RACHAEL RAY

Last weekend I grilled peaches. I started by taking some firm peaches and cutting them in half and removing the pit. Then I dipped them in Jello powder (most people use brown sugar) and grilled them face down for about 5 minutes, right next to my kebobs on the grill. I had seen Adam Perry Lang do something like this but I got it all wrong. I think you are really supposed to macerate the peaches for a while. Here’s how he cooked them on the Open House show Rachael did on Food Network. I was there to sample them and they were delish!

They just didn’t come out too sweet when I tried. I tried Rachael’s recipe for Grilled Stone Fruit with Balsamic and Black Pepper Glaze and that was very good for a dessert dish with a kick. It seems like the common theme here is to either grill them and then give them a drizzle of some sweet syrup or soak them first and then grill them. Either way, you have to start with fresh and sweet peaches.

Here’s a video Adam did on grilling peaches for the California Peach, Plum and Nectarine Board 

We have a smallish fridge/freezer in our kitchen because of a space restriction. My hubbie and I have always talked about getting a second unit and putting it in the basement for the overflow of food we seem to have. This conversation has been going on for years , partly because we disagree on how much food should be kept in a house on a regular basis. I grew up in a family where when you opened the fridge, food would practically knock you over, it was so packed full of everything from fresh veggies, fruit and dairy, to every kind of leftover. My mom would even save the leftover salad, which I never understood. As soon as dinner is over, that lettuce is wilted, but I guess my dad kind of liked the wilted lettuce so there it would go, in the fridge, along with whatever else we didn’t finish. A half a chicken breast here, a cup of rice there, etc. Nothing in Tupperware, either. Everything was in plates or bowls with Saran Wrap, piled on top of each other.

My husband is of the opposite mindset. He likes to keep on hand just the right amount of food to get through that day or maybe the next day. We had enough food to get us through the winter, in my house, but this very thought bewilders my husband. Now that he and I have built our own family, we have sort of a compromise going on, but there is one thing we agree on-we don’t like to waste food. Granted, I’ll keep a leftover around a little longer than he will, but we both think throwing food away is a sin.

We’re also kind of getting healthier and doing the whole organic thing. Recently, in fact, he found a farm that would sell us part of a cow. The idea makes me shudder (part of a cow?) but in fact, it will save us money and will be right from an organic farm. The question is, where do we put it? Here’s where my husband got all manly and burly. He decided to buy a “deep freeze.” I voted for another fridge/freezer unit, thinking I could use the extra fridge space for my diet sodas and big casseroles and cheese platters when hosting holiday dinners. Being that he can’t understand any of this, before I knew it, the deep freeze idea had won (I guess I have to give in on some things!). Somehow, the deep freeze is a guy thing, like grills are a guy thing.

So he goes and buys the deep freeze, which of course, can’t fit through our doorway. I suggested it go in the garage, with the other manly things, but my husband’s face suddenly looked stricken with horror-the thought that something might distrupt the feng shui of his garage space! But in the end, it was a good idea and afterall, it had nowhere else to go. “Okay, it goes in the garage,” my husband said “but don’t touch it.” I love it! Don’t touch the deep freeze because it’s his! It’s for him and his cow! I think maybe he’s secretly afraid I’ll accidentally open it and throw him in there with the cow!

Too funny. So of course, I had to go see what was going on in there. So I snuck to the garage with the keys, yes it has keys. Why does it have keys? Was this thing made for a dead body storage or what? Either that or it was created by Weight Watchers! Anyway, I unlocked the thing, it’s a beast, really. It’s as big as a Prius. I peered in and what do I see, besides mostly empty space (the cow has not arrived yet)? Ice cream. This is my husband’s big secret. He’s got a gallon of Haagen Daaz in there like he was hiding an affair. I quietly locked it back up, put the keys away and never breathed a word about it. Well, except to you.

As your garden grows, you probably want to start thinking about propping up some of your veggies like tomatoes, peas, beans, cukes and others that won’t stand up on their own. This year, I ordered these “ladders” from Gardener’s Supply Co and so far have been very happy with them:

The red ladders are for my tomato plants, which as we all know will be towering over the tops of the ladders by August. The little green ladders, which you may or may not be able to see (look in the bottom right corner of the photo above) are holding up my snow peas and cucumber plants. I have been much happier with these ladders than I was last year with the cone-shaped wire tomato plant holders. You can see one on the bottom left corner of this photo that I am using only because I am short a red ladder.

