Musings

I don’t know what to eat anymore.

We went to a new seafood restaurant around the corner that makes noises about how they’re doing the right thing with the ingredients they buy/serve.

Then I looked at this review, of a new book called Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food (Paul Greenberg, 2010, Penguin), which discusses current issues regarding bluefin tuna, cod, sea bass, and salmon (that is, overfishing and depopulation). (I’m on the hold list for a library copy.) I didn’t see cod or salmon on the restaurant’s chalkboard of specials. They served yellowfin, lobster, Apalachicola oysters, and, get this, the waiter went on about this Mediterranean fish they had had the previous week that was really good, and I swear what he called it was branzino, a term I’d never heard before. From the review, I learn that branzino is the northern Italian term for sea bass. Hrrumph. (Or maybe I misunderstood.)

Even sticking to beans and rice isn’t good. You don’t want to know about rice farming. Even if you buy organic, that doesn’t avoid the habitat destruction involved in field construction, etc.

Still, I very much enjoyed my meal. The gustatory part.

And, from our windowseat, we had wonderful bonus entertainment: watching the evening’s pop-up shower become a downpour. Twice.

Note: I LOVE scallops. I know how destructive it is to harvest them. I only indulge rarely. If I buy them for my kitchen, yes, I play the premium and get the more environmentally friendly diver scallops. I only buy them from restaurants that I expect are also using diver scallops. Like this one. (I hope.)

Get your seafood dos and don’ts here, including an iPhone app version.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

While the signature vegetable of Sicily is the eggplant (especially the smallish white ones), the signature dish, I have read several places (although I’ve also seen it ignored), is peperonata. Peperonata is sauteed sliced peppers (various colors) stewed with onions and tomatoes, a few green olives, and flavored with basil and red wine vinegar (salt and pepper, too, of course). Well, that’s one version.

Vegetable stews that are heavy on tomatoes, onions and peppers are big all around the Mediterranean. Add eggplant and you’re headed toward puttanesca or caponata….

Posted at 3:17 PM | Comments Off on Peperonata: not quite

Or is it tomato art?

I’m not sure what’s going on. Two of my tomato plants are ho-hum. Dotty-yellowy leaves, not a tragedy just not quite right. Not sure why. I think they’re purchase-mates.

The rest are plenty green. Just taking a production break. Or the rodents are getting any of the product that’s getting the rosy tint we all hope for.

This one’s a yellow tomato. Not to be confused with the orange tomato (we ate one tonight).

Okay, it’s a green yellow tomato. But it’s still a yellow tomato.

And not a pear tomato.

I’ll stop now.

Posted at 8:34 PM | 2 Comments »

Boy, I wish I really had a menu dial I could spin to figure out what to cook. A great bonus would be a corresponding grocery list—minus, of course, what’s really in the house!

Ah, dreams.

Anyway, if I had a menu dial, and if I had spun it today, and if the Gods were paying attention to the front garden, I’m sure the needle would have gravitated to pesto pasta.

Posted at 6:33 PM | 1 Comment »

I haven’t given you pictures of this year’s crop of Arum maculatum in a while. Refresher: there’re three this year. They’re still bright green. I was going to transplant them, but, poof!, in this heat: no.

Remember yesterday’s oh-so-tempting tomato? I made the post and started thinking about how many chipmunks I’ve been seeing out front, and after about three minutes I was out there picking the ’mater! In another minute, I had performed minor surgery and had jammed a wedge, still warm from the sun (or perhaps the mid-90 temps), into my salivating mouth….

Oh, yum!

And, yes, I did share with The Guru….

Posted at 3:59 PM | Comments Off on Waiting for the next rosy tomato

I harvested basil and sage from our front garden to augment this baked cacciatore. I substituted turkey for the chicken (along the top of the photo). Needless to say, we gorged ourselves.

Shoulda put the salami slices on TOP of the poultry, though….

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »

In the heat of the afternoon, The Botanist was on a roll, and I helped out. He had shovel-weeded a strip of the midsection of the garden during the morning when I was erranding. So, we made periodic forays into the bright and brilliant sun to plant four (count em’!) rows of sweet corn.

His method is fascinating. First, remove the weeds (duh). Then a quick raking to bust up any clods and remove any plant matter hanging around from the shovel/hoe weed removal. Next, set up a string so you can make a straight row (VERY important). Now, take a hoe and make a narrow trench beneath the string. Drop a kernel (powdered with brilliant fuchsia chemicals) every eight inches or so. Next, the really fun part: water in the seeds, carefully, without letting them get washed down the row (of course, it’s not quite level and drains to the edge, to deal with heavy precip events). Next, grab the hoe and refill the trenchlet, cleverly tromping the soil with your size thirteens (is it critical to have big feet to be an exceptional vegetable gardener?), packing it around the seeds, so they are trapped with the moisture and germinate faster. Do the next row, or retreat to the shade and recover from your labors.

And scare away the robins that are trying to peck at the strawberries!

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Maize in its place

Ah, the searing Midwest summer. Love that heat/humidity combo. We’re tickled there’s a breeze to temper it. And the shade of the moraine locust. Even those tiny leaves can create sunlessness.

The bonus, however: the strawberries are just beginning to come in!

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

Stack of wonton wrappers: raw dough on the hoof, as it were.

Yesterday’s gyōza adventure lead me to think about doughs today. That’s one product we often buy and don’t even think of as a processed food. Examples of raw doughs on the supermarket shelf include pasta, unbaked frozen breads and rolls, and, I suppose, by extension, muffin and cake mixes.

Doughs are basically ground starch powder plus a liquid. Add flavorings, maybe eggs or yeast, etc., and you’re there. Around the world. We commonly think of wheat and maize as dough bases, and doughs can be made from powdered starchy roots, too (think Italian potato-wheat gnocci). One of the easiest ways to cook the dough is to drop it into boiling liquid—voila, dumplings.

A surprising fact about dough, if you believe WikiPee: dough masses usually act like non-Newtonian fluids. As near as I can tell, this refers to the gooey viscosity of the dough. Think of working bread or pizza dough: you can poke it and the surface bends in with your fingertip: the fluid acts like a solid. There are plenty of technical terms in the non-Newtonian entry, if you want to digest ’em!

Posted at 4:23 PM | Comments Off on Dough, the starchy kind

We never decided whether we were making gyōzas or wontons. We used a Chinese cookbook as a guide to making these delicious dumplings, but thought in terms of gyōzas.

We learned some good lessons from this first attempt. We preferred the round over the square dough shapes. It’s difficult to convince yourself what a small amount of filling is necessary to fill them. We had sticking problems in the steamers; maybe we should boil them next time? Or fry-steam a few, and call them potstickers!

I also figure that we could easily use raw meat in the fillings and expect them to be fully cooked when the dough is ready. This time we cooked ahead of wrapper-loading just to be sure….

Great fun! And tasty!

We used lots of grated ginger, and that made the dumplings taste far fresher than frozen ones.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Gyōza experimentation