Cinderella's Curried Butter Balls

Now that I am a fancy breeder, I understand why the cat lovers call their kitties these long names with detailed clues to their parentage.
This year's pumpkin harvest was amazing, and it is still continuing. This year I tried another experiment. Last year, I planted Rouge Vif d'Etampes pumpkin (my favorite for how cool it looks), and also the standard Butternut squash varieties (my favorite for eating). Both varieties are in the group cucurbita maxima, so I had kind of an idea (and a hope) that they would cross.
I was interested in a smaller pumpkin than the fancy French kind that I now usually just call "Cinderella". Every time I wanted to boot one up, I had to find even more room in the fridge or find 20 friends to share it with. This year I even resorted to removing the produce bins to get some of a leftover pumpkin into cold storage. So, to this aim, I planted the saved seeds, and put the plants very close together, and hoped that the larger Cinderella had crossed with the smaller Buttercup and I'd end up with a smaller really cool red pumpkin that is still super tasty.
Well, so far, I am declaring success, even though I haven't actually tasted all of the varieties I came up with. Both potential parents are legends in the taste department, so I had no worries there. I probably ended up with about 10 plants and around 16 giant pumpkins. I got several shapes: the traditional Cinderella squat shape, a higher and boxier shape more like the butternut, and a round kind. All are the same bright orange-red color as Cinderella. Now the round ones are interesting. They have more of a green tinge at the bottom, and being almost perfectly round, have to rest on their sides. Though they were some of the first to fruit, they took more than a month longer to ripen than the others. And though the largest round specimen is only 8 inches wide, it weighs in at a hefty 12 pounds.
I am notoriously bad at keeping track of my seeds. Now to keep track of the 3 new varieties? This year I also planted some buttercup, but it didn't do too well, so I don't expect much additional crossing. In 2012, I'll probably plant last year's seed again, so I can get some additional selections.
Oh, and the curried? It's not about the color. I almost forgot. I also planted one Red Kuri pumpkin last year. It's also a maxima. Come to think of it, my round pumpkins look pretty close to them, only without the neck and all the fussiness.
Note: I got the above photo from Seeds of Change, where I also got the original seeds.

Pickin' the Purslane

Kris Young recently blogged about growing and eating cactus. I have a lovely cactus plant in a pot that he gave me 2 years ago. It is doing well.

When I took the plant, I thought I would eventually eat the fruit, but I was unprepared for how beautiful the plant is all by itself.

Last weekend, I enjoyed freshly-prepared nopales in Monticito, where the prickly pear cactus grows in large and sprawling groves near the older homes. The nopales dinner reminded me that it is always a good thing to work towards getting and using plants that don't need so much water.

Enter purslane. I didn't know that it was edible until a few years ago. It has become my favorite spring salad plant, hitting the plate after the lettuce, and before the cucumbers. It's a succulent, and, like the prickly pear cactus plant, it is considered not too pretty. I disagree, and I like to think of it as a trailing jade plant.

I pick and nibble on a bit of purslane when I go out to the garden in the morning. I let it go to seed. It is everywhere, and that will be so for years.

Enjoy!

Here's Kris' blog post: http://turning60consciously.blogspot.com/2011/05/day-233-smart-food-for-humans-on.html

Day 16 - No Carrots

I went looking for my container of carrots from trader Gaston and found that someone else had eaten all of them. Dang! I really wanted something different today.
I was too busy to shop today. I spent over three hours in the garden, tearing down some old fencing and putting up new metal mesh fencing. I worked until the staples ran out in the staple gun, about a third of the way through the project.
I picked a ton of greens to take with me on a trip, and spent much time washing, trimming and pulling off slugs. The fridge is bursting with vegetables.
For breakfast I had the last of the coffee from partner Irene, and a protein shake from partner Igor.
For lunch, I ate MORE french toast with honey, lettuce and potato salad.
For an afternoon snack I ate a tangerine from partner Earl. After working in the garden, I sat down with a large container of tea from partner Otto and lime from partner Colin.
For dinner I made stuffing with bread from partner Arlene, turkey from partner Cindy, leeks, celery, sage, salt, thyme from partner Philippe, and black pepper from partner Ophelia.
For an evening snack I had a cup of the squash soup, garden pumpkin seeds, lettuce, corn salad, and a taste of sauerkraut. I decided to put some dried shiso leaves into the crock, to see if they would lend more color to the batch. By the end of the day, much color had been added, and I fished the shiso leaves out and ate them. They tasted wonderful, but they could have been left in longer. (They were a bit too chewy.) I lined the crock with a new layer of shiso leaves and put the kraut to sleep for the evening. Shiso leaves have a cinnamon-like taste, and the only cinnamon flavor I have enjoyed since the start of this February challenge

