Happy Halloween!

Sorry I haven't posted much lately...the Halloween holiday's kept us pretty busy, plus we've had a lot going on (and I've been fighting a lot of crime)

I promise to get back to posting real soon!

At Last!! THE PARTY PICS!

And I promise to work on getting videos uploaded soon!!

Here's the pics...or click on the Tortured Barbie trophy below...

Halloween Party 2009 Pics

Wx!

Whoa - didn't expect to see THAT in the forecast just yet!

Hm, wonder if I should be picking all the peppers and beans that are still out there?

Mystery bug

Check out this interesting bug I found out on one of the deck chairs this past week!

I need to do some research online - it has the overall shape/look of a Japanese beetle, only that back pattern/color is definitely NOT Japanese beetle.  I'm wondering if it's a freshly hatched/molting Japanese beetle?  Or perhaps something totally unrelated?  It didn't seem TOO bothered by us checking it out...

And by "us" I mean "me and the dog", who proceeded to get "too interested" in the bug (that's what happens if I look at something for more than a few seconds), and bumped it off the chair into the fern. Oh well...let's hope it wasn't something evil that I should've stomped!

Oh you're so bad...

So the other day, after Doogie had popped out for a bathroom break, he came back in with something in his mouth, which of course I didn't REALIZE until I saw him acting all sneaky in the living room.

Really Doogie?  You found a ripe cherry tomato and had to bring it inside?  You KNOW how this goes!

Sure enough - one bite and SPURT!  There was tomato goop and seeds on the carpet.  Oh well - the good thing about dogs is you can point to something, say "clean it up", and they'll lick/eat it up no matter what it is!

I didn't get to take too many up-close-and-personal pics of Doogie and his afternoon snack before he picked it up and walked off for a little privacy.  A short while later I came back and cleaned up the remaining "carcass" - it seems Doogie only likes the INSIDES of tomatoes, and doesn't care for the tough outer skin.  Greeeeat....

Krispity Crunchity Kale Chips!

I got home from work one day this past week to find a letter in the mail from mom. Well, no "letter" exactly - sometimes she'll scribble a brief note on a scrap piece of paper, but this one was more like what I get from mom - just a clipped out article folded up and stuffed in the envelop. And this one was a real interesting one - a recipe for kale chips! I'd mentioned to my folks recently that I still have a surplus of kale and Swiss chard growing in the garden - I don't know if mom remembered that when she saw the article, or if she just thought I'd find it interesting. Either way, super handy timing!

So the author of the article had compared a bunch of different recipes she'd heard about for making kale chips, and boiled them down to her own version.  You start with fresh, clean, dry kale...easy enough - I ran out to the garden and collected a bowl full of leaves.  Did I wash 'em?  Nahhhh...we've had a lot of rain this week, and I know my kale's never been exposed to any chemicals.  I cut out the midribs, per the instructions, and used that time to also do a bug check.  Nope, no bugs!  The kale is then cut or torn to whatever size you like.

You want to make sure your kale is really dry - so if you washed it, toss it in a salad spinner, or blot it really well with kitchen towels.  Then drizzle some olive oil over it, and keep tossing and turning it in the bowl until the leaves are lightly coated - it really doesn't take much oil to do this!

Let's pretend I already told you to get that oven pre-heated to 350.  You've done that, right?  Good.

Lay your glistening kale leaves out on a pan in a single layer.  Can they touch?  Yup!  Should they overlap?  Nope!  They're going to shrink, but you want to make sure they cook fairly evenly.  Trust me, if you try to chew a piece that DIDN'T cook right, you'll know it - it'll be chewy.  It's like getting an undercooked tortilla chip when you go out for Mexican - not cool.

Now you can season the kale leaves however you like - kosher salt is a must.  The article also listed other options like sea salt, Parmesan cheese, bee pollen (yeah, right), garlic salt, maple syrup, etc...  Seriously, the sky's the limit.  For my first tray I just did salt.  With the second I did salt and chili powder, which was a nice combo!

