A Kitchen Mess!

Today I was trying to make fugassa.  I have no idea how to spell it.  Some people from other regions call it focaccia and I think there's a regional difference.  I never realized that thing people ate at Panera was supposedly the same thing.  The pronunciation's totally different and the bread itself is--fluffier than I ever remembered.  

Other things I don't know how to spell:
   Tocu
   Tajing Verde
   Pasta chuto con pesto
   Torta
   Poulenta
   Pondusa

And the affectionate:
   fetchabrutta
   fatchabella
depending on if we had behaved or if our grandfather (PopPop) was teasing us : )

There's also a couple of lullaby's we have as a family that I only know the phonetics to, but I digress back to fugassa. 

For the longest time I didn't actually know how to say "Fritata", so forget spelling it.  When my dad made these great leftover Italian omelette's (that aren't omelette's) he'd ask if we wanted a "Fri-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta", but maybe with a few more "ta-ta-ta's" on the end.

I remember my grandfather making fugassa and that it wasn't like a regular bread dough.  It was smoother and we sometimes got to be the ones to poke our fingers in it.  It was drizzled with olive oil and salt on top and it was amazing.    

The recipes I have found are often a mix between pizza dough and a flatter focaccia bread.  Something in between seems about right.

So I mixed up a batch of dough. We let the water, yeast, olive oil and flour (and a touch of dried rosemary) rise while we went out to the store to buy some garlic for another dish.  I think milk might be in the regular recipe, but we were out.  I let it rise once on our little rise spot, punched it down, and set it on the counter to rise again while we were out.  

Here's what we came back to:

"Yeast, When Spores Attack!" 1950.  Scarier than a tomato monster.

 
I am a Messmaker.  It's not really a hereditary "in my blood" kind of thing but I am absolutely a Messmaker.  I can use a pinch of cornstarch to thicken a gravy or dip and it will manage to get all over the entire kitchen and me.  Only a tablespoon may have come out of the container, and I swear a tablespoon went into the dish, but somehow it manages to defy some fundamental laws of matter creation and populate every surface in the kitchen.

I'll admit it, I'm a pretty good cook.  I can creatively and tastefully make use of just about anything and re-purpose leftovers into almost totally new dishes.  My husband (isn't just saying this as a newlywed) enjoys my cooking.

However, he may not always enjoy my messes.  He, I think, affectionately calls me his Messmaker.  I really can't deny that I am the hurricane that manages to spread papers over an entire room while I'm studying for a test, or that I knock over neatly arranged piles because I have yet to remember where this table-corner has always been since we have moved in.

I love my very patient husband.

He loves me, he really does!

  He's a good man.  He's also great with taxes, I'd throw out a solicitation for him, but tax season is over.

Also:

This is what he's so happy about!

So I used the recipe I found from Simply Recipes but I knew the one I was trying to make shouldn't feel quite as much like bread.  So I stopped counting cups of flour and went until it felt like a 3rd grader made pancake batter as sticky as possible.  I have since found a recipe (which again, I can't spell half of) on a forum: http://www.gennarino.org/fugassa.htm  The consistencies of the two doughs are very different, with the latter being less....less like dough.

With my big big big exam tomorrow, I thought a nice fast bread would be tasty.  I'll post more pictures, including the finished, tasty product, when I'm done with this comprehensive exam.  Enough procrastinating, time to redraw the Nitrogen cycle.

I think my goal as a cook and a scientist is sometimes to see how many red squiggly underlines I can get in a single post.  What things that you write about has word processing not caught up with?  What are some dishes your family makes that you either don't have a recipe for, or don't know how to spell because it's an oral tradition?

Easter squashlings

Happy Easter for the folks it's Easter for, and I hope you were able to enjoy the giddy weather!  We've had a few rough storms come through this spring and the plants seemed to have made it through just fine.  I wanted to do some update shots on the different parts of the garden.

 Here are the early shots of the garden with little in it. This, I think is either late February or early March.

Early spring after the bed was put in.  Radishes and peas are planted but not yet sprouted

Tiny garlic sprouting in the corner of the raised bed

Here's what's growing in the corners of the raised bed now:

Garlic!

