All Recipes
So there we were at the Union Square greenmarket,
in search of interesting squash of which there turned out to be not very much, and there IT was, Romanesco! The absolutely best cauliflower in the world, if cauliflower it is. ( Some say broccoli, some say cauliflower, most in the know say they don’t know; but if you go by culinary properties, it’s cauliflower)
Photo by John Walker
Doesn’t do to go on about the holy grail or anything, but Romanesco has yet to be readily available, even in the uppermost of upscale markets, and growing it is – see below – a pain, so it’s definitely a “must buy,” even when it costs more than the very reasonable 3 bucks a head they were charging last Saturday.
Romanesco is as delicious as it is gorgeous: less crumbly than other cauliflowers, more toothsome than broccoli, slightly sweet , slightly nutty, not sulfurous unless you let it spend too much time in table-décor mode.
Displaying Romanesco is simplicity itself; just cut the base so it stands level, then put it in a slick of water. (If you use a bowl, be sure the water doesn’t come more than a half-inch or so up the base.) It will stay handsome for 2 or 3 days if it’s kept out of the sun; you can get 4 or more if you put it in the fridge each night. The base is tough, difficult to slice without pressing so firmly you break off points. Use a serrated knife.
Eating Romanesco: For best flavor and texture, buy two, so you can display one and keep the other in the coldest part of the fridge until you eat it asap. Simplest thing is to eat it raw, with coarse salt. Next easiest thing is raw with just about any dip, although the very best may be
Bagna Cauda
Translates “hot bath,” and must be hot to be tasty, so the most important ingredient is a small chafing dish or a saucepan that fits neatly on a portable burner. Good with any vegetable firm enough to dip; just be sure to let whatever it is come to room temperature before serving; the vegetable will have better flavor and it won’t cool its coating and spoil the effect. This recipe is adapted from from my 1969 edition of Ada Boni’s justifiably durable – albeit currently out of print – Italian Regional Cooking. It’s much heavier on butter than most, and even I, the Dairy Queen, often use mostly oil. But before you dismiss the butter out of hand, try it, especially with strong flavored vegetables such as the traditional cardoon ( also endive, celery root, bell pepper and cole flowers ).
½ pound unsalted butter
¼ cup olive oil
2 – 4 tablespoons minced garlic ( use more if it’s hardneck , less if it’s conventional)
6 canned anchovy filets
optional : 1 small thinly sliced truffle
Melt butter with oil over low heat, then add garlic and let it seethe without coloring. Remove from heat, add anchovies and let them sit a minute to soften. Mush them around with a wooden spoon until they dissolve. ( Add truffle if using), salt to taste, reheat to simmering and serve ditto.
Please report back if you try the truffle; confess I’ve never in 40 years of using the recipe.
Cooking Romanesco: like broccoli and cauliflower, chunks are tastiest steam-sautaéed.
1. Cut off florets, cut interior into slightly-less-than floret size chunks. Boil about 1/2 inch of water in a non-reactive sautaé pan large enough to hold the pieces in a single layer. Add pieces, partially cover the pan and stay nearby, alert for the sizzle of “watersallgoneeeek!”. Shake pan (or stir contents) from time to time.
2. In less than 5 minutes, when almost all of the water has evaporated, test a chunk. If it’s still near-raw, turn down the heat, cover the pan and keep cooking until almost done. If initial boiling yields almost done, proceed at once to
3. Remove cover. Stand right there shaking the pan until it’s dry, then add enough olive oil or butter to coat all pieces thinly. Add seasonings if wanted: minced garlic, shredded lemon zest, julienned sweet or hot red pepper, toasted cumin seeds… Turn heat to medium and keep cooking until the chunks are just cooked through and starting to turn gold at the edges. Sprinkle w/ coarse salt and eat ’em up. Good cold if you use olive oil.
