A Key Question

A key question we always try to answer is: What are we gonna do with all this stuff?  The "stuff" always changes, but the question remains the same.  The stuff is all the produce coming out of the garden at the same time.  It is a fun puzzle to work out.  We often try new recipes.  Some work and some... well, we don't try again.

Right now, we have an over-abundance of cilantro.  It comes up volunteer every year in the garden, thicker than you can imagine.  We also have lots of tomatoes ripening.  Cilantro and tomatoes.  Hmmm...  That's a no-brainer.  I'll get Tricia to make some homemade guacamole.  Growing up, my mom always ate avocados.  I tried them as a kid and didn't like them.  It's funny how when you get older, things change.  My taste buds have changed and now I like avocadoes.  Mom was right.  Mom's always right.

Let's make some guacamole.  Gather your ingredients: cilantro, tomatoes, lime, tomatoes, avocadoes and some salt and pepper.

Chop everything up in a mixing bowl and squeeze your limes into the ingredients in your bowl.

Such a pretty concoction with vibrant greens and reds catching your eye and enticing aromas assaulting your olfactory nerves.

With a fork, mash and stir.  The vibrant colors will disappear and are replaced by a dull greenish color.  Don't let the dull color lull you to sleep or catch you off guard.  The flavor will wake you up.

Open a bag of tortilla chips.  We've discovered that we will kill the entire bag of chips and the whole batch of guacamole in one sitting.  Sometimes we have attempted to not eat the whole bag, but have determined that resistance is futile.

The "money" shot

If we could grow our own avocadoes and limes, why, we'd be eating guac every other day.  Chips are expensive!  It would throw our budget into upheaval.  We'll continue to enjoy as an occasional treat.  I'm also curious to try to make a pesto with cilantro instead of our normal basil.  As far as the tomatoes, we might be able to can some stewed tomatoes or salsa if we don't get hit with a freeze in the near future.  

The Garden of Eatin'

Strolling through the garden as the fall crops are slowly getting picked to make room for the spring crops that will soon be planted.  Some of the crops have flowered and I'm waiting for them to go to seed to save seed for next year's crop.  Here you'll see a few bok choy plants than are all bloomed out.

The honeybees have located the plants and are doing their best to visit.  If you look closely at the bee's legs, you can see that they are full of yellow pollen that she's getting ready to bring back to the hive.

The Russian Red Kale towers over the Green Kale and there's some carrots in the background that REALLY need to be harvested.  Perhaps tomorrow?

The morning dew was all beaded up on the leaves of the kale.  Beautiful!

As we continue with the cole crops, here is a nice cauliflower.  We've been picking a bunch of them.

And here is a Jersey Wakefield cabbage.  This variety of cabbage makes a football-shaped head rather than a round one.  Coleslaw for lunch today.  

From the 'alien vegetables' department, here is a purple kohlrabi.  This has turned out to be one of Tricia's favorite vegetables.

Here's a gourmet French heirloom variety of spinach we grow called Monstrueux de viroflay.  As soon as it warms the bugs start getting to the leaves, so we pick them fast.

This is a second variety of spinach we grow.  Galilee Spinach from Israel.  We like them both.  We'll be letting these go to seed to save seeds once more.

A basket of cauliflower, broccoli and spinach.

This time of year, we oven roast fresh picked vegetables on a stoneware tray in olive oil and minced garlic.

We finished this entire casserole dish off between the two of us.

Sautéed spinach with grated parmesan.  A dish to make Popeye drool.

Have a nice weekend, everyone!

From Asparagus to Zucchini

While picking snap beans the other day, I looked down and saw the last of the asparagus coming up.  Most of it matures quickly now as it's warming up.  It's easy to miss.  But I got the asparagus, snapped it off, and ate it raw, right there in the snap bean row.

I finished the beans and remembered that I needed to check the squash.  They're growing ever so fast as well.

I had planned on weighing the garden produce this year, just to start tracking that, but, to be honest, it's too much work, ha ha.  Here's a big basket of nothing but zucchini I picked.  There will be more coming in tomorrow.  Tricia kind of gave me "the stink eye" when I came in with this.  "What are we going to do with all this," she said.  "We're gonna eat it," I replied.

We also give it away.  Today we walked some over to one of our neighbors.  Tricia also made Zucchini Fritters tonight.  We ate an entire zucchini squash, I'm not ashamed to say.  Zucchini Fritters are like crab cakes, without the crab.  You grate zucchini, put it in a colander, salt it, and let the water drain off.  Then you add flour, cheese, eggs, garlic and seasoning and stir.  Then make little patties and fry them.  My wife made a sour cream ranch dressing that we dipped them into.  Very good!

Since we've been using the dehydrator to preserve a lot of the fresh produce coming in, we decided to dehydrate some zucchini.  The zucchini was cut into slices like you see in the measuring cup below and were blanched according to the time instructed.

Blanching aids in protecting flavor, color, texture in the vegetables.  It inactivates enzymes that cause vegetables to deteriorate.  Although the vegetables don't stay in the water for long, we were wondering if you lose water soluble vitamins during blanching?  The answer is yes.  Although it takes a little longer, the next time we blanch, we'll try steam blanching.  Steam blanching allows the vegetables to retain vitamins otherwise lost in water blanching.

After removing and putting in ice water to immediately stop the cooking process, the blanched zucchini is drained and placed on the trays of the dehydrator.  I don't know how this is going to work out.  Zucchini has a very high water content.  It seems to me this process is akin to dehydrating ice cubes.

Twelve hours later, the dehydrated zucchini is done.

Wowzers!  There's nothing left.  If I still read newspapers, I could read one through the zucchini.  It is transparent and thin.  There's nothing left to it.

Five full trays of cut up zucchini yielded a PINT of dried zucchini.

Good for adding to soups and stews, I imagine, and it'll keep.

Sharing The Cucumber Crop

The garden is producing lots of good, healthy, wholesome food for us.  It's almost overwhelming to harvest it and then bring it in and process it.  We've been blanching multitudes of fresh green beans with more to come.  We're eating them fresh, too.  That's the best way with the new potatoes we've dug so far.

The cucumbers are starting to really produce.  We've been eating cucumber salad daily.  I'll post in a few days our favorite recipe.  In the photo below you can see a trellis that I have three different varieties of cucumbers growing on: Boston Pickling Cucumber, Marketmore Cucumber and Suyo Long Cucumber.  I think I have a fourth variety in there as well: Organic Pickling Cucumber. 

We do have a problem, though.  As I was harvesting cukes, I noticed that several of the ones on the very bottom had been eaten on by a critter of some sort. 

With flowers-a-plenty and many cucumbers at different stages, we have plenty of cucumbers to share with family and friends.  I'm not happy about sharing with critters, though!

I have a small varmint cage trap that a friend gave me.  I pulled it out of the barn and set it with a combination of chicken feed and dry dog food.  The next morning, here's what greeted me...

A RAT!  This one doesn't look like the big Norway rats that I'm constantly killing in the hay loft in the barn.  All I know is that he won't be munching on our cucumbers any more.  We're not operating a 'catch and release' program on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  Consider him e-Rat-icated fromt he premisis.  Rats make a mess, carry disease, and eat up the produce.