MULCH MILLIONAIRES!

THE GIGANTIC PILE OF MULCH

Let’s talk about MULCH. What is it? It is usually ground up wood, pine needles, or, in some climates, chopped up leaves. Mulch is placed around the bases of plants and shrubs (and even trees) to keep moisture from evaporating out of the soil, and to discourage weeds.

Now, I have read in gardening books that deal with DESIRABLE gardening climates, that one can just cram wet fallen autumn leaves around the bases of plants to discourage weeds, about an inch thick, and that does the job JUST FINE.

But here in Central Texas, where you can have summer temperatures hovering around a hundred and ten (like last summer) and sometimes no rain for two years (like Last Summer), my Central Texas Vegetable Gardening book advises: “apply mulch at least 8 inches thick and preferable a FOOT THICK, and use ground up trees because leaves will just dry up and blow away.”

ANOTHER ANGLE ON THE GIGANTIC MULCH PILE

Sadly, the amount of mulch advised is just so much, even though I am CONSTANTLY on the lookout for ground up trees, and I grind up all my OWN trees whenever possible, I have never had anywhere NEAR enough mulch. Laying it on a foot thick, a HUGE garbage can full of mulch (the super huge kind) will only do about a five by five foot bed. So for a garden like mine, I would need like 35 giant garbage cans full.

At Xmas, the City of AUstin gives away all the ground up Xmas trees (to keep them out of the landfill) and we got load after load after load of the ground up Xmas trees, and I STILL used it all up before I got half the garden mulched (and only about 3 inches deep).

SO!

Davey Tree Service was hired by the City to cut down all the tree limbs in the entire city that threatened power lines. We didn’t really have any, but they came and rooted out a ONE foot tall pecan that was growing where they thought it might eventually in 20 years touch the power line. And I was joking around with the Davey Tree guy and I said, ” I don’t suppose you are GIVING AWAY any of that MULCH for FREE?” (from grinding up the limbs, which they were doing) And I was TOTALLY JOKING, because normally the tree trimming companies give you the STINK EYE when you make jests of that nature.

And the Davey Tree guy said: “HOW MANY TRUCKFULS WOULD YOU LIKE?”

(and I said. “……………one……………..?”)

And then nothing happened for a week, and I figured he forgot. But then we came home last Friday and there was THE HUGEST PILE OF MULCH in front of our house, the photos don’t do it justice!

And today, the following Wednesday, Dave finished shoveling the TEN THOUSAND TONS of mulch into three piles, no FOUR PILES in the backyard. I have mulched about HALF the garden, too, and I have enough mulch to mulch EVERYTHING A FOOR DEEP!!!  EVERYTHING !!!!

WE ARE MULCH MILLIONAIRES!!!

ALL MOVED TO THE BACKYARD BY DAVE THORNBERRY, SUPERHERO.

More Late Gladiolas

Watermelon Juice; or, Aguas Frescas

Gigantic Pink Glass of Watermelon Juice Over Ice

Aguas Frescas are Mexican fruit juices, fresh juices, that are becoming popular in Texas with EVERYONE. Because they are G*R*E*A*T!!!

Popular flavors include cantaulope, watermelon, tamarind, lemon, lime, and “Orchata”, which is essentially rice milk with vanilla and cinnamon.

Watermelon has always been my favorite, and I began making it when I bought watermelon and couldn’t fit it all in my icebox. Because watermelons are HUGE and my icebox is usually PACKED. Plus, watermelon juice is just naturally cooling and also diuretic, it is probably the perfect thing to drink in Texas in the summer.

For years I made it with a juicer, outside (because juicers FLING watermelon seeds everywhere. Really. Try it, you’ll see….even when it shouldn’t be possible, they manage.) But I read the other day that you can make watermelon agua fresca with YOUR BLENDER and a strainer, and it just sounded like it might be a lot easier.

IT IS!

My INSTRUCTIONS for YOU:

Chop up your watermelon or half watermelon into cubes.

