A Cooking Life

Fruitcake Weather

We finally got a goodly dumping of snow this week, over a foot all told. Winter at last. My stepdaughter Annie and I spent Thursday evening chopping some 16 pounds of dried fruit and candied citrus peel, all of which has been soaking in a bath of cognac and orange liqueur ever since. Tomorrow, I'll bake 2 dozen fruitcakes and slather them with bourbon for ripening.

I'll post some pictures, along with my recipe in case anyone out there wants to play along. The recipe is adapted from this Classic Fruitcake that appeared several years ago in Saveur magazine. It's originally from Maida Heatter, but I've (of course) fiddled with it.

Soup Weather

Our early spring seems reluctant to let go. I know summer doesn't officially start until the 21st of June, but it's not unreasonable to expect some hot sunny weather from the end of May forward. It's been mostly in the 60s, even on sunny days, with temps in the low 40s or even 30s overnight – not even warm enough to sleep with the windows open (to my mind, one of the great joys of spring). And then we keep getting days like today: grey, dark, rainy, blustery, and COLD, hovering somewhere in the low 50s. It's the kind of day that forces you into a sweater and wool socks, demands a fire in the woodstove, and marches you into the kitchen to make a pot of soup.

Garden Report: August 7th

I've got to get a post up before the 8th of the month, or I'm going to start looking like a real loser. I don't even have a good excuse this time – I've just been kicked back and enjoying a few weeks free of responsibility. I've been cooking up a storm; it's a complete disgrace that I haven't posted. So I'm making a commitment to myself and my readers: a post a day for the next week. There.

Let's start with the garden. It's doing quite well, considering what a challenge the weather has been this summer. Cold and dry to start – everybody planted late. My main crops went in a full 3 weeks later than usual. It was warm and sunny for a brief period, but it's mostly just rained. My lettuces bolted before they even set heads, then rotted around the bottoms. Most everything else has grown impressively – I had a fine crop of pickling cukes, and the winter squash have been greatly productive. The pepper plants are getting loaded up; even the poblanos (which are hit or miss in this climate) – they seem to love all the rain, and they're flowering like mad and setting a lot of fruit. The tomatoes plants are heavy with green fruit, but if we don't start to get some warm sunny days SOON to start ripening them, I'll be looking at piles of bloated, rotten green tomatoes.

Pictures of the garden and a list of what's in it follow after the jump.

Garden Report: April 8

Hard to believe, but it's almost that time again. Winter held on pretty tight until a few days ago, but the sun finally came out and it warmed up to seasonal levels – and all that snow finally started to melt away in earnest. If you can imagine, the chair in the garden was totally buried in snow for a good part of the winter.

Planning the garden is one of the things that keeps me from going nuts during the long grey cold months. Seed companies have it just right that they start mailing their catalogs just after the first of the year – they know forlorn housebound gardeners will leaf through the pages of bright photographs and lusty descriptions and drive themselves mad with desire for green leaves and dirt. And then order lots of seeds.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

© 2007 Dan Grossman; Hosted on Fotki

We haven't had a very autumnal autumn this year, but the weather pattern appears to have shifted in fall's favor late last week. Saturday broke dark and heavy, with pelting rain shot from a lowered sky – an excellent day for a track meet.

My husband's youngest daughter, Isabel, took up cross-country running when she got to high school this year. It's quickly become very important to her, and we've scheduled weekend visits carefully to allow her full participation (the kids live with their mother in the farthest northwest corner of the state, just shy of the Canadian border; we see so little of them as it is, we'll take them however we can get them). The state championships were held Saturday up in Thetford, north of here by about an hour-and-a-half's drive. Isabel would be traveling there by bus with her team; we arranged for the other kids to be delivered to the meet, where we would collect them all for the remainder of the weekend.

Garden Report: August 12th

I've been thinking a lot about how off it might seem that I post so much about gardening on a blog that's supposed to be about cooking, and that I post so little about cooking (or that I post so little at all). The truth is, cooking and gardening occupy approximately the same coordinates in my firmament. If I lived in a place with a milder climate, and could garden for more than the few fleeting months allotted us in the hills of Vermont, my blog might easily have been called “A Constant Gardener”. I often fantasize about having my own paradise, overgrown with flowering plants and exotic fruits. But I suspect I'd tire of it, and I'd miss the snow.

Garden Report: July 18

The garden's just about growing out of control; I finally had some time over the weekend to catch up on chores – cultivating to keep weeds down, pruning the tomatoes, spraying for caterpillars, culling overgrown greens, pinching the basil, fertilizing. It rained like hell this morning, but a break in the rain this afternoon offered delicious light for taking some pictures. I love just hanging out in the garden; I can (and do) spend hours examining the tiniest wonders there.

Sun-Cooked Fruit Preserves

Back when I was first teaching myself about preserving and canning, I came across an old method for making strawberry preserves that called for setting the strawberries (tossed with sugar) on a tray out in the sun to cook down slowly and gently over a period of a few days. It sounded intriguing, but for a novice still struggling with the logistics of canning, it also sounded like a lot of extra work.

My Little Garden

Every season I have gardened in Vermont has presented its own set of challenges. The first year I gardened here – the first year I gardened, period – there was a killing frost in early July. Luckily, my garden was very small (10' x 15') and I was able to replant without going broker than I already was. But there was another killing frost in late August, making the total length of the growing season about 45 days. If you garden at all, you know that's not much of a growing season.

Finding Time

I should have known when I committed myself to blogging that actually finding the time to do it would prove difficult. It isn't that I'm not finding the time to cook, it's just that I can't manage to swing a photo shoot every time I find myself in the kitchen, and I'd persuaded myself that without gorgeous photos, there's no point in blogging. Well, phooey. I don't know who these people are that manage carefully composed and beautifully shot pictures at the same time they're scrambling at the stove...I'm certainly not one of them, but from here on out, I refuse to let a lack of food porn stop me from posting.

Because this is what it really looks like when I'm cooking: