B O O ! (Or, Boo-hoo)

This is Bean Sprout in his chili pepper costume.
Bean Sprout is ashamed of this photo, which he morbidly still remembers, even though it was taken a long, long time ago.
Much to Bean Sprout's delight and mental well-being, he has outgrown the costume (but I still have it, which is... scary!).

In unrelated news, the SF Chronicle's wine section today had a small article about a French Camembert, imported by affineur Hervé Mons and available only at Whole Foods. The writer raved so much about its heady mushroominess that I sent Cranky to the store at opening time. He's not back yet, so I don't know if I got a trick or a treat.

Painterly Food

So, right after Cranky got his meat dinner, we had this gentle dish of "pretty" the next day.
Cranky cooked it. He is my favorite wife.
Pretty food really rocks my world.
I don't mean over-pretty food, like decorated cakes and sculpted melons and carved radishes. Sheesh, too much handling of the edibles, if you know what I mean.
I mean pretty food that just happens, because the ingredients are so... pretty!
This dish was a hybrid salad. Served kind of room-temp. Dressed with oil, salt, yadda.
The ingredients were pretty cherry tomatoes, parsley, adorable noodles (tubetti? no, ditalini), and LOL-able cute purple cranberry beans, shelled fresh and cooked just right.

Sometimes There's Meat

Poor dude. Cranky. Gots to have some animal protein every so often, so I agreed to a ribeye steak. Two.
The reason I was interested in the steak was that we had some leftover Andante herbed goat cheese, and I thought I'd love that melted over a slab of beef.
The cheese was a little too herby for my enjoyment on mere bread and crackers, but a hunk of charred meat likes some vegetation. And: Remember those anachronistic "upscale" hamburgers from the '70s with a wad of bleu cheese in the center? So this made sense, in a goofy way.
It was really too much meat for me, but... that's just me.
The best part is that Cranky allowed me to say when the steaks were done cooking. I've learned the trick about pinching the meat to see how resistant it is. Soft: raw. Firm: overdone.
This time I just used the tongs to press into them, and made a snap decision. At the right moment.
Done.
To my liking.
The steaks were beautifully, unimaginably mahoganized on the outside. And completely pink, throughout, on the inside.
OK, a little tough. But it's grass-fed beef and I'm a fan of the producer.
So there are leftovers.
(Beef Stroganoff!)

Saving Summer

My pal Zoomie is tickled that we bloggers get ideas from people we've never met in meatspace. I am too. And the fun thing is, this post is about me being inspired by the same blogger who turned Zoomie on, DancingMorganMouse.
Zoomie made apple jelly (yum!) from her crabby apples, because Morgan suggested it.
I made pickled yellow summer squash... because Morgan suggested it.
I haven't tasted Zoomie's jelly (yet!! hint-hint) but I can tell you that the pickled squash is SUMMER IN A JAR.
Oh, sorry. Was I yelling?
I tossed these little immature babies into a load of leftover brine from home-pickled jalapeños. Only a few days later, they were CAPTURED SUNSHINE.
Oh, sorry. Was I yelling?

How to Complicate a Tomata

A few years ago, when I was new to blogging, I remember saying that I hated cooking my babies. My tomatoes.
Yeah! BLTs all the time. Gazpacho. Raw.
And yet, now that I'm growing 'maters in good numbers, I know I need to cook some of them. I make sauce for freezing. I even cook them into — gasp — recipes.
But I'm still partial to raw tomatoes.
I just usually try not to overfancy them.
Today we ate an overfancy salad of raw tomatoes.
But. Jeez. You grow years of tomatoes, and you finally say: Make it different!
Here you go. Three, no, four kinds of tomatoes. Oregano and parsley leaves. Peeled cukes. Red onion. Shaved dry jack cheese. Salt. Olive oil. Thinly sliced jalapeños (which, sadly, did not show up in the photo).
OKAY?
(Not even bragging about how much of this was home-grown.)

Not Sweet. Sweet!

These are cute. Probably cuter in real life than in this dumb photo.
We call them muffin galettes, and they are made with purchased puff pastry and a medley of backyard fruits.
Some of the backyard fruit didn't come from my own backyard, but I am lucky to be friends with Mr. and Mrs. Married... With Dinner, who have a Santa Rosa plum tree that went plentiful on them this summer.
The Marrieds made up a batch of plum conserve with citrus and walnuts. Oh gosh. Yahoo.
Mr. and Mrs. Crumb have a plum tree of our own (green gage), and we allowed it to develop prunes. The sun and wind, they are great collaborators. We didn't have much say in it.
And, we have that damn pear tree, which was supposed to be all finished by the end of August. But by October we still had four deteriorating specimens in the fridge, all ready to give their lives to this easy, nice dessert.
See, I don't really even like dessert.
And that's how we constructed these muffin galettes: With the addition of no sugar, no cream, no vanilla. I allowed a bit of melted butter to brush the tops of the pastry. And I crumbled in a trace, a mere smidge, of dried lavender buds. It failed to achieve the flavor of soapiness, which was our goal. Soap failure accomplished, yeah. Instead, it just tasted like... cinnamon? But barely.
I would do this again. I might not call it dessert.
In fact, I ate a couple of them for lunch yesterday.

