For those who didn’t know, my mum has been visiting since before (American) Thanksgiving. W took her to the airport this morning for her trip home.

What we’ve been cooking/eating

Besides the usual Thanksgiving fare, we had a goose last week, smoked in the electric smoker. Yum! Another memorable meal was had at the Anatolian Table out in Rocklin.

What I’ve been knitting

While continuing on with various Christmas gifts, I’ve been working on my Stockings with Clocks from Nancy Bush’s book, Folk Solks. One is finished and the second has about three inches done on it (photos to follow when both are done). Quick knits have been a pair of slippers for Mum from Interweave Knits’ Holiday 2008 magazine, a pair of guest socks (pattern by Raggi), and muffs for the tile guy’s headphones.

Yes, you read that correctly. Wayde was making jokes about my knitting and the young guy’s headphones and so I rose to the challenge, knitting up a pair of muffs for the headphones. His earphones (and hopefully ears!) will stay nice and warm now.

After months of being very busy and not on the computer for long stretches at a time, it took me about four minutes to get hooked on surfing the web again. So, when my connection got all dodgy these past few days, I had some serious withdrawal issues. Luckily, they were assuaged by my knitting addiction…

I knitted up a bunch of dishcloths:

And a wonderful little aviator cap for a friend’s new grandson:

(The pattern for this cap is available free from designer Justine Turner’s website: click.

I also spent time making a really nice meal one evening. Of course, I ended up eating it by myself since the Spawn was working and the Spouse was out of town but it was still great. The recipe was an adaptation of a recipe for Chicken Paprikas in Gundel New Hungarian Cookbook (the book being direct from Gundel’s restaurant in Budapest via my mum). Here’s my adaptation:

Chicken Paprikas

2 T. vegetable oil
1 medium onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons sweet Hungarian paprika
1 cup chicken broth
1.5 pounds boneless skinless chicken thighs
salt
hot Hungarian paprika

flour
water
sour cream

Heat oil in large saucepan. Saute onions until soft then add garlic. Cook for a minute then remove from heat. Add sweet paprika and stir until well blended. Add chicken broth, return to heat, and bring to a low boil. Add chicken thighs to pot, reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes. Turn chicken pieces and simmer for an additional 20 minutes.

Season to taste with salt and hot paprika.

Increase heat to medium. Thicken sauce with slurry of flour and water. Cook for at least 5 minutes (unless you like the taste of raw flour) then reduce heat to low. Add as much sour cream as you’d like and continue to heat on low until sour cream is warmed through and well-blended into sauce.

Serve over broad egg noodles.

My favourite thing to do on Saturday is go to the market. Now that I’m working, I don’t always have Saturday mornings off and, at other times of the year, I have other Saturday morning commitments (dog events or book club) but today I leapt out of bed, ran through the shower, and headed off to the market.

One day I’ll remember to take my camera to the market but, until then, you’ll just have to take my word for it that it was PACKED! Lots of fruit available now…plums, peaches, and nectarines primarily with our melon vendor featuring their Ambrosia  melons. Lots of summer squash is available and I saw a couple of vendors selling peppers. As always, there were fresh cut flowers for sale:

We’re just starting to see tomatoes come into the markets and, as is my habit, I bought some heirloom tomatoes from the Watanabe Farms stand and Romas from the Lagorio Farm stand. The heirlooms are for eating fresh and the Romas are for the freezer.

Last year I oven-roasted slices of Roma tomatoes and then froze them or would blanch them to remove the skins, puree them, and then freeze them. There’s nothing in this world like reaching into the freezer in February and bringing out a taste of summer.

Today, the Romas, along with a couple of peppers and some cilantro, were destined for salsa:

Normally, I’d make this salsa with tinned tomatoes but with Romas only 75 cents a pound…

Here’s what goes into the basic salsa:

2 lbs. tomatoes, blanched and peeled
2 small hot peppers (I think the ones I got today were serranos…they weren’t labelled)
garlic powder
salt

Hold the peppers over a flame until they discolour slightly. For example, jalapenos will turn a dull avocado colour. Cut off the stem and, if you like, remove the seeds and pith. Roughly chop.

Puree the tomatoes in batches in the blender. Don’t make them into tomato juice; you want some chunks left in there. In the last batch, add the peppers and puree until chunky.

Stir all the batches together and season with garlic powder and salt. Put in two or three times as much garlic and salt that you think you should. Seriously. For this batch, I used about 2 T of garlic powder and maybe 1/4 cup of salt. Really.

So that’s the basic recipe. I have recently started adding cilantro and sometimes a squeeze of lime when I make this but they’re not necessary for a great salsa.

After weeks of looking at great photos on Smarts and Crafts, I finally sent a photo to share. Of course, the theme was food: lunch, to be specific.

A ploughman’s lunch is one of my favourite summertime meals; lunch, dinner…either one works for me!

