worm composting!

i am so excited about worms right now. i’ve been hearing about worm composting for a while, and now that we’re living in a space with a garden (and no curbside composting) we decided to go for it.

so the first question is: where do you get worms?
i did some research on this, and it turns out that while earthworms are great for your garden, they are not the ones you want in your compost bin. as it was explained to me, earthworms are kind of solitary, slow-eating fellows, who generally like to stay buried in the dirt. the worms you want for composting are the kind that like to live in a colony, come to the surface to eat (the term is “epigeic”), and eat their body weight in food every day. there are two types of ideal composting worms: red wrigglers and blueworms. now, i read somewhere that you could pick up bait worms from a fishing shop and those would work – but i don’t do enough fishing to know if that’s true, and i suppose it depends on your bait shop. it’s worth a shot if you can distinguish red/blue worms from earthworms.

this is the blueworm, Perionyx excavatus

as it turns out, there is a worm store – yes, a store devoted to worm composting –two blocks from our new house. what are the chances of that? so even though i balked at paying $40 for ¼ lb of worms (!) we went there to get our worm colony set up. i figure, as long as this works out i’ll only have to buy them once and then they’ll make worm babies and i can give them away to friends (or start selling them for $120/lb!).
so we went to the worm store and they were super helpful answering all our worm questions. the worms eat any kind of food scraps, paper, cardboard, leaves – they don’t recommend putting in meat or dairy because it spoils and smells bad and can attract other kinds of critters to your worm bin. i’ve also heard not to put garlic or onions in there, but the guy at the worm store said that’s just for the sake of smell, the worms will eat it. what I found out recently from my friend noelle recently is they don’t like rice, so i’ve been avoiding putting rice in the bin.
we left the worm store with a ziplock baggie full of worms and dirt – and because we had a few more errands to run and I didn’t want to leave them in the hot car – i carried around a purse full of worms for the afternoon.

we made the worm bin ourselves, it’s really easy so i don’t recommend buying a worm bin unless you’ve got money to burn. i got a tupperware bin from walmart for $5 - i think i bought a bigger size than I needed for starting out (18 gallons), but i figure the worms can grow into it. i would actually recommend starting out with a smaller bin (like 10 gallons), since the worm guy said if they're in a large bin they spend more time looking for food and for each other to mate, so they eat/reproduce more slowly. we drilled ¼” holes on the bottom, sides, and lid for ventilation, and then put it up on cement blocks with a tray underneath to catch the worm juice. yep, worm juice. they call it “worm tea” and it supposedly makes a really good fertilizer for your plants – you can dilute it 20:1 and spritz the leaves, or water the soil with it.

when we got the worms home we had to make up their bedding. so we layered a burlap bag on the bottom of the bin – to encourage them to stay in there and not slip out the holes in the bottom. then we ripped up strips of newspaper and crumpled it and moistened it to make a bed. i guess they really like to bed in newspaper (or regular shredded paper) and they’ll eventually break it down too.

then it was time to put the worms in their new home. we poured out the worms and dirt from the ziplock, and they say you should mix in some of the dirt they’re used to into your new bedding, this involves slowly carving away at the outsides of the dirt pile. these worms really don’t like light, so they’ll dive inward away from the outside of the pile as you carve the dirt away, leaving a wriggling ball of worms in the middle – which is pretty fun.

once you’ve got the dirt mixed in with the bedding you can put your worm ball in there – don’t break them up, they’ll do that on their own. and then feed them and put more newspaper on top and tuck them in with another layer of burlap. you can leave your worm bin uncovered – which helps with ventilation, but it also invites other critters in there and since our backyard is a lizard haven I didn’t want to encourage the lizards to predate our worms – those little buggers are expensive! so we keep a lid on ours.

