Q dug up one of our three sweet potato plants the other day. Look at that beautiful family! I’ll eat them all up!

Chicken and waffles is a dish with somewhat disputed roots: some claim it as soul food (and, well, Gladys Knight does own a chain of chicken and waffle restaurants. And did you know she was Aaliyah’s aunt? Oh wikipedia, you fill the space between my ears.). Others claim it as PA Dutch. There are evidently two varieties of this dish and I think we can probably guess which version matches up with which group claiming ownership of the concept. One variety is a waffle with chicken on top, covered in gravy (that’s the version we make). The other is fried chicken served with a waffle covered in syrup and butter.

We as a household could basically eat biscuits and gravy for every meal for a thousand years, so modifying the concept into waffles is not really a big stretch.

Plain ol’ waffle, plain ol’ gravy, seitan standing in for chicken, our beautiful sweet potatoes, and some chard with onions. DAMN!

Here is how:

Waffles are the Soy Not Oi recipe. Mix 2.5 c flour, a scant 4 t baking powder, more salt than you’d add for sweet waffles (i think i used about a whole teaspoon). Add one melted stick of margarine and 2 c water. Mix it up, and make waffles.

Gravy is from Jo Stepaniak’s Nutritional Yeast Cookbook. Mix 1/4 c whole wheat flour and 1/4 c nutritional yeast in a saucepan. Gradually whisk in 1.5 c vegetable broth, 2 T good tasty soy sauce, and a splash of olive oil.  Once it’s smooth and evenly mixed, add a pinch of black pepper and maybe a bit of garlic powder. Cook gently over medium heat, whisking frequently.

Chard is from our garden. Just wash the leaves well, cut the stems out and chop them up with some onions and fresh garlic first, and cook ‘em up in a skillet till they’re soft. While they’re cooking, cut or tear up the leaves into manageable pieces. Add them to the skillet and let it cook just long enough for the chard to get soft, which is not long at all.  We usually season it with balsamic vinegar and that’s about it.

Spicy pan-fried sweet potatoes are vaguely based on a recipe that might have been from Vegan Planet? I can’t even remember. If you are smart, you would nuke the potatoes first or boil them. I haven’t made sweet potatoes in a while and forgot about how long they’ll take to cook if you don’t prep them. So this variation involves slicing the sweet potatoes and putting them in a big skillet with some olive oil and sriracha sauce (the chili garlic sauce by the same company is even better for this purpose but hey, we always have sriracha around) — stir it all around so each piece is pretty evenly coated with oil and hot sauce. If you forgot to prep the sweet potatoes, you’ll need to put a lot of water in the skillet too, crank up the heat, and get it to boiling!!!! Boil off all the water, keep the skillet good and hot, and let the potatoes get crispy. So fucking good.

Follow this meal up with a slice of peach pie!

Please note that I ate this meal in front of the television so I could watch the Rick Sebak film “To Market To Market To Buy a Fat Pig,” which is all about regional farmers markets. Every time he used a chuckle to transition to the next segment, I thought I might die of pure joy. I was pretty bummed out that I missed the section about the East Liberty all-season market, but it doesn’t even matter. The rest of it was GOLD. One day Q and I would like to own the entire collection of Sebak programs.

Seriously.

Remember the homemade tomato broth? It became soup and was eaten in a minute and is all gone.

Homemade Tomato Soup

• 1/2 big onion, minced
• 1 big garlic clove, minced
• 1 quart tomato broth
• 1/2 cup fresh basil leaves (rinse, pluck from stem, chiffonade)
• 1 t salt
• 1 t freshly ground black peppercorns
• a pinch of sugar if your tomatoes are sour.

Put a bit of olive oil (or butter, or margarine) in a saucepan and add the minced garlic and onion. If you are me, you will space out while looking for a good record to put on while you cook, and the oil will reach its smoking point and you will be terrified that you nearly caught the kitchen on fire. Hopefully you are not me. Cook those little buddies till they are soft, and add the tomato broth, salt, pepper, and basil.

