Food on Friday with Dollivers

Today was about a lot of food and catchup, sorry, couldn't resist, and first in the catchup, the vinegar.  

I tasted it this morning. No mother had appeared, but it was definitely vinegar, lovely and fruity, and I bottled it back in the original wine bottle, and it's awaiting the next salad around here.  So I can safely recommend this low end method of making wine vinegar.

And Handsome Son managed to fit in a visit for lunch, to which he did total justice. He's a good cook, but right now is also a very busy one, and it's nice to come over for a large meal with seconds!

Today it was chicken rolls, which I kind of invented:  smoked deli chicken slices, stuffed with farm chicken sausage, the apple flavor, and Kennet Square mushrooms (translation for those out of area: the best), with grated parmigiano, also the real thing.  Rolled in farm egg then panko, baked for about 15 minutes at 350, and it went over a treat. In fact there's nothing left.  Good thing I got crafty and make another couple of dishes of these rolls for the freezer, because I got a request to do these again some time.

Potato salad, including my own patio grown spuds, yay, and farm ones.  Just tossed in oil and vinegar, with mustard seeds, bit of sea salt and black pepper.

Dessert was a peach crumble.  Peaches were fresh from the farm, macerated in spices including that really good cinnamon, not the supermarket sort, the real stuff, then frozen to await a crumble. The crust was almond meal, which I made in the coffee grinder from whole almonds, with oat flour and oat flakes, butter, bit of salt, bit of white sugar. I baked this last night, and let it sit overnight in the fridge, which I think I will do from now one, because the fruit set up just lovely, and the flavor was really good, actually better than fresh baked.

And a big carafe of homemade lemonade, which was very welcome to greet him as he came in on this 100 F day.

So this was very happy stuff, I love to use good ingredients and see the food enjoyed.  There's still crumble for other friends when I see them.

Then it was afternoon, too hot to have the oven going and it's restless weather when I can't get out to walk.  So I harvested herbs for pesto, right in the blazing sun, flavor at peak because of the heat and sun.

This was pretty labor intensive, good thing I don't do it more than once a year.  I have my version of pesto, which is all about a big handful of herbs, torn down fine, all the stems gone, a good shake of diced walnuts, pinch of kosher salt, good parmigiano fresh grated, good olive oil, and ziploc bags for freezing them. 

I keep the cheese in the freezer, in parchment paper inside plastic, and it doesn't seem to hurt the flavor at all.  Today I ended up after using most of one block, with a rind, which I'll use for soup, so it's back in the freezer, with the rest of the other block. 

Then, when the pesto's whirled into a paste in the blender and bagged and labeled, the blender has lovely remnants in the bottom, impossible to get out. So I put a cup of water in, blend that up, and freeze the resulting pesto water for soup later.  This pleases my frugal heart no end.

And of course, after all the work, and the cleanup, was over, two Dollivers, Dreads and Blondie Firstborn, reading left to right, showed up in their whites ready to pose and claiming they'd been there all along, but didn't want to get in the way, bad enough with Duncan tripping me at every step.  Or some such malarkey.  


So here they are with the flattened bags, and the containers of water from each flavor, sage, oregano, basil, and a combo of rosemary and thyme.  There was a lot of thyme which I wrapped and froze, so I have twigs of it later for recipes that need that rather than pesto.  I find that freezing fresh herbs, wrapped in plastic and rolled up with a rubber band holding it tight, works just fine, no loss of flavor that I've noticed.

And while this labor was going on, indoors and out, here's a visitor on the lantana, showing that it's really true about they toil not neither do they spin.  

Get a look at that wonderful tiger swallowtail.  Of course the Dollivers toil not, and neither do they spin, and they too seem to be supplied with nice gear.  I hear them shouting from the next room that they do too work, how would I get any ideas at all if not for them, and don't forget they can hear me.

Quite soon the sun will be over the yardarm, and when I pour my one lovely glass of red per day, they will no doubt show up clamoring for a share, since the sun's over the yarnarm..

The glass pans earn their keep

Late July, height of the farmshare season, needing ingenuity to make meals of veggies as well as prep and freeze them, to keep up with the supply.  Roasting is a great way to do this, particularly since I've been using balsamic vinegar to sort of sprinkle over.

And the salt potatoes I learned from Deborah Madison's book on farmmarkets, redskins boiled with a ton of seasalt, took their place in this dish. I had Handsome Son come to dinner the other night, and help me eat the zucchini quiche with a big side of roasted potatoes, squash, onions and corn, and the rest of the frozen lima beans from an Ottolenghi recipe.  

The corn went in the dish raw, but I steamed the others, and boiled the potatoes in the saltwater.  Tossed the veggies in a mixture of olive oil, seasonings, black cherry balsamic vinegar.  Roasted them at 475F for about 45 minutes.

Dessert was a peach crumble, fresh farm peaches, done the way Rose Levy Beranbaum does them in her Bible of pies and cakes, this month's Bite Club selection being desserts. 

And HS pronounced the potatoes great, were there any more, the squash okay, the quiche hm, is there any  ketchup.  But the peach crumble vanished in short order.

The different way Beranbaum does the fruit is to macerate them for a while in sugar, drain off the juices to make a reduction, while mixing the drained fruit with a mix of spices and cornstarch, mainly ginger and cinnamon.  Then the reduced liquid goes back on the fruit and into the pie dish.  I didn't want to make the fancy pastry shapes for the top, so I used Martha's old standby oat crumble, and very good it was.  Not too juicy, but very flavory.

This week there were, among other exciting things, peaches and peppers and corn,  berries in the farmshare -- farmer explained apologetically that they ran out of cherry tomatoes the previous day, and had to sub with berries.  NO problem here with that!

So here's a berry and Granny Smith apple crumble, as per Beranbaum, using ginger and cinnamon, and the crumble part as per Martha, using oatmeal and ground oats.  

This is the kind of thing that's making me lean toward investing in a second little freezer for the kitchen, so I can have this sort of thing in the winter.

Since we are in a heatwave, with those heat index things zooming past 100F there are those who might question the sanity of a person who bakes on such a day, but I had to use the fresh fruit, and well, I was just needing activity indoors.

I finished the window sail for my neighbor, who came over last night to see, and was mad with joy, big hugs and thanks and it went down well.  His house is in an uproar, with wiring and tiling and workmen all over, so he asked me to hold onto the sail for the moment until the dust settles, literally.  I'll post a pic when it's installed.

And the dyeing is moving on, with black walnut dye on what was linen pants and will be a linen skirt with pockets, but that adventure's in Art the Beautiful,  here  http://beautifulmetaphor.blogspot.com/2015/07/transformation-from-linen-pants-to.html