Why I say growing Romanesco is a pain:
There are a number of different cultivars, some hybrid, some open pollinated (Romanesco dates back to at least the 16th century), but even the earliest takes about 80 days to single-head-per-plant harvest , counting from when you plant out the 4 to 6 week old seedlings. Seedlings are frost tender, but those 80 days must all be cool ones, so Romanesco is a fall crop in the Northeast.
That means getting the seedlings going in the heat of summer, a challenge given their preferred growing temperature of roughly 60 degrees. Then, Romanesco being a cauliflower, it needs near-neutral, highly-fertile soil, plenty of moisture, plenty of room to grow – at least 18 inches between plants and 30 inches between rows – and plenty of attention to bug and disease prevention; Romanesco is vulnerable to every one of the 350,000 afflictions that target brassicas. Other than that, piece of cake.
The photographer:
John Walker was attracted by Romanesco’s fractal form, then fell briefly into vegetable love before once more romancing the math.
A reflection on the spinach catastrophe is coming along as soon as I cool down a bit – talk about steamed! I’m ready to kill every news outlet that said nothing about “eat local.” But first, for those legions of sensible people who buy their spinach at the farmers’ market, a tip on washing . I’m sure the (currently radioactive) bagged stuff only got so popular because it’s so easy to use.
There are two tricks to easy greens-washing.
1. Chop first. Dirt and sand fall off more easily when pieces are small, especially if they’re pieces of something as corrugated as spinach.
2. Use a large basin of water. Dunk the material and swish it around, then lift into a colander. Clean the basin. Repeat until no more dirt falls to the bottom. If you live where water should be conserved, just use two big bowls and pour the water back and forth until the very last rinse.
No denying – in fact no escaping – it’s basil and tomato season. The combo is everywhere, at every level of splendor. Amazingly, even in August there are restaurants awash in styrofoam agribusiness tomatoes, leathery, soap-flavored basil and mozzarella the texture of something vulcanized, but in most cases you can count on getting something pretty good, and often you get something pretty great: a combination of dead ripe, sweet home grown tomato and tender young sun-kissed basil, one of gastronomy’s finest pairings, an all time winner –
just not all the time, dammit!
Let’s consider giving it a rest, and not only because this marvy duo is less than fun when it shows up for the 10th time in a week. Time apart is also a boon to the tomatoes, which always end up playing second fiddle to their minty/musky friend.
But that doesn’t mean basil should be neglected, not when it’s so good with snap beans, summer squash, grilled fish , pasta – pesto! (recipe follows) – and if you are feeling nouvelle, nectarines.
Basil that’s ready to cut back right now. ( 3 or 4 days ago, actually) .See below for details.
* Harvesting. It’s best to gather basil at the end of the day. Flavor is strongest and sweetest then, and evening-cut stems last longer. Just be sure to get out there before the dew falls; wet leaves muck up recipes and rot fast in storage.
* Storing. Basil and the refrigerator are not friends; the cold turns the leaves black in very short order. It does pay to keep the stems in water, and since there’s nothing like having the inspiration right in front of you when you’re cooking, I usually keep a bouquet of basil (along with other tender herbs such as parsley, dill, summer savory, and cilantro) in a jar of water near the prep area. Just strip all leaves that would be below the water line before you submerge the stems; change the water daily; and keep the jar out of the sun.
* Plant maintenance and multiplication. Basil gets grassy flavored and leathery as soon as it starts forming flowers. It also stops making green growth. So don’t let it bloom.
As soon as you see the slightest indication that flower stems are about to start, cut plants back, at least 2 or 3 branches down and even farther is better. Pruned plants will rebound quickly, sending out tender stems and tender leaves. As a plus, pruned-off stems with several leaf nodes can often be persuaded to send out roots.
Choose stems that do not have flowers. Store in jars of water as described above. Pot ’em up when roots are about ½ inch long and you’ll have plenty of young plants to tide you over the swing season (frosty nights; warm days; pots of basil in the sun, sheltered from frost by the porch roof). Be warned that if you root stems that have flower nodes you will not have young plants. You’ll have new old plants, which will promptly make tough flowering stems instead of tender growth.
