Summer on a plate

My fabulous sister went home to PA last week and brought me back five dozen ears of sweet corn, as they're still in season up there. There's just something about PA sweet corn that makes it superior to NC corn - there might be something about the soil, or temperature, but it's also possible that nostalgia may play a big part for me. Sal promptly boiled a couple of ears, while I fried us up some green Mortgage Lifters from the back yard. The result was heavenly.

Here's how we fry our tomatoes - you can also just be lazy and dip them in cornmeal before frying and call it a day:

Slice green tomatoes into about 1/4 inch thick slices.
Salt and pepper each slice, then dip in:
1. Milk
2. Flour
3. Beaten egg
4. Cornmeal with some spices mixed in

Drop the slices in a deep fryer if you're blessed with such a contraption, or just put about a 1/2 inch of oil in a large saute pan and fry until browned on each side.

Full disclosure: I am from the North. I had never even heard of Fried Green Tomatoes until the book/movie. If your grandma has a much better recipe that you grew up on, let me know!

Canning Tomatoes

This past Saturday we broke out the canning supplies and put up about 35 lbs. of tomatoes. Our plants didn't exactly produce as we'd hoped (though they're at it now, and will probably give us enough for a couple of loads of sauce, which we'll freeze), so we went to Swart's Gardens and bought two boxes of seconds and first run tomatoes - $1.50/lb or $0.75/lb for seconds.

We decided against making sauce since I mucked up about 20 lbs worth last year, and we didn't feel like hauling out the food mill. Instead we just quartered the suckers and called it a day. It's easier to make sauce from the canned tomatoes as needed anyway. We ended up with 9 quarts and 13 pints - a pretty good start, I may say.

Here's a step by step of the process from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, illustrated by us:

Quantity: An average of 21 pounds is needed per canner load of 7 quarts; an average of 13 pounds is needed per canner load of 9 pints. A bushel weighs 53 pounds and yields 15 to 21 quarts-an average of 3 pounds per quart.

Procedure for hot or raw tomatoes filled with water in jars: Wash tomatoes. Dip in boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds or until skins split; then dip in cold water. Slip off skins and remove cores. Leave whole or halve. Add bottled lemon juice or citric acid to jars. Umm, we totally forgot to do this. Hopefully we'll survive. Crap. Add 1 teaspoon of salt per quart to the jars, if desired. We don't add salt.

Blanching

Dipping in ice bath

Peeling and coring


Packing in jars

Raw pack: Heat water, for packing tomatoes, to boiling. Fill hot jars with prepared raw tomatoes, leaving ½-inch headspace. Cover tomatoes in the jars with boiling water, leaving ½-inch headspace. Also remove air bubbles - they don't mention this.

Packed tomatoes before adding water Removing air

Process: Adjust lids and process in a boiler water canner - 45 minutes for quarts, 40 minutes for pints.

Processing the jars, then Sal lifts them out

Voila! The finished product.

If you can't handle the heat...

Luckily it's been relatively mild for NC at this time of year. The past few days have been partly cloudy and in the low 80s - a well appreciated respite from the killer heat of the last few weeks. When it gets crazy hot like that, I can't even think about cooking. Here's a recipe I got from Real Simple that will keep you cool on those dog days, but still make you feel like you're eating a gourmet meal. Plus, it's ridiculously easy:

Cold Summer Gazpacho

Ingredients:

6 yellow tomatoes, cored and quartered (got mine from Swart's)
1 yellow bell pepper, chopped (substituted two banana peppers)
2 Tbs. red wine vinegar
1 1/2 tsp salt
Basil and feta to garnish

Blend up the tomatoes and bell pepper in a food processor until smooth. Pour into a serving bowl and stir in vinegar and salt. Chill for awhile if you want, but it's okay to eat it now. Spoon into individual bowls and garnish with fresh basil leaves and feta. Pretty and delicious!

Summer in review

As the tomatoes start to dwindle from the Farmer's Market, ours finally begin to appear. It seems the combination of lots of rain and near total neglect has been good for them - we've got a huge crop that looks like it's going to ripen all at once. Hopefully they'll ripen. If not, we'll be eating a lot of fried green tomatoes.

Our eggplant has also blessed us with some beautiful, deep purple specimens that will get sauteed up with some tomatoes and pasta this week.

The garden has fed us well in some aspects, but hasn't been quite what we were hoping. It's been a good learning experience though, in terms of figuring out when to plant, and how to better amend our soil. I have high hopes for our batch of Fall crops.

We started out the summer with a bumper crop of cucumbers, from which I made 4 pints of dill pickle chips and numerous cucumber sandwiches. This English tea time staple is one of my favorite summer treats, and should be enjoyed specifically like this:

• Butter two pieces of white or light wheat bread
• Thinly slice a cucumber (skin on) to cover one slice of bread.
• Layer thin slices of a sharp cheese (Nature's Way's Raw Carephilly is awesome!) over the cucumbers.
• Place the second piece of bread on top of the cheese.
• Slice your sandwich diagonally into quarters. Yum.

Of course, this is kind a moot point as cucumbers are out of season, but whatever.

We also had a promising start with our squash and zucchini at the beginning of the season. Our plants grew huge and had sprouted a few little veggies and was full of lots of pretty blooms. Then slowly, the plants started to rot from the bottom up, and then within a week were reduced to a sad little pile. I pulled them up as soon as I realized they were not going to make it, but wasn't smart enough to try to find a diagnosis right away. Now I'm afraid they had
Phytophtora Crown Rot, which can apparently hang out in the soil for years. Fabulous. Not sure how to amend that situation yet - any ideas?

Our first eggplants

Cucumbers at early season

Squash, pre-meltdown