And the winner is....

Jordan! (via The True Random Number Generator) Who didn't leave an address, and I can't seem to link to his page! I really want Jordan to have this! Jordan, would you please leave me an e-mail to reach you at? Thank you!

And I want to thank everyone who participated in this little giveaway. All of your comments are amazing! From breads to fruit butters, pickles to pears, there were a lot of foodstuffs that you people are spending time on. And I think it's wonderful. Blanching is very time consuming, as is peeling. It takes forever, but then you have that little jar of summer waiting for you in February, and how nice is that? And what can compare to a fresh, hot loaf of bread you made yourself? (Or that someone else made for you!) Or how about some tomato confit (slow roasted tomatoes) or making your own alcohol? Fermenting, home-made pasta, marmalade, olives, bacon, watermelon peeling and tomato paste. Whew! It all sounds amazing.

FYI, to Keira who asked about freezing and canning later: just freeze it and use it later! This is in reference to fruit, I'm not sure about tomatoes. However, tomatoes freeze beautifully, and you may want to consider doing that if you have the freezer space. The Joy of Cooking or the Ball books have detailed freezing instructions, as do many online resources like the National Center for Home Preservation.

My most laborious and inconvenient task this summer was processing 100 pounds of fruit in a few days. Just the other day I bought 75 pounds of peaches, plums and nectarines. Plus the pears I picked with Local Kitchen the other day were on the verge of exploding. I needed to move on these fruits! So, I hustled and froze a LOT of it, because I can make jam another day when it's nice and cold, as I've noted. And I juiced a lot, because most of the fruit was super small (hence the good deal I got on it). I made pear and apple sauce which will become butters. What's great about juicing is that after draining off the juice, you often have pulp leftover, which can be puree, sauce or butter, depending on how you want to roll.

Next week I will elaborate on a few of these recipes, but for now I'm heading to the beach for two days before the cold sets in! Congrats to Jordan, and congrats to people who are cooking real food!

The Lost Art of Real Cooking - Give Away!

A while back, I received this special little book in the mail, The Lost Art of Real Cooking by Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger. I was immediately taken with it, and since then, it's been moving around the house with me, sitting on my night stand and taking up residence in the kitchen. I intended to read it thoroughly before writing this, but due to the nature of the book, I wandered a little. I got carried away. I picked it up and put it down. I don't think the authors would mind this a bit. I think this book wants you to open it up and just delve into it. It doesn't necessarily need a read through. And it can be revisited over and over.

Eclectic, esoteric, irreverent were some of the words used to describe this book of sometimes "laborious and inconvenient" things to make. It's not so much a book of recipes, as it is a book of cooking ideas. Take the pretension out of many of the delicacies that you find being peddled at fancy food establishments, and a good deal of the time you'll find food that folks like you and me have been making for hundreds of years.

There are many sections to get lost in, from fermented vegetables to fermented beverages, bread making, meat curing, fresh pasta, grains and desserts. And don't forget jams! There is a good sense of humor, from both writers, who take turns explaining their respective topics. Albala is a professor of history (and author of many books), so you'll get some interesting information on say, a medieval pig recipe. Nafziger is a chef and editor who hails from West Virginia, and likes to reference her homespun West Virginian upbringing.

Some of the things that fascinated me was learning about Koji mold and utilizing wild yeasts for your bread making. I wanted to follow the recipe for a gallon of beer, but I haven't yet gotten there. Talk about inconvenient food, Albala tells you how to make and grind your own malt. Apparently, the purist home brewers he talked to scoffed at this idea, and he went ahead and did it anyway. I applaud this gumption, but go read the description on how to grind malt! (But then again, I have no problem taking days to make a jam or jelly.)

The book itself is formatted like an old-timey cookbook, which if you're like me, and have piles of cookbooks spilling out of your bookshelves, you know all about. Vaguely cryptic and sometimes insufficient in detail, these kinds of books have recipes like little pieces of flash fiction, all of a paragraph long. In The Lost Art of Real Cooking, the narrative is the route taken on most of these, and I'll be honest, it flusters me sometimes. Although I like to wing it, and make things my own, I do like bullet points and clarity. But it teaches a great lesson: get in there and just do it, all ready! Stop shilly-shallying and make the goshdarn fermented pickles already!

So, I'll admit it. I've made a great deal of cucumber pickles in my life, but never fermented them! Gadzooks! Please don't think less of me. I've jumped this hurdle, and made it safely on the other side. Why, you ask? Oh, I don't know. I've fermented other things, but cucumbers just didn't make the list. This book nudged me. It said: come on, just put some cucumbers in some water, salt, spices and vinegar and just do it already. It's one of the nicest parts of this book. It's encouragement makes you feel like you made the decision yourself, when in fact they were nudging you all along.

The Pickles:

I packed my garden's cucumbers into a sterilized half-gallon mason jar. I put in two garlic cloves, and some pickling spices, a bay leaf, and a dried hot pepper. I covered it in a brine made of 1/2 cup of kosher salt mixed with 8 cups of water. I stuck a glass in the jar (which I saw being done on a blog, but I can't remember which one! What a great idea!) to weigh the cucumbers down, keeping them submerged under the liquid. I put the jar in the basement, and almost three weeks later, I had the most incredible, crunchy, salty, sour pickles I have ever had. And I've had some good pickles.

P.S. Check out Ken Albala's blog at http://kenalbala.blogspot.com/

and Rosanna Nafziger can be found blogging here: http://www.paprikahead.com/

To win a free copy of this liberating book, leave me a comment below and tell me what inconvenient and laborious foods you've been making this summer! You have until midnight, Wednesday, August 25 when the winner will be picked by the random-number generator. Please make sure to leave an e-mail address if you don't have a blog linked to your comment, so I can find you if you win!

Fresh from the Garden Salad

I am in love with this photograph. It looks like a painting. It's slight blurriness and bright sun just feel so romantically hopeful, and the background tan of the lawn so bleak and washed out. There's a story in there. A story of a person in the midst of a drought who picked their first batch of chioggia beets, their hand clutching the bunch with pride. Somehow, in this moment, the beets were all she needed.

This salad makes me proud because it's almost all from my garden, and entirely local (excluding the dressing). The only thing I didn't grow was the corn, which is from Davenport's Farm in Stone Ridge. I grilled it and cut it off the ear to add to the salad. The rest is sugar snap peas, green beans (Hank's Xtra White) both blanched first, beets boiled off, and scallions. Tossed with a vinaigrette. That's it. There aren't many recipes flying around here lately because when you have stuff like this you just prepare it the way it needs to, and toss it in a bowl. That's how we eat summer. Yesterday I made kale salad and it was simply this: steam kale until tender, chop up coarsely, add a cup of pickled carrots and their brine, and voila, an insanely tasty and healthy salad that just gets better as it sits. No oil.

In the meantime, while you're making summer salads, check out Tigress' giveaway for The Lost Art of Real Cooking by Ken Albala (he has a blog, Ken Albala's Food Rant) and Rosanna Nafziger (her blog is Paprika Head). This book came my way, too, and I'm pretty impressed with it. When I first began reading it, I thought, well, now here's a book that's pretty much all about what I like to do and then some! That's always a good thing to think when cracking a book. I'm planning on making beer following their recipe, and when I do, I'll have a giveaway as well. So if you don't win Tigress' giveaway, come back over here in a bit and try again!