pre-Thanksgiving update

It's Thanksgiving, and the garden is going well. I STILL have peppers! I probably could have kept the eggplant around longer, but I just wanted the space. We still have eggplant in the fridge in any case. And now it's finally getting cold, so the peppers won't last much longer.

The turnips are doing well. We should be ready to eat some of them really soon. One mistake I made was to not thin the first planting well. I tried to thin them recently, when the actual plant is pretty big, by moving the ones that haven't really formed bulbs yet, but they don't look great. Even if they recover, that was a royal pain. For my second planting, I've already thinned them, even though they barely have two sets of leaves. There's no point in having 5 beautiful plants that don't have space to form even one nice turnip.

The carrots seem to be doing well also. They grow so slowly that it's really hard to tell. The leeks seem fine as well. They are very difficult to weed, because they blend in with the grass sprouts. They are also planted behind some of the peppers, which I think are probably blocking out some of the sun. I really didn't expect the peppers to still be there at this point!

I just planted 32 garlic cloves, mostly big ones. I think they're from approximately 5 or so bulbs, so hopefully that will be enough variety. More notes on those later, when they actually start doing something!

The mixed lettuce I bought from the nursery is doing great, keeping us well supplied for our salads. It's really fantastic to have home-grown salads again, I'm loving it. I planted some red lettuce too, which hasn't quite recovered from being transplanted yet. I think next year I will try again to grow from seed, I'm learning a lot from growing the leeks, carrots, and turnips this year.

The cauliflower is really impressive - 7 out of 8 are producing, and 4 already have decent-sized heads. We're picking one for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. Loris will bread and fry it and we'll serve it with lemon. He did the same for some fresh porcini mushrooms we found at the farmer's market. I know we're both looking forward to it.

The broccoli is starting to form little crowns. I suspect they'll be ready soon, which is great! I love broccoli. The cabbage is also starting to form little heads, but I think it'll be a while before we eat it. They can grow to be quite big. The chard and spinach is not growing too quickly yet. Unfortunately, the first spinach I planted is really being overshadowed by one of the red cabbages. Whoops.

I think there's a very good chance that the peppers will come out this weekend. I will probably plant turnips or beets in the spot by the leeks. In the larger spot, I might plant carrots and possibly peas. I had no luck with peas last year, but I have learned an awful lot since then.

In general, I've learned a lot about the importance of weeding. I think it's made a huge difference since last year. It does take a lot of time, but when I put in 20 minutes after work a few days a week, it's not such a big deal. My plants are all so much bigger and healthier than they were last year, and growing much faster.

I also have a different layout. Last year I did 6-7 rows, but it was hard to move around the garden, and hard to weed. This year, I have four large beds with three walking rows. It's not always easy to reach the middle of the beds, but I've created areas where it's ok to step into the beds, so it works pretty well. The automatic sprinkling system has so far adapted pretty well, especially b/c I bought some sprinklers that use a finer spray which is much better for seeds.

All in all, it's so far turning out to be a successful fall!

Liquore di basilico 2

My basil liquor is more or less finished. It's bottled anyway. We have around 4 1/2 bottles. We unfortunately spilled some when we were bottling it, but I guess you have to make sacrifices sometimes.

I boiled a LOT of sugar and water, and then let the syrup cool. After that, we combined everything into a large bowl and used a tiny funnel to bottle it (hence the spilling). Then my hunky husband pounded some corks into the bottles (b/c I wasn't able to do it), and now they're waiting a couple weeks.

Not that we didn't taste it first, of course. Delicious!

As an afterthought, though, it doesn't seem to be as green as I expected.

Remember the ketchup?

I'm not sure I ever wrote about the ketchup I made - the last post I can find is about the long process of actually making it. Which turned out not to be all that long after all. Although my directions said to boil for 6-7 hours, I found that it was sufficiently thick after only 2-3 hours. I think I made around 6-7 small jars, which is plenty since we don't eat all that much ketchup.

I don't know how to describe it except that it's delicious. After Loris constantly telling me how superior his parent's homemade ketchup is, I expected it to have a very different taste from standard, store-bought or fast-food ketchup. The strange thing is that it really didn't - it tasted like ketchup. But a lot better. It didn't have that overly sugary sweetness (Loris was surprised to hear that his parent's recipe had any sugar at all). This tasted of fresh tomatoes, the tang of vinegar, the sweetness of a sprinkling of sugar, and that distinctive flavor of cloves that gives ketchup its, well, ketchupy taste.

Giardiniera with friends

A few weeks ago, Candace and Beth came over to make giardiniera. It was quite a production, with 2 large pots and one small one on the stove, and an extra burner set up for boiling jars. We had three large canning pots going at one time, and ended up with 41 jars! I think they're pretty happy with what they accomplished.

Liquore di basilico

So after nagging my husband to get the recipe for liquore di basilico from his brother for weeks or probably months now, I finally looked up some recipes online. Most of them followed a similar format, although one was a bit different (it involved soaking the basil in the water rather than the liquor). Here's my take on the process so far.

