One of the pickles was all mushy, and they all tasted kind of odd. They are going away. I think the moral of the story is that pickling things in July is not a good idea in this kitchen. If I try for pickles again, I’ll do the quick not-actually-fermented kind. I’ll make another go with kimchi and such in the fall when it’s cooler.
Best quote from class today: “Ok, enough about the Bible. We need to talk about obscenity and porn now.”
We also had a nice little librarian confessional, and have decided that the entire class is going to the Special Hell after today’s discussion.
I now have many friendly little microbes in my kitchen :-)
Last night, I started pickles and sourdough starter. The pickle juice tastes pickly, but not really zingy enough yet, which isn’t surprising. The sourdough, on the other hand, is most definitely doing well. In under 24 hours, it went from flour-and-water to this wonderful spongy substance that smells delicious! I put it in the fridge. I’ll make sourdough pancakes for a snack and then feed it so that I can have sourdough bread for Friday. Yaaaaaay! I have a pet. They need a name.
I tried toasting the dried zucchini slices with some shredded cheese sprinkled on them. I think the general idea is sound, but they want to be baked at a lower temperature rather than toasted. They were still sort of leathery by the time they started to burn around the edges.
Tonight’s dinner was Italian-style big flat pasta with mussels, and a tomato-onion-eggplant sauce. The pasta was made with locally-milled white flour and home-ground local spelt flour, plus black pepper, salt, and a drizzle of olive oil. I definitely like egg pasta better, but we were out of eggs. I boiled the pasta in the leftover water from the mussels. The sauce was olive oil, cooking wine, tomatoes, basil, onions (white and green bits), eggplant, and one serrano chili pepper. All the vegetables were from the CSA (harvested today!), and the mussels were sustainably farmed off the coast of Maine. Ben made the sauce, and simmered it until the veggies started to fall apart and it became all delicious and sauce-like. The mussels added the perfect sweet touch, and the black pepper worked well in pasta.
These were the first nightshades of the season. High summer is definitely here! There was even okra, though we had the choice of tomatoes, an extra eggplant, or okra, and we picked tomatoes. There will be more okra later. I picked lots of mint to put in water for sipping…it’s getting pretty broiling out there.
The marjoram and oregano in the perennial garden was *covered in bees* — bumblebees, honey bees, and carpenter bees. I assume at least some of the honeybees are from the new honey farm. I petted the bumblebees and carpenter bees. They are fuzzy and nonaggressive. Then Ben suggested that I should probably stop traumatizing the poor bees.
And the dried zucchini is done! (Not eggplant, zucchini.) A couple slices might want a bit more time, but I’m going to cook with most of it pretty soon to test whether I like it, so I’m not as worried about getting them totally dry. Next project: carrot pickles with the carrots that have been accumulating. Unless I eat them tomorrow.
If some sort of ecological-economical-doom apocalypse happens, there will be no more internet. If there is no more internet, I will not have to worry about CIPA. Hooray!
I really need to get more sleep. But at least I when I did sleep last night, my subconscious went, “Oo, you’re actually getting restful sleep! We must come up with Really Weird Dreams to celebrate!”. They were kind of nifty. And this is one of the only times that I can remember in which I’ve had outright *comedic* dreams. Comedic, religion-themed dreams, I should add. It was a dream which could have been one of those math-test-and-I-havent’-been-to-class-all-semester dreams, but nothing was going the way it was supposed to and it was funny instead of upsetting.
My food preservation attempts have been somewhat thwarted by my schedule. But this morning, I realized that I can actually prep things for drying in the morning, so long as they’re not too messy. I chopped up half of a cabocha squash (sort of like a fat light green zucchini) leftover from a while ago along with a whole largeish zucchini and set them in the oven with the pilot light on to dry. I’ll check on them when I go home for lunch. Once they’re dry, I’ll try cooking with them to see whether this is something we’ll actually eat. Zucchini is dirt cheap at farmer’s markets now, and some local squash will probably even show up at the grocery store.
Turned in paper today. Have lost ability to spell the word “Israeli”. Now I can return to things like Dealing With the Zucchini and figuring out whether we should get a food dehydrator and making emergency “bug-out” bags. And sleeping. Lots of sleeping. Someone from the ACLU came to our class today to talk about intellectual freedom issues relating to the USA PATRIOT Act and related unpleasantness. Could our government please stop resembling Germany in the early 30s? It’s really creeping me out. I am going to avail myself of ACLU resources to alert me of anything a sleep-deprived grad student can do to make things less evil. Most likely this will involve giving them money and signing petitions. And writing Senators. My Representative for the most part is seriously nifty on things like that, and so mainly requires thank-you notes, which take less brain. Mmm….brains.
I had another Incompetent Grad Student moment this morning, and so my breakfast was some applesauce canned from last summer, and lunch was a large Snicker’s bar from the staff room vending machine and some pistachios. This, I decided, was a problem. Once I get down to it, cooking is rejuvinating; it’s just getting up enough oomph to start making anything.
For dinner tonight, I decided I wanted soup, since there hasn’t been much soup around here lately. I tend to make fairly hearty soups by default, and they’re not really a summer food. For this soup, I simmered Quite a Lot of Kale and three small onions (both chopped fairly fine) along with orzo, in water with a good spoonful of the salt stock, some more salt (salt stock isn’t as salty as vegetable bullion, it turns out), a hearty squirt of lemon juice, and some olive oil. I put a nasturtium blossom from the garden on top to garnish it.
It needed…something. Black pepper, possibly? Or maybe fennel? Or a very light chicken broth? It was just the sort of thing I was looking for — light, while still being reasonably filling, and the lemon juice added a summery brightness — but it still needed something to deepen the flavor. There’s leftovers, so I’ll add black pepper to the next bowl and see if that helps. It was, in any case, a good basic paradigm, and would be even quicker if I used lamb’s quarters or Asian greens instead of kale. This wasn’t quite a One Local Summer meal, but the kale, onions, and salt stock herbs all came from the CSA.
I have attempted to make “salt stock”, as mentioned in one of Sharon’s latest posts. Seven ounces of chopped herbs and onion tops and seven ounces of salt, put in a glass jar and shaken until mixed. It will evidently keep forever and is excellent for soup base. I think I know what I’m doing with all those wild onions next spring :-) And with the basil at the end of the summer. I could get pretty little jars and make decorative basil salt to give as gifts! I could put chopped hot peppers in it and make spicy basil salt! *plotplotplot*
