Food: Scarborough Fair Mock Risotto

Oh man, oh man.  Now I've done it!  I finally created something with the Scarborough Fair oil that is not only worthy of serving, but it's completely and utterly sinful and carb-laden and delicious!  Plus, it's fusion food, if you want to take the "Scarborough Fair" song to be British Isles origin and risotto is Italian, so... there we go!

Here's what it really is: orzo with tons of butter, Scarborough Fair oil, spices, half and half, shallots, and Parmesan cheese.  It looks kinda like big-grained risotto.

Here's what I did.

You need:

• 1 pound orzo pasta, cooked
• 1 stick unsalted butter
• about a quarter cup of Scarborough Fair Oil - make sure it's REALLY dense with herbs, almost like Scarborough Fair pesto...
• Lotsa garlic - probably 4 cloves, chopped
• 1 large shallot, diced
• Crushed red pepper to taste
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
• 1 cup half and half

Once I cooked the orzo, I melted the butter and blended the oil in.  Once it was warmed through, I added the shallots and garlic and cooked until the shallots were translucent.  At that point I stirred the orzo into the mixture and made sure it was well-coated.  This is when the to-taste moments started happening.  I added a whole bunch of crushed red pepper (we like it spicy here), salt and pepper, and the Parmesan and half and half.  Once it resembled risotto in its creaminess, it was tasty as heck.

But be sure to serve it immediately.  I learned during dinner that the oil liked to separate from the herbs and yummies sticking to the pasta and collect underneath the pasta.   It still tasted fantastic.

Dogs: Rescue Mission Update

I have noticed that some of my readers have stumbled upon my blog because they are searching for more answers about Southside Dogs and the 49 counts of animal cruelty charged on its owner.  Unfortunately, there's not much more to tell.  The trial has been delayed to sometime this month, and hopefully the judge will throw the book at him.  At his last court appearance, he requested the dogs that had been seized and the litters (4) that had been born while they were in foster care, and he was denied.  I have a friend attending all of his court appearances and she keeps me very up to date on this, and I will post as soon as I know anything.

Thank you, as always, for your loyal readership.

Food: Curry

I am studying up on curry, because I want to learn more about them and learn how to cook my own from scratch.  Of course, the curries I fell in love with came from India, which is the first kind of curry I tasted.

 My first Indian food experience was taking my father out for Indian food for Father's Day or his birthday (I can't remember because the dates are close together) one year, and he introduced me to naan bread, samosas, and all these other delicious things he had discovered while traveling in Great Britain and India.  I ordered chicken tikka the first time and enjoyed it, though it was very, very hot to my traditionally bland-eating tastebuds.  But I loved its complexity, even though I ate tons of bread and drank tons of water.

The second time I ate Indian Food was in Georgetown near Washington DC and had chicken saag.  Oh lord.  That was some amazing food.  Later in life I tried Biryani chicken and loved that too.  The occasions weren't that notable (dinner with various friends) but I loved the food.  I still order chicken saag regularly when I go to an Indian restaurant.

Bringing us to the past couple years, I've been using Butter Chicken curry paste from Kitchens of India as my go-to curry shortcut.  My father introduced it to me, and I loved that I could make "Indian Food" easily without having to pay restaurant prices.  It's very good, but I've been told from some people that it's a little salty (the sodium content is quite high).

My most recent curry adventure was at the home of Winston's dog breeder when she had me, my husband, and another owner of one of her dogs over.  She is British, and she told me that Indian food has now surpassed fish and chips as the number 1 take-out food in Great Britain.   Wowzers!  I always knew you could get good Indian food in Great Britain, but not that it was that popular.  At any rate, she made us Madhur Jaffrey's recipe for Prawns with a Dark Sauce (this recipe is available with a quick Google search).  It was hot, but delicious, and I am definitely in love with more curry now.  I want curry all the time.  I'm on a curry kick.  Give me more curry!

So I went to Indian Food Forever and found lots of recipes for the dishes I've tried and many for dishes I've not tried.  I made a list of basic spices I need, and I placed my order to Penzey's today for my little Indian food "kit."  I hope that this makes for some delicious food and some interesting blogs.  I do have some occasions to cook for in the near future, so I plan to blog more soon.

"And here's to curry vindaloo!" - Rent

Food: Scarborough Fair Oil

Are you goin' to Scarborough Fair,

Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme?

Remember me to one who lives there;

She once was a true love o' mine.

So goes the song.  And I have these 4 herbs growing in my garden.  And I love infused oils.  Inspiration hit me like a thunderclap on this fine spring day!

So I took a little bit of each herb:

and chopped them fine and mixed them together until they looked like finely chopped grass clippings, but smelled a heck of a lot better.

Put them in a prep bowl, poured about a quarter cup of extra-virgin olive oil over the top, covered up the bowl and shook gently.

Man oh man.

My question is: besides dunking sourdough bread in it (obvious choice), whatever shall I do with the stuff?  The possibilities are endless, and I am thinking:

• coating chicken with it before roasting
• using as a substitute for my plain olive oil when I oven-roast potatoes
• turning it into a marinade with some white wine and garlic
• using it as a butter substitute when mashing potatoes
• tossing with pasta and Parmesan cheese
• experimenting with Scarborough Fair pesto (see above)
• drizzling steak, pork chops, and any other grilled meat with it.  Besides hot dogs. ew.
• Could it possibly be used as a tiny garnish for risotto?

