Beans, Beans

June 17, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Beans baked overnight in the bread oven

Beans, Beans

The wonderful fruit.

The more you eat,

The more you toot.

The more you toot,

The better you feel,

So eat your beans

With every meal.

I have no idea where that poem came from or who wrote it. My husband apparently learned it at Scout camp when he was a boy. It makes the 12 year-old in me giggle.

The truth of the matter is that beans don’t make me toot, and they are, indeed, wonderful. We eat beans regularly, in many different forms. Usually I can grow enough beans to get us through the year. I grow black, borlotti, and soy beans. We eat most of the soy green, but I always save some for dry beans. Beans are one of those wonderful, long-storing products from the garden. They’re a low-maintenance, high-yield sort of crop, like potatoes. Best of all, they’re delicious in a wide variety of dishes.

Burritos and burgers are probably my family’s favourite ways to eat beans. They’re time-intensive meals, but well worth the effort. Baked beans, too, are time intensive—mostly oven time, so we usually only make them when we have the bread oven fired up. They bake beautifully in the long tail-end of the oven’s heat.

Simple beans and rice is the most common way we eat beans. If I remember to put the beans to soak in the morning, it becomes an effortless meal, and a perfect winter warmer.

The best flavours to go with beans (no matter how they’re cooked)? Fresh cilantro (added at the very end of cooking), smoked paprika, and cumin. A bit of tomato is lovely, too.

The lambs are coming!

June 16, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Two days ago, I heard the first one—a reedy, high pitched ‘baaa’ from the neighbour’s paddock. Today there are a dozen voices out there, calling to their mothers, whose low rumbles answer patiently.

Lambing comes early in our neighbourhood. These June and July lambs will have to survive the worst of winter, and the farmers know it is a gamble. One ill-timed storm, and a farmer can lose 200 lambs overnight. It is apparently worth the gamble though. Lambs that make it through the winter will have months of growth on the August and September lambs born in the high country, and will be prime for the Christmas lamb market.

Though I feel bad for those little lambs, born in the dead of winter, I do appreciate the promise they bring, frisking in the paddocks on frosty mornings. They promise spring to come. Warmth and light. They bring joy to the bare branches of the winter landscape.

Baked pumpkin slices

June 15, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 2 Comments

I think my husband was the first to try it—baked pumpkin slices. We all love pumpkin, but it can be a real pain to prepare—either you spend an hour baking whole pumpkins, or you peel and cube dangerously hard raw ones. These lovely slices, with the peel on, are easy to prepare and bake up quickly. They make a wonderful side dish with lentils or burgers (and probably go well with animal flesh, too, for the meat eaters among you).

Halve a pumpkin or other winter squash. Scoop out the seeds. Slice each half into wedges about 1.5 cm thick. Place on an oiled baking sheet, flipping each slice once to make sure it’s coated with oil on both sides. Sprinkle with coarse salt, freshly ground pepper, and sesame seeds. Bake at 190°C (375°F) for 20-30 minutes.

Cream cheese frosting

June 14, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

OK, so I’m fixated on cake again. Must be the cold, short days. I recently checked out a book about cake from the library. Can’t remember the title of the book, but I do remember that every third cake was iced with cream cheese frosting.

And I thought…why not?

I’d only ever really thought of cream cheese frosting in association with carrot cake, but this book opened my eyes to all sorts of possibilities. Imagine cream cheese frosting on lemon, chocolate, or spice cake! How about on gingerbread?

Since then, I’ve put cream cheese frosting on a variety of cakes. Today on pumpkin cake. It has been dangerously good on everything!

Cupcakes

June 13, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

The whole family loves cake, and I much prefer cake over cookies or bars, but cake has some important drawbacks. It can be difficult to pack in lunches—icing gets everywhere and the cake crumbles. It’s also not something the kids can grab and go with, like cookies are.

So lately I’ve been turning many of my cakes into cupcakes. They travel well, are easy to snag on the go, and…well…they’re cake!

It’s still nice to have icing on cake, but with cupcakes, I can ice some and leave others plain for lunchboxes. These beautifully iced carrot cupcakes were divine, but the plain ones were just as good!

There are also some lovely cupcakes that don’t need icing at all, like these chocolate chip cupcakes with cheesecake centres.

So far, I haven’t met a cake that didn’t do just as well as a cupcake. Just make sure you pull them out as soon as they’re done—they’ll bake faster than a cake and dry out easily.

A Culinary Adventure

June 12, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

The kitchen, with 3-rock fire.

I spent a couple of hours today going through the letters I wrote home from Panama when we were in Peace Corps–trying to decide if there’s a book in that mass of experiences. As I went through, I noted that, in almost every letter, there is something about food. Life in rural Panama was a nutty mix of plenty and famine, luxury and squalor. We had no electricity, and only rudimentary water, but we had fresh hot bread delivered to our door every morning. Sometimes we ate nothing but rice with a spoonful of chutney for dinner, and other times we stuffed ourselves with fresh produce and tropical fruits.

