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.

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!

Heavy with the harvest

The last several weeks have been filled with gathering produce, processing it, visits from friends, a bout of rainy weather, and hours spent (wasted?) watching television online-- complete addiction to the now defunct Veronica Mars.  Since I'm trying to span a fair amount of time here, the pictures that follow are roughly chronological.

Back in August we had the opportunity to pick grapes at an acquaintance's small farm.  We picked a large box of Concord grapes (with seeds), and a large basket of seedless Thompson, Flame and another variety that I'm forgetting.  Once picked you have to decide what to do with so much produce... juice?  Jelly? Raisins?  We ended up making grape jelly, though not the biggest fans of it, and raisins, and leaving the rest to eat fresh.  The grape jelly has gotten good reviews from friends, though we think its way too sweet and have only eaten it on toast with peanut butter to dull the sugar.  (And that is after I cut the sugar in the recipe by at least a third).  The raisins are extremely tasty, particularly because I made them with a mixture of red and green grapes.  I'm a fan of golden raisins, and these pretty much fit the bill.

The raisins drying.  I rotated them between a low heat oven (175 degrees) and just air drying covered by dust screens.

The grape jelly on an english muffin with peanut butter and coffee, as see from where I generally blog from-- the corner of my kitchen counter.

Soon after the grape picking, we received this basket of peaches from a friend's tree.  Nothing is better than ripe, local peaches (except maybe ripe local apricots) so we definitely ate our fair share fresh, but there were too many and they were threatening overripeness, so more had to be done.  After freezing a couple of bags worth my mom made this lovely and delicious peach tart.  Almost too pretty to eat.

The garden is starting to slow down, but there is still plenty to harvest.  While the corn is finished, we leave the stalks up because there are black beans growing up them.  We pick the pods after they've dried.  This particularly beautiful combo of dark purple and tiny red wild morning glories has also been using the corn stalks to put on a show.

One of the vegetables that we're harvesting now are tomatillos.  For the last couple of years we've grown "Purple De Milpa," thus the slightly purple tinge to those below.  We mostly use them for salsa.

Roasted tomatillo salsa:

1 medium onion

3-4 cloves of garlic

30-40 small to medium tomatillos

2 - 3 jalepenos (or more depending on how hot they are)

1 large handful of cilantro (or more to taste)

juice of a medium lime (again to taste)

salt to taste

On a griddle, a comal, or your grill, roast the onion, garlic, jalepenos and tomatillos until starting to blacken.  Leave the skins on everything and peel just before placing them in a food processor or blender.  Our tomatillos are grown without any kind of pesticides and sometimes get wormy-- I de-husk them and wash them prior to roasting to make sure that no worms are still in them and to throw out any that have worm damage.  Once roasted the skins should peel off the jalepenos very easily, but if they don't they are small enough that it doesn't matter.  Do remove the stem and as many of the seeds as you can before you add to the food processor.  If you leave the seeds the salsa will be much hotter.  Add the salt, lime juice, and cilantro and blend.  I like the consistency to be fairly smooth.  Taste and add more ingredients as needed.

I realize that that ingredients are heavy on the "to taste" instruction, but salsa is highly adaptable and can always be improved upon by adding a little more salt, or another squeeze of lime.  Start with the lower end of the measurements though, since its impossible to take away the heat of too many jalepenos, even with more lime (which should help a little).  I like to make this salsa so that it has a little bite, but not be overwhelmingly hot.  The roasted tomatillos and onions give it a natural sweetness that can be overwhelmed by too much heat.  Its delicious on its own with tortilla chips, as a sauce for chicken or pork, or in a simple quesadilla with cheese and a squash blossom. (For the record, I prefer corn tortillas for quesadillas, but I live in a neighborhood where I can buy them still warm and by the kilo, and they are a million times better than those you buy in the supermarket).  The salsa also freezes well.

Finished salsa.  

In the midst of all that food production we had several days of heavy rain fall.  This picture was taken the day after it rained for 12 straight hours in my neighborhood.  That may be normal for some of you, but this is a desert!  We usually get our rain hard and fast, not steady for 12 hours. This photo looking down our driveway shows the puddles that were forming.  Not too bad considering.

