The Mighty Pak Choi

It is our “winter” here in Baja; the time for growing cool season crops like lettuce, cabbage, and Asian greens. As I have been posting, I am attempting to participate in the Dark Days Challenge. This week, my post is about one of our favorite Asian greens Choi: in this dinner Pak Choi. I grow both the full size plants and the smaller Tsai Choi.  Here are some photos of each in the garden.

A huge Pak Choi ready for harvest

Tsai Choi are much more compact

The big Choi here is destined for this dinner; it is huge and ready for harvest. Before I chopped it up, it filled my dishpan.  No photo of that, but here it is after I attacked it with my chef’s knife.

Chopped up and ready to cook

Before I chop it up I soak the entire head in cool water laced with a few tablespoons of vinegar to chase out any freeloaders. I garden organically so I don’t mind a few holes in my vegies. I handpick snails and it is easy to miss those tiny, tiny babies, but they are no match for the vinegar. I am not much on homemade escargot, too much effort to clean the snails and mine are usually too small anyway; it’s the big ones from next door that are the real problem. They know where the free lunch, or should I say dinner, lives.

I matched the chopped Choi with a few other ingredients: onions and some late ripening peppers from the garden and some local pork.

Sliced pork, peppers, onion, and Choi stems

Beside the Choi, the star of this dinner is some homemade Duck Sauce from our beautiful spring Santa Rosa plums. The sauce is way good and wonderful over rice.

Hmmm, rice… Not exactly local, since it doesn’t grow well here; it’s too arid. It does grow in central California just beyond my 150 mile range, so I am going to use it anyway. I do buy it in San Diego, so does that count? I could have just not admitted it but I wanted to show off the secret flavor of the day: homegrown lemon grass.

Steamed rice with crushed lemon grass

This represents a triumph of a sort for me: it is my third and only successful attempt at growing it. The two previous attempts met their demise at the overzealous weeding hands of Mr. M. After all it is lemon grass. I actually had to plant it in my vegetable garden because he is forbidden to weed there. (NO, don’t pull out those nettles! I need them!) But that is another story.

I steam the rice with homemade chicken stock, a bit of Kosher or sea salt and few smashed stalks of the aforementioned, highly prized lemon grass.

The Bok Choi stars in the stir fry:

Ready to serve

Here is the simple recipe:

2 locally grown boneless pork chops, or chicken thighs

1 Tbs fat or oil (I used some reserved fat from making stock)

1 Tbs dark sesame oil (I’m counting this as a spice)

1 large head of Bok Choi or other preferred greens, sliced crosswise

1 medium onion, thinly sliced

½ large green or ripe sweet pepper, or a few small ripe sweet peppers, thinly sliced

Several cloves of homegrown garlic, sliced, or chopped

1 pint homemade Duck Sauce (a half pint would work if less sauce is desired)

½ to 1 Tbs Cornstarch dissolved in 1 Tablespoon cold water, optional

Semi-freeze and thinly slice the meat. Heat fat and sesame oil, add sliced meat. Cook, stirring constantly, until the meat loses its pink color. Add onions, sliced stems of the Choi, and peppers and fry until the onions begin to soften. Add the garlic and sauce.  Add the leafy part of the Choi and cook until the leaves wilt. If the sauce is too liquid from the moisture in the leaves, thicken with the cornstarch.

I’m pretty sure that this dinner meets the SOLE (sustainable, organic, local, and ethical) requirements: well almost. And, if you are interested, here is the recipe for the

Duck Sauce

(loosely based on the Ball Blue Book’s Plum Sauce recipe, page 84)

4 pounds of Santa Rosa plums

2 cups grated pilonchillo sugar (Mexican cone sugar)

1 cup cane sugar

3/4 cup chopped onion

2 Tbs mustard seed (I get mine at a local Botannica,or herb store; it grows wild here)

1 chopped, roasted, peeled poblano chile

1 minced jalapeno or serrano chile

1 (1/4 X 1″) piece fresh ginger, minced or 1 tsp ground, dry ginger

3 garlic cloves

1/4 tsp ground cloves

1 cup cider vinegar

Wash, pit and slice plums. Combine the rest of the ingredients in a large pot. Bring to a boil and add plums. Cook until plums are soft. Blend with an immersion blender until smooth. Cook until the thickness preferred. Ladle sauce into hot jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace. Adjust two piece caps. Process 20 minutes in a boiling water bath. About 4 pints, but your mileage may vary.