Pack cubes in blender tightly, with a little water and a little sugar (you need to add a little sugar as a preservative)

Blend.

Pour into a strainer set over a bowl to catch the very tiny amount of fiber that a watermelon has.

Serve over ice!

As you can see, an entire watermelon only has a few tablespoons of fiber!

Late Gladiolas

My gladiolas didn't bloom this year because, well, I THOUGHT it had rained enough for them, but actually I needed to water them more. So instead of blooming they all just withered. But this week, after the thousand inches of rain we have gotten, a few of my gladiolas have sent up flower shoots! The rain made them top heavy and they were falling over, so I had to put them in this vase. IS IT NOT GORGEOUS???

More PORKFEST at OLIVIA

Kay and Jim Richardson, talking to the guy who owns the Whip-In Market, which is a local convenience store that serves a huge selection of beer and Indian Food

As I mentioned before, all the courses at PORKFEST featured Richardson Farms Pastured Pork. Jim and Kay Richardson are absolutely the nicest and happiest folks, always cheerful when I see them at events like this one or at the Farmers Market. You get the feeling talking to them that they are just having the GREATEST TIME raising organic pork, chicken and beef, not to mention wheat, corn and millet on their farm. They got involved with the burgeoning interest in pastured, organic meats and grains just at the perfect time to do well and be VERY appreciated.

Their grass-fed beef is so superior, so flavorful and delicious, that I don’t even ENJOY eating beef that they didn’t raise. Seriously. It is THAT MUCH BETTER. It is like the difference between Texas and California peaches! (In my opinion, there isn’t even any POINT in putting a California peach in your mouth. It is DRECK conpared to a Texas peach. But no one outside of Texas KNOWS this, because Texas never exports any peaches….we eat them all here!)

On to the Cuisine!

Caramelized Pork Belly Rillons in Ginger-Apple Butter. THIS WAS SUCH A MEMORABLE COURSE! The Pork Belly Rillons were the best I have ever had, nice and crispy and not overly fatty, and the GINGER APPLE BUTTER WAS AMAZING !!!

Beer-Glazed Spareribs with cucumber and watermelon salad. These were so tender that the meat was indeed LITERALLY falling off the bone. The Watermelon was a perfect foil.

Remember me going ON AND ON AND ON about Texas peaches? The OUTSTANDING dessert was Texas peach ice cream with CHOCOLATE COVERED BACON. One of the best desserts I have ever had! The chocolate covered bacon was so good, I really wanted to send Jim Gaffigan a boxful.

Olivia: PORKFEST

The First Course: Prosciutto, Salami, Guanciale, and Testa, all made at Olivia. Served with grilled Hill Country Peaches and Plums and Green Onion Salad

Tonight I went to a VERY special event: PORKFEST, at Olivia. At a time when higher end eateries are scrambling to issue “groupons” and get folks in the door, Chef James Holmes practically sold OUT this event the first day is was announced. (Also, I should mention it was ONLY $50, which compares VERY favorably to the price of chef-orchestrated wine dinners.)

The concept: Six courses of all natural pastured pork from Richardson Farms, paired with beers from the 512 Brewery, a fledgling brewery here in town (I have to admit I L*OV*E L*O*V*E L*O*V*E the NAME!! It is of course the name of our AREA CODE here in Austin. It is KIND OF like naming your brewery “78704″, but less obvious! GREAT NAME!!!)

Chef James Holmes HAMMING IT UP with a whole roasted pig! I actually SAID THAT OUT LOUD at the event and everyone GROANED because they thought I was saying a PUN I made up! So embarrassing! I didn't realize it was a pun until they groaned

One day recently I figured out that 70% of the meat I eat is PORK (the magical animal! Pork Chops, Bacon, Sausage, Ham!) which is KIND OF SCARY, actually…but anyway, the menu was right down my alley, and the food was DIVINE.

