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

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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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Hey y’all! Do me a favor and take a minute to support my dear friend, Gudrun Cram-Drach, in her art.

She’s a semi-finalist in a web-based competition with her animated master’s thesis film “One Skin.” There is an online voting period until August 31, 2007, and it’d be great if you checked out the website.

It’s easy to vote: they just want your email address and nothing else, and you don’t have to watch the films to make a choice (unless you want to). The films are pretty cool, and there are other categories you can vote in too (fashion, music and art).

Please go here: Uncover/Discover and click on FILM to find her film One Skin. Her film is 10 minutes long, and full of gorgeous imagery.

See what I mean?

I’ve always loved Gudrun’s vision and it’s so exciting to see her finishing her formal education and moving into the career she’s dreamed of for so long.

Synopsis: Mary is confronted by different paths of womanhood — independence at a cost or the confinement of traditional roles. In her efforts to rise above these limiting scenarios, Mary is offered a glimpse of freedom in the bird she seeks as well as a potential solution in the actions of a rebellious little girl.

So go forth and vote! Thank you!

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Goodness, I can’t wait to get my computer fixed on Tuesday. I just went to pay bills online and some of the sites refuse to recognize my computer and unfortunately my contact info is from our old place, so I can’t even use their security system of having them phone me a code to access my account. Fortunately, I’m trying to pay bills ten days early for once.

Also, I’m just dying to show you pictures of things like the swank light table Chris built, and the growing stack of handwork projects I am planning but have yet to find the energy or time to do much but think about with a smile.

Amanda over at SouleMama has me all inspired to make myself some skirts for the spring and summer. I’m not much of a seamstress when it comes to garments, but I know it runs in my blood thanks to my super-talented Mom and Aunt Ginny, so I’m hopeful that with some practice, I’ll pick it up. Already my seams are more consistent just from the bibs and tote bags I made last year. I figure I need some help, though and they’re both a thousand miles away and busy with their own lives, so I went ahead and ordered Sew What! Skirts: 16 Simple Styles You Can Make with Fabulous Fabrics by Francesca DenHartog.

The impending delivery might push me to get that pile around my sewing area cleaned up, no? Well, let’s hope. I would love to make a few simple skirts and embellish them with embroidery. Speaking of embroidery, Amanda also has me wanting to spend more money on a craft I’ve barely even begun to try, never mind be productive with, so I’m just going to put the fabulous book she highlights in this post on my wish list and wait. Looks like I’ll have to anyway. I just followed her link and seems the book is sold out. That doesn’t surprise me at all, I can imagine that 90 percent of her readers saw her adorable linen smocks with embellishments made with the designs in that book and clicked over immediately to empty the supply at SuperBuzzy.

Aaaaanyhoo…it’s Saturday and the sun is shining for a few more moments here, though a big bank of clouds is moving in with rain for later and then yes, more snow for the next few days. I know I should be frustrated, but again I think another weekend I can chip away at the inside stuff, do some writing, and maybe even some reading. Meanwhile, I look out the window and see that the grass needs a trim already, even though it’s had hard freezes several times this month. None of the seed we planted two weeks ago has come up yet. I just hope it didn’t rot in the ground. If it did, we’ll plant again. I have plenty more seed.

We’ve got one payment left on my computer loan, and once that money is available we’re going to redirect it to a landscaping service to go out and cut the lawn at the old house until the thing sells. Making that decision lifted a huge grey weight off of my mind. I hate that lawn. It’s rutted and full of plantain that won’t cut, has massive patches that stay wet year round, but not wet enough to call them a small pond. We don’t own a proper tractor for cutting the grass efficiently, and have no intention of buying one. Our lawn is manageable with the push mower—it takes about one hour if one of the adults does it. If the teenager does it (and he should, it’s his job after all) it takes all day. He stops for food, water, ice cream, bathroom, reading, talking on the phone, grumbling, popsicles, food, bathroom, etcetera, etcetera every time he has to empty the mulch bag.

Speaking of the mulch bag, I have a plan for the grass clippings this summer. Besides using them for mulch around plants in the garden—because we only need so much for that and yet the grass continues to grow—I’m going to start a windrow for compost in the woods. We have about 30 garbage bags of leaves we collected from neighbors and I’m going to dump some of those out in a long row just behind the perennial garden. I’ll add a layer of grass and dump a few more bags on and shovel in some horse manure each time we mow, then turn it every now and again. Next year I should have some good compost for the garden beds.

Okay, time to get my next column for 100Hats finished, then do the grocery shopping. I’m hoping we don’t have to go anywhere else over the weekend, except maybe out for a bite to eat tonight. Unless I really feel like cooking, which at the moment, I don’t. But I do hope you have a wonderful weekend.

