Cooking with kids - Butternut Squash Gnocchi alla Romana

I had half of a Long Island Cheese Pumpkin left in my fridge, and I needed a recipe.  Flipping through one of my Italian cookbooks, I came across a recipe for Gnocchi alla Romana, a recipe I love but is a bit low on nutrition, and thought - hey!  I bet I can find a recipe for Gnocchi alla Romana made with winter squash.  And find it I did.  So I decided to make it for dinner tonight.

Here is the basic recipe that I used, and I didn't make any major changes.  My best idea was to involve the kids, which probably would have been even more successful if Tadpole weren't sick.  Poor little baby.  She keeps getting fevers, and it's starting to worry me.

I cut my pumpkin into thin slices, scooped out the seeds, brushed it with olive oil and popped it into the oven on a baking sheet.  Then I went to do our naptime routine, which took longer than I thought, so my pumpkin slices got a little burned and I had to salvage what I could, which turned out to be just enough.  In the future, if I were short on time, I would consider either using canned pumpkin or frozen butternut squash chunks which I would then roast.  I know my food co-op sometimes has roasted squash in the hot food bar, too, which would be a nice short-cut.

At that point, Turtle woke up, so he helped me.  He is a big helper in the kitchen.  We put the squash in the blender with some of the milk from the recipe (this type of pumpkin seems to be stringy, so I hesitated to put it in the gnocchi without blending it first), and I let him push the buttons to blend it.  Then, following the recipe, we heated the milk, water, salt, and pumpkin in a pot on the stove, gradually added the semolina flour, and whisked until it thickened, which happened almost immediately.

During this process, Turtle put his hand on the stove, and started screaming.  I don't think he actually burned himself (if you look at his hand now, you can't tell that he touched anything hot), but I'm guessing it was still hot enough to be painful.  He actually said "the stove is hot!" as he was putting his hand down, much too quickly for me to stop him.  I hope it's a lesson learned - usually he's really good around the stove and listens to me when I warn him that something is hot.

I found the gnocchi mixture cooked much faster than the recipe claimed, so after only about 5-10 minutes, I pressed it out onto parchment-paper-covered baking sheets and they went into the fridge for about an hour. We pulled them out and then got busy with ... cookie cutters!

Typically, you cut this "dough" into rounds, but I decided to get creative.  It really is much like working with playdough for the kids, and I figured it would be fun for them to eat, as well.

Turtle was really into it, so it was really hard to take pictures because I had to keep putting the camera down to help him.  He wasn't willing to pause for the photographer.  He also started eating the scraps leftover from around the shapes he was cutting out, so I knew he was going to like the finished product.

Two quiche plates full of cars, trains, and animals, ready for butter and parmesan.

Here's the finished dish, with the melted parmesan on top.  I didn't take a picture of the adult version I made, but it included a drizzle of brown butter with sauteed sage from our garden, added before they went into the oven.  It was delicious.  I highly recommend this recipe, especially if served with a side dish of veggies (we had a salad) for a more well-rounded meal!

Really quick garden update

Cucumbers - taking over the garden. Should have given them more space. Had a cucumber salad the other day with our first one - delicious!

Peppers - Really producing, 95% of them doing fantastic, a few that I still can't tell if they're going to pull through.

Zucchini - the yellow squash really faltered and still hasn't really recovered. The light green variety I planted from seed died, but I replanted it about a week ago and now I've got three little sprouts. I'm hoping with these temps they catch up soon!

Tomatoes - first Juliet is almost ripe! Hopefully more will follow soon.

Green beans - producing like crazy. We have 2.5 pounds just from the last few days. Will need to look into canning them.

Eggplant - getting established. Not expecting big things any time soon.

Melon - Really taking off, but no little melons yet.

Winter squash - not doing much, I'm hoping with the heat it'll perk up soon.

Onions - almost entirely harvested - only about 10 left, but we have at least 15-25 at home still.

Carrots and beets - still quite a few left, will need to pick soon (but we still have carrots in the fridge!).

Garden update - shallots, bermuda grass, new plants

I picked the shallots on Saturday, May 30. While a few were mushy, most of them were nice and firm. I feel really lucky about that ... whew! I'm either going to braid them (which doesn't seem as straightforward as braiding garlic), or I'll just do what I did last year and let them dry in some mesh bags hanging in the closet.

I finally had it with the bermuda grass (which I lamented last week). I spent hours on Monday and Tuesday after work digging the stuff out, even around the tomato plants as carefully as I could. It was back-breaking work, but I think I got about 90-95% of it, and I'm determined to start catching it again as soon as I see it. I might even pull out my parsley so I can get rid of what's hiding in there, and then start over.

The only problem is my neighbor, who has tons of bermuda grass in the corner right by the common border we share. I can't do anything about that, but I'm considering buying a big piece of plywood or something similar (and cheap), digging a trench (oh my poor back), and planting that thing in there. I figure one foot below ground and one foot above should stop that grass from coming over. It might come around, but at least I'll limit my vulnerability.

And last - I've planted some more stuff! New plants include two types of melon (ambrosia melon and a variety of Israeli melon - maybe Ogen?), butternut squash, yellow patty pan squash, my zucchini genovese that I grew from seed (2), two black beauty eggplants, and two rosa bianca eggplants. I'm pretty much done with my summer planting, yay!

Oh yeah, and after all that digging and weeding and planting, I did some mulching. I'm essentially mulching only the area around and between the winter squash and melons, since it won't be watered, will supress weeds (I hope) and provide a nice place for the melons and squash to hang out while they grow on their vines.

Here's my garden diagram:

Garden update - end of June

It's the last week of June, and things are looking pretty good. Here’s a rundown on the garden:

1. Cucumber – really great, we’ve had 4 cukes so far and they’re all delicious. These are pickling cukes, so I could pickle some, but I have to check and see how many jars we still have from last year. We don’t eat a whole lot of pickles normally.

2. Melon – doing fantastic for now! We have two melons about the size of a baseball. Unfortunately, they’re starting to climb the leeks that I haven’t gotten out of the ground yet. I’ll have to take care of that this weekend.

3. Basil – growing quickly. We still have frozen pesto from last year, so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with it yet (except make liquor!).

4. Sauce tomatoes – the roma tomatoes are doing very well, we have a lot of green tomatoes so far and they’re growing nicely. I’m doing my best to keep them trained to the stakes, and it’s going decently well. I think these varieties are a bushier variety and training them to stakes may not be the way to go. Some of them are climbing the stakes pretty well, but others aren’t. I can’t help wondering if I’m accidentally limiting the harvest by pruning them or not. I have to learn more about it.

5. Heirloom tomatoes – 5 plants now have little green tomatoes! Woohoo! The last one doesn’t – it’s a beefsteak, which I’ve read don’t do that well in Sacramento because it’s slightly too hot here. We’re having a spate of slightly cooler days now, so I’m hoping it will set fruit. I’m so excited about slicing into our first heirloom tomatoes.

6. Peppers – I can’t remember if I posted that I planted 6 MORE pepper plants. I believe I now have 36 plants (plus one spicy pepper for Loris). A bunch of them have pretty good-sized peppers on them now – I’m quite happy with how it’s going.

7. Zucchini – We’ve had 5-6 good-sized zucchini so far and they keep coming. Yum!

8. Shallots – I dug up one bunch and they were delicious. It seemed like they’re still dividing. I don’t know how/if I should store them, so the others are still in the ground.

9. Beets – doing well – see previous post(s)

10. Lima beans – Just planted, June 22. Total experiment – let’s see how it goes!

11. Green beans – are doing extremely well. Most of them have grown big and bushy, and we’ve had enough to make a big green bean and potato salad, with another big batch in the fridge.

12. Yellow summer squash – this seemed to suffer after I planted it, but now it’s picked up and doing pretty well. I expect it to start producing any day now.

13. Carrots – Doing well, but they’re also sort of “unwrapping” the outside layer from the core. They’re still edible, but they look awfully funny. I didn’t do the best job of thinning them, so I’m not sure if that’s part of it or not. They do seem to be too close together.

14. Eggplant – The four original ones I planted are getting big and starting to flower. I think we’ll have some eggplant when we get back from Italy, if not before. The last one, which I just planted within the last month, had a hard time after transplanting, but seems to finally be perking up. Whew.

15. Parsley – Growing quickly into bushes. Hopefully I didn’t plant too much! We’ll be making a lot of bagnet this year, I hope.

16. Leeks – are flowering. Not good. They’re forming a woody center stalk, which makes them difficult if not impossible to eat. I have to get them out of the ground to salvage what I can. They do have beautiful flowers at least. They never got big like the ones you buy at the store. Loris says it’s because they’re too close together. Honestly, I’m not sure they’re worth the trouble. I can see lining the border of a bed with them, but dedicating a whole space to them is probably not the way to go. We just don’t need that many.

Butternut squash ravioli

Yesterday after work, I looked at the butternut squash sitting on my counter, which has been there for a little while. I had a box of them down in our carport closet for the winter, but I never thought about cooking them when I didn't have one in front of me. Out of sight, out of mind. So I have been trying to keep one in the kitchen for inspiration, when we don't have our refrigerator crisper drawers bulging with veggies from the garden. Since I was home about an hour early, I decided to make butternut squash ravioli.

