Garden Update: End of the Season

We had our first hard freeze last night, so all of the tender veggies are no more.  I'm okay with that, it's kind of nice to be done with the watering season.  This is a photo of what I've been harvesting over the last couple of weeks.  Last night my mom and gathered a big basket of green tomatoes, tomatillos, the last zucchinis and basil.  It was dark when we finished, so no picture.

Now just the hardy winter vegetables will survive.  With a little protection the swiss chard usually makes it through the whole cold season, the same with the kale and beets.  We get a good crop of late wild mustard and dandelion-like greens that I've been known to make into weed salad.

Now we need to process and put aside all of those green, semi-green tomatoes, and tomatillos.  So the garden work isn't quite over yet.  We're planning to can tomatillos, ripen any tomatoes that show any signs of pink, and make this delicious sounding green tomato soup that my friend Deirdre posted recently.

Culinary Chronicles: Swiss Chard and Tomatillo Gratin

I made this dish a few weeks ago after my friend Deirdre brought me a mixed bunch of chard and kale.  I looked around the kitchen and saw a lot of tomatillos sitting on the counter, and the idea of a gratin popped into my head.  As I've said before, I've been trying to use tomatillos in as many non-Mexican dishes as possible, just to extend their range.  This gratin turned out so well that I'll definitely be making it again, and it may end up being my contribution to the annual Thanksgiving potluck that my mom and I attend every year.  

I'm not the type who has pre-made breadcrumbs at the ready in my frig, so I made them quickly by toasting whole grain bread, tearing it into chunks and grinding it in my food processor.  I added a few shakes of smoked Spanish paprika during the last few rotations.  The smokiness gave the breadcrumbs a nice subtle spiciness against the cream sauce of the greens.  Super tasty, so I thought I'd share.

Partially assembled.

Swiss Chard and Tomatillo Gratin (4 to 6 servings depending on size)


1 large bunch of swiss chard
4 to 6 large tomatillos, cut into bite sized pieces
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
2 TBSP flour
1 cup milk
2 TBSP butter, plus more for topping
1/2 cup grated cheese, swiss or gruyere
1 cup bread crumbs**
Spanish smoked paprika


Wash, dry and chop the chard leaves into large pieces, and the stems into bite size pieces. In a covered saucepan bring about a cup of water to a boil, then add in the chard and let it steam for just a couple of minutes until its just wilted slightly. Remove from heat, but save some of the water in case you need to water down the roux a bit.  Remove the husks from the tomatillos, and wash under the tap until the stickiness is removed.  Chop into bite sized pieces and set aside.


Meanwhile, slowly melt butter in a skillet. Make a roux by sprinkling in the flour and stirring while it browns a little. Add in chopped garlic, keep stirring and add in milk slowly. Whisk to remove any lumps. Add in half of the grated cheese and stir until melted and incorporated smoothly. Season with salt and pepper. If needed, add in some of the chard water so that the sauce has a loose gravy like consistency. Once the sauce is finished, make sure that the chard is well drained then mix together the chard, tomatillos, and sauce. In a separate bowl, mix bread crumbs with a dash of salt, pepper, and a few shakes of smoked paprika. Spread into a buttered baking dish, and top with breadcrumb mixture, remaining cheese and little dabs of butter. Bake at 375 for 30 minutes or until topping is browned and vegetable mixture is bubbling. Serve!

(**This originally was 1/2 cup of bread crumbs after making it with a different casserole dish I decided to up the quantity for a thicker topping).

Tiny butter cubes and pepper as the final prep before the oven.

Browned and crunchy topping, just out of the oven.

About to be devoured.

Weekend Edition: Fall Gardening Tasks

Nothing very exciting happened this weekend.  It was mostly putting up food for the winter-- more refrigerator dills, more green chile roasting, making and freezing pesto, and making an freezing tomatillo salsa.  There was also brunch with friends at Café Green downtown.  I had veggie crepes and my friends both had the Dutch baby pancake.  Delicious.

What I failed to do was actually pick anything from the garden.  Oops.  That resulted in this giant zucchini that I picked this morning.  Same old same old on the harvest front.  Not complaining though, look at all those tomatoes!  And the sunflowers!

And yes, I take most of my food photos on the top of the wash machine at my mom's house.  It's not sexy certainly, but its the only plain surface with dependably bright natural light.  I had to cover the supply pipes with a cloth because that was just too ugly!

Weekend Edition: The Beginning of Fall

I tried to sit outside and read a couple of old Dominos, but the apples that needed picking kept calling my name.

