food and things

You may be happy to know that The Wandering Eye was my least favorite of the JAs. Meaning to say, that they just get better (though I also really liked the second one).

Charlie barely eats beets, too. Well, for yourself, you can slice them (or dice them) (you can pare it . . . ) -- and you do need to pare them first, but the peels slip right off -- then heat them up in a little water and slather with butter and salt. You can also do innumerable variations of Harvard Beets (I think the Joy of Cooking calls them Princeton Beets for some reason). Basically it's a hot pickled beet, with vinegar, sugar, and usually cloves and stick cinnamon. Most any basic cookbook will have such a recipe. You can also grate them, if they're still firm enough, and sauté them up that way (butter is still helpful). Or you can purée some in the cuisinart and mix them up with some stuff to make the restaurant-style borscht (rather than the russian style, which is full of meat). If you can't find a recipe for that, let me know, and I can look one up. Mainly, what you need to know is that your cooked beets are just a start. All recipes begin with instructions to either boil, steam, or roast the beets before proceeding. In France you buy them already cooked, in a plastic bag. One thing to beware of -- you will shit red the next day, which happens only with fresh or frozen beets (and you can freeze what you have not used of your cooked beets, btw), not canned.

Shell beans: we do string beans and dried beans, but we've never done shell beans. Now I want to do them, because I understand what she means (what a wonderful quote). Dried beans are enough trouble. I shell them by hand, but next year we're going to try the smash-em-in-a-gunny-sack method. Anyway, even the dry beans we get (and it was damned few -- dem beans dem beans dem dry beans is my bean song) are extraordinary. They cook fairly fast, and they all get done at the same time, and they have a wonderful texture. Actually we do grow some fresh shell beans, the wonderful edamame. They turn out to be pretty prolific and easy to grow, once you get the damned things to germinate (an eternal problem with beans). Then once they're ready, all one has to do is wash the fuzzy pods carefully, drop them in boiling water for 3 or 4 minutes, ice them down, and freeze them pods and all, making them perhaps the easiest vegetable to freeze. When one is ready for them, they are easy to shell if wants shelled ones (and they'll want some further cooking) or, for a real treat, one cooks them pods and all for three minutes or so, then salts them, then squeezes them out of the pod. I've mentioned this before; it's the Japanese businessman's beer-drinking treat.

Made a wonderful pasta dish last night: mixture of julienned yellow and zucchini squash and grated carrots, red & yellow bell peppers over whole-wheat fettucini, topped with a mixture of bread crumbs, walnuts, sliced garlic and parsley. This is a wonderful dish. The mise is long, but then it comes together fast. If anyone wants it, I'll post it here.

Here's what it looks like:


Not my photo; scanned from the cookbook. Working up to a new level. Hope to get good enough text scans from cookbooks and old FCs to post here. We'll see.

Time to start the day. First load of laundry ready to hang out. Spring. The phoebes are back.