Entries Tagged 'Garden' ↓

Okay. I know we assured you previously that the hatches were officially battened, that you could rest easy, tucked in for the winter. But, as Derrida suggests, battening is always deferred. There’re always some loose end to tie up.

Remember those herbs from out garden that we hung up to dry? Well, you eventually have to do something with those. It’s pretty easy, actually. Once they’re dry, take them down, untie them, and try to get the leaves off of the stems. This is pretty easy (if not tedious) with thyme and oregano, and slightly more arduous with sage. Additionally, since thyme and oregano have relatively small leaves, you don’t really have to crumble them any more than the what occurs in the stem removal process. They can go directly into spice jars. The sage will need to be crumbled by hand, or even ground lightly with a mortar and pestle. If you’re wondering about the parsley…instead of drying, ours withered and turned brown. Last year, we potted it and it left it through the winter in our three-season room. So, like the rosemary, you may decide against drying the ol’ parsels and just keeping it fresh on hand.

Since we recently got some new spice containers, we had some of our old ones handy for the dried herbs. Be sure to label them with a date.

The moment you’ve been waiting for is finally here!

Well.

The moment I’ve been waiting for, at least–cooking! All this work putting the gardens to bed, canning tomatoes, drying herbs, and freezing veggies and pesto, and nary a recipe, nary a meal.

As the final chapter in putting our veggies to bed, we needed to use up those last few tomatoes–the green ones on the verge of going bad. I think a lot of people just give up on these guys, but after all that work growing them, I wanted to use ours, come hell or highwater, devil be damned, and any number of other sundry euphemisms. So the logical answer was Fried Green Tomatoes. We rarely deign to fry at home–not because frying isn’t delicious, but because it makes the whole house smell and is better left to the infrequent bar meal–so I thought, why not bake these bastages? It turns out that VeganYumYum was actually using FatFreeVeganKitchen’s recipe for Oven-fried Green Tomatoes to begin with!

Neither Amy nor I had ever actually had fried green tomatoes, though I did see the movie for the first time last year. I don’t think I fully got the significance of the title until making them–taking something that isn’t ripe yet, on one hand, yet also on the verge of spoiling, on the other–and turning it into something amazing. Transforming waste into a delicacy.

I made a few adjustments to Susan’s recipe–essentially merging it with my Chik’n Almond Bake recipe. Additionally, our friend Ryan recently had the genius idea of dipping squash in soda water before battering–this works like a charm for getting batter to stick to slippery veggies.

The tomatoes wouldn’t be enough alone, so we paired this with a pesto pasta–using pesto made this last weekend. F. Yes. Feel the power.

Baked Green Tomatoes

• 4 large green tomatoes, cut into slices
• 1/2 cup cornmeal
• 1/4 cup quinoa flour
• 2 tbsp almond meal
• 1.5 tbsp nu yeast
• 1/2 tsp onion powder
• 1/4 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp cornstarch
• 1/2 tsp ground black pepper
• 1 tsp salt, more to taste
• ~1/2 cup soda water

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Combine all of the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. Slice up the maters. Dunk each tomato in soda water then dunk in the batter, coating thoroughly. Place on an oiled baking sheet. Douse lightly with olive oil and make 15 minutes to a side. You may need to bake an additional 5 minutes to a side, depending on your oven. You want each side to be brown and crispy.

Pesto Pasta

• Pesto
• Pasta

Cook and eat!

I jest. But it is almost that easy. Make as much pasta as you want–hopefully you’ll have made more than enough pesto. About 3:1 dry pasta to pesto is a reasonable rule of thumb. For the pesto, I want to avoid a strict recipe–you often don’t control how much basil you have, so any exact recipe can only lead you astray.

You’ll need:

• basil
• pine nuts
• OR walnuts
• OR both
• olive oil
• garlic
• salt

In a food processor, grind the basil in enough olive oil to keep things moist. Add in nuts and garlic a little at a time–you can’t really over-process this, so better not to overdo it. Pine nuts produce more oil than walnuts and have a stronger taste; keep this in mind as you mix. When the pesto is nice and creamy, add salt to taste.

If you made a lot, you can freeze it in ice cube trays. We used half fresh/half frozen in the pesto pasta and it worked like a champ.

