Pork Sale = Chorizo and Dumplings

Last week I coarse-ground a 4lb chuck roast because I craved a fat, juicy cheeseburger. Instead of that, I made sweet and sour meatloaf immediately. It was so good that when it was gone the next night I made another one. And quickly froze all the rest of the beef so I'm ready for chili when the next cold front hits.
Friday night, with Christmas carols by dead people blasting from the radio, 3lbs of pork sirloin was handled more efficiently. It was ground coarse then ground medium to make chorizo and pork dumplings.

Today's lunch was a chorizo burger on honeywheat/oatmeal/chopped almonds/sesame seed bread that was spread with whirred pintos and mayo, topped with live Romaine and arugula. Mmmm-mmmm, this was my fat juicy hamburger.

All I forgot was some pickled carrots but chunks of them were cooked in the pintos. Will try some in chorizo and scrambled eggs in the morning.

Offensive as decorations and sales are this week, Friday's Christmas tunes helped with the next stage which becomes tedious (like old music redone by young people who scream the lyrics!). At 1 heaping tsp per dumpling, you can see I'm going to make 100. 80 will be frozen. Costco's are very good but why pay $20 for 60 of them when homemade are $6 per 100?

It's like a tamale line but less intense.

Dinner was a double order but I had to test a few. Yes, that's salsa in the ginger sauce. So?

Sunday is Funday

5 days til Thanksgiving, today's high was 80°, and rainfall for November is 1/2" over the average. Everything's back to normal! Even with a warm day I can tell it's Fall because this is the only sun the courtyard gets all day. But chair cushions can stay out all day (if it's not raining) with no worry about them fading.

Turkeys are 29¢ a pound with $25 purchase and so much else is on sale I'll make two $25 trips before Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, the garden is bountiful. The mustard, bok choy, chard and peppers below were sauteed and then piled with garlic on a pizza. Green beans steamed.

Tomorrow starts salad twice a day to keep up. Always with a garlicky Caesar dressing and three-day old bread toasted with herbs as croutons. Left, red tip lettuce, window box is cilantro, Romaine, arugula.


Harvest time for lemon basil. Too much lemon taste for pesto but dried leaves are a tasty addition to tortilla soup and pintos. Didn't plan ahead, tho. The humidity's so high lately the salt is clumped in my shaker and why didn't I think there's no place to dry basil leaves in this climate? (Also note how the weeds are back all over the courtyard with weekly rain. Arrggh)
The ceiling fan is on 24/7 but they're still moist. Wonder if tying the branches with twine and hanging them in my winter coat closet would be aromatic or a disaster..
For the longest I've wanted to make a seafood dish with cubed crab, tomatoes, cukes, mango, and avocado stacked in layers inside a can with the bottom removed so it can be pushed out in place on the plate. If you've noticed, almost all cans have rounded bottoms making it impossible to open the bottom with a can opener. Found the perfect cans for appetizer and entree sized seafood stacks.
One of the biggest lessons a farmer learns is patience. No one rushes Mother Nature. I planted 24 garlic bulbs a month ago. None were sprouting so I didn't expect them to break ground until Dec. One came up within a week and 3 weeks later, still the only one, was 10" tall so I feared they had been treated with a non-sprouter I'd heard commercial growers use. I can fix that. I searched the bin and came up with these three sprouters to plant next to them (not on top of them because Mother Nature bats last and loves little tricks).

On this morning's walkaround I found 11 of the bulbs have now broken ground. I have plenty of room elsewhere (those bell peppers will stop bearing eventually) and one can never have enough garlic.

It's Time for Gardening in Texas

Jed Clampett would call my 2011 summer garden piiiitiiiful. Here are my green beans in early July and I watered them twice a day. Houston averages 2.3 days over 100° and this year we had 46, beginning in June. They didn't have a chance.

But now it's Fall and hope springs eternal. (Ignore the dead St Augustine. I am until Spring.)

Bed 1 already gets no sun so we'll start with
Bed 2
Back row: brussels sprouts, next row: cauliflower with garlic top and bottom along the strings, next row: bok choy, cauliflower, and a row of radishes along the string below, front row: 2 squares chard, collards, mustard greens.


Bed 3
Left: 1st skinny row is carrots, 2 rows of Romano green beans with beets in front, "empty" row is green cabbage, last row is bell peppers with 2 squares of red cabbage behind them.


West fence
Green trellis to left is sugar snap peas with Romaine in front, next trellis pickling cucumbers with yellow squash in front, next trellis sugar snap peas with zucchini in front, invisible chicken wire trellis snow peas with 2 rows of turnips in front.


Chain link on garage
Salad cucumbers and Blue Lake green beans. Faces west and I don't think they're going to make it since they don't get enough sun each day. Beans are flowering tho, so we'll see.


