Here´s a picture of the pumpkin I bought last week. I plan on making pumpkin bread, pumpkin soufflé, and pumpkin pie with it.
I researched in season crops that are grown in Spain and commonly found and I saw that something called berza is in season. I translated berza and they´re collard greens! Yay!So tomorrow I´ll know what to ask for. I´m also looking for something called achicoria, which grows almost like a weed here. We know it as chicory and I plan on roasting to roots to grind for a New Orleans style cafe au lait and use the greens for a salad- they are basically endives. I also want to find more acelgas or swiss chard because I absolutely loved that and ate them all up from last weeks trip. I´ll also be bringing back some sweet potatoes for roasting. I eat them plain- no sugar or butter because the variety here is so flavorful and completely smooth.
For some reason, vegetables here are so much richer tasting. I think it is because they have less travel between the field and the consumer (in the states we get most produce from California or the midwest) and because of this, crops are harvested when they are more mature and ready to be picked.
Also, in the US lots of fertilizers are used and foods are genetically modified to boost growth and shorten time between seeding and maturity. Alot of the agricultural practices are different and follow traditional methods that farmers have used for generations and so the vegetables are really products of the earth. I absolutely love vegetables now and often eat vegetarian now for health reasons. I think I´ve always had kind of a high susceptibility to getting infections and I really want to boost my immune system this winter by eating lots of leafy greens and other natural healthy things. I get kinda excited about it when I think about how well I´m taking care of myself!
I had tonsilitis in September and I really don´t want to get sick, so I´m going to be ¨proactive instead of reactive¨ (that´s teacher speak right there).
Let´s move on to the next order of business. So, the reason I started talking about vegetables was to talk about corned beef. I had bought boucoup cabbage and Irish potatoes because I had wanted to make corned beef. So I went to my butcher and asked for a pound of brisket- it´s callled falda, which means skirt (I wonder if it´s the same as skirt steak). I was looking around at all the stuff, they had skinned and cleaned rabbits with the heads still on them in the butcher shop, ew, and when I got home I realized the butcher had done me a favor and cut up my brisket into chunks. Bless his heart. I didn´t ask him this time, but I usually ask him to cut my beef in chunks for stews and soups and such and I guess he just wanted to be nice- they´re good people, it´s a family business.... ok anyway, back to the story.
So I got online looking for corned beef recipes thinking that I was going to make it for the next day´s meal. Well, duh, corned is like cured, which I didn´t realize. So I pulled up Alton Brown´s video on youtube for how to make corned beef and found out it takes 10 days of curing in a pickling mixture before you cook it. Well, I pulled together all kinds of spices to make a very aromatic brine and sealed my meat in it. This is how it looked this morning. Only nine more days to go till cabbage and potato time.
It looks very unappetizing with the fat on there, but this dish never was a very pretty one on the outside, but it sure is tasty.
On a sweeter note, I made another chocolate ganache cake and some cupcakes. The cake is to take to a friend tomorrow, and the cupcakes are staying here.
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