Three Things

People who know me well laugh when they see email from me with something like "Three Things" in the subject line.

They laugh because they know I wrote that to help me remember to get to everything I wanted to share in the email.  I am famously easy to self-sidetrack.

They laugh because they know I probably started out with "One Thing" in the subject line and then had to revise it a couple of times as I remembered more things I wanted needed to tell them.

This enumeration technique works fairly well for emails so I figured to try it here and we'll see if I can stay on track for what I want to do with this post.  

Three things in particular caught my eye today.  One is a some very good news I wanted to share, one is a bit of wisdom that helped me a great deal, and the last is an idea I want to recommend to you whole heartedly.

First the good news.  The Pundits of Pudge have revised how much weight the typical adult gains during the holidays.

Estimates currently are that we typically gain only about one pound (down from seven!) from our tendency to overeat during the holiday season.  Before you head to the refrigerator with a spoon to grab the CoolWhip container and celebrate, please don't forget that is one pound over and above the pound we all supposedly gain just by staying alive year to year. 

Unless you work to maintain rather than gain over the holidays, you can count on two extra pounds added on to your baseline weight for every year you survive.  

You do the math.  If you are planning on escaping an untimely (defined:before I turn 85 and subject to revision when I turn 83) death, that is two pounds for every year between whatever age you are now and when you turn 85.  

For me that is a projected additional 60 pounds.  While I may not be totally grossed out by the way I look now,  I cannot for the life of me imagine how I will manage to drag around gracefully carry another 60 pounds.  Not unless I grow another 5 or 6 inches.  And what are the odds of that?

OK.  Still.  One pound down from seven.  Very good news! Note to self - work on maintaining without gaining.  Check! Next up - a bit of real weight wisdom to share with you.  

The first time I heard this idea it made no sense to me at all.  The 4th, 5th and 392nd times I heard it mentioned, I began to pay attention to the cues my own body sends me and the light finally clicked ON.

Nutritionists maintain our bodies, like toddlers, often do not distinguish well between "hungry" and "thirsty". I suppose that is where the conventional advice of drinking a full glass of water before a meal comes from.  It is not so much that the water fills you up (not something I have noticed happening, honestly) as it is that your body may send you a signal that you are dehydrated and you may misinterpret by heading to the pantry for oh, say, I don't know, some potato chips(hypothetically).   

Throw that kind of a miscue in with a glass of wine at a holiday party, and it is easy to see how over indulging results.  The wine stimulates your appetite,  you get dehydrated to boot, and blammo, before you know what's happening there are two kinds of adorable cookies on your platewhere that pile of dry carrot sticks you headed to the buffet to get in the first place were supposed to be.  

Know yourself.If there is any chance at all that your body might be telling you "I'm thirsty!" rather than "I know you just ate a full meal but I am still hungry!", try a glass of water before you eat anything else after a full meal.  If after you are hydrated you still feel hungry, deal with it then, no harm done.

OK.  Good news, wisdom, check and double check.  Now for that idea I want to enthusiastically endorse.  

Puttering around the interweb today I saw a bit on the Gaiam Blog that caught my eye. Entitled "Be the First On Your Block To Get A Farmer!" by Leslie Garrett, the bottom line is that the very best thing you can do to help yourself and your family to eat healthier is to know who is growing your food and how they are going about it.    

This idea is not entirely new - Pollan advocates this in his own way as does Barbara Kingsolver and multiple others as part of the growing Eat Local/Eat Responsible movement.  But "Get Your Own Farmer" is such a succinct way to sum up what it is that we all need to try to do that I couldn't resist.  

Garrett orders most of her food from a local farmer.  "Her" farmer.  There are various ways to duplicate that effort. Subscribing to CSA basketoutfits like our own area's Tecolote Farm, using online organic delivery services like Greenling, shopping the farmer's market before hitting the chain grocer's are all great ways to get your own farmer.  

I would add trying to Be Your Own Farmer - growing as much of your own food in a garden as you can, will be doubly satisfying.  Healthy, too.Try as I might, I have never managed to grow anything fattening in my garden.  It just doesn't work that way.   

Here in Austin we are incredibly fortunate to have a fantastic food co-op, Wheatsville, where you can have a whole dedicated crew of produce, meat and floor stock buyers out there working tirelessly to source the best local, organic, sustainable and responsible products to fill your shopping basket week to week.  Is there a food coop in your community?  Check it out.  

If we are what we eat, then don't you want to be organic, local, and sustainable?  Well of course you do.  Think about ways to put "Get My Own Farmer" high on your Christmas Wish List this year.

Postscript:  There was going to be a fourth thing.  I was going to indulge in a mini-rant around the idea of buying an outfit that is too small to be currently worn and have that hanging in the closet as supposed incentive to eat less and lose weight.  

In the current economic climate that really feels counterproductive.  However, after some thought I decided if I want to point fingers at anybody else's closet I best weed out the clothes I never wear and already have hanging in my own closet first.  

