In Season & Fresh from the Garden, the Fields, the Orchards & the Woods
It’s heartening to hear so many people say they want to start growing some of their food. Many also say they are overwhelmed by what it seems to require – or have no idea how to start. However, millions of people have been gardening for …
Cherry blossoms in early April are incredibly lovely, aren’t they? and incredibly fragile. They open their snowy petals for pollinators to do their jobs when the chance of freeze or frost is still real and so one wonders: is this too early? will a frost …
That’s “Brittany” as in “French Brittany” the westernmost maritime province of France.
Following my recent post on making Petits Pots de Yogurt With Strawberry Compote, Paula and Mary both asked about the golden cookie pictured next to the yogurt, and would I please provide the recipe?
Glad you ask.
The cookie is called Galette Bretonne in French and is a very simple cookie, totally unsophisticated: a real country cookie, really, with only a few ingredients and a pure butter taste (Butter from Brittany is renowned throughout France, and so are confections made with it). It’s similar to a short-bread cookie. Need I say, get the best butter possible? There, I said it.
You may use any cookie cutter shape you wish, but the traditional shape is round: I just use a small water glass to cut out the cookies. If you roll out the dough thinly, you’ll have lots of cookies; if you roll it out thick, you’ll have a lot less (but they’ll be very fat). Sometimes, I make thin cookies, sometimes I bake fat cookies. Depends on the mood. You just need to cook the thick cookies a little longer. I can make 4 dozen thin 2 1/4 ” (6 cm) cookies out of one batch or 2 dozen medium-thick cookies or 1 dozen thick cookies. Your choice…
The dry ingredients are measured by weight, not volume, as is typical of a French recipe and in grams. I won’t convert in ounces, because some of you – despite exhortations to the contrary – will read that as fluid oz and use cups. Also the recipe is easy to memorize in grams. Yep, time for you to get a scale! They are not that expensive and they come in really really handy – especially if you start baking for real. The liquid ingredients are measured by volume.
Butter Cookies From Brittany/ Petites Galettes Bretonnes Continue reading Butter Cookies From Brittany
Yogurt is for dessert too. After a 15+ year hiatus, I am again making yogurt. Easy, tasty, low-tech. Did I say easy? Since I much prefer eating yogurt to drinking milk, I have been making at least two quarts of yogurt a week. Love it! …
Serve good food. Serve fresh food. Use real silverware and a real cloth napkin. Make it pretty. Be imaginative in your use of containers – avoid plastic. Print a menu and tuck it in the box. Have fun.
Among the pleasure of the early spring garden is the hunt for the wanted volunteers: dill pokes its elongated slim first leaves among the sowed arugula while cilantro is coming up now in the pea bed – both bright green, brightly flavored, their unmistakable pungency released when you crush or brush them. Both are volunteers that I strongly encourage by scattering the ripe seeds in the fall: I find the plants are much stronger when they come up when they want and not when I want.
And if you think dill and cilantro look similar now, you are right, and they should: they both belong to the carrot (Umbelliferae) family. And if there is a question of what they are, touching them and then smelling my fingers would, without a doubt, tell me. Or I can wait and, then, the true leaves would announce their name as true dill leaves and cilantro leaves look not at all the same… except for dill-leafed cilantro that looks like dill and tastes like cilantro (yep there is such a beast ! – you know there must be an exception that confirms the rule…)
Do you encourage volunteers in your kitchen garden?
Note: the photos were taken mid-march, 10 days ago. True leaves are now showing.
It’s time to start hardening off the babies. At least, for those of us in the Northern Piedmont (and in the mid-Atlantic area). Yep, time to start hardening off the hardy annual vegetables that were lovingly started indoors. That include you people who took one …
Transplants: 350! (more or less); about 200 planted on Monday and 150 planted ten days ago. I have never been successful with the sets (mini-bulbs) planted in the spring: they hardly grew bigger than they start at! So, this year, I bought (more expensive) transplants: …
We are calling them girls (Gael, Gladys, Gwen, Gali, Gudule etc etc). There might be a boy in there – won’t know for sure for a few weeks. He’ll be Gaston, or Gus, or Gaspard – haven’t quite decided yet.
The girls are still in the brooder and not out yet (too cold – got down to 19F/ -7C last night) but I want them to be exposed to the outside and to eat fresh and varied (beside their chicken starter ration). Eating fresh and varied… sounds familiar? So? so, every morning, we dig fresh clumps of succulent greens for them, and put the clumps in a big flat pot or large clay saucer. We bring it to them (replacing the day-old saucer which they have battred down quite vigorously). On the menu this morning: chickweed, grass, mache, dandelion etc sprinklered with granite grit – which they need for their digestion. Gael et al are now at the stage where they actually eat the greens. And they are expecting it! Woe to me if I don’t bring it. Continue reading Breakfast For The Girls
Spring is blue and red: blue clear sky and red maple flowers. Indeed the maples are blooming now, the earliest single species source of nectar and pollen for our bees.