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Posts tagged ‘cooking from garden’

Full moon setting; rosemary mashed sweet potatoes with caramelized shallots

Florida-grapefruit yellow moon dropping to the horizon outside study windows this morning, something I’d miss if I could sleep past 4 a.m. The last of the moonlight makes luminous the mist exhaled by the sleeping pastures, and I wonder, again, how I can leave this extraordinary beauty for a more prosaic site with more people,  more life.

Because I drove more than 150 miles yesterday for lunch with a cousin I hadn’t seen in 44 years, my glamorous second-cousin Amy with her mother’s smokey eyes and voice.  Amy’s dad and my mother were first cousins in the more-or-less gothic Lawrence clan. Not that they wore black eyeliner and tattoos, but each of the four children of Amy’s and my great-grandparents seemed to suffer blows beyond the usual twists in life’s journeys. Which doesn’t mean they weren’t beautiful and privileged — they were, all of them. 

So it was extraordinary to sit for several hours with someone who has her own take on our shared family dramas, who remembers me half a century ago, someone who was there when the elderly siblings dove into their Manhattans before every family celebration, someone who also beheld our formidable great-grandmother swathed in black and swirling snowflakes before the annual Christmas Eve blow-out. The Cheever biography I’m reading disparages autobiography-as-novel, but I think my mother’s family was the ultimate, hair-raising novel.

That’s my beautiful cousin on the right who looks WAAAAY more than 6 years younger!

But if they didn’t do well at emotional expression, they excelled in the kitchen. Thus, as their true descendant (even if I do look like her despised mother-in-law as my mother said all the time), I would rather cook and eat than say something meaningful to someone else or, for that matter, see long-”lost” relatives. Which is why I need to live where there are someones, particularly those who walk and hit the Y (which is what I’m going to do instead of joining Weight Watchers — I have to feel good enough to work out which is only going to happen with some water exercise classes).

My FB friend Peg R. has an interesting proposal, that all of us struggling with food/weight issues commit to being 3 pounds lighter by Jan. 1. (She’s also suggesting each of us be able to do as many pushups by then as we are years old, but that’s not going to happen.) A  manageable goal that should, nevertheless, make us feel that we’re constructively dealing with  the stressful holidays.

By way of a positive beginning, I gained nothing over Thanksgiving. It was more important to do things other than eating and, when eating, to choose the healthy foods. The following Nov. 2010 Cooking Light recipe is my go-to sweet potato casserole for the foreseeable future. Farewell marshmallows and gobs of butter; hello, crisply caramelized and lightly sugared shallots.

Rosemary mashed sweet potatoes with shallots

2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons good-quality olive oil, divided

3/4 cup thinly sliced shallots (about 2 large)

2 teaspoons brown sugar

2 pounds sweet potatoes, roasted and peeled

1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary leaves

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

Heat 2 tablespoons oil in skillet over low heat. Add shallots and cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Sprinkle with sugar; cook 20 minutes or until shallots are golden, stirring occasionally.

Nothing but healthy food and drink as far as the eye can see.

Put sweet potatoes through ricer. Add rosemary, salt and pepper, whisk until blended. Spoon into serving bowl; top with shallots and drizzle with remaining 2 teaspoons oil. Makes 6 servings of 202 calories, 6.3 fat grams each.

Category:

healthy cooking, Holiday cooking, Holiday eating, Importance of others to recovering addict, Weight loss, Why overweight?

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Stoic the Vast and Dora the Explorer; Tomato-cornbread salad

Here’s the thing: A whole lot of stuff does not matter once you get past, say, the quarter-century mark. My husband, Stoic the Vast, thinks that applies to everything (that it doesn’t matter), but he’s wrong. Some things do matter, just not the way people behaved in your high school class 50 years ago.

My classmates Mary and Barb and Mary’s 94-year-old mum, Elizabeth.

As Stoic likes to remind me, our brains aren’t fully formed until we’re in our mid-20s so when we were 16, 17 and 18, we were pretty much idiots. Actually, it seems like I must have been rather a rude idiot because there were more than a few women who looked at me sideways with no love at all. I obviously dismissed them as not important and must still because I don’t remember any of their names after spending 4 days with them last week. A whole lot of my classmates are a whole lot nicer than I am and, consequently, seem to have a whole lot more fun. Hmmmmm.

The woman on the back of whose neck I wrote  with ballpoint pen is still friendly, who knows why? Which is good because I liked her then and enjoy her mordant wit now.

