We made a gallon bowl full of tomato salad - dice up ripe tomatoes, add chopped shallots and basil leaves, slosh with olive oil and salt, grate some extra sharp cheddar, stir, then eat with crusty bread.

Four of us at home, and we're going through a gallon of this every day.

Snow on the mountains today, and it looks like it will be getting below freezing every night all next week.

ok, so I did not eat today but I did process and freeze 4 batches of pesto. Plus, I did find a recipe for beet relish I am going to try in the am.

Kept is simple today -- diced tomoato with basil, ollive oil and basalmic. YUM!

Made the beet relish, tried it today on crackers with sharp cheese. Better then the football game we made the snack to go with.

I think I will bring in a La Madera squash to microwave for dinner.

My Rock Star pumpkins are huge this year! I better be able to sell most for jack o'lanterns. No way do I want to be using those one-cup-shredded at a time.

Some must weigh over 50 pounds!

Steve

Three pumpkin pies!

(Except they are made with winter squash ;o)

Picked the last of the guy lon for dinner, yesterday. Bok choy is still plentiful. I will start more seed for the fall sowing of Asia greens in the greenhouse and see what transplants can be moved in, as well.

Steve :o)

I made goulash Sunday before the game. Shallots, garlic, onion, eggplant, zucchini and tomatoes, slow simmered, added some cooked italian sausage and served over rigatoni pasta. We had the leftovers last night.

Good thread, digit!

Barb

I began to make tomato sauce today. The number of tomatoes just meant that too many were being thrown away to be tolerated by my parsimonious disposition. Marketing is being cut back so I can't blame someone else for the waste.

I have made sauce for years but this was the first time I've used paste tomatoes. It's only the second time I've grown paste tomatoes. The first time was years ago and it was really by accident and I was sorely disappointed in their lack of sweetness. This year, I decided to try Heinz 2653, an heirloom determinant.

I didn't choose it because it is an heirloom but because, rated at 68 days, it's the earliest I found from the outfits I usually order from. The small plants have been loaded with fruit in a really bad tomato year. I think the plants might have been larger without the summer windstorms but I'm okay with how they did. The Heinz 2653 is surprisingly more sweet than I remember the other paste!

They didn't really cook down much differently than the slicing tomatoes I usually use. It's nice smooth sauce with few seeds, however. I'm happy and enjoyed some on a plate full of rotini!

Steve

I was using the picture to torment my kids. (One of them was inspired to make a pizza for dinner. ;o)

Steve's digits

I picked 2 full cereal bowls worth of tomatoes yesterday. I can't believe how many little ones I am still getting. One bowl just full of romas and there is still about 50 nice green ones out there. The other bowl full of cherries and bells. I threw a few in a salad.

I saw a recipe in a magazine and thought I have all the ingredients! Cooked some diced bacon and onions, added some deli orange sweet peppers that finally ripened. Used carrots instead of red potatoes, sliced cabbage,chicken stock and turkey kielbasa. Tasted good and was a way to use up some odds and ends. One of those once a year dishes and something my DH would have never ate.

It's soup weather.

We have fish about once a week. Leftover salmon goes in a nice dinner omelet. Leftover tilapia usually goes in a fish chowder.

The chowder is really just my potato soup. I've been making that and clam chowder so long that it must be in the DNA by now.

I used to live where I could walk to Humboldt Bay and collect my own clams. There were a couple of recipes I used for their use but I liked New England style chowder, not Manhattan.

Lately, those tomatoes on the counter have been drawing to the close of their season. There has been quite a bit of tomato soup joining the pasta sauce in the freezer. Today, I decided to put the tilapia in one of the last pots of tomato soup.

Maybe my tastes have matured! Very, very good. I'll call it Manhattan style fish chowder ...

Steve
who has been trying the "freeze on cookie sheet before bagging" technique for his leeks. that seems to have worked well, too! soup. mmm, mmm, good

We pulled all the leeks, cleaned then cut them into rounds, and roasted them in olive oil in the oven until they were soft and smelled good. Then froze the result - added some to a large pot of pinto beans along with chili and the rest, and they dissolved, making a very decent gravy.

Got these peeled and roasted in olive oil today. Delicious.

Last night we had carrot raisin salad with homemade mayonnaise. The carrots were pulled yesterday and were very cold but not frozen.

I was digging around under the pine needles yesterday - needing more carrots to go in the beef broth (along with some of the last of the sweet onions from the basement. :o)

Today, that broth was combined again with the Jacob's Cattle beans.

I can understand how a someone displaced to a big city and unable to enjoy those beans from his childhood might try real hard to find Jacob's Cattle beans. So good! They are now commonly available and from a number seed companies. I'm glad I went back to growing dry beans a couple of years ago.

I've linked a story about John Withee and his Wanigan Association of bean collectors.

Steve

Here is a link that might be useful: John Withee's Bean Pot

If your not too tired of my parsnips, here is what I found when I went out yesterday to harvest. Carrots and onions were dead tops but look at what those parsnips are thinking:

No wonder we have global warming. Three thousand people eating beans at once.

I'm not tired of parsnips, Bonnie! The seed was a little olde and didn't have such good germination last year. Not only do I need fresh parsnip seed but I need pelleted carrot seed this year. That way, I will have a better chance with a 2nd crop of the little orange guys, sown in mid- to late-June. It's better for me to not grow long-season varieties. Too much time for things to go wrong!

Those are nice parsnips. They must be real sweet (just like my misshapen ones :o). I have been thinking about roasted veggies and trying again to make a decent vegetable broth. Oh, I can succeed with beef or chicken, what's so tuff for me with vegetable broth?

Anyway, the parsnips are almost like sugar. If someone thinks carrots are sweet -- look how the USDA lists parsnips: 4.8 grams of sugar/100 grams. Carrots: 3.45 grams of sugar/100 grams! What's that, nearly 50% sweeter!

Yeah, roasting. A few thick sliced for dinner that have been rubbed liberally with olive oil and sprinkled with dehydrated garlic and onion salt. And ... a few chopped and roasted beside them, destined for the stock pot!

Steve

Yum! The warm weather over the weekend tempted me out to dig up some parsnips too. They looked a little gnarly, but tasted just fine once roasted with some salt and olive oil. Glad I planted them!

tablet camera photo

Four pumpkin pies and a bacon bok choy quiche.

The pumpkin isn't pumpkin, it's my last la Madera winter squash. The bok choy has been growing for months in my unheated greenhouse in the backyard. Included in the quiche was some frozen leeks and tomato sauce from last year's garden.

I wanted to see how long the la Madera squash would last on the basement shelves. But, there is no need to wait any longer and this is my favorite use for a C. maxima winter squash!

ヅ ! You can imagine what my kitchen smells like right now. For me, I think I'd enjoy another slice of pie.

Steve

Pumpkin pie, I can;t think of a better way to end February. I notice, you have several, I will send you my address and be happy to take the extra (or leftovers) off your hands, Steve.

I have some Long Island cheese and winter luxury in the freezer. I have never grown maximas but I do think the moschatas make superior pie filling over the pepos.

My secret is that DW makes the crusts. My crusts are so tough that you can't get a fork through them!

Custard pie always seemed too simple but if you put squash it there, that's pumpkin pie!

Since that is my forte, I need to explore the quiche world. Really, they are so very similar. I've made them before with spinach and broccoli and have learned that some cooks use Swiss chard. I wonder what else, from the garden ...

Steve

Debbie Downer here ... my grandmother died, as grandmother do but she died on Thanksgiving. We had just returned from the hospital, which was hundreds of miles away, and were joined by my mother's sister and her family. Dinner has just showing up on the table and then, a phone call ...

Mom could not celebrate Thanksgiving for several years afterwards. In time, she set about trying and I helped. I made the pies. So, I wasn't accomplished as a piecrust guy but I was a kid who could make pumpkin pie ッ.

