Tag Archives: Harvest

recipes

Basil Pesto

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The other day, I made pesto from the last bits of basil in the garden.  I do it a little differently than some others do.  This recipe started from Taste of Home’s Basil Salmon Recipe, but I’ve changed it up quite a bit.  For one thing, we don’t use pine nuts.   We like more parmesan cheese.  I’ve even tried cutting down the amount of oil used, but that one did not work.  It takes it all.

Here’s what I do:

4-1/2 cups basil leaves

10 Tablespoons olive oil

5 teaspoons minced garlic

1 teaspoon pepper

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons lemon juice

6 Tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese

Place all ingredients in food processor.  Pulse until it is all incorporated together.  Taste.  Add more salt, pepper, cheese, etc. that you want, to taste.  Freeze in an ice cube tray.  Once frozen, pop the frozen cubes into a zip-top bag and keep in freezer until ready to use.  Makes 1 ice cube tray full.

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We use it on fish and chicken, in salad dressings and dips, and pasta the most.  Ja’Ana and I love it!

 

Garden

Garden Update–Aug. 6, 2016

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One of the strawflowers Patsy planted from the 25c seed packet from the dollar store.  A bargain for something so lovely, in my opinion.

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The one Tromboncini Zucchini plant that came up is producing.  Not bad for old seed!

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The garden is just bursting with color and produce.  Almost every day, I am privileged to spend a little time out there, either weeding or picking produce.  Ja’Ana has been weeding like crazy, as she desires to go to to quite a few youth events–Win-Win!  Rob did some tilling, too.  Already, you can see a large patch in the picture above where we have harvested all of the green beans that were there, and re-planted a few fall crops.  I seeded in lettuce, spinach, cilantro, basil, boc choi, Swiss chard, snow peas, and Patsy planted a LOT of radishes.  We don’t use many radishes, but she wanted to plant them badly, and we have the room, so…….Some of our seed is very old, and I am using things up, so we planted thickly and will thin if anything comes up.  If they don’t….well I can live without radishes and I’m sure some will emerge.

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One of my favorite things is the fact that the tomatoes are really starting to ripen now.  We have been eating them like crazy.  There’s just nothing like a home-grown tomato:)

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While cleaning out the seed box, I found several sunflower packets from years gone by.  We planted them all, and these are the Mammoth Sunflowers.  That seems to be what most of them turned out to be, and for sure, are the ones that are growing excellently.  They’ve just started to bloom.

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We’ve been getting peppers, cucumbers, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, and more.  As you can see, the corn is tasseling, but we have not gotten any of that yet.  So, there is still much promise left in our garden and much good eating still to come!

 

 

Garden

Garden Update

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I came back from a few days at Champoeg State Park and found numerous goodies had ripened up in the garden!  I’m especially excited about the green beans and the little yellow cherry tomatoes.  Those are the first I have been able to pick, although my sister got started on them earlier in the week while I was gone.

I made green beans and garlic tonight for dinner, along with coleslaw from part of the cabbage.  I think I will make some fish tacos with some more of it, and make a grill basket with the round zucchini.  There are also some onions you cannot see, as well as some snow peas.   I will add some of them to the grill basket as well.

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Patsy’s flowers are blooming!  They are lovely and will just get brighter and more beautiful as time passes.  The squash on the left is delicata and has several forming.  On the right in the back in a tronboncini squash, a kind of zucchini that grows to look like a musical instrument–I hope we get one.  It isn’t even blooming yet.  There is an acorn squash bush as well as mixed summer squash on the right.  We were using up seeds, so have a little of several things.  In the far center is regular, plain, green zucchini.

I have been succession planting things.  We are on our 3rd planting of lettuce, at least, with a couple more plantings coming up and growing nicely.  I have a new planting of spinach up nicely, too.  This week, I’d like to plant more lettuce, green onions and snow peas. Last summer I did not have to buy lettuce, except 1 or 2 times, and I’d like to repeat that.  None of the rows are long.  I just want fresh things to eat so they are not bitter from heat.  It’s turning out to be a great garden and is easily feeding my family, my sister’s family, and quite a few other friends and relatives.  It’s also working out very well to have more than one person working on the weeds and planting!  Sharing a garden is really a blessing for both my sister and I.  I’m glad.

Garden

Garden Update–June 9, 2016

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The garden has taken off with leaps and bounds with the unseasonably warm weather we had this past week.  The cilantro is bolting, but the rest is just growing along nicely.

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The green beans are growing, the peppers and tomatoes are starting to bloom…

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The 4 big tomatoes that we put walls of water around when we started them are huge and have set fruit.

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Carrots, onions, cabbage and broccoli are getting big, as are many other veggies.

