I love leeks. They grow easily in the garden, and they’re super tasty grilled or shredded and steamed as a base for fish. The only thing with leeks is that they don’t store well once harvested, and for as easily as they grow, you can end up with a lot of leeks just hanging in the garden taking up space, waiting for you to come up with something to do with them.
The other thing I’m starting to get in my garden about now is potatoes. They’re smaller and essentially skinless, but they’re super tender and tasty.
Luckily, my kids love soup. You see where I’m going with this? Leeks? Soup? Potatoes? Wait a minute! Leek soup! Why didn’t I think of that?!
I don’t really dig the whole “puree the soup in batches” thing. That never ends well. Nothing like hot splattering soup all over everything to take the fun out of cooking. Instead, I use potato flour (or flakes) to thicken the soup and leave the leeks as is. You can even add a potato, chopped fairly small, to give it a bit more texture. If you’re a masochist, by all means, skip the potato flour, add more potatoes, and puree away. It’s very good that way, too.
Quick Potato Leek Soup
1 large or 2 medium leeks, trimmed, CLEANED, and chopped. Contrary to popular belief, you can eat the green part as long as you trim off the tough ends. Be sure to slice open the leek and wash it well, they tend to collect grit between the leaves.
1 or 2 medium new potatoes (or any kind, for that matter)
2 Tbsp. potato flour (Bob’s Red Mill sells it… it saves me from having to puree the whole thing, which typically results in scalding and cleaning).
2 slices bacon chopped
4 c. chicken stock
1 c. cream or milk, depending on your paranoia about dietary fat
salt, pepper, bay leaves, etc.
Trim, slice, clean, and chop your leeks.
Brown the chopped bacon a little in the pot.
Add the leeks, potatoes, and a little salt to the bacon and sautee until the leeks start to soften.
Add the chicken broth, seasonings (salt, pepper, white pepper, bay leaf, and maybe some herbes de provence or italian seasoning)
Return to a simmer until everything’s softened.
Add 2 Tbsp potato flour (whisk into some water first, lest you get clods).
The farmers market season is getting rolling in Portland, and I took a trip up to the King market in Northeast.
It was a little sparse, but they had a lot of nice veggies starts and a little bit of early produce (ala leaves, asparagus, and potatoes). They also had some lovely southwest style breakfast burritos and… western europe? style crepes that were tres, tres bueno. Thanks, guys.
Regardless, I bought some produce: a clod of very nice young asparagus (yeah, I know, I have an asparagus patch, but I eat more than I could possibly grow), some spinach, and some lovely lettuce.
After that, I headed over to my own little patch of dirt and found that nature had provided a half-dozen chicken eggs, a decent sized handful of my own asparagus, which I hesitate to add is approximately 5X more awesome than even the stuff from the farmers market, and a bunch of greens from my shallots.
Righty, so, given the situation, I decided that these ingredients might be best put to use in a frittata/quiche/egg pie/whatevery thing. Given that I didn’t want to make a crust today, the Italians won the day. Stupid Frenchies.
Oh, and… while this has ham in it, it certainly doesn’t have to. If you’ve a veg, and I was for years, just hold the ham. There’s plenty of protein in the eggs. As it happens, I eat meat with a carnivorous gusto now.
Rian’s Super Opportunistic Spinach-Ham Frittata
5 eggs
1/3 c. milk/cream
~1/2 c chopped ham (make it something good, like from a local farmer or Niman Ranch)
1 smallish bunch spinach, coarsely chopped
1/2-1 c. chopped green onions
salt, pepper, garlic powder (ideally, stuff you made!)
1/2-1 c. shredded cheddar cheese (or any kind, for that matter)
~1 lb. sliced new potatoes (use something like yukon golds, not bakers, like russets)
Pre-heat your broiler on low. If you just have on and off, use your better judgment for the postition of the rack so things to burn all to hell in a handbasket.
Slice up… everything. The potatoes should be sliced ~1/4-1/2″ slices, the green onions finely, the ham into 1/4″ chunks.
Heat an oven-safe non-stick pan and layer the potatoes in one layer to fry for a few minutes until just starting to soften and browned. Season with salt, pepper, and garlic powder.
Add in the green onions (shallots or chopped onions would work, too) and ham, toss all that around for a little bit.
