Wednesday, December 7, 2022

How to Slow Down Time with Your Mind

Here's another post that is not about food or gardening but it is good for the soul. Who wouldn't want to be able to slow down time with your mind? Hopefully this article from Enoch Tan will help.

How to Slow Down Time with Your Mind

By Enoch Tan 

Your spirit operates outside time and space. When there is an emergency where danger is about to approach you faster than you can normally sense, your spirit will compel you to act quickly without pondering. It directs you through your instinct and reflexes. Think of a time when you moved out of harm's way in an instant and the move was so spontaneous it seems that everything just flowed in the moment. Your awareness of what was happening and your response happened without hesitation, but so quickly that it was almost together at the same time.

That is because your spirit can observe things and sense reality beyond your ordinary rate and range of awareness. Imagine that a dagger is flying towards you from the side. In ordinary rate of awareness, there is simply not enough time to notice the dagger coming and to move out of the way. But in the realm of your spirit’s awareness, time is slowed down to a crawl and it can fully perceive everything that is happening no matter how quickly. It sends the message to you and in that moment you experience the spontaneous and seemingly simultaneous knowing and action. The awareness comes just before the action but it seems that time slows almost to a standstill during that moment of thought. Perception and action become as one.

If you want to consciously perceive faster so that things don’t seem to happen so quickly, you have to slow time down in your consciousness.

It is not time that slows down but you that slows down. See in your mind’s eye and memory things slowing down. Like a picture frame frozen from a movie in motion. It is the way you experience time slowing down or stopping when you see a beautiful person of your dreams.

It would be an advantage for anyone to stop the world or at least make everything appear to move in slow motion. It would give you time to analyze the situation and the actions of everyone and everything around you. It gives you extra time to determine your actions in a pressure situation. This would be incredibly useful in business, driving your car in traffic, playing games, military combat, sports and life threatening situations.

Be Fully Alive to This Moment

Perceptive awareness is being fully alert and living fully in the moment. It is seeing the trees bend in the wind and the way the birds circle overhead. It is sensing how the trees feel and what problems and joy the birds are experiencing. It is experiencing the full moment around us and not just our little thoughts. It is clearing the mind of future events and past replayed scenes, so you can experience the entirety of the current moment in time. It is putting yourself in the full frame picture now in front of you in relationship to everything happening around you. It is being fully alive. With that kind of perceptive awareness, a moment can seem to you to last forever.

A master baseball batter is apparently able to slow things down when he’s at the plate. To everyone else, the ball would be rocketing toward the plate at approximately 100 mph, almost faster than the eye can see. But to the focused athlete, the ball seems to slow down just for him, and present itself to him.

This is what many of the best batters have this in common. Somehow, when they need to slow things down to make their big play, they are able to perceive everything happening in slow motion. The ball rolls slowly up to the plate and is easy to see, often appearing larger than life. It’s almost as if the ball is waiting for them to hit it. To everyone else, the ball is racing to the plate at a blistering speed, curving, sinking, and breaking in ways that make it almost impossible to track, let alone hit.

This is truly time manipulation, since the perception of the person who seems to manage this trick is that time has been stretched longer or made shorter. Since this is the perception of the magician, and becomes the way he acts upon the world, it becomes that person’s own functional reality. It’s really a consciousness shift and an expanded awareness. And yes, it is real magic as we will see.

When playing baseball as a batter, allow yourself to focus consciously on the location and speed of the ball. Clear your mind of all noise and clutter. Get unnecessary thoughts out of your head. Tune out all sound and distraction around you. Simply focus on the baseball being pitched to you. Focus your intent. Imagine hitting it squarely and watching it sail far through the air. Concentrate on your abdomen and visualize projecting energy from this “will center”. You must want to hit the ball and will it to happen. See the ball big and bold. Fixate on the ball. See only the ball and focus your total intent and will on the ball. Did the ball appear to be moving slower than normal? If so, you are well on your way to becoming a master of time manipulation.

For most rapid perception, attention must be at its maximum focus on the area of the thing to be perceived. You must intend to see everything you can in that moment of looking. When you focus only on the thing you are looking at, things surrounding will become dimmer and out of focus while moving in slow motion together with it.

How to Experience Timelessness

To experience timelessness, you need to focus intently on the moment at hand. You cannot allow your mind to wander over events of the past or wallow in deep concern over the future. You must be in the present moment, fully alert and clear headed. In short, you must be totally involved in the “now”.

