Growing a Pineapple Entry 3

After two weeks in the glass of water, the pineapple crown had grown decently long roots as shown in this picture:

We had a medium sized pot (8" diameter) available as well as some potting soil, so I filled that and made a small depression for the new plant:

And here is the planted pineapple crown:

After a couple of months, this will need to be reported into a 12" pot.  By then I should be needing to repot the avocado trees, which are currently occupying that size pot.

Growing a Pineapple Entry 2

Update on the pineapple.  At this point it has been 6 days since I started the pineapple in the glass, and now it has started to grow a few roots from the root nubs.  I will probably be potting it sometime this week.

Growing a Pineapple Entry 1

Due to a request, I am documenting how we have been growing pineapple plants.  We have some that are over a year old, so we can keep them alive for at least that long.  They don't produce fruit for at least a year and a half, so the jury is still out on whether ours will do that.  I started a new plant yesterday for this series of posts.

Without further ado, let's start:

Step 1:  purchase a pineapple with a crown.
Step 2:  grip the fruit and crown in separte hands and twist apart.

Step 3:  remove several bottom layers of leaves until you have a couple of rows of root nubs visible.

Step 4:  place the crown in a glass of water such that the roots are covered.

I will add more posts as this new plant grows.  However, until then, here are some of our current plants that are a range of ages.  We also have a couple of avocado trees that have successfully sprouted.  Sadly, I failed on the mangos.  Next year!

Mango Sauce

Note: we've been quite busy lately and thus no posts in a while, but it has been a good thing. :-)

Question for you: have you ever gotten so many mangos (for free from coworkers, they seem to be the zucchini of out here, when you have some, you have a ton) that you can't eat them all before you go bad?  Well have I got the solution for you!

Mango sauce!  Like apple sauce, but with mangos.

Not much too this, I cut up about 5-10 mangos into about half inch cubes, and cooked them down with some cardamom in place of the cinnamon you might use in apple sauce.  When I only had unripe mangos, I added some sugar, but the best was to have a combination of ripeness.

Cut mango in the pot.

Ono mango sauce ready to serve.

Mango season was back in June/July, but I just realized that I had forgotten to make the post.

Sweet cheesecake

Part 2 of our adventure with fresh bay leaves was a sweet ricotta-based cheesecake.  After the partial success with Part 1, we were optimistic to try a recipe using a less-salty cheese.

The ingredients for the sweet cheesecake were more or less the same as the savory, with the addition of some honey after the baking process:

4 oz. flour
8 oz. ricotta
1 egg
Bay leaves
4 oz. honey

The main prep difference came while shaping the dough on the baking sheet; instead of one larger cake, the recipe called for four smaller cakes (though these turned out to be large enough to share).  For the same reasons as the savory cheesecake, we used more than the specified number of bay leaves for each cake.

Fresh bay leaves ready for the cheesecakes.

The baking method listed for these cakes was the same as that used for the savory cheesecake, placing a weight atop the cakes before baking.  We didn't do that this time, mostly because we didn't want to either wash the weight afterward, or have the weight take up a bunch of dishwasher real estate.  We did observe afterward that the cakes would have been flatter and smoother had we used the weights; as it was, the cakes puffed like soufflés in the oven and subsequently collapsed.  If anything, this affected the texture more than the taste: we thought this might have led to a lighter texture in the finished cakes, which we liked, so next time we try the savory cheesecake we will not use the weight.

Finished cakes after being dunked in honey.  We substantially reduced the baking time from the specified 35-40 minutes to about 20-25 minutes so that the cakes wouldn't brown too much.

Overall, we both preferred the sweet cheesecake to the savory, but that comes with two disclaimers:

1. We both prefer Italian food over almost all else, so I think we're predisposed to go with ricotta over feta in general.
2. We'd want to try the savory cheesecake again with a higher-quality feta.

Both of the recipes seem to be a good use of the fresh bay leaves, but the bay flavor generally disappears after about a day in the fridge, so these dishes would be best served on the same day as baking.

A half cheesecake (minus the bay leaves): perfect for a single serving.

The Classical Cookbook (1996); Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger; p. 93

Writeup background noise: Free Practice 1 of the Russian Grand Prix (when I originally drafted this last night), and NBCSN didn't have their commentators for it, so it was basically just various levels of car noise for an hour and a half punctuated by occasional radio communications between the drivers and their engineers.