Figga

Figs. They are a treat. I love biting into a perfectly ripe one and feeling the juices bursting into your mouth.

Unfortunately, I have a hard time finding such perfect fig in San Diego. Most the figs I can find are black missions and they are usually a bit dry. So I make do with what I have. Instead of eating them fresh I cook them up to bring out the sweetness and the softness in the fig.

The Italians call figs "figga" which is also a slang for vagina. In many ways than one the name fits. You must treat a fig like a vagina; delicately with love. When a fig is perfectly ripe then you eat it. When it is dry you must warm it up gently and add a little love into it.

Tonight, I did just that. I took the figs and quartered them. Exposing their pink insides. I drizzled them with a little grape seed oil and salted them gently. I put them skin side down on warm skillet and allowed them to warm up. Once the juices started to flow, I gave them a stir and tossed in sliced Italian Torpedo onions. Within minutes you could hear the pan sizzle as the mixture started to caramelize.


While all that was going on, I decided to make a steak salad. I had a perfectly grown head of lettuce from the NC garden and a prime new york strip from my mother. The steak was lightly seasoned with salt and peppered and seared in a pan. The lettuce roughly chopped. I piled it all up, topped it with a creamy danish blue, and drizzled some of my favorite balsamic on it and within 30 minutes dinner was done.

NC Garden... when everyone's away.

Arugula that self seeded and coming back.

Lettuce nestled between purple basil

Perfect head of lettuce

One pepper plant growing tall and strong

Parsely and peppers

Jean Flemmes (Julia Child's favorite tomatoes) just about to turn orange.

I'm about to get soo many cocozelle squashes.

Pretty water plants. Look at the Parrots Feathers grow

It's no lotus pond, but it sure is pretty during the summer.

Zucchini Pickle

I dread pickling.

Pickling means hours of prep work. Followed by hours of standing around in a hot kitchen with vinegar and water vapors filling your space. It definitely is not a pleasant task to be performing during a hot summer day.

So... I've been avoiding pickling this season. But the eggplant and squash plants are going absolutely NUTS! Ken D's asked me to pickle his extra produce in exchange for some of the products. He had at least a dozen large yellow zucchini and cocozelles.

I was actually pretty excited to help. I'd gotten a Better Homes and Gardens magazine on Canning which had some a small section on zucchini pickles, and I can't help but to try out some new recipes. I decided to go with the bread and butter zucchini pickles, hot and spicy zucchini pickles, and a sweet zucchini pickle using my favorite pickling mix from the OB People's Food Co-op.

So the first step to crispy pickles is to slice and salt them. You want most of the water to leach out of the pickle, sort of drying them out so that they absorb the vinegar better. But you have to do it cold otherwise your pickles come out mushy. Several recipes recommend making a brine of salt and cold water and soaking your zucchini slices in it at room temp. It's easy to do so if you have the fridge space or plenty of ice, but with several gallons worth of zucchini I had to improvise a bit. The huge bucket and colander I purchased for making kimchi came in pretty handy. I sliced and salted the zucchini, then I mixed in a few pounds of ice cubes into the zucchini and let it sweat in the colander fitted into the bucket and let it sweat for a few hours.

(Ran some errands and washed all my jars.)

Came home and rinsed out zucchini to wash away the extra salt and the canning began.

First thing you've got to make sure when canning is to make sure everything you use is sterile. I cleaned and wiped down the counter top and began boiling LOTS of water. Pour boiling water into all your clean, dry jars and cover with foil until you're ready to use them. Then get more water boiling for your water bath.

