The Produce Man Returns

After figuring out that the Produce Man comes every 2 weeks, around 8:30 in the morning, I was ready for him. I had my list, my Euros, and most importantly the key to the apartment because the door locks behind you. Of course I needn't have worried about my inferior German language skills - the Produce Man is young and speaks better English than I speak German, though I did speak German when I could. I also wrote down the German words for what I wanted but it turned out I already knew them after buying them in the grocery for the last 6 weeks: Kopfsalat, Tomaten, Heidelbeeren, Kirschen, Erdbeeren, und Eier.

I suspect the price was higher than at the grocery, but it's worth not lugging the bags up the hill or spending fuel to drive to the commissary. And if you can't tell from the picture, the produce is quite nice. Silly as it sounds, it was a fun experience and I look forward to buying more in 2 weeks. 



Veggie box surprise

Ingredients:

1 pound of boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 onion
a few cloves of garlic
most of the vegetables that came in the vegetable box and were destined for the compost bin if they weren't used soon
  (in my case this was: romanesco, carrots, bok choy, and cabbage)

Directions:

Cut everything up
Heat some olive oil  and a little sesame oil in a wok
Add some Chinese 5 spice
Cook the chicken
Remove chicken and cook the veggies
Add the cooked chicken back in
Add soy sauce
Add a little hot chili sauce
Cook some more

Eat.

See, I can cook! Let's just say that cooking is not high on my list of fun things. In an attempt to eat more vegetables and less pizza, I have a vegetable box from farmfreshtoyou.com delivered to the house every other week. It definitely has encouraged me to cook and eat vegetables I might not otherwise try, like bok choy and romanesco. Some weeks I'm better at using them up in more interesting ways but it can be hard when I'm working long hours and dinner becomes whatever I can grab. This week has been one of those bad work weeks so it was time for a veggie-box surprise.

Been working on...

I finished one of two flannel baby blankets I'm making for my husband's co-worker. I completed the decorative stitching on the first one, so it's done. The second one still needs the decorative stitching. I used a variegated thread to stitch the stars, which is why it looks dark and light.

I blocked my Rowan "Bonita" sweater - finally!! Next step is to seam the shoulders and then pick up stitches and knit the neck edge.

I worked more on my Rowan "Capri" sweater. The yarn is Rowan Calmer (the one called for) and it's really coming along nicely I think. Very summery. And yes, I do seem to like Rowan patterns (and yarn), don't I?

I made chocolate covered cherries using the delicious Bing cherries from our tree and Valrhona 71% dark bittersweet chocolate. I used a cherry pitter to pit the cherries but found it impossible to leave the stems on and pit them, so I used a toothpick to hold the cherry while I coated it. I melted the chocolate in the microwave in a Pyrex measuring cup. One 100 gram (3.5 oz) bar of Valrhona coated about 2 dozen cherries. I've refrigerated half and then froze the other half to try to preserve them as long as possible. Yes, of course I could just eat them all!

I love having a garden. For the last few weeks I've been able to go out in the morning and pick fresh blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries for my breakfast yogurt. The blackberries are just about finished now but the blueberries are still ripening. Last night for dinner I went out into the garden and picked some lettuce and made up a nice vinaigrette dressing and added a sweet pepper (not from our garden...yet) to make a yummy and fresh salad.

A little bit of France in Mountain View

I don't do restaurant reviews on my blog because 1) this is primarily a sewing and knitting blog and 2) we don't eat out much. Not that we don't like good food and restaurants, it's just that we tend to do our own cooking and don't make a habit of eating out. But Saturday night my husband and I had a very nice dinner at Le Petit Bistro in Mountain View and I liked it so much I wanted to pass on a recommendation to my local friends who read this blog. The food was authentic French and very, very good. For an appetizer I enjoyed two nice-sized lightly breaded patties of abalone and scallop with a tasty sauce and my husband had mussels, which he devoured. For a main entree I chose Coq au Vin in a burgundy sauce and my husband had New Zealand lamb. Both were delicious and well prepared. The vegetables were nicely done too and very good. We finished with desserts of chocolate mousse and apple tart and some espresso coffees. Yum, yum, yum. The atmosphere is quite laid back and you can dress up or be casual and fit in. The decor is ho-hum and dated but we were there to eat good food, not admire the furnishings. An added bonus was that I was able to practice my French because the staff are all French. And they were very warm and friendly. I know we'll be back.

Bon appetite!

Vegetable garden recap

Maria posted a comment to my entry yesterday expressing surprise that I planted vegetables in November. I thought I'd follow up on that. I'm hoping the vegetables grow! I think they will because the winters here aren't that cold and we never have a hard freeze. According to my garden books, our frost "season" is January. That's it. January. However, last year we did get pretty cold. According to our outdoor thermometer we got down to 22 degrees F one or two nights. Usually we only have a few nights where the temperature gets below freezing and I think we had more below-freezing nights than usual last year. The jade plants got nipped and our Bougainvillea froze and died. Or so we thought. It sure looked dead but we left the stumps just in case and planted Wisteria, which is a bit hardier. Now we have both Wisteria and Bougainvillea growing on our pergola. So you never know.

