Root Vegetable Miso Soup

Super Good. I harvested my sweet potatoes this past weekend and am curing the larger ones but using the smaller tubers, mostly in soup. We've made root vegetable miso soup twice, including serving it at a dinner party. It's great. Basically it's just simmered veggies with onion, garlic, ginger. Was particularly good when onion stock was the simmering liquid. To serve it you put a little miso and stock in a bowl, dissolve it/make a paste, then add more soup.

orange & yellow carrot, sweet potato, parsnip, hamburg parsley root

Random Food Pics

 zuke pickle on a buffalo burger

 potato salad with tomatillos (not a great experiment) and fish from TJs (never again unless it's hidden in a curry) with tomato pepper sauce

 garlic shrimp with rice & beans & avo

 pasta with red sauce, wilted kale, and fresh mozz medalions

 bok choy, later grilled on a grill pan by Traves

roasted grapes, neufchatel, bread grilled on a grill pan by Keely

Tomato Pepper Sauce

We are quite enjoying the tomato pepper sauce from Joy of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich.

1lb peppers (mix of hot and sweet)
3 1/2 c vinegar
4 1/2 lbs tomatoes
6 cloves garlic
2t salt

bring to a boil and simmer till reduced by half. pass through a food mill. I have it in the fridge but you could can it.

Chumash Rock Art Movie

very cool

Melon Jam 2012

In some ways it's wrong to make jam from melons, they are so epic fresh. But melon jam, atleast the way I make is damn good. It gets very caramel-y. The batch I made this year I did 83 oz fruit (weight off of the rind), some lemon juice, and 42 oz sugar. I do it the way I do all of my jams, macerating the fruit for a day with the sugar, heating, letting it sit, heating, and so forth. Usually it takes me 4-5 days to finish a batch. Last year's post was equally short/boring/unillustrated, looks like I used a little more sugar last year.

Gazpacho

This recipe is WAY too late for this year. C'est la vie. It's from Claudia Roden's the Food of Spain. It doesn't call for cucumber in the soup, which is unusual.

1 thick slice white bread, crusts removed (we skipped this, actually)
2 1/4 pounds ripe plum tomatoes (hmmm, that's about a kilo)
1 red or green bell pepper, cored, seeded, and cut into 4 pieces (we used a fresh pimiento)
2 to 3 garlic cloves, crushed to a paste
2 Tbsp. sherry vinegar or wine vinegar, or more to taste
6 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil, or to taste
Salt and pepper to taste
1 tsp. sugar, or more to taste

blender. chill for an hour. divine. easy. fantastic w/ goat cheese

Canned Tomato Puree

nothing special, cooked down, but not way down. i think 1t citric acid/jar. water bath canner for 45 min

Chocolate & Zucchini & Kale

good post about lots of ways to use kale

Ensemble Basiani of Georgia

these guys were good, we saw them in a Methodist church in downtown SB

Chipim Sauce

This is another hot sauce using the Emeril recipe. Making it with fleshy chilies I used less water and more chilies by weight than he specifies. Seems to work and hold for a long time in the fridge. This batch I'm calling chipim sauce, as it was 28 oz of pimiento peppers (looks like a small red bell pepper) and 9 chipotles from a can of chipotles in adobo sauce. I think it's great.

Roasted Salsa

Nice informative recipe, pics. I ended up with 9 pints from the amounts in her recipe. I will definitely be making this again!

Just in case the link dies, here's the basic recipe:
8lb romas
2lb chilies
4 onions
8 cloves garlic

1c cilantro
4t oregano
2T ground cumin
2T+2t salt
2T+2t pepper
1c bottled lime juice
1c cider vinegar
1c water

roast first 4 for 30min at 450
foodmill them
simmer everything 15min
fill hot jars, leave 1/2" head space
process 20 min 

Zucchini Lemon Marmalade

No pic yet, I've been eating it too fast. I just want to get the recipe out there cause it's a great way to use up zucchini. Almost as good as the zuke/marmalade cake/bread from Tartine. At the moment I don't remember where it's from, but I'll update.