Make your pickling solution of vinegar and sugar and bring it to a boil. Add your spliced zucchini and onions into the mix and bring back to a boil. (Recipe says you should bring to a boil and simmer the vegetables for 5 minutes before packing the jars. I drop the vegetables in and wait for it to start boiling.) Once it starts to boil, dump out the water from the jars and fill them with the hot vegetable mixture. I like to fill my jars about 80% full from the top. Add your pickling spice (or peppers, garlic, bay, etc) on top of your hot vegetables and pour the hot vinegar mixture to top off the jars. Then its important to use a dinner knife or a spatula to help air bubbles escape to the top. (Stir the inside of the jar using your tool to free air bubbles.) Check the level of the vinegar, there should be a 1/2 inch gap from the top. Clean the lip of the jar and assemble the two piece lids. Screw on the lids just enough so that there's resistance but not too tight that air can't escape it when you set it in the water bath. Boil the jars for at least 10 minutes. I used quart jars and boiled for 20 minutes to make sure that jars are completely sterilized. I also did it for a longer time since I didn't simmer the vegetables prior to packing the jars.

Anyways, after almost 8hrs of pickling I've got 16 quart jars and 12 pint jars for a total of 5 gallons of zucchini pickles! This was round one. I still would like to make more of the Italian style zucchini pickles, where the pickles are preserved in olive oil instead of the vinegar solution. Maybe next weekend?

If you want a complete recipe let me know I'll update the post.

Eggplant Preserves

I usually pickle everything, so I thought I'd change it up a bit. This is one of my favorite recipes I found when I started pickling last year, and I've been prepping for it all year. It's an Italian method of pickling where the vegetables are boiled in vinegar and wine then preserved in olive oil. The variety of ingredients used gives the preserves an amazing aroma and a layers of flavors.

I like to capture the essence of summer in this pickle by using a dry Riesling or Gewurztraminer. The floral and fruity notes of peaches, apricots, lychees, roses, jasmine, etc (depending on which wine you choose) just add such a wonderful layer of flavor and aroma when you bite into an eggplant or olive. You can choose another dry white wine such as a Sauvigon Blanc or a Chardonnay but choose a wine that you would drink and consider the flavors they'd impart.

The homegrown eggplants freshly picked at the height of the plant's production, sliced and salted overnight to remove all the bitterness from them. Then they are rinsed and squeezed dried until they are ready to go into the vinegar/wine mixture. The small, meaty diameter of the Japanese eggplants work much better than the usual fat eggplants used in Italian cooking.

The nasturtium capers are made from nasturtium seed pods. You can find a recipe online if you type in "Poor Man's Capers". If you have a garden you should definitely plant nasturtiums, and if you have nasturtiums you should definitely make these since a healthy nasturtium plant will produce hundreds of seeds in the spring. You can also go scavenging for them around town. In San Diego you can see them blooming everywhere in the spring. They have a wonderful peppery crunch to them with a sweet floral flavor to them. Although the flavor is very unique they are as versatile in the kitchen as regular capers.

Last year when I made this I used only kalamata olives and everything purple... after a few weeks the whole thing looked kinda blah. This time I hit up the Whole Foods olive bar and used a variety of different olives. When I was in Italy last fall I learned that each type of olive has a unique flavor and that the flavors change as the olives change from green to black. Some olives are peppery, grassy, bright, floral, etc all which are imparted into the preserve. If you're a purist then stick with one type of olive. I liked the colors, shapes, and sizes of the variety of olives, but according to an Italian, mixing that many different types dilutes the unique flavors of them all.

My stove top set up when pickling.

Ingredients

The vegetables boiled in the vinegar mixture for 5 minutes

Into the jars. Filled them with oil and put them through the water bath.

Deconstructed Summer Squash Tacos

So walking into the Food Co-op's deli/fridge has turned into a delightful experience for me. Instead of going into it with a recipe in mind, I go in there looking for any interesting ingredients I can cook with. Last week I found blue potatoes, this time I found at least 50lbs of dried black beans and several boxes of a gluten free quinoa-corn pasta.

Black beans, quinoa, and corn. These three flavors made me think about Taco Tuesday. When we used to host our weekly taco Tuesdays during the summer time there would always be summer squash involved.

