I’m still here. Today’s earthquake in central Virginia was centered awfully close to Tangled Branches South – less than 10 miles away. Things fell off shelves, but we had no damage other than a broken drinking glass. However, we continue to have aftershocks, including a rather strong 4.2 magnitude one a couple hours ago. Just felt/heard a loud rumbling a few minutes ago, but that sort of thing happened most of the afternoon. Hoping things are back to normal soon.
Whole Lotta Shakin’
August 23rd, 2011Greatest Hits
August 14th, 2011A hazard of blogging for a long time is that you may start to repeat yourself.
Garlic Chives
One year ago today, I posted the exact same thing we ate for lunch today – Garlic Chives and Pork. That’s the long version, but to summarize, the recipe came from Saveur magazine in a feature on Taiwanese home cooking. It’s ground pork, garlic chives flower buds, chile peppers and soy sauce.
I served it with a cucumber salad containing garlic, chile peppers, rice vinegar, sugar, salt, sesame oil and sesame seeds.
Tonight, I’m making the Potato-Tomato tart I wrote about in August 2007. I didn’t post any visuals at the time I wrote it, but in August of 2008 I posted on Picasaweb a series of photos showing the process of the roasting the tomatoes for the first part of the dish. If I wrote anything about it in 2008, I can’t find it…..so, here are those photos. When I make it again today, it will look almost the same.
Step 1: place cut-up tomatoes in roasting pan with olive oil, salt and pepper
Step 2: after 45 minutes in a 400F oven, add coarsely chopped garlic
Step 3: after 45 more minutes in the oven, this is the finished product
The roasted tomatoes are good all by themselves, but we dug the potatoes on Friday and there’s nothing better than fresh potatoes, so I’ll spoon the tomatoes on top of a roasted potato galette, which is nothing more than spiral layers of thinly-sliced potatoes drizzled with olive oil and salt and pepper roasted in a 400F oven for 30 minutes.
The recent rain has made for fast growth in the garden. I swear the okra has grown 2 feet in the last week.
Okra 'Emerald'
Eggplant plants are making eggplant fruit.
Eggplant 'Listada de Gandia'
Lemongrass is thick.
Lemongrass
There are more peppers than we can use fresh, so I’m going to start packing them into plastic bags in the freezer.
Pepper 'Chapeau de Frade'
This is my contribution to this week’s Garden to Table Challenge at Greenish Thumb. What’s cooking in your garden?
Update, August 15: a photo of the actual finished Potato-Tomato Tart, just before we ate it.
Potato-Tomato Tart
A Week of Firsts
August 1st, 2011First big tomato. German Pink. 12 oz. It made a great BLT. I didn’t take a picture, but I’m hoping for many more.
First attempt at fermented pickles.
Refrigerator Pickles
This is another pickle recipe that doesn’t involve canning – Dan Koshansky’s Refrigerator Pickles via Margaret Roach at A Way to Garden. When the fermentation is well underway, the jars are put in the fridge where they will keep several months. I tasted the brine today – it’s sour (and fabulously garlicky), but I think I’m going to leave the jars on the counter for another day or two.
First Pimientos de Padrón.
Pimientos de Padrón
I probably picked them a little too soon, but they were still delicious. Cooking is easy. Heat olive oil in a frying pan. Add peppers. Turn them over and over until all sides are blistered and starting to brown. Sprinkle with salt. Serve. Pick them up by the stem and eat. You can eat the seeds or gnaw around them. Just be ready in case you’re the lucky person who gets a very picante one. Yesterday’s batch was all mild, except the largest one had a trace of chile heat.
Revisiting some issues from last week, the Lime-Mint Freezer Pickles were great (at least before freezing), but the purple color in the peppers started to fade around the cut edges. You’d really have to use quite a lot of hot peppers to detect much heat through all the sugar (1½ cups), but the lime-mint flavoring was intriguing. Sort of reminded me of the cucumbers served with Satay in Thai restaurants, but with the flavor volume turned up. I made a similar batch (another recipe on the facing page of The Joy of Pickling) last night, but this time the seasonings were dill, garlic and hot peppers. I haven’t yet thawed any of the containers I put in the freezer and that will be the real test of this technique.
The cucumber harvest has slowed and the vines are dying down, so I don’t think there will be many more batches of cucumber pickles, if any.
I’m working on codifying some of my mother-in-law’s recipes. I’ve made her fried okra twice recently, but I’m still fiddling with the proportions of the spices. If you like Indian food and think you don’t like okra, this recipe might change your mind – there is absolutely no slimy texture at all.
