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.

Snap Beans - Four Ways!

The Spring harvest is on!  Tricia picked up a nifty basket from her mom that is coming in useful.  We filled it with zucchini, yellow crookneck and yellow straightneck squash.

But it's not just the squash coming in.  Our snap bean crop looks to be a bumper crop.  We've never picked this many on the first picking.  Tricia gave me "the look" when I started carrying all this in.  Harvesting is not the end of the work.  While they're fresh, we have to preserve the harvest.

Below you'll see Blue Lake Bush beans, Contender beans, Italian Roma beans and Purple TeePee beans.

We eat a bunch of them fresh.  So good. We like to cook them with new potatoes and butter.  Lately, we've been cooking them with tasso and that adds great smoky, seasoned flavor.

We also snap them and pressure can a number of pints.  The pressure cooker holds 10 quart jars at a time, so we try to do them in 10 pint batches.

With some of the straightest of the Blue Lake Bush beans, we pickled them in a vinegar solution with dill and red pepper flakes and garlic.  Crispy pickled green beans.  Yum!!

Then we blanched and froze six additional quart bags of Contenders.

The water bath canner holds 7 pints, so we have 7 pints of pickled beans.  In the pressure canner, we snapped and canned 10 pints of contenders/blue lake bush beans and 10 pints Italian Roma beans.

Tricia labeled them with dates and they're ready to go in the pantry.

Then for the fourth preservation method, we're trying something we've never done.  We are dehydrating some snap beans.  First we snapped them.

Then we blanched them.  They come out such a bright, healthy color.

Then we line the dehydrator trays (all 7 of them) with beans.  Here's the contenders:

Here are the Italian Romas:

After about 10-12 hours of drying, here's what they look like:

Seven trays made 2 quart jars of dried snap beans.

While we have fresh, we're eating fresh picked beans.  But in the late summer and winter, we'll try putting the dried beans in soups and stews and see how they turn out once they're rehydrated.  I ate a few of them plain.  They had a snap to them like potato chips.  They needed some salt, though!  Always looking for new ways to preserve the harvest.

Carrots For Days

Normally, we're harvesting the fall crop of carrots in February.  Our very cold weather delayed everything.  In fact, I thought it had killed our carrots.  I even planted two rows of spring carrots, which I never do, as I thought all hope was lost.  But alas!  The fall carrots rebounded and we had a reduced, but still sufficient harvest.

On a recent trip to where she grew up in Corpus Christi, my wife returned with a big basket that my mother-in-law had given her.  It works out nicely for harvesting.  We have a nice haul of Danvers carrots.  They're our 'normal' orange variety.

Then I picked the other two rows of the other varieties of carrots we have planted.  We fed the carrot tops to the animals by the fence watching our every move.

Here is a better look at the varieties after they're all washed up.  On the left, we have the Cosmic Purple Carrot.  It is purple on the outside with an orange flesh.  The one in the middle is your regular run of the mill Danvers carrot.  The one on the right is my favorite.  It is the Atomic Red Carrot.  It has a beautiful red color all the way through.

We eat a bunch of them, mainly oven roasted with olive oil and salt and pepper topped with some fresh parsley.  But we preserve a bunch, too.  We will can some of them.  We dice them up with a food chopper and then blanch them and bring them to a cool temperature in ice water.

We bag up a lot of quart bags of carrots.  These work perfectly for a quick meal as a side dish or, our new favorite, Cream of Carrot soup.  Into the freezer they go until we're ready.

We are trying a new experiment this year in dehydrating some carrots.  We'll do a couple of trays to see how they come out.

This is the same tray as above after drying.  Wow, they kind of went away, didn't they?

We'll put them in a jar like this.  When we were finished, we had a pint full of dehydrated carrots.

Tricia is thinking that when we don't have fresh carrots, she can throw a couple of tablespoons into stews where they'll rehydrate.  We'll know how this experiment turns out and whether or not this is something we will continue to do as another option to preserve the harvest.

Numbers 11:1-5

1 And when the people complained, it displeased the LORD: and the LORD heard it; and his anger was kindled; and the fire of the LORD burnt among them, and consumed them that were in the uttermost parts of the camp.

2 And the people cried unto Moses; and when Moses prayed unto the LORD, the fire was quenched.

3 And he called the name of the place Taberah: because the fire of the LORD burnt among them.

4 And the mixt multitude that was among them fell a lusting: and the children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat?

5 We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick:

After the Exodus from Egypt, the children of Israel began to complain.  They got tired of the manna that fell from heaven and began to thing longingly about their time back in Egypt.  When they were in bondage, working as slaves for their cruel taskmasters.  The first thing they remembered fondly was the food. 

I thought it interesting that onions are only mentioned once in the Bible in Numbers 11:5.  According to literature I read, onions were cultivated way back in Egypt and there are drawings of onions in the pyramids!  Well, we like onions, too.  We had a bumper crop of them this year - the best crop we've ever had.  We harvested them all and cured them so that they would last.  The photo below is just one of many trays of onions drying in the sun right after harvest.

We had one small issue.  Four of the onions were buried a little deep and didn't quite bulb.  We didn't harvest them as they weren't matured.  We were fortunate.  I scraped the dirt and mulch from around them and they began to develop bulb - not huge bulbs, but bulbs nonetheless.  Last week I harvested those four.  Instead of curing them for shelf storage, we sliced them up. 

We laid them in the trays to a food dehydrator and turned it on.

