Kitchen Garden 2009

I definitely always have eyes bigger than my stomach for gardening. I knew absolutely nothing about gardening when we bought our house 5 summers ago, but I had visions of growing my own herbs and produce. I can't bear to actually sit down and read a book about soil quality and fertilizers and other dry technical matters, so my approach has been of the trial-and-error, lazy organic variety. Fortunately, though pretty it ain't, I've managed to have lots of success with my experiments, despite the fact that by early August I tend to just pretend I don't see the weeds and the gone-to-flower vegetables.

My designated patches are pretty small, are limited in where I can get full sun, and prone to attracting weeds, but though I seem unable to resist overplanting, I get by. I've tried to limit myself to herbs and tomatoes only, but I have allowed myself a few cucumber plants (I like to have a cuke around for a quick cucumber salad), red leaf lettuce, some hot peppers, a couple of broccoli plants (one of the only vegetables Young Master Gateau will eat), and some radishes because they are so easy and fast to grow, and thus good near-instant gratification for kids. There also appear to be a few carrots and beets from last year.

The herbs this year include my monster tarragon plants, oregano, chives, mint, cilantro, basil, dill, parsley, rosemary, and lavender. Nothing particularly exotic, but all get steady play through the season. I have some nasturtiums for decorating salads, and Y.M.G., on a Roman Empire kick, has asked for a bay plant so he can make laurel wreaths.

As for tomatoes, I'm going for a rainbow of smaller heirloom varieties -- Arkansas travelers (red), Sungold and Yellow Pear, Green Zebra, and Black Cherry (a strange purple-green). These plants tend to grow out of control and produce more than I can eat, so I'm going to try to jump on the pickling/canning bandwagon and see whether I can come up with some good preserves, chutneys, etc. At worse, I can turn them into some weird colored but tasty sauce and freeze it.

Tomight we should have the first lettuce and radish salad!

Urgent Cocktail Update

Just came across this delicious-sounding cocktail recipe, the Tropicaliana (via the Al Dente blog Twitter feed, how's that for your intertextual web experience?). It combines rum, lime, ginger liqueur, and simple syrup, topped with rose Champagne or sparkling wine. Must. Have.

Bittman strikes again

I have been following @bittman on Twitter, who is none other than our beloved Minimalist. Yesterday he posted a link to his Bitten blog, which had a recipe for Roast Chicken with Cumin, Honey and Orange. I immediately began craving this dish, so I went to the supermarket on my way home from work and got a chicken. One nice thing about this dish is that you're likely to have all the ingredients but the chicken already in the house. Anyway, it was beyond easy to make -- I love dishes like this that require you to dirty only one small dish other than the roasting pan (see also Donna Hay's cookbooks). You can't really get away from the kitchen while it's cooking, because it has to be basted every 10 minutes, but I found that was a value-added aspect, because it made me sit at the dining table with a magazine and a glass of wine for an hour.

The chicken came out glossy and crisp, with delicious juicy meat. We had it with some string beans dressed with olive oil, salt, and garlic. Just perfect.

Unsmiley Pops

Ms. Cake and I set forth to start what we hoped would be a new monthly tradition of getting together to do some crafts and/or baking. We thought it would be fun and easy to make these adorable smiley face cake lollipops.

So we headed to the supermarket for cake mix and icing, and had a long detour at the craft store, where we went into a fugue state and bought enough stuff for about 15 other craft projects. This turned out to be the smartest move of the day.

The instructions required us to mash a cake together with a can of frosting:

And then to roll the mixture into balls, which are then impaled on sticks:


After this it should be simple enough, you simply dip the balls in yellow candy melt, wait to dry, and then decorate with those cunning edible magic marker pens.

Well, it was an unmitigated disaster. The icing clumped, the balls were flat on one side, if we were lucky, and a large number disintegrated in the icing bowl. Even the children refused to eat them.

At one point we dissolved on the floor as several of our master creations slowly slid down the sticks on which they had been suspended.


The edible marker pens were impossible to work with. Eventually we ended up with this, and threw the rest away:

The (unsmiling) end.

