Way back in June I blogged about the mushroom growing bags I made from a repurposed tent. About a month ago, my husband and daughter started a batch of oyster mushrooms, and the bags were finally put to the test.
Today, we had our first harvest from them—mushrooms as big as my hand! And not a single fungus gnat larva in them (which was the purpose of the bags—to keep the fungus gnats from eating them before we did).
I can taste tonight’s mushroom stir-fry already!
I knew I would be picking strawberries later in the day, so this morning when I was baking I made a simple vanilla cake, because it would go well with the berries.
But why do we consider vanilla simple, plain?
Vanilla is an exotic spice, made from the bean of a tropical orchid. Like most orchids, it has evolved a close relationship with it’s pollinator, and is only pollinated by one genus of bees. Outside its native Mexican range, vanilla must be hand pollinated. Though vanilla was introduced to Europe in the 1500s, it was more than 300 years before a viable hand-pollination technique was developed, allowing vanilla to be grown throughout the tropics.
To make vanilla even trickier to cultivate, it cannot germinate without the presence of specific mycorrhizal fungi.
Add to that the fact that it grows in regions prone to hurricanes and cyclones (which regularly wipe out regional production), and it’s not surprising that vanilla is the second most expensive spice after saffron.
So, why do we think of vanilla as ordinary and plain?
Perhaps it comes from the fact that vanillin, the artificial vanilla flavour that is used in 95% of “vanilla” flavoured products is made from lignin, a by-product of the papermaking industry. That makes artificial vanilla much cheaper than real vanilla—cheap enough to use in everything. Unfortunately, vanillin is only one of 171 different aromatic compounds found in the real vanilla bean, which is why artificial vanilla tastes so…well…plain.
This lovely, exotic spice has been rendered plain by its cheap imitation.
I use only real vanilla.
It’s not plain.
But it goes great with strawberries!
(or how I manage to read novels during summer)
I love to read, but don’t always have a chance to sit down in summer. I’m often busy from 5 am to 10 pm.
But cheese making gives me an unexpected opportunity to get some reading in, and an e-reader makes it all the easier.
Cheese making involves a lot of standing in the kitchen slowly stirring the curd to drive the whey out. Depending on the cheese, this process can last from 30 minutes to almost two hours.
It only takes one hand to stir, leaving the other free to hold a book. Paper books often fall shut, and it’s hard to turn a page one-handed, but the e-reader is easy to operate one-handed. And if I finish a book half-way through stirring, I can just click to another without leaving the cheese pot.
My son is at school camp and my husband is at a workshop, so it was just me and my daughter for dinner tonight.
We indulged in biscuits—eaten first with egg, cheese, lettuce, and all manner of toppings as dinner, then later filled with strawberries and whipped cream for dessert.
MMMMMMM…
A game of washers in the late evening sun, and it was a perfect Girls’ Night In!
Parsley is a ubiquitous herb, easy to overlook, easy to undervalue.
It is said its seeds must go to the devil and back seven times before germinating. I don’t think it takes quite that long, but parsley is slow to germinate.
Once up, though, parsley is tough and long-lasting. The plants I start in August will survive spring frosts to flourish through the heat and drought of summer, and continue flourishing through the cold wet winter, to be finally pulled out in October of the following year, when they begin to bolt, to make room for new plants.
We eat parsley by the handful (none of this Tablespoon stuff), and love it in risi e bisi, soup, potatoes, and gratins.
We grow both the Italian flat-leaf and the curly varieties (because, why not?), and enjoy the flat-leaf parsley fresh in salads (or just standing up in the garden as we pass by). We also enjoy parsley mixed with other fresh herbs to make a non-basil pesto that is lovely on pasta or as a topping for polenta crostini.
Of course, the best reason to grow parsley in much of the world is to attract the beautiful swallowtail butterflies, whose caterpillars specialise on parsley and related plants, incorporating the toxins from the plants into their exoskeletons to serve as defence. Unfortunately, we have no swallowtails in New Zealand, but the flowers of parsley attract bees, flies, and our native butterflies in large numbers.
Whenever I ask what folks want for Sunday breakfast, my son’s response is waffles. He always wants waffles, and only gets them a handful of times a year. I find waffle making tedious—I never get to sit down with the rest of the family, as they’re usually done eating by the time the last waffle comes off the iron.