Whew, many of my weekends are so busy that I feel like Mondays should be the real day of rest.  Its slightly overcast today, making me really feel like a nap is in order.  This weekend's big project was weeding and mulching a big area around the kitchen garden, in addition to normal weekend things like irrigating, baking, laundry, etc.  I've got a couple of recipes in line for posts, but writing them up and processing their accompanying photos is going to take a little more energy than I have today.  For now, here are a couple of photos from the early fall garden.

Garlic chives in bloom.

Even though winter is my least favorite season, sometimes I look forward to it for the sole reason that all the work that a big garden entails is over for a few months.  Anyone else feeling summer chore burnout?

Garden Update: Figs

This was my largest single harvest of figs this year.  Ten.  

Not many figs this year, but at least they were tasty.  We ate them fresh with a little goat cheese and balsamic vinegar and a glass of white wine.

Scenes from Saturday

I always like those "day in the life" type posts, so here is one from my Saturday.  Be forewarned, it's not exciting-- I barely left the house!

9:00 AM -- Looking for green beans.

9:30 AM -- The day's harvest.

10:00 AM -- Coffee and decorating books in Mom's living room.

11:00 AM -- Frugality.  Hand washing another small oriental rug.  I was agitating the water by stomping on it. 

12:00 PM -- While the rug was soaking I caught up on an episode of Charlie Rose.  That's Bret Easton Ellis discussing his newest novel Imperial Bedrooms, which follows the same protagonist as Less Than Zero, but 25 years later.  Less Than Zero was one of the first rated R movies that I wanted to see in the theater, so I have a sentimental spot for it.  Somehow my friend Sarah and I convinced our moms that it was appropriate for 12 and 13 year olds.  (And compared to movies now it was pretty tame).  I never read the book, but this interview certainly made me curious.  I'm now on the library wait list for both books.

1:00 PM -- Lunch was straight from that garden harvest.  

2:00 PM -- The rug rinsed and drip-drying on a fence.

5:00 PM -- I discovered a stash of posters that decorated my rooms in college and I took them out to the studio so I could pin them all up and see what I had.  I have comments about them all, but I actually think I'm going to do a whole separate post about art, posters, etc.

8:00 PM -- Out for dinner in honor of my uncle's birthday.  This Thai restaurant on the west side has the best spicy Drunken Noodles in town (imho).

9:30 PM -- Embarrassing, but I sort of love the Rachel Zoe Project and never get to watch it since I don't have cable.  When I saw that the Season 3 premiere was on Hulu, I jumped at the chance.  

10:30 PM -- Then for something a little more intellectually redeeming I snuggled up in my favorite chair to read a few chapters.  I've been reading classics that my formal education seemed to have skipped this year-- like Anna Karenina, Robinson Crusoe,  and The Painted Veil.  I did read Wuthering Heights in high school, but got the bug to read it again.  Man, I really didn't remember what a bastard Heathcliff is.  How did this story get the reputation of being a romance?  I've spent the whole time thinking about how nice it would be if he were struck by lightening while out on the moors.

And that was it-- with visions of child abuse dancing in my head it was off to bed.  It was a lovely relaxing day!

Recently

I seem to have fallen into a summer slump.  The beginning of the week found me with one of those headaches that would not go away.  It lasted for two days and was accompanied by basic nausea, particularly when I tried to look at my computer screen for more than a minute.  Ugh.  I tried to get back to my lingering projects, shelf and blouse.  The shelves are like the headache.  Its a project that just won't go away.  I switched from spray paint to a can of gloss enamel, which smells infinitely better but refuses to apply without brush strokes.  Sigh.  I'm just going to have to make due and relax knowing that no one except me will give my shelves a super close up view.  I didn't attempt to tackle the blouse with my headache.  In the meantime I have managed to photograph some of the other things that I've been doing.

Making Tiramisú.

The recipe makes one loaf pan cake and two smaller portions.  

A cross section of one of the smaller portions which have been wrapped tightly and frozen for those times that I have a dessert emergency.  As in I need it and have nothing on hand.

I followed a recipe from the book "In Late Winter We Ate Pears: A Year of Hunger and Love," by Deirdre Heekin and Caleb Barber.  A collection of fairly simple Italian recipes based on those that the couple have learned and developed over the years that they've lived in and visited Italy.  They run a restaurant in Vermont called Osteria Pane e Salute that focuses on slow and local food, and have a blog.  I couldn't find the recipe online anywhere and it's too long to transcribe.  (Summer slump remember?)  The book is part memoir and part cookbook, and I like the recipes but was underwhelmed by the memories.  I really wanted to love it, but the prose seemed like it was over-embellished for literary effect instead of reflecting an authentic voice.  The wife's writing is the same on their blog but I still can't imagine that she speaks that way.  On the other hand the husband writes the recipes in a much more down to earth tone.

