A hot topic

I've been looking forward to this post. 

Early this summer we discovered that we actually were growing  more pepper plants than tomatoes.  Maybe it's just some obsession with the nightshade family.  Anyway, since peppers typically have a longer growing season than tomatoes, we're just now trying to figure out what do with all that bounty:

Poblano, Anaheim, Pasilla Bajo, Jalapeno, Hot Banana, Numex Earker's hot, Chili, Sweet banana, Bella hot, Black Hungarian, Ring of Fire (ya that's right mon), Serrano, Thai, Long Red Cayenne, Gypsy, Rumanain, Carribean Red, Jimmy Nardello, Fish, & (is that all???) Hungarian Death.  In some cases multiple plants of each type. 

BTW, the Caribbean Red is a close relative to the Habenero.  I once chopped up ONE of them for a dish, using my bare hands:  and got blisters as a result.  I don't think that hot climates are really needed to grow firery peppers.

One dish we like to prepare is Chile Rellenos, with Poblano peppers.  An earlier more-or-less pepper roasting attempt resulted in Poblanos that were over-cooked.  Since Rellenos get cooked again, that's not good.  So what to do?

Well, I'm introducing the next hot kitchen utensil, soon to appear in your local Sur La Table store.  It uses a propane weed burner (also available at Harbor Freight).  You will be fired up to use it when you discover just how good it is for roasting peppers.  Your foodie friends will burn  with envy when they see your over-the-top pepper roasting setup. Dreadful puns are gratis.

NOTE:  No ceramic angels were harmed during the producction of these images.  They were saferly on the sidelines while the peppers were being blasted with 2,000 degree flames.  Well-paid standins were present during the actual roasting process.

The Poblanos before burning at the stake.  The ceramic angel is blessing their last existence as an unroasted pepper.

About 1 minute later (no joke).   Cheap ceramic angels seem to be immune to flaming propane.

 

 

Photos: the 30-second summary of Summer 2013

Minestroni soup.  Home-made stock; lots of veggies from our garden.

Piliated woodpecker making itself at home in one of our trees.

Crater Lake sunset.  I like the flowing sense of the shadows and clouds.

Moonrise over crater lake.  Wizard island is in the foreground.  This shot was not an accident:  We used an Ephemeris to get the nearest moonrise/sunset times in August.

Moon over crater lake lodge.

Rogue River Gorge near Union Creek.

Sun Worshiper (the Ent)

Summer Largesse

Ahem.  Yes, still alive -- but high time to add another entry!  In the near future I will try to add some entries regarding our latest trip down to southern Oregon -- it was smoky from the forest fires but made for some awesome sunset/moonrise photos.  I think we saw an Ent bowing to the setting sun -- you can be the judge (when the photos come online).

Hewing to the subject of this post, I'm going to talk about stuff from our garden.  Tomatoes:  in Marinara sauce, Puttanesca (a terrific sauce we just tried this year); currently oven-roasting about 10 pounds of a variety called Astiana we grew from seed collected from a purchased tomato.  Curiously, we haven't made ANY salsa yet.  But lots of caprese salads & Greek Salads.

Green beans -- 'way more than we could consume fresh.  I blanched and froze several batches, and tried a no-blanch approach as well, to see how that works out.  We have had beans with a cumin-shallot-mustard vinagrette (recipe taken from an ancient Craig Clairborn recipe book) on multiple occasions and tonight did them with garlic and fresh basil.  Yum.

Cucumbers -- pickling cukes, brine-fermented, waiting in our reefer to garnish burgers, tartar sauce, etc.  Tender-skinned long cukes in greek salads, with yoghurt and mint/garlic/dill, or Japanese style with rice vinegar, sugar (a little) and toasted sesame oil.

Cauliflower -- we bought a 6-pak from Freddies and got more like 20 plants -- and planted them all.  It was a variety called 'cheddar' and is a yellow-orange color.  We made cauliflower mousse, cauliflower soup, and brine-fermented a bunch.  All very tasty.  We have 4 plants waiting to be plunked into the garden for fall harvest.

Broccoli -- lots early on, it seemed to want to bolt (not sure why).  We got lots of the main brocco-flower and many side shoots as well.  All done by now; we should have started more plants because it's too late now.  Oh well.

Beets -- fresh (in beet salads), pickled.  I don't like the pickled ones but am looking forward to oven-roasted beets later this fall.  Beet greens are good, too.