So I will channel the energy otherwise spent on scoldy-typing and redirect that to cleaning out my closet.  Afterwards I may yet return to that rant, filled with self righteous snarkiness, but more likely I will be exhausted and opt for taking a nap.  You can thank me later.  Onward!!

Marketable

Subscribing to a farm and having just harvested organically grown fruits herbs and vegetables delivered to your neighborhood hub to pick up and enjoy week to week may be the easiest way to guarantee you are eating fresh local foods. It is certainly not the only way.

As I reported earlier, joining a local food coop like Austin's Wheatsville Coop is one great shortcut to having a wide variety of local responsible and sustainable products available to shop from.

Wheatsville provides a list of local sources that shows their distance from the store. Aside from a couple of producers in the Yantis and Dallas, Texas area coming in at a distance of around 200 miles (and still within state limits), many more of their sources are within a 50 mile radius from the store. 

Another great shortcut is to head to a farmer's market, where the various producers not only come to one central location for your convenience, but you also often have the pleasure of meeting them face to face.Barbara Kingsolver in her book entitled Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:A Year of Food Life chronicles her family's year of eating nearly exclusively what they could produce on their farm or procure locally, from other farms, cheesemakers, butchers, or other value added enterprises in the area immediately around them.

If, like me, you aren't lucky enough to have a family farm to run this experiment on your own, then a Farmer's Market is your next best bet. You show up and the farmers show up and you have a chance to ask them face to face if something is organic, if they butchered the meat themselves, or any other important questions you might have.

This past Saturday, even though I still have some of my CSA produce on hand, I headed over to the Sunset Valley Farmer's Market, held weekly in the Toney Burger Athletic Center. The market is there year round, rain or shine, and they offer 75 percent organically sustainably grown produce.The market's produce is locally sourced, fresh and in season.

I have learned that some things simply won't survive organically in these climes and times. Corn won't make it organically even under experienced hands. Peaches either most seasons. Some food crops have been taken so far away from their sustainable sources they can no longer produce without the chemical props. Sad but true.

At the market, most vendors have their produce clearly marked as to whether or not it has been organically grown. Short a sign? I always ask. Most people are happier that you care than they are defensive about being asked.

I was there Saturday for three reasons. First and foremost, I wanted to do as Barbara Kingsolver had suggested we all ought to do from time to time - look my food producers in the face and thank them for what they are doing.

I knew David Pitre of Tecolote Farm would be there at the market Saturday and I wanted to say hello to him and thank him for the amazing commitment he and his family have made to helping so many other families have healthy responsibly raised food on their tables. I also was hopeful to buy more of their wonderful Chinese Yard Long beans. We'd gotten these twice in our CSA baskets and I wanted more.

I took my camera and, armed with my mental list, headed over to Sunset Valley. I'd dilly dallied past their 9:00AM starting time. I had two stops to make ahead of getting to the market, a mistake I will try to avoid in future because when I got there just prior to 10 AM the parking lot was rapidly fillingand the lines in front of most booths were already 5-6 people deep. And, something not to be taken lightly in the face of all this fresh food and meat and cheeses...it was already 90 degrees out on the asphalt.

Katie Pitre had reported in our newsletter that there were fruits and vegetables they no longer had in sufficient quantity to share among the CSA basket groups. She stated that even after the basket season ended, what they had in any quantity would be offered at the Farmer's Markets until the end of their season. She shared the list with the basket groups and encouraged us to come see them at the Market.There to see them I was, standing helplessly stuck in a seemingly immobile line as I heard person after person ahead of me brightly inquiring, "and what are these?" about the beans.

Listening to David Pitre explaining enthusiastically about Chinese beans and how to best prepare them, the woman in line behind me wondered out loud "how does he stay so happy in this heat?!".I speculated out loud that maybe he stays so happy because he likes what he does and he gets to eat organic fresh food all the time.

Lucky for me, I stayed happy too. I not only had a chance to say "hello and thank you!" to David and his crew, but I got a gorgeous batch of beans to prepare for dinner this week. Now that I have an updated recipe from Jaden's Steamy Kitchen, I can barely wait to figure out a menu that will do them justice. Also, I bought one of my husband's new favorites, a Canary melon, one of the many treats we were introduced to courtesy of Tecolote Farm this year.

My second goal dealt with tomatoes. My tomato plants are still sputtering. I finally took drastic measures this morning and significantly pruned them in a last ditch effort to promote more fruit to set. Whether or not that assures me a more steady supply of back yard tomatoes in the weeks to come, I wanted, no, I needed more tomatoes and I needed them right now.

Summer is a season I will not negotiate without fresh tomatoes. I had a package of wonderful Pederson's bacon on hand and I'd decided BLT sandwiches were on the day's lunch menu. I needed some T!Enter Morning Glory Farms. I came, I saw, I asked "organic?, they answered "Yes!".  I bought.

