"Alot" Is Not Aword

Thank you very much.

Long Tall Sallium

I've had my eye on this one tall leek plant in the garden.
It was supposed to be a whole bed of leeks, but the guy who sold us the seedlings made a mistake.
That's OK; it would have been too many leeks. Which reminds me of the comment my mom made the first time I planted a bed of leeks: "That's going to be an awful lot of vichyssoise!"
I assured her that you could eat leeks in many other dishes that didn't have fancy French names for humble peasant fare. I mean, leek and potato soup? How fancy is that?
Even so, the humble fare today was indeed vichyssoise.
I won't bother to tell you how easy it was to cook. No recipe. Just the fresh veggies, some stellar vegetable stock made from cilantro and pea pods, and a sinful glug of cream. Take that, humble peasants! (Oh, you have your own dairy cow? Pardonnez moi. Je suis jalouse.)
After the blending, I wanted to amp up the allium flavor, so I raided the now-flowering chive bed (might as well put the would-be "leeks" to some use), and topped the soup with spring colors.
Because it is still spring, and it is still soup season.

Soup Season

I know. We're in a mini heat wave here in the Bay Area, and all I can eat is soup.
It slides down inoffensively.
It nourishes.
It tastes pretty good, even the stuff from cans.
I have two sickbed soups. When I'm arfy-barfy sneezy sick, I go for canned Campbell's chicken and noodle.
When I'm mentally crippled, I go for Snow's Clam Chowder.
I'm in a Snow's phase right now.
Pardon me for not blogging.
Your comments are always welcome, though. I love to gab, as long as I don't have to think.

Green Grows the Garlic Soup

Green garlic.
The first time I bought some at the farmers market, I thought I had been gypped. I thought I'd been sold a couple of baby leeks.
But.
OMG. That stuff is vivid, potent, insistent.
I bought some more this spring.
To tame it, I cut a couple of stalks into fine dice and cooked them, first in olive oil, and then in a pint of added chicken stock (which is very nicely seasoned with herbs). But they were still very, very garlicky.
(What's not to like?)
I cut up a potato into little bits and added them to the garlicky chicken stock, with copious sprinklings of salt and freshly cracked pepper. (I soaked the potato bits in water while I was cooking the garlic into softness, and some of the soaking water ended up in the soup. This is OK.)
Pretty simple so far.
Finishing touch, only because I have them growing in a pot outside: chiffonade of sorrel leaves. It turns brown pretty quickly in the hot broth, and because I am a klutz photographer, you only get to see a little remaining green. But tasty.
Cranky cried, it was so good.
He kept referencing the Spanish restaurant he liked to visit in Cambridge when he was a debonair college freshman.
I think it was even better. It was local.

Eternal Spring Hopes

Wishing you a serene Sunday.
I hope you found all your candy.
And here's hoping the driving will be smooth; we should be arriving at our destination in Southern California this afternoon.
After a quick visit, we'll take the slow route back home.
See you in a few days. In the meantime, I won't be moderating comments, so just look at the funny picture and move on to the next yummy blog.
Pax.

April Flowers Bring Pear Showers

The pear tree is draped in white, as if wearing a frilly wedding dress.
Even while petals are dropping in the rain and wind, new blossoms are opening to take their place.
That is one prolific tree.
I never did get around to pruning it during the winter, and I have a good reason. The best time to prune a pear tree is when it's too horribly rainy and yucky to go out and stand on a wobbly ladder with inconsequential clippers. So I didn't.
That means the tree will be overloaded with fruit again this year. Last summer a loaded branch broke off and landed on my head. We're looking for a reprise of the cranium crackage, but I'm hoping the head this time will be Cranky's. (Because the booger laughed at me.)
We can already see tiny baby pears beginning to form. In about a month they will already be too big to slip an empty bottle over, to wire in place and wait for the pear to grow inside. For making that pootie eau de vie. So I won't be doing that, either.
I guess there's a lot I won't be doing, but I know for sure what I will be doing. Later on, in the summer.
For now, I'm just going to enjoy looking at the pretty, prolific tree. Holding my breath.

Cauliflowers

I think I'm a clever forager, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to eat the blossoms that developed when the broccoli and cauliflower quit producing food and started trying to reproduce. I.e., make seeds. Have babies.
It all begins with some of the leftover vegetables bolting into fertility. We had harvested all the edible chunks, so these flowers came from dinky shoots, really, that we didn't even bother with. Nature's way.
However, Anna tells us that eating the flowers of your brassica can be delightful, provided you do your tactile homework first, and determine whether the stems are edible, too. (They're not. Too wooden.)
So you'd think I had saved these babies and whipped up a pretty salad, or a soup or quesadillas or, or, or...
But no.
Cranky removed the tired brassica from the yard the other day, and it didn't even cross my mind that I should have stripped the flowers off first.
Oh, well. The compost pile is happy.
And pretty.

Behold the Lamb

There has been a delay in my travel plans.
It's rainy.
I don't want to drive 500 miles-plus (with a dog) while it's raining, no.
So we're planning on a Friday getaway; maybe Saturday.
Which meant that we had a day (today) to hang out in the kitchen.
Not too much hanging out. After the initial preparations, you just set the lamb shanks and their aromatics and liquids on the stovetop to simmer, and walk away. Until fally aparty. The lamb, not you. Though I feel a little fally aparty myself.
Partway through the cooking, you set up a mini crockpot to cook some polenta. Again, you just walk away and wait.
And then you eat. Well, you take a picture first.

SAD NOTE: I am being attacked by a huge proliferation of comment spam, in Chinese. What's the point? I can't read it. Is somebody using my blog to communicate with Klaatu? Well, knock it off.
I tried not accepting anonymous comments, but the Chinese spammer immediately used a registered name. Wish I knew how to block him. (Ideas?)
For now, I've activated comment moderation. Sorry.

We Are Growing Sugar

Last year I sat on the patio and looked at all the fruit and vegetables we were raising in the back yard.
The fruit is sweet, of course.
And the vegetables are, too. Not icky sweet, but happycrazy homegrown sweet. They still tasted like tomatoes, cukes, whatever they were supposed to be. But sweet.
And I said to Cranky, "We are growing sugar."
We are growing minerals and fiber and vitamins, too, but they all taste sweet.
It can't be helped.
This blossom is on the green gage plum tree. Even the blossoms smell sweet.
The plums will arrive in the summer, but for now, we are working on finishing up the prunes we dried last year.
How's this for an idea? Slow simmered wheat berries cooked with pitted, chopped prunes. For breakfast. Add yogurt if you want.
Sweet.

Dirty Fingernails

We won't be planting our summer vegetable garden for a couple more weeks, but there are still a few surviving plants out there, and loads of weeding that needs to be done.
So, yes, I am gardening. I have dirt under my fingernails (which is nothing new, but this is real garden dirt, not just accumulated, unwashed crud).
The onions that reseeded themselves from last year's crop are going great guns. We also put in what we thought were some leeks last year, but all but one turned out to be chives or... well, I'm not sure yet. A couple of them have developed pink seed heads.
That one leek in the garden is getting bigger and bigger. If it survives our time away from home, I'm looking forward to something soupy and leeky later this month. (There's green garlic in the fridge; fingers crossed it lasts.)
This photo is the end of the broccoli. It is trying to go to seed, but to do so, it must go through the blooming stage. It has been a tight, beautiful gnarl for some days now; not sure if it knows what flowering means.
I guess I'll find out when we get back.
We take off Tuesday; I might get in another garden pic or two before then.

Dream Sipple

OK, I fooled you with mashed potato ice cream the other day, but this is the real thing.
A week or so ago, there was a story in the NYT food section about a couple of writers taking a challenge to put on a dinner for six (or was it eight?) for $50. I wasn't terribly interested in any of their solutions, except for this brilliant dessert.
Simplicity itself, it consists of three ingredients, no mixing, just plunk and eat. Do offer a straw with the spoon.
First, drop a scoop of vanilla ice cream in a glass. Come on, good vanilla ice cream. Mine wasn't homemade, but it was made less than a mile from my home with local cream.
Next, pour half a cup of tangerine juice over the ice cream. I was able to substitute orange juice, because the juice from my backyard oranges is mild and tender and honeyed. You don't want that piercing Sunkist taste.
Finally spritz sparkling water on top of it all. As much as you like, but don't be too generous.
I stirred and sipped; Cranky used his spoon and gobbled.
Either way, you are getting liquid Creamsicle.
(YES, we still have Thin Mints!)

April Food Day!

There's a little spring chill in the air most days, but some afternoons it really does get warm enough for a chocolate ice cream sundae.
The ingredients are all local, except for the syrup.
You are looking at, from the bottom of the bowl up, a scoop of mashed potatoes squizzled with a drizzle of Bovril, and topped with a dollop of sour cream.
Even though this abomination was stagecrafted for the photo, we decided to taste it anyway after the shoot. Shoot! It was pretty tasty, even at room temperature.
So we heated up the remaining mashed potatoes for supper last night and dosed them with Bovril and sour cream, exactamundo. No need to get creative when you've inadvertently invented something good.
Would you believe that I'm not fooling if I say it was yummy?

PS: I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO LINK TO THIS SITE, SUPPORTING PROGRAMS THAT FIGHT HUNGER IN THE US.