Tag Archives: eat local

Under pressure

In an effort to use up a little vacation time, and give myself a couple of “me” days, I took the past two Mondays off.  Relaxation efforts on the first Monday?  A big fat FAIL.

I told myself I would do better this past Monday.  That all flew out the window when I foolishly offered to deal with our latest tomato harvest, which included my first foray into pressure canning.*

A small portion of the harvest

Instead I spent the day cutting tomatoes,

Blending tomatoes,

And cooking them into sauce,

So I could cancan can.

I watched nervously as the pressure built, fearing the worst (broken jars) as I heard some suspicious noises from inside.

Nothing to do but wait.  Eleven pounds of pressure for fifteen minutes, them time for it to fully depressurize.

A peek inside . . .

No tomato vomit, i.e., tomato bits floating in the canning water, indicating certain jar breakage.  I still held my breath as I removed the jars, since sometimes a jar can crack, but remain more or less intact until moved.

All intact!  Of course, I kind-of overshot my goal of cooking the tomatoes down enough to only have to do one round (seven quarts) of canning.  My super thick sauce only yielded five quarts, which I divided into four quart jars, two pint jars, and a pint-and-a-half of tomato juice to give me seven jars for a full load.

So, relaxing Monday FAIL, but canning SUCCESS.  I’ll take it.

*We bought the pressure canner last summer, right before Pookie arrived.  Matthew used to can a few batches of green beans, but I was pretty out of commission during that time.  Matthew’s mom handled all of the tomato canning last year (water bath method), and she’s done a ton of it for us already this season.

Cucumber soup

Until we have a garden in our backyard, growing our food is mostly Matthew’s domain, and these days, I rarely venture out to our commuter garden.  However, before we left for our trip a couple of weeks ago, I headed out for one final picking.

I harvested a boatload of cucumbers and hatched a half-baked plan to take the cukes to Iowa with us and make refrigerator dills for my family.  We nixed that plan, and the cukes sat in our dying fridge for a week.

We returned to a fridge full of still okay cukes.  After staring them down for a few days, I decided the best way to use a large number of cucumbers was some kind of chilled soup.

Some searching yielded a variety of recipes, many that only used one cucumber (that would never do!).  The most promising involved cucumbers and avocado, but, while I want to give that a try someday, I was determined to work with ingredients I had on hand, so avocado was out.

I needed something in place of the avocado to make the soup thick and rich, since cucumbers are mostly water.  The secret ingredients?  Rice and tahini.

Chilled cucumber soup

Recipe by Melissa
Serves 4-6

Ingredients
3-4 pounds cucumbers
1 cup cooked brown rice
1/3 cup good olive oil
1/2 t. salt
1/4 t. freshly ground black pepper
1-2 T. tahini
2 t. Greek spice mix (or blend of other fresh and/or dried herbs)
1-2 cloves garlic, crushed
1/3 c. chopped onion
1 c. corn (optional)

Directions
Trim and discard the ends of the cucumbers.  If using larger cukes with a lot of seeds, cut in half longways and scoop out and discard the seeds.  Dice the cucumbers.  Set aside 2 cups of diced cucumbers.

In batches, puree all ingredients, except for the reserved diced cukes and the corn, in a blender or food processor.

Try a sample, and add more salt, pepper, or herbs to taste.  Mix in the diced cucumbers and garnish with corn.  Serve chilled.

The first tomato and some ‘chokes

I’ve seen tomatoes at the farmers’ market for almost two months now, and I’ve avoided them like the plague (if only I were so good at avoiding the regular daycare plagues courtesy of Sir).  Sure, they’re locally grown, but most of the very early ones grew in tunnels or hothouses, and they lack that perfectly ripe, hot summer weather tomato taste that makes a REAL tomato.

My waiting paid off last week when my MIL presented our first garden tomato of 2012.  In our eagerness to dig in, I neglected to take a picture before slicing it, but rest assured that it was big and beautiful.

We enjoyed it pure and simple, with some salt and a drizzle of olive oil.  It served as the perfect addition to our meal of quinoa salad and . . .

. . . garden-grown artichokes!

Growing artichokes in our zone requires some special tricks, but Matthew managed for the second year in a row.  I didn’t write much about them last year because most of the harvest came in right around the time Gabriel arrived.

