Recipe Reduction 173...170

Baked Apple Chips

This recipe could have been reduced to a short paragraph: Slice apples thinly, sprinkle cinnamon. Bake at 230 F for one hour. Flip, resprinkle, bake another hour. Turn off oven and let them cool for two hours.

There's no way I could mess that up, is there?  But here's the killer last sentence:
    They will crisp up in this time.
Mine didn't.





Last Saturday's cooking started off with:
Balthazar's Cream of Mushrooom Soup.
(Adapted from The Balthazar Cookbook by Smitten Kitchen)

It was heavenly of course, although I was cruely deceived on the mushrooms. The store packages shitake in the same size carton as white button mushrooms, but they only put 3.5 ounces of the shitake compared to 8 ounces of the button.  Plus, the stems of shitake are sometimes tough and unusable--there goes another third of the weight. 
(Note to me: next time, cut off the stems and soak them in some warm water. The water can then be strained and added to the soup.)

Next came these
Beer Marinated Baked Sweet Potato Fries
from Yup, it's Vegan
The recipe did not include salt, but for once, I could imagine someone eating these without salt. Especially with lots of ketchup.

It's an interesting idea--slice up your sweet potato, soak it in beer for 20 minutes, then bake. I hated wasting an entire can of beer for this and it makes me wonder...would the fries have tasted the same without the sacrificial beer?


Then I burned a rib-eye steak for the husband's dinner. Picture withheld.






I finished up with an almost inedible Orange-Cranberry Crisp. Cranberries are just too blame sour for me. I've made crisps before--crisps can be delightful. This one just tasted like baked oranges and cranberries with dry oats and pecans sprinkled on top. D-

(I'd give it an F but decided to use it as a topping for my breakfast oatmeal next week. I'm okay with breakfast being a little on the tangy side.)

Gardening In My Roots, monsoon edition

I saw a funny on the Facebook: 

It's spring! I'm so excited, I wet my plants!

I know how she feels, but I did do it.. Mother Nature has been giving me a whole lot of rain. Flooding last Wednesday, rain on the weekend, and more coming today.  I finally managed to wade out in the mud to see if the transplants survived.


Still with us! These are the brassicas (broccoli, etc.). They haven't grown any but they haven't floated away, either.





Not nearly as many peas as I expected. I took a seed packet out Sunday and used a stick to poke a few more down into the mud.

By the way, I think it was clearly a mistake to plant a cover crop of winter rye. Winter rye is--uh--grass. I already had plenty of grass in the garden--now I have more. It's all coming out when the soil dries up.










I often thumb my nose at Neil Sperry--he's such a know-it-all--but you got to enjoy advice like this:

(on caging tomatoes)  Don’t make the do-it-yourselfer mistake constructing your own cages out of chicken wire. Yes, they contain the plants perfectly, but you’ll have no way to harvest the fruit.

(on choosing plants)
You want plants that have been exposed to cool weather and wind. They’ll probably have reddened stems.

If you find transplants that match that description, and if they’re a little bit lanky, dig a shallow trench and lay them in at 45-degree angles. They will sprout roots along their stems, and they’ll be stronger and more vigorous for your effort. Do not dig deep holes and bury their stems straight down.

Aha! I've done that. But I'll try it his way next time.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/living/home-garden/neil-sperry/article16492448.html#storylink=cpy

Loved being a kid again!

Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline

Requires some serious suspension of disbelief, but stick with it. After a couple of thousand utterances of that's impossible, you'll likely be as hooked as I was.

I'm scared about the movie. Not even Steven Spielberg could do this right. I'm glad I read it first. I wish I'd read it slower. It's one of those "can't wait to get to the end" and "can't believe it's over already" books.






In other news, I started another one of those slow-rise no-knead breads today. This one's by the King Author Flour Company. Expect the impossible!

