Korean-Style Quick Beef and Veg

So, I promised to get back to blogging recipes. And as much as I love cooking and eating and all things food related, this is ending up being a much more difficult task for me than it has any right to be. So, be gentle on me as I slog through this.

You see, it's been a crazy few years for me. Growing kids with increasingly hectic schedules, family members dealing with life-threatening issues, job changes, and to top it all off, a move. Don't get me wrong, things aren't dire or anything. In fact, they're quite good, knock on wood. But it just makes for the type of situation where here it's coming around to the end of 2017 already and I still haven't sent out last year's Christmas cards with our change of address. THAT kind of crazy.

The other thing that I find complicating is my own sense of perfectionism. I have a difficult time doing things if I don't feel like I can do them the way I think they should be done. I like to show you pictures of all the steps of the recipes I make. I like to have a lighthearted banter in the way I write. I like the food to be easy to make and also delicious. Most of the times, those are not a problem, but right now, the first of those is giving me stress. In the house we moved to, the kitchen is really great, in terms of functionality and usability, and while it needs some renovation, that's probably about 5 years or so down the road at this point. But it's in the center of the house. And while our kitchen has always been the figurative center of our home, it wasn't the literal center before. Which may not seem like it's a big deal, or something that would affect my blogging, but...

...There's no natural light in my kitchen. Which suuuuuuuuuucks for taking pictures. Typical house lighting makes for weird shadows and altered coloring, and I'm not yet really great at photo editing. So I either have to skip all the pictures (Nooooooo! But maybe work with fewer...), take food I want to shoot to other rooms that have natural light (awkward, but yes), deal with shoddy pictures (ugh, hopefully not too often), learn how to preform miracles in photoshop (working on it), get a lightbox or other tools to enable better pictures (on my Christmas list), or just deal with that the pictures kind of are what they are and still forge ahead with the blogging while looking for ways to improve the photographic situation.

So, that's what I'm doing. Like I said, be gentle with me.

And now, back to the food!

Pavlovian Response

If there's one thing I love (besides my family, of course), it's a good dessert.  And pavlova is not just a good dessert, it's an amazingly delicious dessert!  It's also fairly easy to make, although you need to start a day ahead, and hugely impressive.

Nutty Sweetness...Oh, and I Made Chestnut Jam Too.

I have a thing for chestnuts.  And yes, I'm starting to realize that I say that about a lot of foods, but it's true.  Different foods are, in some ways, like books to me.  They can transport me to another place or time, bring back memories, or open my eyes to new horizons.

Chestnuts are one of those foods for me.  They always make me feel like I'm on a picnic in the European countryside, or cooking with an elderly woman in her Italian villa, or walking down the dark streets of London in winter with some roasted chestnuts to warm my cold hands, or snacking with friends in my Parisian dream kitchen (although they never snack in France, so that one is a stretch).  Those fantasies are actually a little odd, now that I think of it, because some of my favorite chestnut snacks come from the Asian market, where I can't read 90 percent of the packages, but if I see a picture of a chestnut, I will snatch it up and gobble it down.  Tiny round pancakes sandwiched with a rich chestnut jam are always the first thing I head for at the candy shop in Chinatown.  But somehow, they still feel very European to me.

Sweet and Spicy: No, Not Just Me, the Pepper Jelly Too!

We get a lot of peppers of all sorts from our vegetable CSA.  Sweet ones, mild ones, hot ones, uber-hot ones...and I'm one of those freaks who loves pepper flavor, but doesn't like crunching straight into a raw pepper.  As far as spice goes, I tend to stay on the mid-to-mild side of things as well.  I don't mind a kick, but I hate things that burn just for the spite of it.  So sometimes, when the CSA is pepper-plentiful, I get in over my head with the hot peppers.

I can grab a serrano or two and whip up some salsa, I might chop a red chili and throw it in some beef broh with onions and noodles for a warming lunch, but when I have handfuls of pepper and an hour or so on my hands, I can whip up a mean bunch of pepper jelly.  You can do it too.

Chop up some sweet peppers, about 3/4 cups chopped.  Throw them right into a one cup measure.  Then chop up some hot peppers and fill the measure to a full cup.  Keep a few seeds in there, if you want more heat.  I usually take most of them out, but I don't stress if a few find their way into the mix.  Feel free to play with the ratio, more or less spice as you like.  This is what works for me.  I had a variety of hot peppers: some Hungarian wax, some chilies, some serranos, and some...I really am not even sure.

