How to eventually have the best garden ever

I had so many fruit pits that I finally had to organize them.

Far left: white peach
Left: white peach, pluot, tiny black plum
Right: white nectarine, lemon
Far right: avocado, apricot

We will have the orangerie. Oh yes.

In the meantime, I am eating fruit like this.

Night:



Morning:

Notice that the only real difference is the lack of tea.

It's not fassoulia: white bean and tomato business.

I was thinking about fassoulia. Lately, when I haven't had supplies to make myself lunch, I've been going over to the Whole Foods up the street by my office and having salad bar instead. The salad bar can go a couple ways. One: lots of greens with shredded carrots and beets, mushrooms, sunflower seeds, chickpeas, and some balsamic dressing. Two: lots of greens with roasted red pepper, marinated mushrooms, hearts of palm, artichoke hearts, fassoulia, chickpeas, feta, croutons, and more balsamic. I really need to make fassoulia at home.

Fassoulia is a white bean salad essentially consisting of huge silver-dollar white cannellini beans in a strong vinaigrette. I haven't ever seen dried beans that big in a store, although apparently Rancho Gordo sells some. I did have normal-sized white beans, so I went ahead and boiled them in prep for at least an approximation of fassoulia. Then I realized we didn't have any olive oil. I couldn't make vinaigrette. I could probably use vinegar as a flavoring agent, though.

I decided to improvise.


White bean and tomato business

cooked white beans
red onion
good tomatoes
sage, thyme, marjoram, paprika
olive oil
white wine vinegar
salt, pepper
cucumber
toasted pita/etc

Chop up half a red onion and soften it in a slug of oil. I had to use safflower oil. However! Olive oil tastes far better in this kind of Mediterranean-y food. If only I'd also had a lemon and a handful of fresh parsley.

While the onion is softening, core and chop a couple good tomatoes. I used the end of my farmer's market haul. You can use whatever edible tomato you have on hand. Canned whole tomatoes should also work. Dump them into the pan and reduce them along with the onion.

At this point you can start seasoning. Add big pinches of dried sage, marjoram, and thyme, plus a good couple shakes of paprika. If you want to season with fresh herbs, chop them up and add them at the end of cooking instead.

When tomatoes and onions have reduced into a sweet mass, add some white beans. I probably used about two cups. Mix the beans with the vegetables, add a big splash of vinegar, and cook until hot through. You can also add some water if things get too dry.

When the whole pan is hot, you are ready. Salt and pepper, then serve in bowls.

This business clearly needed a whack of green crunchy vegetables, so I peeled and cut up half a huge japanese cucumber which had come from a coworker's garden. The cucumber was really sweet and juicy, which worked well with the sweet tomatoes and red onion. It wasn't exactly what I had in mind, though. I'm actually having a hard time trying to think of other vegetables; red pepper might be good. If nothing else, you can add lots of fresh parsley. This wants so much parsley. In an ideal world, I would have squeezed a bunch of fresh lemon juice over the bowl, then covered it with parsley. You could also pour on some good vinaigrette instead of the lemon juice.

Eat with some toasty device. I made pita chips by sticking some pita in the toaster oven. You could also use a number of other breadlike devices.

It was not fassoulia, but it was delicious anyway.

Iced tea is refreshing.

This weekend was all about cleaning things out, so we got hot and sweaty and desperately in need of beverage. I made two liters of iced tea.

Iced tea is really easy. I doubt you need me to tell you how to make it. If you have a glass container and some direct sun, you don't even need hot water! I was too impatient for that, though. I actually boiled two full teapots and brewed hot tea, then chilled it all overnight. This meant that sunday we had iced tea on demand. It was an excellent plan.

I made one batch of assam tea and one of mint.

Hot-brewed iced tea

water
tea
tea strainer if you have loose leaves

Fill your teakettle with water and heat it until boiling. A full teakettle might need up to ten minutes to boil. It takes some effort to actually stay in the room for this duration, but try to at least be in sprinting distance. When the pot starts shrieking, run and take it off the heat.

In the meantime, consider your pitcher. Is it breakable? If so, warm it with hot tapwater before brewing. Boiling water plus cold glass at least equals a cracked glass.

Let the boiled kettle cool slightly. Put your tea into your pitcher, then pour hot water over it. If you have any desire for sugar or other sweet devices, you can add them now: they'll dissolve a lot better in hot water than in a glass of cold tea.

You can get away with using a lot less tea proportionately when making an entire pitcher. I actually made my mint tea with only one tea bag: about one teaspoon of leaves. This worked because mint has no relation to actual tea, so it doesn't get bitter and acidic if you brew it for more than five minutes. Instead of using a lot of tea, I left the single bag for a half hour. For black tea, use about three tea bags or teaspoons, and remove the tea after 3-5 minutes.

If you want a hot cup of tea, pour it off the top of the pitcher before removing the leaves. Then add more boiling water: more iced tea.

Now you have hot steaming pitchers of tea. Put them in the refrigerator. Leave the pitchers unlidded so the steam can escape. It'll take at least four hours for your tea to get fully cold.

Try to be patient.

In the meantime, have a bottle of too-sweet champagne and cut up some bitter-skinned plums or pluots to drop in the glasses: the bitter skins will balance out some of the cloy. We accidentally discovered this the other day. It was a great idea.

At the Santa Cruz farmers market

You bring home spreads like this:

- purple cherokee tomatoes
- yellow brandywine (?) tomatoes
- the tiniest, yellowest shallots ever
- white nectarines
- yellow nectarines
- flavor queen pluots
- dapple dandy pluots
- and some pointy red plums, the name of which has flown completely out of my memory.

That's not even counting all the strawberries we ate at Chrissy's house, or the bag of baby artichokes. Then there were the baskets of totally perfect organic brussels sprouts that looked like actual tiny cabbages, that clearly screamed to be taken home, separated into leaves, and made into salad. We had to leave those there, since the fruit claimed all my money. Boo! On the other hand, yay summer fruit!

Later on we made a bunch of fruit bowls that looked like this.

White and yellow nectarines: while the white nectarines fell off the pit with no effort whatever, the yellow ones clung entirely. This is why we didn't buy the cling peaches right next to them. They were clearly awesome anyway.

More nectarines and flavor queen pluots: there is definitely a reason these dudes are named "flavor queen", although if you go to the Wikipedia page you can see that roughly half of all pluots have names starting with "flavor". They were strongly reminiscent of the supermarket black plums with red flesh, my favorite kind.

All the kinds of pluots fell off their pits like it was nothing. I put the pits on the windowsill with the white nectarine pits, the black plum pits from the apartment yard, the several kinds of lemon seeds and the two apricot pits from trees at the side of the road. My collection is steadily growing. I seriously have to stop myself from collecting apple seeds, but I need to get some from the asian pears. Eventually, in the highly fantastic future, I will plant them all and have a gigantic orangerie of ridiculous, awesome fruit.

It will be awesome.

When you don't want a salad, have pasta niçoise.

When I want lots of vegetables but also need some actual filling food, I tend to make substantial salads. One of the best is Salade Niçoise: greens, boiled potatoes, green beans, hard-boiled eggs, tuna, black niçoise olives, and capers if you have them, all soaked in good vinaigrette. I could eat pounds of it. Then there are niçoise variations, which can be any combination of the salad ingredients down to just potatoes and green beans in dressing, with egg optional. It really depends on what's in the kitchen and how much effort you're willing to make.

Last week I was willing to make a little effort, but I didn't want salad. I wanted pasta. So I took a bunch of niçoise ingredients, messed around with them, and turned them into pasta niçoise.

Usually I'd say potatoes were essential for a good niçoise, but since I was making pasta, I left them out. I didn't use vinaigrette, either, but dressed the pasta in garlicky olive oil and vegetables. The best vegetables here were the beans: when I went to the store one night, I discovered that the usual bin of sturdy 6-inch blue lake beans was actually filled with beans about half that size. Ha ha, haricots verts for $2 a pound! Regular green beans will work fine, though.

Pasta niçoise

linguine
garlic
olive oil
green beans
zucchini
eggs
salt, pepper
grating cheese

Put on a pot of salted water for pasta first thing. You can either put on a separate pot to hardboil the eggs, or cook them and the pasta together, pulling the eggs out after ten minutes. I think I used separate pots this time, but either way will work. Just make sure not to cook the eggs longer than ten minutes, or boil the pasta into floppy oblivion. It's easiest if you're cooking a kind of pasta that takes about ten minutes. I used three eggs for two people. You can also make this with no eggs, in which case you might want to toast some walnuts to strew on top instead.

While you're waiting for the water to boil, warm a substantial splash of olive oil in a wide saute pan. Smash and chop several cloves of garlic, then throw them in the oil to soften slowly. I used about 8 cloves. While they're filling the kitchen with garlic fumes, bust out a zucchini and a couple handfuls of green beans, or an appropriate amount considering how many people you're feeding. Chop off the ends of the zucchini, halve it, and chop it into thin half-moons. Top and tail the green beans and chop them into inch-long pieces. Try for a roughly equivalent volume of beans and zucchini.

Add the green beans to the garlic and cook to soften. Then add the zucchini and do the same thing, cooking just until the zucchini is done: probably 2-3 minutes. Add some salt and lots of fresh black pepper. If you want to add any fresh herbs, you can: fresh parsley would be really good. I didn't have any. I think I used a little dried marjoram (added earlier) instead.

When everything is done, drain the pasta and pour it into the garlic pan. Toss to coat with garlicky oil, then serve onto big plates. Grind some more pepper over each.

Chill the eggs just enough to hold them; I run them under cold water for a couple minutes. Then whack them all over with the back of a spoon, peel them, and chop them into chunks. Or you can leave them in halves, or thin slices. Whatever sounds good.

Strew the eggs over the plates of pasta. Or you can use toasted walnuts, like I said before, or niçoise olives. You might also want cheese in the parmesan family. Any of those would be good.

Eat it with a fork.

If you really like good vinaigrette, I can see adding some when mixing the pasta and vegetables, or maybe pouring a few drops of good wine vinegar over the served plates to mix spontaneously with the oil. Or you could just add a splash of vinegar while actually cooking. I'm going to have to experiment with this further and see what I can see.