Okra is doing well this year (so far hasn’t been eaten by deer), so there should be plenty to experiment with. I’m growing six different varieties this year to see if I can find one that we like and that the deer don’t like.
Top row: Jing Orange, Beck's Big Buck Horn. Bottom row: Emerald, Cherokee Long Pod, Silver Queen, White Velvet
In the last two previous years, I grew ‘Emerald’ which tastes good and remains tender even when the pods are rather long, but just as soon as we would begin to harvest, the deer started to chow down on it. Last year I even wrapped the plants in plastic mesh and the deer still ate the parts they could get at.
That’s all from here for this week’s Garden to Table Challenge, hosted by Wendy at Greenish Thumb. Please visit and taste what others are cooking from their gardens. And if you’re cooking from your garden…join the fun!
Help! I’m Drowning in Cucumbers!
July 24th, 2011
Fortunately, I have a great book on pickling.
Unfortunately, it’s 100°F outside (37.7777778°C) and the thought of boiling a huge kettle of water on the stove for canning is repulsive.
Fortunately, there are some pickle recipes that don’t involve heat. Even better, some recipes involve the freezer.
Unfortunately, all the Freezer Pickle recipes are sweet pickles. I’m not keen on sweet pickles.
Fortunately, I don’t usually follow recipes to the letter. I’m going to make Lime-Mint Freezer Pickles, but where the recipe calls for a small ripe sweet pepper, I’m going to use a couple of fresh hot chile peppers. That will take the edge off the sweetness, I hope. I’m thinking the purple Chinese Five-Color peppers would look cool with the green cucumbers, but I don’t know if the color will hold. We’ll see. 
The rest of the ingredients besides sugar and vinegar are garlic, onion, fresh mint, and lime zest. The procedure is very simple. Salt and drain cucumbers, mix with the rest of the ingredients, refrigerate several hours and then pack into containers and store in the freezer. According to the book, the cucumbers will stay crunchy in the freezer when prepared this way. This seems incredible to me and I’m only on Step 1 at the moment, but I’ll let you know how they turn out. This made a big dent in my stash of cucumbers, so I may not drown after all.
And I’m making Cold Cucumber Yogurt Soup for dinner. I know I had a good recipe for this, but don’t remember where it came from. Basically, it’s a purée of cucumber and garlic and yogurt.
We have eaten well from the garden this week:
- BLTs/BLT salad with basil/garlic mayonnaise (about 3 times) (previous BLT posts: 1, 2, 3)
- Cherry tomatoes, basil and olive oil; again
- Alsatian Gazpacho; again (this contains cucumber, by the way)
- Cucumber wedges with ground red chile, salt and lime juice
- My mother-in-law’s cucumber koshimbir with yogurt
- My mother-in-law’s cucumber koshimbir without yogurt
- My mother-in-law’s fried okra
- Potatoes & onions in foil packets on the grill
P.S. The author of The Joy of Pickling – Linda Ziedrich – has a wonderfully interesting blog.
P.P.S. Stop by Greenish Thumb to see what other bloggers are cooking up from the garden this week.
Aunt Emma’s Cucumbers
July 18th, 2011It looks like a good year for cucumbers here at Tangled Branches South. I picked the first a few days ago and continue to find a few every day. No bitterness so far. Last year in the heat and drought, we harvested zero edible cucumbers – every one was impossibly bitter. But this year so far, so good.
Poona (light green), Snow's Fancy Pickling (dark green)
Most northern European cuisines have some variation of this dish, but in my family they’re known as Aunt Emma’s Cucumbers. If I remember correctly, Aunt Emma contributed this recipe to a church cookbook, from which my mother made it. I’m sure I have a copy of that cookbook, I’m just not sure where it is. At some point I copied the recipe onto an index card (remember those?) and from there copied it into several recipe software programs. I don’t have any of the recipe software programs anymore, but I still have the index card.
Dilled Cucumber Slices
3 Medium cucumbers
3 Small onions
½ teaspoon Dill weed
1 cup Sugar
½ c up Vinegar
½ cup Water
4 teaspoons SaltSlice cucumbers and onions. Layer slices in a bowl. Add dill weed.
Boil sugar, vinegar, water, and salt.
Pour over cucumbers.
Refrigerate.