Let it simmer for maybe 15 minutes, to let the liquid reduce a bit. Taste it and add sugar if necessary (you will probably want a bit of sugar if you’re using big round juicy tomatoes, but not necessarily so if you’re using smaller paste tomatoes.).

This is really a terrible photo of the soup, but I felt obligated to show you the final product!

Then feed it to your friends while you talk about your fondness for laying on the living room floor and eating corn chips, also known as “living free, living proud.”

PS: All you do to chiffonade is roll the basil leaves into a big fat joint and slice them crosswise, thusly:

Every garden is bound to offer up a handful of surprises. The Torley Manor 2007 edition is no exception.

SURPRISE #1 - Like most gardens, we get a handful of volunteer plants each spring - plants springing up from seeds left in the garden either by previous plants or re-located their via our compost. Generally we just get lots of little tomato plants. This year we did indeed get a small army of those, but also had a handful of another unknown plant. At first we thought it was either zucchini or cucumber, but after they began to grow more, we compared them to the cucumber plants we started inside and decide that, yep, these guys were definitely zucchini. No doubt about it, right?

After re-locating a couple of these plants in our garden and giving several of them away, the plants began to grow. And continued to grow and more specifically began to grow as vines, which zucchini plants are not known to do. Thus we decided that these were in fact NOT zucchini, but what exactly were they?

Well, we got closer to our answer shortly after when they began sprouting some tiny squash-like fruit. We began to wonder what kind of squash these would grow to become, but the funny thing is, they stopped growing (well, the individual fruits did, the plants continued growing into the neighbors back yard and looped around back into our tomatoes.) All we were left with was handfuls of these tiny little gourds. We’re not exactly sure what they would technically be called and certainly have no fuckin’ idea how they came to grow in our garden as we’ve never planted or consumed such gourds in our time here at the Manor. So they weren’t exactly what we were hoping for, but they were a pleasant enough surprise.

SURPRISE #2 - We started our broccoli inside this year and it sprouted up quick, but then stopped growing. We transplanted them outside and after a bit they began to take off again, but I think we got behind schedule and they never offered us any harvest. Regardless we chose to let the plants keep growing rather than pulling them out. A couple weeks ago one of the plants actually developed a head, albeit a loosely formed one. We considered harvesting it, but decided to wait, and then got busy and didn’t harvest it before it began to go into blossom. This was our surprise - when broccoli blossomes, it makes a really quite beautiful bouquet of flowers. Tiny little yellow flowers, all bunched together. Here is a photo of it as it now appears, a bit past its blossoming prime.

Also, as of yesterday I noticed that one of the other broccoli plants has developed a small head that looks like it might provide a more well-formed head of brocolli. Right now its only about 1″ across, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed.

SURPRISE #3 - Torley Manor has never had much luck growing peppers. We’ve tried your standard green bell pepper, hot peppers, and this year we tried a Nardello sweet pepper. Our pepper sprouts experienced a similar situation to our broccoli, early quick growth then slow growth once they were transplanted. We planted the peppers between the tomatillos and the “zucchinis”, and as both of those plants took off, the peppers kinda got lost in between, with only one plant surviving. As that one plant wasn’t really showing much signs of growth, we pretty much abandoned it (accepting our fate as pathetic pepper growers). However, last week as I was digging through the tomatillo plants doing some harvesting, I came upon this itty-bitty little singular pepper. I’m not quite willing to call this a pepper growing success story, but its something a little better than all out failure.

ok maybe they are. if your mom’s vegan. it’s officially fall in my house because this is the kind of lazy sunday afternoon meal that becomes commonplace once the school year gets rolling and sundays are for grading papers and watching football. of course, neither of those were part of the gameplan today but I try not to let small things like that come between my junk food and me.

for a less lazy version, add some tofu sour cream, homemade guac and salsa and you could probably charge $7.99 for it as an appetizer somewhere.

We are cooking down our tons and tons of tomatoes, and our heaps and heaps of pumpkins.

