Cook 'em Dan-O

Hot Tip: A Discontinuity in...

... the Toaster market.

This has been bugging me for a while, which should tell you all you need to know about my bizarre mind:  what's up with electric toasters?  As I popped the bread out of our toaster this morning, I realized that I've been putting up with its state of non-functionality for maybe three years now.  To be honest, I'm just happy it doesn't catch on fire while toasting my English muffins.

We have one of those low-priced toasters (I won't mention which one, but it's on the chart below).  All we ask is that it toast the bread adequately, pop it up when it's done, and not catch on fire in the process.  You might say we've set the bar rather low in the requirements department.  Heck, we were delighted that it had a "bagel mode".

Of course, within about a year of buying the toaster, the dial that controls how light or dark you want your toast stopped working.  You can set it to whatever  you like, but the toaster will toast your bread to whatever level it deems appropriate.  It's kind of French that way: "No, monsieur, I will bring your croque-monsieur like so."

Fast forward to today.  I was on a culinary parts website, ordering replacement parts for our Cuisinart food processor.  Once I finished up my ordering, I thought I'd see what they had to offer for toasters.  I searched for two-slice toasters.  I didn't get any fancier than that--four-slice models just encourage overnight guests, and we haven't had a toaster oven since we got married.  What I found is in the chart below.

What you see is that there are a number of manufacturers and models to choose from in the sub-$50 price range.  And there a couple of choices in the (incredible) $250 price range. (Side note: are the super-expensive ones really that good? Or should I just buy five of the cheap models and replace one every year?)

But, except for one Krups model, there is nothing in between the $50 and $250 price points!  Clearly there's a gap in the market here, ready to be exploited by some socially-networked, ad-supported, iPad-enabled product.  I'm calling on entrepreneurs everywhere to address this gap in the market.  Take my idea and run with it, I ask for nothing in return... except for a working toaster. Or five.

Home Cured Olives Update

It's been about three weeks since we first picked our olives for curing. Here's an update on the three methods we've used for curing the olives.

Water Curing

This will turn out to be the fastest curing method. I had to change the water used for curing the olives every day. It took about 20 days to rid the olives of their bitter (think mouth-puckering) taste. So the next step was to prepare a salt water and vinegar brine, pour it over the olives, and top with some olive oil. Since I had a lot of olives, I put the olives in two containers and added some herbs (peppercorns, bay leaves and garlic) to one of the brine solutions. Now the olives will steep in the brine for up to a month to develop their flavor. Adding the garlic to one of the brines meant that I have to store that one in the fridge, to prevent unhealthy stuff from "cooking" in the brine. The other container is sitting in our shed, where the temperature is about the same as a wine cave.

Brine Curing

The brine curing has been the easiest method, but takes the longest time. After soaking in a salt water brine for a week, I transferred the olives to individual canning jars and brined them with a higher strength solution. The jars are now sitting in the same shed. I'll change the brine once a month for the next few (up to six) months, until the olives lose their bitter taste.

Salt Curing

The olives have been sitting in a plastic colander covered with kosher salt for a couple of weeks now. Once a week I put the olives in a bowl, re-mix them, and return them to the colander. Then I cover the olives with a new layer of kosher salt. You can tell that the salt is leaching out the moisture from the olives—the salt feels wet and the olives are starting to develop wrinkles. These guys have a few weeks of curing left and then they'll be ready for storing in brine or olive oil.

I'll check in again when we get to the tasting part… with any luck we'll have plenty of olives for those summer evenings on the deck with a glass of white wine, some cheese and a crust of French bread!

Our Weekend Culinary Adventure—Curing Olives

I am beginning to wonder if my life is going to be defined by the things I used to find disgusting. First, there were tomatoes. To be fair, I didn't find them disgusting, I just had no interest in eating them. (There was that unfortunate incident in second grade, when I had to eat two tomato sandwiches before Mrs. Robbins—an actual, retired WAC—would let me go play at lunchtime, but that's another story.) Fast forward a number of years, and I'm growing tomatoes for friends and neighbors.

Then there were figs. We had two fig trees in LA, and left them in place when we put in a brick patio in the back yard. From that point on, I only thought of figs as those things that went splat on the brick patio. I could either clean them up right away, or deal with the ants that would find them within hours. Fast forward a like number of years, and I'm grilling figs with prosciutto on the barbecue. Go figure.

And now we turn to olives. I grew up thinking olives in their natural state were poisonous (not true) and at any rate cursed them as they dropped onto the lawn in front of our condo, making a mess of things.