Note: when my plums ripen, I have a lot so I double or triple this recipe. I put the sauce up in pints and half pints because it also makes a great dippng sauce.

Things I Wish I Would Do

I like blogging and I like reading others’ blogs. I see all kinds of cool ideas like, say, Wordless Wednesday, when they post nothing but photos. Or the new group that has a challenge of posting a photo every day. Hmmmm…  I don’t think I have that kind of discipline… BUT, I am going to try to post more often, so stay tuned.

Here is a photo for today. It is one of my strawberry pots on my deck. I took it from this angle because it shows our inexpensive automatic drip irrigation. The yellow hose along the edge of the deck is a nine dollar hose from Wally World that we put an end cap on then connected to a timer. Then we punched holes for the 1/4 inch tubing connectors for each of our potted plants.

Sweetness in a pot

By the way, we have two of these pots and have harvested several  quarts of fruit this year already! They love the new system!

A Bed Of Roses

As I have posted in the past, Mr. M and I feel as though we are simply tenants of a property possessed by a family of hummingbirds. They are truly fearless! Recently, we noticed a lot of hummingbird activity in the area where we have our standard roses planted. The trees line a sidewalk that leads to our front door. The walk runs parallel to the deck in front of our house.

Here’s a photo of where we park our car with the roses next to it:

Here is the proximity of our rose "trees" to our usual parking spot

Recently when we walked down the sidewalk to go retrieve our mail, a hummer flew out of this rose tree:

Notice how close the rose grows to our parking spot. We back it out for passengers to get in.

This prompted a closer look and here is what we discovered right in the center of the rose tree:

A surprise right in the center!

Now it has been a couple of weeks and here is a shot of the two healthy babies. No wonder they think they own to place! Generation after generation are hatched and remain to live here.

No room for Mama!

They won’t be in the nest much longer but have been fun to watch from close up! The hummers are so brave we can even cut roses from the bush without causing any problems.

Where Has She Been?

Okay, I admit it: I have been missing in inaction! In December, Mr. M and I went to visit our daughters in Texas and Louisiana. Their internet connections were not as reliable as is ours here in Mexico (surprise!). So, between that and my desire to have a great time visiting with the family during the Holidays, there was little incentive to post.

Okay, what about since then? On January fifth, a couple of days after our return home, I underwent the replacement of my left knee. Did you know that the knee is the largest joint in the human body? Not to mention that it involves four bones, including the kneecap?  Rehabilitation from this surgery is painful and time consuming. Especially when the rehabilitation involves crossing an international border every time one visits the Physical Therapist.  Add to that the fact that I am allergic to a LOT of prescriptions medications, like antibiotics and pain killers and recovery is a bit slow.

It has taken me quite a while to get to the point where I can sit at the desk and type. I know. I know: laptop. I am thinking about replacing my old one that died a couple of years ago but I can’t seem to afford one as yet. It is on the list of Things I Would Buy If I Won The Lottery.

I am finally able to stroll around the garden without a walker (which I came home with) or a cane (kind of classy but annoying). So camera in hand, I went out to photograph what is going on in the garden at this time of year. Let me tell you first though, how great it is to FINALLY be able to walk without the constant pain with every step that I had in my knees. I am the Bionic Grandma now, two knee replacements (one was three years ago) and metal plates in one arm. It is very interesting to go through the airport!

As promised here are several photos from the garden:

My super dwarf apple tree in bloom

This little apple tree is always in bloom or producing fruit. It requires less than 100 hours of chill time and sets fruit about three times a year. And, oh yes, it is only about three feet tall! I just love it!

Some of my beautiful cabbages:



A green Cabbage

A red cabbage

This is a cauliflower that is aptly named “Cheddar”. It is still orangish-yellow after cooking and is delicious!!

 

Peek a boo!

Banana trees blossom according to their own time schedules. The red bananas on the left are a complete surprise! I bought the tiny tree for its interesting red and green variegated foliage. When we were thinning the clump we were astounded to find the bloom stalk. The flower stalk to the right is a favorite with our resident humming birds.

