Small Garden Triumph

I love red peppers. Ever since I was a kid, I've loved red peppers. I might have picked the tomatoes out of things, but I never picked the peppers out. They're one of the few vegetables I'll buy when they're out of season and expensive--my vegetable drawer doesn't feel complete without at least one colored pepper in it. I eat them raw, in salads and sandwiches. I make sauce out of them. I add them into whatever vegetables I'm cooking. I roast them in the oven. If I had a grill, I'd grill them. They're my number one go-to vegetable.

So, when I started gardening, I was very excited to grow peppers. Over the years, I've grown things that I don't eat that much or can't eat quickly enough. But that didn't seem like it would be an issue with peppers.

My first few years at the community garden, I put in at least 6 or 8 plants. And every year, the same thing happened. The peppers would arrive, and when they were green, they were fine. But when I waited for them to turn red, they would rot before I could pick them. No matter where I got the starts from, no matter what kind of peppers. They'd start to turn red, and then they'd rot. Alex started some from seed one year, and the same thing happened. It was one of my greatest gardening disappointments.

Finally, I gave up. It was just too frustrating. But when I bought the house and started gardening here also, I thought I'd try it again. I thought that maybe there was something in the soil at the community garden that made them rot, or maybe there was some kind of insect. And the first year I planted the peppers here, I got a few red ones, and I thought the problem was solved. But last year, it was back to square one--as soon as they were close to being all the way red, they were rotting. I asked one of the guys at the farmers' market who had a nice spread of peppers what he did to keep them from rotting, and he said he didn't--he had rotten ones too, only he'd planted so many that he got some good ones to sell. I found this very dispiriting--I didn't really want to take up a ton of garden space growing peppers that would inevitably mostly rot.

Still, this year, I found myself buying just a few plants at the beginning of the summer. At the same time, I've tried very hard not to get attached to the idea of having red peppers. I'd take casual glances at the plants when I was out there picking basil or digging around for potatoes, but otherwise, I paid them no special attention. Still, when I was poking around in the garden yesterday, I couldn't help noticing that there was a red pepper on one of the plants. I felt it, sure that I would find the mushy spot that indicated that the rotting had begun. But there wasn't one. So, even though it wasn't all the way red, it felt like tempting fate not to pick it, so I did. Here it is, in all its glory, green spot included:




There are some green ones still on the plants, and I'm trying to stay detached from those too, just in case this one misshapen red pepper is the only red one I get. It won't last very long and won't make much of a dent in my need for a late summer supply of peppers, but still. Just the fact that it's whole and red and came from my garden feels like enough of a triumph for the moment.

p.s. Those eggplants and tomatoes keeping the pepper company in the top photo are from the community garden and will probably become either tomato soup or, in the case of the eggplant, Deborah Madison's fabulous summer vegetable gratin, which I will write about another time.

Everything tastes better when you add Mexican chocolate

I made cookies last night for the first time in ages. I'm not quite sure what got into me. We've had some of the loveliest weather of the summer these past few days--cool and clear and sunny--but it's actually chilly at night. Like, under 50. Cold enough to need an extra blanket and a couple of cats to stay warm. So, maybe the oncoming chill made me want to turn on the oven, and maybe it was that I needed an activity while I was waiting for the tomato sauce to cook down. (The first garden tomato sauce of the summer, and it was delicious!)

So, I found a recipe for chocolate oatmeal cookies in a Dorie Greenspan cookbook, and I decided to make half a batch, so I could satisfy my cookie-making urge while not tempting myself excessively. I had to improvise a bit--I didn't have enough chocolate, or exactly the right kind of chocolate--and I found myself thinking, Oh, I can just put some Mexican chocolate in to make up the difference. And as I was grating the Mexican chocolate into the dry ingredients, I thought back to my first real Mexican chocolate experience and realized that it was 15 years ago, and that made me feel very, very old.

