Johnathan Edwards

This past weekend my parents and their friends went up to Stonington Connecticut for the Johnathan Edwards annual wine tasting. I tagged along.

It was a lot of fun and great to get unto Groton one more time before I leave for France next week. We had an amazing time at the winery, it was a very well done event. $25 got you 7 tastings, and you could substitute for doubles, triples, etc of your favorites. There was a live 5 piece band, large dance floor, food, and areas to picnic if you brought your own nibbles. They had a grape stomping competition for a free case of wine and hay rides around the vineyards. We had a blast.

My Dad inadvertently met Johnathan Edwards, but thinking the man was too young, came back at him with, "Yeah, I'm Robert Mondavi." When the 'young man' got on stage at the end of the day to thank everyone for coming, my Dad was quite surprised.

Here's some photos from the event and the following day when we stopped to get pumpkins and apples on the way home at Bishop's Orchard.

New projects...

Happy October (almost)! I cannot believe how fast the rest of the summer went.  So some exciting news in my life: I'm going back to France as an English teaching assistant at the high school where I was last year! I'm very excited, and as great as it's been living at home and catching up with my parents (and all the benefits that come with that - a car, perpetually stocked fridge, etc) I'm ready to get a move on! 


In other news, I just broke up with my boyfriend John. And while some people shop, watch sad movies, go out on the town with renewed vigor, I get bizarre urges to cook (though I confess I did have 500 Days of Summer on in the background of my maiden mozzarella voyage). So far I’ve attempted blanching some late tomatoes a friend gave us, fresh mozzarella, pumpkin scones, various experiments with unknown varieties of squash, and an encore of a pasta fagiole soup I once made in France for my dinner club. 

Small anecdote: I ran down to the local grocer for a gallon of milk (the only ingredient not in my cheesemakign starter kit) for my mozz and realizing I didn’t have cash tried to use my credit card for which the store has a $10 minimum. When a guy who worked there bought the milk for me before I could say anything, I burst into tears prompting a “Hey lady, don’t cry!”. I’ve come a long way since last week. 

Anyway, here are some random pictures from my recent ventures:

My first cheese making kit! I got the idea from Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal Vegetable Miracle" where she does a workshop with this woman, Ricki.

Adding my (free) gallon of milk to a stainless steel pot

My first curds!! Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the finished product which we ended up using in a vegetable lasagna my Mom made. 

I had never blanched anything but it was quite simple, here are the steps: rinse any remaining soil from your tomatoes

Place them in boiling water until the skin just pops open

Like this.

Place them immediately into an ice bath and they are be cored and peeled.

Egg washing my pumpkin scones. I brought some over to  the kids I babysit for and they kept calling them "squeams," how cute?? 

Charlie

Last week John and I went up to Groton to spend a day and also as a halfway point for a tuna fishing trip he had planned off the Cape for the following day.

The trip was successful and John and his two friends came back the following evening with heaps of bluefin tuna.

When I got the call that there would be fresh meat I started planning the rest of the meal. Most unfortunately the local grocery store in Noank, CT had just closed after losing all of their inventory during the hurricane and it was too late to make the drive to the Whittles Farm. All I was left with was the Big Y, which, somewhat eponymously, inspired deep skepticism.

Trying to remain optimistic I pulled in the gigantic parking lot with visions of late summer corn roasted on the grill and baked stuffed tomatoes. My meal plans were quickly dashed as I literally stopped short in the produce section. The corn was either severely picked over or nothing to write  home about to begin with. The tomatoes were disappointingly anemic looking, and from Canada to boot.

After perusing the damage for a good ten minutes I finally found something in season and grown within 1000 miles: squash, more specifically an acorn and butternut from a Massachusetts farm.

I roasted these with some chunks of purple potatoes, grabbed a baguette and some arugula for a simple salad. I made a soy sauce -honey-ginger sauce for the fish out of what I could find in the fridge.


John and Co. arrived and quickly sliced up some sashimi we ate as an app while filleting the loins before searing them for about a minute on each side with some salt and pepper.

Even if the produce was autumnal the weather wasn't and we enjoyed it all on the deck. And voila - a somewhat local, fresh caught and seasonal meal.

