Summer risotto

I associate risotto with summer, even though it is the kind of hot, cooked, starchy, stodgy dish that flies best in winter. Maybe it’s because of its similarity to risi e bisi, the Venetian springtime favorite… maybe because it’s so good with peppers or zucchini or other summer garden vegetables… and certainly in part because last summer when I first met Sparks’ friends Jonathan and Laura, risotto was always on Laura’s menu.

I have a generic formula for risotto, and make it into any number of different dishes by adding different things to it. A couple of cups of shredded zucchini–a quart of sliced mushrooms–a cup of peas–a cup of pumpkin puree–cream and lemon zest–roasted and pureed red peppers–the possibilities of risotto are endless. You can even cook shrimp or other seafood into it, to make it into a well-rounded meal. Here’s my formula:

On a back burner, heat up 6 cups of water with two chicken bouillon cubes.

Finely dice one onion. Put a tablespoon of olive oil in a large frying or sautee pan, and add the diced onion and one cup of either arborio (traditional) or sushi (emergency subsitute) rice. Stir to get everything coated in oil and to partially cook the onion. If you are using a raw vegetable (as opposed to a cooked puree, or lemon zest and cream), add it to the pan at this point.

Now, add two big soup ladles of bouillon to the pan. Stir a little to distribute things evenly, and either stand over it stirring (as I did when I was a risotto newbie) or boldly walk away for a few minutes while the liquid absorbs.

Repeat this process until the rice is no longer chalky in the center. I usually start to taste the rice after the third round of bouillon, to see how it’s coming along.

When the rice is cooked, add from one to three tablespoons of butter and about half a cup of shredded parmesan or romano cheese and stir. If you are using a cooked vegetable puree or lemon zest and cream, add it at this point. Salt to taste, and pepper to taste (I like risotto heavily peppered, to balance the starchy creaminess). Enjoy!

Mmm–zucchini risotto with pulled pork barbecue and okra pickles. Yes please.

Wonderful things

There is no shortage of wonderful things in my life, right now. I have my Sparks, my garden, my fabric, my yarn, my kitchen, my Pudding, and our house renovation, and they all make me very, very happy. There will never, though, be so many good things in my life that I can’t wish there were more… here are a few of the things I wish there were:

Twelve times as many blogs with beautiful photography and thoughtful writing

Twelve times as many magazines as good as Southern Living

Twelve times as many fabric lines from my favorite designers

Twelve times as much time to quilt and sew!

Twelve times as many people to cook for… when I feel like it

Twelve times as many comfy beds to put quilts on

Twelve times as many books by my favorite authors

Twelve times the time in the evenings, so I could do plenty of all the things I want

Twelve times as many flowers in my garden…

*dreamy sigh*

1. 10.000, 2. Do you feel her perfume? / Sentez-vous son parfum?, 3. Pulswärmer – Wrislets, 4. New mushroom, 5. Blanket-WIP, 6. Hagoita Kanzashi, 7. Arabesque Kusudama, 8. Paper Hearts, 9. Kusudama Ball, 10. Lucky Paper Stars, 11. paper heart, 12. orbit snail set 1, 13. stockpiling, 14. WIP – A lot of color for 2008, 15. Blood Oranges – Up Close, 16. re-ment cake madness, 17. Bigger Fruits Tarts Studs, 18. Storytellers Tarts, 19. Les Fleur Debris, 20. Box of Temptation…, 21. Illuminated Gingerbread Cookies, 22. Pale Blue Flower Cupcakes, 23. Mini Flower Cakes, 24. Spring Blossom Wedding Cake, 25. Babette Squares, 26. Babette Blanket colors, 27. Babette Blanket yarn!, 28. dear cups, 29. Heather Bailey’s studio, 30. Triple Irish Chain with flowers, 31. Freshcut Pincushion, 32. Pop Garden fabric Matroshkas, 33. Happy cupcakes, 34. Pink Swirl Cupcake, 35. Vanilla Cupcakes, 36. Ditsy Bird House

Wedding pictures!

Chickpea salad

Good news: Sparks is in possession of the wedding photos! Hooray! I will get to see them all tonight, and then do a nice big post with them.

