Red Vegetarian Pozole

A friend of mine makes a wonderful Green Vegetarian Pozole (we first found out the difference while in Mexico) and I love it. But I was first introduced to Pozole by my friend Lisa in San Francisco. I'd been to gatherings where pozole was served before, but it always had pork in it and so I never tried it. Lisa's red pozole was so good I had to email her after I got home and ask her to send me the recipe! She says it's from Moosewood Restaurant New Classics cookbook. Recently I made it using all produce from my garden. Well, not the avocadoes! I don't think those will grow anywhere close to Portland, unfortunately! Oh, yeah, not the limes either. But the tomatoes, squash, peppers and cilantro were from my garden.




Vegetarian Pozole

4 tsp. vegetable oil
2 cups chopped onion
2 minced garlic cloves
1/8 plus 1/4 teaspoon salt
3 1/2 cups canned tomatoes with juice, chopped
3-4 cups peeled, seeded and cubed delicata squash (Lisa notes that she uses whatever orange squash she has on hand...however, I think delicata is absolutely the easiest and tastiest to work with)
4 cups coarsely chopped green or red bell pepper (I used the sweet peppers I have growing in my garden)
4 cups drained hominy (2 15 oz. cans)
2 tsp. fresh lime juice
2-3 tbsp. minced chipotles in adobo sauce
1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano, sage, or epazote
Grated Monterey Jack cheese, avocado cubes, crushed tortilla chips, chopped fresh cilantro, shredded lettuce, sour cream, and/or fresh lime wedges for garnishing

Warm the oil in a soup pot. Add the onions and saute on medium high heat for 5-7 minutes until golden. Stir in the garlic and 1/8 teaspoon of salt and saute for 2 minutes more. Add the tomatoes and squash and simmer for 10 minutes.

Add the bell peppers, cover and cook for 10-15 minutes, until the squash is tender. Stir in the hominy, lime juice, chipotles, remaining salt, and the oregano, sage or epazote. Simmer for 5 minutes. Serve with your favorite garnishes.

Garden Produce

We've all been at church camp this week, but I've been coming home to pay attention to all the things around here that need attention. Like the garden! Wow, here's the harvest from *just today.* I didn't even plant those pumpkins--they're volunteers, presumably from last year's compost. And there are more out in the garden, some that are just getting started! And I finally realized that the eggplant varieties I have won't get any bigger, and picked them. One is light purple streaked with white, and then there's the three white ones. The big white one, I think, is two that grew together. And lots of tomatoes! That haven't even been added to the tomatoes in the windowsill yet....did I say we were keeping up with the tomatoes? Well, maybe when we're not at camp! I'm thinking perhaps making tomato soup and freezing it for winter would be a good option for tomato excess.

I have to commend the hard-working stupice for the second year in a row! Much as I love heirlooms, and could be happy with nothing but heirlooms on my table, I also am pragmatic and like to have tomatoes consistently. Stupice is the one for that. I pick at least 3 or 4 every other day, sometimes significantly more, and they're early and go late. Pretty tasty too! They're small, but that's okay for just about any use. They're the ones in the front left.

Eggplant Parmesan

One of my favorite summertime dishes! Though I'm disappointed that my garden eggplant are still not ready. But the tomatoes and basil came from my garden. The original recipe comes from The Joy of Cooking; the vegan version is my adaptation. Though really, the "original" I've adapted as well because I don't think the proportions for the coating are correct.

Eggplant Parmesan

Slice two medium eggplants into 1/2 inch thick rounds. (Make sure to trim both ends; they can be tough and overly chewy.) Set up three dishes: the first, a small plate with flour on it, the second 3 eggs beaten with a tablespoon of olive oil, the third a mound of bread crumbs, processed from about 4 slices of bread. First dredge the slices in the flour, then soak in egg, then coat with the breadcrumbs. Lay each slice on a rack and let them dry for 10 to 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, dice 5 large-ish tomatoes and put into a colander. Let them drain for 20 minutes. Then toss with 1/2 cup chopped basil, 2 minced cloves of garlic, 3 tablespoons olive oil, and salt and pepper to taste. Let stand for up to 30 minutes, or until you're ready to start layering.