But I love waffles, too, especially with strawberries.
So when I came in with almost four quarts of strawberries yesterday afternoon, I knew what breakfast would be today.
This recipe is adapted from the Basic Waffle recipe in Joy of Cooking. I double it—leftover waffles toast beautifully the next morning!
1 cup all purpose flour
¾ cup whole wheat flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 Tbsp sugar
¼ tsp salt
3 eggs
6 Tbsp butter, melted
¾ cup milk
Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, beat eggs and whisk in milk and melted butter. Combine wet and dry ingredients, stirring only until it is smooth. Cook according to the instructions for your waffle iron.
When I say I’m going to do some waxing, chances are it’s not the sort of waxing you think of. Instead of depilatory waxing, I’m doing cheese waxing.
I used to hate to wax cheeses. The “instructions” for cheese wax say you should brush it on. I used to try to brush my wax on, but very quickly realized that the wax hardens in the bristles before you’ve even got half a cheese covered, and then you’re trying to brush wax onto your cheese with what amounts to a block of wood. Meanwhile, half the wax ends up on your fingers, and you end up with a lumpy cheese, burnt fingers, and a stove covered in wax drips.
So I started dipping my cheese. This worked much better…until I accidentally dipped my fingers one day and dropped the cheese into the wax. I thought drips of wax on the stove were bad, but the tsunami of hot wax resulting from the dropped cheese took weeks to remove.
I still dip my cheeses, but now waxing is quick, clean and painless. Instead of holding the cheese, I create a sling for it out of cotton string. With my fingers hooked into the string and safely above the wax, I can dip an entire cheese all at once. I get a beautiful finish, no drips on the stove, and no burns. I also get a perfect place to attach a label, so I know which cheese is which after months of maturing in the fridge.
Running late
After a hard day,
Back aching,
Dinner to be made,
Laundry to be folded.
I stood at the kitchen sink
Washing the dishes that I didn’t have time to wash
After lunch.
Outside the window
A bloom danced in the breeze.
A rose
Frothy pink.
Another
Burgundy
Like wine I wished I had time to enjoy.
There were more, I knew
Out of sight.
I left the dishes,
Dried my hands.
Dinner would have to wait.
Scissors in hand, I abandoned my work
To gather roses.
A good stainless steel pot can last pretty much forever.
Problem is, the bits that aren’t stainless steel don’t.
We inherited two glass-lidded pots when we bought our house. They’re not the greatest pots, but they do get used a lot, as they’re very convenient sizes. Unfortunately, the lid handles have broken off both of them.
Enter my ever-resourceful, creative husband, who carved new handles for them.
These delightful knobs are far more interesting than the ones they replaced. In fact, they’re so nice, I’m thinking about breaking some of the other pot handles…
I had never eaten broad beans (aka fava beans) before moving to New Zealand, but now I can’t imagine early summer without them. They’re uncommon in the U.S., and even here where they’re grown by the hectare, they’re often considered “old people’s food”. During my brief stint selling vegetables at the Leeston market, I never sold broad beans to anyone under the age of 80.
But his attitude is unfair. Broad beans are more versatile than that. They have a bold, almost floral flavour that needs no embellishment. When young, the beans are sweet like peas, and they grow starchier as they mature. Somewhere between sweet and starch, they are at their best.
The “usual” way to eat broad beans is to blanch them, peel the skin off each bean, then serve them or cook them into a dish. Nothing wrong with that, unless you’re the cook, who has to shell and peel all those beans.
We prefer to make the consumers do half the work. We blanch the beans and serve them as finger food. They make a lovely appetizer—pop them out of their skins right into your mouth. Paired with a nice Sauvignon Blanc and eaten outdoors on a summer evening, they are no longer “old people’s food”. They become urbane and sophisticated. Something to be savoured with intelligent conversation.
And if you’re more the beer and burgers type, broad beans will oblige. They make a mean green burger that goes well with cheese, mushrooms and ketchup. Light enough for a lager, strong enough for a stout, broad bean burgers go with just about anything.
Broad beans—a versatile legume that’s not just for old people.
Robinne Weiss 