her able hands

Sunrises at the end of summer are often spectacular displays of color, and last week, on the day it rained for ten hours, the sky suggested the weather rhyme “red sky in morning, sailors take warning.”

When I was a girl growing up in Massachusetts, I fancied myself a woman of the ocean, even though we lived inland and didn’t own a boat. We spent part of many summers at the beach in Dennis on the Cape, and I would stare out at the horizon from the water’s edge, my feet tucked tingling into the sand while the waves lapped at the shore, eroding it out from under me with its rhythmic beat.

Some days the wind came right off the water, a slanting salt spray that straightened my wet hair and turned the kinky curls into thick strands of straw. I leaned into the wind and imagined myself sailing out towards a strange, new land somewhere far across the ocean, navigating by the stars. I knew the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Orion, the North Star. I could learn more. I could go places, maybe.

Of course, it always ended with the bunch of us packed into the Vega, our salt-coated skin sticking to the hot vinyl seats, we kids trying not to touch each other in the back unless to deliver a punch or a pinch. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry on those long rides back through the Cape to our town, the wind blasting in through the open car window, hot and frantic, my father’s cigarette smoke rushing around my head and the ash pelting me when he took a corner, the wind whipping my stiff hair into my eyes so that I had to keep them closed. I didn’t want to close them, I wanted to watch my favorite place in retreat.

For years I watched the sunset and sunrise and predicted what the coming day would be like for the brave sailors of the world. Never out loud, of course, that would be crazy.

Now I just dream of spending some length of time (by myself, naturally) by the ocean. I don’t really care what ocean, although I am partial to the North Atlantic, and doubt I would enjoy the crowds of drunk, tan college students in Ft. Lauderdale (or wherever the big spring break scene is now). But I watch the sky for other reasons.

Now that bright red morning horizon speaks to the constant gardener dripping with fatigue from standing out all evening with the hose in hand, whispers the promise of rain. And when the evening sky sets in a blaze, especially after several days of rain and humidity, it heralds the hope of a bright, sunny day burning off all of the mold spores and drying off the leaves in the bean patch so I can get in there and pick before they’re all too tough to eat.

I’m a landlubber and a homebody after all.

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I woke up Saturday morning to the cold and thought to myself, I think we’ll go out to the farm and pick peppers, tomatoes and beans. Then I’ll have to go buy a small freezer. Roasted red peppers, oh my.

I lay in bed with the sun streaming past the window (the bedroom window faces southwest) and relished the idea of being out in the fields in the warm sun and the cool air, but had to invent the warm part because goodness was it cold on Saturday. The kind of cold that’s the harbinger of what’s to come, where the husband bolts out of bed at four in the morning to dig the down comforter from the stack under the desk—and tosses it on top of the resentful, perimenopausal wife who was in the middle of a great dream and just fine under the flannel quilt, thankyew—he shivering and mumbling something about how f*cking cold it is, and holy crap what happened to summer. We woke up to 38*, but the forecast promised a high in the mid 60s. Perfect picking weather. And fortunately, no frost here because I totally forgot to pick the rest of my tomatoes the night before.

It was 90* just last week, wasn’t it?

After breakfast, the kids and I packed up a few snacks, some water and my camera (which I forgot to use but for a couple of shots of the future*) and made the half-hour ride out to Hilgert’s. We started with tomatoes, but the woman running the buckets and cash looked at me ruefully and intoned, “Plum tomatoes are hard to come by right now.” as she waved her hand at the rows of plants all flat on the ground with thousands of semi-ripe and overripe, rotting tomatoes just lying on the black plastic in a vinegary, fermented haze. Yuck. We picked half a bucket and decided to pay the extra $4 a bushel for picked tomatoes at another farm stand.

When we paid up, I saw a bucket with some lovely globe-shaped eggplants and asked if they were for sale. I could have as many as I like for 50 cents a piece, but she had to cut them for me because people tend to rip the plants right up out of the ground. Goodness, who knew people could be so brutal?

Harvesting is not just a skill, it’s an art. One must know exactly how a ripe fruit or vegetable looks and feels before attempting to separate it from its parent plant. Force it before its time and you could lose both. Eggplant is definitely better harvested by sharp knife blade than by yanking it from the vine. And tomatoes will tell you when they’re ready if you just gently tug on the plump fruit. The flesh will give ever so slightly under your fingers and you’ll feel the breaking point in the stem before it even snaps. As if the tomato wants to go to the kitchen now, thanks. Maybe a little salt and pepper?

So I thanked her as she trudged off into the eggplant rows, then thanked her again for her help as I imagined several more containers of my roasted ratatouille (yes, I know, I make it sans zucchini) stacked neatly in my freezer (yes, I know, I’ll need to clean out the freezer if I want to see any neat stacks of anything) and drove off to the pepper fields with a dozen dark purple globes of love.

I really wish I’d taken some pictures of the pepper fields, because here I’ve been all these four years in northeast Ohio, convinced that a local red pepper was a figment of my imagination. But no! Row upon row of sweet, ripe, firm red peppers stretched out before me and it only took about 15 minutes for us to fill two five gallon buckets.

This evening I got home and fired up the grill and filled the sink to wash off the clay spots.

This was the contents of one bag, an overflowing bucket’s worth, all had for $8. A little jar of roasted red peppers in oil at the grocery? Anywhere from $2-$5, depending on how gourmet the marketing shtick. I still have one more big bag of sweets and one big bag of medium hots. I’m intending to dry some hot peppers for chili powder, and will likely just chop, blanch and freeze some of the remaining sweets.

The knuckles on my right hand are all singed because my grill tongs, while quite long and unruly, and nearly impossible to use without getting a cramp in my hand, are about 6″ too short for this kind of grilling. I have to keep the peppers all along the back half of the grill where the heat’s intense enough to blacken the skin quickly and not turn the flesh to mush. After about 45 minutes, I had this:

Boy, howdy that makes me happy. I was feeling so bereft about the lack of food put back for winter, and dreading having to shop for every blasted ingredient in the frigid months to come. But now with this little project almost under my ample belt (I do still need to peel, seed and de-vein the little bastids, then get them into the freezer, separated by strips of wax paper and nestled together in ziploc bags.) That’s a job for tomorrow morning, because I want them to cool completely and it’s just about bedtime on the ranch.

Have I mentioned how much this full-time work thing is cramping my urban homesteading style?

Jeesh.

So anyway, we ran out of steam after the peppers. I probably could have kept on, but only if in the company of happy adults who were equally obsessed with the idea of stocking up, rather than a Very Hungry Teenager Who Wanted a Hamburger and a Preschooler who Really Had to Poop, and in her Own Potty, Please. So maybe next weekend we’ll run out for beans if they haven’t lost them to frost. And I do still have to buy the tomatoes from the other market—I want to can some roasted tomato soup and some tomato sauce.

On the way home I kept hearing forced air leakage coming from Tyler’s seat. After about ten minutes of that, I asked him if he had a problem. He sat up straight and got all blushy and assured me, “No! I’m just blowing my hair out of my eyes! I had a great time. I’m really glad I came. Seriously.”

Well, naturally I stopped for ice cream on the way home. Not that he could get any sweeter.

*Then! Then comes October, people. Look what I get to go pick in October!

Yes! That’s a whole field of gorgeous collard greens. Isn’t it a stunner? And look at this!

You got it! A whole field of curly kale.

People, I’m swooning.

And running out of room in the freezer.

Technorati Tags: Roasted Red Pepeprs, freezing, canning, preserving, preserving the harvest, u-pick, cooking greens

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Here we are at Friday, and I’m just getting around to posting about last weekend. It’s been a crazy-busy week, with something happening almost every evening. But last weekend I busted out the dehydrator and harvested some of my culinary herbs.

Here you see Thai Basil, Rosemary, Marjoram, Opal Basil, Thyme and Greek Oregano. I’ll be freezing the bulk of my basil, some chopped and frozen in ice cube trays with olive oil, and some straight up in freezer bags. But I wanted to try a mix of these two basils, dried and crumbled together for soups.

In the past I’ve dried my herbs the way El does it, by tying them into small bundles and putting them in a brown paper bag tied around the stems, and hanging them in a dark, dry place, but I’m frankly sick and tired of the cobwebs that make their way into the bag. I found my dehydrator a couple of years ago at a thrift store for $3 and I’ve never looked back.

I also find the finished product has much better flavor when dried quickly this way.

And here’s where I let Angelina do the hard work of giving great information on how to harvest and dry herbs, because once again, I’ve used up my alloted morning 15 minutes and now have to hustle to get showered, lunches and brekkies made and the kids up and out the door. Check out her post, it’s most excellent.

Technorati Tags: herbs, drying herbs, dehydrator, garden, preserving food

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So in the comments, on my last post Kim asks: Alright, so… give already. Did it taste as good as it looked?

Yes. Yes, it did. That gazpacho was pure summer in a bowl. But you know what? It turns out I only enjoy just a little bit of that and then I’m all played out. It also turns out that nobody else in my family enjoys it at all, so I made way too much. Fortunately we had friends to dinner that night and I sent them home with the quart jar, had a container of it for lunch the next day, and the rest is going in the freezer.

Technorati Tags: gazpacho, appetite, desire, garden

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I haven’t eaten a single local peach this summer.

I’m just saying.

Geeze-oh-man, the weather alarmists are way off base for our zip-pity-do-dah the past two days. It’s been hot, muggy, still (except for yesterday when a stiff breeze blew over my 7′ tall patch of Matt’s Wild Cherry and Yellow Pear tomatoes). Usually when we get a forecast of 70% chance of thunderstorms, we get some good rainfall. So far we’ve heard some nice, slow rumbly thunder, but nary a drop of rain for our poor, parched patch of the planet. Ah, well. I should have gone out there and watered this morning, for surely then it would have poured.

Instead, I picked the ripe tomatoes so they wouldn’t split wide open if it did rain, then trudged back inside in the thick, soupy air to do some much-needed, long-overdue deep cleaning. Gawd, my house has gotten gross this summer. After about an hour or so, the kitchen looked much more pleasant to work in, so I wondered what I could make that would quickly destroy the spit shine and settled on Gazpacho.

So how’s about this time I provide y’all with an actual recipe, instead of making you try to mine it from my rambling prose? This is my version, ganked from several other versions and varying wildly depending upon what all the veggies taste like coming out of the garden that season. This year, methinks they’re perfect.

Kelly’s Damn Gorgeous Gazpacho

3 Bell Peppers (1 green, 1 red, 1 orange–okay, the orange was from the grocery store)
2 Slicing Cucumbers–seeded, or 4 or 5 small Pickling Cucumbers, or a combination thereof–yielding about 3 cups cucumber bits
8-10 Plum tomatoes of some sort–seeded–this batch I used mostly San Marzano and two big, ox heart shaped Amish Paste
1 medium onion–red is preferred, but I used yellow and it’s tasting good
1 small hot pepper of your choice
1 small stalk of celery– whole stalk if thin, half if super-fat
4-5 cups tomato juice (depends on how thin you like it, I do 4)
4 large cloves of F R E S H hardneck garlic
1 Tbsp. kosher salt
1 1/2 tsp. cracked pepper
1/2 cup White Wine Vinegar
1/2 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/4 cup chopped fresh Italian flat leaf parsley
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro

So you start off by chopping all of the veggies into 1-inch dice and then, one vegetable at a time, pulsing them in a food processor with a blade until they’re coarse. I don’t think it really matters what order you do this in, but it’s imperative that you start with very ripe tomatoes.

I chopped my peppers and onions first and dumped them out into the largest of my glass nesting bowls. Remind me sometime to do a post about my bowls, will ya? I have a lot of bowls and every one of them is special to me in some way.

So now you’re adding the veggies one at a time to the bowl and your kitchen is starting to fill with the fumes from the onions and peppers, and with a sharp, green and cool fragrance from the cucumbers.

I used a mix of one slicing cuke from the farmers’ market and three smallish Boston Pickling cukes from my garden. If they’re organically grown, I leave the skin on, but don’t forget to slice the seeds out, you really don’t want those floating around in the mix.

Next came the tomatoes and then the short stalk of celery. A lot of recipes don’t call for celery, and I’ve tried some that use way too much. I love just a hint of celery flavor, it shouldn’t overpower. The tomato should take center stage.

Now you’ve got a great big bowl of freshness and it’s time to add the remaining ingredients, the most important being the garlic. If you haven’t got any fresh hardneck garlic from a local farmer, well… I’m sorry. I really don’t know what else to say. Except maybe skip the garlic, because the rancid crap they try to sell as garlic at the grocery store just shouldn’t ever be added to any dish you might want to take pride in. It’s disgusting. Sorry to be so blunt and mean, but it’s true.

So while there’s still time, get thee to a farmers’ market and buy up a buttload of hardneck garlic. This bulb is Music, a sweet and delicious variety—super-juicy and garlic-tastic! Mince it up as fine as you can, then fold it into the veggies. Add the olive oil and vinegar, salt and pepper, then the parsley and cilantro.

Last comes the tomato juice. I’ve got to tell you that I’m feeling pretty damned lucky right now. Want to know why? Well, let me tell you. It’s because of the fact that I made a little trip down to the dungeon (a.k.a. basement), and what did I spy right there gathering dust on my dwindling pantry shelf? I found a jar of thin tomato sauce—improperly labeled, because really? It’s tomato juice. My very own tomato juice from my most amazing garden two summers ago.

I got to crack that jar open almost exactly two years to the day—the label read 9/4/05—and swirl it gently into the bowl of vegetables, thus taking it from the level of a loose salad to a cool summery soup.

My fridge is a bit packed right now and I didn’t have enough room for such a big bowl, so I dumped it into a pitcher and the quart jar the juice came out of so it can sit in the cold overnight. You can eat it after a few hours if you don’t have the patience to wait, but it’s much better if you let all of the ingredients mingle and get to know one another overnight. It’s a fuller, sexier soup the next day.

And a fuller sexier soup is just the thing on a hot September day, don’t you think?

Technorati Tags: recipes, gazpacho, tomatoes, eat local, locavore, organic gardening

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