You must not fear but be calm and have a heightened state of awareness. Fear collapses time. You do not want to collapse time, you want to expand it. Awe is one of the feelings that expands time and slows it down. The opposite is true; things that move in slow motion likeness create a feeling of awe. Fear and awe are very similar and yet very different feelings. Fear causes you to be totally unseeing and blind to the action of the thing you are afraid of in the moment. Awe causes you to be totally seeing and taking in the fullness of what you are looking at.

Scientists have shown that mild anxiety can improve performance in some instances like a 100 meter dash, a musical performance, or even an exam. But for the most part, a full-blown autonomic response is not adaptive in most of these circumstances. These are classic instances of what the Taoists would call getting in your own way.

The ancient Eastern masters from various traditions such as Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Zen, Sufi and many others recognized this feature of the human nervous system, and so found antidotes to it. These were awareness and equanimity. They cultivated a calm temperament through meditation and breathing exercises, which you can think of as strengthening the parasympathetic response.

As a result, the Eastern masters were able to develop a very strong and nearly imperturbable presence. Because they were not getting in their own way, in the face of danger they were pure action, maximally effective. This cultivation fed into a hyper-aware state of mind, which, interestingly enough seems to block out emotion-based responses.

Empathic healers who transfer energy to others in therapeutic touch reach a level of heightened alertness, which is classified as hyper beta brain activity. This is a state of “super alertness” similar to the keen alertness that Zen masters have been observed to reach in closed-eye meditations. In this state, the healer is acutely focused on one thought or activity, tuning out all peripheral distractions.

You can also heal or comfort yourself in this manner. In this heightened state of consciousness, you can focus on any area of pain or injury and send healing energy to that area in thought forms. Similarly, you can use your hands to help or to heal, using your hands to project and conduct that healing energy.

A concentrated mind is not an attentive mind, but a mind that is in the state of awareness can concentrate. Consciousness or awareness is never exclusive, it includes everything. It is not a constricted concentration but a relaxed and free one. When you get into the calm and unperturbed state of mind of conscious awareness, you can perceive easily and nothing can happen too quickly for you. When you are able to slow time down in consciousness, you can use time as the ultimate weapon. Nothing can stop you but you can stop anything. Time is the ultimate illusion. All time is mental.

By using the principle of “it is not time that slows down but you that slows down”, you slow down your actions to slow down the rate of things moving around you in consciousness. Then once you have that increased rate of perception, you can start moving faster again with much greater control and effectiveness. This is the secret of slowing down in order to go faster. Do not hurry because hurry manifests fear and collapses time. Only when you are calm are you able to perceive things in slow motion.

Act as if you have all the time to do everything you want.

Every time you slip up on an action or have a hesitation, it’s because you overlapped a proper sequence of things and it just cancels out in your mind. Maybe it’s because you were in a hurry. Your mind can only do one thing at a time, yet each may be done at the rate of microseconds, giving the illusion of many things at once. If you actually try to do many things at once, nothing happens. We’re referring to the conscious awareness here, although your subconscious can do many things simultaneously. It is your conscious awareness that uses rapid perception in order to slow time down.

Time is an illusion, only consciousness is reality. Who is to say that only a certain amount of things can happen within one second and not more? There are times when people encounter life threatening situation and in the moment, their whole life passed in front of them. As their precious life hung in the balance, for one split second, they took stock of their life, including their loved ones, unfulfilled dreams and unrealized goals and made a momentous decision that saved them in virtually no time at all.

Maybe you experienced moments like this before. It is a state of superconsciousness. Everything seemed to slow down. Things seemed to appear in slow motion. You saw your loved ones and they seemed to be frozen in time. You considered logical arguments and argued them through the steps to completion. All of this takes a long time normally, but for this one instance when you are so sharply focused and alert, you play it all our in one magical moment, a moment that you seemed to control.

You can perceive things in slow motion and still let your thoughts and actions flow at the “same speed”. It is all relativity. To you, time around you slows down but to an outside observer, you become phenomenally precise and in control. When you are able to perceive faster, you also possess the ability to respond faster. Each second of your time becomes stretched and you can have increased rate of movement within it. Your time is increased compared to other people’s. Those watching with normal rate of consciousness will see you moving like flashes of lightning with sudden bolts of speed.