This is the first time I've tried to grow winter vegetables but they should be ok. The temperature hit 80 degrees on Sunday and it's been in the mid 70's this week. Not very fall-like. Usually at this time of year we should be getting rain and it should be cooler, maybe in the 60's. The main reason I've not grown winter crops before is because we hadn't done much vegetable gardening in the summer either. This year we decided that the weedy half of the backyard was never going to be a grassy yard and instead we cleared it, leveled it, and put in four 4x4 foot raised beds. We also put in irrigation to each bed because it doesn't rain here from May until October, the prime growing season.

The garden was a success overall. Some things didn't work too well but others did and we had lots of veggies all summer. One of the most prolific producers were the tomatoes. My husband put up 9 quarts of tomato sauce. Yes, my husband. He participated in my jam making enough to know how to do it and while I was traveling for work he got busy in the kitchen. The picture below is from the summer but the heirloom tomato plants are still producing and I made two batches of tomato sauce last week and had tomatoes for chili.

The yellow crook neck squash and zucchini kept us in squash for many weeks. Too much, in fact. Next year I don't think we should plant quite so many. Although we found we did have to share the squash with the squirrels (or rats, although I hope not) so having more than we could eat was not a bad thing. We also had lots of pumpkins. They started ripening in August and at that rate I feared not having any for Halloween. But I did and there are still two out on the vine. We also have pumpkin soup in the freezer.

The cucumbers grew successfully and we enjoyed many cucumber-tomato salads this summer. Some of the last harvested cukes are soaking in brine right now...our first attempt at making pickles.

We had both bush and pole bean plants but the bush beans did better, mostly because they were started from nursery plants and given sufficient space to grow. The pole beans were started from seed, planted in a little area next to the cucumbers, and I have to admit that I neglected them. Bad gardener! I harvested the beans too late and will save the seeds for next year.

We had six corn plants that produced a few ears of corn. The first ears were good but the latter ones were misshapen and not so great. We'll try corn again next year but probably in a better location.

The jalapeño, serrano, and green pepper plants did pretty well. We harvested a number of jalapeños and lots and lots of serranos (which are super mega hot once they turn red!). The green pepper plants ended up being crowded out by the large heirloom tomato plant but we did manage to harvest some of those as well.

I tried growing six cantaloupe plants and was semi-successful. I think we harvested the first cantaloupe too soon but it was still delicious. After the first one we only managed to harvest one more and it was smaller. The remaining cantaloupes were also very small and unfortunately not really edible.

The strawberry is also from our garden. Those and the blueberries and raspberries were wonderful treats to enjoy all summer.

We also grew lettuce and had a successful first crop but then it got too hot and our attempts at subsequent crops never really took. I'm looking forward to more lettuce with cooler weather.

The onions did well. There are still onions growing and they should continue to do well into the winter. We really should grow some garlic. Gilroy, a huge producer of garlic and home of the Gilroy Garlic Festival, is just to our south. Some mornings it smells like the whole neighborhood is cooking breakfast!

One crop that didn't do well was watermelon. My husband was really hopeful for the watermelon and one small one finally started to grow, but it wasn't very edible. The beets didn't do well either, nor did the radishes, I think because of where we planted them. The eggplant is holding on and seems to be doing better. We harvested a little broccoli but no cabbage. These should do better with cooler temperatures. The carrots didn't take but they were planted in a pot and I think we had more sand in it than dirt. Live and learn.

We did learn a lot from our attempts this summer and hope to improve next year. This last year really was a trial garden. We attempted to grow a lot of things, partly because we wanted to be able to harvest a lot, but also just to see how things did.

Homemade ice cream

I'd forgotten how good it is! We made peach ice cream (actually ice milk, since I didn't make it with cream) and brought it to a BBQ Saturday night. It was a hit and caused quite a few people to remark about how they used to make homemade ice cream and should do so again.

The ice cream maker I have is this one:

It was purchased about 20 years ago and was used a lot at first and then spent most of its years in the box. I think I stopped because I was scared away from making ice cream with raw eggs; however, I had forgotten how tasty fruit-based ice milks and sorbets are. Plus they're super easy to make.

This ice cream maker, which you can still buy new today or used from eBay, garage sales, and maybe even thrift stores, is easy to use and turns out a decent frozen treat. Its main feature is a chilled cylinder that you need to pre-freeze for at least 7 hours in the freezer (so it's best to just store it there). You insert the plastic paddle, pour in the blended mixture of your choice, and turn the crank by hand every few minutes. It makes a quart of ice cream in about 1/2 hour (I don't believe the 20 minutes or less on the packaging unless you want very soft ice cream).

