Monthly Archives: July 2009

Tiny but good:  Year 3 of a home-grown seedling

“Mama, looook!  Here’s one that’s ready!”

Other than the beans, the squash, the potatoes, the cucumbers, the tomatoes/peppers/eggplants that populate the harvest baskets at this time of year, it’s quite fun to have something that is special.

Would that I lived in an area where I could get rootstock for artichokes!  Now THERE would be some tasty plants.  As it is, the globe artichokes grown from seed are tasty, but not the same.  Just don’t tell my daughter because she thinks they’re wonderful as they are.

Banner year for the tomatillos

It’s an odd time in the garden and in our food storage systems.  We’re preparing for the onslaught that is the summer produce season, and we’re cleaning out our stored goods to make room for the new things.  And some things are ripening when others are not:  my peppers and tomatillos, for example, are going great guns whilst the tomatoes are only hinting at turning red.  And some stored goods are just plain GONE, like the all-important foostuff that is SALSA.

I took advantage of our daughter’s overnight trip to her grandparents’ to make a very hot and tasty soup that made use of both the new produce and the frozen/canned stuff that needed to be used up.  At the same time, I made an emergency quart or two of some mostly tomatillo salsa, with jalapenos and yellow Hungarian peppers, corn and canned green (color, not ripeness) tomatoes, garlic, cilantro, vinegar and fresh onions.   She won’t object to something spicy if she doesn’t get to eat it!  And both the soup and the salsa were nice and fiery.

This soup takes a while, both in prep and in time cooking it; if you are bound to spend your days in the kitchen anyway, this is a great soup to make while you’re doing other things.  You can skip the chicken if you want a vegetarian soup, but I would add some olive oil and some cooked white beans for fat and protein.

El’s Hellfire Tortilla Soup*

serves 4-6

Soup base:

• 3-4 small jalapenos or other hot pepper
• 7-8 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
• 10 or so peppercorns
• a 2″ piece of cinnamon stick
• one medium yellow onion, cut into thin rings
• one medium sweet red pepper, seeded and cut into thin rings

You are going to make a paste of these items, caramelized and roasted, above.  In one small cast-iron skillet, place the jalapenos, garlic, peppercorns and cinnamon stick on medium heat and roast until the peppers and garlic cloves are slightly blackened, turning frequently.  You can smash the peppers down with a spatula to ensure all sides get toasty, but don’t burst the pepper itself: it’s steaming nicely on the inside.  Set aside to cool.  Into the bowl of a mortar, squeeze the garlic out of its skin, add the peppercorns and crumble the cinnamon stick; pound to a grind and then add the seeded, lightly chopped peppers and pound to a paste.   In a large cast-iron pan or in a hot oven on a cookie sheet, caramelize the onions and the pepper (use no oil) until the onions are golden and the pepper is cooked through.  Add this and the contents of the mortar to the bowl of a food processor, whiz to a pulp.

Soup:

• Chicken:  I used a very large (humongo) breast:  I blanched the breast in a bit of salted water until slightly cooked (about 20 minutes), then I cut the cooled breast into small-ish pieces, adding it back to the broth (about 2 cups of liquid)
• 1 quart tomato sauce or stewed tomatoes
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 teaspoon each:  ground cumin, thyme, Mexican oregano
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Fresh corn:  about two ears’ worth, chopped off the cobs
• 1 green or other mild-ish pepper, diced
• 2-3 tomatillos, diced
• 3 or so corn tortillas:  brown them individually in a cast-iron pan then slice into finger-sized pieces
• minced parsley or cilantro
• juice of one lime

Add the soup base, chicken, chicken stock, spices, salt and pepper into a large stockpot and bring to a boil; reduce to a very low heat and simmer gently for a couple of hours.  About an hour before serving, add the corn, pepper, and tomatillos and continue cooking.  Check for seasonings and adjust accordingly.   Immediately before serving, fish the bay leaves out of the soup and add the tortillas, parsley/cilantro and lime juice.

