Dill pickle chips

I have no picture to accompany this post, but you all know what sliced cucumbers, and pickles, look like, anyway, right?

I've been using my mandoline in the kitchen lately (story of why to follow, assuming I ever catch up on all the posts I haven't written this summer), so I sliced the 3 lbs. or so of pickling cukes I got at the Waltham Farmer's Market nice and thin.

I threw in 2 or 3 crushed garlic cloves as well as a bunch of dill flowers from my wildly overgrown patch of dill (I planted six plants this spring, so when they went to seed, they went with a vengeance!)

Here is the recipe I used for the brine, from one of my new favorite blogs. I made about 1.25 quarts of brine, which was a lot, but I've had trouble in the past with lacto-fermentation and liquid evaporation. It's much better to have too much brine than too little.

If the temperature hadn't been quite so extreme, I think I'd have left them out for another day or two to ferment before packing them into jars and fridgeing them. It was awfully hot, though, so I went with 48 hours.

(Thanks, Susan, for the nudge I needed to get this up here!)

Vegetarian baked beans, ketchup-free

I've noticed that this post gets my blog more hits than practically anything else. I guess there's quite the demand for vegetarian baked beans! Honestly, it's not that hard to make them, either. A little time consuming, but not difficult.

But I've been tinkering with the recipe. It still stands as a good one (pretty loosey-goosey, but I think that's okay: it gives plenty of room for modification to individual tastes.) I've been making these about twice a month since April, so I'm updating with the latest incarnation.

As if it's not enough to make baked beans from scratch, though, I decided I wanted to make them without ketchup. Ever hear that old Carol Sagan quote? "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." So, um, yeah, I know that perhaps "from scratch" can be taken too far. Still.

I used canned tomato sauce (about 1.5 cups, I think), and some additional spices, instead. Perhaps a little extra molasses as well.

You know, the ketchup label doesn't give a whole lot of detail about what's in there (other than the HFCS, of course). "Spices." What does that mean? I checked a couple of cookbooks, notably Laurel's Kitchen and The Complete Book of Home Preserving, by Kingry and Devine, and added small amounts (no more than 1/4 tsp) each of ground celery seed, ground cloves, oregano, and about a pinch each of cinnamon and cumin. I wanted depth without making any of those noticeable, although I may have erred too far on the side of caution. Next time I may try just a touch more.

Chermoula

These pictures, as frequently happens, are out of order. For reasons I can't quite understand, blogger uploads the pictures backwards from how one selects them. Or else it's just messing with me.

Anyway, I frequently get a bunch of cilantro, and don't know quite what I'm going to do to use ALL of it. I often use a few sprigs to half the bunch, but the rest doesn't quite make it into, well, anything but the compost pile.

I vowed it would be different this time -- and I decided to make this Moroccan sauce, traditionally used on fish. I used it two ways: once to dress some thinly-sliced raw salad turnips. The other time I put over a couple of portobello mushrooms Jon grilled for me. Totally delicious.

(The first picture is, um, maybe not as clear as it could be. It's a grilled mushroom on a roll. Blurry, of course.)

Chermoula

about 1/2 cup chopped cilantro
about 1/4 cup chopped parsley
4 garlic scapes, minced
4 scallions, minced
salt to taste
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/3 cup olive oil
juice of 1 lemon

Fun with garlic scapes

I'm pretty much out of scapes (I have two more hoarded from last week to use in pesto later) but next year, I'm going to make this.

A perfect early summer meal

This isn't so much a post about recipes, as just a celebration of a dinner made from local food.

First, steamed beets, sliced and tossed with butter. My sister loves beets so much that she believes butter's purpose on earth is to be combined with beets. Usually I make pickled beets, which is my favorite way to eat them, but for the first beets of the season, I made them Julie's way. They were sensational.

Next, a beautiful salad, with two kinds of lettuce and arugula, radishes and salad turnips. Dressing loaded with garlic scapes, and a couple of tablespoons of chopped parsley and dill from my herb garden.

Finally, a classic in my kitchen: "Spinach Squares." Also known as crustless quiche, and the basis for those little mini-quiches I made a few weeks back. (These are also great brunch food.)

3 eggs
1 cup milk
1 cup (or more - up to 1/2 lb) grated sharp cheddar
1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
as much spinach as you can procure
onion/garlic/leeks/etc. (I'd use one small onion -- use that as your guide for amounts of other things)

Saute onion (I had some lovely spring leeks so I used those) in 2 tablespoons of olive oil till softened.

I had one good-sized bunch of spinach, but could easily have used two. Also I have successfully made this with frozen chopped spinach -- a one-lb. bag works perfectly.

