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!

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.

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!

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

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.

Baked Oatmeal: This is THE way to make Oatmeal.

Baked Oatmeal, seen here with brown sugar and heavy cream.

My friend Christine and I went to Bouldin Creek Coffee House a while back, and she ordered their Baked Oatmeal with Apples. I was really taken with its great texture, flavor and appearance, and decided on the spot to check out recipes for baked oatmeal and give it a try. I am always looking for ways to get more oatmeal into our diets, because it is so good for cholesterol levels and health generally, plus, have I mentioned, I LOVE BREAKFAST?

Also, I like to use McCann’s Steel-cut Irish Oatmeal (Big Surprise, right?) and since it takes 45 minutes to cook, I am always looking for ways to make it that don’t require stirring oatmeal on the stove for that long. I have worked out a few ways, but they never get quite as dry as I would like.

I found a couple of recipes on the internet, and after fooling around with them a little I came up with this recipe:

BAKED OATMEAL WITH DRIED APPLES

1 1/2 Cups of McCann’s Oats

1/2 Cup walnuts

big handful dried apples

1/2 cup or so other dried fruits (I used dried apricots and cherries)

1 cup of milk (any kind including soy)

2 eggs

T coconut oil

t cinnamon

salt

STEP 1: The night before, put the oats and walnuts in a bowl or pot and cover with filtered water with a little salt. They will soak up most of the water. Set on the counter or on the stove.

STEP 2: In the morning, turn the oven on to 350˚. Grease a shallow baking pan with butter.

STEP 3: Mix together the milk, eggs, coconut oil, and cinnamon. Beat them together with a whisk, or put in a mason jar and shake them up. The coconut oil will be solid, don’t let that worry you.

STEP 4:  Drain the oatmeal mixture in a sieve. Dump into a biggish bowl and add the egg and milk mixture and stir it up nicely. Add the dried apples and other dried fruits. Pour into the buttered baking dish.

Step 5: Bake for around 45 minutes. This makes enough for four adults; it reheats beautifully though, so you can just throw the remainder in the fridge if you don’t eat it all, and reheat it quickly another day for an awesome repeat.

The baked oatmeal in the baking dish. This is a rather small dish, only a little larger than the stove burner

It smells just HEAVENLY, and the texture is Perfect! Dry, yet creamy. I like my oatmeal with butter and brown sugar on top, but you don’t need to add much because the dried fruits add plenty of sweetness. I was hesitant at first to put a whole teaspoon of cinnamon, but when I used a half teaspoon, it wasn’t enough. I imagine that over time I will refine this recipe more and more (I have only made it once, after all), so I will post updates as they occur.

Tomorrow is supposed to be freezing and rainy, with a high of THIRTY-SIX (after yesterdays EIGHTY-TWO!) (Now THAT is a Blue Norther), so it sounded to me like a perfect day for Baked Oatmeal. Plus, in my Victorian house, heating up the cast iron cookstove goes a long way towards getting the house warmed up, too!

Turnips!

These Turnips are about the size of Ping Pong Balls

My Neighbor Glen, who reads my blog, asked me the other day, “So, do you put turnips in your meatloaf?” And I was all like, “What? No!” But then I realized that I had written, “I have some beautiful baby turnips, so I am going to make MEATLOAF!!”

(Ha ha I made a typographical error just there, and wrote “MEATLOAD!” That is an AWESOME new name for meatloaf…I think I will privately call it MEATLOAD in my head from now on)

No, this is the thing: turnips just don’t GO with everything. Most people don’t even LIKE them. My very own husband, in fact, describes them thusly: “They have the texture of wet wood, and they taste like wet cardboard.”

Now, obviously, I don’t agree….but I understand that they aren’t everyone’s FAVORITE vegetable. I think the main reason I love turnips is because my Mother hated them, so we NEVER had them when I was growing up. I got to discover them as an adult. And what do you know, I liked them!

The Farmers Market Bounty. All those carrots were only $5!

Turnips are at their best when they are YOUNG and SMALL and freshly picked. I think the longer they sit around, the funkier they taste. (Ooooh, that makes them sound really bad, doesn’t it?) They have a bit of a bitter flavor when they are old and big.

Turnips just taste like TURNIPS. The flavor of turnips goes extremely well with only a few things: game, duck, roast turkey, and MEATLOAD.

