Kumquats, relish, rose petals and more

The past few days have been spent with large chunks of time in the kitchen.  We picked more tomatoes from our neighbor, many of which are still sitting on our counter.  I’d love to make a fire roasted salsa, if anyone has a favorite recipe.  We’ve also been enjoying them with olive oil, balsamic and fresh mozzarella.  (David and I have amassed a fun selection of oils and vinegars during our travels.)

Looking at our harvest, I figured it was time to get a little creative.

The banana peppers became pickled banana peppers.  The jalepenos may become peach jalepeno jam later today, or tomorrow.  And the cayennes are getting tossed into all sorts of things.

Since making roasted tomatoes and swapping them, I’ve been wanting to have some for us.

Our Jaune Flamme has the perfect size roasting tomatoes, so we were in luck!  I roasted the orange tomatoes, along with a handful of San Marzanos, packed them in olive oil and then froze them.  The frozen jar is now in our freezer, where it should keep for a year (but why would we keep them around that long?)

Thanks to the food swap, we had a pound of kumquats kicking around.  We also had oranges, which I juiced.  David and I marinated the sliced kumquats in some of the orange juice overnight.  We then drank the extra fresh squeezed orange juice.

The sliced kumquats were then cooked into a Spicy-Sticky Kumquat chutney.  We can’t wait to use it on pork or chicken! I cut the recipe in half, and this is one that I’ll be making again.

As the kumquats had to marinate overnight, I figured it was the perfect time to make Rose Petal Jam, which also had to macerate in sugar overnight.

Our roses are mostly yellowish orange, and not that fragrant.  I tried to find freshly opened ones, and was able to pick  a bowl full of petals.  The recipe confused me a little- I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to pack the petals down, and when to measure.  I could have emailed her to ask, but I figured I’d go with it.  If you use the recipe, I cut the pectin to 5 tbl and had about 2-4 cups petals, and it gelled perfectly and tastes devine!

The petals and kumquats both had to cook for about the same time, which made for convenient canning.

While they were cooking, I seeded and chopped a large cucumber that we had laying around.  I grabbed a red pepper, a couple small green peppers and an onion and chopped those to make a sweet relish (used sweet pickle relish from Blue Book).

I followed the recipe pretty closely, and was surprised to find it was quite liquidy.  I had about 2 cups of liquid left, and made 5 half pints instead of the 8 it said.  We’re excited to find a reason to use the relish.  I was reminded that my grandma used to make and love piccalilli, and that may happen later this summer. I’ve found a lot of good relish recipes so far, including one that uses summer squash.

Our cucumber plants were picked clean, and it’ll be at least a week before we get more.

I decided to make whole dill pickles with this lot.  A friend gave me a recipe (which we have yet to use), and suggested soaking them overnight in pickling lime.  We’ve yet to pick that up from the store, but it would be nice to have crisp pickles.

This is our third batch of dill pickles and each has been different.  This batch made two large jars and one small.

Today I also harvested enough long beans to make pickled long beans.

The long beans are just taking off, and the bunch I picked fit perfectly into a pint jar.  This will be a fun treat, especially since the brine had star anise in it!

All in all, here’s the pickling and canning that we’ve been doing since last Thursday.  David’s been a great sport and helped out during the canning itself, when I call him into the kitchen to pour and stuff jars.

Did I mention that we did all of the canning without a funnel?  I was so excited to get canning tools earlier this year, that I took out the funnel to use it for something, and then it disappeared!  We’ll get one soon, but finding canning supplies in our part of Los Angeles has been a little bit of an effort.  We now know which stores carry quart jars, widemouth jars, half pint jars and lids.  We have yet to find the 4oz jelly jars, but I know they’re out there!

One last picture of one of our cat’s helping with laundry.  Roxy won’t make any of the outside garden pictures because she’s too scared to go outside.

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Busy in the kitchen

We’ve had a few tomatoes from our garden, but not nearly enough to start cooking with or preserving.  David and I decided that we’d roast or dehydrate a few at a time when we have time.  We figured with the way the tomatos are ripening, we wouldn’t start our saucing operations until the end of July or beginning of August.

There are a few red San Marzanos, but most of them are still quite green.

The Indigo Rose are ripening, and thanks to a suggestion from a reader, we’re leaving them on the vine until they feel soft.  These will be for salads and roasting.

The Jaune Flamme are going to be great for drying and roasting.  There are bunches of ripe ones, but there are not many at the same time.  I did get out the dehydrator though, and figured this was enough to do our first batch.

Our last tomato that is producing fruit right now is the Isis Candy.  These are great to eat in salads.  As you can see though, we’re far from peak tomato season.

Then David chatted with our neighbor across the street.

He told us that he was headed out of town and we should pick all of his tomatoes.

David and I went across the street, dug around for a little while, and proudly came home with two overflowing bowls of fruit.  There should be more later in the week, but we cleared out everything we could find.

And decided that we’d make our first batch of salsa!

I set aside the largest for slicing (every dinner comes with a caprese salads or tomatoes drizzled with vinegar and olive oil), the smallest for dehydrating and chopped up 7lbs for salsa.  We were going to stick to the Blue Book, but I found a salsa recipe that we’re trying instead.  When our neighbor gets back in town, he’ll get a couple jars of salsa and pickles.

Yes, he gave us cucumbers too.

He has some gorgeous salad cucumbers, which David made into an Israeli cucumber and tomato salad.  The ones that weren’t too seedy, were quartered and turned into dill pickles. We picked up some pickling spice at Penzy’s earlier this spring, and have been itching to try it.

Our vines had cucumbers growing on them also.  We’ve been pleased with the shape, size and yield of our little leaf cucumber plants.  I’ve been trying to move away from hybrids, but this one is making me think about that decision.

We have two vines on the ladder.  The vines are full of flowers and have over a dozen cucumbers in the midst of growing right now.

I picked these off our two ladder vines and the one in the backyard.  I snagged a few cayenne peppers and a handful of dill and it was time to make dill pickles.

At that point, I put my camera down and focused on cooking.

Our end tally was:

2 pint and half jars (1 chips, 1 spears)

5 pint jars (2 spears, 1 spicy spears, 1 spicy chips, 1 zucchini chips)

And then there were the apricots.

David bought apricots at Costco for canning, as our new tree isn’t producing this year. We had enough for a half batch of jam.  We decided on something savory, and chose Apricot-Ginger-Rosemary jam.  The amount we had filled two half pint jars and gave us a little bit left over.  The leftover jam was later cooked with caramelized onions and used to top pork chops.

We will savor this jam, and I highly recommend the recipe.  There’s just enough crystalized ginger and rosemary to make it interesting but not overpower it.

We just may be picking up more apricots to make more.

 

Putting up our harvest

There’s a heat wave in Los Angeles, and honestly it’s nothing compared to the heat we just experienced in Florida.  David and I didn’t even run the air conditioning, and had the oven on all day, so you know it wasn’t that bad where we live.  We usually get a breeze blowing through the house, until the wind shifts in late summer and the Santa Ana’s arrive.  August is usually when we run the air conditioning, and many houses in LA don’t even have it!

Dave and I spent the better part of Friday and Saturday preparing food to bring to a food swap!  I’ll write a separate post about that, as we just returned and we’re very excited about how it went!  But first, here’s what we prepped to bring with us.

Roasted tomatoes (recipe linked in last post, but here it is again.)

We slow roasted our small harvest of three types of tomatoes, and I’m looking forward to doing it again later this week (after it cools off).

We’ve never grown the Jaune Flamme tomatoes before and they’re already a favorite!  They are fairly uniform in size, a rich color and just the right combination of seed and meat.  Our plant has giant clusters of them weighing it down.  Actually, I’m going to run outside and pick a few right now, as I’m getting hungry for some!