I have to say, I was VERY impressed with the beers and ales as well. They were ALL awesome, seriously. the “WIT”  brew was made with cilantro and grapefruit peel (two of my favorite flavors, and although you couldn’t REALLY taste them in the beer, I just like the IDEA, you know!); the IPA had just an EXPLOSION of subtle flavors, and the Pecan Porter was seriously, better than most Guinness I have had, dark and smooth in a very luxurious way. I would be hard pressed to say which I adored the most; if I am in a bar that serves 512 brews anytime soon, I will probably ORDER THEM! In preference to OTHER beers!

COURSE TWO: An ENTIRE sausage, with a HUGE perfectly cooked scallop. That is a normal size sausage; the scallop really IS the size of a baseball

Upcoming courses: Caramelized Pork Belly with ginger-apple butter (Extremely memorable and awesome); Beer glazed spareribs with garden tomato, cucumber and watermelon salad; Slow Roasted Whole Pig with potato Gnocchi and summer vegetables; and-

HILL COUNTRY PEACH ICE CREAM WITH CHOCOLATE COVERED BACON!!

Making Fresh Salsa from the Garden

BEFORE GOING IN THE OVEN

Of course, there are MANY kinds of salsa! But what I am writing about here is your everyday (in Texas) red table salsa that is ordinarily enjoyed with tortilla chips. Over the years I have been experimenting with different ways to make red table salsa, and I am pretty happy with this recipe.

You will need:

Garden tomatoes, any size is fine (you can use cherry tomatoes if that is what you have); roughly a small mixing bowl full. How many is that? A pound? Three pounds? I don’t know. I used 4 giant ones (Cherokees) and 6 medium ones (San Marzanos).

One gigantic white onion

Jalapenos, or serranos, or poblanos, or you could even use a single habanero if you are brave. How many? depends on how hot you want it to be. I used three jalapenos, hot ones. (If you don’t have fresh, you can use canned, but the salsa will taste different.)

Some of that frozen cilantro I told you about. Or fresh. One thing I have noticed is that STORE cilantro is way less leafy that homegrown; if you use storebought, you will need to use the leaves off a whole bunch, an ENTIRE bunch.

Deflated and roasted, they are ready for the PROCESSOR!!!

salt and pepper

sugar

a lime

a little oil

Heat the oven to 400˚.  Arrange halved tomatoes, onion slices, and whole peppers on two oiled baking sheets. Salt and pepper them. Roast in the oven until they appear deflated and more than half cooked. They can still be a LITTLE raw. Between fifteen and thirty minutes? You can tell by looking at them. (Or, you can roast them until they are beginning to blacken a little; then you will have “FIRE-ROASTED” salsa!)

Remove from oven, and dump the tomatoes, onion, and peppers into your food processor. (Have you noticed my recipes involve the word “DUMP” a lot? I think I am trying to make this all seem NOT FINICKY to you guys. Cooking can be very loose, very relaxed! You don’t need to be UPTIGHT about MEASURING STUFF!)

Pulse. Add a Tablespoon or two of white sugar, a HALF teaspoon of SALT, and the juice of half a lime. Pulse. Taste. Does it need more sugar? (It will if your tomatoes were sour, the way we grow them around here! Tomatoes that grow in areas where it gets chilly at night are SWEET; in Texas, where it is HOT at night, they are sour.) Does it need more lime? You be the judge. If it needs more of something, add it.

Add a GLOB of Frozen cilantro (Or the leaves from a bunch of fresh cilantro)(Or, if, like my friend Gina, you don’t LIKE cilantro, you can leave it out!). Pulse. Taste. IT IS DONE!!!

This recipe will provide you with a large bowl of better-than-most-restaurants quality salsa. We usually use about half of it right away, and I freeze the other half for later use.

Authentic Table Salsa

Texas Red Plum Pie

The color is as psychedelic as Prickly Pear juice! (Is Texas a naturally psychedelic place? Perhaps! Psilocybin mushrooms DO grow here naturally.)

I bought a few pounds of red plums last year, and what I didn’t eat, I made into PLUM JAM. It is the B*E*S*T Jam I have ever made, and not only that, IT JELLED the very first time (I think because the plums are rather small and tart.)

