My Life In the Season of Big Zucchini

It's been a big zucchini summer here at this household. Not big as in numerous zucchini, big as in BIG zucchini. The big fat green zeppelins that happen when you don't pick your vegetable patch on the regular, so that all the squash get seedy, tough, and outrageously over-sized. 

I like summer squash. I like the advantage of growing it in your own garden, so you can pick them when they are small, young, and tender. Sauteed in butter and herbs, they are a fast, easy, tasty side dish to all the grilling going on during the season. I like them on the grill too, and as a substitute for noodles in lasagna. 

But these giant squash? Yech. Don't tell me to shred and put them in cake or sweet bread, because zucchini is a savory food only for this girl. Desserts with green vegetables in them? No, thank you. Yes, I have tried them, and I think y'all have gone straight crazy. 

Up until this summer, I've considered it a sign of failure, a sign of even (Lutherans all gasp in judgement) laziness, that I keep missing, and then picking, these big green brutes instead of the tender little lovelies that we prefer to eat. I dutifully go out into the yard with my wire basket, peek under the giant umbrella leaves, and -- "Dang it. Again?!"

At the beginning of the summer I took all of this zucchini-picking failure quite seriously. If I'm going to go to the trouble and expense of gardening, I want to do it well. There is a small window (just shy of three months) where I can supply most of my family's fresh produce needs; I want to optimize that. Coming from a family that has experienced poverty, I hate wasting food. Large zucchini seemed to represent a lot of things to me: poor resource management, inattention, waste, and even ingratitude to the processes of Nature which provide for us. 

But zucchini is a distinct season of the summer. We watch it come along in expectation in early May, when the earth finally warms up enough in Iowa to germinate squash seeds, and in June, while the plants spread out their giant leaves and start to bloom. Come July and August, there are pyramids of squash crowding kitchen counters. The reason for all the jokes about summer squash stuffed in mailboxes, left on neighbors' doorsteps, piled on break-room tables at work is because we know that they are prolific. Sometimes too prolific. We balance our gratitude for all that plenty with the relentlessness of it. So, so much. And while we are grateful, we are also tasked with it. Peeling it, slicing it, sauteeing it, roasting it, pickling it, tossing it into omelettes, soups, quiches, pasta-- even if we love summer squash, we know it takes up space in our lives, requires work, and sometimes, is just too, too much. 

This summer, big zucchini do not represent laziness, or ingratitude, or even inept gardening. They do, however, still represent overabundance-- a distinct season in our lives. In the last several months our household has seen multiple major appliance failures, major house repair, a car vs. deer accident (property damage only, thank God), and storm damage. We've done several home improvement projects, and have several more that are needed or that we are considering. We have a grandchild we are over the moon for, and love to help care for him and nurture him. We have aging parents who sometimes need support. We are gone multiple weekends in a row, honoring milestones like a son's entrance into pharmacy school, or another son's move into his first home. We have welcomed home a son-in-law who was deployed in the National Guard. We have visited a sister in Georgia, paddled the Boundary Waters with a blended family of menfolk, gone fishing. We survived a school year complicated by the pandemic and are about to embark on a senior year of high school that is looking much the same. We are navigating menopause. We lost an extended family member unexpectedly. We're looking ahead at college enrollments, helping autism spectrum children find their way in the adult world, and empty nesting.

All of these things are piled up on our metaphorical kitchen counter, and we need to process all of it. Slice and dice, cut out the bad parts where we can, create our own recipe out of these ingredients we've been handed, simmer, chew, swallow, and digest. All that growing, celebrating, repairing, nurturing, grieving, planning, sharing of time with people we love, closing one chapter, opening others. A great deal of it is joyous work, and for that we are grateful. A great deal of it is work-work. Labor and grief and frustration and exhaustion and loss and expense and time. So, we balance our gratitude for all that plenty with the relentlessness of it. It is also so, so much. 

We are in a season of life where things are coming at us fast and thick, both the gifts and the trials. Big zucchini aren't our ideal, but can be expected when we'd rather take care of a grandbaby, or help an adult kid move boxes. They can be expected while we sort through trenching a new water main to our house. They can be expected when we neglect garden work in favor of ceremonies, milestones, funerals, jobs, and much needed rest. 