The Indigo Rose are so purple!  These all seemed a bit mealy or underripe.  Roasting them should make their flavor more intense, which they’ll probably benefit from.  We’re hoping these are tasty enough to be salad tomatos, and maybe part of the trick is learning what color they’re supposed to be when it’s harvest time.

The San Marzanos are weird to slice.  The ratio of meat to seed was weird and I had a hard time making it even while slicing.  This heirloom isn’t designed for slicing- it’s a beauty of a sauce tomato.  The fruit also had lots of caterpillar holes, and I remember cutting out a lot of spots last year.  In the past, we have made sauce, dehydrated, and roasted them.  We just finished the roasted tomatos from our freezer; we have a few of the dehydrated ones left.

We had a full tray of jaune flamme, and half a tray each of indigo rose and San Marzano. Before the trays went in the oven, I brushed them with lots of olive oil and sprinkled them with salt, thyme sprigs and whole garlic cloves. They looked so beautiful when they went in. I thought I took a picture, but I can’t find it.

The tomatoes were roasted at 250 for 5 hours.  We then let them cool a little, packed the different varieties of heirloom tomatoes, in thick layers, adding garlic, thyme, and fresh basil in between the layers.

I then added a teaspoon of lemon juice and filled the jar with olive oil.  We processed it in our canner for the time in the recipe (I never seem to remember numbers).

I was actually kind of sad to bring these to the food swap, because I really wanted to keep them.  But then I was excited that other people get to eat these, and we get to make more for ourselves!  The idea of the food swap is to bring stuff we made or grew, and then trade it for things that other people made.  Since we have such a variety of produce to use, our strategy was to bring a small amount of a wide variety of items.

While David was at the store picking up ingredients for the baking of our giant zucchini and leftover bag of carrots, I prepped all of the pickling things.  I measured out how many spears or disks would fit in each jar, and decided on the amount and type of jar.  We decided on one jar dilly beans, four jars dill pickle spears, 4 jars bread and butter disks.

This was a great first use of our new canner and canning tools.

Last summer, after the frustrating experience of canning tomato sauce without any tools, we decided that we needed to buy a canning kit.  David and I picked one up a few weeks ago, as well as two boxes of jars.  The first day of canning was something that we were excited to do and knew we would have time for during summer vacation.  David and I took turns using each type of jar grip, and the magnetic lid grabber.

Each pickle was made a different way.  The bread and butter pickles were boiled together in the brine for 10 minutes.  We followed the Ball Blue Book recipe.

The bread and butter pickles are on the left.  I was never a huge bread and butter fan until I had fresh bread and butter zucchini pickles in Vermont.  Lisa, the owner of the farm that I worked on, made the best zucchini pickles and I 15 years later I still salivate at the thought of them.

On the right are the dill pickle spears.  We used the Ball Blue Book, and added the seasoning for Kosher style pickles.  I must say, I didn’t realize that Kosher style involved simply adding garlic, mustard seed and a bay leaf.  I was surprised because I’ve always thought all dill pickles include these things.  Also, the Ball Book didn’t mention a blessing or cleanliness or any of the other Kosher rules.

We also made one mini jar of dilly beans.  I used powdered cayenne, forgetting that we have a cayenne pepper plant (and that there were probably more ripe after I did my initial harvest).  The dilly beans were out of the Blue Book also and contained a mix of about six different varieties of beans.

After we finished processing all of the jars, we put away the canner and called it a day.

Day two, Saturday, was for baking.

David got out the food processor and shredded carrots for about 10 minutes.  Then he switched to zucchini.  He shredded the entire 4 lb one.  Each of the piles filled a large bowl.

We made double recipe carrot cake and triple recipe double chocolate zucchini bread.

I’m fast forwarding the description of baking.  David and I worked together to measure, mix, clean, scoop, bake and test the cakes.  At the end of the day, we had 4 large carrot cakes, 2 small carrot cakes, 4 large chocolate zucchini and 6 small chocolate zucchini breads.  These would be our main “money” at the food swap.