Archive for category Food

The amount of produce that comes out of my garden these days is ridiculous. And I’m just talking about the squash, tomatoes, and cucumbers! My tomatoes are finally ripening up and it’s a struggle to get them all off the plant and either eaten or preserved before they go bad. Here’s what’s in my fridge, just from the last week or so:

The romas, I’m going to process into either salsa or tomato sauce. Some of the slicers will probably go in there too, just because I can’t possibly eat all of them. I accidentally broke a branch off the plant while a few tomatoes were still green, so fried green tomatoes are in our future. I’ll probably fry up a zucchini at the same time. Breaded and fried is my absolute favorite way to eat zucchini, but I don’t do it often because of the hassle.

I’m wondering if my cherry tomatoes cross-bred with my other two types. The heirloom tomatoes started out looking all wrinkly and heirloom-y, and then suddenly shifted and turned into small, about 1.5″ diameter, round smooth ones. Meanwhile all my romas are small, but then there is this one roma plant that is putting out bunches of HUGE fruit, so again, I wonder if the cherries cross-bred with the smaller ones. Is that even possible? I bet so.

Whatever. I take what I get and make the best of it. Walking out into the yard to gather whatever’s ripe and ready is an awesome exercise. I said to Issa, “It’s like a grocery store where everything is free, but you don’t get to say how much and when you get the food!” The garden has been making absolute gobs of these yellow pear-shaped cherry tomatoes. They don’t have the best flavor, but boy are there a lot of them! I just took my regular salsa recipe and substituted them. It was yummy. It turns out that most things are yummy if you follow a few basic fundamentals.

Squash is the other thing that I am struggling to get rid off. I picked my first fruit on June 9th, and since then I have harvested 70 lbs of squash. (I just went to my spreadsheet and added up the numbers, and I actually had to pick my jaw up off the floor before continuing this post. Holy cow!) My favorite quick-and-dirty method of cooking it is to slice it, rub it with butter, sprinkle with salt, and stick it on the grill. I do this for breakfast if there’s too much squash waiting. I also make a squash curry with rice that I learned from Rebecca, and I like it a lot. My latest, though, has been squash bread.

You’ve probably never heard of squash bread. I had made a batch of zucchini bread, and to me zucchini and yellow squash are kind of the same thing: summer squash. So I figured if I could make zucchini bread, I could make squash bread too. Now, it turns out that zucchini bread is mostly just a sugar-and-white-flour quickbread/muffin. You put blueberries in it, and it’ll be blueberry muffins; bananas, and it’ll be banana bread. So, on the one hand, it’s a versatile batter that can handle most any fruit or vegetable addition. On the other hand, the recipe as built called for about 1 cup of zucchini per loaf, which meant basically that you couldn’t even tell there was zucchini in it. This might be a great way of sneaking vegetables into your family’s diet, but the amount of sugar and white flour in the recipe made it more of a dessert than anything else. So I doubled the amount of squash, and it actually came out pretty good. While I was eating it, I noticed a flavor that I didn’t know what it was, but I liked it, and I guess it must have been squash. Either that, or it was the olive oil that I ended up using because I ran out of canola. Whatever!

What you see above is actually only about 1/3 of what I made. There are two loaf-pan sized loaves in the freezer, one more on the counter being eaten at, and another batch of 24 muffins also in the freezer. Here’s a tip: freeze the muffins overnight on a sheet pan so that they don’t stick together, then once they’re good and hard, toss them in a ziplock bag. That way, you can pick out one or two as you like without having to thaw the whole block.

I have figured out what may be the key to eating boat-loads of squash: grating. The grated squash that I made for the bread is just about the right size to toss into all kinds of other meals. It contributes its squashy goodness without being too obtrusive. I sauteed some in butter and threw it in my scrambled eggs this morning. No kidding!

All that goodness aside, you may be wondering about the title of the post: damned by abundance. The thing is, as wonderful as all this is, I am actually really stressed! All this food is out there in the garden and I have to pick it and preserve it before it goes bad, and it is a LOT of work! I spend a couple of hours a day either picking or preserving stuff from the garden. And that’s all as it should be, but every time I pass by that pile of squash or that big bowl of tomatoes or, ugh, the garden itself, it’s like a great big to-do list that will never be empty!

Eh, it’s a great problem to have. Today, I said to Issa, “I think we’ve finally passed the point where we can call this year’s garden a success.”

Every four or five days, another batch of produce comes in from the garden, and we have to decide how to preserve what we’re not going to eat. Tonight, I made tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes for the first time, as well as a batch of dill pickles.

Making tomato sauce isn’t too complicated. You boil the tomatoes until their skin splits and/or gets loose, then you dunk them in ice water to stop the cooking process. You can see my setup above.

Boiling tomatoes… These are mostly all romas, which I selected specifically for turning into sauce, since they have lots of flesh and not too much seed.

Issa is peeling the skins off the boiled tomatoes. After the tomatoes were skinned, we squeezed out as much of the seeds as we could. Then I used a stick blender to turn them into tomato puree. I added herbs and spices, then simmered the puree until it was the desired thickness.

Here’s Issa slicing cucumbers for pickles. We were able to fill two gallon jars with today’s harvest. We did one gallon of slices and one of spears. We have about 20 quarts of sweet pickles in the basement, so we decided to do dill pickles this time, and since we’ve eaten or given away all of the pickles in the fridge, we saved ourselves the trouble of processing mason jars and just did refrigerator pickles.

The major difference between refrigerator pickles and processed pickles is that you boil processed pickles in a hot water bath for ten or fifteen minutes. This seals the lid of the mason jar. The up-side is that processed pickles can be stored without refrigeration pretty much indefinitely. The down-side is that processing is kind of a pain in the ass. Even with my huge 20-quart stock pot, I can only process four quart jars of pickles at a time, because that’s all that’ll fit side by side in it. This means I can turn out, at most, four quarts of pickles every ten minutes, and in reality it’s maybe twice as slow as that that because the pot has to come back to a boil for each batch. Another effect of processed pickles is that they are usually softer and less crisp than refrigerator pickles.

Anyway, because we’re doing refrigerator pickles, we can just boil up the brine (vinegar, water, sugar, and salt), toss the garlic and dill in the bottom of the big gallon jugs, fill with cucumbers, pour over the brine, and toss it all in the fridge when it comes to room temperature. Easy, quick, and doesn’t involve lots of fussing with mason jars and lids.

The fruits of tonight’s labor: 2 gallons of pickles (ready to eat in about 2 weeks) and 2 pints of tomato sauce. We had considered freezing the tomato sauce, but seeing as there’s only 2 pints of it, we’ll probably just make pasta tomorrow. I don’t know about you, but I can put a cup of sauce on my pasta alone! I know that the pasta is “traditionally” the star of the show, but to me, it’s just an carrier of delicious sauce.