All the Ingredients

Final Harvests

It is 36 degrees outside and snowing puffy flakes that won't stick. The tomato plants have all turned brown and flopped over. The giant shrub of parsley has finally succumbed to the cold and deflated into a flat circle in the flower bed. It's the third week of November and the last tomato was just picked ten days ago. The weather has gone from end of summer to winter with not much autumn in between.

But for the last two weeks I have been harvesting and putting up the end of the garden produce. I have dried countless batches of oregano, parsley, lavender, sage, and basil in the food dehydrator. I harvested twenty small to medium onions that are hanging in the basement, and dried several batches of leeks diced into small pieces. I also slit, seeded and dried eight jalapeno peppers--the crop was much larger than that but we ate a lot of them in salsas. I made many batches of tomato sauce for the freezer.

I harvested roughly two dozen stumpy carrots. They were on the side of the garden not washed out by the summer's flood, but still they seemed to suffer from stunted growth. I am enjoying them, but they taste a little too much like dirt for the rest of the family. They will be finished off as the Thanksgiving carrot salad next week.

And then there were the sweet potatoes.

I have never grown sweet potatoes before. I found the plants--a dozen for $2.27 at the hardware store greenhouse--and thought I would give them a try. I love sweet potatoes. I dug a bed for them, and spaced the plants out with about eight inches in between them. They grew. And they grew. Like last summers pumpkins, the vines spread out and tried to take over. But the potatoes were growing underground, and the vines were easily trimmed back with the mower when they encroached too far on the lawn, so they were not too invasive. They grew into the arbor vita shrubs behind the bed where they were planted and out the other side. When I finally pulled the vines up, some of them were more than twelve feet long.

I had put black plastic down around all my plants, with grass clippings over the top to keep it down. When I pulled up the vines and then the plastic, the potatoes were hiding just under the surface around the main stem into the ground. Each vine produced three to four potatoes. BIG potatoes. I gave some away and wrapped the rest in newspaper and put in the basement. They will be baked in the oven and mashed. I add a little butter and ginger and freeze them in one-cup containers. We will have mashed sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving, as well as sweet potato rolls.

For these I use a potato bread recipe out of Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads, and substitute mashed sweet potatoes for the mashed white potatoes the recipe calls for. This was done one Thanksgiving several years ago when I realized that I only had enough white potatoes to mash for dinner, and not enough to use for the rolls. I thawed some mashed sweet potatoes from the freezer and made the dough using those. Everyone raved about the rolls that year, and I have made them that way ever since. Last year my son walked through the kitchen and caught me mixing up the dough with the mashed sweet potatoes. He doesn't like them, and said that I was ruining the rolls and he wouldn't eat any at dinner. He ate nine. 

There is still a basket of Roma tomatoes on the table ranging from green to almost overripe. We are slicing them on pizza, adding them to salads, and trying to use them all up. There are many containers of tomato sauce in the freezer, onions, sweet potatoes, frozen packs of rhubarb and our first small strawberries, and lots of dried herbs waiting to be used as seasonings all winter--the dried sage will go nicely in the cornbread stuffing for the turkey. In spite of the flood and all the rain that took out the beans, cucumbers, and the beets, it was a good year for the garden. We will have a lot to be Thankful for next Thursday.

Garden Salsa

The first tomatoes are finally ready in the garden. I also have onions and herbs, so I decided to make salsa.

Now, I spent most of my precollege years in Phoenix. This was back in the days before salsa became trendy and was made out of mangoes or pineapple or peaches. I am stodgy when it comes to salsa. I want a tomatoes base. To me, the other concoctions are fruit relishes.

I also am not a big fan of chunks of onion or large fronds of cilantro. I could be wrong, but I don't think cilantro was a common salsa ingredient in Phoenix in the 1960s. It certainly wasn't an herb my mother ever used, and she was a pretty adventurous cook. So yesterday, with fresh ingredients from my garden, and within my picky parameters, I came up with a frisky salsa.