In the summer of 1993, I was living in Seattle and studying Hindi at the U of Washington in preparation for going to India on a Fulbright in the fall. A few of my college friends were living in Seattle, and we hung out pretty often. I saw my friend Andrea quite a bit, as well as her sister Lindsey, who was studying Mandarin for the summer. (We'd meet sometimes on campus, and after listening to what she was doing in class, I would have to acknowledge that Mandarin was a harder language to learn than Hindi.)

One day, just a week or two before I was leaving, we decided to make cookies. We were in the apartment I was subletting, and there was a copy of the Silver Palate cookbook, and we decided to make oatmeal cookies. Except that the recipe called for 1 1/2 sticks of butter, and we only had one, and it called for 3 cups of oats, and we only had 2 1/2. It was a situation--like last night--where the cookies wouldn't have gotten made if we'd had to go out to get stuff. We could have fudged it, or reduced the recipe, but instead we decided to improvise. We used peanut butter in place of the butter we didn't have. And then Andrea pulled out a little yellow box in the shape of a hexagon from the cabinet. It was Mexican chocolate, the kind with cinnamon in it that you usually use to make Mexican hot chocolate. "Let's put some of this in," she said. So, we grated it up, and used a half cup to make up for the oats we didn't have.

We started to get the idea that we might be on to something before the cookies were out of the oven. The smell was somewhat more sophisticated than the usual sweet cookie smell. And as we tasted them, we were both silent. The peanut butter gave the cookies a mellow base, and the cinnamon in the Mexican chocolate picked up the cinnamon already in the recipe. The chocolate was subtle, but present, and our mouths were suffused with this oaty-spicy-chocolaty-peanuty flavor. We decided that, perhaps, we were geniuses.

We ate more cookies and divided the rest up. I gave some to a few of my Hindi class friends (at least one of whom has gone on to bigger, better, and more dangerous things), and Andrea gave some to her housemates. Somehow, though, she did not give any to her sister. And so a few days later, after having bragged about our cookie-making prowess extensively, we found ourselves having lunch with Lindsey, who mostly wanted to talk about the cookies she hadn't tasted. "So, tell me again, it was the peanut butter you tasted first?" she asked wistfully. Why we didn't go home right then and make another batch, I have no idea.

For years, I was scared to make these cookies again, afraid that they wouldn't be as good as I remembered. But I had nothing to fear.

(As for last night's cookies, they were these, as discussed by Tartelette. Very chocolaty and rich, with some chewiness from the oats. And I have no doubt that the Mexican chocolate made them taste better.)

Oatmeal-Peanut Butter-Mexican Chocolate Cookies
adapted from The Silver Palate Cookbook

8 tbsps. (1 stick) butter
4 tbsps. peanut butter
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
2 tbsps. water
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
2 1/2 cups quick-cooking oats
1/2 cup grated Mexican chocolate (Ibarra brand)
1 cup raisins (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350°. Grease 3 cookie sheets.

2. Cream butter and both sugars until fluffy. Add egg and beat thoroughly. Add peanut butter and mix again. Mix in water and vanilla.

3. Sift together flour, cinnamon, salt, and baking soda; add to the egg mixture and mix well. Add oats, grated Mexican chocolate and raisins, if using, and mix.

4. Form cookies on cookie sheets. Bake 10-12 minutes (15-17 if cookies are extra large).

Stormy night crumble

I haven't gone blueberry picking yet this summer. It's always on my summer to-do list, but somehow it hasn't happened yet, maybe because of our continued monsoon climate. But last Saturday at the farmer's market, I bought 2 pints, thinking I would make some nice blueberry dessert.

Somehow, I managed not to just eat all the blueberries, sitting so temptingly in my fridge, and today, I used the fabulous Food Blog Search and scrolled through pages and pages of delicious blueberry-related recipes--cakes and pies and tarts and muffins. Did I decide to make any of them? Well, no. I did mark a bunch of recipes for later, but instead, for tonight, I returned to my very old standard, blueberry-peach crumble.

