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.

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.

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.

CSA Week 12 and Potluck Picnic

The Millers, who are the very nice organic livestock farmers we’ve enjoyed buying meat from for several years now, are the ones who organized our CSA. This week, instead of picking up our CSA boxes at the growers’ farm, we went up to the Millers’ to get them and to meet the growers and other CSA participants at a potluck. Everyone brought something to share, and we had a very lovely evening getting to know each other and talk about our CSA participation.

The potluck was really fun. The Amish women brought an amazing selection of homebaked breads, butter, jams, cookies, and brownies. There was a creamy bean casserole, a fresh pasta salad, homemade noodles, and “beet chili”- basically beet preserves, which tasted a heck of a lot like strawberry jam. (Delicious on homemade bread, let me tell you!) The Millers made brisket, so soft you didn’t even need a knife, and it fell right off your fork so you really didn’t need one of those, either. I brought potato salad made with my own blue potatoes and a few jars of jam and apple butter from last season. Someone else made a purple-cabbage salad and decorated it with nasturtium flowers (the girls thought that was fantastic, since we also put our nasturtiums in salads). I think there were other dishes, too, but that’s what I can remember at the moment.

We introduced ourselves and, over plates of great food, talked for about participating in a CSA, both from the consumer perspective (someone said it would be very helpful if the more “mysterious” vegetables might be labeled, so the less-herbivoracious among us knew what they were) as well as from the growers’ angle (the late tomato blight is really hitting them hard and they’ve had to resort to using some non-organic fungicides to protect their farms from this devastating disease). It was really nice to meet some of the other consumers and share recipes and food ideas, too.

Many folks in the CSA joined because they felt it was a more economical way to get organic produce. While a share was not inexpensive ($500 for the 25-odd week season), it probably is a considerable savings if I tried buying each item separately in the organic section of my supermarket. There is the reality that I would probably NOT buy things like kale or broccoli, so getting them in my weekly box isn’t really a savings since I wouldn’t buy them anyway. But getting things like kale and broccoli and unusual varieties of other vegetables is part of the fun of a CSA, so I’m not complaining.

And, of course, we picked up our boxes.

This week there were:

• a large bunch of very large carrots (about 2 pounds total)
• four medium red tomatoes
• a pint of cherry tomatoes
• a quart of peaches
• a quart of green beans
• three green bell peppers
• a pair of eggplants

I’m not a big connoisseur of eggplant, but am excited to try it. Perhaps breaded and fried. The carrots look fabulous and will likely go in soup. S5 will demolish the cherry tomatoes, and both girls will take care of our share of the peaches.

Garden Progress

I have to admit to being sort of uninspired by the garden this year. While last season’s garden saw the pumpkins decimated by squash borers, everything else seemed to do fairly well. But this year, a bigger plot and more variety also meant more failures and frustration. But really, I shouldn’t be so hard on myself (or my garden). It’s doing a lot better than I make it sound.

Yesterday, we picked the first cucumbers of the season. I didn’t even see them hiding under all the foliage until I went behind the plants to pick up a big stick that had fallen inside the fence. And there they were! Two cute, pinchy, crunchy, adorable little green cukes. S5 literally squealed when she saw them (she’s a pickle fan).

And I forgot to mention that, last week, while making a barbecue sauce for pulled pork, I ran out to grab these two hot babies:

They were, indeed, hot stuff. But they were very tasty simmered in barbecue sauce.

I also noticed a bunch of green tomatoes that I am pretty sure appeared overnight. I mean, we look at the garden nearly every day, and never noticed them until yesterday morning. So empirically we can assume they appeared overnight, right? Of course, I forgot to photograph them. Maybe later.

Up on the deck in pots, other things are growing nicely, too. There is parsley:

and Pennyroyal, to keep the skeeters away:

The fuschia has bloomed, and is gorgeous:

We’ve even planted some cat grass for Moxie:

Yes, that’s a dog-shaped pot with cat grass in it.  The irony is not lost on me.

Anyway, I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about gardeny things again. Next week: time to dig potatoes!

CSA Week 11

Here we are with another fabulous box of fresh, local organic produce.

Included are:

• A very large onion (used to make spanish rice tonight)
• two round zucchini squash
• five six (we found one under the van) hot-ish peppers
• two bell peppers
• a bunch of beets
• a pint of blackberries
• nearly two pounds of beans
• a canteloupe melon