Category Archives: Cooking

Tomato planting day, or yet another triumph of gardening hope over experience

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This morning was not like every other Saturday at my farmers’ market, because in addition to buying food I paid for some pre-food–as in, I spent $8 or so on a couple of tomato plants that are now tucked into a planter.

A tiny San Marzano tomato plant inside a planter on my driveway.

I’ve been making this once-a-year purchase for almost two decades, more if I tried to grow tomatoes on the balcony of my old condo. (I don’t think so, but it can be hard to document things that happened in the pre-smartphone era.) And most of those years have yielded more lessons than fruit–about the importance of having caging or netting to stop squirrels from chomping on your crop, about ensuring the plants are in a spot with enough sun, about remembering to water them enough, about… well, needing better luck at growing tomatoes.

As a native New Jerseyan, I feel like I should be better at this. We do tomatoes well in the Garden State, so a little built-in aptitude ought to be some sort of birthright–like making pizza. Instead, the Jersey parallel here seems to be Thomas Edison’s optimistic read on experiments not going as planned: “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

In that spirit, this year I only bought two plants–one San Marzano plum, one Better Boy beefsteak–instead of trying to raise my odds by buying more plants and then finding the planter crowded in August. Yes, I should have tried that before, and maybe I will be pleasantly surprised by finally taking the hint. But even if my $8 investment only rewards me with a handful of tomatoes over the season, the BLTs I make with tomatoes still warm from the sun will be among the finest sandwiches I’ll eat all year.

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2022 gardening scorecard: a pleasant pepper surprise

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Gardening remains one of my favorite analog distractions from digital chores–even if it doesn’t necessarily yield as much food to eat as I’d hoped. Which is good, since this was yet another year that saw my kitchen garden underperform in some weird ways.

(For your reference: my 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 gardening grades.)

A bell pepper starting to turn red, with a drop of rain on a leaf of the plant partially obscuring it.

Peppers: A–

I take no credit for this addition to the list: My wife bought a wheeled planter and some plants for it, resulting in a reasonably steady supply of bell and jalapeno peppers over the summer (plus an egglant or two that I’m not going to try to factor into this report card).

Arugula: A-

Once again, this leafy green’s performance in the spring was not matched in the fall, when some heavy rains in September washed out promising rows of seedlings. And unlike last year, they didn’t mount any late-fall comeback. Should I have waited another few weeks to try that second set of seeds? Maybe.  

Herbs: B+

Parsley was its reliable self, but I didn’t get enough basil to make any pesto sauce, which makes me sad. My attempt to grow rosemary from seed went nowhere; fortunately, the tiny rosemary shrub my wife put in that planter did much better. And mint, despite its reputation for weed-like growth, was only a springtime contender.

Lettuce: C+

This was yet another year in which lettuce did not grow nearly as well as it did in 2017, but it was still nice to be able to step outside in the spring and collect some leaves to add to a sandwich. The important thing to remember: Lettuce is so much cheaper when purchased in seed form.

Spinach: C

See my above comments about lettuce, then add the disappointment of seeing a late-summer crop get washed out when I’ve been able to make that work in previous years.

Tomatoes: C-

I didn’t expect to get so many cherry tomatoes this year–because I didn’t plant them and instead was surprised by how many grew from seeds left from last year’s volunteer plants. I had worse luck with the plants I bought at my farmers’ market, which yielded only a few handfuls of tomatoes for me to enjoy in sandwiches and sauces.  

Beans: D+

This poor grade mainly reflects my own inattentive care, which left too many green beans on the vine for too long. I’m blaming a renewal of work travel that was not a factor for the first half of 2021.

2021 gardening report card: a belated basil assessment

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This annual recap of my gardening efforts should have been written last month, but then I got distracted by other topics–much as the return of travel in the second half of last year distracted me from tending to plants during what were, in retrospect, some critical parts of the summer.

In fewer words, I’m still figuring out this gardening thing, more than two decades after my first successful experiments with growing herbs in pots on an apartment balcony.

(For your reference: my 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 gardening grades.)

