Recipes for a Cheapskate: Poppin' Peppers

Too many things to do this weekend to really get the dirt under my fingernails but I did get to harvest my jalapeño plant.

As the peppers were starting to turn bright red, that signaled that the time had come.

I got 13 peppers, just enough to make into a side dish for this week's barbecue.
So what can I do? Make mini jalapeño poppers.
Easy in concept but the smaller size of these peppers make a bit hard to stuff.

Each pepper is sliced on one side, propped open, and stuffed with my homemade mixture of cream cheese, chopped serrano peppers, and bacon.

I wrap them up in foil, poke a few holes in the top, and then put on the grill with our burgers.

The finished product looks something like this.

Darryl
Copyright 2013 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Pan Fried Pork Chops

I cook a lot of Sunday dinners on the barbecue but not all of them. Today, I'll stay in the kitchen to make this entree.

When making pork chops, I prefer to cook them on the stove where I can capture the juices in the pan instead of letting them drop onto the coals of the barbecue. This means I can avoid the bane of pork chops, dry meat.

Like beef, look for good marbling. Pork fat is the key to a tasty, juicy pork chop.  I also have a secret ingredient that you'll need to gather when making breakfast...bacon fat.

INGREDIENTS
3 boneless pork chops, 1 inch thick
2 tablespoons Worcester sauce
2 green onions
1/4 white onion
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 teaspoons red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1/4 cup bacon fat

I like to start several hours before cooking time. As I said, I have a secret ingredient that delivers great taste and juiciness to our chops. At breakfast, I'll make some bacon and reserved the leftover fat in a small, Pyrex bowl. This I'll set aside for later.

Take one green onion and chop up in a small food processor or dice very finely with a knife.  Put the chops in a sealable plastic bowl. Cover them evenly with the Worcester sauce and green onion. Seal the bowl and put in refrigerator.

When it's time to cook, sprinkle the chops with kosher salt and pepper on both side. Put the white onion and the other green onion in the food processor.

Chop up as fine as you can get them.

Preheat a steel pan (no non-stick) with the olive oil on high. Get it very hot.

Heat up your bacon fat so that it returns to a liquid state. 

Put the chops on the oil, they should sizzle very vigorously. Cover with a lid and cook three minutes. Turn them over and cook another three minutes, covered. This will brown the chops.

Turn the chops over, lower the heat to medium-low. Cook 8 minutes on each side. 

When done, put on a platter and cover loosely with foil.

Turn the heat back up to high on the pan. Splash some red wine vinegar over the cooked on drippings and scrape the stuck on bits with a spatula. Once you've got everything scraped up, put in the onions and bacon fat. 

Stir the onions in vigorously. Let the mixture boil for five minutes on high, lower the flame to low, and stir in the garlic. Let simmer for 5 to 10 minutes.

Plate the chops and pour a few spoonfuls of your deglazed sauce over them and serve.

Leftover rating: 4

Darryl
Copyrght 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

RECIPES FOR A CHEAPSKATE: Guacamole

In my seemingly never ending quest to use all of our tomatoes, this week I made some guacamole.

I could have asked my neighbor for a couple avocados but since I was thinking about this while I was at the store, I took the easy way out and bought a couple of Haas avocados, some green onions, and a lemon. I probably could have used a homegrown onion but I used it last week on another meal and don't have another.

This tomato...

...and these chiles, however, came straight from the garden.

It's a pretty easy recipe, first dice up the tomato.  Take the dead skin off of two whole green onions, along with the roots. Chop it all up into 1 inch pieces.

Put the onions and the chile...I've got a very small Anaheim chile, a Thai chili, and a few serrano chiles..into a food processor and chop up into fine mixture of little cubes.

Scoop out the avocados into a bowl, add the tomatoes, and mash up like mashed potatoes. Add a teaspoon of minced garlic and another of salt.  Squeeze lemon juice over everything and add the onion and chile mixture.

Add half and half or heavy cream to give a creamy taste and texture. Stir thoroughly and add salt and cream sparingly to taste.

When done, we add it to our tacos, as shown at the top. You can also use it as a very tasty dip for your tortilla chips.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Mid Season Adjustments to the Team

Like a baseball team, we make adjustments to our lineup and batting order in our garden. Luckily, this year seems like it will just take a little shuffling around with our players and not a fire sale like last year's growing season.

This weekend is one of those weekends where the chores are gloriously few. Yeah, I had to mow the lawn but this sun-scorched patch of drought plagued grass does not have much left to cut.

It only took five minutes.

Time freed up, I decided to try a couple of things I've been wanting to experiment with.

First, I got a little volunteer zucchini plant that must have sprouted from one of last year's seeds.  This gives me an opportunity to move it across the path to the sunny side to see if I get more production on that side rather than the shady spot it's in now.

There it is, put in the ground. It'll now sink or swim in between our tomatoes.

Second, I have an old piece of an onion that I've been holding in the fridge for an appropriate time like today.

It's starting to sprout, so I'm putting it in the whiskey barrel to see if I can turn it into a crop.

