food : peaches

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This year I am canning peaches for the first time. I’ve never been drawn to canned fruits, although I know people who can pears and peaches every year in massive batches. I couldn’t resist the recipe for brandied peaches that reran in the New York Times recently, and decided that I could make a few pints. Since I was only able to scrounge up four wide-mouthed pint jars in the house, four was what I settled on. Which is good, because six pounds of peaches is heckuva lot. At every step—weighing, peeling, slicing, boiling—the bowls and pots I have were at capacity.

The peaches themselves were not the best I’ve ever had. They were ripe, with a couple of exceptions, but the texture was a bit mealy (which I discovered when I went to have one for breakfast earlier in the week). They came from the farmers’ market, from Harris Orchard which generally has excellent fruit. I think the weather this year just didn’t agree with stone fruit, even more than is typically true in this area.I hope they won’t fall apart with cooking; it’s my belief that sugar syrup and brandy will go a long way toward making the texture of the peaches not of paramount importance, but maybe that’s the wrong end of the stick.

After cooking them in sugar syrup until just soft, I packed them into the jars. I’m pretty sure I cooked them too long, and I’m not clear on what I could have done to have the jar not be filled with liquid that seeped out of the peaches. Maybe drain them in a colander first? That seems to defeat the purpose of having them hot. At any rate, I drained them a bit in order to have room in the jars for more sugar syrup, but in the end only had room for the brandy. So, I had an enormous pot of sugar syrup left over. It seems inconceivable that peaches cooked in sugar syrup could end up not being sweet enough, so I’m going to assume that they’ll be fine. In the unlikely event that they’re not, I suppose we can sprinkle sugar on them.

In the future, if I do this again, I think I’ll keep the peaches in halves and definitely not cook them nearly as long. I’ll let you know around Christmas how this batch turned out.

food : peaches

food : tomatoes

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A couple of things have contributed to my silence around here the past couple of weeks. One, it’s been godawful hot and sitting in front of our furnace of a computer is the last thing I want to be doing. Plus, the heat makes my brain melt so anything that requires stringing words together coherently is out. Two, we’ve been up to our eyeballs in fruits and vegetables, and it seems like I’ve been working around the clock to chop, peel, dice, slice, bake, roast, stew, and generally turn them into meals. It probably hasn’t been around the clock, it just seems that way because the kitchen gets so hot.

This year has not been great for tomatoes in our area, so we didn’t get as many early in the season as we usually do. In the past, we’ve been heartily sick of tomatoes by this point in the summer, and this year we’re just getting going. I’ve had sliced Purple Cherokee tomatoes on fried egg sandwiches and my partner’s been taking the assortment of cherry tomatoes to work with his lunch. That leaves us with several pints per week from our CSA (now quarts as the harvest picks up) of mid-sized red, orange, and yellow tomatoes to deal with, in addition to whatever odds and ends are given to us by our friends with the enormous garden. Two weeks ago the solution was deer chili. Yes, I said deer chili. I know that you couldn’t pay me to eat a venison burger during the nine years I lived in a deer-shooting-friendly state, but now that I’m a grown-up and the deer is free and leaner than beef, I’ve succumbed. It’s actually not that bad, and works really well in the recipes in which I’d previously used ground turkey. So, yeah, I’m not a vegetarian anymore, but that still doesn’t mean I’ll eat any of the meat that is reasonably easy to procure and cheap by way of coming from a CAFO. Mennonite-raised chickens and turkeys, wild salmon, and deer killed by a friend: that’s about the whole of it. I may branch out to Mennonite-raised pigs for the holidays this year; don’t hold your breath, though.

At any rate, the chili was good and used up a lot of tomatoes. We have another 2 lb. package of ground venison, but since we also have 2 containers of chili in the freezer, I probably won’t make another batch just yet. Last week I made ratatouille for the first time in order to use up some tomatoes and one of the two eggplants we had in the fridge. While I ate ratatouille growing up, I never buy eggplants of my own volition because I don’t really like them. Since subscribing to our summer CSA, I’ve had to adapt to receiving them as one of the semi-regular vegetables. The first year, I made all of the eggplant into baba ghanoush. Which worked out well, because many of our friends liked it so I could serve it to guests and didn’t have to really eat that much of the eggplant at all. Last year, the weather wasn’t great for eggplants and we didn’t get many (or, possibly, our farmer scaled back because we received so many the year before). This year has been a low-eggplant year, but in CSA terms that means I’ve only gotten a few of the Japanese eggplants and 2 decent sized standard ones. Thus, ratatouille, using the Simply In Season recipe. It was good, and my partner liked it well enough for us to allow for a repeat later this week. I did have to go out and purchase the courge, which I found kind of amusing. Our farmer is committed to not overwhelming us with the vegetable that everyone else is typically overwhelmed with in the summer, thus the summer squash shortage.