Come On Irene

The hurricane didn’t hit us too badly, however we did lose power and didn’t get it back until yesterday morning (bringing the grand total to 5 powerless, waterless days). 

We were up at the beach the week before and were able to secure the house up there before heading back down to Stamford to do the same. I helped my Dad tie up the boat (why use 2 lines when 7 will do), move outdoor furniture and plants, etc.

Sunday we woke up with no power, and perhaps because of that and nothing more do to my father had us outside by noon, blowing the roof and gutters, picking up sticks and branches, and blowing the rest of the yard. There was almost a mutiny of the workers (my mother and I) against the foreman when we realized that we were out there in the eye of the storm and still had the back half that hit us later that night, undoing almost all of our hard work.

Needless to say we were all back out there Monday morning by 9. The weather turned gorgeous and we ended up going one step further and planting fall mums and cabbages as we were on such a roll. My mother and I had to drive to 4 nurseries to find one that was open the day after a hurricane. I turned our overgrown back rock into a “fall garden” with mums and ornamental cabbages. I also planted some perennial rosemary and sage.

More from The Doctor

The Doctor is great. He's very happy and gets along with my parents' dog. After a calm first few weeks he's letting out his inner playful puppy - shredding stray papers, pulling tablecloths off tables, and raiding forgotten grocery bags (so far he’s expanded his palette to Cosco corn muffins and vanilla biscotti from my parents trip to Arthur Avenue).

He was neutered yesterday and is doing well today, resting more than usual but pretty normal otherwise. The night before my mother and gave him a pep talk, assuring him we wouldn’t think of him as any less of a man afterwards and serenading him with Sinatra’s “For Once in My Life” which we decided would be his theme song. I also asked the vets to check out a limp in his front right paw. Lately he’s been making due with the other 3. After poking and prodding and a telling resounding yelp they localized the problem to his right shoulder. They did some X-rays, which I did not know would cost me 100$ a pop, and found that he has calcified cartilage and arthritis in his shoulder joint. Due to his young age and small size, they deduced that it’s not general wear and tear (they usually see this type of damage in Great Danes) and probably the result of some trauma he experienced when he was young and still growing, possibly he was hit by a car. Poor guy. The best they can do is anti-inflammatory medicine.

The Archives

I’ve been occupying my time at home with several projects, the principal being “summer cleaning.” Almost immediately upon returning from Guadeloupe I decided that it was not only time, but an absolute necessity to “purge” my closet of no longer worn clothes, shoes, bags, etc. This urge has overtaken me before, but not on this scale.

After cleansing my closet, I ventured into the basement, where I quickly discovered that for the past 22 years of my life, I had been a horrendous of a packrat. The first step is admitting right? When I made a Hoarders reference my mother vehemently denied we were anything close - I disagree. Armed with my mother, and at times a bottle of wine, we began attacking the abyss of the walk in cedar closet. Boy oh boy did we have some good laughs. A highlight being when convinced her it was time to let go of her billowing drawstring black velvet pants that I’m sure at one point were very stylish “for the holidays”, as well as no less than 4 boxy, shoulder-padded black wool blazers. 


My father would come down at sparing intervals and emphatically enforced the mantra: "When in doubt, throw it out." 

I was much more gung ho about giving/throwing away things I didn’t see need for than my mother, and she came up with some pretty ridiculous justifications for holding on to some choice items, such as: “this would be great if I go for a run in the middle of the winter,” or, “if your father takes me on a cruise and the trends from 1990 make a comeback” and, “if you become a kindergarten teacher in France.” I threatened to make her write down and label some of these.

She refused to donate holiday dresses I wore when I was in the single digits, (but happily chucked her old bridesmaids dress), my middle school cheerleading costume, and a Minnie Mouse dance costume I wore when I was 5. She also saved enough childrens clothes to outfit at least 5 grandkids if they showed up butt naked on her doorstep in mid-winter for a week. Including the event that they were invited to a formal affair.