Layer the spinach on top, add a little bit of liquid (white wine or chicken stock) and cover to steam for 3-5 minutes until the spinach is well wilted.
Stir up the eggs and milk in a bowl until the whites are well broken up.
Pour the eggs into the pan with the other bits. Submerge by force anything that sticks up too much.
Shred the cheddar (or whatever) on top.
Put the pan in the oven (I mentioned “oven-safe” right?) to brown the cheese and finish the top.
Take out and cool. Frittata can be eaten warm, but it’s also a great picnic food or lunchbox item cold.
The asparagus met its fate in my frying pan as a sautee with onions and sun-dried tomatoes as a side dish to the frittata. Throw in a little fresh-baked bread, and I think you’ve got yourself a meal, there, good buddy. 10-4 on the flip-side. Over.
There’s a few pests that I’ve not been able to generate a lot of Buddhist compassion for… the aphid, the weevil, and the leaf miner. They’re all disgusting and deserve an eternity in the hell of boiling oil– at least until I’m able to remove the illusion of separation between myself and them. There is no spoon…
In the meantime, let us attempt to dissuade them from wrecking our plants.
The leaf miner isn’t really an insect, as much as a description of an bunch of insects. It’s a little like saying that the doctor said you “have a sore throat”. The leaf miner is any of a bunch of critters that burrow into leaves and eat out the innards while protected by the outer layers.
For our purposes, let’s talk about the snaggle-toothed suckfly that lays its eggs on the bottoms of my spinach and chard. Said eggs look a lot like this:
Oh, man. I’m mad just looking at that. If you look on the leaf on the right, you’ll see the handiwork of these little spawns of Satan. Thanks, little maggot. Not like I wanted to eat that chard or anything.
It is widely believed, and often stated with a straight face, that you should not worry about them. The damage that they do is mostly cosmetic and usually doesn’t affect the health of the plants. That’s what the leaf miner apologists would have you believe. They are liars. Do not believe them.
Where I live, the leaf miners make my chard, spinach, and beet greens essentially inedible unless you’re big on maggots, rotten maggot tunnels, and, I assume, maggot feces. I am not that keen on those things, and so I have decided to fight back.
I’ll cut to the chase. The answer to near total victory is crop rotation and row covers. The little snotwads overwinter in the soil, I understand, and are quite thrilled to wake up in the spring and find that you planted their host crop right next to their beds. However, if you move your plantings around, as I do, and you cover the beds with Reemay or some such BEFORE the plants come up, you have a good chance of excluding the flies and producing near pristine leafy units.
Unfortunately, I find that row covers make my precious garden look like one of those disaster scenes where the morgue is so full that they’re just laying dead bodies under sheets… on the ground… in my garden. They definitely work, but I can really get past the dead-body aesthetic.
Instead, I’ve gone for a two-prong attack, and we’ll see how well it pans out this year. Firstly, I visit the plants a lot, and I flip over every leaf looking for their tell-tale rows of eggs. They’re easy to scrape off with the finger, and I assume that they’re not programmed to find their way back to the leaf. Second, I spray the leaves with Neem oil. Neem is harmless to most things, but smothers these wankers and, from my experience, appears to dissuade the adults from laying their eggs on the leaf in the first place.
Now, neem oil doesn’t seem to last that long– maybe a week or two, tops. But, given my trade of labor for aesthetics, I’m out there most days anyway, so a weekly spray is pretty easy to get done.
Once again, I’ll keep track of the results and try to document. As it is, they’ve tagged about 10% of the leaves already, and I’m either squishing them in the leaf or tearing the whole thing off and feeding it to my chickens.
Wish me luck.
Of course, if the Rapture happens this weekend, I probably won’t bother anymore. We’ll see.
The veritable Lady Gaga, or potentially Charlie Sheen, of this garden season seems to be the grafted tomato. You’d think it was something cooked up in a Monsanto lab in a test tube with all the hype about them. I must admit that I hadn’t given the whole thing a lot of thought until I saw a Facebook friend announce that she was getting up early to beat the rush down to the local MegaNursery to pick up her grafted toms. G-toms, if you will.
OK, fine… I’ve grown those stupid upside tomatoes for you people. Why not? Time for the Urban Hayseed Official G-Tom Evaluation Experiment.
