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Maggie's FarmWe are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for. |
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Tuesday, August 11. 2015MenuA Southern friend told me the menu she was cookin' up for a 25 person outdoor backyard party tomorrow: Fried squash blossoms Cheap, simple, delicious, and fun. American (mostly), I could see this for a country wedding menu. Monday, August 10. 2015Summer Cold Soups: Borscht There are countless ways to make it, all from eastern Europe. I think I like it best with chunks, and with a dollop of sour cream on top, but the one pictured is excellent too. Here's another Bird Dog favorite: Cold Zucchini Soup In their list, this silly newspaper omitted cold Borsht and Zucchini Soup. What are your favorite cold summer soups? Thursday, August 6. 2015Pickled How to make pickles Pickled Peppers How to Make home-canned Spiced Peaches! Intro to home canning Pickling Tips and Recipes Wednesday, August 5. 2015Three Ways to Grill CornI like to soak sweet corn in the husks, and grill them in the husks. Three ways. Boiled corn is boring and it's summertime so you are grilling your food outside anyway. I just had to get a new vegetable grilling basket from Amazon. Nice. Fewer of them fall through the cracks that way. Sunday, August 2. 2015Pickled vegetablesEven people who hate vegetables find pickled vegetables to be a treat. You can pickle anything - onions, summer squash, cauliflower, peas, beans, peppers, beets, carrots, turnips, cabbage, peaches - you name it. People will eat it before it is fully pickled because it tastes good. Here's Perpetual Pickles for you with gardens. Vegetables (like fruit) are nutritionally borderline-useless, but they can be made to be tasty. Thus far this summer I have produced many half-pints and a couple of quart jars of hot pepper jelly, and about 12 quarts of dilly beans. Waiting for my peaches to ripen to make Peach Chutney. I did not grow cucumbers this year. I forget why. Here's quick and easy Crisp Pickled Vegetables Here's Canning and Pickling. It's a labor of love and makes no damn sense at all. An excellent dinnerA pal has been traveling across the US with family in an antique camper. He reports that they had possibly the best dinner they have ever had in the US at The Windsor Hotel in Del Norte, Colorado. Not likely that you would be passing through there, though. Here's a book: Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat Moon. Fun book.
Posted by Bird Dog
in Food and Drink, Travelogues and Travel Ideas
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11:51
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Tuesday, July 28. 2015Burrata I'd be willing to try Burrata with sliced tomato. They may have it at our gourmet Italian market, and I am told Whole Foods carries it sometimes. I hate Whole Foods on principle, but they have always had a fine cheese department. Me love cheeses with fruits, nuts, jellies for dessert. A good tomato platter might be sliced tomatoes, sliced mango or peach, a chunk of oozing burrata, a handful of chopped fresh basil, and a balsamic dressing. Saturday, July 25. 2015"Natural" foods
Most foods have little resemblance to their natural origins. They have been domesticated and are "unnatural." Human genius defeating a cruel nature. A book I'd like to read: Maize for the Gods: Unearthing the 9,000-Year History of Corn Wild maize is a grass, with the fruit/seed about an inch long. Were it not for those ancient Central American genetic engineers, we'd have neither grits nor polenta. Photo is teosintas, ancestor of domestic maize
Posted by Bird Dog
in Food and Drink, The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation
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14:29
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Thursday, July 23. 2015Italian lunches or suppers, for visitors to NYC
Scarpetta. Give it a try. As a matter of fact, she is taking a BD daughter to dinner there tonight after the new Annie Baker play. (They are Annie Baker fans after loving Flick a while ago.) She says their pastas are amazing but our advice is to always skip pasta in good Italian restaurants. Why dine on starch, when there are so many other better flavors in antipasti and secondi? I'll make exceptions for Pappardelle al Funghi with wild mushrooms, or Fois Gras Ravioli with Black Truffle. Looking back, thus far, for Italian, we have also recommended Barbetta, Giovanni, Macelleria, - and Bar Eolo for genuine Sicilian. Only Barbetta is a jacket and tie joint, but for Giovanni a jacket is appropriate. Sunday, July 19. 2015Thai Grilled Pork