Meanwhile, to keep you entertained, I present yesterday’s culinary triumph: chickpea salad

Mix two cans of chickpeas, rinsed and drained, with one cup chopped parsley, one handful chopped mint, two bunches chopped white & pale green parts of green onions, 2-3 tablespoons olive oil, 2-3 tablespoons red wine vinegar, and a heavy pinch of salt.

The creamy/nutty chickpeas perfectly balance out the other strong, sparkling flavors. Sparks and I both had to have double helpings, and I’ve only got a little scraping left for my tiffin today. Yum!

Pastry ring quilt

My mother had to make a quilt for our wedding, of course. She makes quilts for all kinds of occasions… and the marriage of her only child? Oh yeah. Time to pull out all the stops. I requested the fabric collection and approved the pattern–and she took it from there.

My oh my did she ever take it. This wedding ring quilt took her three months to piece, and is quilted with the densest quilting she has ever done. It pretty much defies comparison.

The fabric collection is Patisserie by Fig Tree Quilts, one of my very favorite designers.

It is a generous queen size, of course, to go on our generous queen bed. It’s finished in scallops to follow the rings.

The back of the quilt, with shadows showing off the quilting.

And the pieced front, also showing off the quilting.

Feathers inside the lozenges

And feathers inside the squares.

Photographs of the actual wedding are in the mail, we hear, so I should be able to share those with you soon. I warn you though, the ceremony was only six minutes long…

We got married!

Hey everyone! We got married today!

All I have picture-wise are the shots on my own camera. More will trickle in in the following days.

It rained. All day. Fireworks are cancelled. We held the ceremony indoors. Everybody still had lots and lots of catfish and barbecue, though, so I hope everybody went home happy.

Christmas in July, again

Why oh why do I love Christmas in July?

Wait, it’s still June. Phooey.

Anyway… I always want to look at Christmas stuff in the summer. I guess I’m really a cold-weather girl at heart.

New “old” ornaments. Modern manufacture, but all indents and bands of color. How much better does it get?

I’m so glad I got that white tree last Christmas, and all of those vintage ornaments last summer. They’re going to be perfect in the great room at Sparks’ house.

Garden news, end of June

Night before last the heat wave broke, and early summer has been lovely ever since. Tonight we have the windows open, and are eating big plates of caprese salad and Father Sam’s whole wheat pitas with green olive tapenade. Summer… is good again. Let’s save the 95-degree heat for August, shall we?

The garden is going bonkers since the heat has gone away. My gladiolus, which I had despaired of, sent up big covert buds and is now starting to blossom. Hooray!

The shasta daisies are blooming too, which is good because by now the lupines and dianthus look like something the cat dragged in.

My poor eaten-up eggplant plants are so happy that one of them is even blossoming. Blossom, little plant, blossom!

I found a sweet pepper just as I was doing this photo shoot.

And yesterday, while staking the five volunteer tomato plants, Sparks spotted tomatoes–on one of them. The three I bought aren’t doing much. Maybe I never need to buy tomatoes again, just leave some out to rot in the garden?

The hot peppers are starting a bonanza. All the plants are covered in blossoms, and I swear, six new peppers sprouted between lunchtime and the time I got home this evening.

In spite of all that, we’ve had only one morning glory blossom, which I didn’t notice till lunchtime of that day. Oh well.

Most delightful of all, snapdragons are popping up all over the rocky area around the air conditioner. I had snapdragons in containers just above this area last year–looks like they seeded. We are in Zone 5, but we must be just real close to Zone 6.

Gin & tonic

C’mon, let’s face it. The gin and tonic is the little black dress of cocktails. It’s appropriate any time, any where, under any circumstances. It’s also my absolute favorite drink, hands down. Of course, it has to be prepared my way.

My way starts, of course, with fat limes. Quarter one, and squeeze that quarter into your glass. Drop the rind in for good measure. I have a theory that a little essential oil from the rind gets into the drink.

The essential ingredient from my point of view is Tanqueray’s Rangpur gin. Regular gin is okay, but just isn’t the same. Rangpur gin is, as the name indicates, infused with limes in addition to whatever other good things gin is flavored with. It makes a gin and tonic incredibly more delicious, and it’s what we use.

