Random Topics on a Monday

First, an update on Mom.  Some of you have asked about her and have been praying for her and we so appreciate it.  Mom was released from the hospital and sent home.  She continues to regain strength.  The UTI had gotten into her bloodstream and really did a number on her.  After two weeks of antibiotics, it has cleared up.  The bleed in her stomach that was repaired is holding.  Mom's hemoglobin counts are rising and holding steady.  She'll be getting physical therapy to help her get back to where she was.  Praise God from Whom all blessings flow!  Thank you for your prayers.

Just to the south of our purple hull pea patch, right next to the honeybees, I planted some zinnias.  The bees seem to like them and they're pretty.  Tricia has been picking the blooms and making fresh flower arrangements for the house.  They look nice.  In all it's about a 30 foot row of zinnias, and when they are done, we'll save the seeds from the dried flowers so that we can beautify the garden next year.

While many plants in the vegetable garden are waving the white flag, several crops are really coming into their own - like okra.  Okra has a big beautiful flower as well:

We're picking okra daily, now.  They grow so fast that if you skip a day, many of the okra pods get tough and woody and must be thrown out.  We're eating a bunch of them, though, making oven fried okra, curried okra, okra stewed down with onions and tomatoes.  I'll have to check our inventory in the pantry of pickled okra.  We may have to build back the quantity of pickled okra in the pantry.

Oh, and while we are talking about jars in the pantry, our salsa inventory was running a little low, so Tricia made up a batch of salsa with our homegrown onions, tomatoes, and jalapeno peppers.

It rained six inches today at the house, making it impossible to get anything done outside.  Maybe tomorrow will be a better day?

Putting up Salsa

Growing up, we ate a lot of ketchup - on french fries, on fish sticks, you name it, we poured ketchup on it. In 1991 something happened, sales of salsa in American households overtook ketchup, and we've never looked back.  Today, we don't even have a bottle of ketchup in the house, although there are a few packs of it in the fridge leftover from the few times that we go to fast food restaurants.

When we have a decent tomato crop (we didn't last year), we try to put up some salsa in pint jars.  We grow a wide variety of heirloom tomatoes: Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Pink Brandywine, Organic Rainbow Blend, Black Tomatoes, Creole, Chadwick Cherry, Mortgage Lifter and Black Vernissage.  My two favorites are probably Black Krim and Chadwick Cherry.  They give us a nice mix of colors and flavors that go well in salsa.

We chopped onions, grated garlic, sliced up a bunch of cilantro and diced jalapenos, anaheims, and hot banana peppers:

We blanch the tomatoes and slice the skins off and cut out the cores.

Here's a big bowl of just blanched tomatoes.  You can see the skins are wrinkled and ready to be removed.

All the cut up tomatoes and vegetables are thrown in a big pot.

I wish you could smell this as it starts to cook.  We have so much in the pot, we keep a close eye on it as we don't want it boiling over!

We ladle the salsa in the pints with a canning funnel and can the pints of salsa following the canning instructions and then pull them out.  We set them on a towel and listen intently for the crisp "POP!" as each one seals.  When the last one seals, our job is done.  17 jars for the first batch.

It's beautiful salsa from homegrown ingredients.

How fast will 17 jars disappear?

If Tomatillos Aren't Your Thing...

Last night we talked about tomatillos and a salsita we make with it.  Tonight I'll show you something for chips you just can't go wrong with: Pico de Gallo.  Pico de Gallo means "the rooster's beak" in Spanish.  Why is it called that?  No one really knows.  I used the Google machine that told me that people used to eat it with their thumb and forefinger, which made the hand look like a rooster's head and you'd eat it with the "beak."

We've been getting lots of heirloom tomatoes in of all different varieties.  The colors are beautiful and the taste is scrumptious.  We've been eating lots of them fresh.  We've canned some and then Tricia has made lots of pico de gallo, too.

Back in the early 90's we'd go to the Folk Music Festival in Kerrville, Texas.  There was a band playing there called "Trout Fishing in America."  I know, strange name for a band, but they sang a catchy little tune that we would sing.  As a bonus, it helped you learn the recipe for Pico de Gallo.  The lyrics go like this:

Pico de Gallo, you oughta give it a try-o,
Even if you're from Ohio, it'll get you by-o,
Don't get it in your eye-o, unless you wanna cry-o,
So, come on don't be shy-o, eat some pico de gallo.

It's got jalapenos. I reckon y'all have seen those
They're kinda hot for gringos and probably flamingos.
Just add some tomatillos, onions and cilantro
Lime juice and tomato, you got pico de gallo!