The first thing I had to do was deal with the fact that you just can't get 95% grain alcohol in California. Actually, I was really grateful to find 75%, as I had heard that grain alcohol didn't exist at all here. So I did some calculations to try to take into account the dilution it already had. I used two 750 mL bottles of alcohol at 75%, which is 1500 mL, or about 1250 mL of actual alcohol. I poured it into our clear water pitcher (it's the only thing I could think of to use) and added 60 basil leaves. These immediately started turning black around the edges and getting black spots on them. Although the recipe said that the liquor would start turning green after a few hours, it didn't seem like it was happening, so I wasn't too happy.

The next morning was great, though, a lovely greenish color that's been getting more and more beautiful ever time. The leaves are really pretty black now, except a few, which are staying green for reasons that are beyond me.

The next step will be to make a simple syrup of sugar and water and use it to dilute the liquor, and then to filter out the basil leaves (or maybe vice versa), then stick this stuff in bottles and let it sit for a couple weeks. I'm hoping to have some ready for Thanksgiving. I'm very excited about this. Yay! I'll have to remember to post some photos.

October update on winter garden

My winter garden is finally shaping up. It's taking a lot more work than last year because I had my gigantic summer garden to get rid of first. It took me a whole day just to remove one zucchini plant and all the tomatoes. Now I've also removed the other zucchini, the butternut squash, dill, melon, and most of the basil. I'm drowning in basil, I have to make more pesto and freeze more so I can get the last of it out of the ground. Luckily we're still having warm days, so the peppers, eggplant, and basil are still doing ok, despite my laziness.

It's taken a lot of hard work to haul all that stuff out, turn the soil, and dig in compost. So far I've planted cauliflower, green cabbage, red cabbage, spinach, lettuce, broccoli, leeks, turnips, beets, carrots, and fennel. I still want to plant swiss chard and garlic, some more beets and turnips, and possibly fava beans and/or peas. I still have 1/4 to 1/3 of the garden available, although as usual it's going to be crowded. But I'm excited and looking forward to eating all of this come winter and spring. We've already have two salads with veggies from the garden - lettuce, the last of the zucchini, and peppers.

More updates to come when I get around to doing the hard work of clearing out the last sections.

Corsican cuisine in Davis

I just cooked my dinner of Corsican cuisine on Tuesday, and it turned out amazingly well. We started with some home-made giardiniera, not Corsican at all but I guess you can't be too picky.

The first course was soupe de poissons, of course, made with only two kinds of fish (butterfish and cod). I actually made it once already, with three kinds of fish, but I don't think it made much difference to have only two. I chop up the fish and toss it into a pot with potatoes, carrots, onions, LOTS of garlic, and herbs, boil it for a while, blend it, then pass it through a food mill. I think I'm doing something wrong, though, because it never gets very smooth, and in fact stay chunky enough that it doesn't pass through the food mill very easily. My main goal is to get the bones out, which isn't always successful.

I made rouille, which was more successful this time than the last as well. Last time, I tried crushing dried red pepper and mixing it in, but it didn't turn out that well ... some bites were spicy because they had a big piece of pepper, and others were bland, with no pepper. This time, I added a bit more garlic, whipped up some aoili, then added some saffron and powdered cayenne pepper. Perfect! And stuck it in the fridge overnight, which helped it thicken. It was the perfect color, taste, and consistency. I was a happy woman. Served with sliced and toasted bread and grated ementhal cheese, it was delicious in the soup. Two of my guests had second or third helpings and finished everything.

The next course was stuffed eggplant, which I hadn't tried before, and came out really well also. I used eggplants from my garden, which I sliced length-wise and boiled. I wasn't clear on the boiling time, and I'm still not sure I picked the right amount of time. It was tough to scoop out the flesh without breaking the skin, and I mangled a few of them. I soaked the inside of some white bread in milk while this was going on, and when I had my eggplant pulp in a bowl, I drained as much liquid as I could, then I added the drained bread, garlic, basil, eggs, butter, and cheese - tomme and parmigiano. Mashed this together, stuffed it back into the eggplant skin (even the mangled ones), then fried both sides in a skillet. That was a bit weird, but it turned out just fine, and gave the top of the stuffed side a nice, golden color and texture. In the meantime, I cooked up a tomato sauce with onion, garlic, and red chili pepper, which I put in the bottom of a baking dish, set the eggplants on top, and stuck it in the oven to stay warm until dinner. I would definitely make that recipe again, it's not as hard as it sounds.

Last we had a dessert, fiadone. It's basically a brocciu cheesecake, although of course you can't find brocciu here so I used ricotta instead. Mix that with eggs and sugar and lemon or orange zest (I used lemon juice), stick it in a pie or tort dish and bake. That's it, it's easy and really delicious.

The only thing we didn't think of was a nice rose wine to go with the dinner, but white did just as well, along with a moscato for dessert. I can't help smiling when I think of that meal.