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Angelina has a great post about cooking with what you have on hand and it’s had me thinking about the pantry I want to build when we reconfigure our back entryway someday. My grandmother had a fantastic pantry when I was a kid, but she tore it out and made her kitchen bigger once all of the kids were grown and raising families of their own. I suppose you don’t really need a huge pantry for two people, but I sure wish I could have it here and now.

I remember the cookie jar on the counter inside, the rows and rows of jars and cans stacked neatly on the shelves. The bin of potatoes and onions underneath. The window at the far end where I could lean on the counter and watch everyone in the backyard from the dark space and feel like I was in another world, spying. She had unopened jars of Raspberry Za-Rex and Coffee Syrup for flavored milk—we blew through several glasses of that every visit.

Here I have one of those corner carousel cabinets that holds a surprisingly large amount of food. But you have to watch how you load it, things knock off into the unreachable space in the corner sometimes. I also have one of those snap-together Rubbermaid shelves in the basement that holds some kitchen supplies that get used less often, as well as the rapidly dwindling jars of canned food from the 2005 garden.

This weekend Tyler wanted to make a sandwich, but groaned his lament at the empty Bread & Butter pickle jar in the fridge. Nothing in it but green brine and mustard seeds, a few floating slices of onion. He looked so bereft and actually started to put everything away rather than eat a sandwich without the beloved pickles. I told him to check the shelf downstairs and he Teenagered me with “This was the last jar, moooom. Duh.”

“You’re sure? Because I’m pretty sure I just told you that so you’d make them last a little longer than your usual week. Go check.”

He huffed and puffed and leaked air all the way downstairs and back he came with the true last jar of B & Bs. He even managed to look a little sheepish and thanked me for being so sneaky. I restrained myself from saying that it’s hardly sneaky when it’s sitting right there on the shelf for anyone willing to schlep down to the basement and get it, lazy bones. Honestly.

The slices at the top were kind of mushy, but they didn’t have brine covering them so I picked out about an inch worth and tossed them into the chicken scraps bin. Once into the brine, oh wow. Even at almost 2 years old, spectacular pickles. I stood at the sink eating with my fingers straight from the jar and could feel the prickly spines on the cucumbers as I washed them in the sink that summer. I wish I had time this morning to go back through my CDs and find the pictures I took of the heaps of harvest in the wheelbarrows. I must have pickled 300 cucumbers that summer, plus the tons I sold at the farmer’s market.

Well, I’m determined to work out my soil balance problems this season so I can restock my pickle supply. Even if I don’t do any other canning this summer, we can’t go without the B & Bs. Oh hell. Or sauce. Or roasted tomatoes. Or roasted peppers. Or salsa. Or Kim-chee. Or pickled banana peppers. Whoops! There I go getting all carried away again, forgetting that I work 45 hours a week. Silly bint.

One other thing that I canned that summer has surprised me with how good it tastes and I sadly used the last jar the same day we cracked open those pickles. We had traveled to see my family that July, right the same week the Haricot Verts came on strong. When I returned the first crop was all a bit oversized for market, so I picked for two days straight, pulling in about 75# of beans that I had to clean and trim. I gave a lot away. Some I blanched and froze, and I know there’s a trick to doing that so they don’t get mushy, but hell if I can figure it out. They had great flavor, but worked best in soups or casseroles. Not so great as a side veggie. The rest I either pickled as spicy dills (pretty yum!) or I straight canned.

Now, I’m not a fan of canned vegetables. I don’t ever buy them in the grocery store, except for an occasional can of creamed corn to add to chowder, or canned artichoke hearts for pizza or pasta and hearts of palm for salad. Oh, and black olives. But I have never in my life bought canned green beans, so I set about this project with some trepidation. What if they sucked and gathered dust on the shelf for ten years?

Well, they didn’t suck. As a matter of fact, I’ve been enjoying a bowl of the roasted chicken soup with brown rice that I made on Sunday, for lunch every day this week and biting into the canned, oversized Haricot Verts that I dumped in at the last minute has been the culinary highlight of my days. They’ve absorbed just a tiny bit of the slow-cooked stock mingled with the salty brine, but just behind that comes the taste of summer. Green, sharp, sweet and while not exactly the flavor of a fresh green bean, the ghost of that beautiful snap and crunch sits on the tongue for just a second.

I can see my pantry, tucked next to the mud room I envision one day after we’ve sold the other house and knocked the debt back down. But for now I look forward to putting up even just a few jars of pickles, sauce and yes, even some green beans this summer. Just so I can pull myself up out of the grey Midwestern winter fog to taste the sparkle and promise of summers to come–thanks to the work of the summer just past.

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