Every week, I had something to say about food:

“Last night’s dinner was actually pretty good. The rice and beans and juice they brought us tasted fine as long as you ignored the dead bugs in both. Same with the soup for lunch today and the mouse droppings.”

“Tonight our dinner was 25 cents worth of bread and a little peanut butter. After eight hours of walking I would have liked more…oh well, we won’t starve to death.”

“6:15 am–I’m sitting here enjoying a delightful warm roll that was just delivered to our door a minute ago.”

“Thanksgiving dinner didn’t quite turn out as planned—the papaya we were planning on for the bulk of our fruit salad was full of worms—but it was very good.”

“We each ate about four oranges yesterday…and the citrus season still isn’t in full swing! We’re hard pressed to eat all the citrus we’re getting now! Guess we’ll just have to suffer.”

“We stopped by a kiosko (little store) on the way home this afternoon for a Coke (warm, of course).”

We grew to love the local lentils and rice, boiled yuca lightly salted and served with a slice of tomato, and thick sweet oatmeal drink that substituted for a meal in the fields. We perfected the art of straining ants out of the coffee with our teeth. We learned how to make lasagne and pizza on our 3-rock fire. It was a culinary adventure!

Birthday Cakes Past

June 11, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

For Throwback Thursday, I thought I’d post some photos of a few past birthday cakes, just for fun.

2010: One of a long series of “flower” cakes requested by my daughter.

2010: The Earth was my son’s request.

2011: My daughter’s colourful paintbrush cake.

2012: The girl requested a surprise animal. This was my first attempt at using leaves as chocolate moulds (for the ears).

2013: A dual birthday party cake–the spice cake owl was for my son, the chocolate log, for my daughter. I had always wanted to make meringue mushrooms…

2014: After the 2012 success with chocolate painted leaves, I used the same technique for flight feathers on the LOTR eagle. Unfortunately, it was a blazingly hot day, and the wing tips melted and sagged within an hour.

2014: The swan used more chocolate painted leaves—white chocolate this time, which managed the heat a little bit better than the dark chocolate (though the icing holding the wing to the body did not). It was also my first, not so attractive, foray into marzipan (for the beak).

2014: My marzipan, cake, and candy triumph—Smaug was the joint birthday party cake. Tail, neck, head, and legs sculpted from marzipan, clear candy wings and jewels studding the treasure pile.

Vacation

June 10, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

“So, should I put this pizza in the freezer for next week?”

“Yeah, that’d be great.”

“Um. There’s no room here.”

The freezer was already full of ready-made meals waiting for a day when they were needed. We’ve gotten into such a habit of making extra to throw into the freezer, that we’ve outstripped our need for those “heat and eat” meals.

So I took a vacation yesterday.

Dinner was baked beans made in the bread oven last week, reheated, served over rice. Fried eggs on the side. A 15-minute meal. And a few extra minutes to roll out a pie dough I made earlier in the week, fill it with gooseberries from the freezer and throw it in the oven. Felt like cheating.

Instead of cooking, I pottered around the yard on the unseasonally warm day, played the piano, paid a social visit to the goats, and did a little writing.

Excellent!

Girl

June 9, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

Girl.

She walks tall,

Plans,

Creates,

Loves,

Laughs.

Considers,

Debates,

Decides.

Imagines,

Does.

Is.

In the space given to her–

The space too small

To hold all that is

Girl,

The space with limits,

Rules,

Expectations that do not meet hers.

Expectations too low:

Strength,

Independence,

Endurance,

Brains.

Expectations too high:

Beauty,

Popularity,

Helplessness.

Make way.

Make space for her.

Space for steely resolve.

Space for sweat.

Space for skinned knees and

Dogged determination.

Because Girl

She walks tall.

She

Is.

Teenage angst

June 9, 2015 / Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

What do you mean I’m too young?

I was in my office, trying to focus on work when her insistent voice broke into my consciousness. Estrella, one of the goat kids, was whining loudly and incessantly. I stepped outside to see what was wrong with the normally quiet girl.

She was standing in the middle of the paddock. Her head wasn’t caught in the fence. Her sister and her mum were nearby. She hadn’t injured herself in the three hours since I was last in the paddock.

Ariana came bounding to her rescue, and her little tail gave a vigorous wag.

I sighed.

Estrella is in season. She’s the last of the three kids to start cycling. The other two have had their days over the past few weeks. Each cycle is heralded by vociferous maaa-ing.

At eight months old, the kids are too young to breed—though they’d happily get in kid, their bodies still aren’t fully developed, and it would cause them trouble. My old girl, Artemis, is now retired from breeding, though to hear her talk, she’d gladly visit the buck, too. Only one of the five goats in the paddock is at breeding age. She’s just come back from three weeks with the neighbour’s bucks, so I’m hopeful she is in kid.

But with four unmated goats in the paddock, and a cycle of three weeks between seasons, there’s going to be a lot of whining in the paddock this winter.

With two children in the house on the cusp of puberty, the whining indoors is almost as bad. I am surrounded by hormonal animals, all wanting something they don’t quite understand and cannot have.

It’s enough to make me dream of olive trees. They would look nice in the paddock. I love olives. And they don’t whine.