CSA Week 18

It looks like this is the third-to-last CSA box for the season. I’m sad because we’ll soon miss seeing our Amish friends each week, and we won’t be getting fresh produce regularly. But – most of all – I’m sad because this means pleasant weather is just about over. But for three more weeks at least, we’ll ignore the impending winter and enjoy all the beautiful colors and flavors that have been developing since spring.

This week’s box includes:

• a loaf of freshly-baked bread (it was still warm in the bag when we got home)
• a yellow onion
• a pumpkin
• four bell peppers: two red, two green
• six large red potatoes
• a jar of pickles
• a quart of cherry tomatoes
• a dozen ears of corn
• one large and one small eggplant

We have *ahem* already eaten our half of the bread. DH and the girls polished it off and I was lucky to get half a slice. Our portion of the cherry tomatoes are about wiped out, too. They are sweet as candy and S5 is eating them as such.

Salsa

Tonight I am making a second batch of “Zesty Roasted Pepper & Garlic Salsa”. It’s really, really damn good. In my opinion, of course. But if you were to eat some, I’m fairly sure it would be your opinion, too.

The recipe is based on the “Zesty Salsa” recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving (Judy Kingry, Lauren Devine) and was the perfect way to use up the overabundance of peppers and tomatoes on my counter.

At a friend’s suggestion (yes, yes, you get credit for this, L!) I roasted most of the peppers, some of the onion, and all the garlic (using one head of roasted for each clove of minced that the recipe called for). The results were smooth, smoky, rich and comfortably spicy. It’s so fine, I feel completely compelled to share.

Zesty Roasted Pepper Garlic Salsa

• 10 cups peeled, diced tomatoes (about 6-7 pounds tomatoes)
• 7 1/2 cups chopped peppers: I used approximately 5 cups of a combination of roasted, skinned jalapenos, hot cherry peppers, hot italian frying peppers, yellow and red peppers. The rest were unroasted, seeded and diced semi-hot peppers.
• 5 cups chopped onion: I used about 1 cup roasted red onion, 3 1/2 cups chopped fresh yellow onion, and 1/2 cup chopped fresh red onion
• 5 heads of roasted garlic
• 1 1/4 cups apple cider vinegar
• 1 T dried cilantro flakes (totally optional)
• 1 T salt (I like kosher, but use what you have)

A few notes on the ingredients:

If you can, use Roma (or a similar paste-type) tomatoes. Globe tomatoes are pretty watery, which means your salsa will be watery, too. However, both paste and globe tomatoes are tasty, and I don’t mind watery salsa. You can also squeeze your tomatoes before measuring them if you want to reduce the amount of liquid.

To roast peppers, you can hold them over the flame of your gas stove or put them on the grill, but I like the oven. I can do a lot of peppers at once without a lot of hassle. Basically you just put your peppers in a single layer on a baking sheet, stick them in the oven at 400 degrees F for 20-30 minutes, turning every 10 minutes or so, and that’s it. The skins will turn blackish in spots and will split and blister. This is perfect. Let them get mushy and look like used-up balloons. Take them out of the oven and put them directly into a paper bag, close up the bag, and steam them for about 10 minutes more before peeling/seeding and chopping them. A tip: cover your baking sheet with aluminum or tin foil before roasting to make clean-up easier. Oh, and wear gloves when you’re peeling and chopping them.

To roast garlic, I whack off the top of the garlic head so that I can see a little bit of each clove. Place the trimmed heads in the center of a piece of foil, close up the foil to make a little packet, and stick that in the oven along with your peppers. It takes about 40-50 minutes to roast the garlic this way. Remove the packet from the oven and let it cool. Open the foil, take one of the garlic heads and squeeze the base of it gently to push the garlic pulp up and out of the skins. The garlic will be soft and practically spreadable (some people do like to use roasted garlic as a spread, in fact).

If you are one of those insane hot-foods people you can also add some hot pepper sauce to your salsa, though I think the best flavor comes from using hot peppers instead.

To make your salsa, dump all of the ingredients into a big pot. Bring it to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce the flame and let it cook at a strong simmer/gentle boil for about 10 minutes. The salsa will thicken a bit. Cook it until it’s the texture that you like (though I’d advise against cooking it terribly long, as it will just get mushy and icky).

Put the hot salsa into prepared canning jars, cover them with lids and rings, and process. I did the first batch in a water bath canner for 15 minutes, and the second batch in the pressure canner at 10 psi for about the same time. I like to use the pressure canner just to get all the processing done at once, though it’s plenty acidic to do in the boiling water-bath. The recipe makes 8 – 9 pints.

Enjoy!

Put Up or Shut Up

Old timey folks like to call canning and preserving the act of “putting up” food. And I’ve been putting up with a lot lately.

Before getting the pressure canner, I mostly stuck with tomatoes and peaches. They’re pretty easy to do and readily available in our area this time of the year.

I recently came into a collection of glass canning jars, which was very exciting. They look really cool, especially with some home-canned produce inside of them.

A few weeks ago, we ended up with a plethora of peppers in our CSA box.

I roasted them with some garlic heads from the garden, and turned them into salsa.

