We eat veggies for breakfast a lot.  Quite a few people have looked at me like I’ve got a third eye in the middle of my forehead when I suggest having veggies and protein for breakfast, instead of carbs and sugar.  Thought I’d post a few pictures about how to do it.

Not shown - I make hashbrowns first that cook while chopping the rest of the veggies:  grate up a few potatoes, fry in olive oil in a cast iron pan with salt and pepper.  Set aside/keep warm while finishing the veggies.  If I’m in a hurry, I just start adding veg to the hash browns as they are nearing doneness.

The usual vegetable mix is onion or shallot, zucchini, pepper, and tomato, plus whatever else is available.  This time I added broccoli and the first 2 pods of okra of the season.  I chop the veggies in the order that they should cook in - onion and green pepper get the most time, then zucchini. Then greens or broccoli, tomato, or basil get just a quick cook at the end.  Start adding them to a hot cast iron pan in that order, with a little olive oil.  This can be spiced up with some hot pepper if desired, seasoned with salt and pepper.  Cooking is usually pretty quick - 5-10 minutes maybe, and ideally things stay colorful and a little crunchy, not soggy. It comes out of the hot pan, and fried eggs go into the hot pan.  Mix the hashbrowns and the veggies on the plates, top with eggs a few minutes later.  Yum. The only thing here we didn’t grow at home is the salt, pepper, and olive oil.  This is also really delicious with a little feta cheese topping it.

And the idea is that the eggs are somewhat runny, and the yolks run all over the mix deliciously.  In fact, there is little to compare at this time of year with the flavor of salty fresh tomato, basil, and egg yolk mopped up with toast or hash browns.

Yes, those words were chosen to conjure up Margaret Hamburg.

Margaret Hamburg, the Food and Drug Administration chief, was recently featured on NPR as follows, talking about the giant egg recall:

“She also had some practical advice for consumers: Reject over-easy eggs. She said that as federal investigators continue their work with the companies involved, consumers should strictly avoid ‘runny egg yolks for mopping up with toast.’ “  (National Public Radio, August 23, 2010)

Now, I’m an odd bird when it comes to runny eggs.  I’ve gotten nauseous at the idea of eating a soft-boiled egg before… when it was someone else’s eggs.  I won’t touch raw cookie dough because of an experience with getting food poisoning from eating it as a teenager.  But our own eggs, that we know the history of, we know the health of the chickens, and every detail about the eggs every step of the way, are another story.  Instinctively, I prefer them more softly cooked than I ever have any eggs with an unknown history.  And on occasion, I make ice cream, caesar salad dressing, or pasta carbonara with our raw eggs.

It’s a pity that all eggs are castigated in one fell swoop - after all, we can’t hurt the giant factory farms’ feelings by singling them out for criticism in comparison to the health of backyard and small producers’ chickens.  I am wondering what the fallout of this situation will be.  Legislation that punishes the small producers?

Well, time will tell, but in the meantime, I purposely cooked our homegrown eggs even just a little runnier than usual the morning after I heard that NPR report.  Must be that third eye that makes me so contrary.

Coffee is just one of those things for me.  I can (do) drink it pretty much all day, and even a bit in the evening, and not feel too much effect.  I like a good cup, but am not much a snob about it.  Well, not true… I don’t like bad convenience store coffee and dislike styrofoam-like cups (some are truly evil, especially some of the newer fine-grained foam ones).

But this isn’t about dislikes, its about what I like right now.  What I am liking right now.  Here is a photo of this morning’s Joe… Mandyrose’s cup is on the right, mine on the left, presspot by Bodum above, maple syrup from 2008 above left.  Our blend du jour is 2/3 ground beans of French Roast by Coffee Express here in Michigan, and 1/3 Irish Creme Decaf from By The Pound in A2.

Grind it medium-fine, add near boiling water halfway up the presspot and stir well, then add the rest of the water and set the top on.  Wait a couple minutes for just the right combination of caffeine and other goodies to move out of the beans and into the water (and perhaps even some of the ions in our well water to adsorb onto the coffee grounds) and then give it a slow, 30-second press to the bottom of the pot.

Meanwhile, the rest of the hot water has been warming our coffee cups.  Pour those off into the dishwater, and pour Mandyrose’s coffee first (she likes it hot).  Add maple syrup to sweeten a bit, pour in a dose of good (really good, fresh, non-homogenated) whole milk (shake a bit first so it’s not all cream), stir once and serve.  Then pour mine and sweeten, sans milk (ok, sometimes I add the milk too).

Creamy, a little bit Irish, mmmmm.

Now about presspots… there’s just something wonderful and clean about this coffee’s taste that I don’t get anywhere else.  I think it’s because no matter how fancy the machine, you just can’t get access to fully clean every part and hose and pipe that the water touches… or if you can, you don’t often do so.  Hot water with ions leaves residues when it evaporates away… period.  You can’t avoid it.  Distilled water? Maybe.  But not once it gets coffee in it.