There are probably many great ways to make turnips, but the classic French way is the way I have been making them lately, Turnips Glace.  The Farmers Market here in town, in Austin in February, has been selling the most GORGEOUS baby turnips for weeks now. The cold weather makes them sweet(er), and I have been buying them every week to eat ALL BY MYSELF (because as you can probably tell, Mr T. has no interest in even trying them, because he is picky, picky, picky.)

Cooking in the GLAZE

Turnips Glace is what you might surmise: Glazed Turnips. People used to make many vegetables glazed in the Olden Days! It essentially means, in a sauce made of melted butter and brown sugar. (They also used to eat many vegetables creamed, which means swimming in heavy whipping cream and butter. And we are supposed to be so decadent NOWADAYS?)

It occurred to me that “Glazed Sweet Potatoes” used to be a popular dish also, so I made a dish of both. Carrots could be used, also, or you can just make turnips all by themselves.

Here is the TOTALLY EASY recipe for Turnips and Sweet Potatoes Glace:

Peel your Sweet Potato(s). Big or aged turnips should also be peeled; with really young turnips you really can skip it entirely.

Boil some water in a pot. Add the pieces of vegetables and boil for a few minutes, Seriously, like four minutes, That is as long as it takes for them to get mostly soft. Test for softness, then drain.

In a skillet, melt some butter. Add some brown sugar. Stir to dissolve the sugar. Add the drained turnips and Sweet Potato pieces.

Toss it all around joyfully. You are all done! DELICIOUS!

Later this week I will be sharing my MEATLOAF recipe, which is the Best Meatloaf Recipe In the World.

Look at the Lovely COLORFULNESS of this MEAL! Don't you wish you lived at my house? Of COURSE YOU DO!

Someone Might Actually Read My Blog!!

Yes, this GORGEOUS head of Broccoli is from my garden, and the carrots are too! LOOK UPON MY GARDEN AND DESPAIR

So I just realized that, because I mentioned it in the paper, someone might ACTUALLY check out my blog! And I haven’t posted since before Christmas! I have a perfectly good reason: I am an undisciplined layabout….no, actually, that is not my reason, it just sounded good. The real reason is I have had a sinus infection and have barely been awake since Xmas Day. For those of you who have never had one, a bad sinus infection is like getting bitten by the tse-tse fly: your body, desperately trying to overcome the bacteria that is trying to get to your brain and kill you and eat you, makes you fall asleep again like one HOUR after you get up in the morning.

But now I am taking antibiotics and presumably, should have some interest in terrestrial events soon. Of course I have continued to EAT and COOK throughout the week, however, it has been mostly EATING COOKIES and EATING OUT. Are all 55 dozen Xmas Cookies gone? Yes.

Part of me feels COMPLETELY ADDICTED TO SUGAR, and part of me NEVER WANTS TO SEE SUGAR AGAIN. Is this a normal feeling?

One of the things that I did, actually I did it about two weeks ago, is read every food blog in Austin that I could find, read them obsessively, and work out a system to rate them, (HIGHLY SCIENTIFIC of course) and I wrote a TOP TEN list of Austin Food Blogs, leaving out, of course, the blogs of my CHRONICLE colleagues, and myself. Most of those blogs would have TOTALLY been on the list, but then the list would have been all CHRONICLE folks and that seems unprofessional and just, I don’t know, like the most ridiculous cronyism.

Also, I would like to add, that two awesome food blogs tied for ELEVENTH place, and I just know that when I see these bloggers they will give me the STINK EYE, so I am never leaving the house again. (That will work in well with my undisciplined layabout lifestyle.) The just-barely-not-in-the-top-ten blogs are MISO HUNGRY and POCO-COCOA, both of which I wish I could have extended the list for. But once I invented my SCIENTIFIC RATING SYSTEM to come up with the TOP TEN, I thought it would be intellectually corrupt to jiggle the numbers. So, just remember that in MY world, my Imaginary perfect world, these two WOULD HAVE BEEN in the top ten, by extending it to TWLEVE.

But ANYWAY, one of the things that counted for a lot of points in my SCIENTIFIC EVALUATION was REGULAR POSTING. Not being regular about one’s posting was the NUMBER ONE SIN!!! So, you can imagine my embarrassment.

