And More Food

Roasted tomatoes give lackluster tomatoes a chance to live up to their full potential. A basket of cherry tomatoes followed me home, which usually happens after a trip to Monterey Market. These tomatoes, from Fully Belly Farm, were a little watered down, probably due to the unusually cool summer we're experiencing here.


I have a fear that my two tomato plants are going to produce lackluster tomatoes because the fog is ever present this summer. At least those tomatoes can be saved with some slow and low heat (250 °F), a sprinkling of salt and pepper, dried oregano, and some olive oil. I like to throw garlic cloves, skin on, into the mix since roasted garlic is better than candy.


I take the tomatoes out of the oven after 3 hours. If you don't snack on all of them, you can use these for a simple angel hair pasta dish with basil and Parmesan cheese.



Usually, the oven stays idle during the summer, but it's cold here! I even roasted strawberries tossed with a dash of balsamic vinegar and a scant amount of sugar. They went really well with pork chops.

Cool weather also means that I get a hankering for spicy food. I just nabbed a copy of Fushia Dunlop's Land of Plenty, which brought back memories of my bike tour in Chengdu. Sichuan food is so different than the Cantonese food I cut my teeth on, so having Dunlop's help to demystify the techniques and spices has made for fun bonding time with my wok. The kung pao chicken recipe is worth the price of the book!

Refrigerator pickles are also happening in these parts. I made a huge batch of Vietnamese style daikon pickles, which is nothing more than a rice vinegar and sugar marinade. Salting the matchsticked daikon and letting it drain for at least 2 hours made the resulting pickles nice and crisp.

Nothing interesting is on the needles or the hook. I'm having to dig deep to finish up a super secret knitting project because reading and cooking are my preferred "I just to need to relax" projects.

Hopefully, I'll have news of ripened tomatoes the next time I blog.

Kimchi, Dead Fish, and Dog Butt

Behold, the saltiest meal on the planet! Not only do we have a few brined kimchis, but there is the Japanese curry made from spicy Kokumaro curry roux blocks. (For those who were following the my Japanese curry chronicles, Java Curry is the winner. Vermont Curry was bland, and Kokumaro was a close second.)

We hosted an impromptu kimchi and sour beer dinner gathering last Saturday. Sadly, I don't have any pics or notes from the sour beer tasting, but I can ask the boy and post results if anyone is sour beer fan.

I polled the dinner guests to see which kimchi was their favorite, but it the answers were evenly distributed. The most familiar and complex tasting kimchi was definitely the napa cabbage kimchi.

I let this kimchi ferment for a few days in the kitchen, but when the days got warmer, I moved the jar to a cooler room. Total fermentation time was 1 week. The tang and spice level was just right!

The cucumber and daikon kimchis did not need to ferment for very long. Some recipes I consulted said that they were ready as soon I they were finished, and to leave them in the refrigerator for a stronger flavor. Some of the daikon recipes required one to four weeks of fermentation. I suppose it depends on how long you are going to store them and the strength of your brine (lactobicillus, the bacterium that gives the kimchi its characteristic tang, can live in salty environment, but the more salt added, the slower the bacterium grows). I fermented both kimchis for 2 days.

I actually remembered to whip out the camera during my kimchi making frenzy.




For the cucumbers, I started with 1.5 lbs of Persian cucumbers.


Once they cucumbers were quartered, I tossed them into a nonreactive bowl (no metal) and I added 2 T of kosher salt.

Look at all the brine! This picture was taken 3 hours after I salted the cucumbers. I let them sit for a few more hours before adding the rest of the spices.


I tossed the brined cucumbers with some green onions, 1 T fish sauce, 1 T sugar, 1 T chili powder, and 6 cloves of minced garlic. They turned out crunchy, sweet, and salty! Before I served the cucumber kimchi, I sprinkled a little bit of roasted sesame oil over them. If I had toasted sesame seeds, I would have added those as well.


Besides the kimchi, I frantically finished a mini Dead Fish Hat for a baby shower. This project was fantastic for stash busting! I used so many odds and ends of my Tahki cotton stash.



Instead of using felt for the eyes, I crocheted a couple of circles with kitchen cotton. The boy was kind enough to sew on the eyes since I detest hand sewing.

As a final note, this is why we shouldn't hang towels on the oven. Ahem... (You know who you are!)