October! Habaneros w Chuck Berry

Summer Habeneros strung up to dry w Chuck Berry

Kimchi

Nappa Cabbage, young onion and daikon after soaking overnight in brine

I've found pitchers are good for brining a lot of stuff

Ginger and garlic

Kimchi flavors: garlic, ginder, Korean chili powder & anchovy sauce
(the last two, plus daikon radish, found at a Korean grocery in Allston)

Many vessels for brining

Ingredients (I've found having a kitchen scale fantastic for this stuff)

Mixing everything together

Stuff into clean jars, pour brine over all

ready to ferment

All in all, I'd like to say, a resounding success.  After learning from other fermentation fails, I thoughtfully placed these puppies in the basement.   Fermentation happens best between, I think, 75- 85  degrees - and it goes faster the hotter it gets.   Our apartment is often in the upper range of that, I think, in the summer, so sometimes things get a little too ferment-y.   One week in the basement, however, worked well.

One addendum to Liana Krissoff's excellent recipe: when the fermenting is done, I poured off the brine and replaced it with water, extra garlic, ginger and chili.  Otherwise it's overwhelmingly salty.

Tomato time!

It's that time again, folks!  

gutted tomaters, waiting to be roasted

Time to pile up so many tomatoes you forgot you had a kitchen counter.  

This year, my tomatoes clearly got a fungal infection (that I think I diagnosed as fusilarium wilt).   It means that many of the leaves turn brown on one side, and the plant gets sick.   This happened to my roma tomatoes out back.  I have been willy-nilly sharing soil between potted potatoes, compost and tomatoes, but no more.   I'm going to try to do a small crop rotation and leave that area tomato-free for a few years (sad!   it's pretty much the only totally sunny area in the back yard!) and see if it can heal.   Bugs and pests I can deal with (mostly), but diseases that persist in the soil are tough.


But, I'm still harvesting a fair amount  of Romas (if not the gargantuan quantities of other years.)  And some odd green-purple ones from out front.

Observe...

I cut them in half, lay them face-down on parchment paper and "slow roast" in the oven for 1/2 an hour.
Then it's easy to remove the skins and freeze them.

This year, to prevent disease, I'm throwing all tomato parts (guts, seeds, core, peels) in the trash

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.

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....:)

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. 

Summer Squash refrigerator pickles

Ingredients

 So my friend Dave calls up with a quandry.   He's just inherited an overflow of squash from a neighbor's CSA.   He wants to know if they can be pickled.   They can, says I, put its hot as balls and canned pickles often come out squishy.   What's to be done?   Well....refrigerator pickles.

Keeping the Harvest.....

So it's been far too long since my last blog post, but now, the day before Thanksgiving, I finally have a little time on my hands.

The garden has been put to bed, almost.   Late to mid October, me and Dawn cut down the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, beans, cucumbers and broccoli.   I pulled up the last of the carrots (some of which, left to grow the proper amount of time, actually got to a decent size!) and beets (ditto), pulled off the green peppers, hoping they'd go to red in our fridge, and gathered up all the green tomatoes to bring inside.

It's comforting, after a few years, to start to have a ritual.   Now I know when the heat goes on in late October (we can never make it to November 1!), upstairs comes the little wooden, three-shelved "onion box" I got at an unfinished wood store, with little mesh grates on the doors.   It lives in our back hallway all winter, our impromptu "root cellar" where we keep onions, potatoes garlic and winter squash.

The dried garlic and onions I grew are gone - I always mean to keep them longer, but they are so good, I always say, what the hell, what if they spoil, live for today, and they go into everything I cook between August and October and then they are gone.  :(  Every year I vow to plant more.

The last of the potatoes are hanging on, and I am carefully plotting their fate, planning my last few potato dishes with them in mind.  But we are moving into a different phase of year, here in New England, something I am slowly getting used to.   When I realized that tomatoes, eggplants and peppers were only fresh here for a few months (more like six to ten weeks!), it brought me down.  How the heck are you supposed to eat the lush, sweet, local produce everyone rhapsodizes about, when October-May practically nothing grows?