First I sliced up a sweet yellow onion. I hadn't planned to harvest most of the onions this early, but more than a dozen of them had pushed themselves halfway out of the soil. Obviously, I need to plant them deeper next summer. So now I have a nice braid of drying, lemon-sized onions.

I added a diced clove of garlic to the onion and sauteed them in olive oil until just soft. In the food processor, I combined chunks of yellow and red tomatoes from the garden, along with some parsley and cilantro. After several pulses, I added the onions, garlic, and some sea salt. Then I diced up and threw in the first jalapeno from the garden. I am new to enjoying spicy heat in my food. I know that many people don't consider jalapenoss to be very hot, but the salsa had quite a lot of zip for me. And the onion and garlic flavors were there but muted. A new family favorite recipe!

Sweet Corn

There are pluses and minuses to living in Iowa. In the last six months, we've had too many minuses. We had a long and awful winter with too much snow and ice. At one point, most of the folks in our area were without electricity for three days, the result of a nasty ice storm. We bought a house with a fireplace so we would have someplace to hang the Christmas stockings and have been grateful for it every winter. A wet spring led into what will now be recorded in our memories and the history books as "The Flood of 2008." We bought a house on a hill because it came with an acre and a half of land. It also happens to be far enough from the lake that surrounds our rural subdivision on three sides, to never be in danger of flooding. Recovery in our part of Iowa will be very slow. Favorite restaurants are gone and won't return. Other businesses have relocated. And many people were washed completely out of their homes, neighborhoods, and towns, and have to start over again.

A lot of people lost their gardens. I was lucky. I only lost my beans which came up and rotted in the wet soil. I replanted, just to have it happen again. A lot of farmers in this area lost all or part of their corn fields. Even now, there's been enough rain that some of these fields remain shallow lakes. I drove by one adjacent to the interstate recently that had a fallen tree along one edge that was covered in snowy egrets. Perhaps they thought they had gotten to Minnesota, the land of a thousand lakes, a little sooner this summer. It was consoling to think that such beautiful birds have stopped to rest in a spot that's beauty this time of year should have come from tall green corn sporting a crown of tassels.

I have my own small strip of corn in my garden this year. I haven't planted corn in over a decade because we live on the top of a hill, and the tall corn plants are vulnerable to the strong rains and hail storms of the average Iowa summer. My small crops were always broken down before they could produce anything. Since I have my garden in our protected side yard this summer, I thought I would give corn another try. Due to the wet spring, the plants emerged at different times and are at different heights, like two blended families with lots of children. So far we have four ears of corn developing. If that's all we get, everyone in the family will get to eat one, and it will have been a successful experiment.

But one of the pluses of living in Iowa arrived on time this week, in this long, hard summer. Sweet corn. I was driving past the parking lot next to the vacuum cleaner repair shop, and there was a rusted red pickup truck with a striped awning over the back, filled almost to overflowing with ears of sweet corn, just picked that morning. A farmer cheerfully filled a plastic grocery sack with twelve large ears for five dollars. I took them home, and served them boiled, with butter and salt, for dinner that night along with hamburgers off the grill. Easily my favorite summer meal. The corn was sweet and crunchy, and we ate seconds, butter running down our fingers.

There are a lot of things I would never buy out of pick up in a parking lot, but in Iowa, in late July and August, I will always stop for sweet corn. This year, it's a sight just as beautiful as the snowy egrets.

Back in the Garden

Happy Earth Day!

In Michael Pollan's article in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday, he addresses the issue of what we can do at this point in our planet's life cycle to reduce our carbon footprint and make a difference, even though it may seem like a drop in a very large bucket. His major recommendation is "plant a vegetable garden." This is a way "to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world." 