Here you go!:

A bag of chips with this stuff around never sees the next day.  We'll finish off the bag and the whole bowl of pico de gallo.  I like to crush up the crumbs of chips in the bottom of the bag and pour it in the bottom of the pico and eat it up with a spoon like you'd do cereal and milk!

Eat some Pico de Gallo!

Saying Goodbye to Store-Bought Salsa

Usually in the summer when we produce a good tomato crop, we make salsa and then we can it in quart-sized mason jars using a pressure cooker.  Then we kind of ration it so that it lasts whenever we have tomato crop failure like we did this past summer.  Even when the crop DOESN'T come from our garden, we still love eating salsa.

Tricia learned a new trick that she tried out this weekend.  We all think it was easy, delicious, and a great success.  She bought some tomatillos  at the grocery store.  I had never had much experience with tomatillos.  They are similar to tomatoes, but have a different flavor.  She also added a big tomato, some sliced onions, peppers and several cloves of garlic to a baking pan.  She broiled them all in the oven for 6 minutes and then flipped them over for another 6 minutes.  You can see that the vegetables have roasted.  The skins are blistered.

She cut the stems off, removed the garlic skins, blended it all up and voila!  Salsa Verde!  Doesn't that look great?

We opened a bag of blue corn tortilla chips and in no time at all, the salsa verde was gone!  We found that the salsa was especially delicious while still hot, coming right out of the oven.

We liked it so much, the next morning, we made some more.  We didn't have any more tomatillos, but we put some tomatoes in the oven in their place, along with sliced onions, peppers and cloves of garlic.  After broiling for 6 minutes on each side, they were ready.

Tricia used a slotted spoon to remove the skins from the garlic cloves and the stem from the peppers.  Then she put into a half-gallon sized mason jar.   The steam coming off the hot vegetables collected on the rim of the jar.

With this batch of salsa, I ran outside and picked a nice handful of fresh cilantro growing in the garden. A few cilantro plants came up on their own this year from seeds falling off the plants last year, but not enough.  We'll end up having to plant more cilantro pretty soon to keep up with demand making salsa.

Once it is all in the jar, Tricia got out her stick blender and let it go to work.  The stick blender is a great invention.  We use it for so many things.

After the milking chores were done, Tricia fried a couple of fresh picked country eggs for me and then I poured some fresh, hot salsa over the top of the eggs.

Delicious!  We'll never buy salsa in a jar again.

Putting up Tomatoes - June 2017

The tomato crop is coming in fast and furious.  Each day I'm picking a nice big bunch of heirloom tomatoes off of the many different varieties we grow.  In past years, I've waited until the tomatoes are red and ripe, but this year I've changed my strategy.  I'm never afraid of trying new things.  I learned that if I waited until they were ripe, the stink bugs damaged them so badly that they were ugly.  If the stink bugs didn't get them, then big black worms bored into them, ruining them.  Finally, if they were able to mature prior to the stink bugs and worms attacking them, then the squirrels and birds ransacked them.

Enough! I said.  Now my new strategy is to pick them off the vine when the begin to turn pink.  I bring them inside and allow them to ripen minus all the competition outside from bugs, worms, squirrels and birds.  In 2 or 3 days, they are ready to eat. So far I've met with success and will continue this process.  You live and learn.  For the past two years, we've eaten some and froze some, but we didn't really have enough to can.  Fortunately this year was different.

Due to the different varieties, the tomatoes are all different types and sizes.  I like the variety.

The plethora of delicious produce we have makes everyone smile...

The only problem with the tomato harvest is that we're producing more than we can keep up with.  I'll admit - this isn't really a problem as we put tomatoes up in the pantry.  Tricia put up a bunch of stewed tomatoes in pint jars the other day.  This weekend it was raining and we couldn't do anything outside so we made salsa.

In This Post from 2014 we showed the recipe and process for making homemade salsa.  We made a batch using 20 pounds of tomatoes.

It took us a while to process all the tomatoes, onions, garlic, peppers and spices, but we finally did it and in so doing, we filled the biggest pot in the kitchen.

That looks delicious and it is not even done yet!

At long last we have a rolling boil and we'll just let it cook for a bit, reducing so that the flavors are concentrated and the consistency is right.

We canned 10 quarts of salsa when all was said and done.  In readying the pantry to stack these quarts of salsa up, we discovered some of the salsa we made back in 2014.  The seal was still good, so I popped one of the jars open.  Still delicious!  We made quick work of emptying the pint jar while talking in the kitchen.