Well, some people use season-extenders, which I'd like to learn more about, just like everything else I'd like to get around to (sewing buttons back on my coats, selling my stand-alone Ikea closet from two houses ago on Craigslist, writing a novel).   Apparently, with the right cold frame, you can get lettuce in January (and I might believe it - my lettuce is still going strong!) but until then I'll have to stick to a tried-and-true old farmwife tradition: food preservation.

So, a few seasons into my New England gardening education, it suddenly dawned on me: old school (ie, colonial) housewives couldn't go to the supermarket in January to get food.  They knew this in the flush seasons of July and August, and that is where our very most basic "processed foods" come from: jams, jellies, pickles, ketchup, mustard, relishes and sauerkraut, wine and beer.   Who knows if the nutritious value was preserved (was it?) but at least they had a little variety.    It also explains the difference between what we know as "Italian cuisine"  and "German cuisine."    Italy is linked with tomatoes, basil, zuccinis, and other fresh veggies of every kind.   Well, guess what?  It stays warm in Italy for a lot longer than in Germany, which is famous for bratwurst, beer, and sauerkraut.  Or worse, Russian food, where tomatoes often barely make it to ripe at all.   This is actually where my ancestors come from, and it is known for hardy root vegetables: potatoes, cabbages and beets.   Black bread.    Why?   Not because they are unhealthful and hate salads, but because this was what was available.

Preserving and Perservering

Beans

Well, it's August, and you know what that means: full on harvest time.  Yes, there are still many chores to be done, but I feel like in August the bulk of the work shifts to inside the house - what to do with the tons of produce we get.   This year we got a CHEST FREEZER, and so instead of having to stand over a hot canning bath if I want to keep something, I can just pop a lot of stuff in the Freezer.  Like those beans.  Cool.

And, in this garden, you win some, you lose some.  I think I got 1.5 beets, after all that fussing over them.  I (fingers crossed) will have 1 really nice canteloupe.   And the squash bit it, hardcore.   In general, my plants seem to be able to fight off most bugs that attack their leaves.   But we got squash vine borers, that get the part of the plant that goes into the ground, and pretty much finishes them off.   So no squash.

But we are pulling in 5-15 tomatoes a week, including some heirlooms, 3-4 cucumbers, and maybe 20-30 new beans every time I look outside.   The onions, potatoes and garlic are in, so I can cook with those, and the eggplants are producing on schedule.   Peppers - well, lots of green, we are holding out for red.   And I'm trying to coddle some late-summer lettuce, bok-choi and peas - so, in general, I'm feeling pretty well fed.

The food goes into stir-fries, pesto, tomato sauce and salad.   I also got ambitious with the tomatoes and beans:   The umpteen beans got turned into a sort of bean-based pesto type dip, that is really delicious, and frozen for future parties.  (Babs Kingsolver calls it "frijole mole" - most people seem to think it's: strange but good)
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/Frijole-Mole.pdf

Into the freezer can now go pesto, bean dip, tomato puree, roasted tomatoes, and whole beans.   I'll get to canning and pickling in a week or two, when it's a little colder.

And with the tomatoes, I"m trying it all.   I've peeled, cored and seeded plenty of my over-healthy romas to make from-scratch sauce, run them through my roma-3000 (or whatever it's called) to freeze the puree, and even bought extras to put away. - well, I bought about $10 of almost-ripe heirlooms at the farmers market to try preserving.   As per my book (The Busy Person's Guide to Preserving Food, by Janet Chadwick), I sliced the tomatoes up thin and left them in Dawn's food dehydrator until they became, and I quote, "leathery" and put them on my shelf, and also roasted a bunch at 225 degrees, with olive oil, to freeze (note to self: 6 hours waaaaay too long for thin sliced tomatoes to roast - anyone want burnt-up tomato chips?).

So, to all my friends who have cooked with me, and to Dawn who has suffered the effects of my vegetable mania ("OK, so I'll cook the carrots and the beets together, the beans on their own, we'll mash the potatoes, oh yeah and the corn, and what about a salad....?"), thanks for the help.    I'm excited for the cooler weather and some canning, because who doesn't feel good with jars and jars of home-grown food on their shelf?