Last but not least, in weeks past I had looked over the many booths offering all sorts of grass fed, antibiotic and hormone free chicken, beef, lamb, goat, pork, bison and gulf harvested shrimp at Sunset Valley. I'd never hesitated buying fresh fruits and vegetables, I'd even bought wonderful eggs there, but I'd always been a bit wary of buying my meat from a guy with a freezer in an athletic center parking lot. Somewhere along the way I had gotten the crazy idea that bigger/industrial is better/safer when it comes to buying animal protein.

Now I know better. When it comes to buying meat, if I hope to have any idea of how an animal was raised, and as importantly, how it was slaughtered, then I have to do my homework, hopefully meet up with the ranchers and butchers face to face, and be willing to ask questions. So far, when buying meat, the producer with the shortest trip from their pasture to my table may be my best, if not my only, conscionable bet.

At Sunset Valley I knew I would suffer from too many choices. I'd done some scoping out and knew I needed to decide on a starting point for buying meat directly from suppliers. As an entry point, I targeted buying a small pork roast in order to make a batch of Sue Bette's smoky "Killer Party Tacos" meat in the crock pot.Thanks to the Richardson's Farms folks from Rockdale, Texas, I now have a 3.3 pound pork roast in my freezer, just waiting it's turn for the crock pot and then our dinner table. 

The Richardson's graciously answered my questions about their animals and past that, we all agreed that transparency in production is key when it comes to trying to eat responsibly. I let them know that I appreciate what they are doing and that as long as I can, I will happily pay more than supermarket prices in order to get meat from animals that are free roaming, fed naturally, and butchered as humanely as possible.  They seemed genuinely glad to hear that.

Heat and crowds aside, I had a great time at the Farmer's Market. I did make a couple of impulse buys. I managed to avoid picking up anything other than a photo of some gorgeous flowers, butI did buy a couple of additional peppers for a future batch of gazpacho, and I couldn't resist some arugula. Other than that, I pretty much stuck to my list and got in and out in under forty minutes.If I add in the dollars I spent at the Market to the dollars I spent at the Coop, I easily tripled my $10/week pledge to buy fresh and local foods. As it turns out, with a little help from the locals, it is fairly easy to eat fresh, eat organic, and put seasonal food on your table.

With the amazing variety of delicious local food available you'll have so many wonderful choices you will never regret spending a few extra pennies to avoid having to eat tasteless supermarket vegetables shipped in from thousands of miles away. I pinky swear it.

Basket 18 - All's Well that Ends Well

The Tecolote Farms CSA Basket Adventure is officially over for 2008. I count it an outstanding success all around. The weekly offerings took us into all sorts of previously untrodden produce territory resulting in our accidental introduction to some new favorites. The experience helped deliciously ease our transition further towards eating more vegetables and less animal protein.

We were reminded week to week about the importance of supporting local small scale producers, as well as the necessity to conserve water and support public water policies that will allow for agriculture to co-exist with developement. I have some interesting new ideas about foods to try in our own backyard garden next growing season, and I even have a new native flowering seed bearing shrub to try in the front yard that will hopefully frustrate the "all you can eat" tendencies of our local deer population.

I've eaten a lot of delicious, fresh, healthy food and felt good about where it comes from. I've met some fascinating new folks who share my enthusiasm for responsibly sourced healthy foods. I've gotten new recipes, had a lot of fun photographing beautiful fruits and vegetables, and learned a lot more about my food and where it comes from than typically happens in any grocery store.

For me, the great CSA Basket Experiment of 2008 ended with a bang as the folks at Tecolote Farms pulled out all the stops to give us a memorable last taste from their little corner of Texas. There were many of the usual suspects in this last blast from the Farm; cucumber melons, eggplant, thai basil, more acorn squash, okra, a sweet yellow Granex onion, some Yukon Gold potatoes and a last Galia melon are all old friends.

But there were also a few surprises this last go-round.Most notably in the "takes both hands to carry" category, we each had a large Rouge vif d'etemps French pumpkin in addition to a full sack carefully stacked with fruit and vegetable goodness.

According to our ever helpful newsletter, these pumpkins are tastier, moister, better suited to making soups than being baked, and will last for months if kept cool and dry. Dry will be easy but cool? I am such a fan of pumpkin pie. I might be tempted to go to the extra step of draining the pureé before adding it to pie crust just for the fun of an extra-extra tasty pumpkin pie. Who wants to fit into a bathing suit anyway....