Put in “the right amount”. We vary the amount widely depending on how we expect the evening to go; probably our amounts go from not-even-an-ounce to well over two ounces.

Then add the right amount of tonic water. The right amount again varies depending on what we want out of the drink… probably between half a cup and a cup and a half. For pete’s sake, make sure your tonic water is fizzy. I have stopped going to certain restaurants because they couldn’t give me a fizzy gin & tonic. Get it in the little individual bottles, if you need to.

Finally, ice to your preference and enjoy. Yum! Lime and quinine… what goes better with barbecue, calamari, catfish, risotto… anything you’d want to eat in the summer?

Cutting by the mat

Before I start this quilting post: a lot of Wee Play is still available right here. I have seen a lot of appeals for sources of it lately, so dig in! They even have a charm pack at half price.

Sometime in the last few months, my mother said something about “cutting by the mat”. In this approach, you use the markings on the mat to measure your cuts instead of a ruler (though you still cut with a ruler to make sure you cut a straight line). It made perfect sense to me, and I had the vague idea that I had done it at one point while cutting lots and lots of strips off of a big piece of fabric… and then my mind wandered elsewhere.

And then I finished sewing the double-hourglass blocks, and suddenly needed to find a way to square them up. After pressing, they are anywhere from 8.25″ to 8.5″ on a side, and that just won’t do. I spent several days trying to figure out how to square them up, and finally, the answer came to me: cut by the mat.

I started out by aligning the squares on the mat like so, evenly straddling two lines 8″ apart, and with its 45-degree seam matching the 45-degree line on the mat.

I then cut the left and right sides of the block off, to match the lines on the mat.

Then I turned the block 90 degrees and again stradded it over two vertical lines 8″ apart. I also made sure that the top and bottom were parallel with lines on the mat, and… if possible… and I live in a maddeningly a-geometrical world where it isn’t always… if possible with the 45-degree lines matching again.

And again I trimmed the left and right edges to match lines on the mat.

Advantages of this technique: I managed to get pretty well-centered 8″ double hourglass blocks without having to go out and buy a new Omnigrid.

Disadvantages of this technique: my cutting mat now has permanent ruts along those vertical lines. Well, you win some, you lose some.

A lazy summer evening

Watching my blog statistics is a hoot. I disappear for 36 hours, people, and have the WORST traffic day in a month? Ohhh, right, everyone’s reading about the Gosselins and Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. I have been enjoying this week’s circus, too, do you think it’s leaving town or will we have another week of thrills & chills?

I am chilling out on the back deck, enjoying the evening, which is merely “very warm”. The days here have been scorchers, this week. I am afraid of what may come in August.

This was my dinner. The tomatoes were, unfortunately, store-bought, but the basil was just-picked from the container on the deck. I am trying to get it before it flowers, this year. It tastes so much better than way. The dipping sauce for the calamari is 1/2 sour cream, 1/2 mayonnaise, a drop of red wine vinegar, one clove of garlic pressed, 1/2 tsp dried mustard, and a pinch of salt. I also ground pepper over the calamari as soon as it came out of the oven.

I am also enjoying a shipment that came from Quilt Home today. They offer “designer samplers” of some collections, which are one-eighth yard of each fabric from the line. That’s one 4.5″ wide strip, which for many applications beats jelly rolls all hollow.

Good Folks by Anna Maria Horner. Lots of people exclaim over how they “love love LOVE!” this fabric. I have come to it slowly and by degrees; to be honest, I’m a little scared of it. It’s so frighteningly like a nightmare in a tiki bar… and yet… there’s something about it…

So when I become too frightened of it, I look at Midwest Modern by Amy Butler. Goodness, it’s all pastels! I didn’t quite realize that. It’s lovely though. Right now, I’m thinking that this will be a queen-size coin quilt, and the Good Folks will be a smaller string quilt. Hmmmmmm. Long summer evenings are built for wondering things like this…

During his drive home on Wednesday, Sparks stopped his car by the side of the road and picked tigerlilies for me. It made me so, so, so, so happy. Somehow, stopping by the side of the road to pick tigerlilies strikes me as being teh most romantical thing ebber. Thank you for these lovelies, sweetheart.

Sparks and I met one year ago today. How about that?

