A coworker gave us a bag of oranges from a tree in her backyard. I thought Chris might make juice with it since he made juice with oranges from natural areas in Florida, but apparently those were sour and made for orange-ade’s and these, well, these were for making marmalade. He spent half of last Saturday researching recipes and watching YouTube videos before making a batch. He had to re-cook it a bit because the first round didn’t gel, but it worked out! Now we have jars of marmalade for a good while!

I wasn’t expecting to have this much of a harvest last Thursday. It started raining around 4pm, a heavy rain, one that I was hoping would refill the rain barrel. I was glad I didn’t have to water as the last time I went the well had run dry, spitting air out instead of water and twisting the hoses around like one of those old 80s water games.

I started poking around not expecting much but I’d lift a giant zucchini leaf to find a fruit waiting to be harvested, and cucumbers cautiously hiding behind leaves. It was a surprise every time I went to a new bed, finding more things to harvest and of course I didn’t end up bringing anything to carry it all out so I had to rummage in my truck for a reusable grocery sack to carry everything out.

All of the cucumbers except the suyo long ended up being converted into three jars of pickles. Pickles and I go way back. I can’t pinpoint when my love affair with the salty-vinegary goodness began but probably sometime when I started teething and could eat solid food. I grew up eating my grandmother’s pickles, made from cucumbers she grew, bought at a farmers market or if they had pickling cucumbers at the store. It isn’t unusual for me to polish off a whole jar in one sitting. I remember people warning me the acid would erode my stomach, but I didn’t care. A perfect Sunday evening mean growing up would be leftovers from Nan’s (my grandmother) of cheese potatoes, fried chicken, maybe some okra and definitely pickles!

One small delight in returning to Texas is that when you go to a movie theater, pickles are sold at the concession stand. I think I found them at one theater in Florida, but otherwise I was out of luck. I don’t know if this is an option in other states, but if it is let me know! I’m also fond of pickle popcorn, salt and vinegar chips…I have an addiction!

As for pickle recipes, we are trying a variety of recipes and Chris made some of Nan’s pickles while I was in PA a few weeks ago. He’s also made Klaussen like pickles and I made some using a recipe from my grandmother on my dad’s side. The cucumbers in this photo ended up in a variation of this recipe from Food in Jars. Basically I only followed the vinegar, water and salt recommendations and then added my own spices.

I’ll let you know how they turn out in a few weeks!

Got a pickle recipe to share?

Now that we are starting to harvest cucumbers we are turning to pickling them. I’ve made a recipe of my grandmother’s before, my mom’s mom, and I love it. Chris is branching out and trying some other recipes. The one in the photos below are a type of Claussen apparently. I didn’t take photos but I made two jars from a recipe of my other grandmother, my dad’s mom, that I found amidst fluttering sheets of paper tucked into an old, red Betty Crocker cookbook.

Chris’ birthday was last week so I made him his favorite cake, carrot cake. Honestly I do not like carrot cake but this recipe was pretty good. One reason I turn my nose up to it is the calorie and fat count on commercial cakes. They are atrociously bad for you. I mean, cake in general isn’t great, but it seems like carrot cakes are even worse. I found a lighter version and really enjoyed it. Particularly the icing. I like cream cheese icing.

Can’t wait to eat lots of pickles in a few weeks! One of my favorite foods! Pickle popcorn, pickle salt, ooh, I have pickle popsicles in the freezer I need to try! Found those at Wal-mart a few weeks ago.

I can’t take credit for this recipe. Our field boss made these for us last spring at the Big Thicket project and ever since they have become a favorite. I didn’t grow up eating eggplant, in fact I only really ate it for the first time a few years ago. This is a very tasty dish, easy and for the most part healthy.

Things you need:
+Ciabatta buns or your favorite bread
+Eggplant
+Large slicing tomato
+Good mozzarella, not the sliced kind.
+Basil leaves
+Olive Oil and spices to taste
+Other condiments as necessary but it is not needed

Slice, spice and grill the eggplant and tomatoes until tender. Apparently the eggplant will firm up again once it becomes tender. Grill the buns of the bread if interested.

I think Chris puts the mozzarella on top of the tomatoes and eggplant while it is on the grill to get it to melt. Put the sandwich together and—mmmm, delicious!

This pairs great with sweet potato fries!

I think a few people, Katie specifically, who were interested in what we made for our dinners since we pre-plan right now. Here’s a sampling of our meals for the past week:

We kicked off with homemade pizza last week. Chris used a dough recipe he found in a cookbook from the library, a recipe we really love. I think it would even be a great flatbread/dipping bread, too. He made two crusts for us to each have our own pizzas the way we wanted them.

He had a little extra dough so he made a few mini pesto pizzas to much on. Very good!

A few weeks ago we were looking for something particular in the pepper section and they typically put more Latin foods in this section. We saw the corn husks and thought making tamales we be fun! Well, Chris ended up making them and he said they were quite a pain to be making every month, but I think the results were great! We did vegetarian tamales and I really love how they turned out. We have enough for at least a few more meals in the freezer.

I’m a bit bummed on how this turned out because we had to improvise. Our grocery store just isn’t as varied as I thought it might be, it carries whole tamarind fruits just not the jarred tamarind sauce needed for the pad Thai. Instead Chris bought a package of rice noodles with sauce that came with it but the sauce just wasn’t enough and not enough to taste. I’ll have to pick up the extra ingredients in the ‘big town’ when we go.

The corn patties were a second meal for these guys. I actually didn’t eat much that night because I’d had a bunch of snacks at a baby shower at work so I think I ate one of them that night. Chris made a bunch of these corn patties up a few weeks before and froze them for a second meal later, which was this night. We found the recipe in a meatless Mexican cookbook. They taste great! Chris had a salad with his, I think we made beans and rice with them the first time around.

We had a heavy lunch on this day, Saturday, so a late dinner of salad was what we opted for. Since we had a few corn patties left from the night before we threw them in the salad. Perfect!

Last night we opted for spaghetti squash ‘spaghetti’ which I really love. Chris was lamented the fact that the squash cost $6 but then I told him that it was a pretty good bargain because we got several meals out of it. Including last night’s meal we had enough for leftovers, some to freeze and then we used some in tonight’s meal. So, if you think about it it wasn’t that pricey at all. We used meatless ‘meat’ crumbles and spaghetti sauce to top.

So part of the squash ended up in the vegetable lasagna we had tonight. This was really good! I remember my mom making a vegetable lasagna when we were growing up and I think we all hated it, mom included. This was really good! We had the squash, a potato (ask Chris, he wanted that one), garlic, kale, calabaza squash, shallots, parsley and then the regular lasagna fixins. Plus some veggie ‘meat’ crumbles. We have enough for lunches and another dinner later on!

So, that’s a sample of what we had made this last week. It really is pretty easy and sometimes when you are making a meal for the first time the budget might be larger, but once the staple ingredients are on hand it is easy to get the rest for cheap.

If you are interested in making meals at home that are affordable and bought locally, Chiot’s Run did a series on her $5 challenge. I wish we had one of the shops she went to! I’m lucky that we can buy local eggs; I bet we could source other things if we looked.

Share your meals with me! Do you have any ideas (vegetarian please!) that we could try?

When we moved in Chris and I decided we’d start planning our weekly meals out in an effort to safe money and not to waste food. So far we have done well and I’ve enjoyed doing what we’ve planned. Our one night out to eat is on Wednesdays and we look forward to that. I’m sure we will be a little more hectic once Chris finds a job and we both have to come home tired from work, but right now I have house-husband so I normally have a meal ready or nearly ready to eat when I get home from work. Yes, it is nice! He did tell me that I had to cook something this week so I’ve got to come up with a something good to eat on Friday.

