Week Ending 9 de noviembre

It's time for another episode of Week Ending, brought to you by the lovely Wanda at Reinventing Mother!


Friday morning I was watering around the house and I heard some noise on the other side of the fence. I looked through, and here's what I found:

This was part of a larger group which roams around our neighborhood. These are not wild horses, but around here animals have freedom to roam in their search for food. It's the same thing with cattle and goats. Since stock owners don't have the means to put up fences or buy food for them, the animals have traditionally been allowed to go where they will; it's simply an accepted part of life in rural Baja Sur.

Here's the whole gang, wandering down toward the corner of our road.

Saturday is the day when I do food prep for the week. In my case, that means cooking up a large pot of rice, another large pot of beans, a chicken, and anything else that takes my fancy. Then, during the week, I have the fixings ready for any number of tasty meals.

This is part of the result from this Saturday's cook-a-thon: chicken, rice, and a small amount of nopalitos (cactus pads).

I do my Saturday cooking outside on the wood stove. It's much more convenient to cook multiple pots of things on the wood stove than on a gas or electric stove.

I used about half of the beans I had been soaking to make a pot of Frijoles Borrachos (drunken beans). This is a very simple recipe and could easily be done in a slow cooker. The following amounts serve 3.

DRUNKEN BEANS
* Meats: I used ham bits, half a kosher hot dog, and a handful of pork rinds (a great addition, BTW!) However, any meat will do.
* A chopped onion
* 2 large cloves of garlic, diced
* 2 roma tomatoes, chopped
* 2 jalapeño chiles, seeds removed & diced
* 1 bottle of beer
* 1/2 lb of soaked dried beans (any kind is fine), or 2-3 cans of beans
* water as needed
* if you want the beans to have a smoky flavor, you can add some Liquid Smoke
* I added nopalitos to this pot (those long green things)
If you are using bacon or other meat with fat in it, put that in the pot first & cook until the fat has been rendered. Add the rest of the meat and cook until its flavor is starting to intensify, maybe 5 minutes. Add the onion, garlic, tomatoes and chiles and cook for another 5 minutes until softened. Add the beans and the beer; cover and put on a SLOW simmer. The amount of time for cooking depends on the kind of beans you're using, so if you're not sure how long it should take, check after 45 minutes, although it could take up to twice as long. Add a bit of water when necessary - not too much, because this isn't soup! Of course, with canned beans, the total cooking time will be much shorter. Once the beans are soft (but not mushy), if the pot has too much liquid, leave the lid off and turn the heat up a bit until the liquid is almost all gone (if you can push the contents to the side and see the bottom of the pot, you're there). This is a very tasty version of beans, and even better the next day.

Other than that, the only notable thing that I did this weekend was work on my crocheted top. I didn't finish it, as I had hoped, because when I'm reading and crocheting at the same time I slow WAYYY down. But I should be done by today to tomorrow.

Cooking with Padre (sort of) - Chiles Rellenos con tocino

As I mentioned in my last post, Padre came over for dinner yesterday but didn't have time for a cooking lesson, so instead I found a recipe for chiles rellenos from a Mexican cooking show and made them: a MAJOR hit with all of us!

Here's the recipe. It takes some prep time, which can be done up to a day ahead, but it only takes about 10 minutes to cook.


CHILES RELLENOS DE FRIJOL

INGREDIENTS
4 chiles poblanos
1 can frijoles refritos (frijoles negros taste better than the more common tan kind)
4 oz white cheese, preferably string cheese or monterey jack

[FOR THE SALSA]
3 roma tomatoes, cut in chunks
1/4 onion, roughly chopped
1 clove garlic

Prepare the salsa:
This is a VERY basic salsa recipe, so if you have a favorite one you like to make, go for it, or add whatever seems appropriate to this recipe. DO NOT USE PURCHASED SALSA - that's a completely different thing!

Cook the tomatoes and onions in a pan (with or without a tiny bit of oil) until they're softened. Put them in a blender with the garlic and a cup of water (or broth, if you have some). If you want to add some heat, add some Tabasco or other hot sauce to taste. Once it's been liquified, heat the mixture in a small pan on LOW heat (don't let it boil!). It should be served warm.

