Summer Crisps

I know it's been ages since my last post, but things have been so hectic. Between vacationing in Alaska with the fam, work drama, and packing up my house, I haven't had to much time to sit down and blog. Despite all this craziness I thought I would take some time to share with by devoted followers (i.e. my family, because who else would reads this...?) one of my summer obsessions. You may be thinking I have uncovered the secret recipe for my favorite mango tart frozen yogurt, but alas they still refuse to give it to me... so sad. Besides frozen yogurt, I have been obsessed with making fruit crisps out of all the wonderful seasonal fruit that has been in the market. 

  

It doesn't matter what fruit you chuck in there, I just look for what is fresh and most important, on sale, mix in some sugar, a little orange juice, top it off with the tastiest walnut crumb topping, bake until all warm a bubbly, and dig in. My favorite combo so far has been rhubarb, strawberry (like you didn't see that one coming), raspberry, and apple. Another good combo is peaches and blueberries. Hope you enjoy making them as much as I have! P.S. Leftovers are great for breakfast...I know, I have issues. 

Summer Fruit Crisp

For the fruit:

Chopped fruit, make sure it's all about the same size

1/2 c. sugar (or splenda)

2 tbs. corn starch

juice from one orange 

For the walnut crumb topping:

1/4 c. butter, melted

1/2 c. flour

1/2 c. oatmeal 

1/3 c. brown sugar

2 tsp. cinnamon 

pinch salt

2/3 c. chopped walnuts

Mix all the fruit ingredients and fill a 8'' baking dish. Top with crumb topping and bake at 350F for 45min, or until all bubbly and the top is browned. 

Two Peas in a Pod

    Spring is here and I wanted to update you all on the progress I've been making in the Victory Garden. In one of my previous posts, I whined quite a bit about all the mucking in cow poo I did to try to prep the soil for planting- BIG mistake! Apparently for the manure to be effective you have to put a three to six inch layer of the smelly stuff, rather than the sprinkling I lovingly placed on my plot. All of my hard work turned out to be nothing more than food for the weeds. When I visited my plot last weekend I found my entire plot covered in knee high weeds. I was so POed that I grabbed my gardening gloves and went at those weeds like a charging ork in battle. After much swearing and sweating I'm proud to say that I got every last one of those weeds up. Since I was on a roll, and determined to keep my plot weed free for at least another week, I once again hopped into the big pile of dung and started hauling barrel after barrel of manure to my plot. While it was my intention to cover the entire plot with a six inch covering of manure, my advancing years got the better of me and I quit after only covering about a third of the plot. You may think I was being lazy, but hauling shit is hard work! 

    After some more whining and soaking of my muscles, and some sage advice form my Mom, I decided that it would be a less daunting feat to build raised beds and work one at a time, rather than trying to work the whole plot at once. So my mission for this three day weekend was just that. I had found a design for raised beds on the web, adjusted it to fit my beer budget, and Saturday I set off to the hardware store to purchase all the makings of a raised bed. I was a little worried about fitting all of the lumber into my car, but I am happy to say that after a little huffing and puffing I was able to get it all to fit -thank God for a rear window that opens! 

    Sunday I hauled all the building materials out to my plot and got busy assembling the beds. While the assembly part seemed to go by really fast, the leveling process took forever.  After digging the beds in and putting the on the arches, I think they turned out pretty spiffy if I do say so myself. 

  

    The next phase of Project Raised Beds was to fill those suckers full of dirt! One might ask "Isn't there dirt already there?". Well yes there is, but since I made raised beds I have to fill the raised part with additional dirt. I tried to do an internet search about how many bags of soil are need to fill one 16 cubic feet of raised bed, but there was no info on bag quantities required. So instead I just filled my Jeep up with as many bags of topsoil and composted manure (I know more manure) as it would possibly hold, and carted it out to the farm. After many trips between my car and the plot, I now have an answer to my question- it takes 18! 40-lb bags of soil/manure to fill at 16 cubic feet raised bed. Phew! But once all the soil/manure was mixed in (a 2:1 ratio if you're interested) I was now ready to plant that bed, and plant I did! I planted shallot sets, two varieties of beets, carrots, lettuce, and spinach. I left some room for planting my leeks and onions later on. I also cleared out a space along the fence and planted some green beans adjacent to my row of peas, which are looking very cute with their curly-q sprouts. 

    Next weekend I'm aiming to fill and plant two more of the beds. On the home front, my veggie seedlings are thriving and have all been transplanted into individual containers and are happily growing under the grow light, awaiting their turn to be planted in the garden! Also to come are custom Mommy made bed covers to go over those ingenious arches built into the raised bed (did you catch the pat on the back there?). Until next time, Hobey Ho!

