| WINTER |
[Jan. 13th, 2009|03:28 pm] |
I had to mow lawn today. It was singularly unpleasant cause it was full of large amounts of dog shit. I must speak to the next door neighbors with the very large Lab about that matter and to please watch her more closely.
And that's winter in San Jose. Though this year is really bad. In the 70s the rest of this week. No rain forecast for the rest of Jan. Fires will be bad next year and there will be water rationing. Which is fine with me (not the fires part though), cause lawns DO NOT belong in places with 14" of rain a year. They belong in England with 300 days of rain and gardeners in green Wellies. I am just mostly killing the lawn in hopes of xeriscaping sometime or other but the weeds still grow after rains. |
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| Leftovers. Didn't suck. |
[Jan. 6th, 2009|08:12 pm] |
Turkey Soup
About 3lb previously grilled turkey breast
1 onion
handful garlic cloves, minced coarsely
bacon fat
duck fat
6-8 fresh bay leaves
2 carrots
2 stalks celery
2 parsnips
chicken stock 2-3 qts
thyme
oregano
marjoram
1lb small white beans
1 large can ground tomates
salt pepper tabasco
I had grilled a huge half turkey breast (over 5lb) on New Year's Day and had a pound of small white beans soaking. Sounded like soup to me.
Softened the onion and garlic in the duck and bacon fat. Mmmm. Heavenly. Add other veggies and bay leaves and sweat them down some. Add stock, 2-3 cups of the soaked beans and herbs, cooking until beans are starting to soften. Add turkey, some finely chopped, some coarsely. When beans are nearly done, add tomatoes, salt and pepper. Cook until beans entirely soft and just a few splitting for thickening. Add a couple dashes of tabasco. Made about a gallon.
Even better reheated as it blended more. This was really good. One of the most balanced and warming soups I've made in a long time. The duck and bacon fats and the smokiness on the turkey really add dimension to this. |
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| closest book meme |
[Sep. 27th, 2008|11:32 pm] |
Instructions:
* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favourite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
Meanwhile, Edward had sent envoys to ask King Phillip for support against the Ordainers, and it was to sweeten Phillip, and "comfort" Isabella, that he joined the Queen at Eltham before 29 October and, in late October and early November, granted her the manors of Bourne and (Market) Deeping in Lincolnshire, and Eltham, with further land in Kent.
Eltham Palace, where Isabella stayed both before and after her pilgrimage, was now her own, Bishop Beck having died and bequeathed it to the King, who had immediately granted it to the Queen. During the next few years, with financial assistance from her husband, Isabella would make various improvements and alterations. In 1312, lead, "estricheboard", and plaster of Paris were purchased for minor works. Then, on 12th May 1315, Isabella ordered a new stone wall, with fifty-six buttresses, to be built around the moat, at a cost of ₤305 15s. 7d.; but the work turned out to be seriously defective and the wall had to be demolished, while the three London masons responsible were tried by the Exchequer Court and thrown into prison. In 1317, however, after providing sufficient sureties and undertaking to rebuild the wall, they were released and the work was subsequently completed. The foundations of this wall still survive on the northwest side of the Great Court. The timber drawbridge was rebuilt in stone around the same time as the wall.
whew.
from Queen Isabella by Alison Weir.
T |
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| Flu shot |
[Sep. 16th, 2008|11:09 am] |
Got my flu shot today. Already feeling kinda lousy and man does my arm hurt to move it. Lots of water and rest in my future I guess.
T |
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| lunch and dinner |
[Aug. 29th, 2008|12:27 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  bouncy | ] |
lunch is Belgian white beer, a baguette from small SF bakery (actually the closest I ever found to a real french baguette), French and Dutch cheeses, Seattle smoked whitefish and fresh blackberries. I love farmers' markets.
J is off today so we got to go together and buy yummy things.
Dinner will be as many of the half bushel of Maryland blue crabs we can eat, some sweet corn on the cob and more beer.
Hurray the end of summer!
T |
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| Winter cooking |
[Feb. 7th, 2008|07:34 pm] |
We're traveling a lot right now, but we are both home this week. Yay! So I have been cooking dinners. So satisfying. Shrimp Risotto, mm. Then this. I came across this basic recipe in on usenet and only had to buy the lamb.
Lamb and Leek Stew
2 lamb shanks
1 tbs. olive oil
4 cups water (bottle of beer for part)
1/2 can tomato paste
Salt & Pepper
3 or 4 leeks
1/2 C orzo
lemon
bay leaves
rosemary
Trim fat from lamb shanks. Cut meat from bones, save the bones. Brown lamb in a large pot or Dutch oven. Add 4 cups water, tomato paste, salt, pepper, bones. Boil, then simmer for an hour. Wash and trim leeks well. Cut into 1/2 inch slices. Remove bones from pot, add leeks. Simmer 15 minutes. Add orzo. Simmer another 15 minutes. Serve with crusty bread.
