Some Late Winter Rooftop Garden Shots

So, it's been a while. The summer ended, the fall seemed to swoop in with little preamble, and then the winter was upon us before we even realized it.

Towards the end of our warm weather, Zach and our neighbors winterized the garden, planting garlic for the spring, cutting down the dead annuals, and covering the soil with hay. Zach had acquired six large wooden fish crates from the New Fulton Street Fish Market while working for GrowNYC, which now ring the perimeter of our roof garden, ready for new plants and deep roots this spring.

We've both kept ourselves extremely busy in the past six months, both of us cultivating new projects and opportunities that have kept us away from this blog--but thankfully, not away from making and eating good food, and planning for next season's garden.

Zach has started saving seeds from our garden and the garden at Madiba, most notably from the enormous basil plants he grew this summer, as well as lettuce and mizuna, two kinds of heirloom tomatoes, and five varieties of chili peppers. Right now, he's testing germination to be sure the seeds will grow successfully into new plants, and so far all is looking good. This is part of a separate effort Zach has started to collect and hopefully sell rooftop-ready seeds to other urban gardeners--he's working on building a parallel website for his growing business ventures, and we'll keep you posted when that is ready to share with the world.

To flesh out the rest of our 2011 rooftop garden, we ordered seeds from Hudson Valley Seed Library and Seed Savers Exchange: kale and pattypan squash for the first time, wax beans for pickling, golden cherry tomatoes (a favorite from the farmers' market last summer) and ground cherries, borage and stevia as sugary substitutes for mixed drinks, oregano, and some zinnia and blue cornflower seeds to add some color.

With our sidewalks still thoroughly lined with piles of snow, it's difficult to imagine starting seeds in the next couple months, but we're more than ready to return to our summer routine of rooftop dinner parties, and daily trips upstairs to collect fresh ingredients for dinner.

Fried Egg Sandwiches with Smoky Sweet Kale and Bacon

2 eggs
4 slices sourdough bread, toasted
2 slices of thick-cut smoked bacon
1-2 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
2-3 kale leaves, torn into half-dollar sized pieces
1 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
2 tsp. maple syrup
cheddar cheese, sliced thin
salt and pepper, or seasoning salt, to taste

Cut the slices of bacon in half to make 4, sandwich-sized pieces. Fry over medium-high heat on a skillet, and transfer to paper towels to drain. Pour off 2/3 of the bacon grease from the skillet.

Add the chopped garlic and crushed red pepper flakes (adjust according to your own taste--we like things spicy) to the hot grease, simmering for a minute or two before adding the kale. Fry the kale in the bacon grease for about 10 minutes or until it starts to get crispy, adding the maple syrup towards the end.

Fry the eggs over easy in butter until cooked to your preference--we like to leave the yolks a little runny. When nearly finished, top with thin strips of cheddar cheese to melt, and season with salt and pepper, or seasoning salt--we're addicted to Penzey's Smoky 4S seasoning salt.

Build your sandwich on toasted sourdough, adding a bed of crispy fried kale, the cheesy fried egg, and topped with bacon.

Some Late Summer Rooftop Garden Shots

 

 

 

 

 

 

Baked Eggplant with Mozzarella and Homemade Marinara

Based on this recipe from Food and Wine.

Working for the Greenmarkets means Zach is constantly bringing home delicious summer produce at the height of its ripeness. With access to wholesalers at Hunt's Point Terminal Market, Zach decided to can a 25 pound case of roma tomatoes for the winter.  Around the same time, he brought home these adorable white and purple baby eggplants, so I decided some fresh marinara baked goodness was in order.

Having never really cooked with eggplant before, I took direction from this Food and Wine recipe, which begins with the instruction to salt the eggplant in order to remove excess water.  This goes along way in discouraging the mush factor--I'd recommend doing this longer than you expect, eggplants are deceptively moist.

I came up with this marinara recipe in college, after realizing how much sugar is in store-bought sauce, and usually doctoring mine with extra red pepper and balsamic anyway.  The measurements aren't exact, so be sure to taste as you go.

Manda's Marinara

3-4 medium sized cloves garlic, minced
1 medium shallot, chopped
3 cups tomato, chopped (or 16 ounce can of chopped/crushed tomatoes)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1-2 teaspoons crushed red pepper flakes
1-2 tablespoons Balsamic vinegar
salt and pepper, to taste
splash of lemon juice

In a saucepan, saute the garlic and shallot in the olive oil over medium high until the shallot is translucent and garlic is aromatic. Add the tomato, Balsamic, lemon and spices, and bring to almost a boil to cook down some of the water in the tomatoes.  Simmer uncovered for 20 minutes to continue thickening, or until ready to serve.






