In Heaven There Will Be Tacos and Chocolate

Recently a friend had surgery, so I signed up on Meal Train to bring her some food. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I would be bringing, so I had to enter "No Idea Yet!" as the mouth-watering name of my entree. "No Idea Yet!" sandwiched between Chicken Enchiladas and Spinach Lasagna! Which meal would you be excited about?

All I knew was that, if you need to make multiple meals, a whole chicken is the best way to do it. One meal for us, and plenty of leftover cooked chicken to go into...No Idea Yet!

Therefore I plunked my Skagit River Ranch farmers market chicken into the crock-pot with some salt and pepper, sprigs of cilantro and a cut-up and squeezed lemon, and let it cook a few hours:

The Beginnings of No Idea Yet!

When it was done, I'd at least thought up what my own family would eat that very night, based on what was in the fridge and pantry: Chicken Soft Tacos.

First I sauteed up some Walla Walla onion slices.

I added shredded chicken and about 3/4 cup canned salsa and let the liquid simmer away.

Prior to that, I'd taken a whack at making homemade flour tortillas:

How's that for an appetizing picture?

They came out thick and more flat and tostada-like, but no one seemed to mind.

Then I chopped up ripe tomatoes and some Napa cabbage (because I forgot to buy lettuce at the Market), shredded some Cheddar, and voila!

Chicken Soft Tacos/Tostadas! Tacodas? Tostacos? Whatever you want too call them, they were nothing short of heavenly, and we scarfed them down with beans and some homemade pico de gallo.

One meal down, one to go.

I'm thinking of taking that leftover chicken and making a chicken pot pie. You know: chicken and little cut-up cooked vegetables in a thickened chicken-stock sauce, covered with a crust. It's possible her kids won't eat it, but I know she'll appreciate it, and--heck--the kids didn't just have surgery, so they can fend for themselves and have a bowl of cereal.

Alongside the pot pie, how about a Caprese Salad? Here was our recent one (tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil are all at the Market this week!):

Too bad I'm delivering the meal tomorrow. Otherwise I'd be tempted to throw in some chocolates from Soulever. Proprietor and chocolate-teer Aimee Morrow keeps sending me pictures of her luscious creations. If you haven't had any, treat yourself this Thursday.

These babies would be Kaffir Lime Truffles

Aimee promises--brace yourself--Vegan Caramels this Thursday, which she describes as "a soft coconut sugar caramel hugged by Peruvian dark chocolate ganache, double dipped in Peruvian dark chocolate." Control yourself, salivary glands!

What can I say? With the possibility of such farm-fresh meals and hand-crafted treats out there, it's almost worth a little surgery. But spare yourself, and get out to the Market while the getting's good. Next week the grind starts up again, but in the meantime, have a great long weekend!

Summer Fruit, YA Pop Culture Edition

Last night my book club met to discuss that ubiquitous teen tearjerker The Fault in Our Stars. As always, we tried to theme our food to the book.

Here they are, in l-u-v

If you haven't read it, the story is about two teenagers with cancer who fall super-de-duper in love, and I learned that the two stars in the movie also play a brother and sister pair in Divergent, which weirded out those viewers who saw both. Having seen neither, I was good to go.

And here they are in sibling mode

But I digress.

As I was saying, we try to theme the food to the book, so we went with "cancer-fighting." And what fights cancer better than our friends, fruits and vegetables? Since book club takes place after dinner, I have to admit that no one brought a vegetable of any kind, and any cancer-fighting that was going to happen fell to the fruits.

My Peach Crisp (which I neglected to photograph before it was eaten)

There was peach crisp and peach-cherry cobbler and one chocolate cream pie because chocolate is a fruit, right? Or is it a vegetable? A bean or a berry? We need a botanist to step in here.

I know I already went on and on about the fruits in season at the Market, but really--there's more to say.

For example:

My sister has always said that, when they bred the seeds out of watermelon, they also bred out the flavor. After buying this traditional, seedful melon from Alvarez, I am inclined to agree with her. SEEDS = FLAVOR!!!

My lazy kids took some coaxing to try the seedful watermelon, but after they tasted it, there were no more complaints. (I might have given the speech, "When I was a kid, there was no seedless watermelon...etc. etc.") Get one of these melons and see if you don't agree.

Then there's River Farm's Charentais melons:

Like mini-canteloupes, they pack amazing, perfumed flavor, as if everything in the canteloupe had to be boiled down and concentrated. Don't miss these ones either!

This post now ends abruptly. I got a new laptop with Windows 8 and am still in the love-hate, I-love-this-speed/I-am-going-to-throw-the-danged-thing-in-the-street-and-back-over-it stage. But I leave you with this funny recycling idea our book club hostess had, for those darned plastic honey bears. See? Perfect for dish detergent, and much more winsome than the branded bottle!

A Glimpse of the Climate Future?

It was time for the yearly drive down to the Bay Area in California to visit my family, and we made a few alarming observations.

