CertainSeason

Kitchen Garden 2012

Got the kitchen garden planted for the most part this weekend. It sits in the circular drive and Bill did just an amazing job edging it. A nearly perfect round. We featured an herb farm as the food purveyor at First Friday and I got most of the herbs from them. They're all organically grown (as is our land.)

I layed it out as a compass...North / South / East / West...with deep purple pansies for the North, yellow for the South, white for the West and bi-color blue for the East. The center is a yellow rose.

Each quadrant has different herbs in it...chervil, sage, chives, French tarragon, English thyme, oregano and parsley. We want some dill and basil of course, but I will put the basil in the main garden and the dill hasn't sprouted yet. The whole is ringed with multi-colored French marigolds which I am hoping fill out and create a border flower hedge. Of course they're also edible.

The picture is taken from due North. That's Missy Girl posing in the background.

 

Putting Up Herbs

It's a cool, gray Autumn day...the sun breaks through occasionally. Good day to have eggs shirred in cream (actually creme fraiche) and toast for breakfast and to start drying and preserving the herb garden for winter.

Drying some lemon thyme, sage and tarragon. Freezing some chives. The system won't let me post a pic. So I'll just leave it at that.Tore out the tomato plants and the undergrowth that took over in the monsoons. Took up most of the pepper plats (one is still fruiting!) and cleaned up most of the rows. And then I planted about 30 garlic plants ((German white garlic from Evening Song Farm.)

Apple (Buddha) Time

Well I guess it's no surprise that I just got tired of writing about rain. It has finally stopped, for now (and we are already holding our breath for winter and what all this precip would look like in white!) But if the rains did one thing right, it is that it grew our apples to a new level.

We've had apples since the day we moved in. The first weekend I was here, almost two years ago (as of 10/31, officially) I gathered apples and made applesauce. But the apples are not "pretty" and they were always small. This year, however, they are nearly twice the size, if not three times the size of that first year's crop. Don't know how sweet they will turn out to be. Rain = size...sun = sweet...but now I need to start getting some apple butter ready.

Bean Baking Weather

Well it's finally turned to Autumn here...at least temperature-wise. Precipitation-wise it's still monsoon season and I've just about had it.  Can't get in the garden. Can't mow the lawn. At least the mosquitoes seem to have abated with the temperature. Leaf raking has entered the To-Do List. Not that it does much good...as soon as you rake up what's there, more fall with the rains.

But it's nice and cool, so what do we do? We pull out mom's beanpot and we bake beans, of course. Yellow Cap beans from Rancho Gordo to be specific. Big meaty beans. We used this opportunity to clean out a good part of the fridge, too...in addition to the normal ingredients we added mango hot sauce, harissa and boiled cider to the beans. And just for good measure, instead of using ketchup, we used Stadium Sauce (a secret Milwaukee ingredient, usually found on brats). Had some nice chunks of salt pork in the fridge, too. I'm rather excited about these beans.

 

 

B&B (Bo & Bill) Baked Beans

2 C beans

4 oz salt pork or bacon

1 onion, finely diced

3 T molasses

2 t salt

¼ t ground black pepper

1/4 t dry mustard

½ C ketchup

1 T Worcestershire sauce

¼ C brown sugar

1. Soak beans overnight in cold water. Simmer the beans in the same water until tender, approximately 1 to 2 hours. Drain and reserve the liquid.
2. Preheat oven to 250˚
3. Arrange the beans in a 2 quart bean pot or casserole dish by placing a portion of the beans in the bottom of dish, and layering them with bacon and onion.
4. In a saucepan, combine molasses, salt, pepper, dry mustard, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and brown sugar. Bring the mixture to a boil and pour over beans. Pour in just enough of the reserved bean water to cover the beans. Cover the dish with a lid or aluminum foil.
5. Bake for 3 to 4 hours in the preheated oven, until beans are tender. Remove the lid about halfway through cooking, and add more liquid if necessary to prevent the beans from getting too dry.

 

Adirondack Monsoon Autumn...It's Apple Chutney Time

Our weather has been wet wet wet...and still more wet. It is so muggy...more like July/August than September/October.

The garden is un-enterable because it so so muddy. We can't mow the grass because it never has a chance to dry out between the rains.

It's monsoon time in the Adirondacks!