ONE THING, though: a number of the blogs I elected to tout have also dropped their balls over the holidays, so at least they look lame along with me. But that is not the point: the POINT is, reading all the very excellent local food blogs has made me realize that I could improve this blog in various ways. So I am going to endeavor to make HUNGERSAUCE the most KILLER BLOG in all of FOODBLOGGING!

For instance: you know what is super boring? Reporting. Food reporting is Borrrrr-inngg. ” I went to X place and I sampled Y and it was tasty and here’s a picture.” There has GOT to be a better way…if nothing else, brevity is the soul of wit, and a SINGLE picture of a SINGLE THING one ate is more compelling than a play-by-play rundown.

Of course that is going to present a problem, because BREVITY is NOT my STYLE. No, I prefer the rambling, overly thinky and parenthetical style of writing, where you run circles around your POINT for an hour before you get to it. I do.

But I can do better than REPORTING. And I shall.

But enough about ME! What do YOU think about ME? I mean, let’s get to the FOOD part.

Vigorous, bug-free winter growth. LOOK UPON MY LETTUCE AND DESPAIR

This is the time of year where the Winter Garden in oh, just so gorgeous. Cold weather makes vegetables sweet and delicious, and two of the greatest things going in the Central Texas Garden right now are Broccoli and carrots. The carrots are still smallish, but totally usable; I have also learned in my VAST EXPERIENCE and WISDOM that, if you wait for a whole bed of anything to reach it’s most perfect maturity, you can’t eat it all anyway and it just goes to seed or rots. So, it is GOOD FARMING to eat the baby vegetables as you go along.

Enormous Broccoli ensconced in enormous broccoli plant

To combat the SUGAR EXTRAVAGANZA that has been my diet, I hit the garden and made a dish that is a popular one around here, it is so popular I am not even sure it has a name. I should think of a name! Well, I will think while I am writing about it. It consists of Broccoli, carrots and onions, sauteed in olive oil (or butter), served over pasta, with Parmeson cheese. (How about BROCCOLI PARMESAN? Nah….)

You will need:

a white onion

some carrots

broccoli

pasta

butter

Parmesan Reggiano

The onions, carrots, and stems sautee, while the water boils in the other pot

Put some oil or butter in your frying pan, over medium heat. Fill a pasta pot with hot water and add a tablespoon of salt (yes a tablespoon!) and put it over high heat. When the butter melts, add the white onion, all chopped up. Salt and pepper it heavily. As it softens, peel and slice the carrots. Add them and stir it up. Slice all the broccoli stems into discs, reserving the florets. Add the sliced stems to the saute pan. Stir.

Can you EVEN BELIEVE that the producer of the James Bond Movies in the Seventies was named BROCCOLI??! Can you even believe that ANYONE would have the name BROCCOLI and not CHANGE IT? Even if they weren’t in Show Business? I think his name was Albert Broccoli. ALBERT BROCCOLI!!

Maybe I should name this dish “Broccoli Albert”!! Or “Parmesan a la Albert” ?   But no, that would be too much like rewarding him.

By this time your water should be boiling, so add your pasta or noodles. Tonight I used Egg Noodles because I felt like it. Stir after adding pasta and drain when pasta is done.

At a certain point, your onion, carrot and stem mixture will appear obviously softened and nearly done. At that point (and no earlier!) add the florets, crowns up, and you should have removed ALL the stems so they should be very tiny florets, not great big ones with stems. COVER. If you are using a cast iron frying pan like I DO, you can cover the pan with a lid that doesn’t fit perfectly, that is OK.

After a few minutes, remove cover, stir a bit, check for doneness. You can stop cooking it when it is slightly underdone, and the florets will finish cooking just sitting there in the pan.

On each plate, pile up noodles or pasta, dot with butter, spoon vegetables over, and then top with Parmesan Reggiano. You can grate it first and pile it on, or grate it on directly, whatever suits you.

(And, how in the name of God could they possibly be producing enough Parmesan Reggiano to keep up with American demand? How can they make enough for Italy ALONE? Even without the rest of the world? I think there must be something fishy going on, because that one little region could not POSSIBLY keep up with demand. Once you have bought Parmesan Reggiano, you can’t go back. You just can’t. Well, I can’t, anyway. For now we will call this the Parmesan Reggiano Mystery.)

Mystery Broccoli?

Broccoli Reggiano?

I know!! Pasta and Broccoli!!!

PASTA AND BROCCOLI