Category: Food & Wine

Mad croissant-making skillz

pounding the butter

Nick has taken up croissant-making in his spare time. It’s a two-day process. On the first day, he makes the dough and rolls it out with the butter. Roll, fold, chill, roll, fold, chill, roll, fold, chill...After the fifth chill, he forms the crescents and lets them rise overnight. The next morning he pops them in the oven for a tasty breakfast treat. Yum!

The proof

You can’t win if you don’t enter

My luck continues! I entered a recipe contest (yes, another one) on Monday in the hope of winning a $50 credit on my Pioneer Organics account. That’s almost a month’s worth of fruits and veggies. Guess what?!

I won!

Nick is astonished: “How did you win?”

“I entered.”

“It’s as simple as that?”

“Judging by the number of contests I’ve been winning lately? I’d say yes.”

Here’s the recipe. (It will also be published on the Pioneer Organics home page starting Friday.)

Beet, pear, and pistachio salad
Servings: 2

Ingredients
2 beets (about 3/4 pound)
1 cup diced Asian pear or ripe pear
1/4 cup diced celery
2 tablespoons chopped pistachios
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon honey
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
Dash of salt
Dash of ground red pepper
2 curly leaf lettuce leaves (optional)

Preparation

Preheat oven to 425°. Leave root and 1 inch of stem on beets; scrub with a brush. Place beets in a small baking dish. Bake at 425° for 50 minutes or until tender. Cool. Trim off beet roots; rub off skins. Dice beets.

Combine beets, pear, celery, and pistachios in a medium bowl.

Combine juice and next 5 ingredients (juice through red pepper), stirring well with a whisk. Drizzle over beet mixture, tossing gently to coat.

Serve at room temperature or chilled on lettuce leaves, if desired.

Plum purgatory

The tandem, ready for its inaugural car ride to Anacortes

With 65 pounds of plums looming over us there wasn’t much time for posting this week. We successfully made two batches of plum jelly, six quarts of plum rum, gave a bunch of plums to law school friends, and got the last of the fruit started in the dehydrator last night. Whew! Just in time for a mid-semester break on Orcas Island. 

Plum Harvest

Keith reaches for another cluster of fruit;
click to see how high he is off the ground.

The official plum harvest occurred today. For the record, we picked a little more than 65 pounds. We lost about 20 pounds to the slugs on the ground, which in the grand scheme of things is probably okay. Enough is enough!

After taking inventory of the canned plum stock in the basement, we will be focusing our preserving efforts on plum jelly (with plenty of pectin this time), plum rapture (a spiced plum flavored rum), dried plums and maybe one or two plum kuchens. We’re also working on a few never-before-tried ways of eating fresh plums, including plum sorbet, plum custard tart, and pork scallopini in plum sauce.