Quayles and Potatoe

Tags

dinner, humor, opinion, potatoes, quails, recipe, riddles, soy sauce

(Trust me, there are two excellent recipes at the end of the post.)

I sent a quick e-mail to hubby at work asking him to stop by the market on the way home and see if they had quails and if they did to please buy them. So I could make him quails, like Tita made for Pedro in “Like Water for Chocolate.”

The intoxicating imagery of personifying Tita in the kitchen cooking quails in rose petal sauce for her lover must have befuddled my intellectual capabilities. Or it could have been the wine, sipped between the flipping of the pages, actually, that caused the inebriation.

Whatever it was, I saw that I had misspelled “quails” when hubby’s reply came. His standard one-word “ok” was this time replaced with “You mean the birds? How many?” In my haste, I had spelled the word as “quayles”. I was quite beside myself when I saw that. I studied journalism. Misspelling words was a big no-no, a cardinal sin, so said Professor Frederickson.

He used to put big Xs on my paper. “I HAVE FAITH THAT ONE DAY YOU WILL LEARN TO USE YOUR DICTIONARY.” Yup, he wrote that on one of my papers. Geez, how wrong was he? There is now what’s called auto-correct. There is no need for a dictionary.

But, so what if you misspell, anyway? My injured amour-propre predictably turns into indignation. What’s the harm? Does it even matter as long as your readers understand what you mean?

Case in point, I used to work with this guy who constantly spelled “speek” when he meant “speak’. He was only the General Manager of the company. And who can forget Dan Quayle spelling “potato” with an added “e” at the end. He was the Vice President of the greatest nation on earth. I’m speaking as a proud American, of course.

So you see, these people at the top? They can’t spell. Didn’t seem to put them at a disadvantage one bit. Me? I agonize constantly about the possibility of making errors, and I’m writing a blog. There is nothing wrong with being a blogger, I assure you, fellow bloggers. I was just trying to make a comparison. Forgive me.

Maybe I should be less inhibited about spelling. Maybe it doesn’t matter all that much. If I had given you a recipe, and it reads like this:

Can you read this?

Would you be able to make it out? I have reasons to believe that you would. Your brain can do much more than you think. Unless of course you are sipping too much of that wine like I was. In which case you might have read “gralic” as “gaelic”. And you certainly wouldn’t want to peel the gaelic. Or maybe you would.

He is gralic (source)

‘Nuf said. I’m making you Quayles and Potatoe.

Clam Chowder

Tags

clam chowder, clam chowder recipe, clams, potatoes, shellfish, soup

Here’s the promised clam chowder recipe. Let me know what you think. (Polianthus and FD, are you reading?)

Clam Chowder
3 strips bacon, cut into 1 inch pieces (if you don’t want to use bacon, then just start with 2 tbsp butter)
1 tbsp butter
2 stalks celery, diced (about 1 cup)
1 small onion, diced (about 1 cup)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp flour 
2 1/2 cups chicken broth (or half broth + half clam juice to make up that amount)
2 potatoes, peeled and cubed (about 2 1/2 cups)
2 cans chopped clams, with the juice
1 cup half & half (or cream)
Fresh herbs (I used thyme & chives, about 2 tsp each)
Salt & pepper, as needed

1. In a soup pot, cook bacon til crisp. Remove and drain on paper towel, reserve for later.
2. Remove fat left by the bacon except for 1 tbsp, add 1 tbsp butter.
3. Sauté onion and celery until nicely tender, add garlic, sauté a minute longer.
4. Sprinkle flour and stir for another minute.
5. Add chicken broth and clam juice (if using), and potatoes. Heat to boiling, then simmer until potatoes are tender, about 15 – 20 minutes. Stir soup often, to prevent sticking or burning. *See note
6. Add clams and cook just until clams are heated through.
7. Add chopped thyme and chives, salt & pepper as needed.
8. Add half and half or cream.
9. Heat through. Do not boil. 
10. Serve with crisp bacon and/or oyster crackers on top.

*Note: At this point, the soup is on the thin side. If you’d like a thicker soup, you have the following options to do:
1. My favorite method, and is also a good one if you’re on a gluten-free diet (foregoing the initial flour as well.) Once the potatoes are tender, while stirring, pick up a few pieces of potatoes with the back of the spoon and mash them against the sides of the pot. Do it a few times, until soup thickens.

2. Make a slurry of flour and milk. 1 part flour to 2 parts milk. Add to soup until a desired consistency is reached. When using this method, make sure you cook the soup until the raw flour taste is no longer there, 2-3 minutes at least.

3. Add crumbled saltines or oyster crackers to the soup and let them dissolve. They will thicken the soup. I’ve done this and the soup thickens beautifully. You may need to help the crackers to dissolve by mashing them with your spoon, as described in the 1st method.

Enjoy your soup, perfect for a day like what we’re having in our neck of the woods. The heat has disappeared, replaced by coolness and cloudiness. I’ll take it!

Hello … Potato!

Tags

basil, herbs, potatoes, vegetables

I have to admit, I’m a better cook than I am a gardener. In fact, when I first started blogging I was undecided about what I should call my blog, The Novice Gardener or The Novice Cook. But Sabo said it’d be misleading to call the blog The Novice Cook. I guess that was some kind of a compliment.

