WEEKEND ON THE GRILL: Asian Inspired Marinated Beef

Sometimes, I get in a rut on the barbecue...steaks, chops, hot dogs, burgers, chicken...and just want to break out and do something different. Lately, we've been watching some travel shows and drooling over the food shown from Thailand, Vietnam, China, and Japan. I want to make something more like that.

A few weeks ago, we had a cheap, easy version of a teriyaki bowl featuring Trader Joe's Korean inspired Bool Kogi. Today, we're doing it from scratch.

I've put together a very tasty marinade and am letting my skirt steak soak in it overnight, then will grill it up and see how good we can get it.

First, the ingredients:

Marinade:
1/4 cup - Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup - low sodium soy sauce
3 teaspoons - honey
1 tablespoon - olive oil
1 teaspoon - Chinese five-spice powder
1 teaspoon - mince garlic

Plus:
2 lbs - skirt steak
3 - sliced green onions

Mix the ingredients for the marinade, put steak in sealable bowl or plastic bag. Pour marinade in to soak and refrigerate overnight.  Cook on grill, 3 minutes per side over direct head and 5 minutes per side over indirect heat, covered.

On the side, I'm making grilled corn on the cob, elote style. I've steamed some corn, cut each cob in half, and then cook over direct coals, 5 minutes per side. Apply some mayonnaise and parmesan cheese before serving.

In addition, I'm cooking some zucchini in foil and grilling pineapple slices...5 minutes per side direct heat...putting a few mandarin orange slices and serving all up on a bowl over rice.

Add the green onion over the top after you've put it all in a bowl.

The leftovers also make a superior steak 'n eggs omelet for the next day's breakfast.

This week's gardening:
Picking weeds out of the lawn, deadheading the roses for the last time in the season, spraying deer repellent on the front yard bushes.

Stop by the Musick Channel Garage Sale to pick up some treasures from our stash of over thirty years of collecting, like these great Liberty Falls collectibles which would look great under your Christmas tree.

Darryl Musick
Copyright 2018 - All Rights Reserved

Casualties of War

Just when I thought my garden was going good...

Among the crops I planted for this year's vegetable garden were three varieties of corn.  Corn has always at least done a bit well for me and this year's crop was looking very good.

Then, on trash day when I brought the cans back in, I saw this...

Something, I guessing a local raccoon, decided to eat the whole lot. All of it. Every bit.

I guess it's just supermarket corn for us this year.

The horror...the horror...

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Super Sides: Creamed Corn

While corn on the cob is good, I have to admit I don't like eating with my hands like that.

Instead, I'll make a fresh corn dish that I can eat with utensils. You know...like a civilized person.

INGREDIENTS
3 cobs of fresh, sweet corn (1 for each person)
1 1/2 cups low fat milk
3 tablespoons flour
3 tablespoons melted butter
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 cup half and half

Remove the kernels from the cob into the bowl. Don't know how? Click here.

Boil the corn for 10 minutes.

Strain and put into a bowl for later.

Melt the butter in a small sauce pan.

Stir in the flour thoroughly.

Add the milk, about a half cup at a time.

After it thickens a bit, add the pepper, sugar,  then the corn.  Stir it in.

Turn off the heat, stir in the corn and the half and half.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Deacon Blues

"They got a name for the winners in the world, I wanna name when I lose. They call Alabama the Crimson Tide...call me Deacon Blues."
Deacon Blues
Steely Dan

Last week, I showed you some of the winners of the garden. This week, it's the losers' turn. Luckily we didn't have too many. Last year was an almost complete lost season. This year is much, much better.

I'm not complaining at all but let's see what didn't work this year.

At the top of the page is our grape vine, which is always a challenge. One year I got 50 pounds of grapes. The next, all the local animals ate them before they ripened. In the years since, I've tried various methods to keep the animals out and have had limited to no success.

This years, I kept the animals out by wrapping the clusters in nets but the resulting fruit was tiny and cracked.  Not nearly as good as the grapes I got at the farmers market for $2 a pound.  I'm just going to let the plant alone next year and see what happens.

The zucchini, usually the most prolific plant in the garden, only produced two very small fruit over the season.  I'll try a different variety next year.

I believe the corn was a victim of an unnoticed clogged sprinkler at the beginning of the season. It never came back.

The severe drought we're experiencing also hit some of the plants. These roses have no blooms because the deer have been coming down from the dry mountains in search of food. They found a taste for the flowers and eat them up as soon as they bloom.

Maybe next year we'll get that El Nino we keep waiting for and the deer can return home.

This rose just gave up the ghost.  I think I'll replace it with a Saint Patrick rose.

The biggest victim is the lawn, which is really a victim of the law. We're mandated not to water it more than two days a week, 15 minutes at a time.  With no shade at all, it just couldn't handle that diet so dormancy kicked in and it's just straw now.