1989 was the summer of crumble. I had just graduated from college and was housesitting for the summer with a bunch of friends, and we made crumble nearly every night. Sometimes, we would make it til 10 p.m. or so, feeling very restrained, and then we'd give in and make a late night crumble, just because we could.

There's something very comforting about making something you've made a zillion times before. I think of my various kitchens, I think of all the various people I've eaten crumble with over the years. I made a crumble for my first date with Alex in 2001. We knew each other casually but not well, and he'd invited me over for dinner. It was August, crumble season, and I offered to bring dessert. It was not the most successful dinner as dinners went, which has nothing to do with his cooking and everything to do with my pickiness. He knew I was a vegetarian and had made me this lovely Japanese meal, with soup with soba noodles and tofu with a dipping sauce and daikon. The soup was in lovely little bowls, and there were blue glasses. The problem is that I am a vegetarian who hates tofu, and I don't like daikon much either. (I did like the soba noodles, at least.) But clearly, he'd gone to all this effort to make this lovely meal, and I felt terrible, especially because it would have been easy to say that I didn't like tofu ahead of time. But I'd brought the crumble for dessert, and it turned out that peaches and blueberries were his favorite combination, and we ate it, and things worked themselves out after that.

So, on this rainy August afternoon that morphed into a stormy August evening, I went down to the kitchen and went through my very familiar routine--blanching peaches, rinsing blueberries, melting butter, measuring flour and sugar and oats. I like that it's such a casual and forgiving recipe and that you'd have to do something really dramatically bad to it for it not to taste good. My peaches weren't perfectly ripe, for example, but I knew that the time in the oven would take care of that. (A month or so ago, I made this breakfast apricot crisp from Smitten Kitchen, and the only apricots I could find were from Trader Joe's. Some were too ripe and some weren't ripe enough, and the rest were mealy. Really, not a stellar batch of apricots. But after some time in the oven, they'd broken down into this sticky, jammy, apricot mush that was quite delicious.)

I usually like to put walnuts in the topping, but meal moths have been wreaking havoc in my cabinets, and the only suitable nuts the moths hadn't gotten into were slivered almonds, so I threw some of those in instead. I also put some lemon zest in, which I usually don't do. But a few years ago on my birthday, we went out for a fancy dinner. Most of the dinner wasn't that memorable, but the dessert--something with lemon and blueberries--was fabulous. We'd restrainedly only ordered one to share. Strangely, while we were eating, the waiter appeared and asked if we knew the name of King Lear's third daughter. There was Cordelia, of course, and there was Regan . . . "Goneril," I said, former English major that I am. "Goneril, of course, thanks," he said and went back to the kitchen. We both stared after him, but we weren't quick enough because really, in exchange for my literary knowledge, we both thought we deserved another dessert. By the time he came out again, the moment had passed. Alas, that restaurant is now closed, so we can't even go back and see if it's still on the menu.

Anyway, this recipe is wonderfully flexible and adaptable. I took the basic proportions from Molly Katzen's recipe for Summer Fruit Crumble in Still Life with Menu and adapted it from there. (Crumble isn't crumble to me without oatmeal in the topping, and her original only has flour.)

Alex came over this evening, and we ate the first ratatouille of the season (another farmer's market/garden amalgamation) with cous cous and bread. And then, of course, there was the crumble, predictably and reliably delicious. The stains on my tablecloth at both of our places are testament to its soupy goodness.

Even though I can't believe it's already August and I'm wanting to slow time down and stretch things out just a little bit, there are things that August is certainly good for, and one of them is that summer fruit is abundant, and you can make crumble every single night if you want to.

Summer Fruit Crumble
Adapted from Mollie Katzen's Still Life with Menu

3-4 cups sliced fresh peaches, apricots, or plums, or a combination
(I usually use 5-6 peaches)

2-3 cups berries
(I use 1 1/2 pints blueberries.)