For that reason, I will make of big zucchini what I can. Some days, that will mean preparing, seasoning, and cooking those parts we like, and enjoying the results. Some times it will mean sharing our overabundance with others that can make better use of big squash than we can in the moment. Some days, it means I will send that big ol' squash sailing over the compost fence and into the pile, so that it can feed some vegetable garden of the future, in another season, where life will assuredly be different than it is now. 

Things I have been doing: 

Enjoying this, this, and this recipe as a way to use up those big zucchini. When I don't, you know, compost them out of sheer lack of time to do anything with them. 

Not reading. But looking at The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain sitting on my end table, and deciding it's a better book for cooler and cozier fall nights. 

Painting buckets of primer and paint on the walls of a basement craft room that we are working on. I'm looking forward to having a permanent home for my sewing machine. 

This Dip: It's Kind of a Big Dill

 

I've got a lot of dill in the garden this year. Like, a LOT. Mind you, it is totally my fault that we have this predicament. When I first started vegetable and herb gardening many seasons ago, I started some dill from seed inside, and transplanted the little herblets out when the weather got warm. Now, every season, the dill grows tall everywhere, with lots of full feathery fronds and giant seed heads. I let it come and go as it pleases, for the most part. 

This year it's been a little, dare I say, out of control. Even for a person who likes dill. It's shown up in places I don't really care for it to be, like driveway cracks and perennial beds, and I've even had to pull up some of the plants so that they don't shade out other things, like my peppers, which need their fair share of the sun too. 

It's hard to hate the situation, though, because I love the smell so much. Along with cucumbers and greenbeans, it's the smell of high summer in the vegetable patch. I like adding it to flower bouquets, and sometimes I like big bunches of it as a stand alone; it makes the kitchen smell great, even if I'm not making pickles. I'm a refrigerator pickle person. My canned pickles are straight up terrible, and I don't seem to have a knack for heat canning them. 

It's a shame, because if there were a year I could be hitting the dill hard for pickles, it would be this one. I've got plenty of material to work with. And I have stuffed plenty of dill into the few jars of refrigerator pickles I've made so far. But there are only so many refrigerator pickles I can make, and then I'm looking at my dill-weedy garden and wondering why I was so confident, years ago, that setting this plant loose in my garden was such a good idea. 

Another thing I've been trying to do is reduce the number of additives and preservatives in my food. I've discovered that I am sensitive to a few of them, some of them make my eczema worse, and not all of them are great from a healthy diet perspective either. And since one of the worst offenders in this area is salad dressings and dips, I've been experimenting for awhile with homemade ones. I've made a few really tasty and relatively healthy dips (I say relatively, because we're talking mayonnaise here, and there's only so much I can lie to myself), and because of that ongoing kitchen exploration, it seemed like a natural place to use all these bunches of dill. 

And I do mean bunches. I'm not a measurer of things, which gets me into trouble. If I make a terrific and tasty version of something, and didn't measure any of the ingredients while putting it together, I can't replicate it. If someone likes it and asks for a recipe, I have to say I don't have one, which makes me sound like I don't want to share. But I do want to share, and after several rounds in the kitchen with a notepad and paper to jot down what I'm doing, I have a recipe that is worth sharing. 

The only not-a-measurement measurement I will make for this recipe is for the dill itself. You need a big handful of fresh dill, like you see at left. How much is that? No idea. About a 1/3 cup to 1/2 cup chopped, loosely packed? Probably. You can wing this a little. I trust you. 

So, a big handful of mostly dill, but also stuff some chives in there too, also as shown. I'd say this amounts to about 1/4 to 1/3 cup chopped and loosely packed. I know "big handful" is relative: I have rather small hands, and so my big handful will be different than your big handful. But it won't matter, because this is a dip recipe, and it is flexible enough to cope with this inconsistency. 

Strip the feathery leaves off the dill stalks and roughly chop the dill leaves with the chives. Don't go crazy, because the food processor is going to do most of the work. Throw the herbs in the food processor with:

1 cup plain greek yogurt. I am picky about greek yogurt. I use Fage brand 2% fat, and I really recommend it for it's thick texture and mild but tangy taste). For a full fat version, you can use sour cream.

