ElainaA
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Posts posted by ElainaA
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5 hours ago, MelissaH said:
Ohhh, you have Dano's beet salad recipe? I'm envious!
I am glad to share it once I am home. The "recipe" that Karen (Dano's wife ) gave me is very vague but I think I came up with a good approximation. I'll be home 8/1 and can post it then .
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Very simple dinner tonight as we (me, my husband and my daughter's cat, Izzy) leave tomorrow morning for a 2 1/2 day drive to Arkansas, my daughter's new home.
I remembered that I had several containers of roasted tomato and basil sauce in the freezer from last summer. Somehow they got buried and forgotten. Now I am really sorry because it is very excellent sauce that we could have enjoyed all winter. So, fettuccine with roasted tomato and basil sauce and a salad.-
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I grow shallots every year. They are huge - much bigger than the ones I see in supermarkets. Also with a stronger flavor. Usually there are 2 or 3 lobes to a plant. I usually grow from started seedlings. This year I couldn't find any in local nurseries so I am growing from sets - I'm not sure how big these will be.
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Tonight the first corn of the season! Fresh corn has a relatively short season here so while it is available we only pretend to eat anything else for dinner. (Tonight we pretended to eat small steaks and a salad, There was steak and salad left over. But no corn.) It is still not strictly local - from Ovid, over on the edge of Cayuga Lake, But close enough. And very good.
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I suspect I have posted this exact meal before. Grill-smoked steel head trout, beet and horseradish salad, potato salad. And a green salad that didn't make the picture. A replica of a meal I ate some years ago in Vienna and since then in a Viennese Heuriger here in the Finger Lakes area. (My husband's company installed and takes care of their plumbing/HVAC. He emailed the owners asking for the beet salad recipe and they sent it to us. (Always be nice to your plumber!) Very vaguely. A list of ingredients with no amounts given. I used it as a stepping stone. I like the result. It is very simple.)
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No pictures - family is visiting and I get distracted.
Tonight: Pasta with purple snow peas (from the garden - (I am so glad they kept their color when cooked unlike purple string beans) (I have only a very few of these since the trellis they grow on has 4" square openings and the deer are very bold since we have no dog - they evidently push their noses through the mesh and eat the tops of the plants as soon as they get over the small mesh fencing.) also with asparagus, shelled peas and sausage. And a salad.
Last night was chicken thighs with a honey-garlic marinade in the CSO with mashed potatoes and skillet green beans.
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5 hours ago, Anna N said:
So sorry - I have not had time to be here much . The mistake is mine. The 18 (more or less in my opinion) get shredded and roasted with the tomatoes. The addition 1/4 cup of basil ribbons are tossed with the pasta before serving. I will edit the recipe if I can. (Sometimes I find i am not allowed to edit posts after awhile.)
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3 hours ago, blue_dolphin said:
This is quite similar to the very adaptable Marian Burros/NYT Plum Torte recipe. Here's a link to it on Smitten Kitchen.
They are very close to identical. The NYTimes recipe has lemon juice and cinnamon and no vanilla. That's about the only difference. If the recipe I have is a
rip-offadaptation of Burros' that could explain something that has always bothered me - why is this called a 'tart'? In no way is it a tart - could 'tart' be a typo for 'torte'? I was able to track down my source - I got this version from Chowhound at least 4 years ago - probably longer ago than that.Now I will have to make this with plums.
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6 hours ago, rotuts said:
what id the advantage , these days , to canning , say green beans , vs blanching and vacuum bagging and freezing ?
Another issue is power outages. This doesn't effect me - and I freeze veggies rather than canning them - but if you live in a place with possible serious power outages due to hurricanes or tornados or other disasters you can lose the contents of a freezer while your canned goods are perfectly safe.
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3 hours ago, MelissaH said:
That looks divine! I might need that recipe as I, too, live in U-Pick cherry country.
