Category — Recipes
Today’s Garden Twenty: Planting Peas
We planted the peas today which worked out to a nice 20 minute task. About a week ago, we’d scraped away the mulch from the soil where we intended to plant. The sun was able to warm the soil up to a pea-friendly 50 degrees F (10 degrees C) We were able to check the soil temperature with this fancy soil thermometer we got years ago with our CompostTumbler. [Read more →]
May 15, 2008 No Comments
Indoor Gardening: Bean Sprouts
Growing beans sprouts all year long is easy. The only challenge is remembering how easy it is to grown your own sprouts. We especially like to grow sprouts during the winter time.
The requirements are very simple. You’ll need a wide-mouth quart-size canning jar, a ring that fits, a piece of cheese cloth and a tablespoon of mung beans. Put the mung beans in the jar, cover with the cheese cloth and twist on the ring. (I bought a nifty little round piece of screen that works well in place of the cheese cloth.) Rinse the seeds thoroughly with cool water. Drain them well. And set them aside for 8 to 12 hours. Repeat the rinsing and draining process. That’s pretty much all you need to do. The indirect light of a kitchen window provides enough sunshine for the soon-growing seeds. 
Small sprouts will emerge usually within 24 hours. We usually let ours grow for 6 to 8 days in order to generate enough sprouts for a delicious meal of Egg Foo Yung.
Egg Foo Yung, basic recipe
• 2 cups of bean sprouts, rinsed and chopped a bit
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 6 eggs, well beaten
Combine the bean sprouts, salt and eggs in a bowl. Heat 2 Tablespoons of oil in a skillet. Fry by 1/4 cupfuls. Keep patties in shape by pushing egg back into the patty with pancake turner. When set and brown on one side, turn and brown other side. Serve hot with rice and sauce.
Variations
There are many easy variations on the basic Egg Foo Yung recipe. What we have on hand determines what else goes in. We also enjoy adding one or more of the following:
• 1/2 cup finely chopped onions or scallions
• 1/4 cup finely diced celery
• 1/2 pound of left-over ground beef, pork, chicken or shrimp. If raw, saute first and add to the egg mixture.
Sauce
We don’t care for the gravy traditionally served with Egg Foo Yung at many Chinese restaurants in the US. Instead we mix equal amounts of soy sauce, mirin, and rice wine vinegar to make a thin sauce that’s also good for dipping dumplings.
We sometimes get out of the habit of sprouting seeds. Getting back on track with sprouting beans is very easy however. It’s a great activity to do with children too because the results are very quick and pretty amazing actually. Sprouting seeds is an easy and fun way to eat something fresh and homegrown, even in winter.
January 26, 2008 No Comments
Christmas Kale and Horseradish
How fun is it to eat food from your garden on Christmas day? Preserved food is great, of course, and very do-able. The exciting thing was that we, who dwell in Zone 5, consumed FRESH produce as well.
Our first delight was horseradish sauce as an accompaniment to an impressive standing rib roast. As mentioned in an earlier post, we make two kinds of horseradish sauce to please the various palates around the table. One tangy horseradish sauce is made simply of ground horseradish root mixed with vinegar. This will keep for about 6 months in the refrigerator. We also make a creamy horseradish sauce, which is mixed with a bit of sour cream usually. We somehow managed to run out of sour cream so we substituted cream instead, and that worked just fine.
Our second delight was a kale dish, made with kale picked from our garden only minutes before preparation. I must admit that I had no idea that kale was actually that sturdy. The leaves I cut on December 25 had the same turgid structure of the kale I’d been cutting all fall.
To prepare about 2 pounds of kale, I washed the leaves and tore out the thick part of the ribs. Then I chopped the kale. In a large pot, I put one sliced onion, 2 cloves of garlic chopped, and about 3 cups of homemade chicken stock. The kale simmered for about an hour while we got the rest of our dinner together. It was really a superb dish. And we had a really lovely meal.
December 27, 2007 No Comments
Last Plant Standing: Kale
Slowly, over a very long time, I’ve grown to love kale.
We first planted it because Jim kept saying “It’s so good for you!” He already liked kale. Our most common way to serve kale in those days was stir-fried. It’s so fast and easy.
