What to do with kale

I didn't know what to do with kale when I first planted it. Of course, there is the traditional German way of making green kale, if you have an hour or three to spare. But a) I usually don't, and b) I wanted a way of cooking them that preserved the vitamins (kale is one of these so called "superfoods").

This dish became one of my weeknight standards:

Heat pasta water, start frying a pack of Italian sausage mix over medium heat (I usually don't add fat to my nonstick pan- the sausage mix has enough. You can substitute cut up sausages, bacon, or strips of roast chicken breast, if you like). Cook the pasta (I used my first ever home made tagliatelle today, but spaghetti is my standard) according to the package instructions. Meanwhile, wash a bunch of kale (the last of my red Russian kale today- lacinato is also great), cut in thin strips, and add to the boiling pasta two minutes before pasta is done. then drain everything through a colander, toss with sausage mix in the frying pan, and serve with salt, pepper, and grated parmeggiano.

Birds!

Today, I finally planted the lettuce seedlings that I had been nursing along for the last two months. They were magnificent plants, a mix of endives, radicchio, and various heirloom lettuces. I went home for a delicious lunch of just-picked cauliflower, steamed and sprinkled with butter roasted almonds. When I got back to the garden two hours later, my lettuce was gone. I could still see a few stalks here and there, but except for that, it had been razed.

Sigh.

Well, at least they left my savoy cabbage and kale seedlings alone. For now.

Guess I'll seed some more lettuce, then. They will have a better chance of survival later in the season, I hope, when the rest of the gardening community remembers that they have a plot, and my lettuce isn't the only fresh yummy greens in the whole garden. Or maybe I should listen to my husband and make some wire cages, just to get them through the worst...

Leftovers

One of the lessons I learned when I made Tortellini for the first time is that you need a lot less filling than you would think. We ate the remaining roast Garlic/Butternut Squash/Goat cheese mash today in an omelet. Quick and scrumptious. Perfect weeknight food.

For those fledgling cooks amongst you

To make an omelette, open eggs into a bowl. Depending on appetite, plan for 2-3 eggs per adult. Add a small shot of milk, salt, and pepper, and whisk until blended.

Meanwhile, heat about a tablespoon of oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Pour in egg mixture. Immediately put your filling on top of the still liquid omelet. Fillings could be anything from plain grated cheese to cooked veggies, hummus, avocado dip or any other tasty spread. Put the filling in a line in the center of the omelet, so that it looks like a circle (the omelet in the pan) bisected in the middle by a vertical line (your filling). Careful not to tear the thing, push a spatula under the sides of the omelet and fold them over towards the center. They should overlap each other in the middle to form a tube with your filling running along the center, so aim at folding over about a third of the total width of the omelet. If the sides of the omelet are not completely set at this point, that is perfect, because they will stick together better once it is done. Now keep cooking until the underside is golden brown, turn around, cook again until the folded sides are golden brown, and let it slide onto a plate. The whole process is very quick, about 3 or 4 minutes per omelet, and there is hardly any wash up, just the bowl, the whisk, the spatula, and the pan.

More Pasta Love

Again inspired by the beautiful food photography in my friend’s Jamie Oliver cookbook, I went all out today and made Tortellini from scratch. I used the same dough recipe as before, but I folded some of our own chervil leaves in while rolling out the dough, for optical effect. As filling, I mashed up a few cloves of roasted garlic, some roasted butternut squash (our own- the next-to last one), goat cheese, and just a bit of salt and pepper.


It took a bit of tweaking to figure out the right size for the dough squares, and how much filling to use so it doesn’t squeeze out when you close the square. Also, I had no idea how to fold the things, and my first attempts were more reminiscent of preschool pottery than Tortellini. Here’s where I wished I’d had a Nonna. This is exactly the kind of thing you learn simply by hanging around the kitchen as a child, just because you’ve seen someone else do it before. I guess I can’t complain too much, though... my „Nonnas“ taught me how to bake German christmas cookies and roll rouladen instead.

Anyhow, I can’t wait to eat them. I think I might serve them to the friend who loaned me the machine, sometime when she doesn’t have to work the next day.

Jaime!

My friend has one true love. No matter what others there may be in her life, she has always loved, and will love forever, Jamie Oliver, the naked chef. I hadn't paid much attention to him previously (c'mon, if you have to undress to get attention, what does that imply about the quality of your food?), but little did I know. Recently inspired by Hank Shaw to try something new and make my own pasta, I borrowed a pasta maker and consulted her, the undisputed queen of homemade pasta in our food loving circle of friends.

