Tomato Harvest

Today I picked another 3 pounds of tomatoes and 6 more ounces tomatillos.  The heat has been pretty challenging to the tomatoes this year, however I’ve still picked more than 15 pounds so far.  Tomatillos are more or less like a tiny green tomato with a husk.  Many great Mexican salsas are made with tomatillos.  Salsa Verde is one of my favorites for pork, chips or enchiladas.  Traditionally, the husk is removed and the tomatillos are roasted in a hot oven or pan with yellow onions and jalapenos.  When I make my Salsa Verde, I plan on grilling the trio for a little twist.  

As far as the tomatoes go, Roasted Tomato Sauce is perfect for Sara and I. It’s becoming one of my favorite ways of preserving the harvest. Fresh mint and basil from the backyard are added, along with sun-dried tomatoes, balsamic, garlic and olive oil. This sauce is great with some toasted or grilled bread.  It’s delicious when tossed into some orzo as a side or whole wheat spaghetti as an entree.  I’ve frozen the Roasted Tomato Sauce in the past.  This time, I plan on canning it.  I also plan on canning the Salsa Verde.  Friends and family beware. You may see some of these sauces at Christmas!

English Cucumber Bread and Butter Pickles

The cucumbers in the garden have been producing very well this year. Who doesn’t love eating fresh cucumbers with a touch of salt or in a salad? Once the fridge drawer starts getting filled by the pound, it’s time to make some pickles! 

The variety that I have growing this year is the Telegraph Improved Cucumber.  It’s an heirloom English variety that’s very tender, crisp and mild in flavor.  They can grow to 18” long.  A couple that I’ve picked from the garden weighed in at 13 oz each.  I have a few vines growing on a trellis. Cucumber and squash growing habits are similar in a couple of ways. If your cucumber vines are happy, they’ll keep you busy come harvest time. There’s a very short timeline between a perfectly ripe cucumber and an over ripe, unusable one. They also take up a lot of precious space if allowed to run on the ground. It’s definitely a more common practice to make pickles from smaller cucumbers.  The smaller “pickling” cucumbers contain more water, making them crunchier and better able to stand up to heating and pickling.  To make these refrigerator bread and butter pickles I allowed the pickling solution to cool before adding to the cucumbers and onions. Another helpful pointer is to soak the cucumbers and onions in ice water for a couple of hours before pickling.  Following is the recipe that I’ve added my own touch to.  I love the pickled onions, so it may seem that there’s a lot. A few days in the fridge is all that’s required to infuse the cucumbers and onions.  You’ll be enjoying homemade pickles in less than a week.  

3-4 English type cucumbers

1 large yellow onion

1 C white vinegar

½ C apple cider vinegar

1 ½ C sugar

1 ½ teaspoons mustard seeds

1 teaspoon whole allspice

2 bay leaves

1 teaspoon black peppercorns

½ teaspoon tumeric

¼ teaspoon cloves

1 teaspoon salt

(1) Slice cucumbers into ¼” disks and the onions into ¼” strips.  Make an ice bath in a large mixing bowl.  Add the cucumbers and onions to the ice bath and allow to soak for 2-3 hours.  

(2) Over medium heat, meld everything for the pickling liquid together, being sure that the sugar and salt are dissolved.  Set the liquid aside and cool to room temperature.

(3) Remove the cucumbers and onions from the ice bath and drain briefly in a colander.  Pack the cucumbers and onions in a glass jar.  Once the jar is filled, add the room temperature liquid.

(4) Allow to pickle in the fridge for at least 1 full day.  Enjoy for up to 2 months. 

Rosemary Focaccia

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a good baker.  I’ve been able to make pies from scratch from the age of 6, but breads, cookies and cakes are my weak spot in the kitchen. This is certainly an area that I plan on improving.  It’s the exact science, measurements and all of the known and unknown variables of baking that can trip up any cook.  The other day I bought a 25# bag of bread flour.  One way or another, my baking skills are going to improve!

So what should I start with?  Well, the rosemary bush is always ready and willing to give some product to the kitchen, so Rosemary Focaccia it is.  Focaccia is an ideal bread for me.  It’s not too crunchy or hard.  It works great to make a sandwich.  Plus it’s strong enough to slice and dip or grill and top.  I looked over several recipes and this is the one that I went with for Trial #1.  I made two batches at once.  I figured if I was going through the routine, I might as well double the product for basically the same effort.  We had a family reunion coming up and I planned on taking some to share.  I made a spinach and white cheddar dip to go with it.  I sliced the bread into 3/4” slices, making it a great size for dipping.  Focaccia is also great with a simple dipping sauce of extra virgin, balsamic, garlic and herbs.  

There are plenty of good recipes online.  It would take me many frustrating trials to put together a recipe.  Here is the recipe that I used for this batch. 

http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/focaccia_bread_with_rosemary/

Homegrown, Homemade Chipotle Peppers

I finally moved ahead with something that I've been aiming to do for a couple of years now...make homemade Chipotles.  This pepper has grown leaps and bounds in popularity over the past few years.  Besides the burrito place, you can find Chipotle this and that pretty much everywhere you look.  Even McDonald's has Chipotle on its menu.  Well, it's at least called Chipotle.  Who knows what kind of ingredients actually flavor it?  Chipotle peppers are smoked Jalapenos.  if you are a pepper lover and grower, it seems that you end up with more Jalapenos than you know what to do with by the end of summer.  Sure you can always freeze them.  Salsa is great to, but how about some homemade Chipotles!  If  you have smoker, then all ya need are some jalapenos and wood chips.

I smoked ribs and bbq for the 4th of July and it just so happened that the first dozen or so Jalapenos were mature enough to pick from the backyard.  With these two events coinciding, the perfect time to make homemade chipotles was upon me.  I placed them on a wire rack and laid the smoke to them.  They absorbed a cloud of Hickory for about 4 hours and were left in the low heat of the smoker for nearly 24 more.  As with pretty much anything else that you smoke, you want to be sure that the heat does not become an issue.  Remember  to smoke them low and slow.  If your smoker climbs above much more than 200, you'll end up cooking and possibly burning the Chipotles.  The great thing is that once the smoker is up and running, there is not any other prep work.  Traditionally the peppers are allowed to fully mature and ripen to their red color.  The Jalapenos in the backyard had reached a decent size, So into the smoke they went.  This picture shows 4 different phases of the chipotle; Green Jalapeno, Chipotle, grinding in the mortar and pestle and finally chipotle powder.  If you want to purchase Chipotles, you will most likely find them canned in a tomato sauce called Adobo.  These dried versions will work great for rehydrating and blending into bbq sauce, soup and who knows what else.

The Long Awaited Olive Tree!

I've added some really cool plants to the garden this year.  Kumquat, Blood Orange, Cape Gooseberries and even a tea plant.  It's been exciting to pick them out and to see them become established and productive in the backyard.  The newest addition to our backyard garden is a Mission Olive tree.  An olive tree is definitely new territory for me.  Until a year or two ago, I had never even seen an olive tree in person. Before receiving the Mission Olive, I had only seen a couple of tiny trees that weren't much bigger than a small twig.  The newest addition to the backyard stands a little more than 5 feet tall.   The trunk is very flimsy.  If not for the bamboo and landscaping tape for stabilization, this tree would barely stand on its own.  From what I've read, olives require well drained soil.  Aside from that, they're not real picky.  They're commonly planted on hillsides where grapes won't grow.  If all goes well it should begin producing olives in 2 years. Unfortunately, I won't be sampling out any homegrown olive oil for quite some time. approximately 40# of olives are required to produce one gallon of olive oil!

4 Carrots, 4 Basils

For at the least the first 25 years of my life, I probably never had a side dish of cooked carrots prepared with anything other than a little butter, salt and sugar.  That's simply how my mom and grandmothers made them.  Carrots are great that way.  A little butter never hurts and the fact that mom or grandmother cooked them, makes them even better.

Over the past few years, some of my favorite ways to cook carrots range from roasted with coriander or tossed in chopped rosemary and grilled.  Recently, I've come to enjoy the combination of fresh basil and carrot.  The heirloom carrots that I pulled from the garden the other day were perfect for this preparation.  After the carrots were cleaned,  I cut the larger ones in half.  I boiled those about 3 minutes, then added the baby carrots for a couple more minutes until all were al dente.  I drained them, then tossed them with extra virgin olive oil, basil, honey, white pepper and kosher salt.  The white pepper has a milder, less spicy flavor, than black pepper.  Did you know that black peppercorns are ripened white peppercorns?  We have 4 different types of basil in the backyard, so a couple of leaves from each were all that was needed.  I think the purple basil looks great in contrast to the carrots. 4 fresh pulled heirloom carrot varieties and 4 fresh basils...Isn't summer great!

Underground Rainbow

About a month ago I was curious to see how the carrots were growing in the garden.  I yanked up a few to quickly realize that it would still be awhile before they would be big enough to use.  Today I decided to give it another whirl and I found some pretty nice looking carrots. Some of the smaller ones came from thinning out the rows.  No problem though, they're the true baby carrot and taste great!

I purchased these seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  Some of the names are Atomic Red, Amarillo and Tonda di Paragi. There's even a white variety from Holland that looks a lot like  a parsnip.  I bought several different varieties.  They remind me of tomatoes in that, once you start looking into the heirloom varieties there's a world of carrots to be enjoyed.  The carrot is believed to have originated in Afghanistan or Iran.  It seems to be the consensus that carrots were originally purple or yellow.  The orange version that we know today only emerged a few hundred years ago in the Netherlands.

Another 6 oz towards my goal of 100# of food grown for the year!