We had a couple of wonderfully smelly epazote stems with the suggestion to use them in making a perfect pot of pinto beans. Apparently epazote is taken from the original Aztec term for this plant "epazotl", often found growing wild here in the US where it is more typically called pigweed or wormseed. Such appetizing names. Epazote is a carminative (like fennel or peppermint) which means it can reduce gassiness. So for epazote to be considered as "essential" to cooking pinto beans is a natural leap.The leaves are quite (ahem!) aromatic. Some compare the smell of the crushed leaves to gasoline or creosote. It is fairly pungent, I'll admit. If I didn't know this was a plant you could cook with I am pretty sure the smell would encourage me to leave it well enough alone. The taste, though, once acquired, means that beans cooked any other way will always be lacking a "certain something" for your palate (and no, by that certain something I do NOT mean flatulence). I have not had a lot of experience with epazote (yet!) but understand the older leaves are more pungent than the younger smaller leaves. Most advise throwing a stem/sprig in during cooking that is to be removed (a la bay leaves) before adding salt to taste at the end of the cooking time.

And last but not least, the smallest and perhaps more delightfully bizarre of our basket offerings for the season, a Devil's Claw seed pod. Proboscidea louisianica, is also known as Ram's horn, or Unicorn plant, all names referring to the woody seed pod left after the fleshy fruit falls away and then splits as these have. It grows wild in Texas and Mexico as an annual, and has reportedly been cultivated for centuries by Southwestern Native Indians for use in basketry as well as a food source. The black seeds found inside the pods can be cracked open to reveal a small white kernel that tastes quite a bit like a pine nut.According to one source, an infusion and/or powder form and capsules prepared with the active ingredients from Devil's Claws are marketed medicinally in Europe as an anti-inflammatory agent against rhematism. These active ingredients, mostly sourced from a variety of the plant found in Namibia, are believed to be iridoid glycosides called harpagosides, which are found in the secondary root.

While it always fascinates me to learn how so many of the oldest plants known have medicinal as well as nutritional uses, I am going to forgo the pharmaceutical and the snacking route, saving most of my seed to plant in my front yard. There I am hopeful the deer will find Devil's Claw a top contender for their constantly evolving "Deer Usually Avoid" list. We have worked hard to take out all the St. Augustine from the beds in front. I am always on the lookout for native plants that will flourish on low water, be interesting in form or flower, AND not simply end up as a main component for Bambi's Salad Bar. Our neighbors have been very kind and patient with us as we've worked to create an interesting variation on the standard swath of water guzzling green. It will be fun to have some Devil's Claw out there in the mix next year, a subtle reminder of the many ways we feed and are fed by, local crops.

Finally, I just couldn't stand the idea of being "all done" with eating locally or seasonally so I decided to do something concrete about that. I have plans to join the Wheatsville Coop. This is something I have meant to do for years, sort of like I'd meant to try out CSA baskets and/or shop at the Farmer's Markets more regularly, and I figure there is no better time than NOW to sign up.

I will be back to you later, reporting on my trip over to Wheatsville where I hope to live through the discomfort of subjecting my newbyness to the ever so much more "crunchier than thou" "I was here long before you" crowd. I may be doing everybody there a huge disservice with that characterization, and I'll apologize right here on this blog if I have, but I will admit it is my fear of encountering a vast array of unknown products and having to ask questions that will trigger condescension bordering on scorn that has kept me out of there for far too long.

Another part of reinforcing my continuing wish to use our food dollars to invest in local, renewable, sustainable and healthy produce involved going online to the FoodRoutes.Org site to take their Buy Local Challenge. I chose to sign up as pledging to spend 10 dollars a week on locally produced food for the rest of this calendar year. As I did that and noted a listing of folks who have taken the pledge by states, my competitive nature kicked in. There is this scoreboard, and as you can see when you go there, Texas is not making too good a showing in terms of folks willing to sign up and pledge their dollars towards supporting locally produced foods.

I'd be really truly shallow to suggest that if you have any stirrings of Lone Star pride in you that you should visit and put your own pledged dollars into the mix to improve our state's standing. I'd be shallow and pushy to imply that if you were any kind of REAL Texan, (or Idahoan, or Indianian or whatever it is you actually are), that you would want your home state to be riding up towards the top of the list to prove to the world how wonderful you and your fellow Texans/Indianians, etc. are. Because at the moment those Californians have the top spot all sewn up and although I have wonderful dear friends there, I simply don't think we can let them get away with that.

At the same time I do realize it is much more important to SPEND that money on locally produced foods than it is to sign a pledge on a website, but I also know that every time I take a step towards a more public proclamation of my intention to eat locally produced foods, I am that much more likely to follow through and not succumb to convenience or comfortable old patterns of just going to that nearby chain market and buying whatever is cheapest on their shelves.

And the more I read, the more I see that even the best local players on the largest scale when it comes to supermarkets, have their own issues with responsibly sourcing food for the masses. Our homegrown gone national giant, Whole Foods, has it's issues:
Supermarkets Failing to Adopt Sustainable Seafood Buying Practices:Report.


Worthwhile pursuits are rarely quick or easy. Signing up for the CSA baskets pulled me out of my comfort zone, but as so typically happens, I am better for the stretch.The vast majority of people I've met who are interested in eating responsibly and supporting local farms are not all overpiced negative heel shoe wearing, tie dye t-shirted, crystal toting, aging hippie flakes, so much as they are kind and thoughtful people of all ages and stages who have taken time to learn about and understand the impacts of their economic choices.