Now bake these suckers for about 10-15 minutes - I think it depends on the thickness of the leaves more than anything?  Oh, and their curliness - my leaves that were more curly/bumpy/savoy didn't cook nearly as fast as the flatter parts...  And you definitely don't want this stuff to overcook - it turns a little bitter (voice of experience!).  Start checking around 10 minutes...my first batch took close to 15 minutes, my second was a LITTLE overdone at 13.

Here's a trays worth of kale chips - these things are SO crispy and crackly.  They cool almost as soon as you take them out of the oven - so you can start eating right away.  Doogie heard me crunching on them from the other room, came running, and loooved them.

Like I said, these are really crackly crisp - extremely fragile, so don't expect to find these for sale in the grocery store already cooked up.  You're either gonna love 'em or you're gonna hate 'em!  I'd say they're reminiscent of the nori seaweed used to wrap sushi rolls....  Oh, and the flavor/texture will most likely also vary depending on the variety of kale you use.  I have dinosaur kale, which just has a very earthy-tasting look to it...

I have to warn you - if you DO like kale chips, they go down REAL easy. Just be careful with how much fiber you're snacking on! ;-)

Thanks for the recipe mom!

Infestation

Uh oh - it looks like we have a fly problem!

And a rat problem too...

Good thing we have some big spiders around...they'll take care of the oversized flies.  Take a closer look - that spider is OUTSIDE and hanging from the gutters  -it's HUGE!

Yup, looks like we're gearing up for Halloween!

Sharon's Muffins!

I was VERY popular at work this Thursday.

Why?

Because I whipped up a batch of these Apple Pie Muffins Sharon had been recommending:

These suckers are loaded with brown sugar and apples, and topped with a brown sugar crumb topping that is SOOOO yummy!  I think I took 22 of them in to work, and by about 10am, more than half were gone...

I think next time they could maybe use a little more apple, OR perhaps a more sturdy/tart apple than I used.  Sharon and I were talking about how so many of these recipes call for a specific variety/taste/texture of apple (like tart or Granny Smith), but let's be honest - if you're making a recipe like this, sometimes you're just gonna use whatever apples you have around the house at the time...  I DO like the way the apples I used cooked down a lot and were really soft, but I think that meant I could've added even more!  And I was telling Sharon that I could easily see sprucing/bulking these muffins up even more with walnuts, a little nutmeg, maybe chopped dates or raisins....but then that would definitely be moving them away from their original design to be similar to an apple pie flavor.  And don't get me wrong - there was NOOOOOTHING wrong with the recipe as-is.  Ask all the folks who scarfed 'em down at work....  I had a few people asking for the recipe, and that's always a good sign!

Thanks Sharon!

Smokin'

This past Monday, when I was working from home, I had the smoker going....multi-tasking actually!  I got all prepared the day before, and managed to take almost everything out in one tray load....

In the picture below, starting at the "top", you see a cookie cooling rack loaded up with peppers.  Now you normally smoke ripe jalapenos to make chipotles, only I don't have a TON of ripe jalapenos right now...but I DO have a lot of ripe serranos.  Hey, if you can smoke one, why not smoke the other?  Each of these peppers has been washed, and was snipped open with scissors at the stem-end, per Chicken Thistle Farm's recommendations...  (Thanks Andy!)

The peppers are sitting on a bowl of smoked mesquite wood - enough to get me through 3 or 4 changes of the wood.  The wood typically "burns up" in about an hour, give or take, and has to be dumped and replaced with more soaked wood to keep the smoke going.

Under the wood is a little toaster oven tray full of kosher salt.  Ever used smoked salt in something?  The brisket recipe I use calls for a couple tablespoons in the rub, so by smoking a bunch now, I'm all ready for the next time I need to make brisket (I ran out of previous smoked salt this time!)

Under, and just to the right, of the peppers is a small plastic container with the Dallas Dandy rub the brisket recipe calls for.  Some of the rub goes in the marinade the night before, and some (what you see here) gets patted on top as the meat goes in the smoker.  The rub recipe is just 2 T each black pepper, smoked salt, paprika, chili powder and brown sugar....stir 'em up, and keep it on hand for stuff!

