picktober

The month of September should be renamed Picktober. It is high season for harvesting and preserving. This year, I'm working on a new (to me) method though. With cucumbers hitting the market in force, I have turned into a pickling fool.

I started with the batch on the left. Straight forward, lacto-fermented pickles. They smelled so good after the first week that I went ahead and pickled some more stuff, starting with okra. Yep, okra. I'd had some about two years ago from a market vendor and they just floored me. With only the barest hint of slime, but crunchy and spiced oh so nice, I made a mental note: make these. So, here we are, one big half gallon of it later. Oh, and the last jar is what happens when you trade stuff, come home with various cucumber varieties and chuck them all together. I haven't sampled these yet, but I suspect they'll be just fine.

Now, where was I? Oh yes, the main body of the post, right. Time for tomatillo talk. Last year, I planted tomatillos, and as suspected many sprouts poked their heads out of the ground and reported for duty this year. Elder monkey watered them often early in the season, convinced she had planted them. They flourished. For comparison, I was given two tomatillo plants this year that when I transplanted, were much larger than the volunteers. They are puny compared to these robust creatures now.

Speaking of now, these plants are producing fruit like mad. Little dude and I went ouside and picked ourselves a nice bowl full. I was lacking any onions or peppers from the yard this year, so I was not thinking about sauce. Then it hit me: pickle them! Hell yeah, that's gotta be good right? I hit the bookshelf for a pickled tomatillo recipe for guidance. None. Damn. Not fazed by the lack of instruction, I consulted my own senses and went on.

The first batch of cucumber pickles were done and came out great. I used some of the leftover brine to start the tomatillos going. I added a few whole jalapeños, a few teeth of garlic and a sprig of epazote. While I was at it, in another bowl I hacked up some carrots and peeled more garlic, got out some more jalapeños, then collected some oregano twigs from the yard. The pickling sickness was really setting in about this point.

One short week later, everything was no longer bubbling and the brine was nice and cloudy. I tasted a few tillos and was stoked by their taste, but not really their texture. No worries though, as blending them up was now the plan. I drained everything and then dumped it in the food processor. Hitting blend for a while, it needed a tad more moisture so I gave it a splash or two of the brine. Getting nearer the consistency I was looking for, I gave it another little splish. Just by the fumes, my nose could tell it was going to be hot as hell.

Tangy from the ferment, not too salty, and indeed hot, but not unpleasantly so. Now, it goes on everything. I start my morning with a dash on the eggs. At lunch, leftover rice sure is nice. For dinner, anything. As long as it can go with some mind-bendingly easy to make, love that I ran this kind of experiment, pickled salsa verde.
(fade to the sound of a bag of chips being popped, mild diabolical laughter, then enthusiastic cookie monster-esque noshing......)

gringo verde

This is my first year growing tomatillos. Being a relative of the tomato, they share many of the same attributes, but in what seems like a wilder form. I forget exactly how many we planted this year, but I think it was only four or so in the "box." Growing three to four feet tall, with an understory of lemon cucumbers, it became the green hedge we have out front. In July, they were a riot of blooms and paper bells, foretelling of a green salsa in my future.

I've been feeling a bit neglectful of my garden lately, and noticing tomatillos beginning to fall of the plants all on their own (I mean, it was mid-September by now) meant time for action. I brought the monkeys out front and we conducted a fruit raid.

Easily filling a gallon sized bowl, we brought the loot back in and took the skins off. I've learned that my elder monkey has a propensity for the tedium, and will gladly work on this task as I tend to the "lil' bruther." After a quick rinse to remove the remaining bits and pieces, and maybe, just maybe a bit of whatever the sticky, strange, not quite entirely oily feeling stuff on them is off, we tossed them in a roasting pan (whew, talk about a run-on!)

I haven't had much luck with growing peppers here in oaktown. I've tried, boy I have, sporadically, for like five years or so. I'm no Chilebrown. (Let me tell you, he's got such a peppery green thumb, that after the simple act of shaking hands with him, you better wash up before touching any sensitive membranes around your eyeballs.) Anyway, this year, once again I gave it a go. I forget which varieties they were, something compact, but mild for sure. Because of all this, I made sure to include the seeds in the salsa to extract any bit of heat they had.

I had a few onions from earlier in the year out in the back shed and I was hoping to use them. I had envisioned an all from the monkey ranch salsa. But no. They had started to rot on the inside after sprouting a bit. Damn. I used a big white onion on the counter and went from there. All mixed up and ready for roasting I had a laugh. I always enjoy the look of all the little green balls in a pan. It reminds me of those ball pits they have at amusement parks where you can "swim." Okay, maybe that comes from having a beer with this one, but, what the hell.

I gave the roasted mess a blend and then went and picked some cilantro to finish it off. After mincing and mixing in we chowed down on some chips. It was super tangy and puckery. Given that it was at least 3/4 tomatillos I wasn't too surprised. I made a mental note about growing these husky tomato relatives here: flavor is good despite small size of fruit. Combine this with the ease of growing them and we have a winner in my book.

I have a feeling, that after seeds get into the soil this year I'll be harvesting volunteers next year. Well, and the next, and so on and so forth. With any luck, all the way into the sweet with heat, chile verde sunset years of life.

smokeapalooza 2008

Kinda like that, but not. Perhaps the event was more like a smokathon. Anyway, the idea is that some endurance in withstanding smokey air was involved, but instead of fundraising, I blew some cash. Then I stayed home, raided the freezer for more food, cracked open a beer, and went out back and choked on smoldering embers for a long time.

A few weeks ago I fired up the bbq and did up anything I could. I figure if I'm going to commit some kind of carbon footprint no-no, then I should be more efficient and cook a bunch at once. Pork shoulder, beef bottom round, and some salmon fillets made it onto the grill. It was a huge load of food that I finally, just today, polished off the remaining leftovers. (Well, kind of, I put two of the fillets into the freezer.) I guess it's been a long couple of weeks steeped in wood smoked foodie goodness.

The pork shoulder was cooked too hot and didn't develop that fall-apart succulence I was looking for. No prob. Just "cook it again in something else" I always say. A trip to the chest freezer yielded roasted chile verde sauce. So, smoked pork with sautéed onion and mushroom enchiladas, topped with a verde sauce just screamed to be made. Served with desert pebble beans cooked with onion, garlic and a twig of epazote. Fresh white corn from Efren, likely picked that morning, and smeared in more butter than I care to admit, rounded the dish out. It was pure satisfaction and felt like the flavors were old school.

The smoked salmon from the smoke-fest had been nibbled away at for at least a week when I finally decided to make quiche. It was in the true spirit of the dish. I had no main course for dinner that night, but eggs, milk, cheese, big flavorful meat, and a want to practice making whole wheat pastry crusts were present in the house. It resulted in this. The salmon hunks sank a bit, but the crust was my flakiest to date. Overall, I think mom would have been proud, and for the most part, the family ate it. Well, the little one ate the filling and the big one ate the crust. If only I'd known ahead of time and just given them these respective portions.

The beef bottom round stayed almost entirely intact for darn near two weeks before I did something with it. I kept thinking of how cured meats hang around a deli for a few weeks and extended this to mean I had plenty of time to come up with a plan. It suffered the same initial toughness that the pork did and needed some more slow cooking "treatment." I began with sautéing a few poblano peppers, a bell, and the largest jalapeño you ever did see along with a hugenormous yellow onion. I cut the beef into disks of a sort, then hacked these in half and threw them into the pepper and onion combo. In the spirit of using leftovers I poured a home-canned jar of seasoned tomato sauce over the whole mess, and then cooked it for about two hours more on low heat. For the last half hour I uncovered it to thicken it some. Meanwhile a bag of masa from a few months back had been defrosting. I slapped some gobs of it around in my palms and laid this on top of the sauce and meaty goodness. I then put this in the oven for about 40 minutes.

It was like a smoke-bomb tamale pie. The high pepper count and tomato tang gave it one rocking jolt of flavor. The smoke from the meat stood up against it all and announced the dishes origins. I ate it for four days straight, but you know what? Right about now I could go for some more.

Well, this Sunday promises to be another smoke filled day. Once again, I'm preparing food for an upcoming backpacking trip that I volunteered to make some jerkey for. Since my experiment last year worked out so well, I'll be looking to duplicate it to some degree. I've got the peach wood and rump roast lined up, and the rest of the marinade in the works.

Now, if I only had a respirator........

stores well on counter

Ever have a butternut squash on your counter for a month before using it?

How about two months?

Three?

Four maybe?

If the answer is four then you win because I was tired of the one on mine after a mere 3 months of taking up space and collecting flour and other dust. Besides, it finally had a slightly puckered look around the stem end, so I put the steel to a big knife and did something about it. First stop: vegan calzone.

Start with the secret ingredient for super-hella bomb big taste, every time. Can you say carmelized onions? They act like sauce AND filling at the same time when forgoing the cheese. Add some thinly sliced mushrooms, a pinch of garam masala and some old-ass winter squash and you're in business! (Please bake on a pre-heated stone and make sure the dough or mushrooms aren't as old as the squash and this will come out great.....)

