Farmer’s market suppers are back!

My favorite thing about summer is having a fridge full of produce.  In winter, I tend to make menus, buy the stuff I need, and go from that.  In summer, I go to the market, buy food, and THEN decide what to eat.  Tonight, after a sleepless night camping in the rain with my daughter’s 4-H group, I wanted something easy.  I tossed together some quinoa, some new potatoes and shelled peas from Summer’s Creek, some hard boiled eggs from South Mountain, a red onion from MOMs (I flash-pickled it: pour boiling water over diced onion and then cover them in vinegar and oil for a bit, until they’re a lovely pink), and a balsamic/olive oil dressing.  It was yummy and easy.  The eggs really pull it all together.

Gazette Article Spurs Return to Long-abandoned Blog

On the off chance that someone actually looks here after the article in the Gazette, I feel like I should post something…

Farmer’s Markets are back!  Woo!  We’re still at the early stages which means a lot of radishes and greens, but I’m chowing on the last of the snow peas.  Hipster Food Dude (that’s what I call one of the Farmer’s Mkt guys.  He informed me that his French radishes were “the bomb.”  They were in fact, like a bomb of spiciness went off in my mouth)  tells me there will be sugar snaps next week.  That was at the N. Frederick market.  He goes to Baughman’s Ln, too.  Baughman’s is still the best, if only b/c Rick Hood of Summer’s Creek is there.  Great guy, great produce, great prices.  AND he has organic chicken feed.

Yes, we have chickens again.  My first chicken attempt only lasted a few months.  I got two hens from the Frederick Fair and boarded them with a friend who had a lot of chickens.  Boarding one’s chickens seems so fancy.  I should have made them little plaid skirts and given them eating disorders.  Anyway, one of them died before I got them home, and I brought my single chicken, Mildred, to live at Two Gables (her coop I made from an old dresser) in April.  She entertained us and gave us an egg a day until September, when  a fox had her for dinner.  A fox in the henhouse really felt so cliched.  We expected more of her.  So I’m building a bigger, hopefully more predator-proof coop out of wood I hauled out of Bulk Trash.  There are ten rapidly-growing chickens in my daughter’s room.  In a guinea pig cage, not just wandering about like it was a little third world country.  Although that’s not far off, really.

It’s the last day of school, which means last day of making school lunches!  Yay yay yay!  Really, that’s my biggest food challenge–variety in lunches.  Becoming gluten intolerant led me on a journey of nutritional study and I’ve come to believe we need to be eating FAR less carby-goodness.  But if I take out sammiches and pastas?  Makes lunch more challenging.  Not that there aren’t still plenty of things to eat, it’s just not as fast.  And I’m pretty lazy.  So my summer journey will be greatly reducing the amount of flours (and not just the usual Evil of white flour–ALL flours) and sugars.  We’ll be Atkins Vegetarians! :O)  I’ll just pack each kid a stick of butter, a couple of carrots, and some salsa for lunch.  Hmm…

For now, I’ll just eat all the strawberries and fresh cream my gullet can hold.  Welcome to any new folks, and I’ll try to be a bit better about the writing.  Next: This year’s garden!

Hello, fellow GFers!

I got a couple of comments on the Gluten Free reveal, so hello to you!  But best of all was Shannon pointing out that Moxie (new bakery on N. Market that I was feeling bitter about not being able to sample) sometimes has GF goodies.  I also hear tell that La Dolce Vita over on Carroll Creek does, too, and even sometimes has GF buns for their sandwiches.  Woo!  I’ve eaten at both Volt and Isabella’s with my new diagnosis and found it easy to dine.  At Volt I was getting the express menu, so I just asked for things w/o bread or croutons or what have you.  no trouble.

This weekend, I was near Berkeley Springs, WV with some friends and we went to Panorama at the Peak Restaurant.  First–the VIEW!  Holy moly.  I live on top of Braddock Mountain and I have a pretty nice view of the Middletown valley from my back porch, but it’s like a view of a brick wall compared to what you see from Panorama.  The menu at this time of year is about 90% local.  Entrees were in the 17-30 dollar range for dinner, but there were sandwiches earlier in the day that looked good.  It’s very cozy (the weather was cold and wet, so that fireplace was welcome) and seemed to be pretty popular.  GF items are clearly labeled, woo!  The food was very good.  Not Volt-good (or, honestly, Isabellas-good), and probably not worth the prices, but a nice treat nonetheless.  I was only feeding myself, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.  If I’d had my family along, I’d likely have…well, I”d have left when I saw the prices.  Can’t feed a family of 5 there.  I’d try it again if in the area and either alone or with my husband.

So, fellow shunners of the Evil Gluten–where else to you eat around town?  Not being able to eat Asian foods is KILLING me.  know of anyplace in the DC or B-more area that’s using tamari instead of soy sauce?

a new purpose…

Okay, hi, I’m back.  I’ve kind of wandered off and returned with a new purpose here.  I’ve been diagnosed as gluten intolerant and I’m having to adjust my diet.  As I’m mentioned, I loooove bread.  But apparently bread hates me.  A lot.  And it makes holes in my gut and makes me sick.  So a fie on bread.  I’ll spare you my new zealotry about gut health and the importance of gastrointestinal testing, but if you want to know more, drop me a line.

What that means here is that I’m going to be on the prowl for GF veggie places to eat and checking out a lot of products.  I know that the key to my health improving is to eliminate the vast majority of processed foods from my life.  I also know that I NEED some for convenience and sanity.  I was on the Eat To Live diet when I started this blog and it was, coincidentally, largely gluten free.  I felt really good on it, but my laziness and love of bread sent me back to the processed food.  Sure, they were the crunchy granola “clean” products from the Common Market and MOMs, but still.  As was pointed out in the very cool blog “Little House in the Suburbs,”  it’s better to eat a pesticide-ridden conventionally grown peach than to eat organic bunny crackers.  good to remember.

That said, I miss some of my convenience foods.  Pizza, for one.  Tonight we had home-made pizzas on Kinnikkinnick personal pizza crusts.  The family’s primary gluten-free bread-winner is out of town, so the 4-to-a-package size was perfect.  They were good!  Even the kids liked them.  The company makes GF donuts, too, so I kind of love them.

I like sausage on my pizza.  In the past, that was no problem as veggie sausage is easy to come by and pretty yummy.  It seems to be the easiest fake meat to make tasty.  I was mad for Field Roast’s Apple Sage sausage.  But of course they are wheat, wheat, wheat.  Gardenburger USED to make a GF sausage, but when Kelloggs bought them, they added wheaty evil.  Bastards.  So I tried making my own.

I used this recipe:

http://www.vegfamily.com/vegan-recipes/entrees/breakfast-sausage.htm

I ended up mixing the spices and tomato paste into the bean and flour mixture, AND I used sorghum flour b/c I only had potato starch and not potato flour.  The texture is not at all sausagey.  It’s kind of…sawdusty.  But the taste is actually pretty close.  I crumbled some up on my pizza and while it didn’t give me the nuggets of chewy, it did give me the sausage taste.  I’ll mess around with the recipe, I think, see what I can come up with.

Meanwhile–any GF vegetarians out there with a great veggie sausage lead?  Leave it in the comments…

Bean Garden update

Well, if society falls and the grocery stores close and the zombies attack at least we’ll have beans.

yes, the weeds lining the garden are spectacular.

There are a lot of bug nibbles on the leaves and some on the beans, but I think I’ll still have plenty in the end.

koronis purple

The newpaper and straw method has worked well. Weeds do poke up here and there, but the earth stays moist enough under that stuff (or at least it has in this blessedly wet summer) that I can yank them up easily.

Now I have to hope they dry quickly enough that I can enter them in the fair!

Gardening update

The rain is making my beans grow like crazy.  I went down to thin them and they were a foot high!  And liberally munched on by some nefarious creature…

whatever it is, it doesn't like oregano...

Now you know I”m captain organic, but seeing that made me reach for the DDT.  Luckily, we were out.  When I can see the critters, I can pluck them off, but I could find nothing on the leaves.  Well, except bug doots and gaping holes.  So I got some BioNEEM from the Common Market.  It’s “Safer brand”  for what that is worth.  I don’t mind if the plants aren’t pretty, but I do need them to survive to produce beans.

I also thinned them, which seems just mean at this stage.  They’re all half-grown.  It’s like a partial-birth thinning.  But I did it, and I removed the plastic cups and some of the paper ones.  They’re all tall and bean-y:

They’re all supposed to be bush varieties.  Let’s hope that’s true.

Found this little guy while I was weeding:

No coat. Must've lost it on Mr.MacGregor's fence.

Cute little bugger.  Better not eat my plants.