Heat 1/4 cup olive oil over medium-high heat, in a large skillet, until the oil is shimmering. Add eggplant in one layer and cook in batches. Turn after about 4 minutes, when golden brown. When golden brown on both sides, remove to a plate. Add more olive oil if needed and finish frying the remaining eggplant in batches. Season with salt and pepper.

Preheat the oven to 425.

Coat a 9X12 baking pan with half the tomato sauce. Layer the eggplant, overlapping them as needed, or use an 11X17 pan for less overlapping. Top with the remaining sauce and then dust with 2 teaspoons of oregano and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Combine and sprinkle over the top: 1 1/2 cups shredded whole-milk mozzarella cheese and 2/3 cup grated parmesan cheese. Optionally, you can sprinkle over the top a tablespoon of chopped fresh parsley. Bake until the cheese is melted and bubbly and browned in spots.

We like this with pasta.

Now for the vegan version:
When you're coating the eggplant slices, dredge with flour, then dip in soy milk, then in vegan breadcrumbs. Instead of cheese, use crumbled tofu. That's it!

Delicata!

I've never grown winter squash before, but this year I tried out Delicata squash. It's my favorite winter squash, because it's tasty, yes, but it's also a lot easier to deal with than lots of other squashes. It's small, small enough to serve two or even just one per piece, and it's skin is a lot thinner and easier to peel than types like pumpkin or butternut squash. (I'm cringing just thinking of the time when I was trying to peel a big winter squash using a dull-ish knife....thinking about how many ways I could injure myself while trying to do so!)

I didn't realize it would be ready so soon, though. I just brought these in from the garden today. I thought I had read that winter squash was planted at the same time as summer squash, and they grew for longer to develop the tougher skins. But these were just about as quick as the summer squash. Does anyone have any more info for me on that?

I've also got pumpkins growing out there that I didn't plant! They must have survived our compost pile and planted themselves. There's quite a few of them, and two quite large ones. I don't know if these ones will last until Halloween....that's why it's good that pumpkin can be used for more than just jack-o-lanterns! One very easy way to use pumpkin is just slice it and fry it in oil. Season with salt and pepper, and add other spices that sound good to you if you wish.

How I began gardening

While watering the garden, I was realizing that in the time since we got home from vacation, almost a week, we've eaten tomatoes every single day. The day we got home it was eggplant parmesan, on Saturday it was a zucchini-tomato bake with fresh basil and oregano, Sunday we made a zucchini tomato frittata, Monday it was Greek green beans (with fresh tomatoes instead of canned sauce), yummy tomato soup on Tuesday, which I had to make sure I had plenty of tomatoes for because it takes three pounds of them, and last night we had a small tomato basil salad along with our white beans and chard. Tonight we'll have pasta with pesto and cherry tomatoes. In fact, I've bought no produce since we returned home except for fruit and onions.

It's so satisfying to be able to provide such delicious food for my family, all home-grown. Especially when it comes to tomatoes! We'd get sick of zucchini when it keeps giving and giving (though, sadly, I think my zucchini plant has died!) but we will always be hungry for tomatoes. The satisfying feeling is akin the feeling I got when I realized, after Hibiscus was born, that I could feed her completely from my own body, no formula needed. My body was made to make and feed babies. Nothing short of amazing!

I told about how I started gardening on Deb's blog, and I thought I'd share it here, because it's kind of funny! It's really Hibi's fault, or perhaps it's really Robert McCloskey's fault. Here's the very roundabout story of how I began gardening:

My parents always had a vegetable garden when I was growing up, but to be honest it always seemed so utilitarian, and very standard. I never even liked tomatoes until I tried heirlooms. I don't remember going out to the garden to harvest anything myself, like my kids go and eat cherry tomatoes and peas off the plant. And all those straight rows! (I never garden in straight rows...)

One book that we loved to read together when Hibi was five and six was Robert McCloskey's _One Morning in Maine_. It's the long, meandering story of a little girl's day, starting in when she woke and found that she had a loose tooth. When she lost it later that day, she is told that she should make a wish on the lost tooth and she will get it. Lots of things happen in between, but in the end she gets her wish when one of the village storekeepers offers her a chocolate ice cream cone.

