her able hands

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

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

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

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

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