1/2 cup mayonnaise. I'm also picky about mayonnaise and want to eliminate some of the fat calories, so I usually make mine with Hellman's Low Fat Mayo or Hellman's Olive Oil Mayo. You can also use full fat mayo if you like. I will still recommend Hellman's/Best Foods, or Duke's. 

Juice of 1/2 lemon. Or if you don't have a lemon around (it happens), use a tablespoon or two of apple cider vinegar. 

1 T. minced garlic. That seems like a lot. It is. Trust me. 

1 T. dijon mustard. I prefer coarse ground. 

1/2 tsp. kosher salt

1/2 tsp. ground black pepper

a pinch of sugar

You need to pulse this only a few seconds in the food processor until it is thoroughly blended. Seriously, you will spend more time rummaging around in your condiment rack and scooping stuff out of tubs and jars than you will processing this up. Most of the time I make this, it is a thick pour out of the processor, and it sets up a bit once it's had a chance to meld flavors in the fridge for a few hours. Other times it's very thick and a tablespoon of milk will help get it to the right consistency if you'd rather use this as salad dressing, which you can totally do.  It makes just shy of 1 3/4 cups of dip, and you can double the recipe if you've got a crowd coming, or if your people are just total dip hogs (we know who we are). 

This dip is great with raw veggies and crackers or chips as a dip. It is fantastic on the side of fried green tomatoes. Toss a few tablespoons of capers in it and serve it with grilled salmon. Throw in some grated, drained cucumber and a drizzle of olive oil and it becomes tzatziki sauce for Mediterranean food. Put it on a buttered baked potato. It's great on salad greens and tomatoes. I'm also thinking (though I haven't tried it yet) that it would be good as the dressing for pea salad, or maybe egg salad too. As long as my dill patch holds out, we will have plenty of chances to experiment. 

A Secret and Inward Working of Powers

"Winter should not be considered as only negation and destruction. It is a secret and inward working of powers, which in spring will burst into visible activity"

--Henry James Slack

It's January in Iowa, pandemic month 4,682. We're indoors and home-bound, more or less, both by the normal cycle of the seasons, and by an uber-virus. 

This does not sound at all like a "secret and inward working of powers." It sounds like drafty upstairs bedrooms in an old house. It sounds like being sick of cooking every. damn. meal. It sounds like I haven't had a beer at the taproom with my coven in forever. It sounds like a barely stifled whimper. 

January, thankfully, is also when the seed catalogs come, and with them, the power to imagine the Garden that Might Be. 

 

There is a lot of daydreamy goodness to that when the only thing keeping my fingers warm is a mug of tea, and it is still a long time (in pandemic months or normal ones, for that matter) until spring.  

I know that I am at my most perfect self as a gardener in January, when all things seem possible, and the pages of the catalogs are full of bright vegetables and soft blossoms. Seed and plant catalogs are the storybook version of real gardening, a storybook that I am all too willing to read, over and over again, like a young child. What happens between April and September is sweatier, buggier, full of earthy delights (I can literally stop and smell the roses) and equally earthy disappointments (just what the hell ate my collard greens?)

I like to consider myself a gardener. A planty person. Herbal witch. Urban farmer. Green thumb. Horticulture geek. But I am not convinced that I am or can become a gardener in any fully adult way. I can't have some sophisticated color scheme, because I want to use all the crayons in the box, from burgundy black dahlias to snow white daffodils. My perennial garden is organized much like my mind's thoughts, with a random assortment of plants crowding the borders. What may have started out with a plan slipped out of bounds as my interests grew this way and that, and so did the bee balm and black-eyed susan, all over the place. And while I came for the flowers, I stay to feel the dirt in my fists, nudge a strange bug along a leaf, and stand still watching, while a possum toodles along the back fence line at dusk. If I were without neighbors, I might make mud pies and sour smelling mashes of dandelion petals and water as I did when I was five. I'm a little less tame in my garden. I like it that way. 

While I have no interest in the perfection of award-winning landscape design or neatly trimmed lawns, I still want to be better at growing things. Better at nurturing green life. Better at raising my own food. Better at taking care of the small patch of Mother Nature under my stewardship. 

That part of January garden planning requires putting down the pretty storybooks, and engaging in honest reflection on my past history. (Are you listening, America?) Not just the successes, but also the total failures, and everything in between. It's where reality and daydreaming meet, and it is the fertile ground where a future garden begins to take shape, the one that with any luck I'll get to tread with dirty bare feet come June. 

Last summer, I grew beautiful little red peppers. We stuffed them with chives and cream cheese, and roasted them. It was my first real success growing peppers from seed for this garden, and I am proud of that accomplishment. It took some research into the best varieties for our region and a heat mat for seed starting, but I learned better ways to grow a healthy food I wanted to eat. 

I grew gorgeous dahlias like this one, a variety called David Howard. But that is only half the goal in tending these half-hardy perennials in a cold winter state like Iowa. They require their tubers to be dug up and stored inside for the winter. The last two winters, I've killed the tubers-- once by keeping them too dry, and another time by keeping them so moist they rotted. This year they are stored in the basement trying yet a third storage method. I may be too stubborn, but I am awfully fond of these lush sunset blooms. 

Sometimes I am a good or terrible gardener on what seems like a purely accidental basis. I discovered I am good at growing geraniums, or pelargoniums. The photo below is Lady Plymouth, a scented leaf variety. I give them a sunny window or a spot under the grow light indoors during the winter and water them once a week. In summer I toss them outside into the patio boxes, where except for regular watering and some occasional feeding, they go do their thing without a whole lot of angst on my part. I've been told they're not for amateurs. And yet here I am, with a growing collection of them.

I am accidentally terrible at growing alocasias, a beautiful tropical houseplant with what appears to be a lengthy list of finicky demands that must be met in order for them to flourish. I've read up. I've searched the internet. I've watered them more. I've watered them less. I've watered them more, but less frequently; and watered them less, but more frequently. I've watered them from below. I've watered them from above. I've misted them. I've kept their leaves clean. I've watered them with distilled water. I've watered them with room temperature water. I've inched them closer to the window. I've inched them further away from the window. I've praised them, named them, petted them, begged and pleaded with them, prayed for their little planty souls. They all come home, put out a few new leaves just to make me think I've got them figured out...and then slide into a slow death spiral I can't seem to pull them out of. It's maddening. 

 

I sometimes keep the dead bodies around to torture myself about the money I've wasted watching these things die on me. 

Here's what they're supposed to look like, from the florist at my grocery store. I didn't bring this one home, because I'm beginning to feel like a serial murderer. I am bad news for you, plant babe. 

Last summer I also managed to grow slimy, inedible cauliflower, overcrowd my entire vegetable garden to the point that it underproduced, and kill a rather expensive flowering mandevilla vine. We also decided we missed green beans, which we did not grow last summer, and can cut back on tomatoes, which we love, but that we are almost too good at growing. 

By Jan. 19, when my local greenhouse opens and I can go buy this year's supply of seed starting soil, I will have spent hours with the storybook side of this exercise as well as the honest assessment part, along with seed inventory, list making, sketching on paper, and making decisions half-driven by the cook that is me (leeks! squash! tarragon!) and also by that inner five-year-old (cool rocks! snapdragons! marigolds as big as your head!)

Garden, I'll be ready for you when you wake up. 

Things I'm doing right now: 

Reading a history book: 1066: The Hidden History in the Bayeux Tapestry, by Andrew Bridgeford

Enjoying a Facebook page where you can all-caps vent your spleen on its "Shouty Thursdays": Tales of a Kitchen Witch

Making calendula salve from Homestead and Chill

August Serving Suggestion: BLT Sandwich

On packages of the nonsense they sell as food in grocery stores (rice cakes, ranch dressing, Count Chocula), they often use the term "serving suggestion." For food conglomerates, it's a legal disclaimer. For me, it's that I don't consider writing about a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich to be a recipe. I don't really consider this cooking. I'm not talking about measured amounts of anything-- and if you can't figure out how to make a sandwich at the same age you should be able to read this sentence, I can't help you.

Writers who are more hip than I (read: nearly all of them) might speak of "curating" ingredients. I kinda hate that word being used unless you work for an art gallery or a museum...and we're talking about a sandwich, for crying out loud. But, the BLT is nearly worthy of that kind of particularity, if not in the ingredients list, at least in the how and where they assemble-- a kind of feng shui of pork fat, summer heat, and vegetable garden excess. It's a very specific experience. 

