Chicken: The Flying Pig, Vancouver, BC

In the interest of getting the vital chicken data into the blog, I will now and then be posting really short posts. This is one of them.

The Flying Pig in Vancouver, British Columbia is a nice place, a little crowded, pleasant staff, just fine on all the setting and service issues.

I post because the parmesan breaded chicken cutlet on the lunch menu is a nice, satisfying, comforting dose of chicken, of the boneless skinless crusty-coating white meat category. I recommend it.

I also see that the online menu mentions "bone marrow cheezy bread." How could we have missed that?

Chicken: Homer Street Cafe, Vancouver, BC, and a new direction for the Rambling Chicken

So, in my other blog, I once discussed the maddening situation of being in an unfamiliar city and not knowing where the perfume is. Aiee! But there's something much worse: being in a city where crunchy rendered chicken skin is available for sale, and not knowing it.

Homer Street Cafe in Vancouver, British Columbia, sells crunchy rendered chicken skin. See? Now you know. And now I'll remember where that chicken skin was, because I've blogged about it.

I've been thinking that I should blog about where a person can eat good fried chicken. And  other poultry both fried and unfried. Bacon, too, would be represented. Stuff like that. Wherever I eat. Home or traveling. And I happen to have this blog with a nicely appropriate name for that purpose, that has been napping since (hang on...) 2011. And I own the domain for that blog, because Himself kindly bought it for me in case I ever wanted to use it. Right now the domain points to the Other Blog, but we'll fix that in a few days.

So here I go.

We went to Vancouver, British Columbia, over (United States) Thanksgiving. We've gone to Vancouver for Thanksgiving, off and on, for years. There's good food, not too many people are traveling that way, and we're not making the cooks and waiters work on a holiday, since they already finished their Thanksgiving. We went, among other places, to Homer Street Cafe.

It's nice. Bright. Pretty. A well-appointed room and casual happy customers, so you don't feel that you have to live up to the room. Friendly staff. It exceeds pretty much all of my requirements for setting, service, blah blah. I say "blah blah' because what I care most about is the food.

The food included crunchy rendered chicken skin, so the rest of their menu could be limited to bran muffins and lukewarm water served in soup cans, and I'd still be delighted with them. But the rest of the menu is lovely. We shared the rendered chicken skin and an appetizer of chicken wings and drumsticks, and I had a quarter chicken while Himself had the special of roast suckling pig. The menu has at least a dozen more things that I wanted to try, including the maple butter pork belly.

It's both sad, and life-saving, that I won't be in Vancouver more often.

That is all.

(No image. I failed to photograph the chicken skin, and nothing else seemed right.)

Gardening: Next Year

The Farm is frantically producing food. Beans, peppers, scallions, lettuce, cucumbers, strawberries, that weird white acorn squash, those giant zucchini clubs, corn, eggplants, those odd round things that might be squash and might be cucumbers that I definitely never planted. Am I focusing on cooking and eating and perhaps giving away all this stuff, and perhaps dancing among the cornstalks? No, of course not. I'm planning next year's garden. The planning part is so much fun that I'm starting now, instead of waiting for winter and the seed catalogs.

Next year, I'll grow more Armenian cucumbers -- no bitter, almost no skin. And I'll plant my Copra onions when they're supposed to be planted, because I'll have a nice raised row all ready for them, waiting for a break in the rain. And I'll plant potatoes, because... well, because they're potatoes. But I'll find some weird ones.

And I'll plant the corn in several staggered blocks -- a little afterthought block shot past corn that was planted weeks earlier, and that leads me to believe that I shouldn't put all my eggs in one planting. And we'll get some vertical structures in this winter, so we can pick peas and beans and cucumbers and maybe squash while standing upright.

And I'll dig a lettuce bed in that almost-full-shade corner, to see if I can keep slow-growing but non-bolting salad greens growing all summer. And I'll plant seeds of sweet Italian frying peppers, because I learned this year that I'm not sure what to do with bell peppers. I don't know what to do with the Italian peppers either, but I can't resist any vegetable that includes the word "frying".

