People Playing With Food, War Edition

I'm a little uncomfortable with war analogies. People seem to use them whenever there's a large group effort underway, but I can't help but wonder if there aren't better examples of determined cooperation that we could use. I guess troop and troupe are from the same word? I should just accept the double meaning? Either way, I won't say that we're at war with the weeds, currently, but you get the idea. So here are the newest PPWF links:

Grocery Store Wars: A classic. You've probably already seen this Star Wars spoof, but if not, enjoy, it's good.

Fruit Wars : Stop animation and food? I like where their head's at.

The Real Fruit War: Same idea, more violence.

What a difference 20 days can make!

Seasonal Eating Gone Awry

I'm not sure why I'm posting this. It feels like crossing the line between food blog (which should be heavy on the food porn and recipes) and diary. But you'll have to excuse me this once because danggit, i just tried so hard.

The summer menu was garlic scape pesto served with a strawberry dressing topped salad. The strawberry dressing was me trying to live up to my salad dressing challenge. It was a no go. The embarrassing part? I made five of them. Five strawberry salad dressings, all a little different, displayed on the table as some sort of fun taste test. And they all failed. Maybe it was the combination that did me in--the garlic scape pesto a bit on the thick side, paired with a heavier dressing. Whatever it was, the links to these dressings are now lurking in my bookmarks, waiting to be stumbled upon, the debacle relived (you're allowed to be melodramatic in your diary, right?). A lesson in trying too hard, i guess (note the parsley).


Er, maybe a different angle would help? No, no it did not.

Fancy Pasta

Having been a citizen of "emergency pasta" town for about as long as I can remember, I was slow to grasp the concept of Fancy Pasta. Yea, the olives and capers are an investment, but they turn a plain noodle dish into something extravagant. Perfect for potlucks.

Shawn's Cinque Terre Sauce*

1 red sweet pepper, roasted on stove top (didn't have)
1 medium eggplant (didn't have)
1/2 cup olive oil
2 cloves garlic (or more)
1 hot red chili (not sure if we had)
2 C peeled, canned tomatoes
2 T chopped parsley
1 T fresh basil
1/4 C red olives (pretty sure we used black)
capers
oregano
salt and pepper

Trim ends of eggplant and cut into half-inch cubes. Heat oil, then add garlic and sliced red chili and cook until browned. Add eggplant and continue cooking. Next, add the tomatoes. Cover and cook slowly until the eggplant is tender. Add parsley and basil. Cook 5 minutes and then add the olives and capers, and some oregano. Peel, core and seed the roasted sweet pepper, then cut into ½ inch cubes and add to sauce. Cover and cook 20 minutes.

* Full Disclosure: I like to make the recipes I post at least twice before sending them out into the internet, but this one is untested. Also, I dislike eggplant.

Damned If You Dough, Damned If You Don't

Chives. Have no idea how to use them. The examples I've seen involve dairy products that I remain distrustful of: sour cream, cream cheese, you know the type. But their flower is gorgeous, so I'm using them as the photo for this post, on cookie dough (the brownie batter got me thinking...)

I make a lot of cookie dough. Much to the chagrin of roommates past and present, I am not inclined to bake this dough. This dough is for eating. If you're making some dough with this purpose in mind, read on (because i'm not actually sure that my recipe makes better baking cookies).

Though I'm currently a food snob in training (eh, most of the time), and prefer Ghirardelli chips or Scharffen Berger chunks, I grew up on Nestle chocolate chips. That's the recipe I have memorized, that's the one I always make (usually just a half recipe). My new favorite uses less butter and less sugar, for a thicker and less grainy treat:

Dry
1 1/4 C AP flour (or 50/50 with whole wheat)
1/2 t baking soda
1/2-1 t salt (depends if your butter is salted, how much salt you like)

Wet
1/4 cup and a little extra sugar
1/4 cup packed and a little extra brown sugar
6 Tbs butter (1 stick is 8 Tbs), melted enough to mix
1 t vanilla extract (or to taste)
1 egg

Chocolate-- quantity and quality left entirely up to you. I don't judge (well, okay, if you didn't put any chocolate in I would judge you).

Stir Dry together in a small bowl. In a bigger bowl, mix Wet. Add Dry to Wet, mix well, add chocolate. Serve immediately. Stores quite nicely, covered, in fridge for a few days. Bake only if necessary. (*chocolate photo credit: Kim Sue, 2005)

Black Plastic:The Devil Within

We're not supposed to like black plastic. It's high on the list with diesel fuel and water usage, heated greenhouses in winter, and corporate seed distributors. Sustainable ag-ers deal with it in various ways; here in Wisconsin we've met some who were apologetic, but see it as necessary, some who are trying the new "compostable" corn plastics, and a few who do without, using a heavy straw mulch or covercropped aisles instead.

But the black plastic is seductive. After we were done, I found myself drawn to photograph the straight rows (beginner's luck!), the sheets reflecting the clouds above like some strange sea. With any luck it'll have become prohibitively expensive by the time I'm in a position to make the call--I don't trust myself one bit.

Here's a link to what I'm calling Black Plastic Brownies. Mostly because they were the only thing I could think of to mimic the rows with (not because you should feel guilty about eating them, i don't support that ridiculousness). They came out a little cakey and dry for my taste, but the batter was yummy, I'd consider serving it as a mousse.

I believe I believe I believe

They took they took! Alright, so these photos are from a few weeks ago--but look! Our trees took!

In March we had the chance to help graft apple trees for the orchard we visit. It's an exercise that requires a lot of faith--from what seems like little more than two twigs, a tree. The thin cambium layers of the scion and rootstock managed to find each other despite our unsure (sometimes downright wavy) cuts. I'm just amazed. I was going to talk about the process, but realized that nobody is going to go out and start grafting based on directions from this blog, so I won't bore you. But I do have some photos of the process and the orchard in spring!

Photos here!