Monkey Monday: post-Thanksgiving edition (with obligatory pictures) 26 November 2007 10:46 pm
Posted by Tracy in : seasonality, pictures, garden, local food, baking, dessert, friends, eating, CSA, cooking , add a commentThe very short version goes like this: we ate sooooo well last week! First, and completely unrelated to Thanksgiving, I feel obliged to brag about the fact that Peter and I made éclairs:
I made the pastry cream and chocolate glaze from recipes in The New Best Recipe; Peter made the pâte à choux from a recipe he found online, and cut a corner off a plastic bag to make an impromptu pastry-filling thingy (the backup plan was to use a turkey baster, but we’re really glad it didn’t come to that). The results? Delicious. Not unlike our awesome Thanksgiving dinner, which (being vegetarian) also did not involve a turkey baster in any way, as you’ll see if you click past the break: (more…)
No real post today! 12 September 2007 6:45 pm
Posted by Tracy in : local food, garden, school, cheese, friends , 2 commentsInstead, I have been busy eating the most delicious huevos rancheros ever (Cook’s Illustrated, January-February 2006 issue), watching movies and riding Pepe with Peter, and picking another few pounds of gorgeous ripe tomatoes from my garden, because at this point it might actually be easier than falling off a log. After I post this I’ll be taking one more practice GRE and getting a good night’s sleep and suchforth (having a really excellent day beforehand is an entirely appropriate way to get psyched up, right?) Everybody think good thoughts for me tomorrow morning from 9:30 AM Pacific time onwards, okay? Thanks.
Meanwhile, if you’re really starved for something delicious to read, check out Ella’s fantastic response to last week’s mac ‘n cheese challenge (so awesome!) Also I enjoyed New York magazine’s recent takes on the locavore phenomenon: My Empire of Dirt, an experiment in Brooklyn-style subsistence farming and Local Shmocal: Our critic weighs in on the latest wave of foodie correctness. If you’re still bored after that, please consider taking my pop quiz, and I’ll be back tomorrow, no doubt with some sort of comfort food recipe suitable for assisting in my recovery from freaking computer-based standardized test (urrrgh).
P.S. I solemnly promise I will not remember 7-11 with a Slurpee again until next year.
Late summer garden update! With dirty pictures! 5 September 2007 9:07 pm
Posted by Tracy in : garden, local food, pictures, seasonality, eating, cooking , 2 commentsThe following numbers don’t include the tomatoes I ate while I was picking (also there may have been green beans), and I don’t have weights for the Brandywines because the first two of them were so ripe they were splitting and so urgently needed to become sauce that they sent me back into the garden to harvest more tomatoes in order to have enough to make that sauce, and on my second of four trips inside it occurred to me that I should be weighing my haul (and what a haul it was!) In short: tomato season. Fuck yeah. (more…)
Another wacky Wednesday, this time with picture! 29 August 2007 11:00 pm
Posted by Tracy in : local food, garden, pictures, friends, cooking , add a commentSo on Sunday (Kitchen Garden Day), Peter broke out some truly Tom Sawyer charm to recruit his hapless officemate Jon into helping us paint the house, and Jon took a truly excellent picture of the preparations for the delicious dinner we all shared that night (and which I bragged about on Monday): (more…)
An open love letter to green beans. 28 August 2007 12:03 pm
Posted by Tracy in : seasonality, garden, local food, summer, vegan, recipes, eating, CSA, vegetarian, cooking , add a commentOkay, so this is a cut-and-paste from my Open Letters project, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Besides, it’s my birthday, so I get to do whatever I want, including slack off a little. I wrote this letter in 2006, before that year’s pole beans kicked in and I learned that they are the secret to finally growing enough green beans to bring some inside, but all the parts about the love are still 110% true. And the recipe sneakily concealed in this epistle is so darn tasty that I may even write it up as its own entry someday. (more…)
