Archive | August, 2009

La fin des haricots*

By on August 30, 2009 in Garden

Mom helping tear out the beans

They were wonderful while they lasted, delicious and amazingly productive, but when I took my eyes off the beans for a few days (road trip to Oregon), the aphids moved in and took over. Earlier in the season, I would have put up a fight, but I was beginning to get tired of beans anyway so I decided they might as well go.

Mom helped me tear them out and free up this year’s new fence for climbers. The fence worked so well and is so sturdy that I’m done forever with teetery bamboo pole tepees. All it took was three cheap poles and two fence panels from Home Depot.

Naturally, the minute I had empty garden space, I got itchy to start my fall garden, so last week I planted sugar snap peas the full length of the fence. Now I’m checking several times a day to see if the seeds have emerged yet. This morning I planted carrots and rat-tail radishes in the rest of the box (plus some other radish varieties and arugula in a couple of earth boxes that looked lonely and empty).

It’s hard to say whether my timing is right for starting the fall garden. Most years I’ve been too late, but this year I may be too early. Time will tell!

* French idiom meaning “the end of the beans, ” described in Clotilde’s Chocolate and Zucchini blog. Here, obviously, I mean it very literally.

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My raisin nut bread

By on August 16, 2009 in Food

raisin nut bread

Unlike baguettes, which take few ingredients and lots of careful handling and technique, my whole wheat bread with raisins, cinnamon and walnuts has a long list of ingredients and not much technique involved. It’s a big ugly lumpy brown loaf, but it tastes good! It’s rich enough that a single piece toasted, even without butter, is a satisfying and reasonably healthy breakfast. (It’s even better with butter and apricot preserves.)

I started making it for our breakfast toast, years ago, with one of those fussy recipes for “perfect” raisin bread from Cooks Illustrated and a bread machine. I’d freeze half the loaf so it wouldn’t get stale before we could use it all. After a while, I got tired of dragging out all those ingredients only to dump them in the bread machine and have to do it again a week or two later. Besides, I wanted the counter space used by my bread machine for a KitchenAid mixer.

So now I make three loaves at a time, using the mixer for the mixing and kneading. The mixer will only handle one loaf at a time, so I get the first loaf started kneading, then assemble the dry ingredients for the next in a big measuring cup and the wet ingredients in another, ready to dump in when it’s their turn. I stop at three loaves only because I have three bread pans the same size and because I’m not sure four would fit comfortably in my oven.

The recipe has evolved a little from what I originally started with, and it may vary from time to time depending on what I thought I had in the pantry but don’t. I think it originally called for vital wheat gluten, which I no longer bother with because it didn’t seem to make any difference when I made it without.

I sometimes use honey and sometimes brown sugar, and sometimes I leave out the sweetener, cinnamon, raisins and nuts to make a simple whole wheat loaf.

I don’t know what the lemon juice is all about (it was part of the original CI recipe), but I always use it, to keep the dragons away I guess.

Raisin nut bread – 1.5 lb loaf

1 cup lukewarm water
1 large egg, room temperature
3 tablespoons (plus or minus) honey or brown sugar
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon butter
¼ cup nonfat dry milk
1 ½ teaspoons salt
1 1/3 cups bread flour
2+ cups whole wheat flour
2 ¼ teaspoons active dry yeast or instant yeast
¾ teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 to 3/4 cup each golden raisins and walnuts

If using active dry yeast, proof it in the water with a little of the honey. If using instant, don’t put it directly on the salt or cinnamon, both yeast killers.

The amount of whole wheat flour required will vary depending on your flour, the humidity and maybe the phase of the moon. You want just enough so that the bread will come together in a smooth shiny ball in the mixer. I usually use about 2.5 cups.

Let the dough rise until double in an oiled or buttered bowl, then form the loaves and let it rise again in the buttered pan (sometimes I just use PAM) while you preheat the oven to 425. When you put the bread in the oven, reduce the temperature to 350 and bake for 40-45 minutes, until it reaches about 205 degrees.

Let it cool for five minutes or so on a rack, then tip it out of the pan to finish cooling.

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August garden blahs

By on August 12, 2009 in Garden

august

August is the least inspiring garden month, at least for me in Sacramento.

Everything looks a little tired and dusty since it hasn’t rained in months. The daddy long leg spider webs and dropping blossoms from my huge crepe myrtle tree are working together to make everything messier, and I can’t justify wasting water to blow them away since they’ll only be back in a day or two.

The vegetables have been blasted with several 100+ degree days, and show the effects. I’m even beginning to have blasphemous thoughts about being tired of tomatoes and green beans, something that seemed impossible only a few weeks ago.

One end of the green bean wall was savaged by aphids while we were away for a week, and the catsitter apparently isn’t that wild about beans, because I came home to lots and lots of tough stringy beans that stayed on the vine too long. I almost filled a five-gallon bucket with the tough ones, but now the vines are producing nice tender beans again. I wonder if they would have been good as shelled beans if I had left them to ripen all the way.

It’s hard to believe, but the tomato hornworm I pictured in my last post seems to have been my ONLY one this year! Usually I find at least a dozen. The tomatoes quit setting during the hot spells, but they will probably revive and start producing lots of fruit next month, just when I’m beginning to think about pulling them up and planting cabbages or something. My huge orange strawberry tomato has redeemed itself. Later, more fully ripe fruits turned out to have lots more flavor. One of them is enough for pasta for the two of us.

I’ve already ordered a big batch of seeds for lettuces, peas and radishes for fall planting, including rat-tailed radishes. I’d never heard of them until we were served them as an amuse bouche along with fava beans at an Oregon restaurant.

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