Back to this being a desert, a day later the weather looked like this-- typical for our fall.  I went hiking up at the volcanoes to the west of town with some friends.  I love this picture because it gives a good sense of scale and the kind of vistas that we take for granted here in New Mexico.

A week or so later we drove up north to Truchas for the Fall Sale at Tooley's Tree farm, and bought three apricot trees.  We planted them near the back garden, where I hope a colder micro-climate will keep them from blossoming too early and getting hit by the late freezes. Afterwards we drove up to Abiquiu to pick apples at the property of a friend of a friend.  She owns an old apple orchard which was loaded with fruit.  We brought back about three bushels full of apples, and a few pears.  So, our next project will be apple sauce and apple butter. Results to follow!

Weekend (Pickle) Edition

I started out the weekend by making raspberry ginger tea cakes, based on this recipe from Design*Sponge. I followed the recipe exactly the first time I made these, and it was delicious with apricots and almond flour, however this time I didn't have either ingredient, so I improvised. I used a cup of regular flour and added powdered ginger (instead of lemon zest) to flavor the batter. I substituted several still frozen raspberries as the fruit. I also made them a bit smaller, using muffin tins instead of small tart pans. The larger size was a bit more cake than I wanted with afternoon tea the last time. I have a winter version in mind using orange zest and dollops of marmalade. Yum. Might have to go eat the last one while I write the rest of this.

Saturday was spent gathering supplies for our first canning project of the year-- bread and butter pickles, and taking a scenic drive south through the farms that stretch down the Rio Grande through Isleta, Peralta, Tome, and Belen. Very verdant, but I didn't take any photos, so I can not share.

On Sunday I stopped by to see the extensive home renovation being done by two of my friends from architecture school. They bought a little shotgun house in Barelas a couple years ago, and it was promptly damaged by severe flooding during a series of torrential rain storms. It was in need of serious work before the flooding, but afterward they had to rip out all the wood floors, stabilize the adobe, and re-grade the yard in addition to building an addition and upgrading the old structure. I think the project is about a year and a half over-schedule now. They've accomplished a ton of work, but still have a lot to do. It made me feel a bit better about my own house to see others who have even bigger and more extensive projects on tap.

Then it was back to the house for pickles! My maternal grandmother always used to make bread & butter pickles, but neither my mom nor I had made them before. For those that don't know, bread & butter pickles are sliced sweet pickles that are generally put on sandwiches or served as a condiment with dinner. (My eastern-european-heritage-mid-western-raised grandma ALWAYS put pickles out on the table with dinner, no matter what was being served. Often more than one variety).

We spent a few days looking through grandma's old recipe cards and cookbooks for her exact recipe, but couldn't find one-- turns out they all looked fairly similar though, so we just choose the version in my mom's old Joy of Cooking. We had about three gallons of cucumbers, but failed to factor in enough red pepper or onions, so our version is a little shy of that. We also added a little hot pepper for a bit of spice. Initial tastings proved it to be a successful venture. The whole process was pretty easy, but totally time-consuming and hot! Once we find a pickling crock we'll probably try some dill pickles.

Pickling used up a lot of the cucumbers we had in the refrigerator, but they just keep coming, as evidenced by the seven I picked this morning. Also picked some beets, thai basil, arugula, and garlic chives and one tiny carrot, which was just to see how big they had actually grown. I plan to dice and roast the beets along with a sweet potato, and throw together a salad tonight using them plus the arugula and herbs. Might add a hard boiled egg too.

Meanwhile for lunch I made my favorite cucumber salad.

Favorite Cucumber Salad:

1 large or 2-3 small cucumbers

1-2 Tbsp. fresh mint leaves, chopped

1/4 cup crumbled blue cheese

1/4 cup pine nuts

1/4 cup finely sliced onion (red or vidalia are nice)

2 Tbsp. rice wine vinegar

1 Tbsp. olive oil

salt & pepper to taste

Peel, seed and slice cucumbers. (If small enough I usually skip the peeling and seeding). Toss in the blue cheese, pine nuts, and herbs and toss with the vinegar and oil. (You can adjust the dressing as necessary depending on how big your cucumbers are). I've tried other vinegars but with the blue cheese the mild acidity of the rice wine is the best, its sweetness just works. Apple cider would be fine, but not as good. Balsamic was not good. Dill is also good in place of, or in addition to the mint, and dried works almost as well as fresh. I substituted a bunch of garlic chives for the onions in the picture above because I had used up all the onions for the pickles this weekend and haven't been back to the store to replenish.