We bought a bushel of peaches at a local market, along with three bushels of tomatoes since my garden has been (til just now) pretty much devoid of any tomato-life to speak of.

The peaches went into several recipes, including plain old peaches in syrup, spiced peaches in a honey syrup, and – my favorite – gingered peach preserves. Good lord, that stuff is like sex in a jar. Good sex in a jar.

We’ve got a nice pantry-ful of yummyness (and a freezer-full, too) that I’ve been putting up all summer and fall. I’ve kept a little list, and realized that there’s quite a lot of food here.

June

12 quarts strawberries yielded

• 5 half-pints strawberry-rhubarb jam
• 3 half-pints strawberry jam
• 2 half-pints strawberry syrup
• plus several cups of frozen strawberries

July

Blueberries: 10 1/2 pounds, all frozen

August

Peaches: 4-quart box yielded 12 cups sliced (frozen with honey syrup)

Corn: 7 ears blanched yielded 1 quart frozen kernels (we have a couple of these)

September

Tomatoes: 3 bushels yielded

• 24 quarts sauce
• 6 pints tomato halves
• 4 pints and 3 half-pints diced tomatoes
• 5 half-pints catsup
• 4 pints and 1 half-pint sweet salsa
• 5 pints seasoned sauce
• 3 pints and 10 halfpints zesty roasted pepper-garlic salsa (used CSA peppers and some other jalapenos for this recipe)

Peaches: 1 bushel yielded

• 15 pints and 4 quarts peaches in syrup
• 7 half-pints gingered peach preserves
• 7 pints spiced peaches
• 7 pints summer fruit cocktail (also used 1 quart of pears for this recipe)

Pears: 4 quarts yielded

• 6 pint jars of pear quarters in light syrup

Bushel carrots yielded 22 pounds diced blanched carrots (frozen)

Finally.

My tomato garden did not do well this year. Well, let me clarify that. The plants did well. The tomatoes did not. There are lots of fruit, but it’s all green, green green. I blame it on the weather. We had a strangely cool summer, an overabundance of rain in July, and not very much sun the rest of the season, not to mention the late blight that blew through (I did get some blight on a few plants about 2 weeks ago, which was much later than most other people around here).

But my plants held on. I resisted the urge to rip the undiseased ones out, even though there have been unripe, green tomatoes for like weeks now. And today, the wait paid off.

We picked two smallish red tomatoes from the garden earlier this summer, but today, there were big ones, and bunches of them. Okay, there were five. But that’s a huge percent increase.

I picked nearly two pounds of ruby-red tomatoes. And oh, my. My, oh my. They are the tastiest little buggers I’ve had all summer.

So finally, the moment I’ve been waiting for practically since March, when I started these plants inside:

That made the wait worthwhile.

Kitchen Mechanics

You may or may not have noticed the profound lack of posting around here lately. This is because I am too busy running heavy machinery in the kitchen to have time to blog. But don’t worry. I took pictures.

First of all, in a fit of desperation (after hand-seeding a bushel and a half of tomatoes), I broke down and got myself a tomato strainer.

This particular one is the “Roma” strainer. It comes with a tomato/apple screen (you can buy other screens, such as a grape screen and a salsa screen, if you have an extra $35 to shell out.) The strainer itself is about $55-$60 and is a good design, though some of the parts are kind of cheesily made.

Notice the very large hopper on top, the hand crank (since, as you might recall, we canned last year’s tomatoes without electricity); notice the nifty chute for your strained product to roll down, and the little plastic garbage funnel on the far left. This is a time-tested arrangement for straining, where a screw inside the screen moves the pulp through an ever-shrinking funnel until all the liquid material oozes out through the strainer screen and the strained out stuff pops out the garbage end.

Basically, you chop your tomatoes (quartered is fine, unless they’re abominations) and cook them for a few minutes to get them extra-soft.

Ladle some of the tomaotes and juice into the large hopper.

Turn the crank, and watch the magic happen.

When you’re all finished, you will have a nice bowl of tomato puree that you can cook down into a thick tomato sauce. Or you can make soup. Or you can make one of the nine billion tomato dishes that require skinned and seeded tomatoes. It’s up to you.

While you’re deciding what to do with your tomato bounty, I’ll show you our other new piece of kitchen equipment. I finally got myself a Pressure Canner.

(You will see by its sheer size and magnitude that it deserved Capitalization.)

See how it dwarfs my old water-bath canner? See how its girth is so massive that the two can’t both fit on the stovetop at the same time?

I fear the Pressure Canner, to be quite honest. It has a humongous lid, with a ginormous handle:

Doesn’t that look just massive? (It is. I can barely lift it.)

But the intimidating part is all the dials, gauges and weights.

They seem so precise, which is so not me in the kitchen. I am a hack, really. And hacks and high pressure don’t seem to go together. Not really. I need to be careful and pay attention, damnit.

Everything about this cooker/canner is big, including the noises that it makes (but that’s another story). Let’s just say that I can process 32 pint jars at one go, or 16 quarts. I can also make enough soup at one time to feed a platoon of hungry soldiers.

But I’m excited to finally have a pressure canner. This means we can put up meat sauce, or low-acid vegetables, or meat, or soup stock, or basically anything you might otherwise see in jars or cans in your grocery. And that, my friends, is no small thing.

CSA Weeks 16 and 17

Ooops, I did it again. Forgot to post the CSA box from last week.

Week 16 (9/17) included the following:

• bunch of beets (1.5#)
• 2 eggplants (aubergines) (1.5#)
• a yellow onion (1#)
• a red onion (8 oz)
• 3 medium tomatoes (1.5#)
• 5 small peppers (1#)
• 4 red peppers (1.5#)
• a dozen eggs
• 6 oatmeal raisin cookies
• a dozen ears of corn

This week’s box had quite a variety of items:

• a dozen ears of corn
• 4 large carrots (1#)
• 5 frying peppers (1# 4oz)
• a half-pint of pickle relish
• 3 potatoes (1# 12oz)
• 3 hot cherry peppers (8 oz)
• 1 large red pepper (10 oz)
• 1 yellow pepper (6 oz)
• a large yellow onion (1#)
• a red onion (12 oz)
• a bag of lettuce
• 4 cookies

CSA Weeks 14 and 15

Ooops, I forgot to post my CSA report last week. Well, better late than never, mom always used to say.

Last week’s box:

It contained

• a very large white watermelon
• a very large butternut squash
• two pints of cherry tomatoes
• five orange tomatoes
• a bunch of beets
• an eggplant
• several different types of chard
• celery
• two very cute, very tasty little melons

This week’s box is full of late-harvest goodies:

We received:

• A dozen ears of corn
• Two red onions
• One yellow onion
• A half pint of hot pepper butter
• a medium pumpkin
• Celeriac (celery root)
• Two gargantuan carrots
• One green, one yellow and one red pepper

On Your Marks, Get Set… TORTURE!

A while ago, DH showed the girls how to play an old snowboarding game that’s on our XBox. All of a sudden, they are obsessed with snowboarding.

All of their toys have caught the snowboarding bug, too. At random moments during the day O3 will have a Little People horse on a playing card, or her soft doll standing on a small book, or some miscellaneous little puppy perched on a plastic dish, and she’ll yell, “Ready? Set? SNOWBOARD!!!!” The toy will slide around the floor/table/countertop on its makeshift board and do all sorts of tricks. The girls have contests, races and snowboarding games with each other. And, of course, they beg to play “the snowboard game” on the XBox.

Tonight, in the bathtub, all the toys in the tub received their very own brand-spanking-new snowboards (foam bath shapes make excellent boards, apparently). There was only one small problem: we were in the tub. And everyone knows you can’t snowboard in the tub.

Imagine, had you not known the detail of these first three paragraphs (like my husband, who didn’t realize that his snowboarding video game had carried over to today’s play), and you hear two little girls in the bathtub shouting:

“Ready? Set? WATERBOARD!!!!”

You can see how that could be a tad confusing.

The Afterlife Needs a Better Ad Campaign

My 8-year-old niece was here visiting the other day. She told us:

“Well, people grow old and then they die. And then they go to heaven. And then they have a… well, they have a deadly life.”

On a completely unrelated topic, S5 was building something with Legos.

“This is my standing-up volcano,” she announced, setting her triangle-shaped construct on the windowsill. “Don’t touch it, or it will interrupt, and kill everyone!”

Well, if we are Girls, Interrupted, then at least we’ll have a deadly life in heaven.

CSA Week 13

Most of the other CSA subscribers pick up their weekly produce boxes at the Millers’ farm, the nice folks who organized our CSA. I normally pick up our CSA box directly at the growers’ farm, since I live closer to them. Last week’s potluck must have thrown a wrench in the works, because somehow my box accidentally got shipped up to the Millers. Mr. Byler was very apologetic, and put together another box for me while I waited.

Rachel, Mr. Byler’s wife, usually puts the boxes together. Each week we receive a half-bushel box which is solidly full, but never overflowing. I think Mr. Byler felt a bit embarassed about sending my box on with the others, because he not only filled my box so full that the flaps were stuck open, but he also gave me a bag with 14 ears of corn in it.

The peppers are definitely in season. This week’s box has several different varieties, and they’re all turning red, which I think is the best stage. I like bell peppers with some color in them.

The box for Week 13 has:

• a quart (2 #) of green beans
• a pint (12 oz) of cherry tomatoes
• 4 tomatoes (2 pounds)
• 4 “tomato peppers” (1 pound)
• 2 bell peppers
• 1 red pepper
• 4 banana peppers (1 pound)
• 3 cubanelle-esque peppers (1 pound)
• 1 small hot pepper
• 14 ears of corn
• and 2 of the biggest onions I’ve ever seen

See what I mean? This onion weighs 2 1/2 pounds. That’s just crazy.

I have already sliced a tomato and made a sandwich of it on homemade sourdough bread, which deserves a post – and I even took pictures for one.  Give me a day or so and I’ll tell you all about that, plus making a delicious plum brandy.

Harvest time in the midwest US  is a glorious thing.