Kale, Italian Sausage, Caramelized Onion Pizza

Tags

cast iron pan, cast iron skillet, light sprinkling, new york style pizza, pepperoni pizza, red chili pepper

To be perfectly honest, I’m a little kaled out. I’ve made it into (our favorite) soup, frozen it for later, grown it in my garden, made kale salad and even used it as part of my Thanksgiving table adornment among other things. But when you have five more balls of the Serious Eat’s New York Style Pizza Dough after using the first ball for classic pepperoni pizza you get inventive with toppings. And inspired by the Trader Joe’s bag of frozen kale in the freezer and our favorite soup, this beautiful creation came about.
I’ve had successes with Serious Eats recipes in the past (like this pan pizza) and with cooking in my 14-inch cast iron skillet (like this sourdough pizza) so I gave their New York style dough a test. The dough is made in a food processor which makes life so much easier than long kneading times or even using a mixer. The first pizza I made after a 2-hour room temperature rise on the counter with excellent results but this pizza was made after a 2-day ferment in the refrigerator (and it can be fermented up to five days!). I can’t say that I was able to discern a flavor difference between the doughs so if you don’t plan ahead, this is still a great recipe if you can let it rise for at least two hours.

Toppings started with browning minced garlic and red chili pepper flakes in olive oil, caramelizing onions, browning chicken Italian Sausage, and sauteing kale until soft. I assembled the dough on parchment paper while the cast iron pan preheated in my 525-degree oven. Stretched the dough then brushed with the garlicky olive oil (with garlic in it), a light sprinkling of mozzarella, caramelized onions, kale, sausage, a little more mozzarella, Parmesan then threw it in the oven for about 13 minutes. Right when it came off another dusting of Parmesan topped it off.

The verdict? This is one of the best ways to eat kale, hands down. The slight sweetness of the dough and onions with the slightly bitter kale and richness of the sausage and cheese was all I’d ever hoped for. Just a slight kick from the red pepper and toasty garlic pushed thing thing right into my comfort zone. And it has kale so it must be healthy, right? Definitely a keeper.

Farmer Friday: Delayed Harvest

I might have waited too long to take these beets out of the garden?

Farmer Friday: The Winter Garden (and Weeds)

Tags

cabbage plants, food, nature, plants, vegetarian

The Thanksgiving table this year had several mason jars with foliage from the garden, some of which were kale leaves and roses. After Thanksgiving, and after the roses had expired, I had a little jar of water and kale leaves on my counter for two weeks. When I went to toss them I discovered that they had grown roots?
I honestly have no idea what this means but I did the logical thing and stuck them in my raised garden bed where they’ve been for a week and so far haven’t wilted. Is this a way to grow new stalks of kale?

I’ll keep ya’ll updated on what happens with the kale leaves. The stalks that were planted by seed last spring are still going strong and producing lots of leaves. Speaking of the raised garden bed that my sister and I built last April, it’s still holding strong though the area around it is now green with weeds from the rain we’ve been getting. My wonderful husband installed a drip system in my garden for when the weather is dry and it’s helped some things take root.

There are a few small lettuces, some cilantro that is still leftover from summer, beets I’ve neglected to harvest, the kale I mentioned before and some new additions including purple cabbage and only one brussel’s sprout plant (all from seed).

Those purple cabbage plants are looking a little windblown! Also, it’s citrus season in California and our limes are finally taking off and looking ready! A few ripe ones have dropped from our little tree and the mint is still going strong. Mojitos, anyone?

Last but not least, I had to show off the gnarly weeds we get in our area. There are some spiky looking weeds that are pretty harmless and then there are spiky weeds that have spines sharper than our rose bushes! These things are NOT to be messed with!

You do not want to be walking around in the yard barefoot and run across one of these! Even wearing leather gloves I try to avoid touching these because they are ridiculously sharp.

Anyone else have a winter garden or root sprouting kale? Or weeds that are sharper than barbed wire!?

Thanksgiving Table Setting

Tags

decor, diy, food, home, nature, pumpkin

The month of November flew by but somewhere in there the husband and I hosted nine friends and family members for our second annual Thanksgiving feast!
Last year we laid the table (which was two tables pushed together and surrounded with every chair we had) for 11 people with drop clothes, silver, crystal and cloth napkins. Between that dinner and this year’s, my grandma gave me two beautiful linen tablecloths that were my great-grandmother’s. Naturally it was worth breaking out the nice linen to lay under my other great-grandma’s silver and my hand-me-down crystal (which may have been yet another great-grandma’s).

