Distraction #2, Food and Wine: How to Keep from being Depressed by Today's News

Early summer garden salad, with mesclun mix greens and radishes from our garden

When Tom and I were first married, I did a lot of cooking. We were undergraduates at Texas A&M University, and my dishes then were family comfort food favorites (potato soup; Cowboy Stew), recipes from my grandmothers (Grandma Dugat's Sweet Potato Casserole), recipes exchanged with friends (Fruit Pizza) and recipes I would pick up in a local grocery store (Shrimp Victoria, from the Texas Agricultural Extension Service). This latter dish I made many, many times as I went from being an undergraduate to a graduate student to an instructor at Louisiana State University and beyond. You could gain weight just looking at the (now food-spattered but still clearly legible) recipe: 1 pound raw Texas shrimp, peeled and deveined; 1 cup sour cream; 1/2 cup finely chopped onion; 1/4 cup margarine or butter; 1 can (6 ounces) mushrooms; 1 tablespoon flour; 1/4 teaspoon of salt; dash cayenne pepper; 1 1/2 cups cooked rice. Sauteed, gently cooked, and served over rice, that shrimp dish was for years the fanciest dish I prepared for company (along with Shrimp Couscous).

As the years passed, however, Tom took over a great deal of the cooking. He introduced hand-gathered (by himself and a friend who was Anishinaabe) wild rice for the dishes I learned to cook in Minnesota (wild rice soup; wild rice casserole). He created many variations on veggie stir-fries and Indian curries; lentil and sweet potato soup; tofu, fried with his special spice blend, sauteed with veggies; homemade sushi. I stuck with my old favorites, such as my family recipe of potato soup, modifying it over time: adding sausage and garlic to the simple potato-onion-salt and pepper-liquid (milk and water) recipe; taking out the sausage as two members of the family became vegetarians and adding cheese; carmelizing the onions before adding to the soup; adding homemade vegetable stock to the milk base. 

But this summer I began cooking dinner every evening, looking for ways to prepare fresh vegetables from our Arizona garden. Spending time looking for likely recipes online, bookmarking the best ones, thinking of how to modify them to our tastes or to the ingredients on hand were wonderful distractions from focusing on Internet news that was guaranteed to bring up my blood pressure.

And so, when the veggies started coming in, I found recipes to fit our palate, such as Mexican Pepper Casserole from The Moosewood Cookbook. To the original recipe, I added garlic and one thinly sliced yellow squash.

Mexican Pepper Casserole, recipe from the 2014 version of The Moosewood Cookbook, by Mollie Katzen

While in Phoenix one weekend, we went by Whole Foods, and I bought some fancy packages of jello powder. Some fresh strawberries (with real whipped cream, not Cool Whip) made a nice touch for dessert with the casserole above:

Strawberry jello with little strawberry hearts

I also baked a tomato pie for the first time, with fresh tomatoes from our garden and a homemade butter pie crust.

Fresh vegetables from our summer garden

My first tomato pie. The butter pie crust shrank a bit and burned at the edges, but...

YUM!

When Tom and I cooked together, I would often make a salad, and he would stir-fry vegetables from the garden; I might put on some squash to steam, sprinkled with dried tarragon. But as the summer progressed and the 2016 Presidential campaign became more heated, you can see how my cooking became a bit more calorie-laden.

I battered our garden-fresh squash in egg, flour and spices--and fried it.

And I set about improving dishes I had tried before and others I hadn't made in a long time. (I used to make apple pie from scratch fairly frequently.)

My second attempt at tomato pie; I achieved a more uniform, less blackened crust. I added a nutty bread crumb and Parmesan cheese topping.

I managed to make one of the prettiest apple pies I had made in a long time, with a double butter crust and apples from our small orchard.

I loaded up fresh vegetable casseroles with various cheeses.

Squash Casserole

A friend suggested that I try to make tomato tarts since we had so many tomatoes from our garden. I experimented first with a few tomatoes and with butter pie crust left over from the apple pie I had made a couple of days previously.

My first experimental tomato tart

I tried a full-sized one next:

My first "real" tomato tart

Last night I made another tomato tart, using a butter pie crust recipe because I didn't have the ingredients for the crust of a fancier recipe I found online.

Rolling out the dough for the pie crust--I added fresh rosemary to the dough.

The final result: perhaps the last tomato tart of the season

Why I now need to get back on the elliptical every day

It took me almost three hours to make that last tomato tart, from gathering the green onions and parsley from the garden to making and rolling out the dough to cutting up the tomatoes and placing them on top of the Grey Poupon, sauteed onion and Serrano peppers, cheese, and fresh herb layers. Cooking from scratch takes a lot of time, time that otherwise might be spent brooding over the news, the days events, all one's past failings....whatever. 

