Posts from — April 2010

I didn’t learn to like asparagus until I was an adult.
I didn’t fall in love with asparagus until we started to grow it in our garden.

Enjoying the first asparagus of the season is like falling in love all over again.

Although we can assert that homegrown vegetables served right out of the garden are superior to anything purchased elsewhere, eating fresh homegrown asparagus is a very different experience than store-bought asparagus. The taste is far sweeter. The stalks are so tender– not a hint of fibrousness. We had a hard time not making yummy noises with every bite.

Shortly after we put in our asparagus bed, we purchased an asparagus steam pot. I’m not sure where we bought it (I’ll check with Jim), but since we tend to buy things on sale, we probably did that. Ours isn’t a major brand pot but it looks exactly like this:

There’s a side to me that thinks, oh, we could have lived without this pot. The smarter, more experienced side of me values the pot for what it is: the perfect tool for the job. The stalks come out tender without drying out the tips. To prepare asparagus, I put about an inch of water in the bottom of the pot, remove the steamer basket, and set to boil.

A quick dash to the garden with a sharp knife in hand yields a good handful of a couple dozen stalks. I prefer to cut off the stalks near ground level.

My next preparation step comes via my friend Amy, probably from a conversation 20 years ago. We learned to cook together, sharing our wisdom and puzzling over cookbooks to discover how to make the best blueberry jam and finding out that homemade croissants were an awful lot of work for very little bang. She told me that you bend along the stalk from the tip end and snap off the asparagus stalk at the spot where you meet resistance; that way you get the tender part of the stalk, not the more fibrous, less delicious part. It always works for me.

The snapped stalks go into the steamer basket, and then I run them under cold water to clean them off. Our plants have no spray or chemicals, so I’m just getting off any dirt or debris. Then into the pot. I cook them for 4 or 5 minutes tops, and then we enjoy every bite.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not noticing a lot of change yet in the compostable Sun Chip bag as of Day 31.

Still, decomposition is a slow process so I suppose patience is in order. Furthermore, we are just getting into “Real Spring” here in Michigan, and the temperatures are just beginning to get into the realm of nice weather with any regularity. When the weather heats up, so does the compost pile.

I also have to take into consideration the fact that my pulling back the compost to peek at the bag probably doesn’t speed up the process either. I do try to rake back the “older” compost to have contact with the bag rather than just putting the fresh kitchen waste on the top.

I’ll keep checking back and updating with posts and pictures.

Here’s a particularly gooey compost pile picture with the Sun Chips Compostable Bag.

We’re 2.5 weeks into the Sun Chips Compostable Bag experiment . Our compost pile is definitely heating up with the change in weather and temperature. There’s noticeable compaction in the last month; before the end of the frosty season, the contents of the container reached right up to the top. Now there’s about 4 or 5 inches of space. We’ve also been adding kitchen scraps very regularly since the trek to the back of the yard is an easy one in the lovely spring weather.

I’m not sure how to access the breakdown of the bag so I’m playing it by ear. It doesn’t look different yet, but perhaps the material is less crinkly? Maybe I’m imaging it. If compostable chip bags wore t-shirts, this one would be appropriate.

Last Saturday when Jim returned around 10:00 a.m. from a morning errand, he predicted a warm and sunny day would follow. It would be a day, he declared, worth getting out the solar cookers. In 2008, we experimented with solar-cooking on fairly regular basis; last summer, we didn’t make nearly as many solar-cooked dishes. Lately, we’ve been talking about our plans for the garden and the summer, and we both agreed that we should further explore solar cookery. So there we had it: the dare had been made. I’m sporting. I’m game. I foraged around in the kitchen to see if I could come up with a meal’s worth of solar-cooked food.

I decided on making three dishes for dinner: a baked spinach, savory grains, and an apple dessert. Here are the recipes I followed.

Spinach Bake 2

10 ounces frozen spinach, defrosted and drained
2 Tablespoons Flax seed
2 Tablespoons Blue cheese, crumbled
1 whole egg
1/3 cup of egg whites
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 white pepper

Mix together. Lightly spray a cooking pan and place mixture in it.

Savory Grains

1 cup kamut
3 cups homemade broth

Stirred together in a pot.

Apple Crisp

3 Apples, peeled, cored and sliced
1 Tablespoon Sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Mix together and place in the bottom of a pre-cooking sprayed pan

1 cup Oatmeal
1/2 plain yogurt, homemade
1/4 cup Brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 freshly grated nutmeg

Mix together. Gently drop on top of apple mixture and spread to form an even layer.

The apple crisp and the spinach bake went into the solar box cooker. I placed the grains on the easily assembled solar windshield cooker. Out of curiosity, I placed a thermometer in the box cooker as well. Then I went about my business for the next 5 hours. I peeked in the solar box cooker occasionally and enjoyed reporting the temperature to Jim while we worked in the yard. It reached temperatures above 150 degrees F for a couple hours.

As we readied for dinner around 4pm, we decided that the grains just hadn’t had long enough to cook. It may have been that I used an unnecessarily large pot to cook a grain that I actually haven’t had a lot of experience with. No big deal– we refrigerated those to finish and enjoy with another meal. (Updated note: For Tuesday’s supper, I simmered them for half an hour more, and they were very good with our meal.)

Two out of three dishes turned out quite well. We enjoyed them with some salmon patties. The spinach bake was creamy and delicious. The apple crisp was yummy and fragrant. I appreciated how the apples were tender and thoroughly cooked, but not mushy.

It’s only March so we have many more sunny months to get reacquainted with the solar cookers. Jim has plans to make a detailed post about the construction of the box solar cooker since we realized recently that it is not something we’ve blogged about here. All summer long, we’ll be posting recipes, suggestions, and encouragement to give solar cooking a try. Solar cooking is a winner in terms of energy conservation, both in using the free energy of the sun to cook and also not heating up the house in the summer. Solar cooking is also an easy, low fuss and quite fun adventure.