PISTACHIO PESTO
(from The Modern Country Cook )
This is actually more a pistachio sauce with basil than anything that could legitimately be called pesto, but it’s a nice change from the usual, for which everyone already has a favorite recipe. I used to be of the opinion that this mixture did not freeze well but I’ve changed my mind – it’s fine. Just be sure to wrap air-tight and freeze in small quantities.
For about 1 ½ cups, 4 to 6 servings:
1 large clove of garlic, minced fine
3 tbl. freshly grated Parmesan
4 oz. unsalted , shelled roasted pistachios
2 lightly packed cups basil leaves
1/3 to ½ cup light cream ( or ¼ cup whipping cream and some milk)
salt
Put the garlic , cheese and nuts in a food processor and grind until the nut chunks are a bit smaller than those in chunky peanut butter. Add basil, stir to get it under the blades and grind again, freeing the leaves with a knife from time to time, until you have a homogenous paste. Whirr in enough dairy to turn the sauce the consistency of mayo. Salt to taste that’s it.
You have to grow the lettuce in the shade (of the tomato plants, for instance) but other than that, August and September are glory time for one of the greatest food items ever assembled, that lunch of lunches, the BLT.
Can’t really say there’s only one recipe. Say rather there’s only one correct set of components .
One ingredient here is a ringer – can you spot it? Read on.
A Proper BLT:
the Bacon: Local pork. No nitrates. Put slices in a single layer in a heavy cast-iron skillet . Cook slowly, turning often, until most of the fat is rendered and the bacon is well-browned and crisp. Drain. Save fat for cornbread, fried green tomatoes and other baconfat-needy items.
( For a while there I was doing the bacon in the microwave, sandwiching it between unbleached paper towels according to micro directions. It got very crisp and was notably ungreasy, but all that lovely bacon fat was lost and the crispness of the bacon was an oddly dry, industrial crispness reminiscent of fake bacon bits. )
the Lettuce: Preferably from the garden. Crisp but not agribusiness-romaine crisp; it has to play well with others while adding a light, fresh note to the ensemble.
the Tomatoes: Ripe on the edge of falling apart but not falling over it. The ones in the picture are, clockwise from top: Aunt Ruby’s German Green, one of the sweetest heirlooms available; Japanese Trifele, a high-yielding, deep-flavored “black” ; and the unfortunately-named Sophie’s Choice, a new, supposedly early variety trialed this year and not destined for repeat although it tastes pretty good ( plants are small, low-yielding, and not significantly earlier than main crop tomatoes).
the Mayonnaise: Homemade mayonnaise is all very well, but NOT on a BLT, which should be made with Hellmann’s. period. The jar in the picture contains a version made with lime juice for the Latino market and alas not available everywhere. Good though.
And thus we come to the ringer,
the Bread: That’s a ciabatta in the picture and it did make a tasty sandwich, but a naturally-leavened bread full of big holes in the European style is not right for a BLT. What’s wanted is old fashioned Pullman bread, aka pain de mie, the bread that got debased into wonderbread. Properly made, the square, soft-crusted loaf has a very tight, even crumb and just a tiny touch of sweetness to go with the blended flavors of milk and yeasted wheat.
(Please scroll down or hit coming attractions for the Garden Tour Plant List)
With garlic, it’s almost impossible to fail completely. Plant one clove, get one multi-clove bulb, pretty much no matter what. The catch is that it’s quite easy to fail partially. I did for years, simply because I kept planting softneck garlic, the most common kind, even though I was in Maine and the garlic wanted to be in Southern California. Over and over, I got small bulbs filled with small cloves that were very tedious to peel, a defect slightly mitigated by the fact that the garlic was so incredibly strong and hot you didn’t need (or want) much.
What I’ve learned since:
* If you live in the North, plant hardneck garlic, the kind with the stiff stem running up the middle. It’s much hardier than softneck garlic. Bigger and sweeter, too. ( it doesn’t store as well, but it stores well enough).