Pork barbecue

So the pork tacos with caipirnhas went over well, eh? Wondering what to do next with that mountain of porky goodness that is STILL taking up every bit of free space in your fridge?

Easy answer. Pork barbecue of course.

All you have to do is soak the pulled pork in barbecue sauce. If you have a secret family recipe, go for it! If you have a favorite bottled brand, go for it!

Sparks is still making experiments in BBQ sauce, but has come up with one very successful KC-style sauce that I’m urging him to make again. The recipe started with one he found online, and was tweaked to make it much sweeter, much spicier, much more acid, and much less tomato-ey. It goes something like this:

1 regular can of tomato sauce
1 can of tomato paste
1/2 cup vinegar
2T olive oil
1/2 cup brown sugar
3 cloves garlic, crushed
small onion, minced
2T Worcestershire sauce
1T molasses
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon cayenne
fresh ground pepper to taste

Cook all of this together and then let it sit as long as you can stand to–as with all BBQ sauces, this one gets better with age. Enjoy!

Renovation news: late June

The renovation has been progressing, and for the next couple of weeks will be at a “sit still and breathe” stage. Demolition seems to be complete. Everything that needs to be torn down or taken out has been. Now, Sparks needs to start moving plumbing and electrical outlets, and we need to get the siding guys out there to install a glass-block window in the master bathroom and to close up the kitchen door.

Here’s the empty kitchen. Current thought, which still has plenty of time to change, are white cabinets, a white pepper countertop, silver glass tile backsplash, and aqua-colored industrial flooring (either linoleum or vinyl and either sheets or tile–not sure yet, we only know the color!) This will make a bright white airy kitchen, and a nice backdrop for all of the pastel appliances that will live on the countertop. Awesomesauce.

We found this bit of wallpaper behind the light fixture in the master bathroom. I can’t help but think, “if only this house hadn’t been changed since it was new in 1974, it would be ultracool and move-in ready…” Not quite true, but sort of true. This wallpaper would have made my month.

Behold the terrifying empty bathrooms. Both were previously divided into three rooms apiece; they’ve now both been opened up into one. It’s crazy how big they are, without all those walls…

Behold the two spare bedrooms. The empty one is waiting to be primed and painted white. Did I update you on my color plans? Ah yes, I did. Brightly colored bathrooms, white everywhere else. Good.

Thus sitteth the renovation. It will be a couple of weeks now before anything serious gets done on it. Sparks and I have… um… other things to take care of

The canny caipirinha

It’s wonderful how I pick up on the leading edge of trends–or at least how it seems that way to me. I find something great, enjoy it, share it, then discover that it was already a known Great Thing in happenin’ places three years ago and I’ve just been swept along on the current of pop culture. No matter; I enjoy great things all the same.

Take, for example, the caipirinha.

To make a caipirnha–Sparks’ favorite summer cocktail, when gin & tonic isn’t his favorite summer cocktail–you need some specialized ingredients. First, you need a bottle of cachaca. Cachaca is Brazilian moonshine–sugarcane liquor. Sparks hastens to tell you that there is no such thing as top-shelf cachaca; it is supposed to be cheap, so go for the cheapest kind you can find (he likes Ypioca, which he pronounces “yippee-kai-yay”).

You’ll also need cane sugar. Most of the white sugar sold in the baking aisle is beet sugar, so if you’re able and willing, do spring for a bag of the cane kind. As I said in the mojito post, it gives you a nice clean virtuous feeling about your drink, for reasons you can’t quite explain.

Caipirinhas are pretty lethal, so you’ll want a small glass. A juice glass, or an old fashioned, are just fine. Notice that I’m not using the pretty colored glass bubbles from the mojito post; oh no no no. That would be a mistake.

You’ll also need some nice fat limes (which is the only kind you ever need. By “fat limes” I mean the big ones, the size of lemons. The ones you buy individually instead of in a bag. The expensive ones. Sparks is thrifty but not cheap.) Cut the ends off of a fat lime, quarter it, then chop two of the quarters into about three pieces each.

Like so.

Put your half a lime in the glass along with a teaspoon or more of cane sugar.