Save it for a Rainy Day

It's a rainy Sunday at the end of a week of school vacation, so Young Master Gateau was hounding me to bake something with him and his friend, the Girl Next Door. I dug out a fancy cake mold in the shape of nine train cars that we'd bought for his 5th birthday party, and baked up half a batch of a Bundt cake mix from Williams-Sonoma that came with it. Then YMG and the GND went to town with the odd bits of candy lying around the house and a supplemental bag of Skittles picked up at the grocery story. The result was impressively artistic, if a little too sweet, and super sticky.

One Billion Chinese Can't Be Wrong

I finally had enough time on my hands today to take on one of my never-used cookbooks, from the Shun Lee restaurant in NYC. I was really intimidated by this, and by Chinese cooking in general, but I psyched myself up and went for it. Most of the ingredients were easy enough to find, and when I couldn't find certain items, I substituted as best I could. They recommend balsamic vinegar for black Chinese vinegar, for example, and that worked. In one case, I couldn't find Schezewan pickled vegetable, but from the description (basically pickled mustard greens) I figured I could get by with pickled ginger, which I had for another recipe. In another case I couldn't find dried Chinese black mushrooms, so I used dried porcini and they were fine. I'm not sure I have the right spicy bean paste, but that also worked with what I had. There was lots of prep work to have all the ingredients ready before cooking started, but nothing particularly complicated. Even dumpling making turned out to be easy to master.

So the menu was:

Fried pork dumplings (so much easier than I had imagined, and the recipe made 30, so I froze 20 of them for later use). The store didn't have round gyoza wrappers, so I used a cookie cutter to cut rounds of square wonton wrappers. Served with a dipping sauce of soy, balsamic vinegar, and sesame oil.



Cold Tofu Salad. Soft cubed tofu dressed with sesame oil/soy/sherry/vinegar/sugar/spicy chili bean paste and sprinkled with cashews, minced scallion and the pickled ginger in lieu of the Schezewan vegetable.



Duck Breast with Pickled Ginger. Stir fried with sliced garlic, water chestnuts, scallions, and the ginger. The meat was beyond tender, and the sauce tangy and delicious.


I will definitely do this again. There is a braised tofu and a braised pork belly I really want to try. And now we have leftovers to reheat tomorrow. No cute little cardboard take-out boxes, though.

Near-Instant Gratification

UPDATE:

I had to try this, so I pulled out a mug and started dumping in ingredients, including the "optional" chocolate chips, mixing it all with a table knife. Because I am Klassy. Here is what the batter looked like.


I put it in the microwave with some trepidation, expecting it to explode everywhere, especially since the batter rose so high in the cup. I laid paper towel underneath, so as to make the inevitable clean-up easier. But surprise! It rose beautifully and nary a drop spilled. Here it is right out of the microwave.


It was a little sticky to unmold from the bottom of the cup, but everything above the bottom couple of inches looked lovely and cylindrical. Young Master Gateau is eating half of it with ice cream, and I will eat the rest later. It may not be the most tender cake in the world, but it's cake. And it really did take all of 5 minutes and a mug.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I received the below in an email today from a colleague at work. We were both lamenting how busy and crazy the last few weeks have been, and noting that chocolate is basically an essential if we are to muddle through. She had gotten this from a friend, and though I have no idea where it comes from or whether it actually would work, I'm intrigued. I think I will try it this weekend, and if successful, will make a dry mix and keep that and the other ingredients handy in the office for Those Days. You know the kind of days I mean. I can't get the pictures to display properly, but basically it looks like a moist and delicious mini molten chocolate cake, about the size of a cansworth of Play-Doh.

A RECIPE EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW

The most dangerous cake recipe
5 MINUTE CHOCOLATE MUG CAKE

4 tablespoons flour
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil
3 tablespoons chocolate chips (optional)
a small splash of vanilla extract
1 large coffee mug

Add dry ingredients to mug, and mix well. Add the egg and mix thoroughly.
Pour in the milk and oil and mix well. Add the chocolate chips (if using) and vanilla extract, and mix again.
Put your mug in the microwave and cook for 3 minutes at 1000 watts (high).
The cake will rise over the top of the mug, but don't be alarmed!

Allow to cool a little, and tip out onto a plate if desired.
EAT! (this can serve 2 if you want to feel slightly more virtuous).

And why is this the most dangerous cake recipe in the world?

Because now we are all only 5 minutes away from chocolate cake at any time of the day or night!
You are going to print this out straight away, aren't you