Colors

I've been posting over on Grow It Eat It about how I managed to make a green cake using purple sweet potatoes, and today I made the first attempt at overcoming the problem: sweet potato muffins with yogurt and lemon juice to counteract the alkaline baking powder and baking soda. Except… the recipe involved molasses, which when combined with the deep purple turned a nice dark brown that totally failed to reveal any other color, whether purple or green or anything in between, and also created the expectation of a chocolate taste which is entirely not present. Though they taste pretty good anyway.

I guess I'll have to try again, with a sweetener in a lighter hue. Meanwhile, I think I'll make a sweet potato pie, which (from the photos I've seen) will be reliably and extraordinarily dark purple.

Speaking of anthocyanins, have some red oak leaves:

I'll get out and take some more leaf photos when the wind calms down a bit.

Eat your greens

We've been in the habit of cooking up greens to always have in the fridge for lunches and dinners (and, for my husband, breakfast; I'm not quite ready to go there) - because they're nutritious and, if not boiled to death, delicious.

Over the weekend I discovered that sweet potato greens and the leaves of Hibiscus sabdariffa go really well together (if you don't happen to have either of these around, spinach and sorrel (real French sorrel, not the aforementioned hibiscus which is also called Jamaican sorrel) would be a similar combination. Today's batch was Tuscan kale that had been in the fridge too long and needed to be eaten NOW, more sweet potato greens (I have rather a lot of them available), and kohlrabi (roots and whatever leaves looked decent).

The basic recipe (it's one of those I Don't Have To Think About It recipes) goes something like this:

Clean and chop up your greens. If they're on the tough side, steam them for 5-10 minutes (I do this with collards and kale and anything similar). You can also add other vegetables; things like kohlrabi root do need to be steamed, and things like peppers don't.

Chop up or slice some onions. Add some olive oil to a pan and cook the onions about 10 minutes or until soft. Add the greens; stir occasionally so things don't stick. Add any seasonings you want: garlic, soy sauce, vinegar, spices, salt and pepper. Cook until vegetables are not crunchy.

At the last minute, add some chopped nuts and/or dried fruit (I'm fond of pecans and cranberries). You can also fry up some bacon and crumble that in, or use bits of cooked ham (especially country ham, mm) or sausage. (I'm out of the habit of doing that since Vegetarian Son was home for the summer, but I'll try to remember next time.)

We did this mostly with frozen greens last winter (fresh are usually available, but frozen are convenient) and I'm hoping we'll have enough of our own home-grown in the freezer to not have to buy for a while. I can start harvesting collards next week.

And now I'm going to try sweet potato latkes...

Yes, We Have Purple Sweet Potatoes

And you can't tell from that photo, but they are really purple, both inside and out. They are sitting in the sun curing right now, which improves the flavor and makes the storage time longer.

I grew some of these last year, but they weren't very prolific. This year I gave them more space (under the tomatoes, but still) and left them in the ground longer, and got a lot more. This (plus about 30 percent extra you can't see in the shot) is one plant's worth, and I have six, so we are going to be eating a lot of purple sweet potatoes.

I have described the taste before by saying that orange sweet potatoes are to orange juice as purple sweet potatoes are to burgundy; it's a rich, complicated flavor and not nearly as sweet as the orange or white types. I'll have plenty of experimental volume, but it's good to have recipes to start with, and a blog makes a good bookmarking device, so:

What the Heck is a Purple Sweet Potato and How Do You Cook It?

Purple Sweet Potato Latkes

Mashed Purple Sweet Potatoes

Stokes Purple Sweet Potato Recipes

Stokes Purple Sweet Potato Pinterest page

Note: these are not Stokes purple sweet potatoes - the variety is called All Purple - but I figure the taste is much the same. I'll report back either here or on Grow It Eat It or both.

The worms have landed!

You will actually get to see a flower if you make it to the end of this post. :)

My worms are here!  The package from Uncle Jim's Worm Farm arrived very quickly; good thing I got organized yesterday and put my homemade stacking worm bin together.  I bought three plastic storage tubs from Lowe's; they cost $4.98 each.  Aside from that, all I needed for this experiment were four yogurt cups (anything of similar size will do, but I ate the yogurt), some shredded paper, a bit of potting soil (ETA: probably not such a good idea; see next post), and a mess of kitchen scraps.  And the worms.

The bottom bin remains imperforate and intact.  In it go the yogurt cups as spacing devices.

This bin will catch any liquid that drips down from the higher bins.  Worms need a moist environment, but not an aquatic one.  The liquid will be good fertilizer.

 The other two bins got drilled.  The one at bottom is upside-down so you can see the holes better.  Exciting, right?  Those holes have to be big enough for a worm to crawl through.  I used a 5/16" bit (I am totally guessing worm size here).  The holes around the top edge are just for air circulation and are a bit smaller.

One of the holey bins goes inside the unholey bin.  The other one gets put aside for now; it'll come into use when the worms get really active.  Lowe's had better not discontinue this size of bin, because I suspect I'll need more later.

