Ginger

I had a large piece of ginger left from the ginger pie (with ginger whipped cream*) thatI made for Christmas, so I decided to play around with it and made honey-candied ginger, pickled ginger, crystallized ginger, and ginger syrup (another "waste not" recipe!)

The honey ginger is the winner.

Ginger Syrup
2 cups water
ginger peels from the other recipes
about 2 cups ginger "stock" from making the candy and pickles

1 1/2 cups sugar
juice of 1/4 lemon
lemon zest
pinch of salt

Make 1 more cup of "stock" by boiling the ginger peels in the water; turn heat to simmer and continue to cook until it is reduced by half. Add to the stock from the other recipes. Add the remaining ingredients and heat until the sugar is completely melted. Continue to simmer until the syrup is reduced by a third to half (depending on how thick a syrup you want). You should end up with about 2 cups of syrup.

Use as pancake syrup, or to flavor tea, cocktails, or sparkling water.

*Ginger whipped cream
1 cup heavy cream
2 T powdered sugar
1/2 t vanilla
1/4 cup ginger liqueur

In a small bowl, whip the cream until it starts to thicken. Add the remaining ingredients and continue to beat until stiff, about 3-5 minutes.  For best results, put the bowl and the beaters in the freezer for at least 3 hours before hand.

Weeds

I think weeding is probably the garden task I spend the least amount of time on.

For annuals and veggies, I always mark where I’ve put seeds. With large seeds like beans or squash I mark each seed individually, smaller seeds I mark out the area. Tiny seeds like lettuce and carrot are going to be immediately obvious as desirables because you’ll have tons of tiny identical seedlings, all the same size coming up at exactly the same time. The “weeds” in these squares, beds or rows are the ones that look different.

The thing with weeds is that they won’t grow where they aren’t welcome. In a mature vegetable garden, one that’s been weeded, planted and amended for years, you simply won’t have much of a problem with extraneous plants, because you’ll never have let the undesirables go to seed in these beds. In perennial/ornamental beds, your plants should provide enough ground coverage and shade that the opportunistic weeds will just have too much trouble grabbing hold. Even lawn will need only minimal weeding, without chemicals, if you properly aerate, mow and reseed.

If you are amending your soil and avoiding compaction, weeds are easy to remove, because you’re not fighting the texture. You can let them get large enough to ID (a few inches) and still have time to pull them before they either develop a monster taproot, or go to seed. I have accidentally pulled plants that I thought were weeds, later realizing that they were cultivars, but you know what? No biggie, shit happens. You’re unlikely to accidentally pull something really mature, because first, you’ll remember it, and second, it’ll look big and important so you’re unlikely to pull it without thinking twice.

Not all weeds are undesirable, just as not all cultivars are good. I happily let the wild onions go crazy, and the lambs quarters, but I’d give anything to be able to get rid of the ground phlox, Queen Annes Lace and Knotweed that some idiot planted in our neighborhood on purpose.


Lemon-lavender syrup
3 lemons
1/4 cup dried lavendar flowers
2 cups water
1 1/2 cups sugar

Ream the lemons-- get as much of the juice and pulp as you can-- into a small sauce pan. Dump everything else in there too and bring to a boil. Turn heat down to a simmer, and reduce to 2 cups, about 10-15 minutes.

I ate that on purpose

Unprocessed. Real Food. Slow food. Locavore.

Every time you turn around these days, there's a new term about getting away from the American industrialized, depersonalized, outsourced food culture. Now on my third food challenge, I think that Michael Pollan actually said it best (that's why they pay him the big bucks).

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

The main thing I take away from these efforts--all of them personally and culturally challenging, mostly well meaning, in varying degrees sensible--is that what you need to do is think about what you are eating.

When I was growing up in the middle of the last century, you didn't have to think about it. The food you bought, even in suburban supermarkets, was what it said it was. It had a shelf life and a source, which was mostly nearby. Importing food was something that starving Indians (as in subcontinent) did. Even as a child I knew which fruits were in season, not because I looked up a chart, but because if it wasn't in season, you couldn't buy it. No one ever got salmonella poisoning, and E. Coli was something you learned about in high school biology. Meat was meat colored, not that bizarre bright red (how do they do that, and why?). Chickens came with innards. Fruits did not have individual labels, and the butcher packed your meat in paper, even at the supermarket (yes, Virginia, there were butchers at the supermarket). You could buy only the amount you needed, and exactly the amount you needed, because they cut it on the premises. I got to Junior year in college before I knew that you could buy French fries frozen in a bag.