So, this year, I bought a few pounds at the Farmers Market, and I have been eating them; but I have enough jam from last summer to do me just fine for this summer. And then, they started to get a little ripe. Okay, a few were getting OVER RIPE! What to do?

I thought, do people make Plum Pie? It doesn’t sound familiar. So I looked it up on the innertubes, and I saw that “Rustic Plum Tart” is super popular. I thought about making a couple of them (I needed to make my neighbor Jeannie a pie, too), but, I have MADE these “Rustic Tarts” before (I made a Rustic Apple Tart once, out of the Hudson’s on the Bend cookbook), and I found that I missed the crumb topping that I usually use on fruit pies.

So, I decided to make PIE, not a TART, and to use a crumb topping. For the filling, I decided to use unpeeled plums (the Rustic Tart recipes didn’t peel) and I thought it sounded nice to use lemon zest and almond extract and brown sugar. And lemon juice.

The pies turned out SPECTACULARLY. So well, that Dave said it is his new favorite kind of pie. I wonder why Plum Pie isn’t as well known as Cherry Pie? Because it is just as red and vibrant as cherry.

MADE UP PLUM PIE

Enough red plums to make a pie

3/4 cup light brown sugar

a lemon

a teaspoon of almond extract

1/4 cup cornstarch

PASTRY

1 1/2 cups flour

2  sticks butter

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

I suddenly realize I haven’t ever blogged my SPECIFIC instructions for PIE CRUST. OY!! I don’t want to get into the specifics NOW! It will take a million years! I am just going to assume you know how to make a pie crust.

1. Using one cup a flour, 1/4 t of salt, and 3/4 a stick of butter, MAKE A PIECRUST.

2. Slice the red plums off of the pits, using a little paring knife, into a bowl.

3. In another bowl, whisk together the brown sugar, cornstarch, and almond extract, in that order.

4. Pour the brown sugar mixture over the plums, and toss around with a rubber spatula.

5. Dump fruit into pie crust. The fruit should be sort of shallow, not deep-dish, about an inch and a half to two inches deep.

6. Zest the lemon over the plums in the pie pan.

7. Cut the lemon in half, and squeeze the juice of half the lemon over the plums. Put the other half off the lemon into your ice tea, or vodka and tonic. Or beer. Or water!

8. Put the remaining flour, white sugar, and quarter teaspoon of salt into the food processor. Pulse. Add the stick of butter, sliced, and pulse until it is crumbs.

9. Arrange crumbs on top of fruit, and bake entire pie in a 350˚ oven until the crust is visibly browning and the plum juice is visibly bubbling at the rim. About 40-50 minutes.

It rained THREE INCHES yesterday (a little bit of Alex) and then probably ANOTHER inch TODAY! For Texas, this is like a month's worth in two days.It was so wet and humid out, my camera fogged up just from going outside. That is why it looks like a picture of the Olden Days.

Artichokes 2010

The artichoke plants are doing SO GREAT THIS YEAR that I have already given away 6 artichokes and eaten 4. Look!

Every plant is covered, and SO FAR, no stinkbugs!

Portuguese Kale Soup

Portuguese Kale Soup

This is one of the most famous and best soups in the WORLD. It is also one that I make often enough to no longer need a recipe. I really don’t know ( I ought to look it up! ) whether this is a popular soup in Portugal; I only know it as a popular soup in Cape Cod among the Portuguese there. In the twentieth century the fishing fleet of Cape Cod became almost entirely Portuguese (it had many Portuguese fisherman in the 19th century also) which lead to the HORROR of Spencer Tracy playing a Portuguese Fisherman (!) in the 1937 Hollywood movie Captains Courageous. OMIGOD, it is worse, WAY worse, than Edward G Robinson playing a Hebrew Overseer in The Ten Commandments! (which led to the snarled quote: “Where’s your Messiah NOW?” by Captain Wiggum on the Simpsons). Tracy’s “Portuguese” accent is so terrible, he sounds like a Cockney from New Jersey. (Also, his body gets cut in half while he floats in the ocean, and he delivers a soliloquy, while cut in half, for like a hour. With his terrible fake accent. Well, it seems like an hour! G*R*E*A*T M*O*V*I*E  ! )

But I digress!

