Category: Food

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Rump roast plus some less-guilt-inducing things. Click here for high-resolution version.

In eleven years of blogging here, I don’t think I’ve ever written about cooking beef before. I’m 98.6 percent vegetarian, but diets change things (for a while).

During my adult life, my weight has bounced back and forth from about 147 to 157 pounds. Why it bounces is easy to explain: If I weigh 147, I gain weight. If I weigh 157, I feel fat, and I start dieting. My motivation for my current diet, however, though I did feel fat, is getting ready for doing some traveling and hiking in the Scottish Highlands near the end of this summer.

As an experienced dieter, my rules are simple: Keep carbs down. But keep protein, potassium, and fiber up. Concentrate on low-inflammation foods (beef is not one of those). My maximum daily calorie consumption while dieting is 1,200. The calorie rule could be honored, of course, on my usual lacto-ovo vegetarian diet. It would just mean eating less of the usual things. But I’m afraid that a 1,200-calorie diet of the usual things would leave me deficient in protein, potassium, or fiber.

Fortunately, I don’t have to diet often. Once I’m at the lower-level marker of 147 pounds, it takes me more than five years of eating whatever I want to get me back up to the red line of 157 pounds. Nor do I have to obsess about weighing myself. My belt tells me all I need to know. I resort to the scales only to confirm that I’m back at 147 again. Then I eat whatever I want and repeat the cycle.

The easiest healthy way I know to get 60 grams of protein a day while meeting a reasonable potassium and fiber target is to concentrate on fish (or meat) and low-carb vegetables. After eating enough beef to meet the protein target, and enough broccoli and fresh tomatoes to meet the potassium and fiber target, I’m foundered long before the calorie maximum is reached. Grilled salmon is my main source of protein on this diet. I grill two pieces at a time — one for today, and one to put in the fridge for a salmon-vegetable curry tomorrow. Beef is just a novelty. After one meal, I’m sick of beef, even though I have leftovers to deal with.

Since I’m also hiking to train for the Highlands, it won’t take long to get back to 147. Then, once I’m in Scotland, it’ll be all about oyster bars, ale, and potatoes, calories be damned. And I’ll be on my way to 157 again.

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Raw walnut pâté in pocket bread, cucumber slaw, homemade refrigerator pickle, garden tomato. Click here for high resolution version.

A good maxim for good health would be, eat more walnuts. Believe it or not, here in the Blue Ridge foothills, I can sometimes find local black walnuts for sale in late summer. You have to know whom to ask. Walnut trees are common. There are a few people in these parts who (like me) hate to see walnuts go to waste (though the squirrels rely on them) and who (unlike me) are willing to do the work of shelling them. They fetch a good price, too.

Otherwise, if you buy walnuts from California, you need to buy from a source that sells a lot of them, to be sure that they’re fresh. Whole Foods sells excellent walnuts in bulk. Trader Joe’s has them pre-packaged, and at affordable prices. Store them in the fridge, and keep them sealed against oxygen.

To make walnut pâté, first soak the walnuts for at last an hour to soften them. Purée them in a food processor. I add a dab of tahini to hold the purée together. After the walnuts are mushed up, pulse in some onion and celery and seasonings, but leave the onion and celery a tad coarse.

I love bread, but if I always had it, I would gain too much weight. When the craving for bread becomes irresistible, I sometimes make myself one flatbread. It’s easy. The people of India are the best at it. Just watch a YouTube video to see how it’s done. I use nothing but flour and water, and I bake the flatbread in a dry skillet. It doesn’t always “pop,” but I’m much better at that than I used to be.

Though the pâté in the photo was incredibly tasty, it was the tomato (one of the first ripe ones of the summer) that blew me away.

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Are we tired of squash and okra yet? It could happen.

Baba ganoush is not just for eggplant. Any vegetable that likes to be roasted can be turned into baba ganoush. This one is made from roasted yellow squash and roasted okra.

Are we tired of pesto yet? I hope not, because the basil is the most vigorous thing in the garden now that the usual July heat stress and water stress are setting in.

This was a very rich meal. I couldn’t eat it all.

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An okra flower. Click here for high-resolution version.

I have been trying to get a photo of a fully open okra flower, but I still have not succeeded. Okra is a relative of hibiscus, and its flowers are much like hibiscus flowers. The photo above, of a not-yet-fully-open flower, was taken at 9 a.m. two days ago. At 8 p.m. the same day, I returned with the camera expecting to see a fully open flower. Instead, the flower already had wilted. I’ll keep trying. Okra flowers, I think, are the most beautiful flower in the vegetable garden.

I’m also doing my best to understand the morphology of how the okra flower relates to the okra seed pod (which is the edible part). That, too, is going to require more observation.

A note on flower photography: A tripod is almost always necessary, otherwise blurring occurs when maximum sharpness is needed. Wind is often a problem and also can cause blurring, because narrow apertures (and therefore longer exposures) are often necessary to manage depth of field. I usually shoot flower photos at different aperture settings, then determine in Photoshop which aperture setting worked best. The idea is to get the objects of interest sharply in focus, while blurring secondary objects that are closer to, or farther away from, the camera.