Garnishes:

• Green onions
• Cilantro
• Sour cream
• Queso blanco
• Avocado
• Lime
• More roasted, chopped tortillas

*I got the beginnings of this recipe from somewhere but it’s gone in the sands of time.  I changed it enough, anyway, to probably claim it as my own, so that’s what I am doing!

Yay!  Another opportunity to show off my latent O.C.D.!

Drying fruit is a fairly straightforward affair.  Preserving vegetables, both as frozen and as dried, requires a few more steps for you but fruit, thankfully, is easy-peasy.  Most of us have an oven, therefore, most of us can dry some fruit, especially if you’d like to try fruit leather.  In point of fact, fruit leather is the only thing I had heretofore tried to preserve, as I didn’t have a dehydrator of my own, either plug-in or solar.  The picture above is one of the school’s 3 dehydrators, liberated by yours truly for the upcoming blueberry onslaught.  Today, though, it’s strawberries.

Evapotranspiration is a mighty big word but it includes a concept (transpiration) you are probably already familiar with, even if you don’t think you are, and evaporation, which you already know.  All produce, all plants, transpire (wick water) as part of “what they do,” and the extreme form of this otherwise natural occurrence is dried produce, dried leaves.  There’s a certain formula of heat plus wind plus relative humidity and soil moisture that farmers look to to see how their crops are growing. On a global scale, evapotranspiration is how water is exchanged in the world (rain to trees/plants and back again), but in your kitchen or in your back yard, you can use it to help preserve your fruit harvest.

I am all in favor as you know of things you DON’T plug in to an outlet, and there are plenty of sites for solar food dehydrators out there.  Here’s one dear to my heart as it’s similar to the chicken tractor, plus it geeks out on the whole process of how it best happens (I do loves me some engineering).  Try this at home!!  Me, I am time-crunched this summer so the plug-in is the way I will go, for now.  These strawberries dried in six hours, and will keep for six months.

Nothing like a little O.C.D. with your project to get you wound up!

SO:  it’s fruit season in this hemisphere:  gotta make hay while that sun shines!  The non-fresh-fruit season is entirely too long in my humble opinion.  Freezing is the best way to preserve any fruit’s nutrients if you can’t eat it fresh. But like anything, freezing has an expiration date:  it is best to eat all frozen fruit within six months of freezing it.

We *love* fruit smoothies around here.  In point of fact, smoothies are the primary way we eat our fruit in the off-season.  I make our own kefir and yogurt, and it’s very easy to just run downstairs with the blender and grab a handful of frozen berries to whiz up for a treat.

Strawberries, cranberries and blueberries freeze wonderfully “dry,” that is, by themselves.  Cherries do too but one should pit them beforehand as trying to do it afterward leads to a wad of cherry mush in your hand.  The best way to handle these berries  is to get fruit at its absolute height of freshness, wash, stem and sort them and place them on cookie sheets.   As you can see one can go a little nutty with the sorting part.  Stick them in the freezer until hard then bag them up, squeezing as much air out of the bags as possible.  You’re now able to open the bags at will this winter and grab what you need, leaving the rest behind.

I also slice fruits like peaches and nectarines and strawberries and coat them with a bit of honey before bagging them up.  You could also cover sliced fruit with a bit of sugar or superfine sugar.  Coating them with a sweetener tends to help them retain their color and their flavor.  Making a syrup of one part honey to four parts hot water also works well:  the fruit is stored “wet” this way and keeps most of its flavor and nutrients intact.  And indeed one can freeze mashed or pulped fruit “wet” too, without sugar.

You know, most thawed fruit is but a pale simulacrum of its fresh self, so for the most part all my frozen fruit ends up in smoothies or cooked items.  I also treat freezing as a form of suspended animation if I have a huge harvest (like, the 30 pounds of cherries from last Saturday) that I can’t get to immediately:  pulling out the bag to make jam or baked goods is a true time-saver.  And I am always looking for more time….