This was too fun a meal not to share. While the brewery’s undergoing massive renovations to the space, and garden plans for this season have been on hold, we’ve still got to eat. The eggs have been proliferating by the hens week by week, ever since late February. Now we have a surplus, and found ourselves yesterday with a few rare gifts: seitan, from a new local company called Monk’s Meats.
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Friday marked the birthday of brewer Pete, and we managed to surprise him by baking this cake right under his nose. (Or over it, as the new kitchen is directly above the brewery.) I was looking around for chocolate that morning, maybe some leftover bars from a visit by the Mast Brothers. I thought some dark chocolate would go well with a stout-flavored cake, or perhaps one with peanut butter. Or both? But when none turned up, and the only dark beer on tap that day was Sixpoint’s Brownstone Ale, it was a brown ale and peanut butter cake instead.
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So I didn’t tell anyone that I took the last five or six of their dried apricots from the kitchen, which had been left out for more than a week. What I did was chop them up and fold them into a rich, milky concoction of chopped apples, brown sugar, beaten eggs and tears of stale bread. There it stayed to soak for a while. Then into the oven it went, with pats of butter on top.
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As the air gets colder by the day, and the garden spits out its last peppers and cherry tomatoes of the year, it was time for a little cleaning-out of the containers on the roof. Some are still growing radishes planted not too long ago; some still have potatoes branching out every whichway in the soil. I pulled up all the carrots that had been slowly digging deeper into their keg-containers, in three different shades and shapes.
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What to do with a random smattering of peppers, pole beans, cucumber, and cherry tomatoes to harvest on any given day? Well, one of the easiest things you can do is to put them out, fresh, as a fresh salad or crudite platter. After doing this a couple times this late summer, it occurred to me that they would do better with a thick, tangy dip on the side than a thin coat of dressing, so people could snack on them on their own time.
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In a word: we’re totally fine! Yes, Red Hook, Brooklyn was looking to be the eye of Hurricane Irene according to many experts’ forecasts in the few days before it hit the East Coast. But luckily, we chanced out, and our little rooftop garden suffered only a few snapped sunflower stems as a result. Hallelujah, almighty!
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They say you should pick cucumbers before they get too big and start to turn yellow, a sign of over-ripeness. Well, we apparently missed the boat on this one — weeks ago, it seems. While peeking underneath big leaves in a particularly lush and crowded row of the garden, I came across this enormous, deep-orange… thing.
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Yes, it’s Friday, but that means we can still squeeze in a day of playing Name That Plant! There are all sorts of them just now perking up on the roof. Like these little, triangular peppers, with a vivid purple hue. They pack some pretty good heat, too.
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‘Tis the season for deviled eggs — not that anyone here minds eating them all year. It’s also high season for eggs from the hens, who lay almost one a day each. Must be all the spent grain they’re getting, and their yolks are as orange as ever from more leafy greens from the garden to eat.
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I’ve misplaced some of the half-empty seed packets that were used this spring, so it took me a little while to retrace what this plant’s called. But it has definitely been the question of the hour at the brewery, since their stalks are so productive that I’ve been handing out one of these incredibly long, purplish-pink, somewhat string bean-looking objects to everyone and anyone who comes by on any given day.
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