Alkahest

and that’s the last of the summer veggies:  pickled green (and unripe red) tomatoes (mostly cherry), bannana peppers, a couple of small eggplant (can you pickle eggplant?) and an okra that I hadn’t noticed.  I’ll crack one of these open in a month or so and see how they taste.  FWIW, the pickled bannana [...]

I went out to the garden on Sunday and took a look at how the okra was doing.  Now I’m feeling somewhat, um, inadequate…

as a gardener.
Really, who lets okra get that big.  I should have been picking them every two or three days so that the maximum size was only 3-5 inches, not 8-12.
In other [...]

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers;
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?
When I planted the garden, I put in a couple of banana pepper plants.  I seem to recall that my thinking [...]

I’ve mentioned before that this is the first year that we’ve had a garden, and it’s been going great.  In the early spring we had lots of spinach, arugula, turnips, lettuce, etc.  Now that we’re in the summer, it’s time for a whole new type of produce.  Last night, I went out to the garden [...]

For the first time in about 10 years I planted a garden.  We are always drawn to shaded lots, so we’ve never had a place for one before.  Even here we’ve got five acres… and they are all wooded.  Normally?  Great.  For a garden, it’s kinda the suck.  This year, I decided to plant a [...]

K and I don’t eat much meat – no red meat, no poultry, etc.  Theoretically, we still eat fish, but since I won’t cook it…
This weekend, we experimented with a couple of new recipes that, in hindsight, were even vegan:

VegetarianVegan Mac and Cheese.  Like a lot of people (I suppose), I love macaroni and cheese.  [...]

Cooking with the world’s most dangerous* additive; or
How I stopped worrying and learned to love MSG.
A few weeks ago, I heard Robert Krulwich on NPR talking about umami – the fifth taste. If you didn’t hear it, go to the link above. As always, Krulwich makes the story very engaging. He describes [...]

One of my favorite things is really good bread. Back when I was in school, I bought a book on making bread. It started from a home made sourdough starter that had no commercial yeast. It was basically water and flour with a few grapes tied in a bag to give it [...]

I hope everyone had a good 4th of July and if you had the day off, you enjoyed it.
I spent my day doing a little of this and a little of that. I picked up a low water use irrigation system that I’ve run to the flowers and the blueberry bushes. I’ll need [...]

I made a few things I’ve never made before for dinner last night, including lemon pizza and two kinds of ice cream.
The lemon pizza recipe is from the Wednesday Chef and was mentioned by someone on an IRC channel (etselec? I can’t remember – sorry).  K and I don’t eat salmon roe, so I substituted [...]