house potatoes

Eggs galore. The buff and the araucana both laid eggs yesterday (consecutive days for the araucana). With a couple of eggs in hand, decided to try making mayonnaise. Turns out, mayo is really simple to make. Next time, have to go a little easier on the granulated garlic (1/4 tsp this time) and the salt (1 tsp table salt) and a little heavier on the acid (1 tbsp lemon + 1/4 tsp vinegar) and the sugar (1/2 tsp).

Since I would’ve added granulated garlic and salt anyway, made a tuna fish salad sandwich. Yum. Going to use what’s left on fries.

This post is picture heavy, but I think it’s worth it.

Last week, the buff orpington and the araucana (easter egger) started running up to me and flattening out like so:

While they’re squatting in this position, they let me scratch their backs and ruffle their feathers pretty much however I want. It’s fun (they’re super soft), and it’s also a sign that they’re ready to start laying eggs soon.

Sure enough, was treated to this sight last Friday! (courtesy of the buff – not pictured)

It’s tiny, but nicely shaped.

We decided to hard boil it. Fresh eggs are always really hard to peel. Delicious…

The buff gave us another egg on Sunday.

Fried over-medium this time with some sungold tomatoes from the garden. Mmm…

Monday, the araucana gave us her first egg! She decided to lay it in a pile of poop… Need to build them a nest box soon.

From Hula Grill, Ka’anapali beach, Maui, Hawaii:

Here’s what they look like at week 2 and week 4.  That’s a total of ~3 weeks of massaging every few days, giving it a quarter rotation each time.

The sugary coating doesn’t surface until they’re almost all dried, about 3 weeks in.

It was as tasty as I thought it would be.  The texture is densely chewy but moist, and the flavor is richly full of persimmon. Success!

Things learned:

• If at any point, peeling the persimmon feels like peeling a peach rather than a potato (particularly near the tip), the persimmon was picked too late.  There’s too much moisture inside to dry well this way — I lost the entire 2nd batch picked in early December to mold after a week.  Stick it in the oven or use it in baking instead.
• The top dries out first, so be diligent about distributing the innards when massaging.

Made matcha macarons with a lime Swiss buttercream filling.

Getting the macarons to turn out right is definitely about technique. I used the recipe and advice from this blog post. The section on ‘screwups – causes and remedies’ was particularly helpful after having gone through the process once. This post gives some more basic background info on macaron methods and the filling.

When you mix the batter enough, your dollops should spread slightly and smooth out a lot.

When you don’t mix the batter enough, it’s really thick. Not only does the batter not spread and smooth (leaving you with lumpy looking cookies), it can even be so hard to pipe that you bust a seam on a plastic piping bag (gooey, oozy, messy).

Some of my own thoughts to add to the Not So Humble Pie advice:

• I couldn’t find any dehydrated egg whites at Safeway, but did at Whole Foods.
• Bob’s Red Mill Almond Flour isn’t well ground. If you sift it, only about a third will make it through. The rest can be used for pancakes or lumpy macarons.
• When you combine sifted almond flour with sifted confectioner’s sugar, there may be a bit of binding between the two. Either that or some grainy almond flour made it through the first sift. I’m going to try different almond flour and maybe different sugar to see if I can avoid the lumps.
• Piping from a cut ziplock bag can work, but for me it squeezed out oblong instead of round so I couldn’t just pipe in the center and leave it. Going to get a proper piping tip for future attempts.
• Going to try a French buttercream next time to make use of the leftover yolks.

Here’s what it looked like after ~5 days of drying. A bit wrinkly with brown speckles.

I couldn’t help it … I went ahead and massaged them very gently. It felt weirdly soft and firm and leathery. Kind of like old hands.

Here’s what it looked like the morning after: there’s some translucency showing through, which makes me think that maybe I was too impatient and now all the jellified insides are trying to seep out.

I picked 8 persimmons as a first test batch (and because they were the only ones I could reach).  They’re still a bit greenish-yellow at the tops, so I hope that’s ok.  Here they are freshly peeled and hanging.  They’re supposed to dry for a week before you mess with them.

Notes:
- The flesh is thinner at the bottom than top, so be careful peeling
- I hung them inside off of a wire shelf, so that I don’t have to deal with rain and animals
- The instructables by farmer jeff (from the last persimmon post) has a lot of handy tips, like what to do if you peel a bit too deeply (patch it up), and a note about staining your hands (I wore disposable kitchen gloves)
- I didn’t bother cutting the shoulders entirely off / flat.  I figured that was more a simplification for large producers.

Omurice (オムライス) from Edoya in Azabujuban, Tokyo:

This was one of the dishes I wanted to try in Japan since we make omelette rice all the time at home.  It’s really just a simple meal to use up leftovers — fried rice, with a hard-set omelette on top, and oodles of ketchup.  But I’d never had it at a restaurant with demiglace (like in the jdrama Lunch Queen) or properly fluffy half-cooked omelette (like in the movie Tampopo).

It doesn’t look like much, but it was so very good.

Incidentally, Edoya is also a very cute old-fashioned place to go eat Japanese-style Western cuisine.  Their hamburger steak, cream croquettes, kabocha soup, and crab-fry were all tasty.  Sit at the counter to be able to watch them cook.  On weekends, the omurice is only available at lunch-time.

Another aside: Hayashi-rice is yet another simple western-style Japanese rice dish worth trying, there’s a shop in Tokyo Midtown, Roppongi.

One of the first things I’m going to do when I get home is to attempt making hoshigaki (干し柿).

We have a beautiful (and too tall) astringent-type persimmon tree at home — I assume it’s Hachiya. Steve and I never eat them because waiting until they’re edible means that they’re this weird mushy texture.

But, I heard about this Japanese method of preserving and drying persimmons about half a year ago. The special massaging-as-you-dry gets rid of the astringency, and you end up with a dried whole persimmon with a white bloom of sugar on the outside.  It’s very time and labor intensive, and is one of the listed items on Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste.  I’ve never eaten one, but I do like regular dried persimmons, and my coworkers all say it tastes good.

a persimmon from our tree in 2008

Research gathered so far:

• step by step photo instructions (English)
• step by step photo instructions (Japanese – translated)
• photos of all the stages (Japanese)
• more instructions (Japanese – translated)
• a very good set of instructional Youtube videos — this is the only place where I could tell what “massaging” actually meant.
• Otow Orchards has a photo slide show of their process (English)

The general steps seem to be: 1: peel and hang on strings 2: let the outside dry a week, 3: massage every three days until it’s dry, about 2 weeks.  There’s an optional blanch-in-boiling-water step between 1 and 2.

Can’t wait, I hope it’s not too late to start!

An interpretation from Aronia de Takazawa in Akasaka, Tokyo.

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It was a great experience … delicious interesting food, good company, friendly hosts.  The full menu that night was:

• Ratatouille
• Green Lemon foam
  on the most amazing oyster ever – photo here
• Takazawa’s Farm in Autumn
• Tea Time
• EZO-Venison Tartar
• Candleholder
• Breakfast at Aronia de Takazawa
• In a Balloon!
• Dinner in the Forest
  there was a log!  and mushrooms and beef and root veggies and such
• Macadamia Nut
• Chocolate Lava

We actually have photos of every dish, if you’re interested in seeing them.