What looked like modest little blocks of beans produced more than enough to eat and to give away; now that I know how little space a decent planting takes up, I'll try more varieties. Wax beans, purple beans, Roma beans, Dragon Tongue beans, those Kentucky Wonders that I never got around to planting this year. Assuming that we get those bean supports up. And I'll plant tepary beans when they're supposed to be planted, during the rains, to see if they really can grow to maturity without extra water.

I'll plant parch corn again, because odds are it's not going to mature this year. I might plant flour corn. Oh, and there will be more sunflowers. Far, far more sunflowers.

Yay!

Image: By Thyme. Wikimedia Commons.

Vignette: Crunchy

(A shift away from grumpy dialogue.)

"Chicken."

"No, fish."

"I'm cooking it, and it's going to be chicken."

"You're still making the batter. The batter doesn't care if you dip chicken or fish in it."

"Of course it cares. Chicken is...well, it's chicken. The golden meat. The crispy meat. The meat of picnics and Sunday dinner. The thing in every pot in the mythical time of prosperity. The happy surprise in the cardboard bucket when Dad comes home. It's chicken."

"Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."

"Fine, but that doesn't mean he'll enjoy it."

"Haven't you ever heard of fish fries?"

"Yes; they're what happens when all the chickens have flown south for the winter."

"Chickens don't fly."

"That's by choice. As long as we don't insult them by bringing in a lot of stinky fish, they stay nearby because they love us. Like shmoos."

"Like whats?"

"Shmoos. They're shaped like a big chicken drumstick with legs. They want to be eaten."

"When did you open the wine?"

"I'm perfectly sober. Shmoos. From the Valley of the Shmoon. Go read Al Capp."

"So it's fiction."

"It's an allegory about something or other. Big political and sociological and economic implications."

"Which you're going to explain."

"Of course."

"Will you promise not to if I agree to chicken?"

"Of course."

Image: By Dougs Tech. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Vegetable Excuses and Shady Onions

Onions.

I want onions in my garden.

This would seem to be a perfectly reasonable goal for someone with a vegetable garden, if it weren't for the lack of sun mentioned in my previous post. I've tried, two years in a row, to grow shallots - really, potato onions - without success. The sensible thing would be to give up on growing my own onions and buy them from the grocery.

The problem is that groceries peel the papery skin off of onions, and as a result the onions go bad, quickly and unpredictably. I don't know why they do this. It's not as if they have the produce folks peeling potatoes or bananas or apples and putting them in stacks to rot and attract fruit flies. They add wax or even plastic to cucumbers, in spite of the cucumber's nice protective skin. But they're apparently under the illusion that the average grocery customer lives in terror of papery outer onion skin.

I've seen onions that appear to be the victims of frantic personnel _clawing_ off the last bit of loose skin that could possibly be separated from the bulb. I've seen gouges. I've seen almost entirely unprotected white or yellow union flesh. I've seen onions so naked that they attract fruit flies. Why, oh, why, can you tell me why they do this?!

Ahem. Anyway. Whatever the nefarious reason, the result is that onions from the grocery far, far too frequently turn up moldy when cut open. I'm tired of unreliable onions, so I want to grow my own - if not for all of my onion needs, at least for backup. What I grow doesn't have to be onion bulbs, it just has to taste of onion.

There are chives, of course - those are already growing. But they're a little too mellow and well-behaved for general onion purposes.

The Idiot Gardener tells me that leeks can grow in cool shade, so that's the first strategy.

And that makes me think of the mythical (to me) perennial bunching onion, an onion that's supposed to grow in stalks like scallions, bunching together and reproducing like chives. I've never successfully grown these, but that may be because I started the tiny seedlings in the same shady place where I planned to grow the onions on. If I instead start a patch in blazing sunlight (perhaps in a pot) maybe nice stocky divisions from a season or two later would consent to grow in less sun? It's worth a try.

The third strategy is onion sets grown to scallions. I've always vaguely disapproved of onion sets - such a big "seed" for such a small onion. But I find myself wondering if a set will consent to produce a decent scallion with limited sunlight, like a tulip is almost guaranteed to produce a flower the first year? And could I store a supply of sets in the fridge and plant a fresh handful every week or so, to keep the onions moving? If so, that could be a fine plan.

