My favorite one yet, I think, particularly “Lions.”  Enjoy!

1. Spoon – I Summon You
2. The Matches – Wake the Sun
3. Foreign Born – Winter Games
4. We Are Scientists – Can’t Lose
5. The Features – Lions
6. Editors – Smokers Outside
7. Hollerado – Do the Doot Da Doot Doo
8. Temper Trap – Sweet Disposition
9. Postal Service – Such Great Heights
10. Phoenix – 1901
11. Weezer – (If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To
12. White Rabbits – Percussion Gun

Yes, we still live, hallooo!

Had dinner with some old friends last night at the tapas place Cafe Tu Tu Tango in Orlando, wherein Husband was entranced by the Sopa de Leon (a chorizo, chicken and chickpea soup), so today’s side project was cobbling together a reasonable facsimilie.   And here it is:

• 8 oz chorizo sausage
• chicken breast, cooked and shredded
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 red onion, finely chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 2 celery stalks, finely chopped
• 1 can chickpeas, drained
• 1 32 oz can chicken stock
• 2 cans diced tomatoes, undrained
• yellow corn tortilla chips

Put oil in saucepan on medium high heat and cook chorizo 2 minutes.

Add onion, garlic and celery, sautee until onion is soft.

Add stock, tomatoes, chickpeas and chicken.  Add salt, pepper to taste and a pinch of sugar.

Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and let simmer for 20 minutes.

Thoroughly crush about three handfuls of tortilla chips and stir into the soup.  Let simmer for another 10 minutes then serve.

Busy, busy, busy.  Have a great holiday all!

1. Jackpot – Dizzy
2. Queen – C-Lebrity
3. The Appleseed Cast – Mile Marker
4. The Black Keys – Strange Times
5. Hockey – Too Fake
6. Heatmiser – Trapdoor
7. Band of Skulls – Patterns
8. Ladyfinger – Little Things
9. Glen Phillips – I Want a New Drug
10. Helicopter Helicopter – By Starlight
11. Three Legged Fox – Maybe I’m Sorry
12. Crash Kings – Mountain Man

Oh how I hate grocery store hamburger buns.  They’re either tough and chewy (from the bakery), or they’re wispy and insubstantial (commercially produced brands).  I make serious hamburgers, people, stuffed with cheddar cheese and crumbled bacon, they need serious buns!

Hamburger Buns

Ingredients:

• 5 cups all purpose flour
• 2 pkgs dry yeast
• 1 cup milk
• 3/4 cup water
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1 tsp salt

Stir together 2 cups flour and the yeast. In a separate bowl, heat milk, water, oil, sugar and salt to lukewarm in microwave.   Add all at once to the flour mixture, and beat until smooth, about 3 minutes.

Mix in enough flour to make a soft dough, 2 to 3 cups.  Mix well.  Dust a flat surface with flour, turn dough out onto floured surface, and let rest under bowl for about 10 minutes.

Shape dough into 12 slightly flat balls, and place on greased baking sheet to rise until doubled in size.

Bake in a preheated 400 degrees F (200 degrees C) oven for 12 to 15 minutes.

They were fantastic.  Firm textured outside, good crumb inside.  And they stood up to a cheese-leaking 1/2lb patty with no trouble at all.

I’d like you to know it is with heroic, er, heroism that I refrained from putting more than one Band of Skulls song on this month’s playlist.  Just buy the album, seriously.

Oh, and don’t watch that Morningwood video at work.  Trust me.

1. Band of Skulls – I Know What I Am
2. The Loved – House Painter
3. The Golden Dogs – Don’t Make a Sound
4. Florence and the Machine – Kiss With a Fist
5. Airborne Toxic Event – Wishing Well
6. A Modern Machine – You So Brightly Burn
7. Radio Radio – Ghost
8. Fielding – Ok Alright
9. The Von Bondies – C’mon C’mon
10. The Humbugs – As Long As I Matter
11. Morningwood – Take Off Your Clothes
12. Ben Kenney – Wrong

This was to have been July’s playlist, then it got hot, and we got laaaazy.  So here it is for October instead.  Even though it’s still freaking hot.