After about 10 hours of drying, this is what those bad boys look like.  Looks like they've dwindled away to nothing but what remains is crisp and flavorful.

We put the dried onions into pint-sized jars.  So four onions made two pints of dried onions.

When our store of fresh onions are depleted, we'll still have some dried onions to use for cooking gravies, stews, etc.  

A Few Things Still Coming Out of the Garden

It is July now.  The tomatoes have all but stopped producing.  Those few that ripen are so damaged with stink bug stings that they are only good for feeding to the chickens.  The yellow squash and the zucchini are still producing well.  This may be our best year.  The Boston Pickling Cucumbers are about done, but the Suyo Long Cucumbers continue to produce.  The green beans are finishing up.

The cowpeas (purple hulls, ozark razorback, and blackeyes) are putting pods on now, oblivious to the heat and dry conditions.  The sweet potatoes are vining all over the garden.  Finally, the okra are just starting to produce and will continue to do so until the first frost in December.

We are picking some eggplant.  They are the long green variety - Louisiana eggplant, I think they are.  Tricia has peeled the skin off of them and is dicing them up.

The vegetable dicer contraption is a big time-saver.  She made a batch of caponata to eat as an appetizer with some crackers.  Man, was it ever good!  Too bad I didn't get any photos.  We ate it too quickly.  We have more eggplant on the way, so I'll try to remember to capture the photos next time.

Ah, peppers.  Criolla Sella, Anaheim, Chocolate bell, Emerald Giant bell, Lilac bell, Horizon bell, jalapenos' lipstick peppers - just some of the varieties we're picking.  They will continue to come in until late fall.  We do cook a lot with them, but we're putting some up, too.  Here's how we do it.  We use the same vegetable dicer to cube them up.  Then we lay out on the food dehydrator:

They shrink in size, but we still get a lot off of every tray.

Then, once fully dehydrated, we bag them up.  Every time we cook, we'll take a handful out and add them to the dish while cooking.  They rehydrate in the broth/gravy/sauce and contribute great flavor to any dish.

In about another month, we'll be thinking about planting broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, etc. from seed.  Amazing how fast the year has passed.  Always harvesting - always planting.  A never ending cycle of good stuff from the garden.

Tomatoes Are About to Finish up

The Spring 2017 Tomato Crop is tapering off now.  The onslaught of the heat and humidity coupled with platoons of stink bugs have the tomato plants waving white flags of surrender.  I've learned a trick that extends the harvest a bit.  The trick involves picking the fruit when you see the first tinge of pink.

I then bring the "just-barely" pink fruit indoors where it can ripen without bug, bird, and squirrel competition.  We have a staging area made up of three platters. Here is an example:  On day 1, you can see the fruit I picked today, mostly green, but with a hint of pink.

Overnight they ripen somewhat on the tray and by the morning, the tomatoes are sporting a reddish color

By day 3 the tomatoes have turned from mostly green to red or blackish-color, depending on the variety.  We grow a number of varieties

Once they are ripe we'll begin to consume them.  Tricia likes to make an Italian tomato salad that she enjoys eating.  It has fresh homegrown purple onions mixed with tomatoes and olive oil and basil

And who can forget about fresh homemade Pico de Gallo.  We can absolutely kill a bag of tortilla chips and a 2 quart container of this stuff.  It has chopped tomatoes, onions, jalapeno peppers, cilantro and the juice of limes with some salt and pepper.

We also slice tomatoes and eat them, dehydrate tomatoes, and can a bunch of them. Here we have quarts of salsa.  In the center, you can see some jars of green tomato sauce.  This came about when we had a hard freeze that popped my Fall crop of tomatoes.  Green tomato sauce is very good, believe it or not!

Then we stewed twenty-something jars of chopped tomatoes that we'll use for cooking when we no longer have fresh ones at our disposal.  Notice the jar of stewed yellow tomatoes below.

We'll still have tomatoes coming in from the garden for a while, but we are stocking up on the inventory of tomatoes in various forms.  Believe it or not, it is only a couple of months before we'll start our fall tomato plants from seeds.  Aside from the summer, we have tomatoes going in some form or fashion.

Drying Dill

Since taking this picture a couple of weeks ago, the dill that is behind the lettuce has grown by leaps and bounds.  It smells so good!  We've been picking a bunch of it to make ranch dressing and dip and also to cook along with some fresh-picked carrots.

Fresh Dill

Tricia decided to pick a nice bit of it to put it in the dehydrator.  She wants to be able to put some aside for flavoring salad dressings and dips and also for making dill pickles later on in the spring.  I'll likely be planting cucumbers this week.  Our dill and our pickles won't be ripening at the same time.

First, Tricia washed the fresh dill in the sink in order to get little critters off of the dill.

Washing the Dill

Then she cut the dill into sizes that will fit onto the dehydrator and began loading the many trays.

Cutting the Dill to Fit

Upon loading, the dill is bright green, healthy looking and fluffy.

Let's Make a Dill

After a day or two the dill is dry.  The color is a darker green and it lays flat on the tray.  We pick the dill up and store it in zip loc bags for later use.

Dried Dill

And here is the final product.  We put it in a storage bag, put a drinking straw in the bag and sucked all of the air out of the bag and then quickly pulled the straw out and sealed the bag.

The dried dill smells very strong.  I guess all of the water has been removed and the dill flavor is concentrated in what's remaining.  We'll likely get another batch or two drying before the dill is finished.  I'll try to save some of the seeds and replant for next year.  Perhaps I can get another plant growing this year that will coincide with the cucumber crop.