Making the Best of Things: Green Tomato Jam

The weather's getting colder, and it's finally starting to feel like fall around here.  Which is both invigorating and depressing.  On the one hand, it's kind of a relief that the work-intensive gardening season is coming to a close.  On the other hand, I hate not being able to go out and grab something for dinner from the yard.  But, for now, I'm just doing my best to harvest and preserve whatever fresh homegrown veggies I can from my gardens.

Tomatoes are tricky things.  If it's not warm enough, they won't ripen.  And if a frost happens to hit, they pretty much roll over and die.  So, with this cooler weather, I had bunches of tiny green cherry tomatoes on my bushes, and not much hope for them.  I mean, I do love fried green tomatoes but that battering, dipping, rolling and frying is a lot of work for tomato slices that are only an inch in diameter.  My middle child, the adventurous eater and tomato snatcher, grabbed a green tomato and popped it in her mouth...and then immediately started spitting it out all over and racing for something else to get the taste out.  So naturally, I had to try it too.  They are pretty gross.  Bitter, astringent, a little sour, but not in a good way.  But then it came to me...currants, some gooseberries, things like that have those qualities too, and they make amazing jams and jellies.

I mean, what can go wrong with dumping a ton of sugar on something and cooking it down until it's a sticky, delicious mess?

Fried Zucchini Blossoms

I think I've mentioned before that my kids have been stalking the garden for their favorites, and one of the things that they have been searching for are the beautiful yellow flowers of my zucchini plants.  Some kids might see these and pick them off and present them to their beloved mother as a token of their love and affection.  Not mine.  Mine want to eat them.  And that love and affection part?  I know it's there, but let me tell you, all bets are out the window when it comes to limited treats like these...let the Hunger Games begin!

Zucchini blossoms are completely edible, and they have a flavor all their own.  Not really zucchini-like at all.  Light, with a crunch, and a little juicy.  Also, makes you feel cool because you're making the most out of the garden by using more parts of the plant.  I tend to think of fried zucchini blossoms as a very Italian dish, and some people like to stuff the blossoms before they fry them.  But you know me, I like quick, simple, and delicious, so here's my straightforward version:

The Best Things You Probably Aren't Eating Yet: Garlic Scapes

Behold the garlic scape.  Small yet mighty, beautiful but with a bite, simple in look but intense in flavor.  Garlic scapes and I were introduced through my CSA the first year we joined it, and I fell in love at first taste.

Lilacs Lilacs Lilacs

I love lilacs.  A lot of people that I know love lilacs.  I think it's hard not to.  They are purple, which is one of my 8 favorite colors.  They smell divine.  And when they appear on their bushes, you know that summer is on its' way.

My personal love of lilacs may slightly have been influenced by the town that I grew up in: Lombard, Illinois. Otherwise known as the Lilac Village.  And let me tell you, they are very VERY serious about lilacs.  Hardcore.  I'm talking a Lilac Ball, a Lilac Queen crowned, and even a Lilac Parade.  It sounds like something you'd find in a quaint country town...and it feels like it too...but it's smack dab in the middle of the suburbs of Chicago.

Jelly From the Weeds

I love that saying that talks about how you can think of a field of dandelions as a field full of weeds, or you can see it as a field full of potential wishes.  Not that I want that field to be my yard, personally, but it makes me smile to think about it when I see a field of dandelions somewhere else.

Dandelions also make me think back to high school, where they were the focus of a well-intentioned school project gone awry.  You see, in my advance literature class one year, we divided up into groups, each group was to read a chosen novel and then create their own project to present the novel to the class.  When I saw the title "Dandelion Wine", it called to me.  Baby, I was born this way. So, spearheading my group, I instigated several courses of dandelion edibles that we would serve as our final project.  This was back in the day before Google, so I was largely dependent on some Native American cookbooks hidden in our library.  We had crispy fritters made from dandelion greens and cornmeal, a lightly dressed dandelion green salad, candied dandelion flowers, and, the grand finale, our dandelion wine...which was a few bottles of sparkling grape juice that we shoved dandelion flowers into.  I mean, you can't being alcohol into school, duh.

The Best Things You Probably Aren't Eating Yet: Quince

Quince.  It's a great scrabble word.  Also handy for crosswords and alphabet games.  And, in addition to all of that, it's actually a pretty decent fruit as well!

Quince is not easy to find, but even if you do, you might simply pass it by.  It looks like a lumpy pear, or a weird yellow apple.  I happened to spot them in the "exotics" section of the produce area at our grocery store the other day, and I may have freaked a few other shoppers out with my yelp of excitement.  I wasn't sure what exactly I was going to do with them, but I knew that I had just come across a quince recipe a few days earlier, so I sniffed the quince, fell in love, and scooped up 4.