Last June Entry 2011

I am at my "real" job in a far away place this week. After a long day's research meeting, I had dinner alone, but not so alone because I shared my table with huge ants crawling over the bamboo-inspired table and chairs and a mosquito so big that I saw him lingering on the top of one of the chartuese-colored chairs directly across from me! Needless to say I was inspired to not linger too long and drink my glass of white wine and eat my broiled Tilapia fillet with slightly blanched broccoli, cauliflower and carrots, topped off with 3 small samosas - one vegetable and two beef!! Headed to bed. Meeting starts at 7:30 in the morning! This is Hot Pepper signing off for the month of June. Next month is Thyme's time.

Vegetable Flowers

For those master gardeners, please excuse this novice. I'm just in awe of my little garden and everyday is a revelation. This morning when I had my garden meditation - yes, that's what I call it - it dawned on me that vegetables have flowers! My eggplant's flower has yellow petals with a purple center. Squash has gorgeous blossoms that open into huge yellow flowers. I should have picked those blossoms and cooked them; maybe next time. Yellow flowers sprout along my trailing cucumber vine. Even my banana and Thai hot peppers and basil have petite white flowers.

I truly can see now why gardening is so educational. You see the nature of plants for food spring forth, bit by bit. Glorious!!

Hot Pepper's Garden Week 5

Yeah, my little garden is taking off!! Take a look at the pictures. I just ate my fourth strawberry. A nice size tomato, with lots of other smaller ones are in the works. Bright yellow squash blossoms are peeking out from under their mother plants. I almost screamed after seeing the head of an eggplant (if you can describe it like that) for the first time in my life popping out of its stem. I'm besides myself with joy over my accomplishment. Now, the only bummer is that I have to go out of town for a week and leave my babies to the care of my son. As I cross my eyes looking at him dubiously he promises to water and take care of them. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Note: I found this website to help this novice gardener, www.heirloom-organics/guide/guidetogrowingvegetables.html.

2nd Annual Juneteenth Skillet Gathering

This past Sunday Hot Pepper and Thyme celebrated the CFNI 2nd Annual Juneteenth Skillet Gathering with several colleagues, family and friends. For those who don't know about Juneteenth, the holiday recognizes when Texas slaves were made aware of their emancipation in 1865. It's a day to honor our ancestors by reflecting and rejoicing the Africa diaspora.

In turn, our Skillet Gatherings are a a celebration of community, food and conversation. Since I've been highlighting this month Jessica Harris' "Beyond Gumbo, Creole Fusion Food from the Atlantic Rim," Sunday's menu included her French Guyana green mango salad (see June 5 blog), Columbian-style fried Tilapia (see June 11 blog), Brazilian greens Mineira style(p. 192) plus hot sauce (p. 143), New Orleans creole tomato and vidalia onion salad (p. 123), Costa Rican corn pancakes (p. 71), and Mexican watermelon agua fresca (p. 346). And for dessert, we had vanilla ice cream with peach schnapps and fresh peach slices. Needless to say, the food was not only colorful, but tastey and a big hit with everyone. Take a look at the picture of the food.

I have to especially comment on the greens. The recipe called for sauteeing onion and garlic in olive oil, adding the greens (kale or collards) and cooking them for 5 minutes. Well, my southern roots baulked at the idea of cooking greens for only 5 minutes! Whoever heard of such a thing, everyone knows you gotta add water (for the pot liquor) and cook greens down and for ever, until they're good and tender. However wanting to be as true to the recipe as possible, I "massaged" the greens breaking them up into small pieces, didn't add water, but I cooked them for about 15 minutes. Amazingly, they were wonderful. No salt and pepper, just the flavor of the greens combined with the onion and garlic. The greens were served at room temperature after the hot sauce (combination of juice of 3 limes, 2 tsps minced onion, 1 tsp minced fresh cilantro, minced, jalepeno pepper to taste, salt & pepper to taste) was drizzled over them. Delicious!

Our conversation mainly focused on CFNI plans to participate in the launching of Food Day, October 24, http://www.foodday.org/, which is being spearheaded by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Food Day is to be both a celebration of real, healthy food and a powerful, grassroots movement for change. People interested in issues such as nutrition, the environment, agriculture, and hunger should be able to use Food Day to advance their programs. We shared our ideas about how we wanted to recognize the event and asked our guests for comments and suggestions. They were very interested in the concept and several people even volunteered to help plan the event. After a lively conversation, we ended our Juneteenth Skillet Gathering with seconds on the vanilla ice cream, peach schnapps, and peach slices.

My Little Strawberry

I ate my little strawberry yesterday. it was bright red with a sweet, tangy flavor. Granted I'm a bit biased, but it was much tastier than any berries I've had this season. I carried on so much about my first ever grown little strawberry that you'd have thought I'd been out in the fields picking strawberries for hours and days.

Reflecting on my over the top, ridiculous behavior, I thought why not find out something about a strawberry picking job. We're promoting plant-based eating for healthier, more sustainable living BUT do we ask ourselves how does this produce magically appear at our farmers' markets, or at the grocery store, and on our tables.

I did a search and found that strawberry picking is a social justice issue. While there were lots of happy go lucky pick-your-own photos, the more poignant photos depicted workers bending over picking strawberries in fields. The work is hard, backbreaking repetitous, tedious, dangerous work performed primarily by undocumented migrant farmworkers. My search came across articles about strawberry pickers fighting for better pay and safe working conditions, which led me to Working in these times, a blog covering the labor movement and the struggles of workers to obtain safe, healthy, and just workplaces. Their Jan. 13, 2011 blog was about CA farmworkers suing to prevent the use of methyl iodide (a cancer causing pesticide) on strawberries.