My entire reunion experience was a lot like Liz Lemon’s on “30 Rock” according to our youngest, Dora the Explorer. Most of my classmates thought Stoic was in our class and liked him a lot, and I found out I, too, was not especially nice unless it suited me. Hmmmm.

I think now, after those 4 days and driving about 1200 miles, that my family and the times were more to blame for my unhappiness than my classmates. As Stoic told me every time we went anywhere in a bunch, “These are some really nice people.”

We had just over 100 in our Class of ’62. Twelve have died, and yet 69 came back so that was most of us.  Stoic is very fond of the food in central Pennsylvania, and we ate a lot of it.

Thursday dinner through Sunday brunch I managed my eating. Once we got in the truck Sunday midday, though, all bets were off. I ate too much on the road and then again Monday but pulled myself back up onto the wagon on Tuesday with no great damage done. When I overeat, I not only don’t lose weight, I feel lousy, too. Slowly, slowly, it is dawning on me that I do myself no favors over-eating and under-sleeping.

I walked in Pennsylvania and have walked since at home. I’m getting ready to go yank weeds for an hour. I’ve entered my calorie and water intake on livestrong.com. The reunion was not the end of my taking care of myself but, I hope, a lengthy beginning.

And with Dora about to leave for four months in East Africa, my world feels like a friendlier place.

We came home to wheelbarrows-ful of tomatoes and there’s nothing better you can do with them than this allrecipes.com salad. Recipe says it makes 10 servings, but that would be 10 servings for mice only, not hungry persons. The avocado and the cornbread combined make something celestial.

Tomato-cornbread salad with avocado and cilantro

5 cups 1/2-inch cornbread cubes

1-1/2 pounds tomatoes, stemmed, skinned, seeded and cut into medium dice

Salt to taste

2 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 red onion, cut into small dice

1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro

2 avocados, cut into medium dice

1/4 cup olive oil

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

Ground black pepper to taste

Heat oven to 250°. Place cornbread cubes on rimmed cookie sheet; bake until bread dries out, about 30 minutes, then set aside to cool. Salt tomatoes, stir in garlic and let stand until juicy, about 30 minutes. Drain off liquid. Toss onion, cilantro, avocado, olive oil and vinegar with tomatoes. Add pepper and adjust salting. Add bread; toss. Let stand 10 minutes before serving.

And to think I’ve never liked cilantro before this summer!

 

Category:

Aging, Handling anxiety without food, Maintaining weight loss, Salad, Summer salads, Warrior Run High School Class of '62

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Upside-down cake starts the weekend off right

Some of our sunflowers have as many as 20 flowers on a stalk.

The days dwindle down but not the garden. More and more and more tomatoes and peppers find their way into huge piles — like highway department de-icer in the winter — on the dining room table.

I made a thick, sweet pasta sauce today (7 pounds tomatoes in 4 servings sauce) that tastes of tomatoes, a few fresh herbs and the echo of garlic only. I made 2 quarts of applesauce last night, and that’s using only a fraction of the  hard little apples out there on the tree, hard little apples that have a big taste when simmered with cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla and a pinch of salt. I also made a Deborah Madison summer squash soup with curry spices today, and it, too, has a big, sweet flavor, exotic and round without tasting anything like commercial curry powder.

But Friday was baking with summer fruit day. I made a peach-raisin-almond crisp and froze it for when the youngest is here in a week or so, and I also made a nectarine-plum upside-down cake from a King Arthur flour recipe. My husband Livermush would like one every week, please, from now on. He loves cake and this has a sweet, moist cake holding up a layer of soft, carmelized fruit in stained-glass colors.

King Arthur Flour fruit upside-down cake

Topping

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter

1/2 cup light brown sugar, packed

1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

As much sliced stone fruit as it takes to cover an 8-inch-square baking pan (24 to 28 ounces)

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

Cake

1-1/3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (I use, you guessed it, KAF)

3/4 cup granulated sugar

1-3/4 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons butter

1/2 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 large egg.

Topping: Melt butter and mix with brown sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon. Spoon mixture into ungreased 8-inch-square baking pan. Heat over to 375.°

Cake: Slice nectarines 1/4-inch thick. Lay slices in prepared pan and sprinkle with lemon juice. Set aside.

In large mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar, then beat in milk, egg and vanilla. Mix together flour, baking powder and salt, then stir into egg mixture. Gently pour batter over fruit in pan.

