August 14, 2008
Our tomatoes, while subject to a few cracks and holes early on, have been a most satisfying crop so far. It’s not just that they fruited so quickly, but they’re ripening very sedately. I was expecting a long wait, a sudden ripening and a rush to eat all the produce before they went bad. Instead, at most, one or two are ready for picking at a time, a few days apart.
I just picked a newly blushing one, and a still yellow one on my way into the house to make dinner. There are two very light yellow/orange tomatoes still on the vine that’ll be ready in a couple of days, with a multitude of green tomatoes varying from a wee thumb-sized one to a double-fisted behemoth.
I’d say we’ve picked an average of three to five tomatoes per week for the past three weeks. They’re no more than one or two pounds’ worth depending on when we pick them, so that’s about an average of $3 per week since our supermarket sells them for about $3/lb.
Considering the only expenditures we made were labor in replanting the poor vines several times thanks to the dog’s romping, and watering, I’d say this was well worth the trouble. (I don’t know if my dad’s doing anything them while I’m gone to make the vines produce so well and so quickly, but I’ll assume he’s not.)
July 31, 2008
This is a sponsored post.
I was recipe hunting last night (with the help of blogging puppy) because I’ve been in the mood to cook. For the last two weeks, I’ve been all about the steak: ribeye, prime rib, Santa Maria style BBQ. That last has been on my mind ever since my dear friend surprised us with a dinner party. Yummm ….
After looking at the price of steak, however, and of the green veggies that I was craving (green beans and asparagus) I’m reconsidering the entree. I know that shrimp is just as costly per pound, but I can use less of it in each dish.
I found this positively luscious recipe over at Closet Cooking for Thai Lemon Shrimp.
Ingredients:
1 pound shrimp (shelled and deveined)
1/3 cup sweet chili sauce
1 lemon (juice and zest)
3 kaffir lime leaves (sliced, substitute lime zest)
1 teaspoon chili sauce
1 tablespoon fish sauce
3 cloves garlic (chopped)
1 teaspoon palm sugar (or brown sugar)
1/4 cup coconut milk
1/4 cup cilantro (chopped)
Directions:
1. Marinate the shrimp in the sweet chili sauce, lemon juice, lemon zest, kaffir lime leaves, chili sauce, fish sauce, garlic and sugar for 10 or more minutes.
2. Heat a pan.
3. Add the shrimp, the marinade and the coconut milk and simmer (not boil) until the shrimp are cooked, about 2-3 minutes.
4. Remove from heat and mix in the cilantro.
I swear Kevin has a positive genius for finding delectable recipes, and most helpfully suggests a substitution for the kaffir lime leaves which are a bit difficult for me to find. I think it’d be an awesome contender in the cook off in New Orleans. I love love love fresh seafood, and even more so when it’s been locally harvested in an ecologically sound manner. After all, as much as I love to feed my tummy, knowing that there will be enough for years to come is just as important.
Do you have a go-to seafood dish that you would suggest? Or have any variations on the theme that I could try? I’m open to all new ideas!
July 3, 2008
So much for self control. I spent $15 this week on lunch fixings and had been making awesome roast beef sandwiches with fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, cheddar cheese with salad and baby carrots on the side. With only a four day week, I should have been set!
Despite the well-rounded meals, I couldn’t kick this craving for something fatty, or (almost) greasy. Despite having a nutritiously-sound lunch, I was still finding myself needing sweets or snacks and still feeling hungry all day. What’s up with that?
Yesterday, my answer was: pizza. We all chipped in to buy a medium pizza and a few orders of Boneless Chicken Wings. I managed to find a 20% online coupon for a first time online orderer, so that was helpful. We split the bill among the pizza&wing eaters, and just wing eaters, to be scrupulously fair, and I assigned the bill collection to another coworker so I could get the order in. My share turned out to be $9 for three slices of pizza and several helpings of wings.
And actually, guilty though I feel for spending out of turn, I did feel better for having a tummy full of pizza and honey barbeque wings.
June 27, 2008
One tomato and cucumber, each sliced.
A handful of chicken breast, sliced.
A handful of pork with a smidgen of onions, sliced.
Orowheat whole wheat bread.
Mayo.
Combine all ingredients in layers on the bread, smush together, and it makes the best sandwich. EVER. I was quite sad when I finished eating because it was so delicious! I wished that I’d taken a picture, too, but that might have seemed a little weird.
And a coworker went on an ice cream run, and brought back a veritable smorgasbord of ice creams: Strawberry Shortcake bar, Raspberry sorbet bar, Drumstick, almond and chocolate covered vanilla ice cream bar, and Dibs! I, of course, went for the Dibs. They were tiny morsels of deliciousness.