The kitchen is very hot. The sweat drips. I can’t decide if I feel awesome or gross. Or both.

For the tomatoes, we:

1. Peeled them (same way as peaches: boil water, chuck tomatoes in for ten seconds, remove, skin falls off. A new tip: before you put the tomato in the water, score a little X on the bottom. Gives you a starting point for the peeling. Sweet.)
2. Cored them.
3. Chopped them in a very half-assed manner.
4. Pureed them in the food processor.
5. Forced the puree through a strainer into a saucepan. Said pan is now full of beautiful smooth red tomato juice/pulp, which we’re cooking down to a thicker puree and will freeze in small batches for many future sauces.

For the pumpkins:

1. I fell asleep at 6pm and Q did all the work of gutting the pumpkins and chopping them into big slices the other night. Thank you, Q.
2. Then we chopped ‘em into cubes and peeled them that way, just with a paring knife.
3. Steamed the cubes in the blanching pot.
4. Pureed the cubes into a watery pulp in the food processor.
5. I haven’t decided yet if I want to directly freeze at this stage, or if I want to cook it way way way down so that I can make pies. That takes a long time, but damn, homemade pumpkin pie is pretty fucking fantastic. Though I could just freeze the watery puree and then thaw and cook it down when it’s cold out and I actually WANT to have the stove on for hours at a time. This dilemma may have just resolved itself.

Pictures to follow.

goodbye days filled with doing whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, or better yet, nothing at all..
goodbye eating when I was hungry and not when I wasn’t, week day pancakes, 2am cookies..
goodbye 8am workouts, walking everywhere, forgetting what day of the week it was..
goodbye full night’s sleep..
see you in nine months.

hello lesson plans, peeing on schedule, 10pm bed times, parking lot duty, grading labs..

…at least some other folks go back to work right around now to keep me distracted.

how did I spend my last night of summer? with an old friend:

but I’m just not that into it. I’m not very into cake either, usually.. but with an excess of fresh blueberries and plums in my fridge, I figured it was time these two hook up.. and pies just seem like a harsh environment for the delicate blossoming of a tender young relationship.. especially if the fruit is claustrophobic.

so I melted some butter and brown sugar together in the bottom of a greased cake pan, layered some plums and blueberries in the caramelized goop as best I could, and threw together a batch of friendly golden cake batter (which can always be trusted not to interfere with this type of matchmaking process) to pour on top. 40 minutes and one precarious vertical flip later, I had this plum blueberry upside down cake:

I think they like each other.

I like food. all kinds. all times of year. but usually, I’d say I’m a pretty seasonally appropriate chef. for example: I’ve probably consumed 50 pounds of blueberries this summer; in a month or two, I’ll be craving butternut squash soup; after that, I’ll begin daydreaming about which pumpkin pie recipe I’d like to experiment with; eventually I’ll move on to sugar cookies and gingerbread men. (exception: ice cream. year round. very versatile!)

anyway, I’ve just taken stock of my eating habits over the past week or two and can’t help but wonder what’s going on.

my brain knows it’s August. in fact, most of me is pretending it’s June in denial of the school year looming in the immediate horizon. the weather is hot, humid, and August-like. so, why am I eating the comfort food people make when it’s cold outside? it’s not like I’m feeling that lame autumn-nostalgia people fall into (ha!) these days.

first I was craving falafel after a visit to the always delicious East Side Pockets in Providence. so I made some:

then I decided I hadn’t made any baked seitan in a while, and it always goes nicely in a chili con carne-style dish so I had to make some of that:

then, despite the fact that macaroni and cheese rarely sounds appealing to me, I just had to have some:

and then with all that baking and the apartment temperature at 88 degrees, I figured I might as well pull out that sourdough starter I made a few months ago and experiment with spelt flour:

who knows. maybe I ought to just freeze all the summery produce I can get my hands on now so I’ll be ready for whatever ironic need for light summer fare will beset me in January.

