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!

The First Poppy

The first poppy of the season, blooming amid the winter pansies.

One of the things that I learned from the most famous blogger in the world, DOOCE, is : If you don’t have time or the brain ability to post, you can just post a photo. It makes it seem like you are posting, but really, you are not actually having to spend much time on it, or think much.

I need to remember this, as I take 1000x more photos than I could ever use, plus, lots of times I don’t have time/brains to post. You see, I usually post at night. If I have a busy day of gardening, writing, and cleaning and cooking and generally being a genius, I often have NOTHING left by 9 PM. Like I sometimes can’t even make a sentence, I am so tired.

I realize that all I am capable of writing is incoherent nonsense, so I don’t post. This ESPECIALLY happens when I have been writing PAYING writing jobs that I have to EXERT myself over; lately I have been having more of those than usual. I REALLY have no brains left after those!

(It also occurs to me that I can REPOST the paying articles here too! So that you can see that I am ACTUALLY writing MORE than usual, not less!)

So, without further ado, here are some PHOTOS!

Mollie asleep in our new chair, that we got at a garage sale for $12!! TWELVE DOLLARS!! CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE IT?!?!?!?!?

Texas Ruby Red Grapefruit Marmalade

SO.

With my FREE BOX of Texas Ruby Red Grapefruit, I thought I would try a recipe that I had been dying to try: The Cosmic Cowgirl’s Grapefruit Marmalade. Or perhaps I should say, the F*A*M*O*U*S Cosmic Cowgirl’s Grapefruit Marmalade, because ADDIE BROYLES also posted about it. Also, Kingmaker that I am, I, with my mighty pen, elevated The Cosmic Cowgirl to one of Austin’s best Food Blogs by SAYIN SO.

So: Definitely F*A*M*O*U*S!

To give a little background information, I really love marmalade. But it was not always the case; back in my youth, when I was touring with my Somewhat Famous Rock Band, we ate breakfast every morning in truckstops and diners. In these inexpensive places, there would usually be a little tower of Smucker’s Jams in little individual rectangles, but mostly all used up and picked through, because the best one was STRAWBERRY, followed by GRAPE. Often, all that was left in the Individually Packaged Jam Tower was Orange Marmalade, because no one likes marmalade hardly. In America.

But after feeling frustrated for long enough, I decided that I would go ahead and USE the orange marmalade, because, frankly, we were all starving. Our daily “per diem”, the money that we got to spend on feeding ourselves, was $5 a day (including tipping), so we ate (typically) two meals a day, both of which had to cost @ $2.00. Food was cheaper then, but NOT THAT MUCH cheaper! We were always hungry.

But often at a crummy diner one could obtain a simple breakfast, two eggs, hash browns, and toast, for $1.85. But the Caloric content could really be upped by adding Individually Packaged Jam Rectangles, so I just started eating the orange marmalade. And in the typical Hunger Is The Best Sauce Fashion, I began to like, then L*O*V*E, Marmalade.

Later on, I began to try making marmalade at home, because If there is one thing I really like, it is having olden days skillz. So I have made many batches of Marmalade: Orange; Orange, Grapefruit and Lemon, and Grapefruit. I think only one or two have JELLED, though. One year I ended up with jars and jars of candied grapefruit peel in heavy syrup, because the damned stuff just would not jell!! I was still a (relatively) young and poor musician at the time, and Brian Beattie used to open the jars of Candied Grapefruit peel and eat it like candy, which, I guess in 1860, it was. I then began to make my own Christmas Fruitcake, because, what ELSE are you going to do with Candied Grapefruit Peel?

So, ultimately, I was sad when I finally used it up. (Maybe someday I will find a use for the jars and jars of blackberry syrup I have, that is blackberry jelly that wouldn’t jell.)(I have sometimes thought I could mix it with soda water, and make blackberry soda. But that really doesn’t sound all that great. Maybe for a special cocktail?)

ANYWAY

This recipe by THE COSMIC COWGIRL looked like it would easily result in beautiful, firm marmalade, PLUS, the food processor method she uses for the peel sounded like a real Time-Saver!! (Usually for marmalades, you have to shave the peel into thin zest strips: TIME CONSUMING!) So now I will share the Recipe in Photographs!

YOU WILL NEED:

5 medium sized Rio Star grapefruit, cut in half horizontally

juice of 4 lemons

8 cups sugar

Cut the five grapefruits in half, and put them in a stockpot, and cover them with water. Then, bring it to a boil and reduce the heat, and simmer for TWO HOURS.

Take the grapefruits out of the water and discard the water. When they are cool enough, remove the seeds (there won't be many.) Then, a few at a time, chop the grapefruit halves up in the food processor. You can chop them as fine or coarse as you like. Then, dump all the chopped grapefruit into your jam-boiler, and add the lemon juice and the sugar.

Bring to a boil and boil and stir until it reaches the jelling point.

SEE THE JAM BOILING! IT BOILS FOR THEE!!