You can also use your mind to increase your own rate of movement to phenomenal levels. Think of yourself moving at extremely high speed that is beyond the ordinary. And act with that mental state. Think speed and you manifest speed. Time manipulation and phenomenally fast movement like all mind powers, require you to be in the right state of consciousness to be of effect.

The best ballplayers, it seems, have learned how to manipulate time whenever it suits them. Perhaps they do this without a great deal of thought or analysis, but they certainly employ all of the key factors of time magicians. They focus their intent, engage their will power, and energize their thought forms. This is personal magic. This is personal power. Everyone can do it. The superstars just do it more easily and more often than the rest of us. We say that they are gifted or superhuman. They are simply focused, intent and willful.

All champions have one thing in common, they have learned to seize the moment. No matter what situation we are in, there is always a cubic centimeter of chance that appears in the moment for us to accomplish what we want. The trick is to be alert enough to seize the moment and then have enough personal power to execute the appropriate move at the appropriate instance. Impeccable warriors are fully alert and fully aware of the physical world.

Everybody knows that under normal conditions when heroics are not on the line, a person cannot pass a ball through a crowd to a selected teammate who scores, all in less than one second. Under normal circumstances, most people cannot even locate a person in a crowd in less than one second, let alone pass the ball to him. This demonstrates over and over again the elasticity of time.

There’s a young swimmer who came out of nowhere at the end of a race to eclipse the field. She always found a way to win, and would “pick her spot” to “make her move.” Still, it seemed uncanny how she could close the big gap between herself and the race leader at the end, when you consider she had to swim nearly twice as fast as she had been swimming throughout the rest of the race.

It’s like the track sprinter who digs down at the end of the race to bolt like a cannon to victory at the end. To the observer, it looks as thought they are running against opponents who are moving in slow motion. How can somebody who’s been running at top speed suddenly double that speed at the end of a race, when they should be the most tired? It’s an obvious display of will power, focused intent, and energized thought power, whereby they conceive of miraculous victory and believe it is possible. And whatever our consciousness can conceive, the body can achieve. Since everything is consciousness, the physical world is only an illusion.

Move into the "Zone" of Higher Performance

You can cope with daily emergency situations and daily challenges where you need extra time and powers that heightened awareness affords you. You can run faster in less time and slow down events when needed by altering your perception of time and space. Some of the greatest athletes do it. Heroic rescue teams do it. You can do it too.

You can meditate anywhere and reach a state of heightened consciousness and timelessness. Surely, star athletes in action do not stop everything that they are doing to sit down in perfect posture and slowly number their bodies to enter this state. They have learned to do it within the flow of events. They pop in and out of this state, as needed. They do it quickly and almost effortlessly with practice. It becomes a learned behavior. Soon your total self will sense the opportunity or need and shift you to that new, higher level of consciousness. Then everything slows down in front of you, so that you can respond.

If you watch top athletes who gets into this “zone”, as sports people often call it, you will notice that their eyes seem to glaze over or close halfway for a brief time. They might even appear to be going into a trance. That trance, of course, is the altered state of consciousness known to meditators. They go into a state of higher consciousness very briefly. A split second can seem to last much longer to a person in this state because there is no time or normal laws of physics in higher consciousness.

Most people think that spectacular athletes simply try harder when they “turn it on”. Certainly, they do find extra energy and move with greater speed in less time at these moments, almost as though time for them was standing still. These golden moments in an athlete’s life are truly magical. They can see everything happening in slow motion around them. They have all the time in the world to make amazing moves. They can run faster, think faster, and jump higher than anyone else. And all of this comes by slipping momentarily into higher consciousness, a nonphysical reality where time does not exist and the normal laws of physics do not apply. What’s even better, they operate in these golden moments with a higher consciousness that thinks faster and better than the normal, physical consciousness that people use.

Remember that you control time as you experience it. As an agent of change, you control the only real measure of time. This is because time only occurs with change. The theatre of events around us is interpreted by our personal perception of change. Your perception will be somewhat different from mine, although we might agree on many things we observe together. Because of your unique perception, you create your own reality. You also create your own sense of time as an agent of change. Time simply measures change. Beyond that simple function, time is nonexistent. There is really only the “now”.

Since time only operates according to perception of it, you can manipulate time by controlling your perception of it. Your higher consciousness exist in the realm of timelessness. Stay in a state of heightened awareness in order to make your perception of time stand still. It is a matter of personal time perception and a focused intent to stay in the now. There are people who use such time powers to transverse great distances in very little amount of time and cause limited resources to last far longer than normal as though inexhaustible. Such are the miracles that happen when time and space are altered.