1 lb zuke, grated
4 lemons + 4 rinds
9oz sugar
9oz honey

Ingredient list is pretty simple, oui? It's lower sugar than normal so not can-able. I'm doing it to save the apricot preserves stock. Basically grate zuke, mix in lemon juice/pulp, chopped up peels. Add water. Make pectin tea with the seeds and add that, too. Let it ferment for a day, bring to a boil, let it sit for a day, repeat for a couple of days. Partially I do that for flavor, partially cause I don't have time to finish it in 1 day.

Lizzy, the Garden Cat

Outlook Fire

In the San Marcos Pass / Painted Cave area.

 there's a helicopter in this one, vulture in the rest

Ojai

Zucchini and Eggplant

Parsley Root Bread/Cake

This is based on the Tartine zucchini orange marmalade bread I've been making all summer. But used a Hamburg parsley root and minimal zucchini. Also some almond flour, and raisins were different from how i usually make it. Divine-ish.

Random Dinner Pics

 a primavera-type pasta

 volunteer sunflower from my sunny plot

we ate this so many times this summer. rice w/ cheese, beans warmed with asafoetida, heirlooms. i think i see some sort of cilantro sauce, too, either zhoug or chutney.

Zuni Zucchini Pickle

I don't love this but it's not bad. It's from the Zuni cookbook, and lots of people have posted the recipe online.

Fried Green Tomatoes 2012

We made these a while ago. It's funny cause that was pre-garden manager and pre s+s. Anyway, this time Sara was pruning and accidentally clipped off some green tomatoes prematurely. We followed Joy of Cooking, flour, buttermilk, cornmeal I believe; it was a while ago. We fried them in a non-stick pan with minimal oil, and also oven fried some. The non-stick pan ones were way better, the oven ones were cooked thru/mushy on the inside. 

this is a green 'Sara Black' tomato

with tater salad. a non-colorful meal, but tasty as heck

Chile Pickle 2012

This was my favorite refrigerator pickle last year. I love it. I've made 3, going on 4 batches this year. The bulk of the biomass has been pimientos, with hotter chilies varying from a yellow Chilean aji, orange thai, cayenne from Gary at the garden, a hot chile from Ventura at Givens, a really hot chile from seeds from Ventura, a ghost pepper from Dar.

pimiento, aji crystal, not sure

ghost

pimiento

Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia

I'm on the Patagonia email list, so learned about a webcast of a talk he did with another Patagonia person at Yale (don't know how long this link will last). He's a great speaker, I heard him once on a local public access channel while catsitting for Keely and was swooning. Anyway, there were 2 nuggets, quite related. When he was a young climber he prepared for a summer in Yosemite Valley by going to a dented can store and buying cases of discount cat food. The last question was about why his stuff is so expensive, Patagonia/Patagucci, and the myth (?) that he was selling expensive stuff to rich people. His reply was essentially that you get what you pay for, that if you are poor it doesn't make sense to go to Costco and buy a 20$ blender that will break the first time you put ice in it, that it's better to save up and buy quality. I'm so tired of our disposable society. While I'm thinking about his talk, he also got on his soapbox a couple of times, and among other things he was really supportive of organic agriculture, working in the field with your hands. Just a super cool guy, and it makes me feel even better about buying his stuff, even though I only buy it on sale or off of ebay ;) Hmmm, stream of conscience writing, hopefully the point got across.  Here's an NPR interview that has alot of the same stories from the Yale talk. The organic cotton bit is great. 100% conventional cotton = 73% cotton + formaldehyde and other interesting things. They've only used organic cotton since 1986!

My latest, a Nano Storm jacket off of ebay

Organics / NPR

2 stories this week about a Stanford study about organic food (focusing on finding no difference between the nutrition of organic and conventional produce) really had me disappointed, yelling at the radio that that isn't why we we grow & buy organic food! Finally in the friday night all things considered a reporter in Portland (of course) did a piece about why people buy organics that had me nodding along. Jeez, if NPR can't cover the issue well what is the chance that more standard media outlets will -- and that people might hear something that brings them over to our side?

Update: Bittman has a bunch of links about the distortions in the Stanford study