Fertilized the garden again

Round of fertilizer went into the garden. Last weekend I also planted tomatoes and peppers, rounding out the Spring planting. Next up: build a box for strawberries, and figure out how to put another eight pepper plants in the ground. Apparently it is going to be a summer of peppers.

Fertilizing the Spring garden

This last Sunday I applied two gallons of fish fertilizer to the garden. Everything appears to be rockin and rollin despite some unseasonably cold March weather--down to freezing again last night.

The lettuce and kale appear to be growing a little faster than the swiss chard. the peas look delicate. I'm hoping for the first crop within a couple of weekends.

a wine cellar update

primitive, but effective

The wine cellar has sat all winter at a temperature of 55-60 degrees. The fluctuation has not been wild, and most of the time it has been at 56. It's been a cold winter, of course. But as of mid-March, we are still holding steady at 58 degrees.

I have several age worthy pinots and two promising cabernet franc's in the cellar. I'm still setting on a 2004 Pomerol which, someday soon I should probably open. It has not been kept at an ideal temperature for most of its shelf life, so I'm sure it has not aged ... properly. Otherwise, the wine rack I built (at left) has not fallen apart, the rack gets no direct light, and is otherwise stable and undisturbed.

Some facts I had not been aware of when I took inventory the other day.

1) I have a tremendous surplus of whites, particularly Chardonnays. Everything from Mersault to Russian River Valley (or further east--Sonoma Coast).

2) I'm sitting on nearly a case of fine Pinot Noirs, most from Gary Farrell.

3) I have a large number of age-worthy cabernets that I bought at table wine prices. Peters', an Alexander Valley winery, chief among them.

4) After my next shipment, I will be close to running out of space. Time to build another wine rack, and try to push a 100 bottle reserve. At present, I really only have about 30 age worthy wines in the cellar.

Spring Planting #1: Year of the Leaf

Determined this year to get a leg up on planting, we trudged down to the Oakhurst community garden and Gardenhood to pick up early Spring plants. The goal was to get some lettuce and kale and chard in the ground. I was fairly well convinced it would not survive. After all, I was planting a week before the final frost was scheduled and if the past is to be any guide, an unscheduled frost would probably follow. The seedlings all looked tender and the roots limpy and fragile. I immediately bought twice what I thought would survive and determined that a 50% survival rate would be a huge bonus. Given that the seedlings were $2.50 for a four pack, this seemed like a good enough bet.

you'll be a big lettuce someday

I planted almost all of it eight days ago--Sunday the seventh. I prepared the beds minimally, turning the soil, breaking up clumps of black and red earth, and adding a good inch or two of compost to each row, which I worked in. The soil is not nearly sandy enough. At its best it was crumbly, but for the most part it was more like moldable clay. I did my best to break it up. The compost did look great. It was all black gold and brimming with worms even in this cold weather. Most of the soil I broke up in the parallel rows was black and healthy looking. A little less so in Maia's plot, where the soil is older and less well cared for. I got the plants in.

The specific lettuce varieties are all marked outside, and I will not produce them here. But in Maia's plot, I planted 17 lettuce plants (four varieties plus one left over from Fall which never died) in the front row, and 8 in the second row. The second row is flanked by chives (third year strong) on the one side, and four sugar snap pea plants on the other.

the tomato row awaiteth

I've left one of the parallel rows covered. I had added compost to these rows two weeks prior during a nice spell. The idea was to have the soil good and worked over by the worms by the time I laid down the tomato plants, which will likely be in mid-April. The second parallel row (where the tomato plants were last year) took two different varieties of Kale and Chard. A total of eight plants, I believe.

The barrier row got a good working over, and is home to some leftover lettuce and kale, as well as broccoli.

Then the frost came. The plants seemed none the worse for wear, and after a week of minimal watering, they still appeared perky and happy in the soil. I was so motivated that I took the remaining eight plants and put them in the ground, in the third row of Maia's plot.

notice empty third row. no longer.

I will continue to monitor the planting, but at present I have an absurd number of lettuce varieties in the ground. We may be looking at thirty plus leaves and at least five different varieties, provided everything survives. I may cut a second barrier row when it is planting time, as well as extend one of the rows in Maia's plot in order to get early cucumbers and zuchini, or squash, or something else to go with all of this.

Adventures in Coconut Land

coconut purée

My daughter went nuts at the DeKalb Farmers' Market today, insisting we buy a coconut. At a dollar a coconut I was in no mood to argue. One learns to pick one's battles in the eternal death struggle that is parenting. So we came home with a coconut.

I cracked it open, drained it, and we cut out the flesh. I was sure a seven year old child who had never had fresh coconut would find it disconcerting, or perhaps just "not what she was expecting," but instead she quite liked it. She insisted we buy more, and immediately wanted to make a drink from it.