The heat plus the insane storms plus the heat plus us going out of town for a few days really did a number on the vining plants, as Q mentioned previously. There is a wee bit of life on the cucumber, yet, but the pumpkin vine is toast. So we picked two of the three pumpkins and they are some CUTE MOTHERFUCKERS! CUTE!

We also have been hustling to get food put by, instead of letting it just get away from us. So here is the bounty of late: Pumpkins, blueberries and corn from a farm stand we ran into while out of town, corn from our own garden, peaches (some from our farmer’s market here, some from a market nearer to my folks), and tomatoes and tomatillos from our garden. HOLY SMOKES WHAT TO DO WITH ALL OF THIS????

Here’s what!

1. Wash, peel, slice, and freeze peaches. This will make a dessert way more awesome sometime in the dead of winter.

2. Wash and begin to cure pumpkins, so we can just deal with them later. MF’ers can last 3-6 months if cured and stored properly. No hurry here.

3. Make a ton more chickpea chili with the tomatillos. YEAH!

4. Shuck and boil the corn, then cut all the kernels off with a sharp knife. I froze two containers of corn. These will make some excellent cornbread or chili or soup later on.

5. SHIT those are a lot of tomatoes and there are more getting ripe all the time. I think I am just going to wait and watch, and eat any that have bruises or are getting too soft to keep. Then when I have a REALLY big heap, I’ll make and freeze some tomato sauce. I’ll report back on that — it’s a big part of the reason we grew only paste tomatoes this year (except for the one volunteer that we let grow because we are soft-hearted).

6. BLUEBERRY PIE ! OBVIOUSLY!

Oh, look at ‘em!!! We made a peach and blueberry cobbler the day we got the blueberries, so this is a little less than we started with. It turned out to be the perfect amount for a pie:

And what to do with the leftover pie dough? Why, sugar pies! Dust off any extra flour and put the dough pieces on a cookie sheet. If you’re feeling fancy, brush them with melted margarine or with soymilk. That is gourmet and not necessary. Then sprinkle sugar and cinnamon all over them. Put on more sugar than you think you want to.

If you do it right, sugar pies taste just like Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal.  Yes!

Back in the late ’80s, when I was a wee one, my eldest sister liked going to Vincent’s Pizza Park in Forest Hills, and my mother didn’t appreciate us going there. Beyond the oceans of grease and the legendary cigarette ash topping, Vincent’s was rather shady — I don’t really know how you could fight, or even really get mad at someone, around that much pizza, but I guess there’s also a lot of beer there.

In 2007, there’s not so much in the way of cigarette ash, nor brawling, but Vincent’s is still the place in Pittsburgh for a huge, greasy, disgustingly great pizza. Thus, Friday evening, Brian, Thiago and I headed for the pizza park. (Seriously. Pizza “park”? Who came up with that? I expect a pizza park to have teeter totters in the vomitorium or something, but whatever.)

We split a small, one side with green peppers and the other side with pepperoni. They don’t skimp on toppings here; in addition to the copious amounts of grease, there were probably three green peppers on there, and a couple pigs as well. (Note to good vegetarians: if you split a pizza and get meat on half, the line is going to be very blurred. This goes for everywhere, but especially Vincent’s. I’m not a great vegetarian, so it’s cool.)

On a Friday night at Vincent’s, service won’t be horribly prompt, but that’s not really the main concern. There are a lot of people there, and you’re drinking beer, and everything’s cool. You will eventually get a bigass pizza that enlarges your stomach when you ingest it. You will sit under the old posters and newspaper clippings about local sports achievements, and you’ll have trouble with your Roman numerals when discussing Super Bowls. You will look at that mug shot of a young Sinatra and mistake it for a mug shot of a young Charles Manson and think about how great it would be to open a pizza shop with pictures of serial killers adorning the walls.

And when it’s all over you will take off eastbound on Ardmore Boulevard, rock down to Electric Avenue, and loop around, content with the contents of your belly, wondering why you didn’t bring a camera with which to document this for the blogosphere.

Vincent’s Pizza Park
998 Ardmore Blvd, Forest Hills
412-271-9181