if you figure they eat their body weight in food a day, you can start out feeding them ¼ lb of food scraps daily – or what we’ve been doing is keeping a bag of scraps in the freezer and then feeding them the whole bag at the end of the week. i’ve also heard that the freezing process helps break down the food so they can eat it faster. keep in mind you have to thaw it before putting it in the bin – you don’t want frozen worms. as they start to break down the newspaper you can add more, and always bury your food scraps underneath the newspaper layer, and keep everything moist – they like moist, dark conditions. you can even keep your worm bin inside your house – but since we have very limited indoor space we’re keeping them in the shade outside. you can expect other kinds of bugs and stuff to live in there with the worms and help break down the food. as long as you keep nice conditions for the worms they should leave peacefully together. They worm guy said that if your colony is unhealthy that’s when other organisms can come in and take over.

and that’s it! they’re super low maintenance and so gratifying. marty and i never thought we’d be so excited about worms. they look really happy themselves; they’ve been getting fatter and reproducing. and though they were kind of shy for the first week and hanging out at the bottom of the bin, now they’re eager to come up and eat stuff. 

our first few feedings were really coffee grounds- heavy, because that was pretty much all we were producing in waste when we first moved in. i’m not sure how the worms deal with coffee, but i figured we might be cracking them out on caffeine, so i stopped putting coffee grounds in, and started sprinkling them around the outsides of our planter boxes so discourage slugs from munching our vegetables. i also try to chop tougher things – like rinds and peels – up before feeding it to them, just to encourage the breakdown process.

the worm poops are called “vermicast,” also known as “gardeners gold” because it’s great for planting and adding extra nutrients to your garden. once your worms have eaten their way through about 6 months worth of food, you can harvest the vermicast – and separate out some worms to give away if you like. i’ll give a full report when we’re ready to harvest.

benedictorious eggs and english muffins from scratch

ben·e·dict: (noun) a newly married man, esp. one who has been long a bachelor.

ben·e·dic·tion: (noun) an utterance of good wishes.  

food for thought.

we ate a lot of good food in hawai'i, and one of the best meals we ate was home-cooked "breakfast for dinner" eggs benedict made my by stepmom, kat. it was incredible. which is hard to say for someone who has hated poached eggs my entire life. i, in fact, am that jerk at the restaurant who asks to have the eggs benedict, "but could you make the eggs over hard instead of poached?" yeah. that's me.

but these eggs were awesome. and the hollandaise was divine. so it inspired me to embark on my own eggs benedict adventure. 

as usual, i'm always wondering: do i need to buy that? could i make it myself? plus i'm in the process of trying to clear out my cupboards before i move, so i decided to make english muffins. from scratch.
did you know that english muffins are baked on a griddle?

a word to the wiser-than-i here, if you're gonna make english muffins from scratch (or any kind of bread, for that matter) you need a little foresight in meal prepping. unless you want to eat dinner at 10pm, which is how it turned out for us. 

i found this recipe for english muffins, and used it as a rough guide. my tweaked version went something like this:

english muffins

    * 1 cup milk
    * 2 tablespoons white sugar
    * 1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
    * 1 cup warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
    * 1/4 cup melted butter
    * 4-6 cups flour (i used a combination of white and pastry wheat, and i didn't need the whole 6 cups)
    * 1 teaspoon salt

1. warm the milk in a small saucepan until it bubbles, then remove from heat. mix in the sugar, stirring until dissolved. let cool until lukewarm. in a small bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes.
2. in a large bowl, combine the milk, yeast mixture, butter, and 3 cups flour. beat until smooth. add salt and rest of flour, or enough to make a soft dough. knead until springy. place in greased bowl, cover, and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size.
3. punch down. resist the urge to knead - i read somewhere else that the "nooks and crannies" that we all love about english muffins (aka their ability to soak in butter) are formed by the less you handle them. roll out to about 1/2 inch thick. Cut rounds with biscuit cutter, drinking glass, or empty can. Sprinkle a surface with cornmeal and set the rounds on this to rise. dust tops of muffins with cornmeal also. cover and let rise 1/2 hour.
4. heat greased griddle. cook muffins on griddle on medium heat until they start to puff and brown - the recipe says about 10 minutes on each side, but i thought that was too much. keep baked muffins in a warm oven until all have been cooked (i'm not sure why that is unless you're going to serve them all immediately, so i didn't do that). allow to cool and place in plastic bags for storage. 

make some new friends, because you've just made more english muffins that you can possibly eat by yourself, three meals a day, until you're sick of english muffins.

the results: mine turned out a little closer to the bagel end of the bread spectrum than the english muffin end, but i'm pretty sure that's because i didn't have the patience to let them rise fully twice (remember i hadn't accounted for that in my meal prep time). other than that they're pretty tasty, and next time i might forgo the wheat flour and do straight white flour; i mean english muffins are a decadence anyway, so why bother trying to make it healthy?
did i mention that this was a meal of firsts for me? i haven't made english muffins before, and i've also never poached an egg. or made good hollandaise sauce. and both of those things have a reputation for being tricky.
the hollandaise was actually the inspiration for this meal because i made meringues a few nights before and had leftover egg yolks.
i relied on epicurious' basic hollandaise sauce recipe for guidance. here's the recipe with my thoughts added:

hollandaise sauce:
* 3 egg yolks
* 1 tablespoon cream
* 2/3 cup melted butter, cooled to room temperature (the original recipe says 1 cup, but that's a ton of
   butter, and the reviews of the recipe recommended cutting it down)
* 1+ tablespoon lemon juice,to taste (you can also use white wine vinegar, but i think vinegar's disgusting)
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* Dash of cayenne pepper

Use a small, thick ceramic bowl set in a heavy-bottomed pan, or a heavyweight double boiler. Off the heat, put the egg yolks and cream in the bowl or upper section of the double boiler and stir with a wire whisk until well-blended — the mixture should never be beaten but stirred, evenly, vigorously and continually. Place the container over hot water (if you are setting the bowl in water, there should be about 1 1/2 inches of water in the pan; in a double boiler, the water should not touch the top section). Stirring eggs continuously, bring the water slowly to a simmer. Do not let it boil. Stir, incorporating the entire mixture so there is no film at the bottom. When the eggs have thickened to consistency of very heavy cream, begin to add the cooled melted butter with one hand, stirring vigorously with the other. Pour extremely slowly so that each addition is blended into the egg mixture before more is added. When all the butter has been added, add the lemon juice or vinegar a drop at a time and immediately remove from heat. Add salt and a mere dash of cayenne.

Note: If you proceed with care your Hollandaise should not curdle. If it does, however, don't despair. Finish adding the butter as best you can. Remove sauce to a small bowl, clean the pot and put a fresh egg yolk in it. Start over again, using the curdled sauce as if it were the butter.

that recipe's verbatim because it turned out quite well. i cut down the butter (as mentioned) and bumped up the lemon juice because i like a tangy hollandaise, but other than that i think the instructions were spot on.

while all of this english-muffin-cooking and hollandaise-sauce-stirring was going on on the stove, i decided to do the asparagus and the bacon in the oven, separately, so they wouldn't take up my stovetop space. the asparagus turned out a little dry, but bacon in the oven is great - and requires do much less attention.

finally, the poached eggs.
i've been intimidated by the notoriety surrounding poached eggs and how difficult they are to make. thankfully, i have the internet. so i didn't have to figure out how to make them myself. i recommend these guidelines, which tell me that those little cups that hang on the side of your pot are actually not only cheating but making your eggs steamed rather than poached. good thing, i didn't have those anyway.
here are the main tips: bring your water to just under simmering, add a tablespoon of vinegar and a little salt: the vinegar will help your whites stay put and not feather out all over the water. once you gently slide your eggs into the water - turn off the heat, cover, and let sit for 3 mins.
admittedly, i let mine sit for a bit longer than 3 mins because i'm grossed out by runny yolks, but that's what poached eggs are all about, i suppose, so go ahead and do that for yours. now, i also went through the extra step of dipping my poached eggs in warm water after removing them from the pan because i really dislike the taste of vinegar, but this adds several extra degrees of hazard with the potential to have those whites you worked to keep together fall all apart (which definitely happened to me), so proceed with that at your own risk.

and voila - breakfast for dinner has never tasted better. i mean, butter + eggs + bacon + asparagus, what could be bad?

hoarding heirloom tomatoes for winter

suddenly in the past two weeks it's turned into winter in the bay area. i really wasn't prepared for this since i was just walking around barefoot at the park a couple weeks ago, but as the chill sets in and now the rain has started i'm kicking into squirrel mode - hoarding and saving all the fruits of summer/fall for the long hard winter ahead (ahem, forgive me friends who live in places that actually have winter - i think i'm funny).