When it is ready, pack in sterilized jars. Process for ten minutes. Now it is done!    My Grapefruit Marmalade did not come out terribly hard (it is a little runny) but it is plenty firm enough when chilled. Sadly, I overpacked two jars and they SPLODED in the water bath. I HATE IT WHEN THAT HAPPENS! But overall, the B*E*S*T marmalade I have made thus far and BURSTING with Grapefruit flavor. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!

Grapefruit marmalade on Grandma Dottie's Oatmeal Bread

Chef Gordon Ramsay’s Broccoli Soup

Colander Full of Broccoli

The other recipe that came up when I googled “BEST BROCCOLI RECIPE” was Chef Gordon Ramsay’s Broccoli Soup. This is a soup that I had even heard of, by word of mouth, in that it has NO INGREDIENTS other than Broccoli and water, and it is supposed to be the best soup there is, well, I mean the Best Broccoli Soup that Is. It is a FAMOUS recipe!

Naturally, I was eager to try it! Maybe it would be as GOOD As The Best Broccoli Of Your Life™!

Broccoli in the Pot of Salty Water

Here is the recipe:

Boil a pot of salty water. Add broccoli and boil for four minutes exactly. Remove broccoli to a blender, with a little of the salty water. Blend. Add more salty water to make the consistency be the way you like. THE END.

EXACTLY FOUR MINUTES!

The result is, a BRILLIANTLY green SOUP! Honestly, it REALLY looks like Oobleck. Stunning.

VERY GREEN BROCCOLI

INTO THE BLENDER!!

But, even with my picked-ten-minutes-ago-broccoli, all bursting with flavor, I have to say I thought the soup flavor was Disappointing. Indeed, it bordered on flavorless. If I were to make it again, I would add sauteed onion, and garlic, and heavy cream, and cheddar cheese. HA HA in other worlds, a simple Broccoli-Cheese soup would be preferable. (And Sauteed mushrooms maybe!)

Not to mention, if I have the decision to make The Best Broccoli Of Your Life™ or Broccoli Soup of ANY kind, I would make The FORMER. (Did I mention that I did have the leftover BBOYL for BREAKFAST?!?!?!  No, not in an omelette….cold from the container with my fingers. And it was AWESOME.)

VERDICT: THUMBS DOWN. A VERY BLAND AND BLAH AND WHATEVER SOUP. EXCEPT: If you have a kid and you have been reading Bartholomew and the Ooobleck, you could make it for dinner and tell them, matt-of-factly, that you were having Ooobleck for dinner.

OOOBLECK !!!!! SERIOUSLY, THOUGH, IT IS VERY GREEN

It’s Broccoli Time!

This Broccoli plant is MUCH more gigantic in REAL life, if you can imagine that

Do you remember that POST from the Before TImes™ where I said that I usually get enough broccoli to be totally SICK OF IT? And then six months later I can’t believe I was ever sick of broccoli and I really wish I could get some more? Because one of the THINGS ABOUT GARDENING is: once you get used to fresh, seasonal broccoli (especially picked ONE SECOND ago in your own backyard), you just can’t see any POINT in buying trucked-in broccoli from thousands of miles away.

You look at it in the store and you say to yourself: Nah. I’ll just wait until next spring.

BECAUSE YOU HAVE BEEN RUINED FOR STORE BROCCOLI.

Well, now it’s that time: Broccoli Time! I could pick a gallon size Hefty freezer bag of broccoli every other day, and temperatures are staying so beautifully temperate that I will probably get another week (or two) out of the harvest. The Broccoli Harvest.

I have nine gigantic broccoli plants and they all look like this:

So, I made Pasta and Broccoli, and Chopped Broccoli, and I used the leftover Chopped Broccoli to make myself a Broccoli and Parmesan Omelette. Then I made a Broccoli, Cheese and Rice Casserole, but it wasn’t all that good (I think casseroles are a great option for families with children who are stretching the food budget, but for families of two, ONE OF WHOM DOES NOT CARE FOR LEFTOVERS (and I am not talking about myself, I rather like leftovers because you can usually make an omelette out of any leftover) (except CABBAGE)), casseroles aren’t practical.

Giant bowl of broccoli, ready for the Olive Oil

Then I had to throw a gallon of broccoli away because it had started to smell. Because I wasn’t using it UP fast enough.

Then I picked another gallon of broccoli, and I thought: I need Some New Recipes! So I googled this phrase: BEST BROCCOLI RECIPE, hoping that I would get everybody’s best broccoli recipe. (Clever, huh?)

What I got was this: The Best Broccoli of Your Life. It is a recipe that originated with The Barefoot Contessa, then made it onto this guys website, and now I am going to write about it. THIS GUY says, and I quote: “After trying this, you’ll never want to eat anything else for breakfast, lunch or dinner ever again.”

Now, you may think that that praise is a Leetle Bit Over the Top. Let me tell you, it isn’t! THIS IS THE BEST BROCCOLI OF YOUR LIFE!!! I made it the night I tried the recipe, and I made it the NEXT night, and that night I had some leftover steak on my plate, and I gave the steak to the dogs so I could fit MORE of this broccoli dish on my plate. Because I liked it better than steak.

I KNOW! (And YES this is ME!)