Day 3 - Settling in

Today I continued to settle into my early-springtime routine. I am busy preparing the garden, cramming in as much as I can between the rains, and cooking with tons of leeks and celery.
Like yesterday, I woke up early and felt like cooking, so I started making almond milk and broth from all the vegetable scraps. I also put two more trays of parsley into the dehydrator.
I made a wheat berry salad using a similar recipe as yesterday's potato salad. I added the bits of leftover pimento gracing the bottom of the olive jar.
I was pretty hungry this morning, so I had a packet of the nutrition drink from partner Igor, some cooked garden-grown amaranth seed with honey, a bit of the leftover vegetable stew with rice medley, some Earl Grey tea from trading partner Virginie and a few pond scum tablets from partner Igor. I had to fight off the cats to get the pond scum for myself. This isn't from a local pond, it's from Japan.

My Syncretic Food Culture - Part 4 - On My Own

“Do you make sandwiches?”
Shortly after I asked, I realized what a stupid question it was.
It was my first week in New York, and I was lured out of my efficiency hotel into a strip mall by a yarn shop. It was situated right next to a deli. I had never been into a real deli before, but at the supermarket, we used to buy fancy rolls and sliced cold-cuts. Then we would take them home and make poor-boys in the oven.
The guys in the deli made a big joke of it, and it was like they were handing out wings, and not the blue cheese and hot sauce variety either.
Once in my own apartment and in charge of my own food choices, I tried many recipes found in my first cookbook, “Recipes for a Small Planet”. My first experiment with soy grits tasted a bit like barfed-up dog food. I made a weekly batch of the granola, and then branched out to various muffin recipes. Upstate New York was dotted with farm stands on the honor system, so in the fall I picked up a bushel of apples and a huge bag of table squash. I joined the local food co-op which offered an additional discount in exchange for extra work hours. My main job was to pick up free-range eggs and fresh milk from local farmers and bring them to the co-op.
One of my favorite jobs was to restock the macrobiotic section. I had never heard of any of these strange foods before, but was intrigued by the large wooden vats of miso and the tofu blocks floating in large plastic buckets. We were the only place in town that carried tofu retail, and we did a pretty high volume on the Saturday mornings I worked there. The macrobiotic way became my new lifestyle, and was really my first formal introduction to eating local foods on purpose. In macrobiotics, it is always better to eat local, both in place (especially latitudinally) and in time. (Of course, it was also OK to eat any kind of food from Japan.) I really warmed up to the idea of eating locally and seasonally, with whole foods. The co-op made it easy for me. All the foods and produce selections were labeled with place of origin, and if they were grown organically or transitionally. I enjoyed making the new signs when we started carrying a new product or vegetable.
When I got to California, macrobiotics didn’t survive the move. Somehow it didn’t seem right to shun certain tropical foods that were growing like weeds in my backyard. What worked in the cold Northeast wasn’t working as well in our Mediterranean climate. I started eating tomatoes, peppers and the citrus fruits that my neighbors gave me. But I never did give up my love of seasonal eating or my favorite comfort food, miso soup.

Cookie Exchange - My winning entry??

Every year my neighbor hosts a cookie and gift exchange, and this year I have decided to use my last December exception meal to celebrate Christmas and eat lots of great locally-made cookies.
I thought long and hard about this one. What prize-winning cookie could I make with red amaranth, honey and chard? One year I DID make some interesting dog biscuits for the gift exchange, and last year made another really popular batch with favorite locally-sourced ingredients such as chicken fat, winter squash and dried kale. They turned out to be less of a hit when my husband popped one in his mouth before fully comprehending what they were all about, but the dog really loved them.
I couldn't do this to my friends again, after all, I want them to remain friends. I decided to make something simple and non-local, something I really like, but with an added decadence.
The cookie would have to contain lots of pecans, for sure, and probably macadamia nuts and cherries. I stopped at a couple of stores looking for cherries, but could find none.
Yesterday at the public market, a man was selling hoshigaki persimmons, so I bought a package to use in January. Today I decided to incorporate them into my oatmeal cookies. Here's the recipe:

Hashigaki Oatmeal Cookies
Use the recipe on the lid of the Quaker Oats box with the following changes:
use only 3/4 cup raisins
Add 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Add 1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom
Add 1/2 cup chopped macadamia nuts
Add 1/2 cup chopped pecans
Add 1 cup chopped hoshigaki dried persimmons
Bake according to package directions

Next week I hope to get to the public market again and purchase more of these wonderful persimmon treats before the season is over.