Time Series Photography

5 guys take the same photo over and over since 1982. neat. check out the video at the end of this Feist interview for a similar project.

Cooking Pasta with Minimal Water

I got on this kick with fideos, but we also starting cutting way back on water when making mac & cheese in Baja cause water is precious down there. This is 1/2 of a box of whole wheat spaghetti, sauteed in a little olive oil, then salt and a beer bottle full of water. Cook it like risotto. Tasty enough and no waste.

Bee Balm

 More fun with the D200

Stewed Rhubarb

Yum. This batch was rhubarb, honey, a vanilla bean, some orange marmalade. Maybe too much marm, but it's all good, it's in the garden so I can make more.

Frog in the Front Patio

 I dig the eye

New Nikon D200

So I sold my D700 in anticipation of getting a D800. Got tired of the waiting list, and realized it is too much camera for me anyway. Now I want a D600 when it is released, which will be alot cheaper. To tide me over I got an old D200 off of ebay. It's great, and I'm learning the tricks of digital photography now. It seems like if I use color temperature for white balance at ~2700K I get no yellow cast from the CFL bulbs. Another nice thing is the D200 has the DX sensor, so wide angle lenses don't work on it, but telephotos and macros get an extra zooming boost. Here are a couple of pics of veggies from the garden. There will be more...

Apricot Preserves 2012

 Last year was a major bust. This year I canned over 26Q, 1 jar every 2 weeks! Recipe is here.

4th of July BBQ

There was a big push to re-do the front patio, it's quite nice now. So we had people over for the 4th. Quite a few of the things made have found their way onto the blog already: strawberry daiquiris, baked beans, apricot cobbler. Here are some more pics.

 ha

 organic dogs, so good

 big bag of charcoal

 we found this portable picnic table, flimsy but convenient

 A&I brought 'patriotic' eggs, unfortunately blue + yellow = green yolks

Mmmmmmm

Grilled Peaches

We've busted out the grill a couple of times now. I wanted to do this roasted apricot salsa from Bittman but the grill grates are too wide. Peaches worked great, though I lost a couple thru the grates. Amazing with vanilla ice cream or even yogurt. Cut peach, drizzle with some olive oil, 5 min/side or so.

Potato Salad

 It's so easy to make good potato salad using the Jamie O method. Boil them whole, drain, cut to expose flesh, dress while warm with olive oil, an acid, salt, pepper, dill. Good.

 with over-cooked salmon... took me a little bit to dial in the salmon

Cobbler

Mmmmmm. I love blackberry cobbler. When we came back to Oregon in the summers my maternal grandma would send us out along the ditches to pick berries and then she'd bake up a cobbler. I made it alot when I got older. Made a apricot cobbler for the 4th of July party, and a peach one more recently. The dough recipe is basically buttermilk biscuits from Joy of Cooking.

Cobbler

2 c ww flour
2t b powder
1/2t b soda
salt
1/3 c olive oil
1/2-3/4 c buttermilk

roast fruit with a little sugar in a pyrex dish 350, 20 min
mix dry ingredients, cut in oil, mix till have 'small peas' of dough
add in buttermilk till a dough forms
 drop spoonfulls over fruit, 350 30 min or so

the apricot one, the peach one is above

Baked Beans

Made these for a 4th of July BBQ. Proportions and such came from Bittman's How to Cook Everything and Joy of Cooking (I think). The ingredients were pretty free-form and weren't necessarily ideal -- the apricots were cute and I had a ton, but they are by no means necessary.

Baked Beans framework/proportions
4c dried navy beans, bay leaf, ancho, 2 chipotle
butter, 2 onion, garlic
4t dry mustard, dill, salt
1 c molasses, 14 apricots, soy sauce, red sauce

Soak beans overnight, cook with bay and dried chilies
Saute onion, garlic in an oven-proof pan, add spices and everything else
300 3 hrs covered, uncover 30min more

Roasted Eggplant Preserve

Alot of eggplant preserve recipes call for cooking it in vinegar, but then you drain off that lovely stuff and toss it. Not my kind of recipe. This one doesn't waste anything, AND it tastes divine. I only made 1 pint summer 2011, will be making lots of it this year for sure! 

The Glass Pantry, Georgeanne Brennan, p.61

2 lbs eggplant
3/4 - 1 c olive oil
2T salt
2T pepper
6 cloves garlic
6T chopped thyme
1/3 - 1/2 c balsamic

brush eggplant with a little olive oil, roast 400 or BBQ, cool.
layer with salt/pepper, garlic, thyme, pouring over oil, vinegar as you go, too. store in fridge, flipping it every day for a week to insure oil/vinegar get everywhere.
they say it keeps for 6 months, mine was fine for 9.
makes 1 quart

Preserving 2011 Review

Preserving season 2012 has begun, so I thought I'd summarize what worked last year, to highlight the good recipes.

Will do again for sure:
Escabeche (1st recipe)
Chile Pickle
Roasted Eggplant Preserve
Cilantro Chutney
Pickled Peppers [yellow bell pepper + serranos]
Emeril hot sauce
Green Zhoug
Fig - Citrus Jams 1,2
Apricot Preserves -- done already
Melon Jam

Citrus Marmalades -- done already

Meh:
Raw Eggplant preserve -- ok, but not mindblowing
Escabeche (2nd recipe) -- cooking technique a little different, not as good
Tipsy Tangerines -- waste. they are offseason of other fruits, so the ability to eat them in the summer isn't all that interesting
Pickled Peppers [other combos] -- texture uninteresting. bulky / not space efficient in fridge
Eggplant Pickle -- just way way too sweet

RIP Donald Sobol

I LOVED the Encyclopedia Brown books when I was a kid. I read all of them in the public library in Setauket. Sorry to hear the author died.

Cao & Perrot / NPR

interesting NPR interview with these landscape artists. also, their website is amazing.

OCMS / NPR

great great interview, the new album sounds like a winner

Strawberry Daiquiri

 This recipe is killer. For my new Nikon D200 I can only use macro lenses, so I'm a little limited in subject matter...

Nutrition / Carbs / On Point

good On Point episode

Mmmmmmmm Sockeye

nice

Dam Road Closed

On the day my dad goes under the buzz saw & triple bypass surgery, an interesting mini-history of the beginning of the dam removal movement in America. The title of the post is from a sign, I think in Nebraska, at a campground we stayed at a time or two while driving cross-country.

Disarm

When I started at UCSB in '92 my roommate Kevbo introduced me to all sorts of bands, the Smashing Pumpkins included. They even came in '93, although memories of that concert aren't great: lousy seats, being from Chicago they didn't seem to like being in SB, and not having gone to college he seemed to resent playing at one. C'est la vie. But damn if this video doesn't get the juices going. Some serious audience signing along at the beginning of Disarm, and the band & audience are amazing throughout. In the Civil Wars post I had a link to them doing Disarm on their North American tour, here it is again (stage banter ends/music starts 3:39) so you can compare the versions. Great song.