1. Lake Shasta was as low as I've ever seen it in my life! An article written in May noted a 90-foot drop in the water level, and I can just add that June, July, and half of August have done nothing to improve matters. In fact, if I'd seen the water at the level pictured in the May article, it wouldn't have freaked me out as much. Let's just say that if a drought like this ever hit Loch Ness, Nessie would have to evolve into a land animal.

2. California was importing cherries from Washington State! What the heck? My mom brought out a bag of Bing cherries from glorious Washington. Back when I was growing up, you could visit Bing cherry farms in San Jose, and now the cherries had to come from Washington? Drought drought drought.

3. The San Jose Mercury ran this graph in an article over the weekend:

The tan-colored bars are bad news. I remember those wet years in the 80s, and they were no picnic either, but mostly because drizzle depresses Californians even more than Washingtonians because they've developed neither tolerance nor secret love for it.

What does this all mean? I think it means two things:

1. Food prices will continue to climb. Our wallets have taken a hit these past couple years, and it's going to get worse. Even if you're a farmers-marketgoer, buying local as much as possible--if the rest of the country starts buying up Washington-grown foods, that means higher prices for all of us.

2. You'll want to hang on to your house and consider retiring in the Pacific Northwest because there are going to be more articles like this. Meteorologist Cliff Mass predicts that the PNW will fare way better than the rest of the country as the world warms, in terms of rainfall, rising ocean levels, heat waves, and freak storms. And even if you believe global warming is so much hooey, droughts are facts, and so far Washington State has shown more drought resilience:

It's relative of course. I think, no matter where you live in the country, people are going to have to get creative about getting and retaining water, but at least the PNW still gets plenty in Western Washington (take the crazy showers of the past day)--we just have to get creative about capturing all that wetness.

In any case, be sure to load up on our in-demand fruits and vegetables and farm goods at the Market this Thursday and Saturday, before the rest of the country cottons on to how spoiled we are!

And I leave you with a picture of much water, to relieve your mind. This is Crater Lake. Granted, it took thousands of years of snowfall and rainfall for the lake to reach its present depth (and last year they only received half of normal snowfall), but doesn't it do your heart good to see it? It was clean enough to drink, and we drank it!

Crater Lake National Park

Take Me Away, Summer Fruit!

“Have done with sorrow;

 I’ll bring you plums to-morrow

 Fresh on their mother twigs,

 Cherries worth getting;

 You cannot think what figs

 My teeth have met in,

 What melons icy-cold

 Piled on a dish of gold

 Too huge for me to hold,

 What peaches with a velvet nap,

 Pellucid grapes without one seed:

 Odorous indeed must be the mead

 Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink

 With lilies at the brink,

 And sugar-sweet their sap.”

(From Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market)

The bounteous summer-ripe fruit at the Market put me in mind of this poem which I was assigned in college. Quite a creepy one, if you read the entire thing, but what stuck with me more than the creepy goblins and ravenous sisters, were the multiple descriptions of lush, luscious fruit. Which is what we've got right now, people!

In just the past week I've had the last of the cherries (Martin Orchards claims); plums that literally exploded with ripeness in my bag, from which I could suck out all the pulp through a vampire bite in the skin; perfume-sweet Galia melon; yielding nectarines; blueberries like miniature sugar bombs; sweet-tart apricots and homemade apricot jam; and freestone peaches that cry out to be baked in cobblers and pies, if only you could stop yourself from just eating them out of hand.

To miss this goodness is to miss the best the year has to offer, and to miss being converted to seasonal eating. You can't eat it all now, but that shouldn't stop you from trying.

A ripe Galia!

TIP: How can you tell a canteloupe-y style melon is ready to eat? Fragrance helps, but you can also look for the telltale cracks at the stem end. River Farm helped me pick this one out, and it was indeed absolutely perfect for dinner that night.

TIP: How do you celebrate July at Christmas? By putting pies by. If you're not up to preparing a half-dozen pies at a time (like my husband does) and freezing them, you can also just prepare fruit pie filling and freeze it. Then just make a pie's worth of crust when you feel like it.

Blueberry-Pie Filling
2 pints blueberries (about 5 cups)
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp grated lemon peel
1/8 tsp salt

Mix all together gently and freeze in a gallon bag.


Peach-Pie Filling
7 medium-sized freestone peaches (about 2 lbs)
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp grated lemon peel

Heat a pot of boiling water. Make a small, shallow 'X' on the bottom of each peach and drop in the water for one minute. The skin should just slide off. Slice and pit and dump in a large bowl. Add remaining ingredients, mix gently, and freeze in a gallon bag.

These easy-peasy recipes are adapted from The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook. The peach-pie filling can also be covered in biscuit dough and baked as peach cobbler, and the blueberry works just fine as crisp filling! I noticed Collins was selling peach rejects at a discounted price--perfect for making pie and dessert fillings.

I was reading a memoir of a woman who worked as a scullery maid, housemaid, and finally cook in 1930s England, and she complained that, nowadays, people only know how to freeze food, rather than preserve it in other ways. Guilty as charged. Especially when I read about the constant, backbreaking work that went into daily food prep back then. So, if you can't eat it all, cook it all, or give it all away this summer, be sure to throw it in the freezer!