Unfortunately, Iowa's cold snowy winter has turned into a late, wet spring. On a rare, warm sunny afternoon ten days ago, I was able to seed the first four rows of lettuce in the raised bed next to the house. We've had a few warm afternoons of sun since then, and today, infinitesimal lettuces can be seen peeking up out of the wet dirt, packed hard by this morning's rain and hail. The rest of the beds around the side yard are too wet to stand in, much less work, so I had to content myself with an inspection tour to see what survived the winter.

I missed harvesting all the onion sets, and have 8-10 onion plants pointing bright green fingers towards the sky, all at least three inches tall. The oregano which I transplanted last summer from a former garden spot in the yard (now adjacent to the "beach" the neighbors installed around their above-ground pool) has sent up six green leaves. Nearby, also in the raised bed, a dwarf lavender plant is shooting out green leaf spurs from stems covered in faded silver leaves from last summer. I had no idea that lavender is a perennial. The other two dwarf lavender plants that I put in the same day just across the side yard under the bird bath (used often by cats, never by birds) show no sign of resurgence.

A gloriosa daisy, one of two purchased at the very end of the planting season for half price, has wintered over and looks dividable. None of the three rhubarb plants I put in last year have survived. But then again, I have a proven black thumb when it comes to rhubarb. It grows behind my next-door-neighbor's garage, but hasn't taken in any of the five places I've tried it in my yard. I will replant again this year because it's a key ingredient in our family's favorite rhubarb-berry pie.

The most cheerful part of the side yard right now is the variety of wild violets blooming in the grass. I have white ones with purple centers, purple ones with darker purple centers, and a very few magenta violets with darker, almost brown centers. My daughter and I like to pick them and make petite bouquets in a set of tiny porcelain vases and tea set pitchers collected over the years for these spring blooms.

So, I am biding my time until the other beds along the fence and shed in the side yard have dried out enough so that I can turn the soil and plant more vegetables. I am sure to get tomatoes seeded in from the fruit I let fall last autumn. But I have learned my lesson--I will only keep one pumpkin vine this summer!

End of the Garden

I am spending today finishing the garden clean-up--getting the hoses and tomato cages put away, and taking care of the final harvest. I finished picking the herbs this weekend, and am in the process of drying the last batch along with a final tray of tomato slices.

One of things to consider when you vegetable garden is how you are going to preserve the crop for later use. I bought a dehydrator this summer--I was interesting in drying tomatoes and fruits--and have been drying different fruits and veggies. I dried several batches of peaches when I had the lug in August. I also dried apples, and some of the fabulous sweet watermelon my husband brought home from the farmer's market. I originally dried the watermelon for my daughter's hamster as a treat, but the poor hamster didn't live long enough to enjoy it. Dried watermelon has a very interesting texture, rather like fruit leather--probably from it's high sugar content. And even though it's dry, one piece explodes in the mouth with all the fresh flavor of a piece of fresh watermelon--just a bit chewier.

I bagged the dried fruits with with my vacuum sealer--another harvest tool I couldn't do without. I used it to package individual pouches of the eggplant Parmesan I made with this summer's crop as lunches for work (no one else in my house eats eggplant). I also have four packages of last spring's asparagus from the farmer's market that I steamed with fresh ginger and froze. This is the first year I have frozen asparagus and not eaten it all in season. The flavors may not be as bright after freezing, but come January, they will be a treat.

I also have a stash of small, dried ginger slices I made from a big knob of fresh ginger. I was amazed at how concentrating drying made the flavor--to taste a slice is like putting chili pepper on your tongue. I also dried some cored and seeded red peppers that a friend gave me. I would like to try grinding the ginger and the peppers together with a mortar and pestle and see what kind of seasoning I can come up with.

I also dried my own green onion and garlic tops after my meager harvest of the sweet onions and garlic bulbs I planted. I don't think they were planted in the right spot in the garden or I didn't prepare the soil well enough for them--all were dwarfish in nature.

