The Sweetest Fig

I remember reading this book as a child. It freaked me out so I never read it more than once. 

 

 

I read it again as an adult. It made a lot more sense, specifically since I was able to link the author as the same person who wrote Jumanji. I was reminded of this book because my neighbor had figs which she shared with me last week. I've tried fresh figs before but they were never a craving or favorite of mine. 

 

I forgot to get a photo of all the figs she shared with me so these were the leftover I didn't bake with.

 

This time, as I ate one fresh, I was able to better appreciate the flavor. They're very sweet when ripe. Crunching on the seeds is a sensation not everyone would appreciate, but it reminded me of eating dragon fruit. My neighbor shared over a dozen figs with me, and although eating them fresh would have been nice, we were leaving town in a few days and needed to clear out our refrigerator. 

 

I was ready to blend them all into a smoothie, but my friend shared a recipe with me for an almond fig cake. I told her I wasn't sure I would make it because we were going out of town for the weekend and needed to finish them ASAP. My friend told me her cake was gone within 24 hours after baking. Now that's a smart marketing pitch. I decided to bake the cake and actually had all the ingredients on hand. It really was gone in 24 hours! (Had we not left town it might have made it to 36, but it was a yummy cake).

 

The almond flavor of the cake is more pronounced than the figs so if you don't like almonds, you won't like this cake.  Mine turned out a little darker than I expected because (I think) I set the oven too high for the first 20 minutes without realizing. I ended up having to improvise the cooking time and temperature in order for the cake to bake as intended. If you look at the photo in the recipe, it's a pretty dark cake, so I don't actually know what happened. But it ended up tasting very good. 

 

If you have access to fresh figs, I highly recommend making this cake (assuming no allergies to almonds and no excessive pickiness to flavor) at least once. Figs are definitely great to be eaten fresh, but I enjoyed this cake, too.  

 

Takeout With the Tos #19: Long John Silver's

When I was growing up, takeout wasn't atrociously priced. You could get a family meal to feed four people for around $20 and probably have some leftovers. Sadly, this isn't the case anymore. As a result, my children don't eat out in the same ways I did. This is probably for the better because I believe they eat much healthier than I did as a child. However, this means they're missing out on some of the fond memories I have of eating out of a fried chicken bucket or eating fries at our kitchen table. My cooking initially increased after my first baby was born. We were home a lot during the evenings and cooking became an outlet for me to be creative and "do something." I wrote about the various recipes I tried the year after she was born. 

One thing I've never done was fry fish. I grew up eating Long John Silver's and it was our "justified healthy food" because we were eating fish. I still live next to the same location we went to growing up. For fun, I looked up the prices and they are much higher than they used to be. 

Instead of ordering a 12 pc family meal for $43.79, we fried our own fish, French fries, and hushpuppies from scratch.

Here are the recipes I followed for each of the items.

Fried Fish Batter - The batter is the main part I needed to help with. I fried each batch of fish for about 4 minutes at 350 degree oil. We used tilapia instead of cod or pollock because that's the only white fish we had at home. We also cut our fish in half so they wouldn't fry with a little slit in the middle. 

French Fries - I hand cut my fries and followed the double fry method.

Hushpuppies - Believe it or not, I followed this recipe almost entirely.

Guys...I got too excited after making an entire meal in the style of Long John Silver's....so excited I never got a picture of everything after frying. Instead, I got the remains of the fish and fries after plating up my children's servings.

The fish and fries.

 

I never got a picture of all the hush puppies, but here are the ones on my kids' plates. 

As a child, food was sustenance. I ate because I was hungry. Sometimes I liked what I ate, sometimes I didn't. As a young adult, I ate what I could afford. Sometimes this was plain food. Sometimes this was delicious food. Now as a more established adult, I've finally begun to appreciate the power of food and the true meaning of comfort food. 

The prices below are taken from the Long John Silver's a la carte menu. Simply calculating from their family meal accurately accounts for the fish but not the proportion of hushpuppies or fries. Because of this, the price is inflated compared to the meal price, but I did not make three sides, only one. 

12 pieces of fish @ $2.89 each: $34.68

3 orders of hushpuppies (6 pc/order) at $2.79 each: $8.37

6 orders of fries at $2.79 each: $16.74

Total: $59.79

Tax:$4.93

Grand Total: $64.72 

I was able to save about half of everything I cooked in the freezer to be consumed at a later date. The leftovers from the other half will last us about 3 portions. I had fun doing a fish fry. The benefit of this fry batch was these were not coated or wet batters. This allowed the frying oil to stay much cleaner throughout the process and remain usable for longer. I will most likely continue to use bits of the oil in my cooking throughout the week before I dispose of the last remaining portion with the bits on the bottom. 