Even with two less people our standard dining table would not have fit everyone and while I debated buying an eight-foot banquet table to keep, we ended up renting a table, chairs and a green linen to go under my great-grandmother’s. It was well worth the very minimal rental fee and my husband and father just had to pick everything up and drop it off. Worked great!

My grandmother said that this linen was custom monogrammed in Chicago for my grandfather’s mother. There are also matching napkins that I have but there was only so much dry cleaning I was ready to commit to. With such lovely silverware, glassware and linens being used, I kept everything on the table to a minimum and took things from my garden.

Centerpieces were mason jars with the garden’s straggling roses and kale. My pumpkins made an appearance and even my giant French muscat pumpkin was finally picked as a beautiful centerpiece! It doesn’t look terribly crazy but it weighed in at over 22 pounds!!! Quite the show piece and I’m very proud of it.

The grape vines in our backyard do turn fall colors so I made use of a few large leaves with more roses.
We serve the food buffet style in our home because even if I hadn’t put anything on the table it would have been a tight fit with all the dishes we had!
After setting the table it became crunch time in the kitchen where my spatchcocked turkey was cooking and I was finishing up some last minute side dishes. My dad got some pictures but I haven’t seen them yet!

I’m so thankful that I was able to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with my loved ones and that I have been entrusted with pieces of history from my family. I cherish the loved heirlooms from my ancestors and look forward to enjoying them for years to come.

Zucchini, Meet Grill.

That huge zucchini seems to last forever but we’re happy to use it up in this house. Aside from eating chunks of the, dare I say, sweet flesh of the squash, its so far been with a marinara sauce two nights in a row. The first night I chopped it up and sautéed it with some onion, garlic, wine and capers then topped it with marinara (from a can) and served it over pasta.

This evenings dinner started by grilling the zucchini with onions, then I stretched two pizzas from a wheat dough I made this morning. Those went on the grill then were topped with marinara, the vegetables and mozzarella. As our side dish I made a raw kale salad with greens from my garden topped with sumac marinated onions and chickpeas that I prepared from dry in the slow cooker.

After two big meals (each with plenty of left overs) we are still making our way happily through the zucchini. While I like the offers for using this bad boy in bread, being able to taste it is so much better.

Farmer Friday: Garden Going Bonkers

Tags

cooking, food, nature, plants, vacation

Before leaving for vacation my husband and I asked the neighbor to come water the plants occasionally. As we were walking through our narrow side yard (which you can see was taken over by tomatoes last year, too) which is turning into a forest of food (in a really small space) my neighbor asked, “What is in your soil!? These tomato plants are huge!” The answer is: nothing special. Vegetables just seem to love this part of our yard and except for a little manure, compost and a sprinkle of fertilizer I try and remember to water occasionally and the tomatoes keep growing and monster zucchinis appear. Which leads me to believe it’s location, location, location. Not what’s in the dirt.

I’m obsessed with pumpkins, and I don’t want to jinx myself, but after having a failed pumpkin last year which started growing way too late in the season, I think I finally have a promising squash here. At least I think it’s a pumpkin. This is another one of my mystery squash/melon plants where I threw seeds in a pot and planted what sprouted.

It may still be too early to tell, but I’m hoping this is one of my fancy French pumpkins also known at Musque de Provence Pumpkin. This is really the pumpkin I am eager to get to grow due to it’s beautiful reddish orange flesh and sweet flavor. Come to mama!

Maybe I should have put my pineapple top in this magic dirt instead of a pot? It’s not looking so good but the geranium cuttings I stole trimmed from the neighbor’s look like they are doing fine!

Dinner last night included a big salad with lettuce and green beans from the garden and zucchini from the garden with pasta and a sprinkle of basil from the garden. It’s my favorite time of year when I can make most of a dinner from the garden I’ve been tending for the last few months.

What are you harvesting? Do you have magic soil or a magic location somewhere in your yard/growing plot?

DIY (Simple!) Raised Garden Bed

Tags

clay soil, leafy greens, nature, plants

Right now my only greens (chard) are growing in a pot but in a post showing them off, I mentioned I was going to make an upgrade. After reading an article that said there are some vegetables that can grow in 3-6 hours of shade–namely those that we eat the leaves, stems or buds of (leafy greens, lettuces, broccoli, etc.)– I decided to get my act together and finally build a raised garden bed that would go in our side yard. Our side yard has pretty much been ignored for the last two and a half years and left to grow weeds with its compact clay soil. Time for that to change!

