I haven’t really been feeling the cooking urge lately. I’m just too busy outside making space for and planting food to be bothered to make very much of it. That will change, though; we have a couple of potlucks coming up, and I’m teaching a class on meat-curing on Saturday, and as the garden gets up to full speed there will be much that needs freezing or otherwise eating. But for now, I’m getting busy with the shovel and such, and then looking around sort of bewildered when I come in at the end of the day, as if dinner is something that I haven’t really considered at all. Because I haven’t.
Year: 2010
I haven’t been hitting the blog with due dilligence of late, I know. First, I had an article due, but now it’s done. Second, I have been outside. A lot. The garden expansion is coming up on finished, and will result in a big increase in bed space. That post should be up next week. In related news, I have a major farmer’s tan, only with flip-flop lines on top of my feet. It’s been seriously hot. Now after last summer I am just about the last person you’ll find who will go on record complaining about this, the most perfect spring ever. But the raging heat has fucked up my salads in a big way. “How?” You may ask–and well you may–and here I am, helpfully, to share with you a heartbreaking tale of the ravages of climate change. (I’m not as fat as Al Gore, so you should listen to me).
The stock I used to make the pink soup (from the last post) was a mixture of roasted and stewed chicken bones plus raw T-bones and trimmings from two local, grass-fed steaks. Sometimes a big, juicy steak-on-a-plate is just what you need, while other times something a bit more refined is called for. In the latter case, I like to trim the meat off the bone, and then trim away anything that does not make…
We’re very slowly getting to the place where more than greens are regular parts of the daily grazing–where what I bring in from the garden is sufficiently varied in color and texture that I can make almost anything I can think of entirely from our own produce. With the new expansion, this should be even better next year, but for now we’re off to a good start. This is what came in the other day:…
I’ve been kind of on a gelling kick lately, due to the combined influences of hot weather and a clamorous child with a vivid culinary imagination. When made using judicious restraint with the proportion of gelatin and fresh, mostly local ingredients, the result is a world away from the ghastly neon cubes and quivering, striated, molded “salads” that have stigmatized the genre so thoroughly.
This all began with a High School friend posting on Facebook that she was smoking a pork butt as a precursor to making pulled pork for dinner. “Hmmm,” I said, “I have some pulled pork in the freezer, already smoked, braised, de-fatted, and pulled–ready to go, in other words.” So I defroze it, and made corn muffins, using the very same local coarse polenta that I used to dredge the quail. This polenta is going places; I had the chance to chat wth Don, who mills it, yesterday at the farmers’ market, and he told me some exciting news that is going to bode well for this region and the farmers thereof.
I love quail. Especially the semi-boneless variety, since my fine-detail butchering skills wouldn’t do anywhere near this good a job without mangling a whole lot of cute little birds. And they defrost really fast in a bowl of tepid water, making a four-pack an excellent choice to grab from the freezer on an evening when time is fleeting. Once mostly thawed, I put the quail in a container full of goat whey to which I…
The weather lately has been amazing–hot, sunny, and alternating between oppressively humid and perfect. Last night we finally got the rain we’ve been needing, making this year so far the polar opposite of last “summer.” Besides the vegetable garden, which is doing well, I’ve been doing some simple landscaping with fruit-bearing plants to establish low-maintenance, high-yield beds that will provide us with lots of food in years to come. The marginal strips around the edges of our almost acre are pretty scruffy, and inhabited by some pretty scrappy and tenacious weeds. Previous attempts to dig them out and plant have failed, except with big things like lilacs or aggressive things like day lilies. So this time around, for fruit and flower beds alike, I’m just sheet-mulching.
The blackberries going in.
So herewith day three of our ocean-derived sustenance. It’s telling–and extremely wonderful–that the scallops we received on Wednesday, cooked tonight, were sweeter and fresher tasting than anything we’ve ever bought from a store. Anybody who reads this and happens to live in the Hudson Valley would be well-advised to seek out the Fishmonger and get themselves the royal hookup. It honest and for true does not get much better than this unless you’re a deep-sea angler. I cut these circles out of square wonton wrappers with a jar and a knife because I couldn’t find my biscuit cutter.
With a pornucopia of freshest seafood in the fridge, dinner this evening was pretty easy. That’s not to say that I didn’t make an unholy mess of the kitchen, of course, because that is the manner in which I roll. But the actual food was pretty easy. To start, because the family was deep into “My Side of the Mountain” (my absolute favorite book when I was about 7 or 8), a couple of quick salmon hand rolls for the cook.