My favorite genetically modified plant is this bell pepper. It has red, yellow, and green peppers all on one plant. The second amazing thing is those eggplant colored peppers turn green when they're ripe.



Baby cucumbers, baby zucchini


Green onions, parsley. Waiting 2 wks for them to get big enough to spread out.

Brrrr!

When it's this cold at 7am....

You need hot coffee and a hearty fried potato, fried plantain and egg breakfast
(Asta got 1/3 of that plate.)

You need to bake some doggie bones to heat up the kitchen. (Note the cake mix, almonds, and pineapple at the side for Marvelous Morning Muffins next).

And start a gallon of smoked turkey gumbo.


Hard to believe dinner the night before was a leisurely harvest from the garden: Romano beans, salad of Romaine, arugula, and cilantro, served with storebought red onions and and chile rubbed pollock filet. Not enough salad to use dressing but the live arugula and cilantro kept it from being bland.


The courtyard salad bowl, front to back: arugula, Romaine (to be transplanted), cilantro.

Bottom left bowl above is shallots I'd hoped to have in December/January but Asta had other plans. Here they were last week, when I thought they were safe on the ground.

In another week there'll be red tip lettuce for salads.

Yes, I Went There

I bought this 4lb can of tuna (equals 11 regular cans of tuna) at Costco. The price matched a sale price - but it didn't slosh with liquid when I shook it! For 3 months I put it on the counter when someone came to visit. Priceless.

Remember when you were little and cans of chunk tuna were just that with some liquid to keep it moist? Nowadays there's as much liquid in the can as there is tuna mush. This is a can of chunk tuna like the old days. I had to break it up to make tuna salad.... which I did for the next two days. It was marvelous with only mayo, onion and celery, no relish or hard boiled eggs.

Here's what it looked like after I'd made 2 bowls of tuna salad from it. I vacuum packed and froze the rest of it. Girl Scout Tuna Wiggle is in my future!

Like Gardening in Phoenix...

In the last week, 2 of my favorite Texas garden bloggers announced regretfully they were giving up on their veggie gardens... and the second one is a farm!

Harvests hardly justify a water bill quadrupling. Even with mulch, no trees on the west side mean it needs water twice a day and temps hit 104-112 out there daily the last 3 weeks of June. If I'd known this was coming I'd have hung shadecloth from the house to the fence but this year is just an anomaly, right? At least I didn't install gutters and rainbarrels as planned.

Here's why I'm not giving up just yet. With summer cucumbers and green beans turning brown and dying one by one, the collards, mustard greens, chard, bok choy and brussels sprouts from winter are thriving on the west side. I would have bet money nobody could grow those in a Texas summer, much less this one. Brussels never reached harvest size by May but I left four of them to shade the cantaloupes and they keep growing. I could roast a mess of them tonight... if it weren't so hot. Ready to try more "winter" veggies during summer.

When the first cukes died, I started a small garden on the courtyard because, with shadecloth over the concrete area, it only gets direct sun from 10am - 2pm and needs watering once a day.

Left: courtyard Dec 2010 when Houston was still a muggy tropical paradise. After several days in the mid-20s, and 1" of rain since the end of Feb, pulling those 12" tall weeds is no longer a monthly chore.

Lost the palm on the right in an unpredicted hard freeze. Sad because it's the last pup of one I bought the day before our '98 trip to Italy. Never put it in the ground because of freezes.

Below is today, with evidence of Asta's passive-aggressive fight (this was done while I was grocery shopping) over what I see as beets and turnips to the left of the lemon basil, and she sees as her 3pm napping site. In the middle are radishes, green onions, chard. On the right is Genovese basil. The tomatoes in 3 pots full of pure MiracleGro garden soil are outperforming the organic fertilized ones on the west side. All are still producing flowers and 2 nights last week lows were 75 which is the miracle point when they'll set fruit. I'm still babying and watering them and waiting for Fall.

Mirth Abounds

I am not even going to read what's behind this Houston Chronicle headline this evening:
FDA sets safe level for melamine in infant formula

I do know it's because this week "someone" has admitted US manufacturers are putting melamine in certain foods sold here but the only canned goods I buy are tomatoes and creamed corn (twice a year for Cowboy Cornbread) and I just don't wanna know that it's been deemed acceptable in them.

Not to mention the brouhaha the media scared us witless with earlier this year about how them danged Chinese are selling us melamine in our food and now our government says certain levels are safe?

Ya can't trust the internet; ya can't trust the government; ya can't trust the media.... what do we do?

Score!

