Travel Artichokes & Other Seasonal Bounty

Dill pickles.  8/17/2024

Matt and I cycled downtown for the Farmer's Market on Saturday.  We were on the prowl for corn, pickling cucumbers, and dill.   It was a beautiful morning.  We readily located the items on our list--plus a couple of tasty vegan pastries--and then returned home and set to putting the produce up for later enjoyment.  We started with the cucumbers.  We used Matt's grandma's recipe, as usual, and canned 11 pints of dill pickles.  I love packing pickle jars.  It is a fun challenge.  Like a puzzle.  Matt's family actually has a puzzle based on this concept.  It is a plastic jar with plastic pickles that can only be packed one specific way.  It is called Peter Piper's Fickle Pickle.  But, I digress.  Matt froze the corn, again using a family recipe passed down to us from his mom.  Matt noted that corn has gone up in price considerably over the past couple of years.  We might have to grow our own again next year.  

Matt had this tasty dinner waiting for me when I got home from the first day of fall classes at the college.  A burrito with homegrown peppers and zucchini, plus some local corn jazzed up elote-style that was phenomenal.   8/19/2024

While Matt shucked and chopped corn, I cooked down another batch of our homegrown tomatoes for dinner.   It was a beautiful blend of tomatoes (yellow, orange, red,) and the resulting sauce has a glorious sunset-golden hue.  Garden fresh really is a different thing.  I still find it spectacular to be a part of the process from seed to flower to fruit and then to make it into a meal within minutes or hours from the harvest.  Homegrown garlic, onion, peppers, tomatoes...melding together into a pot of perfection.  

These Wapsipinicon Peach Tomatos are quite lovely to behold.  8/17/2024

Homegrown tomatoes, onions, and herbs pureed with cashews into a creamy, flavorful rosé sauce based on one from Lauren Toyota's Vegan Comfort Classics cookbook.  We served it with beanballs and fusilli.  8/17/2024

Eggplant season is solidly in swing in the garden.  Eggplant will be on the menu almost daily for the next month or the yield gets ahead of us.  This is an annual challenge, but we're up for it.

The first basket of eggplant.  8/3/2024

Eggplants growing in the sunshiny garden.  8/3/2024

After harvesting more peppers on Monday I tried a new recipe from Lauren Toyota--a delicious red pepper relish.   I added a few ripe, red jalapenos to mine because they were there.  I have the first batch of cayenne peppers drying.  We will use them later in hot sauces and Indian cookery.  Peppers are my favorite vegetable.  I enjoy having a rainbow of colors available right out of the backdoor.  

More of the rosé pasta pictured above, but I fancied up these leftovers with a dollop of the red pepper relish.  It was an extra yummy upgrade.  8/19/2024

Bulls's Horn sweet peppers--one green and one red.  This has become our go-to sweet pepper variety.  The red pepper would end up in the Red Pepper Relish the next day.  8/18/2024

The onions have been harvested and are drying on screens in the garage.  It was a solid crop of baseball-sized fruits in red and yellow.  Their growth was slightly curtailed because a storm knocked them all over prematurely, but we're satisfied.  We use a lot of onions cooking from scratch like we do.  Matt suspects we grew about a four or five-month supply.  So that's cool.

Matt is determined to master onion growing.  He gets better and better with each practice.  This year he intends to let them dry longer as he thinks he has rushed this step with previous crops.  8/12/2024

The current star* of the garden is the row of artichokes.  This is our third year growing artichokes and they are just going gangbusters!  Matt harvested 16 of them in one go last night!  It has most certainly exceeded expectations.  They're being so productive that Matt has started taking them as a traveling treat.  He delights in being able to spread the bounty around.  He steamed up a half dozen for our friends during the Brewgrass fest while we were camped out in the middle of a field--melted butter and fresh lemon juice and all.  Some of our campers had never eaten a fresh artichoke before.  Matt seemed very pleased to have remedied that.   He brought a few over to Ryan and Bek's this weekend when we got together for cards.  Bek cooked them stuffed with minced garlic and we dipped them in lemon-butter.  Mmmmm.  So good.  ...and we've just scratched the surface of the harvest.  Next up, Matt will deep fry the artichokes following instructions from America's Test Kitchen.  It is fun to have so many artichokes that we feel free to experiment and share.

Matt inspects the ripeness of one of the first artichokes.  8/2/2024

The first harvest of artichokes.  8/3/2024

An appetizer of steamed artichoke with lemon butter.  8/4/2024

Matt taking his coffee on a morning stroll in the garden.  He specifically asked that I photograph the wild tangle of artichokes and all their fruits.  8/18/2024

When the primary artichoke is cut from the stalk the plant will grow more fruits on side branches.  The main one is usually the biggest, but the others are still worth eating!  Each plant can put out more than half a dozen of 'em.  8/18/2024

A minimalist dinner- three artichokes (with lemon butter, of course) and three bean patties each.  8/15/2024

The 16 artichoke haul.  We promptly ate a couple with dinner.  8/20/2024

In other garden experiments, Matt has grown tender pink celery stalks (pink celery!  Who knew?!?) and three kinds of colorful potatoes.  He grew a swell crop of shallots, too.  The Brussels sprouts are a little slow going.  It seems they didn't like all the heat.  Time will tell if that experiment pans out.  We tried a different variety of cucumber this year and I do not like it.  They've all been quite bitter.  It is slightly better when peeled, but still...bitter.

Some of the shallot harvest.  8/3/2024

Matt made tri-color potatoes for breakfast.  8/16/2024

Pink Celery.  8/20/2024

The apple tree is loaded.  One branch is actually touching the ground.  The beans have replaced the peas in the west bed.  The squash vines are flowering and starting to set fruit.  The zucchini are coming one after the other.

An Indian Feast--cashew stuffed eggplant, roasted coconut-chili zucchini, gingered eggplant mash, and curried lentils.  8/13/2024

I adore this time of year.  The fruits of so much care, energy, transformation, and love end up on my dinner plate every day, nourishing my body and soul.  We can enjoy seasonal recipes that only get dusted off during one particular window.  We marvel at the beauty of a cabbage leaf, the smell of fresh basil, and the taste of a sun-ripened, heirloom tomato.  It becomes clear how the changing seasons march forward with each first harvest of this or that.  And with the final harvest of this or that, too.  I've seen the early blush of color change in a few trees already.  Fall will be here in the blink of an eye.  I savor the offerings of these days literally and metaphorically.

The sunlight through this cabbage leaf stopped me in my tracks.  It made me think of the blood in my veins and of rivers running out to meet the sea.  Isn't it amazing?   8/18/2024

*And everyone knows the REAL star of the garden is Ginger.  Always.  :)

Ginger perched on the compost pile taking in her domain.  8/3/2024