Category Archives: compote something

Wondering Wondering If You Have Made It

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Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.


Sometimes the blues get ahold of you.



Zucchini cheddar bread made with whole wheat flour have fabulous flavor and a nice crumb. While the loaves were cooling, Pete walked in with dirty hands and said, “Guess what this is.” His hands were not full, so I couldn’t guess. He’d emptied one of the potato towers and found only a small handful of potatoes. Coincidentally, my hair looks just like Froderick’s.

What Does Love Want

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We joined the unnamed university’s farm share program this year. The fee was like a giant blue iceberg floating downstream in my checking account, tearing Buick-size holes in my meager budget and drowning the helpless monthly expenses trapped in steerage. This tragedy turns to triumph – if you can call a constant feeling of narrow escape and panic at the sound of running water triumphant – when we eat or preserve every bite of our share – or it will be. I’ll let you know if that happens. This is good for our diets and good for my brain, but this is work.

The camera adds 10 lbs. to a light dinner.

Three weeks ago, the share included 12 enormous squash. I was unprepared to deal with 12 squash of several varieties and sort of fell face-first into my cookbooks. Did you know that people jar different kinds of squash? They do. Did you know our government discourages home canners from home canning squash? It does. So I ignored the government, jarred zucchini with tomatoes and gave away several pile of squash. Siobhan made purees. Anya and Corinne wielded summer squashes like clubs. Trout’s boyfriend thought the bag of squash hooked on the doorknob was a bomb. Pete asked what I wanted for dinner tonight and I said, “Surprise me with squash soup.”

Pete’s Squash Soup

2 12″ yellow summer squash, peeled and seeded
1 garlic clove, chopped
1 medium onion, diced
corn from 2 raw ears
1 medium hot pepper, seeded and diced
24 oz. chicken stock
olive oil
herbes de Provence
basil
salt & pepper
generous dollops of plain yogurt

Heat soup pot, sweat vegetables in olive oil. Add chicken stock, bring to a boil, reduce to simmer and cook until squash is tender. Puree! Season with herbs to your taste, add dollops of yogurt and serve with homemade whole wheat bread, butter and your homemade apple butter. Dude, freeze some for winter and write Pete a fan letter. He will not reject you!

My favorite summer breakfast is Pete's kryptonite.

A zillion years ago, we were all broke and a housemate turned me on to refrigerator pickles. I’d make a batch and when the cucumbers ran out, the brine was still fine so all I had to do was peel and slice cucumbers and onions and toss them in. The next morning, the pickles were ready again. Two pieces of wheat toast, some cream cheese and that was breakfast. For years, I kept a quart container in the fridge all summer. A couple of years ago, the recipe suddenly left my brain. I’d make up a brine and the pickles would turn out salty. Frankly, I was perturbed. I had to find the former housemate and on Friday, I did.

Tata: You know how I’ve been whining that my pickles kept turning out salty?
Siobhan: You’ve been remarkably tedious on this point, yes.
Tata: Yeah, that’s especially funny since there’s no salt in the recipe.

It’s refreshing, filling, delicious and cheap. You should eat this.

Right Back To Where We Started From

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Here at Poor Impulse Control, who the hell knows if we have our priorities straight. Let’s review:

Adorable grandchildren –
Learning about food preserving –
Potatoes, still without a glass bottom potato boat –
Cat blankets –

And on Monday, Pete and I start a three-day motorcycle safety course that either ends with our getting licenses or drastically rethinking the next thirty years of our futuristic and stylish lives.

Buckwheat: check! Panky: check! Destination: picnic!

Zucchini in tomatoes, pickled beets, red onions in red wine, Tata in 100 degree weather.

We've grown potato plants; no idea if we've grown potatoes.

Hey! Turns out cats like blankets!

Put A Marshmallow In Each Ear

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Though 35 miles south of New York City, the town where Pete and I grew up was just as in the middle of nowhere as any other. Nobody had FM radio until the mid-seventies, but even after that, most people were marooned in AM radio waves while ABC and NBC radio battled it out. If you were really lucky, you had enough money for records or eight track tapes. I probably bought three or four records a year. For me, FM radio was like sparkly jewelry. I’d hear a song once, fall in love with it, then maybe hear it again months later. Sometimes I could figure out whose song it was, but most often not, and I had no idea what the players looked like. Sometimes, a song took on an air of mystery as I waited to hear it again, if I ever did. Here’s one now.