This week, I decided to sautee the squash like I would taco meat, with some oregano, chili powder, and cumin. I added the black beans to it, a squeeze of lime, and added in the cooked quinoa-corn pasta. The whole thing looked like a summer squash/black bean/pasta salad... but that didn't sound very appetizing. So I called it my deconstructed summer squash tacos with black beans, and garnished with tomatoes.

And I'm BACK!

So it's been a crazy few months. I moved. We thought the Surf Club was a goner. I've been working a full time job. Then Spring hit full force in San Diego. Warm 70+ degree weather and every weekend's been devoted to getting all the gardens going.

The result: the garden at Surf Club looks AMAZING! Tomatoes, squash, corn, beets, carrots, beans, everything is exploding. Ken D took all the chickens, and the coop looks bad ass (coop 4.0). We have four new chicks that just hatched out this past weekend. My garden was installed first week of June and now it's starting to do something, but the rabbits are extremely happy and growing bigger every day.

Now that I've settled into the groove of things and everyone is taken care of and all the gardens are taken care of I started volunteering at the UCSD food co-op. I'll be cooking for them once a week to start with. Today was meal 1 and I made a warm Italian Potato Salad.



When I say warm, I'm not talking only about the temperature but I'm talking about the essence of the dish. (I know its summer, but I had to make something that'd go into a hot water bath and stay hot so I had to think warm. I'm also challenging myself by using only what I can find left over from the previous week in the Food Co-op's fridge and what I can grow.)

Ingredient List: (scale it down if you decide to make it)

Potatoes - Russets and Blue Potatoes (8-10lbs)
Onions - Yellow and Red (3-4lbs)
Sweet Green Peppers (2)
Garbanzo Beans (3 cups dried or 6 cups cooked)
Black Kale (yes its summer but this stuff is still growing strong in my garden) (6 cups chopped)
Fresh Rosemary (about 3-4 tbsp)
Canola Oil (1/4 cup)

1. I cubed up the potatoes and onions and threw them into a large bowl of cold water as I was cubing them. Not only does this prevent the starch in the potatoes from turning black but it also leaches out the slimy starch from the blue potatoes and the spiciness from the onions.

2. Deseed the peppers and remove the white parts from it and dice it up also but don't throw it in the water.

3. Drain the potatoes and onions and toss them with the peppers and rosemary in canola oil.

4. Spread them out in a single layer and oven roast them in a 400-425 degree oven for about 45min to 1 hr. Try not to open the oven for the first 30 minutes, then pull them out of the oven (close the oven to keep in the heat) toss them with a spatula and throw them back in until the peppers and the onions are soft and the potatoes start to crisp a bit. When they are done put them in a bowl, salt and cover with foil.

5. While the potato is cooking. Cut the black kale into 1/2in slices (the short way) and get a heavy pan hot. (A good way to know if your pan is hot enough is to splash a bit of water and watch it sizzle away immediately.) Add a tablespoon of canola or grape seed oil (which both have higher burning temperature) and immediately throw enough kale to cover the surface area of the pan but not enough to create a thick layer. Toss it quickly to cover with oil and press down on the kale with a spatula for about a minute. You should hear the kale sizzle and pop. (You're trying to almost fry the kale in a thin layer of hot oil.) Toss once and press down for another minute. Repeat until all your kale is "blacken". You don't need to keep it covered once you take it off the heat. Don't salt until you're ready to serve otherwise it'll loose its crispness.

6. Garbanzo beans... if using dried make sure you soak it over night and then boil at medium for 1 1/2hr before using. No quick soak method has ever worked for me. I recommend just using canned garbanzo beans. With this recipe rinse the beans before using so the gunky starch is removed.

7. Toss everything together and salt to taste.

But wait? What's the secret ingredient? I added a tablespoon of black truffle infused oil to the salad to give it an amazing, buttery warmth.

Truffle oil is one of those things where a little bit goes a long way. Although the black truffle is highly prized and expensive, the infused oil can be purchased for a moderate price. The French company La Tourangelle makes different gourmet oils in California and offers the oil for a reasonable price. (Henry's had it on sale this week.)