The last strategy is Egyptian walking onions. These are the onions that first put out normal green onion  stalks, then produce little bitty onions on top of the stalks, as if the onion failed to pay attention in onion class. These aerial onions, I'm told, can then be planted as if they were onion sets, and will produce scallions. So perhaps I could keep a small patch of walking onions in a sunny spot, producing enough sets to make scallions in the partial shade? I suspect that the answer is, no, I can't, but it's also worth a try.

Meanwhile, I will continue to complain about nude onions, and grocery personnel will continue to give me that good-natured confused look when I do so.

Image: By Hedwig Storch. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Leaves and Sun Denial

There's an area toward the back and side of the house that we've designated the vegetable garden. It's convenient to the back door, nestled into the fence, with a nice newish crazypaved path. We even added a light to enable evening herb-snipping. There's just one problem: It doesn't get full sun. Vegetables are supposed to have full sun. I know this. I believe this. But I continue to try to grow edibles in this space. They don't all fail - raspberries and herbs grow there, we had a couple of decent crops of snap beans, and rainbow chard put out a few leaves. And the shade is deciduous, so there will be a lot more sun from late fall to early spring.

So I thought, greens. Cold-weather greens while it's cold and sunny, and lettuce and other heat-sensitive greens while it's hot and shaded. This could give me a chance to use some of the information in various garden books that make me hungry. Joy Larkcom's The Salad Garden, for example, and her even more interesting Oriental Vegetables. And The Harrowsmith Salad Garden, by Turid Forsyth and Marilyn Simonds Mohr, always makes me feel as if I'm already tasting garlic and vineger and olive oil. And Rosalind Creasy's Edible Landscaping books - I have a battered old original, I believe from before they were broken up into many smaller books, and the pictures of the French and German gardens in particular always make me want to plant something.

The problem is that even greens tend to fail for me, a fact that I find inexplicable given the success of the bush beans, which I could have sworn were more sun-demanding than lettuce. So I plan to take a proper geek experimental approach, choosing several, or maybe more like a dozen, different leafy plants and planting examples of each in all of the different sunny or shady areas of the vegetable garden, plus perhaps a few more spots around the yard. I'll plant them at an inappropriately close spacing, because the goal of this experiment is to see if the plants thrive at all - if a plant crowds out of its four-inch spacing, it's already doing better than the average lettuce plant that I put in.

So. That's the plan. There will be updates.

Image: By Forest & Kim Starr. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Winter vegetables

Autumn may have arrived. Or it may, as I said elseblog, be another of this year's funny weather jokes. But right now the garden is cooler and wetter, and my mind is turning to winter vegetables.

But I failed to plan ahead. I'm dismayed to find that it's already too late for peas, at least according to the local gardening guide. And from experience, it's too late for lettuce from seeds. And I didn't order the gray French shallots that I kept talking about - though it may not be quite too late. And the main vegetable plot doesn't get as much sun as a vegetable plot should, so there's really no space appropriate for any other onions - Himself is OK with shallots in the sunnier flowerbeds, but dubious about any other vegetables.

So for the vegetable patch, I think I'm down to fava beans, or lettuce from already-stocky seedlings. I like the idea of lettuce, so that may be the plan.

Unfortunately, it's usually only the idea of lettuce that works for me. Dense stands of ruffly or rumpled green and red leaves. Memories of the rampion in the fairy tale. Thoughts of crushed garlic and vinegar and really good olive oil. Little minced scallions - will scallions grow from onion sets even in not enough sun? Hm.

It all sounds good, but the reality is generally that the lettuce grows and bolts without ever seeing a salad bowl. I may try it all the same.
Image: By Buen Gastronomico. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Hobby Overload!

I used to sew. Long ago. Well, not that long ago, but it's been a couple of years since I fired up the sewing machine.

All that time, I've had two skirts hanging in my closet, one in linen and one in silk noil, both made from the HotPatterns Miss Moneypenny Trumpet Skirt pattern. These were, uncharacteristically, finished projects - I altered the pattern, made the muslin, and cut out, stitched, topstitched, and even (gasp) hemmed the skirts. I even hemmed them with a little extra in the back, to account for, er, extra on my person, so that they'd hang even. Then I hung them in the closet and never looked at them again.