Which immediately fired my interest. If there is anything that fresh ingredients demand, it is a proper glass to be put in with the proper libation. For coconut, the most obvious place to start would be a piña colada. But the proper recipe calls for coconut cream. How to make that?

coconut boil

None of my cookbooks were helpful. Turns out the Italians, French, Julia Child, and those Brooklyn hipsters do not work with fresh coconuts too often. I turned to mr. google, who turned up a mass of dispiritingly dissimilar information. According to several recipes, one needed to puree the flesh and bring to a boil with 1 1/2 cups water, let sit for thirty minutes, strain, then chill. This makes coconut milk, but chilling will separate the cream. Well, okay. But Alton Brown wants you to grate and then cook it up with a certain amount of 2% milk to make either cream or milk (less for the cream, obviously).

coconut sieve

I opted for the former recipe. With some slight modifications.

I cut the flesh up and put it in the blender with a little water. Once it was ... grated, or whatever one might call its state after being pulverized, I combined it with one cup of water and heated it to boiling over the stove. It took almost no time at all. I let it sit for half an hour, and then strained it. This yielded 1 1/4 cups of coconut milk, or cream, or whatever the substance was. I chilled it, and an hour or so later, we made piña coloda. The recipe for that was pretty standard:

2 oz. coconut cream
3 oz. pineapple juice
2 oz. rum
1 tsp confectioner's sugar
a heap of ice.

And blend.

coconut borracho

And enjoy.

Tonic Water #5

Call it the Big Lebowski. As in naked, and big.

4 cups water
1/3 cup citric acid
1/3 cup cinchona bark
1 tsp sea salt

bring to boil, reduce to simmer, 45 minutes, then do as normal.


UPDATE: unsure if I used 1/3 or 1/4 cup bark.

A Nameless Campari Cocktail--"Once Upon a Time in the (Old South)West"

So we were invited to a party, a kind of high-end potluck that involved dramatic food creations by a variety of amateur foodies. And as usual, the email that came to me was ignored too long, until my pleading partner provoked me to reply. With virtually everything already selected, I promised to make the cocktails. No problem, I figured, with but a week to go. I have a half dozen crowd pleasers in my repertoire.

Or I could come up with one. I was harboring at the time a deep longing for Campari, which was absent from my cabinet and had been for some time. Why not make a Campari cocktail? Were there not a hundred easy variations on the Negroni? No problem.

But, of course, the eternal war between reason and experimentation raged in my brain. Reason always loses, and so I began mixing up various concoctions, trying to come up with some kind of Campari cocktail that would break the mold a little. But after a week, virtually nothing had come to mind.

But the best spur for invention is last-minute panic. Countless artists would  attest to the power of deadlines to inspire creation, although one might legitimately wonder how often this might result in genius rather than simply desperation. Given the difficulties involved in any act of creation, I suspect that genius is elusive enough to defy systematic analysis as to its prompts, let alone causes. But I digress. The point is that at the last minute, I mixed together the following:

1 part Campari
1 part lemon juice
1 part tonic syrup (lemongrass and cloves)
1 part sugar syrup
2 parts gin
club soda
garnish: lemon peel

It worked brilliantly. A bitter apértif balanced upon a fresh citrus sour mix. Sophisticated and playful, as if Renee Fleming chose to attend the party in a pink fur coat.

I was nonetheless apprehensive, and took several bottles of liqueurs to fall back on (Aviation, anyone?). But in the end, I shook up nearly 2 cocktails for everyone. It was a hit, and I was spared the embarrassment that comes from bringing the one dish no one touches.

Our first freeze

Our first freeze this year came early--November 12. It wrecked my squash and the last of the tomato plants (why I hadn't pulled them, I cannot really say). It also destroyed most of my flowering plants, including of all things the golden pineapple sage, which was just beginning to send up beautiful red flowers.

The arugula survived, as did the radishes. And actually my little seedlings of cold-weather plants appear to still be alive, if not thriving.

The temperature below the stairs is now 58 degrees. It climbed briefly back up to 60 after the freeze, but is otherwise holding steady.

UPDATE: within a week, the temperature below the stairs was back up to 64 degrees. Again, holding steady.

The fingers, they burn...

Autumn is and will always be my favorite season. The weather turns cold. Jackets and sweaters make their way from the closet to the dresser. The heavy duvet comes out, and sleep is suddenly more inviting. And the harvests! A season of peppers. The last of the tomatoes. Crisp lettuce.

There is also the smell and the sound of Autumn. It is football on in the background. Chicken bones and onions in water reducing on the stove. Leaves turn in the crisp air, and crunch underfoot on evening walks. And it all came out in fine form this past Sunday. Chicken stock with a heavy clove and pepper spice reduced on the stovetop while we made up pumpkin muffins and jalapeno jelly. A nice end to fall!

Jalapeno recipe is as follows:

about 20 jalapenos. chopped then blended, with 1 cup cider vinegar. Turned mixture into pot with 1 more cup cider vinegar, then added 4-5 cups sugar (recipe called for six). Boiled for ten minutes, stirring constantly. Added 3 oz. liquid pectin, stirred for one more minute. Ladled into ball jars and let them self-seal.

In a second batch, I mixed red jalapenos and orange banana peppers and used dry pectin, although I forget how many tablespoons.

My fingers burned for two days straight. Mean peppers this year.

Viña Eguía Rioja Reserva, Tempranillo

Not a bad $10 wine that we found at Whole Foods. Worth a stock for weekday quaffing, and for foods  that might take an earthy and mildly spicy companion.