1/2 cup, plus 1 tbsp. white flour

1 cup rolled oats

2 tbsp. granulated sugar

3 tbsp. brown sugar

1/4 tsp. salt

1/4-1/3 cup nuts (chopped walnuts or sliced almonds)

4 tbsp. (1/2 stick) melted butter

zest of one lemon (optional)

1) Preheat oven to 375

2) Combine fruit in a bowl. Toss with 1 tbsp. flour and the granulated sugar.
Transfer to a medium size baking pan (8 or 9 inches square, or a small rectangle)

3) Combine oats, 1/2 cup flour, brown sugar, salt, nuts and melted butter. Distribute over the pan of fruit and pat into place

4) Bake at 375 for 30 minutes or until the top is lightly browned and the fruit bubbly. Let cool at least 10-15 minutes, then serve hot, warm or at room temperature.

Monsoon Flashback

Yesterday, I had a sudden reminder of what it feels like to live in the midst of monsoon season. The irony is, this happened before yesterday's monsoon-like storms. In the middle of the afternoon, it got very, very dark. Then the trees in the woods behind the cottage began waving wildly. (I was sure at least one would come toppling down.) And then the rain began. It took me a bit too long to realize that the rain wasn't just coming down, but coming in sideways through the windows. I ran around the house, followed in hot pursuit by the cats, attempting to close as many windows as I could before things got too wet. It was a bad storm--many trees and telephone poles down and streets flooded. Even though the storm itself didn't last that long, the thunder and rain remained for much of the afternoon, and now, almost 24 hours later, my telephone line is still crackly.

But my monsoon flashback had come before all that. I've been in India on the edges of monsoon season many times, but I've only lived through one full monsoon season, the summer of 1994 in Delhi. I'd managed to avoid the worst of the June heat by spending 3 weeks with a friend in the mountain village where she was doing her anthropology fieldwork. I got back to Delhi at the end of June, just after the rains had begun. The temperature dropped dramatically--from well over 100 to the 90s--but the humidity remained close to 100%. After a few weeks back in Delhi, I left again, for 10 days or so in July, for a trip to Bombay and Pune.

When I returned, I was horrified by my apartment. When it had been closed up for 3 weeks in June, it had been fine, but closed up for 10 days during the early monsoon was a different story. Everything was dank and damp, and there was mold, not only on the walls but in my shoes. I don't know why the mold in my shoes seemed so awful, but it did, especially because it seemed like it would be months before they could dry out all the way. It felt like an insult, the mold in my shoes. Not that I liked mold on my walls, but at least I didn't have to wear those. (I don't know if Tevas were around then or not, but if they were, I didn't have them and spent much of that summer in a pair of cheap blue flip flops, easily cleanable and mold-free.)

Flash forward to yesterday, almost exactly 14 years later. I was cleaning my kitchen. One wall is all windows, several of which are open all the time. And on the floor, in front of those windows, is a boot tray on which many pairs of shoes sit, and a little shoe rack, where there are more shoes. You can tell where this is going, can't you? I was taking the shoes off the tray so I could wipe it off and shake it outside, and what did I see, on several pairs of sandals and more than one pair of shoes, but mold. Admittedly, it wasn't as bad as in Delhi--it hadn't reached the fully furry and green stage yet. But still. You know it's been a wet summer when your shoes get moldy in New England.

I suppose I should be grateful, though. On that first day back from Bombay, I had one more monsoon-related surprise. I was in the front room of my apartment when I heard a loud crash. I had no idea what it could be, so I went back to the bedroom, and into the bathroom next to the bedroom, and discovered that the enormous mirror on the wall--not just a little picture frame of a mirror but one that took up most of the wall above the sink--had fallen to the floor and broken into a zillion pieces. How could this have happened? For reasons beyond my comprehension, the people who had put the mirror on the wall had GLUED it there. In Delhi, where it's rainy and humid for 3 or 4 months a year. No screws, no nails, nothing solid holding it to the wall but glue. Which, over time, began to unstick itself, until it gave up the ghost entirely.