Blooming elsewhere at the abbey. Click here for high-resolution version.

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A thriving squash plant, with lots of room and some pampering. Notice how dry the soil is.

I’ve already learned a lot from my experiments with this year’s garden. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, my plan this year was to plant sparsely, leaving plenty of space between things for cultivating and for weed control. This type of gardening also is water-frugal.

One of my favorite gardening books is Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times, by Steve Solomon. This sparse, water-frugal type of gardening is what he recommends when life depends on your garden. I believe I am sold.

That’s not to say that a hard-working gardener with irrigation cannot pack a garden densely and get great yields. But I’m not a hard-working gardener, and this year I resolved to not do any irrigation.

May was a wet month with 8.69 inches of rainfall. June has been dry, with only 1.29 inches of rain in the last 17 days. Gardens really ought to have an inch of rain or more per week. So we are on the dry side. But, so far, nothing in the garden is showing signs of water stress. Weed control has been easier now that the weather is dryer. The plants, with little competition from weeds and from other plants, seem to be pulling enough water from deeper in the soil without any problem. My yields have been terrific. And insect pests, so far, have not been a problem.

I think I’m also realizing that a productive garden is not just about soil and water. It’s also about sun. No plant can make a lot of vegetables without a lot of leaves and a lot of sun to do the metabolism. So sparse gardening also gives plants plenty of room to spread their leaves and get their sun. Soil, sun, and water: the sparse-garden theory is all about not forcing plants to compete with other plants for what they need. That makes sense to me.

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Okra roasts beautifully. The seeds are tender, but with a slight crunch. They’re a bit like fresh corn kernels, or fresh peas. If seared and not overcooked, I think okra would be great in curries. I also want to experiment with using okra as a thickener in sauces for stir-fries, avoiding the dreaded cornstarch.

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It takes 10 minutes or less to make a quart of refrigerator pickles — just long enough to heat some vinegar and sugar, throw in some spices, and pack the jar. Three days’ worth of cucumbers from four flourishing cucumber vines yielded enough surplus cucumbers for two quarts of refrigerator pickles.

If you Google, you’ll find plenty of recipes for refrigerator pickles. It’s an easy way of preserving cucumbers that are meant to be eaten within the next couple of weeks.

I cut the first okra this morning. The squash are just getting started.

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Squash-tofu curry, cucumbers in sour cream

I picked the first yellow squash today. I already had decided that it would go into a squash-tofu curry.

The abbey’s cucumber plants are climbing high and producing excellently. Unless one has enough cucumbers to pickle, cucumbers have to be eaten fresh every day. I decided on cucumbers in sour cream. That’s a Polish dish, I believe — cucumbers dressed with sour cream, a bit of vinegar, a bit of sweetener, and salt. But the concept is the same as an Indian cucumber raita. It’s a cooling dish, and so it’s a nice contrast with a spicy curry. Sour cream or yoghurt — let your conscience be your guide.

When the garden is making lots of cucumbers, I like to stay one day behind. Today’s cucumbers get washed, wrapped in moist muslin, and stashed in the fridge. Tomorrow, they’ll be nice and chilled and ready to eat. Garden cucumbers are like garden tomatoes. It’s impossible to have too many.

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Cucumber-pasta pesto. Click here for high-resolution version.

In the summer garden, the basil and cucumbers won the competition for who gets to the kitchen first. The yellow squash will be about one day behind, the first tomato about five days.

It has been an excellent gardening year, at least for the summer garden. The rainfall has been generous and well timed.

Life is good when the garden is doing well.

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Click here for high-resolution version.

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Click here for high-resolution version.

I’m not the sort of gardener who does everything the same from year to year. I experiment. I try to learn from my failures. After all, gardening is an exercise in adaptability, since conditions are never exactly the same.

This year’s garden strategy was to plant sparsely in such a way that every individual plant can be pampered. I made the rows very wide so that I can use the tiller to cultivate between rows to keep down the weeds. For the remaining weeds, I’m hoeing, or pulling weeds by hand. I resolved that there would be no irrigation this year. Partly this is because the long-range precipitation forecast looked good, and partly it was because the old piping had gotten leaky and worn out, and I had to discard it. I was planting during a period of heavy rains, and washouts were a possibility. So I planted in raised rows (shaped with a hoe) and mounds (also shaped with a hoe). Everything that can climb must climb. Climbing plants such as cucumbers greatly prefer to climb, rather than to sprawl. I made cucumber trellises and tomato supports from rebar and heavy string. Weeds are much easier to manage when things don’t sprawl. There’s also my snake phobia. I don’t want to leave any places where snakes can hide.

So far, the result has been good. My primary weakness as a gardener is to let the weeds get away from me after the weather gets hot and miserable. So far, I’m well ahead of the weeds. The squash are blooming. The first green tomato has formed. There are lots of tiny cucumbers. The basil is vigorous. The onions seem a little slow, probably because I got them planted a little too late. I’m growing lots of okra this year.

So far the outlook is good for a productive summer garden.