In my most recent Sunset Magazine (a magazine about “living in the West”) there was a great plan for “the perfect raised garden bed.” Two reasons this caught my attention: 1) They claimed for the whole thing, including dirt, it would be about $172. 2) They included the instructions for putting in poles that would hold bird netting, something I realized would keep out the pesky squirrels. I was sold.

While Sunset said this whole project would be $172, I ended up spending just over $200 mainly because I wasn’t able to get the price on soil they said was possible despite looking into a couple different options (including bulk). I probably also got nicer wood than needed because that’s what Home Depot had. For a 4’x8′ box, I still think that’s not terrible.

This isn’t a complicated project at all as long as you know how to use a drill, you will probably need someone to help you manhandle the box at one point. Let’s get started!

Step 1: Enlist your sister to help you (or another buddy!). This box gets built upside down and must be flipped. Ultimately, one of us could have flipped it on our own but we didn’t build it right by where it was going to be placed and had to be carried– a two-woman job.

Step 2: Have all your cutting done by your local hardware store. Oh sure, you could do this yourself, but you will save time and maybe even money having the pros do it for you. The plan’s shopping list has the following:One 6-foot-long 4-by-4, Six 8-foot-long 2-by-6s. Our store didn’t have a 6-foot 4×4 so we had to go with an 8-foot long piece and my sister pointed out that three 16-foot 2x6s were cheaper than the already shorter lengths. We just had the lumber guy cut everything down for us in the store so there was no cutting we had to do once we got home. You end up with four 1.5′ 4x4s, four 4′ 2x6s, and four 8′ 2x6s. Make sure you buy untreated wood! We laid everything out before assembling.

Step 3: Drill pilot holes and then screw boards together. I was in charge of using a drill bit to drill pilot holes and then my sister followed by drilling in the screws (exterior wood screws).

Remember that you are assembling upside down so the posts that extend will go into the dirt when you flip the box over.

Step 4: Dig four holes where the posts will go (bonus points if you get your helper to do this while you take pictures). You can see on the right we leaned the box up against the house then just had to lean it over to the ground.

As I mentioned, I wasn’t able to get soil for Sunset’s suggested price of $25 in bulk (for 32 cubic square feet which is equal to 1 and 1/5 cubic yards). Instead, I bought 16 cubic square feet of organic soil amendment (which gets mixed with your regular soil), 3 cubic feet of some cheapo soil amendment, 2 cubic square feet of garden soil and a bag of chicken manure. We ended up skipping the purple bag of compost for now. If I did it again I would probably pay a little more to just get 100% good soil that doesn’t need to be mixed into the native soil even if it cost a little more.

Step 5: Lay box on dirt and attach pipes. We skipped the mesh lining on the bottom of the box because we don’t have gophers/moles in our area. We also couldn’t fine the tube straps (they were sold out) and ended up buying plastic tube strapping that you cut to size. In this case I think it will work perfectly.

Step 6: Add dirt.

Oh what’s that? You don’t see the pipes here yet? Yeah, we may have missed that step and gone backwards. Definitely add the tubes before the dirt.

You can kind of see the clay soil being mixed in with the good stuff here. Again, this mixing step took a while so I would probably have bought the good stuff instead even if it would cost more.

Step 7: Add plants and tubes for netting or shade cover as needed. I should note here that I made a mistake when I was reading my list. I thought the hoops were supposed to be made from ONE 10-foot 1/2-inch PVC pipe cut in half. For a four-foot wide box. Oops. It was supposed to be TWO 10-foot pipes, one per hoop and no cutting needed. It ended up working out in the end because I put pole beans in and the poles along with the unfolded tomato cage we used hold up the bird netting perfectly.

Above you can also see a small hook used for the netting (and a rock to hold it down). My netting is more to prevent squirrels from getting in than birds and they’re sneaky. We added hooks around the entire box and rocks where there was still some slack so those buggers wouldn’t find their way in to bury their nuts, mess up my seeds, etc.

This location only gets a few hours of sun a day but it will be perfect for those pole beans, broccoli, brussels sprouts, beets, lettuce, kale, and hopefully some herbs. You can see my rain barrel on the right, close enough for easy watering. The lime tree on the left is the one I complain about not producing limes, and yes, I know it may be due to limited sun. So far the seeds we planted a week ago in the garden bed are already sprouting!