So now, having become interested in canning and preserving, I took note of the olive trees on our property. Our landlord had no plans for the olives (he put the trees in for decorative purposes) and gave us the OK to pick them. So Crystal and I went out before the rains showed up and picked olives for curing.

It turns out that the "poisonous" notion surrounding olives (at least for me) has to do with the way they're normally cured. Commercially, olives are cured with lye. UC literature on home curing tells you how to do this without killing yourself, but I went the "don't try this at home" route and opted for the non-lye methods of olive curing. They take longer, but don't have the potential side effects that curing with lye can have.

Having picked a surprisingly large amount of olives, we moved on to the curing process. There are three main methods:

• Water curing. You soak the olives in water, change it every day for about 10 days, and you're done. The main drawback to this method is the need to slice into the olives in order to allow the water to penetrate. Since we were working with small olives (Picholine, as far as we can tell), this took a lot of time. Fortunately, it was the perfect activity to take on while watching multiple shows on The Food Network.
• Salt curing. This was the method I was most looking forward to. You pack the olives in salt, and let it draw out the oleuropein that gives uncured olives their (trust me on this, I tried one) incredible bitterness. These olives should be ready in about 6 weeks.
• Brine curing. This method uses a brine of salt and water to cure the olives. It's the easiest method to do (change the brine once a month) but takes 4-6 months to complete.

As it turned out, we had plenty of olives and so we've cured olives using each of these methods. The brine-cured olives are on the far left in this photo, the water-cured are in the middle and the salt-cured are on the right.

We'll let you know how they turn out; if they're good you can count on eating some during aperitif this summer!

Here you can see the brine-cured olives on the far left, the water-cured olives in the middle and the salt-cured olives on the right.

New Veggie Photos

Check out "Expanding our Garden" for new photos of the fun stuff growing this year!  Finally, an answer to the question, "what exactly does kohlrabi look like?"

Now Growing in the Garden

So now that Spring seems to have beaten back the last of the rain (so far), it's been time for more planting, thinning, seed-starting, weeding, scheming, and dreaming about fantastic veggies.

Yesterday I planted the first round of tomatoes, following Cynthia's advice on planting, right down to the fish heads I put in the bottom of the hole.  Here's the result.

 

BTW, that's Doc tracking down a ground squirrel.  And the orange netting surrounds the asparagus, whose fronds get blown around quite a bit in the wind.

I've finally learned to not get greedy and space my tomatoes out properly--three feet apart.  It seems excessive now, but in a month or so there won't be any space between the plants.

One of my new experiments this year has been artichokes, which also need lots of room.  I may have planted these early, but they don't seem to be getting bigger in the seed pots, so what the heck.

 

That little thing next to the brick should grow into a three-foot high plant; we'll see! 

Yukon Gold potatoes were a big hit last year, so I've planted another crop of those.  And, to make use of the bed space, I've run another drip line down the middle and planted red onions and shallots.  The onions and shallots are already sprouting, and the potatoes are beginning to poke through as well.

 

I had Asian Greens at a dim sum restaurant the other day, which got me excited again about our greens.  They've survived attacks by the flea beetles, and (along with the bak choi) are getting close to harvest-size.

Finally, I've gone back to first principles with the lettuce and spinach (those noticeably empty spots below), re-tilling the soil and replanting.  The arugula is doing well, which suits me just fine!

I tried growing radishes and carrots last year, without much success.  This year, the radishes are looking good, and with all the rain the carrots are just beginning to sprout.  I'm thinking I should feed the first carrots to the horses--kind of completes the circle, if you know what I mean!

Garden Update

Spring is here (at least, according to the calendar) and that means I get to move my obsessive-compulsive gardening addiction beyond pulling weeds and turning compost into the soil.

Here's a picture of my "nursery".  For a number of reasons, I found myself starting more vegetables from seeds this year, vs. buying plants.  In addition, I expanded my vision to include flowers (those things you can't eat) as well as vegetables.

 

I won't detail all of the plants here, but there are tomatoes (some I've grown from seeds, many bought from Love Apple Farms), peppers (sprouted today, yeah!), artichokes, lavender for the front yard, and other flowers and herbs.  It's going to get crowded when I have to replant some of these veggies and flowers into larger pots!

I've also been busy upgrading the garden.  I reconfigured two of the raised beds, installing drip irrigation with emitters spaced every six inches (vs. eighteen).  That means I can plant more greens than last year, since they don't need as much spacing as plants like tomatoes.

After just a few days, I'm already seeing sprouts in the beds--lettuce, spinach, bak choi (pak choi east of the Rockies, as they say), Asian greens.  And those two spots of green? Last year, I had potatoes in these beds.  Apparently I failed to harvest a couple of potatoes, and they've re-sprouted.