Finally these last two days I have been drying all the herbs that survived first frost--parsley, rosemary, lavender, and sage. The sage in the dehydrator makes the entire house smell autumnal and earthly. I plan to grind some dried sage and lavender with some sea salt and make a season salt for the Thanksgiving turkey.

Initially for Mother's Day, the family gave me $150 to spend for the garden. With it I bought a few new vinyl covered tomato cages and ladders, and spent the rest on plants and seeds. The three rhubarb plants were a complete bust, dying shortly after being planted. (I have a black thumb when it comes to rhubarb.) But all the other plants and seeds except the carrots bore at least a token crop. Next year I will plant more root vegetables, and rip up all the pumpkin vines except one. I have tomato sauce in the freezer, dried herbs and fruits, freezer peach jam, and the last of pickled beets in the refrigerator.  And in a few more hours, the last of the tomatoes dried to add to breads and soups.

I could go to the natural foods co-op and get more fruit and produce for $150 than I ended up with at the end of this growing season, but what I have learned about managing garden crops is priceless. I already have plans for next year--more root vegetables and herbs, fewer pumpkins (although the mini pumpkins with tea lights in them made a spectacular addition to the buffet table for my daughter's Halloween party). I have read a number of helpful books this season and have eaten at a wonderful restaurant that tries to feature as much local food as possible. We have to be concerned about where our food comes from and what we are eating, in and out of season.  Although I am not ready to embrace a 100-mile diet, I am trying to make wiser consumption choices. Now I have to go try and find a local turkey for Thanksgiving!

First Frost

We have been gone on vacation, and have come home to the threat of first frost. Even though I ought to have been doing laundry today, I decided that the garden needed some attention. Since the leaves on the pumpkin vines that had spent the summer over running the side yard were starting to turn brown, I decided that it was time to pull the vines and harvest our crop of mini-pumpkins.

This involved grabbing the end of a vine and peeling it up from the long grass, like pulling on the end of a snarled garden hose. Strung along the length like Christmas lights were the small orange pumpkins. I was able to harvest some in mid-air, but others popped off the vine and rolled back into the tall grass. Once I tracked each vine back to the base plant, I cut it off for the burn pile. This was hard work. The grass obscured portions of the vines, and tried to hang on as I wrenched the vines up in the air. Pumpkins popped every which way like beads off a necklace.

After I had pulled up all the vines, I waded carefully through the tall grass, hunting mini-pumpkins like errant Easter eggs. I pulled and I yanked, and I yanked and I pulled. As I collected the pumpkins, I lined them up in rows across the top of the weathered, rickety picnic table. Kirby, our large cranky black and white cat, patrolled the benches back and forth, upset because I was filling up her table-top sunning spot.

When I was finished , I counted: twelve dozen mini-pumpkins of assorted sizes and shades of orange.  Along the way I found the missing zucchini vine sporting a large marrow shaped like an inflated cucumber.  Zucchini vines are supposed to be so prolific, yet this was only the third squash I had harvested off this vine. My husband's theory is that the pumpkin vines sucked all the energy from the other things I planted. The pumpkin vines certainly overran the carrots, but I found the beets, at least four of them still going strong. And the eggplant has an odd cant to it, as purple oblongs pull it in two different directions. The onions and the herbs are still going strong, the blossoming fennel waving frowzily, scenting the garden air with her licorice perfume. I suppose I should have pulled the bulb by now, but I know no one will like it but me, and I like her woozy presence in the yard.

The big surprise of the afternoon was finding four bean plants, low to the fence, sporting enough green and purple string beans for a meal. After the first harvest months ago, I would have assumed they were done, but they seem to have been protected from the summer heat by large pumpkin leaves. Heaven knows the tomatoes didn't bear well. The plants are at least two feet shorter than last year's. I have gotten about a half dozen small Roma's and not much else, although the Big Boy's are now covered with fruit. The yellow tiny plum tomatoes, the sports that came up from last year, are bearing like mad, and I can pick handfuls to eat every day. But there has not been the bounty of sauce tomatoes I had hoped for. The big surprise was that I found three pumpkins of more normal proportions, survivors from the one Spooky Pumpkin vine I planted. They are small by Halloween pumpkin standards, and one is still green, but they will be fun to carve anyway.  I found a pumpkin cookbook with directions for roasting the minis. I will have to try it and see what comes from it. If nothing else, we will have plenty of decorations for Halloween.

