Beets for breakfast

It's funny how your harvest can dictate your diet. Perhaps that is, as it should be.

On Sundays, the first thing I usually do when I get up is make a pot of tea and pop a loaf of bread in the oven. (Sullivan Bakery's No-Knead Bread tossed together quickly before bed and proofed over night, all ready for the oven.) Then I head outside to survey the lay of the land and feed the critters. This morning I ate fresh berries right off the vine.

Then noticed several beets rising above the soil, quite ready for harvest.

I decided to take advantage of the hot oven to roast them and then, to my own surprise, just spontaneously ate them for breakfast. They smelled so good. Four roasted beets and a pot of tea. A perfect breakfast. Delicious and a first for me. But I admit, I was glad to be alone this morning and not have to share them.

I can't remember where I learned this basic roasted beet recipe, but I am fairly certain it came from Martha Stewart. Wash and pierce beets with a fork, sprinkle with coarse salt, wrap in tin foil and bake for 50 minutes in a 400+ oven. When the beets come out of the oven the skin will slide right off. They retain a slight salty flavor and you can eat the beets hot or cold. Hot is best, but served cold with balsamic vinegar is nothing to sneeze at either.

I didn't even touch the bread after the beets. I was totally satiated.

There was another happy discovery in my garden.  A row of little seedlings have pushed through.

They are from the romaine seeds I sowed only last week -- seeds collected from this very season's crop of romaine. When I look at that little row of seedlings I see Caesar salad. I just love growing my own food!

Seed, chop, pulse

I love cooking on Sundays but it's days like this I wish I had a stove in the basement so I could get a huge pot of marinara sauce going. I need to get a handle on this bumper crop of tomatoes.



Between the tomatoes and the elderberries - (which just will not quit!!) I have baskets and bowls of fruit everywhere.

I was up late last night canning a dozen jars of elderberry syrup (which is absolutely restaurant quality) but I couldn't face the steam from the pressure canner today.

The syrup is amazing. A concoction of merely elderberries, lemon juice and sugar, cooked down to a syrup, yet it has a rich liquor flavor. I am already imagining it drizzled around plates of decadent chocolate cake with vanilla bean ice cream... yum.

It's satisfying to see the pantry starting to fill up. But canning in the heat means one seriously bad hair day. So I'm making gazpacho today instead.

This cold soup requires no heat and takes care of several veggies and herbs from the garden -- cucumber, tomatoes, green pepper, onion, garlic and cilantro. It really takes the edge off the heat of the day. I usually put a jalapeno pepper in as well, but don't have any planted this season, so I substituted with Tabasco. All you need for this recipe is a knife, cutting board and Cuisinart.

Gazpacho

4 ripe tomatoes - seeded
1/2 cucumber - seeded
1/2 green pepper - seeded
1/4 sweet onion
1-2 cloves fresh garlic
8-10 sprigs of fresh cilantro
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
6 shakes of Tabasco
dash of Worcestershire
squeeze of fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Pulse in Cuisinart - starting with cuke, garlic, onion and pepper, adding in tomatoes, then the rest.

Serve chilled. The soup should have a light glisten of oil.  This recipe serves four.

Garden Update

First carrot o' the season. It may be thin, but it makes up for it in length.

Raspberries still thriving.

Sweet potato, planted only a week ago!

Container lettuce. Ready to eat.

Grapes. Fire up the juicer.

Tomatoes. Gazpacho time.

Elderberries. The saga continues.

The field supervisor. Asleep on the job.

Cob Oven

I'm getting a little behind on my reading these days. The novels are piling up as my library reserves come in, but for some reason reading fiction is less intriguing than reading about how to hand thresh and winnow wheat. I want to be outside doing things. (Thank goodness for laptops.) The pond project is slowly headed to the finish line and already I've been thinking about building an outdoor cob oven.

It's been too hot to bake indoors and I prefer to make my own bread. An outdoor wood-fired oven would come in handy. Playing in the mud sounds like great fun too. Community ovens are popping up in some parks now, but I am ready for a new challenge.

I've come to face the fact that I simply love making things. Be it gardens, furniture, cuisine, structures, books, blogs or TV shows, anything made from scratch excites me. The one thing I'm not particularly great at is needlework. Mind you, this hasn't stopped me from sewing all manner of accoutrement, from curtains and lounge cushions to pillow cases and reupholstered furniture. I tackle stitchery regularly, but it's definitely not my strong suit, despite my accomplished ancestry.

The blog-o-sphere has been a rich source of information on cob ovens. There are a tons of different building techniques. Excellent how-to books on the subject are out there too. Build Your Own Earthen Oven is a popular one. I already know I want to go with the most natural materials possible. Luckily it won't cost me a penny. I have a mound of clay in the yard and plenty of sand to put to use. I can score some straw at a friend's farm and use the river stones hauled out of the old pond for the base. Booyah!

People are having fun with cob oven designs.  Look at this one. Monster cob.

Cucumbers = Dill Pickles

It's pickling cucumber season.  Hooray!

Sour dill pickles are a favorite and so easy to make that it's a waste to buy them. You can whip these up in no time and use the gifts of the garden to do so. I have dill in my herb garden, and that killer garlic, so away we go.

I thoroughly wash and dry the dill and garlic while the canning jars are sterilizing.

Preparing the brine is a cinch. Water, vinegar and coarse salt. Sometimes I soak pickling spices in the brine, but this step isn't necessary. You can go with just vinegar, water and salt. For 2 jars add, 1 cup vinegar to 3 cups water, 2-3 Tablespoons coarse salt.

Scrub and cut up the pickling cucumbers. 

 

Load the dill and garlic into the sterilized bottles and cram in the cucumbers. That's the hardest part. If you have coriander seeds in your pantry you might want to toss a few in as well. But that's a bonus.

Pour the brine over the cukes and seal. Turn the jars upside down. Done! I made two jars of dill pickles with only four pickling cucumbers. The whole process was about 15 minutes, start to finish.

Garden visitors

This beautiful cardinal and his mate visit the feeder twice daily. His cheery song fills the garden and thrills, not only me, but also the field supervisor, who watches from a safe distance below.

Pickled green tomatoes

For years, when you stopped in for lunch at Jerry's Deli in L.A. the waiter automatically dropped a plate of pickles on your table while you perused the menu. Scrumptious, crunchy, mouth watering you-can't-eat-just-one green tomato and dill pickles. That tradition has fallen by the economic wayside (they still serve them at some places, but you have to ask first.) I crave that piquant flavor often. So, with the garden overflowing with tomatoes I decided to embark on a green tomato pickling expedition.

I picked about 8 green tomatoes to start, and some single cloves of my take-no-prisoners garlic (hot!!!). The garlic is so hot, in fact, I don't need a chili for heat. Now this is by no means the be all and end all of recipes. It's something I have flung together and have not yet seen what happens. So be forewarned.

I went to my herb garden for some fresh dill and the tarragon next to it, called out to me. "Take me, take me too." So I did.

While I sterilized the jars in the pressure canner, I prepared the brine.
2 1/2 cups of vinegar
1/4 cup sea salt
1 1/4 cups water
1 heaping teaspoon sugar
pickling spice
bay leaf
dill
tarragon
(I wasn't sure about the sugar, but went for it)

Here's the brine starting to boil. While the brine cooked and the mysterious flavor alchemy did its magic, I shoved tomatoes into the hot sterilized jars. Adding one sprig of fresh dill to each jar.

Then I poured the hot brine over them. Sealed the jars and processed them in the pressure cooker for 20 minutes.

The final result...

I'll report back on the flavor profile in a week or so.

Sun-dried tomatoes

The tomato harvest is so varied and abundant, I feel utterly overcome with wealth. Sun-dried tomatoes add so much to a salad, pasta dishes and sandwiches that it would be a waste to not use the heat of this day to dehydrate a few the natural way.

I slice them in half.

Sprinkle with a coarse sea salt.

 And place them on a rack on top of an old cookie sheet that I use to catch drippings.

Outside they go for some sunbathing. (I bring them in at night so the night scavengers aren't tempted.)

In a few days I should have intensely flavorful sun-dried tomatoes ready to serve up. You could do this in a dehydrator or in the oven, but why use electricity when the sun is available.

I cover them with a cheesecloth that can breathe, but keep flies and debris away.

Elderberry Jelly

Made the first batch of Elderberry Jelly this evening being very careful that not one single seed or stem made it into the jar. I picked only the ripest berries - dark purple, almost black in color. The bush is just teaming with them.  A tremendous crop!

First the berries are washed and cleaned of all stems. Unripe berries are picked out and disposed of. Next they are loaded into a pot with a small amount of water, and mashed as they are heated.

They cook for about 20 minutes before being strained through a jelly bag.

The juice is returned to the pot. The seeds and crud are discarded. The juice is brought to a boil and freshly-squeezed lemon juice, pectin and sugar added. Looks like molten lava, and it is just that hot too. This is careful work.

Skim scum, if any, off the top and dispose. Bring back to a rolling boil. Sterilize canning jars and lids during this process.

Ladle hot jelly into hot jars as you pull the sterilized containers from the pressure cooker. Clean rims before screwing on lids. Process in pressure cooker for 10 - 20 minutes

It's so delicious that it is hard to believe that this fruit is growing on bushes by roadsides and left to wither. I wish every city landscaped with edible fruit trees so the citizens who are not lucky enough to have a garden could glean some of this gorgeous food.

Elderberry jelly has a rich tangy cherry-raspberry flavor. Great as a spread or with a meat dish (use it the way you serve cranberry sauce.)  Worth every second of effort! Canning gives me that old timey feeling. I like it.

Seed saving

I'm vigilant about seed saving this year. The cost of seeds and the diminishing number in some packets is an eye opener. Seeds have value. In more ways than one.

Leeks

As global warming takes hold, bio diversity may be the only thing standing between full bellies and starvation. Listen to this TED Talk about seed saving and bio diversity. Take a look at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault here.

Oriental poppies

My opinion is, if you can't save seeds and need to buy some, get a good supplier. I like Stokes. They are an excellent quality seed company and their seeds always seem to take.

Garlic

When you buy seeds that turn out to be duds, most likely that's because they are old or were not stored correctly. Harvesting and storing your own is the solution.


Once your veggies and plants go to seed, if you don't collect some for next year's plantings, you are wasting a valuable resource.

Coriander

I keep my seeds in paper mailing envelopes, and label each accordingly.



These photos are part of my growing collection from just this season.


So far I have collected, romaine, mustard, brandywine tomatoes, mesclun, rhubarb, garlic, poppy, cucumber, fennel and a single apple seed from a neighbor's rare apple tree that's on its way to extinction.

Fennel

The majority of apples on that tree had no seeds at all. It took dozens and dozens of apples to find just one seed. I'm going to plant it and try to nurse it to life. Those apples made the best darned pie I have ever tasted.

Romaine seed