The peach ice "milk" I made was following this recipe:

2 cups of peaches (skinned, pitted and cut into quarters)
1 12 ounce can of evaporated milk (I used 2%)
3/4 cup of milk (I used non-fat)
3/4 cup of sugar
1/4 teaspoon almond extract

I used a stick blender to mix everything together but you can also use a blender or food processor.

Promises, promises

Ok, so I didn't post about the lounge pants the next day, like I said I would. I got distracted by peaches and cutting out a new top and work and genealogy stuff and more peaches.

Our peach tree harvest is huge this year. Last year we had no peaches and this year we have 25 billion little peaches. Well, not actually 25 billion, but we did harvest a lot of yellow peaches...and the white peaches are right behind. Unfortunately the yellow peaches were very small, about apricot sized, which made it more time consuming to work with. We tried to thin the fruit and I know I picked off loads of unripe tiny peaches earlier this year to keep the branches from becoming overloaded and breaking, but I guess I didn't do a good enough job.

At least this year I did remember that the first peaches, the yellow ones, are freestone and thus easier to process as peach halves than the white ones, which are not freestone. So far we've processed 10 pints of peaches, squeezed a quart of peach nectar, baked a peach crumble, churned a quart of peach ice milk (no-cream ice cream), and ate a lot of peaches. And there are still more yellow peaches in the fridge and on the tree. And did I mention that the white peaches are nearly ripe? Knowing that they will get mangled trying to cut out the pit, I'm saving those for peach preserves and peach chutney. And more ice cream, which was yummy!

And now, the rest of the farm report:

The zucchini and yellow squash are still going strong. I have to admit that I'm getting just a little tired of eating squash every night. Just a little. The tomatoes are slowly ripening - I'm waiting for the onslaught of ripe tomatoes and the adjustment from squash-based dishes to tomato-based ones. Oh, but nothing beats a vine-ripened tomato. Eating one brings back memories of my childhood in NJ when we used to buy tomatoes (and peaches!) from the local roadside stands. The cucumbers and onions are still producing and providing us with a cucumber salad each evening. The bush beans are on their second wind - either they're supposed to produce like that or the extra watering is helping. We spotted two new pumpkins to bring our total to four - I'm ready for an early Halloween. We have about 4 or 5 cantaloupes that are growing bigger each day and there's one tiny watermelon trying to survive. We ate one ear of our corn and have decided to plant more next year. The rest of the stuff: peppers (sweet and hot), eggplant, beets...they're all chugging along. I went to the grocery store last weekend and didn't buy a single fruit or vegetable, which sadly I know is not an uncommon thing for an American, but my farm report here tells you we are well stocked.

So anyway...the pants. They still need to be hemmed but I'll tell you about them anyway, in more detail than you probably care to read so be prepared. It wasn't a big disaster, but not quite the simple, easy project I wanted to do after my not-so-simple orange summer top. I desperately need some new sweatpants or lounge pants to wear around the house, but just can't bring myself to buy any because the styles are either made for 16-year olds (low on the waist and too tight across my thighs and butt) or I just can't, as a sewer, pay money for pants when I have plenty of fabric to make them. And of everything I sew, these should be the easiest and quickest thing to sew, right? That's what I thought too.

I recently bought some cotton fabric from fabric.com that was labelled as "novelty." Just what "novelty" means is up for interpretation. I know what "novelty yarn" means - generally acrylic in nature and containing bobbles, tufts, metallic thread and usually made into scarves. But when it comes to fashion fabric, "novelty" can range from something that Vicki Lawrence might have worn on a Carol Burnett show skit to a really interesting fabric, that could be of good quality and just doesn't fit any other definition. The "novelty" cotton fabric I bought was actually pretty good. Here is a picture of it, "borrowed" from the fabric.com site:

I also bought it in navy blue. I originally had in mind making some sort of top out of the fabric (I only paid $1.95/yard for it) but when I received it I thought it would be perfect for some lounge pants. It's a bit thinner than sweatpants but is the same weight as some other drawstring pants I bought and wear around the house.

I decided to use this New Look 6730 pattern, which I used for a skirt last year:

I have not sewn many pants for myself because I fear the fitting process. Even elastic-waist pants can cause me grief. As I've been taught, I chose my size based on my hip size, which meant the ginormous size (yes, ginormous is now a word). I could have spent time measuring and altering the pattern but these were supposed to be easy, lounge pants, so I figured I'd just make them in the ginormous size and take them in where needed. I traced off the ginormous size, leaving the pattern intact in case I wanted to traced off a smaller one later (wishful thinking).