But my gardening skills are slowly catching up to the cooking. One thing for sure, I now know how to grow potatoes. Just take a look at my potato harvest, all from just one and a half plants. (One plant wasn’t dug up completely.)

Potato harvest

The one that was uprooted produced 20 tubers, totaling 4 lbs of potatoes. I used my bathroom scale to weigh them, so it’s probably not very accurate, but it should give you an idea. And I even scrabbled 3 potatoes from this plant earlier in the season. That made a grand total of 23 tubers, from one original seed potato. That’s pretty impressive in my book.

The plant I didn’t uproot gave me 7 huge tubers, at 3 lbs total. I just scratched the dirt around the plant and felt for the tubers, and extracted them, without digging up the whole thing. I’m letting it grow for now, to see what will happen. It still looks green and lush.

And I have a theory. As long as the potato continues growing green leaves above ground, it also continues to grow tubers underground. So the longer the plant stays green, the more it produces. Am I right?

I based my theory on the fact that when I uprooted the plant with the 20 tubers, the leaves were also still green, and there was even a small cluster of flowers. And look at the number of tiny tubers still forming.

There were at least half a dozen of them. I wonder if they would have continued to grow had I not dug up the entire plant? It would be exciting to have a perpetual potato plant, wouldn’t it? Harvest only as needed, as long as the season lasts.

I have to thank my fellow bloggers for giving me advice and information on growing potatoes. Annie’s Granny taught me how to scrabble for a few new potatoes without digging up the whole plants. And Food Kitchen Garden gave me an explanation and sort of confirmed my theory already, about how potatoes will continue producing tubers as they grow. Thank you, guys!

Harvest this week also included cucumbers, eggplants, kale and senposai leaves, a few blackberries and tomatoes, green rhubarb stalks, and runty carrots and turnips.

Harvest this week

And lots of volunteer basil.

The small carrots and turnips were grazed by the cook as she slaved in the kitchen. 😉 And some of the potatoes were made into oven fries. But I have other plans for the rest of them. Maybe samosa (TG’s favorite) and clam chowder (Sabo’s favorite). But don’t say anything to them yet. I still need to find the time to make them. Right now I’ve got to do some Mom stuff, like playing chauffeur for the kids, etc.

You, on the other hand, can head right over to Daphne’s and view other harvests from gardens across the globe.

Harvest Monday

Tags

farm fresh eggs, flower arrangement, flowers, free range eggs, frittatas, garlic, Mushipan, organic eggs, potatoes, spinach, wild flowers

Harvest was sporadic throughout the last week and a half. Didn’t really have much chance to get to the garden. It rained and rained, everything was wet and muddy. On days that were dry, I found myself having other commitments taking me away from the garden. 

The garden seems to be in a transition, but not in a good way. Spring crops are dwindling, but Summer crops have been slow to produce. So I’m left with not much to harvest. This really is one of the slowest years for me.

That’s why I’d rather be talking about this, also from the garden. Don’t you just love flowers from the backyard?

Haha … all kidding aside, I did dig up some garlic and a few potatoes. Is there anything more thrilling than digging in the dirt and finding these?

I only took a few and let the plants continue growing. I never did this before, but I learned from Granny that you could scrabble for a few new potatoes without uprooting the whole plants. Hopefully they’ll continue to produce more tubers.

Aren’t they beautiful? I need to plant more potatoes! They were steamed and dressed with a simple yogurt dressing, and we each had a little taste. Sabo and the kids were so impressed. I was even able to extract promises of help in the garden from the kids, as long as I plant more potatoes. But somehow, in the middle of the conversation, the subject of getting them a puppy came up again. So, as it stands now, a puppy = help in the garden. Am I getting bamboozled again? We’ve trained them too darn well!

Unlike the potatoes, the garlic on the other hand, was pathetic and failed to impress the family. They were probably not ready to harvest, but I was impatient. The small single bulbs were planted thickly in March from garlic that sprouted in storage, so I suppose they had no hope.

But I actually like these single bulbs. I think they’ll be beautiful in a jar, as pickles. I have a head of garlic that’s sprouting in the kitchen right now, so it will be planted. Hopefully in September I will be harvesting more single garlic bulbs.

There was also a bit of spinach, the last of it. It was added to a frittata, along with some gigantic scallions.

I also harvested lots of lemon balm, which I used in many recipes, including a Japanese steamed bun called “Mushipan.” It really turned out smashingly good! Give it a try, it’s a healthier version than muffins since it uses less sugar and no butter, just a drop of oil.

Then, there was always a handful of strawberries every now and then. Mostly the alpine strawberries. I’m happy to report that they are still putting out fruits. The Sequoia strawberries, on the other hand, are about done.

Can you see how rich the color of that yolk is?

Last but not least, there were eggs from a friend’s backyard. Thank you, Laurie! I keep telling her I would pay for these eggs, but she keeps refusing my money. These eggs are big and oh, so rich and so good, because they are free-range organic eggs. I have to turn them into something special. Stay tuned, I have something in mind.

All in all, it wasn’t bad, I guess. At least I was able to use something from the garden for a few meals, and that’s always a good thing, right? I can’t wait for the tomatoes and peppers to start kicking in. Seems like everything is slow this year.

In the meantime, enjoy this one more time, and then hop over to Daphne’s Dandelions to view more harvests, real ones!