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At this time, I am harvesting lettuce, spinach, cilantro and basil.  I have snow peas forming and they will be the next item ready.  The rest is going to take more time, but I’m very pleased with how much it has grown in the past week.  This week is going to be cooler, so it will slow down, but the greens will like that better.

I’ve been busy helping with cherry season, so haven’t worked in the garden very much.  I did take the time to plant some more lettuce and cilantro.  I plant short rows often, so that even when the heat comes, I hope to always have a new crop coming along that we can eat.  Last summer, I only had about 2 weeks where there wasn’t good lettuce growing, but we will see if I can do as well this year.  Rob is going to till it this morning, and everyone is going to pitch in and get some weeds out, and then it will be just fine for a few more days.

Fruit

Cherry Season

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One of the most interesting things I get to do while parked at my sister’s house is be a part of cherry season.  Their orchard has Rainier (pale), Dark (various kinds), and pie cherries in it.  They sell the cherries U-pick and the season started today.  The cherries are extremely early, but are clearly ripe.

On the first day, they always open at 6 a.m.  That’s because there are very eager people who want to pick that early.  After today, they will open at 8.

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My sisters and I grew up on a U-Pick farm, and I continued working there for many years after I was married, so this feels comfortable to me.  I enjoy visiting with the customers and watching people.  They come from miles around, lugging buckets, baskets, plastic containers, stepstools and ladders.  They head out into the orchard and pick, then bring them back to the stand to get weighed, and pay for what they picked.  In actuality, Rob got to help with that a lot more than I did today, but I did get a short turn while others ate lunch.  My jobs today were to take Patsy to school (45 minutes away-1 way), stop at the store, cook for everyone, and then go back to town to take Lovana to work, and then pick Patsy up from school.  I love to cook for a crowd, so enjoyed that job. Driving–not so much, but it needed to be done.

The season will only last for a few days, due to the amount of customers that come, and the fact that the crop is not huge.  But that’s ok.  Peach season is coming up in a few weeks, and I’ll be ready!

animals, Saving Money

Eggs Again

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I am delighted that the chickens have decided to lay again!  They took a little break during the darkest time of the year, which is normal, but recently have been cranking out a few eggs a day.

Every day when Rob brings in the eggs,they are placed on the counter in a bowl.  When I get ready to wash the eggs, I place the bowl in the sink and run tepid water on them so they can soak.  Many sources say to not wash your eggs because they keep better unwashed.  Mine have chicken droppings on them, so I choose to wash them off.  Some sources say that if you are going to wash them, use lukewarm water so that the pores are not opened with hot water, impurities don’t enter, and the cold water doesn’t close the pores, trapping in the impurities.  I have no idea if that’s true, but it sounds sensible, so I use lukewarm water.

I have an old toothbrush that I use for egg washing, only.  I just gently scrub each soaked egg while holding it under a small stream of tepid water. Sometimes stains remain.  I’m fine with that.  I air-dry them on a towel and then put into cartons in the garage fridge, or into the egg keeper in the refrigerator in the kitchen.

We had to buy one 5-dozen package of eggs from Costco this winter when the chickens were not laying.  I didn’t even get them finished before they started up again, so I probably  could have survived without buying any, but we had no way of telling when they would start again.  They are very light sensitive, the days are getting longer again, and this batch of hens is less than 1 year old, so we knew they would lay some more, we just didn’t know when exactly.

Since we have been paying for feed all along, I am delighted to be entering that time of year when I have all the eggs I want.  I also give them away when I have an overabundance, so my sister is happy, too.

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Garden, Saving Money

Garden Tomatoes in December

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I was very excited to have a garden tomato on my sandwich today for lunch!  This year, we tried (as we have before) to get some tomatoes to ripen in the garage for us to eat during the fall.  We are very excited, because, this year–it worked!

Here, where I live in Oregon, our garden has already succumbed to killing frost.  There is a little Swiss Chard still alive down there, but very little else.  A few herbs have survived in my herb planter box.

In late October, before the killing frost, I picked as many green tomatoes as I could.  I only saved the ones that did not have a bad spot, a bit of blight starting, or any other thing that might make them go bad quickly.

Rob and I tried 2 different methods.  The first method was to wrap each nice green tomato in a white napkin and place them single layer in a box.  We got several good tomatoes from that box over the last few weeks.

The second method was easier.  We simply placed a bunch of green and ripening tomatoes in a cardboard box.  They were mostly Romas and we grabbed the ones that were turning red out of the box as they turned or rotted.  Some were also placed on cookie sheets because we had so many.

