Category: Food

Cucumber sandwiches

Here in the U.S., cucumber sandwiches are thought to be an English thing. I’m not sure if that’s true, though it sounds reasonable, and stores here sometimes sell what we call “English cucumbers.”

In any case, when I was a boy in rural North Carolina, cucumbers were plentiful, but I had never heard of a cucumber sandwich. Tomato sandwiches were the only kind of garden sandwiches we knew. I probably first got the idea of cucumber sandwiches from literature. For years they’ve been staple when good cucumbers are to be had and if I’ve bought store-bought bread in a moment of weakness. The cucumber in the photo was picked yesterday at dusk. It went straight into the refrigerator and spent the night there.

The tomatoes are coming along, but I’m still some days away from the first tomato sandwich. I’ll have to buy another loaf of bread.

Several varieties of cucumber are grown in these parts, but I grow only old-fashioned pickling cucumbers. I haven’t pickled any for several years, but if the cucumber harvest exceeds what I can eat fresh, then I’ll make some refrigerator pickles.

Borage


Click here for high-resolution version.

I had not previously encountered borage. I think it is not as commonly used in the U.S. as it is in Europe. But we grew some this year in Ken’s herb trough, starting from seeds in a variety pack of favorite German herbs that I bought on Amazon. The borage is blooming now, with cheery little star-shaped flowers. Its taste is a bit like cucumbers, and it works well in soups and salad dressings.

One last noble service from your mayonnaise jars

It bugs me how much food gets wasted inside retail food jars, no matter how much scraping you do when the jar is empty. With mayonnaise jars, my solution is to keep the near-empty jars in the refrigerator until I need a quick salad dressing. Add vinegar, seasonings, and herbs, shake it up, and you’re done.

This particular empty-jar dressing included fresh dill and borage. I used it on raw vegetables that came from the garden this morning — onion, cucumber, squash, and tomato. This supper was my reward for three hours of toil this morning. I pulled out the defunct spring crops such as kale and gave the garden a good weeding. Now I have spaces where I can plant late tomatoes, late basil, and such.

This was my first proper supper from the summer garden. That’s variegated beets on the plate (they were mostly white, yellow, and pink).

Countdown to summer: 4, 3, 2, 1

The first pesto of the season may not be as exciting as the first tomato sandwich. But it’s pretty exciting.

It would have been a crime to apply heat to a perfect little squash that was growing in a cool rain only minutes ago. So I et it raw.

Speaking of summer, do we tolerate summer better as we get older? I would find it difficult to live without air conditioning here in the South. But I set the thermostat for 83 (though I make it a little cooler at night). It’s 93 that I can’t handle. Still, working in the garden in the heat of summer is hard work. My only hope for keeping a respectable garden now that Ken has headed back to Scotland is to get the gardening done early in the morning.

April 20


The photo is from 7:50 p.m. Supper is over, and the kitchen has been tidied up after the wreckage of a wok supper.

I am so lucky not to be cooking for one — or gardening or orcharding for one — during this quarantine. There is a certain reluctance, as suppertime approaches, for those who are not in the kitchen to wander into the kitchen and ask, “What’s for supper?” A better practice, I think, is to pretend you’re a bistro and put out a sign.

Spring continues to slowly unfold in the cool weather. And what a spring it is.


The spiderwort just started blooming.


First rosebud!

Spring mustard

 


Mustard greens, just washed through three waters

The neighbors’ garden is a couple of weeks ahead of the abbey’s garden. They’ve got a big mustard crop, and they invited us to come pick some. That meant that last night’s supper was pinto beans, mustard greens, corn bread, and deviled eggs.

This sharing from the garden is the old-fashioned way, and the old-fashioned way is making a comeback here on our little dirt road. There’s a saying, “A third for the neighbors, a third for the critters, and a third for you.” We’d be lucky here to hold the critters to their allocated third, especially in the orchard.

Cinnamon rolls

I wish I could say that I made these cinnamon rolls, but I didn’t. I had my share of them, though. It is my good fortune that, by pure accident, I’m not sheltering in place as a household of one, plus one cat. There are travelers sheltering here, too, and do they ever have skills.

Quorn Stroganoff

I had not thought of Stroganoff in years. If ever I had even made beef Stroganoff, I don’t remember it. But, a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times mentioned beef Stroganoff in its beautiful weekly column, “What to Cook This Week.” Once you get Stroganoff in your head, you might as well give up. You’re going to make some.

I’ve made it twice since the New York Times piece. I used the faux ground beef version of Quorn. Much of the appeal is the egg noodles. I had not had egg noodles in years. If I’ve ever even bought egg noodles, I don’t recall it. I’ve probably acquired a new bad habit. Oh well. Too bad.

