Archive for garden

pickles

September.21.2009 at 10:13 pm · Filed under garden, kitchen

pickle varieties

pickle varieties

it’s been a busy summer. too much running around. after months of traveling, booked weekends and what seem like billions of little errands and household whatnots to deal with, i’m ready to hole myself up for the winter.

right before the first of this summer’s big trips, i made an enormous batch of pickles. i won’t give myself all of the credit, john was my canning soux chef, and without him i probably wouldn’t have finished in time. it was down to the wire. we were chopping, measuring, boiling and sealing until midnight with plans to leave early the next morning.

the problem with pickling is this, the results are nowhere near instantaneous. i’m an instant gratification kinda gal and i don’t particularly like waiting for the payoff. it’s been a couple of months now and we recently cracked the seal on the first jar of pickles. each jar was labeled with a date and “variety” of pickle. we made some slight alterations to each jar in order to find the perfect recipe. late night, sleepy canning leads to bleary eyed, lazy labeling. the first labels were clear: spicy, garlic, plain; but, as the hours wore on, the hand writing became sloppier, the dates started to change and the descriptors became abbreviations. months later it’s hard to remember what l.m. and b.m. stand for.

i opened the l.m. pickles first. i had forgotten that l.m. stood for “last minute,” meaning that these were the jar we made after running out of fresh dill. they sucked. well, let me rephrase; they were less than stellar. after the first taste of l.m. pickles, i wasn’t anxious to try the others. turns out fresh dill makes a hell of a difference. refrigeration doesn’t hurt either; i like my pickles chilled.

i’m not gonna say they were the best pickles i’ve ever had, but they were damn good. that’ll teach the pimply faced bed bath and beyond employees to laugh at me for asking where the canning supplies were located! harumph.

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you say tomato…

August.20.2009 at 4:34 pm · Filed under garden

tomatoes

tomatoes

fruit or vegetable

fruit or vegetable

if i could only have one vegetable for the rest of my life, it would probably be a tomato. yeah i know, some people might argue that the tomato is actually a fruit, but i dispute this claim. in culinary applications the tomato is a vegetable. whoever heard of tomato cobbler or tomato jam? plus, as you can see by this handy dandy venn diagram, the tomato technically falls into both categories! i never knew tomato classification was such a great debate, but apparently it goes all the way back to 1883. in fact, i’m pretty sure the great tomato debate has been around since the dawn of time.

either way, fruit or vegetable, my garden is producing some rockin’ tomatoes. i have 4 different varieties: lemon boy, mr. stripey, better boy and another who’s name has completely escaped me. the tomato is so amazingly versitile, but right now, my favorite thing is a sliced lemon boy with olive oil, vinegar and fresh cracked pepper. so good.

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zucchini overload

August.2.2009 at 1:08 pm · Filed under garden ·Tagged , ,

this week's harvest

this week's harvest

the tomatoes and peppers are starting to ripen, the cucumbers are out in full force and the mutant gourd-squashes continue to multiply, but nothing is growing as fiercely as the zucchini. i’ve collected 5 in the past 4 days, each one larger than the last.

zucchini is not the most versitile vegetable. pasta, soup, bread… my ideas are running thin, and it doesn’t help that erik has a deep seated hatred for all members of the squash family. clearly there is a childhood trauma behind that story, but i’ll save that for another time. in the meantime, i think some will get frozen, some will be given away and the rest will get turned into zucchini bread, the only squash product erik has deemed acceptable.

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mystery squash

July.30.2009 at 6:50 pm · Filed under garden ·Tagged , , ,

spacchini? or summer squash with genital warts?

it was my first garden. i may have been slightly overambitious.

johnifer and i had a vision. we dug a plot about 4′ x 7′ and headed to the despot to buy some plants. we loaded the cart with their paltry selection of tomatoes and peppers and headed home to put them in the ground. i wasn’t satisfied. the garden was cramped, but there wasn’t enough variety. i extended the plot an additional 7′ or so and headed to the local garden center to see if they had a better selection. they did. i came home carrying a flat brimming with fruits, herbs and veggies: strawberries, cantaloupe, basil, chives, dill, cilantro, zucchini, cabage, green beans, broccoli, cucumbers, and what i thought was spaghetti squash.

i guess i assumed that half of my plants would die, this being my first garden and all. they didn’t. in fact, almost everything grew about 10x bigger than i assumed it would. i didn’t read the tags. it was poor planning on my part.

my small plot of land has turned into one giant green mass. i’m not sure what’s going on in there anymore. there are tomatoes in the beans, there are cucumbers in the cabbage, in short, it’s a mess. i’m up to my eyeballs in zucchini, my peppers are coming out and my cucumbers are blazing a path through the herbs. i noticed among the scruff a few days ago, a tiny blossom on my “spaghetti squash.” a few days later, i had what appeared to be a summer squash with a case of genital warts. i started doing some squash research, meaning i looked on wikipedia. apparently spaghetti squash and zucchini can cross pollenate, and since mine are nextdoor neighbors, i thought it might be a possibility. i can’t, however, imagine two smooth skinned squashes inbreeding to make a warty one. but i’m not too sure on the baby makin’ specifics of the squash world.

i’m still not sure what it is, but i picked it and i’m funsta cook it.

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