Herbs: A

Parsley was not as prolific as in previous years, but basil was 2021’s pleasant surprise, between the two plants I bought at the farmers’ market that kept yielding gorgeously green leaves through fall and the smaller crop I got from seeds in a pot in the dining room. Mint and rosemary grew reasonably well too, and the the same indoor pot yielded enough dill to flavor the occasional plate of scrambled eggs.

Arugula: A-

My most reliable green lived up to past performance in the spring but then took a mighty long time getting in gear after I planted a second crop of seeds in September. That second batch looked to be finally coming into its own after we returned from Christmas travel–and then we had snow while I was out at CES, and I think it may be done for now.

Beans: B

We repeated last year’s apathetic strategy of trying to grow beans in random containers around the back patio, but they were not quite as productive this year. My being around less often to tend to them after July also probably figured into this shortfall.

Lettuce: C-

Someday, I will figure out what I did right to get lettuce to grow as well as it did in 2017. That day did not come at any point in 2021, so I had to content myself with just enough lettuce for some springtime sandwich fixings.

Tomato: D+

This grade would have been a D or lower had it not been for all the plum and cherry tomatoes that either volunteered or grew from seeds that I didn’t expect to do much of anything. They contributed to some delicious pasta sauces–but the slicing tomatoes I value most for their contributions to sandwiches fell victim to my being out of town in mid-July and again in August.

Spinach: D

Here’s another vegetable that did much better before, even though I tried growing it in almost the same spot this year and gave it the same overall amount of care. But there’s nowhere to grow but up in 2022, right?

Better pizza at home with steel and paper

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The last 20 months of enforced home cooking have allowed me more opportunities than usual to make one of my favorites, pizza. I’ve made my dad’s recipe, I’ve figured out deep dish–and lately the unlikely combination of a slab of metal and parchment paper has figured into my pizza adventures.

Pizza just out of the oven and still on the parchment paper, topped with sausage.

It all started years ago when my wife gave me a Baking Steel, a quarter-inch-thick steel plate that addresses a major weakness of baking pizza at home: Your oven can’t get hot enough to yield a crispy crust. Metal this thick, however, both soaks up heat and conducts it to whatever’s touching it–so preheating this slab in a 500-degree oven for 45 minutes ensures that pizza dough will get much closer to the crispy, lightly charred crust of a legit pizzeria.

The catch with this technique is that you need to transfer a fully-assembled pizza to this furnace of a surface as quickly as possible. But sliding a pizza off a wooden or metal peel risks part of the raw dough getting stuck halfway through–an anxiety-inducing scenario after you’ve sunk a couple of hours into this culinary project.

That’s where the parchment paper comes in. After finally thinking to look up if the 420-degree maximum temperature listed on the box meant all that much, I saw that Cook’s Illustrated pronounced parchment paper safe for up to 20 minutes of 500-degree heat–and pizza on a Baking Steel needs just nine minutes.

This belated insight radically simplified the whole production. I flatten out the dough and top the pizza right on a piece of parchment paper, slide a metal peel underneath that, have the pizza slide effortlessly off that onto the steel, and then retrieve the finished product. Bonus: The steel stays clean, requiring only a just-in-case swipe with paper towel after this heat sink cools off… some two hours later.

A yard once again in bloom, and in new need of work

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This morning, the weeping cherry tree that I planted last spring to try to keep myself occupied as the world shut down showed its first blossoms. By this evening, that little tree was well on its way to surrounding itself with a cloud of white flowers.

After years of being a cherry blossom spectator, I feel like I’m being a good local citizen by making my own tiny contribution to one of the D.C. area’s signature spring sights. What also feels good: seeing the work of a previous year come back to life. It’s one of the most satisfying things in all of gardening.

Photo of cherry blossoms, showing base of the tree and my lawn velow

My yard also features a growing collection of daffodils, with lilies making their way out of the ground to bloom again. The redbud trees and a lilac out front are rapidly budding, and the small raised bed outside the back patio has a crop of arugula seedlings planted two weeks ago that should be providing sandwich fixings in another couple of weeks.

And all the time I’ve put in over the last few springs to root out bittercress and chickweed seems to have resulted in far fewer of those pests to twist out of the ground with a weeding fork.