Recipe Reduction #174

 

Indian Curry Paste
(Very upset that I've lost the link to the author)




 No suspense here: win, win, win!  It came out spicy, rich, warm, and full of complex, complimentary flavors. When it was finished, I added a half can of light coconut milk and some veggies and simmered them until tender.

Although it was a simple recipe, I put the laptop on the counter and consulted it often. Just once, I wanted to get this right.

Does this look golden brown to you? I would have said it was more like dark mustard.





Then I added the tomatoes; they were supposed to 'melt' but I don't know that that meant. They were supermarket Romas; if they'd have been home grown they probably would have melted. So would I--in ecstacy.











And here's the finished product. Magnifique!

Recipe Reduction 175-6

Yuzu Glazed Shrimp Fried Rice
from Roy Choi

(sorry no pictures this time. I PROMISE to have pictures for the next one. Already took them.)

I didn't have yuzu, so I didn't really make this dish. You could call it in the spirit of yuzu-glazed shrimp fried rice.

It was awful.

The fried rice was okay but very fattening. Four tablespoons of oil for two cups of rice--wow. The "glaze" was the problem. Yuzu are supposed to be the size of a small tangerine; I was substituting limes but there were exceptionally large, juicy limes. There was so much liquid that I had to pull the shrimp out--not soon enough; they were way overcooked--and try to reduce the liquid into a glaze. As it reduced it became very, very salty, and since I'd already salted the shrimp the end result was like sprinkling salt on a half lime and sucking out the juice.  (Which I've done. But not in many years.)

It probably wasn't a bad recipe, just bad execution. But it would have helped if he'd specified exactly how much juice and warned about over salting. Now that I know, I could do it correctly--but I don't want to. Too little time, too many recipes. If I get my hands on some yuzu, maybe.

By the way, what's the obsession people seem to have with making everything taste like citrus fruit? I just saw a recipe for lemon-herb turkey with lemon-garlic gravy. Why should a domestic fowl taste like a tropical fruit? I want my turkey to taste like turkey!

Thai Green Curry Guacamole
from Yup, it's Vegan
I wonder if this was invented as a way to use up slightly spotty avocados. It certainly worked well for the purpose.  My avocados were spotty but still flavorful--or I wouldn't have used them. You don't make that mistake twice. But they weren't pretty.

So this recipe loads them up with green curry paste (hot!), cilantro, lime juice, jalapenos or Thai Bird chiles, green onion and shallot and I don't remember what all.  Very hot and would be great on a taco salad. 

I want a taco salad.

Just listening while jogging increased my speed

Fire on the Track

Betty Robinson and the Triumph of the Early Olympic Women

by Roseanne Montillo

That was some fierce listening. At times it was almost two much information--I wondered if she was making up the details. But Betty Robinson--or was that Helen Stephens?--kept a journal. I don't know about Stella Walsh; Babe Didrickson doesn't seem like the sort of person who would.

Still, everyone involved were celebrities of some sort. I'm sure the author manufactured no more than she needed to, to make it all seem so very real that you were there, right there.  Watching, waiting, worrying...sometimes even running with the amazing women pioneers of the Olympic track and field.

I can't think of a single criticism. It was long, but it was worth it. I wish she'd write a sequel covering the next two decades of women's athletics.

On a personal note, it was mind-blowing to read this at the same time as the start of the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. Nobody was questioning whether women should be allowed to participate; no one was insisting that the athletes would no longer be suitable for marriage and motherhood; and no one was saying what's the point of women in sport since their best scores were no better than those of high-school boys. Things change--really they do. And sometimes for the better.

Roots & Things

Seeds are up!!!
I waddled around in the mud Saturday with my camera, and I didn't even need the zoom feature to locate this:


Spinach--those first peculiar leaves, unlike almost anything else in the sprouting world.


Radish, lettuce, and mesclun were up, too, and with a great deal of zoom and careful cropping, peas! 
There's a lot of pea-like sprouts in there--probably the Hairy Vetch I planted for a winter cover crop. But these are the real thing!

The weather map is predicting an unusually rainy week. Not impossible, especially in spring. I need to finish transplanting and planting NOW. In the mud. Ug.

Later:
I did it. I transplanted about half of the kale, broccoli, kohrabi and bok choi. I finished the beets and lettuce and even planted the potatoes and the dill. In the wrong place, but what the heck. I never succeed with dill anyway.

Recipe Reduction #177

New York Bagels
from The Happy Herbivore

I made a bagel. Two bagels. Two charming puffy brown bagels. With whole-wheat flour. They'd have been lighter and fluffier with white flour, but it wasn't a bad tradeoff for the halo effect.

It was round when I took it out of the oven, but I was in such a hurry to try it that I took a chunk out before taking this picture. Sorry; the other bagel wasn't as photogenic.

Better than Einstein Bro's? Not really. But at least I know where it's been.

Recipe Reduction 179-178

Italian Breaded Pork Chops

by ELISAW
If anything is capable of making me believe there's such a thing as a weeknight recipe, this might be it. 30-40 minutes max, with nothing prepared in advance. My pork chops were thin so I cut the baking time in half.

They tasted okay despite the mistakes I made. I won't go into details, but let me just mention few choice words like "burned", "over-browned", "cheap Italian bread crumbs", and "quality control" (lack of). But what do you expect for a Tuesday night?

On a sad note, I think I need to rethink things like store brand, pre-seasoned bread crumbs.  These tasted and smelled horrid.  It would have been better to use plain Panko and add my own seasonings. Am I becoming a gourmet cooking snob?

Hoosier Pie

Didn't the pecan pie teach me a lesson?  If a custard pie has already been in the oven for ten minutes longer than the longest time specified in the recipe, it's done. DONE. Don't bother checking whether the "sides are set but the center is slightly jiggly." Just. Stop. Right. There.

The recipe said 35-45 minutes. At 65 minutes, the top was set but the underneath was as jiggly as jello. When I finally gave up, at about 70 minutes, and pulled it out, still the same.  But---

On the counter, ten minutes later, hard as a rock.

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. The center was still liquid; the rest was hard as a rock.  A tasty rock; but nothing worth breaking a tooth over.

At least it fulfilled my Valentine's Day commitments. Husband has a birthday coming up--what dessert shall I destroy for it?

Recipe Reduction Regimen 183..180

Only four recipes last weekend; I'd hoped for six. But I might sneak one in during the week.  I'm trying to get ahead now because when gardening weather hits, I'm gone. I might have to take a vacation day just for the purpose of catching up.



Sweet Potato Polenta

 from Yup it's Vegan

One of the books on food that I read last year, probably The Third Plate, exulted over the flavor of polenta made with a heirloom replica of corn. (Sorry, I don't remember if was an heirloom or a replica of one.) But from how he described it, he might as well have said, if you've never eaten this polenta you've never eaten polenta.

So I made polenta. And I ate it. But, I'm afraid, I've never eaten polenta.

I didn't use the cheap grocery story cornmeal, either--it was Red Mill's stone ground. But still no flavor. In the Little House Days, Ma would have heated up some lard in an iron skillet and fried this up into golden cakes, to be eaten with sorghum molasses or maple syrup.  What didn't I choose her recipe?

Hidden Cashew Ranch Dressing
FatFree Vegan Kitchen

It sort of tasted like ranch dressing. Is that good enough?


Ms. Susan Voisin, the author, pointed out that this was merely a starting point and offered several suggestions for changing it up. I'm thinking more cashews, less milk, more parsley, real chives (I had to use onion), dill, and maybe a half shallot. And for a final adornment, a scoop from a jar of Marie's Ranch Dressing.



Pecan Sandies Melt in Your Mouth
By Missy Wright

Just opening up the bowl to take this picture made me giddy. I had to back off from the aroma in order to stay detached enough to write this note. Maybe I should taste one to see if they're as good cold as they were warm....

