lperry

Much happiness in the garden this week! Everything is flowering. I anticipate the watermelons, peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes to come. I also have three volunteer cucumber plants. Since this is our first summer in this house, I have no idea how they got where they are, but I'll let them grow to see what happens. I also have a plethora of little pepper plants. As is the usual, the ones I really wanted came up sparsely, and the ones I didn't really care about came up in spades. If anyone is interested in a "murici" pepper plant, PM me. I've got them potted up in pairs and they are yours for coming to get them. This is a cultivar of Capsicum chinense from the Brazilian Amazon. Hot hot hot and shaped like a tiny cherry pepper, but yellow, orange and red. They are named for the murici fruit, Byrsonima crassifolia, because of the similarity in shape. I'll be very surprised if they make peppers this year, they are about three inches tall now, so you would need to be dedicated enough to overwinter them. But I'll bet your neighbor isn't growing them.

Here it is - I'm pretty sure this is adapted from the old checkerboard cookbook, but I learned from my Grandmother. Spiced peaches or pears The basic ratio for the syrup to make enough for about five pounds of fruit is: 1 cup vinegar (white is the usual) 2 cups water 3 cups sugar (I cut the sugar from where it was. If you want a heavier syrup, you can go as high as 5 cups of sugar) Put this on the stove and heat it up along with sticks of cinnamon and cloves. The measurements are going to be sort of "to taste" because spices vary so much in flavor. I usually start with two sticks of cinnamon and a couple of teaspoons of cloves, and that will be enough if they are really fresh. You can let the spices stay in the syrup floating around and then put them in the jars with the peaches or pears, but they will cause browning and discoloration with storage. For a prettier finished product long term, use cheesecloth or a tea ball. Bring the syrup to a boil, and add the fruit in batches to heat it through. Cook just until almost done because there will be processing later. Small peaches can be left whole, and if you do pears, a firm variety works best. We use Pineapple pears off my Grandmother's old tree - they stay crispy. Ladle the hot fruit into jars. At this point, I add in a slice of fresh ginger. Do the usual tamping down of all the fruit to pack it in and leave the threaded rim for headspace. Now divide the syrup into all the jars. This is the tricky part - I almost always end up needing more syrup, but the syrup in the pan is now full of spicy fruity goodness. So divide it evenly, then make more fresh to top off the jars if you need to. Close them up and process pints for 20 minutes, quarts for 30. If you have extra fruit, you can put it in a container in the fridge and break it open in a week or so. Vinegary, spiced, and sweet all at once.

I completely missed the pickled peach recipe request. I have a recipe for spiced peaches that are in a vinegar/sugar syrup, but you can easily leave out the spices and just have sweet pickled peaches. It also works great with pears. If that's the sort of thing you are looking for, I'll be happy to dig it out for you.

Have you tried using homemade pectin? It's basically apple jelly. I use Christine Ferber's recipes that usually call for a kilo of fruit to 800 grams of sugar. You bring it all to a simmer, macerate overnight, then cook to completion the following day. This makes the fruit clear and sparkling - a very nice product. That's a rambling way to get to this point - her book has recipes that call for adding 8 oz of this homemade pectin to low-pectin fruit recipes to help them gel. It has worked for me in combination with using a candy thermometer to insure that the mixture gets to 20 degrees above boiling.

I love my pressure cooker, and I use it mainly for risotto and to cook dried beans on a whim. Boiled peanuts also get soft and saltilicious in one third of the regular time. I've found it does wonders if you want to cheat on foods that you usually have to simmer to get all the flavors to meld. Sometimes you need the meld, but have no time for the simmer. A general rule is to cut the cooking time to 1/3 and check the contents at that point. Lorna Sass has some great cookbooks that give times and water ratios for all sorts of beans and grains. That might help with the rice. Happy pressuring! -Linda

Pressure canning is fantastic. I have jars of roasted red peppers as well as poblanos for emergency chile potato soup. I've canned lots of things, and have only been disappointed in the pesto. The Ball blue book has times, and I also have a little book from the USDA. We are still unpacking from a move so I can't find it to tell you the name. The one trick I can suggest is that you do a test run with an empty canner to learn the settings on your stove that will make it work. It is OK to turn the heat down if you need to, but if you have to turn the heat up during the process, a lot of the food will make its way out of the jars and into the pot. Not fun after all that work. I've never used it for jams - I had the luck to find a steam canner at a garage sale years ago for a few dollars. It's wonderful to be able to process all the high acid foods with less water. That means less energy and less heat in the kitchen. Some day I'll be as smart as my Grandmother and do it all outside.

I saw it last week at the Grand Mart on Little River Turnpike in Annandale.

^ The staple didn't spark on his show, and I didn't try it with the stapling. I just folded the bag down on itself. Not because I was afraid of the spark, but because I couldn't locate the stapler...

Alton Brown had a show a few years back where he showed that you can put any popcorn in a small, brown paper bag, staple the top, and microwave it. I think he may have tossed in a little oil and salt. I tried to find the link, but there was a show since where he cooked it in a bowl on the stove, and it seems to have trumped the old show. At any rate, I've done it by placing the corn in a bag, folding the top, and putting it in the microwave. So you get the fluffy texture without that chemical taste that microwave popcorn always seems to have.