• Love the Bangkok Blend so much I bought the 4 oz size and an empty bottle to store the half that doesn't fit in my previous bottle.
• Added Turkish Seasoning to a pkg of dry garbanzos I crockpotted to freeze for hummus whenever I wanted. It's so good I've eaten half the garbanzos and will have to start over.
• Mixed the Chili Powder with water, lime and oil and rubbed a spatchcocked chicken I grilled Friday night. Stupendous - nice warm flavor without too much but that was only 1 T for the whole chicken...
• Italian Sausage Seasoning is because I make 3#s of sausage a month and it's just too much easier than keeping fennel seeds and all the other ingredients.
• The Wall of Flavor? Mural of Flavor? was free with this order and haven't looked at its contents. Vanilla is the same price as pure vanilla, 35% alcohol, at local stores so what the heck.
• Chinese Five Spice Powder is because so many on my cooking group use that as an ingredient I didn't want to try their recipes without it.

Penzey's says their whole spices are good for 4 years (!) and ground spices for 2 years if not more. If I'm going to be eating the cheap parts of animal carcasses and more and more veggies, this seems like a good investment over a 3 yr period. If they're all as good as the Bangkok Blend I'm afraid I'm in trouble. I learned the first visit not to walk into their stores; it's safer to order online and check your total every time you add something!

How I fell in love with bread machine loaves again

I've used only my bread machine's dough cycle for about 6 years. It's an original model (donated when Willie and Julie transferred to Denmark in '97) and the bread was great but I didn't care for the vertical shape with a hole in the bottom and a bulb on top.
I use a baking sheet or a restaurant supply loaf pan. Boy, I defy you to burn bread in one of those things. I've slept an hour past "done time" and the top was really brown but the insides were perfect. Guess it's because the sides and bottom are two layers with air(?) in between.

There honestly have been a few times - with overnight guests and all - that I've used the delay timer so fresh bread is ready at 7am without waking the entire house. A couple of weeks ago I was so busy I didn't want the distraction of setting an alarm to take the dough out before the second rising, form it, and set another alarm for when it was baked. So I went full force with the machine.

It smelled so good the last half hour of cooking that I took butter out to be ready when it was. This looks a little under-done but it wasn't when cooled and sure was good slathered in butter.

The big discovery was when I split the bread in half vertically (I did start letting it sit a half hour before this step). I had two loaves, the bottom hole/slash was not so much a problem, and they were the perfect size for a half sandwich for lunch. Add the fact I pour in all ingredients then Set It And Forget It and it's how I've baked my bread the last two weeks. This will probably change when daily temps get down in the 30s... or maybe not.

Belgian fries

Poor Asta. I've conquered Belgian fries and she doesn't get any more limp, greasy rejects.

My Fry Daddy has only one temp setting so I couldn't fry them in 2 steps and at 2 different temps. My solution is to 3/4 bake them in the microwave, let them cool, cut into spears, and deep-fry.

I tried slicing before microwaving, which I thought would give more crispy bits on the outside but that doesn't work at all.

Dip into sriracha lime mayo and mmmmmm.

Yes, I realize the Belgians peel their potatoes. I don't.

An entertaining site (in English) with history and recipes is The One and Only Original Belgian Fries Website.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year... shopping wise

This is the week for shopping and stocking!

Penny bought 2 HEB turkeys at .77 last week. I told Harry she shoulda waited...

This week, HEB Houston has turkeys for .29lb with $20 purchase. I'm going twice.... and should go three times. Last night I made a Fiesta run and got a .57lb turkey with $10 purchase. My fatal mistake was greed. I bought a 15lb turkey. When you intend to put 4 turkeys in your freezer, they gotta be 12lbs or less. Also in the mix: Harry has a 12lb turkey he took from my freezer during The Ike and keeps saying he's going to return it.

Cream cheese, which has skyrocketed to a sale price of 1.19 pkg, is .88 everywhere. The sellby date on all is Apr 09. Not only is that 6 mos away, it's the sellby date which gives another 3-4 months afterwards which means it doesn't have to be frozen. Tonight one block is dedicated for Robb Walsh's Atomic Deer Turds on the grill.

I use HEB's online shopping list which allows a list on the right side for your "needs" shopping list and the left side is from their sales circular (by location). The weekly sales disappear as expired and the month-long sales stay. This not only consolidates all, it focuses on my most favorite store - the HEB at Beltway and Beechnut. I call it the Asian HEB since that's their market there and the types of seafood/veggies have a definite Asian influence - and they open at 6am. The back of the printed list gives plenty of room for specials at other stores for the week. I store it in my purse because in the next 6 days I'm near any of the other stores for a dropin.

Also checking out Costco this weekend, where I haven't been for 6 months. Scallop recipes (both sea and bay) abound on the internet lately and they're the only source I'm SURE doesn't add water/chemicals to their scallops. And it's time to replenish my "hospital size" olive, feta, and sun-dried tomato stores.