 

 

These red bananas were a surprise

This banana blossom is a complete surprise

A Natural Humming Bird feeder

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the time when our citrus trees are in transition. The fruit is ripe and the trees are putting on new growth and blossoms. If you have never been near a citrus tree in bloom you have really missed out on one of the pleasures of life. Each type of tree has its own unique sweet fragrance.  Commercial “orange blossom” fragrance isn’t even within the realm. Not only is the fragrance sweet but it has an underlying  slightly bitter, citrus zing. The sweetest of my citrus blossoms belongs to my Mexican, or if you live in Florida, Key, lime. It is the favorite of the Humming Birds and they are extremely defensive of it!

The beginning of next year's Meyer lemons

A unique variegated lemon that is pink inside when ripe

This years oranges getting ripe

Random photos of the winter vegetables:

Lettuce have a salad

Peas and Broccoli, please

First time I've grown Brussels sprouts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And last but not least some random photos of the flower at this time of the year:

These little daisies are naturalized and come back year after year!

One of many irises

The poinsettia still has lovely flowers. I prefer the Spanish name Noche Buena, or Good Night (a reference to Christmas Eve)

What’s this?

I finally have tackled the job of harvesting my fennel seeds. That is until I discovered the swallowtail caterpillar on one of the canes. I left the rest for it to munch on. While we were cutting the seedheads we found this:

What happens when onions and fennel get friendly

This is what happens when you are a lackadaisical gardener and your onions and fennel go to seed at the same time. It seems that the fennel sent the seeds right up through the center of the onion seeds. Fun to look at right?

Scapes!

Scapes, you ask? What am I talking about now? I am speaking of garlic scapes: the stem that supports the flower bud that develops on hardneck garlic in the spring. Maybe I need to backup a little and tell you a little about garlic.

Most of the garlic found in supermarket, especially here in the west, is the type known as softneck garlic. The cloves grow in an overlapping style, similar to an artichoke. When ripe it can be easily braided and stores very well. Most of this type of garlic is mild to moderate in flavor and widely available. This garlic grows well in the southern part of North America (including here in Baja).

The other type of garlic is known as hardneck garlic, a good description. The cloves are much fewer but larger than the cloves of softneck garlic, and grow in a single layer around a hard stem. This type of garlic can be quite hot to the bite when raw but mellows with cooking to a delicious flavor. The best growing area for this is in the northern part of North America. Undaunted, I do grow both types of garlic here in Baja with interesting results. Some grow well one year and others better in another year. I just keep the largest and healthiest cloves to replant the next fall. The rest goes into the cocina.

The hardneck type of garlic develops a central stem that grows tall and will eventually curl like a spring with a flower bud at the top. This slender stem is the garlic scape. Left to its own devices it would produce a cluster at the top, not of seeds but of tiny garlic bulbils, each only about an sixteenth of an inch in diameter. These tiny bulbils can be planted but take about two to three years to produce usable garlic. In addition, this process also saps the strength from the developing garlic cloves, leaving them soft and less tasty or useful. In a word, it is best to cut the scapes off to induce the garlic to make lovely big garlic bulbs.

That is what I did today, and this is what I harvested:

These curly stems arise from the center of the growing garlic bulbs

What to do with these? They make a wonderful, garlicy addition to stirfries. But I already have some frozen for that. I decided to make pesto with these. If you look closely at the photo above you can see a few scapes that are quite a bit thicker than the rest. Those are from some onions growing in the garden. I cut those too for the same reason I cut the garlic scapes. I will use some of them in my pesto, too.

The ingredients for my pesto are really simple. I used to be more of a purist in my cooking but like everything else, I have mellowed with age. There was a time that I would have had to use the traditional pine nuts for pesto but today I had some raw almonds in the refrigerator so I toasted a little more than a cupful in my oven:

Warm and toasty from the oven

I didn’t make them crisp; I just toasted them enough to make them begin to become fragrant. I wanted them to develop some nutty taste but not to be too hard. I guess I baked them for about ten minutes.