Those crunchy guitars, the mushy lyrics, the improbable and almost comical harmonies: to my 15-year-old ear, this was a perfect radio song. There was no way in the world I’d get to see a band play a show, and even getting to see a band play live on television was unlikely, so today is the first time I’ve seen The Sweet. Bless my buttons, these skinny boys are super sexay rock stars. The hairstyles alone are genius. My dad came back from Europe dressed like this and the women in my town lost their minds. Bonus: the bizarre camera work would not have interfered with my gooey teenage love of this song, had I seen this video. From experiences like this, from waiting for weeks or months to hear a song a second time, I developed a hunger for certain musics I couldn’t get to and couldn’t have.

You: Ta, what in glamorous tarnation are you getting at?
Tata: I thought you’d never ask!

I love this like the Flying Lizards’ craven and comic version of Money (That’s What I Want):

Needs a white scarf with fringe for real glamor.

Tomatoes and zucchini is the answer to the question, “What the fuck am I going to do with another freaking zucchini?” The recipe for onions in vinegar came from the Ball cookbook, which as you might imagine is full of Post-Its, index cards and syrup stains. The tomatoes and zucchini recipe has vague points like what volume of tomatoes to use and why after five minutes’ simmering zucchini would be cooked through, so I added some lemon juice to the jar before processing. The onion recipe is for red onions in red wine vinegar but I ran out of both and improvised with white onions and vinegar, adding a tablespoon of pickling spice to the simmer, which I let go awhile longer than the recipe described because my father-in-law arrived at my kitchen door. Pink pickled onions will be fantastic on homemade pierogies in January, almost as good as a new guitar sound on a bright summer morning, when anything is possible.

Of Skin You Can See Through

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The packaging really sells this product.

Thursday night, I started feeling a little hinky. BP capped the gusher in the Gulf – if it is capped – and though my sense is strong that this thing is not done yet I was limp with relief and fatigue. On Friday morning, I woke up, called out and went back to bed but could not fall asleep. My mind ran in circles. I got out of bed and began tracking down recipes as a form of discipline, to prevent panic, which is only hilarious when you watch someone else do the silent-film-hair-stand, boobitty-boobitty-run-run and reeeeeewwwwww-faint. But you’re right. That is funny.

It's like the eye test of the damned.

Sometimes, when you feel like reheated merde, the thing to do is work for someone else’s good and quit thinking about yourself, by which I mean that it’s all about me when I think about you. I stuffed this pile of cat blankets into a space bag, sucked out the extra air – with a vacuum like other adults! – and wrapped all that in brown paper and half a roll of packing tape. This package sat in the little red wagon while I dragged it through the grocery store, where I remembered to buy gelatin packets but forgot cat treats. I shiver, just thinking about it. Then I mailed the package and felt a weight lift.

Please admire this festival of B Vitamin readiness.

For the past two seasons, Pete did most of the jarring and I ran around, peeling, scouring and scaring up recipes. Last year, I didn’t even boil water without him except to try a jelly or a jam that failed, as I recall. This year, Pete’s upstairs painting and I’m downstairs paring. Pickled beets are not my favorite nosh but that B Vitamin surge sometimes means the difference between my getting out of bed and my lying flat with cartoon X’s over my eyes. So it turns out jewel-like pickled beets are really easy to prepare, fresh pickling spice is a reason to live and little black cats will supervise your early morning photo shoot.