At the library I checked out a bunch of vegetarian cookbooks and Chris picked out some canning and preserving books. He found this pizza recipe in one of those books. Honestly I was a bit skeptical when he told me what was on it but when I saw it out of the oven and then tasted it—oh it was good! The crust is very thin and tastes wonderful, the sauce is pesto, mozzarella and goat cheese on top with some green olives too. He meant to put some garlic on top but forgot until after the pizza was cooked. Next time! You could add meat to it if you wanted, but I think it tastes fine without.

Yesterday we made Drunken Beans, a meatless Mexican recipe I found in another cookbook. It’s ‘drunken’ because it requires a bottle of Dos Equis, but Chris substituted Corona. Can’t taste any beer in the beans, but they did come out with a sort of Ranch Style Beans taste to them. We’re using leftovers to make taco salad tonight. One ingredient it called for was a Mexican style brown sugar called piloncillo. We weren’t too sure we’d find it and while rummaging through the produce section we came across it piled up with the chili peppers. Score!

Despite not having curb side recycling we bought a second trash can that is solely dedicated to recycling. We’ve been reducing our trash a considerable amount because of that. The recycling center is right next to the community garden so it will make it easy to take things when we are going that direction. We’re also starting to collect food scraps in a cut out milk jug under the kitchen sink for taking to the compost pile at the garden. I’ve always wanted to do that but in the past haven’t had a compost pile to take it to. I’m hoping we develop some rich dirt to grow our fall crops in!

Still without internet at the house so I’m doing my blogging and scheduling from Mickey D’s. Will try to get some other posts up for next week—hopefully this situation will be resolved soon so that I can do some research for the project I’m working on!

Cute photos of the niece and nephew tomorrow!

We’d stopped by Central Market, a grocery store that is a bit like Whole Foods but with some Trader Joe’s and other indie food type stores mixed in, last week to pick up some things for my mom’s birthday. They have a good coffee selection so that was our main goal but while perusing the fruit and vegetable section we spotted mangosteens.

Our first encounter with mangosteens was while living in Florida when Chris began reading about them to grow. They are a super tropical plant that really cannot be grown anywhere in the continental U.S. and even Hawaii has problem growing them. You can read more in detail here about them. Anyway, Chris sent off to Thailand for seeds and he tried to grow them and I’m pretty sure they sprouted, lived a few years, and died later on. Chris says we had a hot and dry spell and they keeled over. Anyway, despite south Florida being known to grow a lot of tropical plants that otherwise might have to be imported like lychees (ohhh, lychees! We found them at CM too!) mangosteens can’t be grown there and we’d never eaten one.

Enter Central Market.

Now, imported fruits can be expensive, but when we saw the price for these fruits we thought long and hard about buying them. They were a pack of 4 for $12.99. Yep. You read that right. Finally we decided that once a year we could spent the exorbitant amount of money for a tropical treat, so we broke down and threw them in the cart with the tiny amount of lychees that were left in the box for sale. We went back a few days later for more lychees.

At home Chris used a serrated knife to cut a ring around the hard outer shell. Inside the fruit resembled an orange, but not quite in texture.

I can’t even tell you how the fruit tastes, it is sweet and mild, really delectable but disappointing in the same bite because you know that once you are done, that’s it. You can’t run out and buy them again because they were the seasonal fruit on sale.

We chilled ours for a bit which added to the taste I think. Most of the pieces didn’t have seeds (though they really aren’t seeds if you read that article linked above) but a few do, so you’ll have to eat around them. They are large and you will notice them, so don’t worry about that.

But then you are done and that’s it. It really is quite sad to think about. It’s too bad they are so expensive, but then again they will make a great treat to look forward to every summer!

Do you have a favorite or rare fruit treat?