So it is with some unexpected sadness that we bid a fond farewell to CSA Baskets from Tecolote Farm for this year, and move on to Wheatsville and the Farmer's Market. Stay tuned to see if I can make good on my pledge to spend $10 dollars a week on locally produced food for the rest of 2008.

Talkin' Bout My Cucamelon

(to the tune of  "Talkin' Bout My Generation" with apologies to the Who - and ok to you as well if you are that easily offended..sheesh!.)

In our CSA baskets this summer we have gotten a wonderful array of cucumber melons, dubbed "cucamelons" by David Pitre of Tecolote Farms. These are Italian precursors to the more familiar and readily available hybridized cucumbers you'll see everywhere, but size and a few treatment considerations aside, they are just about identical in taste and texture to the garden variety cuke. Grown since Roman times, they have become popular again as many gardeners and farmers are turning to the heirloom varieties for their proven endurance.I like them for two reasons. First, they are Italian! What's not to like about that? I am discovering, via the newsletter reporting of the Pitres as an adjunct to our weekly baskets, that a lot of the Italian heirloom fruits and veggies do pretty well in our hot Texas summers.

Secondly, they are HUGE. I wish I could carefully avoid any potentially tasteless "would you get a look at the size of those melons" type riffs, but seriously, these cucamelons are in Dolly Parton territory easily. Gotta love larger when it comes to delicious summertime treats.

With a preponderence of cucamelon on hand, I have been keeping a watchful eye out for potential ways to enlarge my cucumber repertoire. I've already covered how much I like cucumber sandwiches. I've already waxed poetic over the delights of gazpacho. I've shared my favorite cucumber salad with you and yet I STILL had more cucumbers to use. What do to?

Enter Avocado-Cucumber Soup, a recipe I stumbled across recently on the Serious Eats website. This recipe intrigued my interest for several reasons. First, sure, because it would help me use up my cucamelon stash. But the simplicity of the recipe, and the inclusion of several ingredients I have growing my back garden already (although many of them stubbornly unready for harvest yet), pushed this over the top. Even though my sweet husband has declared his steadfast dislike of chilled soups, I took the note off the SE site seriously that as well as a chilled appy for two, this recipe would make a perfectly acceptable meal for one person. Off I went.

Here is the recipe and to follow it I offer a little primer on handling cucamelons and jalapeños for the uninitiated: 

AVOCADO-CUCUMBER SOUP
- Serves 2 as an appetizer or 1 as an entrée -
Adapted from Serves One by Toni Lydecker.
Ingredients
1 Hass avocado
1 cup peeled, seeded, chopped cucumber
2 tomatillos, quartered
1/4 cup chopped onion
1 small serrano or jalapeño chile, halved lengthwise, stemmed, and seeded, membranes removed
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons chopped cilantro (optional)

Procedure:Run a knife lengthwise around the avocado and twist to separate the halves. Lightly strike the pit with a knife blade and twist to remove. Score the flesh with a knife and scoop it out with a spoon.In a blender or food processor, combine the avocado, cucumber, tomatillos, onion, chile, and salt. Add 1 cup water. Blend until the mixture is pureed, adding more water if necessary for a soupy consistency.

Chill well. Sprinkle with the cilantro, if using.

So how do you handle this ginormous melon of a cucumber differently? Easy as this...you cut the melon in half.Then you scoop out the seeds. After that, you peel and slice as you would any other cucumber.

You'll note the recipe calls for a small serrano or jalapeño chile, halved, stemmed, and seeded. If you have never tried this on your own, let me share with you the need for a little respect when it comes to capsaicin and peppers.Capsaicin is what puts the varying degrees of "pep" into peppers and not only renders peppers as inedible to most predators, but has an array of healing properties as well. You can spend all the time you wish learning more about capsaicin, but centrally what you need to know when cooking with peppers is that you want the capsaicin to stay on your knife and/or cutting board and OFF your hands.

The very best way to do this and avoid a chemical burn story all your own is to wear gloves. Seriously. You can try to not get any on your hands and you can try to wash it off your hands but you can still burn your eyes or your nose by touching them even hours later. Using gloves while handling peppers allows you to skip the painful lesson.

The capsaicin mostly resides in the seeds and membranes of any pepper which is why you will see a similar instruction to "halve, stem, and remove seeds and membranes" in most recipes calling for hot peppers in the mix. The pepper half on the right is a little capsaicin bomb, ready to burn anybody careless enough to get close. The pepper half on the left is still plenty much heat bearing, but used that way in a recipe it will not actually burn your mouth in the soup the way touching it will chemically burn your eyes. Even after the seeds and membranes are out, I don't touch the peppers while I am chopping them. I've already proven to myself that my eyes are not magically immune to the horrors of a capsaicin exposure just because I have a high tolerance for eating hot peppers.

One other note. You may be saying to yourself, "well, hmmmm, I haven't seen a red jalapeño before- maybe she is confused about what kind of pepper she's got and I can ignore the other things she is saying about caution and peppers?". I feel you there. These were the first red jalapeño peppers I had ever seen either and I know they are jalapeños because they have come off the plants in my garden.

Apparently, when you leave a plant on it's own indefinitely they will not only grow peppers but those peppers will eventually turn red, just like a bell pepper will if it is left on the plant long enough. It does not seem to have affected the heat or taste at all, they are not especially sweet I don't think, but maybe a little less testy than a green pepper might be? It is my experience that different plants in different soils under different growing conditions produce different peppers in terms of their heat, so there you go.

Here is the soup - beautifully green despite the little red pepper I used.It is amazingly rich and delicious and maybe I am crazy but it has this salty lively taste that makes it an almost meaty experience in your mouth.  This little soup is a powerhouse of flavor that is ready in under 15 minutes, glove time included.Even if you don't have tomatillos, jalapeño and onion in your back garden, or cucamelons lurking in your vegetable bin, this deliciously fresh recipe is well worth a run. In terms of summery goodness, this soup hits an awful lot of high notes. Try it and see- soon you'll be singing it's praises on your own.

The Long View/Grow Your Own

Update: This Grow Your Own entry to follow made it late into the roundup due to a technical glitch, so graciously guest hosted by Jai and Bee of Jugalbandi. Special thanks to them for being so conscientious to add in those entries that somehow got lost originally.

You really won't want to miss the amazing lineup of sweet and savory delights folks have come up with, even in the heat of July. I will admit to a bit of "tomato envy", our plants here in Central Texas are not setting much fruit this year. In a few minutes I head off to the Farmer's Market to see if more experienced growers are having better luck. Meanwhile, enjoy the Grow Your Own RoundUp!

I really enjoy the internet.  I can barely remember how it was to try to shop and prepare food without the opportunity to sit down at a computer, enter the name of an ingredient or style of dish, and have the resources of all sorts of amazing amateur and professional chefs popping up on my monitor in a neatly arranged list, just to help me get the best out of my dinner plans.

That said, occasionally I run across an ingredient that seems to have shunned even it's internet 15 seconds of fame.  

When I began to look for recipes for the Chinese Long Beans I got in this week's CSA basket for instance, I was able to find several resources telling me about the beans, but not so many simple recipes that didn't call for ingredients I didn't already have on hand or more time than I had to spend.

If I were a more knowledgeable cook, or had a better stocked pantry, I'd probably have had more luck locating a recipe I could easily duplicate. But if those conditions applied, I probably would not have been sitting in front of my computer last night searching for simple recipes to prepare Chinese Long Beans in the first place. 

So there I was, looking for some reasonable way to prepare the beans, but wanting a full on recipe, not simply comments along the lines of "these beans are often best stir-fried".  Then I found it.  Jaden's Steamy Kitchen.  Or rather, I found the recipe on her web site for Stir Fried Chinese Long Beans.

It was everything I needed.  A simple preparation style, short ingredient list, and the finished dish would be ready in barely 15 minutes including time to prep the beans.  

Going in, I knew I had to make two major accommodations.  First, I don't currently have a wok.

 

I know, I know, stifle your squawks and protestations.  If I was any kind of  a "real" cook, blah blah blah.  We currently have a ceramic cook top/grill combination for a stove top, all electric, no gas.  I tried a wok with a ring over the ceramic cooktop and it didn't work so I got rid of it years ago.  I've been knocking out meals wokless from this kitchen for over two decades now and nobody has starved to death yet.  

Second, this recipe calls for three tablespoons of fish sauce.

Folks, I just bought my first ever bottle of fish sauce a couple of weeks ago.  I tend towards the "Gack!" end of the "Loving/Hating It" scale when it comes to pronounced fish flavors.   I am one of "those people" who order their Caesar salad anchovyless.  The closest I've gotten to sardines as an adult is to occasionally buy and then open a can of them for my husband to eat, in the other room, smashed on crackers (the sardines, not my husband).  

But I am stretching myself with this whole CSA basket experiment to begin with, so boldly going into fishy territory where I have never been before is just part of the (cough!) fun.  So. OK.  This recipe calls for three tablespoons of fish sauce.  I figured I would use one tablespoon of fish sauce and substitute in low sodium tamari for the other two tablespoons. I don't have a wok but I do have an electric skillet that heats up really quickly, has a good lid, and will allow me to just as quickly reduce the heat to finish the recipe.  

Then I had a brain flash. If I included one of our home grown jalapeño peppers in the dish, I could expand the deserved exposure of this particular recipe and some of these amazing websites generally as part of a Grow Your Own submission. A great side dish, a GYO post, a chance to tout some of the amazing food blogs out there. A blogger's hat trick if ever there was one. Onward.

