2 August 26
Farmers Market at 50
Yesterday the Davis Farmers Market celebrated its 50th anniversary. We had a sketchcrawl at the market for the event. I didn’t stay long at the sketchcrawl, but did complete the sketch at left.
23 July 26
Scallions For Stirfry
At some point I learned that the combination of scallions, ginger, and garlic is considered the holy trinity of Chinese cooking. Maybe that is so — at any rate it is a key part of a favorite dish of ours that I made for lunch today, called deliciously spicy tofu. The recipe is from Madhur Jaffrey’s Eastern Vegetarian Cooking book (page 201): basically one takes the ginger, garlic, and scallions and stirfry them, adds tofu, and mix in a chili-bean sauce.
As a bonus, scallions, ginger, and garlic are all fun to sketch.
28 April 26
Yellow Onion
This onion is from our grocery run this morning, and is sketched with Derwent drawing pencils, watercolor wash, and a bit of extremely fine black ink linework.
14 April 26
Red Potato
Sketched with Derwent drawing pencils, Derwent Graphitint pan colors, and a bit of black ink. I’m going to be making lentil soup tomorrow, so I picked up a couple of red potatoes in today’s early morning shop.
17 February 26
Delicata Squash
Sketched today before it got chopped up for our weekly soup. I drew it with ink and Neocolor II watercolor crayons.
28 January 26
Dinner Shallot
The smaller portion of this shallot made it into our dinner this evening, which was stir-fried green beans and mushrooms over rice. Sketched with Derwent Graphitint pencils.
30 December 25
Onion Soup
I usually make a big pot of something on Tuesdays, and give some to a couple of friends who live nearby. Today, though, neither one was around, so I did something I haven’t done for years and years: I made onion soup. The recipe, a vegetarian (not vegan) one from Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook, uses soy sauce instead of beef broth and much less butter than you’d find in Julia Child’s version, but it was still plenty buttery and good. I toasted some baguette pieces with oil and garlic, poured the soup over them, and topped the whole with gruyère which I put under the broiler to melt.
Back when I lived in Boston, translator Art Goldhammer would always make a big pot of onion soup on election night. Even this smaller amount was a lot of onions to slice and if I were to take up this practice I’d invest at least in a mandolin if not a food processor. And next time I’d brown the onions a little more to get the soup a darker color.
16 November 13
From Field to Flour
Two years ago we started getting involved with Farm 2.6, a new educational community farm a few miles west of Davis. I had the odd idea then of putting in a small wheatfield, with the idea of baking some bread from wheat I had grown myself. Today I ground my first batch of flour from the wheat!
There is a reason why grains do not figure in most home gardening efforts, despite being an important diet staple. It is an awful lot of work to produce grains in any sort of quantity at all. (For those who are nevertheless still interested, one good text is Gene Logsdon’s Small-Scale Grain Raising). The timeline of our efforts was as follows. In late winter of 2012 we sowed the field in red clover as a cover crop and to put nitrogen into the soil. It then lay fallow until late January of this year, when we planted the field in a hard red spring wheat. It didn’t end up as a very densely planted field, and there were many, many weeds in it, but wheat we got, and several of us harvested it by hand in early July. The wheat then sat in the barn until last week when at a work party it was threshed and winnowed. The threshing was done by dancing on the heads of the wheat placed in a pillowcase; the winnowing was done with the aid of a small fan. The resulting wheat berries are at left.
We have a small hand-cranked grain mill at home and I set to grinding today. This too is hard work, and in about an hour-and-a-half I grinded about 3 cups of flour. I ended up borrowing one of our pieces of cat furniture to clamp the mill to; the cats were curious what use I was making of it. Below is some of the flour. Next up comes baking a loaf of bread! 
15 August 11
Sunday Challah
Now that I’m back from vacation in Pennsylvania, I’m continuing on with my project to work my way through the recipes in the Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book. Today I baked their whole wheat challah recipe. Despite it being entirely from whole wheat flour, it tastes amazingly like challah. There are four eggs in the dough, and it was incredibly sticky to work with.
6 June 11
Loaves For Learning
For some reason I’ve gotten it in my head to work my through the recipes in the Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, baking a couple loaves of bread each weekend. I’ve been doing this for several weeks now. At left is what I baked today, a molasses bread recipe. This is made with coarse stone-ground flour and has an overnight first rise.