Slow Time Down and Stop the World

Sword masters and ninjas all use this “slowing time down” and “stopping the world” with the mind technique to accomplish amazing feats of lightning fast combat which normal perceiving people can hardly even comprehend how it is humanly possible for themselves to attempt.

We miss ourselves. We are so busy out there in our minds, in the mirror, on the phone, on the pc, listening to deafening music, overtaking, seeking power, status, labels. The boy racer feels alive, excited, when he is near a near death opportunity! Adrenalin pumping, over excited, showing off, seeking attention, seeking power, seeking approval, fearful. Fight or flight that we cannot see the signs. We make mistakes, we miss turnings, we lose or forget things. Because we lose the plot, we lose reign of our senses.

Only when there’s an accident, a car crash, a thump on the head, a slap in the face, a comment, a synchronistic moment, a glance from a beautiful person, song of a sweet bird, the rising or setting of the sun, a shooting star, ever renewing the rhythm of the waves do we stop for a second…time slows down…in awe, devotion, speechlessness, thoughtlessness, our ears perk up. We become aware of something here now. Something beautiful, fresh, sweet, pristine, shining, glowing, evervessant, ever fresh. Only at these times, are we awake, truly alive - during the skid / bang / crash - time slows down.

Mindfulness can be defined as knowing what is happening while it is happening, no matter what it is. The essence of meditation is training in mindfulness. It’s direct perception. We see through meditation, what the mind is doing, moment by moment. Why? Because we are training ourselves to become present. If we are present, we naturally bring our intelligence to bear on the moment. Therefore we have no option but to find out what is happening.

Meditation, then, involves being present with what is here. The observer consciousness allows you to fully observe what is happening internally as well. You notice thoughts and feelings as they arise and realize the causes. It is a self-reflective awareness where you know you are thinking when thinking happens. When you become mindful, you become more aware of things both within and without. The way to wisdom and intelligence is to understand ourselves as human beings. Not through a theory, not through a concept, but through direct experience.

When you are calm, you are clear seeing. You filter out a lot of noise that affects consciousness. To have a calm mind is to silence and still a lot of vibrations leaving perception to be free and unhindered. You get into the state of observer consciousness, where you are just watching what is going on and seeing it in every moment of its happening. Mindfulness is the systematic training in knowing what is happening, while it is happening.

As the mind becomes tranquil, many things begin to become clear. Things that were not formerly clear to us about ourselves, the world around us, the way we are living, relationships. We become clear about everything. So we need to generate within our minds the conditions for a prelimary mindfulness which is the essence of meditation. As tranquility arises we began gaining insight into the state of our own minds. Insight may arise naturally with tranquility. That is the traditional teaching. We train in tranquility and insight naturally arises.

Insight is the most profound level of learning. It is learning through direct perception which naturally gives rise to understanding. It is not learning through externally acquired information, something imported from outside. It leads to wisdom because it is learning inwardly how we are and what we are as human beings. When your meditation becomes really powerful, it also becomes constant. Life offers many challenges and the serious meditator is very seldom bored.

When you’re looking for something or a solution, take time to pause and enter the stilled state of consciousness. Don’t think of it as wasting time during the work day. With practice, this little exercise takes very little time, as others perceive it. Think of it as a creative way to think through your problems by engaging your higher mind to meditate on work issues. In that state of consciousness, the answer can come to you suddenly.

Remember, even a brief second in an altered state of consciousness can seem like hours, since you are controlling time. You are creating perfect timing of perfecting time manipulation. Time is but an illusion. There is all of the time in the world, if you can focus your intent and control your perception. Make your own reality.

Any activity where you perform can be expanded and enriched by a heightened state of awareness that allows you to expand your perception of time and operate somewhat outside of normal physical limitations.

Slow down only that which you want to, otherwise allow it to proceed at normal speed. Use rapid perception on whatever you want to, whenever you want to.

 

Friday, November 11, 2022

Beef Short Ribs with Grits

 

Braised beef short ribs cooked low and slow served over grits. Daaaamm!
OK, this post just has two short ribs but Lisa had left for Georgia and it was just me and I remembered there were two in the freezer and I wanted them. So there. If you want to make more, which I would expect you would want to do unless you're a hermit or an old maid, you can easily double or triple up this loosely put together recipe. That said these were fall off the bone and delicious.