Prepare the chiles:
On a gas stove, lay the chiles (one at a time) over a high open flame and char the skins well, turning with tongs frequently until they're uniformly blackened and stop snapping (I generally do 2 chiles at a time, on 2 different burners). The more charred they are, the easier it is to remove the skins. If you have an electric stove, put the chiles in a wide pan on maximum heat & do as described above.

Put the chiles in a plastic bag, close it and let them sweat for about 10 minutes to soften the skins further. Remove them from the bag and scrape off the skins. You can do this with your fingers, or with a paper towel or with a knife. Be careful not to tear the meat of the chile! This is messy, so I do it over a bowl.

Make a small slit in each chile and carefully cut out the bump with the seeds, making sure not to cut away the stem. Remove the seeds (don't worry if there are a few left - cooked poblano seeds aren't hot). Fill each chile loosely with frijoles refritos (about 1/4 per chile), and lay a slice of cheese on top of the beans. Take a slice of uncooked bacon and wrap it tightly around the chile, using it to cover the slit and keep the contents from spilling out. Fasten it with one or more toothpicks. At this point the chiles can be covered and left on the counter for a few hours, or even refrigerated.

When you're ready to cook them, put them in a wide pan on high heat. Turning frequently with tongs, cook them until the bacon is sufficiently cooked (it should still be soft - not crisp). If you want to, you can then put some shredded cheese on the top and put them in the oven for a few minutes for it to melt, but this isn't necessary - it's completely a matter of presentation.

Serve the chiles with the salsa to spoon over. Since I forgot to take pictures of the process of roasting the chiles, here's a link to a site that describes (with pictures) how to roast poblanos if you don't already have experience in doing this.

Cooking with Padre: Salsa con chicharrones

As my hordes of regular readers already know, our priest is teaching me to cook like a native Mexican (when he has the time). This, then, is the first in what I hope to be occasional posts of traditional Mexican recipes as taught by Padre.

As a background to how he came to be such a good cook, he told us that his mother taught him to cook when he was still a boy. He had a younger brother who had meningitis and epilepsy (he eventually died young), and whenever the brother was in the hospital Padre's mother had to stay there with him. Here in Mexico (as in many other countries) family members are expected to stay with a hospitalized person to help in their care. As the oldest child in the family, Padre had the responsibility of feeding his younger siblings during those times when his mother was gone, and he came to love cooking, which is his favorite thing to do on his day off each week.

This first recipe is a simple salsa, mixed in with pork rinds (chicharrones) to make a main dish. The salsa needn't be used with chicharrones, but I had never heard of cooking with them before so Padre wanted to show me how it's done.

SALSA CON CHICHARRONES
Salsa ingredients:
8 tomatillos OR 5 roma tomatoes (fresh)
5 dried guajillo chiles (can be found in the Mexican section of most supermarkets, with the spices)
2-4 piquin chiles (these are a bit harder to find, and they're also much hotter than the guajillos)
2 large cloves of garlic, peeled

Also:
3 cups of chicharrones (pork rinds)
1/2 large onion


Using a griddle or large shallow pan, and without adding any oil, heat the chiles and tomatillos (or tomatoes). The heat should be on medium-high; you don't want everything to get blackened. The point of heating the salsa ingredients is to intensify the flavor. The chiles will only take a couple of minutes to darken; take them out of the pan and set them aside. The tomatillos (or tomatoes, whichever you use) will take longer; you want the skins to become somewhat translucent, but they won't be actually cooked to the point of softness:

The small red thing in the pan is the chile piquin - you can see that it's much smaller than the guajillos. Padre used 4 of these, and the Pirate and I think that 2 would be our ideal - piquant without a lingering heat.

While the tomatillos are still getting done, put the chicharrones in a pan or pot with high sides, and NO OIL, and put over medium heat, stirring regularly. This step can be skipped, but the flavor will not be as strong. The color of the chicharrones will darken somewhat. DON'T allow them to burn.

Slice the onion and add to the chicharrones along with about 2 tbsp of oil. This step should be done after the chicharrones have turned golden. If you were to put the onion in earlier, the liquid that it makes would prevent the chicharrones from browning. Continue to cook the mixture, but turn the burner down a bit, since you'll need to give your attention to finishing the salsa.