To the right of the rub are some ingredient that go in the tray above the smoking wood - a couple beers, a chopped up onion, and the ends of a couple heads of garlic, cut in half to expose their innards.  I also ran out to the garden and grabbed a handful of parsley to stuff in the tray.  Unfortunately all my rosemary, thyme, sage etc got smothered by other plants and died off...so I'm limited on herbs right now.

And with all that talk of smoking a brisket, you KNOW I've gotta have A BRISKET, right?  Not much to look at here - it's a 12 lb slab of meat, cut in half, both stuffed in a 2 gallon zip lock bag, which is down in a garbage bag, and that's in a soup pot.  The marinade (which I only doubled, but probably could've trippled AND spiced up more!) is in there with it - it's got stuff pureed together like onion, Dallas Dandy rub, beer, liquid smoke, vinegar, oil, chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, and I forget what else...  The meat marinated for a minimum of 18 hrs.

After smoking for about 5 hours or so, the meat, salt and peppers came out of the smoker.  My dad's thoughts are that the meat's probably not going to absorb much more "smoke flavor" after that time, and that you're just aiming to get the meat tender from that point on - and why go to all the work (and expense!) of swapping out burned up wood with fresh wood if it's not going to add much.  So the meat got wrapped in foil and thrown in a 350 oven for about another 5 hours, and the peppers (which you see here - definitely not fully dried out) got moved to the dehydrator.

Here's the smoked salt.  Does it look pretty?  Nope!  But it sure smells good!  This gets transferred to a glass jar and stored for use in recipes.

And here's the meat, fresh out of the smoker, ready to get wrapped in foil, tossed in the Dutch oven and baked.  The scorchy looking stuff on top is the rub that got added on just as it went in the smoker...

And here's the meat after another five hours - lemme tell ya, as good as this smells and tastes, shredding the meat is my least favorite part.  It's always soooo hot that by the time you're done, you feel like your hands are cooked, even if you let some of the meat cool on the cutting board while you work with the previously "cooled" stuff.

I should've weighed the end result - I  know 12 lbs of meat (plus fat) went in, and I  know a LOT of fat gets lost in the process....I don't even know if there was a full 6 lbs of meat left after the whole process...but it's such a good, filling, rich meal that you really don't need to eat a lot of it at once.  We each had a serving for dinner, I had some for lunch the next day, there's probably two more servings in the fridge, and then there's three bags in the freezer, and each of those probably have 4 servings?  So that's, what, about 17 servings?  Maybe more?  I want to say I paid $14 for the whole thing?  I don't think that's too bad in the long run...

And finally, here's the peppers after they've been drying in the dehydrator all evening/night.  I was smart - never having dehydrated peppers before, I decided to play it safe and set the dehydrator out on the deck...and BOY was it spicy smelling whenever you went outside!!  Heck, the next afternoon the whole downstairs STILL smelled like smoke and spice!!  Anyhow, all of these guys got jammed into a glass jar and stuffed in the freezer for when we need to add a little heat and flavor to something like chili....let's hope they're good!

We both agreed that this particular batch of brisket, while VERY tender and tasty, wasn't AS smoky/spicy as the batch that I made up for the big "Eat Local-ish" cookout a couple months back. Hmm....definitely gonna have to work on that for next time! ;-)

Another Harvest

I hope you didn't think those last pictures of pumpkins were the last you were gonna see! OH NO! There's still more! After all those other pumpkins were cleared off the deck railing, I figured I'd better go pick more and line 'em up!


Turns out one of the Lumina pumpkins must not have cured enough, or been close enough to dropping off the vine - the stalk was constantly leaking a little clear fluid that the wasps and yellow jackets looooove. Check out the sort of white-faced "wasp" to the right of the stem.


And since I have so many of them this year, I can't have another pumpkin posting without more close ups of the peanut pumpkins, right?


Check out those cool textures!


Pumpkins aren't the only things I've been picking lately. Here's MOST of the small spaghetti squash that formed this year - there are still a few left, and those are all up growing on the deck railing. I don't remember now if something volunteered from last year's spaghetti squash (did I put seeds out for the birds?), or if I planted one on accident this spring? Either way, I have no complaints - these little guys are great!