Inside the bin goes:  a layer of shredded paper a couple of inches thick, sprayed with water; some food scraps (they should probably be cut up more, but we'll get in the habit of doing that); a cup or so of potting soil (garden compost or soil would do, but I didn't want to introduce any foreign worms or other critters).

Worms inna bag!  They came with a warning that they might look a bit dried out and shrunken, but really they weren't so bad (wriggling away in their peat moss!) and they will rehydrate fine.

A view into the dark and mysterious interior. -->

I dumped the worms onto the food scraps, and covered them with some more damp shredded paper, and then put the lid on the bin and set it in the kitchen where it will live.  I am trying not to check on them too often.  They should start eating soon and making what are delicately called castings.  When the first bin has lots of castings in it, I'll put the second bin on top, with paper and food scraps in it, and let the worms migrate up.  Then I can collect the mostly worm-free castings from below, and the bins keep switching places.

I'll let you know if that works out as planned.  So very glad I did this - admittedly, it was an easier step to take than getting bees or chickens, neither of which I've plunged into yet, and much cheaper.  A thousand worms cost under $20 plus shipping; $15 for the bins... not much of an investment for something that should yield enough compost to feed all my potted plants.  I'm excited!

I'm less excited about the freeze warning for tonight, considering everything out there that's in flower - my blueberries at the link, magnolias not quite done yet, cherries making pink snow everywhere.

Viburnum 'Mohawk' now out in full bloom - wish I could share the scent with you, but we don't quite have the technology for that yet.  A sweet clove scent that perfumes the air twenty feet away.  (Just imagine it.  It'll get the worms out of your nose.)  It's a short bloom even in years when it goes off properly a month later; I'm afraid the freeze may make it even shorter, but we can hope.

If collards be the food of love...

Oh, I am back to my old tricks.

This isn't a recipe post (though maybe I will do some of those this long cold winter, now that it is sort of cold) but more a food-related musing, so no photos, unless I think of any.  I'm just trying to reassess food a bit... good time of year to do so, with all the holiday treats tempting from every side, and this week and last I have been organizing concessions for the high school drama production, which entails looking at a lot of cookies.  I did make bagels for both shows last weekend and hope to do it again this weekend, but since they are white flour bagels it's not that much better.

During the set-up I got into conversation with one of the other moms (the one who brought clementines for the refreshments table, bless her) who told me her daughter often brings stuff like leftover kale for lunch, and my son is the only one who doesn't make fun of her for it.  I'm proud of him for this, and also determined to branch out into the salads he's been requesting that I never quite manage to remember to pack.  To think that only seven years ago, when we spent a few weeks in England and Wales, he ate chicken fingers at (to my clouded recollection) every non-breakfast meal, thus missing out on some really good food (no jokes about British cuisine here); and then there was the corn dog period, which he was just reminding me of yesterday, while gazing into the Trader Joe's freezer at the corn dogged shrimp yes really oh my god.  Anyway, the fussy eater is gone for good, hurray.

My husband spent two months this fall doing the Paleo Diet Challenge, and while I have problems with the Paleo Diet (mostly semantic, since it seems to me to be an arbitrary mishmash of modern dietary research and romantic notions about what people who spent most of their time looking for food would and wouldn't have eaten), problems I did not hesitate to express, I have to admit that we ate better during that time, even those of us who weren't attempting to split our plates evenly between meat and vegetables (with no grains, legumes, potatoes, sweet potatoes WHAT, dairy, sugar and I can't remember what else.  Oh yeah, booze.  No problem there; I can't drink it anyway, migraine trigger).  I am even wondering now if I can possibly convince my stomach that fish and vegetables work for breakfast.  Probably I could manage a puree of sweet potatoes and apples.  Along with my GrapeNuts.  My neighbor Anna eats great breakfasts: lots of green smoothies and toast with things on it.

One thing we're doing as a result of this is stocking lots of frozen veggies (it helps that we bought a freezer this fall).  The nutritive value may be slightly less compared with locally grown organic produce, but actually eating frozen broccoli (not while still frozen, obviously) is better than saying "oops, I have no locally grown organic produce in the vegetable bin" or "oops, the locally grown organic produce in the bin is now mush."  Which happens far too often especially when we have high school drama productions.

I did freeze some of my own garden produce, but not much (next year, in Jerusalem, without groundhogs), though we are well supplied with squash and sweet potato soups, and I've got two more ginormous butternuts (not local unless you consider Trader Joe's to be such) to soupify.  Great stuff, endless variety of seasoning possibilities.  (Blogger's spell check appears to think ginormous is a word.  Good for it.)

On the other hand, the Post's Food section cookie issue arrived today, oh my god lime-Thai basil shortbread, double chocolate coconut, etc. etc.  I want to make them ALL.  Love comes in many flavors...

In which I eat yacon and dahlia tubers

Grow It Eat It post, here.

(This seems generally easier than reposting the entire thing.)