Fortunately, our apple harvest is better than the last two years. Our Golden Delicious tree is infected with the apple-cedar fungus (pictured on these pages earlier this year). So it isn't doing too well. But the Cortland has always given us at least a small harvest (the first thing I ever cooked off our land the first year was some applesauce from that tree) and this year the apples are bigger and better than they have ever been! The apples look better (though they will never win any beauty contests) and are larger and better shaped than we've ever had. Oddly, the first batch of applesauce didn't turn the lovely blush color it has in the past. 

So I put up several quarts of Apple Chutney yesterday. The nice thing about this recipe, from my perspective, this particular year, was it helped me use up some of the good tomatoes I had left. Didn't get to do much in the way of sauce or stewed tomatoes at all. First, we didn't have the right kind of tomatoes this year (all Romas, some red, mostly yellow) and the ones we had, as I said, all burst on the vine with the rains.

The recipe is quite explicit that I am not allowed to taste it now for another six weeks.

Mrs. Robinson’s Apple Chutney

[with a special thanks to Hilary Robinson, who calls this "my mum's chutney"]

3# apples

1 lb brown sugar

2 t salt

1.8 pints malt vinegar

8 oz sultanas

½ t ground cloves

1# ripe tomatoes

1# onions

¼ t cayenne

2 oz crystalized ginger, chopped (or 2 t ground ginger)

all spices are approximate – adjust for taste.

1. Core and peel apples, chop, along with onions and tomatoes. Put all into a pan with the dry ingredients. Add vinegar, stir with a wooden spoon.
2. Bring to the boil, reduce heat until the mixture thickens – at least an hour – stirring occasionally.
3. When thickened and moisture reduced, dish into hot sterilized glass jars. Cover and seal. Leave to cool. Store in dark space for 6 weeks before using.

Dinner for Tom and Diane

My brother Tom and his wife are driving up from NYC enroute to a wedding this weekend in Connecticut. It's the first time they've visited us here, so I wanted to make a nice dinner. The menu:

Individual Cherry Tomato Tarts

Lemon-Garlic Marinated Chicken Breasts stuffed with Chicken and Spinach Sausage

served on a bed of

Creamy Stovetop Corn with Poblano Chiles and Creme Fraiche

Flourless Chocolate Cake with Gilded Raspberries

 

Jalapeno Jelly

Canning Season

Busy day...putting up caponata, applesauce and strawberry jam.

Final count: [left to right] four pints applesauce (gonna do an interesting apple chutney tomorrow that uses tomatoes, too!)...two and a half pints of caponata and five half pints of  strawberry freezer jam.

Monsoon Season and Visitors

Lots and lots of rain and lots and lots of visitors. Mary and Emma (sister and niece) were here ever so briefly (alas) and Bev and Clinton and Bob Rigdon from L.A. was supposed to get here, but Irene foiled his plans. Bev ended up stuck with us for three or four extra days. Mary and Emma...in and out! And I'm not just sucking up here...but don't they look like sisters rather than daughter and mother?

We went to the Southern Vermont Garlic Festival, which was tasty and fun. We cooked up a storm (an unnamed storm) including Billy's lovely rice pudding pie with the prune puree layer. We didn't have prunes, so this time he used apricots to good effect. We made tomato puddings and tomato tarts and homemade pasta with cherry tomatoes (noticing a theme here?)...hard to remember all the food we've done, but there were some merguez sausages with homegrown peppers and onions in there somewhere (that was transformed into Chicken cacciatore last night). But all I got pictures of was the garlic festival and Gramma Billy's Rice Custard Pie (renamed for the occasion.)

And it has been raining and raining and raining...my gauge (which I can't show because my computer is doing weird things) shows three inches in the last 48 hours. It's been more. It's a small gauge. The ground is soggy.

Bill's Birthday Dinner

With all the stuff I document on here with photos, I can't believe this is the only picture I got from our dinner party last night. Pre-hurricane, plenty muggy, but all outdoors with Bev and all our Granville (well, not all, but many) friends.

Anyway...dinner was:

Tomato Tarts with assorted cheeses and pates

Beef Tenderloin in Bourbon Mustard Glaze with Horseradish Crema

Creamy Corn with Poblanos and Creme Fraiche

Boston Baked Beans

Panzanella and Tomato Pudding

Strawberry Vanilla Cake