food inspired: 05.01.015

Some quick links to what been food inspiring me.

-Went to the library to find a book for my commute [Woo hoo! on book #3]. And found Bar Tartine: Techniques and Recipe. Been seeing this mentioned in a lot food blogs for a while. Lots of stuff that I've been wanting to do try: drying [been think of buying a dehydrator] and fermentation [I love koji]. There"s a recipe for apple butter that uses the dehydrator. Oh, I think I need to buy this book.

-One of the chefs at our restaurant has great organic garden. She gave me some garlic chives that she harvested. I decided to share some of it with my co-workers. Here's a couple of recipes from No Recipe Blog that I shared with them: Niratama (Garlic Chives Scrambled Eggs) and Oisobagi Kimchi (stuffed cucumber kimchi). The Oisobagi is so good--great umami taste with miso.

My Garlic Chives bounty

-The chef at restaurant has also been spoiling me by making some great vietnamese style salad. I found this chicken and cabbage version from the The Urban Poser blog on pinterest that I want to try for my lunch. Maybe add some kale. Or maybe just ask the chef to make me a salad because I'm lazy.

Vietnamese sausage, pork, shrimp, flat rice noodles with salad and Nuoc Cham

2 robins and a woodpecker

Sounds like a start of joke but they were just hanging out in my yard yesterday. Wish I had my camera with me. :( The woodpecker had a red head and speckled body of white and black. I hear him pecking in one our trees later that evening. 

The 2 robins looked pretty young--probably teenagers. And really tame or not jaded with life with human and just looked at me when I went to the back door. They were just hanging out near my back steps in the shade.

No pictures of the birds, so how about pics of veggies and stuff. 

My first harvest of kirbies

I'm thinking a making a small batch of Oisobagi Kimchi from No Recipe with a little supplement from my farmers market or if there are more cukes to pick.

Wild Strawberries

Not sure if I should pull or leave it. Tiny strawberries that either the birds (baby robins) or chipmunk are eating before I can get to them. That's okay Captain Wheatgerm keeps bring home tons of lbs of strawberries to make jam and whatever else I can think of. This week, strawberry and mixed berry jam,  a mixed berry pie and I'm going to try out some fresh strawberry sauce. 

Bed of fern

This bed of fern is probably really old. It's has been there as long as we had the house and probably longer as it didn't look like a new bed when we moved in. This year it's doing great.  Maybe I can find smaller leaves for the tables at the restaurant. [see my distress impatiens on the bottom left corner. They are doing great.]

They look great in my white bathroom

Summer/Winter Chair Project

The summer part of the project is to cleaning the frame of the chair--scraping the rust off, taking of the ripped out seating and then making a decision about the color. Then I'm over the winter I'll going to weave up a the seat with the rice bags I've collected to make up market bags