culinary notes

I was just flipping through the pictures of the garden from before and thought i would make a few notes....

- the rocket bolted like, nearly instantly. It is amazing to look at it now in full flower and recall that it was baby rocket a mere month ago. I cannot eat it straight now. However, it is still very good to put a few pieces in with the other salads (they are working on bolting but have not gotten there yet). It is still bitter, but there are several things which have worked. One is to pair it with a vinagrette made with lemon-infused olive oil and with parmesian cheese. That works fairly well (of course when Catherine & Sarah came over i forgot the cheese....oops). The whole lemon-infused olive oil was an accident too -- we ran out of ordinary olive oil and dug up some specialty stuff that had been a gift. I think it would also taste very good with some nut oils, like walnut oil or pistachio oil. Not that i know where to get those in the States. Another thing which works is to put it with a sweet dressing, like a raspberry vinagrette. If you like sweet dressings, that is (the males in this household give them a big thumbs down).

- the 'White Wonder' cukes make great pickles (we know this from a few years back) but they make lousy table cucumbers. Or to be clearer -- the skin is very thick. So if you want to just eat them, you have to spend the time to peel them, and then they just look like regular cukes, nothing exciting. But i suspect the thick skin is exactly what made them such excellent, crispy refrigerator pickles. I really hope i can reproduce this effect this year, if we eventually stop eating them all at the table so there are some to pickle.

- maybe we should try a green tomato recipie, we seem to have tons. Well, when dh gets back...

Actually, there is one tomato of 'Cherokee Purple' variety which is starting to turn! It is now a pinkish color, they are very dark (almost purple) when ripe. I will be watching carefully...