Category Archives: Food

Bread & tomatoes, illness on the side

Sick + Writer’s block + Entertaining + Tiring week at work (last week) = not much blogging around this place.

While I have a relatively high pain tolerance, I don’t do sick well.  This has been the kind of mildly sick where I’m still able to function, albeit at a slightly reduced level.

Saturday night I passed out on the couch at some early hour, abandoning Matthew to start the bread making on his own.  This resulted in a new note on our whole wheat bread recipe: “Do not start at 9 o’clock at night.”  Even though he was only getting the dough together so it could have a long first rise on our cool back porch overnight, he didn’t make it to bed until after midnight.  (I moved from the couch to the bed sometime before then, pausing only to brush my teeth, no energy for flossing or neti-ing.)

Sadly, the bread did not turn out as well as it has in the past.  Still good, just not the “We should open a bakery and sell this for $5 a loaf” quality that we were expecting.  The bread served as the base for some very-late-season Caprese Salad Sandwiches last night.

We’re slowly working our way through the last of the garden tomatoes.  We (and by we, I pretty much mean Matthew’s mom) harvested a boatload of tomatoes a few weeks back and they’ve been slowly ripening (as well as slowly rotting, in a few unfortunate cases) in boxes in our living room ever since.

A few of the things that we’ve done with the tomatoes:

  • Roasted tomatoes
  • Tomato sauce (we need to make more)
  • Tomato tart (the crust has some serious butter)
  • Pizzas
  • And, of course, the Caprese Salad Sandwiches

My usual recourse for ripening tomatoes (and other unripe fruit) is a paper bag, but we had way too many tomatoes for that.  Instead, we set the tomatoes in single layers in cardboard boxes and covered them with newspaper — fast to arrange and easy to keep an eye on them.

Tunneling

My favorite gardener constructed this nifty little low tunnel to extend the growing season.  We should be able to harvest spinach almost all winter.

I’m not sure how this stacks up environmentally, since what you’re looking at there is a lot of plastic.  Sure, it’s heavy duty plastic that should last multiple growing seasons, but still.

It may be better than buying plastic bagged spinach shipped in from California, but the greenest option would be to just eat local spinach during the regular not-extended-with-tunnels growing season.  That said, it will be fun to get something out of the garden when fresh, local produce is scarce.

Applesaucin’

One week ago, I was doing this:

That would be picking organic apples at an orchard near my grandparents’ cabin in West Texas.  The owners generously shared their apples with us, even though we were “Yankees.”

The golden delicious apples weighed down our checked bags a bit, but they made it back to St. Louis with only a few bruises.

I spent the morning chopping apples for applesauce, which is pretty much the easiest thing in the world to make.  Just wash the apples, cut them into chunks (I leave the skins ON), toss them in a pan with a little bit of water to get things going, and cook for awhile (20-30 minutes).  Voilà!  Beautiful chunky applesauce.

Apples are naturally sweet, so unless you’re using really tart apples, don’t add sugar.  Change things up a bit by adding a dash of cinnamon to your sauce.

I don’t know how many apples I started with (a lot!) but it cooked down to exactly 7 pints, which I processed in a water bath.  Handling the canning by myself was enough work without photographing the process.  I also intended to add cinnamon to some of the jars, but forgot amid the mild chaos.

Properly canned applesauce will keep for quite awhile without taking it space in the fridge or freezer.  See the canning instructions I followed here.

Travel green

Ready to fly

If you’re flying it all starts in the airport.  You CAN bring your reusable water bottle with you, just make sure it’s 100% empty when you go through security.  To emphasize the emptiness, I usually leave the lid off.  Find a drinking fountain and refill once you get to the other side.  To further cut down on waste, bring your own snacks (we had some delicious pumpkin bread) — most of the food options in airports, especially smaller ones, are crappy anyway.  Security seemed to have no issues with our wooden utensils.Continue reading “Travel green”

When life gives you lemons . . .

. . . be patient and wait until they ripen; they’ll taste better that way.

I bet you didn’t know you could grow lemons and limes in Missouri! We’ve watched these guys growing all summer, and they’re getting oh so close.  After they put on size, they were strangely light weight, similar to the fake lemon that my mom uses as a practical joke.  Now they’re putting on weight and starting to lighten to yellow.

We’re also growing key limes!  This tree didn’t set fruit for a long time, which had us worried, but now it’s going strong.

I sense a key lime pie in my future.  The best part?  We can zest our lemons and limes and enjoy our culinary creations knowing that we won’t be consuming “food-grade” wax.