Dilled Cucumber Slices aka Aunt Emma's Cucumbers
Now, that’s the way I have the recipe written down, but that’s not how I make it. First off, I just guesstimate the amount of cucumber and onion, but for the batch above I used 6 small pickling cucumbers and 2 small white onions. You’ll notice that in the recipe the proportions of sugar/vinegar/water are 2 parts sugar, 1 part vinegar, and 1 part water. I use rice vinegar, which is a bit less acidic than distilled white vinegar, and so I make it about equal proportions of sugar, vinegar and water. For last night’s dish, that was about 1/3 cup of each. Not quite enough to cover the cucumbers and onions because they will give off moisture as they sit and will be totally immersed after a couple hours. And I cut the amount of salt in half (or even a bit less), so it was about 1½ or 2 teaspoons salt (Korean sea salt). And normally I would up the amount of dill a bit, but the dill I used was freshly cut and dried this last week and very fragrant, so I kept it about ½ teaspoon this time. One more change – I don’t boil the vinegar mixture – just stir everything in a big mixing cup until the sugar and salt are dissolved. I put it in the fridge and it’s ready to eat in 2 hours or so. I suppose it would keep for a few days, but we rarely have any left over that long.
Elsewhere in the garden, the tomato avalanche continues. I made fresh salsa a couple times and Alsatian Gazpacho once. I blogged about Alsatian Gazpacho a long time ago – the post is in the archives of the old site.
I’m going to have to start writing down what I’m cooking from the garden each day – can’t remember at the end of the week what we ate at the beginning of the week so I can document it here for Wendy’s Garden-to-Table Challenge. 
Oh, last week, I said I’d tell you what I made from 3 okra pods. I made Corn, Okra and Tomatoes, based very loosely on a recipe in James Beard’s American Cookery. Basically just a sauté of, um, corn, okra and tomatoes.
I used mostly Snow’s Fancy Pickling cucumbers to make Aunt Emma’s Cucumbers. Appropriate, because they supposedly originated in Rockford, Illinois, not far from where I grew up and not far from where Aunt Emma gardened and cooked. Aunt Emma was actually my great-aunt, daughter of Emil Beilke and Emilie Trebes.
I became curious about the Snow Pickle Farm, since the only easily-found references to it were in seed catalogs. Through ancestry.com, I learned that J. C. Snow along with wife Mabel, sons Hiram and Kenneth and brother-in-law Chester Carman, lived on River Road in Rockford, as of the 1910 US census. His occupation is listed as “Pickel Farm”. His 1917 WWI draft registration card says his occupation is Farmer, Pickle Mfg. By 1920, they had added two more sons and the address is listed as North Second Street. He is still a farmer in 1920. Looking at a 1905 plat map of Winnebago County, there is a parcel owned by H. Snow along Rock River in Section 12. Looking at current Google maps, there is a Snow Avenue off North Second St. leading towards the River. I’d bet that this was the approximate location of the Snow Pickle Farm. By 1930, Junius C. Snow still lived on North Second Street with his wife, sons, a daughter-in-law and a sister-in-law, but has gotten out of the pickle business and into real estate.
The Harvest Accelerates
July 11th, 2011
Tomatoes and Okra
It’s payday in the garden. All the sweating and fretting are beginning to seem worthwhile. ‘Matt’s Wild Cherry’ continues to be the star performer in sheer number of tomatoes produced, but ‘Jaune Flamme’ is so loaded with fruit that the tomato cage is leaning to one side (and these are heavy tomato cages). One big disappointment is ‘Tess’s Land Race’. Those are the small tomatoes outside the bowl in the photo above. It was supposed to be a currant tomato in a range of colors. I only set out one plant, but was hoping for some color other than red. I got red. They look almost exactly like ‘Matt’s Wild Cherry’, but they taste nothing like. This is going to be the first tomato plant I’ve ever ripped out of the ground; the skins are tough and the flavor is just strange, doesn’t even taste like a tomato. Yuck. A big “thumbs down”.
A few days ago I picked the first okra pod – ‘Jing Orange’. And today after I type this, I’m going out to pick a couple more – ‘Emerald’ and ‘Beck’s Big Buck’. Any good ideas what to do with 3 okra pods?
Last week I harvested all the potato onions and the remaining two garlic varieties, ‘Nootka Rose’ and ‘Romanian Red’. I still haven’t heard a convincing explanation of the name “potato onion”, but these are them.