(I didn't)  But just to attest that they were as good as I say, I'll point out that the one I broke in half so I could see if it was done in the middle (a bad habit of mine), had disappeared by the time I finished supper and went back for dessert. Should have wrote my name on it.

I still think the best cookie recipe I ever made was for toasted coconut shortbread. But as a vehicle for applying cellulite to your thighs, these were first rate.

Vegan Shepherd's Pie
from Fat-Free Vegan

I'm no expert but I don't think rosemary follows the rule of conversion between fresh and dried herbs. Ms. Voisin specifies 2 tsp fresh or 1 tsp dried; I used fresh and probably a little less than 2 teaspoons, but it was overpowering. I notice that http://www.ourherbgarden.com/rosemary/drying-rosemary.html says to use a one-to-one substitution.


Or possibly it's my rosemary. It's been in the pot too long and it's not getting enough humidity.  I'll plant it outside in the summer and see if I can start a cutting.

As to the dish, it's okay. Not much difference between eating mixed vegetables alongside mashed potatoes. It needed a big scoop of gravy.

My Dorothy Sayers fiction reading is complete

The Documents in the Case
by Dorothy L Sayers and Robert Eustace


Very peculiar arrangement--I guess she was trying an experiment. And I guess it worked--it kept me reading, anyway. She used the "letters" approach in the first part of Busman's Honeymoon and it was an amusing way of showing what other people were thinking about the matter. But in this book, it's all letters and statements. Luckily, the statements are written informally, as if a person was talking or copying down his own experiences, rather than speaking to a policeman.  That would have been horrid.

Here are some notes I made while reading it:
Page 45 and no murder yet. But I can't stop reading--clearly, something is going down.
Over a third through, and still no murder. The mystery deepens.
Page 134 (out of 261) and nothing has happened!  Well, no, a lot has happened. But no murder. There has to be a murder, doesn't there? It's called The Documents in the Case--you wouldn't assemble documents for a case if there was no case, would you?
(Actually I know the answer from the blurb on the cover. I wish I hadn't read it; it tells too much.)

If you're a die-hard Sayers fan, you'll have already read this. If not, then my suggestion is this: start with The Nine Tailors, read all the others, then finish with this.

Recipe Reduction #184

Chickpeas Romesco
adapted by someone from Veganomicon
 
How's that for a weeknight dish? 45 minutes from start to simmer.  But--looking at how simple it was, I'd have estimated 20 minutes. Here's what it took:

Mince a little scallion and hot pepper and garlic--but you have to double that time because I forgot the garlic and had to do it separately. Open two cans. Roast and peel, tediously, a red bell pepper. Grind almonds into powder with an electric chopper. (Should have used the spice grinder, but I saved a step by using the chopper for the bell pepper, too.) Chop up some fresh rosemary because my dried rosemary had lost its stuff. Throw it all in a pan; turn on the heat. Simmer. Smile.

This Recipe Regimen may have been a bad idea. I just counted--326 days to go / 184 recipes to go. That's still four recipes per week.  And I just found six buried in a folder labeled "save for later".  Should have been labeled "save for when I go insane." Like this: Stuffed Pumpkin!!! Who did I think I was going to stuff it for, Vegetarian Santa Claus?

If I'd culled them out before I started, they'd be gone with no apology. Now, according to the rules of the game, I have to replace them.

We should all be (a little) more like the Danes

The Year of Living Danishly: 

My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country

    by Helen Russell

I say! She doesn't skimp on her research.

Ms. Russell and her husband are transplanted to Denmark for a job opportunity with Lego, so she decides to continue her free-lance writing work while taking up the quest to discover why "Danish people are the happiest in the world." In her search, she discovers that they love to play, do hobbies, sing, and attend traditional festivals ranging from New Year's Eve fireworks (set off by themselves) to turning out the cows on fresh grass in spring. They pay high taxes but don't seem to mind because that guarantees them benefits ranging from free education to top-of-the-line medical care. Danes attempt to respect all jobs equally and ensure that all jobs, from trash pickup to pastry shop cashier, pay a decent living.

