Cooking with Canning

I mentioned in my last post that I’d finished up using almost everything I canned last summer (just in time for this summer). I used my few cans of tomatoes, my salsa, my peaches very sparingly since I had so few.  It was a lot of work just to make a shelf’s worth of canned goods, so the fruits (haha!) of my labor were parceled out to worthy projects:  a warm pot of chili just as winter started, a small and rich batch of tomato sauce a couple of weeks ago, a peach crumble, some peach ice cream.

When I cook something I canned, I use all my special ingredients - usually things I get specially from other places, like my Dad’s basil and oregano.  I use rosemary and bay leaves from my mother-in-law. These things teach me about the importance of ingredients, when you see it grow or put the work in to preserve the food. I learned long ago, from I don’t know who, to not waste food. I scrape bowls when I cook. I keep my leftovers. I learned to use up my food in the order in which it goes bad.  I’ve never been wealthy, so I guess I learned a lot from watching my pennies at the grocery also.

Farmer’s markets are great, and I will always go to them, but really, it is my dearest wish to have garden. With lots of sun. And lots of stuff I eat. My backyard has now decided to add 2 kinds of purple flowers and some weird bush to its usual crop of rocks and trees, but it leaves much to be desired. And it’s not my house, so I just can’t bring myself to fix it up really nice when I know it’s a temporary arrangement.

Jeff’s mom has mentioned her garden will be growing asparagus, tomatoes, carrots, green beans, radishes, black beans, okra, thyme, dill, basil, thornless blackberries, elephant garlic, eggplant, onion and garlic chives, bunching onions, 1015 onions, butternut squash, acorn squash, bell pepper and cayenne pepper.  I copied that from her email to me.  I hope she knows I’m raiding her garden. I think she planted some of it because she knows I like it.

Apart from cooking and clearing my stores, I got a bug to make jewelry the other day. It was an exhausting day of work, and I was frustrated, and I am not a calm and patient sort of a person. I get anxious and tend to, um, get overexcited about things. I am somewhat … opinionated, I guess you could say. And when I get particularly overwrought, I end up at the craft store, whatever’s closest. Last week I ended up at Hobby Lobby looking at findings and fabric stiffener.  This being a brand new craft, I’ve been teaching myself about what happens when copious amounts of felt glue are applied to fabric and beads. This could get messy.

Hope you’ve all had a fun week. I’m going to do a fair imitation of posting twice this week. Watch out!

This and that and a few threads

There are six columns in my flower afghan and eight rows.  48 granny squares.  4 borders each.  When I am done with this thing, I’m going to count approximately how many stitches there are in the entire thing.  Squares, borders, the whole thing.  And I’m going to figure out about how long this blanket has taken me.  I am fairly certain I am going to be appalled by the number of hours, but not surprised, exactly.

All six columns are now assembled, and two have been stitched together.  If you’re wondering, yes, this feels exactly like making a quilt, except FAR MORE labor intensive.  I never thought anything could be as labor-intensive as a quilt, but I was wrong.  After the columns are stitched together, then there are two borders of different color.  I could have just done one, however, I had to buy an entire new skein of red yarn to finish the last two red squares, so it’s getting a red border.

Meanwhile, I tried out a few stitches on my  birches quilt.  Take a look, because that’s the last you’ll see of them.  They’re supposed to be waves, but I definitely did not like and I ripped them out.  I think I know what I’m doing now (haha, sure).  Tell you what, all I’ll commit to is that I’ll try the next one I thought of, and I’ll show it to you regardless of whether or not I like it.  I can’t promise to keep it.

I wish my camera showed the color variation in the blue fabric well … the warp and weft are different colors, and it gives it an interesting depth.  The weft is the blue that you see, but the warp threads that were used are silvers and golds.  It’s so pretty.  Unfortunately, that means that most of the blue and gold embroidery threads I’d chosen do not show up at all.  Bummer.

To take a break from big projects, I keep cooking, hopefully nothing too hard.  I find I’ve been liking pureed soups for their simplicity and how tasty the simmered ingredients can be when blended.  Last week I invented some zucchini soup with basil, which I enjoyed very much.  I just looked for a similar recipe online with no luck - this one’s not chilled or curried or made with dairy or mushrooms or whatever else, so I’ll have to write it down sometime.

