Category Archives: Garden and Orchard

  • Radishes With Butter And Salt (And Moments Of Perfection)

    June 14, 2012

    22 Comments

    Radishes with butter and salt, a perfect trio.

    Late post today. Our eldest and I went to the Giants game last night and stayed late to watch Matt Cain pitch the franchise’s first perfect game in 130 years. As we occasionally hint in the blog, all of us are lifelong Giants fans. We have seen Bonds’ home runs, All-Star games, Timmy’s Cy Youngs, World Series losses and (glorious) victory and everything in between. And there was nothing quite like the perfect game. Everything comes together in one game. A brief, brilliant spark of pure joy and surprise. And for the players it was the moment when the orchestra is perfectly in tune and the conductor is at his best. A sweet reward for a lifetime of effort.

    But in baseball, it is a lifetime of effort that is always filled with failure. Even the best baseball players fail, in some way, in almost every game. The best learn to accept failure and build more towards a lifetime body of work. That is what makes perfect games or championships so special. Not simply that you were the best on “X” day, but because the players must overcome failure to get there. Success is all the sweeter when reached through failure. You grow, you improve, you build.

    Mixed radishes, fresh from our garden.

    If you garden or cook (or simply raise a family) this should ring true. While you may not toil in the spotlight, gardening and cooking are a lifetime of successes and failures. And some you simply cannot control. The beds were perfect, you checked the soil, picked the right seeds and watered on time. But the blight or frost came anyway. Green became brown. Fail. You picked the perfect recipe, shopped on time, did your prep and cooked like a pro. But the guests came late, one of the kids sprained an ankle and the roast stayed in the oven too long. Medium-burnt. Fail.

    But after a few well-placed “words”, you start again. There is always the next meal, day, week, season and year. And when the successes come they are sweet, and they are shared with those you love. When the cocktail is tasty and the guests are happily chatting, the kids eat the (perfect) fish and the dessert made from the fruit that you grew has been totally devoured, then you have it. A perfect meal, a perfect day, a perfect moment. And well-earned. And well-remembered. Think of those moments, and we bet you have a few that stick with you, and those you love, to this day. Brief, brilliant sparks of love, joy and content. The glow from those sparks lasts a long time.

    In the garden, harvest is often that special moment. This week we have cherries, berries and radishes. More on the fruit soon, but as for the radishes we will give you a “perfect” recipe to enjoy any time. Fresh radishes with butter and salt. How do we know it’s perfect? Because pretty much every celebrity cook, cookbook author and blogger has posted a version of this recipe at some time or other. But since we actually grew these radishes, we (selfishly) think we can post on it too. And it is a very tasty, and easy, dish.

    And we are big fans of radishes, both as cooks and gardeners. In the home garden radishes are a great crop. They grow to harvest in 3-4 weeks (the name comes from the Greek Raphanus meaning “quickly appearing”), work in many climates and compliment many cuisines. Radishes grow in spring and fall, so we stagger our crop over a few weeks to get radishes though most of both seasons. And, frankly, they are hard to mess up. While gardening is filled with failures, crops like zucchini and radishes do offer the opportunity for a few “quick wins”- and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

    While we like quick-pickling radishes or using them for crunch and heat in salads, we usually just eat them out of hand. We enjoy their crunch and light, peppery heat (the kids like them too, so that is a big bonus). Serving radishes with butter and salt simply creates a more balanced dish. The sweet, creamy butter and the salt add more dimension to the radish. And all you need to do is slice some radishes and put some butter and salt into a few bowls and serve. This is a great summer dish- easy, but full of flavor.

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  • Fireworks In Slow Motion

    June 8, 2012

    14 Comments

    Boom.

    I am sure we are not the first to think of this, even the ancient Chinese named their fireworks for flowers, but the flowers in our gardens are simply fireworks with a very slow burn. Different colors, shapes and sizes. Some linger, some burst, some change before our eyes. But they always delight us. Ask yourself, “have I ever been bored by fireworks?” or “are there ever too many flowers in the garden?”. I think we all know the answer.

    Note the insect on the nasturtium.

    More bugs, see the grasshopper on the zucchini blossom.

    Not exactly a flower, but a welcome blossom, nonetheless…

    The flowers even have their own sound-effects, happily supplied by the bees. The constant hum and buzz is a reminder that nature is all around us and, if left uninterrupted, supplies us with a constant stream of beauty and inspiration. Some flowers become honey, other blossoms bring fruit and some simply calm the soul. 

    Melon blossom. A sign of sweet things to come.

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  • Blueberry Slump: It’s No Slouch

    June 7, 2012

    17 Comments

    Blueberry slump with vanilla ice cream.

    Ok, I cop to the hokey title, couldn’t resist. Or you could call it a “grunt”, “cobbler” or even a “sonker”, but we will get to that later…

    We are in full berry season here at the farm and the blueberries are in their prime.  Two of the bushes are at their peak and we pick 2-4 cups of berries a day. In a week or two, it may be even more, as our slower bushes will catch up. Happy times at the farm. The only problem is what to do with all the berries. These are good problems to have.

