Tomato season, finally!

Several of today's tomatoes, plus a jar of last year's honey from our own bees.
The big pinkish tomato is one of my favorite variety, Prudence Purple...

Spicy Dill Pickles with Peppers and Garlic

Yesterday I made my second batch of pickles for the year. I'm getting a lot of pickling cucumbers from the garden right now. This time I added some garlic cloves, spices, and pepper strips to each jar, including a sliced whole small hot green pepper. I wound up with a total of 27 quarts' worth, and it took most of the day. I haven't tasted them yet, but they look pretty good. Sheba (aka "Boo-Boo") investigated the jars before I stored them away. (click pictures to enlarge)

More red cabbage salad

 

We ate up the first batch of cole slaw pretty quickly.

With the other half of the giant red cabbage from the garden, I made a sort of Mexican style vinaigrette slaw and added black beans, corn, cilantro, red peppers, onions (including their scallion tops), and chipotle sauce.

Red Cole Slaw and first Green Beans

I cut the largest head of red cabbage from my vegetable garden and made cole slaw. Also from the garden I added to it shredded carrot, chopped kale, and red onion. A touch of chopped store bought yellow pepper added some pretty yellow color. I made the slaw dressing with mayo, yogurt, mustard, lemon juice, vinegar, salt, black pepper, celery seed, and dill.
That head of cabbage was about the size of a volleyball, and only half of it made a BIG bowl of cole slaw. Now I'll have to decide what to do with the other half. Then there are three more cabbages growing... but happily they are maturing a various rates so I'll be able to harvest them over the next month or so. 

I also picked the first batch of tender green beans.  We'll have them steamed and buttered, alongside wild rice for dinner tonight...
The Vidalia, red, and white onions will need to be pulled and dried for storage soon- their tops are flopping over, but are still green.  When the tops begin to turn yellow the onions have stopped growing and should be harvested. 
(click photos to enlarge)

Dill Pickles

Today i made my first batch of pickles for the year- dill spears. I picked a whole sinkful of pickling cukes and they made about 14 quarts' worth of dill pickle spears. Used up the 12 quart jars I had pretty quickly, and some extra pint jars too.

Brian likes dill spears, I prefer sweet pickles, so next I'll make a batch of sweet chunk pickles for me. After that, I will need to make some cole slaw from the big heads of red cabbage growing in the garden.

My cucumber vines look like they'll be giving me 2 or 3 more batches for pickles equal in size to this one, so I'll need to buy more quart jars and a couple more gallons of vinegar. My bees are doing a great job pollinating the cucumber blossoms- they are buzzing all over them all day long.

Birthday chocolate mousse cake

Today was my 57th birthday. I was taken out for a lovely breakfast by my wonderful Brian. Afterwards, I worked a couple hours at the food pantry, then came home and did some gardening- the weather was perfect!

Our friend Madeline DeLosh, pastry chef extraordinaire, came to visit and brought the most beautiful and mouth watering chocolate mousse cake that she made for me. Here are pictures, before Brian and I devoured half of it. Look at the oval white chocolate plaque with her delicate writing in chocolate!  I have no idea how she managed to make the magically striped sponge cake around the bottom. Click on the pictures to see them enlarged...

HERE is Madeline's website in case you want to order some of her masterpieces for yourself! We consider ourselves very lucky to have Madeline and Eddie in our small town community.

Rosemary Garlic jelly

It's January...long past the season for making fruit jams and pickles, but it was easy enough to make some garlic rosemary jelly this week.  All you need is fresh rosemary and fresh garlic bulbs, vinegar, sugar, and pectin.  I love this jelly alongside any kind of roast chicken, pork, or lamb.  The hardest work is peeling all the garlic cloves (about 6 large heads' worth per dozen 8oz. jars of jelly), but it's worth it.  The house smells really good when making this jelly.  I wound up making about 22 half pints from 12 large heads of garlic and a bouquet of fresh rosemary sprigs.  That's enough for over a year of eating plus a few gift jars.