I got several practical tips from her, which have helped me a lot with my first batch of pasta, which I had for lunch today and which is pictured above. Some gems from her, and the above links- use semolina or 00 flour (I used half semolina and half normal baking flour, which is what I had on hand)- knead until your arms fall off- let the dough rest at least 30-60 minutes- work in small batches, so your dough soesn't dry out too much- freezing of fresh pasta works better than drying- get the right consistency (like the inside of a woman's arm, according to Hank) by rolling the dough through the pastamaker on the widest setting and folding after each turn. This also helps to get some nice square pieces of dough (which actually isn't all that important when you're making tagliatelle, anyways).

In the middle of explaining, she pulled out her Jamie Oliver cookbook (Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook) to illustrate a finer point she was making. I started browsing (it's hard to resist the great layout and food photography), and despite my prejudice, I have to admit that I liked it. It has a lot of recipes that, number one, sound very yummy, and, number two, sound like something I realistically could do on a weekday night (ok- I'm not saying every weekday night here). Number two usually determines whether the cookbook will be used by me or not. I have the most gorgeous cookbooks and never use them because the recipes are just too involved for my current level of commitment to cooking. I'd rather just improvise something with under six ingredients. So now I'm debating whether I should buy the Jamie Oliver book or not. Basically, I could just get all the same recipes from his website... but it is a gorgeous book. Here's a recipe for egg pasta similar to the pasta I made above.

Experiment

This is my latest experiment: home made yogurt. Now some of you may ask themselves: who makes yogurt? At least, that's what I asked myself when a friend told me last year how easy it was to make. I thought to myself- well, that's nice if you're a stay at home mom. At the time, I was barely able to hold my stuff together, trying to not quit my job with an eight month old who had not slept more than 4 hours at a stretch ever. And whose usual sleep pattern involved 1-2 hour cycles of napping and feeding. I had no idea this level of exhaustion existed before I had a child.

However, fast forward a year, and some serious catching up in sleep deficit, here I am, making yogurt myself. It is really, seriously, easy. All you need is a gallon of milk, a thermometer, some clean jars, and a camping cooler. Oh, and of course your "starter culture", which is nothing but a cup ful of yoghurt with live yogurt cultures (I used the plain one from Dannone- it even has some funny label saying that the live cultures in the yogurt comply with standards set by the American yogurt association... that makes me chuckle) . Then, all that you neeed to do is

1. Fill camping cooler with 120 F warm water (close the lid, so it stays at 120- don't go above 130, or the yogurt dies)

2. Heat milk to 120 F (don't let boil, that changes the taste)

3. Whisk in starter yogurt (make sure you mix well)

4. Pour hot milk-yogurt mix into clean jars, set into the 120 F water in the cooler and keep there over night.

5. The next morning, eat yogurt for breakfast.


As always when working with milk, you want to be as clean as possible. The dishwasher is ok for the jars, but I boiled the wisk and thermometer, because they'd been in the drawer for a while. Keep your hands clean and don't touch anything that will touch the milk. If your yogurt is firmed up and sour the next morning, you can be pretty sure that those lactobacilli did their thing. Just as with sauerkraut, the low pH kills or inhibits most pathogenic bacteria.

This yogurt turned out a bit less solid than most store bought products (apparently, stabilizers such as gelatine get added to yogurt a lot to make it firm). I love to eat it plain, or with a drop of honey or jam. My daughter loves it, too. It may be coincidence, but over the last week, she has started to say "dodu", for yogurt (came home,went straight to the fridge, pointed at it, and, with commanding voice, "dodu!"). I guess I will be making it again.

Bummer

Remember how I was raving about Romanesco cauliflower the other day? Well, this year's are a bit of a letdown. The heads are tiny! I'm sure that they'll taste great, but I had to harvest three plants for one dinner. I wonder if it is because I bought seedlings from the store? I usually start from seed, but my own cabbage seedlings this year had been completely decimated by birds and/or mice. Twice. When I took down the Romanesco plants after harvesting the tiny heads, the root system seemed to be confined mainly to what was in the seedling pots to begin with. Perhaps they were kind of old seedlings and didn't make new roots. And then they became all stunted because they couldn't get enough nutrients... Well, at least I have some harvest from that plot.

