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By feral, on January 5th, 2012%
Two months ago Murzik emailed me this recipe for sardine rillettes with the following comment: “made these a few times, total hit with everybody, especially served on some bread with a side of salad – perfect lunch! or makes pretty good little appetizers.” Even though I had no clue what the word rillettes meant, the recipe looked so appetizing that I bought a can of sardines, a pack of cream cheese and all other ingredients — but never got to mash them together.
Yesterday Murzik made them for lunch. The preparation took about 3 minutes, and I immediately regretted my procrastination. It was a love at first bite and an instant addition to my impress-in-5-minutes-or-less recipe list.
 Snooping around Murzik & Husband’s kitchen (and its garage extension) in El Granada, always results in new inspirations and useful culinary discoveries. To demonstrate, here’s the first thing I saw upon arrival:
 This is probably only about a quarter of their home-canned bounty and certainly puts my own feeble canning attempts to shame. These shelves deserve their own reality TV show: “Extreme Canning in . . . CONTINUE READING → Sardine Rillettes and 5 more tips from El Granada
By feral, on December 24th, 2011%
Obviously, I still need to work on a few things, e.g. smiling and speaking. But I do believe this new and exciting medium has a bright feral future. Please enjoy this video tour of my garden and keep in mind that it was really freezing this morning — normally, it looks much bigger. Although I didn’t harvest anything from the garden other than the above footage, today was overall a terrific day for me. I slept until 10, then located and successfully disposed of a little dead mouse that had been filling the house with anti-holiday spirit, and finally cooked a trio of Russian/Hanukkah comfort foods for dinner: borscht, roasted apricot chicken and, my absolute favorite, potato latkes.
I was very happy with myself about this dinner. Especially because I managed to eat somewhere between 10 and 15 latkes. For the record, these potato pancakes are my most favorite food in the world. Ever since I was very little, they never failed to make me happy. Needless to say, back in Belarus they were a regular food, not a once-a-year Hanukkah treat — but nonetheless, always a special . . . CONTINUE READING → For the first time ever, a video tour of the garden
By feral, on November 3rd, 2011%
Let them eat kale!
Is that what Marie Antoinette’s real programme was for fixing the world? And an unfortunate hiccup made it sound like “cake” leading to all sorts of misunderstandings?
Alright, alright I make joke… But seriously, how many times have you heard lately that kale is a new miracle-food? It has been a staple of German cuisine for ages, braised with bacon, onions and/or ham (see Grünkohlessen) – delicious! — but now it has become ubiquitous. There are even kale smoothies… Is there literally no wrong way to eat it? I can think of at least 2 such ways, both found at your local WholeFoods. One is the tasteless and unchewable version presented in the prepared foods section as “steamed” or “wilted” kale, and the other manifests itself in the magnificent assortment of kale chips which are, I’m sure, delicious but for some reason all cost $8.99 a pack… Unless kale is subject to the New York City cigarette tax, I cannot find a good explanation for this price!
Alright, now I joked and I ranted — and am finally ready to move on to the essence of this post.
My latest favorite way to eat kale . . . CONTINUE READING → Raw Kale, Carrot & Kohlrabi Salad
By feral, on October 23rd, 2011%
On Friday we were due for our bi-weekly garden visitation. However, James had to travel to California; so, I drove upstate by myself. With several How Stuff Works podcasts entertaining my curious mind and with the Taconic wowing my weary eyes with foliage landscapes at every turn, it turned out to be a lovely drive.
With green rapidly fading from the scene, the garden still had a couple of green surprises for me: the last batch of green tomatoes, string beans, the relentless shishito peppers, 2 radishes and even 3 cucumbers! (Which brings the total number of cucumbers I harvested this year to 5. Ok, maybe to 10…)
 I spent some time on Friday afternoon cleaning up in the garden. It gets dark around 6 now, so I didn’t have that much time. The dusk’s sudden advance interrupted my activities; I raised my eyes from wilted tomato plants I was pulling out of the ground and suddenly saw a gleaming beam of red light shooting out from the woods. It looked almost like the tail of a meteor — but, in fact, it was the tail of a rainbow. And . . . CONTINUE READING → Out with the green!
By feral, on October 10th, 2011%
Generally, I don’t allow myself to feel proud that often – but yesterday I did. And here is the reason:
 In the morning I thought to myself: Wait, I forgot to include carrots in my previous Orange post! What a scandal! But then I unearthed this specimen and was happy about this oversight. In my opinion, this carrot fully deserves its own post.
This is what you might call a perfect carrot — I immediately thought of Rabbit from Winnie-the-Pooh and his garden — long, straight, thick, and totally blemish-free. Full of excitement, I ran to James to ask him to take a photo of me with my new best friend.
 Which turned into an entire photo shoot. Have I missed my calling as a carrot model?
James was just as fascinated by the giant orange tuber as I was and insisted that Carrot and I pose for a whole series of silhouettes.