I added the bay leaves, lemon and rosemary. (Which reminds me. I should replant my rosemary bush, it's in way too small a pot and has failure to thrive.) I used a full can of tomato paste cause what are you going to do with half a can before it goes bad? Well that was a bit too much tomato. I simmered a large rosemary sprig for like 15 min but it could have stayed in longer. Squeezed in the lemon at the end. It was quite good. Needs a bit of tuning but I'll play with this again, not cutting off the lamb first but just braising the shanks. It was too hard to cut out all the tendons. Easier to just pick off the meat after they are gelatinized.
Tonight is Tuscan Bean Stew from the latest Cook's Illustrated. I love that magazine; they are sooo geeky about cooking. I always learn more food science and technique each issue. |
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| Peas |
[Jul. 13th, 2006|11:08 pm] |
(I wrote this in 2001.)
I shelled some peas today. Not peas I grew myself, but bought from a yuppie farmers market. Still, they were fresh and cool and very sweet, so I bought the biggest bag. I love raw peas and I thought this way I might have some left over to actually cook for dinner.
So I brought them home and started to shell them and something just wasn't right. My motions weren't right. I thought about it and remembered how to arrange things; bowl in lap, peas on this side, hulls on that side.
And it made me remember my Grandma. She lived with us in a trailer next door after I was 10. We always had a big garden since we canned and froze nearly all our vegetables for each year. Mom would get up at dawn and start picking what was ready, and nearly every day, something had to be picked - green beans, tomatoes, yellow beans, limas, peppers, corn, cucumbers and sometimes peas.
The beans were never ending. Bushels and bushels of them to make hundreds of little cardboard pint boxes in the freezer, all with a year written on the end with wax pen. Things get lost in a freezer you know. The beans would often still be cool from the night. Grandma and my little sisters and I would sit in the shade so we could catch what breeze there was, half bushel peach baskets of unsnapped beans around us, all the big bowls and plastic washtubs to take the snapped beans, little bowls to take the ends which were thrown in the fields for composting.
Snap! Crunchy sounds as the handsful of fresh beans were snapped and thrown into the bowls with rhythmic little thumps like tiny drum beats. Crunch! When you bit into one that looked too sweet and juicy to let go. Beans were washed and blanched then plunged into water with big chunks of ice in them to stop the cooking. We dried them in clean bath towels and then into little plastic bags in the boxes, each with a tiny white rubber band to seal the bag.
Grandma always wore a dress and usually an apron over it. The metal bowl for shelling or snapping was in her wide lap.. A pile of peas next to it. Her fingers were deft, gnarled things that would run through large amounts of vegetables. Plink, plink the peas would hit the metal bowl, slowly filling it. It was always hard not to eat the raw peas, but the yield on them is low for freezing weight per row, so we were told not to eat them.
There we would sit, under big trees in our lawn chairs, with all this bounty spread around us. It was hard work but your own food in the freezer is so much better than store bought. I thought so then and I think so now.
I can see Grandma's face, round and wrinkled, almost always with a smile on it. She raised a passle of kids, seven I think, buried one infant. No money, a man who'd be as likely to go off hunting in the mountains of Virginia for months as he was to stick around all the time. Hillbilly folk, she talked like a backwoods woman to her dying day. When I was little, and she and Grandpa still had her own house, she fed 20 or 30 folks for Sunday dinner after church, always inviting just about everyone in the whole Baptist church to "come on and have dinner and set a spell with us". And an amazing number did. There would be hordes of kids in the back yard, climbing gnarled old trees, chasing after the half wild kittens, snitching strawberries or tomatoes to tide them over or begging a cookie, since kids ate last. The cellar was cool and dark and had a dirt floor and we kids weren't supposed to play in there.
It was a tiny house that had a sort of closed in porch added onto the back of it. There she would feed the masses in shifts, a true Martha, caring for the bodies and well being of others. Hams, chicken and dumplings, mounds of mashed 'taters with lumps from her old battered hand masher, butter beans swimming in grease, pickled pepper slaw, sweet potatoes, O! her fried mushrooms, pies, cakes. She was always feeding people, urging you to eat. She thought a 9" pie should be cut in to quarters, nobody would want a smaller piece. When she made us pancakes, they were the size of her cast iron frying pan and filled the plate to the edges and were half an inch thick at least.
Plink, plink. I shell the peas, their cool green pearls filling my bowl. Plink, plink.
I miss you Grandma. |
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