recipes

As the steam bath of summer abates and cool air moves in, as labor day weekend marks the end of swimming and time to start thinking about things like firewood and school, I find I regain enthusiasm about really cooking again. During the summer, I'm often a tepidly enthusiastic cook - it is so easy to go out in the garden and mix greens and whatever is ripe with a hardboiled egg, some dried fruit or a bit of cheese and call that dinner. Sliced tomatoes with basil, barely cooked corn on the cob and something else quick - some grilled veggies tossed with pasta and homemade goat cheese or eggs…
When the heat wave finally broke this week, I found myself dying to cook again. After days of it being too damn hot to cook - and too hot to eat anything that had been cooked, when salad and corn on the cob were the extent of my culinary ambitions, food appealed again. This is good, because the list of things you can do with raw zucchini is somewhat limited and we had reached the "For the love of god, someone, please cook something with these damned zucchini" stage. So we did. And with the tomatoes, the blueberries, the eggplant, the kale, etc.... Zucchini make wonderful dried zucchini…
Today we took the children to Table Mountain, a volcanic mesa in northern California. It is a special place, preserved from development by the dense, rocky texture of the soil- no good for farming. We strolled through carpets of flowers Lasthenia californica (California goldfields). Blemnosperma nanum (yellow carpet), Lupinus nanus, Triteleia ixiodies (pretty face), Castilleja exserta (purple owls clover), Triphysaria eriantha (Jonnytuck or Butter 'n' eggs), Eschscholzia caespitosa, (foothill poppy), popcorn flower and gaze at the box kites flying overhead. The blue, grey and white match the…
Recipe of the week: Turnip Blue Cheese Gratin Raoul has lots of turnips and rutabagas at the farm. This recipe was provided by our friends Sue and Buck at a recent bring-your-best-dish-ever potluck. It was delicious. The chef used rutabagas instead of turnips, but feel free to use either or mix and match. Ingredients 2 cloves garlic, smashed salt and pepper to taste 3/4 cup half-and-half cream 5 sprigs fresh thyme 1 bay leaf 2 large leeks - cleaned, and cut into 1/4 inch thick rounds 2 large turnips (or rutabagas), peeled and sliced 1 cup cubed butternut squash (optional) 4 large mushrooms…
Happy New Year! Here is a post from Raoul at the Student Farm at UC Davis. From the vegetable's point of view the holidays weren't that great. Continuous rain or fog was only broken up by hard frosts. Our head rot resistant broccoli varieties proved to be not as resistant as advertised, hence there is no broccoli in the Student Harvest baskets today. The good news is that greens and root vegetables are doing fine. Today's baskets include: rutabagas, fennel, collards, delicata squash, cilantro, radicchio, Purple Haze carrots, Komatsuna, Dino kale, Chinese cabbage, beets, carinata kale,…
Today is the first week of Fall quarter at UC Davis and the Student Farm has harvested some glorious vegetables. The tomatoes in the CSA (community supported agriculture) basket today came mostly from the farm's Seeds of Change variety trial. The green striped, red striped, orange, dark striped, etc. tomatoes represent only a fraction of the 75 varieties the farm trialed this year. There are a couple of red slicers in the mix as well. In their newsletter, the Student Farm crew (Eric, Larisa, Sasha, Ari, Ethan and Raoul) asks us customers to observe how the trial tomato varieties compare to…
Korea has a 5000 year history of food and farming. How much can a nine-year old and her mother learn on a two week visit to this land of miracles? For the first few nights we stayed in a tiny room in a traditional Korean house called a "Hanok" house. There is a courtyard that everyone shares that the owners have filled with lots of stuff including a rabbit named Mimi. In this quiet place, one can imagine ancient times before the rebirth of this powerful nation that was almost totally destroyed by the Korean war (1950-1953). Now, although most cities are dominated by massive buildings and…
Today's recipe is something I made this week for the first time, and trying it was like a revelation. It's simple to make, it's got an absolutely spectacularly wonderful flavor - light and fresh - and it's incredibly versatile. It's damned near perfect. It's scallion ginger sauce, and once you try it, it will become a staple. To quote David Chang, whose cookbook I learned this from: if you've got ginger scallion sauce in the fridge, you'll never be hungry. There are two main variations of this: there's a cooked version, and a raw version. Mine is the raw version. I love the freshness of…
Tonight's dessert is plum cake: Tante Lissy's Flaumen Kuchen (Plum Cake) 1 c Butter 1 c Sugar 1 Egg 2 tsp Almond extract (or vanilla) 1 tsp Salt 1 c White fl our 1 c Barley 10 Plums, pitted and cut in half 2 Tbsp warmed apricot jam 1. Beat together butter and sugar. Add in egg, almond or vanilla extract, and salt. 2. Mix in fl our and barley to form a dough. 3. Pat 2/3 of the dough into an ï¸-inch pan with removable rim. Arrange plums, cut side down, in pan. 4. Lattice rest of dough on top; drizzle with apricot jam. 5. Bake at 350°F for 45 minutes. I saved some Santa Rosa plums last summer…
Starting our CSA (aka "Community Supported Agriculture") was a risk. I knew that I could grow vegetables, and more than we could eat - I'd proved that the previous year. I knew also that I could find some people who would believe me when I said I was competent to run a CSA. Beyond that, I was clueless. I'd never organized a garden to produce food for other people. I had no idea what I was doing. I'd scheduled twenty weeks worth of deliveries, starting in early June. I just didn't know what was going in the recycled laundry baskets I was using for my deliveries. And in retrospect, early…
