Eating Well Anywhere

Summer! Er, sort of. I hope you are all enjoying this late spring/almost summer time of year. It’s ice cream season, is it not? You wouldn’t necessarily know that from the weather here lately (on the chilly side), but no matter. We are blissfully ignorant of outdoor temps when ice cream is concerned; furthermore, hot fudge is never out of season. This is the recipe I use for a quick fix.

Homemade Hot Fudge Sauce

For something thinner, more like a warm chocolate sauce, add an extra Tablespoon or two of evaporated milk.

1/2 cup chocolate chips (I like Ghirardelli 60%)
3/8 cup evaporated milk (or about half of a 5-ounce can)
pinch salt

Combine the ingredients in a small saucepan over medium heat. I use a 1-quart saucepan, add chocolate chips to cover the bottom, then add evaporated milk to barely cover the chocolate chips. Stir until smooth. Cook, stirring occasionally, until sauce just begins to bubble.

Serves: Two, probably 3 or 4 with more modest servings, but I honestly wouldn’t know

The very best strawberry jam I’ve ever made.

Thank you, Ina.

Ina Garten’s Easy Strawberry Jam recipe

Note: There’s an apple in there, too. I added the peel separately in one big piece (it’s in there for the pectin?) and fished it out after I pulled the jam off the heat.

[Butter & Eggs Marigold]

All of life should be more like gardening–try, try, and (when that doesn’t work) try again. No one knows when you screw up (well, unless you post it on the Internets), and no one cares.

Here’s a running list of seeds I’ve tried–some successfully, some unsuccessfully–in my AeroGarden. (Beware: swapping seeds voids the warranty on your seed kit at minimum.)

Salad Bowl Lettuce. Switched seeds into a pod in the herb kit, used fertilizer from the herb kit as well. Sprouted and thrived for the duration–a few months.

Greek Oregano. Same as for Salad Bowl Lettuce. Sprouted but never grew much.

Bloomsdale Spinach. Same as for Salad Bowl Lettuce. Only one of three seeds sprouted (it’s a spinach thing, I think), but I made pasta with baby spinach from that one plant every week or two for a few months.

Butter & Eggs Marigold. Perfect Starts* growing medium, Liquid Earth fertilizer, reused pods and domes from the herb kit, Tomatoes setting. Sprouted quickly, moved to peat pots after 2 weeks.

Caseload Shelling Pea. These seeds sprout great in both garden soil and seed starting mix, but no luck in the Aerogarden.

Alpine Strawberry. I’ve had better luck with these seeds in soil.

Recent starts:

Lavender. Random seeds, not sure where they came from. Sprouted but not growing very quickly (oh, but the smell is divine). The plan is to move these to a pot later.

Long Red Cayenne Pepper. Same as for Marigold. Sprouted within a couple weeks.

Pablano Pepper. Same as for Marigold. Sprouted within a couple weeks.

Grape Tomato. Same as for Marigold. Sprouted quickly, moved to a peat pot. The warm water gave the tomatoes and peppers a jump on the ones I started in seed starting mix under grow lights–my house is blissfully cool in summer but downright cold in April and May.

Tiny Tim Tomato. OK, it’s only been a couple days since I added this one to the mix, but I’m excited about it–short season, short plants. Perfect Starts, Liquid Earth fertilizer, reused pod and dome from herb kit, Tomatoes setting. Update after about 3 weeks:

*The Perfect Starts are great for starting seeds for later transplant to peat pots, but they do grow algae pretty quickly if not covered.

I want to tell you about making fresh sausage from ground pork. First, a few disclaimers: This sausage is relatively “dry” in terms of fat content since it includes no additional ground fat, and it’s a bulk sausage, not the kind you can slice or serve as breakfast links.

So why make it this way? See the disclaimers above. No fussing with adding extra fat or filling casings. We get the flavor of our favorite basic pork sausages without the preservatives and fillers in the supermarket products and without spending more on a better product to avoid them. Good ground pork is readily available to me; I have several pounds in my freezer from a local pastured pork producer, and our butcher carries it, too.

[homemade maple breakfast sausage]

You can make it to suit your own tastes. Hotter, milder, sweeter, less salty . . . and if you have a fennel-hating husband, you can make Italian sausage without the fennel seed. That recipe is below (we like it in Giada’s Fusilli with Sausage, Artichokes, and Sun-Dried Tomatoes); for breakfast sausage I use Cook’s Country’s Homemade Breakfast Sausage recipe (sorry, membership required to view the recipe, but it’s a good one if you can track it down; I actually got it from one of Cook’s Illustrated’s e-mail newsletters).

Homemade Italian Sausage (kinda, sorta) recipe

1 pound ground pork
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

We don’t like the flavor of this sausage as well after it’s been frozen, so instead of making up a big batch and freezing it, I divide a couple of pounds of ground pork into smaller portions, freeze those, then thaw and mix in the spices right before I saute it in a large skillet (adding about a Tablespoon of oil to the pan first if it isn’t nonstick).

 Print