I made it out to DeBaggios and got three different types of eggplant and purple tomatillos. Also catnip, purple ruffles and Thai basil. All my herbs save the rosemary and thyme were completely demolished by a mysterious unseen herbivore, but they are coming back now. This weekend I will get the tomatoes in the ground. The sweet 100s already have fruit... I feel like a delinquent parent. Here's to the slow, steady rain! I put a sugar baby watermelon plant in the ground just before it started. Summer will be here soon!

What's up with the breadcrumbs? I grew up in a breadcrumb-free environment and only use them now to dust cake pans (thank you Maida Heatter for the wonderful tip). Is this an extra dimension of crunchy brown stuff? Because the creamy stuff is made that much better by the contrast of the crunchy brown stuff...

I watched the video this morning. As an ethnobotanist, I am intrigued. The little guys look like coffee fruits - the fruit that houses the "bean."

Thanks! Joe Riley PMed me. (I apologize if I made a faux pas by posting the question instead of PMing it.)

Is the Highland Park 15 year in? I need a birthday present for my favorite Scot. -Linda

Went to Sunflower at Seven Corners last night. General Tso's and Golden nuggets were ordered and enjoyed, as were the spring rolls. We were not rushed at all but the food came so fast that we were out of there in about forty minutes. A nice meal.

How fun! I used to hunt morels and chanterelles in Illinois, and I harvest epazote out of my Grandmothers' fields in Florida. I had no idea that we had shiso growing here! If you organize something, please share! -Linda

I'm going to try to come and will probably bring some sort of salad since it seems to be the category that is lacking. I have very little excuse since I live 3/4 of a mile from the park and can walk to it. The only possible problems involve my current move into a new house and scheduling with those guys (they really wait until the last minute!). So I'll be italicized as a probable maybe. Bookluvingbabe - I run at Ft Ward park all the time, and it is very shady, and because of all the rain, is now very damp. I think the bug spray might be more important than the sunscreen.

Went to the Green Spring Garden sale this morning. I realize I may be the only one in the DC Metro area who has never been (and was not in attendance at 9 AM), but it was a very large sale with lots of bedding plants, trees, shrubs, and vegetable plants. I picked up a yellow pear tomato, a sugar baby watermelon, and some catnip. Everyone had herb plants, and the main greenhouse even had a reasonable selection of scented geraniums. If you hurry, you can get various and sundry tomato plants from the Master Gardener booth for just $1. I'm pretty sure the gardeners donated what they grew and did not plant, so they are interesting varieties. (Complete disclosure - my mother is a Master Gardener in Florida, and I think they are very nice people. )

The TJs at Bailey's Crossroads has Grove Street Meritage for 9 bucks a bottle.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen Jumilla Monastrell 2005.

When I learned to cook as a child, my Mom had me choose my favorite dish (spaghetti in red sauce), and that is what I learned to make step by step. I think that "cook what you like" is excellent advice. I would go a little farther to suggest that you choose a particular dish or a meal that you really like (Mom is always right ), and start looking up recipes and techniques on the web or in cookbooks. YouTube is fantastic for little videos of people cooking various things - that's where I learned how to make pupusas. Make your one meal a few times until you are happy with it, finding out along the way how different ingredients or slight changes in your cooking techniques change the flavors, and before you know it, you'll be an expert at that dish and you will be moving on to new things!

Hmmmm. I didn't know it had been closed. I recommended Meaza to a friend who took a date last week, also had the vegetarian sampler, and was also quite pleased with the meal. So it seems to be open and doing well!

These look nice. I forgot to mention that I'm having to share the storage area with my photographer BF, and he has so much gear that I really need to maximize space. These have so much open space that I would feel like I'm wasting space. Although they can be had locally, and the price is certainly right. Thanks! I may take you up on that. I need to get back down there tonight and do a little measuring. The biggest issue, apart from saving space, was that we didn't want something really nice in the basement where various and sundry basement things could happen to it. Plus, these seem to hold lots for the space they take up. I'm hoping to do this in town if we can, although the internet is always an option. Hmmmm. This could come in handy during those long road races...

I need a wine rack for a basement area, so I want something that won't gather a lot of dust (no big wood frame), and makes it easy to see the wine, and will hold a hundred bottles or so with the possibility of making it larger in the future. What I *really* want is one like the modular metal grid rack that was in the back of the living room on the set of early AbFab episodes. However, the one metal grid rack I found online has to mount to the wall, and we can't do that in this space. Yeah, I know, I don't ask for much. Thoughts? Ideas? Can I go local on this one? I'd like to do that over the internet. -Linda

That's my experience as well with HT in general, however, for someone who is unable to function in the kitchen without a few southern staples (e.g., White Lily flour), HT makes me very happy. It is also the best alternative I've found for produce when I can't get to a Grand Mart. It's been ages since I bought produce in a Safeway or Giant around here. It always looks old and tired. We're about to move and my store will now be at Glebe and US 1 instead of Shirlington.