For the 2010 Pi day bakeoff, I baked a Swiss chard-Gruyere pie. Shown here is the backdrop to our garden:a mural on the side of our barn, painted with California poppies, rice plants, sunflowers and (look closely) a red double helix. Artist: Jim McCall, Elastic Media. Here is the recipe: First, gather as many ingredients as you can from your garden. In our garden, I found multi-colored swiss chard, Kale, chives, thyme and parsley. Next, prepare the crust: 1 cup barley flour2 cups white flour 1 tsp salt 1 cup unsalted butter 1/2 cup unsalted margarine, frozen grated rind of 1…
Thank you Bill Gates for your work on behalf of farmers and.... for blogging on our book, Tomorrow's Table! If you don't have time to read the full reviews, here are a few excerpts: "This is an important book for anyone who wants to learn about the science of seeds and the challenges faced by farmers... I think anyone who reads this book will be convinced of the authors' sincerity and intelligence - even if, like me, you never try any of the cool-sounding recipes... I gained an understanding of the history of organic farming and learned about some of the very clever ways organic farmers…
Three feet and counting so far. The prediction for the "upper elevations" (that would be us) is that we could get another 1-2 feet before tomorrow night. So while I am lost in meditation of the stunning beauty that surrounds me and trying to locate my woodpile, our car and the dog, all of whom are largely encompassed and hidden by snow, I leave you with some alternate reading. First of all, in the "deeply sorrowful things" category, Leila, who posted at ye olde blogge as "Bedouina" and "Leila" died this fall. I hadn't realized it - and I feel terrible that I did not realize. The last…
Ok, I did try and do a real blog post today, but it just isn't happening. We had wonderful guests this morning, and it is bloody cold, and I really need to clean the rabbit cages and then I just want to hang out and bake things that smell like cinnamon - writing is way down on the list. So today I'm just inviting you to share - what's the best thing you've cooked in the last few weeks? What was so great about it? Want to post the recipe? Besides pumpkin pie, which is always a high number contender for best food ever, my most recent contender for best recipe of the season is latke-kugle…
I was about to post the Chocolate-Banana Bread Pudding recipe that I left out of my food waste post, when I found myself worrying a little bit about whether posting recipes is appropriate for my new forum. You see, I tend to think of Scienceblogs with the first syllable pronounced just like Thomas Dolby in "She Blinded Me With Science" yelling "SCIENCE!" (which I have included a link to for no apparent reason, simply because it pleases me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V83JR2IoI8k.) Is this warm, fuzzy, chocolatey goodness appropriate to a hard-edged SCIENCEblog? Does PZ Myers post…
For most people, a fruitcake is an over-sweetened store-bought concoction, dry and dreadful, something to be thrown away as soon as the gift-giving friend has stepped off the front porch or quickly recycled to an unsuspecting colleague. But this is not how I feel about my mother's fruitcake, a dense mixture of dried fruits and nuts, spiced and infused with brandy. The taste invokes memories of snowy holidays in a tiny mountain cabin, massive icicles hanging from the eves, the warmth of a fire on cold feet, and a full stomach. My mother is the cook in our family (although my father has…
It's not saturday, but I've got a recipe that I needed to write down before I forget it, so you're getting an extra bonus. I usually make a simple cranberry relish for thanksgiving. But it needs to be made a couple of days in advance. This year, I completely forgot about the cranberries until this morning. So I figured I needed to do something else. A good chutney sounded nice. I went hunting online, but couldn't find anything that sounded good, so I went ahead and ad-libbed. And the results were amazing - this is definitely the new cranberry tradition in the Chu-Carroll household. Sweet,…
I forgot to take a picture of this dish - so Physioprof, shut up :-) I don't even pretend that this is an authentic mexican mole. It's something that I whipped together because I felt like a mole, and I worked from very vague memories of a mole recipe I read years ago, and ad-libbed this. So it's absolutely not authentic - but it is yummy. Ingredients 2 pounds chicken breasts, bone in. One large onion, diced. 2 cloves garlic, minced. 1 teaspoon coriander powder. 1 teaspoon cumin powder. 1/4 teaspoon cinammon powder. 1 teaspoon mexican oregano. 1/2 teaspoon epazote. 1 chipotle…
Lately, friday's have just been too busy for me to get around to posting a recipe. So I decided to switch my recipe posts to saturday. I'll try to be reliable about posting a recipe every saturday. I tried making homemade salsa for the first time about about two months ago. Once I'd made a batch of homemade, that was pretty much the end of buying salsa. It's really easy to make, and fresh is just so much better than anything out of a jar. When it takes just five minutes of cooking to make, there's just no reason to pay someone else for a jar of something that's not nearly as good. This…
My wife is chinese. So in our house, comfort food is often something chinese. For her, one of her very favorite things is dumplings, also known as pot-stickers. They're time consuming to make, but not difficult. They're really delicious, well worth the effort. They're best with a homemade wrapper, but that's not easy. If you go to a chinese grocery store, they sell pre-made dumpling wrappers with are pretty good. Not as good as homemade, but more than adequate. The wrappers are circular, and about 2 or 3 inches in diameter. These are traditionally made with ground pork. But I don't eat…