First, I chopped the squash in half, then peeled and diced just half of it and stuck the other half in the fridge, since I tend to end up with too much ravioli filling. I let it boil while I made fresh pasta with two eggs, some unbleached all-purpose flour, olive oil, and a pinch of salt. When the squash was soft, I drained it, mashed it, and added some powdered sage, salt, and pepper (a bit too much pepper, whoops). Then I made my ravioli. I actually ran out of filling, I guess my squash was a bit smaller than I expected.

For sauce, Loris melted some butter that I had just made with my kitchen-aid stand mixer. A couple weeks ago, I used a recipe that I found here to make butter from heavy cream using a quart mason jar, which was fun! But took forever. So I googled "kitchenaid homemade butter" and found that I could make it in just a few minutes with my mixer, and voila! Homemade butter. He added some sage leaves from the backyard, browned everything a bit, and added some of our stash of parmiggiano from Italy. Delicious! I'm enjoying the leftovers right now. Homemade bread and radishes and salad from the garden finished our meal.

I'd really like to find someplace to get real milk and cream, near where we live, although we don't use it all that often. But it would be so nice to know that it was possible.

On a side note, I had a little incident yesterday. I bought a cheap, old road bike to use to run errands around Davis, in the interest of getting in shape, saving on gas money and wear and tear on our car, and helping the environment. Not to mention just avoiding the horror of Davis driving and enjoying the weather more. Anyway, I bought heavy news-paper-delivery style baskets, spent several evenings fighting with my tools and my bike to attach the darn things to the back (and scratched up the paint a lot, too), and then took the bike onto campus yesterday to swim in between making the ravioli and cooking them. When I arrived at the pool, I promptly forgot about the giant metal things attached to the bike right behind me, swung my leg over as usual, and had one of those moments where things happen too fast but you still remember every excruciating moment - I felt my foot get caught on one of the baskets and I fell on my face, in a big tangle of backpack straps, bike parts, and body parts. It was ugly, it was bloody, and it was painful, and a public swimming pool FULL of studly, ten-years-younger-than-me college students in swimsuits didn't seem like the best place to lick my wounds.

So I went home.

But! I swear that won't stop me from using my crappy bike, at least locally.

(P.S. I actually rode my bike to work from Davis to Sacramento this morning, but that was my nice, beautiful, shiny, loving Specialized road bike, which my husband gave me (thank you wonderful husband!), and which has never tried to throw me. I LOVE my bike).

Tomatoes, tomatoes and more tomatoes (and peppers!)

Just went to the garden after a weekend away, and I came away with a cloth bag 2/3 full of romas again. I counted my jars of sauce today - I think I have around 54 (they're not all pint jars, but a few are bigger and a few are smaller, so I think they balance each other out). I think that's enough tomato sauce for one year. Luckily, the last time I made sauce, after straining it through a T-shirt to try to get rid of excess water, I found that at a certain point it just wouldn't strain anymore and I ended up using a hand-held strainer to scoop out the tomato flesh and dump it into my anti-seed-and-skin machine. What I was left with looked like tomato juice, so, being the tireless kitchen taster that I am, I tried it. It tasted like tomato juice, too, except better and with a lot less salt. Yum! So that's what I'm going to do with the last of my tomatoes before I leave for Italy in something like 5 days.

A note on preserving basil. I have made TONS of pesto. More than we will ever use (well, maybe not). But anyway, I wanted to preserve some basil as just basil, and not a paste with olive oil, and salt, and garlic. So I looked up info online and in my various cook books and garden books and herb books (yes, I have books just about herbs), and consulted with my food-snob Italian husband, and decided to freeze it. I stripped the leaves from the stems, blanched them in boiling water for about 8-10 seconds, patted them as dry as possible, and packed them in a thin layer in a freezer bag and stuck them in the freezer. I haven't tried them yet (I still have way too much fresh basil), but it seems to have worked well. So today I'm doing a ton more basil, a bit of purple basil, and some parsley. I guess we'll see this winter.

And the peppers are coming! The peppers are coming! They're all turning beautiful shades of red, orange, and yellow, in spite of their burned spots. A few of them unfortunately rotted, but I am getting quite a few. Right before I leave, of course. I think we'll make peperonata today (still need to post that recipe), and at the end of the week I'll roast whatever's left and preserve them under oil or vinegar or something. I guess we'll see.