Here’s how I am using the short ladders for my cukes:

I went to see my friend Aura’s garden yesterday and was stopped in my tracks with envy. Not only did she have neat little borders and a special herb garden (my stuff is kind of all over the place) and a fence to keep out her dog and other animals (ambitious), but she had built this pea ladder that looks like a tee pee:

Don’t ask me how she did it but isn’t it brilliant? She was away for the weekend and her husband had no idea what inspired her, but when she gets home, I am going to have her show us how she did it. It looks like she took three sticks from the backyard and wrapped twine around it in a special kind of weave. She then has the peas crawling up the twine in the same way I am using my green and red ladders shown above. But hers is home-ade and cooler looking.

The other thing she is doing well is making use of some space in her backyard where she couldn’t plant directly either because the soil quality was not good or there was no soil at all. Instead, she built a home-ade container out of wood and essentially created a box for her broccoli plants:

I think she did a good job and it inspired me to try the same.  I realize now that my plants are all about a month behind hers because I did everything from seed and she bought plants.  I kind of like the seed experiment and mostly everything has sprouted, with the exception of my watermelon and red chili peppers, but then again, I have so much packed in my garden that I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I went out there and saw a small green globe!

Next thing I have to figure out is how to keep out the critters.  The raccoons and squirrels are having a feast on my account.

How is your garden doing?

Well, I got my first vegetable delivery from our new CSA that we just joined. This is our vegetable package and I have to say at first impression, I am very satisfied! First we got an email stating what foods we would be receiving for the week and a few recipes to go along with the list. This week we got red kale, some kind of cabbage, lettuces and garlic scapes. I never thought garlic scapes had an actual name, I just thought they were this thing that grew in my parents’ backyard that smelled like garlic. Who knew they were actually food. The recipe says we can use them in soups or cooking or if feeling adventurous, diced raw into salads. I think I will use them as I would a scallion.

According to the Washington Post, the scape if left to grow, would produce a bulb that eventually would become the garlic head we know and love.

Has anyone else cooked with them?

As you may have read in my previous blogs about my garden, I have planted so many seeds this year that I have at least one plant that I can’t identify. All of the seeds I planted in the ground are now thriving. Take a look at my beautiful zucchini plants which are just now starting to flower-see the yellow blossom:

Aren’t they gorgeous?!?! They are going to get unwieldy soon but then we’ll have beautiful squashes. Speaking of which, I also have eggplant and cukes growing in the garden (or they will be) and I just bought them short ladders. Even though you don’t need them and you can let your squashes and other plants just wind around the garden, they will grow better with small ladders or propped up somehow. They’ll get more air and have less of a chance of rotting or getting eaten by bugs and worms.

Okay back to the mystery plant. I planted these seeds in a pot and they have been growing strong-in fact I just transplanted them to the ground today because they were getting too crowded. However, I still have NO IDEA what the heck I am growing but now I am growing alot of it. Any ideas???

Lucky me-this past week an ad appeared in my local paper advertising “Nick the Milkman.” I thought back to my childhood and the guy who used to pull into our driveway each week in his little truck, wearing the milkman hat and coat and delivering farm fresh eggs and milk to our door. I couldn’t believe that someone like this might still exist, but intrigued, I called Nick to find out the dealio.

Nick, as it turns out, may not wear the uniform (I actually wouldn’t know because he drops off the milk at 4am), and instead of a metal milk box he uses an insulated plastic bag for drop off, but he is otherwise almost exactly the same as the man who came to my door when I was a child. Nick drops off farm fresh, hormone and pesticide free milk in glass bottles twice a week. After speaking to him I signed up and now get milk delivered twice a week.

First of all, there is something comforting in the thought of Nick dropping off milk while I sleep. It’s like someone bringing one of those Zone meals to my door, only it’s real food. I love the idea that Nick is out there, working on my behalf, while I sleep. It’s like he’s taking care of me. And there’s a little present when I get up-no waiting in line at the supermarket, no heavy bags of milk to carry.