Total Prep and Fry Time: 2 hours. 

Takeout with the Tos #18: Fry Edition

We don't have any streaming services right now. We do have a nice big screen TV and an antenna to get public channels. Occasionally I miss the variety from when we had access to a streaming service. It would have been very easy for us to sign up for a subscription and pick up right where we left off. It would cost us about $20/month and we'd continue the shows we watched from before. However, with us being out of town for two weeks at the time, we decided to wait. I was never opposed to signing up for a subscription, but I knew once we started, there was no going back.

 

When we came back from our trip, there was a period of time when we didn't watch a lot of television. There was just too much to do around the house and we were still tired/jetlagged from our trip.  It wasn't until about a month after returning when we started resorting to the television again. 

 

We haven't started a subscription for anything yet, and honestly, most of the time, there's nothing overly exciting to watch on public channels, but once in a while, there will be a nice gem of a show that's on when we're watching. 

 

This happened at the end of last week. We were browsing channels at night and came across a cooking show talking about Louisiana and seafood. They introduced various restaurants in Louisiana and the food they served. These weren't fancy high-brow restaurants. Most were just basic restaurants serving simple food of the south. I loved watching them talk about oysters. It also made me hungry for some oysters myself. 

 

I had oysters in my freezer. With some thawing technique, I was going to give it a try. The recipe I followed loosely (and boy do I mean loosely) is this one.  

 

If you've followed along with my blog you'll know that I'm a very rustic cook. I don't like following recipes because they slow me down. I either have to memorize enough of it to be simple to execute or it's completely made up. 

 

What I followed from the recipe: a 1:1 ratio of flour and cornmeal

 

What I didn't follow from the recipe: everything else 😂 

I didn't have buttermilk for the recipe, but I also didn't have enough milk to amend into buttermilk (milk + vinegar) so I ended up just leaving that part out. I also did not add seasoning to the oyster or the batter. When using frozen oysters, I learned from a Korean cook to salt them and wash them before using. I thought this would have been enough salt to flavor, but it wasn't. 

The overall fry was great though. 

Tasty.

Proof it's an oyster and not chicken in disguise.

 

 

If I did this again in the future, there would be two things I'd make sure of:

1. Add some seasoning. Or wash them in more salt next time, haha. 

2. Fry a little longer. These weren't bad by any means but they got less crispy as they cooled. A longer fry may have helped this. **We've gone to seafood restaurants before and had dried fried seafood so I'm aware of the opposite extreme.**

 

Now if you know me, I don't waste my frying oil or my extra fry batter. I had both in this case. That same evening, I speed-prepped some shrimp balls for frying. Because there is cornmeal in the batter, it wasn't a true Asian shrimp ball. Think more of a shrimp hush puppy.  But it was improvised on the spot, quick to pull together, and tasted pretty good. 

I don't think these would ever be my main item on my frying list, but they make a good secondary fry to use up extra batter and take advantage of the oil. 

 

 

 

The following day, I continued my frying efficiency by making a batch of chicken karaage. This is the recipe I first used when making karaage, but since then, I just wing it by memory and improvisation now.  

I've breaded it in both potato starch and tapioca starch. Both get good results. 

I love fried food. We never had homemade fried food growing up, but we did fast food. My kids get the opposite. We don't do a lot of fast food, but we have fried food in my freezer on hand. A pipe dream of mine is to never buy freezer chicken nuggets again and to always have enough karaage in my freezer. My kids consume a lot of chicken nuggets, so this is a lofty goal, but maybe in the future when they can significantly help in the kitchen, this will be possible. 

As for our health, everything in moderation, right? Not all of this (except the oysters) were consumed in one sitting.

Fried Oysters x18: $20.99

Shrimp Balls x11: $15.99

Chicken Karaage (1.5 lb): $14.99  

Total: $51.97

Tax: $4.29

Grand Total:  $56.26

Summer Vegetables, Filling My Freezer, and a Compost Experiment

Earlier this year, I had mentioned my garden was running solely on recycled water. As expected, that ended in the middle of June when the rains stopped. It didn't rain for a solid two weeks or so. However, yesterday, we had a decent storm which lasted all of about 10 minutes. For these 10 minutes, I went outside and stood next to the gutter downspout and saved as much water as I could with the containers I had. It ended up being about 10 gallons worth of water. Now before you think I'm crazy for doing this, a number of factors had to align in order for me to be able to.

- I wasn't working when the storm came and my kids were happily playing together. 