And now for the onion segue to our second stop.....

Why is it we only buy the bulby round part of the onion plant? Why don't we use more? Probably because we are no longer growing them regularly in our own yards. You see, when onions are getting big and mature, like a lot of other plants they wanna bloom. Since you're typically only after eating the bulb part, the bloom stem or "scape" is of no use and is generally cut off and discarded. I've seen garlic scapes bundled together and sold at the BFM, so why not use onion ones? Since we have twenty or so torpedo onions out front currently 'scaped, I figured it was time for a little experimenting. We ventured out and I hacked off a few while my daughter snapped the picture. Now, actually cooking with them. Hmmm, let's see.........

How about adding freshly chopped onion greens to pan browned beef and then smothering in a nice tomatillo sauce? Yeah, when I first thought of it, it sounded good to me too. It just had to happen. Now we're getting somewhere! Let's get on to the Second stop: butternut verde.

I looked at the remaining two-thirds of the ancient, now decapitated looking gourd. Grown and harvested by my father in-law back in October, sitting with it's own kind and some larger pumpkins in his barn on a wooden pallet for a few months, then transferred to my counter for another three, only then, or more really two days since I cut the stemmy portion off and used it.....(gasping for air) it was time to finish off this winter squash from hell.

Big, somewhat dry chunks of butternut went in beside our last little harvest of potatoes from the yard, pulled the week before. It made me very happy to be using up the rest of these foodstuffs before they turned to compost on the counter. I tasted the concoction and it needed adjusting, so I tossed in a touch of sugar to cut the acid and bitterness from the green sauce and let it begin simmering until all was nice and tender. I got my rice going and contemplated making a hollandaise sauce.

Well, maybe no sauce for the spears (as we'd had with our second round of asparagus this season) but plated up, I still think it looked good. More importantly though, the beef chile verde with butternut and potatoes had enough kick to accompany the homebrew IPA rather nicely.

Oh, and the squash from hell lives no more.......

Welp, I guess that's it, so remember, like, Everyday is Earth Day man!

local winter verde

We've been broke (looking down at belt and tightening one more notch) so now is where we really start paying more attention to the shopping bills and start combing the cupboards for meals. Happy that we put up a lot of stuff this past summer, most particularly in September, it is time for the freezer and pantry to shine. We've been enjoying endless english muffins slathered in jam, but we need to dig deeper into dinners. I had porky goodness on the brain. A roast put in the freezer way-back-when, for occasion just such as this came to mind. Mmmmm, chile verde. Local ingredients, our hard work at food preservation, and craving for succulent pork shoulder in a mouth watering green sauce all came together. It was a Dark Days Challenge inspired: Winter preser-verde dinner.

Pork shoulder and meat stock from the freezer. Tomatillo sauce from one of those crazy canning sessions. More from the pantry in the form of whole wheat flour and homemade salt (not much left these days, might be time to make some again) are ready for dredging the meat before frying it in olive oil and ploppin' in the crock. I just love cooking like this. Defrost, powder, brown, braise. I can handle that. When the weather is cold and damp, nothing says loving like braised pork shoulder.

(sluuuuuurrrp!) Lookin' good!
Green, chunky, seedy. That's pretty darn verde to me. It was now time to work on the rest of the meal as this stewed for a few hours and shrank in volume. Not really due to evaporation but as a few pieces of pork are sampled throughout the process. Who can deny this delight in such braising events? Not me. Nope, and an unh-uh. Can't do..........

And the final result?

Mmmmmmm!
Yeeeooowww!
Hooooo-hooooo-hoooooo-hooooooooo!!!!!!!!


It felt so primal and good to enjoy this feast. Hot, local, porky and all. I enjoyed the feeling so much I had seconds. Which, come to think of it is more like thirds or fourths after all the tasting during the cooking. Mmmmmm, here's to no self-control in the kitchen around braised meat!

And wait, I can't forget to give credit a bit here. This verde sauce was lacking in heat compared to another batch I made. In subsequent leftover helpings I gave it punch by adding a few crumby pickled peppers (that you don't even want to know what I had to do to get my hands on a jar of) to the dollop of local sour cream. The first bite and right there it went over the top.......off into that: I will remember how this tastes right now and forever, vowing to recreate it with future frustration and never quite get there kind of dishes. Those ones are tricky. Could have been the moon cycle, the humidity and day of the week that all conspired. For sure, the peppers kicked ass. Well, I won't forget to mention the produce and local bounty, but still, for this one, it all came together soooooo well......(licking last bit of sauce off fingers as I finish typing this..........)