She does uncover a few oddities--there seems to be a lot of fighting, especially among kids, drug use, drinking and unprotected sex. But on the opposite pole, there's also a high degree of trust between peoples. She is shocked when she first notices people at a restaurant who left their baby's tram outside in the pleasant weather.  It's not uncommon, either!

I won't say I didn't doze off from time to time, but it's so awesomely refreshing to hear about a country where they don't think their fellow citizens are all lazy, self-interested freeloaders who want to rip off the system. Where they know that if you give people a decent education, valuable jobs, and security against accidents and illness, people will choose to work hard, support their community, and pay their taxes on time. When did Americans forget this?

Not wanting to steal her thunder, I won't repeat her final conclusions. But I do believe she ended up believing, in the end, that Danes really are the happiest people in the world. And she knows why.

Gardening Roots Are Cold

Nothing new in the garden. I was going to plant but it's too blame cold. Nothing is up, which is good. I'll start watering again tomorrow.

On the other hand, every robin in America is in my front yard today.  The seven below are just the few who paused to pose for me.

Recipe Reduction 188-185

sorry no pictures...they wouldn't have been interesting anyway.

Rice Milk by Scott Jurek

I believe this recipe will work just fine for others, but it didn't work for me.  Maybe I need a better blender--I blended for a lot more than the two minutes he suggested and still ended up with three uncombined layers--rice on bottom, water in middle, oil on top. Will try again someday.

Alton Brown's Overnight Oats

Sweet, creamy, aromatic...and a little gritty. I suspect the grit comes from the failed rice milk--with the nut milk he asks for it would be even better. But I don't like buying nut milk. I bought a carton of mixed almond-coconut milk once and it was delicious, but it seems like sad waste of almonds from a place that's been in a drought for several years. However, from the research I just did, the growing and production of almond milk is no more or less wasteful a use of resources than just about anything else we might buy--compare tomato juice or cow's milk. But there's still the problem that almonds are mostly (80%) produced in California. I have yet to hear of anything that is sustainably produced in California. Except possibly Hollywood movies.

On a cold morning in February, Alton's icy oatmeal doesn't exactly hit the spot. But it would be terrific to carry along on a road trip where you have an ice chest but no hot plate. It's a keeper.

Pioneer Woman's Beef Stew

Is it fair to say I made a recipe if I made five changes to it? I think 'yes' with the stipulation that I'm not allowed to comment on the Food Network page. But if I did, I would say simply this:
               Like all of her recipes, it turned out great and was well enjoyed by its intended audience.

My changes weren't huge--onions instead of shallots and more of them; dried thyme instead of fresh; more consomme instead of wine; and double the cooking time. The only one of these which was really necessary was the last one--my beef was tough as old shoe leather--but I'm sure Ree Drummond would understand.

(Excuses: Shallots are expensive and I'm not wasting one of my precious garden shallots on a stew; my thyme plants are dormant; my target audience prefers the unadulterated beef flavor to that of wine. But his heart is in the right place.)

Roasted Butternut Squash, Farro and Kale Salad

I need one more trial of the dressing before pronouncing final judgement, but for now I'll just have to admit to a personal failing: I just don't like oil-vinegar salad dressings without sugar. Kraft Zesty Italian--my "diet" dressing--has a teaspoon (4g) of sugar in a typical serving. The dressings I really like probably have a lot more...oops...here's one with 17g. Damn.

If, however, you like oil-vinegar dressings, you'll like this salad just fine. But nothing to lose sleep over.

Myself, I like the salad better without any dressing--the slight sweetness of the squash, the nuttiness of the farro, and the unami of the cheese make up a dressing all by themselves. Hey! That's an invention! If I tossed all three into a blender and whirred them up a bit, would I have a new, low-fat salad dressing invention? Could I patent it?

Somewhat--a whole lot--conflicted

Spider Woman's Web: 

Traditional Native American Tales About Women's Power

 
by Susan Hazen-Hammond

This book gave rise to a tremendous conflict within me--sarcastic dismissal versus respectful open-mindedness. First I'll write the sarcastic voice and get it out of my system, then speak more sensibly and kindly.

I wouldn't have bought this if I'd realized that half of the book is explanation, commentary, or "Connecting the story to your life" exercises. It says so clearly on the cover: each is accompanied by thought-provoking exercises and meditations.  The reviews I read must not have mentioned this.

For example, after one story she proposes this meditation: At what points in your own life have you had to set boundaries to protect yourself from people who claimed to love you have your best interests at heart?...

I don't mean to be a prickly agnostic, but the story in question didn't strike me as any sort of parable about looking out for yourself. In the story, a husband's two wives think he's died. One wife remarries and one remains faithful to his memory. When he comes back, he kills the unfaithful wife and lives happily ever after with the faithful one.

The meditation I would take away is,  "Think about times in your life when you let a man make unreasonable demands and get away with it." He was dead, for crying out loud.

One of the more imaginative tales is called The Quilt of Men's Eyes. It's about a group of women quiltmakers who rip out the eyes of young men and sew them onto a magic quilt. While the blinded victims wither away and die, the eyes stay alive. Great, spooky story--imagine being a child again, hearing it told over a flickering fire?

Then, two brothers are forced to walk through the quiltmakers' tent, but they keep their eyes strictly on the floor, refusing to look at the quilt. The eldest brother escapes but the younger is tricked into looking. He loses his eyes, falls into a spring, turns into a duck, then enters one of the women and is reborn as a baby. The baby grabs the quilt and runs, and all the women come chasing. Trying to hit him with hammers, they instead bludgeon each other to death. The brothers restore the eyes to all the men and live happily ever after.

But when it comes to, "connecting the story to your life," the author wants you to contemplate the times in your family history when talented women were denied an artistic career, or denied it to themselves, and what happened to them. How did they affect you?  Have you denied your own creative aspirations?

I don't get that out of the story at all. And I find it vaguely irritating that she feels the need to take a perfectly splendid tale and twist it to suit her her own devices. There were two other, equally farfetched exercises. Frankly, I'd rather contemplate the duck.

Despite my sarcasm, I think could be a valuable book for someone wishing to explore deep issues in his life. They're all perfectly valid, valuable exercises; all worth doing. I just disliked their pairings with the stories.

Enough ranting--back to the reason I wanted to read it in the first place. When I was reading The Prodigal Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd, I was pained to see her struggles finding a woman's place in the Christian religious tradition. She eventually found support in the legend of Mary, the strong, faithful Mother of God, but that was all. (Although later in life, during visits to Greece, she began to recognize that all gods of all cultures weren't necessarily male.)

The native American tradition has many examples of the old, wise, and powerful Spider Grandmother. It's not Ms. Kidd's tradition, of course, but then neither is the Greek legend of Demeter and Persephone that she found so intriguing. In the book's introduction, Ms. Hazen-Hammond says:

Through the centuries, while their counterparts in Europe grew up on stories that depicted women as weak, helpless, sinister, or untrustworthy, Native American women grew up hearing tales about the powers and strengths of women. They heard stories about women healers, women warriors, women artists, women prophets. But above all, they heard stories of woman as the divine creator, woman as a supernatural power, woman as a force of transformation in the universe.

She concludes with a wonderful benediction that I want to remember forever:

May the spirit of Spider Woman, White Buffalo Woman, Nomtaimet, and all the other ancient Women of Power stay with you. May they protect you and guide you. May they encourage you and give you faith in yourself. May they help you feel connected with all those who have gone before. May your life become a dance of joy that celebrates your womanhood, your personhood, yourself.

