Beets from the garden

I planted beets a long time ago and then sort of forgot about them in the rush of tomatoes and cucumbers and basil and peppers and lettuce and such.  But they were patient and sat there waiting for me to remember them!

I washed them off and cut all but an inch of the greens of the beets, saving the greens of course.  For the beets themselves, I wrapped in foil and baked an hour or so at 350.  The time will vary depending on the size of your beets. Poke them with a knife and make sure they’re soft through.  When you unwrap them, you can easily pull the peel off, trim the root and greens ends off, then chop. Top with a bit of butter and salt. Yum!

I sorted through the greens and took out the big tough ones (because they’d been in the garden so long!) The tender greens I cooked like chard, with some garlic and oil, letting them wilt.   Served with a few wedges of lemon (also from the yard). Garlic was homegrown too.  The more things come from the garden the more I enjoy the meal!

Anyone have some favorite beet recipes to share? Borscht?  I have a dozen or so left in the garden.  Will be planting more since they were so effortless and easy and are patient!

Pesto from homegrown basil

I am going to freeze some of this pesto, so I left out the cheese in the main batch, following my former mother-in-law’s rule as well as Mark Bittman’s advice in How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food, one of my favorite go-to cookbooks. I’ve added some as I went using this on some chicken breasts the other night but will freeze the rest without the cheese.

My basil this year is the best I have grown yet. It is flavorful and produces plenty of leaves! I’ve used in Thai curry, tomato caprese salad, pasta with fresh tomatoes and basil, etc.   But somehow I hadn’t yet made pesto!  So I will be making lots of pesto over the next few weeks. The plant is starting to flower a lot and I don’t want to lose it all!

homegrown basil

I picked a huge branch of it and trimmed the leaves off, not worrying about the smaller stems but definitely discarding the woody thick ones.  I left a few flowers in.  After trimming, I rinsed them all off in a salad spinner and then spun them dry.

• 2 cups of loosely packed basil leaves, rinsed and dried
• a bit of salt, to taste
• 1-2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
• 2 Tbs pine nuts (you could lightly toast but I skipped this)
• 1/2 cup olive oil, maybe more
• 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese, if you’re using immediately

I used my food processor, first blending the basil, salt, garlic, nuts and half the oil. I had to stop and scrape the sides down a few times.  Then I added the other half of the oil and finished blending it all together, tasting to adjust the salt.  As I said, earlier I did not add the cheese yet since I was planning on freezing.

Note: if you don’t have pine nuts, you can use walnuts or just leave out the nuts. My MIL used to just mix the basil, salt, and oil together, then freeze in plastic bags laid flat. She could break off a pinch here and there as she wanted some fresh basil flavor in a dish.

What’s your favorite use for pesto, other than on pasta?

I like cucumbers and find that a just a few plants climbing up a cage can keep us well supplied in cucumbers for the summer. I’m growing a different variety than last year and they are much better, fewer seeds and not all prickly on the outside.   The girls like them just plain, sliced in circles on a plate.  I like them dress them up a bit.

Last night I made one with red onions that pretty much follows the recipe in The Everything Thai Cookbook: From Pad Thai to Lemongrass Chicken Skewers, except I left out the 2 Thai chilies, seeded and minced so add those in if you want it spicy! I saw a very similar recipe in a magazine recently that had thinly sliced radishes in it, which also sounds good. I also added some bean sprouts to a cucumber salad once and loved the double crunchiness.

• 1 cup boiling water
• 5 Tbs sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup rice vinegar
• 2 -3 small cucumbers, seeded and sliced
• 1 small red onion, sliced

Mix together the hot water, sugar, salt and vinegar, then let cool to room temperature so you don’t cook the cucumbers! If you don’t have rice vinegar, you can use white vinegar.

Last night I actually got out the mandoline to make the slices really thin just for fun but you can just slice the cucumber in half lengthwise, use a small teaspoon to scrape out the seeds, then slice into half moons.

I served this with some excellent curry, similar to this  Thai red chicken curry. I used a mix of peppers, bamboo shoots and peas for the vegetables.

I grew up with my mom making a quick pickled cucumber salad, similar to this quick cucumber salad recipe (and my mom’s old recipe is on that page as well.)  I’ve also played around with cucumbers and sour cream.  And then there’s this one with an Asian flare to it.   (And if you’re looking for a different salsa, this cucumber and grape salsa is fantastic!)

The tomatoes are so good this time of the year!  And I could eat this sauce on practically anything. Serve it with tortilla chips for an appetizer or with quesadillas. Spoon on some black bean soup. Serve with grilled chicken or fish… the possibilities are nearly endless!

Tonight we used it on some burritos made with some leftover bbq’d steak, black beans, and sliced avocados.