Happy Friday everyone!
It’s almost shameful that it’s taken me this long to try our local farmer’s market. It’s only a few step from my train stop, and it’s usually going strong from April through October, 5-8 pm, once a week. The biggest obstacle has always been that the closest booths to the train station are the food booths, with kettle corn, funnel cakes (mmmmmm), and bbq stands all in the way of my fresh produce. Fearing for my wallet, I’ve simply never deemed it a worthwhile endeavor to out-willpower the funnel cake.
Today, I marched myself all the way to the produce area and found my three tomatoes, three short and fat cucumbers, and a pound of green beans for all of $3.73!
The green beans look super fresh, and the tomatoes and cucumbers should hold me over until our harvest at home. I think we should be ripe and ready for picking in about a week or two?
Wonderful SoCal weather and soil that we have, our plants have blossomed and fruited in what seems like no time at all.
June 24, 2008
Thanks to this doggy, who is blurred because he can NOT stay still, our tomato plants have been moved out in our front planter. I wouldn’t think that’d be the best place for them, but it seems like they’re thriving in the sunlight and non-doggy-thrashing zone.
At $2.49-$3/pound, I’m glad to have our own little patch of veggies. It took me a while to figure out which general vicinity to photograph, but I finally found it!
I still can’t spot our cucumbers, but Pa says they’re growing too, despite my visually-challenged skepticism.
June 4, 2008
Photo credit: www.ciaprochef.com/
BD and I are on a kick to see how useful iPhone can be. We’ve mainly been using the GoogleMaps function together, and a bit of the Safari browser on the side. I use the heck out of the email function now that it works most of the time, but that’s not useful when we’re hanging out.
I’ve found that there are a couple sites, like Citysearch and Amazon, that offer a special version of their site for the iPhone which would be special but they actually seem like dumbed down versions. Actual Citysearch on the web shows price ranges (very important!), location, ratings, reviews and sometimes, hours of operation. iPhone Citysearch locates restaurants and gives an address. That’s it.
On this particular quest, we were trying to coordinate dinner and a movie in the same city. Since we primarily have AMC tickets, we needed to stay close to an AMC theatre, but we weren’t familiar enough with the area to pick a restaurant. Between Garmin, random suggestions (Indian? Yeah, Indian sounds good. I’ve found ten restaurants, how do we pick? Uh, Japanese sounds good….sorry. Oooh, Japanese? That sounds even better! Ok, let’s find a sushi restaurant!), and iPhone Citysearch, I found Fuki Sushi in Palo Alto was a highly rated restaurant five years running. iPhone Citysearch wouldn’t tell me anything else more useful like how much we could expect to pay, and the reviews I’d Googled sounded both promising (palate) and intimidating (wallet).
We decided to give it a shot even though not knowing what the price range could be made us both nervous.
The menu was remarkably extensive: pages upon pages of appetizers, a la carte items, noodle dishes, rice/dinner combinations, sushi/sashimi combinations. I think we might have spent nearly as much time putting together the perfect order (portions, proportions of raw fish to cooked items, total cost) as we did eating the meal. We have a thing about overordering, at least when BD’s in charge, so we’ve developed a menu conversation where we try to balance it perfectly to have a reasonable amount of leftovers, if any.
Our appetizer, the spicy agedashi tofu, was heavenly. Perfection. The garlic and spices that made it spicy were completely worth the sniffles and watering eyes. Absolute heaven. I didn’t even want to move on to the next dish, it was so good. (Disclaimer: I love love love tofu and garlic, so if you’re not of the same mind, you might not be quite as enamored of this dish as I was. But I highly recommend it if you even lukewarm like tofu and garlic.)
We shared two pieces of hamachi (yellowtail), two pieces of madai (red snapper), a kani roll (snow crab meat) and an assorted tempura dinner that included a generous stack of shrimp and vegetable tempura, a generous serving of rice, and four additional pieces of sashimi. Mmmm.. I’m getting hungry again thinking about it. The fish was cold, not so cold that you couldn’t taste it, but just cold enough to accentuate the freshness. I always wonder how someone can have texture issues like I do and be ok with eating raw fish, but it never stops me.
The bill was just under $50 for the both of us, including a nice tip. I liked our server, she didn’t bother us during the meal but took care of each stage efficiently so we never had to look for her.
I felt like our meal was definitely a splurge since we weren’t celebrating any sort of occasion, but the experience was lovely and I look forward to returning to try the million other menu items that we had to pass on. Usually I get annoyed by a menu that’s too extensive, but this one was intriguing.