When you’re satisfied with your pesto, toss it with the noodles in a frying pan over medium heat. Add in a few fresh, ripe tomatoes for color and a touch of zang.

Now relax. You’ve done what needed doing. You, my friend, are a true champeen.

Hatches = Battened

Okay. So we’ve pretty much got tomatoes covered (we’ll talk about green tomatoes in the next post). So let’s talk about gardens, and the putting-to-bed thereof.

Wait. First let’s talk about the gardens themselves. A few years ago, while visiting Amy’s fambly in Georgia, we stumbled upon an old copy of Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening that belonged to Amy’s uncle. Amy got about 3/4 of the way through it before the weekend was up, so her uncle kindly donated the book to “the cause”–the cause being our gardens. We’d put together some ramshackle first-timer gardens the year before, with a moderate amount of success, so why not bite off way more than we could possibly chew and plant four (4) square foot gardens (Mel recommends one or two for first-timers–booo-ring!)? And, just to make sure that we didn’t have any extra time to spare, why not build five (5) rain barrels?

Long story short, the weather wasn’t great, Mel’s soil recommendations weren’t very good (we have great soil here–Mel recommends creating your own soil mix and totally disregarding what you’ve got…we respectfully disagree), and our gardens weren’t that happy.

This year though, we were far more prepared. We made spreadsheets. Let me say it again for effect: SPREADSHEETS. We raised a few beds, busted out the rain barrels, and prepared to kick major garden ass. And over all, this year went really well. We got enough rain to almost entirely avoid municipal water and had good enough weather that most of our stuff thrived: lettuce, green beans (performed like true champeens), cucumbers, zucchini, kale, tomatoes, summer squash, bell peppers, hot peppers, celery, carrots, potatoes, and herbs. We had some failures too, of course: spinach never did a thing; the second crop of lettuce gave up without a fight; the butternut squash was strangled evil-twin-in-the-womb-style by the summer squash; and the bell peppers I just claimed as a success were actually pretty damn small.

We found ways to eat most of this stuff as it came in…though we struggled with a few things. I mean, zucchini got it’s own tag. We still haven’t used it all.

And here we are at the end of the season. So what to do with all the stuff that’s still there?

Carrots: Dig ‘em up, remove the greens, wash ‘em, and refrigerate. Carrots will last quite a long time in the refrigerator. If you have a huge surplus of carrots, you can blanch and freeze them. In theory, you can also leave them until spring; they’ll be larger and sweeter. We couldn’t wait. (more info)

Potatoes: Dig ‘em up, wash ‘em, store ‘em in an attractive bowl. You can also blanch these, if you have too many. Or make a bed out of mashed potatoes. Your call. We had a lot better luck with our red potatoes than brown, for what it’s worth. They’re smaller and seem to thrive better in smaller gardens. (more info)

Celery: Same as carrots. Seriously. Exactly the same. That being said, a lot of our celery was still looking a little small, so we covered them in 1′ cubed garden boxes, in hopes that they’ll keep trying. Don’t they love us? (more info)

Green Beans: Almost the same as carrots. Green beans won’t keep as long, and it’s far more likely (if you’re gardens are identical to ours) that you’ll have more than you can use before they go bad. You’ll very likely have to blanch these guys. We did. Just boil them for 3 minutes, then bathe in ice-cold water for another 6 minutes. Freeze. I hope I’m not ruining the suspense, but that’s pretty much all blanching means for most produce (except tomatoes). (more info)

Peppers: There’s no way you have enough peppers to be worried about this. If so, please send by carrier pigeon to: Ypsilanti, MI, USA. I’m sure either I or Jennifer from Scrumpdilly will get them. Otherwise, you can: (more info).

Kale: See Peppers. You’re pretty much just stuck eating kale, which isn’t a bad thing. In general, you can freeze greens, but you’d have to be working pretty hard to grow enough greens that you couldn’t use them up before they went bad. But maybe you craftily picked up a ton from a local farmer? Well…you can freeze them. As usual, just blanch and freeze. Can you see the pattern here? (more info)

Cabbage: Okay. I’m actually serious this time. You can’t possibly have enough cabbage to really be overthinking this. Of course, one head of cabbage lasts like a month…so, if you grew two, I guess that’s a problem. You can blanch cabbage. But c’mon!

Squash/Zucchini: You can just cut and freeze this directly, according to Disposable Aardvarks Inc. It can get pretty tough to use. Man.