* Big cloves make big bulbs. When you get your seed garlic, either at the farmers’ market or from a source like Filaree Farm; plant only the large outer cloves. Eat the smaller cloves at the center or plant them in the perennial border and let them stay there indefinitely, making larger and larger clumps of their gorgeous, twirly stems.
* Plant in well-drained, fertile, weed-free soil, in late September or early October. Goal is to have good strong roots but only short green shoots when hard frost puts growth on hold until spring.
* Garlic comes up early. So do weeds. Mulch helps, but you’ll probably still have to pull a few. The plants are too narrow to shade anything out and they have small, shallow roots that do not compete well.
* The combo of increasing warmth and lengthening days tells the plants to stop making leaves and start making bulbs. Energy to do this comes from those leaves, so the goal is to have them get as big as possible as soon as possible. ( A little fish emulsion at intervals never hurt anybody).
* Bulbs keep putting on size until mature and must be mature to store well, but if they stay in the ground after they’re ready, they split and spoil quickly. Generally speaking, it’s time to harvest when about half of the leaves have fallen over or turned brown or both. Dig on a dry day, brush off dirt, then spread the plants on racks ( screens on bricks, for instance) to dry. Ideal spot is a barn or shed that’s warm, dry and dark. Let the bulbs cure for about a month, then cut off the tops; hardneck is not braid material.
* Eat lots. No matter how you store it, it will start sprouting by February. We like:
Garlic Roasted With Olive oil and Potatoes: several head’s worth of peeled cloves for about 2 pounds of small , new potatoes. Big splash of oil in a jellyroll pan. Be sure potatoes are thoroughly dry, so they don’t stick. Roll everything around to coat well, then bake in the upper third of a 400 degree oven until interiors are soft and outsides have lots of crisp brown spots, about 45 minutes. Stir with a flat spatula from time to time. Malden salt at the half hour mark or at the end but not at the start.
Now that it’s over it’s safe to say that this was not the best of morel years in the mid Hudson Valley. Early fruitings were poor, late ones abundant but caught by the rain. Dedicated (i.e. constant) hunters did ok, but we were able to go out only 8 or 10 times and thus ended up with only a few meal’s worth and nothing to put by. Over and over we either found nothing or found the ultimate frustration: carpets of riches too old and rain-ruined to be worth gathering. Fortunately, Bill the determined never quits and on his final trip of the season came home with about 7 pounds of gigantic blondes.
Which we have of course been eating and eating in all of the usual ways, and some less usual ones too, including as a rich saucelike mélange of morels and corn. The combo is an affront to freshness – corn and morels are at opposite ends of abundance season – and I can’t vouch for how this would taste with supermarket corn, but frozen home-grown Silver Queen from last fall was great.
We used it to blanket pork chops and still had quite a bit left over, so the next night when it was Bill’s turn to cook he used it as stuffing for an enormous honker morel almost 8 inches long. ( He halved the thing, egg-and-crumbed the pieces, shallow-fried them crisp and then applied the reheated sauce mixture at the very last minute).
CORN AND MOREL SAUCE
For 4 generous portions:
Slowly cook a diced medium onion in 2 tablespoons of butter until it is semi-caramelized, starting to get deep brown around the edges. Add about 4 loosely-packed cups of coarsely chopped mature morels (3 cups would probably be enough if they were young and less copiously juicy). Let stew uncovered, stirring from time to time, until the morels are fully cooked and liquid is reduced to a few tablespoons. Add a slug of Madeira , simmer for a minute or two, then add 1 ½ cups of very tender cooked corn and about 1/3 cup of heavy, not-ultrapasteurized cream. As soon as these items are hot, it’s done. Taste, add salt if needed and serve.
One of Bill’s finds, with the proper cooking fat.
I’m seldom out ahead of the pack, but I did get fooled before April 1st. On the most recent podcast , to be exact, when Dean sidetracked my passionate defense of home cooking into a celebration of dandelions.
