Short-term cucmber-onion pickles (or the quickest pickles of all...)

This one's for my friend Katie who was trying to figure out what the heck to do with the pile of pickling cucumbers from her Boston Organics order.  Here's some pickles that you can make this afternoon and eat tonight.  From Deborah Madison's Local Flavors - a cookbook with seasonal, semi-fancy farmer's market-based recipes.

I would serve these pickles with grilled meats, put them on sandwiches, throw them on a salad or eat them plain.  (for the simplest pickles of all, I slice salad cukes or onions 20 min-1hr early, throw them in a tupperware, sprinkle a few spoonfulls of vinegar on them, close, shake, and store in the fridge until its time to serve the salad. yum!)

QUICK CUCUMBER-ONION PICKLES:

2 shiny fresh red or white onions
2 cups thinly sliced cucumbers, peeled only if the skins are tough

Pickle Troubleshooting

Here's a link from the Canning for a New Generation facebook page - now, if you try to make one of the pickle recipes I posted, you can find out what went wrong!  : p    Or you can scan it before you start to avoid trouble...

Hopefully you won't need it, but just in case you do...

http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/can_06/fermentproblems.html

Quick pickles...or what to do with all those beans.

Veggies cut up to make Achar Segar - and Indonesian quick pickle

So....I love beans, and I harvest a lot of them - especially the purple-spotted dragon beans I love.   I also have a bean teepee that's in full effect right now.   But the problem with beans is that you need to pick them almost every day - they are best when they are just a few inches long - in just a few days they can grow to 7" monsters that while still might be crunchy and sweet, can also be a little tough.

So what to do with all these beans?   Well...rinse them, cut off the tips and tails, and throw them out for hungry dinner guests while waiting for the rest of the food to finish.   Or steam them for 3-4 minutes and cover them with a little salt and butter.

Preserving beans?   Well, I've tried just throwing them into a plastic freezer bag and into the chest freezer - and the result is ok - defrost, saute and serve - but still a little squishy.

Sauerkraut: advice from the pros...

Learn about fermentation from the pros - Sandy Katz, who I got to learn from during a summer internship at IDA in central Tennesee, actually was one of the first people to show me how to do food preservation.    After I left, he published the book he'd told us he was working on, and its become a little bit of a cult phenom for people who love to ferment.   I still haven't bought the book, but here are his tips for making sauerkraut - which actually makes me more confident about my own kraut.   Check it out for more info on starting your own fermentation.

Wild Fermentation Sauerkraut tips

How to make pickles and sauerkraut - Part I

All right, kids, I had to do a little quick research on wikipedia before writing this blog entry....because a) I got confused reading all the different recipes to make pickles, and b) there are at least two, completely different ways to make pickles, and I wanted to make sure I had the terminology/verbiage right for this.  

So....If I say that I am making pickles, there are two different methods I could be talking about.   One method, that I'll talk about in another post, is to simple submerge a vegetable in vinegar (or a vinegar-salt-water-sugar-and-spices) mixture for a certain period of time.   I've done this with carrots, beans, beets, onions, garlic and cucumbers.   The finished product can either be canned (safely, because of the high acid content of the vinegar), or stored in the refrigerator and eaten within two weeks (although some recipes say these "refrigerator pickles" can be good for months at a time...I've certainly eaten commercial pickles months after I opened them and stuck them in the fridge...but then again, I often eat things I shouldn't....:)

"Saved" from Irene...

Today's cucumbers, green tomatoes, onions, potatoes...

My storm preparations....digging up all the yukon gold potatoes from the community garden (about 10 mins before the rain started), then pulling all the tomatoes that even had a hint of red...they will ripen on the window sill - I didn't want any of it to get blown on the ground or rot - or split - sometimes tomatoes get so filled with water that they split.    So now....I'm ready.  Sounds like tomorrow will be a good day to cook.

Garden journal:  only about 3-4 lbs. of potatoes from community garden - and I'm pretty sure I planted 2 lbs. of seed potato.  (I'll have to check my invoice), but in general, kind of a disappointing yield.   On the other hand, I barely watered them, and only weeded occasionally, and the plot was shady and had tree roots...but still, I have had much, much, much better luck growing these suckers in containers...

around 10 lbs. "red thumb" fingerling potatoes grown in buckets and bags in the backyard.   See how long these babies last!

Harvest Season

Harvest, 8/26

So....I haven't posted in a little while - BECAUSE I'VE BEEN GARDENING MY TAIL OFF!    And I've even got some other people involved in my capers (ie, fermenting...the final (?) frontier).   More on that later....

So....what happens in the garden (even a postcard-sized urban garden) in August to keep a girl too busy to blog?   Everything.