A Crockpot Primer and Two Bean Quinoa Vegetarian Chili

It has come to my attention that I have many friends who have not yet tried using their crockpot. Let me tell you - it is a wonderful and useful thing. I use mine all the time because I love being able to cook without being tied to my stove. On many a non-workday, I can be found in and out of the house running errands while cooking something up in the crockpot. And on workdays, it's nice to come home to dinner all ready - I suggest chopping the vegetables the night before, so that all you have to do in the morning before work is throw everything into the pot and turn it on.



What do I make with my slow cooker?
* Dried beans. I prefer this over cooking dried beans on the stovetop because it eliminates the need for overnight soaking and watching the stove for two hours. I make a big batch and then freeze it in portions.
* Grains like barley and farro. They doesn't take as long as beans - only a few hours. Again, I make a lot to freeze and have some on hand.
* Tomato sauce - recipe coming soon
* Pulled pork or any large cut of meat that benefits from braising, like pot roast or lamb shoulder
* Granola
* Oatmeal - I've been on an overnight steel cut oats kick lately, but I hear you can make them in a slow cooker too.

And most of all, soup. I've been making slow cooked soup a lot lately, since my stove wasn't working for couple weeks in September while they repaired a gas leak in my apartment (typical of old Park Slope brownstones that formerly had gas lighting). The great thing about soups and stews is that you can really use any combination of beans, meat, vegetables and grains that you have on hand, and it will probably taste decent.

Here are some slow cooker soups I've made in the past:
* Farro, kale and bean soup - terrific with poached egg on top
* Lamb and vegetable stew
* Vegetarian baked beans
* Beef, sweet potato and barley stew - this was a favorite last winter and I'll have to recreate the recipe

More recently, this two-bean quinoa chili is my favorite soup invention - I've already made it twice this month. You want to cook it until the tomatoes seem to melt into the broth and the beans are tender and salty. The quinoa thickens it, while the kale provides some texture and color, and the jalapeno and spices generate an overall spicy heat. It's great for warming your insides on these chilly fall nights when your landlord hasn't turned on the heat yet.



Crockpot Two Bean Quinoa Vegetarian Chili

1/2 cup dried black beans or 1 can cooked beans
1/2 cup dried white beans or chickpeas or 1 can cooked beans
1/2 cup quinoa
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
2 jalapeno peppers
4-5 tomatoes
a few stalks of kale (not a full bunch)
4 cups vegetable stock
2 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp turmeric
2 bay leaves

Place the beans and quinoa into the crockpot. Dice the onion, garlic and peppers, followed by the tomatoes and kale (discard kale stems for best results). Place the vegetables over the dry ingredients. Add the stock and spices and stir it together (see below). If using dried beans, cook on low for 7-8 hours. If using canned beans, cook on high for about 4 hours. Makes 4-6 servings

Crockpot Pro-tips:
* I like to stir it only roughly, leaving the dry ingredients primarily on the bottom with the vegetables primarily on the top. This ensures that the beans and grains are all submerged in liquid and will cook fully and evenly. Toward the end (after about 5 or 6 hours) I stir it all together.

* I like to start my crockpot on high for the first hour or so, which gets it warm quickly, and then turn it to low after that, since it will hold in the heat.

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The Challenge of Healthy Eating

For about two months now, I've been trying to follow a restricted diet for health reasons. No alcohol, no coffee, no dairy (except yogurt), no sugar, limited fruit, and no grains except for low-glycemic grains like quinoa and steel-cut oats. It was easy the first couple weeks, but after that it became near-impossible. I've learned a few things about myself and society in the process:

* There are no particular foods that I really miss. In fact, I miss bread and pizza a lot less than I expected. Instead, I miss the overall feeling of indulgence. I've realized that our lives are built around little daily indulgences. A morning cup of coffee with honey. A chocolate chip cookie as a pick-me-up during a terrible afternoon at work. A glass of wine with dinner. The evening walk to get ice cream after dinner. I'm used to being able to eat relatively whatever I want whenever I want it. My days now feel like constant deprivation, as I'm confronted with other people consuming foods I can't have.

* Our society is built around unhealthy eating. In the abstract, reading sample menus for a healthy diet don't sound so bad. Really, it's the exposure to all the tasty, unhealthy food that makes sticking to a diet hard. It feels particularly so in New York City, where temptation is on every block, in every bodega, restaurant, pizza place, ice cream parlor, cafe, bagel store, falafel cart, and so on. I must pass more than a hundred places selling food on my bike ride to and from work. I suppose that's part of the fun of living in New York City -- all the easy access to restaurants and bars that push enjoyment as a lifestyle. They call at me to stop and relax and enjoy myself with a drink and whatever food I want. I imagine it would be easier if I lived in a place with fewer options where I drove directly to and from work. For example, I know was able to diet easily in the summers during college because my setting was restricted to campus without a dining hall.

Moreover, when eating out, it's hard to find meals that don't come with bread or noodles or white rice or fries or chips. Because tasty food is what sells, that's what restaurants and companies sell, sending the message that they're okay and normal to eat. Yet, it would be better for us all if refined grains and processed foods weren't so ubiquitous.

* I thought I had my approach to healthy eating down. I pride myself on incorporating a variety of grains and beans and vegetables into my home cooked meals. I consider whole milk and butter and meat healthy when sourced from grass-fed farms. I like to experiment with natural sweeteners like honey and pureed fruits. I have no problem making whole grain versions of foods like breads and crackers and muffins from scratch, but this doesn't even allow for that.

* I also miss making baked goods not for the tastiness of the sugary confections themselves, but for the act of making something fun and creative that will delight people. I used to bake a lot, as documented on this blog. My baking has waned over the past couple years. Part of that is because of Evan, who is always reminds me how unhealthy baked goods are (yet he eats ice cream every day...). Which is true, and which is why it has always fascinated me that some food bloggers bake seem to bake so often, also given that it's expensive to keep buying all that butter and chocolate. I used to take my friends and coworkers' birthdays as occasions to whip up some new creation. In the two years at my current job, I've brought baked goods into work only a few times. I've been wanting to get back into baking, especially now that fall is here. But alas...

* Which is all to say that I haven't kept to the diet strictly. I make small exceptions to help get myself through the days (and big exceptions on a recent two week vacation in Oregon). And it isn't forever. It's temporary. But it's been a good learning experience that will make me more conscious of what I'm eating going forward.

Have you done any crazy diets? What did you learn from them?

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Yard: Farewell Flowers

This yard was just grass and dirt and ivy and weeds when we moved in, and we transformed it into something better. As I've mentioned before, I took the opportunity to plant flowers in the ground for the first time in my life. I had visions of flowers everywhere, but I soon earned that it actually takes years (or lots of money) for perennial gardens to look lush, because the plants spread a little each year. Even though these plants don't look like much in these photos, most of them should reappear even better next year. So the future tenants will get to reap the rewards of our work more than we did.

I created a bed for wildflower-type perennials. In late May, the blazing sunset geum and salvia were colorful, but the ground looked sparse. 

By early July, those flowers were washed out, and the ground filled in with weeds. Later in July, echinacea and bee balm bloomed here, though I didn't get a picture. There's also some scraggly lavender, which could have used a pruning last fall.

On the other side of the yard, I created a little shade garden, edged by stones that Evan found in the yard. On the left is astilbe, which sends up white flowers in late May. On the right is bleeding heart, which has little pink blooms in May. I added a fern, because that's what a shade garden calls out for. In the middle is a small mound of ajuga, which is supposed to spread quickly as ground cover, but hadn't spread at all - maybe next year. The grassy area within the stones is where the crocuses bloom in early spring. 

An extension of the shade garden, the hostas and dusty miller planted last year were still going strong, with impatiens added for pop of color.

I planted this pincushion in the back of the yard by the daffodil and tulips, but it was lost back there. Another lesson learned: Bulbs are showy enough that they can be planted at the back of a yard, but most other flowers are best situated closer to the windows or patio of one's home, where they will actually be in view.

My parents brought daylilies dug from their yard, which made me feel like I had brought a little piece of their upstate garden to life in Brooklyn.



This bed doesn't look like much, but that greenery actually includes a hosta, a columbine that started blooming at the end of July, and mums that could be blooming now for all I know.

In addition to planting perennials, I tried growing several types of annual flowers (marigolds, zinnias, cosmos, cornflowers) from seed directly in the ground, but they disappointingly didn't come up. The lessons learned about annuals are: perennials go in the ground, and annuals go in containers. And that it's best to just buy annuals as starts that are already blooming from farms/garden stores. Gardeners are able to get a head start in their greenhouses, so it adds pop of color early in the spring, instead of waiting around for your own seeds that may or may not bloom. that annuals are best reserved for container planting. Here are petunias, lobelia and marigolds in hanging containers.

In putting this retrospective together, I realized that even though I took lots of photos of the yard, there were actually more blooms that I forgot to capture. They will live on in my memory with lessons learned for when I have a garden again someday, and in the eyes of the people who live there after us, and for the bees to pollinate.

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Yard: We Went Out Fighting

Unfortunately, we were forced to move out of our beloved apartment this summer. That's the main reason for my absence, as most of my time was filled with moving-related issues. We hoped to call that apartment home for many years, and we invested so much - both emotional and physical energy as well as money - into the yard.



Yet, within a couple weeks, we had to dismantle everything. The chiminea for enjoying warm fires, the rubber patio tiles - purchased to extend the awkward sized patio, the indoor-outdoor hose system, the push lawn mower, the broom, shovel and rake, the dozens of pots, the outdoor lights and candles, the tables and chairs, the mosquito repellent accoutrements. It all had to go to new homes, since our new apartment has just a fire escape. We wanted to move everything, out of spite, but sadly ended up behind leaving the slate stepping stones that we foraged from Evan's farm, as well as the table repurposed from a concrete door.

Ultimately, it's okay that we no longer have that yard, since we felt like we were constantly fighting with it.



From June to October, it was plagued with tropics-level mosquitos that swarmed in the daytime heat and nibbled more discreetly in the dark. We tried many different approaches, none of which worked, but which deserve a post of their own. Because of the bugs, we couldn't lounge outside with a book and a hammock, and we never did host dinner parties around that concrete table.

DIY table and deer antlers

The actual ground was contaminated with high levels of lead, which is a health hazard that also deserves its own post.

the meager vegetable container garden

Since we couldn't use the yard for leisure, we thought we could use it to grow things, but that didn't go so well. Our summer growing season went much like our first failed fall growing season. We accumulated many more pots, I developed an addiction to buying seed packets, started seeds inside to transplant, started some outside and bought some starts. It looks like it's off to a decent start in the photos, but most of the baby plants never grew any bigger. I attribute it to both bad soil and lack of light.

overly ambitious seed collection

windowsill seed growing set up

For convenience sake, I picked up lots of Miracle Grow Organic Soil from Home Depot while getting a bunch of other stuff there in early spring. I think their soil has too many chunks of wood and isn't fine enough for seedlings. We later got some quality organic soil from our local garden store and saw a marked difference wherein tomatoes grown in the new soil grew tall and tomatoes grown in the old soil were stunted and yellow. Meanwhile, many of the plants that did grow were eaten by insects. The kale was riddled with holes from some cabbage beetle, and our lush herbs like the lemon balm below were taken out in the blink of an eye by Japanese beetles.

lemon balm later eaten by japanese beetles

Despite an afternoon where my dad helped Evan take down some branches on high with a rope saw, our yard was probably too shady for most plants. The tomatoes actually grew too tall, as they stretched ever higher looking for light. We later learned you're supposed to pinch them back to keep that from happening. We sold the tomato plants before any of them ripened. What did we harvest from our yard? A handful of green beans. A handful of kale. We planted garlic last fall, from which we harvested a handful of scapes and about $2 worth of garlic. Each clove only doubled, that was all.

garlic scapes

We hoped to amend the purchased soil with our own compost, but our compost bin didn't work either. We DIY'd compost bins out of two round plastic garbage cans with holes drilled into them. Once a week or so, we'd add new scraps and roll the bins around, but that apparently didn't aerate them enough. Scraps collected last summer/fall still hadn't broken down finely enough by the time we left in July. I guess next time, I'd splurge on bins designed specifically for composting with a crank for aerating. We left the compost bins behind too. Maybe someday they'll turn into compost that someone else there can use.

unfinished compost

I did leave behind a nice legacy of perennial flowers, coming up in the next post.

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To Prep or Not to Prep

A while ago the New York Times ran an article about prepping, as in preparing for disaster, whether it be environmental or economic, saying:

"Prepping is the big short: a bet not just against a city, or a country or a government, but against the whole idea of sustainable civilization. For that reason, it chafes against one of polite society’s last remaining taboos — that the way we live is not simply plagued by certain problems, but is itself insolubly problematic."

This is true, and maybe this is why no one talks about it. But today, I'm talking about it at the Green Phone Booth, wondering what we should be doing to prepare our lives for an uncertain future. Check it out.

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Trying to Shop Eco-Consciously

I'm over at the Green Phone Booth today sharing my seemingly contradictory approaches to shopping for new clothes. On one hand, I get most of my clothes for free from friends, or used at thrift stores. But I'm also willing to spend a lot to buy high quality items now and then. Both are part of my attempt to reduce resource consumption. Read on to find out the challenges involved (hint: shopping is hard and clothes don't always fit) and why it's important in light of the garment industry's ethically and environmentally questionable practices.

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Yard: Evolution of the Bulbs

One of the best gardening decisions I made was to plant bulbs last fall. There's a high level of pay off, since just a few hours of digging results in big, bright blooms to cheer up early spring. Bulbs are great for shady gardens like mine because they show up before tree leaves fill in. It's also nice that crocuses and daffodils will come back and spread year after year. I'm totally going to plant more bulbs this fall, including a mini field of grape hyacinths.

bulbs carefully spaced in a big hole

crocus bulbs hiding under the just planted and stamped ground in the fall

crocuses arrived in march

crocuses, spent a few weeks later

meanwhile, tulips and daffodils peeking up 

daffodils and tulips blooming in late april

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Yard: Signs of Life

So what exactly is happening in the yard?

The lawn is dotted with dandelions. Evan loves dandelion greens, but we can't eat these leaves straight from the ground or we'd get lead poisoning (more on that later). Last weekend, he collected some seeds and planted them in a container to grow dandelions for eating.

We killed off other whole sections of ground cover last summer by ripping out weeds and having pots and a table in the middle of the yard. Now we're trying to fix that by planting grass seed - perennial rye and pasture mix that Evan's parents gave us.

A few perennial wildflowers are reemerging - coneflower, bee balm and something that is black eyed susan or daisy respectively. Around them I scattered marigold, blue cornflower and cosmo seeds. I collected perennial seed packets too because seeds are cheap and I wanted lots of flowers, but only recently realized that perennials don't usually bloom the first year. So I'm kicking myself for not buying more established perennials when they were on sale last fall.

Radishes on the left, arugula on the right. Hope they keep growing.

I planted three mums in the fall, but only one came back, which my mom said is normal. The tall plant seems related to sweet woodruff and hopefully it will produce little white flowers like a wild baby's breath. Those are stinging nettles poking out of the fence. I kinda hoped they wouldn't come back because they really do sting and are a gardening hazard. And again, I can't make nettle tea because of the leaden soil.

Dusty miller thriving after the winter and hostas returning.

The garlic I planted in the fall is going strong, as is kale.

Potted herbs that survived the winter: Catmint, marjoram and parsley. The rosemary and regular mint did not make it. I kept meaning to bring them all inside overwinter but was too lazy to clean off the dirty pots. I'm tempted to put the catmint in the ground. I hear it will spread invasively, but what's so bad about that?







What's peeking up in your yard? Tomorrow I'll show you the bulbs!

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Gardening Brain

I have a bad case of what I'm calling gardening brain. Over winter, while the natural world went dormant, so too did my thoughts about it, leaving me free to think about the rest of my life. But now, for the first time, I'm landscaping, and it's overwhelming. It may be a small yard, but I'm dreaming of looking out my window and seeing greenery and flowers everywhere. I've planted a few things in pots before, but now I'm going back to my flower strewn childhood roots and putting things in the ground, and it's become a preoccupation.

It began in February while it was still snowing, and I created spreadsheets outlining overambitious plans. I sketched out a map that I'm mentally reevaluating as I go along. I'm puttering around in the yard getting too lost in what I should plant where, in what pot or what bed. I'm moving plants around and reseeding when things don't come up quickly and trying to decide whether it's worth it to plant another kind of vegetable seed or pick up another ornamental plant. Evan says he'll get mad if I move another plant around, and then I make him dig holes so I can do it anyway.



On my daily bike rides through the city, I'm paying attention to what's growing in a way I never have before. I'm noticing not just that the daffodils and tulips are up, but the less showy plants next to them too, and how they're arranged. I'm realizing that landscaping is a personal choice chosen from endless possibilities, like fashion, and I'm trying to absorb inspiration from everywhere - from the shady brownstone front yards, the sidewalk planters, the foliage peeking through the fences of community gardens, from walks through the botanic garden. You can be lazy and have a few shrubs or pansies in mounds of mulch or you can work lush magic. I see all the plants and I want them too.



But it's early spring, seeds are in the soil, little sprouts are coming up, my yard isn't thriving yet, and except for the bulbs, there's just a lot of dirt. I'm impatient to know how it's going to grow. I could speed things along by buying lots of already grown plants. But the problem is that gardening can get expensive quickly. As a renter, I'm trying to balance my desire for all the plants with the reality that I'm frugal. There's a wide gap between what I would do if I owned property and what I should reasonably do with this rental property since I don't even know if I'll be here long enough to see the perennials bloom next summer (probably, but who knows). I don't want to invest too much of my time and money - just enough to have enough prettiness.



So I'm sowing seeds, buying starts selectively and reminding myself to wait and see. It's all an experiment, and I must be patient and happy with the daffodils that are blooming and not sad at the dirt that's not.

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Failed Fall Seeds

In a past move, I gained a yard in August, but didn't plant much, thinking the growing season was almost over. I came to regret it, as fall went on and frost didn't hit until November. So when I moved into this apartment last summer, I quickly got to work in early August planting for a fall vegetable harvest.


Radish greens with no radishes underground


Poor little broccoli that died at that size.

I'd done alright growing a few things from seed before, so I thought I would try growing it all from seed rather than starters, since it's so much cheaper -- especially having just spent a lot of money related to the move. However, it was an experiment that largely failed. I direct sowed a variety of cool-weather vegetables - carrots, leeks, kale, mixed greens, arugula, radishes, broccoli, delicata squash, and more, but they all sprouted into little seedlings and then just stalled out.


Kale seedlings, the one plant which actually did get bigger (though not big enough for harvesting) and survived the winter.

I'm not sure why. It shouldn't have been the soil, because I used soil from a few different sources. Maybe it was that I didn't add any compost to the soil myself, but the potting soils I bought had organic matter mixed in, and the garden store owner told me I didn't need to add compost. It may have been the weather, since there was a storm that beat down the two-week oldish seedlings, and they never really recovered. After a couple more weeks, I planted new seeds, but they also stalled out, and I think there was another storm that didn't help matters. It's possible it was something called damping off, which can happen when soil is too wet and fungus attacks the young plants...which is worrisome since the fungus would still be in the soil this year. Another theory is lack of light, since there are several trees overlooking my yard, and trees are at their leafiest in summer when the seeds were planted.

Any gardeners out there have any suggestions for what I could do differently this year?

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