Well, okay. Not the best argument for home cooking. But a GREAT example of great food close to home. Dandelions are everywhere, first green of the season. They’re delicious (like endive, only more so) and almost obscenely good for you : tons of vitamin A, quantities of B complex, C, and D, plus iron, potassium, and zinc.
To say nothing of absolutely free,
BULLETIN: Just looked out at the feeder. The goldfinches are golden again, drab winter plumage all gone.
WILTED DANDELIONS
This is the way I learned to love them when I was a kid in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Italians have other ideas, which will be addressed another time.
For about 4 to 6 side dish servings or dinner for 2
A good sized heap – half a brown paper grocery bag full – of young dandelions ( see below) or other bitter greens, washed and coarsely chopped
½ pound bacon
1/3 cup cider vinegar
1/3 cup water
3 or 4 tablespoons brown sugar
Several turns of the pepper mill
A bit of minced garlic is not authentic but is tasty
2 hardboiled eggs
1. Let the greens come to room temperature in a large, heatproof bowl. Cook the bacon in a heavy skillet over low heat until very crisp.
2. Set the bacon aside to drain and pour off all but about 1/3 cup of the bacon fat. Put the pan aside, off the heat. Crumble the bacon and slice the eggs thinly.
3. Add the vinegar, water, sugar , pepper (and garlic) to the skillet and bring the mixture to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar. When sugar is dissolved, bring dressing to a rolling boil and pour it over the greens. Toss thoroughly. Garnish with bacon and hard egg and serve.
(If the season is almost over and the greens are on the serious side, cook them briefly in the dressing … just until wilted.)
To Harvest and Clean Dandelions:
Size doesn’t matter – the older the root, the larger the rosette of leaves – but youth is crucial: go for plants with small, tight flowerbuds buried in the center. Once buds start swelling, greens turn bitter and tough.
Cut the rosette at ground level. Discard any discolored leaves and trim off the dirt-covered base before dropping the rest in your bag or basket.
Separate leaves and chop coarsely, then dump in a large bowl of cool water. Swish ’em around, then lift into a colander. Discard sandy water in bowl. Repeat until no more sand comes out. It almost always takes 3 passes and often takes more .
(Taste a leaf, bearing in mind that the dressing will gentle them quite a bit. If they still seem mindbendingly bitter, let them soak in cool water for an hour or two). Drain so they’re not sopping wet but don’t worry about drying them.
Loveliest of trees, the maple now
Is hung with
…buckets along the trunk, actually.
Thus the poetic rhythm of north-country life. No matter how cold it is, spring has arrived. We are in sap season, the alternation of freezing nights and warm, sunny days that brings sugar-laden “sweetwater” up through the dense wood of maple trees to nourish the swelling buds.
You can make syrup from the sap of many different maples – in fact, you can make it from birch – but the sweetest and most delicious comes from sugar maple ( Acer saccharum) and black maple ( A. nigrum), beautiful trees that glow like fire in autumn and, as if sweetness and light weren’t enough, are the “maple” of first class hardwood and figured wood like tiger maple.
These days, alas, sugar maples are also a flock of red-feathered canaries, weakening and dying in droves. Many factors are involved, but acid rain is one of the big ones. And because hard maples are cold climate plants, they’re on the sure victim list when it comes to global warming.
In other words: get it while you can. Buying from a local producer means sweet support for open space – and if you have access to a few trees, consider making your own. Our family did it for years when Celia, my stepdaughter, was small. The ritual was one of her favorites and she was always the first to notice the buckets on roadside trees.
Making maple syrup is ridiculously easy and doesn’t call for any expensive equipment. The most important thing you need – other than access to a few trees – is an outdoor heat source like a campfire to do the boiling down. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, and that means a whole heap of steam, as we discovered the first year we tried it and incidentally stripped the wallpaper in the bedroom above the kitchen.