Tomatoes: We’ve already detailed our adventures in canning, so what more could there be? Well, not all of your tomatoes are going to be ripe. But you need to harvest the green ones before it gets nasty out, or they’ll all just rot. So. Here’s what you do: take the heartiest greens and wrap them in paper and put them in a box. Store the box in a cool place (in theory a basement or cellar–we have ours in our three-season room). They’ll ripen. In the box. How awesome is nature? We did this two years ago and had fresh tomatoes into December. The not-so-hearty, will-be-rotting-soon, have-started-to-rot-but-are-still-salvageable tomatoes can be saved too. Cut off the bad parts, slice ‘em up, and make Baked Green Tomatoes.

Blanching

Before freezing most veggies, you’ll want to blanch them. Though the time can vary a little depending on the veggie (pay close attention on potatoes [they're a starch]–you can wing it on most other stuff, if you’re a wingin’ it kinda person), the general rule of thumb is put in boiling water for 3 minutes, then put in ice cold water for 6. The less dense the veggie, the less time it needs. So green beans, for instance, only require about a minute in the boiling water. You can freeze veggies as soon as they’re drained.

Herbs: This is a little more complicated, depending on which herbs are perennial and which aren’t. So here ya go:

Perennial

• sage
• oregano
• chives
• thyme
• rosemary (BUT–this can’t deal with major cold; you have to transplant and bring it in.)

Annual

• cilantro
• parsley
• basil

Any/all of these can be dried. Just hang them in a warm, dry place. The more you can separate them, the better they will dry. In terms of harvesting, you should grab all of the annuals and pull up the roots. The perennials, you can leave–except for the rosemary; it doesn’t like temps under 30 degrees Fahrenheit. You need to dig it up, pot it, and bring it in. The rest of the perennials should be harvested almost fully; just leave enough for the plant to start strong next year.

Additionally, cilantro, parsley, and basil can all be made into pesto, put into ice-cube trays, and frozen.

This might seem like a lot of work, but it’s all pretty easy and the payoff is well worth it–far easier than canning.

Now if we could just teach our cats to run an indoor hothouse for year-round lettuce.

If, like us, you live in Southeast Michigan, winter is nigh! Last weekend was the first freeze, so it was time to batten down the hatches and begin the winter nesting ritual: putting the gardens to bed, harvesting the veggies, bringing in the rain barrels, and this year, canning.

Canning is something we’ve meant to do for years now. If you’re interested in eating local, canning is a great way of making the produce from your garden or your local farmer’s market extend into the winter. We don’t grow enough for our gardens to necessitate this, however, so it’s never been a huge priority–just a matter of curiosity and conviction. On top of that, we’re lucky enough to live near Eden Organics, so we can get local canned tomatoes and beans, as well as soymilk year round. This comes with the caveat, of course, that they prefer/try to source local ingredients. Ethics aside, though, there is certainly something more intimate about using tomatoes that you’ve grown, or that you’ve gotten from a local farmer directly.

So this year was the year. It turns out that canning is a lot of work, depending on how fastidious you are. Since we’re newbies and didn’t really have any of the necessary supplies on hand, we figured we do this right and get a pressure canner. I know, I know. Regular water bath canning is pretty much just fine for tomatoes–they ride that fine line between being too acidic and being just right. But. Theoretically, it’s safer to use a pressure canner, because at 10lbs of pressure it brings food to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Regular water bath canning only reaches 212 degrees. Most of the dangerous wee beasties are killed at 240 degrees. This is easily remedies by taking the proper precautions, but we like not getting botulism. So pressure canning it was.

We ended up splitting the tomatoes roughly in half–half for sauce and half for plain ol’ maters.

The Sauce

• ~ 15 lbs tomatoes, diced
• 1 medium-sized white or yellow onion, diced
• 1 medium-sized green bell pepper, diced
• 6 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 – 2 tbsp brown sugar
• olive oil

We took the easy way out on the sauce–we didn’t blanch, seed, or peel the tomatoes. We just sauteed a little garlic (supposedly, you want to go easy on thing like onions and garlic in canning, as they can become somewhat bitter over time) in a small pond of olive oil, diced up the tomatoes, and cooked them down over medium heat. Meanwhile, we diced and sauteed a white onion and green bell pepper. When the onion and pepper were soft, and the tomatoes had cooked down quite a bit, we strained the tomatoes over a pot. This gets rid of all the excess juice–which we later used to can the other tomatoes in and to make tortilla soup. We put the maters back in the pot and added in the onions and peppers and let cook for another 45 minutes  – 1 hour, as we prepared the rest of the tomatoes.

