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.

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!

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.

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.

There was one bright spot on the tomato scene last year though, and that was ‘Matt’s Wild Cherry‘. That one plant yielded more than the other 9 put together. Luckily, we like it a lot. So it’s definitely on the list for this year.

A couple of new-to-us varieties also performed better last year than the others and have earned a place in this year’s garden – ‘Jaune Flamme‘ and ‘Ten Fingers of Naples’. ‘Jaune Flamme‘ was highly praised by MSS of Zanthan Gardens, and I agree. A great-tasting tangy little tomato and a good yielder in a difficult year. ‘Ten Fingers of Naples‘ was planted on a whim. I’m always on the lookout for good paste tomatoes but the seeds were a freebie from Sand Hill Preservation Center. They turned out to be a cute little plum tomato (really more of a pear shape) with a very nice flavor. Susceptible to blossom-end rot, but maybe we’ll get rain every 3 days this summer (I can hope).

The rest of last year’s varieties and my thoughts on each one:

• ‘Black Krim‘  A pretty good medium-sized black tomato. Not as much cracking as my favorite ‘Black Russian‘, but I thought not quite as flavorful either. But ‘Black Russian‘ is such a pain to grow, so ‘Black Krim‘ will be in the garden this year again. For what it’s worth, this seems to be happier in cooler weather – it produced well early and late, but not midseason.
• ‘Virginia Sweets‘ Loved, loved, loved this one in 2009. Hated it in 2010. In the cool rainy summer of 2009, I got enormous wonderful-flavored yellow/red bicolor fruits from a huge plant. In the hot dry summer of 2010, it grew fairly well, but yielded next to nothing. I’m giving it another chance this year and hoping for good weather.
• ‘Striped Roman‘ My favorite paste tomato. It didn’t do well last year, but I know it can do better. This variety has been a constant for the last 6? years and I see no reason to change that.
• ‘Brandeva‘  A stable cross between ‘Brandywine‘ and ‘Eva Purple Ball‘, trying to get the flavor of ‘Brandywine‘ in a pretty package such as ‘Eva Purple Ball‘. It was OK, but I want to date other tomatoes. It won’t be back for 2011.
• ‘John Baer‘ A small fruited heirloom. I don’t see why anybody would have saved it based on my last year’s results. It produced poorly and the tomatoes didn’t taste good. I don’t plan to try it again.
• Hungarian tomato from eBay (Garafarm brand seed packet). I couldn’t read the Hungarian label, but this was an average red tomato. Not bad, but not great either. I’m looking for superior tomatoes, not OK ones, so this will not be back this season.
• ‘Break O’Day‘ I apparently got some wacky collection of seeds that happened to be labeled ‘Break O’Day‘. In 2009, this was a very nice tasting green-when-ripe tomato. It’s supposed to be red. Last year, it was a strangely shaped pinkish tomato. I’m tossing those seeds out. I’d like to give ‘Break O’Day‘ another chance because I’ve read good things about it, but I’m not planting it this year.

You’ve heard the saying that generals are always prepared to fight the last war? I’m going with more of the type of plants that did well last year – mainly small-fruited varietes. This year’s list includes some previous favorites, and only two large-fruited varieties.

Old friends:

• ‘Matt’s Wild Cherry’
• ‘Striped Roman’
• ‘Virginia Sweets’
• ‘Ten Fingers of Naples’
• ‘Black Krim’
• ‘Jaune Flamme’

The newcomers. Links are to descriptions from Tatiana’s excellent TomatoBase.

• ‘Riesentraube‘ If this produces as described, I’m going to have awfully many cherry tomatoes this year.
• ‘Tess’s Land Race‘ I really don’t need another small tomato, but here it is anyway. Sounded interesting.
• ‘Ceylon‘ Cute shape, but I really don’t need another small tomato.
• ‘German Pink‘ Ah, a big tomato. This is one of the varieties that gave rise to Seed Savers Exchange. Slow Food USA has included it in their Ark of Taste, but I think it’s in little danger of extinction.

That’s the list for 2011. I started ‘Jaune Flamme’, ‘Matt’s Wild Cherry’ and ‘Ceylon’ early this year, and am going to set them out extra early, maybe under a row cover or similar, hoping for early yields. The rest will be sown tomorrow. That’s the plan anyway.

l-to-r: Matt's Wild Cherry, Ceylon, Jaune Flamme

What are your thoughts on tomatoes this year?

Previous tomato lists:

• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007

'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.

16-day-old tomato seedlings

I think we had a frost last night! Good thing my tomatoes are nowhere near ready to put into the garden. I was quite late in starting the tomatoes, peppers and eggplant this year, but if summer progresses as spring has we’re going to have a very long hot summer. There should be plenty of time to catch up.

So, what tomatoes am I growing this year and why? 14 plants (last year’s count)  is really too many for the way we live and eat and I absolutely positively have to get back to a more manageable number. 10 plants this year – no more! As always, I wanted to try some new varieties. The result was that I overlooked some known good-performers-in-my-garden in favor of novelty.

Tomato seeds from Hungary

The rookies:

• ‘Jaune Flamme‘ salad-sized orange tomato. Various favorable reviews, including MSS at Zanthan Gardens. This variety is said to be good for drying and dried tomatoes are sooooo useful and I didn’t dry any last year.
• ‘Ten Fingers of Naples‘ paste tomato. A whim – I could use at least 2 paste tomato plants and would happily plant an entire row of ‘Striped Roman’, but didn’t want any duplicates in my 10-plant quota and happened to have these seeds in my stash.
• ‘Black Krim‘ medium-sized black tomato (and possibly the most common black variety?). The only black tomato I’m growing this year – I’d like to do a direct comparison to ‘Black Russian’, but there’s that 10-plant quota again.
• ‘John Baer‘ basic round red tomato. An old garden variety; said to be a selection from ‘Bonny Best’.
• Tomato from Hungary, basic round red tomato, or so I believe. Another whim – I was browsing eBay and found garden seeds from a seller in Budapest. The name on the label – Paradicsom – just means tomato in Hungarian.
• ‘Brandēva‘, a cross between ‘OTV Brandywine‘ and ‘Eva Purple Ball’, developed by a local horticultural celebrity, Jeff McCormack, founder of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

The returning veterans:

• ‘Striped Roman‘: paste tomato developed by John Swenson. One of my all-time favorites and I can’t imagine not growing it.
• ‘Matt’s Wild Cherry‘: my favorite cherry tomato. Little tangy-sweet bursts of tomato happiness.
• ‘Virginia Sweets‘:  large yellow beefsteak-type tomato, streaked with red. I’m only growing one big yellow tomato this year and this is it. See last year’s post about the huge tomato.
• ‘Break O’Day‘: basic round red tomato. Another old garden variety. Didn’t get a fair trial last year (see my post about green-when-ripe tomatoes) so I’m trying it again.

So that’s this year’s line-up. What’s in your tomato patch?