Category Archives: Kitchen

Preparations and Recipes

Olive Oil Is My Choice

Health, Kitchen

DSC02287 For many routine oil and fat uses olive oil is my  first choice.

It stays fresh in quantity.  We can buy three quarts at once which lasts a from one to three months, and therefore  is “turned over” to stay fresh often enough at room temperature in the dark.

It is versatile, being good cold in dressings, and warm for cooking.  It also mixes well with fats, such as butter, for a change in flavor.

It is reputed to be healthy for us with its large amounts of monounsaturated fat.

We always use up the olive oil, so for us it is a good buy, and very efficient to use in our kitchen!

Seasoned Oil

Herbs, Kitchen, Recipes, , , , , ,

DSC02281 Though I always love the idea of seasoned oil,  because it is out of our usual recipes and routines, I find that we rarely use it.

DSC02288This particular oil is made in Italy for Italian and English speakers consumption, and it contains:

  • Sunflower oil
  • Black peppercorns
  • Cinnamon
  • Coriander
  • Lemon leaves
  • Lemon grass

I personally am familiar with all of these items, except Lemon grass, which somehow I have never used, and I have not used Lemon leaves as a seasoning.  In the above mix of seasonings, the Lemon leaves are the dark green ones, the Lemon grass is the tan leaf, the Cinnamon is evident as the brown stick, the Black pepper is the set of black dots, and the Coriander is the set of tan dots.

I love dipping bread into Italian seasoned Olive oil, which is quite different from the above oil.   In specialty grocery stores they can convince me to buy various exotic ingredients or mixed products.  Today I uncorked the above bottle, at least seven years old, and separated out the spices.  The oil itself is rancid, but the bottle is nice,  and I would like to keep it.  Lesson:   To avoid waste, don’t get too many exotic oils!

Southwest Kitchen Garden Bed Planted on February 21, 2014

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DSC01801 All the weeds are pulled from this bed.  We had landscape fabric under some mulch, which had been overtaken with weeds and grass. Then I dug it up in most places,  amended the soil with a bag of garden soil, raked it, and planted it with the vegetables  okra, cucumbers, and eggplant.  These plants, which “fruit” in the botanical sense, should be quite safe to eat from the lead point of view, because of the triple barriers to any lead from soil to the “fruit”.

  1. The soil to root barrier
  2. The root to stem barrier
  3. The stem to fruit barrier

Besides that the soil had been replaced after we had painted our house the first time.

Additionally, because there was a lot of space between the vegetable plantings, I sowed some flowers, blue bonnets, lavender, and some nasturtiums among vegetables and each other.  I hope I will be able to distinguish most of the seedlings as they emerge, because there were a lot of weed roots that I could not completely remove.  After the sowing was done, I applied some of the plantain and stick mulch, as much as I could, and watered it well.