I washed the fabric and here is where I encountered the novelty part of the fabric. When I went to lay out my pattern I found that it got all twisted and off-grain. The fabric came as a large tube with the selvages serged together and maybe this caused it to twist in the washer. Or maybe "novelty" means you are to laugh at the novelty of a cheap fabric that gets off-grain when you wash it. Had it not been for the gray and white checks of the fabric, I might not have noticed. Word of caution: check your novelty fabrics (and non-novelty, for that matter) carefully for grain after they've been subjected to the punishment of a washer and dryer.

After much tugging and pulling and coercing, I got the checks lined up and cut out one back leg. One piece down, three to go. Due to the grain problem I decided to cut out the pieces on a single layer. However, with piece #2, I realized my fabric was about an inch too short. I thought 2.5 yards would be enough to lay out two pant pattern pieces next to each other: 90 inches long = 45 inches for each. But I've never checked my measurements and for the whopping cost of $1, I should have sprung for an extra 1/2 yard. I was probably trying to keep my order total from bumping me up to the next shipping charge tier. Thankfully, the fabric was wide and I managed to cut out the remaining three pieces without any creative piecing. Another word of caution (besides not scrimping on fabric): think before you cut. If I'd realized my dilemma I could have positioned the first piece a little better and gained more room for positioning the remaining pieces. This is why "cutting out" is my least favorite part of sewing - too much prep work and even when you think you've got everything figured out, something else happens.

Finally I had all the pieces cut out and could move to the sewing machine. I serged the leg seams and crotch and reinforced the crotch with a utility stitch on the sewing machine. I don't know what the stitch is called. It looks like a straight stitch but it is sewn with both forward and backward stitches. I think it works well for reinforcing stress areas like crotches and underarms. I used an elastic with a built-in drawstring for the waist. First I made a small buttonhole in the front of the pants for the elastic to go through. I wanted the drawstring on the inside, so I made the center of the buttonhole about 1/2 inch from the top. This is half the width of my elastic, which is 1" wide. If you want the drawstring on the outside of the pants, you would position the buttonhole down 1.5 times the width of the elastic. I used a zig-zag stitch to attach the elastic to the upper edge, folded the elastic over, and stitched it down, close to the bottom of the elastic.

Now the big try-on. Plenty of room in the hips and thighs, but the waistband was much too high and I could pull the pants up well above my waist. So out came the elastic and I trimmed off 1" from the top of the pants, put in a new buttonhole, stitched the elastic in, and now they fit ok. I do still have to hem them though.

The annoying part is that if I'd known I was going to lop off 1 inch from the waist band, I could have saved myself the grief I had laying out the pattern pieces on fabric that was just a smidgen too short. I didn't have any problem just cutting down the waistband. I noticed that the pattern was graded so that each next size was taller in the waist (had a longer crotch curve). Those kind of gradings perplex me. Larger people are not necessarily taller. I guess that's why I should pay more attention to the pattern before I cut.

Simple lounge pants. Yeah, right. Nothing I do is simple.

Zucchini Muffins - the bad

The zucchini muffins I tried this weekend did not turn out. Maybe I made a mistake somewhere or maybe there's an error in the recipe. I'd like to find out. I was surprised when I went back to look up the recipe that it's in a Bernard Clayton cookbook: Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads. I hadn't made anything from this cookbook although we really like and use his other book The Breads of France: And How to Bake Them in Your Own Kitchen. Based on this one failure I was ready to give this cookbook away but I may re-think that.

I was going to print the recipe here but realized that I might be violating copyright laws by doing that, although a quick google search revealed that the recipe is already out there.

Here it is (with no reference to Bernard Clayton's book - shame on them)
And here it is again on a blog (with a reference) and it apparently turned out just fine for the author and at least one person who commented. Well. I honestly don't think I made an error. Perhaps it was the applesauce substitution. Or maybe my zucchini was overly moist. Maybe my oven (a Viking, gas convection) was too hot and they simply got done too soon on the outside and not enough on the inside. I have to say that my muffins did look like the ones in the picture on the blog.

Zucchini Bread - the good

This recipe was from a co-worker of mine, a long time ago. Margaret, wherever you are and whatever you're doing, I hope you're well and thank you for this recipe!

Grease 2 5x8 loaf pans
Preheat oven to 325 degrees

Blend together and set aside:
3 cups flour
3 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup nuts (optional, of course)

Mix together
2 cups grated zucchini
3 eggs
2 cups sugar (no, this is not diet bread!)
1 cup oil (I used 1/2 cup oil and 4 oz of applesauce)
3 tsp vanilla (oops, I realize now I forgot the vanilla and it still turned out tasty)

Mix well and add flour mixture to zucchini mixture. Pour into 2 greased 5x8 loaf pans
Bake 1 hour
Cool about 10 minutes in pan and remove