The Last of the Peaches

A lug of peaches is a lot of peaches. After making jam and encouraging everyone to eat up, I realized I was going to have to take drastic measures to use up the peaches before they spoiled. So I went out and bought a ceramic deep dish pie pan--probably the only kind of pie plate I didn't already have. Then I had to hunt down a recipe for a deep dish peach pie. I reached for Pie: 300 Tried and True Recipes For Delicious Homemade Pie by Ken Haedrich. I bought this book right after it came out three years ago, and my husband Scot and I have been baking our way through it ever since. If you do not have a basic pie cookbook, or you want to learn the craft of baking pies from the ground up, this is the book for you.

I looked through Haedrich's twenty peach pie recipes for a deep dish recipe and didn't find exactly what I wanted (just plain peach pie with no other accessories like blueberries or cream). So I adapted a recipe, "Deep Dish Nectarine Pie with Almond Crumb topping (pages 108-109)." I have often traded peaches for nectarines and vice versus in recipes. Some years the peaches are better; some years the nectarines. When I went to make the pie, I discovered that I didn't have any almonds in the freezer, so I made a different crumb topping that called for pecans and brown sugar. I also added grated fresh ginger to the filling. And when I went to make Haedrich's "Basic Flaky Pie Pastry," I was almost out of all purpose flour so I used two thirds pastry flour and one third whole grain flour (both from King Arthur).

"So, basically you made the whole pie up, " Scot said as I served him the first warm piece.

"I adapted it," I explained.

You can use any basic crust recipe you like. I have been  baking more with whole grains in the last year, and like the combination of whole grain flour in the crust with the nuttiness of the pecan crumb topping. Once you have your deep-dish pie pan lined with whatever pastry you like, make the following filling while the crust chills in the freezer for 15 minutes:

• 6 cups sliced ripe, peeled peaches
• Scant 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• 2 teaspoons grated lemon peel
• 2 1/2 tablespoons  cornstarch
• 1-2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger depending on your preference

In a large bowl combine the peaches, 1/2 cup of the sugar, the ginger, the lemon juice, and lemon zest. Set aside for 10 minutes to juice. Combine the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar and the cornstarch in a small bowl. Then stir the mixture into the fruit. Scrape the filling into a chilled pie shell, smoothing the fruit with a spoon. Place the pie in the center of the oven, and bake for 30minutes.

While the pie bakes, combine the following in a food processor in this order:

• 1/2 cup of all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
• 1/2 cup pecan halves
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup cold, unsalted butter cut into small cubes

Pulse several times to chop the nuts. Transfer the topping to a bowl and rub it between your fingers to form coarser clumps of topping. Chill. After the pie has baked the first 30 minutes, pull it out of the oven and careful mound and spread the topping over the filling. Put the  pie back in the oven and bake for 30-40 more minutes until the peach juices bubble thickly around the edges. The crumb topping can also be made substituting almonds or oatmeal for the pecans. I also always add a little cinnamon to my crumb topping.

The first pieces are best eaten while the pie is still just a little bit warm. Then the peach flavor explodes in your mouth. You can add a scoop of good quality vanilla ice cream if you'd like, but once I've gone to the trouble to make the perfect fruit pie, I don't want to add anything to dilute the flavors. Scot and I finished the rest of the pie over the next several days, rationing out a piece each for breakfast (neither of our children much care for fruit pie). I had enough fruit left to make two deep dish peach pies--a fine finish to the last fresh peaches of the season.