• 2 large beefsteak tomatoes, seeded and chopped
• 1/2 small onion, diced
• a handful of fresh cilantro, chopped
• a few good squirts of lime juice
• 2 small cloves of garlic, minced
• salt to taste

Stir and mix, taste and adjust seasonings as per your tastes.

Chicken cutlets are a favorite around here. I vary them now and then but our absolute favorite is how I prepared them tonight.   The variations I’ve done over the years include pounding rather than slicing thinly, eggs and water for the binding rather than eggs and soy sauce and lemon juice, not marinading at all, skipping the flour and marinade and going straight for an egg and water dip then the breadcrumbs, using storebought Progresso breadcrumbs instead of the Panko breadcrumbs (which make for a crispier coating, especially combined with the marinade, then flour, then egg, then breadcrumb dip I did tonight. So if you don’t have everything, improvise. It’s always good!  This version is a bit more crispy with the double coating and Panko crumbs.

• 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts, sliced thinly or pounded into thin pieces
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 cup flour, seasoned with salt and pepper
• 1 egg beaten with a splash of soy, a squeeze of lemon juice, and a spoonful of water
• 3/4 cup bread crumbs or so, seasoned with 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese and some herbs (I used an Italian blend tonight that was meant to go in some olive oil for a dipping sauce. I succumbed at a Foodie store then wondered what to do with them when I got home. This is a great use!  As are homemade croutons.)
• oil for frying

I usually make these with the frozen boneless skinless chicken breasts so just slice them thinly when they’re partially defrosted. If you start with fresh chicken, pound until the pieces are thin and probably cut into smaller pieces. I don’t know, we find them more appetizing when they’re cut into smaller pieces rather than one big huge piece.

Marinade in some buttermilk and refrigerate. If you don’t have buttermilk you can use plain yogurt. If you don’t have either you can skip this step but I do like the flavor it seems to add.

When you’re ready to cook, pull the chicken out of the refrigerator while you prepare a few pie pans or other small flat dishes with:

• flour and salt and pepper in one
• egg, soy sauce, lemon juice and water (or just egg and water) in another
• breadcrumbs seasoned as desired in the third (the Parmesan cheese is really good!)

Heat enough oil to cover 1/2″ inch or so in a large frying pan.  Test by throwing a pinch of flour in. When it sizzles, the oil is ready.

Use two forks to move the chicken pieces from buttermilk to flour, flipping to coat both sides, then to egg, flipping again to coat both sides, then to breadcrumbs, flipping again to coat both sides. From there, set into the hot oil and cook, turning once, a few minutes per side depending on how thick your pieces are. (Pull one out and cut it in half to test for doneness.

Later you’ll gain a feel for how “done” chicken cutlets feel when you poke a fork through them.) Lift up and let as much oil drain as possible.   Then drain on paper towels and keep warm while you finish whatever else you’re serving.

Tonight I made a boxed pasta mix actually, request of my youngest who came grocery shopping with me.

I also served this with a very simple cucumber and tomato salad. I’m growing both cucumbers and tomatoes in the garden so something similar to this is showing up a lot these days on our dinner table.   Chopped cucumbers and tomatoes and in this case green onions with a simple dressing of about:

• 1 Tbs honey
• 1 Tbs rice vinegar
• a pinch of salt
• pepper to taste

This dressed about half a long cucumber, peeled and sliced, and 1 roma tomato.

We’re figuring on using the leftover chicken cutlets in some chicken salad of some type for lunches.

Cucumber salad with sour cream and dill

I am growing the most fantastic cucumbers this year. I bought the starts from the local nursery so I’m not sure what variety these are but I remember that they are a Japanese variety. They are at least a foot long and not too full of seeds. Really fantastic.  I did seed the one I used for the salad tonight as it was a bit overgrown but if I stay on top of them, the seeds are very fine and small.

• 1 to 1.5 pounds of cucumber, peeled, seeded, and thinly sliced
• 1/2 cup sour cream or yogurt
• 2 Tbs lemon juice, preferably freshly squeezed
• a pinch of cayenne pepper
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh dill or parsley ( I used parsley but sprinkled some dried dill as well)

If your cucumbers are seedy, peel them slice them lengthwise and then scrape the seeds out.  Slice thinly.

Mix the sour cream, lemon juice, cayenne and salt and pepper.

Toss the sour cream dressing with the sliced cucumbers and chill for an hour or two or serve right away.

