Valentine Chocolate Bark

This recipe will be either really easy for you or really difficult, depending on the kind of cook you are. It has no measurements. I happen to think that makes it the easiest confection to confect, but some people panic without very specific instructions. Sorry, those people.

In its simplest form, chocolate bark is just chocolate chips (or baking chocolate squares), melted, spread out, and chilled back into solid form. But you have to add something to it. Otherwise you’ve just made a plain chocolate bar.

Nicole’s Valentine Chocolate Bark

Orange

Sugar

Toasted walnuts, coarsely chopped

Craisins

Semi-sweet chocolate chips

Sea salt

Candy the orange peel: Scrape long strips of the peel off of the orange.* This is most easily done with the handy zester/garnishing tool I am wielding in the first picture, because this tool gets the peel off without much of the white pith.

*If all you have is an ordinary orange peeler made for separating the peel and pith together from the orange segments, you’ll have the extra steps of peeling the orange in large pieces, boiling the peel in plain water until it is soft, then using a spoon to scrape the pith off of the back of the peel, and then slicing the peel into thin strips. Now you may continue.

Put the strips in a small pot, squeeze the orange’s juice into the pot, and add equal parts water and sugar, enough that the peel can float around. Boil, stirring occasionally, until the liquid has reduced significantly, about 20-30 minutes.

Using a fork, transfer the orange peel from the pot of syrup to a cutting board dusted with sugar. Roll or toss the peel around to get some of the sugar stuck to it. The peel will seem similar to a gummy worm at this point. Chop it into small pieces.

Make the chocolate bark: For this part, it is crucial to have everything ready before you melt the chocolate, or the chocolate will begin to solidify while you’re still chopping the walnuts or rummaging through your pantry looking for Craisins.

Have your candied orange peel, along with the craisins, walnuts and sea salt, ready nearby. Have a baking sheet out on the counter and lined with wax paper.

Pour the chocolate chips into a microwave-safe glass bowl and microwave for 30 seconds at a time, stirring after each interval, until the chocolate is all melted.

Dump the melted chocolate onto the wax-paper-lined baking sheet and spread it into a ¼-inch thick rectangle (thin enough to break into pieces when it’s solid but not so thin it will fall apart).

Immediately sprinkle the candied orange peel, chopped walnuts, and Craisins over the chocolate. Gently press them into the surface with the palm of your hand. Finely sprinkle a pinch of sea salt over the whole thing.

Put the baking sheet (with the chocolate on it) in the fridge for at least an hour. When the chocolate is fully solid, break the rectangle into pieces. (Just pick up an edge, peel the wax paper off of the bottom, and gently try to bend the chocolate – a section will snap off.)

Store the bark in the fridge; it can get slightly soft at room temperature and does melt in your hands.

BONUS: Use the leftover orange sugar syrup and the chocolate remaining on your spatula and in the glass bowl! Add some milk to the bowl and microwave it for a minute or two (just don’t let it boil). Scrape the chocolate down from the sides of the bowl, stirring until it melts off of the spatula and blends with the hot milk. Pour it out into a mug. Add the syrup leftover from candying the orange peel. Drink.

It should be obvious that this year’s Valentine’s Day dessert was far more successful than 2010’s Lollipies mostly in that it was, well, successful. But, my favorite Valentine dessert so far has been the peanut butter mousse I made five or six years ago. I must make it again someday.

Zucornwhatnow?

Zucornchile.

This is an adaptation of a recipe from one of our no-fail cookbooks, Home-Tested Recipe Collection. This book seems hard to find online, which is too bad for you, because almost every one of its recipes we've tried so far has been delicious as well as fairly inexpensive and easy to make. This particular recipe was an amazing surprise.  I thought, zucchini, taco flavors, really?  But, we tried it, and wow!  It's tough not to go back for seconds thirds.

Zucornchile is a good recipe for the summer when we have zucchini fresh out of the garden, but being a casserole, it's also a great one for winter, making use of those summer flavors we've stowed in the freezer.  Also because it's a casserole, it's easy to play with the amounts of the ingredients and double the recipe or simply make it cheesier or saucier—or beanier or zucchinier—as you like.

Here's the recipe, followed by a few notes on convenient variations/substitutions.

2 cups of canned tomato puree
2 tablespoons of chili powder
2 tablespoons tomato paste*
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder*
1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper
A couple dozen tortilla chips
3 cups thinly sliced zucchini*
1 1/2 cups of Monterey Jack cheese
1 cup corn kernels (canned, frozen or fresh)
1 can of black beans

Preheat oven to 350.  Grease a 2 1/2-quart baking dish.

In a medium sauce pan, combine tomato sauce, chili powder, tomato paste, vinegar, cumin, salt, garlic, and red pepper. Bring to a boil then reduce heat to low and simmer about 10 minutes.

In the baking dish, make a layer of chips, then zucchini, corn, beans, and finally cheese.  Repeat with one or two more layers, depending on how quickly you use up your ingredients. Pour the tomato sauce all over the top. Bake 30 minutes.

Serve hot.  It's good topped with sour cream and green onions, too.



*NOTES
Sometimes I omit the tomato paste just for convenience.  It does deepen the flavor of the sauce, but it's not essential.

Often we use fresh minced garlic instead of garlic powder.  Just triple the measurement.

You may want to steam your zucchini slices first, unless they really are very thinly sliced. A couple of minutes in the microwave should do it.  When I made this casserole this week, I used grated zucchini we had in our freezer.  Turns out frozen zucchini is mostly ice, so, let that stuff thaw and drain quite a bit before you throw it in the casserole.
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Not Too Early

It's the first full week of February and currently below freezing outside (29 degrees at 8 a.m.), but the predicted high today is an unseasonable 43 degrees.  So if you ask me, "Isn't it a little early to be gardening?" I will answer, "No! It is not too early!  In just two weeks, I should start some seeds indoors."

I know this because of a fun little website a friend just recommended to us: sproutrobot.com. You plug in your zip code and the things you want to plant, and a gardening calendar is created just for you. I imagine it is based on the average frost dates and average temperatures for your location, besides of course the climate needs and growing time of each plant.

I signed up for the free membership to Sprout Robot, so I get the calendar and email reminders when it's time to plant something. There are also memberships for purchase, which include organic heirloom seeds by mail; the price goes up depending on the size of the garden (basically, how many varieties of seeds you want).

In addition to the email reminders I will receive from Sprout Robot, I also have on hand a book we got for Christmas: The City Homesteader: Self-Sufficiency on Any Square Footage by Scott Meyer.  It's one of those fun-to-peruse books that has a lot of good ideas but doesn't go deep enough into any one topic or project for you to really, really know all you need to know about doing whatever it is you're reading about.  But, I did find useful its advice on which cool-weather crops to plant in the spring and which to save for the fall.  Certain crops will be ready for harvest in time to plant summer veggies in their place, while others are better to be planted just after the harvest of the summer crops, because they'll last a little ways into the winter (or will be ready very early the next spring if they are planted at the end of the sesason).  Combining the two planting time lines, I hope to make the most use of our small space at home and our larger but seasonally limited space in the community garden by most efficiently rotating what's growing from early spring to late fall or perhaps even early winter.

Of course, this all depends on my ability to stay on task with the gardening schedule, something I haven't been so strict about (due to busyness, laziness, absent-mindedness...) in the past few—well, ever.

Incongruous

I'm biking in January—in northern Illinois!—without gloves or ear coverings, and I'm even a little too warm wearing two shirts.  And yet, it's still too dark to ride without lights.  There are still piles of snow that haven't melted at the corners of every intersection—usually blocking the edge of the sidewalk, meaning I must dismount and hoist my bike over.  Pedaling home at 6:30 this evening felt more like riding around at 9:00 on a late spring night.  Except for those snow piles, of course.

So strange to have gone from bitter cold and seven inches of snow so quickly to this unseasonably mild weather.  But I'll take it.  Saving gas, getting exercise, right?  Besides general laziness, the cold is what keeps us off our bikes and in the car.  It's why we put on our winter weight.  So, I'll take it while I have it.  I'm sure we'll snap back into the typical Chicago winter soon.

In the meantime, I'll try to post a little more frequently.  And post something a little more interesting than one 25-minute bike commute.  It's just that... well, I'm sure you've noticed how our posts taper off in late summer as harvest time hits (as if we were big crop farmers), something that has gotten worse every year in the three years we've been blogging.  So, I'm going to make an effort.  After all, I need to catch your attention with regular posts before I can even hope for you to notice my annual reminder to participate in Earth Hour (March 31).

Gold Ball turnips and a Black Spanish radish.

Our plants are growing slower than last summer, and I worried it was something we were doing until we walked around the community garden this morning and saw other people's plots.  Some have plants much further developed than ours, especially tomatoes and peppers (ours, grown from seed indoors on window sill, are pretty sad, but we're keeping our fingers crossed), but many others have some plants even smaller than ours.  So I feel better.  Even if we should be doing something differently to boost our garden's production, I think we can safely blame the weather (three days of 90, two weeks of 60, a week of 90, a week of 70...) for most of the slow growth.

Despite the inconsistent weather, we are harvesting a few things, as you can see in the photo of the turnips and one black radish we picked on July 4.  For a few weeks now, we've been snipping off leaves from the beets, turnips and radishes and steaming/sauteing them for dinner, and now we've enjoyed a roasted veggie platter that included our turnips.  We haven't eaten the radish yet, but we did stir fry some radish pods (from the radishes that bolted and went to flower quickly, then producing snap bean–like seed pods).  Not bad.  And, we're picking a few beans each day—Cherokee, wax and magpie—and will soon have enough to make a great bean salad or something.  A friendly gardener Len met while toiling away in the sun shared with us some of her broccoli, small red radishes and bok choy.  And, we're picking raspberries every day, just like the last two summers around this time.  The raspberries are the lowest maintenance, highest yield item in our edible garden.  And possibly the most delicious.

I can't wait to start picking cucumbers and zucchini—just in the past two days, I've seen itty bitty baby ones.  Oh, and we added some potatoes to the garden!  My mom gave me some little budding potato chunks that she received from a neighbor with a huge garden.  We just tossed them into the ground, and less than week later we had potato plants.  As they grow taller, we pile the dirt higher around them.

The last thing I have to report is the Insect Watch.  I saw one squash bug near our calabaza plant a couple of weeks ago.  I killed him and, after seeing the squash-bug invasion my parents are facing, I have been diligently checking the stems and undersides of the leaves of all of our squash and melon plants every time we go out to water.  So far, no new sightings and no egg clusters.  Maybe the dill, catnip and nasturtium (which hasn't yet bloomed) are working?  Meanwhile, Len is daily hunting and squishing Japanese beetles in our corn stalks.  Now we know what became of the white grubs we found while digging up the garden.  Next spring, we'll kill the grubs as we find them instead of just tossing them out of the space.  The other pest we've found is the cucumber beetle.  Rather cute little black and yellow guys, they devoured some of our squash seedlings in one weekend earlier this season.  We replanted the ones in the worst shape—and the ones that disappeared entirely—and now just keep a murderous eye out for those beetles, too.  It's always beetles.

Here's to living off the land!

The Garden Plot, A Visual Aid

You'll probably have to click on this image to open it separately and zoom in to read which veggies are where.

Actual measurements of our garden plot revealed that the space was not quite a full 20x30, so we shuffled a couple of items and alotted slightly less space to the walking areas, but this plan will give you the general layout of our spot in the community garden.  You'll see that the sprawling items, like cucumbers, melons and squash, have about 9 square feet for each vine to fill, except for a few of the plants that will produce one- to three-pound fruit—Len built vertical frames for those guys to climb, saving some ground space.  Most of the plants in the center will be planted in clusters of four, in little 2x2 squares. Those we will transplant into the garden plot after they have sprouted and grown into hardy little seedlings indoors. The beans, beets, turnips and radishes, ranging from 9 to 16 seeds per square foot, will be planted in stages, about every three weeks, so that we can harvest them over a period, instead of pulling up about 50 radishes all at once.

I also plan to plant some nasturtiums and dill here and there among the squash.  And marigolds among the tomatoes.

The items you don't see on the map—herbs, lettuce, kale, spinach, chard, onions—are planted in a space about 4x7 next to the strawberries in the front yard.  I'm worried about those seeds.  They seem awfully slow to start.

Garden Grab Bag

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This year, our edible garden was a surprise, even to us. 

We were lucky enough to find out about Seeds of Change's Sowing Millions Project just before they gave away all 100 million seeds, so we placed two orders for 25 packets of certified organic seeds (two orders so we could share with our moms, not so we could hog them all for ourselves!).  The shipping cost was all we had to pay for the orders and was $4.99 each.  We didn't get to choose what plants we wanted or even get to see a list of the kinds of seeds they giving away; Seeds of Change would just send us a random variety.  It was exciting, kind of like waiting for Christmas morning.  But, we also had to wait to plan the garden until we found out what sorts of seeds we would get.  In other words, we waited impatiently for about three and a half weeks.