In the Garden

My children are going back to school this week, and I will finally get some space for myself--just in time to deal with the harvest from the garden.

Inspired by Barbara Kingsolver and all the others I read last spring, I put in a larger garden than I have had for years. Rather than do a large plot, I put it in as a border around four sides of the yard outside the dining room. Early on, the narrow strips were easy to mind and weed, but once both kids were playing ball several nights a week, and I hit the July crazies at work, the garden was left to fend mostly for itself. Here's a summery of what grew, and how it went.

Lettuce--I expected lettuce to be an early and fleeting crop, much like the small patch of spinach that I planted and barely harvested before bugs turned it into a fine green lace by munching large holes in it. But it is the middle of August and I am still picking lettuce. I harvested the last of the Red Sails head lettuce this week. It had finally gotten too long and lanky. The Romaine is tall and a little bit tough, but still good. Several weeks ago, I had harvested the last of the Mesclun in a hap-hazard manner, leaving the stalks in the ground. My daughter Emily's hamster Muffin likes a bit of stalk for a treat, so I have just been trimming them down bit-by-bit. Yesterday I noticed that they have suddenly sprouted new green leaves along their lengths. I think the lettuce has continued all summer because I planted it next to the house in the raised bed where it's cool and shady from noon on.  Also in this bed are the onions (three kinds), one eggplant (only one fruit so far, but it's finally begun to grow another), and the garlic, all doing well.

Herbs--I planted a number of varieties this year: two kinds of basil, perennial oregano, lavender, sage, cilantro, parsley, and rosemary. One of the three lavenders was devoured by someone, and I have lost the cilantro and parsley under a tomato jumble,  but the rest are doing well.  Next year I will know to put ALL the herbs in the raised bed where I can keep track of them.

Cucumbers--I planted three cute little cucumber plants in the corner where the shed meets the fence. They grew and grew and grew. I have never planted cucumbers before and had no idea how they would climb, crawl, and cavort about. I can no longer find the tiny plastic stake that tells me what kind they are, but they are something I have never seen before. I pick them green and they quickly turn a harvest gold when left on the kitchen table. And not because they are rotting either. Left to get huge on the vine, they turn golden orange there too.  They are very seedy, but delicious. My husband has suggested we carve one for Halloween.

Tomatoes--I planted some red and some yellow,  both from seed and from garden center plant. They are not as fruitful or as large as they have been the last few years when they were the only crop.  I also transplanted several cherry tomato plants that came up as sports from last year's crop. Along the edge of the garden underneath the regular tomatoes, I planted some beans (not enough for more than a few steamed), carrots, beets, peppers, and fennel. I know the fennel is still there because I can see it's tall, wispy top, but I don't know how the root vegetables are faring. I can't quite get to them anymore because of the

Pumpkins--I did not plant pumpkins. I repeat. I did not plant pumpkins. On purpose anyway. I put last year's Halloween pumpkins, carved and not, along the fence to be fertilizer for this year's tomatoes. I planted one zucchini vine, and noticed other vines coming up. And coming up.  Pumpkins. I weeded them down to three vines which have now crawled along the fence, battling the tomatoes for space, and have spread across the grass of the side yard--a kind of Midwestern Kudzu--spouting gorgeous big yellow blossoms and orange mini pumpkins. There are also two big pumpkins growing in the melee right now. I was able to pick two zucchini, but that vine had either been completely overrun, or is hiding its fruit when I can't find them.

I am the only person in the house who likes vegetables, and who will willingly seek them out. I have shared some of the tomatoes with some secret animal friend who eats them at night, in the dark, the day before I am ready to pick them. My husband Scot has enjoyed the cucumbers, but mostly it's a garden for one, although the rest of the family will love the home-grown tomato sauce. The harvest and putting by for winter is beginning. I know I should have put in more beans and spinach, and have been surprised by the longevity of the lettuce. It's been a grand experiment.