But after harvesting the goodies from the garden this morning, and noticing all the ripe and near-ripe key limes on the tree, the ball started rolling with…

Key Lime Cookies

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup fresh lime juice
• 1 tsp grated lime zest
• confectioner’s sugar for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter, sugar, egg and egg yolk until smooth.  Stir in the lime juice and lime zest.  In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and salt, then blend this into the creamed mixture.  

The dough is going to be sticky, so the best way to dish it out is with a “disher” or ice cream scoop.  Spray the disher with non-stick spray and scoop out dough (more batter than dough really) in tbsp size glops.  

Bake the glops 8 to 10 minutes, or until the bottom edges are just slightly brown.  Slide the parchment paper onto wire racks.  Sift confectioner’s sugar over the tops of the cookies while they’re still warm.
 

Next up are my personal favorites…

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients

• 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
• 2 sticks butter, softened
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 2  eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 3 cups rolled oats
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2  tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to (of course) 350 degrees.  Beat together the softened butter, brown sugar, and sugar until creamy.  Add the eggs and vanilla and beat well.  In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt.  Add this to the wet ingredients and combine thoroughly.  Add the oats and chocolate chips, stir well to combine.

Drop by the tablespoon-ful onto parchment paper-covered cookie sheets and bake 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown.  Slide the paper to wire racks, cool completely, etc. 

Fair warning, the above recipe makes a crapload of cookies.  Substitute raisins for the chocolate chips, but only if you must.
 

And finally…

Chocolate Drops

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup shortening
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 egg
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Preheat the oven to (surprise!) 400 degrees.  Prep parchment paper-cookie sheets.

Mix together the shortening, sugar and egg.  Stir in the milk and vanilla, combine thoroughly (don’t freak if it looks curdly, the dry ingredients will fix that).  In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, salt and cocoa powder.  Mix this into the wet ingredients.  Chill the dough for 1 hour.

Drop the dough by rounded spoonfuls onto the prepped cookie sheets.  The easiest way to do this is with two spoons, just roll the scoop between them until it is round-ish.  (Bonus: then you get to lick TWO spoons!)

Bake 8 to 10 minutes, then cool on the parchment paper on racks. Frost them with royal icing, dust with powdered sugar, or eat as is.
 

Aaand I think that’s enough cooking for today.  Though I tell you what I need, a decent sugar cookie recipe for the plethora of Christmas-shaped cookies we’ll be making in the next two weeks.  Anyone?  Bueller?

First, some background…  The red rice bean is one of the top five most commonly grown green manure/cover crops in the world.  It grows thickly enough to control weeds, and fixes nitrogen in the soil.  The stems can be used as animal feed or mulch, and the vines can be cut for hay when the pods are immature.  Even the leaves can be fed to chickens.  The beans themselves are completely edible, and are a staple in many Asian cultures, typically grown as a soil improvement crop in between rice harvests. 

Red rice beans can be dried and cooked, eaten as vegetable sprouts, or as young green pods (40 to 60 days old).  The sprouts are a great source of zinc, and the beans themselves are high in protein, calcium and crude fiber, the latter of which makes them easier to digest.  The red bean ice cream you have in a Japanese restaurant is made from red rice beans.

We started these beans in Box #4 after the complete and utter failure (sob!) of the corn crop.  They sprouted quite quickly and rapidly started sending up viny tendrils.  The vines have tons of little grabby hairs, so they will climb absolutely anything.  I made a homemade support system for them, consisting of tall garden stakes and a good bit of twine:

This structure is about five feet tall, and you can see they would happily keep going up.  Once the vines overtopped the structure, I just guided them back inside the mass, so they’d entwine amongst themselves.

They start blooming after about 30 days, gorgeous purple orchid-like blooms:

And from those blooms come pea pods, about six inches long, two to three per stem. 