Every year, the syrup is syrup but every year it’s different. Sometimes smoky, sometimes honeylike , sometimes with a hint of fruit and sometimes a whiff of leather. The taste depends on how long the sap runs, on how much sun the trees got last summer. It depends on which trees gave much and which ones little, on the wind and the rain…
Celia is grown up and gone now; we haven’t made syrup for years. But we still have quite a bit of it left, a reminder of happy times; and every March those trees hung with buckets say ” remember, remember.”
Maple syrup is generally resistant to being used in recipes – the best thing to do with it is to just pour it over something ( or put a drop in some unblended scotch). But we are all big fans of Les Grandperes, an easy, down-home cottage pudding that’s basically biscuits on syrup. It’s good with vanilla ice cream and great with sheep’s milk yogurt.
Les Grandperes
This French Canadian recipe comes from Alice Perron, a fine home cook and the woman behind the stove at Bien Fait Fruitcakes
.
for 6 servings:
dough for Aunt Ida’s Biscuits ( below)
1-1/2 cups maple syrup
1/2 cup boiling water
1. Heat oven to 425 degrees. Lavishly butter an 8x8x2-inch baking dish and pour in the maple syrup. Pour in the water, then put the dish in the oven until the syrup is bubbling, about 8 to 10 minutes.
2. While syrup is heating, roll out dough 3/4 inch thick and use a biscuit cutter to cut out 9 1-1/2-inch discs. ( Refrigerate remaining dough. Use it to make biscuits within 24 hours)
3. Place the circles side by side, just barely touching, on the bubbling syrup. Bake for 10 minutes, then lower heat to 350 and bake until the biscuits are richly browned, about 5 minutes more.
Alice’s Aunt Ida’s Biscuits
For 12 large or 18 small biscuits:
2-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar (optional)
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup cold butter
1 egg, beaten
2/3 cup milk
1. Heat the oven to 425. Thoroughly combine the dry ingredients.
2. Cut in the butter until it resembles small peas. Beat the egg with the milk and stir it in, stopping as soon as all the flour is dampened.
3. Turn the dough onto a floured board and knead 2 or 3 times, then roll out 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick and cut with a sharp cutter. ( Scraps are lightest if baked as-is; re-rolling the dough makes it tough.)
4. Place biscuits, well separated, on an ungreased baking sheet and bake until risen and nicely browned, about 15 to 20 minutes.
Sorry it took so long, but here are the muffins discussed at some length back on February 4th.
FULL BREAKFAST BRAN MUFFINS
Honesty compels me to admit the low-fat version was an accident ( I was melting the butter on the woodstove in another room, and you know what they say about “out of sight…”). But it turns out these muffins are very tasty – maybe even tastier – when the only butter you use is used to grease the cups. Just be warned that that’s tasty, not tender; texture is definitely better when you put the butter in. And muffins made with no added fat get stale a lot faster.
For 12 muffins:
1 cup wheat bran
1 1/3 cups whole milk yogurt
¼ cup butter (optional, see above), plus butter for the pan(s)
1 ¾ cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 ½ tsp. fresh* baking powder
1 ½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp salt, or a bit more if it’s unsalted butter
2 extra-large eggs
¼ cup lightly piled* brown sugar
¼ cup molasses
3 tbl. wheat germ
¾ cup light or dark raisins or diced dried apricots or any combination thereof.
1. Set oven to 400 degrees.
2. In a small bowl, mix the bran with about half the yogurt. Set aside. In another small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
3. Melt the butter if using. Heavily butter a dozen* 1/3-cup muffin cups.
4. Use the whisk to lightly beat the eggs, then beat in the remaining yogurt, brown sugar, molasses, wheat germ and reserved bran mixture.
5. Switch to a large mixing spoon and quickly stir in the fruit lumps, then the flour mixture. Distribute among the prepared muffin cups, filling them 3/4 to 4/5 full (these don’t rise all that much). Bake until well browned and dry-toothpick producing, about 20 minutes. Cool briefly in the pan before turning out onto a rack or into the breadbasket.