Until today. When I wore the linen one because the only other option was black polyester, on a summer day. And I liked it. It was nice and long and swishy, and the little flare at the hem worked just the way it was supposed to, and it looked good with my new girly sandals. And after that couple of years of aging, I was no longer aware of any flaws in the construction - at least, on the outside.

So, of course, now I want to start sewing again. Even though I just took up knitting. And there are still the 100+ books and chicken frying and gardening and blogging and the tricycle and my likely participation in NaNoWriMo and and and. And. (And now I've gone and written a post about my hobby cycles. Here.)

But I'm doomed. I already went to look at PatternReview. And HotPatterns. And no doubt I'll be looking through pattern books before the month is out. And digging through old boxes to find, I fervantly hope, that already-altered skirt pattern. And inventorying my remaining fabric and pattern stash.

Will I actually start something, and finish it, and use it? That is the issue. If I start small, I might. Like with pajamas.  Or, for months I've been imagining a Chicken Frying Coat to keep me from smelling like the chicken after I fry it - something silly, with three-quarter-length sleeves that won't catch fire, and something to tie a kitchen towel to for constant hand-wiping. I could make it in, say, blue chambray, with white pique cuffs, and applique a chicken on it...

Maybe I should lie down with a cold compress for a while.

Image: By PKM. Wikimedia Commons.

Food: Food.

Chicken was fried.

Chicken was eaten.

The fried hangover has begun. Adding a vegetable to the plate didn't fool the brain one little bit.

Therefore, this is the extent of today's post.

Good night.

Image: By Garitzko. Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Korean Fried Chicken

It has, once again, been too long since I offered any fried chicken information. So I point you to this article about Korean fried chicken. Sadly, the only sources mentioned are in New York City, but who knows? It almost sounds worth the trip.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Food: Random Opinionating

The correct way to eat bacon is with a fork. Limp, greasy bacon is easily eaten this way, but is not worth the eating. Crisp bacon is delicious, but is impossible to eat correctly. Life is often like that, but it's a shame it has to be that way at breakfast time.

Judith Martin, Miss Manners' guide to excruciatingly correct behavior.

Some opinionated ChickenFreak opinions about food:

• Bacon should always be crisp.
• Chocolate should always be dark.
• Bread pudding should not be clogged up with raisins or any other object that interrupts the purity of the squishy bread.
• Cheesecake should not have a crust. Or any non-cheesecake flavoring, topping, or decoration.
• The crisp skin is the best part of poultry. 
• Romaine hearts should really be romaine hearts. If they're dark green, they're not hearts.
• Nothing ever has enough garlic.
• Sweet pickles are wrong.
• The chocolate milk flavoring that you drank between ages two to ten is the chocolate milk flavoring that will be "right" for the rest of your life. Hershey's, U Bet, Kwik, Ovaltine, Bosco's, whatever it is, loyalty is absolute and lifelong.

Image: By Joadl. Wikimedia Commons.

Food Rambling: Vegetables, remember the competition

So, continuing on yesterday's theme, I'm increasingly convinced that it's a mistake for moral vegetarians to advocate vegetarianism for health, or a connection to nature, or the beauty of the cornucopia. People who normally eat four strips of bacon on Sunday morning are not interested in the healthy leafy argument. They know what bacon tastes like. Bacon tastes good.

Now, those people probably do dislike cruelty. They probably have pets. But, again, bacon tastes good. If you combine the messages "It's wrong to eat pigs." and "Fat-free beans are really very healthful," you're doomed to failure. The followup thought to the pig thing is, "Try a bite of these fried truffled potatoes with caramelized onions. Would you like some more salt?" Hey, with the truffles, you even bring in gratitude to the pigs, see?

That's all for today.

Photo: By Jess Sawrey. Wikimedia Commons.

Food Rambling: Vegetable Umami

So I've started reading Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows, by Melanie Joy. It brings me back to a frequently-felt conflict between guilt and greed: I don't like the idea of eating animals. But I love fried chicken. And well-done bacon. And crispy duck skin. And steak fat...