Ingredients -

Beef short ribs 1 lb
1 medium Onion roughly chopped
1 Carrot 
Beef bone broth
Favorite red wine
Salt and pepper
Rosemary - fresh
Thyme - fresh
Bay leaves
Red pepper flakes
Montreal Steak seasoning
Olive oil
Garlic
AP Flour for dusting















350 F for 2 1/2 hours




For the grits -

Grits
Grated Parm cheese
Butter
Salt and pepper





Tuesday, October 25, 2022

The Nancy Harts Militia


"LaGrange vs LaGrange" - Painting by Mort Kunstler

This is a departure from my usual food and garden posts but I wanted to share it because it is a very interesting part of the history of the town we moved to - LaGrange, Georgia. It is an account of how the women of LaGrange, after the men had gone off to fight in the Civil War, formed a local militia group to help guard and defend the town if the occasion arose. They actually had an opportunity to do just that. They formed an armed  battle line to stop a Union Cavalry regiment, the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry, that had orders to burn down the town - and the women won - by negotiating a peaceful end to the encounter and sparing the town. And then made dinner for the the regiment's commander and his staff. Here is their story from an article in the  New Georgia Encyclopedia

"The Nancy Harts militia, formed in LaGrange during the first weeks of the Civil War (1861-65), was a female military unit organized by the wives of Confederate soldiers to protect the home front.

On April 26, 1861, the LaGrange Light Guards of the Fourth Georgia Infantry, comprising men mostly from LaGrange, in Troup County, left home to fight for the Confederacy. In that year alone, 1,300 men left LaGrange, making the town particularly vulnerable to Union attack because of its location midway between Atlanta and the Confederacy’s first capital at Montgomery, Alabama. Soon after the men departed, two of their wives, Nancy Hill Morgan and Mary Alford Heard, decided to form a female military company. The two women called a preliminary meeting at a schoolhouse on the grounds of U.S. senator Benjamin Hill’s home. Almost forty women attended, ready to do their part to defend their homes and families.

Inexperienced with firearms and unfamiliar with military matters, the women turned to A. C. Ware, a physician who remained in town due to a physical disability, for assistance in their training. The members initially elected Ware as captain but soon thereafter chose Nancy Morgan as captain and Mary Heard as first lieutenant. The regiment leaders were assisted by elected sergeants, corporals, and a treasurer. The group called themselves the “Nancy Harts,” or “Nancies,” in honor of Nancy Hart, a Patriot spy who outwitted and killed a group of Tories at her northeast Georgia cabin during the Revolutionary War (1775-83).

The women began their military training using William J. Hardee’s Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics (1861) and met twice a week for drilling and target practice. The leaders offered prizes to the best markswomen, and after several mishaps, including shooting a hornet’s nest and a cow, the women became expert shots.

Although the Nancy Harts organized as a military unit, they served primarily as nurses. During the latter half of the war, LaGrange became a medical and refugee center because of its proximity to key battlegrounds and its intact rail line. LaGrange’s four hospitals were often full, and a number of residents, including nearly all the Nancy Harts, took patients into their homes for individualized care.

Although it was not the only female military unit organized during the Civil War, the Nancy Harts militia was unique in several respects. First, the women drilled and continued target practice until the end of the war. (Most other such groups existed only fleetingly.) Second, unlike other female militias, the women faced Union troops as a regiment. In mid-April 1865 Major General James H. Wilson led a Union raid on west Georgia. As the Union troops approached LaGrange from West Point, the local Confederate cavalrymen fled, and the Nancy Harts stepped in to protect the town.

On April 17 the Nancy Harts marched to the campus of LaGrange Female College (later LaGrange College) on the edge of town to meet the enemy forces. When the Union cavalry arrived in LaGrange, the women negotiated a peaceful surrender of the town to Union colonel Oscar H. LaGrange (coincidentally named) and laid down their weapons then organized an effort to feed both the Union and Confederate soldiers. In return, Col LaGrange agreed to only destroy facilities that were helpful to the Confederate war effort - factories, stores, and railroad tracks, but spared private homes and property.

After the war the Nancy Harts members returned to their prewar duties, though many were forced to make difficult adjustments since more than a quarter of LaGrange’s enlisted men did not return home. 