Other favorite cucumber recipes:

• Cucumbers with Sour Cream, Lemon Juice and Vinegar
• Cucumber Salad with Green Peppers and Onions
• Cucumber and Mango Salsa
• Grape and Cucumber Salsa

I would have taken a picture but this was getting eaten about as fast as  I could make it!  Hard to guess on quantities so take the following as guidelines rather than a rules.   For about 12 slices from a small baguette:

• 4 – 5 ounces cream cheese, softened
• 1 -2 Tbs chopped fresh basil
• 1 -2 tomatoes, seeded and chopped
• 1 green onion, chopped
• 1-2 Tbs capers chopped (or use some black olives)
• 12 thin slices from a French bread baguette

Mix the cream cheese and the basil.

Mix together the tomatoes, onion and capers.

Lay the slices of bread out on a cookie sheet and broil until lightly toasted on one side. Flip the pieces over and spread the cream cheese over the untoasted slices. Put back under the broiler a minute until softened. Top each slice with a spoonful of the tomato mix.

Devour.

The cucumbers this year are fantastic! I need to make sure I note which variety I used because they are really good, long and thin, not a lot of seeds and not all prickly on the outside. Some sort of Japanese cucumber I think.

I have a few cucumber salad recipes I repeat a lot, including this cucumber salad with sour cream recipe and this one from many years ago, cucumber salad with onions and green peppers. Oh, I also have this great Grape and Cucumber Salsa recipe. I like cucumbers.

Tonight I saw a recipe in an old Cooking Light magazine that added an Asian twist with some sesame oil and using rice vinegar for a milder version of the basic marinade, but then kicking it up a notch with the crushed red pepper. Very nice variation!

• 2 cups peeled and thinly sliced cucumbers
• 3 Tbs rice vinegar
• 2 tsp sugar
• 1/2 tsp sesame oil
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper

Mix it all up and chill an hour or two before serving.

I’ve been making fried apples, apple pies, and apple crisp, not to mention slicing an endless number of apples up for snacks and lunches. Over the weekend I decided to make apple butter. I was originally going to just make “a batch” and enjoy it, refrigerated.

But somehow I started cleaning out the garage over the weekend and that led me to look up into the storage area a previous owner had built, only to see the myriad empty boxes. You could tell a lot about my professional freelance career, perhaps, by analyzing those boxes. From a very old Packard Bell box to the latest Dell; from a cheap no-name scanner to the last HP LaserJet I bought several years ago. A friend offered to come over with his truck and go to the dump with me to drop the boxes for recycling. Well, not only did he show up to help with that, he climbed up and pulled down boxes that existed in this house before I even moved in 16 (!) years ago, which was more than I had hoped for! Flattened old wardrobe boxes and boxes stuffed with paper, plus my own computer boxes. We pulled the Styrofoam out of everything, flattened them, and loaded up his truck. No dump fee for recyclable stuff! What a treat! Now, I have the Styrofoam to get rid of but since a typical week has me only filling my garbage container halfway, I’ll be through with that in no time.

Removing all those old boxes revealed my secret, semi-forgotten stash of canning supplies. Boxes of quart Mason jars. My mom’s old huge canning pot for hot water baths. And inside the pot was a funnel, tongs, the rack to hold the jars, a few boxes of lids, and her old food mill.

I grew up with the secure feeling of rows of glass jars of food stowed away. One house we lived in had what we called “the storage room,” a long “hall” with no exit, lined on each side with sliding panels that revealed shelves. This was when we lived “in the country” and during that time, to the best of my recollection, we always had a huge garden and my mother would can applesauce, jams and jellies of various types, peaches, pears, stewed tomatoes, dill pickles, and probably more things than I can remember. Dessert was often “go pick a jar of fruit.” But I hated the stewed tomatoes that seemed a winter mainstay for our vegetable dish. A small bowl of stewed tomatoes appeared at the table nearly every night in the winter. Ugh. I love tomatoes today, but I’m not sure I would eat stewed tomatoes even now. The pickles, though, were better than anything you could ever buy. The canned fruit was either off our own trees or locally grown and bought by the lug. There’s another story in there about how we, as kids, used to pick apples for the guy that made cider locally.

When I moved into this house I live in now, with its 14 fruit trees (or perhaps more when we moved in), I decided to make applesauce one year. With four apple trees, you’d think it’s a natural. However, whomever planted the trees here did a remarkable job of staggering the fruit production. Lemons are available about 8 months of the year. Cherries come in around Memorial Day. My first apple tree, a tart green cooking apple, comes ripe in June. Plums come in the summer. The apricot tree has since died, but the blood peaches I planted come in September. There used to be a fig tree as well. Now in September I have two large apple trees full of fruit and it’s a bit overwhelming. Later in December when the last winter apple comes ripe, I’ll be able to really enjoy it as the nearly final fruit of the year, although it, the persimmon tree, and the orange tree are typically good through January or February. March through May are fairly barren except for lemons. The fruit trees are part of how we measure the passing of time here.

