True confession: Barbeque chicken bores me to tears. Maybe, as someone who doesn’t eat beef (except for the beef sushi incident), I’ve had too many mediocre chicken sandwiches in bars and restaurants across the greater Boston area. So when no egrets suggested that we have BBQ chicken for the Fourth, I was underwhelmed. After some soul-searching, we came up with spicy peanut chicken.

The benefit of peanut chicken is that it can be used in many capacities. I had my first spicy peanut chicken breast on a sandwich bun. The next day, I cooked up some noodles and had cold peanut noodles with chicken, which was even better. You can use this peanut sauce on tofu, veggies, pork….anything.

Here is the recipe for cold peanut noodles:

Chinese Peanut Dressing (adapted from Nina Simonds’ Asian Noodles)

a healthy 1” ginger
4-8 cloves of garlic
fresh chili pepper (or rooster sauce)
1/2 c peanut butter
1/4 c soy sauce
3 1/2 Tb Chinese black vinegar or Worcester sauce
3 Tb sesame oil
5 Tb chicken broth or water

Use a food processor to grind up these ingredients in order. If it is too thick, add more broth or water. If it is too watery, add more PB. Don’t forget to scrape down the sides and mix it well.

The Chicken

If you have a lot of time, marinate chicken in a ginger/soy sauce/sesame oil marinade overnight or at least for a couple hours. Then grill or bake the chicken. If you don’t have a lot of time, grab some leftover chicken from last week. Check for freshness. You’re no good to me as readers if you die of salmonella.

The Noodles

Cook up soba, rice, or plain ol’ grocery store Italian noodles. Drain. Add peanut sauce to warm noodles along with the cooked chicken (or tofu, or veggies) cut into strips.

Etc.

Many veggies would taste good with this. I like grated cucumber and carrots.

Serve hot, lukewarm, or cold. Really. It’s that good.

-goldlentil

Up here on the North Shore, we haven’t seen the sun in….a long time. It’s achieved record-setting proportions.

Strawberries are the last sweet shred of life I am clinging to. We picked up some Marini’s strawberries from the Marblehead Farmer’s Market on Saturday. On Sunday, no egrets made strawberry shortcake.

Strawberries
Slice up the strawberries, add a tiny bit of sugar (maybe a teaspoon) if the strawberries are not very sweet. You can add lemon juice if they are excessively sweet (if you believe in excess in that department).

Pound Cake (from Joy of Cooking, ca. 1964)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Mix 4 c flour
1 ts salt
4 ts baking powder
Set aside.

Mix 1 cup milk
2 ts vanilla
2 Tb yer favorite likker (that would taste good in a pound cake. No sour pucker. Ew.)
Set aside.
Cream 1 1/2 cups of butter, and then add
3 cups of sugar (gradually).

Add 8 eggs, one at a time; beat thoroughly after each one.

Keep mixing and alternate adding flour mixture and wet mixture. Stir until thoroughly blended.

Baked in a greased loaf pan for 15 or 20 min, or until a toothpick comes out reasonably clean.
Whipped Cream

Take a pint of heavy cream. Whip it up in your mixer, and add (slowly) up to 5 Tb of sugar and 2-3 ounces of your favorite dessert-embellishing liquor (we prefer bourbon or Grand Marnier in these parts). Once it looks like whipped cream, you are done.

Combine and pretend it is summer.

-goldlentil

See what the Wall Street Journal has to say about Cape Ann Fresh Catch! I believe this is the first CSF near a big city (and which also drops off in a city) in the US. Evidently we are cutting edge, up here on the North Shore (who knew?).

 -goldlentil

[New York Times, we are way ahead of you.]

It could just be that I’m an obsessive personality. Instead of buying a complete bike, I buy a frame and spend 2 years tinkering to get 10 speeds out of a 28-speed gruppo.  Instead of waiting and saving for a hot tub, I drag an old one out of someone’s yard so it can beautify mine. A pattern has been established.

