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

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!

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.

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 Salt

Slice 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.

'Matt's Wild Cherry' tomatoes

…and peppers and beans and okra and a couple of tiny cucumbers…

This morning's harvest

For those keeping score, the peppers are ‘Quadrato d’Asti Giallo’, ‘Milord’, ‘Romano’, ‘Padron’, and ‘Ají Cyrstal’. The beans are ‘Fin de Bagnol’, ‘Tavera Filet’, and ‘Pencil Pod Wax’. The cucumbers are ‘Poona’ and ‘Snow’s Fancy Pickling’. Only one kind of okra and that is ‘Emerald’.

There are lots more varieties of peppers and tomatoes, just not quite ready yet. Also, keeping my fingers crossed, I think we’re going to get some decent eggplant this year for the first time.

It has been just incredibly hot here. Over 100°F (≈38°C) for the last 3 days and over 90°F every day except one since the 4th of July. Very little rain.