Carmelized Baby Onions and Carrots

Carmelizing onions is a good way to use small onions. I cooked one beet, mashed it, then made a caramelizing sauce with peach syrup. The onions were braised in butter, then simmered in chicken bullion. The sauce is poured over the onions at the end. (Fennel and sorrel, also from my garden, are used for decoration - the sorrel seeds can be dried and cooked like oatmeal.)

Canning Tunisian Harissa

To create harissa paste I pulverized the harissa spices with ground fresh red pepper. Only a small amount is necessary for flavoring curries, enhancing soups, or used with couscous.

Gur Wale Shalgam: Curried Turnip-Rutabaga-Onion

All the veggies were picked in the morning, and in the pot for dinner.

Pickled Turnips, Carrots, Rutabagas and Beets

I still have an entire row of rutabagas to process, so some will be processed into pickles. I use an Arabic recipe, mostly vinegar, salt, and spices.
The beets turn the other vegetables pink - so pretty!

Baked and Fried Poppadom

Just an experiment, how to use these, make them, and fill them.

Fried, they can be used like a tortilla shell; baked, they can be filled with stew, salads, or chutneys.

These poppadom are made with lentil flour.

Vegetable Beef Soup with Crusty Bread

Harissa paste adds the deep color to this soup.

Moroccan Garbanzo Salad

Cardamom Cookies for Feast

It's a meal! It's an obsessive disorder! It's both!

For decades Weight Watchers have helped people loose unwanted pounds by providing ideas for meals - like this Melon Mousse created in 1974. Wendy McClure features a collection of these horrific food-styling events. Click with the first meal, read the text and pull your mouse over the photograph - her real thoughts are there!

Swamped in Garden Production!

The previous posts feature garden production - meals, canning and pickling, chutneys, pesto mayonnaise, stews and soups. A busy time!

When factoring in the time, food preparation (and clean-up) takes enormous time and energy. Fortunately, we've had cool weather, so I have been able to 'pick and prepare' as the garden allows.

Many of our tomatoes are still green due to cool weather. I'll pick them to avoid blossom end rot, which occurs with too much rain, and haul in the remainder of the onions and turnips.

Tomorrow I'll pickle turnips with a few beets, and make 'pink pickles', then can several jars of green tomato relish. Green tomatoes work well in most Indian sambars, since the spices work wonderfully with sour/bitter vegetables. So, time is on my side if the tomatoes do not ripen up quickly.

I'm hoping for an Indian Summer to pull our recently planted fall crops through - collards, kale, chard and beets. George planted these, and I sure hope I get a second wind to process them.

A Simple Flatbread for Chutneys - Naan

Small Batch Canning: Moroccan Chermoula

When I prepare Chermoula, a savory vegetable topping for fish and rice, I make a big batch so I can process several jars. This saves on work and time.

Harissa Paste - Getting Ingredients Together

Moroccan Harira - Classic Tomato-Lentil Soup

Parsnip Soup with Kebab-spiced Meatballs

Tomato Chutney - with Fresh Huckleberries

Huckleberries Turn This Chutney Purple

I canned six pints of tomato chutney, using huckleberries. This year I picked two and a half gallons - in the rain, while George and Dick were canoeing nearby. Guess who is going to eat most of those huckleberries.....

Peach Syrup - For Tagines, Chutneys & Granola

Garden Chutneys - Using the Food Processor

This chutney uses all kinds of herbs from the garden - even nasturtium leaves (peppery) and calendula flowers. A bit of tart apple sweetens the mix.

Mint Chutney and Pesto Mayonaise

Pickled Rutabagas, Turnips & Carrots - Torshi

Pickle Production: Salting & Draining

Zucchini- Green Tomato Pickles

Celery-Kale-Parsley: Finely Chopped for Khasha

Some of my cooking projects are used as enhancements to a meal - they add a little more flavor or fiber. Sauteed onion and garlic are also added to Khasha - buckwheat groats.

Making Plum Syrup

Shiner-Hutchinson Lakes - Eastern Washington

We've just spent a week canoeing with George's brother Dick. We left the rain in Tacoma, and headed over to eastern Washington where we explored back-roads, canoed Shiner-Hutchinson lakes in the Columbia Wildlife Refuge, and enjoyed the old coal-mining town of Roslyn.

It was Dick's idea to disembark from the canoe and hike up to a bluff overlooking Shiner Lake. It was my idea to hold him by the belt, so he wouldn't slip in the sand as he tried to get back into the canoe. He had a bad knee and the ground was soft.

I found wild celery growing here in the reeds.

This was such a gorgeous sunny day!

A Moose For Little Daniel

A Busy Weekend - Production and Family

While George worked under the house repairing insulation I made plum syrup. I'll make several more batches, then call it quits. We'll give the rest of the plums to the food bank.

We attended the Olsen's devotional on Sunday.

Ruhiyyih and Matt came to Tacoma to run in a race and celebrate a birthday. Then we all went to Annie's and Rue's for lunch.

George was given permission to photograph in Daisy's room - can you tell she is a teenager?

George's brother Dick will arrive tomorrow for a visit, so I have much to do out in the garden and here at home if I am to participate in their outings. Fortunately, my tomatoes are ripening late, so I can hold off making sauce and canning it.

I'm still up to my ears in turnips, parsnips, potatoes, celery and carrots, kale and chard. I have been making soup and freezing it. Matt and Ruhiyyih left town yesterday afternoon forgetting to load up on zucchini. So, I'll be making more miniature loaves for hiking trips, and freezing them.

Taking Precautions - It Runs in the Family

My 10 lb weight, a note to my husband, and a letter and hand-warmers from my sister rest on my coffee table in the den. I realized all of them had a common theme.