Because of this, I am able to "think" about food. I have clear memories of what it looks like, when it's naturally available, and how it tastes. My mother had to cook, because the prepared food industry was just getting started ("Prince spaghetti day", anyone?).

Younger generations don't have this advantage. You are rediscovering what I grew up understanding, perhaps the last generation to do so. I'm not saying there were no processed foods; we had spam and cake mixes and tv dinners and every day there was a new "convenience" product. But families eating meals cooked from whole ingredients was the norm, not the outlier.

For the way I live and eat, I think the "slow" approach works best-- seasonal, local, organic, whole. It gives you flexibility--can't find or afford organic? Buy it from the local mom-and-pop, instead of the super store (on the "3 outta 4 ain't bad" theory). What works about it, and all the other monikers, is that they make you think about what you're putting into your and your family's bodies.

Unprocessed. Real Food. Slow food. Locavore.

Call it deliberate eating.

Pumpkin Caramel syrup
1 c. brown sugar (or 1 cup evaporated cane sugar mixed with 2T of molasses)
1-2 T water
1 tsp white vinegar
2 tbsp. butter
1/2 cup pumpkin puree
1/2 c. cream
1 tbsp. cornstarch
1T homemade pumpkin pie spice (ground cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, in 4:2:1:1 ratio)

Put the brown sugar in a heavy-bottom saucepan, adding just enough water to make it the consistency of wet sand. Turn on the heat to medium and add the vinegar. This will keep the sugar from recrystalizing. Boil for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Add the pumpkin puree and spices and reheat to just short of boiling. Add the butter and continue to simmer until the butter is completely melted. Dissolve the cornstarch in the cream, then add it to the sugar-pumpkin mix and bring it back to a boil. Cool several hours in refrigerator or overnight.

Syrup will thicken and set in the fridge. To get back to pouring consistency, put the amount you need in the microwave, or reheat on the stove top.

Use for pumpkin caramel lattes, or as a sauce for ice cream, scones or apple pie!

Barter

I tried to hire a graphic designer friend recently to design a new logo for my fundraising consulting business. She designed the logo all right, but she wouldn't let me pay her. Her exact words were "I'll work for fresh-picked corn."

In the end, we weren't able to connect with the fresh corn, but I took her 10 pounds of fresh and home-preserved produce yesterday-- garlic bulbs, herbs, black bell peppers, a huge zucchini, tomatoes, carrots, chard, pickles and peach chutney, all packed in a mini picnic basket. (I'm kicking myself for not taking a picture, because it was gorgeous.)

Using garden produce and home preserves as gifts is an honored tradition of the crunchy set, but bartering for services goes back even farther. Paying the doctor with a chicken is a cliche of American mythology, and of course barter is the basis of the entire concept of commerce. We still barter in everyday life, because of our cultural decision to honor the collective delusion that paper money has value.

Most of my seeds this year were from barter too, otherwise known as seed swapping. It's THE best way to make new friends if you're a gardener. I think pretty much every new gardening friends I've made in the past two years (see my blog list!) I met through seed swapping.

What have you bartered your garden bounty for this year?

Homemade chocolate syrup
originally from The Tightwad Gazette via the blog Small Notebook for a Simple Home. Text is verbatim.

½ cup cocoa powder
1 cup water
2 cups sugar
⅛ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon vanilla

Mix the cocoa powder and the water in a saucepan. Heat and stir to dissolve the cocoa. Add the sugar, and stir to dissolve. Boil for 3 minutes over medium heat. Be careful not to let it get too hot and boil over! Add the salt and the vanilla. Let cool. Pour into a clean glass jar, and store in the refrigerator. Keeps for several months, but trust me it will be gone before then. Yields two cups.

So many challenges

I really need to find a way to make this blogging thing pay. It's taking up all my time. And the reason is: challenges.

Let’s Get Real! Food Challenge. Growing Challenge. Project GROW. And they all want their posts on Sundays.

So one challenge per post, and apologies for three posts (maybe four, also going to Chicago Flower and Garden Show) in one day. Current plan is an appropriate recipe for each one, but we'll see how I feel when I get to #3.

