Recipe Reduction 114-113

Savory Swiss Chard Pie
by Susan Voisin

It was a valiant attempt to make a shepherd's pie without potatoes, but it didn't succeed. The topping was made from tofu, nutritional yeast and potato starch, with raw cashews thrown in for their rich creaminess. Sounded interesting...but it came out with the texture of wet cornbread and almost no flavor at all. If it hadn't been for the bitterness of my nutritional yeast, which is apparently old and needs to be thrown away, it would have had absolutely no flavor at all.


I don't know what the onion powder was supposed to add, nor the pinch of nutmeg. Whatever it was, it didn't. Sorry. You can blame my technique or my yeast or even me, but I am not looking forward to finishing this.
 


Sigeumchi-namul
 by Maangchi


Simple and quick; should have been the perfect side dish. But I'm thinking my proportion of spinach to seasoning was off--too little spinach, too much seasoning.  It called for eight ounces spinach to 1-1/2 tsp soy sauce, sesame oil, and 2 tablespoons sesame seeds. Most likely my bag of spinach was closer to four ounces.

Try again but adjust accordingly.

Whole family adventure--great!

 

A Life Without Borders: 

By Sailboat, Planes, Train, and RV, a Funny and Inspiring Tale of a Family's Quest to Escape the Boundaries of Their Ordinary Life

 by Carla Gray Bedell

I enjoyed this so much that as soon as it ended, I wanted to turn back and start over. A family--husband, wife, young son and younger daughter--jump out of the rat race to spend a few years on a 38-foot catamaran called Allegria. The transition wasn't easy, at first. In the rush of packing and preparing, her daughter brought home an invitation to a cookout, and the mother says no, they can't go.  Too much to do--

I angrily said to her the words that will stay with me forever, "Who said this was supposed to be fun?"
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized how crazy they sounded. Who said this was supposed to be fun? Really? I just said that? If it wasn't fun, then why were we doing it? I let out a deep sigh, relaxed, and gave thanks for being blessed with such an insightful daughter. Giving Tessa a hug, I said, "You're right. This is supposed to be fun. We're going to a party!"

There was still plenty of hard work, storms at sea, scares of pirates, entry permits and customs declarations. But there was plenty of fun, too. And snorkeling. And beaches. And seafood so fresh it jumps off the plate.

I wanna go too.

Great promise, great tedium

Elizabeth and Her German Garden

by Elizabeth von Arnim

Copyright 1898 and supposedly very popular and frequently reprinted in the early 20th century. It aged well, especially the gardening parts. I enjoyed the occasional mention of "the babies" (her three children) and the Man Of Wrath (her husband, a mild-tempered sort who indulges her little hobbies graciously.) But halfway through she writes.

    I have two visitors staying with me, though I have done nothing to provoke such an infliction, and had been looking forward to a happy little Christmas alone with the Man of Wrath and the babies. Fate decreed otherwise. Quite regularly, if I look forward to anything, Fate steps in and decrees otherwise; I don't know why it should, but it does. I had not even invited these good ladies -- like greatness on the modest, they were thrust upon me.

And so on. If you love her writing style, you may enjoy the second half, but I found it tedious. She entertains her unwelcome guests kindly and becomes pretty fond of one of them, but one hundred pages of petty jealousies, behind-the-back snips and weary criticism became...well, wearisome. I kept hoping she'd get back to gardening, but no.

It's funny contrasting the gardening efforts of a turn of the century gentlewoman with mine. She supervises her gardener and laments when he plants the rockets in rows rather than masses of color--

...no future gardener shall be allowed to run riot among my rockets in quite so reckless a fashion.

I supervise myself and lament when I find my own Man of Wrath has planted daffodils directly adjacent to a walkway or 5-foot tall flowers in front of a 3-foot tall bird bath. I can guess when the birds are bathing--but only because I see splashes in the air over the tops of the flowers. Sadly, when I discover that such a disaster has occurred, it's up to me to put it to rights. I don't get to delegate to the gardener. Shovel, trowel, wheelbarrow and my own dirty fingernails get the job done--or it doesn't get done.