I used some wonderful semidry cheese from our local cheese makers. It is flavorful and fragrant. I guess any semidry cheese like parmesan or pecorino could be used. I just had this on hand.

Because I wanted the pesto to be more chopped and not too pasty, I would have loved to use a fine Italian mezzaluna, but I have done a lot of paring down of my kitchen tools so I don’t own one. Not being a purist anyway, I used my food processor. I put the almonds in first and chopped them coarsely; I didn’t want almond butter.

I used my best asparagus technique to decide how much of each scape to use. By that I mean I snapped the stalk just the way one does an asparagus stem. I used the more tender part in the processor. After snapping them, I used my kitchen shears to cut them into one to two inch pieces and tossed them into the food processor with the almonds. I gave them a quick buzz or two to chop them too. I cut the cheese into half inch cubes and tossed them into the processor and chopped them together.

This is where it gets tricky. The contents of the processor were crumbly. I didn’t want it too pasty so I added about a third of a cup each of water and olive oil. I wanted the flavor of the oil but not too much oiliness so I used an equal amount of plain water. I was very careful not to over process the mixture. Here is what it looks like:

Just the right texture

It is creamy yet still retains the identity of the ingredients. To store it I packed one cupful into a canning jar and put a thin layer of olive oil over it to use this week. The rest, about three cups, I put into zip top quart bags and put them into the freezer (no added oil).

Here is the jar for this week:

Ready to use

And here is the recipe, as best as I can write it down. I am one of those a little of this and a little of that cooks….

Garlic Scape Pesto

1 large bunch of fresh garlic scapes

1 cup of raw whole almonds

7 ounces semidry cheese, like parmesan

1/3 cup of water

1/3 cup of good olive oil

Toast almonds lightly, pour into a food processor fitted with a sharp blade. Chop almonds coarsely. Break or cut tender part of the scapes into one to two inch pieces and add to the food processor. There should be maybe about a 1 1/2 cups. Chop coarsely.

Cut cheese into half inch cubes and add to food processor and chop until the contents are crumbly.  While the processor is running pour in the water and the olive oil and process until slightly creamy yet the ingredients are still identifiable. A tablespoon of oil or water may be added to produce the preferred consistency.

Note: due to the saltiness of the cheese I used, I didn’t add any salt to my pesto but it is optional

Buh Bye Broccoli

After a fairly wet winter here in Baja, my broccoli plants were well over three feet tall and becoming home to a host of aphids, carefully tended by their farmers the ants. I was becoming frustrated by trying to fight the aphids and use the ever smaller broccoli side shoots.

My flourishing winter garden

My freezer is quite full and I was having a hard time finding a place to squeeze in even one more zip top bag of broccoli. Enough! I ripped out the broccoli plants with great effort. Some of them had “trunks” over three inches thick! Next I had to prepare my soil for replanting. Here is a spent plant next to my spading fork, notice that the trunk is thicker than the handle of the tool.

Broccoli plant is bigger than my spading fork

I have friends that know of my garden and some of the asked me if I would loan them my rototiller. I would be happy to, but they have to provide the power for it. Here is a photo of my new one:

My foot powered rototiller

My old one has tines that are bent beyond repair because I was using it to remove some buried stones. My gardens are in raised beds and I do all of the turning of the soil by hand, or should I say by foot. I compost every time I replant the garden. You can see the compost around my spading fork.

After enriching the soil I replant. I am planting snap beans, peppers, chiles, tomatillos, and tomatoes now. I also have some onions that I use as an edging for the garden. Any that I don’t use as scallions, I let grow into dry bulbs for the kitchen. Later this week I will be planting summer and winter squash but they are real space eaters, so they cannot go into the raised beds.

Here is a photo of the first of the beans:

Brand new baby snap bean plants

Perhaps you will notice that the rows are not straight. This really bothers Mr. M! “I used to use sticks and string so my rows were really straight when I was a kid.” I have no problem with wandering rows. I plant along the black ooze tubes that run through the garden bed. Since the hose is looped it won’t lay straight. Notice the rock near it. I use them to help hold the hose where I want it. Guess what?! The plants grow just fine in wandering lines. And they really love the water from the hose.

