One morning in late May, I woke up to find that someone had pilfered nearly all the sprigs from my baby thyme bush. All but two of its lovely 12cm springs had been surgically snipped right at the base of the plant. I checked over the other herbs but they had remained untouched – who, I wondered, had so brazenly helped themselves to my thyme?

My answer didn’t come until the next morning when noises outside my window broke my slumber. I sat upright and looked out the window just in time to see a grackle, perched on the edge of the thyme pot, close his beak around one of the remaining two sprigs and give a mighty tug.

“HEY!” I yelled, bolting out of bed towards the door, “Get offa my thyme!”

True to his thuggish nature, he gave me a quick once up and down before flying just far enough away so I couldn’t reach him. We locked eyes in a Mexican standoff – him alighted coolly on a branch, head tilted cockily to the side; me, arms akimbo, hands on hips, glaring from beneath a worried brow. He blinked slowly as if to say, “Eh, I’ll just wait until you go to work.” and flew off.

A little research on wikipedia revealed that male grackles often line their nests with fragrant herbs to attract potential mates. Last year, thyme was the AXE herb of choice for the local grackle population. It turns out that lady grackles grow just as bored with last year’s trends as their human counterparts. The thyme bush has been untouched in 2010 but the mint has been ruthlessly savaged.

So, if you’re stuck with a bunch of thyme on a hot day and want to make a nice refreshing salad that goes with with damn near everything, try this:

Ingredients

• 2 medium ripe tomatoes
• 2 medium-sized or 1 big fat cucumber
• 1 cup of cooked chickpeas, sans juice
• 2 tbsps of lemon juice
• 1 tsp of fresh thyme, chopped fine
• Salt and pepper to taste

Preparation

1. Chop the tomatoes and cucumbers into chickpea-sized bits. Remove thyme leaves from stems and chop finely. Toss in a bowl with lemon juice, salt and pepper. Serve immediately or chilled.

Postprandial Notes: The lemon juice has a nice, light flavor and the thyme gives it a little kick. If you wanted a more mediterranean flavor, you could substitute vinegar for the lemon juice and add a splash of olive oil. Chopped parsley instead of thyme or perhaps half and half with thyme might be a nice addition. Maybe some capers and possibly a few sliced black olives.

• 1 cup black beans
• half an onion, finely chopped
• 1 garlic clove, grated
• 1 tbsp chili powder
• 1 tbsp cumin
• 1 tsp oregano
• salt and pepper, to taste
• optional: lemon juice
• your favorite taco toppings

Preparation

1. Soak the beans overnight. Bring them to a boil and simmer until soft.
2. Drain liquid, retaining some. In a skillet or frying pan, heat cooking oil and saute onion until translucent. Add beans, garlic and spices and 1/2 cup of the bean liquid. Saute until most of the liquid is absorbed. Turn off heat, sprinkle with lemon juice if so desired.
3. Heat tortillas. Heap with beans, shredded lettuce or cabbage, tomatoes, pico de gallo, salsa, sour cream, cheese, etc. Enjoy with lots of napkins.

• 3 pounds of smaller thin-skinned potatoes, like Yukon Gold or fingerlings.
• 4 good-sized sprigs of dill
• 1 cup of mayonnaise
• 2 rashers of bacon, chopped
• 1 red pepper, chopped
• 1 small onion, chopped
• Salt and pepper, to taste
• Optional: Some oil, for sauteing

Preparation

1. Rinse the potatoes and chop into pieces with skin on. Place in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Drain water and let cool in a bowl.
2. Fry & drain the bacon, reserving the bacon grease (or use already cooked bacon). Chop the pepper and onion and dill (remove dill from thick stalks before chopping). Saute the onion and red pepper in bacon grease (or cooking oil of choice) until soft. Add half the potatoes and stir til well blended. Cook til warm, about 2-3 minutes.
3. Return sauteed potatoes and vegetables to bowl. Chop the bacon finely and add, along with mayonnaise and chopped dill and stir til potatoes and vegetables are evenly coated. Add salt and pepper to taste and mix well. Serve warm or chilled. Keeps covered for about a week in the fridge.

Postprandial Notes: I’m not a huge fan of creamy potato salad and if you are, you might want to add more mayonnaise. You could also easily substitute sour cream (or any cream sauce base, really) for the mayonnaise. I think it’s also tasty without the dill. Future experimentation includes a curried version and a warm, garlic version.