Recipe Reduction Regimen 190, 189

Tortilla de (Sweet) Patatas
 An Eats Well With Others Original

I just did an awesome thing!  I made a big omelet of sweet potatoes, onions and eggs. I slid it off onto a plate, and then flipped it over upside down, back into the pan! How marvelous am I?
 
As the the recipe...well, sweet potatoes and onions are lovely, and my hastily improvised substitute for Chinese Five Spice powder wasn't too bad--it could have been spicier. Putting it all together with eggs and toasting it in a skillet doesn't exactly make a "tortilla"--I give her credit for creative naming--but it made a fine omelet.  With some frozen spinach, it made breakfast.

After last weekend's sad mixture of failure with mediocrity, I'm happy to report we have a winner!

Mirin Glazed Tofu
author unknown



Okay, what do you expect if you simmer tofu in a sugary glaze of mirin, miso, and soy sauce, then bake the tofu to give it a little 'skin' while you reduce the glaze?  It was so good that I kept tasting it, to the tune of half gone before it hit the table. Luckily it was only for me, but even so, I don't need to make a pig out of myself.

I wonder if this isn't the recipe for the chilled tofu I get at my favorite sushi restaurant?

The Widow Douglas Diet

Here follows my brilliant insight into how Asian women can eat all that rice without getting fat and why Americans are helpless to duplicate the feat.

It's not what they eat, it's how they don't eat it.

Contemplate a fancy Japanese meal photograph.  Beautiful, no? 

Bring it into an American home, close the door and pull down the shades. I don't know about you, but I'd slop it all together on a plate and dig in with a spoon.

The person who invented Chinese carryout must have really had a grudge against Americans. The rice comes in a box and the greasy, saucy entree in a separate container--Chinese eaters will eat it, properly, with chopsticks. Chopsticks let you pick the pieces of food out and leave the sauce behind. The rice is eaten plain, except for what falls out of the chopsticks onto your lap.

But then...they offer it to Americans. Without an instruction manual. Or chopsticks.  And of course, with true Yankee ingenuity, we take it home, dump the rice on a plate, pour the entree on top, and let the rice soak it all up. Eat it all, forkful by heavenly forkful. And smile. And grow fat.

I say, Don't do it! Give your taste buds time to get bored. Eat the rice plain; eat the entree in pieces; throw away the yummy sauce. :-( 

So, that's the secret of my diet--
    Don't swap the juices! 
 
I'm going to call it the Widow Douglas Diet, based on this quote from Huckleberry Finn about the Widow's victuals:

...though there warn’t really anything the matter with them,---that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself.  In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.

The Root Report, Winter Edition

I'm still trying to come up with a catchy name for the weekly gardening report. Suggestions gracefully accepted. But I'll probably ignore them.

Early February update: No progress. The peas and carrots are sensibly deciding to stay under the ground, since the ground is dry as a bone and there are at least two more frosts ahead. Only the bees are out--

 They were swarming the bits of citrus fruits in my compost pile, so I offered them a little sugar water to help out until the first dandelions of spring appear. Maybe they'll think kindly of me when I have pea flowers needing pollination.

Exploring...me too, soon?

Exploring the Edges of Texas
by Walt Davis

Traveling around Texas in good company, with the many travelers who walked, rode or floated the edges in long ago--or not so long ago--time.  Some of it is downright depressing--from the journal of John James Audubon,

Around noon we entered Buffalo Bayou, at the mouth of the San Jacinto River, and opposite the famous battle-ground of the same name. Proceeding smoothly up the bayou, we saw abundance of game...This bayou is unusually sluggish, deep, and bordered on both sides with a strip of woods not exceeding a mile in depth...It was here today that I found the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in abundance...

 The author finds no woodpeckers and none of the exceedingly tall, majestic Magnolia trees that once lined the river. But he does find sections of nostalgic beauty, where traffic noise is hardly to be heard, and Great Egrets stalk the river banks.

There's a lot more in this book than my small brain can remember, but remember it I shall. Reread often.