So you may want to show up in early May with some vinaigrette dressing and a bottle of white wine :)

Our New Chickens

Here are the latest additions, Milk Chocolate and Dark Chocolate. Don't ask me which is which.

Cactus Anyone?

Got adventurous at Dos Amigos tacqueria and ordered the cactus and goat cheese burrito. Pretty tasty. Cactus is a bit like gelatinous bell pepper. No really you should try it.

Garden Update

I've posted some additional photos to the "Expanding Our Garden" photo library.  

We now have everything planted:  various salad greens (the arugula is already coming up--yum!), radishes, carrots, cucumbers (for Danielle), beets, beans, corn, swiss chard, a load of peppers (from mild to mouth-scorching), asparagus, potatoes, muskmelons (for Crystal) and (queen of the garden) an abundance of tomatoes.  To top it off, we've added in some herbs at ends of the beds--oregano and dill--both because we love to cook with fresh herbs and because they should attract beneficial insects.

Last year, I hacked up the ground, added some compost, and chucked in the plants.  They did well, but when you're an OCD farmer more and bigger is always better.  So as I've already noted, I put a lot of work into amending the soil in the beds, and it's already showing great results.  We've added row covers (not shown in the photos) and some bird netting to keep the little birds from munching on the miniature carrot tops and other shoots.  We followed the full Grow Better Veggies recipe for planting the tomatoes, including use of fresh fish heads.  OK, they were from farm-raised trout bought at Costco, but I was proud of being able to put expediency ahead of rigorous adherence to a preconceived plan of going to Morgan Hill (Poppy's) for fresh-off-the-boat fish heads.  I've also taken to visiting the garden in the evening, picking off the bugs and tossing them into the chickens' area for immediate "recycling".

The asparagus is already starting to flower.  We have to let it flower this year, then cut it back and we can begin to harvest next year.  I had a bite from one of the stems the peacocks bit off, and it was very tasty.  

So things are just starting to pop up out of the ground, but we can't wait to begin harvesting and enjoying our crop.  We've got a variety of peppers and tomatoes (no tomatillos this year), so just add onions and tortilla chips and salsa by the pool is in our future!

How To Spot a Good Restaurant

When I was traveling with my sister and some of our offspring on a cross-country trip (for me and mine, stopping at New Orleans) we made a pact with the mostly-teen passengers--no junk food.  No McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, etc.  Any place we stopped had to be of the non-chain variety.

Pretty quickly, the task of finding restaurants fell to me.  We found a great place in Pecos, Texas (which has a reputation much bigger than the town) where the owner and cooks all laughed at my attempt to eat the spicy Mexican food.  We had what Sean still considers to be the best tamale ever at a place in Albuquerque that was located at the back of a souvenir shop (I had my doubts about that one).  OK, there was the place outside of Baton Rouge where seemingly everything was deep-fried.  But all in all we ate at some amazing places.  And with no Internet or Lonely Planet guides to help us.

Some tips on how I did it:

• Look for locals in the restaurant.  Lots of people know this one.  It's especially true in San Francisco's Chinatown.
• Skip the chains.  It doesn't take long to figure out that Waffle House is going to be a lot like Denny's.
• Stay away from the high-rent districts.  Not entirely (as I'll explain), but just remember that if the restaurants are paying a lot for rent, they're going to have to charge a lot.
• The less neon the better.  Neon is the visual equivalent of the barkers in the French Quarter or North Beach trying to get you into the peep shows.  And as with those shows, once you're in you're likely to be disappointed.
• Look for a side street.  I found the restaurant Adega by walking up Yonge Street, past the Eaton Centre (think Toronto's version of Picadilly Circus) and lookiing down side streets.  Eventually I cam to Elm Street and found Adega, along with a number of other places.  If you're on the main street, all the neon and glitter will get people into the restaurant; the food doesn't have to speak for itself.  On the side streets, you only go there if you're lost or if you're looking for good food.
• And don't ignore the ethnicity of the neighborhood.  If there are lots of Middle Easterner's, you're going to find some great falafel places.  One of the best gyros I've ever had was purchased from a hole-in-the-wall place near Athens, for a Euro.

That should be enough to get your started.  And once you've gone to the trouble of finding a promising place, follow through and try something that's a signature dish.  Don't wimp out and stick with your starched-tablecloth version of a cheeseburger.  I had the octopus carpaccio at Adega and it was fantastic--thin slices of (cooked) octopus, with a great olive oil and pepper sauce.

Bon Appetit!