Clap, clap, clap…
The things seem, at first glance, to be ridiculously expensive. My 8″ or so start cost me $10 at New Seasons grocery store. At Portland Nursery, the bigger ones were $15 each. Whereas New Seasons had a whole rack of them, Portland Nursery was down to about four, and those were that odd green-when-ripe variety, green zebra. Hey, if I wanted all my tomatoes to be green, I’d just grow them… in Portland.
So…
What’s a Grafted Tomato
So glad you asked. You know how they graft fruit trees, grapes, etc. on to root stock of closely related, but differently selected, plants to deal with soil conditions, diseases, or desired growth habits? Yeah, well, they do. This is the same deal. And, surprisingly, this has been going on for many years. In places like Japan and Korea where the agriculture is, by necessity, very intensive, grafting has been used for some time to overcome the inevitable buildup of pathogens in the soil and to keep production up.
Essentially, what happens is that there are two plants grown: the desired cultivar of fruit (the “scion”) and the uber-hardy rootstock. At some point, early in their lives, they are spliced together. There’s two options. They’re either “top grafted” by slicing through both at the same angle, and just holding the scion on top of the rootstock with a special sleeve. In the other case, they’re “side grafted” and joined in a Siamese twin kind of situation where the two plants share their roots for a while, and then eventually, the root stock is beheaded, leaving the fruiting plant with two root systems. After the graft is healed, the plant is cut free from it’s “heirloom” roots leaving only the root stock and the grafted fruiting top. Neat, eh? No wonder they cost $10.
There’s a couple of popular rootstock tomatoes that are chosen because of their resistance to soil-borne pathogens or for their tendency to increase the vigor of the plants.
As far as I can tell, Log House here in Oregon has a lock on production, at least in this area. Here’s the ad banner for them:
It’s an AMAZING DIFFERENCE!!! Well, you know how that is. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. What’s certain is that this has been used for years by people trying to deal with funky soil or low production. I don’t think my soil is too funky, but I haven’t had a decent tomato crop in a couple of years. So, I’ve got two of these Mighty ‘Matoes. I’m going to grow one in the ground and one in a pot. The rest of my toms are just good, old heirlooms.
I’ll keep track, compare, and report in regularly. If this works out, I may just grow my own grafts next year (and sell them for $8.50!).
I went on a rampage this weekend and tried to add every plug-in to this blog that I thought would be at all interesting or useful. One that grabbed my attention was called Twitter LiveBlog. The theory is that, by sending a certain code, you can start up a session on your blog that will capture everything you tweet until you send the ending code.
Nifty! OK, so, I get myself all set with my iPhone and a Twitter app… install the plugin… make sure all the settings are right, and BANGO!
Nothing. As far as I can tell, the plugin did… nothing. No errors. No indication of any kind that anything had happened on Twitter, or anywhere else for that matter. Ah, well. I’m about half-certain that it’s operator error. I’ll check into it and see if I can make it work someday.
Nonetheless, I made a great dinner, and so I thought I’d just import the shots, and we can all pretend like I tweeted it to Facebook app Google mobile Bing RSS trackback whatsy doodle.
Chicken Soup
Chop up a cup or so of a bunch of veggies and 2-3 chicken thighs.
Brown the chicken in a Dutch oven with a little salt and pepper, and then put aside in a bowl. Brown the veggies in the pot.
Pour in a little chicken broth or white wine and scrape the yummy bits off the pot. Add the chicken. Add several cups of (ideally homemade, but canned will do in a pinch) chicken broth. Season with the usual suspects: salt, pepper, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, herbes de provence, bay leaves, etc. Simmer until the veggies are tender.
Beet Salad
This is definitely my favorite salad these days, and it’s pretty easy to whip up.
Peel a large beet, and put it in a bowl with some water. Nuke it in the microwave in 2 min. intervals until the beet’s just softened. In the meantime, toast a handful of pecans in a pan. Lay out a bed of greens on a plate, sprinkle with some thinly sliced red onion, arrange the beets on top, dot with goat cheese, and sprinkle with the toasted chopped pecans. Dress with an olive oil, balsamic vinaigrette.
Strawberry Shortcake
I’m tired now, but I’ll get the recipe up for this tomorrow. Still, to whet your appetite:
Now, when I figure out how to get this whole “live blogging” thing going, we’ll give it another whack.
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