More good Middletown eats

I had lunch at The Main Cup in Middletown today.  I’ve eaten there several times and it’s been consistently good.  Last week I had a great salad with goat cheese and candied nuts.  Today I had the grilled veggies on cibatta bread–super yum.  The pasta salad I got on the side had a good flavor, but the texture was off…gummy somehow.  I’ve gotten the “build your own bruschetta” before and it was enough for a light meal on its own.  There are loads of veggie options, the prices are good, the atmosphere is charming.  Patio dining!  It’s not fast food, so if you’re in a hurry, it might not be your best bet, but it’s not unreasonably slow for made-to-order food.

If your dining partner swings both ways, my husband said the fish and chips was the best he’s had in Frederick County.

check it out!

Grocery stores

I need to grumble.  I do most of my grocery shopping at MOMs or The Common Market, depending on whether I’m feeling more loyal to my former employer and friend or my vague socialist leanings.  But sometimes I do need to go to a “regular” grocery.  Leaving aside the heart palpitations I get when I see what other people are eating or, worse, feeding their kids (and this is not a money thing, really, non-organically-grown apples are still FAR better for your kids than green apple fruit gushers.  Whole wheat gross soft bread costs the same as the same brand of white),  the check out is leaving me snarly.  I’m a union supporter (see “vague socialist leanings,” above), so I like to go to a store with unionized employees.  I used to shop at Giant before Izzy retired and it all went to crap.  When I lived downtown, I shopped at the 7th street Safeway, where the employees never. ever. change (that’s the sign of either a good employer or a hostage situation).  Now that I’m in Braddock, my conventional grocery needs could be met by the Middletown Safeway.  But oh  my  god  it is the slowest store in the world.  When gas was $10 a gallon, I shopped more at Giant Eagle so that I could get gas credits and I came to looooove that self-scan thing where I can ring up my groceries as I go and check myself out in about 2 minutes.  Love.  To go from that to the…European service at the Middletown store?  Oh the pain.  I have rung groceries and I have bagged (see “former employer,” above) and it is not that hard, people.  It doesn’t even require a lot of focus, really. Ringing should not take that long.  Bagging should not be that…”inept” is too passive.  It was almost aggressively contemptuous.  Bananas never go on the bottom.  Ditto tomatoes.  Someone bringing her own bags is not license to shove every thing in one bag, with the apples on the tippy top, ignoring the PILE of spare cloth bags just laying there.   GAH!  Friendly and relaxed is nice.  It is.  But efficient really is what I’m looking for.  Rant over.  I thank you for your time.

Garden 2009

This weekend was glorious and the weather motivated me to get cracking on this year’s gardening experiment.  Last year, I started Square Foot Gardening and made 3 raised garden beds.  This year, I gave over one of those beds to flowers, one has greens and sugar snap peas, and the one on the deck has tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers.  The big garden went to seed last year, and was home to Mildred the chicken the previous year.  But this year, I was determined to use it.

I joined Seedsavers during the winter, and when the catalog came, I was just stunned by the sheer variety of dry beans available.  An early bout of I Must Win at the Fair kicked in and I decided that my goal would be a ribbon-winning soup bean mix.  I have no idea if that is even a category, but surely mine would be so amazing that they’d make one just so I could win it.  I filled out order forms to get a nice range of colors and waited for spring.  With spring came weird weather, a gazillion end-of-school-year child obligations, and little spare time, which meant I didn’t get down to the garden until this weekend.

Confession: I really only like gardening until about mid-June.  Then I’m done.  That’s why square foot was nice–little weeding, and I could just slap a flower in a spot I no longer felt like dealing with.  The big garden is alllll the way down in my yard.  It is a pathetic fact that I seldom go down into the yard b/c that means I have to trudge back up the hill to get to the house.  One generation out of the mountains and I’m already spoiled.  In past years, that garden has been abandoned toward the end of the summer, crops left to rot and pestilence.  I know what I’m up against–my lazy is strong–so I am planning accordingly and trying out something new.

I hoed and weeded the whole plot and covered it with newspaper and straw.  I’m told this will inhibit weed growth.  I hope it is true.  Then I dug little holes, placed a paper cup that I’ve cut the bottoms out of in the hole, dropped in four beans, and covered them with earth.

I’ll pull out all the the strongest of the sprouts.  My hope is that I’ll have this nice straw-strewn plot with bean plants poking up.  They’re all bush beans, but I’m wondering if I should have cages ready nonetheless…

I’ve planted between 3 and 5 each (or it will be once I’ve thinned) of 11 varieties of bean.

see? Look how far DOWN it is!

“Damn Girl,” you must be thinking, “you must eat a lot of beans!”  No.  Actually I do not.  I have nothing against them, but canned beans are mushy and I just don’t have good luck getting dried beans to cook.  I don’t know if I have a lousy source or a cursed house, or what, but I’m hoping that growing my own will be the ticket.  Plus, while listening to The Splendid Table, I heard of a book about heirloom beans from Rancho Gordo.  So I ordered that and it looks fab, plus there’s a pretty cool, if not particularly vegetarian, blog.  And, of course, I am always inspired by Mary Jane Butters and fancy the FarmGirl life.  in the abstract, of course.  In reality I am deeply suspicious.

Aleko’s–Great Greek for Vegetarians!

Oh happy discovery!  Aleko’s Village Cafe has opened in Middletown.  It’s inside the Fountaindale Sunoco, where there used to just be subs and ice cream.  There are still subs and ice cream, but they no longer matter at all b/c there’s super yummy vegetarian food…and baklava (insert Homer Simpson drooling noise).

Owned and operated by the Tsinonis family (the NICEST people), Aleko’s offers plenty of standard carnivore fare (well, it might be fantastic, but I don’t need to care about that) as well as the spanikoptia and Tiropita that we veggies turn to, but the big difference here is Vegetarian Gyros.  They’re made with Morningstar Farms steak strips, which are pretty processed and far from actual food, but oh the yum!  It’s the real deal (except for the absence of lamb…the silence of the lamb…sorry), tasty strips, tzatziki, feta, lettuce tomato, onion, and french fries–yes, french fries, as god intended.  So good.

I popped in for lunch today and got a gyro and some sweets.  There are several kinds of cookie and mini baklava, as well as big ol’ baklava and rice pudding.  This afternoon, I tried the Melomakarona (honey cookies), the Koulouraki (Butter Cookies), and Kourambides (wedding cookies).  The gyro, as mentioned, was great.  The honey cookies were good, they tasted like gingerbread soaked in honey.  Crazy sweet.  The butter cookies were just barely sweet, with a dry crumbly texture that called out for a cup of coffee to go with them.  The wedding cookies were that cookie that every culture seems to have–Russian teacake, Mexican Wedding cake, Shortbread–these are almond instead of the pecan that often turns up, and are good.  Covered in powdered sugar, though, so be prepared to dust off.

Lunch was good enough that I decided to get take-out for dinner (Oh, really there can only be take-out.  In nice weather, you can sit at the picnic tables outside, but there is no inside seating) since I run a 4-H meeting on Wednesdays and don’t have time to cook dinner.  I called ahead for 2 Spankakopita, 2 Tiropita, one Veg. Gyro, and an order of Feta Fries.  When I got there, the owner (lovely woman) told me that they had run out of Spanakopita but she had more in the oven.  She offered to have someone drive it to my house, but didn’t think it would get there before 8.  Since I was feeding 3 kids, I said I’d pass, but then she suggested I could just finish baking it at home.  Brilliant!  I also grabbed some rice pudding (made, apparently, by the owner’s son) and a slab of the big baklava as well as one each of the wee ones.

While the spanakopita baked and the tiropita warmed, we ate the feta fries–they’re boardwalk-style, which isn’t my favorite, but the feta made them worth eating.  The kids hoovered them.  The tiropita was a huge hit with the kids and I’d be quite happy to eat it again.  The filo is super flakey and not at all greasy.  The spanakopita was still baking, so we took a sweets break: The baklava–available by the mini pan or by the slice–made my eyes roll back in my head.  Buttery, honey-y, nutty yum.  The minis are available by the pound.  They were good, but after the big baklava…no contest.  Then the long-awaited spanakopita was done.  It was a bit too spinach-y for the kids.  I thought it was fantastic, as I usually don’t think there’s enough spinach in my spinach pie.  It isn’t at all heavy, which is a nice change.  The rice pudding was our end note.  Delicious, good old-fashioned kind.  This is not Kozy Shack (not that I won’t eat that by the vat, too), but a product that clearly contains rice.  The kids were licking the bowls, so I’m thinking they approved, too.

When I mentioned to the owner that vegetarians were going to be so excited to find the meatless gyros, she exclaimed over how many vegetarians she’d seen.  Then she said, “I can make lots of other vegetarian things, just ask next time.  So I’ll be back. Oh yes.