For anyone who is curious, the plate contains: (starting at the top) a slice of sourdough bread, rare beef sprinkled with Stilton cheese, cornichons, grapes, cantaloupe, red plums, heirloom tomatoes, white cheddar, Brie, and a couple of pickled onions.

Yum!

We took a ride this morning to stock up on some of the best sausages we’ve found here in California:

Sitting right there on the main drag in Lockeford is Lockeford Meats, home of the best sausages in Northern California. A colleague of the Spouse turned us on to this place, telling us it was a fantastic source for bangers. We’ve gone there several times now to pick up some of their wares; also on the “must buy list” are their andouille sausage and their Dakota sausage (smoked or fresh…both are fabulous). They also offer a pretty damn good tri-tip.

Now, if they could do a beef and onion sausage, life would be complete.

I should have included this in yesterday’s post, shouldn’t have I?

I got this recipe from the Spouse’s grandmother way back, even before the Spawn was born. Every year, I’d do up at least one batch (sometimes I did several batches as they were consumed) and, for as long as we lived in Metchosin, I entered a jar of them in the Luxton Fall Fair. I’m happy to say that these beet pickles won first prize at said fair for four years running.

The yield of the original recipe is 4 pints; I have doubled, trebled, and even quintupled it (yes, I had to look that word up!).

4 quarts of small beets
3 cups vinegar
2-1/2 cups sugar
2 cups water
2 tsp. pickling spice
1 stick cinnamon
1/2 tsp. whole cloves
1 tsp. pickling salt

Cook beets until tender; drain and plunge into cold water. Slip off skins and trim if necessary.

Heat vinegar, water, sugar, spices, and salt to boiling. If spice bag is not used, strain out the spices. Add beets to pickling solution and bring to boiling. Pack into clean, sterilized jars, cover with solution, and seal immediately.

That’s the original recipe. I think it wise to add a ten minute spin in a hot water bath (85C) to the recipe. And, it should go without saying to follow all food safety procedures when making any home canning products.

After our meeting this morning, book club headed off to the farmer’s market to buy the fixings for making pickles…both beet pickles and dilly beans. Leigh was good enough to document our afternoon with her camera.

I’ve put all the photos in a Flash slideshow (powered by Flash Slideshow Maker) which you can see here: click!

At the end of the day, we ended up with eleven pints of beet pickles and one pint jar plus 5 half-pint jars of dilly beans. Yum!

A downside of the summer weather can be what to make for dinner. On days like today, when the temperatures hit triple digits (or damn close!), I know I sure don’t feel like eating anything hot. My solution?

Naengmyun.

This cold noodle dish is tasty, refreshing, and easy to make. I tend to just throw things together so I’m sure this isn’t anything like a traditional recipe for naengmyun. My version uses Japanese udon noodles (because I have them in the house more often than the more traditional buckwheat noodles), whichever cold vegetables I can scavenge from the fridge (instead of the traditional Korean pickles), and a gochujang sauce.

The gochujang sauce can be made as spicy as you like. Between the cold noodles and the heat of the sauce, naengmyun makes a superb summertime meal.

Here’s my recipe for “Tossed Together Naengmyun”:

Japanese udon noodles
English cucumber chunks
green onion
Romaine lettuce leaves, cut into 1″ slices across the leaf

1-2 T. gochujang paste
1 T. soy sauce
1 T. rice vinegar

toasted sesame seed oil
sesame seeds

1. Cook noodles in boiling water until done.

2. While the noodles are cooking, prepare the vegetables and set aside. Combine gochujang paste, soy sauce, and rice vinegar in a small bowl, stirring until well-mixed.

3. Drain noodles and quickly submerge in cold water. Add ice cubes to stop the cooking process. Once the noodles are cold, drain them again.

4. In a large bowl, toss together the noodles, vegetables, and sauce. Serve, garnished with a sprinkle of toasted sesame seed oil and sesame seeds.

Yesterday, I decided to try making something totally new for me…a ratafia. Initially, I was going to make an entirely vodka-based liqueur but then I found this NY Times article by Pete Wells: Bottling the Bounty of the Season. Google pointed me to this article because I had searched for recipes using loquat seeds. After reading it, I found I rather liked the idea of using wine instead of liquor to make the beverage. And so it was out to the garden to harvest some loquats!

This was taken this afternoon so, obviously, I didn’t need the entire crop …

I added a bit more fruit than the Times article called for and also added some of the loquat seeds. This is what ended up going into my fridge:

2 cups chopped loquats
1/4 cup loquat seeds
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup vodka
750 ml Pinot Grigio

I also saved a whack of the seeds, just in case I do want to make the vodka-based liqueur after all.

If this turns out, it could make a really interesting way to capture the seasonal flavours. I reckon this will make a great beverage for midsummer; I bet it would be super made into a Pimm’s Cup sort of drink too…