.... pause for fatty crispy dreams ....

OK, I'm back now.

What I'm craving, I realize, is umami - savoriness. That fifth taste, beyond the sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. What I want, in an ideal world, is meat-free unami, delicious enough to make me forget bacon. Or at least to make me eat less of it.

So I thought I'd consider that problem, and create a list of foods worth exploring in the quest:

• Sesame oil. Toasted sesame oil. A non-animal fat with a flavor that, to my tastebuds, can sometimes compete with the glorious flavor of animal fats. And what about other nut and vegetable oils? I find olive oil only pleasant, not gloriously gluttonous. But I'm sure there's a world beyond olive oil - what wonderful oils might I be missing?
• Aioli. Greasy, creamy, garlicky aioli. Well, and other related things, like homemade mayonnaise. Yes, it's got eggs, but I'm not excluding eggs - as far as I know, it's possible to raise eggs in a cruelty-free way.
• Artichokes. Split artichokes grilled with plenty of oil and salt and herbs. Dipped in that aioli. Mmmm.
• While we're dipping things in things, let's also dip itty bitty skinny double-fried French fries.
• Roasted garlic, roasted in plenty of oil.
• Caramelized onions, cooked slowly until they collapse utterly, give up all their moisture, and make all their sugar available.
• Grilled asparagus. And that aioli again.
• Greasy brown potato things. Fried potatoes. Roasted potatoes. Grilled potatoes. Potato chips. Now, I admit that they're better with, say, lard or duck fat. But have I given olive oil and sesame oil a really good thorough try?
• Croutons. Greasy baked-through garlicky or sesame or nutty or herbal bits of crisp toast. With salt, of course. Tossed on your salad or your soup or directly into your mouth.
• Plain old fat-fried bread crumbs, tossed on things. Preferably with some garlic or chives or sesame oil or sesame seeds or nuts or all of the above.
• Mushrooms. Now, I usually don't like mushrooms, but I remember a restaurant dish of some sort of dark mushroom, and some sort of pepper, and garlic and onions and a ton of oil, slow cooked in an earthenware dish. It was amazing. Mushrooms have possibilities.
• Of course, there's a whole world of fried-dough foods. Fried bread with garlic, slicked with a little toasted sesame oil?

I pause to wonder, is cruelty-free milk possible? If it is, then we get butter and cheese and cream back. Brown butter and all of the things that you can fry in it. Umami-rich parmesan. The infinity of things that you can do with melted and fried and toasted cheese.

I haven't eaten my last piece of bacon, and I certainly haven't fried my last chicken. I'm not ready to declare a prohibition - if I do, I'll break it and afterward I'll just avert my eyes from the whole issue. So I'll edge up on the issue, by exploring the vegetable world's potential for satisfying gluttony.

Excuse me while I go fry something that isn't a chicken.

Photo: By Marshall Astor. Wikimedia Commons.

Food: Chocolate: Sel de Mer Caramels by Sweet

I spent some of my growing-up years in Tennessee. So to some extent, I eat like a Southerner. That means, in addition to fried chicken and pickled okra, salted watermelon. I love salt on sweet.

I also, of course, love chocolate, and candy, especially the squishy buttery kind. So Sweet's Sel de Mer caramels - caramel, and sea salt, and white or dark chocolate if you want them - are great on paper. And they're even better in person. They're fabulous in person. They're "eat them all in ten minutes and dream about more", in person.

So thank you very much, Joe, for bringing them to the Fat of the Land party. And everybody else? You want these. You really do. If you're in Ashland, just go get some. If not, well, they do ship.

Link: Sweet

Photo: by Christian Mertes. Wikimedia Commons

Ramble: ChickenFreak's Restaurant Fantasy (Frying chicken for the good of humanity. Or Dalmations.)

I have a fantasy of running a restaurant. But there's a problem with it, caused by the fact that my reality TV niche of choice is British-influenced restaurant shows such as Kitchen Nightmares, with failing restaurant owners begging for rescue from British chef Gordon Ramsay.

