Ahem. Yes, still alive -- but high time to add another entry! In the near future I will try to add some entries regarding our latest trip down to southern Oregon -- it was smoky from the forest fires but made for some awesome sunset/moonrise photos. I think we saw an Ent bowing to the setting sun -- you can be the judge (when the photos come online).
Hewing to the subject of this post, I'm going to talk about stuff from our garden. Tomatoes: in Marinara sauce, Puttanesca (a terrific sauce we just tried this year); currently oven-roasting about 10 pounds of a variety called Astiana we grew from seed collected from a purchased tomato. Curiously, we haven't made ANY salsa yet. But lots of caprese salads & Greek Salads.
Green beans -- 'way more than we could consume fresh. I blanched and froze several batches, and tried a no-blanch approach as well, to see how that works out. We have had beans with a cumin-shallot-mustard vinagrette (recipe taken from an ancient Craig Clairborn recipe book) on multiple occasions and tonight did them with garlic and fresh basil. Yum.
Cucumbers -- pickling cukes, brine-fermented, waiting in our reefer to garnish burgers, tartar sauce, etc. Tender-skinned long cukes in greek salads, with yoghurt and mint/garlic/dill, or Japanese style with rice vinegar, sugar (a little) and toasted sesame oil.
Cauliflower -- we bought a 6-pak from Freddies and got more like 20 plants -- and planted them all. It was a variety called 'cheddar' and is a yellow-orange color. We made cauliflower mousse, cauliflower soup, and brine-fermented a bunch. All very tasty. We have 4 plants waiting to be plunked into the garden for fall harvest.
Broccoli -- lots early on, it seemed to want to bolt (not sure why). We got lots of the main brocco-flower and many side shoots as well. All done by now; we should have started more plants because it's too late now. Oh well.
Beets -- fresh (in beet salads), pickled. I don't like the pickled ones but am looking forward to oven-roasted beets later this fall. Beet greens are good, too.
Peppers -- we actually planted MORE pepper plants than tomato plants. They are really starting to produce now, except for the very late super-hot ones. If we're lucky (?) we will get some ripe Caribbean Red Hot peppers, which are similar to Habanero. Last year I made the mistake of chopping one up without wearing gloves. I got blisters -- felt like a chemical burn. But they made some good hot pepper marmalade. The batch made with green hot peppers was dubbed "dragon snot". I want to try brine-fermenting more, and pickling some. We have a variety called pimiento de padron that would be pretty good pickled. Sort of like a spicier pepperincino (sp)?
Zucchini -- the usual overdose of squash. Yellow and green. We've been thinking about trying stuffed zucchini flowers but haven't done it yet. The end is near for that cooking experiment.
Eggplant -- three plants. The happiest ones I've seen in our garden, ever. No ratatouille yet but I want some!!
Winter squash: Cinderella pumpkin, sweetmeat, hubbard, blue hubbard, boston marrow, a few others I don't recall at the moment. We need to figure out how to store them better -- they always seem to go to heck a few months after harvest.
Various -- kale, swiss chard (is it really from Switzerland???), 5 different kinds of basil, sage, tarragon, oregano, summer savory, marjoram. No wacky-weed.
A few years back we innoculated a pile of wood chips we had gotten for free from an arborist, with a type of edible mushroom called Stropharia. It is very efficient at breaking down woody matter (the reason we experimented with it). We later used the chips to mulch the garden, and that year we got a lot of Stropharia mushrooms fruiting in the garden. Ever since that time we've seen smaller fruitings of Stropharia around the garden. It's not dangerous to living trees but it's been interesting to see how it has sort of naturalized around the garden. We regularly put down bark chips to help control weeds so the Stropharia continues to fluorish. We got several fruitings this summer. Stropharia is interesting because it's been used for bio-remediation -- the enzymes needed to break down wood appear to be good at breaking down some types of chemical waste, and it also appears to have an appetite for E. Coli.
So what's next? The beans are winding down, but the tomatoes and peppers are still going pretty strong. The recent rains did cause many tomatoes to crack but we can use them for things like salsa or tomato sauce. Turning a Brandywine into sauce may sound like a crime but it's better than letting it rot. And I'm a recent convert to Puttanesca.