 

much as i was doing at about this time last year, i decided to start by canning our precious heirloom tomatoes while we're still getting them in our farm box and they're still gracing the farmers markets. last year i was a little grumbly at the price of preserving heirlooms, since they shrink down so much that the cost to cans produced ratio shocked me. but come the middle of the winter when the only tomatoes in sight are those hot house water sponges in the grocery store i was so grateful to be able to crack open a jar full of the flavors of fall. so i vowed to make them again this year, and here i am.

                                                 

i supplemented our usual farm box tomato stash with a run to the farmers market, only to realize when i went to pay for my bounty that i didn't have enough cash. thankfully the guy at the stand knows me (he's one of my two favorite vendors at the farmers market) and graciously told me i could pay him next time. i mention this because it's happened to me a couple of times in the past month - once at a coffee shop i'd never been to before in the financial district of san francisco - and i love the recognition that even in a seemingly big, anonymous urban place people look out for and trust each other.

 

i had to call to consult with aryn, since i was tomato canning solo this time, about temperatures and process. it goes something like this: wash your tomatoes. oil a baking pan (or two in this case) generously with olive oil. aryn made the "generous with olive oil" point to say that the tomatoes seem to do nothing in the oven for a while, and then reach a point where they burn easily if you don't have enough oil on the pan. i experienced this; she's right.

 

i also tossed in a few whole cloves of garlic with the tomatoes this time, figuring everything is made better with roasted garlic. stick your pans in the oven at about 400 degrees for somewhere between 20-40 mins. i hear you can slow roast tomatoes, but i'm not really one for slow processes.

if you're canning heirlooms, you're likely to have a variety of sizes of tomatoes - from very small to very large, thus the range of cooking time. watch them carefully and once they slump into a little puddle it's time to take them out - i opened the oven every few minutes to take them out in ascending order of size so the little ones wouldn't burn.

 

while your tomatoes are in the oven you can get started on the water bath. bring a giant pot of water to boil, and steralize your jars and lids by boiling them for about 5 mins.

 

when all your tomatoes have successfully roasted you can layer them in the jars with basil, garlic, and lemon juice. the lemon juice here is crucial - about 2 tablespoons per jar - to discourage botulism. i like to layer them in alternating colors, with a basil in between, and then top it off with a little of the tomato juice/olive oil mixture left in the pan from roasting. it also helps to run a spatula around the edge of the jar to encourage the air bubbles to come out, and i recommend doing this before you top off the jar at a 1/4 inch from the rim - otherwise it can get messy. i speak from experience. make sure you wipe the edges of the jar so you can get a clean seal and screw on your lids to they're on but not too tight.

 

process the jars in the boiling water bath for 40 mins (or longer if you're using larger jars).  take them out and let them cool for a day somewhere where they won't be disturbed. make sure your seal was created properly (the lid shouldn't be able to pop up and down when you press on it). and admire your work. good luck waiting until winter to crack them open; i've been salivating over mine all week.