My ineffectual landlords fluttered about a bit but weren't very helpful. (I did, eventually, get a new mirror, and I stood there watching them put it in until I was positive they were fixing it to the wall with something besides glue.) I was very insistent on living without a servant (unusual in Delhi), but even I gave in and paid the girl who did the sweeping for my landlords to clean up the mirror.

And in some kind of synchronicity, my new friend, Janet Chawla, invited me for dinner as an antidote to the moldy shoes and the shattered mirror. Now, 14 years later, Jan (who still lives in Delhi and does research on traditional birth practices in India and runs an NGO called Matrika) is my frequent email Scrabulous partner. And 14 years later, in this season of climate change and New England monsoons, I'm dealing with moldy shoes once more and grateful, at least, that the potential bad luck of another broken mirror has not yet befallen me.

Summer Vegetable Love, or, Pasta with Corn, Zucchini and Tomatoes

At some point later in the summer, about a month or so from now, I'll be cursing summer vegetables. Not because I'll be sick of them, really, but because I'll be inundated with them. My kitchen and dining room tables will be covered with bowls of tomatoes and stalks of basil in jars of water. My stove will be perpetually splattered with red. I will realize, once again, that my supply of quart containers has dwindled and needs replenishment. I will pat myself on the back, once again, for having bought a second freezer for my basement a couple of years ago. I will, for a few weeks from late August into the later part of September, be a slave to my garden produce, and thus I will complain. (Unless, of course, my garden doesn't produce as planned, and then I will complain about that.)

For now, though, there's not too much of anything. For one thing, the tomatoes on my plants all remain resolutely green, so the only tomatoes are what's at the farmer's market. For another, I was very restrained and only planted 3 zephyr squash plants, in the hopes of avoiding a glut of squash. And it's true that I can't drive past my favorite farm stand without stopping, so I often have more corn than I know what to do with on any given day, but that doesn't feel particularly oppressive, just bountiful. (One reason I love summer food (and living by myself) is that, if I want to, I can eat a couple of pieces of corn on the cob while standing around in my kitchen, and call it dinner. Yum.)

Tonight, I made one of my summer stand byes, taken from a 2004 Mark Bittman "Minimalist" column in the NY Times. What I love about it, besides that it's delicious, is that it requires bits of things rather than volumes of things. I used 3 ears of corn (of course from my favorite farm stand), 3 farmer's market tomatoes, 1 zephyr squash from my community garden, one onion of unknown origins, 1 clove of farmer's market garlic (though mine is just about ready to be picked) and a handful of basil from my garden at home--it felt like a very egalitarian dinner. It's not the prettiest dish (though the tomatoes give everything a faint pink tinge) nor the most elegant, but on a humid July evening, it's the perfect thing to eat. And even better, there are lots of leftovers, so I can eat it again tomorrow, and I won't even have to get the stove all dirty again.




Adapted from The New York Times

PASTA WITH CORN, ZUCCHINI AND TOMATOES
Time: 30 minutes

Salt and pepper

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, or 2 tablespoons oil and 1 tablespoon butter

1 cup corn kernels (from 2 or 3 ears)

1 cup diced zucchini or summer squash (from 2 or 3 small vegetables)

1 medium onion or 3 or 4 shallots, diced

1/4 teaspoon minced garlic, optional

1 or 2 sprigs tarragon (I used basil instead)

4 plum or 2 large tomatoes, diced

1 pound cut pasta, like penne. (I used something fancy and twirly.)

1. Set a large pot of water to boil and salt it. Put 2 tablespoons oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat and add corn. Cook, stirring occasionally, until corn begins to brown. Add zucchini and some salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally, until zucchini begins to brown.

2. Add onion or shallots and garlic if you are using it. Cook, stirring occasionally, until onion softens, about 5 minutes. Add tarragon and cook for 30 seconds, then tomatoes. Put pasta in boiling water and cook until tender but not mushy, 10 to 15 minutes.

