Hanging out in the kitchen

Yesterday I stopped at a farm stand outside of Marysville and picked up corn, peaches (3 different kinds), nectarines a couple of tomatoes and a melon.

This morning I hit the growers market in Grass Valley and bought some basil, small pear tomatoes, red bell peppers, a sour dough baguette and some pomegranite syrup.

Then I cruised by the supermarket for some coconut milk.  You gotta love this place, they had a huge shipment of New Mexican Green Chiles and they were roasting them outside, the aroma was amazing.  Of course I bought a big plastic zip lock bag filled with warm, black, roasted chiles.  I figure that if I can't find anything to put them in I'll just dump them on the floor and roll in them, they smell that good.

Back at the treehouse I got a batch of Moroccan Chickpea Stew going, cleaned off a few of the peppers and added them to that along with vege stock, garlic, sweet potato, fire-roasted tomatoes, chickpeas, red bell pepper, lime juice, green curry paste and a can of coconut milk.  While that burbled away I finished cleaning the rest of the peppers, chopped them and stuck them in the freezer, later I'll add them to soups and whatnot.

Then I made an lovely salad of orzo, basil, tomatoes, corn left over from last night's dinner, red onion, balsamic vinegar and some olive oil with various spices.  The crunch of the onion, the sweet corn and the sublime basil smell and taste make this one of my favorite salads.

Meanwhile I'm boiling and peeling peaches and dumped them all into my biggest bowl with a handful of sugar and a dump of lemon juice.  I had an idea to make some little personal pies so I made some pie dough and rolled out little rounds and put them in my favorite Ziploc round plastic containers.  Then I added some more sugar to the peaches along with a bit of flour and poured some in each container, rolled out a top crust, sealed it up and tossed them in the freezer.

For dinner I added some swiss chard and a little kale to my stew and had a bowl of that with the sour dough bread and some orzo/basil salad and a glass of Lucchesi's Sauvignon Blanc which is so crisp and flinty it held up very well to all those veges.

I wanted to try one of my mini peach pies to see if it would work so I let them freeze for a couple hours to set up a little and then made a triple layer aluminum foil mini pan, popped the pie out of it's plastic holder and put it in the foil, baked it for 40 minutes until bubbly.

Holy Cow!  It's great!  Half was just enough for a small dessert and I saved the other half for breakfast.

All in all a good day.  Except for the mess in the kitchen.  I love to cook.  I dislike clean-up. Oh well...

Next project will be a huge pot of Giada's Marinara Sauce.  My freezer is looking pretty good.

Smiles