If you’re going for pulse (dried beans), as we did, leave the pods on the vines until they turn completely brown:

But be careful…the pods are VERY brittle at this point and if you are too rough removing them the pod will burst open, the two halves jumping in opposite directions, beans flying everywhere, with lots of nice volunteer bean plants emerging shortly thereafter.

You can see the chewed leaves in the picture above, so they’re not completely impervious to pests, but the leaves with actual holes in them make up only about 5% of the total.  And the cursed whiteflies, may they rot in hell, have not touched the bean plants at all…and they live for wide leaves under which to hide and multiply. 

Our beans have been producing steadily for about two months now, and show no signs of stopping.  They have new blooms as of today, and I’m still harvesting pods every day.
 

Removing the beans from their shells is something that should be done over an entire table…so you can see where the errant beans land after they’ve sprung out of their shells.  Half the beans are attached to one side of the pod and half are attached to the other…I’m sure there’s a botanical word for this but I’m too lazy to look it up.  The point is, you should be careful when shelling, as the natural inclination of these pods is to just fly apart.  My technique is to gently squeeze the pod from one end to the next, loosening the halves and the beans inside, then gently open it like a book, from the center, knocking beans into a bowl below.  No matter how much care you take you’re still going to be picking up beans from the floor.

So, what does one do with the harvested beans?  Well, in the absence of much Internet-based guidance (do not be fooled by “red beans and rice” recipes, they are NOT the same thing), we simply boiled them for a bit in salted water (15 to 20 mins at a rolling boil, ymmv), until they were al dente.

The water becomes a true bean liquor, taking most of the color from the dark red beans, and making a wonderfully flavorful sort of broth…I can’t wait to try these in a soup.

We drained the beans and served them with short grain sushi rice, tiny sirloin steaks and shrimp sauce (recipe here).  

How’d they taste?  Like peanuts, actually.  They added a wonderful nuttiness to the rice, and seem to me a fantastic way to add protein and calcium to your diet if you’re not interested in the steak-y part.  

Will we grow red rice beans again?  Absolutely.  This has been our big success story of this growing year, a high-yeild crop that can withstand the humidity and all the myriad pests Florida has to offer.

Creamy Corn and Vegetable Soup (with Bonus Sausage) and Fried Italian Bread

Ingredients

• 4 cups fresh corn kernels
• 2 cups milk
• 2 spicy italian sausages, cooked, drained and chopped roughly
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 med onion, diced
• 1 med red bell pepper, seeded and diced
• 1 med zucchini, diced
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 2 plum tomatoes, seeded and diced
• 3/4 tsp salt
• black pepper

Use a stick blender (or regular blender, or food processor) to puree 2 cups of the corn and all the milk until smooth, then set aside.

Heat the oil in a medium-sized soup pot over medium-high heat. Add the onion, bell pepper, zucchini and cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Add the corn, sausage and chicken stock and bring to a boil. (Since most store-bought stocks are so weak, I always add 2 chicken bullion cubes at this point.) Add the pureed corn and tomatoes and cook until it is hot…do not bring back to a boil. Add salt and pepper to taste.

For the bread, you want a good solid Italian loaf, nothing too soft. Slice it then cut into halves on the bias. Heat several tbsp of olive oil in a shallow pan, and add either grated fresh garlic, or garlic powder. Place the bread in the hot oil and let brown on each side, maybe 1 to 2 minutes per side. Add more oil/garlic as needed to fry the rest of the bread. Serve immediately with the soup…IN the soup is best.

…

Last week we tried a technique witnessed at a greasy spoon featured on the Food Network show, Diners, Drive-In and Dives:

Homemade Baconators

Ingredients

• 1 lb hamburger meat
• worcestershire sauce
• kosher salt, pepper, garlic powder
• 1 pkg bacon
• the usual myriad hamburger accoutrements

Cook the hamburgers as you usually do…for us, that’s lots of salt, pepper, garlic powder, and worcestershire sauce, cooked hard and hot. For the bacon part, first you’re going to boil it until it’s technically done. Then chop it into bitty pieces, crank the electric skillet up to its highest setting, form the bacon into patty-shapes and let it rip.