And here it is. I am not sure where this came from - I think the Harvest forum on Garden Web.The original recipe is for a pear tart but it works with almost any kind of fruit. I have made it with sour cherries, sweet cherries, blueberries, raspberries, pears. It's a handy recipe to have when you have too much of something or just when you need a simple, fruity cake. I'm giving the recipe as I got it, for a pear tart. Just sub what ever fruit you have. And I have no idea who Laurie is.
Laurie's Pear Tart
4 oz butter
3/4 c. sugar (increase to 1 cup if using sour cherries)
1 t. vanilla
2 eggs
1 cup flour
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. salt
Heat oven to 350 degrees (F). Grease an 8" spring form pan.
Cream butter with sugar.
Add vanilla.
Add 2 eggs, beating well after each.
Combine flour, baking powder and salt. Gradually beat into butter mixture.
Spread batter into spring form pan.
Add fruit - cram in as much as possible. If using pears, peel, core and slice thin.
Bake about 1 hour, until a skewer comes out clean. "If you have any doubts, UNDERBAKE. If it dries out it is just a cake." (That is quoted literally from the original recipe.)
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The only things really ready for picking in my garden are garlic scapes and salad greens. I'd grow garlic scapes purely for their weird decorative value - but they do taste good.
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Breakfast for dinner tonight - an homage to M.F.K. Fisher- Am Omelet and a Glass of Wine. (It is not my favorite of her books but I love the title.) The omelet is filled with sautéed onions and tomatoes and grated cheddar.
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1 hour ago, kayb said:
I need to pick cucumbers again tomorrow. I have done nothing with the last batch I picked. It may be sweet pickle relish time.
My cucumber plants are about 4" high!
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I picked cherries. Too many cherries. I love picking cherries.
4 jars of Sweet and Sour Cherry Jam with Kirsch. (from Ferber's Mes Confitures - her recipe is called Morello Cherry and Black Cherry with Kirsch but the farm where I pick simply has sweet cherries and sour cherries.)
Also 7 jars of Cherry and Orange Conserve. This is more like a sauce for ice cream rather than a jam. It was supposed to be all sweet cherries but i didn't have quite enough so I used some sour cherries too and increased the sugar just a little.
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On 7/2/2017 at 1:11 PM, Shelby said:
Anyone ever grown artichokes? My plants look like this now....they don't seem to be growing very fast.....is this normal?
I'm growing artichokes this year - 2 plants in the green house and 2 in the garden. I've grown them 3 times before (never in the green house though) and only got actual artichokes once. In my experience they grow very slowly for quite a while, then send up stems that (if you are lucky) produce chokes. The plants in the green house are much bigger than the ones in the garden. But then the tomatoes in the green house are twice the size of the garden ones. I need to take some garden pictures.
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This is very simple compared to the postings here ! Today I picked cherries- both sweet and tart - for jam. And as usual I picked much more than I needed. (If you have never picked cherries, i recommend it. It is one of the loveliest experiences, especially with the tart cherries. On a sunny day (as today was) the sun comes through the tree leaves and the small, red , translucent balls just glow. It is so beautiful. That is probably why I always end up with three times as much as I intended.)
So a sour cherry cake.
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Burger night.
Many, many years ago when I was young, fresh out of college and impressionable I spent 2 years in Teacher Corps in Vermont. Another intern, some what older, became a friend and a cooking guru. After college, she had spent some years in France teaching English and had attended a course at Cordon Bleu. I took anything she said about food as Gospel. And one thing she believed was that hamburgers are best served on English muffins. And today, with much more cooking and food experience, I still think she was right. (This was 1970. I have a vivid memory of helping her prepare a beef Wellington for a visit from her parents. It was magnificent - all decorated with pastry leaves, The one and only time I have ever actually seen that done. On the other end of the spectrum, when I had a horrendous stomach bug she made me the most delicious chicken broth I have ever had. I make good chicken broth but it doesn't match my memory of hers.)
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Grilled chicken with tomato chutney, roasted sweet potatoes, and carrots and roasted spiced chickpeas over spinach (from my garden!) with a yogurt, lemon, olive oil dressing. (At this time of year everything from the garden is worthy of an !. By late July i will be more blasé.)
