19 Pounds of Lettuce

Chris sent me a panicked message this morning: he had forgotten to harvest the lettuce. The heat was going to make it bolt today. Could I rescue it for him?

So, that tiny lettuce patch filled two large shopping bags. And I don't mean grocery bags! Totally dry, they came in at 19 pounds. Up until now I had never seriously considered that lettuce has weight. It's mass-less and ethereal!

Two thirds of this haul went to the Franklin Food Pantry, washed and bagged. 17 bags! And it is beautiful lettuce, too. Not a blemish on it. Hopefully all of the spiders jumped off in my kitchen.

The Recipes Have Moved!

The recipes, cookbook planning posts, and food bank discussions were cluttering up our nice garden blog, so I have moved them to a new home. Please come visit! :D

Community Gardens, Pulled Pork

Chris has been helping to get the Community Gardens in Franklin up and running, and the project made it to the news today.

I've been watching Gabe while he's off at the meetings, or staying late to put together snazzy 3D images to show people what's possible. Ironically, he dug up some 3D models of garden plants out of mothballs to populate the virtual beds - 3D models that I made probably eight years ago! So, in a remote sort of way, I'm helping, too. . .

Progress on the cookbook continues. I decided that I need to learn more about cooking meat, so that I can have a reasonably comprehensive meat section. I cooked ribs a couple of weeks ago, but they turned out a bit tough, so I'll have to refine that recipe. More recently, I made pulled pork. Huzzah! It was glorious. Pork shoulder is a wonderfully economical cut of meat. Brine it all day, cook it all night, and viola, delicious, perfect sammich makins.

I used this awesome recipe for the pulled pork, and shortly I'll be writing up my own revised version.

With these long-cooking meats, I am looking for recipes that not only freeze well, but can be done without a slow cooker. As it turns out, when searching for recipes for chunks of meat that require extended cooking times, it's actually tough to find non-slow-cooker recipes online, because everybody and their mother wants to share their fabulous shortcuts. Not that I have any beef with slow cookers, mind you, but the pantry cookbook is for those who can't afford one and likely don't already have one.

I have also so far avoided recipes that call for disposables, such as plastic bags and aluminum foil. This is to save my audience a bit of money, but also because my ulterior motive is to keep that single-use garbage out of the landfill.

However, I still see no good alternative to my addiction to semi-disposable plastic boxes. They're just so darn useful. And so long as you prevent them from falling out of the freezer (which causes them to shatter) they do last a while. Are there any good alternatives that aren't single-use or painfully expensive??

It also seems that my microwave is conspiring to teach me how to cook foods without its sleek convenience. The old geezer went kaput yesterday, just in time for me to learn how convenient the broiler is for reheating pulled pork.

Snow and Cooking

Well, the amazing snow this year has formally introduced Chris and I to the idea that ice dams are nasty, and a well-insulated attic has more uses than just saving on money and fossil fuels. Like everyone else in New England, we put in a few dozen phone calls to ice dam removal services when water came dribbling in two of our windows. Thankfully, the only company available wanted to charge us an introductory price of $1800, so we reassessed the situation and found it to be Not All That Bad.

And lo, when rain came, and a night and day of snow-melting warmth, the water defied my expectations by ceasing its infiltration into the house.

I now look back at the heart-wrenching decision to remove the dangerous old oak tree and breathe a sigh of relief, because we could have easily been dealing with that through our roof. A little cosmetic water damage above the kitchen window? I can live with that.

Work on the cookbook has slowed a little because I have largely run out of recipes that I can recite from memory. Now I'm into new territory, cooking old dishes for the first time with a measuring cup, and trying entirely new things. This evening I cooked rice on the stove top for the first time in almost a decade, and I cooked cabbage, plain and simple, for perhaps only the second time in my life.

Some memorable out-takes: I tried a recipe for parsnip-peanut-butter French fries that was a total flop; somewhere in that combination is a tasty dish, but my version turned out so very unlike the promised results that I won't be tinkering with it. But the bonus is that I know now that parsnips are delicious. Forget the cooking, I'll take 'em raw.

And not for the cookbook but for me: I made pot stickers from scratch. The filling was tofu, minced cabbage, and some Chinese sauce from a jar. The wrappers came in a package; I filled 'em, closed 'em, and cooked 'em. I absolutely nailed the fry/steam technique that a Chinese friend told me about a few years back, causing none of the pot stickers to stick to the pan, and they were beyond delicious. And, of course, the picky toddler rejected them. I think the purple filling was just too scary. I'll have to try again with a meat filling, or something else less colorful.

For the time being, I am giving up on photographing the cookbook foods. I just have too much else to do if I want to complete this project.

Speaking of which, I need to go write down what I learned this evening. . .

This and That

There's a nice post at the Garden Professors explaining how this amazing string of winter storms is evidence for, not against, the presence of global warming.

(We're looking at another storm tomorrow, and then yet another during the week. I've finally had my fill of snow. Waking up at night with the sudden fear that the roof will fall in is not nice. Neither do I like seeing water trickle in the kitchen window as it melts. But on the bright side, we have one icicle hanging from the second story which has almost connected with the snow bank beneath it. That's kinda cool.)

Here is a website that I liked for the first thirty seconds. Heirloom seeds, ooh shiny! But it's full of predictable, unscientific ranting about GMO seeds, crops, and foods. Enough already. The world is going to need both approaches to food production. Get over it.

To add insult to injury, I popped over to their recipe section and found it to be entirely unhelpful in my quest to compile a Food Bank cookbook. While what they offer looks delicious, it's aimed at well-off foodies who can afford shrimp, fancy spices, and stick blenders. If I were living on food stamps, I wouldn't give them a second glance.

I would love to try the Food Stamp Challenge, but it will have to wait until I am no longer pregnant. Some members of Congress took the challenge a few years back.

UPDATE: Chris has found a quick, temporary solution to our ice dam problem! This is the best use of panty hose I have ever seen!