Category Archives: Kitchen

Preparations and Recipes

A Baked Fish Dinner

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Our midday dinner of baked cod, mostly brown rice, and garden salad from yesterday  Our Baked Cod Dinner with brown rice and salad.  The warmth generated by the oven is very nice on a cold day.

Fresh parsley from the garden DSC01619  Even though it sleeted, I could go outside and pick these sprigs of parsley.  They yielded the two tablespoons of minced parsley, which I wanted, along with the two cloves of minced garlic from the store.  to put on the thawed fish.

 Garlic and the parsley chopped up for the fish DSC01621 Minced garlic and parsleyMeyer lemon given to us, half of which is to be used for the fish DSC01622 On top of the fish went the juice of one half a Meyer lemon, a gift.

DSC01623 A pat of butter on top completed the assembly.  This went into a 375 degree oven for fifteen minutes.  A very healthy dinner, and rice is leftover to use tomorrow!  I just love being able to use exactly as much fresh parsley as I would like, and not have to store the rest of a big bunch!  I couldn’t pick any more lettuce to augment the salad, because I had picked most of what is available, until more grows, but it will!

 

Homemade Soft Pretzels Today

Health, Kitchen,

DSC01129  Our first efforts at soft pretzels.

DSC01131 Two of the nicer ones.

Our unbromated flour, bread machine dough soft pretzels came out well enough for a first trial.  We shaped the dough made with the dough setting.  They rose nicely as they baked, so we can see that to get a real pretzel form, we have to leave a lot of space between the pretzel loops.

This only used 1 1/2 teaspoons of yeast, whereas a packet of yeast contains 2 1/4 teaspoons of yeast, so we could probably increase the amount of all other ingredients by 50%.  That would remain within the machine flour limit of 4 cups of flour.

The pretzels  were very tasty, served with garlic butter, and Parmesan cheese, and were slightly crunchy.

We generally eat at home for weight and health reasons, so these may be healthier than purchased ones.  Besides that, it was a meatless meal for us.

My better half says it is bread!  Give us this day our daily bread, in this case pretzels!

 

 

 

Garden, 10th Week After Planting

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Garden, End of 10th week after planting DSC01021 View of garden, some things grow better

Best radish so far DSC01029  Best radish with slightly swollen stemBest parsley DSC01035 Best parsley showing speeded up growth

Best lettuce DSC01040 New lettuce seedlings.  All others disappeared

. Best dill plant DSC01030 Best cilatro DSC01036 Best cilantro, growing better

Some plants are starting to take off!  As you see the garden is shaded by the houses a lot, because we are getting close to the winter solstice.  Nine more weeks from now there will be more light than we have right now.  The light will begin increasing in 4 1/2 weeks at the winter solstice, and it is our experience that in general things in the yard slowly begin to grow at that time such as clover and grass.  Maybe parts of the garden will grow better again.

It seems that caterpillar season is over.  I did not see any crawling today, although the temperature on the font porch was over 70 degrees.  The beets and carrots have been eaten off to the ground.   There are some new leaves of lettuce coming up.  It has been apparently eaten off several times, but a few new seedlings are popping up, yet again.  Time will tell.

For sure we will have a few herbs to harvest as needed for our kitchen in a few weeks!