Let’s Get Real! is an incredible challenge, taken to its extreme. With the premise of minimizing packaging and food miles, in the three days since starting just the research (forget the actual eating), I have discovered that, despite living 50 miles south of the dairy heartland of America, most of the dairy products at the chain grocery stores come from places like California. (Can't buy the most ecologically correct brand, because I don't want to fund the on-going political career of the conservative wingnut who owns it.) They're just packaged in Wisconsin. WTF. No wonder my milk always tastes sour. It's been frozen and thawed and is already a week old by the time it gets on the shelf.

Forget flour. There is absolutely no way to tell where your flour comes from, and I'm sorry I'm just not going to mill my own. Which brings us to the main philosophical problem with trying to eat "real." Where does the balance tip the wrong way? I could drive about 20 miles, to where there's a year-round farmer's market. Or I could go to Whole Foods, where I'll pay around 5 times the regular brand price for the privilege of feeling smug and local. And frankly, I don't really trust the labels at Whole Foods. I think those brands play the same sorts of games that Dean's milk does, importing food to be packaged locally so that they can call it local.

FamilyFarmed is trying to find me locally milled flour that I don't have to order from the internet.

Then there's eating out.

I managed to locate just two restaurants where I can be reasonably sure that they source lots of their food locally, because they make it part of their branding. One is too expensive to pretty much ever eat there. The other is fine if the dinner is your destination, but last night my destination was the movies, and this restaurant is on the other side of town (and I live in a big town). We ate at the Golden Nugget. It was food. Not even going to think about how "real" it was.

UPDATE from Abby: Mado, Publican, Blackbird, Avec also source ingredients locally.

I'm sure once all these logistical issues are sorted out I will find that the food is better, but at this point I'm not sold on the concept, and it's not just about the inconvenience. It's about that tipping point. I live in the 4th largest metropolitan area in the U.S. Nothing we eat comes from here (unless it comes out of my own garden). The closest working farm is 20 miles away; the bulk of the local food market is 50 to 100 miles. Is it still local?

Which is more sustainable--walking to the local big chain to buy my groceries, or driving 20 miles to go to the year-round farmer's market (and even in summer the nearest farmer's market is 5 miles away).

And to top it all off, I ran out of the Mrs. Richardson's caramel syrup that I like to put in my (shade-grown, organic, free-trade, but, sadly, imported) coffee.

UPDATE: Caramel syrup
The first time I made this, the sugar recrystalized. So here's a method that keeps it smooth

1 c. brown sugar
1-2 T water
1 tsp white vinegar
1 tbsp. butter
1/2 c. cream
1 tbsp. cornstarch

Put the brown sugar in a heavy-bottom saucepan, adding just enough water to make it the consistency of wet sand. Turn on the heat to medium and add the vinegar. This will keep the sugar from recrystalizing. Boil for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Add the butter and continue to boil until the butter is completely melted. Dissolve the cornstarch in the cream, then add it to the sugar and bring it back to a boil. Cool several hours in refrigerator or overnight.

If I get an apple corer for Christmas, I'm going to be pissed

My sister-in-law makes a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner every year, although she confessed this year that preparing these meals makes her terribly anxious. Which is amazing, because she is such a rock in my life, and such a wonderful cook (in fact, more or less wonderful at everything).

I rather enjoy conceptualizing, planning and making these big meals. I love to plan them and to execute them, for the full sensory onslaught-- taste, and smell, and sight. I got the idea to do a maple-themed meal from a recipe on that insomniac's savior, the show Cultivating Life. Their recipe for maple scones will be on the menu for Friday.

I have the luxury of spreading out the cooking over several days (plus I cheated and got a ham this year, which means no main dish worries), so I'll be making the meal in stages. Today I started with the things that will keep the best.

Apple sauce
4-12 large Granny Smith apples
1T light brown sugar for each 2 apples
1/4 c. pure maple syrup
1 cup water
small handful to 1/2 c. dried cranberries (depending on how much applesauce you've made)

Peel and core the apples. Cut the apples into smallish chunks, conserve the peels and cores in a pot of cold water (or two pots if you're making a larger batch).

Dissolve the sugar in the water in a small saucepan, and simmer until the water is clear. This will prevent the sugar from burning in the apples. You can also just leave the sugar out entirely, although use a sweeter apple like a Gala, Mac, or Red Delicious if you don't use sugar. The Grannies are quite tart.

