her able hands

I’m one of those morning people who has to get up out of bed, pull on my pajama bottoms, then get a pot of coffee started before I do anything else. Then I usually sit down at my computer to respond to emails or start a blog post while it brews, squinting at the screen through foggy eyes until the first few sips of liquid daytime hit my nerves.

I had a mysterious malfunction with the coffee pot this morning and the cup is full of floaters. I sure hope that’s not an indication of what the day holds.

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My favorite spot to photograph my vegetables is on this worn cedar picnic table. The only thing missing from this picture is a horizon of blue ocean behind the green fronds. Yes, I’m wishing I had found a way to make it to the beach this summer.

I couldn’t resist pulling up a small bunch of the carrots growing in the first chicken tractor bed. Once again, I see the effects of not enough sun. The carrots should be fulll sized by now, they’ve been in the ground since early May, but the largest of the bunch was an inch across and only twice as long.

I planted two varieties—Shin Kuroda and Chantaney, both short and stubby varieties suited to imperfect soil. Hardly enough in this meager harvest to center a dish around, but I was craving a garlicky, brothy potato kale soup so I chopped the carrots up into tiny bits and tossed them into the pot towards the end. They added a nice dappled color to the soup and because I didn’t let them cook way down they maintained quite a bit of flavor, even if in the smallest of doses.

I ate one raw and it was sharp and sweet and oh, so deeply carroty. I’ll plant these again next year, only in a sunnier spot. I’m hoping to have enough this fall to make at least one batch of carrot and ginger soup. Given the circumstances of the placement of this bed and the wacky weather this season, I would consider that a success.

Technorati Tags: carrots, garden, organic gardening, Shin Kuroda, Chantaney, harvest

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I took a sick day today, courtesy of my skull-tingling, spine-wrangling sinus headache. I thought I would just drop the Lila Bean off at school and head back home to sleep for a while because I only got about two hours last night. But when I came in, flashes of red winked at me in the bright morning sun from the garden beds next door. I grabbed the colander and walked over in the still cool air, passing by the chickens who are still happily scratching bugs up out of the soil, making those contented little gurgly chicken noises.

So instead I’ve been listening to Natalie Merchant’s, The House Carpenter’s Daughter, while coring, seeding and quartering the colander full of San Marzanos, and tiny dicing eggplant, a variety of peppers, and mincing shallots and Red Russian garlic. Slow-roasted Ratatouille for the freezer. The house and neighborhood are so quiet, just the music twanging from the speaker on top of the fridge, the kitties wandering around, scratching at the door for in, then out. The cicadas and crickets sing their swan song of summer and I know I made the right choice staying home today. I’m in desperate need of some alone time in my own house, a little head space for the head case, so-to-speak. Almost perfect, except for the pounding headache, the perpetual sneezing and the constant chills which we will attempt to ignore for the remainder of this gift of a day.

San Marzano paste tomatoes, as described at High Mowing Seeds where I purchased my seed two years ago:

A favorite among processors due to its high solids and outstanding flavors, this classic Italian variety makes an excellent, all-around tomato for paste, puree, or canning. Long, 3” X 1 ½“ intensely red cylindrical fruit resists cracking and holds well both on the vine and in storage. Indeterminate.

This year I bought my plants from a grower through ebay because I didn’t get my seed-starting act together in time. I swear I posted about that, but can’t find where to link back to it. I’m not very good at the meta-blogging. Aaanyway, even with the less-than-optimal access to the sun, these plants produced some fine tomatoes that are ripening at just the right rate to make a batch of roasted sauce at a time (today a double-batch). I’m all addicted to roasted sauce now—gas bill be damned—with small diced eggplant and lots of garlic and peppers and plenty of fresh herbs tossed in for the last hour of cooking. It comes out so sweet and caramelized, tasting of earth and sun and captured summer.

I can’t see any real reason to grow other types of paste tomatoes if you’re looking for a true paster and are low on space to grow them. (Although I am a big fan of the Amish Paste and Italian Giant Paste tomatoes as well.) The San Marzanos have very few seeds, almost no gel and thick, dry walls with a terrifically meaty texture. They’re super fast to prepare for cooking, with very little mess. Steven’s been very busy with his San Marzanos this summer, too.

I can only imagine how incredible they must taste when grown under the Italian sun, hugging a trellis built by wizened peasant farmer’s hands on soil that has been tended by the same family for centuries—as opposed to my second year Ohio soil, overshadowed by giant old oak trees.

Oops! Sorry. I seem to have fallen down the romantic stereotype rabbit hole.

See how neat and tidy that looks? The seed clump slides right out leaving a truly empty, dry cavity that’s just begging for a good slow roasting.

Don’t you think?

You should smell my house right now. That’s what someone needs to do—write a wordpress plugin for fragrance blogging. Come on all you code wizards out there, heed my call!

So here we have one of two pans about to go into the oven.

And here’s the finished batch from Saturday.

Hee. Do you like how I did that? Now, you can see that I didn’t take the skins off the tomatoes. I seldom do. I’m just one of those weirdos who doesn’t mind the papery skin sticking to her teeth and the roof of her mouth. Or maybe I’m just too lazy to deal with that extra step of dunking them in hot water, then plunging them into cold, then peeling them. I mean, let’s cut to the chase, what’s a little tomato skin between teeth?