Everywhere In My Mind

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In most things, one can find good news and bad news. When I read this recipe I had questions, but finally my first thought wasn’t I’ll ask Dad – to be immediately followed by Ah shit, not again. Usually, I’d ask Minstrel Boy technical questions about jarring, but he has his hands full at the moment with another matter. This meant that I stared at this recipe for a few days, bought the cherry tomatoes and still hadn’t figured out how to measure English pints in grams in my kitchen. Last night, Pete and I bicycled over to my sister Anya’s and asked if she had a food scale. She did not. Her husband Dan, who is a terrible liar – by which I mean he has no talent for it – pulled out a half gallon of soy milk and began converting milliliters into centimeters. I guffawed at him. If I remember correctly from third grade, that might work with water but not cherry tomatoes and certainly not since for me numbers are a little fuzzy. This morning, still perplexed, I called my boss Gianna, who lives three blocks away. She was not at home.

BEEP!
Tata: Hi, this is Ta. I was wondering if you had a food scale that measured in grams. I have a French recipe for tomato jam that calls for ingredients measured by weight and not volume, and since grams are usually the province of drug dealers, I don’t exactly know what to do. Stop laughing and call me back.

I thought about what I’d just said and rousted Pete from under his car. No, I hadn’t run him over. Yes, he was working on his brakes. With TOOLS! We went to Target and while I tied myself in knots trying to find something remotely underwear-esque to wear to the massage therapist’s, Pete picked out a decent food scale. He is our hero! I am considering going back for the boxer shorts with the mugs of beer.

Gianna was at a wedding and called back while we were in the car.

Gianna: I got your message. What?
Tata: The recipe I’m working on came from a French source and I got stuck.
Gianna: A French recipe. What? How?
Tata: Those questions sound so reasonable when you ask them! We bought a scale. If the recipe turns out, I’ll bring you a jar and if the recipe doesn’t turn out I’ll save your life and not bring you a jar.
Gianna: Thanks. I think!

Turns out 2 pints of cherry tomatoes weighs about 800 grams. Finally, I can start making sense.

Be Running Up That Road

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Firefighters have alternative ideas about structural porosity.

Pete called me at work this afternoon from a roadside to say our next door neighbor’s house was on fire. He didn’t seem all that upset, but I threw a hissyfit at my desk. Siobhan tried to be comforting about the whole thing but I said a lot of things that sounded like, “Grrrrrr bzttttt keck keck guappppp.” When Pete called me back from our backyard, the driveway was taped off, firefighters from three towns were smashing attic windows to let out smoke and I could tell Pete wasn’t telling me the whole story. I got on my bicycle and rode home, searching the sky for signs of smoke. At home, our cats were also freaking out.

A police officer allowed as how another fire in town was probably not an accident.

For hours, emergency vehicles blocked off our street and about two dozen firefighters moved around like warmly dressed chess pieces. By the time I got home, the fire was out and the investigation was beginning. The neighbors leaned on a car across the street, looking shell shocked. Pete and I invited them in to sit down, but the police took turns asking them questions. Later, one of the officers told Pete there’d been three fires in three days and one of them differed from the others. When we walked to the main street later, we saw this and thought it looked very suspicious.

By the time we sat down for a dinner of CSA vegetables and pasta we might've called it breakfast.

We joined a farm share program, which led to me writing a check that made me hyperventilate. We live modestly, so a whole season’s vegetables all at once really add up. Thus, when Pete puts a plate like this one filled with carrots, cabbage, onions, green beans and herbed compound butter in front of me it is as if we are rewarding ourselves for making an unnerving leap of faith.

Our street smells like smoke tonight. Our cats are finally calm.

In the Wild West End Sometime

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Last year, one of our most successful preserves was caponata. It was easily cooked, handily jarred and the flavor improved with time in jars. When opened and served with whole grain crackers, caponata can serve as a light, filling meal. Another measure of success: my sister Anya asked how she could have jars of this tasty concoction extracted from my pantry, perhaps by stealth, and placed gently in hers. I appreciated that she didn’t just break into my house and steal stuff she liked, but even more, I really dug the vegetarian’s confirmation that jarring caponata is a brilliant idea. Yay!

This happy accident opens up a new frontier for us: meals in a jar. I’m not talking abut Beefaroni, but I am interested in jarring things that when we open the jar require nothing more than crackers or – even better – just a spoon. It’s got to be nutritious, so 8 oz. jars of chocolate and marshmallows is right out. Do you have any wild ideas? Have you done this? Braintrust: ignite your rockets!