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.
24 December 09
But We Forgot The Beer Beforehand
Yesterday we went to see “Invictus,” the movie directed by Clint Eastwood about Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s largely Afrikaner rugby team, the Springboks, during the 1995 Rugby World Cup played in South Africa. It’s a great story, and pretty much all true. Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon do credible jobs playing respectively Nelson Mandela and Francois Pienaar, the team captain of the Springboks. In classic sports movie trope fashion, the underdog Springboks manage to win the final, and more significantly help to unify the country in those fragile post-apartheid years.
As it happens there’s a bit of local color to the story. There’s a guy in Davis named Michael Lewis who writes a column every month or so in the local paper on beer and brewing (Lewis started the brewing science curriculum here at UCD). His last piece was about the story of the movie. It turns out Lewis was actually in attendance at the final of the World Cup, having been an amateur rugby player from a long ways back and for some reason was on hand in South Africa at that time. As he puts it — “The event is quite clear in my memory — despite a prodigious amount of pre-game beer sunk with my son and my brother-in-law, at his club — because it is, without a doubt, the seminal moment of my life associated with a sporting event.”
He concludes: “I look forward immensely to seeing the movie…partly, I suppose, because I’m an old rugby player, but mainly because I feel some ownership of it, odd as that might seem. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it as well. Look out for Jonah Lomu, the SAA 747 *, and the No. 6 jersey. And to make the experience thoroughly authentic, have a few beers before you go.”
* The bit in the movie about the jetliner is true.