Winter squash, however, is a different story. We are already starting to see the boom of winter squash, and I had two spaghetti squashes (one enormous, one normal) to find a use for. I’ve seen those weight loss shows, I know that you can do some weird thing and the squash gets all stringy and you can eat it with sauce if you’re on the Atkins Diet. I just really didn’t know what weird thing, or if this was a food that a person not trying to lose 10 pounds per week would ever want to actually put in their mouths. Since we had the squash we gave it a try, serving the ratatouille over it, and I am pleased to report that it was good. The other half of the (enormous) squash I used to make a cold salad with chunked fresh tomatoes (also chopped onion, minced garlic, and fresh basil). The salad was surprisingly good. I am not the best at cold salads; it rarely occurs to me to make them and I am always doubtful regarding their appeal. Last summer was the first year I made a cold salad other than bean or potato (and I haven’t made potato salad in years), a shredded beet salad from a recipe foisted on me at the farmers’ market by the guy who runs the nearby community garden farm. This year I tried a couple new combinations, and they were all nice so I shouldn’t really have been that surprised that a non-green salad was good. So good that we voted to use the remaining squash for another salad rather than with the ratatouille, even.

In addition to tomatoes, which another round of salad has the benefit of making a dent in, the item I most need to find a use for is chicken stock. Our winter CSA included two stewing chickens, and due to limited time I only ever stewed one of the chickens. (Yes, I don’t have a job, but that doesn’t mean I actually have a lot of time for all-day activities like making chicken stock.) Now, limited freezer space means that I need to use the chicken stock I have before I can thaw and stew the remaining chicken. One of the only recipes that I make regularly with chicken stock—Turkey Lentil Pilaf, also from Simply In Season—also uses up fresh tomatoes, so we’ll be having that tonight and probably a couple more times over the next few weeks. In fact, the recipe doesn’t use much more than chicken stock and tomatoes: lentils, turkey, rice, and fresh mint. Probably also some onion and garlic. Now you know.

After tonight’s pilaf and tomorrow’s ratatouille, I’ll assess the remaining tomatoes and decide if some of them need to be stewed and frozen. And then we’ll pick up our CSA on Thursday and start all over again.

food : tomatoes

food : blueberries

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The echoing silence around here has been due to our absence. We were off in the Great White North last week, visiting family and collecting blueberries from the family farm. Usually when we arrive this time of year the bushes are laden with fruit, so much so that it’s impossible to pick them all. Along with the fruit, the bushes are typically crawling with all manner of wasps and hornets which feast on the berries as they become overripe. Despite our best efforts each year, we’ve never been able to pick the bushes totally clean.

This year the bushes were the barest I’ve ever seen them; oddities of weather meant that the crop was unusually small. The scarcity when we arrived was also due in part to the decision to allow pick-your-own folks to access the field without set hours; the easy to pick berries at eye and hand level were all gone. Berries remained at the interior of the bushes and at heights that required one of us to stand on a stool while the other held the bucket. In addition to these, some bushes were dotted with second round berries, those that were left to ripen after the bush was picked nearly clean earlier in the season. As a result, we spent more time in the field this year for fewer berries. The weather was gorgeous, clear and much cooler than home, even on the hottest days. It was nice to be outside, and I lost track of time each day as I usually mark the hours passing by the number of berries in the buckets.

Now that we’re back home we’re eating berries in our cereal, I’m freezing some for the winter, and I’ve made one pie and some sauce to go over the angel food cake we had for my partner’s birthday. There’s a recipe for pickled blueberries that seems to be something like a sweet relish or chutney that I’m interested in trying, but I may decide that we don’t have enough berries to spare for that. I remind myself that the berries will grow again next year; I’m sure I’ll be convinced, as I am each year, to share some with our friends.

food : blueberries

garden : clean up

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It has finally begun to rain again, which means that the plants are less brown and the rain barrel is filled up again. I was surprised to empty it, and it definitely came in handy during the dry spell. We have yet to set up the second one, although we could have used it. The indoor plants seem to like the untreated water just fine, so that’s a bonus use as well.