Being the frugal duo, Mr. M and I don’t have fancy planter boxes for our gardens. Our raised beds are simply a row of old bricks that hold the soil where I want it. The main vegetable garden in based on one I saw in Sunset magazine here:  http://www.sunset.com/garden/fruits-veggies/winter-greens-planting-plan-00400000052086/

The size of this plan is great. I can tend the plants easily from any side. I also can avoid stepping on the soil since I turn it by hand (okay, foot) and once I have it prepared, I don’t want it packed down by stepping on it. I just keep composting and turning it every time I harvest a vegetable.

I plant in short groups and at different times so I can harvest over a period of time. For instance, two weeks ago I planted green, purple and yellow bush snap beans. I also planted a row of yellow and green snap beans that are a type that freezes well. Today I planted some more short rows of green and yellow bush snap beans and some Italian type snap beans (the ones with the flattened pods). In a couple of months I will have a variety of green beans for the table and the freezer, followed by a variety of other beans over the summer. Now if I can just find a little space to grow some Anasazi beans for shelling and dry use… And maybe some pole beans…

A Ticklish Business

It is definitely Spring here in Baja. That means that it is time for me to harvest our “winter” crops and transition our garden to summer crops. This winter I grew a plant that I had not tried before, fennel. It was surprisingly easy! I just sprinkled the seeds where I wanted to grow it and stood back! With our El Niño rains the fennel practically grew itself.

Today, I cut a few bulbs so I can process them for my freezer. I put all kinds of food in there… Since the portion of fennel in the freezer is intended for cooking I do minimal processing and I do not blanch my herbs. Here is what I did:

First I cut off the base, which I think is called the bulb (and indeed it does resemble a lily bulb). I put that part into my dishpan to soak for about 15 minutes in cold water with a little salt to draw out the bugs that might be hiding there. Sure enough there were a few small (eeeewwww!) slugs. Here is a photo of the bulbs soaking:

Two fresh fennel bulbs in their vinegar-water bath

Next I cut off all of the ferny fronds from the stems. There was quite a pile when I was finished: (That is my butcher knife peeking out at the bottom)

Looks and feels like a giant pile of green hair

Then I tackled the stem part:

Fennel stems look a lot like celery

It is a lot like celery so I chopped it with my trusty Cutco butcher knife. I cut the finer stem into pieces about an inch long and the thicker stems into slices about a half of an inch long. My goal with these is to produce pieces that I can just add to a sauce while it is cooking. I could go all fancy and freeze these pieces individually on a cookie sheet then bag them, but I have found that freezing them in a flattened bag works just as well. I just give the bag a sharp whack on my counter and the pieces will break apart and I can pour out as much as I need. (I do the same thing with celery, too)

I then drained and rinsed the bulbs. I removed the thicker outside pieces and sliced the middle in half lengthwise:

Its a little blurry but this is the center of the bulb

I cut this part into crosswise slices about a quarter of an inch thick to add to sliced onions when I make my fennel and onion chicken. I put each half of a bulb into a quart zip top freezer bag. I also put the sliced stems into the same type of freezer bags. After removing as much air as possible, I just flattened the bags as much as I could and put them into the freezer.

The thicker outer part I simply sliced into pieces about a quarter of an inch thick and bagged them up. I plan to use these in sauces or dishes that will cook longer since they are a little tougher than the center. They have wonderful flavor.

Now, for the ticklish part, the fronds: while I was chopping the rest of the fennel I put the huge clump of fronds into my dishpan with a little vinegar and a lot of cold water. I let them soak for about fifteen minutes. It is a lot like washing someone’s hair… I decided that the best way to handle them was to use my Oxo salad spinner. I pulled the fronds out and let the drain in the insert of the spinner while I put fresh water in the dishpan. I put the fronds through two rinses then I took out a few handfuls at a time and used the spinner to get out as much water as I could.

I let the huge pile of fronds drain on kitchen towels for a time then I stuffed handfuls into quart zip top freezer bags. The easiest way I have found to remove most of the air from these bags is to close the top all except maybe an inch. Put the filled bag on a counter and roll the bag from the bottom, squeezing out as much air as possible. Then seal the last inch of the top of the bag while it is still rolled up. Then bag can be flattened and it will have a vacuum around the food. When I want to use the fennel fronds I simply open the bag over the food that I want to add it to and use my kitchen shears to snip the fronds. I can reseal the bag with the unused portion and put it back into the freezer.