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21 minutes ago, kayb said:
Oh yes, I am jealous. I won't have many (if any) tomatoes until August. But then, we have very few days above mid 80's. Summer is wonderful here. That is if it would only stop raining every other day.
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5 minutes ago, Shelby said:
Oh Elaina, I know how hard it is some years. Have you tried to dust with Sevin for the flea beetles?
As far as i know no insecticide is very effective for these little beasts. They are horrible survivors of almost everything. The traps do work - bright yellow cardboard stapled to popsicle sticks and coated with 'tanglefoot" - the stuff you use on fruit trees to catch gypsy moth caterpillars. I do use insecticides but not on greens that I will be eating immediately.
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On 6/9/2017 at 10:47 AM, kayb said:
The garden is progressing apace, as is the grass within it (the straw didn't work as well as I'd hoped to keep grass down), due to the amount of rain we've had. Despite the face it needs a good hoeing, the veggies appear to be coming along nicely.
I decided against using the landscape fabric to keep weeds and grass down. I will definitely use it next year. The straw, which I thought would work wonderfully, isn't; it's hard to walk on, and it doesn't really keep the weeds down, either.
I sometimes use straw over layered newspaper for garden mulch. It always turns into a hay field. It seems like such a good idea - a natural mulch that can just be tilled into the garden next spring - but in July when I am pulling hay by the hand full, I always regret it. I usually use black plastic and feel guilty because it isn't ecological so about every 3-4 years iI go back to straw and paper. . Right now I am living with the guilt and not pulling up so much hay.
Be careful with landscape fabric. Weeds will grow through it if the seeds land on top of it and it is almost impossible to pull up once they do. Both Pine Tree Gardens and Johnny's Selected Seeds sell biodegradable paper mulches, Only good for a year then you till them in. I'm thinking of using that next year. But the black plastic is easy and cheap so i might stay with that. I but the 10 x 25 foot rolls sold in the paint department. My husband drills 1/4" holes every 3" before I unroll it so that rain water gets through. It works.
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I really love where I live but at this time of year I get really jealous of all you in warmer growing zones. Here the only things ready for harvest are garlic scapes (no pictures), some radishes and salad greens.
The rest of the garden is doing fairly well. All the rain has encouraged the flea beetles so the arugula, mizuna and mustard greens are pretty much inedible. And they are starting on the eggplants.
I plant my lettuce very thickly as I like to use it as baby greens. That works well most years - as I pick I thin it out enough so I get good sized plants - but this year has been so wet that the lettuce is rotting. Today i pulled about half of it out (for the compost, sadly, not for use) and hope the rest will do better. Soon the flea beetle gnawed arugula and mizuna come out and get re-planted. I put in flea beetle traps that seem to have help. I need to make another set.
I put in 48 basil plants but it has been so cool and wet that they really haven't taken off - they are sort of just sitting there - not dead but not really growing either.
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I forgot to take a picture but tonight's dinner was a variation on "Speedy Lasagna" from Patricia Wells Trattoria. The original has lots of sautéed onions, (home) canned tomatoes put through a food mill, some red pepper flakes and an herb bundle (rosemary, parsley, thyme, bay leaves). Then quite a lot of ricotta added when you combine the sauce with the pasta (fettucine in this case). It just happened that I had some sweet Italian sausage sitting in the fridge approaching its "use or die" date so I cooked that up and stirred it in. I actually think I like the vegetarian version better but my husband really liked this variation. Served with a big salad - it is lettuce and other greens from the garden season!
I chose this menu because I had 2/3 of a container of ricotta left over from an earlier meal. No recipe (for 2 people) seems to need an entire container of ricotta and way too often the partial container simply goes to waste. I am making an effort to plan meals that use up the entire container. Is this a problem for other people? With what other foods does this happen?
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@kayb Sometimes I am so jealous of all of you in warmer growing zones!
Slow Roasted Cherry Tomato Sauce
in RecipeGullet
Posted
If you are using Romas I would chop them. And if using rosemary in place of the basil I would use less - rosemary can easily be overpowering. What about oregano?