* Fresh Baking Powder: Unless you’re really big for biscuits or belong to Cornbread Nation, it’s quite likely your can of baking powder has been around long enough to lose lifting power. If you have reason to suspect staleness, dissolve a teaspoon or so in a half cup of hot water and watch for vigorous fizzing. Medium fizzing is ok – just use 2 teaspoons. But languid bubbles or none at all mean it’s time for a new can.
*Measuring Brown Sugar: Because brown sugars vary so much in comparative loft, the famous instruction “tightly packed” helps ensure accuracy when you’re measuring by volume. But I can’t bring myself to call for “2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons tightly packed brown sugar,” which is about the amount you want. (In theory, tight packing also smooths lumps. In theory. )
* Muffin Cups: Hold quite different amounts, so it pays to measure. It also pays to use two 6-cup pans instead of one that holds a dozen. The 2 in the middle of a 12 cupper don’t get as much heat as those on the outside, so they tend to rise less and cook less quickly.
Today is mostly a pair of creature features – deer vs. daylilies and squirrel counting comin’ right up. But first, a spoonful of recipe rescue at the request of my good friend Sue,
She called the other night in a panic –
“Is there anything you can add to make something less hot? ” Turns out she was making a big deal cioppino for a whole bunch of spice averse friends and she’d overdone the hot pepper flakes.
And this in spite of using far less than the recipe called for. Well, there isn’t anything you can add (except a great deal more of everything else). All she could do was make a quick batch of rice for people to pour their hot hot stew on top of. That and pass a bowl of sour cream, which is a horrible idea from the culinary standpoint but at least could keep people from starving. And please don’t write to say why not pasta – it doesn’t mitigate heat the way rice does.
In future, I suggested, take about a third of a cup of broth out and add the small amount of pepper to that. Then add the seasoned broth to the big pot o’ stuff until you like the result. Pause a moment between additions; it takes a while for the heat to disperse, and be sure to KEEP TASTING! This works for anything that might cause problems yet is added in such small quantities it’s easy to overdo. Truffle oil, for example, the most regrettably overused of yesterday’s trendy seasonings.
On to the deer, since I promised last week I’d give some tips for keeping them out of the daylilies.
Tip A number one is fencing. It was fencing before and it’s still fencing, but putting it on the list is sort of cheating because everybody knows it and everybody keeps hoping there’s something else and getting a dog doesn’t count.
So: repellents. Obviously, those that smell bad before they taste bad are better. Most of them keep smelling bad to deer even after they no longer smell bad to you, but it’s a good idea to try ’em out first – in – as they say of cleaning products – an unobtrusive spot.
A few brands with good reviews include: plantskydd , deer off , deer out, liquid fence, and deer chaser, but there are dozens. Those based on dried blood, garlic , rotten eggs, ammonia salts, peppermint , cinnamon or some combination thereof seem to work better than predator urine, probably because it doesn’t take deer long to figure out that the predator is not in the vicinity.
Choose at least 2 kinds and keep switching. Deer can become habituated to almost anything, so the more you can keep ’em off guard, the better. Start making the area repulsive when the scapes start growing, well before the buds develop, then spray the buds. If you have fragrant daylilies , stop when the buds are about half-swollen.
And although you don’t spray it on, don’t forget good old smelly soap: Dial and Irish Spring are favorites. Just put a few chips in a bag of cheesecloth and use a clothespin to attach the bag to a thin bamboo stake. The soap should be slightly above the lily buds. Other strategies to be posted shortly and meanwhile:
Please send me a squirrel count (ll@leslieland.com). Are you seeing more of ’em? Fewer? The same as usual? We are seeing none at all, though I hesitate to jinx things by mentioning it. Our birdfeeders have been overrun, winter and summer, for 15 years – ever since we came to this house – and this winter there are suddenly none. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Rien. I see them out in the world when I’m driving, so they are clearly still here with us on the planet…