And begin to muddle. The goal is to grind all of the juice out of the lime, as well as some of the essential oil from the rind. Sparks is using his half-a-rolling-pin muddler here, but he often uses a wooden spoon, and says that he sort of things the wooden spoon works better.

When you’re tired of muddling, fill the glass the rest of the way with crushed ice. Now, a lot of people can get crushed ice out of the door of their fridge/freezer. I’m not sure that that is quite what you want, here. One of the things that makes a caipirnha good is the way the ice melts into it. Chipped ice from your freezer door may be a little too perfectly chipped, leading to a slow melt. Since my freezer doesn’t chip ice at all, Sparks crushes it on the garage floor with a meat tenderizing mallet. Inside of a plastic bag, of course. Notice that the ice is about half chips and half “snow”.

Now pour in cachaca up to the top of the ice. I told you these were lethal. This is why you don’t want to make this drink in a big glass!

So here we are with the cachaca poured, before stirring…

And here we are after stirring, with the liquor and ice and lime juice and sugar all nicely mixed. Because the ice chips are still melting, the drink will get weaker as you let it sit. Even once you have drunk all of the cachaca, you’re still going to have a tasty concoction of sugar and lime juice and melted ice. Yum.

Caipirinhas. Do try them. This weekend we were at a restaurant that advertised a strawberry caipirinha… I think we’re going to have to try that.

The hexagon afghan

Afghans, for me, require inspiration. When one inspires me I work on it at every opportunity, and to the exclusion of everything else, until it’s done. I’ve finished two other afghans in my life, and now, I’m going to finish this one:

This is so totally the afghan I’ve wanted to make my whole life.

It is made with 16 colors of Red Heart worsted-weight acrylic yarn, plus white. I have said before and I will say again: acrylic yarn is my choice for afghans. It is cheap, colorfast, washable, and plenty warm enough for the midwestern climate I live in.

The pattern was guessed based on pictures of a similar afghan made by Sarah London Textiles.

Pudding is quite sure the afghan is hers. She’s even willing to tolerate a little humiliation, in the interest of staking her claim.

Pork tacos

So by now, you have put up about seven pounds of juicy, succulent pulled pork. What are you gonna DO with it? Oh me oh my, what a difficult question. First, you’re going to make pork tacos.

We like our tacos tiny and in soft shells–the way we’ve most often seen them made by street vendors in Mexico (on Anthony Bourdain’s show). So start with several 6″ white corn tortillas, if you can get them, and warm them up. Sometimes I microwave them and sometimes I turn on my solid-surface electric range and drag them back and forth over the burner until they’re ready. Sparks will put them in the toaster, but I don’t trust myself to pay enough attention to them that way.

Top each tortilla with a small spoon of sour cream and a larger spoon of green salsa. Green salsa? It is one of the finer, if not the finest, thing in life.

Should you have been unable to buy sufficiently fiery green salsa or if–as is our case–you’re just addicted to pickled jalapenos, go ahead and add some. Yum! Why do I like these so much? Some questions will never be answered.

Top with a handful, yes a handful, of chopped fresh cilantro. If you are one of those people to whom cilantro tastes like soap… I am so so sorry. I hardly know how to tell you how to modify this recipe, because the cilantro is such an integral part of it–probably I would fill in with shredded cabbage or lettuce to get the cold crunch. But you’re sadly going to miss out on the flavor.

Pile on the shredded pork, but remember that this little tortilla needs to be able to close around the fillings. It’s easy to go overboard at this point.

Now wet the pork down with another spoon of green salsa. Yuuuuuum.

Finally, if you didn’t salt the pork as you were pulling it (and we don’t), you’re going to want to sprinkle a little salt over everything.

Also, if you felt like squeezing a quarter of a lime over all this, I wouldn’t look askance. All the limes in our household had been devoted to mojitos, that night, so alas alack–none for the fotogs.

Now sit yourself down and tuck in to one of the tastiest, juiciest delights that summer food can offer up. Oh my, these are so good, I had them for three days in a row and only stopped because I ran out of cilantro. You want some. YOU WANT SOME.

Adventures in machine quilting

Two posts per day? Yeah, there’s so much stuff happening here, I think it’s called for. I’ve gotta blog all this great summer food while it’s still summer, but I’ve gotta blog other stuff too, and pretty soon there are going to be scads of wedding posts. So–you deserve it, and I wanna do it. Two posts per day it is!

