bee creative

does this mean I should turn the heat up?

eating local: tomato leather and a few other experiments

It's a tomato pancake!  No, not really.  It's tomato sauce dried to a "fruit leather."  It can be added to a soup and will dissolve or it can be made into sauce by reconstituting it with water.  I haven't tried it yet, but I'm very excited to see what happens.  When I shared with my grandmother what I was doing, she told me that one of her aunts used to make tomato sauce and then dry it in the sun this way.  If it tastes good it will be much more efficient than canning tomatoes.

I'm also experimenting with sauerkraut for the first time.  It's fermenting away right now.   

And then there is the liquor experiment:  One jar contains pears, the other pomegranate.  And vodka for both.  More info on doing this at Chile Chews .   I've done raspberries this way and had very good success.  Very curious to see how this turns out.   

another cycle begins...

My favorite photo that I took this past weekend.  Sunday was incredibly stormy.  With such dark skies, the last of the fall leaves just glowed. 

It's change in progress.

It's new every time, and yet part of a cycle. 

eating local: Pane Dolce di Zucca (Pumpkin Bread)

This past weekend I decided to try something new.  I cooked my own pumpkin for puree. I really don't know why I haven't done this before. 

I made the puree for a pumpkin bread recipe from The Italian Country Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper.  She noted in the recipe that it is a bread that is commonly made in areas of Italy for All Souls' Day.  Seemed like an appropriate time to try this recipe out. 

The recipe called for the pumpkin to roast in the oven.  When I took it out the edges of the pumpkin had become crisp and a little caramelized.  I decided to trim the edges off before I went on to the next step in the recipe (which I did follow-mostly).  It was so incredibly good.  I will most definitely roast pumpkin again. 

The bread turned out very well and I will make it at least once a year I'm sure.  I used raisins that I made myself from the grapes from the garden.  So good!  Other local ingredients:  the pumpkin, honey, milk and flour (milled in my community, wheat from the Pacific Northwest).  The lemons, well, they were from California. 

One recent thought I've had about cookbooks.  Vegetarian and ethnic cookbooks tend to be very helpful when it comes to eating in season.  I've also discovered that my library has an incredible collection of cookbooks.  I'm going to be exploring that section more.   

P.S.  Mom, I left that last pumpkin in the back seat.  I want it, but if I were you I"d roast it and eat it.... 

Inspire Me Thursday-Dia de los Muertos

Dia de los Muertos is a holiday that has always fascinated me.  I was happy that it was the prompt for this week for Inspire Me Thursday, but it's taken me a long time to decide just what I wanted to do.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about people I love this weekend, about how I am surrounded by the history of my family.  Very few of the things that fill the spaces of my home are new, but rather things that have belonged to my family.  About how much I cherish having these connections.   

This week my grandmother sent me some of the lace my great grandmother made.  My mother says she remembers Grandma crocheting lengths and lengths of lace trim.  I've incorporated some of it into the collage I made.  I've also used photos of flowers that I've taken.  Flowers from my garden.  And of course, the skeleton-from my stash of trash.    

eating from the pantry and cooking by the seat of my pants

I love to cook, to read cookbooks, and to not follow recipes.  Cooking is a creative act for me and a meal is often the result of "Hmm...what have I got and what can I do with it?"

I think that eating with local and seasonal ingredients sometimes calls for some risk taking, seat of the pants combinations.   

This started with some tomato sauce.  The container that I had froze the sauce in had fallen out of the freezer and an edge on the corner (one of my few remaining plastic containers) chipped.  I popped the sauce out, put it in a bowl and let it defrost in the fridge.  That was on Thursday. 

Today's shopping included a trip to the farmer's market and to the local fish store.  I ended up with some sole, some Oregon shrimp, cauliflower, and the tomato sauce.  I decided it could work together somehow, and it did.   

Here's a very flexible recipe in case anyone is interested in trying this.

Ingredients for one person:  1/2 cup bay shrimp, 2 small fillets of sole, 1 cup cooked spaghetti, 1/2 cup roasted cauliflower (cauliflower was roasted in a 375 degree oven and was coated with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper), a pinch of herbs, 1 cup tomato sauce,  a little less than a tablespoon of butter and enough pepper, salt, and flour to coat the fish.

Here's what I did:
1.  First I started the spaghetti and put the cauliflower in the oven. 
2.  Next I coated the fish with flour, salt, a pinch of herbs (mine's a mixed blend of Italian) and cooked it in the butter.  I baked mine in the oven 'cause it was on for the cauliflower.  If you want to try this, melt the butter in the pan and then add the fish to the pan.  My fish cooked in about 5 minutes. 
3.  When the spaghetti was done, I drained it and returned it to the cooking pot.  I added the sauce and another small pinch of herbs.
4.  I then added the shrimp and heated the mixture until everything was hot and the sauce had cooked down a bit.
5.   The cauliflower (hot from the oven) was stirred in just before I decided the sauce was where I wanted it.
6.   Then I placed the pasta mixture in a low shallow bowl.  I put the sole on top and broke it up just a little bit.  And finally, a little sprinkle of parsley from the garden (that I ran out to get in the dark and the rain, 'cause it just needed something more when I put everything else in the dish).

I'll do this again.  At least, some version of it....