 

roasted red pepper dressing

we've been getting tons of bell peppers in our farm box lately, and i love peppers - but i rarely buy more than one red or yellow bell pepper because they're so pricey.  did you know that red bell peppers are the same as green bell peppers, they're just ripe?  

anyway, i didn't really know how to handle this influx of colorful peppers in my life - and while we've been chopping them up and adding to dishes i still had a handful left over. so i pulled out a recipe from the complete vegetarian cookbook for sweet pepper dressing.  it's delicious and good on all sorts of things.

i love roasting red peppers, so i went ahead and did that rather than boiling like the recipe calls for.  my preferred method for roasting is to throw the peppers on a sheet pan under the broiler - i even do it in the toaster oven if the peppers are small enough to fit in there without touching the broiler - that way you can monitor their progress easily through the window.  just rotate the peppers every few minutes as the skin starts to blacken so that they're nice and charred all over.  then i pop them in a paper bag - which helps the skins loosen from the flesh - and let them cool in there.  peel the skins off and take out the stems and seeds.  this one ended up looking like somebody's heart, i thought.  and then you throw the pepper in the food processor with some oil and vinegar and salt and pepper - i also added a bit of lemon juice to mine - and that's it.

here's the recipe:

 

SWEET PEPPER DRESSING

Makes about 1 cup

1 large red pepper
4-6 tbs olive oil
2 tsp wine vinegar

a little lemon juice (optional)

salt and freshly ground pepper

1.    [if you don't want to roast your peppers like i did you can use this method:] Put the whole pepper into a saucepan and half cover with water.  Bring to a boil, then simmer for 15-20 mins, until the pepper is very tender.  Test by piercing it with a fork.
2.    Drain the pepper and remove the stalk and seeds.  Purée the pepper in a blender or food processor, then add the oil and blend again.  You should have a thickish scarlet emulsion, like a mayonnaise.  Gently stir in the vinegar and salt and pepper to taste.

we used the roasted red pepper dressing as a pizza sauce since i'm not really a fan of tomato sauce.  it was delicious - kind of sweet and very flavorful.  i imagine it will also be good on salads, pasta, and i think it would pair well with cheese and crackers.

more uses for peanuts and a druken pie crust

last week i took an unexpected trip to hawai'i to visit with my grandfather, who was in the hospital.  we weren't sure if he was going to make it out of the hospital, and all of his kids and grandkids flew in to see him.  it's a testimony to the power of love that he turned around from having "eight toes in the grave" as my dad says, to coming home and back into his element surrounded by family.  thank you to all of you whose aloha and support made that possible.

in honor of popsie, this post deals with two of his favorite food things: peanuts and apple pie.

for months i've had a bag of raw peanuts in my cupboard leaftover from making boiled peanuts a while back.  boiled peanuts are a favorite of popsie's, though he can't really eat them now that he's on a salt-restrictive diet.  since it was quite a while ago that those peanuts were fresh, i wasn't sure if they were still good to boil and eat, so i decided to sprout them.  i remembered a sprout vendor on kaua'i who sells little ziplock baggies of peanut sprouts - which are fresh and nutty and nothing like roasted peanuts - so i decided to make my own.  i shelled those little buggers and soaked them in water over night, then plopped them into the sproutman bag (which is supposed to reduce mold and such, but you can sprout these in a jar or even between moist paper towels because you're only sprouting for a couple of days).  peanut sprouts are ready to munch when they have little tadpole tails sticking out like this:

they're great sprinkled in salad, or just by themselves like regular peanuts.  i highly recommend peanuts for sprouting - if you have access to raw peanuts (mine came from the korean grocer up the block, where they were labeled "law peanuts" - no joke), they're super quick and easy to sprout and taste amazing.
i also saved a couple of these peanut sprouts and planted them in little pots in the window sill, just to see what would come of them, and it was so exciting.

the peanut surfaced in the soil and then split open to reveal the a little plant in the middle.  under sele's care while we were gone visiting popsie they flourished and now look like this:

i'll keep you posted if they start bearing peanuts.

on my last day in honolulu i baked an apple pie (popsie's favorite - again, without salt).  i hadn't baked an apple pie in quite a while, so i based my recipe loosely on this one from smitten kitchen.  my aunty wanda had a good suggestion to reduce the liquid in the pie filling - which inevitably leaks out of the apples while they bake and then makes your crust all soggy- microwaving the apples for a few minutes to allow them to release their juices.

