Scrappy Blog

So I have never tried growing potatoes before. I plan to try growing a variety that are supposedly purple, although the seed potatoes don’t look very purple:

But they have good sprouts on them so there is that. 

Here is a 2×2 bed, filled with compost and dirt to a bit below the surface, with a bamboo and mesh cage surrounding three sides. I plan to wall up the fourth side with more mesh as I fill in the dirt and compost around the plants as they grow. 

So I lay my taters in the middle and also a line of peas around the edge (might as well get extra use from the trellis). 

I expect the soil to sink down a bit because I dug a ton of leaves and compost down into it. The plan is for this to be a combination compost pile and bed, I will use yard trimmings and such to hill up around the plants as they grow. So last step is to pile up soil – a couple of inches at the edge over the peas, 3-4 inches over the spuds. 

So – did I do right?

I flunk recipes, but I cook regularly.  What works for me is to understand the principle behind something and what can be varied, so I can make it with ingredients at hand without referring to a recipe.  So this launches a new approach for documenting food prep:  summarize a food form (with typical ingredients and possible substitutions, options for cooking, important proportions, etc).  Then when I go to make that item, if I don’t remember quite the right proportions or oven temp or whatever, I can come look it up.

So:  Lasagna

I don’t know why it took me so long to start making lasagna.  It’s one of my husband’s favorites, and I love it too.  I think I thought it was complex and difficult.  But… really, not.

Lasagna is simply a layered casserole.  The real key is moisture balance – you want enough moisture to cook the noodles, but not enough to make it soupy.  You’ll see in the photo above that there was still a bit of runny red sauce in the experiment above; usually I try to end up a bit less juicy.  So:

INGREDIENTS

Prepare roughly equal volumes of each of the following layers:

REQUIRED Layer:  Noodles, of course.  Classic lasagna uses those wide flat noodles with a bit of curl along the edges.  In a pinch you could use a variety of other thing – for example, you could put a layer of small macaroni-shaped noodles like a pastitsio.  With the regular lasagna noodles, many recipes call for pre-cooking them but as far as I can tell that’s not necessary.  I just put them in surrounded by liquid, and they’re fully cooked by the time the thing is baked.  You might want to pre-bake macaroni or thicker noodles. 

Amounts – it takes between one and two boxes of noodles to make three or four bread-pan lasagnas.  I try to just over-buy since extras will keep indefinitely until the next time I make it.

To try someday:  Some recipes try to make the lasagna lower-calorie and lower-carb by substituting in thinly-sliced vegetables such as zucchini instead of noodles.  If you do that, you’ll want to be very careful about moisture levels.  Noodles absorb fluid as they cook; vegetables release fluid.   So if using a vegetable “noodle” layer, you may want to balance that by adding some other dried ingredient to absorb the extra liquid.  Dried onions, garlic, and/or mushrooms might be nice.

REQUIRED Layer:  Sauce.  A classic lasagna sauce is tomato based, seasoned with onion, garlic, basil, oregano, and contains ground meat and onion.  You can add/substitute practically anything in there as long as it’s chopped pretty small – remember that you’re spreading this stuff out in fairly thin layers without air pockets, so you don’t want big chunks of meat or veggies sticking up out of your sauce layer.   You’ll want to pre-brown your meat so you can de-fat it, then mix with the tomato sauce (canned spaghetti sauce is a quick easy option) and seasonings.  You may want to simmer your sauce for a while to cook off some excess moisture; the ideal sauce will offer up just enough moisture to cook the noodles and then serve up nice and thick.

To give your sauce a bit of an exotic flavor, try varying the spices.  “Warm” spices like cinnamon, cloves, or cardamom go beautifully with tomato and cheese.  Or try a bit of curry (garam masala?) for an unexpected but yummy twist. 

Amounts – more than you expect.  For four bread pans worth of lasagna, I like to use maybe three pounds of meat, one of the BIG cans of tomato sauce, an onion, and bunches of garlic and herbs. 

OPTIONAL Layer:  Extra veggies.  You can add in a layer of extra veggies in addition to the sauce layer.  This adds moisture, so be careful with moisture balance – probably you will want to pre-cook your veggies a bit to get rid of excess moisture.  Spinach or other greens, mushrooms, broccoli, etc… it’s all good.  Just chop it finely so it’ll spread in an even layer.  Amounts are negotiable but in general if I do this, I try to have a volume about equal to the volume of sauce.