Flip them a few times to fully crisp them on both sides (this takes a bit of time), then slide them on top of the burger with your favorite condiments.

…

Tonight, we all stood in the grocery store, pondering what to have for dinner. The Husband went thataway, the Boychild went thataway and the Girlchild and I went thataway. And here’s what we had:

The Boychild’s Fresh Vegetable Soup

Ingredients

(makes one growing-boy sized bowl, plus a little leftover, so double/treble at will)

• 1/4 small onion, diced
• 1 lg carrot, diced
• 2 pinches celery seed
• grated garlic clove
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 1 cup water
• 2 chicken bullion cubes
• 1/2 diced russet potato
• 1/2 diced tomato
• 1/4 diced zucchini

Saute the onions, carrots, grated garlic and celery seed in a bit of olive oil with kosher salt and black pepper. Add stock, water, bullion, zucchini and potatoes and bring to a boil. Reduce to med-low heat and add tomato. Simmer together until potato is fork-tender.

This was a fantastic soup, really. It was cobbled together from no written down recipe, came straight from my basic knowledge of cooking (“…it’s the BASE of a soup!!”), and the boy’s desire to dice things. Highly recommended.

The Husband’s Chicken Tostadas

Ingredients

• 1 lb ground chicken
• 1 package taco seasoning
• 1 can enchilada sauce
• 1 can black beans, drained
• corn tortillas (about 3 per person)
• cojack cheese
• sour cream
• shredded lettuce

Brown chicken in a bit of oil, then add taco seasoning, enchilada sauce and beans. Heat a few tbsp of corn oil in a shallow skillet until very hot, and fry the tortillas on each side until crispy and browned.

Lay one tortilla on a plate, top with cheese then some of the meat mixture. Place another tortilla on top, add cheese, sour cream, meat mixture, lettuce, etc. Top with third tortilla, with a dollop of sour cream on top.

Serve with ice-cold cerveza, lime wedges and slices of avocado.

This was fantastic, really. I love when he gets these ideas and starts whipping things around in the kitchen.

My Soy-Honey-Garlic Tilapia Packets

Ingredients

• 4 tilapia filets
• portobello mushrooms
• med zucchini
• white onion
• snow pea pods
• 4 tbsp melted butter
• 1/8 c soy sauce
• 1/4 c honey
• garlic clove, grated

Preheat oven to 425. Julienne all the vegetables (except the snow pea pods). Tear off largish pieces of foil for the two packets, about 18×24. Better to waste foil than have to scour your oven, no? Make a vaguely bowl shape with the foil so everything you’re about to add doesn’t go squibbing out into the floor. Drizzle a little olive oil in the center of the foil, and put two pieces of fish in each foil piece, turning to coat with the oil. Season the fish with kosher salt and black pepper. Lay the julienned veggies on top of each set of fish, as much as you want, just be sure you can seal the foil over the pile. Now, the sauce…

Mix together the melted butter, soy sauce, honey and garlic. These proportions here make a fairly sweet sauce, so vary them as you like, more soy if you want saltier (I’d leave off the kosher salt step up top if so), etc.

Spoon the sauce over the fish and veggies. Fold closed the top of the foil packet first…bring the two sides together and fold them over several times, leaving some space above the pile and the top of the foil…it does not need to be tight against the food. Then fold the ends up, going towards the middle of the package, again leaving room.

Place packets on a sheet pan and bake for 10 minutes to start. Check the packet after this time (watch out for steam!), when the fish flakes on the fork it is done.

…

Boy, don’t you wish you lived next door to us? You know this house is FRAGRANT tonight.

