September Wrap-up

I have another list. Sorry. And this time it's kind of a braggy list.
September was the dedicated month for this year's Eat Local Challenge, and even though I didn't officially participate, I embraced the theme of preserving food.
So here's what I got into jars and freezer bags during the last 30 days.

jalapeños (pickled)
serranos (pickled)
ajís colorados (dried and ground up)
pear butter
pear chutney
pear vinegar
tomato sauce
tomato juice
tomato paste
prunes (didn't have to do much)
arugula pesto
basil pesto
zucchini slices
foraged fennel seeds

I was unlucky with my great plan to make "tomaisins" from sun-dried tomatoes. Tomato skin is pretty thick, and after a month in the sun, the little cherry tomatoes were still plump and juicy, but rotten inside. Eeg. That's OK. Next year I'll just cut them in half first.

Remember Tater Tots?

We were cleaning some junk out of the refrigerator. Old jars of forgotten condiments and stuff. Really old.
It was all interesting stuff, but it was really old and it was obvious we weren't going to eat it.
And then I started thinking about what I don't eat anymore.
So I made a list, brand-names only. You can probably guess what the products were (totally American, although some may be international). I honestly haven't eaten any of this stuff since I was a little kid.
Got any others to add?

Birdseye
Jolly Green Giant
Gorton's
Minute Maid
Swanson's
Wishbone
Chef Boyardee
Smucker's
Sunbeam
French's
Kellogg's
Log Cabin
Ore-Ida
Chung King
Wesson

Must add: None of the stuff we threw out came from this list. Today's scuttling was from our Mesofoodie Era, things like Chinese preserved vegetables, Portuguese chili sauce, cherries in infused vodka.
Now we are in our Locafoodie Era. A few jars of home-pickled local peppers went into the fridge, to take up the space we had cleared out.
Sigh.

Eat Locally, Think Globally

Oh, this can't be local food. It's Chinese.
But the eggplant came from my backyard. The scallion and garlic came from the farmers market. The rice is from the Sacramento Valley. The pork is from Prather Ranch.
Naturally, a couple of ingredients couldn't possibly be local: the peanut oil, the soy sauce, the sesame oil and the chile bean paste.
But the best local thing of all was the inspiration for this recipe: Passionate Eater.
A former San Franciscan from Los Angeles, she recently moved to New Orleans (so she's a former local... sue me). By the way, she's ga-ga about her now-local Louisiana cuisine.
PE first turned me on to her Ma Po Tofu last year. I tried it. It worked! Dang, it was good.
Then I gave her fried rice recipe a try. I loved it.
I'd always been a "fake Chinese" cook, meaning I'd stir fry some vegetables with a bunch of meaningless flavorings and (gasp) thickeners. I always overdid the soy sauce. I'd add a peculiar squirt of hot sauce. I'd leave out the ginger and scallions.
And I hated my concoctions.
But the first time I tried Passionate Eater's tofu recipe, it SANG. I know, it's easy. Basic. But I had never been taught the rules.
So yesterday, I felt brave enough to fiddle with the rules. I cooked some eggplant grown in my backyard, and used it instead of the tofu. I think it worked out OK. It needed a spritz of sweetener (is that all right, PE?) and a drizzle of water to loosen up the mix.
I hope PE doesn't get all gumbo on me and forget to teach me how to make more of these amazing meals.

Where's Felco?

They're called Ají Colorado, a long, slender red chile from Peru. Wrinkly-skinned, I didn't expect them to have much to offer in the fleshiness department. But when you slice one open, there's a little meat.
A little heat, too.
I decided to try drying some. I cut a little lengthwise slit in each pepper, and packed them into the zip-up laundry bag on top of a rack. They're sitting on a lawn chair in the sun now.
I hope this works, because I have visions of grinding the dried peppers into a spicy paprika, to bring a little summery zap to my winter braises.
And because it's September and we're all about preserving food, dammit. Right, Waldo?

Equinox Equanimity

Summer ends tomorrow morning, while I'll still be sleeping. So for me, today is the last day of summer.
I can't believe how abrupt it's been this year.
We've already pulled out and dispatched the cuke and zuke plants.
Yesterday I harvested a pint of serrano peppers.
The eggplant is still chugging along, though. The celery is robust.
And the tomatoes? Fading a bit, but still bouncing in like Carmen Miranda's hat. And that pear.
Damn! I still have pears in the fridge to deal with.
And zucchini. Today I will blanch and freeze them.
I wanted to share a funny story about the oppression of zucchini harvest. If you haven't already read it in the SF Chronicle, take a peek here.
Happy fall.

Garden of Unearthly Delights

I've had a pretty good tomato year.
I remember when I couldn't bear to cook my homegrown babies. I'd just rather eat them fresh and juicy, in any number of preparations.
This year, though, I've harvested enough tomatoes to cook down for sauce, in addition to the raw sandwich and salad eatin'.
So today, I was roasting what may be the last of my Roma tomatoes (there are still some on the vine, but I have doubts about their willingness to ripen). The house smelled spectacular, as usual, with the aroma of roasting Roma.
And then I thought, no, dog! I'm not running this batch through the food mill.
Cranky dashed down to the store and bought a loaf of rustic bread. We toasted it and applied the appropriate lashings of butter.
Over this, we scooped fresh, hot spoonfuls of roasted, collapsed, sweet, deep, dark tomatoes. Nnnngghh!!
But, wait.
See that brown puddle under the tomato chunks? Kinda syrupy, kinda evil, kinda...
Yeah.
Marmite.
Ohmygah.
Best sandwich ever.
You could call it bruschetta, but you'd be a dink.

Now Ain't That Too Damn Bad!

It's a pretty big bowl, sure, but I didn't expect it to yield TWO QUARTS of homemade tomato juice.
Just for perspective, the little gold tomatoes in the picture are cherry tomatoes.
The others are Purple Cherokee, Aunt Ruby's German Green, and Dona. The Donas are eerily uniform in size, almost perfectly round, and a cornball shade of hot red. Ideal sellability factors, though it's not the tastiest tomato in the world. Still, I might grow it again next year.
I spent a happy hour or so on the patio, cutting and salting the tomatoes, then running them through the food mill.
All those crazy colors blended to make a fairly satisfying-looking juice. Deep red.
I popped it directly into the freezer.
Then, this morning, I was reading my trusty, tattered copy of Putting Food By. I learned that uncooked tomato juice has a tendency to separate. Something about enzyme action. Hm.
Well, no problem, say I. Once I thaw it, I'll just give it a hearty zap in the microwave.
I mean, come on. Right? Don't spoil my fantasy.
My Bloody Mary fantasy.

Celerity

Do people really grow celery at home? I'm still blown away by this.
We spent most of the summer simply trimming stalks off our bunches as needed, and letting the remaining stalks grow. It worked fine.
But the other day we had a hankering for a deep, dark bowl of celery soup (the second this season, sue me). And it seemed to make most sense just to hoist up an entire head.
Gah! It was hard to pull out of the ground. Those roots, man. They're twisty and tenacious. They glom onto the dirt in a way you couldn't imagine. I tried to unweave some of the roots, but there was so much dirt in there, it wasn't worth it.
So we hacked off the roots and made the delirious soup. You must try it. Next time I might even add potatoes.
I'm saving one of the celery bunches (still in the ground) for a brunch party next month. They'll be great in Bloody Marys. I've even offered to bring tomato juice from the garden.
Now, I'm off to the kitchen to juice the tomatoes. (And into the freezer. Can't wait. The tomatoes need to be used.)

Oeufs à la Flashback

I wasn't going to let summer get away without using my "Devilled Eggs" plate. I found it in a rather pleasant antique/junk store, and this is its debut.
The plate — and especially the brown stripe and lettering — suggest to me 1940s or '50s, maybe early '60s. The kind of upscale "country" restaurant with amber crackle-glass candle cups on every table. Red Naugahyde booths. A wagon wheel on one wall. Little brown ceramic pots of highly overspiced cheese product that you can slather on completely ordinary (but seeded!) crackers, two to a cellophane packet, while you sip an adult beverage.
The kids are twitching, waiting for cocktail hour to end.
"Don't eat up all the bread and butter! You'll ruin your appetite."
If you didn't ruin your appetite, maybe you'd be allowed to order the stuffed eggs as an appetizer. Way better than that acrid cheese product.

Parsimony in a Spare Tree

I don't think I told you about the "extra" pear tree.
Heck, I didn't even know there was a "main" pear tree when I decided to move to this house and rip up the backyard for a vegetable garden.
How was I to know that Bartlett pear harvest time coincided exactly with my summer plans?
"Coincided." Heh. That's just a polite way of saying the pear tree tyrannized me, demanding daily attention purely on account of its heavy windfall. And when you pick up that many pears every day, you'd better think of something to do with them.
Dammit. I wanted to luxuriate in my tomatoes and cucumbers. But, no. Big crybaby pears were throwing a fit over there, and I had to cope.
I made gobs of pear butter. My ad-hoc recipe improved with each batch.
I made pear chutney; ditto.
I made pear nectar. Swoon! It takes a LOT of filtering to get most of the grit and sediment out, but... swoon!
And I'm currently attempting to make pear vinegar. (We had to throw a lot of spoiled pears into the Green Can, and as the days wore on, the can developed an irresistible vinegary smell. Inspiration from garbage.)
I finally demanded that a group of friends come over and help me harvest. Yeah. Tom Sawyer-style. We turned it into a groovy patio party, and everyone was required to take home a sack of pears.
Freedom, at last.
But, no.
The "spare" pear tree. Actually, it looks like two saplings, intertwined. They almost certainly sprouted from the seeds of fallen pears from the main tree. Still young, it's already bearing fruit. But it had the good manners to wait a couple of weeks, so we've only just now had to pick the tree clean.
The pears are different, somehow. Squatter. Paler. More buttery!
I'd been plotting to give the spare tree away to anyone foolish enough to dig it up, but you know what? Even after having my entire August monopolized by the big tree... I've fallen in love with the little one.
Tonight: pear tart.
UPDATE: After some discussion in the comments, I've come to believe this spare tree may be a different variety of pear, possibly Comice. Which completely baffles me, because the tree is jammed most inconveniently up against a fence, and in the shade of the main tree. Who would plant there? And why? Ah, mysteries of the over-fruited garden.

Infusion, Feh

A few years back — quite a few — I sampled a vodka at Zuni Cafe, infused in-house with chiles.
Gack.
Garbagey, vegetal, over-hot.
I say that this was quite a few years back, because I think most of us have refined and improved our infusing skills over time. They simply got it wrong then, and for all I know, it's a most delectable item nowadays. Wouldn't know. Haven't ordered it again.
I've experimented with a few infusions of my own. My biggest mistake was vodka infused with coffee beans. I simply left them in too long, and I got a very dark, very Juan Valdez drink. At the same time, rather tasty. But, too much. El muy mucho.
Fast forward a couple of years.
I'm pickling sliced jalapeño peppers.
I'm pouring a shot of Hangar One (unflavored) over ice.
I'm thinking, what if? What if?
So, yeah, I tossed in a single jalapeño slice.
OhMaGah.
The magic of alcohol is that it is able to extract flavor from additives So Fast. (Which is why I goofed with the coffee beans.)
In this case, I could immediately taste the pepper. In fact, I could taste the spices I had used to pickle the peppers.
Biggles, I'm gonna need more jalapeños.

Are You Ready for Some Nachos?

Monday Night Football begins tonight. I'm not ordinarily interested in it, but my homies are kicking off the season. Go, Niners.
I'll be the first to say that watching football should only be done via television. I've been to a few stadium games, and, dammit, there's no instant replay. You don't get that holograph-y yellow line on the field showing you where the — um — what does that yellow line show you? Something about "must get ball this far or the down was a wash."
TV gives you all these great angles. Cutting and swooshing and "OK, you, Camera 3." (That sounded pretty technical, didn't it?)
Basically, I can't understand the game unless I'm seeing it on the tube and listening to a couple of annoying hacks explain things to me.
But there's one thing you don't get when you're watching a football game at home.
Stadium Nachos.
Trust me, they're horrible. But when you're watching the game live, some lout in the seat behind you waddles down with a steaming paper tray of scary orange napalm squirted all over dead tortilla chips, and if you (and he) are lucky, he will have asked for extra jalapeños to be scattered all over this mess.
It smells so-o-o good!
I've actually succumbed to buying a tray of this crud, and regretted it.
But it smells so good!
So for tonight's game, I decided to re-create Stadium Nachos using good, local cheddar along with good, local jalapeños. The rest of the ingredients are not quite so local.
I started with a bechamel, and stirred in my cheese. Added a splash of broth for that odd liquidiness.
I toasted store-bought tortillas in the oven to make chips.
And I trotted out the newly pickled peppers.
The cheese sauce curdled. I don't know what's worse: curdled homemade cheese sauce made with nice ingredients, or that peculiar orange goo that's pumped out of industrial containers. Well, mine tasted better.
The chips were OK.
But the jalapeños? They smelled so good!

Saints Presarve Us!