Apple sauce, Halloween 2010

We made apple sauce all day on Halloween this year. We bought a full bushel of Jona Gold apples at a local orchard and set up our kitchen assembly line. Brian peeled and cored the apples on our little hand crank coring machine, and he got each big pot of apples cooking- stirring, adding about 1/2 to one cup of water, and a few dashes of cinammon.

My job was to fill the sterilized pint jars with the finished apple sauce, process the jars in the boiling canning bath for 15 minutes, then give the lids a final tightening and let cool, making sure they sealed properly. I like to hear the little metallic "ping!" of each lid as its vacuum dimple pops in while the jars cool in stacks on the kitchen table. I think of it as little temple bells ringing.
One bushel yielded 38 pints (19 quarts) of really good apple sauce. We figure if we eat an average of one pint per week (and don't give away more than a couple of jars), this will last us into next June, when fresh fruit will again be available locally.

The virtuous radish

French Breakfast radishes alongside their cooked green tops

Now that the heat of summer is over and the cool Fall nights have begun, it's time to plant new seed of cool-loving vegetables and greens. These are many of the same veggies that thrived in cool Spring.
About 3 weeks ago I began planting new little rows of spinach, carrot, bok choy, radishes, beets, and new baby kale and swiss chard. I also have been trying out new types of seeds for various Asian greens to see what they do.

My favorite radish is the long French Breakfast radish.
The trick to radishes, since they grow so quickly in cool weather, is to plant a new row of seed about once a week, with only about 15 seeds in the row, one inch or so apart. This provides a steady source of fresh young crispy radishes, rather than having too many radishes ready to harvest at once, or worse yet getting older and fibrous in the ground while waiting too long to be picked. Treat your seeds like the precious treasures they are, and space them out carefully in succession for the best freshest supply of delicacies.

When radishes are still young and fresh, their green tops can be cooked quickly in a very small amount of water and eaten like spinach. Incredibly nutritious! The slightly furry-prickly leaves quickly soften and shrink in volume by about two thirds when cooked, just like spinach does. I like to cook a whole large bowlful in about 1/2 cup of water, add a small pat of butter and a little sea salt at the end, and consume the nutritious broth right along with the radish greens.

From the garden

Today I picked a big bowl each of carrots, cherry tomatoes, and string beans from our vegetable garden.
This is about the fourth bowl of green beans and the second batch of carrots we've gotten from the very small patches I sowed- each only about one square yard's worth of garden space.
We've had lots of cherry tomatoes for several weeks now, but tomatoes are winding down. The single large tomato in the photo is our last of the large tomatoes- we've had a drought and the tomato vines are giving up the ghost.
The carrot variety is "Royal Chatenay", a short fat carrot. I like the shorter carrots since I don't have to dig eight or nine inches down to loosen the soil when sowing the seed. Instead, five inches with a garden fork will do them nicely. I probably should have pulled these carrots when they were smaller, but I was busy with other things. Some of the carrots were one and a half inches thick! They taste wonderful anyway, like all fresh grown carrots do.
The green bean is a Blue Lake bush type. I like the bush beans rather than pole beans for my situation- they won't grow in a tall climbing shape that might block the sun from other plants. My protected vegetable garden space is not limitless, so I have to plan carefully.
We'll be having carrots and green beans with mashed potatoes for dinner the next couple of nights.
The large single flower is Tithonia, or Mexican sunflower. A friend gave me three tiny seedlings of it. The plant gets quite big and has large showy bright orange flowers. This stem blew over in the wind and broke so I put the flower in a glass of water.

The end of June

Well it's just about the end of June now, Summer is here. The vegetable garden is bursting full. Here, the bee's borage is stealing the scene at the front of the middle bed, a three foot high constellation of pure twilight colored flowers, looking like blue shooting stars cascading from stems of furry pink...

Hard to believe that this previous photo was from May 13th, a mere six weeks or so ago:
Everything except the tomatoes was grown from seed planted directly in the ground.