And on the home front, some of our local produce.

Yesterday's harvest.  I like the ombre effect of this composition.  The tomatoes are clockwise from the left: Brandywine,  San Marzano, Sasha's Altai.  Beans: Kentucky Wonder pole beans and one Chinese long bean.  Herbs: summer sorrel, mint, tarragon.  Cukes: Armenian cucumber, and Mountain Pickling cukes.

The fig was dug started from a side shoot of an unknown variety.  My guess is Turkey brown.  It produces  lots of small fruits and it is totally winter hardy in our climate.  

Last night we put up a batch of tomatillo salsa (posted recipe last year).  We tend to freeze it rather than can it because it holds up well that way and we usually make it in small batches.  Tonight we are going to make refrigerator dills.  Anyone got a favorite pickle recipe?  I've been using this one with the modification of added garlic for dills, and also plan to make more bread & butters since the turned out so well last year.  I'm also thinking of pickling some of the Armenian cukes and adding a cinnamon stick and some cardamon to the brine.  Haven't researched that one yet but the idea has potential, don't you think?

Summer Beauty: Night and Day

I meant to post this on Wednesday, but the week just got away from me.

Tuesday night we had amazing pink clouds in the northern sky.

Wednesday morning brought the first cucumbers from the garden.  They promptly became lunch.

Weekend Edition: Saturday Supper

About once a month my mom likes to have my uncle over for dinner on Saturday-- a monthly family get together.  Usually in the summer months we grill, but thanks to overcast skies it was cool enough to cook indoors and I had a craving for a roast chicken.  

Super simple and most ingredients (except lettuce, lemons, sugar & butter) from New Mexico.  Tomatoes, basil, mixed herbs, and pears from our garden.

Garden Update: Pears

My lunch today featured a pear and a tomato both from our garden.  Yay!  Finally, some harvest.

Curried tuna with carrots and tarragon, pear and tomato from the garden. 

When we bought our property one of the things that we liked about it was the abundance of mature trees.  The history is a little fuzzy, but the front house (mom's) was probably built in the 20s or 30s and then added onto in the 50s and 70s.  The back house (mine) was built in the early 50s according to a neighbor, and added onto in the 60s and 70s.  In the early years someone with a good sense of design and proportion laid out the property with a nice angled driveway that limits visibility from the street.  They also planted a lot of trees.  Since then many weed trees have sprung up along fencelines and such, and now we have dozens of trees.  Unfortunately post-70s the property wasn't very well cared for.  I think elderly people lived here, then a woman who got divorced and lived here alone until she set up some trailer hook-ups and rented out trailers.  Yeah, weird.  Almost two acres though, of county jurisdiction means some strange allowances when it comes to zoning, thus informal trailer park.  The post-70s neglect meant that the irrigation system went all to hell and by the time we moved in during the winter of 2001, several of the trees were completely dead and almost all of the others were in need of serious TLC.  Some of the big trees that we lost were short lived species, but several were fruit trees.  Two big cherries were completely dead, as was one pear.  The other pear hadn't been pruned in years but was still alive, probably because it was near a big leak in the irrigation piping.  There were also three apple trees which were getting crowded out by a giant mulberry, but were still alive.  

This post is really about the pear tree though.  It's huge, probably 40 feet tall, and with a trunk diameter of 21.5 inches (68 in circumfrence!).  Due to its lack of pruning many of the old branches reach for the sky and just to taunt us, that's were the majority of fruit forms.  That is until a couple of years ago when some new growth sprouted out just above our heads.  After a couple more years we're starting to get more fruit at pickable levels.  The pears are small, and we don't spray anything for bugs or to keep away birds, so they tend to have little marks.  So tasty when ripe though!

The pear tree.  The ladder is six feet tall for scale.  There is lots of dead growth that needs to be cut out, but we always prune in winter and sometimes can't tell which limbs are dead.  You'd think we'd remember to mark them, but we never do.  Oh well.

Some of the ripe pears out of reach above my head.  The animals are the biggest recipients of the fruit since the dogs eat fallen pears as desert after their regular meals and as snacks at any point in between.  We also gather the fruit in a bucket so that we can take a few pears back to the neighbor's horses when we walk to the back.  The dogs help themselves to the fruit in the bucket too.  