It does make for some extensive planting seasons, though, and in light of that, we’re already buying seeds to start in the spring (read: March). A made a huge purchase from growitalian.com and sent me some of the bounty, and I just made a purchase from rareseeds.com and will reciprocate. Here’s what’s on the garden agenda for this year:

• Red Onions (Tropea Rossa) – Very sweet. Gods, I love onions.
• Cucumbers (Picollo di Parigi) – A pickling cucumber, about 4 inches long. Mmm, pickles.
• Tomatoes (San Marzano Redorta) – I’m skeered of the whole canning thing, so we’ll just have to rough chop these, sprinkle with kosher salt, and eat as-is. Darn the luck.
• Tomatoes (San Marzano 2) – Apparently the premiere sauce tomato of Italy. Can. Not. Wait. To get my hands on these.
• Red Bell Peppers (Quadrato d’Asti Rosso) – Rough chopped and thrown into a batch of eggs/cheese/hot sauce/onions… *pant, pant*
• Carrots (Pariser Market) – These are ideal for containers since they make nifty ball shapes instead of long thin shapes.
• Broccoli (Romanesco) – A “nutty” flavor it claims. We are so there.
• Red Onions (Rossa Savonese) – Did I mention I LOVE onions?
• Peppermint – Despite it’s fearsome growth habits, it is a staple in our garden (and teapots).
• Rosemary – Chicken just isn’t chicken without it.
• Oregano – For use in the San Marzano sauces, of course.
• Broccoli – The non-nutty variety, I think.
• Melon Ananas – There are more varieties of melon, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. This one smells of pineapple.
• Tomatoes (Gioia della Mensa) – I know, how many varieties of tomato does one garden need? All of them, kthx.
• Cucumbers (Beth Alpha) – A slicing cucumber. Did you know cucumbers don’t like to be transplanted?
• Paprika Supreme – These are the peppers from which you make paprika. You knew paprika came from peppers, right?
• Peas – I’ll get these kids to eat peas if it kills me. And eensy = cute.
• Red Rocket Peppers – This is the pepper you harvest, dry, and turn into ristras. Hello enchilada sauce!
• Tomatoes (Sun Gold) – A lovely little cherry tomato. I plan on eating these things like grapes.
• Leeks (Carentan) – Already planning some wonderful things for these lovelies…
• Peppers (Topepo Rosso) – A pimento-type pepper, very sweet. Mmm, pickles…
• Tomatoes (Cream Sausage) – As far as I know, they don’t actually *taste* like sausage, that just refers to the shape. But how freaking cool would that be if they did?? *drool*
• Tomatillos (Purple) – As A commented, “coolest salsa ever.”
• Tamarillos – A fruit that tastes like a tomato. Bonus!
• Metki Painted Serpent Melons – A cucumber-shaped Armenian melon.
• Tigger Melons – Come on, it looks fake! It looks like one of the Green Goblin’s pumpkin bombs. How could you NOT want to grow these things??

Yeah, that’s a lot, isn’t it. How many acres do I have, you ask? Er, somewhat less than half of one… Yeah, we’ve got LOTS of pots.

On the home cooking front, we got up at a stupid hour (for a holiday) this morning to start a 4lb pork butt in the smoker. In a little while it’ll go into a low-heat oven to braise for another 4 hours or so. Carolina-style bbq coming up! Here’s a good vinegar sauce recipe for the true North Carolina pulled pork sandwich (with cole slaw on top):

Carolina Vinegar BBQ Sauce:

• 6 parts apple cider vinegar
• 1 part Tobasco sauce (yes, it has to be Tobasco)
• finely ground black or white pepper (to taste)
• white sugar (amount to use = “some…” again, to taste)

And that’s it. I plan on microwaving it a touch before we’re ready to serve the pork, just to heat it up, otherwise it’s use as-is.

Merry New Year to you all.

Updated to add…

Convo just had via AIM with the Husband:

tedbronson2007 (10:35:03 AM): baby, what bird down here is the size of a condor?

Sekimori (10:35:14 AM): no bird

Sekimori (10:35:41 AM): or, the magnificent frigate bird might get close, but they do not come this far north

tedbronson2007 (10:35:40 AM): dragon then

Sekimori (10:35:48 AM): definitely dragon