The water feature in my garden.

photo (c) Acorn Landscaping

It's spring here in California, and when California springs, it doesn't kid around. I've completely lost count of the number of hours I have spent in the garden over the last two weeks. Weeding, pruning, fertilizing (organic), spraying (Safer Soap, etc.) Then there's "The Farm" - turning the soil, tilling and cultivating, pulling old carrots and planting new ones, planting corn, tomatoes, peppers, cantaloupe, cucumbers, zucchini, patty pan squash, herbs... Then there's the spring harvests - crazy amounts of chard and fava beans. On top of that I have to do something with all that food.

Busy, busy, busy.

Spring in the garden is always a busy time, but this year it is doubly so because my garden will be featured in the Hillside Gardeners of Montclair garden tour, May 1. This is a wonderful tour of gardens in Oakland's Montclair district that raises funds for various horticultural educational projects. I'm very pleased and honored to have my garden on the tour. However, it is an extra challenge because I want to time things so that by May 1 my garden looks perfect, but I also want it to look untouched. Perfect but effortless. No easy feat.

As if that weren't enough, I noticed that the Hillside Gardener's of Montclair didn't have a web site (tsk, tsk.) To my surprise, HillsideGardeners.com was available! So, I registered it and created a web site for them.

Busy, busy, busy!

Ingredients:

Method:


For my coconut sorbet I start with Ming's Perfectly Simple Coconut Sorbet from Food.com, but there are two things I don't like about this recipe. Most important I feel like there is much too much shredded coconut. I also find it too sweet. Nonetheless, it could hardly be easier. So, check that out and note my comments on that page.

A few weeks ago I posted a blog about gin flavored waffles. I decided to submit it to PunkDomestics.com in their "Infusions and Liquors" section. I knew that it didn't really count as an infusion or liquor, but it seemed like such a unique way of using gin that they might like it anyway. Well, it wasn't much of a surprise that gin flavored waffles didn't fit the criteria for PunkDomestics. However, they did say that if it had been waffle flavored gin that would've been another story. Of course, waffle flavored gin is a ridiculous notion. Or is it? Waffle flavored gin? It was too much of a challenge to ignore. So I sat down with some waffles and a glass of gin and thought about what waffle flavored gin would be.

The biggest hurdle was that waffles themselves have a very subtle flavor. They are really much more about texture than taste. Making a waffle flavored liquid inherently eliminates that textural element. Perhaps Nathan Mhyrvold has some magic that will give a liquid the texture of a waffle. If so, I am not privy to it.

But what about the flavor of a plain waffle; assuming there are no berries, nuts, or other flavorings added, an unadorned waffle is slightly sweet and has nice elements of caramelized flour. That's about it. It is a "quick bread," so there is no yeast involved and none of those yeasty flavors that you get in bread that uses "biological leveners." The egg and milk in a waffle seem to contribute little or nothing to its flavor. There are subtleties to waffle flavor that can make one waffle better than another, but unless we're talking about a burnt waffle, they are all so delicate that alcohol obliterates them. I concluded that waffle flavored gin was about the experience of eating waffles and drinking gin, not about trying to actually make gin take on the flavor of a naked waffle.

 

Most of us in the USA use waffles as a substrate for butter and syrup. A quick survey of some of my waffle-loving friends confirmed that they prefer waffles to pancakes because the texture is crunchy and the holes hold onto the melting butter and maple syrup. Since crunchiness was already ruled out, it seemed to me that it was butter, maple syrup, and caramelized flour that would define the waffle eating experience in a liquor.

The next question was the gin. The most common type of gin in America, London dry gin, is a spirit with a fairly high alcohol content infused with herbs, principally juniper berries. The flavorings other than juniper in gin vary from maker to maker. Taken straight, gin is a very powerful flavor. There was no way that any component of the "waffle experience" would survive infusion into gin. I decided that for my waffle flavored gin I would start with relatively flavorless vodka and add elements of juniper and waffle in a way that would provide a pleasing balance.

What follows is my experiment creating waffle flavored gin. To be honest, when I started I did not expect to succeed. However, to my surprise I did indeed create an alcoholic beverage that I believe provides the experience of waffle flavored gin. Is it good? I think so. Would I want to drink it every day? No, not really, its a bit on the sweet side. Is waffle flavored gin a good idea? Well, that's for you to decide; all I can say is that waffle flavored gin turns out to be feasible, whether or not it is desirable.

I'm afraid there are no measurements here – I played it entirely by taste, you'll have to do the same.

For the "waffle experience" I started by coarsely shredding a waffle and putting it in a pint mason jar. To this I added a couple tablespoons of maple syrup and two or three tablespoons of ghee. I used ghee because I wanted that buttery flavor, but I was worried about butter going rancid. I figured ghee in alcohol in a closed container would last just fine at room temperature, and I was right.

 

I replace my herbs and spices on a regular basis. The whole point of herbs and spices is that they're full of volatile flavonoids. If they weren't volatile we wouldn't be able to smell them or taste them as strongly as we do. Their volatility (ability to be easily vaporized) is both their strength and their Achilles' heel – these flavors which we prize breakdown quickly. Unfortunately, herbs and spices have a second drawback: they tend to be expensive.

A couple of years ago I was at my local Whole Foods (then the one in Berkeley, California,) replacing my collection of aged spices. Along with my other grocery items I had a jumble of little glass bottles of spices in my cart. Heading towards the produce department I noticed the display of bulk herbs that I had never paid attention to before. I had often bought cereal, grains, and dried fruit from Whole Foods' bulk bins, but somehow the herb department had slipped my notice (possibly because at the time it was located in cosmetics and medicines, with culinary and medicinal herbs intermingled – in Berkeley it has since been relocated to the same place as the other bulk foods.)

This particular day, having noticed the bulk herbs and spices for the first time, I decided to compare what I had in my cart to what was being sold in bulk. I was stunned at the price differential. I knew that the bulk grains and fruits were cheaper than their prepackaged counterparts, but the difference in cost for herbs and spices was astounding. I filled baggies with all the products I needed, then returned those little glass bottles to the shelves where they belong. At home, rather than throwing away the old bottles and replacing them with new, I poured out the old contents, refilling the bottles with the fresh, vibrant, herbs and spices I had bought in bulk.

Recently, I was at Berkeley Bowl (a local natural grocery store.) In their bulk department I noticed a bin of large grain sea salt. I was out of sel gros and had it on my shopping list. The price at Berkeley Bowl for sea salt in the bulk department was $.80 a pound. The price for my usual brand was $4.99 for a 1.5 pound canister. So now I am buying my salt in bulk too.

There are two other great benefits to buying in bulk; first, you can buy much smaller amounts of those spices you use infrequently. I’ve never made it through a bottle of cloves before I considered them too old to use. Now I buy half an ounce at a time, so they’re always super-fresh and there is no waste. Also, I am no longer disposing of all those bottles. Sure, they don’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things, but every bit helps.

When I tell people about this they are almost universally as surprised as I was. So I figured I would pass on the tip – just remember, if you're shopping at Whole Foods in Oakland or Berkeley, or at Berkeley Bowl, leave some for me ;-)

For illustration, the following are some of the prices for a few bulk spices and for salt from the Oakland Whole Foods, and their corresponding prices for those products in packages. Note that sometimes there is not a perfect comparison, as in many cases the packaged product is available under different brands at different prices. These numbers are solely for illustration, prices in your area and for your favorite brands will certainly be different. For convenience I have converted all weights to ounces. [Check out the vanilla for the truly crazy price difference.]

I mentioned in my original blog entry about the Herb and Seed Cleaning that I wasn't satisfied with the way I had used a cardboard box to act as the catch basin and hold the levels in place. It worked, but it was a clunky hack. I had a large sheet of Masonite lying around, so I used some of it to make a base for the unit and as side-panels to hold the levels together. It still ain't headed for the Museum of Modern Art, but it is now a much slicker, cleaner implementation, and stores more easily as well.

For the base, I simply cut a rectangle of the appropriate size and nailed it on with 5/8" bright wire nails. The pieces of Masonite that act as guides/braces for the sides are just 3"x3" squares screwed on with a variety of small screws from the big can-o'-miscellaneous-screws.

If you have any more improvements to suggest, please let me know!

UPDATE: November 2013:

I decided to an additional top level to my herb and seed cleaner. This new level uses chicken-wire as its screen. There were several cases where I wished that I had a very gross first filter; notably peas and beans, and also seeds like basil where the seedpods remain attached to a long flower stalk. My new chicken-wire layer catches many of the large pea and bean pods, and the dried flower stalks of basil, dill, and other plants. A fair amount of unwanted material does fall through the large gauge of the chicken-wire, but it catches enough big pieces to make further processing at the 1/4" hardware-cloth level much easier.