But a presspot is glass and steel, with perhaps a bit of plastic near the top for a final strain (but my next one won’t have that plastic), but basically you’ve got hot water and coffee in an easily cleaned vessel, pure and simple.  And the taste of the coffee is all coffee, no residue.

My mother and I have discussed coffee over the years.  I had bought her some better beans a few times, and made my best for her, but she didn’t really like any of them.  Each time I visited I would try some different things to see what she liked, and finally one day she said, regarding a cup of joe I had not made, “Now this is what I’m talking about!”  The common denominator, after all these years, was the taste of the residue from coffee makers.  The particular coffee in question was from one of those enormous church percolator pots, with the big coffee basket on top.  The crew in charge had (fortunately) not over percolated this brew, so it was as good as such coffee gets, but was full of the unmistakable taste of years of hard water + ordinary coffee grounds with a simple rinse instead of cleaning.  Those big church-hall coffee makers are something else in that regard, building a patina of taste that lingers with me from my earliest coffee tasting attempts at church functions when I was 7 or 8 (lots of cream and sugar).  But that’s what Mom likes!  It’s that residue taste that is missing from all my other attempts to introduce her to coffee bliss.  So I just use her coffee in her coffee maker when I visit her, and all is well.

Ordinary coffee makers (of the Mr. Coffee variety) do the same thing, more or less.  Mostly less, of course, but unless you clean the heck out of them, with hot vinegar washes and the works, they gradually build up the same types of residue and produce the same types of extra tastes for you to get accustomed to.  I spent a week recently with a friend who makes espresso in a beautiful machine, a machine fastidiously cleaned… except of course it isn’t.  There are innards that get residue built up, and I could detect something like a residue buildup taste, or at least I believed I could.

But my presspot, it’s just coffee and the glass.  Pure and simple, and repeatable.  Our coffee always tastes the same.  Mom doesn’t like it much, but she doesn’t have to.  She knows what she likes.  We do too.  And with my third little cup finished, so is this post.  Have a good day.  Oh, and Hi Mom! :-)

Question from the market:  “Do you spray your vegetables, at all, with anything?”

mantis at home among the beanstalks

Thank you for asking!  It’s an easy and straightforward answer:  No!

I began growing my own food partly, as I’ve mentioned before, because of flavor and quality, and pleasure in the process.  But only partly.  The other reason has to do with my beliefs about pesticides, herbicides, and nutritional quality, and what we are doing to our health and our world by poisoning or compromising our food.  I reason that if I grow it, I really know what’s been sprayed on it, and what the soil it grew in looked like.  And I want food with no chemicals, to the extent that this can be achieved in a world contaminated by the drift from other peoples’ chemical applications. My family tree holds an enormous history of cancer.  All four grandparents, a parent, several aunt/uncles, a great grandparent at least. This is a conversation for another post, but the root of the matter is - I do what I can to avoid controllable carcinogenic exposures.  Please read Living Downstream, by Sandra Steingraber, for insight into this issue.

Baby bluejays beside the garden

I am also opposed to harming beneficial insects, and unfortunately, several of the chemical applications deemed acceptable for organic growing methods can do just that.  Neem oil, pyrethrins, insecticidal soaps, rotenone, and Bt, for example, don’t discriminate among which insect to kill, at times, or damage other animals.  Too often, people don’t discriminate among insects either.  This is also another post for another time, but in brief, without insects, we are without many foods.  Most fruit or vegetable parts we eat that contains seeds, and most fruits or vegetables whose propagation involves reproduction by seed, will be damaged in productivity if the pollinating insect population is damaged.  And you can forget about honey.

We also do not “prepare” soil for growing plants by spraying it one season and growing without sprays subsequently.  I have been astonished to hear farmers tell clientele their food is grown without any sprays at all, then describe to other farmers how they are increasing their growing area by spraying with Roundup one year to get the weeds down, then growing food there the next year and saying they didn’t use sprays.  I encourage everyone to ask the deeper questions:  “Do you use any kind of pesticide or herbicide anywhere ever?”  “Have you ever used _____?” “What do you think about pesticide sprays?”

Tree frog guarding the zucchini

None of this should be confused with an opposition to killing individual creatures.  We handpick japanese beetles, potato bugs, tomato hornworms, and various hungry hungry caterpillars, and squish them, drown them, or feed them to the chickens with satisfaction.  Row covers, staggered plantings, crop rotation, and good soil (to grow strong plants that can handle a little damage) are preventive measures.

Today I picked tomatoes in the rain, and a frog hopped out from under the plants swiftly, too swiftly to identify.  A few days ago, I found a green treefrog contentedly nestled against a zucchini leaf, almost perfectly camouflaged. Praying mantises, garden spiders, toads, birds, and predatory wasps are a common sight among the crops.  These creatures tell me something of the health of the microcosm where our food grows.  Hopefully, where they can live, so can we.

