Harvest, September 4, 2011

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the Easiest Okra Recipe Ever. Or so I thought when I wrote it. Since then I’ve found an Even Easier Okra Recipe. Like the other one, it isn’t so much a recipe as an idea, but here goes. Preheat oven to 425°F. Wash okra, dry thoroughly, and cut into large chunks (say 1½ to 2 inches long). Toss the okra in a bowl with some olive oil. Place okra in roasting pan (or casserole dish, or ovenproof skillet, or whatever.) large enough to hold it in a single layer. Roast for about 20 minutes, stir, and then roast for about another 20 minutes. The okra should be cooked through and starting to brown. Remove from the oven, sprinkle with seasoning of your choice, and serve.

Ripe Chimayo Peppers

Since I was serving the roasted okra along with leftover Baingan Bharta, I seasoned it with a mixture of salt, coriander, cumin and our own freshly dried and ground Chimayo chile peppers. If you google “roasted okra”, you’ll find more suggestions for seasoning, but we really liked this one. I hate to sound like a broken record, but you really should try okra cooked this way even if you think you don’t like okra. It might change your mind.

Dried Chimayo Peppers

This is my first year growing Chimayo peppers, but it won’t be the last. I thought they might sulk in our hot, humid summers but they were very productive and very tasty – a sweet, almost berry-like flavor with a good kick of chile heat after they’re ripe. I tried one while it was still green and didn’t like it at all then, so as far as I’m concerned this is a pepper for drying only.

I missed last week’s Garden to Table Challenge, but mostly because I’ve been too busy harvesting and cooking to write about it. I’m actually looking forward to the coming of fall, so we can get out and do other things…..today we went to the Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello, which deserves a blog post all its own.

1. An earthquake and 22 officially recorded aftershocks, close to Tangled Branches South in central Virginia. As I wrote before, we had no serious trouble even though we were less than 10 miles from the reported epicenter.
2. A hurricane. No real problems with this either. Some downed tree branches, a few broken stems in the vegetable garden, but no power outages, no flooding, and no damage to buildings.

Things related to gardening since the last time I wrote anything about gardening:

1. Eggplant! I picked several on the morning of the earthquake.
   

   Beans, eggplant, peppers, okra

   And another dozen since that. We love eggplant and this has been the best year for it so far. I switched varieties again, keeping ‘Pingtung Long’ from last year but adding ‘Listada de Gandia’ (the striped one above) and ‘Rosita’. I’m very happy with all three varieties this year. So far, I’ve made Baingain Bharta, Roasted Vegetable Panzanella and Baba Ganoush.

2. It’s a good year for bell peppers too. I’ve made Pepper and Egg, Pepper and Egg, Pepper and Egg…. I’m much happier with my results since I started making it following Clara’s directions.
3. The day before the big earthquake, we bought a freezer. The bush beans and the pole beans are all producing at once. And since we were so rattled by the earthquakes, we haven’t been there every day to pick them. So I blanched the best of them and packed them into freezer bags. The big, somewhat overgrown beans weren’t a total loss though. I turned them into Southern-style green beans, braised for about an hour and a half with bacon and a little chopped onion. I fry the bacon first, remove it and some of the fat from the pan, saute the onion in the remaining fat, then add the beans, part of the crumbled bacon and a small amount of water. Keep checking during cooking to see if more water is needed. When the beans are very thoroughly cooked, add the remaining crumbled bacon and salt and pepper to taste. I happen to really like beans cooked this way, but it’s not to everybody’s taste.
4. Speaking of “not to everybody’s taste” – okra. I think people who say they don’t like it just haven’t had it cooked properly. Okra requires some finesse in cooking. But that doesn’t mean difficult, just observant. So here is the Easiest Okra Recipe Ever. Slice okra crosswise into ¼ to ½ inch thick rounds. Slice chile peppers. Heat olive oil in a large skillet. Place okra in skillet. Stir to coat with oil. Let it cook for a bit, then add chile peppers. Stir periodically, so the okra browns on both sides. When it’s mostly brown and crispy, sprinkle with salt and serve. Keys to success are to keep the okra very dry, as moisture will make it slimy; slice it thick enough so that it doesn’t disappear in cooking (it shrinks a lot), but not so thick as to negate the brown crunchiness; do not cover the pan during cooking; do not add salt until the end. You may need to add more oil – okra absorbs a surprising amount.
5. Yard-long beans. These are cool. Beautiful vines with dark glossy leaves, and very productive too. I want to make Wendy’s stir-fried long beans, but haven’t been able to find Chinese dried olives. Can anybody point me in the right direction in the Asian market? (I tried to find them at the various big Korean supermarkets and at Great Wall in Merrifield.) Are they shelved with the other dried stuff – mushrooms and the like? What sort of packaging am I looking for?
6. Drying tomatoes. One plant of ‘Riesentraube’ is going to give me enough dried tomatoes to last the winter and beyond.
   

   Tomato 'Riesentraube'

   I had read great things about the taste of Riesentraube, but mine are sort of sweet and bland. Fine for drying though.

That’s not everything that I could include for this very belated Garden to Table Challenge post, but I’m headed into the kitchen now to make Pepper and Egg again and after that back down to central Virginia to see what’s been going on in the garden while I’ve been away. Hoping for no more aftershocks…

Oh, and right now we have a Severe Thunderstorm Warning. The thunder made me jump.

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!

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.

'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.