Stir-fried Kale
Wash, chop and let dry 10 or 12 leaves of kale (It will significantly shrink in the cooking process, so better to over-prepare). Mince a clove of garlic. Add a tablespoon of oil to a large pan or wok. Once the oil is hot, sauté the garlic for one minute. Then add the chopped kale. Stir-fry to coat the leaves in oil. After 3 or 4 minutes, add 1 or 2 tablespoons of soy sauce to the pan and continue to stir. Turn off the heat and cover. Let the kale steam for a few minutes before serving.
Another big plus to growing kale is that it’s a beautiful plant. It stands tall in the garden bed and adds texture and color variation. We’ve planted several varieties in the last few years, including purple kale. It’s especially lovely in the garden and it cooks up green!
Gardening rumor has it that kale tastes even better after the first frost. I’ve come to agree with that philosophy. It’s also utterly amazing to me that our kale is still standing and we are still harvesting– even in the second week of December.
Kale and Smoked Turkey
Use either smoked turkey wings or smoked turkey legs, available in the grocery store. You may not have seen them, if you haven’t looked for them, but most stores do carry them. (We’ve also used smoked ham hocks but I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.)
Put the smoked turkey into a large pot. Cover them with broth. (You can instead use water, about a quart or so.) Bring to a boil and add one chopped onion and 2 minced cloves of garlic. Partially cover and simmer for one hour.
Then add 2 pounds of washed and chopped kale. Simmer the pot for another hour. Take out the wings or legs and cool briefly so you can then remove the meat and return it to the pot.
Serve kale in bowls with some pieces of turkey and some of the liquid. We always have fresh hot corn bread as well. It’s a favorite winter meal of ours.
December 14, 2007 No Comments
Recipe: Jalapeno Potato Soup: What to do with Jalapenos #1
Many moons ago when the Internet was young, we were living in Toronto, which very well may be the Best City in the World. We discovered the joys of the World Wide Web through our cool local internet service provider, a neat group called Magic. Jim was in an intensely domestic phase at the time while he was a full-time doctoral student, and he did most of the cooking for our family and our assorted graduate student-type housemates. He collected a good number of good and unusual recipes via the magical internet and gathered them in a binder titled Hot Off the Online, which strikes me still as a good name for a cookbook.
One of our most favorite recipes from that collection is Jalapeno Potato Soup. It’s an especially tasty potato soup recipe that makes the sometimes-bland-and-boring potato soup into something extraordinary, with a touch of green and without adding unnecessary calories or fat. The original recipe was posted to a recipe exchange site by a user named Danceswithcarp (giving credit where credit is due). You’ll find our variation on that below.
JALAPENO POTATO SOUP
Ingredients:
- 1/4 pound bacon
- 2.5 pounds of potatoes, diced
- 3 cups of milk
- 3 cups of broth
- 2 cups of Jalapenos
- pepper & salt, white pepper too
- 2 tablespoons margarine
- flour to thicken
Cut the bacon into small pieces and fry until crisp. Set aside.
In a soup pot, boil the diced potatoes until done, but still firm; drain. Pour in the broth and the milk, minus 1 cup. Add the margarine and the bacon pieces. Turn this mix up no higher than medium to heat it so you don’t scorch it.
Take the Jalapenos and puree them in a blender. For ease, I usually use a cup of milk to help with the blending. Then toss the puree into the soup and stir.
Add salt and pepper to taste and add a couple to four tablespoons of flour (or cornstarch) to thicken.
You can enjoy the soup in its chunky form or puree the whole batch for a smoother soup.
Variations and other information:
- We like jalapenos. If you aren’t sure how much you or yours does, start with fewer peppers.
- You can also regulate the heat by leaving as much (for hotter) or as little (for more jalapeno flavor than heat) of the inner ribs and seeds in place as you want. The potatoes and fat from the milk and the margarine take the edge off though.
- If you like things hot and crisp, add chopped onions, celery and additional chopped jalapenos just a few minutes before serving.
Play with the soup to make it your own. It’s double warming effect is just what’s needed on a crisp fall day.
October 19, 2007 1 Comment