In the end, I think the Sunset “Perfect Raised Garden Bed” was a good choice and super easy to build. While it didn’t end up as cheap as I had hoped, I’m very happy with the result and believe that my shady vegetables should do fine here.

Do you have a raised garden bed? Have you had any success with growing leafy vegetables not in full sun?

Around the Garden in the Beginning of Spring

Tags

food, nature, plants

In between some long delayed rain we’ve been getting plenty of sun around these parts in Northern California and it’s making flowers bloom and seeds sprout. I haven’t done a Farmer Friday in a while but we’re close to doing them every Friday again. This is more like a Farmer Thursday this week– a little look around my parts at what’s growing.

First up… wisteria. I thought I honestly had killed this guy. All the leaves turned yellow. Then they fell off. I even made my husband call the nursery for me and ask if I had done something wrong. They said prune it back hard. I checked the internets. I didn’t want to impede it’s progress on covering our arbor (and blocking the neighbor’s view) so I trimmed a little. I was worried we weren’t going to get blooms because everything I read online indicated that if you don’t trim enough, no blooms for you. Somehow, some way, that doesn’t appear to be a problem.
After I planted my egg carton seedlings for squash and melons, I started another for more peppers and herbs. I’m feeling a little uncertain about my squash and melons (more on that soon) so I’m scared for these tomatoes, peppers and herbs but they already have prime garden plots with their names on them.

My favorite flower is blooming! Calla lilies are so lovely and these were already in our yard when we moved in. Each year I tell my husband I’d like more, maybe in other colors, in other parts of our yard. He has yet to cave (or go out and surprise me) and I have yet to just buy some to plant. They had some for $3 per small pot of them at our farmer’s market, too!

Last but not least, my little garden plot is starting to wake up thanks to some rain and sun. Here is what my garden from a few weeks ago looked like.
And this morning (can you tell it is overcast, misty and gloomy this morning, below?) it looks like this:

All that empty dirt may be the future home of all my various pepper sprouts because it isn’t quite big enough for any squash or tomatoes. Then at the end of summer brussels sprouts are going to go in.

Who’s planning on getting things in the ground this weekend?

Lessons Learned in My First Garden

Tags

cherry tomato, tomato plant, tomato plants

Other possible titles were “Failures of a beginning gardener,” “Don’t garden like I garden,” “Gardening: Say What!?,” “Common Beginner Mistakes That Only I Would Make.” My grandma is an avid gardener whose garden I spent lots of time in (eating string beans from the plants) when I was a kid but that doesn’t mean I was ready to garden as well as she does when it came my time to cultivate my land. And by land I mean the 6-foot by 4-foot patch of dirt that we didn’t cover in grass. So here is a list of lessons I learned the hard way or never knew until I came across it reading somewhere!

Some vegetables don’t produce their first year. Or the year after that. When my husband and I bought asparagus root stock from the local big box store I was all set with my hollandaise recipe to smother my stalks in. What was this fern doing in place of little asparaguses (asparagii?) poking up from the dirt!? As it turns out, asparagus takes a year or two to start producing stalks. Rhubarb shouldn’t be eaten in the first two years after planting. The good news is that they’re both perennials that produce for 15-20 years so no reseeding each season.

Celery and leeks need blanching. In this case, blanching does not mean dropping in boiling water and then throwing it in an ice bath, either. It means you cover the plant with dirt or something to block out light for a little while to make it sweeter. Yeah. Seriously. Weird, right?!

Tomato plants can (and should) but cut back. As I mentioned over the summer I had a cherry tomato plant (the small, yellow pear-shaped kind) grow to be over 8-feet tall. The picture below shows the plant when it was still growing up and not out in front of our 7-foot fence. It made it taller than the fence and then over it. It was all but too late when I heard that trimming it to keep it about this size would have been a good idea and produced larger, better tasting tomatoes.

Tomatoes will replant themselves which means if you pull one out of the ground to build a deck and then try and transplant it to a shady spot and it dies, it will suddenly reappear the next year. Tomatoes do not grow well in pots even if the guy at the nursery tells you they do. They have pretty long tap roots and you will get a significantly better bounty if your tomato is in the ground. In full sun.