This has taught me that running a restaurant is emphatically not something that I could ever dream of doing successfully. Or at least, not successfully and while making a profit. That puts a damper on the restaurant fantasy.

I've solved the problem with some backstory. In the fantasy, my distant (and fictional) Uncle Horace, who feels that a nice girl like me should get away from the compiler and into the kitchen, has left me several million dollars. But I only get the money if I run a restaurant with it. To motivate me to go along with this disastrous plan, Uncle Horace has specified that if I refuse, the money will be donated to some dreadful soul-sucking organization - the Cruella Deville Foundation, let's say.

See how easy? I must open a restaurant.

OK, backstory complete and on to the fantasy.

The restaurant, of course, would be a chicken shack. I'm picturing an old one-story clapboard building in a nice small town somewhere, rescued by ChickenFreak Foods, lovingly re-sided and painted in a variety of bright circus colors. We'd change the circus colors every couple of years. This should convince any chicken-resistant townsfolk to come by once in a while, to see the restaurant transformed from sky blue, butter yellow, and magenta to forest green, fire-engine red, and sunshine yellow. And so on. If that doesn't do the job, maybe we'll try some murals.

The parking lot would be re-paved in red brick; after all, I need to use up Uncle Horace's money before I can get out of the chicken business. There would be box planters of red geraniums, and canvas umbrellas in those same circus colors, shading (of course) brightly painted picnic tables.

The paint explosion would continue inside, where you'd step up to the gleaming painted-wood counter and order your chicken. Fried chicken, American-southern-style pan-fried chicken, the kind that used to require a half-hour wait, back when it was available at restaurants at all. Looking past the counter into the kitchen area, you'd see the three giant cast-iron skillets, dozens of pieces being fried, manned by an always alert world-class fry cook with tongs in hand.

In addition to chicken, the fantasy includes shoestring french fries, fresh-cut and double-fried in pure lard right in the restaurant. And potato salad. And cole slaw. And deviled eggs. And for those who want an occasional nonfat bite, vinegary cucumber salad, and pickles, and peaches in season, and watermelon in season. And the peaches and watermelon would always be served with a tiny packet of salt.

And there'd be soda, in glass bottles. Coke and Dr. Pepper with cane sugar. And RC Cola. And Boylan's. And Cheerwine. And so on. A big old glass-door cooler with a multicolored display of hundreds of gleaming bottles. And outside, one of those old-fashioned Coke machines to serve the cravings of those that arrive after the restaurant's closed.

What else do I need? Got to get some bacon in there somehow. And would Hawaiian-style macaroni salad be off topic? And do you have a restaurant fantasy?

Mmm. Chicken.

Photo: By Andreas Dobler. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Leafy Gluttony - Squash Blossoms (And butter! And cheese!)

I don't like summer squash. I agree with Hercule Poirot that they taste like water.

But I love squash blossoms, whether they're from summer squash, winter squash, or pumpkins. And they continue the leafy gluttony theme of food that's better from the garden than any other way. Groceries do sell baby squash with blossoms attached, but they're generally sadly wilted - squash blossoms aren't good for more than a few minutes away from the garden.

So when I grow squash, it's for the blossoms. That means that ideally, I'd grow squash that produce plenty of male blossoms, and a minimum of fruit-producing and therefore energy-wasting female blossoms. A hunt through Google points me to Butter Blossom summer squash, but fails to find me a source for seeds. Sources suggest that Costata Romanesco and Sunray, both from Johnny's Selected Seeds, are also good producers of male blossoms.

So once you've gotten the seeds and have a handful of blossoms in the kitchen, what do you do with them? Fry them in butter, of course!

At least, that's one option, and the simplest. I rinse the blossom, pull the petals off in one flat sheet, dust them in flour, and fry them, carefully, in a generous pool of foaming butter over medium-low heat. Let them cool from the pan just long enough to allow them to crisp, and eat them. This is not a plated dinner party dish; just as the raw blossoms aren't good for more than a few hours out of the garden, the fried ones are at their best a minute or two out of the pan.