Approaching adulthood, somebody (probably Mom) told me that every man should at least be able to make an omelet. So, I added omelets to my culinary repertoire ...

After I grew up, that book with the title, "real men don't eat quiche" came out and caused quite a stir. I didn't know what a quiche was but when I found out, it made me mad! It was going to be easy for a pumpkin pie omelet making guy like me, to make a quiche. So, I did!

It took me quite awhile to realize that I don't care for nutmeg in them and I prefer a vegetable other than spinach. We use a lot of broccoli through the winter. (And, we'd have a lot of broccoli in the summer if'n Benjamin Bunny would stay outta my garden!!)

Anyway, it's usually winter and usually broccoli but now I have bok choy in the winter!! Hey.

Steve

I've mentioned it before, there are two squash I grow for pies, both from Johnny's, their hybrids ChaCha and Confection - the later has been replaced by Winter Sweet. There's something about the climate and clay soils that makes these two just incredibly flavorful and sweet. I've never been able to grow or buy anything close. This last summer was a disaster for squash, the guy I had covering for me in the garden when I was away wasn't, shall we say, familiar with the care and maintenance of squash plants, and we only harvested a half-dozen small fruit. So I bought 6 more organic squash from Safeway, varieties like Red Kuri and Confection, cured them up properly for a few months, and they were awful. Tasteless, bland, watery, blerk. I ended up throwing most of them away.

Anyways, I'd recommend the Cha Cha as being consistently good.

some good squash, this

Oh, and try grating fresh ginger into the pies.

April!

Rhubarb pie! May know how it tastes yet today - it's just out of the oven. Yes, we bought some strawberries but ... each of the 5 rhubarb plants had some stalks to offer.

I mentioned this in Paige's thread: Bok Choy. The first. Seed sown in March under the temporary hoop house over the garden beds. Nothing in those beds that can't take a freeze and it has frozen in there several times. It didn't seem to delay this San Fan baby bok choy. Kitazawa says it is ready in 40 days and that's what it did. It was a warm March but a more normal April. Bok Choy!

Steve

who has also had more walking onions and chives than necessary

I snipped onion tops and added them to sautéd shrimp. Hey, its a start.

Ha!

No, I didn't eat it hot!

I just sat it on the oven mitt for the picture ... having it for my 2nd breakfast. Hey! Those 2 cookies and that banana was over 3 hours ago.

Steve

Orach!

Am I the only one who has "mountain spinach" to enjoy from the garden every spring??

And, do you think there should be a new "eats from the garden, 2015" thread? If it should have menus more complicated than stir-fry with bacon ... you better start one before I do!

ت Steve

I left several shallots over the winter - they never bulbed, they survived the -5ºF just fine, and now they're wonderful sliced up fresh as a garnish. My French tarragon is being harvested as well.

We got mountain spinach seed from hubby's grandparents 50 years ago. Green orach.

It was grown in mining camps as it will grow most any where. Young and tender for salads and older leaves cooked for spinach.

Lost hubby Aug 30 after a rough year. Had hip replaced in Dec. having shoulder in June. Much smaller garden.

Orach, yes! I let a few go to seed each year so don't plant in the spring. We have been enjoying it fresh in salads with other greens from the garden. How else do you use it?

Anyone have miner's lettuce?

COMary, I just had a big serving of the purple stuff with dinner last night ッ . Typically, just some turkey bacon went into the skillet first, then the orach, still wet from their rinse in the sink. Toss, toss ... Toss on the plate!

Really, I think orach shows its best "colors" as a salad green. Remarkably tender ... I've now begun harvesting lettuce and that's the match for orach. Of course, in a spinach salad, it would just be a variation on the theme.

Miner's lettuce? I barely recognize the wild plant after looking at a picture ... I could toss some prickly lettuce in with the orach stir-fry ... there's plenty of that weed showing up in my garden ...

Steve