Chop the spinach and add to the pot with the onion. Let it just wilt -- don't cook it too much. Allow it to cool.

preheat oven to 350.

In a 9x13 pan, melt a tablespoon of butter. Tilt the pan so the bottom and sides are coated.

Combine the dry ingredients in one bowl.

In another bowl, beat the eggs, then add the milk, the cheese, and the spinach mixture. Carefully mix in the dry ingredients, then spread into the prepared pan.

Bake for 35 minutes.

Strawberry roll cake

We picked strawberries, 6.5 lbs, which yielded enough for 4.5 pints of jam (still making the old-fashioned, long-simmered, no-added-pectin kind), plus the sauce for this strawberry roll cake, and some just for snacking. I still have plans to pick more in a few days. I want to be drowning in jam. Jon loves strawberry jam; I love making it. Good thing we're married.

Several factors contributed to the making of this cake:

1. I had a weird hankering to make a roll cake a couple of weeks ago, and told Arij maybe I'd make one for my birthday in a few months. (Planning ahead is so important, don't you think?)

2. The kids requested shortcake (complete with whipped cream), but I was pretty sure they were thinking "cake" and not "biscuit," so I thought I should make something cake-like for the base.

3. I consulted The Joy of Cooking for cake recipes; they suggested a sponge cake. My original intention (lacking little cake molds) was to cut it up into squares and layer them with a little strawberry syrup and top with whipped cream.

4. But then all three of these things coalesced and I thought, why not just roll that sheet of spongy-sweet goodness up with some strawberries?

The result was yummy.

The cake was moderately fussy. The recipe instructed me to beat 5 eggs with 3/4 a cup of sugar for 5 minutes (with a stand mixer) or 7-10 minutes (with a hand-held mixer). Well, since I don't actually BAKE cakes (or so goes the logic in my little brain), I don't own a stand mixer. Besides . . . where would I *keep* it?! But I was making this as I was stirring jam, sterilizing jars, supervising my kids, etc., so I couldn't very well stand there all that time. So I took breaks, and estimated, and tried to gauge whether it resembled "soft whipped cream." (Oh, I also worried if one could OVER mix it and ruin it irreparably.) So I finally just stopped beating it already and added the 3/4 cup of sifted cake flour, the teaspoon of baking powder, and the 3 T of melted butter combined with 1/4 cup of hot milk.

The baking was uneventful: I poured the batter into an 11x17 pan lined with the sil-pat (basically reusable parchment paper) and baked for 9 minutes. You have to invert it right away onto foil, wait for it to cool, and then peel off the parchment, flip it back over and peel the foil off. Then it's ready to go.

basil and garlic scape pesto, with an elaborate presentation

Do you ever fiddle around with food, preparing multiple parts of a dish, only to realize you've just spent an inordinate amount of time on something that doesn't really even count as a full meal?

Oh. Maybe it's just me, then.

Moving right along . . . We got a little bunch of basil, yielding maybe a loosely-packed cup, from our CSA this week. Not enough to really make pesto with. But we also got a generous clump of garlic scapes, and together, I thought they'd make a great pesto. I shelled a couple of walnuts and tossed them in the processor, followed by 3 or 4 coarsely chopped scapes and the basil, adding a little olive oil to loosen it up. I added a few pinches of salt and some parmegano reggiano, and scooped it into a jar. Lovely.

But what to eat it on? Pasta? Yawn. How about polenta? But I apparently am incapable of making it and leaving it alone. I made my oven-baked polenta, then stirred in about a cup of grated romano cheese. I scooped it into a loaf pan and let it solidify.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I had a few mushrooms that my mom had brought me, and they weren't getting any fresher . . . . so I chopped those up and seared them in olive oil with a little salt.

Once the polenta was (almost) solid -- almost because I ran out of time -- I (washed the processor and then) processed up a couple of slices of pain de campagne from several days ago to make crumbs. I dipped the polenta slices into a an egg beaten with a little salt and a couple tablespoons of milk, and then into bread crumbs. I baked them at 400 for 20 minutes, flipped them over, and baked for 20 more minutes.

But really, does fussed-over polenta topped with fungus and elaborately-wrought weeds mushrooms and pesto really constitute a meal? No, I didn't think so either.

So I threw together a salad, with scallions, radishes and beautiful lettuce, dressed with a lemon juice and olive oil vinaigrette. (Um, is it still vinaigrette if it doesn't contain vinegar? Clearly, one for the ages.)

Know what? It's a good thing I have an indulgent spouse who puts up with this kind of thing for dinner. The fact that it tasted beyond fabulous probably had something to do with it.

(As you can see, the camera situation is getting pretty desperate around here. I have *got* to upgrade.)