I is presarvin' as fast as I kin.
Not "can."
I'm actually having second thoughts about canning, partly because I have such a small bounty that needs to be canned, and partly... {{chicken}}.
I don't use recipes, so I have no idea if the ph levels of my concoctions are legit.
And in the case of this jar of pickled peppers, I'm only making one jar. If I'd canned it properly, I would already have twisted off the lid by now, and it would have to go into the refrigerator anyway.
But I do consider this preserves. Local, with a couple of allowable little deedles in there (we Locavores call them "exceptions," and yes, it tastes exceptional).
You are looking at serranos from my back yard (the whole, little peppers) and sliced jalapeños from Meathenge Labs.
I covered them with a boiling mixture of vinegar (local), salt (uh-uh), sugar (nope), cinnamon (as if) and cardamom (yeah, right). Water from Marin County. No idea if this mixture is chemically balanced for the hot water bath, but it's yummy just the same, and who cares.
I actually nuked the whole jar for one minute to get that khaki-gray-green color you see in commercial jarred peppers. Probably didn't have to. Even so, the peppers are still crisp.
And hot. The serranos are sharing their heat with the jalapeños. Cool.
I mean hot.

Summer Soup Is Green, Part... uh, Eleventy-Seven

I keep insisting that summer soup is green and winter soup is orange.
But gazpacho is red, and I have it several times each summer.
Except today the gazpacho was green.
It wasn't technically gazpacho, of the Spanish recipe that includes bread. (Heck, it wasn't even WHITE, of the original Spanish recipe made from almonds.)
But it was chilled green tomato soup, made from ripe, green tomatoes.
So much twisted flavor in those tomatoes (Aunt Ruby's German Green) that you didn't even need to add a splash of vinegar. The additives were minced zucchini, cucumber, leek and serrano pepper.
Every Single Ingredient — except for the salt — came from my yard!

Basket Case

I started using this cute little basket to collect pears that had fallen from the tree overnight. I'd pick them up, a-tisket, a-tasket, and trot them over to a bunch of much larger baskets I was using to store the accumulated fruit, under a canopy on the patio.
Soon, the large baskets were completely filled. I rummaged in the garage for more baskets (these things seem to follow me from house to house, no matter how many I dump at Salvation Army). Successively smaller baskets were filled. Finally even this petite basket was stuffed with all the pears that would fit in it, and I had to tote the morning's pears in my uplifted T-shirt (me still wearing it, dig?) when I went on my daily rounds.
Well. {{audible sigh}}
The pears are now all off the tree. I'm not done talking about them yet, but, alas — I'm also not done talking about the little basket.
Let's just say that today the house smells like Tomato Cake. The insistent, insane aroma of roasted tomatoes.
Cranky did the work, his first time.
Cut up the tomatoes. Toss in oven dishes. Glug some oil on. Roast (375°F) for about 2½ hours, maybe less, maybe more (today's took a strangely long time). Let cool, then run the pulp through a food mill.
Tiresome, messy work. Oh, but the results! Packed into freezer bags.
Thanks, little basket, for helping us harvest.

Yard Food

I thought about it, briefly. And then I decided not to attempt the tarte Tatin-looking dish that was the crowning glory of the Pixar movie Ratatouille.
I decided not even to cook the vegetables separately, and then combine them after.
I wanted merge, moosh, munch.
So into the same pot they all went, one at a time, until a summer stew was achieved. Yes, I cooked the eggplant first and then removed it. Next the onion. The garlic. The red bell peppers. The zucchini. The tomatoes. Basil bundle. Eggplant back into the pot, and a little extra simmer time.
My recipe said "it tastes even better the next day." But we didn't want to wait. There would be plenty of leftovers for the next day, in case that was true.
It tasted GREAT the first day, because, I believe — the ingredients were so fresh and local. The only ingredients that hadn't grown in my yard were the onions, garlic and peppers (and I think I'll try planting some next year).
The next day? Softer, mellower. Not discernably "better," but soupy and nice.
The day after? Into an omelet. Mmmm.

September Eat Local Challenge

For the first two Eat Local Challenges, August in 2005 and May in 2006, I proved to be a maniac. I jumped in with my mouth wide open.
I made some mistakes, sure, and I even temporarily "resigned" from the 2006 challenge — only to get back up on my high horse. Frankly, I can be rather annoying about my local habit.
It changed my diet. It changed my cooking. It changed my shopping.
So there's really nothing much for me to accomplish this month by signing on.
Oh, wait, there is! The theme of this month's challenge is "preserving food." I have food that needs preserving, and I need to learn how to go beyond merely saving it in jars in the fridge and plastic bags in the freezer.
So I will personally take the opportunity to learn to can this month.
But I'm still not signing on.
Really, it's just too, too easy for me. I don't want to become a bore.
This morning I walked out into my backyard and "foraged" local, preserved plums.
Nano-local prunes. Lying on the ground under the tree.