So, I think about BPA being in all of that “organic” food I buy in (plastic-lined metal) cans, and decide to buy some nice, inert Ball jars and a pressure canner. Maybe you can see where this is headed.

I need my cans of ingredients ready to go (I’m too ADD to start things like beans days ahead, and only losers with no friends can reliably plan meals 2 or 3 days out all the time). We got the bigger of the 2 Presto models.  It’s bulkier to store than the little one, but the small one is close to useless, and since you only have to fill it with 4 inches of water to pressure can, it isn’t like the bigger one takes longer or anything. I store clean jars and other supplies in it when it isn’t on the stove turning its unresolved childhood rage into safe, preserved food. Ahem.

The Presto canner was about $120, and it will last you the rest of your life if you replace the rubber parts every decade or so, so I’m not counting it in my figuring. Your first jars of beans will cost you around $1.30 per can assuming you buy jars and dry beans. Quart jars and pint jars cost about the same, so I run 2 batches – quarts of chick peas for hummus, pints for salads or side dishes – to increase our initial economy in this venture.

The next time I use a mason jar to can beans, the new lid (always use a new lid) and the beans will cost me under 30 cents. If it doesn’t break, I’ll use each jar dozens of times. Even recyclables are trash, after all.

I hit the hundred-jar mark some time ago, meaning I think the process is officially paying for itself. We left Trader Joe’s about 1 bag lighter than usual, too. While I was supposed to be grading papers, I made blood orange marmalade (you only need jars and a big pot for this – you don’t need to pressure can acid foods) at a cost of like $3 per pint, including the cost of the canner and the ingredients and jars. 

This never happens. Usually, my plan to get something cheaper or for nothing involves a ton of work, learning 87 new skills, and breaking even if I’m lucky.

So, with jars of black, cannellini, fava (mush, but okay for hummus) and pinto beans, chicken stock, chick peas, orange marmalade, lemon-lime hot pickle, and more stuffing my cabinets and mounting towards heaven, it has occurred to me that I’m well prepared for the Rapture, or the Zombie apocalypse if you insist on the vernacular terminology. No sugar-rush-headaches for me – I’m living on protein until they come upon me in the night and turn my brains into bean dip.

Then, I start to wonder – what if it’s my spider sense? What if, instinctually, I know the end is near, and I’m not just obsessive, but incredibly wise and attuned to the vibrations of the universe?

I’m going to put up some apple pie filling, and maybe some meat sauce, just in case.

-no egrets

Yes please! No Egrets won my eternal devotion for making pork and apple pies, also known also as pork pasties, but if I put that on the blog title, lord knows who would have shown up. This is not a summer dish, but it is very very yummy.

(see more below)

First brown a local teriyaki-marinated pork tenderloin from Tendercrop Farms  in a frying pan with 4 Tb olive oil, 3 Tb whole coriander seeds, and 2-3 teaspoons of curry powder. Deglaze the pan with half a bottle of cheap pinot grigio. Put in oven to cook for 2 hours at 250 degrees (or in a crockpot).

Make your favorite pie crust (I used the pastry crust from the Vegetarian Epicure). One double pie crust should be enough, unless, like us, you want to have a little extra and you can make apple pies for dessert.

Thinly slice three (or more if you want apple pie too) granny smith apples and put them in a bowl of cold water so they don’t brown.

When the pork is done and slightly cooled, get out the pie crust (which should have been happily chilling in the fridge) and roll out the dough and cut them into thick rounds (I used a bowl to cut out the rounds in an even manner. If you are a pie whiz you might be able to roll them out in beautiful circles.)

Brush the rounds with egg to keep them from getting soggy in the oven. Shred or slice the pork. Put the apple slices and pork together on the rounds and either fold over the dough in half like an empanada, or bring the sides of the dough up to a little dough topknot or topridge (yes, I made that word up) in the center of the pastry.

Bake in the oven until the pies turn a beautiful light brown.

Eat!