My advice: if you love gardening, read the first half. If you love her writing, carry on with the second. But don't expect rockets.

Gardening In My Roots, hot weather edition

First 100+ degree day and I've lost another squash plant. Damn borers!

On a positive note, I harvested some more carrots. It's way too late for them--they're decidedly tough, but still tasty. I should cook them...if they survive the cat attack.

The tomatoes look sad--too few leaves to cover the still green fruit. But the cucumbers are leafing up awesomely!









And the winter squash are trying to choke out my pepper plants. I'm rerouting them, whenever I catch them. I hope they don't mind the temporary indignity of being disentangled from their support and flopped over on their backs.  Winter squash are lovely to have, but peppers are indispensable!

Awesome little YA book--with running!

Patina (Track #2)
by Jason Reynolds

What I like about Jason Reynolds is his ability to take kids who have been through bad situations and show what it's like in their normal lives--normal, that is, for kids with a secret history they don't like to talk about. I bet kids can really relate to these books. They'll see themselves--maybe they don't have a daddy in prison because he chased his wife and son throught the streets with a gun, maybe they don't have a mother with both legs amputated on account of the sugar--she don't like to say diabetes because it has "die" in it. Can you blame her?

There's a lot of street dialect in here, but I have no trouble understanding it. Maybe that's the difference between a person writing the way people actually  talk instead of writing in a made-up, try-to-be-clever home-boy speak, like certain other authors I've tried to read recently.

The only bad thing about listening books with well-done dialect is that I start speaking like them. Remember my experiences with Brit-speak? Now I'm going to start saying things like, "he just trash-talking" or "getting up at the butt-crack of dawn."

Recipe Reduction 113

Carrot and Beet Soba With With Chard
from A Modern Way to Cook

Next on the list of timed recipes -- 20-25 minutes is the author's estimate and it took me...
20 minutes 54 seconds!  Yoo hoo!

With one quibble--the recipe called for 3-1/2 ounces kale or chard. I used beet greens but what the heck, it's the same thing. The instructions said, only: "shred the greens." So I didn't start with a bunch of greens lying on the counter--I started with greens that had already been washed in three changes of water and stripped from the stem. Unless she buys her greens pre-washed in plastic bags, she left out ten minutes of the preparation time right there.

A similar ingredient was "leaves from a small bunch of cilantro". Why wasn't the five or so minutes it takes to pull the leaves off the small bunch of cilantro included? I'll guarantee you can't buy de-leaved cilantro in plastic bags.

It tasted pretty good but I don't expect to make it again. I'll decide after eating it for a lunch a times or two. I'm especially worried that the "thumb sized piece of ginger" that I was supposed to "coarsely chop" is going to bite me. I love ginger but don't like chomping down on a big hunk of it.



The final verdict: I love soba noodles, but the carrots and beets did nothing for them. Except stain them purple and make them hard to eat while you're wearing a white shirt.

Great YA audiobook and it has sequels!

Ghost
by Jason Reynolds

I'm very glad I waited on the audiobook! The library had two copies and they were checked out for months. But worth it--the narrator rocks!

Yes, he sounded like an educated man in his twenties playacting the voice of his early teenage self, but he sounded so right. Especially when the author went off on totally idiotic asides--you can hear the joke in his voice: describing a man as a white James Brown; laughing at the word fartlek; perfecting his method of consuming sunflower seeds....

It's funny, really. Not out loud funny, but smiling one minute and heartbreaking the next, funny. I can't think of any episodes to tell about that wouldn't be giving away the story, but imagine what would happen if you'd just spent an hour running away from a bad situation only to arrive at track practice to find out the workout for the day was long distance running?  With the coach trailing behind in The Motivator Machine?