On right, fresh chestnuts. On left, one of the all-time convenience ingredients: peeled, skinned and ready to go, as easy to cook as dried beans.
Admittedly, dried chestnuts don’t have the mashed potato fluffiness of the fresh article. Somewhere between mealy and creamy is about the best they can do. But other than that they’re just shortcut chestnuts: great in soups and stews and stuffings, great with winter vegetables and great in holiday sweets and why they aren’t more widely adored is a mystery to me.
Sweet Snowballs (chestnut and white chocolate candy) recipe at the end of the post.
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Just a little reminder it’s not going to be winter forever.
First, though, present time. Here’s my perennial shopping list ( with source links) of good gifts for gardeners.
Membership in The Garden Conservancy is on that list without further explanation and at this point none may be needed. But just for the record: after starting small and being exceedingly Northeast-centric, the Conservancy is now saving significant gardens all over the US and offering benefits almost everywhere. Just the ticket for garden-loving friends, regardless of skill level or actual possession of garden.
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One of my favorites! For trouble-free late fall bloom on a plant that’s lovely all summer long, I’m with Eric in finding it among the best.
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Last Saturday winter began in earnest: steel gray sky, cotton candy snow: very beautiful, very cold,
Then, after the mail came, very much time to be thinking about next year’s tomatoes.
Seed catalogs don’t wait for Christmas any more; they’ve been coming in for about a month. Now the pace is picking up and after last summer’s disastrous late blight, I’m looking through their offerings in a whole new way, because
In the summer of ’09, purely by accident, we had hybrid beefsteaks in the greenhouse.
They were the only tomatoes we got and although they weren’t as good as our favorite heirlooms they were better than anything we could buy locally, heirloom or hybrid.
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December 1st, 6:00 PM: The candied grapefruit rind is bubbling in the syrup, almost done, so I’m sort of stuck in the kitchen when I notice it’s cold outside in the clear still night under the fat moon. So of course I get nervous about the lettuce and my pet baby radicchios.
The radicchios are still making progress toward heading up; I continue to have hope
Decide to put covers back on even though plants are already at that frozen stage where you shouldn’t touch them if you want them to thaw unharmed. Wilted tips better than wilted everything being my thinking on that.
Turn off the grapefruit (recipe follows)
Home candied citrus rind is worlds better than store-bought. Also extremely easy to make and very nearly free.
Put on the headlamp, recruit Bill, who puts on his headlamp, and down we go to cover most but not all of what’s left.
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In this post, our friend Eric over at Yale’s Marsh Gardens reports on his new pet greenhouse, which will include – finally! – a proper environment large enough to house the significant collections of desert plants. The cheiridopsis, an iceplant-relative that like most of them is only a weed in warmer climes, is about to be one very happy camper. (Eric, too, once the dust clears.)
the (currently somewhat cramped) carpet weed
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Even though we’ve had three days of feasting: two dinners and two lunches at our house, one dinner in town with another branch of the family.
Local Thanksgiving bouquet – the very last chrysanthemums
Twelve people ate here between Thursday night and Saturday morning– several of us more than once – so even though the Poughkeepsie branch ( Saturday night) had leftovers of its own we ought, by rights, to be out of turkey.
We are not, even though the bird only weighed 12 pounds after I got done boning it. There was so much other food the turkey was as in my opinion it should be, almost incidental.
If you don’t remember to remove the string that helped restore approximate turkey shape, the starring bird will have a bikini line.
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It would be beyond bogus to pretend we’re anything like self-sufficient. We’re not even notably local; I’m too fond of things like olives, lemons and pomegranate molasses.
But at Thanksgiving we always try – ok; I try; I’m the one who makes up the menu – to celebrate our own harvest, both from the wild and from the gardens.
Some years this includes the meat; we have venison. Bill has even on one occasion shot a deer so close to the back garden we were probably eating our hostas and roses along with the rest of the produce.
This year it’s turkey, just so I can keep my hand in. Local but not heritage. And the corn for the pudding ! you absolutely have to have corn pudding! will be a mixture of our own Black Mexican and some kind of tender hybrid from Beth’s farmstand up in Maine.
Corn from the days when we grew more kinds. Top to bottom: Ruby Queen, unknown hybrid (seed purchased and name forgotten by Bill), the Black Mexican we still grow, at the cornbread stage
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Over in Connecticut, our friend Eric at Yale’s Marsh Garden has lifted his eyes from his greenhouse’s travails and fastened them on the ginkgo trees. Herewith his overview of the ginkgo’s unique place in the plant kingdom, its fascinating history – and its worthiness in the garden.
Ginkgo biloba, a late-bloomer in the fall color department
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In theory, the combination of steam vents and tightly crimped edges prevents the juice leakage visible at left. In my view, if there isn’t so much juice at least a little bubbles out somewhere, there isn’t enough juice.
Inside that crust is a Three Cheers Pie (apple, pear and quince) in honor of this being pie season.
Of course, back last spring I would have said summer is pie season; with rhubarb as the opening salvo. Even before those stalks start getting stringy there will be cherries and peaches, plums and blueberries – all primary reasons for pie to exist.
On the other hand, next thing you know here come the apples and pears and pumpkins and then uh-oh, it’s Christmas, the one time of year when mincemeat pie…
Take your pick for maximum pie pressure, no matter how you slice it that’s a lot of crust. Here are a couple of the recipes I use, starting with that super-fast easy one.
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