Our last two melons (out of five) came off the vine today. It's possible there are more I haven't noticed, but I'm not sure the melons were worth growing. They only cost 50 cents to a dollar to buy them, and they take up a lot of space in the garden. But they are really good. I'll have to think about it for next year.

A last note - I decided to check on one of my butternut squashes that is close to the sprinkler, to make sure it wasn't rotting from sitting in a wet spot. I lifted it up and twisted it a bit to check underneath and snap! Off it came. So it's my first experiment in curing winter squash. I think I'll stick it outside in the yard in the sunny end where the sprinklers don't reach, and see what happens in 5 days or so when I have to pick all the rest right before I leave. If I can say anything, it's that we won't starve this winter with all that tomato sauce and butternut squash!

I didn't go to the garden since last Thursday because of my friend Amy Lu's wedding, up in the mountains. Although I am aware of how many bags of veggies I bring home each week, it's still a bit of a shock to come home with one bag completely full of tomatoes and another bag completely full of other things. I hadn't really realized how fast the zucchini grow, until after three days without a trip to the garden I ended up with five huge zucchini. I'm definitely going to have to can or freeze some of this.

And I am completely full of tomatoes yet again. After canning 9 large jars of giardiniera yesterday, I'm getting sick of canning, but it's hard to turn down another 5-10 jars of homemade tomato sauce. This time I guess I can make big jars (since I'm completely out of pints), to use when we have guests or we're making melanzane alla pargmigiana.

Today I'm going to check out the butternut squash. I've read that it's ready to pick when you can't puncture the skin with a fingernail, and some of mine are certainly starting to look like they are at that stage. You then cure them at room temperature for 10-20 days, and then store them (although I must admit I don't have anywhere significantly colder to store them at the moment).

I'm going to Italy in just about 10 days, so that will be the perfect time to cure the butternut squash. But I haven't figured out how I'm going to get my garden cared for while I'm gone. Or my kitty!

My first lessons

My first lesson has been to remember to dig in a lot of compost before I get started. I have a feeling I should have done this at the beginning, because now I'm not sure that I will ever have the entire garden empty again, so it's going to have to be piecemeal now. A much bigger lesson would be to learn how to compost myself, but it always seems like such a big job, and I don't know where to do it - out at my garden or in my backyard? In my backyard would be handy, except that I'm a renter and I don't know when I'll move, and also it would be hard to transport to the garden. And my rented community garden isn't really big enough that I want to use my planting space for composting. So that's a lesson I have yet to learn.

Here are some brief notes of what I've learned so far with this summer garden ...

Peppers - plant them close together! This way, they support each other physically, and the leaves protect the pepper fruits from getting burned. I'm pretty sad about my burning pepper fruits, but too lazy to find something to block them from the sun. They're getting these awful brown spots, which sometimes eventually burn all the way through to the inside of the pepper. And they have so many peppers that they're all falling on their sides, which I'm hoping isn't a huge problem. Their buddies aren't close enough to hold them up.

Green beans - plant them closer to the edge of the garden, not in one big block. It's really hard to pick the beans on the plants that are farther from the path, so I find myself constantly stepping into my garden and compacting the soil. I think the smart thing would be to put the peppers in the middle of the block, maybe in two close rows with stakes the way I've staked my tomatoes, and the green beans around the edge.

Zucchini - one is probably enough. And buy plants, don't grow them from seed. Because really, what's the point if you only have one or two plants? And then you end up with something like what my yellow squash is - some weird hybrid that looks more like a winter squash and I have no idea what to do with it. That will probably be the first space available for my winter garden (so the first I'll have to compost!).

Cukes - maybe don't plant pickling cukes and slicing cukes right next to each other. I haven't accidentally pickled slicing cukes, because I planted the pickling cukes first and got sick of pickling before I even had any slicing cukes. So I don't know if it would be a big problem in future years. Also, I need to try to be more diligent about training them.

Tomatoes - pick the darn suckers off early and constantly! Actually, I did a decent job with my two rows of romas, and they're doing really well, although I must have left at least a couple too many suckers on one or two plants, because I faithfully tied everything up, but they're so dense I can barely get in to find the ripe tomatoes. And the heirlooms are out of control, all over the place, and producing far more tomatoes than we can eat. I am trying to decide if it's worth trying to can some of them for a fancier tomato sauce ...

Squash (winter) - cut the vines before they get out of control! I didn't know you could do that. I think I've got at least 10 butternut squashes growing, I have no idea what I'll do with so many except give them away. And they've more or less taken over my garden.

As for everything else, it seems to be doing ok - the eggplant, melon, basil, and parsley. I'll write more about those in future posts.