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By now, on December 10, they are looking pretty sad.  All of the ones that are wrapped, and on cookie sheets are either eaten or rotten.  The quality of the tomatoes is going down.  I have to cut out little spots of the “good” ones, and the texture is a little mushier than when truly fresh.  Clearly, I need to clean out this box as well.  I will get the ones that still look good out of there and either compost the rest of feed them to the pigs.  If you look closely, there are still a few good ones in there as well.  I don’t think that the green ones in there are going to ripen, but I’ll give them a few more days.

In our opinion, our experiment was a huge success.  We have had tomatoes for tacos, sandwiches and salads galore, for about 6-8 weeks after  our garden was finished.  I noticed that the Romas are better keepers and that it didn’t seem to make a difference if we wrapped them or not.  This was a good garden year, and there wasn’t much disease on the tomatoes, which helped, I’m sure.  I know this experiment is pretty well finished, but I sure enjoyed my sandwich today, knowing that the tomato I was eating was from my own garden, and that I haven’t had to buy tomatoes for quite a few weeks into the fall.  It was definitely worth the effort.  Success, any way I look at it!

snacks

Roasted Hazelnuts

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During my childhood, I was raised on a hazelnut farm.  We also had peaches and cherries, but the main crop was nuts.  So, as a result, I got the opportunity to enjoy them many ways.  One of my favorites was to eat roasted filberts, as we called them.  My mom made them during holidays roasted with salt and butter.

Now that I’m grown, I still like roasting them.  My mom still has “connections” and gives me many pounds of the shelled nuts each fall. Hazelnuts are harvested in the fall and then taken to the hazelnut plant.  When they fall from the trees, they are considered “green.”  The nuts I work with have been dried and shelled, but are still considered “raw.”   This morning, I decided to roast a cookie sheet full of them since it’s been a while since we’ve enjoyed the salty, crunchy treat.

First, I preheated the oven to 250 degrees.  I poured raw hazelnuts on a cookie tray, 1 layer deep.  I then lightly sprinkled olive oil and a little salt onto them and stirred them.   I roasted them for 1 hour, stirring them every 15 minutes.   More salt was added, as needed.  When they were done, they were crisp, and turning slightly brown in the center.

We enjoyed munching on them all afternoon with our oldest daughter and her husband.  There are a few left for tomorrow, and then I’ll have make another batch.  Nuts are great for you, and fill my need for a salty, crunch treat without a lot of carbs.  Hazelnuts are another wonderful benefit of living in the Pacific Northwest. I feel blessed to live in an area that has so many unique, delicious foods that are so abundantly growing all around me, ready to be harvested and enjoyed by my family.

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Garden

Garden Clean-Up

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The garden is winding down.  Yesterday afternoon and evening, Lovana helped me begin the clean-up job.  She pulled out the tomato cages.  I picked the last remaining vegetables off of dying bushes.  There is much more to do, but we got a good start before it became so dark we could not see any more.

I have several large raised beds.  I have a large portion of the garden that is able to be tilled.  About 1/3 of the fenced area is in berries, which are permanent.  I was able to get a start on cleaning out the raised beds last evening.  After I clean out the old plants, I will put compost on the emptied beds.  In one bed, I have some leeks, spinach, peas and chard, which I will leave in for the winter.  There are also 2-3 plants of overwintering broccoli.

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I was able to get butternut squash, a few zucchini, peppers, and cucumbers.  More tomatoes are ripening daily and there are many squashes that will be good for many months.  It was an extra-long growing season this year and I feel very blessed for all the wonderful produce we have harvested.

food preservation, Garden

Salsa Verde

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This week was fun!  My friend visited from out of town for 3 nights and we canned up quite a few things from the last remains of my bountiful garden.  It is looking pretty bedraggled by now, but we found a few items that we could still use. She brought a few green tomatoes and a few peppers from her garden as well. The recipe we used was from the Foods of the Pacific Northwest pamphlet, Salsa Recipes for Canning.   One thing we decided to make was Green Tomato Salsa, or Salsa Verde.  The recipe is also on the website for the National Center for Food Preservation.  It is called Tomatillo Salsa, but I always use green tomatoes for it.

We made a triple batch.  The onions I grew this year were very small.  We had to peel a LOT of them!  We both cried a couple of times while peeling and as we got a whiff of the aroma when we started to whirl them around in the food processor.  The rest was easy.  We just chopped everything up, measured it out into a big pot, and followed the directions in the recipe.  Then we canned it up.  We got about 22-24 jars of various sizes, but most were pints.  They all sealed and the next day, after they were cool, we put half in my basement and packed half for her to take home.  We had a wonderful time, visiting and canning and agreed:  We both have a strange sense of what fun is–but we both love to can and got a lot of pleasure from each other’s company and the rows of jars gleaming on the counter when we were done!