Potato Onions
They’re a so-called perennial or multiplier onion because what you don’t eat, you replant. If you plant a small one, you’ll get a big one and if you plant a big one, you’ll get a clump of small ones. They have a mild, but very nice, flavor. I’m trying to build up my stock of them, so probably will eat very few and replant the rest, either this fall or next spring.
But today was the day I most look forward to in the garden – the first chile pepper. It was a variety that I hadn’t grown before – Korean Hybrid ‘Winner’. It turned out to be a slim pepper – I was expecting a broader and longer one – but it tasted great and was indeed hot. I forgot to take a picture before we ate it for lunch, but there should be plenty more.
Yesterday, I dug up a volunteer daikon which was starting to bolt. And I’ve been perusing my copy of The Joy of Pickling, courtesy of Wendy at Greenish Thumb. I don’t have enough of anything to make a big batch for canning yet, but the book also has a number of recipes for quick pickles – small batch pickles and relishes to be consumed within a few days. So, I made something I’ve made before from other recipes, but this time I followed the recipe in the book – Vietnamese Pickled Carrot and Radish. Perfect atop last night’s Banh Mi Burgers. I more or less followed this recipe for Vietnamese Five-Spice Pork Burgers, except I left off the pate (not having any on hand) and I didn’t butter the burger buns before grilling them. We didn’t miss either omission.
I made one other noteworthy thing from the garden last week – an omelette filled with a mixture of sautéed tomatoes, bacon, onion and fresh dill. No recipe, no photos, but you can figure it out for yourself.
I’m a little late for this week’s Garden to Table Challenge, but better late than never.
Now off to pick those two okra pods. I’ll let you know what I made out of them next week.
Garden + Olive
July 3rd, 2011Have you noticed how many new businesses are named SomeThing + SomeOtherThing? Who started that? Why is it so popular? I have no idea, but I do know that garden produce + olive oil = (really easy) (really tasty) meals. You might say “well, that’s obvious“, but I never thought of it as a defined concept until I read Extra Virgin by Annie Hawes. She writes:
…thanks to all those insistently ripening eat-me-now-or-I’ll-rot vegetables, we have at last understood what it is about the olive that has made it such a symbol of peace and plenty for the last couple of thousand years. The olive is magic: if you have olive oil…you can transform virtually calorie-free greenery into nutrition-packed sustenance.
…we’re too lazy to bother going all the way down to the shop. So, go down to the orto instead to see what it dictates for lunch: return with some tomatoes, a fistful of basil, a few zucchini. Boring? But cut the zucchini in strips lengthwise and stick them on your griddle; when they are a bit translucent and brown-stripey, chuck them in a bowl with some garlic and olive oil, a crumpled thyme twig. Leave a few minutes for the flavors to mix. Mmmm, as we English so ludicrously say.
No zucchini here, alas, but we continue to get a few ripe tomatoes every few days. The seedling onions are starting to make bulbs. And I don’t have fistfuls of basil due to poor planning, but due to poor cultivation I do have enough volunteer basil plants to snip some leaves (poor + poor=OK sometimes).
'Yellow of Parma' green onions, purple basil, (l-to-r) 'Ceylon', 'Matt's Wild Cherry', and 'Jaune Flamme' tomatoes
Chop it all up, add olive oil, salt and pepper and you have a vegetable dish to serve.
tomato + olive oil
I made this twice this past week. Once as described and next substituting a mature “potato onion” and chives for green onion and basil.
Olive oil + garlic + herb also makes a pretty good seasoning for steamed vegetables or a dip for bread or a base for a marinade. Smash a couple cloves of garlic with the flat side of a knife, put them in a small microwavable bowl, add a few sprigs of some herb, add enough olive oil to cover, and then microwave for a very short time on low power. You don’t want to cook the garlic and herbs, just heat them enough to release their flavor into the oil. For the amount I make, that would be less than 30 seconds on medium or low power. Last night I used this technique twice. First with rosemary as a sauce or flavoring for steamed new potatoes, and second with a mix of thymes (variegated lemon, Provencal, Lemon Mist) as a marinade base for chicken breast on skewers. The rest of the marinade was a splash of basil vinegar (from a previous year) and ground white pepper and ground Korean red chili pepper.
That’s about it from here for this week’s Garden to Table Challenge at Greenish Thumb. I hoped to have green beans soon so I could write about something besides onions and garlic, but while we were away last weekend the critters settled into the garden and chewed off all the bush beans.
deer + rabbits = no beans
I’m attempting to prevent further chewing by mulching with thyme and fennel prunings. Let’s see what happens.