On the downside, an unusually damp February has left large, low-lying swaths of lawn reduced to shoe-grabbing, clay-dense dirt. I would like to think that the grass will make a springtime recovery, but realistically, I need to regrade those parts. And after so many years of low-maintenance lawn care–including 16 years and counting with the same electric lawnmower–it bothers to me think that I’ll have to pay for dirt. But if I do my job right now and them remember to reseed in the fall, next spring I won’t be looking at caked clay in those parts of the lawn. Right? Please tell me I’m right?

My recipe management remains surprisingly analog

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All the kitchen time I’ve had over the last year of not going out to eat in restaurants has seriously advanced my cooking, but it has not advanced my recipe management nearly as much.

Yes, I still save recipes on paper, cutting them out of various publications and gluing them into pages in the binder I’ve tended for last 20 years or so. I also keep recipes in digital form–there’s an entire notebook in my Evernote for that–but each time I add one electronically and then cook off of that on-screen copy, I’m reminded of the advantages ink on paper retains in this use case.

Photo of an iPad open to Evernote, showing a list of recipes. Below it sits my recipe binder, showing a handwritten recipe from my mom.

Start with my primary source for new recipes, the Washington Post’s Food section. The Post’s Recipe Finder sites is fantastic, but it provides no way for me to save my favorites like the Recipe Box of the New York Times’ Food section. So each time I hit that page, I have to redo my search or hope the browser’s autocomplete takes me back to a specific recipe page.

As for NYT, my second most-frequent cooking read, it neglects its Recipe Box feature by not providing any obvious way for me to get to it in the Times’ iPad app, much less add a personal shortcut to it. I could fix that by installing the paper’s NYT Cooking app, but I resent the idea of getting a second app from one company to fix a usability problem in its first app.

So in practice, the recipes I find online that I want to keep making go into Evernote. Adding recipes on my desktop isn’t bad, since Evernote’s Web Clipper extension offers a variety of import options that go from pulling in an all of a page to just the text I select. But on the device I use far more often to look up recipes, my iPad, that clipping feature–available via the Share menu–ingests the entire page. Which on foodie blogs mean I get the multi-paragraph opening essay, the affiliate links to buy ingredients or kitchen gadgets, and the comments.

(I don’t mind all that stuff when I’m in recipe-browsing mode–I respect how my fellow indie creators work to monetize their content–but I don’t need it once I’ve got a spatula or a spoon in hand.)

Deboning one of these imported recipes requires an extra, non-obvious step in Evernote: select the clip, tap or click the banner at its top, and tap or click the magic-wand “Simplify & Make Editable” icon. Then I finally have a clean copy of a recipe that I can look up anywhere… well, whenever I’m once again in a position to cook in somebody else’s kitchen.

Finally, consulting a recipe on an iPad gets awkward the moment both of my thumbs get covered in flour, oil, butter or whatever else is going into the recipe–at which point I can no longer unlock the screen via Touch ID once the tablet automatically locks. Unfortunately, iOS doesn’t offer any sort of recipe mode, and it doesn’t appear that I can use a Siri shortcut to keep the screen unlocked for only the next hour or two.

Meanwhile, I have my three-ring binder of recipes. The workflow to add a recipe from the paper is not what I’d call elegant, but breaking out scissors to cut that out of the paper and using a glue stick to attach it to a paper at least exercises arts-and-crafts skills that have mostly gone unused since grade school. (Removing a recipe that’s been added this way is difficult to impossible, so I have a separate folder of recipes that I haven’t yet made enough times to deem them binder-worthy.) More important, this collection also includes recipes that never made it to any screen of mine: handouts from farmers’ markets and restaurant and winery events, printouts from friends, and the occasional handwritten one from my mom.

There’s no search tool in this binder, but it does support a limited sort of favorites functionality that works automatically over time and yet is incompatible with digital storage: stains from sauces and other dripped ingredients.

2020 gardening report card: a very small hill of beans

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This year has given me more time to garden than any other in my adult life. Now that the gardening season is officially over, courtesy of multiple below-freezing days and the season’s first snowfall, I’m once again grading myself on how well I did at growing some of my own food–and I’m left wondering how I didn’t make better use of that extra time to play with plants.

