Food
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13. Delicious – December Reflections 2022
New Mexican food probably deserves to be posted here but I don’t think I took any photos of the food while in New Mexico. We had some delicious pozole and wonderful enchiladas, and definitely missed the free chips and salsa situation that comes with Tex-Mex, but the lack of photos is hampering my ability to make them the highlight here. What? I can write a post without photos? Do you know me? How long have you been reading? You know that’s not something I do often! Photos, I need photos! So, the deliciousness that gets shared here is my jar of roselle syrup that I made at the end of…
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Tomato Portraits (and a couple of Squash!)
A few tomato portraits from this season. It’s been a few years since I’ve taken fruit and vegetable portraits—err, looks like I filed a kombucha post in the wrong category as you will see if you click through that—and I got around to doing a few one day before canning a few weekends ago. Hopefully I can get out and do some more this summer! Togo Trifle/Togo Trefle: These tomatoes have been fairly prolific this season but they have also been targeted heavily by the leaf footed bugs and as such I’ve had a ton of them rotting on the vine because of those pesky insects. Rutgers: This tomato isn’t…
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Blackberry Kombucha Shrub
I started making kombucha in August of 2013 (and side note to that post: A 10pm run to Walgreens for sugar? Oh man, I miss those days of randomly running out to the store at weird hours. That *does not* happen now with a toddler. Making kombucha at 10pm also does not happen!) and I’ve kept it up on and off in the years since. Brewing and drinking kombucha is definitely cyclical, with months of being very interested in having the drink around and other months where the batch sits in the closet just hanging out until I’m in the mood for a new batch. For those months that the…
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Current Fermentation Projects
Kombucha If you’ve been reading here for any length of time you may remember when I got into kombucha. I let my SCOBY go into the compost when I was pregnant and for much of the year after Forest was born but, I think it was last summer, my SIL gave me her SCOBY because she wasn’t doing much with kombucha at the time. Well, it molded quickly and I had to chunk it. I ended up ordering another SCOBY from Kombucha Kamp and had success with it for 6-8 months. There were some down times when I wouldn’t be interested in brewing and would let the SCOBY just hang…
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In the Kitchen: Making
It’s taken awhile but I am slowly feeling like I can begin doing my old kitchen experiments once again. I may not be getting wild hairs on a Friday night at 8pm to make homemade pasta (done it!) but I feel like I can tackle some small projects in the kitchen once again. Suffice to say, the last 15 months have been hard, the first 9-12 months of that the roughest. An adjustment period. Some of the more curated blogs and social media sites are very great about depicting the ability for a new mother to keep up with her old ways, or even a mother with a new baby…
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Pizza On The Grill
The first thing we cooked on our new grill was pizza. I had seen several people blogging about pizza on the grill and had been intrigued for awhile. We use a dough recipe from a Pampered Chef book that is usually made on a pizza stone, but it worked well on the grill. Bubbling up nice! A little olive oil on the top side… And then flip it over! The process is incredibly fast, so you really need to be on top of your game and have all ingredients ready and on hand. Pizza! I’ve now had grilled pizza three times in the span of two weeks and I am…
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Kombucha Fun
For the uninitiated into what kombucha is, here’s a run down. Last week when I was at my parent’s house for my grandmother’s funeral I mentioned to my brother and sister-in-law that I wanted to try their kombucha. Stephanie, my SIL, had received a ‘mother/SCOBY’ as a present for her birthday. They’ve been happily brewing kombucha ever since! Now the SCOBY has split enough that she could share so I was gifted a jar of fermenting tea and SCOBY. Last night was my night to pour it into Ball Jars and flavor it how I wanted and start a new ferment. I opted to keep the new ‘baby’ with the…
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Fig Season!
It’s fig season around here, or just starting up really. I tried one out about a week ago and it wasn’t quite ready yet…but now, now we’re talking. Last night I walked back and forth under the fig tree as I passed by doing garden and yard chores and would snag one off as I passed. A deliciously fresh desert! I also noticed some other garden animal had enjoyed one too as it was half eaten on the stem! Last year we harvested from the community garden. I’d forgotten we’d done that around the same time we’d closed on our house. We’ve been here a year—time flies!
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Lunch Tomato
My kitchen does not have good food photography lighting so I apologise for the dark tomato shots there. I finally carved into the German Johnson tomato, the only tomato off of that plant so far, that had been sitting in my fridge for several days. It was high time, too. I only ate the two slices but I think I’ll polish the rest off at dinner, only after I save some seeds. It is definitely one of the larger tomatoes I’ve grown so I think I’d like to try again with this variety next year, though if it is a poor producer once again it is being struck off my…
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Collard Green Pesto
The collards were starting to bolt and I decided that I wasn’t in mood for boiling up lots of collards for dinner one night and instead wanted to do something different. In passing on a blog somewhere I’d remembered reading about collard green pesto. Sure enough there were a lot of recipes and I decided on this one to experiment with. I modified it using walnuts instead of pecans and eliminating the olives, but for the most part I followed the directions. Pesto is forgiving and very pliable, I think you could use any kind of green for a different result. All of the collard leaves were not picked, but…