And now a couple of random photos from the last week:

Corn from the garden. The ears are small, but the kernels are mature and we've had to pick en-masse because worms are eating them. We are adamantly organic, but really lazy about buying organic pest controls. Last year we swore we'd get the BT powder for our corn, but voila here it is mid-August and we still haven't bothered. For certain next year we will have it on hand.

And finally, the artichoke I picked last week that had gone too far towards blooming is now doing so in my mom's kitchen window. Soo beautiful.

In the Garden

When I refer to my garden I'm almost always referring to the vegetable garden. There are currently two vegetable gardens on the property, this fenced area in the back, and an area near the houses where we've begun a raised bed garden, to be referred to as the Kitchen Garden. I find the garden very hard to photograph in its entirety. Details are much easier. The play of light and shadow seems to confuse everything when I try to take an overall photo. And I "save for the web" in photoshop in order to keep the file sizes down, which lessens the saturation of the photos a bit. Nonetheless, here are a few from this morning. Compared to previous years we're having a pretty productive year.

This is the garden gate. It's functional, not pretty. The plot is fenced to keep the dogs out. Also, I am aware that part of the problem with being able to get a good photo is the completely out of control weeds. We need to start mulching to keep them down, but last year we tried, and the straw turned out to be full of seeds, so this year we have weeds from last year's mulch. Pecan shells would do well, but be kind of expensive, and wood chips can foster bacterial problems that I think we already have in some of the soils. So what's left? This year it was just no mulch.

The (weedy) rows. Tomatoes and tomatillos and peppers in the foreground, corn, beans and squash in the background.

Purple de Milpa tomatillos and marigolds. We have three tomatillos, and all have grown to be large plants, but only this one is producing a lot of fruit so far. Hopefully the others will step up, because I love tomatillo salsa, and I'd love to try canning some this year.

Pollination in progress in one of the zucchini flowers.

Morning glories mean summer to me. Love them. They can be invasive in the garden, but I don't care, anything that blooms that beautifully is welcome to steal a little water from the other plants.

Garlic chives in bloom. A very tasty addition to any salad, plus a natural pest control.

The artichokes and pickling cukes that I picked today. We're stockpiling the cukes for this weekend, when we intend to try my Grandma's bread and butter pickle recipe.

We've grown our black beans right up the corn stalks for the second year in a row. Its an ancient technique, and we like the way it looks and saves space.

Our watermelons just started to form fruit. Hopefully its not to late for them to reach maturity.

Artichokes are so cool, not to mention tasty. We've had more than enough to eat this year, especially since last month it was so hot that we couldn't bring ourselves to heat up the house by actually boiling them. We have a bit of an artichoke backlog in the frig now.

Looks like we left this one too long and its about to bloom.

Zinnias. I'm a big proponent of flowers mixed into the vegetable garden. Its a good place for those that you intend to cut and bring inside. We've been expanding the garden year by year, and next year I'd like to have a whole plot dedicated to flowers for cutting. Old fashioned flowers like gladiolas, dahlias, zinnias, and cosmos. We almost always have cosmos, but for some reason this year we didn't. I think its just because we started everything from seed, and just didn't have any cosmos on hand. We'll definitely have to remedy that next year.

The entire days harvest-- artichokes, Armenian cucumbers, zucchini, basil, tomatillos, and pickling cucumbers. There was also plenty of swiss chard, kale (its still going strong despite the heat), and some beets, tomatoes, and chiles-- but generally we don't pick those until we are ready to eat them.

For lunch I made one of my favorite snacks-- cucumber slices with dill, chunks of smoked cheese, and nuts. Its a great snack to serve with a chilled white wine-- though I skipped that today. I prefer it with walnuts, but all I had in the frig were these pine nuts, so they had to do.

One last photo as a bonus. I'm rather addicted to taking dark sky photos, and I took this one last week because the remaining hint of sunset against the dark trees was too pretty not to document.