The Nancy Harts have been a point of pride for residents of LaGrange over the decades. In 1904 the Ladies Home Journal published an article on the Nancy Harts, giving the militia national attention. In 1957 the Georgia Historical Commission placed a historical marker commemorating the women’s service in front of the LaGrange courthouse, and four years later a group of LaGrange women staged a reenactment of the Nancy Harts’ activity for the Civil War centennial, complete with officer elections. In 2009 the LaGrange chapter of the UDC and the Pine Needle Garden Club planted a tree in the city’s Stonewall Confederate Cemetery in honor of the Nancy Harts."

Here is a video made by the LaGrange Legacy Museum about the Nancy Harts -



There is also a historical novel about the Nancy Harts written by Glen Craney - 

"The Cotillion Brigade: A Novel of the Civil War and the Most Famous Female Militia in American History"  

Paperback – March 13, 2021


Thursday, June 2, 2022

Bucatini with Ceci Beans

This dish is classic Italian peasant cooking - pasta and ceci beans (chick peas) or, as my cousin Poochie said his dad called it, "past n' cheech". Simple and easy and packed with flavor. This particular recipe is based on one in the book - "Franny's Simple Seasonal Italian" that my wonderful daughter bought me for my birthday. THANK YOU again Brittany!


Don't shy away from this dish because of the ingredients. They all work very well together. The lemon juice adds an especially nice brightness. After you have this you're going to say, "Wow I wasn't expecting that! Damn, this is really good!"  And you WILL make it again and it will be even better the next time.

I use bucatini, a hollow spaghetti-like pasta, but spaghetti or linguine will do just fine.

Ingredients -
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, plus more for  drizzling
1 15 oz can of chickpeas, drained
5 cloves of garlic, sliced thin
1/2 medium onion sliced in thin half moons
3 anchovy fillets - don't leave these out!
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes, or more to your taste
1 box of bucatini or spaghetti
1/2 cup finely chopped fresh flat leaf parsley - not dried parsley
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh mint - not dried mint
1/4 tsp cracked black pepper
Kosher salt
Juice of half a lemon


In a large skillet, warm 1/2 cup of the olive oil on high until the oil starts to shimmer. 

Add the chickpeas and fry without stirring, 5 minutes.

Add a little more olive oil and the garlic and onion. Cook for about 5 minutes more.

Add the anchovies, stir and mash them with a wooden spoon until they dissolve.

Add the red pepper flakes.

Add a little water and remove from the heat.

Cook the bucatini until almost al dente.

Toss the pasta into the skillet with the chickpeas and add the parsley and mint. Stir and add more water if it seems too thick.

Turn the heat on to medium and warm the pasta and beans through for about 3 minutes. The pasta will finish cooking in the sauce.


Squeeze the lemon juice over the pasta and season with a little salt and the cracked black pepper.

Serve in pasta bowls and drizzle with a little olive oil.  You can add grated cheese if you want but it isn't necessary. Pecorino Romano would be best choice if you do. 

Enjoy!

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Deconstructing/Reconstructing Caliente's Big Fat Greek Mediterranean Pizza

Caliente Pizza and Draft House is our favorite pizza joint here in Pittsburgh. And our favorite style is their Big Fat Greek Wedding pizza that used to be called their Mediterranean pizza. Either way it is amazing. It is a "white" pizza with a mix of interesting toppings - garlic butter sauce, artichoke hearts, agrodolce tear drop peppers, kalamata olives, baby spinach and feta, provolone and mozzarella cheeses all on top of their secret recipe long rise dough. 

Since we love this pizza we thought we'd try to make it at home ourselves because why not? All the toppings are easily available except one - the agrodolce (sweet & sour) tear drop peppers and their taste is very important to the overall flavor of this pie. Luckily they have them at a local super market otherwise we would have had to look for them on line.

Here is what they look like - 


We made a few changes/tweeks that we felt could make this even better - 
1 - We added crisped up thin sliced hot soppressata, an Italian hard sausage. If you cant find this where you live, don't substitute with pepperoni, just leave it out. It has it's own unique flavor.
2 - We used arugula instead of spinach because we had some arugula that needed to be used up. No other reason.
3 - Their crust simply can't be duplicated so we used a premade Boboli crust. But next time we'll make our own and give the dough a good slow long rise.