I have been making tentative adventures into machine quilting. I have made a set of coasters out of the leftovers from my Neptune hourglass quilt, as you see.

I just love this collection too much to waste any tiny piece of it. A collection this cool may never be released again. Also, on such a small scale, I can just put the piece under the machine and start quilting–no changing the sewing foot, no learning how to lower the feed dogs, no pinning. I’m just *doing* it, and for a first step, I think that’s healthy. I’ll conquer the complications one by one as I move on to bigger things.

And yesterday, a slightly bigger project: a pair of potholders. These were made with fabric from Joanns, in the brief and glorious era when they offered cool fabric in the fat quarter format. These have some puckers in them, which motivates me to learn how to attach the free motion foot to my machine. Deep breaths. Deep breaths. All of this is also giving me practice in hand-sewing binding, particularly in mitering corners, which is precisely the kind of fiddly mathematical thing I’m awful at.

More great news is that there is a quilt shop in the same town as Sparks’ house, practically within walking distance even, and it has a longarm quilting machine. YAY!

How to smoke (meat)

Your mojito is ready and your charcoal is heating up. Time to get smokin’.

Because of the time involved in smoking, you want to do a lot of meat. Our three favorite choices, so far, are (1) a family-size pack of chicken breasts, which will come out juicy and flavorful, (2) a whole pork loin, which will come out juicy and flavorful and can be bought for $1.79 a pound, and (3) pork shoulder, shown above, which makes wicked good pulled pork and can be bought for $1.19 a pound. The economy is bad, but swine flu is the silver lining.

This particular pork shoulder weighed 15 pounds and had quite a lot of fat on it; Sparks decided he was going to trim it up prior to smoking.

Yum. Lard.

Is it wrong of me to think that the muscle striation is kind of pretty? I guess this kind of attitude is what got me my biology degree.

The hunk of meat after trimming: lean and mean.

Time for the rub. He used about half a cup of rub on this piece. We are spice-aholics in this house and had been using random bottles of “bone suckin sauce” rub, but in this particular instance we made a batch of faux-taco seasoning using dried onion, cumin, chipotle chili powder, and random other things I didn’t take note of. Have fun–create your own.

When your charcoal is ready, take the top off of your grill and place two bricks inside, as shown. Dump the charcoal behind one of them if you are smoking something really big like this pork shoulder, or both of them if you are smoking something smaller like a pork loin or a mess of chicken. This is sufficient heat to completely cook the chicken breasts or pork loin; for a big shoulder like this, however, not only are you going to have to add a second dose of coals after 3-4 hours (which is why you want the space behind one brick to be available), you’re going to have to move it to an oven or an electric roaster to finish cooking.

Heat check: yep, they’re hot.

If what you’re smoking is big enough, stick a meat thermometer (or two) in it, and put it on the grill. If you want wood chips to be part of the smoking process, sprinkle them around. Us, we stick to the basics. Cover and let sit, checking the internal temperature about once every half-hour. Pork loins take 2-3 hours to cook, for us; chicken about 90 minutes. Pork shoulder, as noted earlier, is going to take a second dose of coals plus some slow-roasting.

We have an electric roaster–the kind that keeps food warm at church dinners. Once the pork shoulder has gotten its second dose of coals (for a total of about six hours of smoking), Sparks moves it to the roaster and cooks it at 200 for another 5-6 hours. At that point, it looks like this:

Falling apart and, as Sparks says, “tender as a mother’s love.” Let it cool for the rest of the night–because you smoked in the evening and roasted into the wee smas, right?–and in the morning it will be ready to pull.

There is no art to pulling, you just tear the meat apart. You decide what size chunks you want, and you decide how much fat you want. We like ours lean and thoroughly pulled. We also advise that you do everything you can to make sure you are in robust health before you start doing this; it takes up to an hour to do and becomes quite disgusting partway through.

For pork shoulder, something in the area of a 40% yield by weight is what you can expect. This 15-pound pork shoulder yielded 7 pounds of lean pulled pork.

At this point, package ‘er up. You’re going to want to recover for a while before eating any.