Here you see the garlic, the broccoli and the olive oil

You will need:

A Lot of Broccoli, like two big heads, or the equivalent amount of side heads

3-7 cloves of garlic

5 Tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil

salt

pepper

a lemon

some Parmesan Reggiano

Some Pine Nuts (optional)

Some fresh basil (optional)

A cookie sheet and an oven.

Ready for the Oven, with the garlic on top (there is a miniature cauliflower head in there too)

Here is what you do:  1) make the broccoli into florets by cutting or tearing them apart; don’t cut off the stems. 2) put the broccoli florets into a big bowl 3) Turn the oven on to 425˚ 4) drizzle the olive oil over the broccoli and toss it around until it appears to be well-coated 5) remove the broccoli to the cookie sheet with a utensil 6) peel and slice the garlic cloves, and coat them in the remaining olive oil that is still in the bowl 7) dot the garlic slices over the broccoli shove it in the oven for 20-25 minutes.

When it is done the broccoli will be darkish green, the stems will be cooked and the buds will be a tiny bit crispy.

9) take the lemon and, using a microplane zester, grate lemon zest onto the broccoli. You don’t have to zest all of the peel, just do as much as you think you would like. I used about 3/4 of the zest for an enormous pan of broccoli. 10) Then, squeeze a little lemon juice on; I used about a quarter of a lemon but suit yourself. 11) Using the same microplane zester, grate Parmesan over the broccoli.

NOW IT IS DONE! When I made this the second time, I sprinkled some raw pistachios over the dish before baking, because I didn’t have any pine nuts and the addition of nuts sounded awesome. It was awesome. This is, seriously, the Best Broccoli of Your Life. Its partially the texture: soft, yet dried-out and crispy, with wonderfully concentrated flavor; but then also the ecstatic blend of flavors, garlic and broccoli and lemon zest and Parmesan, all turned up to ELEVEN.

THE BEST BROCCOLI OF YOUR LIFE

Cooking with Incredibly Famous Chef Tal Ronnen

Here is a picture of Tal Ronnen's Cookbook

Except I didn’t actually cook with him. I watched him give a cooking demonstration, and, well, he showed me how to make tortellini, and I did it SO G*R*E*A*T that he called me “TORTELLINI LADY”.

He is the most famous Vegan chef in the world. He is very…he seemed to me like a very gentle guy, who would never ever want to hurt an animal or be mean.

Its past my bedtime, so I will expound upon this experience later!

Here Chef Tal is making a tortellini. I think he would like this picture, because he is not entirely in it.

My Breakfast: PANCAKES

THIS IS WHAT A GRIDDLE CAKE SHOULD LOOK LIKE, PEOPLE !

Here you see a whole-wheat wild blueberry pancake frying in the cast-iron skillet. I use freshly ground whole wheat from Richardson Farms in this recipe; also, we like our pancakes thin and somewhat crepe-like, so I don’t use any baking powder or other chemical leavening. Here’s the recipe (Makes enough for two people):

GRIDDLE CAKES

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1/4 cup white flour

3 Tablespoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 eggs

3 T butter

MILK: can be cow milk, buttermilk, soy milk, almond milk, half and half, or any other milk you have around. How much? Enough to make a batter that is as thick as you like it to be, which you will learn from experience. At the most a cup, but probably less.

Some blueberries, fresh or frozen. Lately I have been using frozen wild blueberries from WHOLE FOODS. If you use frozen, defrost them in the microwave before using them. This makes a little blueberry juice happen, but that’s OK, just pour it into your batter and it makes the batter blue, which is KEWL.

Step One: Mix the flours and other dry ingredients together.

Step Two: Crack the eggs into the bowl and, using a whisk, stir it up. It will make a gummy ball. A gummy ball that is stuck in the middle of your whisk.

Step Three: Turn the heat on under the cast-iron skillet, and melt the butter in it. When it starts to fizzle, turn the gas off. Don’t let it brown if you can help it. (If it DOES brown, you can still use it though, as long as you don’t BURN it.)

Step Four: splash some milk into the gummy ball of gunk in your pancake bowl. Whisk. Keep adding and whisking until the gummy ball frees itself from it’s whisk prison. Add more splashes of milk until the consistency looks right. Add the melted butter and whisk some more.

Step Five: Add the blueberries and juice. LOOK ITS BLUE

Step Six: Turn the flame on under the cast iron skillet sort of medium high. Pour about half a cup of batter into the pan and tilt it around so that the batter is rather evenly swirled in a biggish circle on the bottom of the pan, but not all the way out to the sides, because that would be TOO BIG. After a bit (but BEFORE you smell burning!) flip it over.

As the pancakes are done, immediately place them on the plates of the waiting people so they can be eaten while HOT AND CRISP. EAT IMMEDIATELY OR YOU ARE MISSING OUT!! NO WAITING!!!  NO BEING POLITE !!  The cook eats their pancakes standing at the stove.

Never put more than one pancake on your plate at a time if you can help it, because they get slightly soggier and it is an affront.

If you don’t have or don’t want blueberries, just leave them out and you will have PLAIN griddlecakes.