Cut off the tops of the chiles and slice them down the middle; remove all the seeds. Set one of the guajillos aside for later. Put the other chiles in a blender with the browned tomatillos, the browned piquin chiles, and the garlic cloves. Add enough water (or broth if you have some) to liquify the mixture (about 1/3 of the way up the blender container). Blend until well liquified. Voila! Salsa! (yes, I know that's French, but I can't think of a Spanish word like that).

Pour the salsa over the chicharrone mixture and turn the heat to medium. Mix the salsa in well, and stir continually until the salsa has soaked into the chicharrones so their texture has become like soft meat (this will take 5 minutes or less). Take it off the stove. Take the guajillo that was set aside and crumble it over the chicharrones; mix it in thoroughly and serve.

As you can tell, traditional Mexican cooking is done "by feel", not "by the book". I hope that this example encourages you to try other ingredients when making salsa, or other types of meats or mixed things to mix the salsa in with. Buen provecho!

Got leftover tamales?

When I was growing up in Northern California there used to be an ad on the radio every Tuesday saying "Tuesday is Red's Tamale day!". I don't know who Red was and I didn't eat tamales as a child - I had my first tamale after I was 40 years old. Now I live in tamale country, so I recently ended up having a lot of leftover tamales and needed to do something interesting with them. I found a recipe for Tamale Casserole in one of my favorite cookbooks, "Tacos, Tortas and Tamales", by Roberto Santibanez. As usual, I tweaked it a bit so this is my version, taking into account that most readers won't have all the same ingredients available that I do here in Mexico.

INGREDIENTS:
> 10 leftover tamales
> 2 large (7 oz?) cans of diced chiles, or if you're up for more heat, 2 cans of rajas (sliced poblanos) or if you like to do things from scratch, 4-5 fresh poblano chiles
> 1 medium onion
> 12oz cheese (oaxaca, chihuauha,jack or cheddar or a combination), shredded or sliced thinly
> 1/4 cup of sour cream
> about 8oz of salsa, preferably a real Mexican variety like the one in the photo below - this shouldn't be too mild since it will be cut by the sour cream

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Remove the husks from the tamales and roughly chop them into pieces of about 1".

Slice or dice the onion and cook it in a pan over medium heat until soft. Add the chiles (if you use fresh poblanos you'll have to char them, remove the skins and de-seed them, and cut them into slices or chop them).


In a baking pan or similar size casserole dish, layer the tamale pieces, the onion/chile mix, and the cheese. The dish I used here is about the size of a 9x9 pan, but about 1.5 or 2 times deeper, and the ingredients filled it to the top.

You'll end with a layer of cheese, but before you put that layer on...

Mix the salsa and the sour cream (or half and half, or canned milk if you don't have any sour cream), and pour evenly over the contents of the casserole. THEN add the last layer of cheese.

Cover the dish tightly with aluminum foil and bake for 45 minutes.


If you like tamales, you'd love this casserole - it has the tamale taste but is much more flavorful. My husband called this dish "extraordinary!" - something he rarely says about food. This recipe could easily serve 6 people.

Frittata is the answer

The question, of course, is "What can I make with summer squash that would be a good hot weather dish?"

Here's what I did with some some my excessive amount of summer squash that's now coming from our garden. I had looked through a great cookbook I have on how to use the vegetables in your garden, but for squash there were only recipes for salads or soups(!?).

Since my favorite kitchen challenge is to make tasty meals of stuff we already have (rather than finding recipes and then going and buying the ingredients), I rummaged around and found - in addition to the squash - a tomato that was going to go bad if I didn't use it pronto, some onions (my motto for cooking is "start by cooking an onion in some olive oil..."), a tin of smoked clams, and some eggs.



