It’s official. This was the hottest summer on record in the District of Columbia.
With meteorological summer having ended Aug. 31, our local weathermen tell us that we experienced a mean high temperature of 90.2 degrees and overall temperature of 81.3 degrees. The previous records were 89.3 and 80 degrees. So far, we’ve had 58 days of [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Recipes'
My Favorite Piece of Kitchen Equipment Isn’t in the Kitchen
August 28th, 2010 · 2 Comments · Recipes
We use cast iron skillets and Le Creuset pots for cooking every day. But ask me what turns me on most in my batterie de cuisine and I would have to say my electric Weber spit-roaster. It’s really just a metal ring that fits onto a standard Weber grill with a bracket to hold the [...]
Tags: chicken·spit roasting
Birthday Cubanos
August 26th, 2010 · No Comments · Ethnic, Recipes
Every year we cook a birthday dinner for our friend Tomeika with her choice of entree. This year she chose Cubanos, the famous Cuban sandwich made with pork loin, ham, Swiss cheese and pickles. We had no idea she was a Cubanos fan.
The one missing ingredient in a Cubano made outside Miami typically is the [...]
Tags: Cuban·sandwiches
What to Do with Green Tomatoes
August 23rd, 2010 · 5 Comments · Recipes, garden
I saved more than 10 pounds of green tomatoes from the marauding pack of field mice that have been devouring our kitchen garden lately. In the picture above you see what I salvaged from our Roma vines, the tomatoes we would normally use for canning. No ripe tomatoes to can here. Fortunately, some of our [...]
Spicy Cajun Pickles
August 20th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Recipes, garden
We look forward to these pickles every summer because they’re our daughter’s favorite and they really are spectacular. The way they’re made is a bit unusual, too. They’re lacto-fermented in a salt brine with a wee bit of vinegar and a heap of herbs and spices while in the jar. Then they’re moved into the [...]
A Little Sweetness in Your Dill Pickles?
August 19th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Recipes, garden
I’m convinced that the best dill pickles I’ve ever tasted had at least a little sugar in them. The traditional flavor combo–dill seed, mustard seed, peppercorns–just doesn’t do much for me. Yet I’ve had the hardest time finding a dill pickle recipe (I’m talking about vinegar pickles, of course) that gets me closer to the pickle [...]
Foraged Garden Mash-Up
August 18th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Recipes, garden
Sometimes bits of one thing or another from the garden end up creating their own dish.
As I considered a handful of okra left over from a round of pickling yesterday I wondered what else we had in the garden that might work with it for dinner. A few minutes with a pair of kitchen scissors [...]
Baba Ganouj
August 17th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Ethnic, Recipes
When you’ve got lemons–so the saying goes–make lemonade. The same applies to eggplant. We’ve got plenty of it in the garden right now. In fact the plants themselves have long given up trying to stand upright, they are so weighted down with fruit. They just spread themselves on the ground. (Note to self: stake the [...]
Tags: eggplant·Middle Eastern
Quince and Clove Sour: A Cocktail Weeks in the Making
August 13th, 2010 · 6 Comments · Recipes, entertaining
We needed a delivery of “Pink Cloves” cordial from a friend living in London, but finally last night we were able to sample a cocktail my wife has been working on quite literally for weeks. It’s called a Hendrick’s Quince and Clove Sour, and she found it on the amusingly Monty Python-esque Hendrick’s Gin website.
We’ve [...]
Okra Gone Wild
August 10th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Recipes, garden
It’s that time of year when we are racing to harvest our okra. It grows so fast in the heat and humidity here in the District of Columbia that we have to check our okra plants twice a day. You can practically hear the okra pods getting bigger.
But my purpose here is not to bend [...]
Tags: basil·coconut oil·eggplant·okra
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