BFF

While they may say cats and dogs don't get along...


....these two really don't mind each other most of the time. Sure, Doogie gets a little rough with Tucker sometimes, and so either we have to tell Doogie to leave the cat alone, lift the cat out of Doogie's reach, or just let Tucker express how he's feeling... But more often than not Tucker will quite happily walk past Doogie and rub his tail/butt up in the dog's face, or will sometimes even instigate a game of chase.


And then what we have here is what I was considering a Mexican Standoff. You know SOMEONE was either gonna get licked or slashed right after I took this picture. In this specific instance it looks like Doogie's not actually paying attention to Moxie, but I assure you - he really WAAAANTED to nuzzle her, and with all the growling she was doing, he kept looking away, reconsidering his options.

And these two

And here's two more goofballs. We've got one more, but she seems nice and innocent so I won't pick on her...

Trapped in a workshop with dufuses

Trapped here with some real goofballs in this training session. One of these two dufuses here already messed up her, ah, their laptop - but I won't mention any names.

Gummi

What's the craziest present Brett got for his birthday this year?!?


That's right - a ONE POUND GUMMI BEAR from Peter and Conrad. Even after he took it in to work for a day AND we've both been taking little cuts off've it, I'd guess there's probably still .85 lbs left. ;-)

Disco Inferno

Or to quote another song: "Feeling HOT HOT HOT!"


I gave away a number of those scorching hot Fatalii peppers last week. Haven't heard all the reports back on what people thought of them. And then I gave the last one to Brett's brother Blake Saturday when we met up at Whitey's. He agreed it had some heat to it after the first few nibbles, but Blake loves HOT stuff.

And these jalapenos here? I'm going to try my hand at smoking them to make my own chipotles!

20 lbs

Just in case you're wondering, what you see in the bowl here is what 20 lbs looks like!


And that's not including the few extras on the sides - a few more gourds, a bird house gourd that's slowly rotting, and a couple butternut squash (one of which is really oddly shaped!)


Check out that variety - don't they look cool!? I kept saying I wouldn't need to grow more next year since I'm hoping most of these dry nicely, but who'm I kidding? Gourds are fun! I'll probably have to grow them again next year - maybe aiming for different shapes, colors, varieties.... People think I should be selling these, but I honestly doubt I'd make THAT much off've these, plus I want to have a lot of them for the Halloween party...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHARON!!!!

Today's Sharon's birthday, and I almost forgot to post it on here! Happy Birthday Sharon - I hope you get something good!!



Sitting here at Park Honda in Canton, waiting for my car repairs to wrap up. Ouch, that's gonna be a bit pricey.... Then we get to meet Sharon and Andy for dinner tonite, so that'll be fun!

The one and only!

What's the bestest tasting thing in the whole wide world!?


It would be this - the One and Only Perfect Asian Pear to come off my tree this year! (Notice how I'm trying to make my hand look small and lady-like so that the slightly-smaller-than-grocery-store-Asian-pear-apples looks a bit bigger...)


I'm not saying it was the ONLY one...there were a couple others, but they were a tad malformed or undersized. There's still one holding on for dear life - a gentle tug doesn't get it to release, so I leave it - it'll come off when it's ready. And why was this one so perfect? I wrapped it in row cover while it was developing - no bugs could get to it, but it had fresh air and room to grow.


There it is - I couldn't hide it forever - the one flaw. We'll pretend that didn't happen.


You're probably wondering - "aside from good looks, how did it taste", right? Well I was a little worried when I cut into it because it was a bit more yellowy, but y'know what? It was seriously the best tasting Asian pear apple I've ever had! It tasted SOOOO good! A little sweeter than ones I've had from the store. MMMM! I can't wait til next year - hopefully I'll have an even bigger harvest if I continue to pamper it...


Oh, and what were Brett's thoughts when I got him to try a small slice? "It was disgusting. I wish I could've spit it out." Oooooh well - this just means more for me in future years! In his defense, he doesn't like pears, nor does he like russet-skinned fruit...