- We have a downspout that's easily accessible from a covered location that drains a lot of the water from our roof. So this isn't me standing next to a trickle of water slowly catching it.

- I was enjoying my audiobook via earbuds the whole time. 

I'm all for efficiency so what's wrong with listening to a book while recycling water to reuse in my garden? Nothing! This may have been more enjoyable for me than some of you enjoy your day jobs on a really bad day. 

I get a certain amount of joy looking at the water I saved

Reusing/repurposing or getting creative with items really excites me. There's something very satisfying to me about being able to bring back to life something destined for the trash. I was able to experience this again at the grocery store this week. I just happened to go on a day when tons of vegetables were marked down for quick sale. I picked up over 6 pounds of tomatoes at roughly 50 cents per pound. It's rare to find fresh tomatoes below a dollar per pound now, even on sale. 

The grocery store had also marked down their mini sweet peppers. I was able to get 4 pounds for 63 cents per pound. Yes, there were tiny spots which were rotten and needed to be cut away. But overall, the quality of produce I was able to get heavily marked down was not bad at all. 

Left: the sliced peppers I had leftover and would not use immediately being prepped for saving. Right: the compost tops of peppers.

Most people see these and maybe buy a few because they know they must be used quickly or run the risk of rotting almost immediately. I don't get scared of this though because I prep them for freezing to be used at a later time. I've had to do some searching online to see how others do it, but overall, it's pretty easy. For the tomatoes, I read about freezing them from Woks of Life. Other bloggers have posted about freezing tomatoes as well, but it wasn't until I saw Woks of Life post it when it occurred to me that I could potentially freeze tomatoes. Many of their recipes are the traditional Asian stir-fry recipes so if they benefitted from freezing tomatoes to reuse later, I probably could too. It's not just for soups and stews!

For the mini peppers, I sliced them up to the size I'd use them in recipes and then spread them out on a tray for freezing. After 6+ hours, I moved the bell peppers to individual freezer zipper bags. Each bag was the amount I'd use for a recipe so it will be really easy for me to pull out later to use. I do always write the date on my bags so I know how old things are in my freezer. When I see dates that are older than 4-6 months, that's usually when I start to think about ways to use it in the near future. But with proper freezing techniques and my vacuum sealer, I've used one-year-old meats from my freezer before and not gotten sick. Not recommending everyone take the risk, but removing air is a crucial part of food preservation!

***

With the increasing temperatures this summer, I've not gone outside as much anymore. Also, the mosquitos are insane this summer. I can't stand outside without constant movement with exposed skin for longer than about 2 minutes without guaranteeing myself at least one bite. That being said, it must be a rough summer out there for other critters as well. 

A few summers ago I was really struggling with critters eating my bell peppers. We went through and put wire beneath our fence to close up gaps and keep them from getting into our yard. I hadn't had a problem with any of my vegetables being eaten until this summer.

I've had a good harvest of tomatoes this year already and none of them had been harmed by insects or critters, but one morning, I walked out and saw this destruction. These were still green tomatoes about the size of a large grape, and they were already munched on. Clearly someone was very hungry and desperate to reach whatever he could. Both of these tomatoes were completely gnawed away in the two days following this discovery. My other tomatoes are growing much higher on their stems so they've avoided the wrath of a mammal's feasting. 

***

I discovered this summer my compost bin is dying on the inside. The metal rod in the middle of the bin is severely rusted and about to break apart due to all the corrosion. It's definitely on its last leg and I don't know how much longer I'll be able to use it before it's not effective anymore. In the mean time, I've been trying an open compost method to experiment.

I had an extra large pot which wasn't being used this year for planting. It had some leftover soil in it but was only about halfway full. It's placed in full sun outside, and with the hot temperatures during the summer, I figured it might be a great location to do some quick composting. For the last week or so, I've been throwing food scraps directly into the pot. I give it a stir once a day in the morning when I go out and do my daily garden check and continue adding scraps as they come with my cooking. You can see below, the photo from the left is from the day I threw in my pepper tops. The photo on the right is from this morning's check and stir. When it gets extra dry, I do water the soil to keep things hydrated.  With yesterday's storm, I probably won't need to add water for at least a couple of days. 

I've never been a fan of open composting due to critters and pests. That's why this was an experiment. My pot is 24 inches tall and it is only half full. I make sure most of the scraps are covered in soil. I haven't physically seen any critters get to my compost pot yet. I will continue this experiment through the rest of the summer and then reassess what to do once the weather cools down and this method will not work as quickly. 

I realize not everyone enjoys these tasks of homemaking and outdoor care like I do. But if you're at all interested or intrigued, I hope you'll give it a try at least once! Once upon a time....that was me.