I just realized that I’ve been keeping this version of my blog for five years now. That means that this blog is older than my kid. Wow. I know that doesn’t mean much to you, but it kinda freaks me out. I was reading some of the older posts, and let me just apologize for being such an ignoramus before, and… probably now.
OK, well, in year five, if we don’t count chicken eggs, the first thing out of my garden is ASPARAGUS!
Sauteed Asparagus and Garlic
If you’ve had asparagus that tasted like shafts of balsa wood, try some of the early spring fresh stuff (ideally out of your garden, though, it takes a couple of years to get it established). It is so distinctly asparagusy and good, you won’t believe the difference. I cut a few spears and sauteed it in chopped garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper, and a little chicken broth, and it was just very fine.
I’ve got a green and purple variety, though I’ll admit I don’t recall which, growing in a 3′x6′ or so bed, and they’ve been at it for at least three years by now. Last year, I think I harvested a dozen or so spears before they took off into giant 6′ high ferns. That’s something that I recall being surprised about. I think I thought that asparagus just grew into… asparagus shaped plants that… flowered or something.
No, they grow into really tall ferns. Your little patch of asparagus becomes a mini-forest. And like bulbs, you have to let the greens mature and soak up sunlight all summer so that they’ll have the energy stored under-ground to pop up their little delicious sprouts in the spring. Then, after a couple of years, you can harvest them until they get really thin. That’s when you let them grow up into the fern forest.
Today, I’m going to let you in on a couple of super incredible pizza-making tips that only the really cool kids know about. And I overheard them talking about it.
Make your own dough. It takes maybe 10 minutes, tops. I recommend bread flour. More gluten, chewier, better bubbles. Just put a couple of cups of flour, a teaspoon or so of salt, yeast, and sugar, a tablespoon or so of olive oil, and enough water to make a medium dough (i.e., not wet and sloppy and not hard and tight). Mix it up a little, knead it until it’s elastic (just a few minutes, it’ll feel less sticky, more “satiny”, and very uniform).
Let it rise until it pretty much doubles (an hour or so), and then you can punch it down and cut it into portions and form up your little dough disks (see #3). The “second rise” kind of happens while it’s resting (go back and see #3 again).
Make little dough disks. Form the dough into about 75% full size disks, and lay them on some non-stick sprayed parchment paper or something along those lines. You can stack them up that way. For that matter, you can freeze them if you make them a bit smaller. The main point I’m getting at here is get the dough into the appropriate shape and let it rest that way for 15-20 minutes. In fact, I’ve had even better luck doing this and then tossing to full size and letting it rest again for a while. This allows the gluten to relax and has the benefit of preventing the dough from shrinking when you shake it loose on the peel (see #4) or ripping holes when you toss it to full size (see #… probably gonna be 5 unless I think of something else in the meantime).
Use a wood peel that’s well floured. You can also use corn meal, but I find that good old flour seems to meet with less resentment at the dinner table. Periodically, when you’re putting your stuff on, give it a little shake to make sure the dough will slide off onto the pizza stone (uh-oh, that’s gonna be #5, so the note on tossing is going to be later).
Use a pizza stone. When you heat up the oven (oh boy, OK, THAT’s gonna be #6. This could go on all night.), let the stone get really hot. Give it at least 15 minutes at full heat. It really makes the bottom cook faster and crispier so it doesn’t get all mushy and “doughy”.
Heat up the oven as hot as you can– unless you have an oven that goes above 800F, I guess. It’s a safe bet that you don’t. Anyway, the hotter, the better. Don’t be scared. You want that dough to cook fast to make it crispy.
OK, tossing the dough. This was going to be #5 before. So, cross-reference that. Um. Oh! Yeah, toss the dough. Don’t roll it out. Among other things, rolling out the dough squishes out the bubbles that make for a nice, airy, crispy crust. Plus, tossing looks cool, and it’s not really that hard.
Make your dough thinner than you think you should. I find that the right thickness is just before I can see light through it, and that happens just before you make a hole. So… uh… make a hole and back up two steps? Or, better yet, just make your dough nice and thin. It’ll puff up a lot when it bakes, and unless you want pizza toppings on a loaf of bread, make it thin to start.
Keep an eye on your pie. If your oven is good and hot (and after #6, it damn well should be) the pizza can go from dough to coal pretty fast if you’re all drunk on red wine and jabbering about all the stuff you know about making pizza (I assume).