While I'm still proud of my foray into the world of gardening, I want to educate myself more on the relationship between plant-based food consumption and the social justice of picking produce. I want my social responsibility to reflect not "just-them" but all of "just-us." Hope that makes sense.

Hot Pepper's Garden - Week 4

My morning's begin with short meditative moments, sitting on the patio, looking out at my garden. Yesterday the highlight was seeing a hummingbird dart in to sip from a freshly bloomed gladiola growing in a container. It was a magical experience. This morning I saw my first strawberry ripening on its little vine. Look closely and you'll see it in the picture shown. If that pesky rabbit in my yard or the bugs don't get it, I'll pick the first fruit of my labor in a day or so!

Round 2 - Jessica B. Harris' "Beyond Gumbo" Cookbook

A huge jicama is in the HOUSE! I found it at my neighborhood Safeway yesterday, where none were to be found last week. So I had to re-make the jicama cole slaw to see if there was a difference. Remember last week I substituted quince. Well, let's see.

First, have you ever peeled a jicama? There's the outer peel, a tough, faintly yellow, straw, matrix-looking second layer, and then a firm, somewhat juicy, inner white fruit. The second layer makes peeling jicama a little work. For my second try at this recipe, I used about a quarter of the jicama because it was so large and I used one of those quarter lb. size Ziploc bags of cabbage saved from last week. This time I didn't add the golden raisins, but I did modify the recipe again - 2 tbsps apple cider vinigar, 3 tbsps buttermilk plus the 3/4 c mayo, salt and pepper, sugar to taste. Oh, and I'm called "Hot Pepper" for a reason, I added a tsp of cayenne to give the slaw a little kick!

Did the jicama make a difference? Well.... jicama has a rather earthy taste and reminds me of one of those foods that takes on the flavors of whatever is added to it. So to be blunt, I didn't taste much of a difference from last week's cole slaw BUT because the jicama was juicy, it made the texture of the slaw a little more loose and smooth. Nice.

My second recipe was supposed to be fried catfish steaks, Columbian style (p. 237). As I said last week modify and substitute when necessary. No catfish steaks on hand, used tilapia fillets instead. Otherwise following the recipe to the letter almost, I marinated 4 fillets with the juice of one lemon ( recipe called for 2 tbsps), salt and pepper to taste for 1 hour in a glass dish (recipe called for nonreactive bowl). I prepared a batter by beating 2 eggs and adding 2 tbsps flour and 1 tbsp dried cilantro instead of parsley. Lightly coating the fish with the batter, I then fried them until golden. Pictures of the end result are shown. Served warm with the cole slaw, it was delicious.

Hot Pepper's Cookbook Review

For the month of June, I will be reviewing several recipes from "Beyond Gumbo, Creole Fusion Food from the Atlantic Rim." This cookbook was written by Jessica B. Harris and published 2003. My copy is even autographed! I love her cookbooks because she was the first African American cookbook author that I discovered years ago and her genre is the African diaspora. Her cookbooks include recipes, interesting stories and historical facts, pictures, a food glossary and resources.

I chose this particular cookbook because 1) my known roots are from Louisiana, 2) gumbo is a favorite dish in my family and 3) the recipes are an example of the diaspora on this side of the world. Also historically, June is the month for celebrating Juneteenth (more to come on that later) and the recipes I've chosen will become part of my menu for that celebration. So let's get started.

Today was a warm, kind of partly cloudy Sunday and ideal for light fare. I prepared four recipes: US deviled eggs (p. 82), green mango salad from French Guyana (p. 87), US jicama cole slaw (p. 114), and Maryse's salad mix plus vinaigrette from Guadeloupe (p. 116 and 136, respectively). Like many cooks I don't exactly follow recipes to the letter. I improvise and substitute. In this case, 4 green mangos became 3 plus 1 slightly ripe one. I used 3 scallions instead of 1, 4 garlic cloves instead of 2 and 4 tbsps peanut oil instead of 2. All these ingredients got mixed with the juice of 1 lemon, half of a large jalepeno minced, and salt and pepper to taste.

Now any other day I would see jicama in my neighborhood store; today no such luck. I used quince as a substitute. The recipe also called for 1 large green cabbage and 1/2 head of red cabbage. I used half of each, shredded and combined them, then took out 2 quart-size Ziploc bags for later use. To the remaining cabbage I still added 2 grated carrots, 3/4 cup mayo, 1.5 tbsps sugar, salt and pepper to taste, 2 tbsps of buttermilk (instead of 1), and 2 tbsps of apple cider vinegar (instead of 1). And to finish it off 1/2 cup of golden raisins and a tsp of cayenned went into my modified recipe.

The only change to the salad mix was 1 large tomato instead of 2 medium ones was combined with 1 cup canned corn (yes, canned was listed in the recipe!), 2 freshly boiled beets cubed, 1 grated carrot, and 1 small onion, thinly sliced. And rather than drizzle the vinaigrette (which I doubled to include 4 tbsps olive oil, 4 tsps red wine vinegar, 2 cloves minced garlic, 1 tsp Dijon mustard) over the salad, I tossed it.

All my salads got chilled in the frig for a couple of hours. I had some boiled shrimp leftover from yesterday and added a couple to my plate. Pictures of the foods purchased for these recipes and the end results are shown. A picture of my garden, the start of week 3 also is included. My babies are growing!!