Cooking Demonstration at Socrates Greenmarket, August 10

socrates-greenmarket-j-glebocki farm-greens-potatoes-astoria-queens

This weekend, Saturday, August 10, I’ll be doing a cooking demonstration at the Socrates Greenmarket, located in the Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria. I did one last year, which was really fun, where I prepared a Mexican Panzaella. This year I’ll be making a corn and peach salad. Yum, summer.

The cooking demo will be from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. It should be fun and delicious! Yes, there will be samples. Plus you can check out the rest of the market, which sells everything from produce to cheese, juice to coffee. The bread is also awesome. I’m definitely going to stick around and enjoy the day. The park has some works on display, too.

Socrates Greenmarket, Socrates Sculpture Park, Broadway and Vernon Blvd., Astoria, Queens, 11106 (map)

Tomato Harvest

tomato harvest mid-august

Now that it’s August, the tomato plants have really started producing. This is what I collected over a few days. There are Stupice, Blondköpfchen, Tommy Toe, Silver Fir, and Mexican Midget tomatoes in this bowl. Everything has been delicious. I’ll likely make some of this into jam. Lacto fermented salsa is on the schedule once more of the larger tomatoes ripen (or I purchase a tomato share from my CSA).

Change of Seasons

fall leaves

This is the first year in a long time that I’ve been eager for autumn to arrive.

Usually, I lament its arrival – the air cools down and the leaves fall, alerting me to the impending Dreaded Winter.  I am forced to change over my wardrobe to longer sleeved tops and pants, heavier clothing in general, and am always a little sad to put my shorts away.  However – and I wrote about this often – this summer was a scorcher, so cooler weather is truly welcome.  I actually feel a bit cheated out of my summer because on many days the only option was to stay inside with the air conditioner on.  As someone who likes to be outside, this was a disappointment.

Our ConEd bill will also decrease, which will be a relief.

Along with my welcoming of the cool, crisp fall air this year, I also welcome back a number of foods I set aside while it was hot and I didn’t want to turn on the oven: I’m cooking more whole grains, including steel cut oats for breakfast; granola and bread baking are in my plans for next weekend; and roasting winter squash!  This might be my favorite cooking technique in the cooler seasons.

We’ve been getting these hard squashes in our CSA shares for a few weeks, and they have been fantastic.  The other day I cut an acorn squash in half, scooped out the seeds, then cut each half into three pieces.  Then I roasted them with olive oil, salt, and cumin. They were amazing!

Sauerkraut season is around the corner, too, which is very exciting.  This should herald the arrival of a Harsch crock to our home.  I’d also like to make some kimchi this fall, too.  All lacto-fermented, of course.

I’m back to drinking raw milk, too – I was eating raw yogurt but not straight milk for a couple of months. I have a lot of milk in the freezer right now!  Not sure why I stopped for a little while, but my guess was that it had something to do with the warm weather, and my not eating cereal (homemade granola or porridge – I don’t eat commercial cold cereal) for breakfast.  Most of my milk intake happens at breakfast.

My running should also click back into gear – due to a couple a colds and simply overly hot and humid weather, my running suffered in August and September.  Running keeps me centered and healthy, both physically and mentally; the cooler temperatures can only facilitate getting back into a regular routine.  Truth be told, my favorite running weather is sunny with temperatures in the mid-50s.

And with a new season, comes a few changes to the blog.  I’ve cut things down to two columns, giving the content area more space.  Images can be bigger this way, too.  I’ve also added a polling feature, so I’ll showcase polls from time to time.  I’ll also be doing some more fiddling around, so you should see minor changes come and go for a little while longer.

I’m excited by this new season – it feels like a kind of restart, or at least a return to a more varied life.   Fall, I’m happy to see you!

The End of Summer

Although it’s still warm here in NYC, since Labor Day it’s really felt like summer has ended. Once the temperatures become more moderate, it will really feel like fall.  I am of mixed feelings about this – normally I don’t care much about or for fall, in my mind it’s just the transition season to The Dreaded Winter.  I am not big on the frigid weather of the Northeast.  However, this year’s summer was so terribly scorching hot, with multiple 90+ degree temperature days in a row, cooler weather can’t come soon enough.  I am eager for fall.

First tipoff to the transition out of summer – I received an acorn squash in my CSA share this past week.  I’ll save it for a cooler day, though – I absolutely love winter squash of all kinds, so this is an awesome score!

I expect I’ll have some green tomatoes to fry later in the season.  To my surprise, my paste and Prudens Purple tomatoes are still producing!  I really thought the Prudens Purple tomato was on its way out for sure, but there are a few little tomatoes on the plant, and none have blossom end rot so far.

I think the BER problem really was with me – I don’t believe I watered the tomatoes nearly enough this year, which would explain how nutrients couldn’t get to the fruit.  I’ve been watering more intensely this past few weeks, and all the tomatoes are doing much, much better.  I have close to a dozen little paste tomatoes hanging on, too!

The mystery plant – the one that looked like a cucumber plant – is not a cucumber at all.  I think it might be a melon or a winter squash – the fruit is small and hard, about the size of a large fig.  I have no idea where it came from, but I’m enjoying watching it grow and do its thing.

In general, the garden is looking quite rag-tag. The lemon cucumbers are at their end; the tomatillos did not fruit one whit; the tomato plants are looking scraggly.  It’s a little scary looking out there right now.

I’ll be in Portland OR for a few days and hope to enjoy some of the delicious food in the Pacific Northwest.  I’ll bring my camera and take pictures and share some of them here after I return.

Farro and Summer Vegetable Salad

farro summer vegetable salad

I did not plan this salad.  It just sort of came to be through improvisation; I like to cook in this way.  Recipes are great, don’t get me wrong, and I enjoy using them, but it’s also nice to take what you have and come up with something delicious, which this most certainly is. Or, was – I ate it all within a 24 hour period.  It was that good.

First, though – what is farro?  Farro is an ancient whole wheat grain also known as Emmer; it’s also related to spelt.  It looks like large barley or even a bit like freekeh, and is medium brown in color.  It has a toothsome texture and mild, nutty flavor.  It has slightly less protein than quinoa, but has almost twice the fiber. You cook it like most grains – soak then simmer in a pot til the water (or stock) absorbs.  My farro comes from Cayuga Organics via my CSA.

So, Tuesday morning I decided I wanted to cook some grains.  I looked in the pantry and the first grain I spied was the farro.  So, I brought it down, put it in my soaking bowl, added water and raw vinegar and let it soak while I was at work.

That night I picked up my CSA shares – the veggie share was full of summer vegetables, and I knew their robust flavors would go well with the farro.

I took what I had – red peppers, leeks, zucchini, tomatoes – and mixed it with the cooked farro, along with some feta and lemon juice.  The salad was so delicious!  It was hearty and satisfying without weighing me down.  The flavors were sharp and clear and they all mixed together to make an excellent dish.  It was wonderfully savory.

I would make this again… in fact, I probably will make it again next week!  It was fantastic the next day, too – the flavors had married and tasted a bit deeper.  Definitely a good dish to bring as leftovers to work.

Farro and Summer Vegetable Salad

1 cup dry farro
soaking water and an acid (I used raw apple cider vinegar; lemon juice would work, too)
juice and zest of 1 lemon
kosher salt
1 leek, finely chopped
1 small red, orange, or yellow bell pepper, chopped
1 small zucchini, julienned, then the matchsticks cut in half to the length of an inch or so
1/4 cup feta cheese (Bulgarian feta is my favorite), crumbled
2 tablespoons pine nuts (raw or toasted)
1-2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
1/2 pint cherry tomatoes, each cut in half

Put the cup of dry farro in a bowl, cover with water and a splash of acid, and let soak for 8-10 hours.  When the soaking time is up, drain the farro and put in a saucepan with 1 cup of water.  Bring it to a boil, then let it simmer until almost all the water has been absorbed, about 20-25 minutes.  Rinse and drain and set aside.

While the farro is cooking, cut up the leeks.  The way I do this is that I cut off the top fibrous green leaves, leaving the tender white parts.  Then cut off the root end.  Slice the leek in half from root to tip, and rinse the leeks in a way to be sure there is no dirt stuck between the layers.  Put the cut side down and slice thin half moons.  You’ll have a pile of cute skinny half moon leeks – then chop them until they meet your standard for finely chopped.

Add the bell pepper and zucchini.  Add the lemon zest and squeeze the lemon onto the mixture of leeks, pepper, and zucchini, sprinkle with salt (I used about 1/4 tsp) and let that macerate until the farro is ready to be added.

Add the farro and mix with the vegetable lemon combination.  Crumble your feta and add the pine nuts. Pour the olive oil over it all. Last, add the sliced-in-half tomatoes. Mix it all together.  Adjust seasonings as you like.

Serves 4-6, or two servings for some very hungry people.

Gardening: I Grow It In the Ground

As I’ve written before, I am very fortunate to have a garden plot in the backyard behind my apartment.  I’m not growing a wide variety of things, mostly tomatoes of varying sorts, and cucumbers.  Speaking of cucumbers here is one of my lemon cukes:

lemon cucumber plant

I’ve got four plants in the ground right now.

I’m also growing tomatillos:

tomatillos

These have really taken to the soil and are quite large now compared to when I put them in the ground.  Tomatillos are crazy growers and two plants should supply me with plenty of fruit this summer.

I’m growing ground cherries:

ground cherry

There are about four plants in there, and when they get a little bigger, I’ll separate them.

I’m growing tomatoes, too.  Two of the varieties are Prudens Purple and Silver Fir.  Thanks to the urban gardener meetup a few months ago for the Silver Fir seeds!

prudens purple

silver fir

I’m also growing an Amish paste tomato, and I attempted to grow a yellow pear.  The yellow pear especially is not thriving – I think it’s because of the location in the plot.  Unfortunately, this space doesn’t get as much sun as I would like.   I may put one of the remaining pear tomatoes in a container on the deck.

And finally, another gratuitous tree shot:

through the trees

Hooray for the warm weather growing season!