Small pears, but mostly unblemished.

A much better representation of their color.

Weekend Edition: Garden Growth

I didn't do too much gardening this weekend due to the swarms of mosquitos that took over the yard last week.  (Seriously, I look like I just got over the chicken pox, I've got so many welts on my arms and legs).  Just a little weeding and regular watering.  I was extremely excited to see that the green beans are finally blooming.  The vines had already climbed to the top of the trellis and I'd started to resign myself to the fact that they might just add greenery to the garden this year and no produce.  I can't wait to eat beans from the garden.  We also have an eggplant well on its way, and there are lots of green tomatoes in the back garden that so far seem to be developing nicely.  While I think the garden is healthy so far this year, we've had very little to show for it.  Our long cold spring delayed planting and was followed by a solid week of 100 degree temps that fried a lot of the little seedlings.  Luckily we don't get hard frosts until October here (usually) so there is plenty of time for everything to catch up.  Go veggies, go!

Weekend Edition: Dinner from the Garden

Artichokes from the garden, before and after.  Dipped in a sauce made with mayo, chipotle chile and garlic.  

Ideal weather

I took this photo of the apple blossoms on one of our embattled trees. Only one of three trees is doing well after a hard freeze-thaw-freeze cycle two years ago which cracked the trunks open on many of the trees in the neighborhood. One tree is basically dead and needs to be removed, one is struggling to come back, but is now shaded out by bigger trees that have grown up since it was first planted, and this last tree is covered in gorgeous blossoms.

The weather has been perfect this week making it hard to do any indoor chores or work. Right now I'm tied to the inside because I'm on hold, but I'm hoping to get outside soon and enjoy the day. Its supposed to be overcast and rainy tomorrow, but I'm hoping that it won't rain much since Sunday is our first day to irrigate, and I don't want that cancelled.

Garden Update: Self-Seeders

I'll get to the self-seeders in a minute, but first this shot of my make-shift attempt at protecting our apricot blossoms from frost. Apricots are one of those fruits that are delicious home grown, but almost always terrible when purchased from the grocery store. In the fall we planted three small trees, and they were loaded with blossoms over the last couple of weeks. Of course during that time we had weather that ran the gamut from sunny and warm, to snowing, freezing, hailing, and gale force winds (currently-- argh!). All of which is completely normal for New Mexico in the spring time. Since the weather has been mainly warm, and the snowing and freezing was supposed to be just for a couple of days, my mom and I erected these tepees over the little trees last weekend. I have no idea if our row cover actually helped or not, but we tried!

Our daffodils are also blooming. Our plan is to plant 100 or so every Fall, until the area between the meadow and future orchard is covered in bulbs each Spring. The reality? We've planted bulbs exactly twice, and therefore have about 75 bulbs blooming.

Okay, now on to the self-seeders! I'm also adding in the over-wintering plants in the garden. Our last frost date is usually set at April 15th, so we're not ready to plant out any tender garden plants, however those that self-seeded and over-wintered are starting to produce again. The swiss chard...

This red leaf lettuce that self-seeded last Fall and popped up early this spring...

This flat-leaf Italian parsley which over-wintered. Its stunted so far, but still pickable!

This arugula which self-seeded...

The tarragon (my favorite herb) has come back from dormancy, as have the garlic chives...

And although these do not grow in my garden (thanks TJs!) these lovely apricot tulips have been brightening my kitchen counter along with the little wire skeleton I made one day while procrastinating in the studio...

Happy Spring!

Fall Harvest: stragglers

Since our first, and only so far, frost on the first of the month killed most of the tender garden plants our harvest quantities nose-dived. However, in small amounts we've still been getting a little produce. It looks a lot different than it did a couple months ago.

All of the foliage on the tomato plants died, but the fruits were undamaged by the cold. They've continued to ripen on the vine, and every couple of days there have been one or two to pick. Last week I got our last zucchini, a tomato, and a couple dwarfed cukes.

The artichokes and cardoons weren't damaged by the frost at all. Now if only I could find a recipe for the cardoons that sounded inspiring. They were so bitter the last time I tried to cook them that I've kind of ignored them, but I know that I should try again.

This morning I decided that I'd better bring in the butternut squash or risk it getting soft from sitting in the soggy (and cold) mud for much longer. I picked all of it, even those that hadn't developed the best color. Hopefully they'll finish ripening in storage. (I have no idea if they can do that-- not a winter squash expert).

Meanwhile, the kitchen garden hasn't been hit with a frost, and we have more swiss chard than we could possibly eat. First up, tonight's enchiladas.