Here’s the recipe, to go with the post!  :)

This started as a recipe from The Zucchini Cookbook, by Paula Simmons.  I have modified it to my own tastes quite a bit.

• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 cup olive oil, or less
• 1 1/4 cup sugar, or less
• 2 T blackstrap molasses
• 2 eggs
• 1 t vanilla
• 1/2 cup sour milk (Or 1/2 c milk w/ 2 t lemon juice or vinegar added.  Or 1/2 c yogurt.)
• 1 c white flour
• 1 c whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/2 c barley flour             (So, 2 1/2 c flour total - you can experiment)
• 5 heaping T good quality unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/2 t baking powder
• 1 t baking soda
• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/4 t nutmeg
• scant 1/4 t cardamom
• 2 1/2 packed cups grated green zucchini (original recipe called for 2 c, cubed)
• 1/2 cups dark chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9×12″ square cake pan. (if desired, “flour” the pan w/ more cocoa powder.) Cream the butter, olive oil, sugar, and molasses together.  Add eggs, vanilla, and sour milk, and beat until smooth. Fold in the grated zucchini.  Sift together the dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients with dry ingredients, stirring just until combined well.  Pour into pan, and smooth with spatula to evenly fill pan.  Sprinkle the top with chocholate chips, using as many as preferred.  Bake about 30 minutes (?) until toothpick comes out clean.  (Original recipe says bake 40-45 min at 325.  I tend to not watch the time, but

go by smell and the toothpick test.  Sometimes I turn the temp down to 325 halfway through the cooking.)

This cake is really soft and crumbly.  Barley flour gives it a soft heavy density that’s really delectable.

You can just use regular flour, but it will be a different cake.  I like the zucchini grated in it much better (than cubed), and can get more in that way.  If I’m using a big overgrown zucchini, I only grate up the outer portions, not the seedy inside.  Don’t use a zucchini so big its skin is getting tough.

I think I overdid it in the heat a bit today.  I wouldn’t usually work out in the hottest part of a hot day, but several sources told me that severe thunderstorms were on the way for the afternoon.  And I so wanted to get the last of the onions in!  It was a perfect moment for harvesting - after some dry days without much rain on them, a very hot dry sunny day.  Onions have to be cured (dried) carefully in order to last into the winter months.  I’m not planning to buy any onions, so I’m pretty invested in curing ours carefully.  Rain on them in the afternoon would have seriously interfered.   So I went and pulled the rest of the onions, laid them out in the sun to dry, and then didn’t stop there, because there was so much else to do, clearing beds, weeding, harvesting…  It’s amazing how fast you can overheat - working fast so you can be done sooner, feeling the sun on your skin and the sweat dripping everywhere feels kindof good, if you keep moving, keep distracted.  Before I knew it, I was pretty tired, headache starting up, face beet red, vague nausea.  It’s taken several hours of fluids and cooling down again to start to feel better.  And then it never did rain - blue sky all day.

But this post is supposed to be about onions.  Onions are one one of those magical things to grow, to me.  When the bulbs start to fatten up, and you can store them and use them months later, it just seems amazing, when I think of them coming from tiny little seeds, and the most impossibly thin frail little stems.  I grow all my onions from seed now, after years of disappointment with the little bulb onion sets.  I never got decent onions from those, and many of them went to seed and made no bulbs at all.  It made a lot more sense after I learned about what impacts onions’ growth in one of my favorite gardening books - The Book of Garden Secrets, by Dorothy Patent and Diane Bilderback.  When you buy the bulbs, you don’t have any idea how they’ve been stored, and it turns out that exposure to certain amounts of light and temperatures will influence whether the onions that grow from the bulbs go to seed, or produce a food onion.  I can be more sure of what happens to them when I grow them myself, and that has resulted in astronomically better onion success.

We grew 3 varieties this year:  Copra, Redwing, and Varsity.  Redwing did beautifully last year when Copra failed; this year is vice-versa.  Varsity is new to me, and I’m very happy with it - huge perfectly round yellow onions that are gorgeous.  The final test will be to see how they store.

To cure onions well for storage, you are supposed to wait until their tops fall over, and stop watering them at this point.  (This is where the unpredictability of rain comes in.)  When they have been in the ground under these conditions for 10 days or so, you pull them, hopefully on a hot dry sunny day.  Lay them out on the ground in the sun to dry, but only for a day or two.  Next, they are brought indoors and laid out on a screen for finishing drying.  When their stems have no wetness left at all, I braid them into onion ropes and hang them for storage.  And that is our onion supply for the year! If we are lucky, they may last into early March, when the first chives and green onions come in, and the cycle starts again.