Here is the recipe as written:

[Recipe Correction: Please note in the recipe to follow, the correct amount of fish sauce is 3 teaspoons, not 3 tablespoons as pointed out by Jaden Hair of the Steamy Kitchen herself in the comments below. As the originally reported recipe was central to parts of the post, I left the quantities unchanged in the recipe copy per se. /Deb] 

Stir-Fried Chinese Long Beans
1 lb Chinese Long Beans, washed and trimmed to 3″ lengths
2 tsp Garlic, minced
1/4 c Water
3 Tb Fish Sauce (Three Crabs Brand)
1 tsp Sugar

Heat up your wok, add oil. When barely smoking, add minced garlic. Fry just for a few seconds until fragrant, but not brown. You want to make sure that you don’t wait too long before adding the garlic to the oil, otherwise the oil will be too hot and the garlic will burn.

Add your long beans, fry in wok for 30 seconds, incorporating the garlic throughout the beans.

Add water, fish sauce and sugar. Cover the wok. Let the beans steam for 5 minutes on medium heat. Check to see if beans are almost tender, but not too soft. If not, re-cover and steam an additional 1 minute. Uncover, let the rest of the liquid evaporate, about an additional minute. Serve.

And here is how it looked when I tried this MyWay.  I served the beans as one of two sides with grilled jalapeño nilgai sausage.  Since I had the spicy sausage, I threw the seeded, minced, red ripened jalapeño from our garden into the beans along with the fish sauce/water/sugar combo to echo.  The little red jalapeño was not especially hot and it pretty much just melted into the bean sauce, as I'd hoped.  

Since I had two pepper spiced dishes in the meal, I countered that a bit with a first run at an eggplant casserole recipe from that little church cookbook I picked up a few weeks ago.  The casserole was rich and creamy, just the thing to counter the garlicky beans and the spicy sausage.  

The beans were delicious but I think even the low sodium soy concentrated in the cooked down sauce was just a bit too much saltiness in combination with the garlic.  Although the tablespoon of fish sauce was extremely aromatically fishy going in, the final flavor of the dish was richly layered and complex.  There was not really any one note or element you'd put your finger on as "fishy", the garlic pretty much took care of that.  I may have been a bit overgenerous with the garlic in retrospect. I am a lifelong garlic lover and as careful as I might have been with adding in fish sauce, that is just about how lackadaisical I was with measuring the amounts of garlic I used in this recipe.  

Next time?  On the next go round with long beans I will try two tablespoons of the fish sauce and leave the soy out altogether.  I will watch the garlic and stick (closer) to the amount called for and see where that finds us.  I'll definitely keep the jalapeño in, and if they are out of season I'll sub in pepper flakes.  

If I decide to grow long beans in our garden next year, I will hopefully have all the time and beans I will need to range further afield into the more complex recipes I unearthed in last night's search. While reading about the beans (and not finding recipes), I discovered they are prolific producers, very tolerant of hot temperatures.  That makes them just about a perfect candidate for Texas summers in small gardens.  Could be next July I'll be doing a Grow Your Own post with my own beans and jalapeño.  

Finally - a few words about some of the amazingly professional and ambitious blogs out there.  

I confess - from time to time I suffer big time blogger's envy.  Ms. Hair is not only an amazing cook, but she is writing her own cookbook, does all her own food photography and staging for both the book and the blog, has several newspaper columns on food, and appears regularly doing live cooking demonstrations on morning TV.  She has a service on her blog where she will even help you learn how to and then create and send your own cards.  Physically apparent three dimensional ones, not the electronic sort.  I didn't quite get all the way in to every aspect of her site but would not be surprised on going back to discover a section detailing "How I Spin Straw Into Gold".

Ms. Jaden is an extremely talented and prolific person.  Having my very small scale blog appearing on the same internet as Jaden's Steamy Kitchen, Andrea's Recipes, Jugalbandi and so many other incredible blogs on food and cooking is, well, a bit chastening.

It all calls into mind a t-shirt I spotted recently.  

So why do I seem to care? Because it's fun, that's why. And it's great to be in such good company, actually. I don't confuse what I am doing with the likes of Jaden or Andrea or the folks at Serious Eats or Mark Bittman of the Times. I simply enjoy the gardening, the CSA baskets, the cooking, the eating, and then sharing all that with you. And that is enough for me.

A tisket, A tasket

a full on summer basket....Well, OK, we do NOT have any tomatoes in this week's CSA basket which perhaps disqualifies it for a "typical" full on summer basket according to usual Central Texas standards.

At the same time, nobody I know of around here is having much luck growing tomatoes this year. I can barely field enough to make a garnish for two plates at the moment and I have three large plants in the back. Under ordinary circumstances, three tomato plants would be more than enough to overload two full grown tomato loving adults and would find me bringing the extras to church on Sundays looking for unlocked cars in the parking lot. Not this year.