The less simple options? I've never tried them yet, but gathering some nice-looking links, I see:

Five Ways to Eat Squash Blossoms, from Apartment Therapy The Kitchn. Cheese-stuffed and fried, cheese-stuffed and baked to steamed, or in pasta, quesadillas, or soup.

What to do with squash blossoms, from Gastronomical Three. A detailed gorgeous-picture-laden description of how to do the stuffed fried blossoms.

A bruschetta version of the stuffed blossoms, from MyRecipes.com.

A version filled with pulled pork, from the Food Network.

Basil-stuffed blossoms from SippitySup.

And finally, baked squash blossoms with ricotta and honey, from NYMag.com.

Yum. I'm not going to have enough blossoms.

Photo: By Rasbak. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Leafy Gluttony - Alpine Strawberries

I don't grow food to save money. That's partly about skill - I'm not skilled enough to get a substantial harvest. And it's partly about space and sunlight. And largely about laziness. I'm just not prepared to work hard enough to maximize pounds of potato, or ears of corn, or cubic feet of pumpkin, harvested from my few sunny areas.

So, why grow food at all? Largely because it's fun - I started my gardening career with vegetables, and it took me a long time to care about ornamentals. But I need more of a reason, more of a goal. That goal is to produce taste experiences that I just can't get from the grocery. And, well, to produce them lazily.

One of the first candidates for this goal was strawberries, and we've grown them rather lackadaisically a few times. I've never tasted a strawberry from a grocery, restaurant, or any other source, that compared in taste with dead ripe strawberries harvested from the garden. This is, I think, no great surprise and no testament to our skill. When a fragile fruit doesn't need to travel more than the five feet from the ground to my mouth, it's possible to grow very delicate varieties, and to harvest them at a level of ripeness impossible for a grocery strawberry.

But there's a catch: Strawberries take work. Weeding. Watering. Mulching. Nipping off the fruits the first year. Dividing the plants the third or fourth year. A second bed to grow out of sequence so that there's something to eat during the years that you're nipping and dividing. Fighting off snails and slugs and birds and probably raccoons. And they occupy generous amounts of dedicated, prime, plush, sunny bed space.

So we evicted the strawberries and planted their bed with culinary herbs. And then we missed them.

This year, I have a new theory: alpine strawberries. Rumor has it that these smaller strawberries can grow in the empty spaces in a flowerbed, instead of hogging dedicated space. Other rumors claim that they're better than ordinary strawberries, even those miraculous home-grown ordinary strawberries. The harvest is supposed to be small, but that's fine - the goal is an occasional bonus bite of something miraculous, while I'm puttering in the garden.

Photo: By James McNally. Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Food: Slow Fried Chicken

You've got to have fried chicken!

But this blog has barely a word on the subject yet, so I wanted to link to the Slow Fried Chicken recipe over at Obsessions.

That is all. Go fry some now.

Photo: By DougsTech. Wikimedia Commons.

Food: Frances Grilled Cheese (Too Simple To Be A Recipe recipe)

When the bell rang for lunch Frances sat down next to her friend Albert.  "What do you have today? said Frances.  "I have a cream cheese-cucumber-and-tomato sandwich on rye bread," said Albert.  "And a pickle to go with it.  And a hard-boiled egg and a little cardboard shaker of salt to go with that.  And a thermos bottle of milk.  And a bunch of grapes and a tangerine.  And a cup custard with a spoon to eat it with. What do you have?"
Bread and Jam for Frances, by Russell and Lillian Hoban

One of my favorite books when I was small was Bread and Jam for Frances. Frances is a little-girl badger who declines to eat anything but bread and jam. Her mother provides lovely meals; Frances wants her bread and jam. Her friend Albert brings elaborate lunches to school, and offers to share. Frances still wants her bread and jam. Eventually, Frances comes to appreciate her own grand school lunch, complete with a vase of flowers. I loved the ending, and went on refusing to eat anything but peanut butter and jelly. (And fried chicken.)

So what does this have to do with grilled cheese? Well, when I make this sandwich, I like to add a number of added touches to the plate - a peeled tangerine for each person, and a few cucumber spears, and a few okra pickles, and a few marinated artichoke hearts, and some olives and grapes if we have them, or even a hard-boiled egg - and call the whole thing "Frances lunch".

