Winter Wonderland …

Posted on December 27, 2008 by cmf

The wind is howling outside this morning — a morning that dawned slow and grey although it looks like the sun might try to peek through sometime later. Drifts are piling up — all that lovely, sparkly, dry snow that has fallen in the last week or so is swirling into strange shapes.

I love winter here. Summer I spend outside in the garden, driven out into the yard from the time I wake up until it’s finally time to shut down the kerosene lantern hanging from the apple branch and go inside to bed. But winter has a different appeal. Winter is quiet. Winter is the time to retreat to my cozy, cluttered basement writing office and get back to work making sentences. In winter, retreat feels normal, going to ground like some hibernating animal, reaching back inside to see if I can find the words to tell the story I want to tell.

Is it my grandmother’s voice that drives me outdoors all summer? She’d find me reading in the far corner of my Aunt Lynn’s living room, inside on a bright summer day. “Go outside,” she’d scold, pulling the book out of my hands. “It’s a beautiful day, what are you doing in here?” So summertime I feel compelled — outside, into the garden, onto the trails, into the backyards of my friends where we grill and chat and watch the kids play on the swingset.

This week between Christmas and New Year has always been one of my favorites. The excitement of the holiday is over, but there are new toys to play with (my new TiVo box that streams movies from Netflix) and when I was little, every year, there was a new diary, with a tiny lock. A whole new year of blank pages stretching ahead of my. The promise of a new start in this week that feels like a general pause, a moment when we all take a deep breath, putter around in our new slippers and eat leftovers from our lovely festive holiday. I’m looking at a baggie full of lovely leftover beef and I’m thinking shepherd’s pie. Something warm and beefy cooking in my kitchen while the wind blows snow in swirls and I try to bring my moribund novel back to life once more.

Worth all those Saturdays

Posted on October 23, 2008 by cmf

Tonigh night I was fried. I went out the last two nights, and while it was so much fun last night carving pumpkins with the kids (thanks Dad for that perennially-scary pumpkin face you taught me when I was little) well, the grownups overindulged just a tiny bit, and then today was crazy at work. By seven, I was rattling around trying to figure out what to eat for dinner. I wasn’t that hungry, but I wanted something other than cheese and crackers.

And that’s when the antelope bolongese that I put up with the terrifying pressure canner came in — sauce, meet noodles. Ten minutes and it was dinner. I did have to take a flashlight to find the parsley in the garden, but pasta, sauce, parmesan, parsely. Dinner. Everything from someplace I understand. Good clean food at the end of a long day. Who could ask for more?

Winter Herbarium

Posted on October 23, 2008 by cmf

I managed to get my herbs in before the big snow which was a relief, especially as it took months for the shiso to germinate and I’m curious about using it. I put the herbs on this table in my mud room last winter, and while they didn’t die, they didn’t exactly thrive either. There’s a window directly opposite the table, and it is the south-facing side of the house, but it doesn’t get a whole lot of sunlight, especially on those gloomy days.

So I bought a couple of brackets and a timer, and rigged up one of the grow lights from my basement seed-starting setup. So far, after a week they seem to be doing pretty well. I’ve got the lights set up for 12 hours a day, and because there’s a light out there I seem to be remembering to water more regularly. I’m not good with houseplants — I forget they’re there and kill them. Or they get whiteflies and die. Or something. But I’m hoping this winter to keep growing basil and marjoram and shiso and thyme and rosemary and mint and chives (the chives are in a post-transplant swoon at the moment. I’m hoping they recover.)

That was fast …

Posted on October 10, 2008 by cmf

Here’s what I woke up to this morning — yup, that’s snow. About four inches — and it’s supposed to keep coming down all weekend. Yesterday I woke up to a hard frost — I went to check the tomatoes and they were dead. Dead dead dead dead dead.