So here's what I did:
1. Start by slicing an onion finely and cooking it in some olive oil (true to form!) on medium heat. I used a 10" pan, so if you use a smaller pan, reduce the ingredients to fit the pan.
2. Slice at least 3 smallish squash very thin - you could probably use up to 5 squash in the frittata, depending on their size - but I just took the 3 that needed to be used soonest.
3. When the onion has cooked enough to get soft, add the squash to the pan. If you slice too much squash and realize that it won't all fit, set aside some for tomorrow's meal.
4. Break 6 eggs into a bowl (could be up to 8 eggs if your pan - and the crowd you're feeding - is big enough).
5. Add a pinch of coriander to the eggs, a couple of shakes of the original Tabasco (the best for eggs, if you like them a bit spicy), some salt and pepper, and if dairy's okay for you, a small pour of milk or half and half (this makes the egg mixture thicker and smoother).
6. Once the squash has softened up a little (not too much!) add the tin of smoked clams with their oil to the pan and turn the heat to LOWEST.
7. Slice the tomato thinly and add to the pan (the tomato isn't necessary, but it looks nice)
8. Add the eggs, making sure that the egg mixture spreads over the contents of the pan.
9. Cover the pan (I'm too lazy most of the time to do the trick of turning the frittata, so having the pan covered ensures that the top gets cooked).
10. Leave it for 5 minutes and check to see if the top is solid yet. If not, check every couple of minutes until you've got a solid top.
11. Let the frittata sit for at least a few minutes or up to a couple of hours with the top on. This dish is great warm, cool, or cold.
12. Serve it up!

Some changes that would work well:
You could add some chopped up garlic to the onions. If you do that I would forget about adding the coriander to the egg mix - the flavor is too subtle to stand up to garlic.

You could use thyme instead of coriander to season the eggs.

If you don't have a tin of smoked clams (but why not? They're so versatile!), you could use any leftover meat you have, or substitute some grated cheese (any kind) for the meat.

You could also add chopped olives if you don't use smoked clams - they would give the frittata a distinctive flavor. But don't put them in with the smoked clams because the flavors would probably work against each other.

Putting in some chopped parsley would be a pretty addition too.

Since we usually eat only one thing per meal, the two of us ate the whole frittata in a single sitting. If you add a green salad and some crusty bread, both of which would go really well with this dish, there would be enough to serve 4 adults, or 2 adults and 4 children.

Buen provecho! (the spanish version of "enjoy!")

NOTE: this post is dedicated to the two of my granddaughters who love to cook the most: Ayla and Brenna.

Week Ending - betcha can't top this one!

This was my birthday weekend, and I was looking forward to a very special gift that I had specifically asked for. But first...

FRIDAY: Today the workmen came to tear down our fence because our black dog, Quila (short for Tranquila, which she is NOT) had pushed on it so hard in guarding our house from the dangerous and malevolent schoolchildren that pass by every day that it had given up the ghost and fallen over.

This, of course, meant that we had to keep the dogs chained up most of the day so they wouldn't run off and get into trouble, which is their normal MO.

What made the day particularly interesting is that the front end of a tropical storm came through just about the time that the welders started working to weld the posts. Yes, rain - a steady drizzle.

In the late afternoon, since the dogs had been on their chains all day, I decided to take them for a walk - in the rain - to give them a chance to "do their duty". Since I'm not strong enough to take both of them on a leash at the same time, I had to do the walk twice. We all came back thoroughly soaked (surprise!).

SATURDAY: The first thing I did when I woke up was take the dogs for (separate) walks again...in the rain again. On Saturday Tropical Storm Ivo had moved in closer, so we had wind as well. I was desperate to do some laundry and since we don't have a dryer (why bother when it's sunny 360 days out of the year?) I had David string up some twine in the guest bedroom so I could do a load of the most desperately needed clothes and have somewhere to dry them that didn't cut off our ability to walk around in our 850 square foot house.


On Saturdays I generally cook up a bunch of things to use during the week - rice, beans, and whatever else comes to hand. Although we were in the middle of a tropical storm, it was still too hot to cook inside, so I fired up the woodstove in the "summer kitchen" (which is where I've been doing all my cooking since the weather got hot) and put on a pot of black beans, a pot of rice, and 4 crabs that I had bought at the pescaderia (fish store) the day before. By this time the rain had stopped, but the wind had really kicked up, with gusts of about 40 MPH. I had to hold onto my potholders, but other than that it didn't affect my ability to cook.

THEN came my birthday present! Our priest had promised to teach me how to make mole (pronounced mole-ay for you non-spanish speakers), and at lunchtime he showed up with about 20 ingredients. He laid them all out and while he did almost all the work, I took notes. What most people in the States don't realize is that there are many types of mole, not just the one with chocolate. This particular mole doesn't have chocolate, but it does use FOUR different types of chiles, along with TWO types of nuts, bananas, and many other things. It took about an hour and a half to put it all together, and another half hour to cook.