3. While pasta cooks continue to cook sauce, reducing heat when tomatoes begin to break down. If sauce dries out (with plum tomatoes, this is likely), add some pasta cooking water, about 1/2 cup at a time. When pasta is done, drain it, toss with sauce and remaining oil or butter, and serve immediately.

Yield: 4 servings.

Land of the Lost

So, I spent the first real morning of my vacation in my basement, looking for my bike lock. Monday was the official start of my vacation, but I didn't finish my quarterly proofreading project til yesterday afternoon, so those first two days didn't really count.

My basement is not a pretty place. It's not finished, for one thing, and it gets wet when it rains, so everything down there has to be up off the ground. And there are a lot of things down there. Before I moved here, I lived for seven years in an attic apartment with a massive amount of storage space. Because I am so bad at moving, and because I didn't take any time off from work before I moved, so I was doing all my packing evenings and weekends, I ended up moving a number of boxes directly from the storage space in my old apartment to the basement. And then my parents decided that once I had a basement of my own, that meant that all of the boxes of my stuff sitting in their basement could be transferred. So, there are a lot of boxes.

Two summers ago, my first summer off, I made an effort to tackle the basement and made a bit of progress. Last summer, not so much. This summer, it's on the list. But it wasn't my plan to tackle it today.

But I can't find my bike lock. My bike is in the garage, there is a bike lock key on my key chain, but there is no lock. I am perplexed. So, the basement is the logical place for it to be. I am not always a regular bike rider, but with the $4 gas and all, and given that I live across the street from the bike path, it seemed like it would be nice to be able to do at least my local errands on my bike. So, I was thinking this morning that I could ride my bike into town and get the paper. I can still do that without the lock, but I can't then go to the library or the grocery store. Hence the search.

I am sad to report that though there are many, many things in my basement, there is no bike lock. (Or if there is, it's well hidden.) I know, though, that the minute I buy a new one, the old one will turn up because that's just the way that these things go.

Now, the stranger thing than the bike lock that's lost is my bread knife. It has vanished. I am sure I used it on Saturday night to cut the end of a corn cob off. But Sunday morning, when my brother and nieces came to visit, and I was looking for the knife to cut the loaf of bread I'd just baked, it was nowhere to be found. Usually when I can't find a kitchen implement, it turns up in a drawer or a cabinet, or perhaps underneath the stove, if it's something the cats can bat around. But it is now Wednesday, and my bread knife has not reappeared. I looked in the compost, to see if somehow, I'd thrown it out with the corn husks. I looked in the trash (though, really, how can you throw a large heavy bread knife out without noticing?). I am really puzzled.

In the found category, however, is a pair of gym shorts with pockets that might come in handy, and this t-shirt, a former favorite, languishing in a drawer down there for years.

It's from 1986, the 10th anniversary of coeducation at my oh-so-enlightened college. They didn't exactly show much leadership in this particular arena. In the photos from the day of the trustees meeting in 1976 when they officially voted to go co-ed, there's a photo of all of the women faculty (maybe 5 of them) wearing these t-shirts. They were re-printed for the 10th anniversary in 1986, and I wore mine diligently for years. I think I might have to put it back into my sleeping t-shirt rotation, just for old time's sake.

Fast Forward

Okay, so it's not strawberry season anymore. In my blogging absence, we've leapt right ahead into raspberry and, amazingly, blueberry season. I kind of can't believe I'm actually eating local blueberries. (Though not so local as my own yard--I did finally plant my blueberry bushes, but they're at least a year or two away from producing any large amount of berries, and I'm hoping devoutly they'll do better than the asparagus has done.) Still, the presence of blueberries always reminds me that summer is well underway, that we're closer to fall than to spring. I kind of hate that, especially when it's the first week of my summer vacation.

I have a post from a few weeks ago that I am going to finish and slap up here, but for the moment, I'll just post a photo of my latest garden produce, the conjoined zephyr squash. I suppose if I'd let it grow any bigger, maybe I could have entered it the strangely shaped vegetable competition at the local country fair. Instead, I picked it, I photographed it, and soon, I'm going to eat it.