So I pulled them up and threw their soggy carcasses into the compost. I salvaged enough late ones to make this big pot of frostbitten-tomato sauce. That’s the last of the tomatoes, a couple of carrots, and a sautee’d onion — later I added a can of Muir Glen organic tomato paste and ran it all through the food mill. I don’t always get too worked up about the skins and the seeds, but I’ve found with the late-season ones that if you leave them in the sauce gets really bitter. I left the sauce until this morning because I decided to do a Bolognese and the meat needed to thaw out. I thawed a package of ground antelope, two stray Italian sausages, and a pack of elk Italian sausage I found in the back of the freezer. This morning I sauteed up some more carrots and onions, browned off the meat, and added a quart of my good local Jersey milk. I let that all cook down for a while, then added it into the big red pot of tomato sauce with about a quarter of a bottle of white wine. It’s cooking down on the back burner now — later I’ll can it in the terrifying pressure canner.

The markets might be crashing still, but thanks to my anxiety habit of hoarding dry pasta — with six or seven quarts of nice Bolognese on the shelf, I should be fine all winter.

Hockey Pucks …

Posted on October 6, 2008 by cmf

It’s all harvest all the time here at LivingSmall right now — I put tomatoes up this weekend in the terrifying pressure canner, and there’s all that kale and chard I’m going to have to deal with at some point — but in the meantime my Roma beans finally came in — they got such a late start I didn’t think they’d come through, but they’ve been producing like gangbusters for a few weeks now.

I’ve taken to cooking them up in big batches, then freezing them into what I like to think of as hockey pucks. One of the things I love about Roma beans is the way they get silkier and silkier the longer you cook them. I did these in the big dutch oven with some onions and garlic and tomatoes, then froze them in muffin tins like this:

Once they’re frozen, I dumped them out (a dip of the pan in warm water helped), wrapped each one in cling film, then put them in zipper bags. They’re great for those nights when you just can’t deal with dinner — a hunk of frozen meatloaf and a hockey puck in an ovenproof dish, half an hour or so in the toaster oven and voila! dinner.

On Eating Less Meat

Posted on October 3, 2008 by cmf

As anyone who has been reading here for a while knows, I’m no vegetarian (I tried in college, but I missed sausage, and lamb, and bacon, and cheeseburgers). But I have to admit that with rising food prices, and global warming, and my increasing unwillingness to eat meat that wasn’t raised by someone I know (which means I’m paying a lot more for meat) — well, I’m eating less meat. Mark Bittman wrote a rather inspirational post about this earlier this summer that got me thinking — it’s really easy to just slip into that meat-veg-starch dinner formula. And it’ really sort of boring.

I got my first lesson in meat-as-accent when I lived in Taiwan for a few months in my twenties. My best friend from college went and married a lovely Chinese guy (who has become a big star). One day we were in the Hypermart and Constance bought a small package of greens and Chinese ham. It was a revelation. Sauteed garlic chives with slivers of salty Chinese ham (think American country ham — dense, salty, fabulous). A little soy and sesame oil over rice — it was wonderful. Wonderful like nothing I’d ever eaten in America wonderful. Wonderful like a whole new world opened up — greens as the main part of the dish? with a little ham to accent? on rice? Not something I’d ever experienced before and one of those bellweather dishes by which you gauge all others.

So last night, in honor of my new rice cooker (the old one mysteriously crapped out — it was a cheapo, but I was sad) I cooked up a batch of one of those yummy Lundberg rice blends (this one had brown, mahogany, wild, and some other rices mixed together). Then I sauteed up the last of last year’s pancetta (there’s a new one curing in the fridge), added some carrots, an onion, some peppers from my garden, and a zucchini that my beloved Milk Lady brought me today. When it was all done, I crumbled in some of the Milk Lady’s herbed feta (which is really more like a mozzarella) and ate it over the rice. It was delicious. It was easy — a real work night supper after a week when I’ve been way behind and fried — and most important, it was delicious.

I know, I know — standard hippie fare — veggies, brown rice, cheese — pancetta wasn’t in the original veggie-hippie recipe — but the thing is, no matter how many memories we might have of bad hippie fare, there’s something to be said for the sweet-salty mix of veggies and bacon, and I’m becoming more and more dedicated to the idea of meat as a condiment. As an element of dinner, not the main attraction.