Both plants drenched in B1 and water, it's time to let them go and see what happens.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Right Reserve

Caging You Up for Your Own Good

Last year, the garden was devastated by animals coming down from the dry mountains to eat the succulent, tender shoots of my vegetables coming out of the ground. This year, I'm determined not to let that happen again, so the main theme of this weekend's gardening is animal repellent.

No, I'm not using any chemical or traps. I'm not interested in harming anything...at least proactively. My goal is, however, to make my plants look uninviting and a bit hazardous for critters to get to so maybe they'll find greener pastures to feed in.

This year, I've got new onion, tomato, zucchini, and corn seedlings.  There's already evidence that something has been chewing on the onion seedlings, which I left in the open after transplanting. No one seems interested in the corn, so I'll just leave that one alone.

So here's my plan...

I'm wrapping tomato cages in chicken wire.

It's a bit tricky when the wire comes on a roll to flatten it out so I can cut it. I hold it down with my foot and snip away.

After wrapping the cage, I make cuts in the edge at the top to form little spikes in case any animal gets adventurous and climbs up. The poke should make 'em think twice about going over the top.

All done.

I'm using the temporary wire cover I used for the tomato seedlings to cover the onion plants to give them a chance to survive the season.  Let's see how all this caging works out as the season goes.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Deep Sixing the Seedlings

OK, 4 weeks in the nursery is enough. Time for you kids to go out and earn your keep.

At two weeks, they were poking their tiny, little shoots above the mix.

Three weeks, they were starting to show their differences.

Now at four weeks, they're about to bust the pots...except for the onions, whose leaves still look a little weak.

Tilling the ground with a little Amend and then popping those seedlings into their slots for the season.

The roots are very healthy, as you can see in this pot of corn. They're biodegradable...in fact, already dissolving...so I just pop 'em in the ground.

I need to find something to repel the pests. For now, I'm covering with some chicken wire, watering in, and then tend until harvest.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

This Year's Model (Crop)...

I've decided to start my vegetable garden a month later this year. Instead of planting in January, as I have in years past, I'm starting at the beginning of March.  You can see the crop selection up above.

Last year's garden was the most unproductive I've ever had. The main culprit was the extreme and prolonged drought California experienced.  While the lack of water was one thing (a 50% surcharge was added to the water you used over your allotment), the critters were another.

We live right up against the mountains. The very, very dry mountains.  With no food and little water, the animals were pushed down into the residential neighborhoods below.  This meant deer would eat my roses. Rabbits and squirrels joined the mocking birds and jays, taking turns eating the fruits of our labors, or most often just chewing up the tender new growths of the plants.

They killed our zucchini, decimated our chile plants, and took all our tomatoes.  

Only the tomato plant I had in a hanging basket and our grapes gave me any meaningful crops, and not much at that.

Let's hope I can come up with some strategies of pest repellance if the dry weather makes a comeback.

In the meantime, I'm starting my seeds.  It's a rainy weekend, so this is a great project to do indoors, in the garage.

I got this little 7 pot seed starter kit at Lowe's.  The pots are biodegradeble, so I can just stick 'em in the ground when I'm ready.

My wife has this bag of potting mix for her euphorbias and I'm going to use a little for my seeds.

Filling up each pot with the mix, I tamp down on the soil with my fingers, pushing it down to good seed depth.

I put a few seeds in each pot, cover with mix, tamp down and water in.

Finally, I'm leaving them indoors until they're strong enough to transplant and repel the invaders. They're sitting in a sunny, southern window until then.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Old Man Winter Never Got Old

OK, I guess I have to admit we're never going to get a freeze this year. Our winter turned out to last all of three days, maybe four if you push it, and it never dropped below 45 degrees (F).

I'm sitting here a week before the official start of spring, temperatures should hit 90 by tomorrow. Like the governor, I'm officially declaring the end of winter and an early spring.

Time to get back to work...

I've cleaned out the west wall and dumped a bag of Amend in it. This is an organic soil and soil amendment. How can you tell it's really organic? Just follow your nose.

Now that I've got that wonderful barnyard smell worked into the soil, let's plant.

I had a tough time with the tomatoes started from seeds last year. This year, it's a couple of buck-99 hybrid seedlings from Lowe's.

They pop in easy enough.

I will be growing most everything else from seed, though.  My wife found this little seed starter kit somewhere deep in the garage. It even comes with a free sample of fertilizer.

Each cell is a biodegradable square with a pellet of dried potting mix.  I water it and wait for the mix to expand.

Today, I'm planting onions, zucchinis, and...for the first time...I'm going to try some cantaloupe.

The onions are on the left and I'm putting in 2 zucchini seeds in each cell. Let them duke it out and I'll keep the best 2 or 3 plants to transplant.

Same with the cantaloupe.  Once planted, I'll put it on top of the whiskey barrel where I plant to transplant it later.

One last test of the sprinkler pattern then I'll count this job as done.

Darryl
Copyright 2014 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved