Last Squash Of The Year – "Dilly Squash"?

We have been picking squash for 4 months from the same plants. Four hills produced hundreds of pounds of squash. Most of it was given to others. We just could not eat 20 to 40 pounds a week. We had a freeze coming a few days ago, so I picked everything, including the little ones. These ranged from 9 inches down to about 2 inches long. The 2 inch long squash were about ¼ inch in diameter.
I have made “Dilly Beans before much like dill pickles but made with green beans. I wondered if it would work to treat small skinny squash like green beans and make “Dilly Squash”. I decided to try it. I chose the skinniest squash I had until there was enough to fill a pint jar and then followed the dilly bean recipe for one pint. The recipe includes water, vinegar, salt, garlic, dried red pepper flakes and dill. The largest squash was about 5/8 of and inch in diameter. This is what the jar looks like.
I’ll load it in the car to try out at Thanksgiving. It might be good and then again it might be horrible. We can all find out together.

What’s in the Woods?

I just posted the blog on Chili Rellenos a few minutes ago. I actually wrote the text on both blogs and had everything ready to post a week ago, but did not get time. So here are two in one day.

From my bedroom window, I saw some mushrooms that looked interesting, so I took the camera with me to investigate. When I first saw them from the window, I thought they might be some kind of morel mushroom that we frequently see this time of year in the woods. As I got closer, this is what I saw.
Even closer yet, I could see they were not morels.

I looked in our Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms. The closest I could find was “Shaggy Mane” which was listed as “choice”. There were enough differences (like the cap on top) that I was not going to try them out. There were also some similarities to “Scaly Inky Cap” which was listed as edible with caution. Regardless of what kind of mushroom these actually were, I decided to go with the caution philosophy and only take photos.

While in the yard with the camera, I thought I should check out the growing sink hole. A couple of years ago, a new large hole opened up in the front sink hole. It had steep sides and was pretty deep with lots of mud in the bottom. We recently had lots of rain. We had about 5 inches in one day, so I was wondering how the muddy sink hole was, because the scouts are coming to our house to play capture the flag in the woods at night on Wednesday evening, and I did not want it to eat any scouts. This is what it looks like now.

The diameter has increased from erosion and filled in the bottom so it is not as deep as it was a few months ago. Rocky used to go nuts when Joseph would go down in the hole, which made it more fun.

I think I need to mark it off with some caution tape and glow sticks for Wednesday night so we don’t lose any scouts in the dark.

Chili Rellenos

One of my favorite places to eat Mexican food is Pueblo Nuevo in Hazelwood on Lindbergh. They serve chili rellenos that are really good. They use poblano or ancho peppers which are shapes somewhat like bell peppers but they are mildly hot and are usually picked when they are dark green. They are called ancho peppers when they are fresh and called poblano when they are cooked.

I liked the chili rellenos so much that I decided to grow my own poblano peppers. I started with 6 plans and recently picked the peppers. The photo below shows the peppers we had AFTER about 15 had been roasted, including the 6 Mom used to make our dinner last week.
The peppers are roasted to get the skins off. We used the oven method by putting them in the oven at 350 degrees for 10 to 15 minutes. When the skins puff up, they are done. The peppers are then pulled out and wrapped in a wet towel. When they have cooled down enough to handle, the skins are removed and the top of the pepper is opened and seeds removed without completely opening the pepper. Strips of Monterrey Jack Cheese are then placed inside the peppers as shown in the following photo.
The peppers are then rolled in flower.
Once coated, the peppers are dipped in an egg mixture described at the end.
They are then fried in hot oil until golden brown.
Mom made 6 of them.
This is what it looked like on the plate with rice.
They were really really good. We each had two for dinner. Mom had one the next day for lunch and I froze my leftover one and took in my lunch to see how good they were after freezing and then re-heating in the microwave. It was still really good.

I roasted quite a few peppers and pealed them and then froze them to use in future foods. Mom also roasted a bunch of peppers and made a green chili stew that was really tasty. We still have about half of the peppers in the refrigerator that I plan on roasting one of these days and making a bunch more chili rellenos.

The recipe that Mom used was scaled from the recipe on page 7 of Ryan and Hailey’s Family Cookbook.

6 ancho (poblano) peppers
Monterrey Jack Cheese
4 eggs – separated
½ tsp salt
Pinch of baking powder
1 T milk
Oil for frying.

After baking the peppers in the oven at 350 for 10 to 15 minutes, or when the skins puff up, they are removed and placed in a wet towel. Remove the skins when the peppers have cooled enough to handle. Cut open the to and remove the seeds without completely opening up the pepper. Some recipes say to leave the stem in, which is what they do at Pueblo Nuevo, but since we do not eat the stem, there was no point to leaving it in. Stuff the pepper with cheese and then roll in flour. The peppers are then dipped in the egg batter made as follows:
Combine egg whites, salt and baking powder in a mixing bowl and beat until stiff. In another bowl, stir the egg yokes and milk together. Very gently fold the whipped egg whites into the yoke mixture. This is a very critical step. Don’t mix, just fold 2 or 3 times maximum. Don’t crush the little bubbles of egg whites
After dipping in the egg batter, fry in hot oil until golden brown and the cheese is melting and oozing out of the pepper. Remove from frying pan and drain on a paper towel. Serve with favorite salsa and sour cream. Our favorite salsa is actually Salsa Verde, but we were out and use Pace mild salsa instead.

Chain Saw Skills

Each year on the first Saturday of October, Art’s Lawnmower in Blackjack, where we bought our mowers, chainsaw and tiller, has a big open house where they have chain saw experts to demonstrate the new equipment. The also have free brats and soda and chain sharpening for about half price. I like to go between conference sessions and get my brat and soda and get my chains sharpened for the winter wood cutting season.

The Brats were good. The served them with the traditional sauerkraut, with ketchup and other condiments. They also had home made apple butter this time. I tried it with the sauerkraut, and it was really good.

They had someone from Stihl Chain saws demonstrating how you do sculpturing on a log with a chain saw. The first photo is the chainsaw expert in action.
The next photo is a completed eagle.
I think I’ll just stick to cutting up logs for firewood. That is more my skill level.

I Work With Turkeys

I do not mean to disparage the people I work with, but we really do have turkeys at Emerson. Several years ago, two female wild turkeys were noticed in the woods on Emerson property. The company president thought it would be cool if there were more turkeys, so he had a couple of domesticated male turkeys brought in. The male turkeys didn’t like hanging out in the woods, they were not afraid of people and loved to look at their own reflections in the glass doors of the buildings as they strutted with their feathers puffed up. After about a month of the maintenance people cleaning up the turkey droppings in front of the building entrances, they got rid of the males. The male turkeys apparently at least said “hi” to the wild female turkeys because a few months later there were lots of young turkeys roaming around Emerson property. They stay away from the buildings, but they do not seem to be very afraid of people. They will run away if you get within about 10 feet of them. I think there are currently about 15 to 20 turkeys living off the land at Emerson. I passed close to a few of them while walking to another building for a meeting in the middle of the day and took these photos with my cell phone.
Before anyone thinks I need to bring one of these to Tucson in November, I’m pretty sure Mom will not want turkey droppings on the back seat, and besides, the turkey would go after the bags of rice I was going to bring. I think we ought to stick to a store bought turkey.

What is in between white rice and brown rice?

I noticed that my last four blog entries have been about food. This makes five in a row.

Like many health conscious people, we have tried brown rice before and while it is good occasionally, it is not as pleasant to eat as the premium Japanese white rice. While at Global Foods, I was looking at the various types of rice. We bought Haiga rice (explained below) once before and liked it a lot, but I have not been able to find it lately. Julie liked the Haiga rice too and wanted more. To make white rice, the outer bran and germ are milled away, but apparently, there are different degrees of glory in the milling of rice. This is a photo of the information on the bag of rice I recently bought.
As you may be able to read on the bag, Haiga rice has the bran milled away, but the rice germ is still intact making it healthier than white rice. Since I have not been able to find Haiga rice lately, I thought I should get some brown rice. I discovered that there is yet another category of brown rice that is somewhere between true brown rice and Haiga rice. This particular brand has called it Gen-Ji-Mai rice, where the outer bran is partially polished away just enough to allow the rice to cook more like white rice and have a texture that is more like white rice than brown rice while still retaining most if the vitamins and minerals that are usually lost in the milling process to get white rice.

For comparison purposes, here is a photo of our normal white rice.
And a photo of the Gen-Ji-Mai partially polished brown rice.
This is what it looks like on the plate after it has been cooked.
It still has healthy brownish looking stuff in it, but it tastes really good. We were impressed. You can tell that it has more healthy fiber than white rice, but it is still pleasant to eat. We had some Nishiki true brown rice before, and while it very good for you; this new rice that we found is much more enjoyable to eat. I don’t think we will completely give up the yummy premium white rice as there are times when it is what our taste buds want. But there will be quite a few meals that will have this slightly polished brown rice instead of the traditional white rice.

For those that are interested, we should have space to bring some with us to Neil and Ashley’s house for Thanksgiving.

Gyoza

A few days before Joseph left to go to Utah, we had gyoza for dinner. Of course we needed to have green beans with them. This is what Mom’s plate looked like before we started eating.

We made a lot of gyoza, more than was necessary for three people. After Mom’s plate was filled, this was the plate of the rest of the gyoza.

We made about 45 of them all together. We had 2nds, 3rds and so on. It was really good. We decided that we are getting really good at it, because they were as good as any we have ever eaten.