It’s not that I’m cutting out meat — after all, I have half a pig in my freezer, along with a fair amount of antelope and lamb — but I do think that cutting back a few nights a week can only be good for us all. For our arteries, and our wallets, and our planet.

The Vacation Part of the Trip

Posted on September 30, 2008 by cmf

My trip last week was a great success — my mother and I had a very fun time together, and we found two apartment buildings that look interesting and cool and that she can afford — but it was a busy week. I put just over 1000 miles on the rental car, but the trip did have some very restorative aspects, one of which was the amount of time I got to spend in my friend Posy’s garden. Because there was no wi-fi connection in the guest house, I had to take refuge under this beautiful pergola, which looked out over this lovely perennial garden. It was pretty swell out there, and at night there are some little lights tucked up in the beams of the pergola. I lucked out on the weather as well — it was lovely and warm in Chicago the whole week — beautiful fall weather.
Now Posy and I have a sort of mutual-admiration society that started when she moved into our neighborhood when I was about four. Apparently, I dragged Patrick up the driveway and said “Hi, I’m Char and this is Pat — do you have any kids we can play with?” She did — and so we stayed and I swear I spent half my childhood there — it’s been a great joy to become actual friends as adults as well — we had a great time catching up and as always, I’m enormously grateful for her friendship and hospitality.

Making it up as you go along …

Posted on September 10, 2008 by cmf

I don’t have a photo of last night’s yummy dinner because well, I ate it instead of photographing it, but it was one of those delicious surprises that happen sometimes when you’re just making something out of what you have. I had a bunch of tomatoes that were about to go bad on me — not enough for a real pot of sauce, three or four big-ish red ones, a few Jaunne Flammes and a handful of cherries. I dithered for a while because I didn’t really feel like cooking, I felt more like heating something up but I didn’t want to eat any of the stuff in the fridge. So back to the tomatoes.

I put on a pot, sliced one of my little onions from the garden (they’re just a little bigger than a golf ball, most of them) and one of the three cayenne peppers that I’ve gotten so far this year and started sauteeing them. I threw in a clove of garlic, cored and chopped the tomatoes and put them in at a pretty brisk simmer. The tomatoes gave off a fair amount of juice and although it looked a little soupy, it smelled good. I put on some water for penne and while the penne was starting to cook I went out to look under the plastic to see if there’s any basil. The basil in the regular garden is toast — if we didn’t have a hard frost we certainly had a soft frost sometime this week. But under the plastic was the nicest looking basil I’ve had all summer — I picked a handful and as I came back through the garden I remembered the handful of roma beans I picked earlier in the week. (The season got such a late start that I’m afraid I’m not going to have beans to freeze like last year.)
I love roma beans and they’re one of those things I grow because you can’t really buy them around here. The beans are what took this simple little dinner up a notch from good, to really good. I topped the beans, cut them into inch long pieces and threw them in with the penne, which had another 7 minutes to go. When the timer went off, I drained the penne/beans, added them to the sauce and let it all simmer for a minute or two so the flavors would blend. A little parmesan and this was a great dinner. The beans were perfect — cooked all the way through but with a little tooth to them still, and roma beans and tomato are a great combo.

This is what I really love about cooking from the garden, the sort of dithery, hmm, what should I try next aspect of it. I’ve learned to cook things I didn’t have any experience with before this garden: roma beans, chard, kale, strange Italian greens I buy from Seeds of Italy because they look interesting.

Closing the Windows

Posted on September 3, 2008 by cmf

Sigh. It’s that time of year again. My house has been wide open since the middle of June and in the last week it’s become clear that it’s time to close the windows and, double sigh, turn the heat on again. It’s time to come inside. It’s cold out there — in the low 40s at night, and we’ve had rain so it’s damp. No more sitting in the backyard under the Coleman lantern reading novels into the night. Even with the firepit going, it’s just too cold, and too damp, and unpleasant.

Part of me loves this back-to-school feeling. I was in Target the other day and it was all I could do to tear myself away from the school supplies aisle — there’s a reason I went all the way to a PhD — I loved school. The chill in the air has come far too soon — I mean, it only stopped snowing on June 17 — but that turn of the planet always feels to me like a hopeful new start. And I have work to do — I need to get back to this blog after a slacker summer, and there’s a novel manuscript that is three chapters long that has been languishing since spring.

