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.

…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.

‘Ajo Rojo’, a creole garlic, was the first to mature this year. I dug them on Saturday. Probably should have done it a bit sooner, but Saturday is when I had time.

Garlic 'Ajo Rojo'

There seems to be no consensus on whether garlic should be washed after digging, but in my experience, washing will expose any potential rot and pest problems so you can take action. In the photo below, you can see a spot of something that left alone would probably cause the whole clove to rot. I use up any like that first and leave the healthy ones to cure.

Garlic 'Ajo Rojo', washed

In general, ‘Ajo Rojo’ looks pretty good this year. Knock on wood. In the past few years, I’ve had a lot of problems with rot and some kind of larvae, which I believe to be onion maggots. A few bulbs of garlic just made one large clove instead of several. I assume that had something to do with the size of the clove that was planted, but that’s just a guess. You can see a couple of those above, including the one with the bad spot.

Last night we had Baba Ganoush made with that one large clove of garlic and one other small one. I can still taste the garlic this morning. I don’t really have a recipe for Baba Ganoush, but I like to roast a nice fat eggplant on the grill, then purée the smoky, roasted pulp with a tablespoon or two of tahini, 2 or 3 or 4 or ? cloves of mashed garlic, the juice of about half a lemon, and salt to taste. After putting it into a serving dish, I drizzle olive oil on top and sprinkle with a bit of ground red chile. (It’s going to be a long time before we have any eggplant from the garden, so the eggplant was from the grocery store.)

In previous years, I haven’t done anything to preserve garlic other than to let it cure and store it in the garage for the winter, but this year I’m trying something new. Pickled garlic. Or garlic vinegar. Take your pick.

Let me back up and say that I love herb-infused vinegars. In the past few years, I’ve made tarragon vinegar, purple basil vinegar, and mint vinegar. I use them occasionally for salads, but more often like a seasoning. Just a few drops of herb vinegar added to sautéed vegetables (or almost anything) invigorates the whole dish. Not so much that you really taste the vinegar or the herb, but just enough to brighten the taste.

Spearmint 'Kentucky Colonel'

Spearmint vinegar turned out to be one of the most useful for that purpose and my ‘Kentucky Colonel’ spearmint is going to get unruly if I don’t cut it back soon, so that mint will soon be swimming in vinegar in the fridge.

I treat these vinegars as a sort of refrigerator pickle. Pack a glass jar with herbs. Pour in enough vinegar to cover the herbs. Put it in the fridge and keep it there. You can start to use it any time, but the herb flavor will get stronger as it sits. Some people remove the herbs after a while, but I don’t.

So I’m debating whether to employ this method using garlic alone, or to combine garlic and herbs. What would you do?

Gambas al Ajillo is one of our favorite Spanish tapas. It’s such a simple thing to make that I often overlook it when thinking of dinner menus and blog posts. So I had this green garlic that I dug up and I needed a dinner idea … I wondered how Gambas al Ajillo would taste with green garlic … and I can now tell you that it’s delicious. Here’s how I made it. My recipe is non-traditional in that I add shrimp-shell broth to the garlicky olive oil.

For 2 people as a main dish, peel and devein 1/2 pound of medium-sized shrimp. Do this a bit ahead of time because you are going to make broth from the shrimp shells, as follows – place shrimp shells in a saucepan, add about 2 or 3 cups of water and simmer the shells for at least half an hour. Slice about 3 stalks of green garlic crosswise, green tops and all (slice the leafy green top thicker than the more solid parts of the stalk). Heat a generous amount of olive oil (2 to 3 tablespoons or even more) in a 10″ sauté pan. When the oil is hot, add a dried bay leaf, and a few dried red chile peppers (to your taste, but we like it spicy). Let those sizzle for a few seconds, then add the sliced green garlic and let that sizzle until it smells good (a couple minutes or less). Then add the shrimp. Stir until they start to turn pink. Sprinkle on salt to taste. Spoon a bit of the shrimp broth into the pan. You don’t want it watery – just enough to lighten up the olive oil somewhat and create a sauce for sopping up with crusty bread. The whole broth thing is completely optional and not at all traditional, but we like it because it gives us more sauce. Pour the whole contents of the sauté pan into a broad shallow bowl (a big soup plate works) and serve with thick slices of a a good crusty not-too-heavy bread – baguette is good, but slice very thickly; ciabatta is even better.

Sorry about the lack of visuals with this – I didn’t plan to write it up when I made it. But here’s a preview of coming attractions.

Petit Pois Precoville

Zebra Swallowtail on Lavender

It was very fresh and very fluttery and appeared in the garden after a rainstorm yesterday. I only mention the rainstorm because it was so hot and steamy outside that the camera lens fogged up. Repeatedly. Fortunately, the butterfly stayed until the lens cleared.

There was a faint wash of pale blue on the upper side of the wings. You may have to click through to enlarge the picture enough to see it.

Notice the pale blue color close to the body.

I’ve noticed that all the swallowtails are besotted with the lavender this year. The variety is ‘Munstead’ from seed, if that makes any difference.

And I found another use for green garlic. Green garlic butter! I first made it as an accompaniment to homemade Camarones Brochettes, similar to those served in several local restaurants. I puréed green garlic (the whole stalk, roughly chopped) in a mini-blender and then added cold butter (and salt because the butter was unsalted) and whirled it just enough to combine. I think it would be great with any kind of seafood and I can verify that it’s delicious tossed with ravioli and coarsely ground black pepper.