Yield: 3 1-quart jars

The Rest of the Tomatoes

For the other 15 lbs of tomatoes, we blanched them in boiling water (leave in for only about a minute) and then immersed them in an ice bath. We removed the peels and cut into quarters. We didn’t remove the seeds, but a sufficiently fastidious person might. This process sounds simple when reduced to a sentence, but I find blanching and peeling tomatoes utterly miserablech. By the end, my hands were getting wrinkled from all the tomato juice.

Yield: 5 1-quart jars

The Canning Process

We dishwashed the jars and tried to time it so they’d still be hot when all of the tomatoes were done. You want the jars still hot–people often boil them. We boiled the tomato juice leftover from the sauce and packed the tomatoes into 5 jars, filling in with boiling tomato juice and tbsp of lemon juice (helps preserve flavor and inhibits wee beasties). They got pressure cooked for 10 minutes at 11 lbs. They look like pickled innards, but also kind of beautiful.

We plopped the sauce into 3 jars and also topped with lemon juice. These got pressure cooked for 15 minutes at 11 lbs. Well, more like at 11 – 15 lbs, as I was having a hell of a time getting the pressure set where I wanted it. I guess this is something you learn about your pressure cooker and your stove over time. I’m pretty adept at getting our smaller pressure cooker to work with beans, but the big guy is still something of an enigma. I guess as long as you don’t drop under 10lbs, you’re okay; you want to keep enough pressure to maintain a steady 250 degrees.

The downside of the pressure canner is you don’t get that fabled POP!. By the time it’s done its thing, your stuff is sealed as tight as a drum.

But is it Cheaper?

Ultimately, I don’t know that we saved much money. Organic tomatoes usually go or $3.50 – $4.00/lb at the farmer’s market. We got a pretty decent bulk price of $2.50/lb for a little under 30 lbs. Using your elite maths, you can see that this is almost $75 worth of tomatoes. This got us 3 jars of sauce and 5 jars of tomatoes. Eden sells canned tomatoes @ $3/28oz, directly, so with our coop’s markup and the 4 oz difference, that’d be about $4 for an equivalent amount. We made 5, so that’d be about $20. Ugh. The sauce would probably be $5/jar equivalently. We made 3 jars, so $15. For a grand total of $35. Ouch! It makes me feel slightly better that Walnut Acres (based on New York) sauce goes for like $8/jar at our coop. I think we came in at about $10/jar of sauce and $8/jar of tomatoes.

Was it Worth it?

Warm fuzzy feeling aside, was it worth it? For the experience, for sure. I always think there’s value in learning where your food comes from by doing it yourself. It helps keep things in perspective and keeps you closer to your food. On the other hand, it also helps you appreciate industrialization and specialization, when carried out in an ethical way. Eden can make this stuff much more efficiently than Amy and I.

Is there social value in canning? Absolutely. We buy most of our produce from the same farm and it’s certainly worth helping to keep their business viable.

Is there ethical/environmental value in canning? Well…it’s certainly about is local as you can get–especially if you can your own produce (which is obviously far more cost effective). We know where our produce came from, and we processed it in our own kitchen, so the alleged food miles are about as low as they could be.

And I’m sure if you ask us after we pop open that first jar of sauce if it was worth it, you’ll get a resounding “Hell yes!”

Feel Free to Stop Here; I’m About to Philosophize

It takes a whole afternoon and costs a lot more; could this time and money have been put into a better cause? This is always the big question. In this, the age of specialization, the most efficient use of my time will always be web programming–my area of specialty. I can then use the money I make to pay other people with less specialization (cheaper) or more specialization (faster) to do the good that I would have done directly. And while this is the natural aim of progress, it also limits our experience and, thus, our understanding of the world. Let me curtail this philosophical digression by saying that, yes, I do think there’s some inherent value in acquiring understanding–that while we didn’t save any money and probably didn’t do much either way environmentally–we’re more geared to make better food choices and to help others make those choices.