All My Food Tastes Like Tomatoes Now

Finally, the tomato plants are doing their darnedest to finish up.
Which means we have a lot of incoming. We roast some for sauce, we eat some salted for fresh salad, we toss some into minestrone.
Today we performed a "dry" minestrone. Technically, it's a braise. Not too much liquid, though.
It's based on an old recipe from Deborah Madison, one we've made so many times we don't even look at the book anymore. Shoot, I forgot to throw in a bay leaf today. No matter; we had sage and oregano from the garden.
It's still October, so I get to brag that everything in this dish, including possibly even the salt, was local. But that's not the point.
The point is that this was a perfectly seasonal meal, made with lovingly grown vegetables.
It is simple, tasty, satisfying, roasted in the oven at (sigh) 350 for as long as it takes.
A splurt of olive oil
Cherry tomatoes
Small potatoes
Zucchini
Yellow crookneck squash
Mild chile peppers
Onions
Carrots
Peas (OMG; still fresh from Iacoppi Farms)
Fresh cranberry shelling beans (slightly precooked)
Vegetable stock
Herbs, salt, yadda (including ground homegrown hottish chile pepper)

It Was Either This or Gazpacho

This time of year, I don't know if I should be eating warm-weather food or cool-weather food.
It's still a little warm in my neck of the woods, but it's decidedly cooling off.
So here's this amphibious dish: Minestrone. It's a hot soup, but it's made with summer produce, much of it backyard-grown.
Worked just fine for me.
Roasted tomato chunks
Zucchini pieces
Onion bits
Mild green pepper squares
Great Northern beans
Vegetable stock
Non-local pastina (bonus: star-shaped)
Herbs, salt, yadda
Cook, sprinkle with parm-redge, eat.

I Can't Make This Stuff Up

Chef Who Stabbed, Seasoned Victim Guilty of Murder

No, he didn't stab a seasoned victim. He stabbed him, then seasoned him.
Might have cooked him up a little, and chewed on him.

Garden Emergency

This is not eye-bleedingly wonderful. It's just nice. Really nice.
I have an ambitious yellow crookneck squash plant, and I'm tired of thinking up recipes for using it. We've sauteed it over a charcoal grill. We've made soup. We've pickled it (good!).
The other day I dreamed up a simple, simplistic recipe for squash pudding. Not sweet; you know me.
Something fluffy, fragrant, kinda pure. When you have lots of squash to eat, you shouldn't be looking for recipes that dilute the squash. Eat the squash.
Here's what I'm proud about: I made up a recipe, without consulting cookbooks at all. I invented a grated squash "bake" that I really liked.
This is not a recipe blog, so sorry.
But! Grate and salt some yellow summer squash (you might need to remove the seeds if it has grown really large). Squeeze out the liquid if you like; I probably shouldn't have. Saute some diced onion and fresh mild chiles. Chop the kernels off an ear of corn. Mix a beaten egg with a spoonful or two of sour cream. Toss this all together with a handful of grated cheese and a little dried chile pepper if you like. This is the best part: Toast a little bread, lightly. Chop it into pieces, smallish. Mix this into the mix.
Then bake it in a buttered dish at 350ºF (always 350), until it's done. Forty-five minutes.
The bread chunks prop up the rest of the mixture, so you have a light, savory mess, kinda bread pudding; kinda not.
Not eye-bleedingly good, but I was wild about it.

To Stuffed Peppers and Beyond!

When I started participating in the early Eat Local Challenges, I found myself gravitating toward a New World diet. It seemed natural to eat what my California ancestors ate.
I'm not going the elk/otter/acorn route (yet — we'll see how the economy holds up), but I've been enjoying a kind of rancho repertoire. Father Junípero Serra would love to eat at my house these days.
Yesterday yielded this beautiful roasted pepper, filled with beans, tomatoes, onions and cheese. It's perched on a spray of sauteed corn kernels.

Attsa Spicy Tomata!

Did you know you can grow San Marzano tomatoes at home?
I didn't know. Until this year.
In April, I became aware of a seedling sale conducted by Marin County Master Gardeners.
They had all kinds, including some with adorably cute names like Mortgage Lifter (it failed utterly; harbinger of the subprime meltdown?) and Boxcar Willie (it's doing OK, it's safe but is not interesting). The Chocolate Cherry was totally cool — plump, brown tomatoes the size of an egg yolk; juicy and sweet. The Sungolds were their usual: reliable, early, prolific, sweet, dull.
But we were astounded that we could plant San Marzanos, the vaunted Italian plum tomato of legend.
Is it true to Italian San Marzanos? I don't know. I have never plopped down three dollars for a can of them (and besides, I'm off canned tomatoes entirely).
But we have roasted several of them and made sauce. It's dreamy, creamy. Superb. Tart. Sweet. Smooth. It's in the freezer for now. There are still several tomatoes on the vine that we HOPE will ripen before the days get too short.
Look at that seductive little character.

Back on the Local Wagon

Cranky's Cousin Steve came over for dinner. He's visiting California on business, but it's always great to put in some good family time together.
I don't know if Steve realized it, but we served him a dinner of entirely local — Bay Area local — food. Backyard tomatoes, onions from the garden, beans from Tracy, chicken from Marin County, cheese from Northern California.
We made a pot of white chili. Mild, sure, but flavorful and rich.
I'm not going to yammer on about the food. I just want to say that we topped the chili with ultra-thin slices of fresh jalapeños from the yard. Not very not, but crisp and green. A really nice garnish.
I think I can quit pickling all the jalapeños as they grow large now. I'll spend the rest of the season eating them raw.

Insanity, I Tell You

This time of year, I need to be consuming the produce that is bouncing out of the backyard. Squash, eggplant, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers. Not to mention all the fruit we collected and sorta semi preserved but still needs to be eaten, pronto.
But. Do you ever look at Tastespotting? I know. You do. All the time.
Oh, those gorgeous photos, better than any I could take. And those wondrous dishes from all over the world, some deeply complicated and some as simple as a plate of flavored noodles. They have nothing to do with my backyard problem. But they are beautifully seductive.
Yeah, I crumpled. I weakened. I jumped so far off the eat-local chart they should put me in permanent detention.
See, it was this picture of pretty brown spaghetti. The pasta was tinted by whatever concoction it had been stirred with. And the concoction was... butter and Bovril.
Help. I have only recently become enamored of Marmite. Before that, I had tasted a bit of Vegemite from a tiny gift jar, a joke present from my brother-in-law after his trip to Australia. (I think I was the only recipient of his gag gifts who actually wanted to eat it.) Now, at the risk of offending my friend who turned me on to Marmite, I have fallen under the spell of Bovril. It's — different. A little meaty. Smooth and mellow.
We almost didn't buy the Bovril for this dish, thinking Marmite would do the job, but our local store carries it, and, and, and... Whew.
OK. The "recipe" (you know I don't follow recipes) came from the charming ChickyEgg, a resident of Malaysia whose English is so CUTE. She totally talked me into trying it, grammatical innovations and all.
So, yeah, when you're using Bovril for the first time, you should probably follow the rules. I totally agree with ChickyEgg that one teaspoon of Bovril per serving is just right.
I also agree that the minced parsley topping is inevitable. I thought it was just for looks, but munching the taste of umami with sprightly crunches of chlorophyll was heaven. I woke up the next morning wanting more.
Yes, I loved it.
Loved it.

The Many-Headed Hydra

This is my first time growing yellow crookneck squash. Last summer we had an overload of zucchini, so we restricted our planting this year to one zuke, and added one crook.
The season began gently enough. We pulled summer squash off the vine while they were still young and small. Don't want any of those huge green cudgels out there (although one or two biggies did sneak in).
Then the crookneck plant began a strange growth surge. Instead of growing upward and bushy, it proceeded to march across the lawn in an ever-lengthening ooze. Robust, yes, but charging into the southern sun, like a platoon of stiff-legged North Korean marching soldiers.
And it developed a most unusual flower cluster. More than one flower cluster, actually. This thing was popping out babies like the Queen Ant in the Hive of Hell. Most of the babies stayed oddly small, so we didn't panic. In fact, we ignored the thing.
In so doing, we accidentally allowed a couple of yellow cudgels to develop. (There's one in the lower right of the photo, under the leaf.)
You can't really tell from looking at the pic how bizarre it is. With the naked eye and a biologically correct swiveling neck, you can take it all in: There are literally bouquets of baby squash squirting out of this plant.
I don't know what we're going to do about them all. But October is Eat Local Challenge 2008.
I'm sure the squash would be delicious with cherry tomatoes.
Good thing we have a few of those, too.

Can I Call Ya Stupid?

She read her cue cards. That's all she did.
She avoided answering direct questions (did you catch that acrobatic squirm-away from the bankruptcy loophole issue, which she goofed up anyway by saying she's not with McCain on it?).
She got things plain, palin wrong.
But she's pretty. Perky.
And she winked! Too many times! (Psst, Sarah: one time is too many.)
I was kinda hoping for a meltdown, I admit. A faceplant. A major Baked Alaska.
All we got was some bimbo reading from her cue cards.
You betcha.

UPDATE: Hilarious Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart.

Sarah, Palin and Tall

I can't WAIT to watch the vice-presidential debate tonight. It's all I can think about.
Thank you, John McCain, for bringing us a comedic character worthy of SNL.

(What? That's not a photo of Sarah Palin?)