This week I tried my hand at African Peanut Soup, but made it a whole lot spicier than the recipe indicated (honestly, 1/8 tsp of cayenne in a tomato/peanut butter soup is nothing!  That’s not even respectable!).  I even made my own peanut butter for it, because I have a food processor, and I can.  I fell in love with the peanut soup at a local restaurant and had to try making it, and this is pretty darn close.  It was also pretty simple, even though I made the peanut butter.  Plus, I then got to mix the leftover peanut butter with honey, which I will apply to graham crackers later.  Winner!

I will leave you with The Two Troublemakers.  Oh, and they certainly are.  Audrey got a good report on her health the other day - she will probably never be totally well again, but we are told her recovery so far is unusual and really very good.  She’s out of the woods.  Callie, on the other hand, is completely well and leaping tall buildings and all that, and getting fatter and fluffier by the day.  She’s a year and a half old now, and thank pete she’s not a kitten anymore.  That was just a nightmare.  I’m kind of dreading spring as our temperatures climb above 85F - what will she be like when she sheds?! O the horror!

In the immortal words of Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s Christmas vacation: “Later dudes.”

Moodiness, Music and Food

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday) I was feeling sort of moody: disconnected and blue. Sometimes I get that way, when the imminent end of the weekend sneaks up on me. Makes me sad. There’s never enough weekend, between the fun stuff I want to do, the other stuff I wanted to do, the stuff I’ve been promising myself I’ll get to sometime soon, and the stuff I just have to do to keep the house from being a wreck and clean clothing in the closet.

My solution to this malaise is cooking for at least 2 hours. I often try to cook enough for about 5 nights of food.  When it’s done I feel better from the soothing activity of puttering in the kitchen, and I’ve accomplished something very real that will make my life easier for several days.  Plus I get to see a smile on Jeff’s face when he tastes what I’ve come up with and spend time with Audrey and Callie, both of whom camp out to see what I might do and if there’s anything for them.

I have a pattern.

• Long playlist of music and my kitchen speakers. I fire up an iTunes Genius playlist, perhaps centered on a Kings of Convenience song or one of the Frequent Flyer compilations, maybe Barcelona.
• My folder of recipes to be tried.  In a vain attempt to actually corral my recipe collection, I keep a folder of stuff that I’d like to try, or things I’d like to make a vegetarian version of.
• These shoes.  These are very silly-looking, but Mario Batali is right about Crocs: excellent for cooking.  I used to need to curtail my cooking to about 45 minutes, but my Croc knockoffs ($12!) mean I can be on my feet for 2 1/2 hours and just be a little footsore. Lovely!

Yesterday’s menu:

1. New recipe: Warm Butternut Squash and Chickpea Salad with Lemon-Tahini Dressing. This is a wonderful, happy, delicious recipe I procured from the Smitten Kitchen site. I was lucky enough to have a Meyer lemon for the dressing. But even if I hadn’t, this is a winner of a recipe. It is so delicious, I can’t explain, but if you come to my house I’ll make it for you and you can see for yourself.
2. Old Standby: White Chili and mexican cornbread.  A simple staple I’ve talked about before, but now made vegetarian.  I’m so familiar with chili varieties that I find it to be something I can easily throw in a pot without thinking.  This kind has black beans and white beans of some sort and is flavored with chipotle and hatch chilis.  I think chili is best when it cleans out your sinuses and makes you sweat.  I threw it together and put it in the refrigerator for slow-cooking today. It was MMM!
3. New recipe: Cheesy sweet potato pancakes.  Epicurious calls them “crisps” but I didn’t flatten them that much, and next time I’ll just make them into regular latkes and add a bit more flavoring and more interesting cheese.  They’re pretty good.  I think sweet potatoes are an overly-maligned starch, unfortunately associated with that eminently-Southern-but-disgusting marshmallow recipe that no one actually seems to like (forgive me if you’re that person).
4. New recipe: So I went completely overboard while shredding sweet potatoes. My Christmas brought a mandoline and a food processor to me (score!), both of which I’m being VERY careful with so as not to damage myself. Thing is, that 14-cup processor can shred five large sweet potatoes in under five minutes, and did. I didn’t want that many latkes. So I found another creative idea with Sweet Potato and Goat Cheese Muffins to use the rest of my shreds. Nice!

Do I have many pictures?  Nope.  I was just cookin’. And tastin’. Cooking is the best.