REQUIRED Layer:  Cheese/egg mixture.  The classic lasagna cheese is ricotta.  However, cottage cheese is cheaper, available in low-fat or fat-free varieties, and virtually indistinguishable in the final dish.  People also sometimes mix in parmesan or other strongly-flavored “hard” cheeses for extra flavor, or add mozzarella for a bit of stretchy goodness.  You take your cheese mix of choice and blend it with a couple of eggs (or egg whites); the eggs help stiffen up the cheese a bit so the final dish will have a proper texture.  Also I think the egg helps keep the cheese a bit fluffy?  You can also blend other stuff into your cheese mixture – for example, green herbs (parsley, oregano, basil) and garlic.  I like to blend up everything but the mozzarella – I end up sprinkling the grated mozzarella over the other cheese layer to create a think stretchy “seal” over the whole thing.

Amounts – I buy the largest size tub of cottage cheese (the one that’s about 8 inches tall), a tub of ricotta that’s about half that, and a 1-2 pounds of mozzarella.  This amount of cheese calls for 3-4 eggs; I use egg whites from a carton.

PREP

So start by prepping the layers:  brown your meat or veggie sauce ingredients, add the tomato, and let that simmer while you prep everything else.  Throw your cheese and egg and other flavorings into the food processor to mix.  Grate the mozzarella if not pre-grated already.  Chop and pre-cook any optional extra ingredients.  

Lasagna gets layered in casserole.  The key is to choose a container with sides that are high enough to accomodate many layers – the photo above was made in a bread pan with four inch tall sides.  I love making lasagna in bread pans since that means each pan provides four generous servings (again, see picture).  Prepare several at once, freeze the extras, and you can enjoy lasagna for quite a while after one good prep session.

Preparation simply involves creating layers. You want your wettest layer (the sauce) right above the noodle layer so the juice will coat the noodles, which then absorb the liquid as they cook.  Start at the bottom of the pan with a layer of sauce plus a layer of any “extras” you’ve added.  Then gently spread a layer of cheese mixture over the sauce. Then a layer of noodles, laid out so as to get full coverage but no double-coverage.  Then  repeat the sequence. Keep going for as many layers as you can fit.  The top layer should be cheese, which nicely seals off the sauce and noodles below it so the moisture will all go into cooking the noodles.  On top of that final cheese layer, you can add a layer of grated mozzarella and a sprinkle of parmesan to get a nice browned cheesy top. 

COOKING

While I’ve seen recipes for crockpot lasagna or microwave lasagna, I generally pop it in the oven.  I’ve found that in my oven, it does well at about 375-400 degrees (Fahrenheit) for 45-60 minutes – check periodically.  It’s cooked when you slide a knife into the center and all the noodles are clearly softened.  Since most ingredients were cooked before you baked it, the baking is really just to cook the noodles and meld the flavors a bit. You can cover the lasagna as it bakes, but you’ll want the cover off at least at the end to let the cheese on top brown a little. 

PRESERVING AND SERVING

Once the lasagna is cooked, you can freeze it.  I just freeze it directly in the bread pans, covering the pan with a layer of saran and then wrapping the thing in aluminum foil.  As an alternative, cut into individual servings and freeze those in appropriately sized microwave and freezer safe containers, and you can pop them into a lunch bag very easily.

To reheat – you could pop the whole thing in the oven at low to medium heat until it warmed through, but I usually just cut out servings onto a plate and warm it in the microwave.

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE?

Prepping the ingredients generally takes a half-hour to an hour for me, depending on how many fresh ingredients I include.  Chopping onions, peeling and chopping garlic, etc, take time.  You can throw things together really quickly if you start with a jar of spaghetti sauce, and buy pre-chopped and pre-grated ingredients and bottled/dried herbs.  Laying out the layers is fast – maybe 10-15 minutes if you’ve got everything prepped ahead of time.  Then of course you can be doing something else while it bakes.  I do BIG batches so I get many meals out of one cooking session. 

So that’s lasagna as a food form rather than a recipe.  What did I forget to mention?

Want to hang a skirt and jacket together?  Pinterest will tell you to use a soda tab but my skirt hangars have a big fat top that doesn’t fit in the hole of a soda pull tab:

So… What else seems to breed in the back of my office drawers?  Paper clips:

‘Nuff said. I read the tip about the soda tabs at least a year ago. Can’t believe it took me this long to follow up. 

I see that cinnamon is supposed to have anti fungal properties, and is recommended for rooting new plants.

This is a planting of kale and chard, by the way.  In January in Houston I plant the cold-hardy fast-growers (can set them outside within three weeks because they’ll survive a frost) and also planting the slower-starting warm-season veggies, like eggplant, peppers, and tomato. 

Squirrels apparently like to dig in nice soft dirt. This is a problem for my newly planted beds.

So, about a bajillion people on pinterest have posted links to articles like this and this, in which the writers say that you can take the stump left from a head of romaine lettuce and re-root it and re-grow more lettuce from it.  Which suggests that at least some types of lettuce are pretty sturdy.

Also I see articles like this one about “cut-and-come-again” harvesting of loose-leafed lettuce, in which  you just chop off the top portion of the lettuce head and leave it and it’ll grow back from the base.  This seems rather consistent with the ability to grow back again from the stump, so I’m starting to see a pattern here.

And it sure seems like it would let you get more lettuce from less space, if this approach works – I strongly suspect that a lettuce stump with an established root system would grow back to harvest-able size faster than a new head would grow from seed, right?

So just tried it.  Went outside, whacked off the top half of the three lettuce heads that are currently big enough to harvest, and made a nice salad (yum!).

We’ll see what happens – whether it grows back, and how long it takes.  I’ll be sure to report back here!

Here is a bed that I have dug out all the previous soil and am going to start fresh.

At this point if you press in the soil you learn it is still quite fluffy and bouncy. That’s good in a way since aerobic composting is faster. But it means you’ll need to mound up the final soil layer so that you won’t end up with a half-full box. 

Last spring I accidentally left my box of seed packets outside, and they got rained on. Realizing that they were therefore probably ruined, I hurriedly planted every single seed, sometimes hands full at a time, in every corner of the garden as well as in dozens of old pots. 

So here are some issues to be grappled with to carry out my rotation scheme:

1.  Balance.  I usually want far more tomatoes and peppers and eggplant and such than I could fit in four little boxes.  But if I do more than four, then the following year I’ll have an over-abundance of some other thing.  So will start my planning at four and see what happens – perhaps will do additional boxes of nightshades which then roll over to compost immediately instead of going on with the rotation?  Have also noticed that the soil level drops a lot after the first “composting” year, probably because so much of the bulk in the box was organic matter breaking down.  So… maybe do a couple extra boxes of nightshades, and at the end of the season, dig the dirt in them out to top off the remaining boxes, leaving a couple extra boxes for compost management and launch the following year?  Also worth noting that peppers often survive the winter in which case they might be “permanent” boxes instead of annual/rotation boxes. 

2.  Sorting out spring and fall.  Really in Houston one should be able to get both a spring and a fall crop of tomatoes.  So where is the room for beets and spinach?  I’m thinking that these things just get planted around the base of the tomato plant in the fall, along with onions since they’re also cold-season growers.  And in spring, could do a very early spinach crop to be harvested in time for a late spring basil crop around the base of the plants.  So then there’s the question about planting the same box spring and fall… which I think I’ll try doing since the fall crop would be expected to be a pretty short one and hopefully can produce before the fungus takes over.

3.  Determinate versus indeterminate – I always wondered why one grows determinate varieties.  I mean, the idea is to have a steady supply of fresh veggies, not a whole slew at once, right?  But as I think about it, I realize that every year, I get only a short window of produce before it gets super hot and the indeterminates stop producing.  By fall they’re so beat up and gross that I want to start fresh with new plants.  So if I planted determinates maybe I’d end up with more total tomatoes.  Clearly the thing to do is experiment.  So, I have planted both this fall:

Indeterminates along the fence, a variety called “Early Girl” which is supposed to mature in 50 days which ought to get me fruit before we get any freezing temperatures, and 

A nice experimental determinate vine, “Celebrity”, on the patio which said 65 days to harvesting – again, it should be safe to get something harvested before there’s a freeze.