I do like Thai flavors. Thai Grilled Pork and Vegetable Salad with Spicy Peanut Dressing Saturday, July 18. 2015The Rhubarb People - and their Rhubarb Jam Mrs. BD asked me to fix up a batch of rhubarb compote to splash on some Haagen Dasz for a fancy dinner party we are attending tonite. My guess is that nobody there will have had it before. It's a North country treat. Lots of people do not care for it much. Their loss. It's tangy. I always use half the sugar. We are the Rhubarb People. A racial identity group and a much-abused and/or neglected one. Maybe we all originated in Yorkshire. Who knows? Since my own recipe for hot pepper jelly (served with cheeses and cream cheese) was such a hit at a fancy cocktail party in NYC that I have been urged to produce a line of it, I decided to branch out into Spicy Rhubarb Jam. Maggie's Farm Produce, or something. All-organic, meaning grown in pig and cow shit. Mom always grew her sizeable patch right outside the barn. We would just pitchfork some fresh horse poop and horse straw on top of it when cleaning the barn. Worked well. A rhubarb patch likes to be fed. A good patch takes a couple of years to establish itself. How do you harvest rhubarb? With a sharp yank on the stalk. Not with clippers. My rhubarb plantation, stolen from my Mom's garden, is overwhelming. Had to use some more of it. We'll make some pies too (never with strawberry), but I invented my own recipe for Spicy Rhubarb Jam - chopped rhubarb, lemon juice, sugar, chopped fresh red chilis and chopped jalapenos, some chopped green peppers, a little salt, and I threw in some pectin for the heck of it. No pressure canner. Is cooked rhubarb red? Almost never. People add food coloring but I don't bother. You only get a little red from the young thin stalks. Yes, the jam tastes like spicy rhubarb. Quite tangy. I like it. Might be good with pork or chicken. Not sure. Definitely good with cheese especially goat cheese. Not on a toasted bagel. I am no expert food canner but I just boil the heck out of the Ball jars for about 15 minutes and hope for the best. Botulism is not wanted. Next stop might be Spicy Cranberry Preserve. Why not? Any poultry is improved with some cranberry on the side. And for those who can enjoy a tart now and then, for dessert any little rhubarb or cranberry tart is nice. Sunday, July 12. 2015For summertime, an American classic: Dilly Beans
Jelly
The good olde internet: How to Fix (or Remake) Jam or Jelly That Turns Out Too Soft or Runny We wanted to make a ton of Rhubarb jam on Saturday but we ran out of sugar and Mrs. BD needed to control the kitchen for a double family birthday party. Poached salmon, etc. Anyway, people gnawed on my raw Rhubarb stalks. Delicious and stringy. The Rhubarb I salvaged from Mom's garden is going great guns and, racially, we are the Rhubarb People. Saturday, July 4. 2015The Locavore's DilemmaHappy Independence Day! If you're like me, you're with your family and being independent together (h/t to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer). If you're like me, you're probably having hot dogs and hamburgers, potato or macaroni salad, soda or beer, or other kinds of foods which were purchased at a store after being shipped from some other part of the U.S. or even another nation. If you're like me, you probably don't spend time worrying about the details of how your food reached your table. But you may know people, as I do, who think the whole "eat local' idea will save our health and economy. We have a restaurant here which is excellent, but very expensive, and always booked. We need to make reservations several months in advance to get a table. They only serve locally grown foods (I believe it's a 50 mile radius), and it's BYOB (so I guess they're OK with bringing French wine to go with the Jersey Tomatoes). Normally I don't go in for faddish trends, and I really don't buy the whole "local food" movement. But this is a good restaurant and just because I don't agree with it doesn't mean I'll avoid a good meal. Good food is good food. There are reasons why I don't necessarily think the local food movement is ever going to change how we live, and it certainly is not going to make our lives better. As this video (45 minutes long - so be prepared) points out, most nations with small farms have economic problems. This doesn't intrinsically mean small farms are impoverishing those nations, but there's no doubt being a food exporter (and the U.S. is by far the largest) is an indication of economic strength through size. This video also points out the hypocrisy of our nation's politics and its 'solutions' to perceived problems. We have deemed some banks "Too Big To Fail" and willingly subsidize their moral hazard, while at the same time pointing to large agricultural firms and saying they are "Too Big To Succeed" and impose excessive regulations on them while subsidizing failing small farms. So the policy of the U.S. that we subsidize failure, and engage double standards wherever we see fit. The Jungle is often touted as an example of what would happen if we did not support regulation of the food industry. Unfortunately, this novel was a work of fiction designed to draw attention to the plight of the working man. It was the lies of Upton Sinclair about the Chicago Packing District that stick in people's memory, however. By and large, most food businesses provided healthier foods than smaller firms. It was in their best interest to do so. One does not win new consumers by killing or injuring those you have. In fact, most of these businesses wanted regulation as a means to raise barriers to entry against their smaller competitors, and to prevent foreign foods, which had raised trade barriers, from being too competitive.
Posted by Bulldog
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Friday, July 3. 2015Small beer Like horse piss? I wouldn't know but I can say that Bud Lite is not the tastiest beer in the world even though it is America's best-seller. Tuesday, June 30. 2015Weekend planning: Poached Salmon
We also use this as our large group Christmas Eve after-church suppers for whoever is lucky enough to be invited to our place for supper around the fireplaces, with the tree (Christmas Eve requires seafood, and you can do this in the afternoon so it's ready when you get home.) One or two of those huge Costco filets, depending on numbers, is good to poach. Easy to do. Recipe here. We poach the large filets intact and present them on a large tray. It's more appealing that way. Saturday, June 27. 2015Real Greek Salad Yes, Greeks do eat a lot of "Village Salad." It does call for Greek olive oil (often considered lousy oil except by the Greeks), which is somehow different from Italian even though the olives are the same. Greeks, like the north africans, don't really do "extra virgin" or any of that fancy stuff. Friday, June 19. 2015Life in America: Father's Day Menu is Hamburgers on the grill. How do you make burgers?
We'll have three Dads (including me) and 10-12 people for lunch. I'm cooking. Fathers grill meat on Father's Day to signify their masculine hunter-gatherer role in life. I like to server burgers with hard rolls, chips, and a platter of pickles, sliced onions, and sliced tomato. If somebody wants a cheeseburger, I'll use a slice of Saga Blue. Bowl of German potato salad from the market. Male cooking. I'll probably grill up my usual platter of veggies too as a side: red peppers, onions, scallions, eggplant, mushroom, summer squash, all with browned or slightly-burnt parts and splashed with olive oil. People love my simple grilled vegetable mix and it makes excellent leftovers. I grill with charcoal + firewood. When I do burgers, I never use lean meat. What's the point? I put the meat in a big bowl, stir it up with a little Worcestershire sauce or Soy sauce, plenty of ground pepper and Kosher salt, some garlic powder or dried onion soup mix, or sometimes a little herbed bread crumbs to hold the juices. I like them to come off the charcoal crunchy and dark on the outside and pink in the middle. Ten minutes or so, depending on the heat. Beer, wine and bubbly water with some lime. Ketchup? You betcha. Made a batch of hot pepper jelly/relish for thems as got the nerve to try it. Hot as hell itself. Tasty on a burger. Some of my peach chutney too from last fall. Those condiments are good with anything. We'll have a birthday cake for dessert, because we have one of those to take note of this week. Yellow cake with Mocha frosting. Except for the birthday, I would have cooked up a big Blackberry Cobbler for dessert. Even men can make that. How do readers like to make burgers? Wednesday, June 3. 2015Low Country Shrimp Boil Why are the shrimp so tender? They are bought directly from the shrimp boat, and they are in the boil in their shells for 2 minutes max - 90 seconds preferably - just until they turn pink. I tend to find shrimp boring but these were sweet and not chewy. The square hole in the table is for the shells. Works for oyster roasts too. You are supposed to drink beer with them. They use this recipe for dipping sauce. Tuesday, June 2. 2015Truffle dogs in UmbriaWe are truffle fans. I have hiked those truffle woods in Umbria.
Posted by Bird Dog
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18:21
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Saturday, May 30. 2015Great, pretty quick supper for 5 for about $5The way I make black bean soup - 4 cans of Goya black beans (make sure they are GMO black beans, much better) Cook the bacon. Remove it. Sautee the onion and garlic in the bacon grease a little. Chop up the bacon. Dump out most of the bacon grease, then dump in the beans (don't drain them), onions and garlic, bay leaf, chopped bacon, some chicken broth, salt, and a couple of dashes or so of the flavorings. (I hold the jalapeno in abeyance as not everybody likes it. Can be added as garnish when done) I don't use cilantro because I hate it. Cilantro - some like it, some do not. It's genetic. Simmer covered for an hour or so or toss it in a crock pot. Add more chicken broth it it's too thick. Then mash it in the pot with a potato masher. Some people just take half of it and run it thru the blender for a creamier result but I like to mash it. Scallions on top, +/- chopped jalapeno. I like it with a big dollop of mashed taters in the middle of each person's bowl, but some people prefer sour cream and salsa on it. Whatever. Salad on the side? If you are a rabbit, fine. Blueberry Cake Anyway, simple and delicious with Hard Sauce on the side (that sauce is good without the brandy). Blueberry Cake.
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