Sugarplum Fairy

Our fridge, once again, has become out of control. While our freezer is holding strong I have had to be somewhat creative with the items in the fridge and moving them out.



Just look at this sad state of affairs. It's sickening. But no matter. I would just have to buckle down and start putting this stuff to use.



Except I forgot that we had another fresh batch of vegetables arriving today!

This week we got: three pounds of tomatoes, a basket of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, a bunch of summer spinach, some more edamame, another Wala Wala onion, a bunch of carrots, two lilac peppers, three cucumbers, a bunch of lime basil, three serrano hot peppers, a bag of Red Clap pears, Ruby Queen Red Plums and Ruby Queen Black Plums.



The thing about edamame branches is that they take up a huge amount of space and yield a tiny amount of pods.



Here is the bunch of edamame branches with a size 10 men's shoe for scale.



And here is that same branch and shoe with the pods removed. Note that these are pods with tiny beans in them. The total yield of edible beans is probably about one cup whereas the bean pods are about enough to fill a size 10 men's shoe. Not that I tested that, I'm just estimating, of course.

The good news is that a Google search for "edamame pods separated with shoe" brings this picture up as the #1 search result! I'm figuring that is going to drive a lot of traffic to this site.



I used the edamame beans, which I lightly steamed in their pods, along with slices of the farm tomato to make this salad along with the farm spinach, a drizzle of sesame oil, a little soy sauce, and some sichuan pepper.



For the main dish I grilled up this pork loin chop from Lucki7 Livestock. I rubbed it with some of last week's farm thyme and a little Meat Magic before throwing it onto the grill.



I also threw the thyme stems onto the grill. This was something we were always doing in restaurants. Instead of throwing the stems away we would throw them onto the grill in hopes that some minute amount of flavor would make its way to the meat. Sadly I'm afraid that the only affect it had was in making the kitchen smell like weed.



Yesterday Jen made a chutney out of our sugarplums which is good because I'd somewhat given up on sugarplum creativity. She made this by boiling water, sugar, vinegar, ginger, garlic, sugarplums and apples then added some orange peel and cinnamon.

It's so nice to have a wife that comes up with sugarplum ideas. I guess you could just always eat them plain but that's would be even more boring to read about than our uses for them!



The beer I selected was this Aventinus from G. Schneider & Sohn. This one has been in the fridge for a while. Supposedly it goes well with grilled meats. Grilled meat sounds like a good pairing for just about any beer.

The website shows the most absurdly wonderful glass to drink it from. Unfortunately that glass is not in my arsenal so I was forced to resort to this lowly weizen glass.

However, now I know what to ask for for Christmas.