Daily Archives: July 13, 2014

Cooking

Cooking

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Summer                                                             Most Heat Moon

Picked up Chez Panisse on vegetables, one of my favorite cookbooks, right up there with beets chard 7 6 12R600Joy of Cooking and How the World Cooks Chicken. When I called Kate this morning, she was at Mt. Rushmore with Jon and Ruth. I only had one question. What do I do with the beets after I clean them? Oh. You don’t take the tops off first? Too late for that. Boil them for 15 minutes then slip them out of their skins? OK. I can do that. Go back to Borglum.

Cooking is something I really enjoy, but I’ve avoided it for a couple of years now. Kate’s home and my need to cook has diminished since she’s enjoyed getting back in the kitchen after a long absence from regular cooking. I don’t cook like Kate does. She’s a recipe gal and a damned good one. Just ask the Woollies who said her meal a couple of years ago was the best they’d had at a Woolly meeting.

Me, I’m a let’s look at the ingredients and see what we might make kind of cook. A bit more, no, a lot more, free form. That means I make wonderful surprises and the occasional ghastly surprise. I’ve gotten better over the years so the ratio has widened in favor of wonderful over ghastly, but I’ve not eliminated them.

So I’m trying to recreate the beet salads I like so much when I go out. First step, roast the beets. 400 degrees covered with foil. Large baking dish. But, again, I’m starting out behind because I’ve already boiled and peeled the beets. After removing their tops to begin with. I’m not expecting it to turn out perfect, there are a lot more beets where those came from. But it should be interesting over the next couple of days to see what I can produce from roasted, pre-boiled and prematurely topped beets.

Cooking, Garden

Beets, Carrots, Green Beans and Lamb

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Summer                                                      Most Heat Moon

Spent the morning first spraying, then in the garden weeding the vegetable beds and harvesting beets and carrots. After the first beet crop was out of the ground, I planted the third. The second is already growing in another bed and between open spaces created by earlier harvests.

The beets and the carrots all go into the hod, a metal mesh with two wooden ends and a curved wooden handle for carrying. The wire mesh is useful with roots crops because it allows the hose to get all sides, including the underside of just picked vegetables.

Inside I prepped the beets, boiled them, skinned them and they now await some other action, one I’ve not chosen. Or, perhaps more than one.

A few of the carrots and a handful of green beans, picked this morning, too, got heated up and eaten with the remaining lamb from the rack of lamb we had the last night Ruth and Jon were here. These were from last November when I got a good deal on a Byerly’s order, brought to me since I had no vehicle. I had rack of lamb for Thanksgiving while Kate had Thanksgivukkah with the Denver Olsons.