More reasons to love Foodsavers

This cilantro was purchased Oct 28 and immediately sealed in a vacuum canister. I opened it last night. Can you imagine cilantro lasting 1 day short of a month and all it has is a couple of yellow leaves? I cannot tell you how much liquid cilantro I've dumped in my compost before I bought my Foodsaver.
I bought this lettuce the week before Thanksgiving 2007. No! I didn't open it last night but I did open it (by the photo timestamp) Dec. 22. That's a month! Nothing brown but the stem where I'd already cut some leaves.
Leaves require a canister, not a vacuum bag and you are NOT to wash them first. I'll try cilantro and lettuce in the same canister next time. This will be handy when all my lettuces are ready to harvest at once.

I bought mine at Costco after researching and hearing owners discuss them for a year and saw their price drop. I realized later it was $129 only because a new model was coming out but it was a good deal and included a huge roll of plastic to seal and 3 sizes of containers. The 1/2 qt size fell out of the fridge and cracked in two a month later and the 1.5 qt size suddenly has a crack one year later (sure no vacuum packing with an opening in the container...).

I've since bought a set of 3 square, squat 24 oz containers that are good because they're stackable in the fridge. I don't have to eat leftovers every day when I do a mass cook-in because they'll keep for much longer than a week. One thing doesn't keep a week: bread with no preservatives - but it does keep freshly soft for 4-6 days.

Just the happiest house and day....

I have a 4-day vacation coming for TG - 2 days of heavy home maintenance/renovation involving tile-setting on my courtyard sidetable and surgical scrub and painting of the master bath followed by a day of compost laying and transplanting more winter crops, and then a spa in the new bath and general loafing and cooking things I've never tried before on Sunday.

This full moon has been a fool moon with all kinds of weird situations, lots of business, emails and long calls from people I haven't seen in years, kind of like the surprises every evening when we see what congress has (not) done daily. Maybe it's a planetary lineup and affecting everyone. Sure beats boredom.

Beating that is finding out at 1pm that today is Thursday, not Friday! That's a good thing as busy as work is. And explains why all my new seeds and a Penzey's order due Friday haven't arrived by 3pm.

Even Asta's in hog heaven. Can't get to the store for dry food so she's eating from the gallons of chopped pork steak stew I made for her last month and froze in 2 cup packets. Bring it to boiling, toss in 1/2 c rice and some veggies and she thinks it's human food.

And leaves all this for me...

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.

Changes in sizes and pricing

Yah, everything's going up in price and no one likes it but I've noticed people can't agree on how manufacturers should keep their costs and profits level.

Half feel they're being cheated when the price stays the same but the container or portion size shrinks. The other half asks why the price has gone up again on the same size container. I didn't mind either way but have decided the huge number of people in the US on fixed or low incomes, able to pay one price, would be better served if sizes decreased and pricing stayed the same.

A box of cornstarch lasts me years so I've no idea when this happened. Argo has changed to a resealable plastic container. I passed over it three times looking for a cornstarch box that hadn't changed in decades. It seemed like a great idea to add this safety feature to compensate for a smaller size. Whoa! Both of them hold exactly 16 oz. It has a larger footprint but easily supports another box or can on top. I'm sure the price is higher (it's corn-based, isn't it?) but this is a fine example of why you must read labels.
Coffee, not so good. When the old 16 oz cans went to 13 oz, I switched to the 39 oz size. Well, about the time the new 13 oz decreased to 11 oz, the 39 oz decreased to 34.5 oz (left). Now I see it's down to 27.5 oz (right) and the price has gone up a dollar! I won't switch to lower quality (my sister-in-law is laughing at me saying that right now) but if I can cut back to no coffee after 11am, I could pay the same and buy good quality coffee beans.

Roberta's Chicken Fried Steak

My aunt Roberta in Dalhart, TX made the best chicken fried steak I've ever had. It happened to be the first one I ever had and they were the first people I knew with a meat locker. Willie and I rode over with Uncle Bill one morning to pick up the meat for dinner. They also introduced us to corny dogs but that's another story.

I watched Roberta prepare the meal and it was quite a production with a flour dip, an egg dip, and another flour dip (those are required). It took me quite a while to capture the heat regulation for a perfect steak. I always cook them in a stainless steel skillet so add in that problem making sure they don't stick. (The secret, I learned on a cooking group, is to bring the dry skillet up to heat first, then add the oil and then the meat. Works every time.)

Kroger's little meat clearance bin last week yielded some tenderized steaks at a great price. Too bad I was already over budget with all the chuck and sirloin roasts I grabbed at a great price so I only got one pack.

Not a big fan of mashed potatoes but this called for them and I splurged using cream and lots of real butter (not that you could taste butter with my 40-weight cream gravy poured over all). On second thought, this is a once-a-quarter splurge so it's a good thing I only bought this much.