Take it out and let it cool on something like another pizza stone or a wood peel. Put it on something that’ll absorb some of the moisture from the crust, and it’s less likely to get soggy.
Oh, sure, there’s lots of others like “try smoked mozzarella for the cheese” and “use only a thin layer of sauce” but then there’d be more than ten, and we all know that tips come in groups of ten.
Sorry, I promised to do a little thing about maintaining a raspberry patch and forgot. Well, I didn’t forget so much as take a lot of pictures of which this:
A spent cane
Is the best one. Kinda sad. All that shows is what a dead cane looks like, and that I have woman hands.
So, this is going to be kinda quick and dirty (like the nails on my woman hands.)
There’s basically two kinds of raspberries: primocanes and floricanes. The difference is that floricanes flower and fruit on the previous year’s canes, whereas primocanes flower and fruit on this year’s canes. That’s actually an oversimplification, as you’ll find if you grow primocanes. Because they’ll fruit the year the canes grow, you CAN chop them all to the ground in the fall. However, if you don’t, they’ll usually fruit again the next spring.
Actually, that’s not exactly right, either… the canes themselves are called primocane in the first year and floricane in the second… Anyway, look for “fall fruiting”, “everbearing”, or “primocane” vs. “summer-bearing” or “floricane” in the description, and you’ll know what that means.
In essence, though, primocanes are a bit simpler to handle if you don’t want to do the next bit… pruning. The downside is that if you have an early fall, you may well miss the fall crop entirely. Then, if you chop them down, you don’t get any at all. Thus, you are raising raspberry canes and not much else. Personally, I have both kinds, and we are usually awash in raspberries during most of the summer and fall.
Raspberry pruning mostly involves getting rid of the canes that have already fruited and died. You can tell primos from floris because their canes will be green the first year and brown or gray the next. You can tell third year canes because, well, they’re dead.
So, what you do is go to your patch, row, fence, or whatever… and take out all the dead ones. Easy! OK, now steel yourself and take out the spindly canes. I know, they have flowers on them. Just do it. Leave the thickest canes so that you have about 5-6 per row foot. Next, pull out all the adorable little sprouting canes outside a foot or so from your planting line.
You want to get both light and air to the fruit and the canes to ripen them, give the plants sufficient energy, and avoid any nasty fungal stank from establishing itself in the damp darkness of an unpruned tangle.
After that, I usually spread a little corn gluten to suppress weeds and provide nitrogen all around the base of the canes. Raspberries produce a lot of greenery, so they eat up a lot of nitrogen.
No, not my best work, but at least I feel relieved of the obligation now, and that’s good enough for me today.
Remember how I said I was going to be back in the garden. Yeah, well, here’s proof:
Trillum
I have this thing with trillium… or trillia… Not sure why. I think I remember hearing that they’re endangered in the wild or something. I don’t know. Anyway, they’re kind cool, and they seem to like my yard, so I have a lot of them.
Froggy Fountain
Also have a weird thing with frogs. Now, this doesn’t mean that I want you to buy me a bunch of frog stuff. I had some friends in Minnesota whose home was loaded with cows because somewhere along the line she’d told someone that she liked cows, and now it was a family tradition to get her cow stuff. She was too nice to tell anyone that she just meant that she vaguely thought cows were basically kind of cute. They took that to mean she had some super freaky cow fetish. I just think frogs are cool. That’s all. And dragonflies. But don’t get all weird about it.
Cherry Blossoms
The rainier cherry is in full bloom. You’d think that’d mean that we’ll be eating cherries until we’re sick this fall, right? Yeah… no. That means that the squirrels and birds are going to be eating hundreds of delicious, organic cherries, and I’ll get dick. Not even a thank you.
Garlic
Here’s the great thing about garlic: you buy it once, and you never have to buy it again… you plant a bed of it, eat as much as you care to over the course of a year, and when you’re done, you’ve probably got a enough sprouting cloves of the stuff to plant another entire bed of it. I get so much these days that I pickle it, dry it, eat it fresh, and still have too much left. Just like potatoes…
Aforementioned Potatoes
Potatoes. Same deal. In fact, due to my attempt to be pretty good about crop rotation, they’re pretty much weeds. I planted some this year, but only because they were sprouting, and it’s nice to have some idea where they’re gonna come up.
Asparagus
More weed vegetables. I’ve got green and purple asparagus coming up (along with a LOT of weeds). I planted about eight crowns a couple years back, and now they thoroughly fill their allotted 4′x8′ bed. Love that kinda thing. I’ve completely converted from wanting to grow only the stuff that leaf miners and cabbage loopers love to really appreciate the stuff that’s gonna come up if I’m there or not.