Two and a half gallons of salsa!  It is nice to have this put away.  We'll enjoy eating all of this within the next year.  This batch is special as it is the first year we've made it with our homegrown onions as an ingredient.  Stewed tomatoes?  Check.  Salsa? Check.  We're eating lots of pico de gallo now.  We plan on drying some tomatoes next with rosemary.  Those came out great the last time we made it.

Making Salsa from Homegrown Tomatoes

According to This Link salsa surpassed ketchup as America's favorite condiment back in 2006.  Growing up we always ate ketchup on everything.  That's changed now and to be honest, unless we eat at a fast food restaurant (which is rare) and get fries, I never eat ketchup and can't even tell you the last time I ate it.  Salsa is just SO much better to me, with the spice, the heat, the onions.

So with the bumper crop of tomatoes and a dwindling supply of last year's salsa in the pantry, we figured we'd put up some salsa this weekend.  Here's how we did it:

First you start with the fruit of the vine.  No, the other fruit of the vine, the tomato from the tomato vine.  Pull a bunch of vine ripened tomatoes off the vine and bring them inside.

Vine Ripened Tomato

We use the recipe below and you can see it has been well-used with smudges of tomato sauce and other ingredients on it.  The yield is 16-18 pints using 7 quarts of tomatoes, but we adjust the proportions of the ingredients based on the amount of tomatoes we have.  You can see those adjusted proportions written on either side. One thing that we omitted from the recipe this year was oregano.  While we love oregano in Italian dishes, we just didn't like the way it altered the flavor of the salsa. We also substituted Criolla Sella peppers for the long green chilies since that's what we have on hand.

The Salsa recipe we use

After removing the skins from the tomatoes and coring them, we assemble all the other ingredients.

Most of the ingredients prepped for mixing together

We chop up the tomatoes, saving the juices.

Fresh chopped tomatoes

We combine all the ingredients in a big pot, except for the cumin and cilantro, and stir together to mix it all up well.  Then we turn up the heat.

Once it boils, we turn down the heat and let it simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes, while stirring every few minutes.  We doubled the cooking times as we are desiring a thicker salsa and want some of the liquid to boil off, yielding a chunkier, more intensely flavored salsa.

Simmering Salsa

While that's on the stove top, we washed some jars, gaskets, lids, and rings in warm, soapy water.  We'll be using wide mouth pint jars and we're breaking it up in two separate batches since our canner will only handle 8 wide mouth jars.

Canning supplies clean & ready

After 20 minutes of simmering after the boil has been reached, we ladle the hot salsa into the pint jars.

Filling the jars

We measure to ensure we're leaving 1/2 inch of head space and then we wipe the rim clean and affix our Tattler gasket to the top of the jar. 

Measuring and putting the gasket on top

Then we put the plastic Tattler lid on the top of the jar.  Tattler lids and gaskets are reusable!

Tattler lid on the jar

Now we screw the ring on finger-tip tight, according to the Tattler website: LINK  

Put the bands on, "Finger-tip tight"

Then lower the jars into your water bath canner and bring the water to a boil.  

Things are heating up...

We put the lid loosely on top of the canner to achieve the boil and allow the salsa to process for 15 minutes.

Salsa is processing in the water bath canner

Once 15 minutes has passed we use our canning tongs to remove the jars from the canner.  We immediately tighten the metal band firmly as soon as they're out of the water.  Tip: Use a dishrag so you don't burn your hands!  We then allow them to cool and come to room temperature.

Allowing the salsa to cool

We had a little bit left in the bottom of the pot that wasn't enough to put in another jar.  Oh, what to do?  What to do?  I know.  We'll eat it!

Freshly processed salsa (not from New York City!)

Here's the verdict:  Delicious!  Substituting the criolla sellas for the green chillies seemed to make this batch a lot hotter than the last one we did and that's okay, because we like hot stuff.  The flavor, seasonings and spices were perfect.  If I could change one thing I might allow to simmer 15 minutes longer to make it a little thicker, but that's just my preference as I like to use the chip as a SCOOP or a SPOON to transport this heavenly concoction to my mouth!

I don't dip my chip.  I use it as a shovel.

When the dust cleared on Saturday, we stacked up 12 pints of homemade salsa to accompany all the stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce in the pantry.  The tomato crop is starting to slow down now, so we'll eat the rest fresh and we'll also blanch and freeze some whole.  Opening a jar of salsa and eating chips and salsa while sitting around the island in the kitchen is enjoyable time and is a relatively healthy snack!