So, on to the sandwich. I could just say "make normal grilled cheese, but use seedy bread and add chives to the cheese and sesame oil and salt to the butter". But, as I recently mentioned, I'm not concise. So:

Ingredients, per sandwich:

• Two slices of white bread, preferably one with a nice seedy crust. My preference is Beckman's Three Seed Sourdough.
• Cheddar cheese, preferably a good one that's a bit sharp, sliced barely thicker than those prewrapped cheese slices, enough for two slices thickness per sandwich.
• Lots of butter.
• Sesame oil.
• Chives, dried or fresh thin-sliced.

Cooking:

• Assemble the sandwiches, with bread, cheese, and a sprinkling of chives on the cheese.
• Melt a nice generous base of butter in the bottom of a frying pan, on medium-low heat, high enough to make the butter very gently foam. Mix in a modest amount of sesame oil - somewhere between a couple of drops and a teaspoon, depending on taste. Sprinkle some salt into the foaming oil/butter.
• Drop the sandwiches on the oil and butter and fry slowly until the bottom goes from butter-soaked to a gently crisp crust. The slow frying is essential for a proper break-through crust and for getting the cheese thoroughly melted all the way through.
• Flip the sandwich and fry the other side, adding more butter if necessary. You need a nice generous pool to get that evil crisp crust. 
• Flip the sandwich out and quarter it into triangles or cut it into fingers. Yes, you can just leave it in plain halves, but that reduces the silly.
• Put it on a nice plate with whatever sour or bitter or salty or fresh or fruity bites you can find in the kitchen. And a cloth napkin. And maybe an itty bitty vase of flowers. And if you have any of those tiny individual salt and pepper shakers, that would make the whole thing complete.
• Eat, keeping a napkin handy for buttery fingers.

Photo: By Garitzko. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Snack Garden (And catalog season!)

I've grumbled that we grow vegetables, but don't eat them. I rarely go out at dinnertime to corral any of that nice fresh food and bring it back to the kitchen. But I do nibble when I'm outside. I hunt for raspberries, or peapods, or I nip off the occasional lettuce leaf to eat on the spot.

So when I started leafing through my shiny new heap of garden catalogs, a plan came to me: A snack garden. If I'll only eat what I can eat in the garden, then that's the sort of thing to plant.

So, what's in these catalogs that a roving gardener could eat? And which ones would look good if the plan fails and I don't end up eating a thing?

The candidates:

• Peas! As I recall, Cascadia snap peas, in the Territorial Seed Company catalog, are sweet enough to eat raw, right off the vine. If any of them make it inside to meet a pan and some butter, that's a bonus.
• Can you ever eat a pepper out of hand? Territorial says that Yum Yum Gold sweet peppers have very few seeds. They're tiny and they're adorable, so I'll add them to the list.
• Cherry tomatoes are an obvious candidate. Abundant Life Seeds has Black Cherry and Snow White cherry tomatoes, both indeterminate. A plant of each, twining together on one big stakes, could be a sort of tomato War of the Roses. I like the vision. 
• And Johnny's Selected Seeds brags about the sugar content of Matt's Wild Cherry, and also warns that it's soft. Since I'm going to eat it six inches from where it grew, and I'm not crazy about that explode-in-my mouth feeling, soft is a bonus.
• As another color contrast combination, Abundant Life has a Miniature White cucumber, and Territorial has a snack-sized Rocky cucumber, this one dark green. I could encourage these to share a trellis.
• Territorial assures me that Pineapple ground cherries really do taste like pineapple. I have to try that.
• Next, I see Mexican Sour Gherkins. Territorial says that they have a  "powerful, sweet, cucumber flavor with a tangy, citrus twist." That could be a nice contrast to all the sugary things.
• To add even more spice, I could add rattail radishes, hot little spears of radishnyess. I haven't found these in any of the catalogs yet, but somebody's got to be selling them.
• And as the last snack when the season's winding down, a few Russian Mammoth sunflowers, for cracking and eating as I stare at the garden and plan next year. 

Sunflower Photo: Giovanni Dall'Orto