Tomorrow: pork tacos!

The Mighty Mojito

Sparks has been making large-scale and highly successful experiments in meat smoking, this summer. Because we love alla y’all, we’re gonna share our secrets (some of them anyway) in the photo-documentary style of “The Pioneer Woman Cooks”.

Materials? One 22″ Weber grill, two bricks, good-quality charcoal, lighter fluid, a charcoal chimney (punch holes in a coffee can), and soaked wood chips (entirely theoretical and optional).

Fill your chimney with charcoal, douse it in lighter fluid, set it on fire, and let it stew for 30-40 minutes. Now, go inside and make yourself a drink.

If you have mint growing outside your house, you’re going to want to make mojitos frequently in the summer. We are mere neophytes in this arena–having previously focused our attention on caipirinhas (perfected by Sparks) and gin & tonics (perfected by me, and I have a secret). This mojito recipe was photographed opportunistically and provides only a loose outline. Start with four big mint leaves per mojito (these pictures show a single-serving construction).

And one small spoonful of granulated sugar. Shown here is cane sugar, which we had around from our caipirinha days, and which gives you a nice clean sophisticated virtuous feeling about your drink for reasons we don’t quite understand.

At this point, you can muddle the sugar and mint together, if you wish. This results in very finely ground mint which won’t offend the partaker of the finished drink. Unfortunately, it also seems to minimize the taste of the mint. So your alternative is…

To add the juice of one big fat lime, or two small skinny limes, and make the best muddling you can before the sugar melts entirely. You will end up with big chunks of mint leaves in your drink that have a disconcerting habit of hanging half out of your mouth after you’ve taken a sip, but the presence of the acid during the muddling helps flavor-oil extraction enormously.

Ladies and gentlemen, muddle. If you don’t have a muddler per se, use the end of a wooden spoon, the pestle from your mortar and pestle set, or (shown here) a wooden rolling pin cut in half.

Even a wet-muddling can result in nicely pulverized mint leaves.

At this point in the process I got too excited about what I was doing (art! photography! macro! i’m doing it!) and added the soda before I added the rum. I can’t say whether it hurt the final product or not. In any case, add a generous dose–maybe a cup–of soda water (if you like dryer drinks; the mojito is going to be sweet no matter what) or lemon-lime soda (if you have a real sweet tooth or if, hee hee, you’re going to give it to the kids. I’m kidding.)

Next, add “the right amount” of rum. We had half a bottle of light rum sitting around still from last Fall’s Caribbean dinner party, so I used that. What is “the right amount”? I don’t know, because I never measure liquor–I just pour. If you want to measure a jigger, go ahead and do that. Or trust your instincts. C’mon, this is as close to living dangerously as most of us come.

Finally add ice, keeping in mind that there are two kinds of people in the world: the moderate icers and the severe icers. Pictured is my moderately-iced drink. Sparks, who is a severe icer, will fill the glass to the rim with cubes.

All right. Now sit on your back deck and enjoy the summer afternoon until your charcoal is ready.

Continued tomorrow.

Garden blooming

Oh boy, am I gonna have some great foodie posts for you in the next few days. Sparks has been smoking big hunks of meat, and between the process itself and all the things you can do with it afterward, it’s turning into an epic week-long series of posts. Awesome!

So before we all get completely carried away with that, let me update you on the non-flowery parts of the garden: they’re all blossoming. I have blossoms on hot peppers, sweet peppers, tomatoes, honeydew, and zucchini. I couldn’t be happier with where the garden is, right now. I even have three volunteer tomato plants from tomatoes that fell last year–I can’t wait to find out what variety they’re going to be! I had only ordered my favorite Sweet Tangerine plants, but it looks like we’re going to get some more variety than that.

The only two disappointments, vegetable-wise, are the cucumber vine that was eaten by rabbits (second year in a row that I don’t get a cucumber vine… bummer), and the eggplant plants which have been pretty badly eaten by bugs but that aren’t–dead–yet. With the generous rain and warm, sunny weather we’ve had in the last few days, they seem to have perked up and are giving it the old college try. I may have eggplant yet.

Hop to it, Mr. Bee. Those blossoms need to be pollinated. I want garden-grown tomatoes by my birthday!