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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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.

A long vacation and a rich harvest.

I didn’t plan on missing blogging as much as I did. It’s been almost two weeks since my last post because we went out of town on vacation.  We asked our neighbors to water the backyard every two or three days and crossed our fingers for the best results.

By now our plants are well established and the lasagna garden has broken down quite a bit.  We knew the weather would be hot and sunny, and that it never rains in Los Angeles in the summer.  We also know that our neighbors don’t garden and get home late at night from work (sometimes after dark) and we hoped they water.

David and I arrived home from the airport at 11pm last night, and grabbed a flashlight to inspect the plants.  Except for the zucchini that fell over because the fruit was too large, things looked really good!  The plants need tidying up, but overall it was a great time to leave the garden and the supports that exist are still holding up.  The tomato cages will soon need staking (like tomorrow), the cucumbers and melons need more ties and we’re starting more zucchini and beans in the nursery.  We were happy to see that the plants definitely had water while we were gone (one indicator was that the squash leaves have powdery mildew beginning). By flashlight we picked the giant zucchinis and righted the plant.  We resisted a midnight harvest, and I did it most of it before David even got out of bed this morning.

Our harvest after the vacation.  I’ll go through each item, and how we plan to use it.  The only reason I snagged the bunch of mint, was that it was crowding the cucumber plants.  We don’t plan to use it right away.  We have fresh mint year round and have plenty of dried mint on hand already.

The largest Safari zucchini weighed four pounds and the smaller fruit was two pounds.  These are both destined to be double chocolate zucchini bread.  We’re taking the bread with us to the LA food swap on Sunday.  The food swap is our first one and we’re planning on bringing a variety of items made from this harvest with us.

Our mixed green beans.  This is enough for a small jar of dilly beans.  I didn’t take pictures of our dill but we have three plants which will provide all the dill we need for the canning session.

The Indigo Rose (front) and Jaune Flamme (back) are beautiful and ripe for roasting.  These are our first fruits from the plants and there are many more coming soon.  The plan is to roast the tomatoes and pack three jars of them with olive oil.  

The Jaune Flamme are a rich golden orange when ripe.  They have a great flavor (I snuck one more that I found on the vine) and will be fun to roast and can this summer.

The Indigo Rose are ripe when there’s red on the bottom of them.  We’ve been anxious to pick them, and I think we’re having trouble determining if they’re ripe.  Roasting these should help intensify their flavor.

Our Isis Candy cherry tomatoes are ready!  Last year we grew these in a pot, and they were our favorite cherry.  This year we gave them prime real estate in the raised bed, and the plant is our largest so far.  These will be enjoyed in our salads, and next week we should begin to have a small supply daily.

San Marzanos!  Two years ago, David discovered how wonderful these sauce tomatoes are and we’ve been growing two plants ever since.  This is the first of our harvest.  Many had caterpillar holes in them, which doesn’t really matter when it comes to roasting the good parts.

These are our Tounge of Fire shell beans harvested from plants that we pulled.  David and I enjoy the color and having a shell bean around, but these hybrids were taking up valuable space.  We decided to harvest what was there and we’ll use the space for something else.

These will be served with dinner. These shell beans have a fun pattern.  I’d like to get heirloom shell beans when it’s time to order more summer seeds.  Any suggestions of your favorite varieties?

These easter egg radishes grew in the new lasagna garden and have twisted up tips to show for it.  We didn’t have enough to do much with, and David’s happy to have them in his salads.

Our little bell pepper plant was sagging under the weight of four bell peppers.  I picked the two biggest and figured we leave the others on the plant to turn red, or until we need them, whichever is first.  These will be fun to use in salads or cooked.

The hot peppers are doing well.  That’s not entirely true… the cayenne, jalepeno and banana pepper are doing well.  The rest of our hot peppers have been stunted and we’re hoping a shot of fertilizer will help them snap out of their growing funk. The cayenne will get tossed in the pickles, and I’m not sure about the jalepenos yet.  We have about 6 more that are the same size, and I’m thinking about making a jalepeno jelly.

The nasturtiums had more seed pods on them, so I figured it’s time to pickle up another jar.  These were mostly from the two new plants that are now taking over the mystery garden.  These are currently soaking in a brine on the kitchen window, and will be pickled tomorrow.

Another “soon project” will be picking the green coriander seeds.  I’ve been reading about the treat of green coriander and dreaming of ways to use them.  I’d probably be more excited if I actually liked coriander, but David loves it so I’m channeling his enthusiasm.  I read about pickling the green pods, and would love suggestions if anyone has them.

Pickling cucumbers is the way to go!  Most of these are from the little leaf cucumber vines, and one of them is a Straight 8.  They will all become either dill pickle spears or bread and butter chips.  There are a few more on the vines that should be ready when it’s time to prep them.

We picked our first winter squash!  The delicata is one of my favorite.  This one looked a little small, and I am hoping it’s ready.  The skin is hard so I guessed it was time to harvest. A lot of what I read said to harvest winter squash before the first frost… which just didn’t help.  As with most of this harvest, I decided to pick it and then pay attention and learn as we cut into our veggies.

Our first buttercup squash.  What a beauty! This one is from the plant that we thought was an acorn squash and was one of our first squashes to begin growing.  It may be a little soon, but not much.  There’s four more that are close behind this one.

This little pattypan squash is our first one. The poor plant has been hiding under Red Kuri and zucchini leaves for the past couple of weeks.  I figured it was time to pick the lone fruit, and see if the plant can start growing more.

David and I are keeping busy, and I hope to update the blog soon on what the plants look like and how the preserving goes.  Isn’t summertime grand?