Canon EOS 5D with ST-E2 transmiter, 180 sec @ f/6.7, ISO200. Main light: 580EXII at 1/16th power bounced off back wall. Key light: 580EXII at 1/8th power with grid. Tinfoil reflector.

Big things have been heralding the arrival of fall as well: kids once flying around the neighborhood on skateboards and bicycles now encumbered by backpacks and school uniforms, the return of kickball to Marie Reed, and the Vogue Fall Fashion issue.

My personal favorite fall herald are apples. If I had to choose a single scent that defined fall and winter, it would be the thick, warm smell of baking apples and cinnamon. I am a complete sucker for recipes that involve apples and will choose apple pie over even the most decadent chocolate lava cake every time.

Stewed apples is a recipe I’ve watched my grandmother make a thousand times. It’s quite easy to make, highly customizable, and only really requires a few ingredients. Truthfully, I rarely measure anything so it’s a bit hard to quantify those ingredients – I thoroughly encourage you to experiment with the spices and amounts you like best.

Ingredients

• 3 apples, peeled and sliced about 1/4″ thick
• 1 tsp of cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• small pieces of lemon rind
• 2/3 cup of water
• optional: 1 tbsp of sugar, 1/2 tsp of ginger, walnuts, raisins, etc.

Preparation

1. Peel and slice the apples. Hard apples suitable for baking are ideal but you can use any apple, really – a softer apple will cook faster.
2. Place the apple slices in a saucepan and add spices, lemon rind and anything else you wish. Add water and stir well to evenly distribute the spices. Cover the saucepan and cook over a low flame for about 20 minutes (check your apples periodically for consistency). If the water cooks down too quickly, add some more.
3. The final consistency should be somewhat less liquid-y than apple pie filling. Slices should be cooked but not completely falling apart. If you wish to reduce/thicken the liquid, remove the lid and increase the heat to medium and cook the apples for a few minutes uncovered.
4. Serve with ice cream, yogurt, whipped cream, sprinkled with granola or enjoy as-is. I prefer them warm but you may like them chilled. Keeps in the fridge for about a week.

Commercial break: If you’re too lazy/busy/etc. to make these on your own, hit up the Florida Avenue Grill sometime for breakfast. You can get apples as a side to their main breakfast courses. Granted, they’re fried but that just ups the addiction factor (for me, anyway).

Camera notes: Canon EOS 5D 1/80 sec @ f/6.7, ISO 200. Canon 580 EXII bounced off back wall at 1/32nd power. Canon 580 EXII zoomed to 105mm & gridded at 1/16th power. Tinfoil draped over a cardboard box for the reflector.

My cucumber plant would make a fantastic computer. It never gets virii (yes, I realize people say “viruses” but four years of Latin study doth indeed a pedant make), has no bugs, and can execute numerous instances of its fruit-bearing program flawlessly at incredible speeds. Which is a fancy way of saying there were five massive cucumbers ready to be picked today, two that will be ready in a day or two and lots of tiny babies for the future.

My grandmother used to make several versions of summer cucumber soups but the one I remember best was a very simple cucumber-dill mashup with sour cream. I’ve modified the recipe to use Tofutti “Better Than Sour Cream!”* but you are free to use either or even plain, unsweetened yogurt if you want a more tangy taste. The recipe has two parts: continue on to the second part for a creamy cucumber soup or stop at the first for a light, simple cucumber soup.

Cucumber Soup: Part The Firste

Ingredients

• 4 large cucumbers, peeled and chopped
• 1 onion, chopped
• Some cooking oil
• 1 tbsp chopped fresh dill
• 2 cups of chicken broth
• juice of 1/2 lemon

Preparation

1. Peel and chop the onion and cucumbers. I don’t remove the seeds but you may want to if you desire a very smooth consistency or if your cucumbers are excessively seedy. If you do remove the seeds, you may want to add a 5th cucumber to the mix.
2. Chop the dill finely.
3. Saute the dill and the onion together in some cooking oil or butter until the onions are soft. Add the chicken broth, cucumbers, lemon juice and simmer gently for 20 minutes or so.
4. Puree in a blender or food processor.
5. You can eat this soup still-warm or chill it for 5 hours and eat it cool. Tart it up with a demure sprinkling of fresh chopped dill or an extravagant dill sprig.

Cucumber Soup: Parte the Seconde

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp of chopped dill
• 1 cup of sour cream/Tofutti “sour cream”/yogurt

Preparations

1. Chill the soup for at least 5 hours.
2. Mix in the sour cream and dill. Serve in dainty cut glass bowls with antique spoons and eat delicately in your Sunday best with pinky finger extended.

As you may expect, DC recycles many forms of paper and metal but, until recently, the types of plastic suitable for recycling were limited to #1 and #2. Which covers things like orange juice or laundry detergent containers, but doesn’t cover other plastic containers like those used to hold yogurt and hummus.

I live with a complete hummus addict. He is afflicted with a very specific addiction that only Asmar’s Mediterranean Hummus, Extra Garlic (Party Size) seemed capable of relieving. I have seen the man, having exhausted all other supplies of pita bread, corn chips, tortillas, or cut vegetables, eat hummus off potato chips. He easily goes through a quart of hummus a week, which was a lot of containers we couldn’t put in the recycling bin.

And thus a quest for hummus to replace the Mighty Asmar’s was begun. From my first attempts to this final refined recipe took about 3 months of careful tweaking and taste-testing by the addict himself, who heartily endorses this recipe:

“Yo’ Hummus is Soooo Garlicky Van Helsing Be Bathin’ In It” Hummus

Ingredients

• 2 cups cooked chickpeas (slightly less than 1 cup uncooked)
• 1/2 cup of tahini
• 1/4 cup of olive oil
• juice of one lemon
• 2-3 good-sized cloves of garlic
• 1 tbsp cumin
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Optional: 1 tbsp of paprika or, if you like it a lil spicy as Wayne* does, cayenne pepper

Preparation

1. Cook the chickpeas. My method: boil them for an hour, let them soak in their hot water and then gently boil them until soft. Or buy a couple cans (but don’t throw away the juice).
2. Shred the chickpeas in a food processor. Add tahini, olive oil, and lemon juice and puree together. Add a small amount of the chickpea juice only to facilitate the pureeing.
3. Grate the garlic by hand** and mix it all together in a bowl. Add seasonings to taste. If the hummus seems a little too dry/thick, add pea juice until desired consistency is reached.
4. Enjoy on anything (Wayne recommends warm pita bread or tortilla chips).

*Wayne Moses Burke is the Executive Director of the Open Forum Foundation and a self-confessed hummus addict.

**You can puree the garlic with the other stuff but be forewarned: Garlic is like those popular girls in high school. It might be found in the midst of other, lesser foods like chickpeas and olive oil but will vehemently resist your attempts at total integration. Some of it may be integrated during pureeing but rest assured, several small cells will remain intact, patiently waiting for the moment to detonate an unexpected bomb of epic garlic proportions.

Make ice cream without 1. milk and 2. an ice cream maker.

Amazingly, neither of these proved to be a real obstacle to making ice cream. As David Lebovitz pointed out on his blog:

People have been making ice cream far longer than the invention of electricity so there’s no reason you can’t make ice cream and sorbets at home without a machine.

A small confession: I am an inveterate label reader. If I think a food has too many ingredients, I won’t buy it. Especially if a lot of those ingredients are things I’ve never used myself (i.e., guar gum, wood esters, tbhq, anything with a number after it or a multi-hyphenated chemical name.) When comparing two items, I will always choose the one with the shorter list of ingredients, unless one of those ingredients is msg or another acronym food product.

That said, my recipe for Coconut Ice Cream is incredibly short and could be even be shorter, depending on your fondness for coconut.

Hey Ma, No Milk! Coconut Ice Cream

• 3 cans of regular (not lite) coconut milk
• 1/3 cup of sugar
• optional:1 tbsp of vanilla

Preparation:

1. Mix it all up nice and smooth with a whisk and pour it into a shallow dish or pyrex pan. A shallow dish isn’t necessary – a large pyrex or metal mixing bowl will work well too but it won’t freeze as fast or as evenly.
2. Place the dish in the freezer and check it every 30-45 minutes. Using a spatula, metal spoon or even a beater set on very low speed, mix the ice cream til smooth. Keep repeating until evenly frozen – about 3-4 hours.
3. Enjoy!