Onion, Garlic, and a volunteer of purple lettuce. 

Notice how full and lush looking the center of the raised bed is?  We added some soil amendments from our compost pile we've made since moving in.  We've now got some unexpected residents---squash!

Squashlings

At first we saw a few come up, then a few more, and then about 20!  Then we had a hailstorm and a bit of a cold snap and they all died.  I turned over the soil and now....

We've easily got over 20 squashlings again.  I call them squashlings, not because it's necessarily correct, but because we have no idea what they are.  We've eaten cucumber, watermelon, spaghetti squash, acorn squash, butternut squash, pumpkin, maybe even some zucchini?  They all look the same when they first sprout.

Squashlings

 And there are coming up as if they were meant to own this spot.  My husband has grand plans for peppers in this raised bed, so there will either be some selective thinning, or he'll get really good at training these melon squashy things.  They're even coming up from the compost after we turned that over.

Squashlings coming up from the compost

I wonder if they're is more than one type.  Does anyone know how to tell these little guys apart before  they start fruiting?  Well, before the fruit starts changing color?

April 8th plant quiz answer!

 Plant Quiz Answer: 

Starch GrapeHyacinth or Blue-Bottles!  As ID'd through Virginia Tech's Weed Identification Guide Muscari racemosum  


Congrats to both Camille from Red Onion Woodworks and her blog The Wayward Spark, and Jackie who correctly answered (though on not in the comments below).  As promised, I do offer a local pickup of some of the tomato seedlings!  This may or may not work for those on the Western side of things, but it was still fun!

Muscari racemosum

At first, I thought these were onion-grass as our yard in the summertime has a lot of that. I've even cooked with a few of them before. You can definitely tell by the smell when it's onion-grass (or wild-garlic as I've read the two are often confused, both in the Allium genus, bulbs like the lilly family).

I thought my allergies were acting up when it didn't smell like onions.  I don't think this plant is terribly poisonous, because I chomped on the stem a little to see if it tasted like onions.  Don't worry, it was just a little chomp.  chomp.

                                     Top, USDA Allium (onion) example and bottom,
                                                     the racemes of the M. racemosa 


Anyways, the biggest difference was the flowers; they would have been very different.  The University of Madison Wisconsin botany program has a nice display of inflorescence types.  My fast attempt is below:

 Raceme and Umbel Inflorescence 

As the name implies, these grapehyacinth flowers are in a raceme (racemosa) which means they are a group of indeterminate flowers (oldest at the bottom) attached similar to the way a french braid looks.  In fact, it's a lot like an upside down french-braid come to think of it...   But the flowers are fairly tightly packed and in Bob Ross terms, the one above is a happy raceme, ours is a sad raceme--see below:

Sad Raceme.  Similar to the M. racemosum but less packed full of flowers

In conclusion: the Allium genus is typified by its umbellate inflorescence.  Umbell like Umbellerella--no wait...

Again, anyways, they're attached all at the same height on the stem and go out like a fireworks explosion if you look at it from the top.

So, grapehyacinth = umbellerella and allium = explosion.  maybe.  We'll work on this.



Weed'n-seed won't work on these guys by the way (except maybe the blueberry).  The part where they are a bulb, and in the Lilly family (in the broader sense of the term, sensu lato) means they're not broad-leaves like violets, plaintain thingies, or other broad-leafs in the lawn.  They're monocots, like your grass.  Though grasses (sensu lato) aren't bulbs, they too are monocots and the weed'n seed selects out dicots and interrupts their metabolism or just kills them some other way i'm not aware of.
          
     PS--you just learned latin.  A common cattail, Typha latifolia means wide-leaf cattail.  folia = leaf and lato = broad or wide (the same lato that's in sensu lato).  As opposed to the other kind of cattail, Typha angustifolia which has narrower leaves.  I'm not sure if angusti means narrow.  Hmm.  Also, cattails are monocots.

