first fruits

Today I brought in the first things from the garden that we didn't immediately eat out of hand! 1 hungarian hot pepper and a good sized handful of snap peas. I'm also excited to report that I spied 4 or 5 baby zucchini growing as well as quite a few green beans that are near picking size. I am so ready for harvest season to begin!

Tonight I was feeling lazy, but ended up with a pretty tasty (and local!) meal anyway. I still had some (cooked) ground sausage leftover from making pizzas on the grill this weekend, so I thought I'd pair it with some eggs. (Sausage from a local meat market and eggs from a local farm!) Then I remembered I also had some goat cheese and baby beet greens from last week's CSA. Those items combined along with some locally produces zoye oil (an olive oil substitute made from soy beans) and CSA onions made one of the best omelet's I've had in a long long time. Ooh, and I had some salt and hot pepper sour-dough bread to go with it - yum!

Staying In For Sushi

Today turned out to be a beautiful, though busy, day - the kind of day that makes me want to grill and eat outside. By the time I got around to figuring out what we had to make it was after 5pm and I had no meat thawed to grill, but I did have a tuna steak in the freezer.

Tuna always makes me think of sushi, because tuna (prepared raw or barely seared) is how I learned I liked both tuna and sushi... so I started looking through my recipe books for something sushi inspired. After adapting a few things here's what I came up with. Brandon and I both loved it! I was a little uncertain as I prepared it, but held out hope that a bunch of my favorite things about sushi all combined in one bowl would be good! It was! So I thought I better share/record what I did.

Chirashi sushi (literally "scattered sushi") - Sushi Rice Bowl

Prepare some sushi rice. You do this by cooking short grained rice, dumping it into a very large bowl and stirring while pouring 1/4 cup rice vinegar (with 2 Tbs. sugar dissolved in it) over the rice and continue stirring until it cools.

Next I prepared the tuna for the grill, using a recipe from epicurious.com called Guam "Volcano" Tuna (Pepper Crusted Tuna with Ginger-Wasabi Dipping Sauce), cut down to size for only 1 tuna steak which we shared. Basically this meant putting a lot of fresh cracked black pepper all over the steak plus some cayanne, ground mustard, garlic, and celery salt. Right before we put it on the grill for about 3 minutes we covered it in olive oil. It's supposed to basically get charred on the outside while the inside stays very very rare.

I also prepared the dipping sauce from the same recipe as a dressing for the bowls. It was basically soy sauce, lemon juice, wasabi, and some green onion and serrano peppers - it was spicy and awesome!

Finally I chopped up a bunch of my favorite sushi veggies: cucumber, carrot, green onion, and mushrooms, added some sugar snap peas and poured a little soy over all those to marinate though they remained raw. I also sliced up some avocado.

While Brandon seared the Tuna, I put it all together. Rice first, then a bunch of veggies. Then I sprinkled some "Nori Shake" on top. This is from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and it was my way of adding some sesame and seaweed flavor to the bowls. To make it I toasted a sheet of nori seaweed wrap (which is what you wrap sushi rolls with) and toasted some seasame seeds. Crumble up the seaweed and add some salt and you've got "Nori Shake."

Finally we sliced up the tuna, placed it on top and added the sauce/dressing to taste - and it tasted so awesome I didn't think to take a picture until I was half done. We will definately make this again. And if you like sushi, I highly recommend it. Chirashi sushi (sushi in a bowl) is much easier than making the rolls, but just as yummy!

All in a day's work

Yesterday was a long day at work and then I had to turn around and be there first thing this morning, so I decided to take the afternoon off... and make some jam! I bought 4 quarts of strawberries and a pound of rhubarb (I already had another pound at home) at the market this morning and started making jam as soon as I got home. Within a couple of hours I ended up with 6 half-pint jars of rhubarb/strawberry jam and four more of plain strawberry jam, with a quart of strawberries left for us to eat fresh!

The recipes I used for the jam are super simple. I don't use any added fruit pectin, which just means you have to boil it for longer to get it to set up. I probably should have let the rhubarb batch cook longer, but overall, I'm pleased with the results. Here's a few photos and the recipes!

Rhubarb and Strawberry Jam (adapted from Simply in Season)

6 cups Rhubarb (diced)

2 cups Strawberries (lightly mashed)

Cook together until they start to boil then add:

3-4 cups Sugar

Continue boiling hard for 20 minutes or so, until it reaches gel stage. (An easy way to check for this is to sick a COLD spoon in the boiling jam and hold it up - it should all come off in a sheet rather than drips).

Pour hot jam into hot half-pint jars and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Turn off heat and let sit for 5 minutes before carefully moving to the counter to cool.

Strawberry Jam (adapted from Choose-a-Berry Preserve recipe in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving)

8 cups strawberries

2.5 cups sugar

Combine in a large pot and let sit for 10 minutes or until strawberries release their juices. Turn on the heat and boil hard for 15 minutes or until it reaches gel stage. Pour hot jam into hot half-pint jars. Process for 10 minutes in boiling water bath. Turn off heat and let sit for 5 minutes before carefully moving to the counter to cool.

summer has officially started!

In my book summer has officially begun, not because the high is 90 degrees, but because yesterday was the first day of CSA pick-up and I am currently eating real, fresh strawberries and yogurt! Yum!

The "official" start of summer has me thinking about cooking and preserving all of the lovely veggies that are just starting to grow and how helpful it would be if I only knew how many peppers I'd frozen so I could do more next year, for example. So I am resolving to use this blog to record my cooking, gardening, and preserving adventures once again.

I am excited about all the produce in my fridge and on my counter right now: bok choy, lettuce, asparagus, strawberries, and rhubarb, as well as some hothouse-grown tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers! Woohoo! Hope to post what I make out of them over the weekend! For now, here's a pic of what real strawberry yogurt looks like: plain greek yogurt, a squirt of honey and some fresh berries :)