Now that the daylilies are done blooming, I took some time to cut out the dead stalks. They now look tidier, but much shorter. I also cut the flowering stems off the lavender, which was time-consuming as I didn’t want to simply shear the plant down. Perhaps in future years; at the moment it looks nice and bushy and more like it belongs in its spot (in contrast to when all the stems were growing nearly horizontally in their attempts to be in the sun at all times).

Besides those two efforts, I have done very little in the yard lately. It’s been brutally hot and humid, but also dry so not much has been growing. The big excitement has been the insects that have discovered the milkweed: we have a whole slew of orange milkweed aphids, and just last week I returned to see a female Monarch flitting around. It appeared as if she were inspecting greenery, but I couldn’t locate any eggs so we’ll have to wait and see if she laid them. On the butterfly front, I’ve had several other small visitors to the garden now that the liatris is blooming, a Horace’s Duskywing and a Silver-Spotted Skipper.

It’s my hope that we’ll get back out in the yard and finish clearing it of weeds in a few weeks, after we go on vacation and the weather cools down. Of course, around here we could be a couple of months waiting for cooler weather. Plenty to do inside as well!

garden : clean up

food : CSA bounty and the gardens of friends

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Our CSA is swinging into full summer gear, and we are overflowing with potatoes, basil, tomatoes, a variety of cucumbers, and two kinds of squash. To be fair to our farmer who works hard not to overwhelm us with what he perceives to be the less desirable of the summer vegetables (squash), this week’s surplus results at least in part from my choice to buy a second box at a discounted rate. Showing up exactly when the farmer is delivering has a few advantages, and being offered an orphan box is one of them. So I have twice as many tomatoes and squashes as usual, and am trying to decide what to do with them.

Although many people complain about squash, I like them and will probably just continue to eat them as a regular part of meals. So far this summer we’ve had yellow squash sautéed with olive oil and tarragon (my personal favorite way) and yellow squash fritters. The fritters were an experiment, the result of combing through Simply In Season and studying all the recipes marked with ‘summer squash.’ The fritters were quite tasty, but consistently soft. We’re going to have them again tomorrow—three cups of shredded squash is less than I thought it would be, so I have some squash pre-grated and ready to go—and I’m hopeful that smaller and thinner will lead to a crispier outcome. I’m also tempted by a pickle recipe that uses yellow squash, but not terribly motivated to hover over a pot of boiling water again so soon. Maybe later in the summer if we have another big yellow squash week. In the meantime, the green and white courge will go into muffins, and we’ll munch our way through the variety of cucumbers.

On the tomato front, I have a row of smallish red tomatoes lined up on the windowsill, two pints of cherry tomatoes in the fridge, and two large Cherokee Purples ready for eating. I’m thinking I’ll just stew and freeze the red ones, despite their suitability for sandwiches, which will save me the trouble of figuring out an actual dish to make with them once cooked. Freezer space is now at a premium, however, which means that recipes involving chicken stock need to start appearing on the menu forthwith. Not to mention that the actual chicken needs to be thawed and stewed, although that will do nothing to address the chicken stock surplus. It’s not exactly soup season, but I have some ideas involving rice and vegetables that could use some up.

We’re also getting a decent amount of lovely basil, but I’ve been too slow to use it and it’s quite wilted. It’s currently soaking in an ice water bath, which the internet assures me will revive it; I suspect that much of it has crossed the line from wilted to dried, so I’m unlikely to ‘revive’ enough for the pesto I was hoping to make. We did use the lovely lemon basil from the folks we know in Frederick for pesto last week, and I’m sure there will be more to come. I just hate to see it go to waste. Speaking of the folks we know in Frederick, they sent us home with some delicious selections from their garden. So far we’ve had dragon tongue beans and escarole, and are looking forward to the radicchio, which will be likely just sautéed as a side for salmon, and cabbage, which I’m going to make into Sweet and Sour Cabbage even though it’s white rather than red.

Not only is this making me hungry, it’s reminding me that there is a lot of chopping, dicing, stewing, sautéeing and baking to be done in the kitchen. Prepare for winter, indeed.

food : CSA bounty and the gardens of friends