessel, while adding generous pinches of salt between the layers. Add a little sauerkraut to the top, then put a plate on top and add a heavy weight; a jar filled with water usually works. Let the whole thing ferment in an out-of-the-way spot in your kitchen for 4-6 weeks.  If the cabbage doesn't provide enough moisture to cover within a day or  two, add enough brine to completely submerge the cabbage. To make brine, mix 1 tbsp of non-iodine salt with one cup of water.

For more information on how easy making fermented foods can be, check out Wild Fermentation.

Duck: Simply Amazing

Roast duck with orange-pineapple glaze and kale potatoes. The glaze was a happy accident, and definitely not made from the pouch that comes in most frozen ducks. 

For crispy, well-cooked duck, score the skin and steam duck quarters for 45 minutes, then roast for 10 minutes a side. If you cook off the steam water, you can save the rendered duck fat for later use. I freeze it and use for sautéing potatoes.

When I steamed the duck, the orange-pinapple juice from the brine (always brine poultry!) dripped down along with the fat into the steaming water.  When I rendered the fat, the fruit juice reduced and became a syrup-like glaze which added a nice finish to the meal.

It also didn't hurt that Sarah made potato bread earlier.