But that’s not the most important thing, of course. The milk is amazing. I never realized what a difference the glass bottle makes, but the taste is completely different. We get 2% and this is so rich and creamy, it tastes almost like whole milk.

If you could find this kind of service in your town, I highly recommend it! And in the end, he is cheaper than what I would pay for organic milk at the supermarket. Next I will try his eggs and cheese and maybe someday we will fulfill our dream of buying a deep freeze and storing meats that we buy from an organic and pasture-fed farm too. Between the garden and the milkman, we might not have to spend so much at the grocery store this summer!

It is nearing 100 degrees today in the Northeast and if you have been following my gardening blogs, you might imagine that I am concerned. Some of my plants, like the tomatoes and the peppers, love the heat and they will thrive in this scorching sun and humidity, but other plants of mine, like the leafy spinaches and lettuces, which are made up almost entirely of water, could wither. Here are some tips:

• Don’t water your garden at night as mold could form. You want to water it during the day so the sun and warmth will allow it to get absorbed by the plants.
• However, don’t water the plants just before or during the period when the sun is blazing down on your garden as the glare can actually burn the plants. Water them either early in the morning before the sun is too high, or later in the afternoon.
• Plants in containers, especially if they are not self-watering containers, need more water than those in the ground. The ground is so vast that it contains more nutrients and more soil, so inevitably the supply of moisture is greater. Last year, I saw this with my basil. I planted some in pots and some in the ground and the ground basil flourished while the potted plants were weak and their color was more faded. So in addition to making sure they are keeping moist, make sure the pot is big enough so they have room to grow.
• Tomatoes especially need water every day. If you are concerned about wasting water, consider creating a cistern to capture rain water and use it on your garden. You can’t ask for cleaner water so why not try to grab a little bit o’ Mother Nature? You do this by creating some kind of water collection system that sits at the end of your gutters, for instance. This water is not for human consumption, because once the rainwater hits the gutters or the roof, it starts picking up dirt and debris along the way that you don’t want to put into your stomach, but it’s fine for the garden.

To learn more about creating a cistern, try these websites:

University of Florida

Urban Design Tools

Oikos

Okay so I had to order a pair of these super cute “Rachaels” that Gretta Monahan has produced. Gretta is the fashion and beauty contributor on Rachael’s daytime tv show and she now has shoes available through shoes.com that she has designed. She even named one after Rachael, called, what else, the Rachael. I bought a pair in leopard skin pattern, because I am that kinda sassy gal, and look at how cool they look:

I like these because they are wide and although the heel is high, they are supportive because the bottom of the front part has a platform sole that seems to kinda steady them.  They are very affordable too-under $50!

This weekend, we had surprise guests.  Literally the phone rang at 2:30 and my friends, who were supposed to come at 6 for dinner, asked if they could come at 3:30 instead since they had forgotten they had a committment and had to leave our house by 6.  So we agreed that it would still be fun to see them and that we would do a quick backyard BBQ with just hotdogs and sausages on the grill.

But that’s never enough, so I pulled a fennel bulb out of the fridge and a bunch of celery.  I looked up and found this recipe from Rachael Ray -Fennel and Celery Slaw Salad-and made it my own:

Instead of white vinegar, I used the juice of one lemon.  I added 1/2 cup chopped and pitted Kalamata and Sicilian olives.  I used mostly the heart of the celery as well as some of the stalks.  This recipe was delicious!

Okay you green thumbs out there-here’s a weird one.  So I was checking on my potted and growing herbs and noticed a new, maroon-colored leaf sprouting out of one pot.  I thought, “oh, that must be my eggplant!”  But then I saw the same sprout in every other pot I had an in the ground.  Upon closer look, I saw a few of those helicopters that had fallen from the tree above, had landed in the pots or ground and started to stand upright in the ground with the seed as the base.  The sprouts are coming out of the seeds of these helicopters.  I pulled them out, assuming they will turn into weeds, but I really don’t know.  What the heck will these grow into?  They’re taking over my backyard!