We then moved on to Tupperwares, during this stage my mother disappeared upstairs more and more frequently, which were much more of a headache than the clothes as I sifted through every note I ever exchanged in middle school, movie stubs, birthday cards and candles, triple sets of photos, nametags, rock collections, CDs, magazine collages, every book I ever read, school projects, swimming ribbons from when I was 8, dried corsages. Basically anything you could possibly imagine having even a tangential influence on my youth I saved. At times it was a fun trip going through “the archives” as my mom and I nicknamed them, reading half filled journals aloud when the biggest news in my life was my Mom’s new haircut that I “hated.” I also found it cringingly painful but oddly satisfying to go through and shred the existence of my 15-year-old boyfriend. Yeesh.

I’ve confirmed that I was a fashion obsessed pill as a child who felt the need to document everything and an angsty (at best) teen who had a lot of trouble sorting out her feelings, and repeatedly thanked my mother for having put up with me.

Kreyol Colombo

CT farmer's market fresh veggies

Pierrette, our fabulous Guadeloupean chef, made a chicken colombo, a signature Creole dish, her first night with us, and it was a knockout. She served the bright yellow concoction right right out of our comically large pots. It was a stewy dish with tons of vegetables and bone-in chicken thighs and legs (pretty much the only way chicken comes on the island.) As we ate we took turns guessing which vegetables we were eating; there were the usual key players: carrots, potatoes and onions, but definitely a few unfamiliar ones as well. When we asked her later she claimed to have used whatever vegetables we had around, which included some kind of yucca-like root vegetable as well as some under ripe green mangoes. It was decently spicy as she also threw in a couple small peppers that I later found out Guadeloupeans slice and throw in just about everything. All served over steamed white rice, which cut some of the spice, it was delectable – hearty, nutritious, and exotic.

I found that by cutting all the vegetables to similar sizes and thicknesses that they all cooked evenly

The real secret to this dish is the seasoning, which I bought in a small, unmarked plastic bag at a spice market on the mainland one afternoon with Pierrette. I tucked the little tied off bag in my luggage and it managed to perfume most of my clothes on the way home. Without the spice, there is no dish. It’s pretty uncomplicated. I have no idea what is contained in that magical blend, but definitely some curry judging by the scent and the bright yellow color the dish ends up coming out. As about 10% of Guadeloupeans are of Indian descent it makes sense that there would be some blurring of the food cultures.

Seasoned chicken with sliced veggies on top

I improvised my Amerian version of colombo with the pretty vegetables John and I bought up at the Coventry Farmers Market this past weekend, and imagine you can really use whatever you feel like. 

Chicken Colombo (Serves 4) 

A few tablespoons of olive oil

1 smallish eggplant, cubed

1 squash (I used golden zuchinni), cut into disks

~1 pint of small potatoes, scrubbed, skin-on and halved

1 large green pepper, cubed

4 large carrots, halved and cut into segments

1 medium white onion, cut into rings

3 cloves of garlic, minced

1/2 small red pepper, minced
A few thin slices of a green pepper that turned out to be way hotter than we thought when John had a coughing fit just cutting it
Juice from 1 small lime
4-5 heaping tablespoons of Colombo seasoning, depending on how spicy you like it
1 package of about 5 boneless, skinless chicken thighs (there we skinned our own bone-in parts)

I heated a few tablespoons of olive oil in a deep pot and laid the chicken down at the bottom. I then sprinkled ~2 tablespoons of the Colombo seasoning over the thighs and then added the chopped vegetables on top, topping them off with about 2 more tablespoons of seasoning. I cooked the whole thing, covered, for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, mainly to keep the chicken from sticking to the bottom and to more evenly coat the veggies with the seasoning. The juices from the chicken and the liquid from the vegetables combined with the spices to create a nice sauce. You could probably add a half a cup of water and some cornstarch if you wanted more of a stewy version. I didn't do this but imagine that some lime juice would be excellent squeezed in at the end.

Not very well presented but delicious final product

I made a vegetarian version for my Mom and I in which I simply left out the chicken. It cooked exactly the same, with an olive oil base for the vegetables, however, I added about a half a cup of water throughout the 30 minutes of cooking. 

I served both over some rice I cooked using about ½ a tomato bouillon Pierrette also gave me and added some fresh chopped parsley at the end.

I also boiled a couple plantains (halved, still in their hard green skin), but accidentally bought the green skinned, white, starchier variety instead of the sweeter kind with yellow skin. I recommend the latter.

And voila, my parents were able to try my version of a traditional French West Indies dish.