![]( "big carrot <span style=") . . . CONTINUE READING → Carrot Pride
By feral, on September 11th, 2011%
Helen and Russel visited us for lunch today and we fed them pizza. 2 pizzas, to be exact, James and I designing a pie each. (There was also some leftover tuna casserole involved, served as a semi-cold appetizer, but we don’t speak of it.)
Anyway, the purpose of this post is to log the pizza crust technique — because it was a success! (Helen even asked me to email her the recipe but I said she’d have to look it up on FG, so there…) Here’s the dough recipe I used (twice now), loved it, and am adding it to my list of notable recipes. It’s pretty fast — took about 20-30 minutes to make and 1 hour to rise – light, tasty, and soft. To bake, I preheated the oven to 475F with the pizza stone inside, for about 20 minutes, arranged the pies on parchment paper dusted lightly with cornmeal, slid them onto the pizza stone, one at a time, and baked each for 15 minutes.
And now on to the artistic part. James’ idea was to use squash flowers that are still blossoming in abundance, and so we did! He picked some (butternut squash, I believe) . . . CONTINUE READING → Feral Pizza — it’s all in the dough
By feral, on August 25th, 2011%
I was away from the garden for long three weeks. Finally, we escaped the city, shaken up by yesterday’s seismic tremors, and safely arrived in Canaan late last night. (Although the earthquake was most noticeable in the neighborhoods of Twitter and Facebook, I did feel it in Soho and James, who was at home, says that 5.8 magnitude translates into quite an unnerving sensation on the 37th floor…) And if Manhattan, fortunately, did not sustain any damages, in the garden this morning I witnessed scenes of devastation.
The tallest sunflowers collapsed.
Tomato plants fell to they ground, many with their support structures.
 None of these catastrophic damages, however, were due to tectonic shifts. The sunflowers grew too tall for their own good and tomatoes too heavy, although I do take partial responsibility for a somewhat faulty deficient job staking the latter. In any case, it won’t hurt to get more earthquake-resistant varieties next year.
But it only looked dramatic. The was almost no real damage. Quite the opposite, actually — I spent the rest of the day harvesting, . . . CONTINUE READING → Back in the garden – harvest time!
By feral, on August 20th, 2011%
Everyone, I would like you to meet my new friend.  It is an Omega J8005 Nutrition Center Single-Gear Commercial Masticating Juicer, and I haven’t named it yet. So, please help me welcome it to the family and if you have any naming ideas, do share.
Why did I choose this specific model? I listened to everyone who responded to my polls and gave me suggestions (thank you, all!), researched, contemplated, and finally concluded that I like my juicers slow, masticating, and multifunctional. And this one appears to fit the bill just right.
I learned that there are 3 basic types of juicers: centrifugal, masticating (or single-gear) and twin-gear. Plus, I’ve consulted with some juice aficionados who recently converted from juicers to turbo-blenders (such as Vitamix or Blendtec) and swear by them. In other words, it was a tough decision, and here are some of the factors that determined my choice. (You can also get an independent overview of different juicer categories here or just skip to the bottom of this post to see more photos of my new friend.)
(1) Price range. Twin-gear juicers are very good . . . CONTINUE READING → My life just got juicier!
By feral, on August 19th, 2011%
Sometimes they let me out of the garden, and even onto a plane. Last week was one of those times. We flew to San Francisco for our friends’ wedding and returned just a day ago. I miss that part of the world so much — and this visit was way too short… This post is not meant to be a trip report but rather an explanation of my recent blog-absentia and an apology to friends and family whom we didn’t get a chance to see because we had so little time (hopefully we’ll be able to make it right soon). However, since I’m at it anyway, here are some somewhat random highlights.
On the flight there we passed a gigantic electrical storm. I took a video with my iPhone but because I am technology-challenged, the first — more dramatic and much clearer — part didn’t tape (I forgot to press the record button… And then did it again at several other occasions, including the wedding). So, here’s the less impressive part of that light show. Fun times! We returned to New York into another lightning storm, which my iPhone captured just as artfully.
![]() . . . CONTINUE READING → Back from California
By feral, on June 30th, 2011%
The other day I heard James laugh loudly all by himself. Not a blog-worthy occurrence per se (otherwise, I’d be writing several posts daily). But here’s what sparked the hilarity. You must agree, this cartoon (from The New Yorker, obv.) is totally relevant to our kitchen life and, therefore, joyous.
One of us prefers to look up recipes on the web and follow them step-by-step; while the other one likes to make stuff up and then upload it to his blog. One way or the other, cooking without the internet is no longer an option in our family.
Don’t get me wrong: I read lots of recipes online and off; however, I’m not a very good recipe follower. What mostly sticks with me are not precise measurements but rather some basic principles, like: wilted kale + garlic + balsamic vinegar (+ pepper flakes) = excellent. And then I mess with them. Often, with disastrous consequences… Luckily, not this time!
On Tuesday I had to cook some kale (because we’re about to go back upstate and I still haven’t . . . CONTINUE READING → pasta with kale (or kale with pasta?) and blue cheese
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