Full Moon - Forever tied to The Ike

Full moon this week reminded me it's been two months since Ike. I'm sure it will always remind me of electricty-free Ike days when I see one. And it still makes me walk thru the house turning off lights.

Other post-Ike notes:

• It brought hummingbirds to my courtyard for the first time in years.
• It drove four-and-twenty doves from my palm - who won't be back since mockingbirds bought it.
• All the squirrels in my yard are adolescents (and all that entails). Asta is beside herself.
  
• Halloween morning four men walked down my street with chainsaws. Would have called 911 pre-Ike.
• Heavy trash trucks still crawl thru 3x a week. Trees are still falling.
• All frozen foods in Houston are new. Not a single package has a solid clump on one end or another yet.
• While bored witless recharging my phone in the car one day, I got the Bob Dylan CD unstuck from the player and it's good.
• While bored witless listening to talk radio, I cleaned every crevice of my ole jambox and it looks brand new.
• It was the 3rd store that finally had Asta's required Pedigree canned food. It was recalled the morning Ike hit and I had no way of knowing!
• My handwriting is legible again, almost engineering level form. Ike (in my neighborhood) is worth that alone!
• Still miss leaf confetti. Ike's winds tore leaves into little 1/2" pieces that covered the windows like mosaics some mad hippie created during the night. After things dried, twice a day the wind would pick up and they blew off the roof onto my courtyard like confetti. This lasted three days but one last confetti a week later delighted me once again.
  

Another thing I love about full moons. Little rocks always show up in the garden. Christy noticed when she used to work in my garden and asked me once where they came from. They're too random to be tossed by neighbors so I was sure they work themselves up from the soil.

What I noticed after that is there are more of them the day before and through the full moon. Don't call me crazy until you're intimately familiar with your soil. I've watched it for years and sometimes break up the soil a week before so they're more visible; but they'll come up thru hard soil as well.

Cooking spree! Pork and Cabbage Soup

I was afraid to restock my Ike-emptied fridge for the first 2 weeks after electricity was restored. Catching sight of both doors open for 15 days never failed to give me a start... kind of like seeing a relative laying on the kitchen floor bleeding profusely would. Not sure I'd survive throwing away another freezer full. Not to mention the dread of cooking everything all at once again.

Good decision because 10 days later it went off for 24 hours (new tree-falls on my lines). But it knocked comcast out of order which took 5 days to fix. I decided the odds of electricity failing again were enormous, and I couldn't work with no internet access, so I went shopping. I purchased 4 family packs of different pig parts :O! None of them cost over $1.67lb so I drug out the Foodsaver and started cooking (Please, Brer Fox, please don't throw me into the briar patch - this time it was fun cooking everything at once.)

First start was a loaf of whole wheat bread. My courtyard table gives the best rises but I wondered how it would be affected when the current coldwave kept the temp below 80 even at high noon. No worry. This happened in just under an hour. And, by Jove, Jon Stewart's right. Karl Rove's face DOES look like a loaf of unbaked bread dough.
All three dishes were prepped at the same time, in 3 different areas of the kitchen, so I guess I'll separate them by dish. (Hope I don't have to say these were finished and eaten over 36 hours) First was getting the pork and cabbage soup started in the crockpot.

This was .99lb pork steak cut into pieces and sauteed. Under the top steak (both packages) the steaks were 25% pork fat so I guess I'll be rendering lard in the near future. Not sure what I'll use it for but everyone from Homesick Texan to the top chefs give how to instructions and recipes on their blogs so what the hey.
Tossed the pork, raw onions, celery, carrots, and cabbage in the crockpot with Italian spices and poured in a can of diced tomatoes. 8 hours later it looked like this and I sliced into the whole wheat bread.


Mmmmm. This is good even if it's not cold outside.

Most Bang for the Buck Appetizer

Unique, fast, and easy.

Bought Rosa Bianca eggplant seeds (heirloom, Italian) on a whim, not knowing they take so long to ripen. They're softball size and the blooms are, too!

These should have been picked before IKE. Every morning I'd see four of them from my kitchen window getting older and older but who has time??? I did have time with no electricity for 15 days but unable to google a recipe. Finally peeled, cut into chunks and roasted them last night then mixed with olive oil, red wine and balsamic vinegar, green onions, capers and mint leaves. Wish I'd remembered the mushrooms in the fridge. This was delicious and so quick to prepare.

But everyone roasts eggplant. The topper is the Crisp Rosemary Flatbread I found on epicurious.com (be sure to read the reviews for other ideas). I've been searching for a cracker-like bread recipe since I first tried it at Sorrento years ago. This one is so easy, takes no yeast/kneading and even the first time was super simple. (I don't use parchment paper, just oiled the baking sheet and cooked it on the grill which may be why it took an extra 10 mins to brown.)


I have a fresh old-fashioned eggplant in the fridge and am making it again tonight with the addition of sliced mushrooms and chunks of roasted carrot. Wish I had Parmesan or goat cheese but there's only so much lost food you can afford to restock per month. Plus, I have this nagging feeling the electricity will suddenly go off again and I'll have to start all over. When does that end?

First Meals Post Ike

After more than a week of Dinner Impossibles - entrees and sides dictated by what's going bad the fastest instead of compatibility - Fiesta had the brand of NO olive salad I saw at the restaurant trade show and assumed I'd never find retail. Grabbed it and the rest of the fixings for a muffaletta... on a bolillo roll.
Saved a recipe last month from NPR which stated the olives go on one side only. Compounded that error by trimming meats but using both pieces on the tiny bolillo.

Tasted swell but next two made with those bolillos will have one layer of salami, olives on both sides, cheese on both sides. Will heat it in a cast iron skillet with another on top instead of using the microwave as well.

Made a loaf of whole wheat before grocery shopping thinking I'd only have sandwiches for a day or two while catching up with work. Couldn't wait to dig into it so this was breakfast the next morning.

Breakfast Sausage

SCORE! Fiesta had .99 lb family packs of pork sirloin. Made a batch of Homesick Texan's Breakfast Sausage on Day 3. I've tried four different online recipes and hers is by far my favorite. Only used 2lbs of the pork for this recipe so have enough left to freeze for stirfries, to grind for a freezer stock of dumplings,* and make more sausage.

So glad to have access to my food processor again.

Grind the pork, mix in the spices and it's done! I add 4 T water, as Nathan Lau suggests. He actually says water or wine which will be an interesting experiment.

Delicious, preservative free, and half the cost. I think this is what my Mommy and Daddy ate as breakfast sausage when they were young. Tomorrow is biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast.

* Did you assume, like I did, that wonton skins must be refrigerated because they'd get moldy? Ike taught me THIS is what happens when they're not refrigerated!

Papayas Revisited

Not only do they taste great for a Caribbean breakfast, every papaya seed I've ever planted has grown.

I discovered this at a Garcia BBQ. Luisa asked if I liked papayas and took me out beside their deck. She whacked one off a tree and cut it up! They grow quickly but are weaker than banana trees. 6-month old Asta chewed down a tree taller than I was that had thrived planted on my courtyard since before she was born.

Last April I gave a handful of seeds to Bill McCormick. Here's his papaya field Jan 1, 2008.
It almost doesn't qualify as frugal to plant and water them since they're always on sale for 49 cents a lb. But I'm starting over. I should scatter those fertile seeds on my sidewalks and driveway and see where the birds drop them in my yard. Label that entertainment.

UPDATE Sept 08
With fences and shingles down all over SW Houston:
"while my papaya trees were stripped almost bare of their branches, the fruit hung on.....They were tiny before the storm hit, and I had blooms as well....Seems as if they all laughed at Ike."