Feta cheese crumbles - 


Sauteed and caramelized artichoke hearts -


Handful of Kalamata olives sliced in  half -

Crisped up pieces of soppresotta

Boboli crust but home made would be better -

Roasted a head of garlic the day before and squeezed out the soft sweet cloves with butter, salt and a little olive oil to make the garlic butter -

Brush the roasted garlic butter over the crust -

Add the artichoke hearts first -


Then the arugula and the feta cheese -

Then the olives and the soppresatta -



Then the mini sweet and sour pepper drops -


Mozzarella and Provolone cheeses loaded and ready for the oven -



Baked in a 450 degree oven for 12 minutes.


Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Preserved Lemons


Preserved lemons...? Aren't they those funky lemons used in North African and Middle East cooking? Yep, that's them. And that's probably as much as the average home kitchen hack knows about them. So, maybe when you've read about a cool sounding exotic dish you want to try and the recipe called for preserved lemons as an ingredient you either just logged it away for another time or just substituted lemon zest or lemon juice - which really aren't good substitutes. The good news is though, preserved lemons are easy and quick to make at home, last practically forever, and will enhance your dishes like nothing you’ve ever tasted. The downside is that you will have to wait about a month for them to cure. But if you’re willing to take a few minutes of your time to make a couple jars, you’ll be able to reap a lemony harvest throughout the rest of the year. In January I started curing a jar of preserved lemons. I'm glad I did!

Here's the deal - preserved lemons are lemons that have been pickled in salt and their own juices and left to sit for a month before using - they get even better over time. Think about how much you love things flavored with lemon. Preserved lemons add an intense, concentrated lemon flavor to the dish without all the sour tartness. The preserving process tempers the tartness while accentuating the lemon flavor. Mildly tart but intensely lemony. They will transform your dish from something good into something amazing. 

Preserved lemons can be used to add flavor to a variety of dishes – everything from meats and poultry to salads, rice, stews, seafoods and sauces. Your imagination is the limit to how they can be used and enjoyed. 
                                                   
Here are a few ideas: 
       
Salad Dressings - Blend some preserved lemon into it and that dressing will love you forever. 
Seafood - Seafood and lemons are soul mates. Make a marinade for your fish with some finely diced or blended preserved lemon or add it to a sauce to drizzle over fish. 
Vegetables - Tossed with vegetables or add tiny bits of preserved lemon to a vinaigrette.  
Rice - How about a preserved lemon risotto or pilaf?  
Pasta - Buttery pasta tossed with a creamy preserved lemon sauce?  
Dips - Try adding some preserved lemon to hummus next time or to baba ganoush
Salsas - Next time you make mango/pineapple/however-you-make-it salsa, add some diced preserved lemon to it.  

Here's how to make them - 
     
Ingredients
                                                            
3 large lemons (Meyer is even better) per 8 oz canning jar
5-6 teaspoons salt
An extra lemon for juicing
Water that has been boiled and cooled (sterile)

Instructions
                    
You can make as many preserved lemons you like, but roughly 3 will fit per 8 oz canning jar. Thoroughly clean/scrub the lemons. You can let them sit in some vinegar water for a few minutes, then rinse - this should help remove the waxy coating.

Trim the nubs off both ends of each lemon. Quarter each lemon, slicing them down just over ¾ of the way to leave the slices attached at the end.

Put one teaspoon of salt into the cavity of each lemon.

Place one teaspoon salt into the bottom of the jar. Put a lemon in the jar, cut-side down, pressing firmly to squeeze out the lemon juice. Put a teaspoon of salt on top of the lemon. Firmly press the second lemon down on top of the first lemon. Repeat with the third lemon, pressing down firmly. Add a teaspoon of salt on top of the lemon.

The jar should be halfway full with lemon juice. If needed, squeeze some additional lemon juice into the jar to bring it to the halfway point. Don't waste that lemon; slice it and stuff the slices into the jar. 

Pour the boiled/cooled water into the jar to fill it to the top.

Screw the lid on and let it sit at room temperature for 3 days, shaking it and rotating the jar upside-down/right-side up a few times per day. 

After 3 days transfer the jars to the refrigerator and let them sit for at least 3 weeks before using. Store in the fridge, will keep for at least 6 months.

When using them, take out what you need and rinse with cold water, using just the rind, cut into strips or dice and add as the recipe requires and if you are a "lemonhead" like me, experiment with them. The first thing I used them in was a rice side dish. I added sauteed sweet onions and a some diced preserved lemon to plain basmati rice. Pow!