A nice light lunch, with a bit of leftover soup.
Jennifer played around with a garden last year, but this year we’re serious and we’re going to do it right. The home-made BLT sandwhiches we had last year – home grown tomatoes, home-made bacon, home-made bread – more than justify doing it up!
Today Jennifer went off to volunteer at a museum (as she does) and I broke out the c. 1975 Sears 5 HP rototiller that’s a bit of a family heirloom.
It took some work to start it up (who knows when it was last fired up!), but after taking apart the air filter and spraying some starting fluid into the carb, it took just three well 19 ok 57 or so pulls on the rip cord. Seriously.
It took about four hours to rototill the complete garden area – about 10 feet wide by just under 30 feet long.
This is the first time I’ve done serious rototilling, and it’s a bit more work than it looks like. Every two minutes or so you’re stopping to break out the pickeaxe and digging out deeper rockes.
Jennifer got back partway through the task and helped me out by raking and pulling up rocks that had been driven to the surface.
Woof. Only four hours of work, but it feels like more.
Moving to the farm in 3-6 years (depending on the economy and how well we save) is going to be hard work. But it’s going to be the best kind of hard work.
…and also, I’ll have a tractor. 
I like Angry Orchard hard cider, so I decided to give the Harpoon hard cider a shot.
Meh.
B+.
Not as complex, not as “apple-ey”. It tasted fairly neutral, almost like a champagne. Clean and clear, but without much character.
This was the cover recipe from Bon Appetit last month
rating: A
Really, really good. Tremendously crispy, and the jalapeno-and-hot-sauce slaw goes great with it.
From the Border Cookbook, where it’s called “pinnata chicken”.
A mixture of vegetables and chorizo (or, in my case, extra machaca) is fried up.
Goat cheese and jack cheese are added.
The filling is stuffed into chicken breasts that have been pounded flat.
And the breasts are pan fried for a few minutes.
At first it was bland, but a bit of salt and ancho pepper brought it to life.
Jennifer: A
TJIC: B+
Another one from The Border Cookbook.
As with the cheese soup, I picked this to use up stock. The recipe is pretty simple: dry rub spices onto chicken parts, then fry them in a Dutch oven. Remove. Fry onion and garlic, then add rice and fry some more. Then add chicken stock.
Return the chicken to the Dutch oven, add chorizo (I used machaca, which I had one hand, and oregano and other spices – all the same stuff that goes in chorizo).
Cook for a while, then add peas and black olives.
At first I thought that this was just a B-.
Meh. It didn’t really gel; it felt like a pot full of random leftovers.
Then I realized that it needed salt, it needed heat, and it needed acid. I sprinkled on arbol pepper, salt, and splashed with a generous amount of lime juice.
…and suddenly we were up at a B+.
From The Border Cookbook
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1558321039
I picked this to use up stock – 6 cups of it. I’m a stock making machine, throwing a chicken carcasse into the stock pot most weeks, and even a whole pork leg bone with some regularity. The freezer was getting more over stuffed than the walled city of Kowloon.
Stock, spices, 3/4 lb of jack cheese, onion, carrot, salt, 1/2 & 1/2, one flame roasted mild green pepper.
Went really well with home-made bread. Filling. Colorful.
A-
Some people sleep on piles of hay…but a princess can feel even one pea under a dozen mattresses.
Some dogs eat out of plastic food bowls…and some demand crystal.
I’m joking, of course. She eats out of plastic…but when the orange pudding is all gone, she might as well preclean it for us before we hand wash the triffle serving dish.
From Arabesque.