And there is still work to do in the garden — the tomatoes are tucked away under a tent of six-mil plastic with jugs of water tucked in there to store heat overnight. The Galician kale is three feet high and will need to be harvested. There are three more cabbages and the mystery broccoli that is also three feet tall with nary a head in sight. We lopped off the apical buds hoping to spur the growth of side shoots — and there are a few shooty-looking things going on, but we’ll just have to see. If nothing else, we’re looking at a lot of fodder for the compost heap. The brussels sprouts are starting to get tall, the chard is finally firm and green and lovely, and the onion tops have flopped over. The carrots are also looking good and I’m trying not to let the cool weather fool me into pulling them too soon.

But I’m sad to see the summer go. We got snow up high this weekend, and it’s just over. Morning dog walks require long pants, socks, and a jacket now. And my windows are closed. My house has an inside and outside again, and this weekend I found myself at Lowes looking at storm doors. Winter’s on it’s way, and it’s supposed to be a cold one, with high energy prices. I’m battening down the hatches and filling my larder.

Hoarding the Bounty …

Posted on September 2, 2008 by cmf

Over at the gorgeous A Way To Garden, Margaret asks what your tendency is, to savor or store the produce bounty that anyone with a garden confronts this time of year. I’ve written before about what an inspiration Joan Dye Grussow is to my garden project, and so I think there’s nothing more to say than, yeah, I’m a hoarder.

So here’s this weekend’s tomato harvest. The weather has gotten cold, and I’ve had to cover the row of plants with plastic, so now we’re in that dodgy part of the year when I have no idea whether there will be more, or whether this is it (I do so hope those Marglobes get enough heat out there to ripen, because they’re lovely, and big).

Here they are sorted out — clockwise from the top right: Milano plum, Jaunne Flamme, Galina, Sasha’s Altai/Prairie Fire and a couple of early Marglobes, tomatillos. and Principe Borghese plums. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with them — I considered making sauce, but I have some left from last year. So I made salsa — I started with a recipe from Rick Bayless and fired up the grill outside. I grilled the tomatoes until the skins blistered up, then blackened some serrano chiles and the tomatillos as well. I made one salsa with the tomatillos, a serrano, a big handful of cilantro, and a clove of garlic. It’s delicious — very hot, but delicious. It only made one half pint so I just stuck it in the fridge.

I skinned and cored the tomatoes, which were kind of watery. I had to pour off excess water a couple of times before putting them in the food processor. I whizzed them up with a clove of garlic but it became clear that the tomatoes were going to turn into juice before the garlic got chopped fine so I fished out the big chunks and moved to the mini-chop. I love my mini-chop, for stuff like this it’s much better than the big processor. I threw a couple of cloves of garlic, some salt, a lot of cilantro and the juice of 2 limes in the mini-chop, whizzed them up to a rough puree and then stirred them into the salsa. I also minced 2 small white onions from the garden and stirred that in, then added about half a teaspoon of citric acid just to up the acid level in case the tomatoes and lime juice weren’t quite enough. Then I cold packed them in sterilized half-pint jars. After I made the peach chutney (another post) I put all 12 jars in a hot water bath and processed them for 45 minutes. Here’s the fruit of those labors — a dozen little jars of stuff for winter. Sauces that I know exactly what’s in there and where it came from — the salsa came out delicous — I haven’t tried the processed salsa, but the cup or so that was left over and went in the fridge is lovely. I’ve been eating it on everything — eggs especially. All hoarded away on the top shelf in my pantry. I love looking up there and seeing what I’ve stored away, knowing that in a blizzard I’ll be fine. And I’m not entirely selfish with it all — all my loved ones get Christmas baskets with whatever I’ve been making this year. But there’s that funny part of me that wants to put up all my food for the winter from my backyard — the same part of me that greets any financial anxiety, no matter how minor, by stocking up on dried pasta. A barometer of my anxiety level — how many boxes of Barilla are there in my pantry?

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