Archive for the ‘fish and seafood’ Category

2 Aug

My Southeast Asian Summer: lemony herbs

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, fish and seafood, front yard gardening, herbs, home food production, preserving, recipe, sustainable, Uncategorized, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

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Some of the most delightful herbs used in Southeast Asia have a strong, clean citrus scent. Here we’ll consider lemongrass and lemon basil, along with a Western taste-alike, lemon verbena.  My love affair with the piquant and flavorful food of Southeast Asia continues, and I’m putting more and more thought into which herbs and roots to buy and which to grow. There’s an excellent reason to grow rather than buy: these herbs are almost never available organically grown. My experiments are aimed at seeing which ones I can grow in useful quantities without a greenhouse or other specialized setting.

They are very delicious with fish and seafood. For the Lemon Shrimp above, go to the very end of the post, after the growing info.
For more about growing and using the lemony herbs, click here. Continue reading →

4 Jul

The Joys of Summer: dinner on the grill

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, fish and seafood, front yard gardening, home food production, preserving, recipe, sustainable, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

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When it’s too damn hot to heat up the kitchen, the pleasures of summer dinners are just getting started. My garden is producing huge beautiful heads of broccoli right now, and the blossoms have died off the potatoes, indicating that I can start digging new potatoes. You can go to the Los Ranchos or Corrales farmers markets and find the Fishhuggers, Kenny and Brenna, who will sell you a splendid King Salmon “breakfast” steak from a fish personally caught by Kenny. They do beautifully on the grill. Add one large sweet potato and you’re all set. The small amount of prep work can be done in the morning, before the heat starts, and then the entire meal is finished on the grill.  If you read my earlier post (“The First Garlic,” three posts ago)and made garlic confit, you have a head start on the prep work. 

King salmon is loaded with omega 3 fatty acids, and personally I would rather eat delicious food than take pills, so for me the choice to eat Kenny’s wild-caught sustainable Alaskan fish whenever I can afford it is an easy one.

This meal is especially nice if you need to feed vegans and vegetarians as well as fish-eaters, because the vegetables are so satisfying by themselves.

Clich here for the recipe! Continue reading →

13 Jun

The First Garlic

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, fish and seafood, front yard gardening, home food production, kitchen staples, preserving, recipe, sustainable, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , .

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I think it’s underappreciated that garlic is as seasonal as any other vegetable. Sure, you can obtain it throughout the year, and personally I’m never without it, but the great dishes of sheer garlic debauchery- aioli, roasted garlic, chicken with 40 cloves of garlic, etc.- were designed to be made with fresh garlic, the kind you harvest in early summer, before it develops the slight (sometimes pronounced) acridness that comes with storage.
I grow three kinds of garlic, and one of them is Chinese Pink, which I get from Territorial Seeds. It’s a nicely flavored hardneck type, and I grow it because it matures fully a month earlier than any other garlic that I’ve grown.

See my earlier posts on green garlic and using the scapes of hardneck garlic for other uses of the maturing garlic plant, but by June the Chinese Pink is mature and I’m ready for some garlic confit. The confit process involves long, slow cooking at low heat in fat, olive oil in this case. The result is soft, mellow, and intensely flavorful without the sharp punch of raw garlic. It will keep in the refrigerator for a good long time as long as you make sure the cloves are well covered with oil.

Click here for the recipe!
Continue reading →

22 May

Passing Pleasures: Artichokes

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, fish and seafood, front yard gardening, home food production, passing pleasures, recipe, salads, sustainable, Uncategorized, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

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      Artichokes are a wonderful addition to the New Mexico garden. They are splendid silvery architectural bushes for the cooler seasons of the year, and provide a rare treat to their enthusiasts.

       One of the overlooked aspects of front yard gardening is that neat greens like Swiss Chard can’t be used as edging because passers-by don’t know vegetables when they see them, or don’t care, and so they let their dogs urinate on anything along the sidewalk. I solve this problem by edging my front garden with artichokes: the edible part happens a few feet off the ground, and until a squadron of Irish Wolfhounds comes to my neighborhood, I’m safe.

     Now is the time to start artichokes from seed, to enjoy next spring. I like the common “Green Globe” best. The plants typically live 3-4 years in our area. The scaly buds don’t get as big as they do on the misty west coast, but they’re very delicious. A deep watering once a week is plenty once they’re established. They don’t produce over a long season, but for two weeks in late spring we revel in all the fresh artichokes we can eat, and a rare feast it is, too. If you’re interested in such things, artichokes contain abundant amounts of two antioxidants, cynarin and silymarin, which are found only in the thistle family. I’m not sure what this really means nutritionally, but it does mean that when I feel tired and out of sorts, I can eat a plate of artichokes, telling myself that a good dose of cynarin will fix me right up. It usually does, too, unless it’s the bagna cauda or the general abundance of the season that I’m responding to.
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For more on cultivation and recipes, Continue reading →

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