Oh, and I did keep one bulb out to share with a friend and to use for a salad. Raw fennel is a real treat. It has a mild licorice flavor that is not overwhelming at all.

Citrus Spring in Baja

It has been quite a while since I have updated my blog! I am attempting to discipline myself to write again. There is so much to write about that at times I feel I can’t choose a topic, so I have decided just to plunge ahead with whatever comes to mind first!

It is definitely springtime here in Baja! Our weather is beautiful. We had a brief shower this morning and the sun has come out, luring me out the door to walk around the garden.

My spring bulbs have started blooming and the freesias that I planted a few years ago along my entry walk are perfuming the air. I always have to stop and cut a few to bring into the house because I love their scent! They are so reliable here, multiplying and returning each year. They disappear completely during our warm, dry summers and sometimes I forget where I have planted them. On occasion, we have moved an entire garden (we think) only to be surprised the next spring with random freesias blooming where we have forgotten them.

A hallmark of our Baja spring is that our citrus trees ripen their fruit and begin blooming with next year’s crop. A citrus tree in full bloom is a heady experience, indeed! Those tiny white blossoms are amazingly fragrant! The sight of a citrus tree filled with ripe fruit and white blossoms is a real showstopper!

To achieve the perfect color for an orange is an interesting phenomenon. Different types of citrus have varying degrees of sensitivity to low temperatures. Our oranges love our summer warmth but don’t need desert high temperatures. To get the beautiful orange color they actually need cooler nights, around 45 degrees Fahrenheit.  After a few nights the oranges will turn their true color. If they hang on the tree too long after the nighttime temperatures rise, they will turn green again, in a process appropriately called “regreening”.  The inside stays orange, but the peel becomes partially green again.

The first year we grew oranges, we weren’t sure when they were ripe and actually left the fruit on until the next crop turned orange! The first crop was really strange inside; kind of coarse, pale and tasteless.  It is a lot easier to tell when our Minneola tangelos are ripe! The fruit turns orange and develops its telltale “neck” at the top of the fruit. It is easiest by far to tell when our Mexican limones, or Key limes, are ripe. The trees drop the beautiful yellow fruits to the ground!

I feel very lucky to live in an area where the occasional rain is a treat and I can garden all year around. I can step out my front door and pick a perfectly ripe orange and enjoy the “fruit of my labor”!

Not Really a Yard Long, But Delicious Anyway!

A while ago I wrote about how I am trying out some new varieties of vegetables in our garden this year. One of the new ones is a bean that goes by the name of Asparagus beans, or yard long beans. They aren’t really a yard long; more like eighteen inches. Still they are pretty impressive compared to the usual pole bean. I posted a photo of the vines before they started producing here.

The first dilemma I found with these beans was how to tell when to pick them. They grow long in a matter of days! The first ones I picked were a little too new, they felt sort of flabby and didn’t have any seeds developed inside of them. They were okay, but I found that the beans are much tastier when they are a little more developed.

There seems to be a window of a day or two when the pods are just right. Sort of a Goldilocks thing, I guess. To young and they are insipid and flabby (not to mention skinny!), too old and the pods are fibrous and the seeds too developed. Asparagus beans are a variety of cowpea and when the seeds are past the perfect stage they look like this fresh out of the pod (the pod was too tough to use – a day late, I guess…):

These beans are from a past is prime pod

The single seed at the top of the bowl is from a “just right” pod.

The beans, as I have discovered are quite prolific! Despite the ants and their aphid herds, my vines are doing quite well! I am actually able to not only have plenty for our dinners but enough to blanch and freeze for later. I just dunk them in boiling water for three minutes, cool them off with cool water,put them in freezer bags and freeze them.

Here is a photo of what I picked today. I had already started to break some of them up to blanch and freeze when it occurred to me to write about them.

The quarter shows how long these beans are!

By the way, I put a US quarter next to them to show just how long the pods are. The light green pod near the top of the bunch is the “past its prime” bean. All of the beans in the bowl above came from it. Wish I had some hens to eat the part that is too tough for us!