Peppers -- we actually planted MORE pepper plants than tomato plants.  They are really starting to produce now, except for the very late super-hot ones.  If we're lucky (?) we will get some ripe Caribbean Red Hot peppers, which are similar to Habanero.  Last year I made the mistake of chopping one up without wearing gloves.  I got blisters -- felt like a chemical burn.  But they made some good hot pepper marmalade.  The batch made with green hot peppers was dubbed "dragon snot".  I want to try brine-fermenting more, and pickling some.  We have a variety called pimiento de padron that would be pretty good pickled.  Sort of like a spicier pepperincino (sp)?

Zucchini --  the usual overdose of squash.  Yellow and green.  We've been thinking about trying stuffed zucchini flowers but haven't done it yet.  The end is near for that cooking experiment.

Eggplant -- three plants.  The happiest ones I've seen in our garden, ever.  No ratatouille yet but I want some!!

Winter squash:  Cinderella pumpkin, sweetmeat, hubbard, blue hubbard, boston marrow, a few others I don't recall at the moment.  We need to figure out how to store them better -- they always seem to go to heck a few months after harvest.

Various -- kale, swiss chard (is it really from Switzerland???), 5 different kinds of basil, sage, tarragon, oregano, summer savory, marjoram.  No wacky-weed.

A few years back we innoculated a pile of wood chips we had gotten for free from an arborist, with a type of edible mushroom called Stropharia.  It is very efficient at breaking down woody matter (the reason we experimented with it).  We later used the chips to mulch the garden, and that year we got a lot of Stropharia mushrooms fruiting in the garden.  Ever since that time we've seen smaller fruitings of Stropharia around the garden.  It's not dangerous to living trees but it's been interesting to see how it has sort of naturalized around the garden.  We regularly put down bark chips to help control weeds so the Stropharia continues to fluorish.  We got several fruitings this summer.  Stropharia is interesting because it's been used for bio-remediation -- the enzymes needed to break down wood appear to be good at breaking down some types of chemical waste, and it also appears to have an appetite for E. Coli.

So what's next?  The beans are winding down, but the tomatoes and peppers are still going pretty strong.   The recent rains did cause many tomatoes to crack but we can use them for things like salsa or tomato sauce.  Turning a Brandywine into sauce may sound like a crime but it's better than letting it rot.  And I'm a recent convert to Puttanesca.

Winemaking and a brief beermaking comment

Now that we've got some extra room to do stuff in, we've restarted our home winemaking activities, along with making beer.

2012 was an interesting summer -- it stayed fairly cool (we may not have had a single day in the 90F range), but it turned out to be a long and dry summer.  The grapes had plenty of time to fully ripen.  I was going thru my wine journal for some additional facts & found that we had picked the Pinot on October 11.  We took home about 500 lbs of grapes, 20 bags.  The sugar content was 21 Brix which is typical for ripe Pinot grapes from Fred's vineyard.

Fred's vineyard was planted in the mid 70's (in the Pommard clone) so the grape vines are close to 40 years old now.  He is located at the very end of the Willamette valley at about 700ft elevation.  He claims that on a very clear day he can see one of the Sisters Cascade volcanos.  We privately doubted that, since there are lots of hills between his vineyard and North Sister.  But we took a look at some topo maps and there may be a gap in those hills -- Fred probably is correct!

When we vinify Pinot, we like to manage the fermentation time and temperature so the cap (where the grape skins accumulate during fermentation) hits a maximum temperature of about 90F, and the time is about 1 week.  When we do that, in a good year we get very good extraction, both in color and flavor.

2012 went as well as we could have hoped, as far as the time/temperature profile goes.  The fermentation took about 1 week to complete.  We used two different types of yeast -- it had been awhile since we had made wine, and one of the yeast varieties we'd used in the past was no longer available.  We used Pasteur Red in one fermenter and the other was pitched with Borgovin.  The latter is a variety that is supposed to be especially good for Pinot.

 On 10/20 we pressed the pinot and got 4 5-gallon carboys of each variation.  Tasting at that point is always interesting -- the young wine is very fruity (and full of yeast, too).  It tasted pretty typical for that stage of the game.

Skipping ahead a bit, on January 2, 2013, we racked the pinot.  I was able to consolidate the volumes some so wound up with 3 carboys each of the Pasteur and Borgovin.  Tasting showed that the Pasteur is more fruit-forward with raspberry notes, while the Borgovin is a little more restrained and more black cherry.  So far, so good.  As Lisa says, the key to making good wine is to start with good fruit and then not screw it up!

4/13/13  we oaked the Pinot.  I decided on 4 oz of "french oak chips", purchased at a local wine and beer making supply store.  I had forgotten how much the wine foams up when you add wood chips to it -- some of the CO2 comes out of solution I guess.  We had to suck a bit of wine out of some of the carboys to give some extra head room.  We destroyed the evidence by drinking it....