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. My mom used to make it when she taught preschoolers and many blogs out there talk about making homemade butter. Most places I read said it would take 10-20 minutes but it took me an hour. I think separating it into two jars was the trick. You should give it a try sometime.

PS: Find a good movie to watch while doing this

I’d of thought that with vegetarianism and veganism being much more prevalent and accepted these days it wouldn’t be difficult for people to grasp the concept or get orders correct.

It seems that it is increasingly common for wait staff and/or kitchen staff to continually screw up my order. I mean, really how hard is “no meat”. I didn’t say “no guac, no onions, no meat, no cheese”. Just one thing was taken out. I want everything else. That pasta I ordered? I want the pasta with everything but the meat. Instead I got a kid sized order of pasta without meat. I didn’t say re-size my pasta. I *don’t* get it. I ordered cheese enchiladas one day and got beef enchiladas. WTH? Of course I sent it back. Then there are some things that I don’t think of, particularly when asking for cooked greens or beans, forgetting that meat like bacon or ham is often used for flavor. Sometimes I take a few bites and try to ignore my gaff.

Chel and Eliana do you have this problem? Any other veggies have this issue?

I am looking forward to having my own place and kitchen once again to actually cook some good vegetarian meals. This whole veggie thing was meant to be temporary through the work project here in Beaumont, but the more I do it the more I just feel like keeping on. Oh, I still look at meat and when I smell it—I do drool. But it is pretty easy to turn it down.

We’ll see. I’ve got a few more weeks here and we’ll see where it goes from there.

About a year and a half ago, before we went on the AT I tried a week of going vegetarian while Chris was on a business trip. It was really easy for me then, I was able to cook what I wanted and try new recipes. I haven’t tried this again until the last two weeks.

We’re back in Beaumont for our job for about two months and I got the idea to try going vegetarian again. I thought it would be easy but we eat out most of the time and it is really hard! Vegetarian options are either making something meatless or eating lots of salads and pasta. Sometimes I don’t mind this but it is really frustrating to find something vegetarian on a menu.

A few nights ago was semi-difficult. We went to Pappadeaux’s Seafood for dinner and there is very, very little on their menu that is vegetarian. Originally I thought I might try to eat some fish once or twice a month but now I am being stubborn and trying to really stick to this plan. Trust me, the crab cakes were lusted after heavily. On their lunch menu was a chicken pasta that I thought I could order without chicken, which I did after asking the waiter if I could get the lunch item for dinner. He said he could swing it. My other option if that failed was going to be a Greek salad with some sides. I had thought the dirty rice might be worth getting but Chris got it with his meal and it had sausage in it. Hrm. So, that wouldn’t have worked.

I have various reasons for trying to do the vegetarian thing. The biggest reason is to stay healthier while we are on the road working. I notice a huge difference in how I feel after dinner without eating meat; there is no heavy, over stuffed feeling in general. Another is the environmental effects from eating meat. Some of it is also the animal cruelty aspect, the mass farming of animals. When we ever settle down (I’m done guessing at this point…it’ll happen when it happens I guess!) it will be easier to purchase organic and free range meats to eat a few times a week while eating vegetarian for most of the week. Right now that just isn’t an option while eating on the road.

I would love to be around Eliana for her super-vegan help but she’s off in Florida (Alaska at the moment actually). If someone out there is vegetarian and has any help or ideas for great vegetarian options, drop me a comment or email. I’m already getting annoyed with the same old options of pasta and the regular old vegetables that are served. Breakfast and lunch is really easy because I can prepare that myself for the field and in the hotel room but Chris prefers to eat out (I’d be ok eating in most nights) for dinner. I’ve checked a few vegetarian restaurant website lists but we are in a very southern, bordering Cajun area that is just not into the vegetarian thing.

One of the better things I’ve had recently was a stuffed portobello mushroom that was almost like a baked potato. It was awesome!

So, I don’t know how long this will last, but I hope I can make it the two months. We’ll see!