Ken's Red Kiwi
I had a terrible time getting kiwi established in my yard. As it turns out, apparently, I was planting them in their least favorite spot– where the hot tub had been drained and the soil was all funky. Once I picked some other spots where the sun wasn’t quite so intense and the soil was nice and soft and less chloriney, the damn things are taking over. God bless ‘em. This one’s a Ken’s Red “grape” kiwi. Pretty, eh?
Oden is the classic simmering on the stove Japanese stew. It’s got hunks of veggies, fish cake, chicken, eggs, and various other bits. None of which has to do with my point, which is just that, if you buy the “set” from the store, throw away the soup base. Make your own. It’s …___—***SO***—___… much better. It’s just 4c. chicken broth (remember the chicken, I roasted?), 4c. of dashi (just use the powdered stuff if you don’t want to bother with fresh, 1/4c. soy sauce, 1/4c. mirin, and salt. Whoa, Nelly. What a difference.
OK, so, on to the muffins.
My son recently received a couple of books in the Serendipity series of… what can only be described as hippie-agenda peace, love, and dope, left-wing, new-age child mind-control manifestos. One of the books is called The Muffin Dragon, which is about… a “dragon” who’s oppressive exploitation by force of threat of the proletariat serves, in the end, only to extract such rent that only his ultimate salvation (via the pooling of his resources with the skills of the worker) results in a Utopian socialist nirvana in which all benefit equally. So, my kid, naturally, wanted muffins after reading about that.
This recipe, apparently, originated on a bag of King Arthur flour– though, I snagged it from Smitten Kitchen and modified it just a little with some extra spices.
Apple Muffins (fit for the Muffin Dragon)
2 apples, peeled, and sliced into chunks
1 c. whole wheat pastry flour
1 c. AP flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. nutmeg (optional)
1/4 tsp. dried ginger (optional)
1/4 tsp. allspice (optional)
1 Tbsp. cinnamon
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1/4 c. brown sugar (+ 1/4 c. for topping)
1 egg
1/2 c. (1 stick) unsalted butter (room temperature)
1 c. buttermilk
Preheat the oven to 450F. Line a muffin pan with cups. For me, this recipe filled a standard 12 muffin pan perfectly.
The recipe is dead simple, perfect for when you’re dead tired, which oddly enough, is how Ms. Kitchen wrote about it. Just whisk together the dry stuff in a bowl, and set aside.
At one time, I thought the idea of buying a dedicated apple peeler/slicer was for those people who own microwave popcorn poppers. As it turns out, given the frequency with which I cook with apples, it saves me all kinds of time.
A Fine Unitasker
Slice up your apples into roughly 1/2″ chunks. Set those aside.
Now, cream the butter and sugar in the mixer until it’s well mixed and fluffy. Then, add the egg, blend well, scraping down the bowl midway, and quickly mix in the buttermilk. Just get it blended.
Run the mixer on low, and slowly add in the dry ingredients just until it’s all blended in there. Again, don’t beat the heck out of it, and don’t worry about some lumps. Just get it all wet and decently mixed in. Then, fold in the apples with a spatula (so as not to mash them up too much).
Fill the muffin cups up to the rim. You might want to spray a little non-stick spray on the top of the muffin tin first, since they’ll mushroom up over the tops of the cups on to the pan itself.
Get Good Apple-Batter Proportions
Now, if you’re irresponsible like me, take the remaining 1/4 c. (or a bit more) of the brown sugar and sprinkle it on the tops of all of the muffins. It really is the best part. Public Service Announcement: Sugar’s poison. Eat celery sticks and drink distilled water. OK?
DON'T do this!
Bake these guys at 450F for about 10 minutes, and then turn the heat down to 400F and let them go another 15 minutes or so until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.
Let them cool for 5-10 minutes in the tin, make sure the tops aren’t melted on to the tin, and then turn them out onto a wire rack to cool for another 15-20 minutes. Seriously. Let them cool. If you don’t they’ll just decompose into mush when you try to unwrap them.
Note torn-off side of top. See note on non-stick spray.
And the jammie-judges say:
Phew...
The next morning, we sliced them into four, layered them with strawberries and bananas, and sprinkled them with powdered sugar and mint. One customer even sprinkled hers with maple syrup. She was GOING FOR IT! (‘It’ being diabetes, I guess) It was a weekend breakssert extravaganza.
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