R.I.P. Tomato Seedlings

 I know it sounds silly, but the thought of thinning out my tomato seedlings after all the loving effort I put into bringing them up to where they are now made me kinda sad. But after much reading on the web about the necessity of each tomato plant having adequate room for their roots to grow, I decided that tonight was the night thin out the seedlings to one per 4'' pot (dum da dum dum). After a quick drink of water, lulling the unfortunate seedlings into a false sense of security, I plucked the excess seedlings out of the loose soil with the efficiency of ripping off a band-aid. Once removed from their happy home, the seedlings were unceremoniously dumped into the compost bucket where their nutrients will live on in the future plants they feed. 

  

As you can see, my little seedlings that I planted are all doing quite well, if I do say so my self. Both the cauliflower and green bean seedlings are almost ready to be transplanted into their own containers- look at those green beans (below), only a week old and they are almost a foot tall!- all my herb seedlings have come up, and I'm just waiting for my flower seedlings to make their debut. I'll head out to the farm this weekend and hopefully the soil will be ready to work, because I'm just itching to get some spinach, shallot sets, carrots, and beets into the soil. 

  

And just because she is just too cute, I thought I would include a picture of my garden helper. She follows me around the house as I muddle through my gardening exploits, looks at me like I'm crazy while I coo lovingly to my plants, and refrains from making a snack of the plants I leave on the kitchen floor when I run out of space elsewhere. 

Pan Seared Orange Roughy with Stewed Eggplant

Since there is not much to report back on my garden, it keeps growing away, I thought I would share one of my new "Jamie creations". For those of you who know me- and since I'm pretty sure only my family and friends read this, that's most of you- I am an constantly coming up with new concoctions from random ingredients I find in my pantry and 'fridge. I have to say, my latest creation of Stewed Eggplant with Pan Seared Orange Roughy has to be one of my better ones, I've already made it twice!

  

As with all Jamie creations, this recipe is supper simple and quick and I'm sure if you try it yourself you'll be as in love with it as I am. I started by salting some cubed eggplant- and no this is not just a Jamie loves salt thing, it draws out the bitterness that you find in eggplant- and let it chill in a colander for about 30 minutes, after which I rinsed it well, see no more salt, and let in drain. I caramelized some onions in olive oil, then added the eggplant, chopped cubanelle pepper, garlic, some crushed red pepper flakes for some heat, Italian seasoning, tomato sauce, some water and let it simmer for about 30 minutes or until thick.

  

While this would be darn tasty as is, what really makes it great is that I finish off the eggplant with some chopped sun-dried tomatoes for depth and some capers for a little bit of acid to round it all out. Some fresh chopped basil would be awesome, but alas I was out :(.  At this point you could use this as a sauce for some tubular pasta, but I prefer to  top it with some pan seared orange roughy, which is my favorite white fish of the moment, and you have a plate of yummy eggplant goodness.

 Stewed Eggplant with Pan Seared Orange Roughy

Serves 2 major eggplant lovers like me!, or 4 regular eggplant aficionados 

1 large eggplant, cubed

1 cuabanelle pepper, chopped

1 Tbs olive oil

1 onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 8oz can tomato sauce 

2 c. water

1-2 Tbs crushed red pepper flakes

1 Tbs Italian seasoning

1/2 c. chopped sun-dried tomatoes

1/4 c. capers

2-4 sauteed orange roughy fillets 

Salt eggplant and let rest for 30 minutes. Rinse well and allow to drain.  Heat oil in a large saute pan, add onion, and allow to caramelize. Add garlic, tomato sauce, crushed red pepper, Italian seasoning, and water and allow to simmer for 30 minutes or until thick. Finish with the sun-dried tomatoes and capers. Top each serving with the fish and dig in! 

Now We're Talking

After a wonderful, but smelly, day at the garden it was time to head home and start some more seeds! Since we are about a month away from the last frost, even though it feels like summer already, I started the rest of the seeds that needed to be started indoors, which as you can see in the picture was quite a bit of planting. Unfortunately, I have limited amount of space on my warming mat, it holds about 10 4'' pots, so some had to stay out on the counter until there was room on the mat. 
   
 

The seedlings I started a few weeks ago have been happily soaking up the "sunshine" under the grow light and are doing fantastic. In fact, both the tomato and lettuce seedlings have gotten their true leaves and are ready to be transplanted. I know the New Victory Garden said to transplant each tomato seedling into an individual 4'' pot, but I don't have that many pots (poor planning on my part) or that much space (who does?). Instead, I planted three tomato seedlings per pot; I figure some of them will die anyway, right? I tried using the wooden label stick to make a hole in the potting soil to place the seedling into, but it didn't work as so well; I'm special, what can I say?. I ended up just sticking my finger in the pot and twisting it around a bit, which is totally idiot proof. I did the same with the lettuce seedlings, except I planted one seedling per 1'' well. Once in their new homes, I watered the seedlings with some organic water soluble fertilizer, left them out of the sun for about a day, and did my darnedest to keep the dog out of them.  