After all that effort we were all hungry so I made a salad for us to eat:
1/2lb of good ham (not that watery stuff-use thick sliced bacon if you can't find good ham)
1 small (8oz) can of corn
1 bell pepper (I used yellow)
1 large roma tomato
1/2-3/4 cup of kalamata olives
3 hard boiled eggs

I cubed the ham and heated it up, then mixed it with the other ingredients and poured garlic italian salad dressing (purchased) over the whole thing. It was a major hit!


Part of the birthday present is that Padre was going to come back after the midday mass on Sunday (the third of 4 for him each Sunday) to have chicken mole with us. He told me that we should have rice and tortillas with it, so after he left I went back out and cooked up the chicken and made another batch of rice (because the first batch I made is for other meals this week). After those were finished, I deboned the chicken and also got all the meat out of the crab to use for later. So the result of all the cooking outside on a woodstove during a tropical storm was:
1.5 quarts of black beans
2.5 quarts of mole (yummy!)
3 quarts of rice
1.5 pounds of deboned chicken
1 pint of crab meat
And of course the salad...

SUNDAY: Our church has a fundraising program for the various groups in the church where one of the couples in the church makes tamale lunches once a month and tickets are sold, with the cost of the tickets covering the ingredients, plus extra which goes to the church groups. For some reason David had bought FOUR tickets this time, plus a friend of mine gave me 2, so we had SIX tickets for tamale lunches. Thankfully I had just found a recipe that uses leftover tamales to make a casserole, so right after church I got the 6 lunches and we hightailed it home to fire up the woodstove so I could heat up the chicken mole and the rice.

We had a VERY tasty lunch and I got a wonderful surprise. I asked Padre what recipe I should learn next and he said that he will come over in a week and teach me how to make a special kind of salsa that I've never heard of. It turns out that he LOVES to cook traditional Mexican ranchero food, which he learned from his mom, and he usually spends his day off each week cooking! So he's pretty excited that I want to learn this stuff, and I'm even more excited that he's willing to find the time to teach me! I'm hoping to have a series of occasional blog posts, "Padre's Kitchen", with the recipes and photos of these traditional dishes. I'm sorry I didn't take any photos while we were making the mole, but trying to watch Padre and take notes during a tropical storm needed my full attention. However, Padre said that soon he's going to come over and watch ME make the mole from scratch, to be sure that I have it down, so I'll do a post with the recipes and photos then.

After Padre left David and I settled in for a nice long summer's nap, and when we woke up we took the dogs for a walk. And enjoyed the sunset, of course!

Feliz cumpleanos to Kathleen Basi and everyone else whose birthday was this weekend! Now hie thyself over to Reinventing Mother to see what's been going with Wanda and others this past weekend.

Week Ending 28 de Julio

This fin de semana (weekend) I've been swimming in the depths of God's kingdom. It started on Friday when a colleague from my days as a financial planner called to talk about God. She's been having situations come up in her life that are causing her to ask a lot of questions about christianity and God and we had a wonderfully dense and chewy conversation, especially about how God is different from His followers. Odd point, I know, but I think quite common - consider all the people who reject God because of what they see His followers do or neglect to do (guilt by association!)

That evening (Friday), when we went to mass, everyone was so sad - lots of long hugs and crying - and we found out that the brother of one of the leaders of our Renovacion group was killed in an auto accident only a couple of hours before. The brother's wife also died, and their little girl was taken to the hospital. The siblings and the parents were all there at mass, as well as for our Renovacion (charismatic) service afterward. The renovacion service started with an acknowledgement of the pain we were all feeling, either as relatives of the couple who died, or as friends of the family, and prayers for the families. Then we spent the rest of the time praising God and focusing on His sovereignty and great love for us. At the end, all the family members went up to the front for an extended time of prayer.

On Saturday morning I went on a walk with a friend of mine. We walked and talked about the things of God, and agreed that there's really nothing more satisfying or worthy of conversation than that. So this weekend I was blessed with TWO long conversations focusing on God!

Saturday was also the funeral for the couple that died (down here the funeral is always the day following a death). The church was completely packed. Anibal, (the Renovacion leader and brother of the dead man) and his cousin were lectors, and Anibal wanted me to be the third lector. I was so honored that he specifically asked for me to read the New Testament reading (Romans 6:2-4). Remember that all of this is in spanish! I was so humbled to be chosen over others for whom spanish is their mother tongue, and who are closer to the family than I.

