The Freezer Must Overflow

If you've ever been to my house before, you'll notice I like to hold onto things. Piles and piles of books, papers, toys, ephemera, just things that I like and want to remember. I feel this way about summer, and in turn, its fruits and vegetables, too. Its hard to let go of the good good.

This summer, from strawberry to raspberry to marionberry and blueberry, to peach to pear to plum, I picked. And picked. And picked.









My freezer is filled with summer.

Shaking the Pickle (or How I Spent My Summer Vacation)

I was going to write about my new lunch date main squeeze, but instead, I'm gonna riff on Kittee's post, as it talked about topics that are most dear and true.

I got a ton of jars on top of my fridge. Right now, the count is 7 (and if you're reading all your mofos, you know how many I started with! Test!) Those be well-loved jars of kombucha-making joy. But note! They will become jars of lovin coconut kefir soon enough, as did you know, you can make a vegan kefir? I did not until I went to this summer's mosh pit ferment orgy known as our first Portland Fermentation Festival. Within, in addition to every fermentite I know, there was water kefir aplenty, and it was delicious. To describe: like coconut water, like kombucha, but like neither and both. In order to make those jars into something other than air catchers, I need to obtain fancy kefir crystals. And with my head in my books, I don't see that happening in the immediate future.

Ah, summer. The summer of rivers. The summer of vegetables. The summer of pickles. First up this summer was dilly green beans. I was really excited about these, and my goal was more to put them out rather than put them up. One way to tell that I love you (and thankfully, not the only way!) is that you went home with your own jar. Then a bunch of other things followed: cucumbers (though I made lots of varieties, I have nothing spectacular to say about these), pears that I picked ma own self, yada yada. Let's skip to the creme de la creme of pickles, shall we? Proceed to the next paragraph.

Beets! My co-op has a woman with a tatooed beet on her head, does yours? I have more beets put up than you, I promise. There are three layers of beet pickles in this picture!

And they are all SPICY! These were also the best to make because I made my friend mamakim's special life-changing recipe (well, it's in The Joy but I didn't know about it or that book until Kim) and I made them with lots of help from my pickle cousin, Kittee. They are going to be groovy, and I'm going to wait until the darkest, rainiest night of all time to pop open my first put up.

It's hard to top the joy of spicy pickled beets, but I did. After a wonderful lunch at guess who's house in which I consumed a belly ache of the best store bought spicy Indian pickle I had had in a while, I soon got to work on some Green Mango Pickle. All it takes is time and light, and the best part, a shake or two each day for 15-20 days, and you can have your dream pickle.

I used Madhur Jaffrey's recipe for "Green Mango Pickle" from World Vegetarian, one of my favorite books of all time.

Here I am, shaking the pickle. When I think of the end of summer, I think of this most:


Runner-up in fun is Kohlrabi Pickled in Two Misos, and though I admit that I haven't even tried one yet (huh?) it was the second most fun to make. There are two layers of cheesecloth, two layers of miso, and one layer of cut kohlrabi on this plate!

Here I am, applying biological principles to the pickle lab.


Can someone photoshop me with some goggles?

His Imperial Majesty

Today I ate the kind of food to wake this blog from the dead.

One of my favorite restaurants in NYC, well, I should say The Bronx, was a place in my dad's old neighborhood, Pelham Parkway, where I worked for 5 years. On the corner of Lydig and White Plains Blvd., it was called H.I.M., which I always have to be reminded, cause I have a weak memory for abbreviations, means His Imperial Majesty. They served Ital food, and it was greatness. I try not to think about NYC too much, and my old job even less, but that was really good eating. When you live in a place like Portland, you don't even hope to eat Ital food, let alone good Ital food, so you stop thinking about it.

But today that part of my brain and heart that gets activated by the smell and taste of plantains and peas and greens dreams of the next time I get to go to one of Portland's yummiest food carts: Assase Ital Palace. I won't say much more because I have a friend who's got that one in the works, but I will leave you with all the dishes I got to try, all of which I recommend: The Red Red, Green and Gold, Jerk Fish and Rice, plantains, Veggie Chicken Drumsticks, Fry Bread, and more delicious and creamy than the best milkshake -- the Pure Niceness!

p.s. "ah -sah - see"