It's best for supper, not lunch. It's a kitchen sandwich. I've never had a good BLT at a restaurant. Never. Better places will destroy a BLT with "improvements" like pepper bacon and arugula and herbal mayonnaises. Chain restaurants always have weirdly dry and tasteless tomatoes, the harried teen boy in the back kitchen won't toast the bread precisely the way you like it, and they'll be stingy with the bacon. Nope, nope, nope. Kitchen is best. So much so, it's part of my serving suggestion.

For one BLT sandwich, you need six things:

1. Your own kitchen. Ideally, you've come in from a few hours of yard work, you've got dirt on your bare feet, and you're not really sure what to have for supper. But you have a shit-ton of tomatoes from the garden sitting on your counter you don't know what else to do with, and you're too tired for anything more ambitious. If there are other people involved, they are the ones who have seen you every damned summer Saturday in your paint-stained Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt and still love you anyway (but wish you would go take a shower, like, right now). You know that the knife that slices the tomatoes best is in that drawer over there. The skillet that fries the bacon just the right shade of crispy is within reach. You don't have to wash your feet or comb your hair or find the car keys to get this sandwich. 

2. You could say about bacon what is often said about pizza and sex; even when it isn't that good, it isn't bad. Trying to be fancy about bacon is ironic. It's a blue collar food; it's got a job to do and it is going to do it as the earthy base layer of the sandwich. I've used store brands. I've used the good stuff you can get at a decent butcher counter. I like the thick cuts for crisp/chewy bacon, but can appreciate the position of people who prefer thin and crunchy. Either way, the whole point of bacon is the smoke, fat, and salt. 

3. Iceberg lettuce. I know. I once denigrated iceberg lettuce as the salad of my grandmothers, but what was I thinking? Grandmas are smarter than we are; that's how they get to be grandmas. Iceberg lettuce has its place and it is as the capital L in the BLT. Its layers of cold, sweet, and crunchy are the yin to the bacon's yang. You can't really be fancy about iceberg. You can't grow it either, and you shouldn't have to-- grocery stores on Mars have iceberg lettuce. And unlike the sissy baby boutique greens that we grandchildren have wasted our hipster spending money on, iceberg lettuce will last forever in the bottom of your produce drawer. Or at least until the next time you make BLTs, which will be soon with as many tomatoes as you have to get through. 

4. Tomatoes. I think of the BLT as the Sandwich of August, because that's when I have tomatoes from my own garden. I put a lot of thought and planning into growing my tomatoes, starting seed indoors in February, just so that I can have this particular sandwich in this particular month. Look at that bad boy: 

This one weighed over a pound, and a single slice made a whole sandwich. There are, in any given August, about eleventy-billion of these things growing right outside my back door. There are few better ways to which they could be put when they are this perfect. And by perfect I mean that the juice from the tomato will soak your bread, run down your wrists, and require multiple napkins. 

5. Mayonnaise. The mayo isn't part of the acronym, but it should be. BLTM. I have my strongest opinions about the mayonnaise. First of all: obviously pro-mayo. If you live east of the Rockies, it's Hellman's; if you live west, it's Best Foods. If you live south, I'll let you folks have your Duke's. It's a fine mayo and we've got bigger things as a country to argue about. Kraft people, you're excused from the conversation. And Miracle Whip people? Satan get behind me. As for getting it on the sandwich-- load up. This is no time for halfway measures. 

6. Toast. As a snob in general about bread, you would think that I would be a snob about it when it comes to BLTs. But really it's just a vehicle for getting the BLT (and M) combination from plate to face. Honestly, almost anything will do as long as it's toasted and not too weirdly flavored. I've used hamburger buns when out of sliced bread. I've had a pretty darn good BLT in a pita pocket. I like multigrain bread best, but my husband likes white. You can be fancy about the bread in a way that you really can't be about bacon, but the truth of the matter is that no matter how awesome the bread, the bacon grease and the messy tomato and the Grandma lettuce and the kitchen table and your Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt will drag this right back down to the proletariat. And that's okay. Better than okay, because you have a BLT sandwich. 

Spring. Ish.

Spring is here. Ish.

If you don't count the frosts. And the clouds. And the rain.

Then again, Iowans are very familiar with the maddening weirdness of a windy April day, where the sun glows warm, almost too warm, and yet a steady and icy wind blows from the direction of Saskatchewan, with periodic banks of clouds. You spend half the day throwing your jacket off as the rays bake through the fabric, and then shivering in the bluster and putting it back on. Off. On. Off. On. Just when you think you've had enough, it rains.