Salad mix

One of the nice things about growing one's own veggies is that salad mix is different each time, depending on the time of year, what you've been growing, what seeded itself out from last season (wild arugula is great- seed it once and you'll have volunteers forever), and what weeds you have in your garden (I used to have a ton of purslane in both my plots. Unfortunately I didn't realize it was an edible weed until I had already pretty much eradicated it). My dinner tonight, part of which you can see above, has four different kinds of lettuce, endive, frisee, mache, rocket, wild arugula, parsley, and chervil.

Cleaning up

Just a brief stint in the garden today, weeded some beds, re-seeded lettuce, mache, and kohlrabi, and cleaned up some old collard plants. All the lower leaves were half eaten; I suspect the mice that I've been seeing a lot of lately, there appears to be some kind of population explosion. Last spring, we temporarily housed a gopher snake in our fava bean plot- it was great. After loosing about 90 % of our winter plantings to gophers, the snake took care of business and we had almost no losses for the rest of the summer (with the exception of a few tomato plants). I am hoping that he or she will return and conduct some more biologic warfare on our behalf. We briefly toyed with the idea of trapping gophers and mice. However, after a little demonstration of how the trap works by our (semi-pro) garden neighbor, we decided that even loosing 90 % of our plants somehow couldn't justify essentially impaling a sentient creature and letting it die a slow and very painful death. I know many will disagree, but since my family doesn't depend on the food, I'd rather "waste" my time planting it and having it eaten than killing small mammals.

I still managed to get enough young and fresh leaves from my plants for some yummy acacia honey and mustard braised collard greens tonight. It tasted great with some rosemary sausages we had in the freezer, and, as always, it was extremely satisfying to eat our own food.

It's done...

It's done... my first hand knit pullover in more than twenty years. It's soft, and light, and my daughter loves it. It was fun to make, but as always, I hit that strange spot around the 90% completion mark where I didn't touch the project for about two weeks. I've had projects in the past that I almost completed and then just never touched again. I wonder why that is? Anyhow- today I finished it, and I think it turned out all right.

Magic moment

Last weekend, it was finally dry enough to put my seed potatoes in the ground. I had seven different kinds of wonderful potatoes, yellow, red, and blue. They were all from the store, rather than dedicated seed potatoes. Experts advise against using store bought potatoes as seeds, because they get some sort of anti-germination treatment that supposedly inhibits sprouting. However, for some inexplicable reason, my pantry appears to provide ideal conditions for potato germination. So over the last few months, I simply kept the ones that started having eyes in a paper bag on the top shelf. Now, I really needed to get them in the ground, as some of the sprouts had become rather long (which is apparently another no-no in potato-growing circles).

So come sunday, the sun was out and the ground was not too bad and I grabbed both hubby and daughter for a stint in the garden. I turned the earth where I was going to plant, and was amazed by the number of earthworms in it. We've had this plot for just one season. When we got it, it was completely compacted with nothing but crabgrass growing on it. In several weekends of back breaking labor, we loosened the soil using nothing but a spading fork and tons of persistence. The ground was so hard that I had to stand on the spading fork and rock side to side in order to be able to drive it into the ground. We added horse manure generously, once in the summer and once in fall. By now, the presence of all that organic material had attracted literally thousands of earth worms. As a result, the soil was so loose that for the most part, I was able to dig "hands only", not even needing the extra weight of my foot to push the spading fork completely into the ground.

This time, it took only about an hour to dig the potato bed, which takes up half the current plot (about 200 sqft). Another 45 minutes later, I'd popped my seed spuds in. For almost the entire time, I noticed a small, brilliant blue, russet and tan western blue bird sitting on the fencepost in the next plot. He was very clearly observing me, cocking his little head this way and that while he was checking out what I was doing. The moment I moved away from the plot, he dove down and immediately started pulling fat earthworms out of the ground. Good for him- I think we really have a few to spare!

I took a walk with the hubby and baby to go check out the other plot. When we came back, the area surrounding the freshly dug plot was swarming with birds. Literally. They were all snacking on the myriad of bugs and critters that my digging had disturbed, snapping them up as fast as they could before they would hide back under ground. Since we were talking, my husband and I weren't paying attention. It was the baby who spotted them first. She cried out excitedly and almost jumped off my arm. We looked up and saw them taking flight ahead of us, twenty or thirty birds from various species. It was a magical moment, and I felt blessed- for my daughter, her joy, the birds, and for having contributed to their existence in a small way.