Hot Days of July

I had a lovely dinner last night with a few good friends. Most of what I served came from my garden, and I can not tell you how satisfied this makes me.

I made a beautiful salad of mixed greens (red and green lettuces, mizuna, cress, arugala, purple basil), nasturtiums, lemon cucumbers, Sun Gold and San Marzano tomatoes, and baby red salad onions.

For the main course, I hand rolled egg noodle fettucini and made a fresh batch of basil pesto, then sauteed a couple of summer squash. I have been harvesting a bag of basil leaves twice a week and making batches of pesto for the freezer (and to eat, and to give away, and to sell on DibSpace).

For dessert, I pulled out a recipe I have used many times from one of Martin Yan's Chinese cookbooks. It is a recipe for egg custard tarts. They are easy to make, and don't require any special ingredients. They are simply little rounds of pastry crust (which I make in the cuisinart in under a minute), pressed into muffin tins and filled with a mixture of:

2/3 cup sugar melted into 2/3 cup warm water,
4 beaten eggs,
a teaspoon of vanilla,
and 1/3 cup of half & half
(his recipe uses canned evaporated milk)

They are baked at 300 degrees for about 35 minutes. We ate them with blueberries and strawberries.

Well, today is another scorcher (predicting 96 degrees), and since it is my birthday today, I am allowing myself to have a lazy day. I am still in bed, laying between two fans on high speed, watching PBS's "Frontier House" documentary, eating my zucchini bread, and reading, "Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way." Eventually I will get moving and do something... maybe go for a swim at the local pool, or stick my feet in the cooler that I set up downstairs with ice water in it.

I hope that if you are reading this from the hot weather of the Pacific Northwest, you stay cool!

crazy zucchini bread days

Oh.My.Gosh. It is hot. Am I totally crazy to be still thinking about baking things? Possibly. However, I have lots of excuses for this craziness. They include:



1) When the zucchini is ready, it is ready. If you let those tender little guys sit on the vine for an extra day or two, they become the size of your thigh.



2) I am half way to a stocked freezer of sweet baked summer breads, which I will be eating all winter.



3) I really, really, like my newly adapted zucchini bread recipe.



If you come over on a chilly fall or winter day this year, to visit me and the baby, I will invite you to sit in front of the fireplace with a cup of tea and a slice of this bread, and we will coo over the baby together... or I could let the baby sleep and we can adult-speak together too.



I found this recipe on the Simply Recipes blog, and it seems that she adapted it from a 1974 Sunset Magazine recipe. I have tweaked it again.



Sweet Caribbean Zucchini Bread



3 eggs
1 cup oil
2 cups white sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 heaping cups of grated zucchini
1 cup crushed pineapple
1.5 cups white flour
1.5 cups whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup grated sweetened coconut
1/2 cup raisins
2 tablespoons of rum or whiskey


Soak the raisins in the rum or whiskey.


Beat the eggs, oil, sugar and vanilla. Stir the zucchini (after I grate it, I let it sit in a colander to drain off the extra water) and pineapple into the batter. Combine the dry ingredients. Using one cup of the dry ingredients at a time, mix into the wet ingredients. Fold in the coconut. Stir in your drunk raisins.


Line your bread pans with parchment paper, before pouring in the batter. Bake at 350 degrees for about 60 to 75 minutes. Glass bread pans take longer than dark metal.


If you would like to freeze yours for winter too, allow to cool completely. Pull out of bread pan, leaving on the parchment paper if you wish. Wrap tightly in two layers of plastic wrap. Freeze. When you are ready to eat it (ideally before 7 or 8 months), allow to defrost overnight on the counter. Warm in the oven before slicing if you'd like.

Sea Urchin continued

Wow! Kudos to my mom for finding a photo of me actually eating the sea urchin. 1990.

By the way... I am thinking of changing the name of this blog to be easier to remember and to spell. What do you think of

Food.Soil.Thread

Since my favorite things to do and write about are eating, gardening and quilting... any thoughts?