This is sort of how the last month has been for me. I'm off (coming out of the winter blues) I'm on (the tomato seeds sprouted!) I'm off (persistent wracking cough for a solid week). I'm on (the lilacs are blooming!)

While I'm waiting for the weather to even out so that I can start some outside projects, I've been working on a bunch of different things. Some of it is self-therapy, so I don't go crazy with impatience. Some of it is the usual family busy-ness. It's all over the map. So is this blog post.

I've been having fun with baking lately. I used to make a lot of my own bread b.t. (before twins, and yes, I do realize they're eleven years old), and I've been doing more of that again. It's been good to have the oven on during these chilly rainy days.

Also, cake. Because if you're impatient for Spring, why not celebrate Not Spring? 

We're coming up on the end of the school year, too, and that means extra projects. Like turning this kid into Albert Einstein for his big biography presentation. I had to share and brag, because is he not the cutest theoretical physicist you've ever seen? 

I'm also taking a photography class this month. That's another thing I'd like to write a longer post about, but the fact that I'm taking the class means I've been short on blog time.

This is me, experimenting with apertures for an assignment, or as I'm beginning to call it, "effing with f-stops." And a chicken. With lemons and limes. No, I don't really know why those things either.

(Basically, the background details come into sharper focus at higher f-stops, changing the depth of field.)

The bathroom project mentioned in the last post has come along as well, but since a lot of it has involved tedious plaster repairs and big buckets of plain white primer, I haven't updated readers. More is coming on that soon as well. I may even have better photos of it, though lilacs are always better subjects than cramped and outdated bathrooms.

I'll be back soon. I hope spring will be too!

Exponential Tomatoes

It's late summer, which means tomatoes. I like how they start out small, like the two wee things above we "harvested" in late July.

Now this is our daily take, with more romas as the summer ripens into fall:

How's your garden this year?

Fork and Spoon Friday: Hungarian Cream Cake

When I'm cooking, pretty is not on the schedule. Most of the time, I'm slinging hash.

Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. But I've got four boys to feed, and let's just say I'm not individually plating entrees with garnishes. Get it shopped, chopped, cooked, and on the table is my usual way of things, week after week. 

I get tired of it sometimes. I actually enjoy cooking when I have the time, when I'm not catering to the large appetites of all four and the picky tastes of two of them. Sometimes, I just want to take my time making one good thing. Sometimes I want to experiment a little. 

Last Friday evening instead of going out, I stayed in with my mixer. Ever since I picked up this small cookbook last fall: 

I've been interested to try some of the recipes in it. The cakes looked promising, old- fashioned,  and rich. I hadn't baked a "real cake" in a while. 

I picked out this one: 

Luckily we have a local dairy that sells the thick, unprocessed cream our grandmothers were likely to have used in such a recipe (The cookbook was published in 1934).

"Sift flour once, measure, add baking powder and salt, and sift together three times." I did this step, and I think it matters for older recipes. I didn't have a sifter, but used a sieve to get the same effect. And look how much flour was left over (on the right) after measuring from the first sift:

The volume of the sifted flour really is more. 

One of my favorite things, a mixing bowl made by a local artist: 

Getting the sugar and eggs pale and frothy. I love the delicate color. It looks like satin: 

After the dry ingredients and cream are added, the batter looks like a big mound of french vanilla ice cream. And yes, of course I taste tested. You could eat the bowlful without baking. Not that you should, but you could. I promise I wouldn't judge. 

No matter what a cake recipe says, I grease and put a wax paper circle in the bottom, grease again, and then flour. That way I know the layer will always come out of the pan: 

I spread the batter evenly and baked. The recipe, I should point out, is HUGELY WRONG on bake time. I baked my layers at 350°F for 25 minutes (not the 50 in the recipe) and the cake was done to a turn. If I'd baked it for twice that time they would have been burnt crusts. Next time I make this recipe I will only bake for 20 minutes before testing.

This isn't a big cake. It only makes 2 8-inch layers. 

This is where my baking night went a little off the rails. I also tried a self-invented recipe, for blackberry buttercream frosting. 