(For your reference: my 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 gardening grades.)

Beans: A-

The pandemic arrived in the middle of both planting season and my realization that we had a lot of leftover bean seed packages lying around. So we went a little crazy–in addition to planting seeds in the usual spots in the shabbier raised bed in the side yard, my wife and I repurposed a few random pots we had laying around for bean-growing purposes. For a while, we had more beans than we could eat; although the bean plants in the raised bed didn’t make it past summer, most of the others kept growing through fall, if at a slower pace.

Arugula: B+

I can usually count on two growing seasons for this salad green, but most of the seeds I planted in September got washed out by heavy rains, and then the survivors failed to yield more than a few tiny plants. So I wound up spending more on lettuce at the farmers’ market than I’d hoped, which was somewhat frustrating.

Herbs: B

Flat-leaf parsley once again grew like crazy all spring and summer, enabling me to make multiple batches of parsley-walnut pesto, but then it failed to resume growing in the fall. Rosemary made a comeback: After last year’s rosemary died, I planted a fresh batch in a new pot, and those plants are still going strong. Mint was also its usual reliable self. But the sage plants died sometime in late summer, and basil underperformed, if not as badly as last year. I did finally get thyme to grow–indoors, in a pot in a sunny corner of the dining room.

Spinach: B-

I enjoyed modest success with this in the spring–by which I mean, some of last year’s plants hung on until then, and not all of the seeds I planted this year vanished into the dirt.

Lettuce: C+

See the above entry for spinach, but make everything 20 percent worse.

Tomatoes: C-

Unlike last year, I was able to treat myself to the sublime pleasure of a BLT sandwich made with a just-plucked-off-the-vine tomato. Well, once or twice.

Taking stock, one set of leftover bits at a time

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I needed a week to cross off a big item on the post-Thanksgiving to-do list: making stock from the remaining parts of the bird. In my defense, the three of us took that long to make enough of a dent in our half turkey before it was worthwhile picking the last meat off the carcass.

Making stock from scratch isn’t hard, but it does demand some time and cleanup. (If you homebrew beer, you may recognize some similarities.) Most of the time, I simplify this procedure by only making vegetable stock, and that’s where I’d recommend you start.

As the Washington Post’s Joe Yonan wrote several years ago, that starts with rerouting vegetable scraps to the freezer instead of a compost bin. Every time you’re chopping up veggies and have some bits you don’t want to eat–like the ends of carrots and onions, the greenest parts of leeks, or the woody stems of cauliflower or broccoli–toss them in a quart bag in your freezer. Once you have a quart’s worth, simmer them with a quart and a half of water for 30 minutes, then cool, strain and use now or freeze for later.

Turkey stock is more involved, and I decided to further complicate it Thursday night by following the advice of Serious Eats and roasting the carcass first. That proved to be an excellent idea, first because it made the kitchen smell amazing and second because it turned the last bits of turkey skin deliciously crispy and crackly.

I sauteed some leftover vegetable bits from the fridge in a pot, added the re-roasted turkey parts, threw in the most recent bag of frozen vegetable scraps and poured in enough water to cover everything.

And then I let the pot simmer for the next couple of hours while I wrestled with Christmas lights on the front porch. Straining it yielded about a quart of stock that after refrigeration, as predicted by the Serious Eats recipe, had set into a gelatinous state. I will admit that the results may look a little gross that way. But I’m sure they’re going to taste great.

Thanksgiving almost entirely from scratch, and on short notice

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More than three decades after I moved out, I finally cooked Thanksgiving without parental help. This was not my original plan for the holiday, but the pandemic led us to scrap that a week before the holiday–giving me just enough time to shop and plan a downsized meal.

The turkey was the first item to cross off the to-do list. I thought about buying just a turkey breast, but when I realized that Virginia’s EcoFriendly Foods had half turkeys for sale, I picked up one at the Arlington farmers market on Saturday. FYI, it is significantly easier to carry less than 7 pounds of half a bird–yes, I lived up to local stereotype by buying a left-wing turkey–than 14 pounds of a complete one.

I also came home from the market with a few pounds of potatoes, leaving surprisingly little shopping for other ingredients over the next few days: sweet potatoes, fennel, and stuffing mix.