You could use any good recipe for beef Stoganoff or hamburger Stroganoff, but you might need to consider some minor changes. Recipes probably will have you brown the beef first, then set it aside while you cook the mushrooms. Since Quorn doesn’t release any fat, I’d suggest changing the order. First, cook and brown your mushrooms in olive oil. Set them aside. Then gently brown your Quorn in olive oil. Then add your flour and brown that along with the Quorn. Then deglaze the pan with white wine or stock, and put the mushrooms back in. If you didn’t use stock, I suggest adding some Better Than Bouillon to give the gravy more oomph and brownness. At this point you should have browned Quorn and browned mushrooms in a thick gravy. For the final touch, you can use sour cream, crème fraîche, or even heavy cream. I used Greek yoghurt.

Most recipes will call for mustard and Worcestershire sauce. Mustard is probably more authentic. But I found that I prefer a touch of tomato sauce (or tomato paste) instead. The red improves the richness of the brown and adds some umami.

I mentioned beef Stroganoff to some neighbors a few days ago, and, like me, they had not thought of it for years. They made some the next day. Resistance is futile.

It’s the mushrooms and gravy and noodles, really, that make this dish, as far as I’m concerned. You could even double the mushrooms and not go wrong.

The end of the road for all you can eat home cookin’?


Hillbilly Hideway. See below for more.

It’s true everywhere, but here in the American South, our cuisine is (or was) an essential part of our culture and identity. Passing that culture and identity from generation to generation is very important work. But — at least here in the American South — that work is breaking down.

For decades, all-you-can-eat places serving traditional Southern cuisine, served family style, have been a meaningful (if smallish) niche in the eating-out ecology. I remember, as a child, on road trips into the Appalachian Highlands, stopping for supper at the Dan’l Boone Inn at Boone. It’s still there! And it’s still doing it, at $19.95 per person. River Forest Manor, at Belhaven on the North Carolina coast, used to serve family-style meals, but they’ve now gone to a different model that emphasizes the big house, for weddings and such, rather than the food. I could name other places, long gone. Back in the 1960s, there even were places that served all-you-can-eat seafood, including shrimp and oysters, on Fridays.

Here in the middle of nowhere, in Stokes County, North Carolina, we still have Hillbilly Hideaway. It seems they haven’t updated the prices on their web site, but lunch and dinner are now $20 per person.

A few times a year, I have Sunday breakfast with my Republican friends (no kidding!) Jess and Kitty. Here in the middle of nowhere, there aren’t many places to go, so sometimes we go to the Hillbilly Hideaway, which, even though it’s in the same county, is nevertheless 17 miles away. Hillbilly Hideway doesn’t do Sunday breakfast anymore, but they start lunch at 11 o’clock on Sundays, before the church crowd. However, there doesn’t seem to be a church crowd on Sundays at Hillbilly Hideway anymore. Jess, Kitty, and I lingered until almost 1 p.m. last Sunday, but only a few tables were occupied, and the place was quiet. Jess, Kitty and I figure that the high cost of all-you-can-eat these days — $20 — is just too high for a poor county like this. Plus I’m starting to wonder if younger people even care about traditional cooking anymore.

For people my age, traditional Southern home cooking is what we grew up on. The standard for any particular individual might have been a mother, a grandmother, or a favorite aunt. But we all idealized it. It’s what people here still do on holidays, insofar as they remember how.

But the younger generations, I now realize, know far, far less about home cooking. They may not even like it, because they’ve grown up on fast food, frozen food, and home cooking that can be put together in 30 minutes or less. Too many vegetables! It’s related, I think, to why even many country people with lots of land don’t bother with gardens anymore. They don’t like that stuff.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who can get their money’s worth at a $20 all-you-can-eat meal. Jess, Kitty, and I are not among them. I wish Hillbilly Hideaway all the best. I hope they can adapt to changing times.


Fried chicken, ham, hoe cake, and cornbread.


Hillbilly Hideaway vegetables


Potatoes


Pinto beans


Stewed apples


The dessert cart, extra cost

Update: Ten years ago, Huntington, West Virginia, was identified as the most obese city in the nation. Today, Politico reports on how citizen activists improved on that. For fun, nine years ago, Jamie Oliver went to Huntington and found that most children cannot identify basic vegetables.

Beyond Sausage vegan bratwurst


Beyond Sausage bratwurst, sweet and sour Brussels sprouts, and potato salad

Beyond Meat’s bratwurst was on sale at a grocery store in Madison, so I decided to try it.

Was it awesome? Not really. In taste and bite and texture, it was a lot like vegan cold cuts that have been on the market for a long time. Still, it was good, with a nice meaty bite. And, at the right price, it’s a good high-protein meal, with 22 grams of protein and only 190 calories per brat.

It surprises me how quickly these new meat alternatives have become available, even in provincial grocery stores. Most provincial shoppers won’t buy it, which is why it goes on sale. Their thinking is entirely reasonable, I think. Why pay more for pea protein than for animal sausage?

I would like to think that these meat substitutes will be less expensive than meat before long, as they ought to be. Then we’ll be making progress. A day will come, I think — maybe sooner than we expect — when children will be horrified to hear that people used to kill and eat animals.