I had some frozen blackberries: 

It seemed like a great idea. But the fruit was a hassle to puree in the blender and then sieve to get the seeds out:

At one point it looked like I was committing fruit murder-- with butter.

Even though it seemed like a simple concept (butter, fruit puree, powdered sugar, a little cream), it was a little too soft to "behave" well, and adding more powdered sugar didn't help. And it was sweet. Really, really sweet.

The cake however, was great:

It ended up being okay that the frosting was a little too sweet, because the cake itself is not overly sweet, and is a bit rich. Still, I decided not to frost the sides to keep the blood glucose levels down in general. Grownups liked it with coffee, and what kid has ever minded too much sugar? I will make this cake again soon, probably for Mother's Day with cream and strawberries. It would also be fantastic with a good fudge frosting. I won't be making the blackberry buttercream again (this version, anyway) and that's okay. I'm glad I gave my idea a try.

Do you like baking? What's your favorite? 

Fork and Spoon Friday: Roasted Vegetables

What do you pack in lunches for work?

I wish I had a better system, but I'm trying to perfect it. One thing I do know is that if I don't have something made up and ready to go in the fridge, I'm far more likely to a) eat out or pick something up from a deli or b) eat from the vending machine. Both tend to be expensive and unhealthy. So I try to keep some things prepared.

One of my favorites is roasted vegetables:

It's hot, filling, and comforting, good for that midday break. But they are also healthy, low fat, vegetarian, and full of fiber and vitamins. Did I mention cheap? So, yes, better in every way than that bag of chips from the vendo-land in the hallway.

I thought I'd show everyone how I make mine. It's easy to do in a half hour to 45 minutes on a Sunday, and is amazingly flexible.

Choose your veggies:

Here I have a sweet potato, some small red potatoes I had left from another meal, a green pepper, and a leftover half of a red onion. This is a little on the lean side for amounts. I usually roast enough so that I have about 4 to 5 cups of roasted vegetables when I'm done. This will get me about three.

You can roast almost anything. Parsnips, turnips, winter squash, and beets are good. So is fennel bulb and leeks. Mushrooms work too, and in spring you can add asparagus. Tomatoes taste heavenly roasted, but they do tend to overwhelm other veggies in the flavor mix, so I usually leave them out, and do them all by themselves for other uses. Using potatoes that are all sorts of colors makes a beautiful roast mix.

Chop up your veggies. I peel the sweet potatoes:

But I don't peel the red ones: 

1 1/2 to 2-inch chunks are about the right size. I cut up the pepper, and added some orange and red mini-peppers I found in the crisper drawer that were a little marginal for fresh eating:

And the onion, in big wedges: 

Put just the firmest, root veggies in a cast iron skillet or pan. For me that's the red potatoes and sweet potatoes. This would also be the time to add turnips, beets, parsnips, or winter squash. You want a dark, heavy pan that can store and radiate heat for this. My cast iron skillet is older than I am, and I love it for this job.

Drizzle them with 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons olive oil, and salt and pepper them to taste. Toss so they and the pan are thoroughly coated.

Slide them in a 400-degree oven:

Bake them for 15 minutes, stirring once in the middle of that time. By the end of 15 minutes, the vegetables should look a little translucent in places, and you should see some browning in some places:

Add the softer vegetables. In my case, this would be the peppers and onions. This would also be a good time to add asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, fennel, and mushrooms:

Slide them back in the oven for another 15 minutes. Stir once or twice during this time, making sure you get up all the brown toasty bits that stick to the pan. That's what makes it taste good.. When it's out for one of those stirring sessions, add 1 finely chopped chipotle chili in adobo sauce, plus a tablespoon of sauce from the can. I usually keep chipotle peppers in a adobo sauce in a container in the freezer so that I can pop out one for recipes like this. The chipotle adds a little spice and flavor, but you can add more if you like heat. You can also skip this entirely if you'd rather not.

By end of cooking time, the vegetables should be looking nice and roasty. They look done when they look like this:

This batch got me about 3 cups of veggies, a little on the small side. For me that's 2 big servings or three smaller ones. This is good with shredded cheddar melted on top. You can also add a side of brown rice to keep it vegetarian. Roast vegetables also make a good side dish for home suppers of grilled meats.

I love how versatile and healthy it is. What's your go-to work lunch?