What do you all think?  I'm all ears.

Food: Mac and Cheese experiment II

So I did another mac and cheese experiment.  It turned out even better than the last recipe, if I do say so myself.  Plus I learned a lot.  Such as: never trust a mac and cheese recipe for the roux.  You have to know your roux, defend your roux, beat the heck outta your roux until it's that badass golden color and then SLOWLY add your milk and get it to the perfect simmer as it thickens all bubbly and wonderful.  I have never followed a recipe to successfully make a perfect roux.  Every time I've improvised, the roux gets awesome.  So: never trust the recipe.

Anyway, here's what I did.

grated an 8oz. block NY reserve aged cheddar, a 4 oz block of Yancey's Fancy roasted garlic cheddar, and a 4 oz block of Yancey's Fancy Champagne cheddar.

Boiled the pasta in salted water for 6 minutes and then drained.

Made the roux with a stick of butter, a pile of all-purpose flour, and a whisk.  Seriously, I just added flour and whisked until it looked like that wonderful roux you see on food channels.  Then I slowly whisked in bits of milk until it turned into a very thick gravy.  Then I added more milk slowly.  And then let that get thick and bubbly and coat a spoon.

Added: a whole ton of garlic powder (shame! but I was out of fresh garlic), probably 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (sprinkled it in), a teaspoon or so of smoked Spanish paprika, a teaspoon or so of dry mustard, 1/2 teaspoon-ish of kosher salt, and tasted.  It tasted good.

Mixed in the cheese till it melted.  Adjusted the seasonings until I tasted even more yum.

Mixed in the cooked elbow pasta.  Poured the mixture into a 9x13" pan and covered with a generous amount of panko bread crumbs.  Baked at 350 for 35 minutes.  Took it out of the oven and let it sit for 5 minutes.  Dished it up.

It was good.  And no, I didn't take a picture, because I was too busy eating it.

Gardening pictures

I finally was able to take some pictures of the garden repairs.

Here's the strawberry bed, that someday will be replete with berries (I hope!)

Basil that survived the freeze warning the other night

Rosemary, doomed to only one summer with us in this cursed zone 6.

German thyme

The cutest little sage plant that I could find, that is looking markedly perkier now that he's in the ground instead of in that terrible, horrible, root-bound peat pot.

Parsley, which grows into a large bush here.

Greek oregano

and... dock.  The cursed dock weed that invades every part of my yard and garden and threatens to take over.  Hickory-dickory dock.  I hate dock.  I took this next to the lilac bushes that we inherited from previous tenants.  Sadly, the lilac bushes never bloom, but the dock certainly flourishes.

But that's the state of affairs right now.  And I hope they stay beautiful.

Gardening: a horror story

Let's face it: I am a neglectful gardener who follows a very predictable pattern.

Every spring, I get all excited about plants and gardens and fun stuff like that, and every spring I go all gung-ho into planting edible things thinking we're going to save mother lodes on grocery bills by eating our own fresh produce.  By summer, I have forgotten to weed and prune and pluck and give the poor beds the TLC they so desperately need and deserve, and every summer I wind up with a ginormous weed bed out of which you can sort out the following:

• enough basil to make a container of pesto sauce
• enough chives to last a family of 4 a year or more, even if they use them heavily
• some strawberries that haven't been eaten by rodents
• a handful each of raspberries and blueberries
• unidentifiable piles of herbs that have either been choked by weeks or overgrown to the point that I don't recognize them anymore and don't know what to do with them.
• The Monster Weed that has the huge long taproot, grows anywhere, and is impossible to get rid of.  I don't know what it is, I don't want to know what it is, because it is so strong and so horrible.  I have named it Audrey II.

Every year, I say it's going to be different, and every year the weeds overtake me.

This year, it IS going to be different, because I have a new strategy: mulch with Preen built into it.  Plus, I'm actually going to get out there and do things to my garden.  Really. I promise, because I want to love the yard we have and be proud to show off my garden to visitors instead of sheepishly saying that I have a black thumb and shrugging when they tell me that they remember me being all excited in the spring...

I can't do that anymore.

So this year IS going to be different.  Yesterday we laid a sidewalk going from the patio to the fence gate and dug out the weeds from the garden beds to reveal really good soil.  Today, I planted and mulched the beds and have the following ready to go, and I hope it will work this time:

• strawberries in their own 4'x8' bed.  Hopefully they spread like weeds and take over so that weeds cannot.
• 2 raspberry bushes from last year, and 2 blueberry bushes from last year, with lots of strawberry plants around and between them to see if they'll grow.
• enough chives to... well, you know.
• leeks - 1 "set"
• 3 basil plants, big ones
• a single sage plant that I hope will grow into a perennial sage bush like I had in our previous dwelling
• German thyme - single plant
• parsley - a single plant, because I learned last year that a single plant will most certainly "do ya."
• a single rosemary plant that is in the ground, that I hope to dig up and save before winter this year.  I kill rosemary in pots, and I don't live in a zone where rosemary survives the winter.  More's the pity.
• oregano - single plant

My hopes are to have a nice herb garden that lets me USE the herbs in my cooking (oh boy!).  I apologize for a lack of photos, but it is blissfully raining out right now (saved me from having to water my plants as I planted them only an hour or two ago!) and gently drenching the soil of my sweet baby plants that I keep hoping will grow into something spectacular.