The Art of Corona St. Cooking

This post is going to be about food. We love food, in case you haven’t noticed. We are obsessed with growing veggies, buying delicious ingredients, cooking elaborate feasts, and savoring every morsel. Today, we are going to talk about bread, giant sandwiches, and veggie tacos.

I know that we have talked about Dave’s bread baking in the past. These are just a couple of newer creations we’ve tried out. Looking back on our blog, it seems we have already talked about the herb bread we make with the fresh herbs from our garden, so I won’t go into that too much, except to say that this one was made with mostly just lavender, which made for a unique and delicious tasting loaf.

Pre-Cooked

Post-Cooked

The other thing we did was make rolls! Rolls are something that Dave has always wanted to experiment with but never did. We made a double batch of French bread so we would have a huge loaf for our giant sandwich. But it was just too much dough to work with, so we cut some off, formed it into little balls, and presto! Scrumptious rolls! These came out pretty much like white dinner rolls. Dave did some nice slashing action before they went into the oven, and they came out looking pretty professional.

This brings us to the Godzilla sandwich. We baked the aforementioned loaf, which was about 50% bigger than normal. We got delicious fresh produce, mostly from the Saturday farmer’s market and including our own homegrown cucumbers. I believe we had peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, cukes, onions, avocado, provolone cheese and mayo. This is one of our favorite meals in the summertime. You make it and cut off a hunk to eat right away, then put it in a bag and refrigerate it. If you can wait until the next day, it’s even better because the bread gets a little softer and the flavors all meld together. Really easy to do and so good. We don’t eat it when the veggies aren’t in season though, because it seems to lose something.

Lastly, we will talk about taco night. Our friend Molly recently moved back to Colorado Springs, and came over one night last week to make dinner with us. She has a great recipe for veggie tacos that she has perfected over the years. They include bell and spicy peppers, onions, corn and black beans, all thrown in a pan and let to cook down and get delicious.

We supplied the tortillas – we learned of these uncooked tortillas from our other friend Lin that you can get at Costco. They look just like flat white discs when you take them out of the bag.

You put them in a hot frying pan for a few seconds on each side and they puff up, get brown and are so much better than the pre-cooked ones you get at the grocery store. If you go to Costco, pick some up. They are also delicious as desert with cinnamon, sugar and butter. So, the veggies cooked, the tortillas puffed up, some cheese and sour cream was added at the end, and voila! These tacos were so quick and tasty. We had enough for leftovers the next day, which were great too.

We read an article last week published in the New York Times by food genius Michael Pollan. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=michael%20pollan&st=cse

He talked about how far things have come from the early 1960s, when Julia Child’s The French Chef premiered on PBS. He wrote that since then, food companies have taken the preparation – and essentially the food – out of cooking these days. Parents can buy pre-made frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches now! Yes, everybody is so busy these days working harder than they have had to in a long time just to make ends meet. But making food doesn’t have to be so laborious, time consuming and expensive to be homemade and fresh. We have learned over the past year or so that cooking can be a most rewarding and enjoyable experience. It is sad that so many people see preparing a meal as a tedious chore and not worth spending time on. A potentially deadly downside to buying prepackaged food-like product from the grocery store or loading up on fast “food” is that you have no idea what you are eating. So if you have the opportunity, get in touch with your food. Take an evening to shut off the TV, recruit friends and family, and cook a meal. Then do it again.

Quilted jars of relish

So you were all here for the can-tastrophe regarding the relish a few weeks ago. Luckily the cucumbers continue to grow. We had another load of them that all became ripe around the same time. The problem, as before, is that there are not enough that become ripe for a recipe but way too much just to eat in sandwiches and stuff. So this time we decided to supplement our pure, natural, special cucumbers with who knows what kind of cucumbers from the famer’s market. Anyways, I made the relish and canned it. We have to wait a month until we taste it so all of the flavors get together properly. I hope everyone out there is canning because it is so easy and you can make such great stuff. I didn’t burn myself, nothing blew up, and now we have several jars of hopefully yummy relish. This is all it took:

• 1. making the relish and letting it sit over night in the fridge
• 2. washing the jars and stuff

• 3. cooking the relish mixture

• 4. sterilizing the jars by boiling them in the canning pot

• 5. filling the jars with the cooked relish mixture

• 6. putting the tops on the jars
• 7. boiling the jars for some unspecified time (seriously, the recipe didn’t say so I had to make an informed guess by reading other recipes) don’t forget to adjust for altitude!

I still like it complicated

Dave ruined a loaf of bread in classic dave fashion by failing to add salt. This is by far his most frequent baking error. You may underestimate how important salt is in bread. You shouldn’t. It is basically uneatable without it. And this is from a couple of people keep their standards low. It can be used for breadcrumbs or croutons. Trust us when we say a 2lb loaf of bread makes a lot of bread crumbs. The good news it was a loaf of anadama bread – that sweet dark heavenly loaf new englander’s know and love. yum. YUM! This is why that was good. Because earlier this week Amy C. requested more info on anadama. Since dave’s last attempt didn’t end up in an eatable loaf we are not sick of eating this type of bread and are totally ready for a loaf of anadama. Of course we wouldn’t have been sick of it even if we had eaten the whole thing because it is so scrumptious. So that entry should be forthcoming. Also, we may be attempting relish again. We had another bounty of cukes this weekend. As we speak dave is rushing to the farmer’s market to get baby cukes to supplement our own. Chances are when he gets there all the vendors will be gone or they will still be there, his hopes will swell that he will be able to get them, only to be disappointed when he learns that they have all been sold out. We shall see when he returns. This morning we were very excited to purchase a box of 2nds peaches (bruised or dented ones which are half of and perfect for baking) only to find out they sold out moments before we arrived. This was after talking with our friend molly for days about how delightful a peach cobbler would be… with either ice cream or homemade frozen yogurt to top it off. yum. YUM! YUM! (that is right, YUM! X 2). So no peach cobbler or peach salsa this week. Anyways, stay tuned for more news regarding the cukes and anadama bread.

Also, before we forget, dave played at raven’s nest open mic this past week. It was fun as always. He played lucky me, bus driver blues, colors, and only sleeping.

I like complicated

These are Dave’s words. You should know that we tried to make relish and failed miserably. We don’t have any pictures to show for it. Anyways, here is the story. We had a bunch of cucumbers that were ready from our garden all at once. The recipe called for about 4.5 pounds of cukes and we had about 3 pounds. We thought this would be no big deal and we would just tweak the recipe. However, Renee a canning cookbook which insisted that you not decrease the amount of salt in a recipe even if you decrease the cukes. We shredded our precious cucumbers and added onion. Then we added tons of salt to the relish, along with sugar and cinnamon. It tasted a bit salty but otherwise was fine. The next step was to cook the mixture. Something wild and chemical must have happened in that pot on that stove on the way to relish because the next time we tasted the relish it was horribly salty. Way way WAY too salty. Ew, horrible, we shudder at the memory. Renee was ready to pitch it but dave wasn’t going to give up so easily. He instructed that sugar be added. We tasted again. This time the result were so revolting the hideous brew was spit into the sink. The horror! Our lovely baby cucumbers, the first produce we grew with our own hands – destroyed. Turns out Renee was reading a page about pickles and the whole thing was a misunderstanding.