Know what the plant looks like before nurturing a weed. Oh, do you think that sounds crazy? I’m just telling you from experience. The picture below is what I thought was a giant bell pepper plant because it sprouted where I planted my seeds. I thought the leaves looked about like a pepper plant‘s leaves, too. I bug sprayed this thing, watered it, and loved it. Until another one of these popped up where I hadn’t planted seeds in another part of the yard, and another, and another. And it never grew peppers. In fact, the only reason I have a picture of it is because I legitimately thought it was a pepper plant.

Flowers on herb plants are bad and are bad on some vegetables. When herbs flower it’s called “bolting” and it basically means that they’re trying to produce seeds. Because we want their leaves, flowers should be pinched off. The same applies for some vegetables (like broccoli, below) except we eat the flowers before they bloom. When they eventually bloom, they will expand plant energy on seed making and not on broccoli making. Then these weird grayish broccoli colored aphid-type bugs show up and it’s no good. The moral: eat your broccoli.

Thinning is good. I have a thing with thinning or trimming vegetables, I don’t want to pull out the baby sprouts! I don’t want to cut those tender new shoots! I’ve realized I just need to plant less seeds if I don’t want to thin. Otherwise you get a wall of broccoli and beets that are too close to grow very big (both below). I want to nurture all baby sprouts. Don’t be like me.

Make sure you know what kind of soil you are getting. My first garden at my house was a “raised garden” made using leftover cinder blocks that were left by the previous owner. We bought the cheapest “soil” we could find which ended up being mostly bark and super acidic to fill it. It was really good at growing mold. Which brings me to:  Potting soil and garden soil are different. Which kind of makes sense since they have different names, right? Turns out it also means they have different soil composition (potting soil allows more air in for plant roots) and different nutrients (potting soil has nutrients a plant would get from regular ground soil).

Squirrels love sunflowers. Squirrels will leap from a fence to a sunflower to trample it down and then gnaw off the head of a sunflower even before the sunflower seeds are something they want to eat leaving you with beheaded sunflowers. I would punch every squirrel in the face if I could.

When it says full sun it doesn’t mean mostly sun. And if you ignore the seed packet/ common sense of planting vegetables in full sun, they will only start producing late in the season and never fully ripen. While I’ve now learned what to do with green tomatoes (besides frying them) I would have preferred them and my pumpkin to have ripened.

Dogs like vegetable fertilizer. The pooch below is not dead from fertilizer (she’s actually just sleeping on newly laid sod in this picture). But she would have eaten all the plant fertilizer I laid down if I hadn’t prevented her. Chicken manure was also pretty great for her to smell as well. Just keep your animals away from any kind of fertilizer even if you’re using the organic stuff. They don’t know why it smells good but they will try eating it.Lots of learning experiences in my first attempts at a vegetable garden but I can’t wait to make more mistakes and learn from them this year. What have you learned in gardening that was unexpected?

Frozen kale?

Time was running out for a bag of pre-washed pre-chopped kale that I bought and we were getting ready to leave for a short trip. I didn’t have time to cook it, so I did what I do with most goods that I want to save but can’t use right away: threw it in the freezer.

Think about it, since kale is often cooked (soups, sautees, stews) because it’s more nutritious that way, any loss of cell structure from ice crystals breaking cells wouldn’t matter. I just made sure it was completely dried to avoid as much mushiness as possible. Guess what?
Complete success. Kale is such a hearty green that it was almost completely unaffected by freezing. Obviously you don’t want to leave it in a freezer for too long but this could easily buy you a few more days or a week or two before this goes into Your New Favorite Kale Soup or some other delicious creation.

Other things I love to freeze as broken into category of why I love freezing them:

Food that takes a long time to cook
Cooked pasta (this one is best to let thaw in the refrigerator instead of defrosting in the microwave)
Cooked rice
Beans (instead of using canned beans you can make your own fat free, low-sodium beans)

Leftovers that would otherwise go to waste
Parmesan cheese rinds (for minestrone, etc.)
The end pieces of bread (for bread crumbs)
Tomato paste (when a recipe only calls for a little, freeze the rest)
Ginger (if you aren’t freezing your ginger root and grating from frozen you are probably wasting a lot of ginger)

Foods that could spoil
Wheat flour (yup, that’s right, it could go bad if you don’t use it fast enough)
Nuts (same as above, these can go rancid)
Coconut

Any others that I’m missing? Did you know a freezer (and refrigerator) is more efficient when it’s fully stocked because it leaves less room for warm air? That means you should stock up on ice cream to fill up your freezer. Right!?