These are the flowers from the funeral mass in front of the door of the business that the couple was connected with.

Sunday when we arrived at church for mass, we discovered that there would be multiple baptisms. So in one weekend we had sorrow, followed by joy, both appropriately addressed with solemnity.

There were probably 15-20 children (plus of course parents and godparents) there to be baptized after mass - just those people took up half the pews! As I was praying before the mass, one of the nuns came up to me and asked if I would be the lector for the first reading! I'm always so blessed when I'm asked to do a reading; it's such a privilege to serve that way.

I generally do some special spiritual reading on Sundays after mass, and today I turned to a little-known book by Louis Tronson, "Examination of Conscience Upon Special Subjects". Father Tronson was a priest in France during the late 1600s and the rector of a seminary there. This is a jewel of a book, although a bit tricky to read since it's one of those old public-domain books that was scanned in the google project and therefore there are occasionally strings of letters that were mis-translated by the electronic reader. But the book is SO worth reading! And it's free! (in electronic form, of course)

For dinner Sunday evening I made lettuce soup (!!!). My DH had WAY too much lettuce in the garden and was discouraged about having it go to waste, so I found a great recipe in one of my favorite cookbooks, An Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler (although Alice Waters is given credit on the cover, she only wrote the preface).

The description in the book is actually too simple to be called a recipe. Start by sautéing an onion (cut up any way you want) in some butter or oil or whatever type of fat you want. Add 1/2 cup of rice, 8 cups of chicken stock and as much salt as you prefer and cook until the rice is so done that it has become jagged around the edges (like Campbell's soup chicken and rice). Then add the lettuce, cut into thin ribbons. You can add as much as a BIG head of lettuce, or less if you're a bit wary. Let it wilt a little in the warm soup, add pepper (and more salt if you want) or any other seasonings that you like. Because this is Mexico, I added some cayenne & garlic. That's it - easy peasy! The DH really liked it!



Quite a fulfilling weekend. Here's the perfect ending to it:

A typical sunset at our house.

For more weekend stories, hop on over to Wanda's blog, Reinventing Mother, and bless the bloggers whose posts you read by leaving a comment.

Week ending - 14 de julio

I've come to the realization that although I want to participate in group linkups (it's a way of building community, after all), several of the ones that are most popular to don't fit me. I really like {pretty, happy, funny, real} at Like Mother, Like Daughter but the things I have to share don't always fit well enough into that framework. And with many linkups I feel a little lost in the crowd when there are over 50 participants. So I was really happy to find the link that Wanda at Reinventing Mother created to memorialize and reflect on our weekends and I decided that I'll be joining her Week Ending linkup. However, she's taking a break this week so there's no linkup, but I wanted to share what we did this weekend anyway.


Saturdays tend to be our "out and about"days. Sometimes we go to the city near us, sometimes we go on little excursions, and sometimes we just go to the vivero (nursery). This weekend we did the latter and came back with some real finds.


These are called corona de cristo (in English we call them crown of thorns). These two are varieties I'd never seen before, one with pink flowers and one with large pinky yellow flowers.

I was stunned to find crocosmia at the vivero. I haven't seen it around here at all and it's one of my favorite flowers! The owner of the nursery didn't even know what they were!

On Friday the Pirate had returned from one of his excursions with a new type of fruit that neither of us had ever seen or heard of before: the mamey (also known as the sapote). He tried some and decided that it wasn't something he liked. I tried some and was astounded to find out that it tastes just like canned pumpkin. The color and the texture are the same as well. Since I had 3 large mameys that weren't going to be eaten as fruit I decided to find some pumpkin bar recipes that I could use them in. They were going to rot soon so I had to use them all up at once, which meant that I would have to bake far more sweet stuff than we have had in the house for a long time.


I ended up making 2 types of "pumpkin"(mamey)bars, both of which turned out more like cake or brownies than what I was expecting. I got the recipes here and here. They both tasted great - just like pumpkin brownies - but if I try the recipes again I might just leave out the flour (I used rice flour both times) since the mamey seems to provide sufficient body by itself (like what peanut butter does in the 3-ingredient peanut butter cookie recipe).

I added pecans and chocolate chips to the recipe. I wanted to put dates in it - I think they would have gone well - but I didn't have any.

What I spent the most amount of time on this weekend was knitting. I'm working on a shrug which I want to finish this week because I want to start on another project, so I spent probably 5 hours working on it this weekend. This is one of those projects that seems to knit quickly but the piece doesn't seem to progress at all. I measured it on Friday evening and it was 24" long. After knitting what should have been 4" of rows I measured it again and it was 26" long. I knitted 4 more inches of rows and it was 29" long. And yes, I checked the gauge and this estimate is based on the actual gauge of the piece! Ah well, that's what I get for wanting to complete the piece by a particular date rather than letting it lead me in the pacing.

Garden to Table

Last week I found a recipe for onion jam, so I made some and after putting away a pint, I used the rest in one of my famous "one pot" recipes. When I first learned to cook the Pirate and I lived in an old 20x20 army tent and our only source of heat (it was winter) as well as our only cooking appliance was a two-burner longbox wood stove, like the one below only in worse shape.


So I learned to cook one-pot meals back then and this has been my favorite method of cooking since then (for one thing it cuts way down on the cleanup!). I thought I'd share this combination I made which turned out really tasty and had the added benefit of using up a bunch of kale from our garden. We're drowning in kale right now. It's pretty easy to do if you grow it - each "cut-and'come-again" plant is quite prolific and it's really easy to plant too much, even for a dedicated italian kale eater like me.


Here's the recipe for the ONION JAM (slightly changed because the original was a bit too fiery, even for us people south of the border).

2 tbsp olive oil
1.5 pounds of red onions,peeled and sliced in slivers (I used 3 biggish ones)
a minimum of 4 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced (I used 8 large cloves, but we LOVE garlic)
chipotle powder, ancho chile powder, cayenne or Tabasco (or a combination) to taste - or if you're really a heat wuss, use chili powder
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
salt to taste

On lowest heat, heat the oil in a large skillet. Add the onions and garlic and cook for 10 minutes or until softened, stirring occasionally.

Cover the skillet and cook for 20 more minutes, stirring once or twice. Uncover the skillet and add the spices for heat and the balsamic vinegar.

Stirring often, cook until the vinegar is reduced and the onions are a rich brown, about 10-15 minutes more. You can see from the photo below that there is no liquid left.

Add salt to taste (you won't need much). I recommend putting the jam in a glass canning jar - I filled a pint jar with a little bit left over for the dinner dish below. This jam will keep in the fridge for at least a couple of weeks. Serve it warm or at room temperature, or mixed into a hot dish.


Here's what I made using the jam:

[1] 1/2 to 1.5 cups cooked meat cut into bite-sized pieces (pork, chicken, beef - it doesn't matter what kind). The amount depends on what you have on hand and how many people you'll be feeding.
[2] 1/2 to 1 can of beans (NOT baked beans or chili, just beans - black, red or whatever you have on hand); or if you cook your own beans from dried (as I do), use 1-2 cups of cooked beans
[3] 1/2 to 3/4 cup of onion jam (your call)
[4] as much greens as your skillet can take on top of the other stuff - I estimate this to be about 1 bunch of bought greens.

[1] Put the onion jam, meat and beans in the skillet and cook over medium heat, stirring frequently until they're heated through.
[2] First making sure that the food in the skillet isn't cooking too quickly, wash and chop the greens. It's best if there's still water from washing the greens clinging to the leaves when you put them in the skillet.
[3] Add the greens to the skillet and cover. Cook for 3 minutes, until the greens have wilted. Stir everything in the skillet so the greens are mixed in well and cook for another 5 minutes or so until the greens are fully cooked.

[4] Check for seasoning. Depending on how much heat you put in the onion jam, and how much jam there is in proportion to the rest of the food, you may want to add more heat (whatever type you like best) and/or salt.
[5] I happened to have a couple of hard boiled eggs on hand, so I used those for garnish. You might also use pine nuts or pecans as a garnish. Sorry the photo is so dark, but you get the idea.


As you can tell, I'm not a "by the numbers" person - whether it's cooking, knitting, or most other things. I've given you enough structure to keep from any large imbalances but still find the proportions you like best, and make it easy to adapt the recipe to what you have on hand. That, plus first, start with onions are my two fundamental cooking principles.

As they say here in Mexico, "provecho"!