All good kittehs are alike; each bad kitteh is bad in its own way. – Anna Kittehnina
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Garden
Tidbits
It’s soup season. This one is a navy bean soup with cured ham and cute cornbread muffins. I didn’t do a soak because these beans are small and are good (not old) beans. Just add water to cover by 2 or 3 inches, add chopped onions, black pepper, your ham, and a couple of bay leaves. Bring to a boil and then simmer for a few hours. Toward the end you can add veggies like carrots and celery if you wish.
These are the last of the peppers. The plants were productive pretty much all summer. I almost snapped a pic of the plants after they were hit by a hard frost but I decided it would be just too sad looking..
This was very good but I doesn’t look right. It’s a roux-thickened, garlic lemon cream sauce over shrimp and angel hair pasta. I added dried basil and parsley flakes to the sauce as it heated. Make the roux and stir in heavy cream, grated Parmesan, the zest and juice of a lemon, season with salt and pepper.
I can never get angel hair pasta to work for me and I tell myself that spaghetti is fine for these things after every disappointment but I forget after a while.
Huevos rancheros is just a killer meal any time of the day.
I looked at the pics I took of this rueben after I ate it. One was too blurry to use and this one is not very good.
Here’s what those beef odds and ends turned into after a couple of hours. I pulled the meat off the bones and strained the broth. Not sure where I’ll go from here. Veggie beef and barley?
Another bowl of chicken noodle soup. Fettuccine noodles in this one.
Here’s a golden oldie. Homer is receiving illustrated instructions on how to use a scratching post.
Why Have A Big Cast Iron Pot?
It’s for those times when you have a pile of bone-in stuff like ox tails or beef ribs, and you have a bunch of herbs that are one more hard freeze away from not being fresh herbs any more. Some red wine, tomato paste, broth, onions and carrots and celery need to go in, and maybe…
yeah, that’ll work. I think this is going to be a beefy veggie soup or stew.
Sammich, Finally
I’ve been holding a bottle of a mojo marinade for a long time. I finally used it on this pork shoulder. Just poured it into the pan with a bunch of garlic and several very coarsely chopped onions.
Poked holes in the meat, shoved in more garlic, and loaded this into a 220° oven all night. I waited till evening because I wanted to make sure that the 12 hour auto-shutoff was disabled. Still going this morning so we’re good, there.
Drain the fat and chop it up:
Our peppers are almost done, I do have a few of those little bitty red peppers but the Kroger garden is going to have to do for a while. Winter gets its turn.
The mojo sauces are citrus-y sorts of things, I wondered how it would go with a drizzle of habanero orange. I liked it a lot, YMMV.
Sammich Pr0n
The green tomato relish has been a huge success! Yay!
Green Tomato Relish
I didn’t weigh or count these, so we’ll just say for recipe purposes “about yea many”.
Along with the green tomatoes, I added two big sweet onions, and four bell peppers, two green and two red. Coarse chop all of that then spin it in a food processor to get the final mince on. Stir in two tablespoons of kosher salt and let drain in a colander for a while, then add to a big pot. I added yellow and black mustard seed, whole coriander seeds, a dollop of Dijon mustard, black pepper, many cloves of garlic, minced, some ground cumin, granulated garlic, granulated onion, 1 cup of sweetener, and one cup of vinegar.
Bring to a simmer and let it bubble for 20 minutes or so. I managed to cram everything into 5 wide mouth pint jars. Process in a water bath for 20-30 minutes.
Sammich Pr0n
Chunky tuna salad sammich on white toast with a side of tomatoes in vinaigrette with fresh thyme.
We stripped all the tomatoes from the vines in the back garden and pulled them from the ground so there won’t be any more fresh tomatoes coming on. What was on the bush yesterday is what we have. I’m going to make some green tomato relish today,
Tidbits
We brought in some more tomatoes and promptly turned them into stewed tomatoes with lots of peppers and onions.
We canned most of it but saved out enough to make our favorite sauce.
The tomatoes and peppers with chicken broth and a pound each of Italian sausage and hamburger. The usual herbs and spices went in: granulated onion and garlic, bay leaves, thyme, oregano, basil, black pepper and salt.
Which we had with rice because its’s good that way. The recipe was modified from a stuffed pepper soup recipe and the rice was a part of that. It’s great on pasta.
So we used the rest of that batch to make another lasagna, We used ricotta in this one and that turned it into maybe the best lasagna I’ve ever made. This one cooked at 350 for an hour, the mozz on the top browned up nicely.
We said goodbye to a humongous corkscrew willow. We planted it soon after we moved in, maybe 25+ years ago. It grew fast and started to lose big branches, we worried they would take out infrastructure.
Honey bees were attracted to the sap oozing from the fresh cuts. We are leaving the big ol’ stump right where it is for now.
Random sammich – we kept a tomato or three out of the pot just for one of these. That’s a lucky double yolk on that egg!