Hibi was taken with this idea, and when it came time for her first tooth to come out, she was very excited about a wish being given. At this point, I was worried--the book didn't come with instructions for parents as to how to find out that wish in order to fulfill it! So I convinced her that the tooth fairy (we merged the "wish" idea with the tooth fairy that we'd grown up with) needed her to whisper her wish just as she was laying down in her bed at night. And what I heard that night was a whispered "a turtle!" (I'd been kind of hoping her wish would be the same chocolate ice cream cone...)

Oh, boy. No way a turtle was going to appear under her pillow! So I left a note from the tooth fairy saying that she had charged her parents with taking care of the acquisition of the turtle. A trip to the pet store ensued, and a tortoise was obtained named Torty. (We decided after that that the *first* tooth lost got a special wish; the following ones just got ordinary money!)

After we had Torty in her aquarium, we really felt kind of bad that she didn't have more room to crawl around. So, in front of our apartment, we created a space that was fenced in where she could crawl around. It was Paul's idea to make it a little garden with plants that she would like to eat. So, we especially for her planted petunias (she loved petunias!) and chard and aloe vera. (No tomatoes or basil back then--this was the fog belt of San Francisco!) And not only did Torty have a beautiful little world to crawl around in, but a gardener was born: me. That tiny space was perfect for a beginner gardener as it wasn't overwhelming, but just the right amount of space to figure out how to grow things.

Fellow gardeners, how did you begin your gardening venture? Please leave a comment, and if you blog about it let me know!

Paul cooks!

Yes, he did! I was going to offer that he could do a guest post on my cooking blog, but he just told me that he's almost ready to send his book manuscript in if the preface comes in tonight, and he's all ready to start on his *next project.* So, I suppose he's not interested in blogging right now. So I'll do the honors.

This post is to try to inspire others to garden and raise chickens, because almost everything in the frittata came from our garden or chickens!

Here's how this came down: Paul is still on vacation until tomorrow, and we wanted to attend a different church on this last day. So Paul had energy and time to say, hey, after church why don't we make a frittata with zucchini and cherry tomatoes? Ooh, that sounded good. So we found a recipe for zucchini frittata in Joy of Cooking, and adapted it. Here's how he did it:

First, he sauteed one cup of thinly sliced onion in 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a cast iron skillet, until golden brown. We added one large-ish zucchini, thinly sliced, and a small basket-full of cherry tomatoes, halved, and cooked it about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, we beat 5 eggs in a bowl with 1/2 teaspoon salt and a bit of freshly ground pepper.

Once the vegetables were finished cooking, Paul put them in a bowl to cool. Then I convinced him that even though that broth (oh, he had a Greek word to describe it....probably got it from one of our bishops who love to cook) looked very tasty, it should be drained off before adding to the eggs, so they wouldn't be runny. He saved the broth, however, so I can use it in soup.

So then he added the veggies to the egg mixture, along with 1/2 cup fresh grated parmesan cheese and about 1/4 cup combined fresh parsley and basil. He heated two tablespoons of olive oil in the skillet and then poured in the egg mixture and reduced the heat. He cooked it until the bottom was set and then put it in the broiler until it was nice and golden brown. He cut it in wedges and served it. Yum!

I sure hope it isn't next year's vacation before he cooks again!

Summer Garden Stew

Hot! Hot! Hot! It was 104 today! Yesterday it was only 86, and this is the first time this summer it's gotten anywhere close to 104. I couldn't quite think about cooking what I had planned, which was scallion crepes and bok choy from Local Flavors cookbook (which I haven't made before...hopefully I'll be able to make it sometime, as I do have plenty of bok choy in my garden!). Somehow standing over a hot griddle cooking crepes just didn't appeal.

So, I went out in my garden with colander and knife in hand. I went through and picked everything that I could. That turned out to be: one zucchini, a handful of basil, bunch of chives, 5 cherry tomatoes, 2 slightly larger tomatoes, the last of the peas, the first of the green beans, a big bunch bok choy, and one short, fat carrot.

I chopped the scallions I'd planned for the crepes and three cloves of garlic and sauteed them lightly in olive oil. Then I threw in all the other veggies, chopped if appropriate, except the basil and chives. Cooked that for a while and then added a bit of vegetable broth, not to cover, just enough to get them good and wet. I cooked them until the broth was reduced and everything was tender, then threw in the basil and chives.




I cooked a pot of pasta then served the stew over the pasta, and topped it with a dab of butter, ricotta, and parmesan.



It was delicious!