I'm hoping we'll get enough water this year that I can overseed with a heat-resistant blend for next year.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Caught in the Act!

Here are some of the deer that have been coming down from the nearby mountains to feed on my front yard rose garden. This one is helping itself to my nextdoor neighbor's holly topiary.

The drought is serious, folks.  These animals, and many more like them, are really feeling the brunt of it. They can have my roses until the rain returns.

Luckily, the bulk of my garden is behind a tall wall in the backyard, let's see how it's faring this week.

Tomatoes! I'm loving my tomato plants this year. Here, the hanging cherry tomatoes are reddening up. My son and I sampled but they're a bit tart at a redder color than this so we'll let them ripening for quite some time before harvesting. There are a ton of them on the basket.

That's in contrast to last year where I could count my entire tomato harvest on one hand. This hybrid is giving the cherry tomatoes a run in the numbers game and the big ones are the size of a baseball.

I was sweating a little over the heirloom plant but it's getting some nice fruit on it too, now.

In our citrus grove, we've got Myer lemons on the branches...

...more fruit on our Cara Cara orange...

...and a few late blooming Cara Cara flowers, too.

I had a micro-sprinkler clog and I think it affected our corn adversely. I replaced it but I don't know how this will do. In this drought-affected garden, however, it's sink or swim. We'll see if we can get anything edible out of it.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Keeping up Appearances

Checking into the status of the garden. First, in this era a megadroughts, how about a look at water usage? It's raining today, that's good, but we're still under rationing.

Last month's bill was $17 and change. this compared to the same time last year when we paid, well, more (the water company's website is down and I can't look up last year's bill right now). There is also a strange credit on the bill of a couple of bucks, called the "CA: LA Payment Assistance" credit, that I don't know what it's for but in water usage, we used 6,732 gallons this May and 7,480 gallons last May.

My next door neighbor, who has a large green lawn that she only waters once a week, has a bill over $180 for the same period. Yikes!

The tomatoes are busting out all over. Many fruit on our hybrid plant and cherry tomato plant. The heirloom plant is showing lots of flowers but no fruit yet.

Our chiles are doing better this year. I used this Anaheim chile in our eggs this weekend and there's some gorgeous pasilla chiles on another plant. I'll maked stuffed peppers out of them someday.

Got six ears of corn showing so far. 

The grapes are showing slight signs of smut so I hit them with some sulfur dust on Sunday.

My wife made me take the cage off of our zucchini, now it's showing signs of animal damage and I still haven't gotten any fruit. I put the cage back on, let's see how it does.

It's June. The vendor at the farmers market who sold us the dragon fruit plants told me to cut back by a third and we should see flowers by May. I did. Got lot's of new growth but no flowers or fruit yet.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Deep Sixing the Seedlings

OK, 4 weeks in the nursery is enough. Time for you kids to go out and earn your keep.

At two weeks, they were poking their tiny, little shoots above the mix.

Three weeks, they were starting to show their differences.

Now at four weeks, they're about to bust the pots...except for the onions, whose leaves still look a little weak.

Tilling the ground with a little Amend and then popping those seedlings into their slots for the season.

The roots are very healthy, as you can see in this pot of corn. They're biodegradable...in fact, already dissolving...so I just pop 'em in the ground.

I need to find something to repel the pests. For now, I'm covering with some chicken wire, watering in, and then tend until harvest.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

This Year's Model (Crop)...

I've decided to start my vegetable garden a month later this year. Instead of planting in January, as I have in years past, I'm starting at the beginning of March.  You can see the crop selection up above.

Last year's garden was the most unproductive I've ever had. The main culprit was the extreme and prolonged drought California experienced.  While the lack of water was one thing (a 50% surcharge was added to the water you used over your allotment), the critters were another.

We live right up against the mountains. The very, very dry mountains.  With no food and little water, the animals were pushed down into the residential neighborhoods below.  This meant deer would eat my roses. Rabbits and squirrels joined the mocking birds and jays, taking turns eating the fruits of our labors, or most often just chewing up the tender new growths of the plants.

They killed our zucchini, decimated our chile plants, and took all our tomatoes.  

Only the tomato plant I had in a hanging basket and our grapes gave me any meaningful crops, and not much at that.

Let's hope I can come up with some strategies of pest repellance if the dry weather makes a comeback.

In the meantime, I'm starting my seeds.  It's a rainy weekend, so this is a great project to do indoors, in the garage.

I got this little 7 pot seed starter kit at Lowe's.  The pots are biodegradeble, so I can just stick 'em in the ground when I'm ready.

My wife has this bag of potting mix for her euphorbias and I'm going to use a little for my seeds.

Filling up each pot with the mix, I tamp down on the soil with my fingers, pushing it down to good seed depth.

I put a few seeds in each pot, cover with mix, tamp down and water in.

Finally, I'm leaving them indoors until they're strong enough to transplant and repel the invaders. They're sitting in a sunny, southern window until then.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved