There are some odd triggers in my culinary habits. One of them is that I've become accustomed to having a supply of duck fat for those times when you just need to cook with duck. (I keep it in the freezer, because I don't use it that quickly.) This means that using up the last of the duck fat is a trigger for picking up a duck to roast. So that's what I did this week. The ducks at Ranch 99 come in several options of scrawniness, but some are "scrawny with lots of subcutaneous fat". So I now have about 1.5 cups of rendered duck fat in the freezer, a container of various bits of breast and thigh meat that will supply 2-3 dinners, and a stockpot full of potenez, the duck & lentil soup I invented to be part of Alpennian cuisine. I should come up with some more Alpennian dishes. It's fun.
The other fun food thing I'm doing at the moment is seeing to what extent I can live off the vegetables from my own estates. I'm currently getting reasonable supplies of tomatoes, squash, eggplant, and chard, with just enough green onions to get by. There are a few staples that aren't convenient for me to grow myself. Iceberg lettuce (and my leaf lettuce isn't enough currently to do my daily salad), corn, mushrooms. I thought I planed cucumbers but not sure what happened to them, so I get the occasional cucumber. And I don't grow my own avocados, not only because the trees take a long time to get established, and because it would take several trees to supply my wants, but also because I loathe and despise cleaning up after avocado trees. The leaves don't compost and they fall fairly constantly. But there you are. I suspect I could reasonably aim to grow all the fruit I need, if I was willing to forego having a long strawberry season. If I keep on top of long-range planning, there are more vegetables where I could grow all I need. Onions are a good possibility but it requires setting up a schedule to start new ones, which I'm working on at the moment. I'm still fiddling with getting the right balance of water to the plants. Last year the tomatoes were getting too much water, this year, not quite enough. Fine-tuning requires making fiddly adjustments to the micro-sprayers and drippers on the plants that don't need as much water, since they're all on the same circuit. Being on the same circuit means I can't simply do different durations. And at some point I'm going to expand to use the fourth circuit on the watering system in the back yard. I'm not sure why my landscaping guy didn't use all four, but since the basic system is all set up, I think I can manage to hook in another line on my own.
And the thing I'm not procrastinating about is writing a podcast script for the show I need to record tonight. So that's it for blogging.
The other fun food thing I'm doing at the moment is seeing to what extent I can live off the vegetables from my own estates. I'm currently getting reasonable supplies of tomatoes, squash, eggplant, and chard, with just enough green onions to get by. There are a few staples that aren't convenient for me to grow myself. Iceberg lettuce (and my leaf lettuce isn't enough currently to do my daily salad), corn, mushrooms. I thought I planed cucumbers but not sure what happened to them, so I get the occasional cucumber. And I don't grow my own avocados, not only because the trees take a long time to get established, and because it would take several trees to supply my wants, but also because I loathe and despise cleaning up after avocado trees. The leaves don't compost and they fall fairly constantly. But there you are. I suspect I could reasonably aim to grow all the fruit I need, if I was willing to forego having a long strawberry season. If I keep on top of long-range planning, there are more vegetables where I could grow all I need. Onions are a good possibility but it requires setting up a schedule to start new ones, which I'm working on at the moment. I'm still fiddling with getting the right balance of water to the plants. Last year the tomatoes were getting too much water, this year, not quite enough. Fine-tuning requires making fiddly adjustments to the micro-sprayers and drippers on the plants that don't need as much water, since they're all on the same circuit. Being on the same circuit means I can't simply do different durations. And at some point I'm going to expand to use the fourth circuit on the watering system in the back yard. I'm not sure why my landscaping guy didn't use all four, but since the basic system is all set up, I think I can manage to hook in another line on my own.
And the thing I'm not procrastinating about is writing a podcast script for the show I need to record tonight. So that's it for blogging.