We are in week 15 of the 18 week CSA season for Tecolote Farms, we are hitting triple digit temperatures, and tomatoes or not, it is most definitely summertime. As I unloaded the harvest today, I found myself wishing I had some way to transform this space into "scratch and sniff" mode for you. Between the basil and the melons, my nose was working overtime. Just tantalizing aromas, spicy and floral and full of promise for delightful meals to come.

On to our roll call for today's harvest along with reporting on my plans to use the various components. Don't tell anybody, but when I go back to read what I'd planned on doing week to week it is chastening. My plans are almost always much more ambitious than I turn out to be when the reality of the end of most days strikes. Onward. Basket 15!
Eggplants. A gorgeous array of Purple Italian heirloom and white American hybrids. We are about eggplanted out around here so I am happy to hear from others that I can peel, cube, sauté and freeze these beauties for a delicious taste of summer weeks and months from now when I am not getting baskets any longer.Not one but two melons. A Cantaloupe and a Crenshaw. The Canary melon from last week is so sweet it is currently knocking our socks off. That will be a tough act to follow, honestly.Butternut squash. Thankfully, butternuts keep for a long while. I have a great recipe for soup with sausage that I'd intended to try with last week's squash, but the scalding evening temperatures have pretty much taken away our appetite for hot rich soups at the moment. I will find a nice cool dark place to store these beauties until we get past the worst of summer's heat.Cucamelons. The beetles are doing a bit of a number on the skins of these melons at the moment but the insides are pristeen. I am finding the abundance of this delicious cucumber precursor nearly compensates for the loss of tomatoes this summer. I've been feasting on gazpacho and cucumber salad nonstop for three weeks now and loving it.Chinese long beans. Reportedly these are best stir-fried or sauteéd rather than steamed or boiled. We had the previous batch in a noodle dish. I haven't quite decided what to do with the current bunch. I have loose plans to make more of the ginger fried rice that has become a new family favorite, and am currently thinking to do something stir fried with the beans and some peppers to go with that. I could follow up another night using them chilled in a salad. I'll be back with more on how that turns out as the week unfolds.Hungarian medium-hot peppers. We are told these are sweet in your mouth then hot going down. I'm not sure exactly what that means but sure will have fun finding out. I am thinking of these in combination with the Chinese long beans in a stir fry at the moment.Red Bell peppers. Next batch of gazpacho will probably feature these. If I have any left over I will slice and freeze the strips for future pizzas seeing as I am the only one who likes bell pepper pieces on my pies. I always try to have some on hand in the freezer to sprinkle on my share of the slices when we make pizza at home.Sweet Yellow Granex onions. Although I am only showing one here we got two in our basket today.

Similar to the legitimate criticism I might have taken over battering and deep frying organic okra - taking something healthy and rendering it somewhat less so - I am currently considering venturing into similar territory to satisfy something of a craving for home made onion rings. My major problem with rings is that if I am not careful I tend to burn my tongue early on by trying to eat one of the first few before they've sufficiently cooled.

I can easily make a meal out of onion rings. I am mind's eyeing the left over batter that my relleños recipe inevitably yields and thinking rings might be a great component to a vegetarian dinner as we try to eat less meat this year. Mmmmm. Chiles stuffed with cheese accompanied by fried onion rings. Wow. I think I just gained a pound typing that...

Last but not least, another batch of lovely basil. A friend of mine at lunch recently was commenting in disbelief about his experience in a local restaurant where he had ordered a favorite summer basil shrimp with mushrooms and jalapeños and was told by his waiter this place was out of basil.Out of basil? In Texas in July? Hard to fathom when the plants are still going great guns. Every market I've set foot in lately has had lots of fresh bunches for sale. Maybe that was a reflection of everybody having tasties for basil this time of year. Basil shrimp, basil salads, pesto, no matter how you like your basil, if you like it at all, you are generally in luck in Central Texas this time of year. When the weather heats up, I personally really enjoy the ways basil provides a cool note to a dish. To me it is similar to mint but deliciously more complex. I can't believe I was nearly 35 before I ever tasted any fresh. I am making up for that late introduction now, I assure you.Friends, it is hot today. Not "oh sure- it is summer" but legitimately, everything alive is wilting too toasty to get outside in it HOT. Even for here for July. Triple digits already and most certainly not the hottest part of the day yet. One of ways I cope with such heat is by eating less (for me- everything is relative) and by taking naps during the hot afternoons so I can stay up later and get up earlier and take advantage of the cooler parts of the day.So off I stumble to nap my way past the triple digits for today and hope for a thunderstorm or something to break the heat for a bit. Dinner tonight will be the ginger fried rice, which cooks over medium heat all in one skillet without having to toast up the entire kitchen. It could be the beans and peppers will have to wait for another meal - perhaps with a bit of added protein to make a full on entreé. If I pull that off in any way I'd want to duplicate - I'll share it here, so please check back.

Meanwhile, take care to pace yourselves through these hottest summer days, and raise a (cool) toast later to summer's bounty with me.