Recipe Reduction Regimen 193, 192, 191

Rosemary Focaccia
from America's Test Kitchen

Failed. Horribly. The recipe was either misleading or just plain wrong, because--

   not  enough  flour !#@%#!

I can't check it now; the only copies of the original that I can pull up are protected and I refuse to spend hours trying to justify a failure. Here's the problem: for a round of bread, to be cooked in a skillet of 10" diameter, the recipe called for only 1-1/4c flour plus six tablespoons for dusting. All I can guess is, they must have been extremely rounded tablespoons and they must have done a lot of dusting.

Then I committed the cardinal sin of overbaking it, but it was getting late by then and I was tired of messing with it. I just threw it in the oven and set the timer; 20 minutes later I pulled out a skillet with a rock glued inside.

If I wanted to give this another chance, which I don't, I'd have a much warmer kitchen, let it rise for twice the six hours I allowed, and add a lot more flour during the periodic "stretches". The poor yeast tried hard but it just ran out of food--I starved it to death and buried its pitiful remains.

Garlic Lover's Salmon in Foil
from GimmeSomeOven

A sad waste of expensive fish. Salmon is a fatty fish with a wonderful flavor, so what was the point in drenching it in butter and overpowering it with garlic? I love butter and garlic, but taking a delicious fish and smothering it in them didn't result in the explosion of flavor I imagined. In fact, it would have tasted the same if I'd left out the fish!


The best salmon I ever ate was a steak I cooked long ago. I browned a single clove of garlic in a tiny pat of butter, added the steak with some salt and cooked it gently. There may have been a sprinkle of lemon juice at the end and a bit of parsley for garnish.

        Contrast this soggy mess----->










Egg Pie
 from panlasangpinoy.com

Certainly interesting. The crust recipe they gave was double-crust size, so I skipped it and did a single crust. Note to self: don't roll out a pie crust on the same piece of wax paper you chilled it in. The wax paper starts to disintegrate and has to be pulled off in tiny pieces. Hope I got them all.

The interesting thing is that the typical egg custard pie has a smooth, dark yellow top. This one--with a beaten egg white folded in--was bumpy and a  mixture of brown and beige. I had a little too much filling for the pie pan but I coaxed it in there anyway, so I had to bake it an extra twenty minutes.

Tasted fine but not as good as "my grandmother's custard pie" I bought from a pie seller at a farmer's market in Hot Springs. I don't know what made her recipe taste so good...maybe she snuck a cup of bourbon in.

I am blown away.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

by David Mitchell

What a scope! A tapestry of threads of human lives, loosely woven together by their contact with the Dutchman Jacob de Zoet. He travels as head clerk with the Dutch East India Company to Dejima, a man-made Island in the Bay of Nagasaki. Apparently the Island was constructed to keep foreign traders off the mainland. I don't think the author, David Mitchell, mentioned that, but her did a masterful job of balancing details of daily life in the early 1800s with total plot immersion--for a spell of time covering several years, I was there. Right there.

An interview with the author about the difficulty of creating such a work:

Small details, such as if people used shaving cream or not, could use up lots of time so that a single sentence could take half a day to write. "It was tough," Mitchell said. "It almost finished me off before I finished it off.

I didn't know this as I was reading it, but it's loosely based on known history and the memoir of Hendrik Doeff, who became chief of the Dejima post and wrote a famous Japanese-Dutch dictionary. I doubt if the irascible Doctor Marinus, the brilliant midwife Orito Aibagawa, or the evil Abbot of Mount Shiranui Shrine existed, but they're told so well you think they might have.

So many characters, all a mixture of good, evil, greed, pain and desire--it made my head spin. At times he went off on long tangents, such as the details of a game of whist or billiards or a life history of one of Jacob's fellow travelers, and I wanted to be bored but I had to pay attention--sometimes they were sneakily the plot lines. Other times they were just curious. Just stories.