Also a note about the Riesling.  Yes, we made riesling, too.  But I kinda screwed up, by adding too much sulfite before pitching the yeast.  I had wanted to discourage the wild yeast from starting up before we pitched the yeast we wanted (wine yeast has been cultured to be more tolerant of sulfites).  However, the yeast took a very long time to kick in, and when it did it started making a lot of H2S -- hydrogen sulfide.  That is NOT a pleasant component to have in a wine.  So I went out and bought an aquarium air pump and an aeration stone, and aerated the wine.  That helped.  I haven't tasted it lately to see if the problem is completely solved or not.  If not, we will put some clean copper strips in the wine to try to ty up the H2S -- copper sulfide is not water soluble so the reaction between Cu and H2S is a one-way deal.

The air pump will come in handy for aerating beer, as well.  Yes, I've been making beer too.  Most beermaking recipes these days call for aerating the sweet wort very well before pitching the yeast -- the added O2 in the wort gives the yeast a good start and reduces the production of off-flavor fermentation byproducts.  I have to say that my results, by simply pouring the wort in a very "noisy" fashion into the carboy, seem fine.  But now that I've got the air pump I guess I will have to give it a try....

This isn't the end of the story on beermaking, but that's the subject of another blog.

And now for something completely different!  Enjoy (or not, up to you).
 

               Oregon Sunset

The Sun was a Crimson Cadillac
    burning rubber on the crystal Sphere:
  and the skyway cops were ticket-mad behind.

Caddie and cops screamed down Main,
tossing pedestrians and poet's cliches aside

crashing into the west-side junkyard
  of a billion sunsets

and the conflagration scorched
   the purple night.

  What the Rain Brings

Slugs and Fungi, at least.

This spring is another wet and cool one.  We got all excited by a (brief) shot of warm weather in mid-May and planted a bunch of stuff in our garden, only to see the eggplant, basil and peppers turn yellow and wan in the subsequent rains.  However, as the season has progressed things _have_ gotten a little better.  At least we have some radishes:

 And here is a shot of the whole garden.  The tomatoes are on the right, with all the rebar poles.  Eventually we will have the cages up.  Interesting note:  the stuff that's doing the best (other than radishes, which are hard to screw up) is a patch of asian greens that volunteered.  We just left them and are using them in stir frys, etc.

On a trip back from Bend, we stopped by one of our favorite mushrooming spots around Mt. Hood.   We'd hoped the recent rains had restarted the Morel season.  No such luck:  but we did find a nice batch of Boletus Rex-Veris (B. "True King"), which is basically a spring version of B. Edulis.  We made some cep soup last night and that was pretty tasty.

Here's a photo of our find:

...not too bad for about an hour's work.

Retrospective, 1 year ago; current house projects

I was reviewing our old blog postings done about 1 year ago. This time last year we were stressing about the exterior house colors, and the various built-ins had arrived: kitchen cabinets, upstairs cabinets/shelves etc. I sure am glad we're past all that now.

Current house projects are mostly centered around building storage shelves in the basement. That's been a step-at-a-time process, because I wanted to seal the basement floor _before_ putting in the shelving. We got some acrylic sealer from our contractor, thinking that we would do that part ourselves. Well it's taken awhile but we're about halfway through that part of the project. I've been cleaning the concrete before applying the sealer, and that involves sweeping, vacuuming and then wet-mopping. Doing 1900 square feet that way is just going to take some time.

In addition to the concrete sealing, I've been working on making a router template. My shelf design calls for some additional 2x4 supports, and I don't want them sticking out past the edge of the shelf -- so I'm going to route out some pockets in the shelves so the supports will be flush with them. A saw won't work because of the back edge of the pocket. So I found some thin plywood at our building materials recycling place -- 39 cents for a 1' x 3' piece -- and cut a template for my router guide. I used a coping saw to cut out the back edge. I tried out the template yesterday on some scrap plywood (we have LOTS of that around) and after a bit of refining with a file it will be fine for the job. I need a sharper router bit though -- maybe a carbide bit instead of the high speed steel one from my el-cheapo router bit set.

That reminds me. Long back one of my acquaintances was using a router to make some speaker cabinets. He had a wood panel clamped to the top of his very expensive table saw, and unfortunately had the router bit set too deep. He cut a slot across the cast iron surface of his saw and didn't even notice it. It was a carbide router bit. Note to self: don't use a table saw as a work table.....