1. Owl City – Fireflies
2. Head Automatica – Brooklyn is Burning
3. Modest Mouse – Missed the Boat
4. Spoon – Don’t You Evah
5. Simply Red – Sunrise
6. Vampire Weekend – The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance
7. Matt & Kim – Daylight
8. Steve Earle – Conspiracy Theory
9. The Ting Tings – We Walk
10. The Limousines – Very Busy People
11. Puscifer – The Mission
12. Paramore – Ignorance

I promise there will be actual gardening content here at some point, but it’s October 11 and still 93 degrees.  We’ve got most of the garden beds solarizing under black plastic, will worry about planting when it’s less than murderous out there.

The original recipe is here.  Below you will find our new favorite version, borne out of my inability to accurately detail the ingredients Husband needed to pick up on his way home from work…

Ingredients:

• 2 14oz cans of diced tomatoes
• 1 lb whatever tomatoes you have lying about on counter or in your freezer

• 1 small onion, finely chopped (or if your husband is allergic to them, as mine is (*sob), 4 tbsp dehydrated onions)
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1 tsp black pepper

• 1 8oz can tomato sauce
• 2 cups chicken stock
• 1 cup milk
• 1 pint light cream

Method:

In a heavy, deep saucepan (I love my Calphalon for this), saute the onion in the butter until golden and fragrant. Add the tomatoes and all the dry stuff.   Realize you’ve told Husband to pick up TWO cans of tomatoes instead of THREE.  Raid the freezer for the array of cherry and plum tomatoes you put away back when the tomato plants were actually producing, and not blighted sticks. (If your non-can tomatoes are rock-hard frozen like mine, don’t even bother cutting or peeling – because you can’t – just fish the skins out of the soup after the simmering is all done and before blending.)

Simmer for about 25-30 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes or so. Be doing something else, and pretty much forget about the tomato mixture for a bit, until it simmers down and loses most of the liquid.  Say “shit” and fish about in the pantry for chicken stock.  Add 2 cups.

Remove the pot from the heat, fish out the bay leaf, and attack the soup with your stick blender (carefully, dammit, it’s hot). You’re aiming for a pretty fine texture, bisque should have a smooth mouthfeel.  Then add the milk and cream.  Taste.  Realize it’s now too thin and go back to the pantry for more tomatoey flavor.  Add 1 8oz can of tomato sauce.

Return the pot to the heat and bring the soup back to “hot,” stirring constantly so Nothing Bad Happens.

Taste and smack yourself for not using chicken stock before now.

And not just because it’s hot, sticky, weed-choked and otherwise nasty.

That’s an enormous argiope making a meal of an equally enormous green dragonfly.  I know argiopes gotta eat too, but I draw the line at butterflies/dragonflies.  Time to get out the Lousiville Slugger.

Did I mention it’s hot, sticky, weed-choked and nasty out there?  There are exactly TWO crops doing well right now…

1.  The wonderful red rice beans:

That’s a 6 foot tall fence, and they’re reaching to the ground on the other side.

2.  Husband’s experimental tobacco:

That’s 5+ feet tall there, and being sprayed with Bt to keep the nasty chewy things away.

Speaking of the Husband, he goes in for surgery on Sept. 3 to repair the disc/remove the bone spur on his vertebra, so the backyard just isn’t going to get much attention at all until recovery is made from all that.  Yes, MY recovery too…I’m a champion worrier.

*sigh*

In the meantime we’ve been doing a lot of cooking.  The jalapeno soup was spectacular:

The Shrimp Two Ways (honey lime sauteed and cold with roma tomatoes, avocados and balsamic vinegar) was also mighty good:

And the made-em-ourselves tamales were so very tasty:

Things will get back to normal around here eventually, just as soon as all the medical issues sod off, and the heat becomes something less than KILLYOUALLYAAHHH!! outside.

Yeesh, almost a month since the last post…good thing you’re not paying for this, eh?

Well, it’s hot, as I may have mentioned, and with the kids not here for the summer our routine is shot all to hell.  We did take off for a week in Sanibel right after the 4th holiday, and while we greatly enjoyed each other’s company, Florida beaches in July are not the most pleasant places to be…something to remember.

After our return Husband’s shoulder bone spur went from ‘ow’ to ‘jesuschristonadonkeythathurtsOW’ which has now prevented him from working for going a week, despite a cortisone shot, so it looks like surgery is in his future, hopefully arthroscopic to reduce recovery time.

So combine the “hot/nasty” with “hurt” and you’re getting a whole lot of “ignoring the garden” going on around here.  Husband steps out from time to time to vent his frustration on the grasshoppers that have suddenly taken an interest in our key lime tree, and coo over his nearly-a-foot tall tobacco plants, but everything else has slipped into benign neglect…which I am making a note to myself in the journal, remember for next year.

It’s not all bad, though.  The jalapenos, padron and whitney peppers are all still producing like mad.  The fig tree has grown two feet and is covered with fruit.  The peanuts are blooming.  The red rice beans, good golly the red rice beans…let’s just say don’t stand too close to them or they’ll climb your ass, too.

So next year we’re going to adjust our plan a little.  Tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, bush beans and corn are the first things to be started, (in January inside & March outside) and will be removed the first of June no matter how productive they still might be, because it is just going to be all downhill from there.  Then in June we’ll be doing all peppers, soybeans, peanuts and red rice beans.  In September we’ll remove all those things and start second rounds of tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, bush beans and corn.

That’s the plan and we’re sticking to it.  Yep.

As those of you who read a lot of Florida bloggers know…it’s frickin’ hot out there.  This tends to make us not go out there nearly as often as we did in the spring/early summer, so everything in the garden is officially on it’s own.

This is fine with the volunteer tomato, who inexplicably is putting out orange fruit:

I would have bet good money on its parentage being the grocery store vine tomatoes, and it may yet be, no guarantee those things will seed true.  Whatever, they’re all destined for a big pot of ranchero sauce this week.  *drool*

Here’s the paprika pepper drying operation:

Yeah, it’s slow, but it works.

Here are the myriad red bell peppers and tomatoes that have A) fallen off, B) been harvested early to prevent splitting due to excess rain, and/or C) rescued from wilt-stricken plants…

…of which the body count now stands at THREE thank you.  I believe I can trace the infection from the purchase of a jalapeno plant from Target’s garden section.  And I’m *really* pissed off about it, as you may well imagine, especially seeing as how the red bell plants in that box also appear to be wilting.  *fume*

Look back up there at that crazy sausage-shaped tomato…that’s a Striped Roma and is it not the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen?  The orange is sort of iridescent, sparkly in the sunshine.  I think they need to sacrifice themselves to my ranchero sauce, too!

–

Husband and I were on the way to Lowe’s this morning (I swear they need to paint a parking space there for us), talking about what to have for dinner, when it hit me that we had, out in the garden, absolutely everything required to make beef stock (well, except the beef).  We added beef necks to the grocery list and today became Stock-Making Day.

First was the harvest of 9 lbs of bunching onions, shallots, scallions, leeks and cipollini onions, and 3 lbs of celery.  Then the cleaning of same, which I have to tell you, would better be effected outside with the assistance of the local fire department.  I believe I have permanently stopped up the right side of the sink at this point.

I had a picture of the onion harvest – 9lbs of crazy green stalks sticking out of my blue bucket is quite the sight – but my dang camera got a little confused and that image is lost forever.

Trust me, it was cool.

Here’s the celery harvest:

And the leftover celery/onions headed for the freezer until the next Stock-Making Day:

Into the roasting pan went the beef necks, shallots, onions, leeks, cipollini onions, white/orange and purple carrots, a goodly dash of olive oil to keep things from sticking, and an entire bulb of gorgeous garlic, smashed and peeled.

That roasted at 450 degrees for 30 minutes (turning a couple of times).

We pulled it out, nicely burning my thumb in the process, transferred everything to a stock pot, then deglazed the pan with 2 cups of water and poured that lovely goodness into the stock pot too.

On top of that went 3 bay leaves, 12 cups of water, a goodly handful of the freshly harvested celery (imprecision is not really a problem in stock making), a handful of fresh thyme from the garden, a tbsp or so of  black peppercorns, tsp or so of kosher salt, and about 8 of my baby black plum tomatoes. Use whatever you have on hand…parsnips, potatoes, other things that do not start with “p”…

Interlude to Allow for the Waxing Rhapsodic on the Wonder of Black Tomatoes: This is our first year growing any black tomatoes, and I’m just astonished at the depth of flavor they have.  Very low acid, wonderful sweetness, but still a great tomato flavor.  These are on my list to grow every year from now on.

So, all that good stuff is in the pot and simmering away right now…

…after which it’ll be refrigerated overnight, the congealed fat peeled off, and the stock poured into the nearest mold-type thinger we can find (ice cube trays work great) and frozen until needed.

The only downside to this stock-making business is you spend all day smelling the amazing aromas coming from the stock pot but it’s not for eating.  Yet, anyway.