When we were raising our family I was the only one who ever locked the front door - everyone else was in too big of a rush to even think about it. To solve that, I had a storeroom doornob installed - it keeps the door permanently locked, and a key is needed to unlock it from the outside.

I thought I'd solved the problem, until I noticed that when my husband attends meetings late into the evening he actually forgets to shut the front door when he arrives home. The door is IN the door-jam, but NOT shut. When I awake in the morning to get the newspaper I'll sometimes find the wind has pushed the door open an inch. I imagine anyone could have entered our home while we were sleeping! And, they could have taken George's keys, wallet and phone, which are on the bookshelf just three steps away. Yes, readers, that is where his valuables are: Top shelf, on the bookcase, next to the coats. On the left. (It could be a two second heist even in the dark - trust me.)

What to do. Guess I have to change the note - it is not the locking of the door that is necessary. It is shutting the door that counts. And those hand warmers? Ladies, you know where to put them, if your shirt gets wet!

Muscular Definition - It Runs in the Family

Noticed this beautiful photo in my son Taraz's Facebook album. I made the comment: "Love the anticipation of movement here, the dance...and your muscular definitions are so like my own. We're built the same - it is inherited."

Then, I noticed George's comment, following: "Definitions? Isn't that something you find in the dictionary?"

Of Sage and Sky - Hiking at Twin Lakes, Washington

We watched the forecast for western Washington - rain predicted - so drove over to eastern Washington, where temps were in the low 80's, with sunshine and scattered clouds. It couldn't have been more beautiful for the Labor Day weekend. Perfect for hiking, canoeing, cooking...and star-gazing. The Milky Way was mesmerizing, the sky so clear. Hundreds of twinkling stars!

We set up camp at Coffeepot Lake, a game reserve on BLM land. It is only a few miles from Twin Lakes, where we did a 9.5 mile hike the following day. Our 3-day trip was blessed with solitude - very few fishermen or campers this time of year (although we did awake one morning to the sound of Russian speaking fishermen, and a Spanish speaking family the next day.)

More than 900 acres bordering Coffeepot Lake are managed for wildlife habitat. We saw flocks of geese and cormorants; hawks soaring over the canyon, sandpipers flitting along the shoreline, marsh wrens grasping tule reeds, grouse and snake along the road, and we heard an owl calling from the tree near our tent at night.

We took a two hour paddle around the lake early Sunday morning, right after coffee. We wanted to check out the end of the lake, where wetlands and sand extended down to another reach of lake.
We beached the canoe and hiked up on bluffs, startling a herd of mule deer. I could have spent an entire day there, exploring and soaking up the vista.

We paddled along the shoreline, noticing all the nests made by cliff swallows. River otters swam ahead of us, checking us out - about six of them, poking their heads up and hissing, then diving under the water. A flock of pelicans favored the rocky shoreline at the eastern end of the lake where herons stood like statues waiting and listening. As we approached, they squawked, and slowly flapped their huge wings when they flew away.

The next morning we crossed over the lake to explore an old abandoned cabin used for duck hunting or fishing - I think of it often, wondering who built it. What was the area like when blanketed in snow, with winter winds blowing across the lake, and not a soul around?

I used a front pack for the 5-hour Twin Lakes hike, carrying only my sandwich and one bottle of water. The day-pack was perfect for holding just a few shirts, too. George carried a full pack.

We didn't have a map for hiking at Twin Lakes. (They are provided at the campground, but not at the trailhead, where we parked our car.) However, we had a feel for the hike's general directions - 9.5 miles of old roadbed, through shrub-steppe uplands and wetlands, along basalt bluffs, and out onto an expansive stretch of farmland.
There was an abandoned ranch in Lake Creek Canyon.

I'll have to admit, by the 8th mile I was becoming a little worried - it was almost 5:00 p.m., with no familiar terrain in sight. Trail markers, placed at every turn of the road, were of little consolation. I felt a few sprinkles of rain from a passing cloud, and noticed that George was limping a little. His boots were not holding up. No blisters, just tenderness and pressure - we'd hiked for 4 1/2 hours without sitting down for a rest break.
He was sure relieved when we noticed a familiar gravel road leading back down to the Twin Lakes campground and the trail-head.

We hope to do this hike again next spring, and check out some of the other adjoining lakes. George will bring an extra pair of shoes to give his feet a break.

Matpe Beans for Lemon Rice - Camp Cooking

I purchased matpe beans at the east-Indian market, and sprouted them for a kebab-rice stir-fry. Sprouting is a simple procedure that takes about three days - if you want long shoots.

After they are sprouted, steam some basmati rice, then stir-fry it with chopped vegetables - mixed peppers are nice - and spices.

Then, gently blend everything together - I add a little turmeric.
I served this with meatballs flavored with kebab seasoning.

Recipe for Lemon Rice:
3 cups of basmati rice or other long-grained rice
3 tbs vegetable oil
1 cup sprouted matpe beans
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 whole dried red chili
¼ tsp chili
¼ tsp asafetida
tsp turmeric
¼ tsp coriander powder
½ tsp garam masala
¼ cup lemon juice
4-5 curry leaves
1 tsp sugar
Salt as desired

We also enjoyed dal makhani on potato buns, zucchini fritatta, bacon and onions on toasted buns, and a carrot-orange-red onion salad...this meal had to sustain us through a 9.5 mile hike.

I made strawberry crepes in the dark, right before we crawled into the tent - because we wanted dessert after dinner. George had to hold a flashlight, so I could finish eating!

The next day we had peach crepes - these are the best I could do for 'sugar shots' - quick, with fruit and yogurt.