   

        

With the Victory garden well under way, I turned my attention to my garden around my house. I have a bunch of perennials already planted, but each year I pick out several varieties of annuals to mix things up. Since I've been having so much luck with starting seeds in my house, I decided to try my hand at starting annuals, and a few perennials, from seeds. While most of the seeds were started the same way as my veggie seedlings, some had instructions to not cover with soil since they needed light to germinate. Weird. I guess we'll see how those work out. 

Knee Deep in Shit

And I mean literally. This weekend was a garden work day at the SMLC Community garden, and as luck would have it Saturday was a beautiful day to be working in the garden. Since it was forecasted to rain Sunday thru Wednesday I decided to soak up as much sun on Saturday as possible. This lead me to one of several possibly bad decisions of the day. I mapped backroad directions to the garden, and figured it was only 11 miles away and would be an OK distance to ride on my bike (like peddle peddle, not vroom vroom). So with my directions in my pocket, a couple bottles of water, gardening gloves, and a change of shoes (the choice of shoes is bad decision number two, but more on that later) and set off late morning to the garden. While the ride to the garden was not too bad, at points it was really quite fun, I have to say the roads in Michigan make biking very uncomfortable. The enormous quantities of snow we get each winter leave the road full of potholes, which the adventurous rider must navigate and suffer through, since there are very few designated bike lanes in Ann Arbor. 

   

One hour and one sore bum later I arrived at the garden and readily asked to be put to work (bad decision number 3). I was asked by a seemingly nice man if I had ever turned a compost pile? I told him no, but that I was a quick learner. His ready enthusiasm at my answer should have been a clue into his sadistic nature and the fate that lie ahead of me. Maybe it was the long ride, or maybe I'm just not that perceptive without a morning cup of joe, but I willingly followed this "gentleman" to the compost bins. When we got there I was told to grab a pitchfork and move all the compost from one bin into the other bin, so that it has a chance to breakdown further. As you can see from the pictures, these are not small bins, the only way to move everything from one to the other is to hop on in. You also may have noticed from the pictures my attire for the day. While it was appropriate for biking in warm weather, it was far from what you would want to be wearing while wading through a big steamy pile of kitchen scraps and manure. That said, I didn't want to seem like a woose, so I attempted to put a winning smile on my face and trudged into the pile of shit. All I can say is YUCK! Surprisingly it didn't smell, but it was quite juicy, and when I say juicy I mean I had God knows what oozing in between my toes and splattering in my face. 

  

Once I was finished with what I am now positive was some sort of hazing ritual, I decided to take a look at my plot and see if there was anything that I could do to it. Since the weather is still yo-yoing between winter and spring, the soil was still far to wet to till. I spied one of the other gardeners fertilizing his plot, so I figures since I was already covered in shit, what's a little more. Three wheel barrels latter, my plot and abutting fence were covered in a nice layer of poo and awaiting tilling at a later date.  By this time I was pretty bushed and was not looking forward to the ride home (have you caught on to the bade decision yet?) I bid my fellow gardeners goodbye, changed back into my biking shoes (and while I wished to toss my poo soaked shoes away, I begrudgingly put them into by bike pack), and headed back onto the open road. The ride home was painful for three reasons: 1) I was pretty tired from my afternoon as a farm hand 2) those potholes were really starting to bruise my bum 3) at one point I wasn't able to unclip fast enough at a red light an my bike and I fell over (stop laughing now!). It was my first ride out with my new peddles and I was 3/4 of the way home and was feeling kind good about myself that I had done so well with them, but I obviously spoke too soon. Well, at least it wasn't a major intersection.  Once home I instantly hoped in the shower, I was so smelly that my dog wouldn't get near me. After I rest my old bones for a bit, it's time to plant more seeds and transplant my tomatoes and mesclun greens! More on that next time.

Weather make up your mind.

What a wonderful day to start some seeds. It is weird to be planning and starting a garden when there is snow on the ground, but fun never-the-less. While the snow swirls outside, I'm all cozy in my house and up to my elbows in potting soil. But first, lets get updated on the seeds that I started last week. After about a week on the warming matt, seedlings came up for the leeks, tomatoes, and onions. Once I noticed these little guys, I immediately began work on constructing my very first grow light! Since I live in a condo with minimal space, I purchased a grow light/stand combo that was suprisingly easy to put together. Although I have parts left over that I have no idea how to incorporate into the frame, it seems sturdy enough and happy in its new home on my kitchen table. Once under the grow light it was amazing how the little seedlings perked.  The New Victory Garden suggest giving seedlings 6-8 hours of sunlight daily, so my plan is just to pop on the grow light before work and turn it off when I get home. The green onions and celery seedlings were still a no show, so I left them all warm and toasty on the warming matt. I want to give a word of caution when using the warming matt- make sure your pots are well watered. I noticed about a day after being on the matt that the pots were prone to drying out, so water them well at least twice a day.