The Portuguese are a strong cultural presence on Cape Cod, and Portuguese Kale Soup is a staple in many of the restaurants there, even the “Fine Dining” ones. I met with it when visiting my Uncle Don and Aunt Jeannie in Provincetown, where they lived in their later years. Naturally I began to try to make it at home, especially after I started gardening and had TONS O’KALE to use up.

My Whole Bolted Kale Plant. It is 3 or 4 feet tall.

This soup will use up a whole mature Kale plant, or HALF a bolted one. My Kale bolted last week, darnitall, but there doesn’t seem to be any difference in the flavor of the Kale. I met a lady last week who lets her Kale live through the summer (?!?!?!  THEY LIVE?!?!?) as sometimes Swiss Chard will, so I am thinking of trying that this year with one of the plants. It is beyond prediction which plants can live through the heat here. IMAGINE MY SURPRISE that one of the heat-hardiest is the LEEK! The delicate Leek! The other that can live is French Sorrell. So…we shall see.

My other surmise about Kale Soup is, perhaps it is one of the only vegetables that can be grown in the sandy soil of Cape Cod. Agriculture does NOT flourish there; I have a book written around 1880 called Cape Cod Folks, and it describes in homely detail what homesteading on the Cape was like in that time. There is a REASON that Cape Codders ate a lot of chowder: one could keep a milk cow on the salt marsh grass, and you could fish, and you could fetch potatoes from Newfoundland. Grow a lot of vegetables you could not. The soil was just too sandy and too salty. To this day, I think the main agricultural crop of Cape Cod is Cranberries, which grow there naturally.

ANYWAY

Satueeing the Peppers and Onion

Here is how you make this soup. Which is DELICIOUS and FANTASTIC!!

You will need:

A ton of KALE (I used about a cubic FOOT of it) (not Joking)

2 ripe red sweet peppers

a huge white onion

a little olive oil

1 can of Red Kidney Beans

1 looped DRY German sausage from Opa’s in Fredericksburg (a dried sausage is best; if you can obtain a Portuguese dried sausage, even better!)

2 pints of stock, any kind really. If you use storebought, buy extra and cook it down a little, cause that stuff is pretty weak. I used one pint of Incredibly Strong Turkey Stock and a pint of Vegetable stock. I should write a post about Vegetable Stock because I have been THRILLED, THRILLED I TELL YOU! to discover that it is the PERFECT thing to make out of extra, ugly or surplus garden vegetables. For instance, I made this batch of vegetable stock using: possum-gnawed cabbage, misshapen carrots, bolted flowering onions, bolted parsely, cilantro stems, Kale leaf spines, the green part of a huge leek, and floppy old celery. And it is delicious.)

Slicing the dried sausage into thin discs

The Recipe:

1) slice up the onion and the red peppers into strips that seem to you to be about right for soup 2) heat up a little olive oil in your soup pot 3) add the onions and peppers, salt and pepper them,  and saute over medium high heat until they are sweaty and floppy…like a bombing comedian! 4) add the stock 5) slice the dry sausage up into thin slices 6) add to the soup 7) add the cubic yard of Kale (it will be hard to fit it all in) and cover 7) take the lid off occasionally and stir; when it gets boil-y, reduce the heat and let everything stew a bit. EIGHT) when the kale darkens to an edible softness, drain the can of kidney beans and stir in. Turn the heat off and cover and let the beans heat up.

Done!

Stirring up the TON O' KALE

The finished SOUP

I always freeze the great majority of this soup, as it is a PERFECT soup to eat later on in the winter, or anytime you just want a hearty, fat-free nutrient-dense soup (such as when you have baked a loaf of bread and want something nutritious to eat with it). One of the World’s Best Soups!