I do, however, caution about the wine: too much, and you're likely to leave that message on a Facebook page that you have long avoided doing. Please be a bit sparing with the liquor in drowning your political angst. Screaming into your pillow may not wake your neighbors, but it's likely to upset your partner, as sympathetic as he may be. 

Another undesired result can be weight gain. Tom and I are going to be eating a lot less cheese-laden casseroles and vegetable pies with butter crusts. I'm looking for simple recipes for canned tomatoes, since Tom canned 53 pints of our summer produce. I just found a cool Gazpacho recipe in The Moosewood Cookbook, just right for winding down after the presidential election, all emotion spent.

A New Year: The Garden I Have Now

early January, aloe vera blooming

In April of 2011, I moved to southeast Louisiana to join my husband, who had been hired as a wildlife refuge planner (Natural Resource Planner) for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Tom had already been working in Louisiana for ten months. In the almost four years since I have lived here (twenty-five years ago we lived in another Louisiana town while Tom finished his PhD at Louisiana State University and I taught there in the Department of English), I have really enjoyed year-round gardening and recording my gardening experiences on this blog. I first began the blog in 2007--in a different town, in a different state-- as a way to keep myself connected to the world--to demonstrate to my children that even though I had given up on my career, such as it was, I hadn't given up on living and creating a meaningful life beyond a paycheck. In these past four years, I have been involved in social justice issues (creating and writing a blog for a social justice group, attending meetings of the Louisiana legislature, educating myself and then writing letters to local leaders against allowing hydraulic fracturing in our parish with its sole-source water aquifer, among others) and in helping encourage transparency in local government (attending and taking notes at the Planning and Zoning Commission meetings in our small town and publishing those notes on the Facebook page of our local "sustainable growth" organization). Many of my friends here are far more politically active than I am, but I am happy to have done my part--as long as that part did not take me away from my garden too long.

And despite the very wet weather we experienced the last week of the old year and the cooler weather we're experiencing now, the garden is still producing. Our loofah experiment was mixed. The plants grew very quickly, taking over the bamboo trellis Tom built for them and then spreading past the garden and into the yard. The fruits grew huge, but as they were still green when we had our first frost, we were afraid we would lose the entire crop. However, Tom managed to harvest several large fruits that had matured to the fibrous texture of bath sponges, and he is now trying to cure them out. This requires peeling them and soaking the spongy interiors in a solution of bleach and water. The hot, humid Louisiana climate made them moldy, but we will be able to salvage some of the loofahs for sponges.

loofahs

The arugula, mustard mixes, and dill that I planted in the fall are doing very well. Home for the holidays, our daughter suggested that I make an arugula pesto to serve with pasta. I found a recipe online and was very pleased with the result (recipe below).

arugula, mustard, bronze fennel

dill

Our winter garden also includes garlic, which won't be ready for harvest until June, green shallots (onions), and looseleaf lettuce and mesclun mixes. The radishes we planted did not do very well this year. And while the gourd plants grew very promisingly, most of the gourds dropped off the plants and rotted in the humid Louisiana weather. I managed to salvage a couple of gourds, one which I emptied of its seeds and made into a decorative box for my daughter and the other which I painted and kept intact as a musical shaker.

Usually at this time of the year I begin planning my spring garden, but this year we're expecting some big changes in our lives, and so I am enjoying the garden I have now.  

Recipe: Arugula Pesto (Original recipe here)

4 cups packed fresh arugula
1 tablespoon minced garlic
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1 cup pure olive oil
2 tablespoon pine nuts, toasted, plus 1 tablespoon (I used pecans because that is what I had on hand)
1/8 teaspoon vitamin C (optional) (I did not include)
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan

Prepare an ice water bath in a large bowl, and bring a large pot of water to a boil. Put the arugula in a large sieve and plunge it into the boiling water. Immediately immerse all the arugula and stir so that it blanches evenly. Blanch for about 15 seconds. Remove, shake off the excess water, then plunge the arugula into the ice water bath and stir again so it cools as fast as possible. Drain well.

Squeeze the water out of the arugula with your hands until very dry. Roughly chop the arugula and put in a blender. Add the garlic, salt and pepper to taste, olive oil, 2 tablespoons of the pine nuts (I used pecans), and the vitamin C, if using. Blend for at least 30 seconds. In this way the green of the arugula will thoroughly color the oil. Add the cheese and pulse to combine. The pesto will keep several days in a tightly sealed container in the refrigerator.

Pull out before dinner to get to room temperature. Before serving, add the remaining 1 tablespoon toasted pinenuts (or pecans or walnuts).

Recipe courtesy Michael Chiarello


Read more at: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/michael-chiarello/arugula-pesto-recipe.html?oc=linkback

gourd box with a crocheted surround that I made

bottom of the gourd box--I made up the pattern as I went along, so I'm glad the crocheted bit turned out as well as it did.