Anyway, the first few years, before I found someone who knew how to prune the trees for me, the apples were way overproducing and much of the fruit was too high to pick, so it would come falling down to the ground from on high and get split open. I bought a fruit picker with an extendable pole, which helped. But the apples were coming ripe faster than I could pick bags of them to give away. I asked my Mom to come down and help me can some applesauce. She said sure and brought me her equipment, which she said she was done with. We cooked apples all day long and canned I don’t know how many quarts of applesauce. We were both exhausted. As I recall, I had a baby or toddler at the time, so was dealing with that at the same time. And at the end of the day, my Mom looked over our rows of glass jars of applesauce and said “That’s it. I’ve taught you. I’m done. I don’t ever want to do this again.”

Over the years I’ve followed the general guidelines from Stocking Up : The Third Edition of America’s Classic Preserving Guide and some recipes from Fine Preserving. I made some spiced cherry jam one year, which was fantastic, and some lemon and orange marmalade another year. And I’ve done various frozen batches of tomato sauce, applesauce, and more. But in general, the whole canning thing has scared me somehow. But I saw the stuff up there and saw the many apples left on the tree, despite all my crisps and pies and decided to do “something small” like apple butter. I picked the apples this morning after the youngest left for school., cooked them down with some cider while I worked this morning, took a break to run them through my KitchenAid food strainer attachment, then through the batch into my slow cooker for the final stages of cooking, coming down every half hour or so to stir things up. At some point I added some honey, cinnamon, allspice, and ground cloves. I didn’t measure the spices though. I did start with:

5 pounds of apples, sliced (not cored or peeled or anything)
3 cups apple cider

I cooked this in my big stockpot until the apples were mush. I love my KitchenAid strainer attachment (and use it when I cook up pumpkins also) but a hand food mill would work as well. I took all the good stuff and put it in the slow cooker on high, stirring until it thickened. I added the spice and sweetener about when I put my big old canning pot half full of water on the stove to come to a boil.

I probably ended up adding about:

2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 cup honey
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp allspice

These are fairly sweet apples though. Tart ones would probably require more honey or sugar. I’m not sure what kind mine are since I didn’t plant them. Perhaps Red Delicious that don’t get too red since we don’t have the cold nights here. I took all of the ones this morning from the red-skinned tree. The other tree that’s ripe right now is a Golden Delicious I think. I just picked this tree because it was closer to the kitchen.

I put my jars in the dishwasher to clean them, then put them in a sink of hot water until I was ready. After the apple butter thickened and the big pot of water came to a boil, I took another break from work and filled the jars, leaving 1/2″ of headroom. Put the jars into the boiling water and processed for 10 minutes. As they cooled, on several layers of towel, I heard the familiar PING! as the lids sealed. There was half a jar left over and I stuck that in the frig.

The girls each had a taste as they got home from school and wanted to sit and
eat it like applesauce. I had to promise to make a batch of applesauce later. So I brought down the quart jars and cleaned up a dozen of them.

The applesauce recipes I see all say to core and peel but I don’t see why I can’t do what I did here, and cook it all up with core and peel and just run it through the strainer. I’m a pretty good apple peeler and can regular impress the girls by peeling an apple in one fell swoop, with a long apple peel in one piece. But pushing it all through the strainer seems much simpler.

From the garden of course…

A friend questioned me the other day about why I so seldom steamed vegetables. And the answer is:

I don’t know.

Habit I suppose. I’ll cook up vegetables in a bit of olive oil and/or butter, some minced garlic or garlic salt, some herbs, some white wine and/or chicken broth or vegetable broth. But I rarely steam. So tonight I steamed.

The vegetable combination was based purely on what’s in the garden right now. I had tried and tried to get green beans growing back in the spring and the dang snails ate or birds ate everything that popped its head out of the ground, so I gave up. I had built cute little tepees out of garden poles by putting them in the ground in a triangular shape, then tying the tops together about 8 inches from the top. There they sat, a testament to my green bean (and pea) failure this year until I noticed a green bean plant climbing one a while back, having evidently snuck past the birds. I let it go, convinced I’d never see beans because of the heat at this point. But I’ve now harvested three dinners worth of beans off that plant. This weekend, in fact, I planted more green beans around the other tepees and we shall see what happens. Actually, they were rainbow colored beans, rather than purely green. Youngest was with me at the nursery and we have rainbow colored everything! (Radishes, string beans, bulbs…)

So I steamed the beans and yellow squash but then they looked so plain sitting there. I couldn’t resist. I drained the pot and threw the vegetables back in with a bit of butter and garlic salt. They were delicious! I have a bit leftover which will find its way into the soup I’ll be making sometime this week.