Bake cake for 45 minutes or until cake begins to pull away from side of pan and springs back from touch. Remove from oven and cool for 5 minutes in pan on rack. Invert pan onto serving platter and let it sit 1 minute more before removing pan. If any fruit sticks to pan, carefully scrape it off and replace it on cake. Serve warm with whipped cream or ice cream. Making 6 to 8 servings.

A simple buttery cake is the base for caramelized summer fruit slices.

Category:

Cake, Desserts, Fruit, vegetables

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Zucchini, the sequel

And they keep on coming, thank goodness. These are the best of the dark green little jokers we’ve ever grown. And that is a swell thing because we have lots of vegetable-impaired friends and because I can make zucchini souffle.

This is a wonderful, goof-proof recipe from the Fourth Creek Meeting House Encore cookbook our church published in 2003 on its 250th anniversary.  The recipe’s provenance (I’ve always wanted to use that word!) is in some dispute. According to one member, it’s her mother’s and no one else’s. It’s in our cookbook twice under two different names,  but that’s OK because it’s that good.

This souffle will not fall. It has nowhere to go because biscuit mix is propping it up. It’s good hot from the oven, at room temperature or even cold. It’s a wonderful main dish with a green salad or slaw and lots of mint tea, or it’s a perfectly splendid side dish. Any way you eat it, it’s genuinely and surprisingly good. He Who Can Actually Plant Seeds in a Straight Row sniffed in disdain  once but never again after he’d eaten it.

Zucchini souffle

3 cups grated unpeeled zucchini

1 cup baking mix (like Bisquick)

1 small onion, minced

1/2 to 3/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1 teaspoon seasoning salt

1/2 cup vegetable oil

4 eggs

Mix together zucchini, baking mix, onion, Parmesan (I use the larger amount) and seasoning salt. In a second bowl mix together eggs and oil. Pour liquid mixture into dry mixture, combine. Grease souffle dish. Pour souffle mixture into dish and bake 1 hour at 350 degrees. Says it serves 6 to 8 but that’s never happened at our house!

And p.s., 31 pounds gone as of yesterday. I’m having popcorn with Move Over Butter for supper tonight to celebrate. Tomorrow morning I’m getting up at 5 again so I can exercise before I go to work. Read today that 5 moderate 30-minute workouts and 3 strenuous 20-minute workouts weekly are the minimum I should be aiming for. Seems to me I’m going to need another day of the week!

 

 

 

Category:

Exercise, Local food, Seasonal food, Weight loss

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All mimsy were ye borogoves

I’ve never had a clue what this line from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” means, but to me, just the sounds of it describe our ride this early morning. Ye borogoves were all mimsy with Michaelmas and ox-eye daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, blue spiderwort and pink phlox, milkweed, hairy vetch (purple), orange daylilies ,  ripening red blackberries, wild onions (purple), low bindweed, deadly nightshade and  New Jersey tea (white), crimson honeysuckle, butterfly weed, rabbit ‘baccer, butter-and-eggs and dandelions.

I’m sad we don’t have bastard toadflax (that I know of) because it’s my new favorite wildflower name.

When we first got to the bottom of our hill, turned off the gravel and rode out onto the Kennedy Creek bottom land planted in corn, a red-tail hawk floated overhead, the sun shining through its rosy tail feathers. For the rest of the ride, though, I pretty much focused on the coffee and  zucchini bread planned for breakfast. That and the need to shampoo my mare’s white (now orange) mane and tail. (If I have a next horse, it will match our red Carolina clay.)

As part of trying to become a smaller person physically, I’m out in the early mornings to do something physical before the temperatures hit steambath level. As part of trying to become part of a larger world than the one I’ve got used to in the last 23 years, I hope I’m listening and observing more keenly. We’ll see.

Cabbage rolls around here right now like heads during the Reign of Terror. This morning I made slaw for a graduation party tonight with regular cabbage, red cabbage, Chinese cabbage, currants, toasted almonds and grated carrots, dressed it with equal parts plain yogurt and low-fat mayonnaise, lots of white pepper and salt (most of these folks will have been out on their horses in the heat of the day), the juice of one lemon and 2 teaspoons sugar (this is a BIG bowl of slaw).

Another picnic tomorrow and I’m taking more deviled eggs and a loaf of zucchini bread with brown sugared cream cheese. And another 10 pounds of zucchini just walked in the door. Along with two baskets of potatoes, one white and one red. Summertime and the livin’ is all about vegetables.

 

Category:

good food, healthy cooking, Rural life, Weight loss

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