So I think I’m going to do this Ratatouille thing with the rest of my tomatoes as they come in. The eggplant at the market has been great—medium sized, skin not too thick, not too seedy and affordable. I’m thinking ahead to February and how wonderful a container of this is going to taste over rice while I’m balancing my bowl on my belly and browsing through seed catalogs.

Technorati Tags: San Marzano paste tomatoes, Ratatouille, slow-roasting, garden, eat local, locavore, stocking the freezer

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I can’t believe OLS is over. I didn’t try half of the recipes I intended to try, but the summer isn’t finished and the produce at the farmers’ market is still abundant, so I’m going to keep this thing going on my own blog for a few more weeks.

I had no idea what I wanted to make last night because my brain is all fogged up with histamines. The goldenrod is in full bloom and my sinuses feel like a big rig has parked right up in there, and the driver is a heavy smoker. That and a new symptom that I’ve never had with seasonal allergies before—my entire body hurts as if I’ve been whacked all over with a rubber stick. Like flu aches. Lila and Tyler are both wonky from allergies too, so we all kind of pooped around all day. Be forewarned, this post is going to meander. My head’s a wreck. I promise eventually to get to the point, and it’s all related, just not particularly well organized.

The big college apartment complex out across the road that runs behind us had some kind of a battle of the bands event outside yesterday. Lots of extremely loud, angry music. I know I’m getting old because dudes…what the everloving hell? I just don’t understand the noise that passes for music with the kids these days. So much angst. Hate. Anger. No melody. No rhythm. How is this considered music? And why did it have to infect such a glorious day yesterday for eight solid hours? Hours that I had planned to spend wandering around outside, peacefully doing small jobs that wouldn’t entail too much lifting or bending over.

I tried working outside, but my heart was beating so fast from the allergies and the grinding metal guitar and screaming. I did manage to pick a large colander of San Marzano tomatoes, which I forgot to photograph and Chris has my camera down at the old house today, so you’ll have to take my word for it. I’ll snap a pic of the slow roasted sauce I intend to make with them today. I also finally dug up the last row of potatoes, German Butterball. Looks like about 20 lbs. Some of those will go into vegetable soup with the Red Russian kale I got at the market, and the carrots I picked.

While I did all of that harvesting, Lila and two of her friends discovered the wood lot for the first time in a year of living here. They marched around from one end to the other—barking out orders—and climbed the wood chip pile to survey the lay of the land. They also tromped through a huge patch of poison ivy. Oh joy. It was close to nap time though, and the two girls began to melt down, so it was time to break up the search party and head inside. Thank Maude.

Lila pissed and moaned for half an hour and I lay on the bed next to her reading Harry Potter and trying to ignore all of the terrible sounds coming at me all at once. Whining. “Music”. Lawn mowers. “Music”. Whining. Eventually she fell asleep and I stayed inside and read for three hours. To hell with everything else.

So by the time I started dinner it was already almost 6:00. I halved two acorn squash (organic from the market) and started them baking in a 350 degree oven. Meanwhile I warmed up the cast iron skillet and dropped in a dollop of Amish butter, some sliced Cippolini onions (market), 3 types of peppers (my Anaheim Chili, and 1 sweet red and 1 sweet green from the market) and sautéed until golden. Added some zucchini (market) and all blue potatoes (mine). I added these to ten eggs (mine), a cup of flour (local), 1 tsp. each of baking powder and baking soda (not local), and chopped fresh basil (mine). Poured the goop into a buttered 9″ square baking dish and baked for 35 minutes at 350.

While I waited for all of that to cook, I sliced up a bunch of tomatoes (Pink Caspian from the market, my Juanne Flammé and Black Krim) and a cuke (market), then tossed those with a little balsamic, salt and pepper (all not local), local goat feta and my basil. Doesn’t it look yummy? I didn’t get the photo until dusk, so it’s a wee dark.

I sat out on the deck browsing through the latest Gardening Jihad Catalog while everything cooked and Lila played on the swing set with two friends. The music, blissfully, had ceased. The air smelled of late summer, loamy and green with a tinge of decay, and a rich, eggy warmth wafting out of the kitchen. Soon the timer dinged…

So over the next month or so, I'd like to try cooking a few things I haven't tried before, but will need to do a bit more sourcing (driving) to accomplish locally:

Leg of lamb (I've never cooked lamb in my life, so this will be a new one. Any advice on cooking one on the grill much appreciated!) If we end up liking the taste of lamb, I have opportunity to buy a good amount to stock the freezer for winter.

Homemade pasta. I can't find my pasta attachment for the KitchenAid anywhere. It's only been used once in, oh, fifteen years. No idea what happened to it.

Stuffed Cabbage using local, grassfed bison.

I'm also going to do a little canning/freezing by doing some U-pick at Hilgerts a local farm that isn’t certified organic, but uses Integrated Pest Management. In the next month or three they have paste tomatoes (sauce & salsa, dammit!), green beans and cooking greens that I want for the freezer, onions, turnips, rutebega, yams, and parsnips for the chilly corner of the basement that I’ll pretend is a root cellar. I will have local foods this winter.

Jeepers. That’s like, right around the corner, isn’t it?

Technorati Tags: one local summer, eat local, locavore, garden, seasonal allergies, pantry, root cellar, harvest, zucchini tart

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