Put the sugar syrup, maple syrup and apples in a large pot or dutch oven and bring to a light simmer, stirring constantly. Continue simmer and stirring until the apples are a uniform chunky mush, then blend in the pot using a hand-held immersible blender (my best new toy of 2009).

Simmer the cranberries in a little bit of water just until they plump up, then mix them into the applesauce. Serve warm, cold, or room temp. Delicious no matter what.


Apple-Maple syrup
a TorXani original!

Apple cores and peels
1 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup maple sugar (or, since it's hideously expensive, 1 cup granulated sugar)
2 cups water, plus water for the apples

Put the conserved apple cores and peels in enough water to completely cover them, and simmer until the skins are soft (about 20 minutes). Since I used 12 apples for the applesauce, I ended up with two 2-quart pots of water and peels.

Combine the sugar, maple syrup, and 2 cups water and bring to a simmer. Simmer for 10 minutes.

Run the apples and their water through the food mill, scraping the pulp into a separate bowl (it's applesauce) and discarded the pips, skins and cores. You should now have an apply juice; pour this into the maple syrup mixture.

Boil the whole thing down to 2 1/2 or 3 cups (3 cups makes a thinner syrup). Strain it through a fine seive and cheesecloth. You can use this as an ice cream or waffle syrup, or add it to club soda for homemade apple soda.

I used the strained pulp as a glaze for a pan-fried catfish. Very nice.

By the way, these recipes are not for the faint of heart:

Fruit

A regret of my tiny urban "farm" is the limited amount of fruit I'm able to grow. I have raspberries, a gift from my friend Holly I believe the very first summer we were in the house (I had forgotten this, until she reminded me). They might be the first food I ever grew, and they are still going strong after nearly 25 years. One of my favorite aspects of cooking from the garden is the whole Little House on the Praire aspect-- puttin' up preserves, cannin' pumpkin and squash. I've even investigated the possibility of putting a root cellar in our basement.

I love making syrups and preserves, so every summer we end up with quarts and quarts of raspberry jam. This year I finally put in 3 blackberry canes and a gooseberry bush, but will probably not get fruit from them for a couple of years. Next year-- blueberries.

In the meantime, I've harvested almost 5 quarts of raspberries so far this year, a bounty due to my clever (if I do say so myself) use of spiral tomato stakes to as supports for the canes. Because of this, they're getting a lot of sun.

We also have an apple tree which has never produced more than one apple and usually loses all the new fruits a few days after appearing. This year they're hanging on; haven't given up hope yet that we'll get some actual apples. I may try my hand at vinegar if we do. In the meantime, the tree loses a large handful of apples every day. I've just been piling them in the dirt prior to dumping them in the compost, and then today got this bright idea: apple edging.


In the meantime, I'm on my third raspberry preserving task. Once I have another pint or two of the berries, I'll make syrup. Last week I made raspberry apricot jam (with sugar) and the week before the delicious and unusual preserves (no sugar) below.

Raspberry-Mango-Basil preserves

3 large ripe mangos
1 1/2 quarts fresh raspberries

1/2 cup fresh basil, chopped fine

Combine all ingredients in a large saucepan and bring to a gentle boil. The raspberries should turn quite liquid. Continue boil at 220F/104C for ten minutes, stirring constantly (this will release the pectin and reduce the liquid). Remove from the burner and place a burner ring over the flame, turn the flame low and replace the pot. Continue simmering until fruit is reduced by two thirds (top picture); you should end up with one or two pints of preserves.



Don't use sugar in this recipe as it overwhelms the basil.

The flavor of this compote is indescribably complex-- tart raspberry followed by the sweet mango and a sweet basil after taste.

I used the mango pits and skins, which still had a lot of fruit on them, to make mango syrup-- boiled the discards in 3 cups of water and 1 1/2 cups sugar (bottom picture), then scraped the fruit off into the liquid and ran it through a hand mill.

Sight, sound, touch, taste, scent

There is a “Savory Walk” in my garden—a 12 by 16 foot plot filled with herbs and aromatics. Basil, oregano, 3 kinds of mint; parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Rue for the poetic name. Salad burnett because it's mentioned in Shakespeare. Savory, summer and winter, chamomile, caraway, coriander. Wormwood and Russian sage, with the added bonus of beautiful silver foliage.

Elsewhere in the garden are other herbs and aromatics, as well as medicinal plants—basil, cilantro, marigold, and parsley as companions in the vegetable plots, lavender in one flower bed, fennel in another. Borage for strength, beebalm for the bees, and of course, since this is Chicago, our own wild onions, everywhere.

Marigolds are one of those stealth aromatics— you always forget that marigold is an herb, and that it has a wonderful smell. I want to say strong smell, but that’s misleading. What I mean is that the smell makes you think “strength.”

I love to walk past the fennel. If you brush against it the whole yard gets a whisper of the anise scent. Sage will do this too. It was this that inspired the Savory Walk—a slightly-too-narrow path lined with aromatics so that you have to brush them on your way past.

A garden is sensory. You can experience it in so many ways. There’s sight of course— what most people think of when they see a garden— it looks nice. And taste— you can grow the things you eat. This is where gardeners start, I think, with a desire for beauty and food. But gardens also have sound. Buzzing insects, and singing birds. Rustling of small animals in the brush, maybe running water. Gardeners know about touch. The fuzz of a lambs ear, or the prick of a rose. A crisp forsythia leaf, the hard shell of a nut, the heavy sun on the back of your neck and of course the wonderful feel of the soil around your hands.

Scent is subtlest sensory benefit of a garden. It’s why I feel you can’t really plant too many herbs. I never feel bad about not harvesting all of them, because the dried and dead plants will retain their scent right into the winter. You can brush your hand over dead thyme in the middle of January and get a rush of midsummer hitting your nose.

Mint-Lavender Soda

2 cups granulated sugar
2 1/2 cups water + 1/2 cup water
splash of lemon juice
one cup of lavender blossoms
one cup whole mint leaves

Bring the sugar, lemon, and 2 1/2 c. water to 200° F and maintain for 10 minutes. The sugar should be completely dissolved and the syrup clear. Add the rest of the water, the mint and lavender, and bring back to 200 and boil for 10 more minutes or until the liquid is reduced to two cups.

Add 2 oz. to a 12 oz. glass of sparkling water with ice, with fresh mint leaves to garnish.

TorXani syrups

I’ve been into syrups this year. Don’t like commercial sodas, but I do like fizzy drinks. I’d been buying Toranis, but they’re expensive and I get tired of the same old flavors. I started by going on line and finding syrup recipes through the magic of Google. Most of them are for use over ice cream or pancakes, but if you strain them a little more they work for adding to sparkling water or tea just fine. I’ve found that a hand food mill and then cheesecloth strain work better than trying to thin/pulp them with a food processor. By this time I’ve made from fresh fruit: lemon, lime, raspberry, blueberry, orange. From frozen pulp or concentrate: mango, passion fruit, orange. And from frozen whole fruit: blueberry, raspberry, cherry, mango, peach. A basic recipe is 1 to 1 to 1 ratio of sugar to fruit to water. Make the sugar syrup first:

* 1 1/4 c. sugar
* 1 1/4 c. water
* splash of lemon juice (or zest if you’re making a citrus-based syrup)
Bring to 200 degrees F and simmer for ten minutes (keep an eye on it)

While the sugar syrup is acookin’, you want enough fruit to end up with 1 1/4 c. of liquid, which seems to be about 3 cups of most fresh or frozen fruits, 1 1/2-2 cups of pulp or concentrate. Lemon and lime, use much less— 1/2 to 3/4 c. with this amount of syrup. If you are using fresh, pulp, or frozen fruit (as opposed to a citrus juice), heat it until the structure breaks down, but try to stop short of releasing the pectin— this will make your syrup too sticky. I’ve been eyeballing it but someone here maybe knows the temp?

Depending on the fruit, and how thin you strain it, this recipe will yield about 2 cups of syrup, although I’ve gotten as much as 3 1/2.

Here again I’ve been experimenting. You can add the syrup to the pulp (might add a little water here), take it back up to 200 degrees, then strain it, or strain the fruit first, then add the juice into the syrup, then to 200 d. for another ten minutes. I’d be interested in hearing people’s experiences with this.

To boost the flavor, I’ve toyed with the idea of adding commercial extracts (peach extract, etc.) with some of the more delicate fruits, but that seems like cheating, somehow.

Needless to say, the citrus juices work best, especially if you add in the zest to the syrup stage. I’ve also been trying out different herb additions. (lime-coriander, orange-fennel, lemon-basil, lemon-peppercorn, peach-vanilla).