Recipe: Tilapia with cherry tomatoes, olives, and parsley

The recipe below will be even better when cherry tomatoes are in season, but fresh parsley and fresh garlic made it taste heavenly tonight. I think this is a nice simple dish to cook on a weeknight with a glass of pinot grigio. It is also a nice way to end the weekend without making too much of a mess in the kitchen.

SPICY SAUTEED FISH WITH OLIVES AND CHERRY TOMATOES
Via Epicurious and Bon Appétit, May 2002, Candida Sportiello, Ventotene, Italy

I made this with a half pound of tilapia, two hand full of grape tomatoes, fresh parsley, and cracked green olives from Trader Joe's. I usually coat the fish in flour per the suggestion of others on the Epicurious website and deglaze the pan with a little white wine. I tried coating the tilapia in almond meal rather than flour with favourable results. To avoid smoking the olive oil, I needed to keep the heat at medium rather than medium high.

Garlic, onions, and parlsey oh my

I picked my first bulb of garlic and a handful of small onions yesterday. I am still searching through recipes to find a new a tasty meal with onions, garlic, and parsley, which is the basic foundation of any good meal. The onions are small, but were removed to make room for their neighbors to grow larger. The garlic was a bit lilliputian, but it had broken through the ground and was thus vulnerable to little critters or the covetous hands of someone wandering near my garden. Our community garden does have its fair share of "volunteer harvesters" who come to our garden to do their shopping. Petty garden theft is a somewhat complex issue of food security, the urban environment, and cultural misunderstanding that I will write about later. Let's just say for now that I wouldn't even think of curing my onions in my garden. The technique of drying out the onions by laying them out in the soil for a month at a time would only, in my humble opinion, invite these volunteers to take the onions. No matter, I have found a bit of shade in front of my apartment.

For more information on curing onions, try this resource from the University of Illinois Growing Onions

okra plants, beets, and carrots on their way

I feel as though I have needed to start each post with the phrase "nevermind" as of late. My frustrated attempt to diagnose the barren appearance of a patch of garden that I sowed with beet, carrot, chard, and okra seeds nearly a month ago has filled my blog posts as of late. Yet, I was greeted with dainty okra, beet, and chard seedlings when I arrived at my garden on Friday. This patch had looked like fallow grounds on Wednesday night, but it was now filled with incredibly lovely short rows of budding new plants. The seedlings were exactly where they should have been. I guess my garden is more forgiving than myself. It is clear that more water would have brought me to this happy state sooner, but it came when it needed. The predicted light rains should help these new plants grow taller and stronger

I was so flush with happiness that I called my mother right away to tell her the good news. I began my happy tale with, "so you know how I have been so worried about my seedling that never came." Someday I know I will worry less. There will always be odd years for gardening, rain will come down in heavy down pours, and sometimes it will not come at all. Perhaps reading a year's worth of blogs in which my worries melted with each rain will teach me to be more patient. Right now, I am just so pleased to look at those proud short rows of plants.

Not enough water (mystery solved)

Although I may have waxed philosophic about the failure of my seeds to germinate on my Monday-June 4th-post, a wiser neighboring gardener told me that I just didn't water my garden enough in May. He encouraged me to water last night even though DC was soaked on Sunday because the ground was still so dry. He dug into my garden, and sure enough, the ground, and thus roots systems, were dry after about 4 inches. In addition to the derth of rain in May, the topography of my garden leaves me particularly vulnerable to dry soil. My garden gently slopes downward, and thus the rain waters drain into other gardens down the hill. My garden is near the crest of the hill.

My neighbor offered some parsley cuttings along with his evalution of my garden's health, and I think he is going to add a sunflower to my plot as well. That is how we offer up bad news in our community garden association.

NOAA provides some very useful climate reports on the obeserved temperature, wind, and precipitation for different time periods. I checked the monthly climate report at the National Weather Service, and DC only received 1.76 inches last month. The average is 3.81 in for May in our region. While I did water my garden on the weekends, it is hard to germinate plants when little moisture and high temperatures dry out the soil.

More stats from NOAA to come.

Easy Chard and Pasta Recipe

After an unfortunate squirrel incident, I only have a few chard plants producing leaves. I supplemented my supply with pickings from my local farmer's market last Saturday and tried the following recipe from PBS's Victory Garen website on Tuesday night with moderal success.

Fettuccine with Swiss Chard, Walnuts and Lemon

The recipe has a good balance of ingredients, but the temperature settings for cooking the chard seemed way off. I think that the recipe asks one to cook the chard on high heat to soften up the chard stems more quickly. I have found it easier to cut out the stems and steam them seperately for 5-10 minutes (depending on the toughness of the stems) and then simply add the softened stems and leaves together in a sautee of olive oil and garlic over medium heat. The greens will wilt quickly event at this lower temperature.

I also added a bit of white wine in place of some of the chicken stock to deglaze the pan. Given the ample nutrients provide by the chard s(see University of Illinois extension), I decided that I had earned it :)

May Climate Fast Facts for Gardeners

I was completely surprised when I read the National Weather Service's May Monthly Weather Summary for DC. I had thought that my plants had suffered due to what I thought was the abnormal temperature extremes in the area. The observed values almost completely matched the normal values.

http://www.weather.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=lwx
accessed June 5, 2007
Weather Observed Value Temperature (F) : Highest 91 (May 26th) Lowest 44 (May 8th); Normal Value highest 90, Lowest 44; Departure from Normal: Highest 1, Lowest 0

The real abberation was found in the precipitation we received last month.

Roughly 50% of our rainfall is attributable to a single rainstorm (which I was caught outside in) on May 12th. Many of my seeds didn't get sown until a week later.

too much dirt...or too little...or

My rows of beans, carrots and beets that were planted on 5/20 have yet to break free from the soil. This is not a good sign. It usually does not take three weeks to germinate. I have tried to delude myself that some weeds were actually beans, but I know that the weeds will look even more like weeds and less like vegetables when I return to my garden on Friday. In addition to a healthy does of denial, I am still trying to figure out what I did wrong. Either I planted the seeds too deeply and they didn't have enough energy to make it to the surface, or I planted them to shallow and the heavy rains washed away the seeds. It is also possible that the seeds didn't receive enough moisture during germination. There is also option "d", none of the above.

I think we are usually conditioned to think that we can learn from experience. However, gardening regularly challenges this thought. After many springs, one might have a better grasp, but there are so many things that are just unknown to the novice. Although frustrating, it is probably good that I can't research out the answer or test my hypothesis. Instead, I can simply shrug my shoulders and plant again on Friday.