    There are a few ways to deal with an abundance of berries; eat them (duh), share them, freeze them or cook/bake with them. We do them all. It is particularly worth noting that blueberries freeze well. One of the problems with trying to cook with freshly picked blueberries is having the volume to make big desserts like the slump. But if you freeze the berries you can build up some inventory, and with almost no loss of quality. To freeze blueberries simply place them on a sheet pan and put them in the freezer for a day (they don’t stick together this way). Then put the berries in a container in the freezer. They will keep for months. In this recipe we ended up using 1/2 fresh and 1/2 frozen berries and it was great.

    We have lots of blueberries, times are good.

    As for cooking and baking with blueberries, we have a pretty constant supply of blueberry muffins and pancakes but Carolyn likes to make other blueberry desserts, and this gets us to the blueberry slump. We recently saw an article on blueberries in Saveur and it included a recipe. You could say we adapted the recipe, but it really was just a reminder. Carolyn makes slumps and cobblers often in summer, as they are an easy way to enjoy fruit in a dessert.

    Making a slump is about as easy as dessert baking gets (Carolyn thinks the “Lazy Daisy” is the easiest dessert- recipe soon). Basically you heat the fruit in a skillet with some sugar and juice, then top it all with a quick biscuit dough and bake in the oven. The whole thing takes less than an hour, and only 10-15 minutes of active time, and you use one bowl and one skillet. You can even make the biscuit dough ahead of time. And the slump tastes great. As it should. Pretty much everyone likes fruit, sugar and biscuits. Add some ice cream and you start getting close to dessert nirvana.

    Make some quick biscuit dough.

    Boil berries, citrus juice, sugar and salt to dissolve the sugar.

    Top the berry mixture with the biscuit dough and sprinkle sugar on top.

    Bake in the oven for 25 minutes.

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  • Sharing (and Sometimes Stealing) Food With Family and Friends

    June 6, 2012

    9 Comments

    Wild Flour Bread. Good stuff.Writing, cooking and gardening are often thought of as a mostly solitary pursuits, but we find that the opposite is true. Fresh fruit on the tree, new recipes and a well-earned drink seem to always supply a path to more time with family and friends and easy opportunities to engage with our community. In a time where so many voices express outright fear of food and drink, it is worth noting that few things unify us more than the simple act of breaking bread together. And if that bread happens to be tasty, then so much the better.

    And this week we literally got to break bread and share with many family and friends. Carolyn’s Dad, Bill, was generous enough to bring us bread from Wild Flour Bread in Freestone, California, a few hours north of us. Wild Flour bread is a truly artisan baker that bakes all of their bread on-site in wood-fired brick ovens. They feature a few dozen varieties of bread and pastry each day. They do not sell anywhere but the bakery and when they are out of bread for the day, you are out of luck. Happily, Bill brought us four loaves; olive, super seed, garlic rose and a sweet cardamom bread. The bread was terrific, and the kids loved it (and since they have no “filter” their praise is noteworthy). We enjoyed the cardamom bread toasted with butter at breakfast and made simple, tasty grilled cheeses for the kids with the other loaves.

    Good bread = good grilled cheese sandwiches.

    What makes the bread so special was not just the taste, but that Bill was so willing to go out of his way to share the bread with us. His simple logic was, “it’s really good bread and I thought you might want to write about it”. The same thing happened a few months back when Carolyn’s Aunt and Uncle, Ann & Russel, started trying our cocktails and sent us Bernard DeVoto’s marvelous book “The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto“. My sister sends photos of an endless wall of bitters, and our buddy Chad sends us envy-inducing photos of fresh bay scallops. Our friend Scott has a recipe for a new variety of Manhattan and we just have to try it out….

    The Hour. A good case for including the occasional cocktail in your life.

    Later in the week, our friend (and true gourmand) Phelps came by to pick up some beef. This spring, we bought 1/4 of a grass-fed cow from Stemple Creek Ranch and the steer was recently harvested. Phelps bought half of the beef and needed to pick it up (a 1/4 cow is a lot of beef, if you are curious, it fills two large coolers). We got to catch up with Phelps, walk through the garden, share (and show-off) some of our berries and even pluck a few more of the early cherries. We are just a few days away from a full cherry harvest. It was a brief visit, but a good one, and we look forward to cooking with Phelps this summer.

    Ribeye steak from Stemple Creek Ranch.

    And finally, when we aren’t sharing with friends we resort to stealing their produce. Well, not quite stealing, but certainly being “opportunistic”. Recently our friends Roger and Greta rented a house in a nearby town. The house was built by an old Italian family years ago and they literally covered their property with citrus trees. Lemons, limes and oranges, and the trees are huge and very productive. Our friends haven’t really moved in yet, but Carolyn was in the neighborhood and stopped by the house to check it out. It’s late in the year for citrus but there were still limes and lemons on the trees and Carolyn decided to “help herself”. She did get permission after the fact, so the stealing became sharing (ex-post-facto). In any event, we did mix Roger a drink using his lime juice, so we hope they will forgive our transgressions and let us “liberate” more of their citrus in the future. It will certainly give us a good excuse to stop by. Continue reading →