Then the seeds arrived.  So many different veggies to grow!  Some people complained on the Seeds of Change Facebook page that they received lots of flowers and hardly any vegetables.  Our packages fortuitously contained mostly vegetables, with only six envelopes of ornamental plants, three of which were marigolds—very useful in the vegetable garden.  We did receive duplicates of some things, even quadruplets of the okra and pumpkins, but I think that was a good thing because it made it easier to share the seeds with our moms and because, let's face it, I don't think we're quite ready to plant, grow, and harvest 50 kinds of vegetables.  I should say, 50 new kinds of vegetables, because when I list out all of our seeds below, you'll see the count is actually around 50.

So, the produce we will eat this summer and fall has already been determined—mostly by our surprise assortment from Seeds of Change, as well as the seeds we gathered or had leftover from last year, and just a few new purchases. Here's the list:

Lemon Basil, harvested seeds from aunt
Sweet Basil, leftover seeds
Cherokee Wax Bush Bean, Seeds of Change
Green Snap Bush Bean, leftover packet
Golden Lumen Wax Bush Bean, Seeds of Change
Sonoran Gold Bush Tepary Bean (traditional), Seeds of Change
Magpie Bush Snap Bean (heirloom), Seeds of Change
Yellow Intermediate Mangel Beet (heirloom), Seeds of Change
Witerbi Mangold Chard, Seeds of Change
Chives, leftover seeds
Cilantro, harvested seeds
Sweet Corn, leftover seeds
Upland Cress, Seeds of Change
Satsuki Madori Cucumber (rare), Seeds of Change
Sumter Cucumber, leftover seeds
Bush Champion Cucumber, Seeds of Change
Mammoth Dill, new purchase
Turkish Orange Eggplant (heirloom), Seeds of Change
Florence Fennel (heirloom), Seeds of Change
Vates Blue Curled Kale, Seeds of Change
Red Russian Kale, Seeds of Change
Red Oak Lettuce, Seeds of Change
Butter Crunch Lettuce, leftover seeds from Mom
Romaine Lettuce, leftover seeds from Mom
Eel River Muskmelon, Seeds of Change
Crimson Sweet Watermelon, leftover seeds
Sweet Dakota Rose Watermelon (heirloom), Seeds of Change
Mammoth Spineless Okra, Seeds of Change
White Lisbon Bunching Onion, Seeds of Change
Parsley, leftover seeds
New Mexican Green Chile, leftover seeds
Bell Pepper, leftover seeds
Jalapeño, leftover seeds
Jack-o-Lite Pumpkin, Seeds of Change
Pie Pumpkin, harvested seeds
Calabaza, harvested seeds
Round Black Spanish Radish (heirloom), Seeds of Change
Bloomsdale Long-Standing Spinach, leftover seeds from Mom
Hokkaido Stella Blue Squash, Seeds of Change
Butternut Squash, harvested seeds
Gold Nugget Squash, Seeds of Change
Zeppelin Delicata Squash, Seeds of Change
Sweet Dumpling Squash, Seeds of Change
Cherry Tomato, leftover seeds
Yellow Pear Tomato (heirloom), leftover seeds
Oregon Spring Tomato, new purchase
Gold Ball Turnip (heirloom), Seeds of Change
Black Beauty Zucchini, Seeds of Change
Not to mention the strawberries, raspberries, and shallots always growing in our yard.

Also, we'll be mixing these plants into the garden as a natural repellent for harmful insects like squash bugs: two types of marigolds (Seeds of Change),  the dill already mentioned above, catnip (easily found wild around here), and two types of nasturtiums (new purchase).  We will let you know just how well this approach works.

Even with the 20x30 plot in the community garden and the 4x10 area in our front yard, it seems like we have a lot to cram into our gardening space, and we do.  But we're employing some of Mel Bartholomew's Square-Foot Gardening techniques, including some vertical gardening for the cucumbers and smaller winter squash.  More about that in another post.  Also to come: a map of our garden.

I'll finish up with a quick summary of what we planted on Saturday (May 7).  Sowed directly in the ground: both kinds of kale, all of the kinds of lettuce, spinach, cress, fennel, chives, both kinds of basil, turnips, beets, radishes, green snap bush beans, and cherokee wax bush beans.  Started indoors: all three kinds of tomatoes, all three kinds of peppers/chiles, both kinds of marigolds, eggplant, and parsley.

Now, to keep track of all of this is a garden journal...
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