Baked Eggplant with Mozzarella
2 medium eggplants (or the equivalent), sliced into rounds
olive oil for frying
1/4 cup breadcrumbs
1/4 pound fresh mozzarella, sliced
1 cup loosely-packed basil, coarsely chopped

Salt both sides of eggplant rounds and layer them on a plate between two layers of paper towel. Cover with a plate and weight down to press out and absorb excess moisture, and let stand for 30 minutes or more. Pat the slices dry when finished. In a large skillet, fry the slices in about 1/8 inch of olive oil until brown and tender, a couple minutes on each side, adding more oil as needed. Transfer to a paper towel to drain.

On the bottom of a lightly greased baking or casserole dish, sprinkle a thin layer of breadcrumbs.  I didn't have any, so I toasted a couple slices of fresh sourdough bread until they were totally dried out (but not burnt) and crumbled them coarsely with my hands.  Arrange the fried eggplant slices in a layer in the dish, overlapping slightly.  Cover with a layer of marinara sauce, and then slices of mozzarella and sprinkled basil. I also mixed in larger croutons of the bread here and there, which helped make the texture less monotonous.  Repeat these layers until you reach the top of the baking dish.  Cover with foil and bake at 400 degrees until warmed through (if you made the marinara, this all pretty much a formality), or about 20 minutes.  After baking, remove the foil and transfer to a broiler for a few minutes, just long enough to brown the cheese.  Let stand for 10-15 minutes and then serve!

A Brief and Delicious Trip to Boston: Part Two

Continued from Part One...

After waddling home from the North End to refrigerate our leftover pastas, we refreshed and re-grouped and hopped a bus to Cambridge to take in the scene around Harvard Square.  After a brief and dimly lit tour of the Harvard Yard (fertilized with compost tea!), we ducked into Grendel's Den. Despite the thick smell of drawn butter and celery salt, we immediately knew we were in Cambridge by the following warning printed both over the bar and on the menu:

"No Bud. No Coors. No Bud Lite, No Coors Lite. No Miller. No Michelob. BASTA!"

Beer snobbery is snobbery I can support. (Basta is Spanish for "Enough!").  We didn't get food - we were still plenty full of squid and other kinds of seafood - but we had several rounds of beer and cocktails, including my first-ever Pimm's Cup (refreshing and not too sweet), and Zach's new obsession with French martinis (I will reserve the girly drink jokes).  The scene was pretty laid back, but we had a great server and a good time before cabbing it back to Back Bay.

The next morning we awoke, somewhat slowly, but with great purpose - for it was our day to eat a whole lobster by the sea.  When planning this visit, Zach and I had wanted one thing and one thing only, and that was fresh lobster in the shell. Leah, a veritable encyclopedia of useful knowledge, knew exactly where to take us for the cheapest and arguably the freshest lobster in Massachusetts: the Roy Moore Lobster Company in Rockport. 

Rockport - or rather, the area we were visiting, strangely called Bearskin Neck - is a quintessential New England coastal town, filled with seafood places, pastel B&Bs, American flags, and ice cream.  Roy Moore has two locations on this spit of idyllic Americana, but the one to check out is the tiny, blink-and-you'll-miss-it shack where they sell fresh fish, clams, scallops, and the lobsters. When we arrived, a guy was filleting a freshly-caught tuna on the fish cooler, and sunburned teenagers were hauling in a tub of live lobsters to add to the tank.  Roy's is primarily a fish market, but they have a few prepared and refrigerated options like stuffed clams that they'll warm up (in the microwave over the fish cooler) while you wait, as well as piping hot clam chowder.  Zach ordered both. 

And then there's the lobster.  Boiled in seawater right behind the register, we ordered 3 half-poundish lobsters for $36.  That's right, $12 a piece for a whole, fresh lobster and drawn butter, and very-necessary Wet Wipe.  To dine, you're amiably waved out the back door, to improvised tables and benches made of wooden lobster traps (or maybe faux-lobster traps, they seemed a bit like props) on the deck. 

This was Zach's first lobster-in-shell experience, so Leah gave him step by step instructions, made easier by the friendly lobstermen inside who had cracked the shells before serving us.  The lobster meat was delicious, salty from the seawater and incredibly sweet--some lobster might be an elaborate vehicle for butter, but this was juicy and rich enough to eat plain.  Couple that with a view of the very water from whence your lunch came, and the boats who brought it in, and that's one hell of a satisfying meal.

We didn't have a lot of extra time before making the drive back to South Station to catch our bus, but we did take a stroll through the rest of the "neck," fulfilling our weekend-long craving for root beer floats, and buying a pound of super-fresh saltwater taffy from Tuck's--the only shop in town that we saw where you watch the taffy being made.  On our way back to the car, we ran down a tiny little beach to dip in our toes in the water (still frigid, even in August), and then packed it up to go back home.  A more satisfying summer weekend will be hard to find.


Grendel's Den photo courtesy About.com:Boston.