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..

Food rules

Deliberately ambiguous title this morning.  Read one way, it's about how food rules my current world.  Read another it's about the rules I need to observe in order to stay in charge of the food and not be ruled by it!  This is not about consuming food.  This is about the logistics of liking to cook and save and freeze vs. the reality of a smallish freezer at the top of my fridge.

So I made a giant loaf of bread yesterday, whole wheat and oatmeal with sunflower seeds inside and poppyseeds on top.  This is a variation I made of the whole wheat recipe in the Healthy Bread book.  I also quit using loaf pans, and put the entire lot into one great big casserole with a non stick lining, which creates a fabulous crust. 

I bake at the usual 450 F. for about an hour and a quarter, had to lengthen the baking from the loaf pan time, but now I've got it down.  The crumb of this loaf is lovely, too, nice texture, firm, but good.  Excellent for spreading tomato lemon jam on..

Then found that when I quartered it into useable sizes, the segments  that I freeze wouldn't go into the freezer, dangit.  Those containers full of herbs I picked for pesto were taking up too much space.

Deep sigh, removed them from the freezer, put the bread in their place and set to work, forced by necessity and the rules of food to get on with pesto making.  And after all that whining and tergiversation, it only took about an hour to create flattened packages of pesto for the freezer, now in there lying on a plexi sheet to keep flat while they freeze.

Rosemary, sage, basil, English thyme, lemon thyme, peppermint, spearmint, oregano, I think that's the lot, all done.  Instead of my usual olive oil, walnuts, herb, grated parmesan, I used all the above, but subbed grated asiago for the parmesan as an experiment, so we'll see how that works out.  And I made a container of pesto water at the end, to rinse out the blender without wasting any pesto.

I also finished one bottle of oil in the course of this, just came to the end of it.  Then left it capped and upended while I got on with the newly opened one.  After a few minutes, uncapped it and as I expected, at least another ounce of oil in there still, poured that into the new bottle, waste not want not, good olive oil is expensive.

The food rule seems to be like so many other parts of life: just do it. Don't put up the ingredients and waste a lot of mental effort remembering and planning and resolving to do it.  My whole winter's pesto is now up and done.  And the bread and the pesto all fit nicely in the freezer.

Next to make soup from all the little containers of potato water and pesto water and green bean water and other bits saved up, along with all the veggies waiting their soup life.  I'm thinking of putting soup into freezer bags and squashing it flat, too, why not.  Space saving. 

Every year at this time I wonder if I should have another freezer, and the urge passes if I lie down for a while..or until I get another space saving idea like this one.  So that the cook, not the food, rules!