-goldlentil

Exciting news! This is a little lukewarm off the presses, as I’ve been distracted by other things, but sign up here for Cape Ann Fresh Catch. A twelve-week assortment of fish is available in whole shares (6-8 lbs. a week for $360) and half shares (3-4 lbs. a week for $180). Pickup may be available in Ipswich, Gloucester, Marblehead, and Cambridge, depending on interest.

Support your local fisherman and learn how to cook new kinds of fish!

-goldlentil

Before you run away screaming, let me explain. Always on the lookout for something with which to culinarily impress his friends, No Egrets began to think about ways to modify the sushi formula. What  he came up with was beef nigiri, a perfect dish to take to our friend’s surprise birthday party.

The evening before the surprise celebration, we cooked a vat of sushi rice (which is nice and sticky) with a little rice vinegar and put it in the fridge. No Egrets also marianated the filet mignon (it’s true)  in soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger, and garlic.

The next morning we got up and sprung into action. No Egrets seared the beef and cooked it until it was (to my non-beef-eating eyes) quite red. He shaped the cold rice into little oblong shapes, and put a thin slice of beef on top. Next time he will add a dab of wasabi between the rice and beef.

The rare steak resembled rare tuna, which was a nice effect, and almost broke my non-beef-eating ways. (OK, I confess, it looked so good I tried a piece.) It was an overall success, and may be a great way to introduce sushi to your midwestern friends and family when fresh seafood is merely a fantasy.

-goldlentil

PS Our friend was taken completely unaware. Ha!

I went out into the garden for the first time this year. Well, I had passed it while gathering firewood, or bringing something heavy around to the back of the house, but today was the first day I actually put my hands in the dirt. I got in touch with my inner weeder, because don’t you know, the herbs were straggling up but the dandelions and long-haired-weed-number-seven were so green and lush it could have been June (I wish).

One of our surprise gardening successes last year was the five-gallon pot of carroty goodness. I had received a packet of carrot seeds as a favor from a wedding a few years back; but I’ve never been much of a gardener. (In my bachelor days, I kept one spider plant and one pot of basil in the window of my JP apartment, and considered myself a success.) I had been using the carrot seeds as, um, a bookmark, when No Egrets saw them and liberated them from a life of dormant literacy.

Not having a clear idea how old the seeds were, No Egrets proceeded cautiously. He filled a five-gallon pot one-third with sand and two-thirds with rich beautiful soil and sprinkled the carrot seeds. We waited. A month later, we had scads of baby carrots. We harvested a few, and many grew in their place. Every time we were in the garden, we picked one and ate its fresh, almost peppery, carrot self, reminding ourselves why it was worthwhile to weed out the dandelions. Again.

-goldlentil

Yesterday, I saw daffodils while I was walking through the rain, and believed, for the first time, that it was spring. (See, I’ve become a hard-bitten, cynical New Englander after all.) In preparation for farmers market season, No Egrets and I bought a pressure canner.

We decided to practice a little before we had pounds of heirloom tomatoes, green beans, peppers, and okra to waste. So, as I sat at the table doing my day job (that would be corraling commas and wrestling homonyms to the ground), I watched No Egrets can beans. We decided to begin with plain beans. Our first idea had been to make Mexican beans, salad beans, etc., but then we realized at the end of the season we would want Mexican beans, but have nothing but cannelini beans with basil.

No Egrets boiled the turtle beans, stuck them in mason jars, and put them in the pressure canner. (There may have been more steps, but I was too busy matching references and citations to notice.) Then he spent an inordinate amount of time staring at said canner, watching the metal pin that releases pressure bounce up and down.

After an hour or so of boiling, we turned off the heat. We waited for the pressure to go down from 11 pounds to zero pounds, and then gingerly opened the canner. There was bean liquor boiling in the jars. We took this as a good sign. One by one, I heard the glorious pop of the mason jars sealing themselves.

Here’s hoping we don’t die of botilism!!

-goldlentil

I’m on the road (again), but I saw in today’s Boston Globe (thanks internet!) another article about Community Supported Fisheries. Keep the clamor going!

-goldlentil