i tried this, and then boiled down the juice until is was thick and sticky and added it back in.  i guess i didn't microwave them long enough, though, since the pie was full of liquid when it came out of the oven anyway.  now i know for next time.  i didn't have any on hand at my grandparents' house, but a good trick i learned from cook's illustrated is to use half vodka, half water for the liquid in your pie crust.  using vodka solves that problem i always have, where i'm afraid of adding too much water to my pie dough so it becomes chewy and not crispy, but then i don't add enough liquid and it's crumbly and really hard to roll out and work with.  using vodka allows your dough to be moist enough to be easy to work with, but then it evaporates in the oven, leaving your crust crispy.  the reason this works is that the ethanol in vodka doesn't bond to the gluten in the flour the way water does.  here's an npr story on the "pie dough crisis" - in which chris kimball explains the vodka secret.

the crust turned out fine without the vodka (other than the excess pie filling liquid issue), which may have been in part due to our inability to wait for the pie to cool down before digging in.  here you can see popsie encouraging the pie to cool.

beets = better than bbq chips

a quick note on roasted beets: they're amazing.
i know it's not exactly the season to be talking about beets, and i'll probably have more to say on the subject come fall when there aren't also bounties of heirloom tomatoes, peaches, corn, and all the summer harvest to rave about. but for now, i just have to say i've been roasting beets and adding them to salads and spring rolls and, well just popping them in my mouth whenever no one's looking.


they've got a sort of sweet, salty, smoky flavor, and are so pretty to look at.
marty describes them as "better than barbeque chips," so what more is there to say?
they're very easy, seem relatively healthy, and don't take much time.
basically you slice the beets into 1/4 inch rounds, lay them flat in a single layer on a cookie sheet or baking pan that's been greased with olive oil, dust them with a little salt and pepper if you like, and bake in a hot oven ~400-425 (i've been throwing them in with other things, like baked tofu, lately so my temperature guage hasn't been exact) for a while, maybe 20 mins - check on them periodically and flip them over once they start to brown on the top.


this is the salad i put them on, though they seem to be hidden under the sliced steak, baked tofu, feta, corn, and heirloom tomatoes. like i said, it's a summer bounty.

dried apricots = better than the real thing

apricots are one of the few fruits i actually prefer dried over fresh. i just found that out this week. we've been getting apricots in our farm box lately, and while i appreciate their rich, tangy flavor, i actually find myself wishing for the chewiness of dehydrated fruit rather than the kind of mealy fleshy fruits themselves. sorry apricots, your texture gives me the creeps.
thankfully, aryn owns a dehydrator, which i was able to borrow last night after our dinner party celebrating the end of school (oakland public schools, that is).
dehydrating apricots is a nice sunday morning activity. the process goes like this:


juice a lemon or lime and add about a quarter cup of the juice to one cup of water. this is your dipping bath for the apricots to prevent oxidation (browning when exposed to air). cut your apricots in half - they come with a convenient guiding cleavage down the one side which makes this process even easier. remove the pit. you can chop them up smaller at this point, but i prefer a good mouthful of apricot, so i left them in halves.


grab each half and pop it inside out, meaning give the skin side a good poke with your thumb. this is called "popping the back" and i guess it helps it dry more evenly. my halves ended up more flattened than inside out, but i can see how that would be helpful. let them soak in the citrus bath for about 5 minutes, and lay them out on your dehydrating racks. if you don't have a dehydrator to borrow you can theoretically dry your apricots in the oven - if your oven gives you the option to go as low as 120-150 degrees fahrenheit, or even in a sunny window if you happen to live somewhere particularly hot and not humid.


from what i've gathered online, if you're using the dehydrator you'll want to set it between 120-140 degrees fahrenheit. you can start it out on the high temperature end, for an hour or so and then turn it down for the remaining time (somewhere between 12-48 hours). you'll be able to tell they're done when they are leathery with no pockets of moisture, and if you tear them in half and see moisture beads along your tear line you'll know you need more time.
for now, the dehydrator is pumping out a soothing hum of hot air and apricot smell into my kitchen and i'm enjoying it immenseley.