Typha latifolia from the USDA plants database

Blueberries, by the way, do have a similar looking flower from the outside.  They're in the heath family with rhododendron and azaleas (Ericaceae family) which is an acid loving family.  Vaccinium (that's their genus), do have bell looking flowers similar to the Grapehyacinth, but they are not a bulb-bearing family pretty far removed from the lily family.

Vaccinium corymbosum from USDA plants database

Notice the name (specific epitaph) corymbosum.  Its inflorescence is in a corymb.  Similar to an umbel, but not quite.  They tend to remind me of a menorah.  Also, people naming plants are still not creative.

Corymb inflorescence.  Don't laugh at it, it'll hurt its feelings.

What are your thoughts on onion-grass--a useful vegetable that grows in your lawn, or a pesky weed that weed killer doesn't often kill?  Have you ever seen it bloom?  I don't think I have, to be honest.  I can't wait to see its umbel!

More tomatoes!

While my lab testing (wooo, thesis work) is on hold, and I try not to freak out about graduating every 3rd hour, I thought I'd post how the little guys are doing. I'll end this one with a plant quiz! If you're local, you'll win a tomato seedling of your very own!

First up: The tomatoes. On top are the seedlings we were just given last week (aren't they cute!). I think they're happy to have outside light as they have started to put out their true leaves. In just a couple days they might start to look like their older, yet same height, tomato siblings.

Tomato seedlings during the first week of April

Why are my younger seedlings as tall as my older ones, but more spindly? 

Plants have a hormone called auxin that's broken down by the sun, or at least negatively phototactic, meaning it runs away from the sunny side of the plant (plant people forgive me, I've forgotten which).  Since auxin is a growth hormone, wherever there isn't enough light, it persists and the plants grow.  There's an evolutionary advantage to this.  

It's a bit of a crap shoot being a plant and if you grow up in a place where there is little light, there's little chance of survival.  So the mechanism of having a growth hormone active in the absence of light means that a seedling in the dark will grow tall, fast.  This gives it an advantage IF it can find light before it becomes that funny yellow color and gets to tall and thin such that it falls over.  

See how much thinner and taller these little guys are? The power of plant hormones!

This is also how sunflowers follow the sun!  The auxins are only present on the dark side of the sunflower which make that side elongate.  One side of the sunflower is now longer than the other and it will lean towards the shorter side--where the sun is!    

Tomato seedling leaning

It's pretty cool, sunflowers don't reach for the sun, they elongate on the opposite side of the sun!    Who'da thunkit?    The next time you turn your plants that are "reaching for the sun" near a window.  Think about auxins!

I'll post a little bit more plant science when I transplant (things like The Scotts Co. 100645 Miracle-Gro Fast Root Dry Powder Rooting Hormone Plant Food and what's in these kinds of things to make them work).  

Tomatoes do some pretty cool stuff.  Betcha may not have thought about all this science in your garden!  Okay, maybe you did, but it's still cool!  

Okay, as promised, here's the MYSTERY PLANT of the day/week/month (whenever I update): 

Mystery Plant of the Day/Week...whenever.  Inflorescence close-up  (pssst. it's a leafless flowering stem)

Better view of the mystery plant as a whole

 If it's a real stumper, I'll have a clue later on.

Post your guess for the Mystery Plant below!  (Guesses on facebook won't get you the baby tomato plant!)

Garden seedlings

Our seedlings have been rather quiet under our late March cold snap. The sunshine today should really get them going. We received a few more seedlings from my husband's Aunt and it'll give us some variety in tomatoes.

Our tomato seedlings, trying really hard!

Go little guys go!

I'm not sure how our peas, radishes and lettuce will do as the "weed and seed" has gone down on the lawn. I quote a fellow outdoor enthusiast "Naturalists make terrible gardeners and lawn owners."

I'll admit it. I LIKE chickweed! It saved our little pea seedlings from the hail impact. I LIKE violets; I think they're neat little spring flowers and display a neat evolutionary choice in both asexual and sexual reproduction.

I don't think I'll ever really understand the American ideal of a beautiful monoculture of even size grass.

Oh well, that's how it goes till we own our own place!

PS--Aren't the baby tomatoes cute!