We enjoy them steamed and dipped in a olive oil and butter sauce.

Artichokes with dipping sauce

Recipe by Melissa

Ingredients
Whole, fresh artichokes
1 T. olive oil
1 T. butter
1/2 t. lemon juice
salt to taste

Directions
Cut stems off of artichokes (if not already removed) to leave a flat base.  Place artichokes on the bottom of a pot, standing upright.  It helps to choose a pot where you can pack the ‘chokes tightly so they stay upright.

Add water to cover the bottom of the pan, place a lid on the pan, and steam the artichokes until tender, 15-30 minutes, depending on size and freshness.  They are ready to eat when you can easily pull out on of the leaves and/or when you can easily insert a fork in the base.

While they steam, melt the butter and combine with olive oil, lemon juice and salt to make a dipping sauce.

Serve  artichokes whole with dipping sauce.  To eat, pull off outer leaves, dip in sauce, and then scrape the flesh at the inner base of the leaf with your teeth.  As you get closer to the heart, there will be more tender, edible flesh on the leaves.

Once near the heart, use scissors to snip off the top, pointed portion of the remaining leaves.  Dip and enjoy!

Still gotta eat

As would be expected, the move altered our usual cooking and eating patterns a bit.  I cooked on Friday night, but by Saturday it was time to start saying goodbye to our kitchen.

We planned to go out to eat on Saturday with my mom, who came to see Sir and help pack.  Unfortunately, I came down with the latest disease from Typhoid Gabriel and didn’t really feel like eating much of anything, much less leaving the apartment to do so.  We settled on take-out from Pho Grand.  Not the greenest dining option, giving their use of the standard large polystyrene containers, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

We had a decent supply of leftovers in the fridge, so we worked on lightening that load at both lunch and dinner on Sunday.  We enjoyed a “deconstructed” pumpkin lasagna for lunch (yay for frozen homemade pasta) and a Swiss chard and chickpea dish for dinner.

All bets were off on Monday, our actual moving day.  When lunch rolled around, we’d been up packing and moving for hours.  I picked up some sandwiches and deli-case salads at a nice little deli within walking distance of our new place.

Except I didn’t walk (hangs head in shame).  I was heading back to our old apartment to get Matthew and a last car load, and the deli was more-or-less on a direct route anyway, and it was like eleventy-million degrees outside with high-noon sun, and with a second floor to second floor move, I’d already walked up and down more flights of stairs than I cared to count.  So that’s my excuse for choosing inactive, gas-guzzling transportation.

But lunch was good, though, once again, some disposable containers.  Matt’s mom brought us carry-out pizza for dinner.  The pizza box was pretty darn clean, so that at least got recycled.

The good news is that despite the still-crazy state of our apartment, we’ve gotten back into the kitchen the past few nights.  By which I mean Matthew’s gotten back into the kitchen, of course, per our usual weeknight routine.

The garden supplied almost all of the ingredients for Wednesday night’s dinner.  Boiled beets — some cubed for part of the main dish, some thinly sliced for a side with goat cheese.

Potatoes “baked” in the microwave, cubed, and tossed with olive oil and salt to serve as a base for sauteed cabbage with onions [previously] roasted elephant garlic, edamame, and the cubed beet.

The only produce on the plate NOT from the garden was the edamame and the onions (both of which we’re growing but are not ready for harvest yet).

Plum out

I’ve been trying to lighten the load for our move (less than a week away!) by eating through some of the dry goods in our pantry.  While the shelves are by no means bare, they are a bit emptier, and the post-move shopping list on the fridge grows longer every day (I’m afraid this grocery trip may give new meaning to “Whole Paycheck”).

We ran out of raisins a couple of weeks ago, and we have extremely limited quantities of a couple of other dried fruits, so I’ve gotten creative with my morning oatmeal.*

The plum trees at my MIL’s have yielded a bumper crop this year, and, while cutting the flesh away from the pit is a bit of a pain, they contribute to a delicious bowl of oatmeal.

This variety of plum is very tiny, perhaps a bit larger than a big cherry.  Small and delicious!

Sir also finds the plums an acceptable (if messy) addition to meals.

*Raisins are not the only fruit I eat in my oatmeal, but they’ve become a go-to when apples aren’t in-season.  While not local, shipping dried fruit from California is better environmentally than shipping fresh fruit, because of the water weight.