Sea Urchin

My brother is relaxing on a Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea this week. He is two weeks into a two month trek through Europe with his sweetheart.



I visited the island of Korcula when I was seven years old, with my mother and grandmother. Even at that age, most of my travel memories are of food. One of my clearest memories was a day spend in a small boat off of the coast of Korcula. Our friends, Jelena and Damir, had brought a loaf of rustic bread, juicy red tomatoes, and slices of onions that were super sweet, with no hint of pungency. Damir dove off the side of the boat and swam down to the sandy bottom to pluck female sea urchins from the sea floor. He would pass them to us on the boat to be sliced open. With a chunk of bread, we would scoop out the salty eggs from the hallow of the urchin's inside, topping it with a slice of tomato and onion. I loved it. The sweet, salty, fresh, live taste of the sea and the yeasty bread and the juicy vegetables.



To this day, I have never again eaten Sea Urchin. Once something has been eaten so fresh, dripping wet from the sea, I fear that to order it in a restaurant would only disappoint. Instead, I preserve the taste in my mind.



I trust my brother is collecting his own delicious memories at this very moment.

Rhubarb Bread

Its been a great week so far. All of the rain in the forecast never did come, the clouds parted, and we are back to sunny weather. I spent a nice morning with other food bloggers (courtesy of Frantic Foodie's Keren Brown) listening to Renee Behnke talk about her food history: running Sur La Table, traveling the world to cook and eat, gardening, and writing a cook book. Her newly published book, Memorable Recipes, is beautiful. One of the food bloggers noted that the book looked in the style of Ina Garten. It is fresh, vibrant, with lovely photos, and recipes that are interesting without seeming unusual.

On the way home, I had a walk at Greenlake and met up with a woman who gladly bought a bag of extra produce from my garden. I made up a bag of today's harvest (fennel bulbs, snap peas, carrots, Italian kale, zucchini, patty pan squash, and basil), a loaf of rhubarb bread that I baked last night, and a jar of this dressing. I posted an offer on DibSpace and within hours I had half a dozen people asking to buy the bag.

The recipe for the rhubarb bread came from the B&B that I stayed in last weekend on Whidbey Island. My husband and I like taking the ferry over to Whidbey once every summer, but we had never spent any time in Coupeville before. Our B&B sits two blocks above the little wharf and Main Street of old town Coupeville, and we were pleasantly surprised by this little town. Next time we are on the island, we will be back to Coupeville for another night. We ate dinner at Christopher's, one block away, and appreciated the relaxed pace of a restaurant that allowed us to enjoy a three hour meal.

The B&B served the rhubarb bread for breakfast with fresh fruit and boiled eggs. They were kind enough to share their recipe with me. I have already put a few loaves in my freezer for winter, and plan on baking another round this evening. My mom and I "adopted" a rhubarb plant growing amongst weeds, behind the community garden near her house, so I was very pleased to find a great use for all the rhubarb I picked. I hope you enjoy as well.

Rhubarb Bread

from the Lovejoy Inn in Coupeville, Washington

Mix together in a bowl:

1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar

2/3 cup vegetable oil

1 egg

Combine in a measuring cup:

1 cup buttermilk

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Measure:

2 1/2 cups flour

Dice:

2 cups fresh rhubarb stem

Optional:

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Add the milk mixture to the sugar mixture, alternating with the flour, beating well after each addition. Fold in the rhubarb, and the nuts if using. Turn into well greased and parchment lined loaf pans. Bake for about one hour and 10 minutes, at 350 degrees, or until a knife comes out clean.

Hint: if you leave some parchment paper hanging over the edge of the loaf pan, it will be easy to lift out after baking.

I should get back to my quilting project (make that plural). Here is a photo of yesterday's progress on the Tumbling Blocks pattern. Do you see the cubes?