Around these I will plant some onion sets and spinach and beet seeds.  Maybe intersperse the spinach and beet plants, assume that the spinach gets harvested as the beets get bigger? 

The home desktop died and hasn’t yet been replaced, which has made it inconvenient to post.

But haven’t been entirely idle even though the summer heat has encouraged me to spend a lot of time just trying to hibernate.

Got in a bit of fall gardening yesterday.  Am still really trying to teach myself to do this effectively; my childhood gardening experiences only take me so far in learning what one has to do to effectively grow fruits and veggies here in Houston.

So.  The first set of research has been around the idea of crop rotations.  Seems like everything is vulnerable to something – tomato plants get fungus, squash or cucumbers succumb to borers, slugs and snails munch the cruciferous veggies and lettuce.  Crop rotation is supposed to help reduce the problems with the tomatoes anyway.

Surfing google tells me that people use rotations that cover three or four years.  The idea is that by three or four years, soil fungus and bug eggs/larvae have probably died off, leaving soil that won’t just attack and eat up that particular type of plant.  Problem is, most sources do not assume the ability to grow two crops (spring and fall) every year.  So I have to think it through a bit better.

SO after quite a bit of reading about what different things need and shuffling ideas around, I am ready to try a four-year cycle that entails pairs of plant families, with spring and fall coverage.  Or rather, a three-year cycle with a rest and recharging in the fourth year. 

In this post I’ll outline the basic rotation; then plan future posts to talk in more detail about each grouping and what I plan to try with each.  The tentative plan assumes I have 16 boxes but of course could expand or shrink this number; just needs to be a multiple of 4.  For my yard plan, I’ve mostly gone with small planting beds – 2×2 raised wood beds, or larger-sized plastic tubs with the bottoms cut out.  So four of my little boxes is like half of one of the standard 4×8 raised beds you see on a lot of plans. 

So here’s the mighty rotation, in picture form:

And if that doesn’t come through clearly here’s the brief list:

1.  In the first year of the rotation, I plan to pair nightshades (tomato, pepper, eggplant, pepper, etc) with the beet and spinach family, and also slip in alliums (garlic, onion, chives) and basil as companion plants.  Lots of additional detail and planning to do here, but tomato fungus is one of the primary reasons I’ve started this whole rotation idea.

2.  In the second year, those boxes would go over to some mix of brassicas (kale, kohlrabi, broccoli, radish, etc) and legumes (beans and sugar snap peas).

3.  For year three, those boxes would now be filled with some combination of cucurbits (squash, cucumbers) and for the cooler weather there’s parsley and carrots (who knew those were in the same family?) and lettuces.

4.  And, the fourth year is a chance to plant odd-ball families like sweet potatoes (did you know they’re actually related to morning glories), and give the boxes at least one season of rest during which I will add a bunch of compost to raise up the soil levels in the box, maybe plant a nitrogen-fixing cover crop like alfalfa or clover to prevent weed growth and further enrich the soil.

One thing I like about this plan is that it gives me a good place to KEEP compost to minimize the amount I have sitting around in bins.  Emptying the compost bin into the beds and covering the compost with a pretty cover crop strikes me as a good solution to help handle the influx of yard clippings in spring and leaves in fall. And by using all that material more effectively I hope to lessen my contribution to city landfills, and also decrease my need to purchase soil or compost from the local big box store.

In reality, this plan won’t be a stable “rotation” for many many years.  For one thing, I haven’t half finished my plans for building out the garden design.  And things will also need to shift around to accommodate other changes, like my fruit trees getting bigger.  In the end I expect to have more than 16 little planting boxes available for edibles around the yard, which is a good thing because I’ll need additional boxes to house perennials and herbs (rosemary, lemon grass, thyme, sage, oregano, mint, etc) as well as natural biennials (parsley) and annual veggies that inexplicably decide to become perennial in my yard, like these broccoli plants that have cheerfully ignored two hot summers now including one of the worst droughts we’ve seen in decades:

So yeah, that’s the plan.  More ruminating on it later.