Thanksgiving itself started a little before 9 a.m. with mixing dough for two baguettes. Julia Child’s recipe from The Way To Cook spans five pages and requires three rises; it’s far more effort than the no-knead bread I’ve done in previous years, but a complete baguette freezes better than half a loaf.

As the dough rose, I made the crust and filling for pumpkin pie from my usual recipe; getting dessert finished before 1:30 p.m. was a good morale booster. The baguettes went into the oven next (accompanied by a head of garlic), while on the stove top I boiled the potatoes.

But what about the turkey, the entree that my brother’s wife had handled when we had family Thanksgiving here last year? I had been tempted to follow Kamala Harris’s advice about wet brining but didn’t get around to that Wednesday, so I limited myself to rubbing butter on the bird and then seasoning it with salt, pepper, herbes de Provence and some diced rosemary from the garden.

I mostly followed the roasting directions in my go-to cookbook, Mark Bittman’s How To Cool Everything, except that I cooked it at 450 degrees instead of 500 for the first 20 or so minutes before backing down to 350 degrees. I stuck the temperature probe for a ThermoWorks Dot into what seemed the thickest part of the bird and set the alarm on that remote thermometer to 165 degrees.

Meanwhile, my daughter helped mash the potatoes as I threw too much butter and some of the roast garlic into that pot while my wife handled the stuffing and crafted some tangy cranberry sauce from scratch, using a recipe she’d looked up that afternoon.

After about two hours in the over–another advantage to getting half a bird–the turkey was done and looked and tasted amazing. Folks, this doesn’t have to be hard; like many other areas of cooking, throwing butter at the problem works. Speaking of which, I whipped up some gravy from the drippings in the pan. I will admit that the results were lumpy, not that anybody cared.

The only real misfire in this entire cooking production was the roast vegetables–putting that dish of sweet potatoes, carrots and fennel on the top rack in the oven meant that I didn’t see it when I took out the turkey and so left them a bit overdone. But roast veggies are pretty fault tolerant, and everybody ate enough of everything that we had to walk around the neighborhood to check out the earliest Christmas decorations before indulging in dessert.

Thanksgiving was not the same with relatives only visible on an iPad’s screen, but at least we did dinner right. And now we’re going to see how long Thanksgiving leftovers last with only three people around to eat them.

How I got Amazon Prime almost for free

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Last summer, my appetite for quantifying my finances intersected with my food-procurement habits to yield a math exercise: How much of my Amazon Prime membership was I chipping away with these discounts at Whole Foods?

The Seattle retail leviathan’s 2017 purchase of the Austin-based grocery chain consolidated a large portion of my annual consumer spend at one company. It also gave me a new set of benefits for the Amazon Prime membership my wife and I have had since 2011: an extra 10% off sale items except beer and wine, plus some Prime-only deals.

(Personal-finance FYI: Amazon also touts getting 5% cash back at Whole Foods on its credit card, but the American Express Blue Cash Preferred offers 6% back on all grocery stores. That higher rate combined with Amex Offers for rebates at designated merchants easily erases the card’s $95 annual fee and returns more money than I’d get from Amazon’s card.)

So on my way out of Whole Foods, I created a new Google Docs spreadsheet on my phone and jotted down the Prime savings called out on my receipt. Then I did the same thing after subsequent visits. If Whole Foods and Amazon were going to track my shopping habits (which I assume they could from seeing the same credit card even if I didn’t scan in the QR code in the Amazon app at the checkout), I ought to do likewise.

Aside from $10-and-change savings during last July’s Prime Day promotion and again on roses for Valentine’s Day, most of these 41 transactions yielded $4 or less in Prime discounts. But after a year, they added up to $118.14, just 86 cents less than the $119 Prime annual fee.

To answer the obvious question: No, I did not step up my Whole Foods visits because of this tie-in. That place does happen to be the closest almost-full-spectrum grocery store to my home, but there’s a Trader Joe’s barely further away that trades a smaller selection for cheaper pricing on staples like milk and flour. And thanks to this dorky habit of mine, I can tell that I’ve shifted more of my business from WF to TJ’s the past few months.