 

Once the seedlings were eating up the rays under the grow light, I decided to plant some cauliflower and mesculun salad mix seeds. This time I tried to be much more patient with the bottom watering, which if you know me is no small feat. I left them in the watering pan for the better part of the day, placing them on the warming matt just before bed time. From what I hear, lettuce seedlings take only a few days to germinate, so I should have seedlings up soon!

 

As for the excess seeds that I don't plant, I've been storing them in tupperware, with some rice in the bottom to absorb any excess moisture, in the refrigerator for next year. If this is not right, or there is a better way to store them I'm open to suggestions. Until next time. 

Summer is coming!

A friend said to me the other day that I have so many things planned for this summer that I would never get any sleep. While this may be true, I spent the past winter suffering in silence, planning all of the wonderful things that I would do when the weather turned warmer, and I won't let a little thing like the 24 hour day stand in my way! While this is not a comprehensive list, these are just some of the things that I imagine filling my summer hours: scootering and biking around Ann Arbor, starting my own Victory Garden, learning how to sail/wind surf, hiking with my BEAUTIFUL dog Kairi, kayaking down the Huron River and elsewhere, learning how to can my freshly grown produce (my Mom added this one to my list), and trying out new recipes with my produce. 

This past week has set two of my summer musts in motion. First, I got a new scooter! Well, not new exactly , but new to me. It's a 2001 50cc Yamaha Vino, which fits my personality to 

a tee- vintage at heart, classy, fun, and a little beat-up. After a little drama, tale of the missing key,and a week of cold weather, I was finally able to ride it into work on Friday! There is nothing better than riding with the wind in your face, not having to take the bus, and filling up your gas tank for $2. Unfortunately, the weather turned cold and I haven't gotten to ride it since. But in what little time I did spend on my scooter I have realized one thing -"I feel the need, the need for speed!" While my little 50cc scooter has enough power to keep me at the speed limits around Ann Arbor, I see something with a little more power in my future. 

Also this week, I began work on my very first Victory Garden. At the suggestion of my Mom, who always knows best =p, I purchased The New Victory Garden by Bob Thomson. For anyone looking to start a vegetable garden this book is a must have! The chapters are broken down into months, with a to-do list on the first page of each chapter. I don't know about you, but with all of the information available, starting a project like this can seem daunting. With this book it is SO simple, you only have to focus on one month at a time. The only adjustment I had to make was regarding the last frost date, which is the focus point of his entire planting time-line. Luckily, the difference in his frost date and my own was almost exactly a month, so I just had to shift the chapters by a month. 

Once the idea of starting my own Victory Garden came to mind I started trolling garden stores, Wal-Mart, and Meijer for seeds. I think I may have gone a little bit overboard; I may have more than my little 20x20 plot can hold. After reading the back of each seed packet my head hurt with all the different instructions for the various seeds. After taking a deep breath and consulting my version of the Bible, i.e. The New Victory Garden, I was able to calmly sort my seeds into months according the the book, rather than chuck them across the room. Since I only got the book a few weeks ago, I was a little behind the "ideal"planting schedule, but I guess it's better late than never. This weekend I planted seeds for leeks, green and yellow onions, celery, and tomatoes. 

For those of you who are new to vegetable gardening, here is what I did; keep your fingers crossed that it works! 1) Moisten germinating soil in its bag. I wasn't able to find the soil recommended in the book, but the lady at the garden store sold me on some cactus potting soil she swore would do the job. This is all one big experiment anyway, so why not? 2)Fill 4'' pots with soil, then compact down to about an inch from the top. I wasn't able to find cheap plastic pots, so I used peet pots instead. If you want to get super cheap, I hear cleaned milk cartons, with holes poked in the bottom work well.  3) Tap seeds from packet into the pots, ~2x the amount you eventually want to plant. 3)Cover seeds with soil and lightly firm 4)Bottom water with warm water. The idea behind this is that the bottom watering won't disturb the seeds. Maybe it was the peet pots or maybe I was just being impatient, but this seemed to take FOREVER! After several hours of letting the pots sit in the water I still didn't see moisture on the surface, so with my fingers I gently added water to the top of the pots 5)I then put the pots on a heating mat and let them do there thing. They don't look like much now, but hopefully I should have seedlings in a week or so, and photos for you soon after!