Back to today... A view from the far end of the garden. Along the left rear bed are tomatoes, cucumbers, and sunflowers all supported by stakes.

Today after breakfast I spent a couple hours pulling out some patches of lettuce, radish, and spinach that were way past their prime and just beginning to get tough and bitter. Into the compost bin it all went (a giant wheelbarrow packed full), and I hoed up the spaces and planted various new seed. It was rejuvenating in a spiritual sort of way.
Years ago I never could have brought myself to yank all those greens out if any of it was still remotely edible. But I've changed my ways...I'm ruthless now! Of course knowing that it gets composted and thus cycled back in again makes it seem less awful. The reward is the joy I get from planting tiny new seeds with my bare hands...tucking them tenderly into the soil like tiny babies, gently patting a fine coverlet of soil over them.

I have small green tomatoes growing now, sunflower heads forming, tiny 1/2" baby cucumbers on the vines. I am getting to know some of the lettuce varieties better, so I know what I will plant more of next year and which types I won't repeat. Definitely more purple kohlrabi next year!

This was yesterday's dinner...
Adding little fresh chevre or mozzarella is the final touch along with the dressing:

The honeybees continue to expand their population and stores, so I added the first medium honey supers on top of each hive a few days ago. I am for the first time using foundationless frames in the new supers, and hopefully the bees will soon begin to draw all their own comb in the new frames, using just the popsicle stick guides I glued in along the tops as a base to start comb building from. We shall see!

Guests and gardens...

We had guests last weekend- my brother and his girlfriend, Joy.
Joy loves taking pictures and she took these photos of my vegetable garden and the salad we made for dinner.
You can see the garden is really just getting started for the year, but already we've been harvesting enough to make a nice salad from the carefully cut young leaves every other day or so.


This salad was really a wonderful dinner for the four of us one night. It had spinach, leaf lettuce, kale, bok choy, and French breakfast radishes picked fresh from the garden. To that I added some chevre cheese and a cucumber that I bought, and some black pepper. Note the pink hard boiled eggs!- last winter I pickled a whole lot of beets, and when the beets were eaten I saved the pickling brine (which of course had turned intense pink from the beets) and filled jars of the brine with hard boiled eggs and let them pickle slowly in the fridge. The pickled eggs take on the pretty pink color and look a bit like a sunset with the golden yolk.

made bread today

Today I made bread. I rolled in some chopped calamata olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and browned onions with garlic. A simple flour dusting and slash pattern on the crust. It came out well- fluffy, with a nice crispy crust. (click on photos to enlarge)

First bread of the new year, 2010

I made two white boules today- the first bread of the new year 2010. I topped one with sesame seed and one with poppy seed. They came out nicely!

first carrots

I pulled my first young carrots from the new garden today, along with some turnips, parsley, and scallions. They all went into a big crockpot of vegetable soup for tonight. Added to the chicken broth were some local friends' broccoli, kale, tomatoes, celery, and red cabbage. Some store bought onions , red pepper, and garlic too. I ground some black pepper to top it off and started it simmering....

an apple sauce day

Yesterday Brian and I put up some apple sauce.
Around noon, we bought a bushel of nice Paula Red apples from a local orchard, 'Love Apple Farm' (gotta love the name). Brian used our old fashioned hand-crank countertop apple peeling-coring machine to peel and core the apples, and he made the apple sauce in a big spaghetti pot, one pot at a time. Brian makes great apple sauce.
Meanwhile, I sterilized the canning jars, packed them with apple sauce and processed them in boiling water in another spaghetti pot, four pints at a time for 20 minutes.
We had a regular little assembly line going.
By evening we had 35 lovely pints of fresh chunky apple sauce. The Paula Reds were so perfect we didn't even need to add any sugar at all...just a touch of cinnamon.

a pickling day

A generous friend let me pick a whole slew of pickling cucumbers from her garden. I gave her some of my lettuce and scallions. I also had a bag of beautiful striped pink Chioggia beets we had gotten from the local organic farmer's market as a thank-you for us playing music there. So I decided to pickle them all today.

I made 16 pints of sweet bread and butter pickle slices. I had enough beets for four pints of pickled beets. The Chioggia beets are pink and white striped on the inside, not the usual dark inky red. They look so pretty in the jars, with a soft golden pink glow.
After canning and processing the 20 pints of pickles and pickled beets, I had about 3 cups of pickling brine leftover. I hard boiled 12 small fresh eggs and packed them six to a jar into two clean pint jars, then filled with pickling brine. Those I won't bother to process, I'll just put them in the fridge to mellow and eat pickled eggs over the next few weeks. :) A good way to use up the leftover brine!

Two kinds of sprouts this week

Here are some dark green broccoli sprouts on the right, and some 'sandwich mix' sprouts I tried out. This is simply a produce storage container for the fridge- not what the sprouts grew in. I grew the mixed sprouts in a sprout mason jar, and the broccoli sprouts in a tray, on a little piece of clean towel. I have to learn to start with less seed- my jars get a little too jam packed with sprouts towards the end! It's hard to believe how little seed you really need to get a whole jar full of sprouts.

Sprouts

A friend recently gifted me some little broccoli seeds sprouting in a tray, and I was so delighted by their refreshing green-ness that I decided to start growing some sprouts myself. So I bought a 'sprouting jar' at my local health food store, a hemp 'sprouting bag', and various organic sprouting seeds to try. I read about how jam packed full of nutrition sprouts are.

I happen to love alfalfa sprout sandwiches, so I sprouted a bunch of alfalfa seeds in my sprouting jar (basically it's just a Mason/canning jar with a screen lid). I was very diligent about rinsing them with fresh water twice a day, and look how beautifully they came out!:These alfalfa sprouts took about 4 days to mature. I got about 3 whole cups of sprouts from 2 tablespoons of alfalfa seed in the 1 quart jar. Today I spread a sesame hamburger bun with a little cream cheese and a dab of mayonnaise, heaped it high with sprouts and a sprinkle of salt....mmmmmmmmm!!!! Brian put a big handful of the sprouts on his cold string bean salad today too.

As per the instructions, the hemp bag (from Sproutman.com) is especially good for sprouting the larger seeds, grains, and beans, so I put some mung beans in that and I submerge it in fresh water also twice a day to rinse and wet the sprouts, then hang it to drain over my dish drainer. This picture was taken after just two days growth. I figure another day or two and the mung sprouts will be ready to eat...
I can't get over how cheap and easy it is to grow sprouts- I had never tried it before! Sort of makes me feel like I'm back in the 1970's again. I ate sprouts back then but never thought of growing them myself. I stopped buying sprouts at the supermarket long ago because they often looked a little sad and wilted.
Anyone living in an apartment or even a dorm or room can grow their own fresh nutritious greens with no soil or pots or fertilizer at all!
I now look forward to fresh green sprouts even as snowy blizzards howl outside this coming winter.

String bean salad

Today i went out in the old little vegetable garden to do a bit of weeding and cleanup. I had seen some baby string beans developing on the tops of the bean bushes, but as I poked around in the foliage I discovered a whole mess of string beans all ready to harvest! Mostly Kentucky Blue Lake, with some yellow wax beans as well.
I picked a big bowlful, then cut them and lightly cooked them just until tender. They looked so pretty in my old blue bowl...
I decided to just make them into a nice cold summery vinaigrette bean salad that we could snack on over the next few days right from the fridge.

To the lightly cooked stringbeans, I added:
Olive oil and balsamic vinegar
dill, salt, and pepper
one can garbanzo/chick peas
one can small black olives
a generous handful of capers
a couple thin slices chopped raw onion
a little chopped garlic
a few chopped sweet pickles

yum yum yum yum -a great way to enjoy fresh string beans from the garden!
We're having them for dinner tonight, piled on some of our own fresh lettuce and a few slices of tomato...