Clockwise from the top: Brussels sprouts, two giant squashes, two hot peppers, some Asian pears and four sweet peppers. Our CSA season is half over!
Clockwise from the top: four more ears of corn, some banana peppers, two egg plants (made into baba ganoush), more peaches, plums, some woody green beans, and yet another watermelon (made into some rather passable ice cream).
Clockwise from the top: four ears of corn, some of the best peaches ever, more bell peppers, more tomatoes and another box of cherry tomatoes.
Clockwise from the top: yet more potatoes, beets, four ears of corn, bell peppers, Brussels sprouts and a giant bulb of garlic. We made the peppers, potatoes and Brussels sprouts along with pineapple and onions into kebobs for the grill. Tasty!
Clockwise from the top: cabbage, cucumbers, tomatoes, a few habaneros, a couple very-ripe peaches, potatoes, and another watermelon. The stand-out item from this week’s food was a habanero peach salsa. We made tamales (with real corn husks and everything) and topped them with this sweet, spicy salsa. Yum yum.
The sixteenth of July marked the fifth anniversary of our wedding. In celebration, we decided to order Mission: Impossible …all of it. We scoured the web and found a mega-bonus pack with all seven seasons. That’s right, we are talking about the indispensible television series straddling the 60s and 70s. Steven Hill, Barbara Bain, Martin Landau, Greg Morris, Peter Lupus (and of course) Peter Graves really bring it. So many improbable high jinks!
Our tomato plants have been bursting with tomatoes. We didn’t measure them, but in early July we had half a brown paper sack of them. What to do with all the fruits of summer is always the challenge. We made some marinara sauce with a good number of them, but we also tried something new for us: oven-dried tomatoes. It’s a way to get something like a sun-dried tomato without all those weeks in the back of a Tuscan ox cart. Based on advice from both Martha Stewart and Pim Techamuanvivit, Matt cobbled together a recipe that seemed like it would work for our tomatoes in our oven. 
Basically, you halve, quarter or thickly slice the tomatoes, lightly salt them then put them in a 200 °F oven overnight. The key is to get them hot, but not boil them (212 °F). That dries the tomatoes out. Preserving them further afterward in oil, cans or the freezer is up to you. Matt started a batch at 11 PM one night. He halved the smaller and quartered the larger ones. You can see them before going into the oven in the top picture. Baking anything for 8 hours seems crazy, but…
The next morning the tomatoes were… somewhat dried out. The above picture shows the tomatoes after about 9 hours in the oven. There was nothing to do, but to keep them in the heat – all day. Eventually, the tomatoes did start to dry out. After a shocking twenty-four hours in the oven there were still some squishy, moist parts, but some of them were starting to char. Splitting the difference and not wanting to leave them for a second night, Matt proclaimed them good enough. Below is the result. They taste fabulous, but we’re not sure they are worth 24 hours of cooking. A few days later, Matt tried a second batch but this time he sliced the tomatoes into half-inch slices to start with. The thinner sections really helped. The results were about the some, but it only took 8 hours to get there. Give it a try!
Clockwise from the top: basil, another watermelon, more potatoes, cherry tomatoes and not-quite-ripe peaches. We turned the basil into more pesto. We ate lots of pesto for a while there. For the watermelons we got out our juicer for the first time in literally years and juiced them along with come kiwi fruits and then froze it in an attempt to make a sort of sorbet. We ended up with what the recipe described, we just didn’t like that texture. It was more like a watermelon snow cone than sorbet. We ended up letting it melt again and drinking it as juice! The peaches ended up as a bit of cobbler.
Clockwise from the top: basil, garlic, beets, potatoes, a watermelon, tomatoes. We made pesto.
Clockwise from the top: more blueberries, two cabbages, three onions, green beans, cilantro, pie apples. Grasshoppers doesn’t deliver on the week that contains the Fourth of July so the week before, they gave us stuff that lasts a little longer.
Clockwise from the top: squash and zucchini, beet greens, dill, fennel, green onions, garlic, a cabbage and blueberries. We love the variety we get in our share of veggies.
Matt’s brother and parents set up some raised beds in their back yard this year. His parents have wanted to grow “Grandma’s beans” and various herbs. Michael wants to become some kind of horticultural mad scientist so having a garden plot is a step in that direction. They left us a spot in one of these beds so we could plant a few plants of our own. At the end of April we went to our favorite local plant store, The Plant Kingdom, and bought two Serrano plants and two tomatoes. We planted a “big boy” tomato and a “better boy” tomato. Hilarious names.
Like the atomic weapons these tomato names make Matt think of, our plants exploded! We actually had to move the Serranos out from under the shadow of the tomatoes. In mid-June the plants were huge! Matt’s parents were getting cucumbers, beets, various kinds of beans and peas, peppers and tomatoes from pots as well as sage and basil. Also it’s been a really good year for morning glory – which seems to snake and twine its way into everything. Out of all of those plants, the biggest and fullest in the garden are our tomato plants. Matt had to make special trips to stake them up and help them support their own weight several times. Our first harvest was small, but it’s fantastic to have fresh vegetables from plant you planted. Thanks to all who you who did the daily watering!
Clockwise from the top: lettuce, squash and zucchini, savoy cabbage, green onions, Swiss chard and more garlic scapes!
Clockwise from top: kale, two heads of lettuce, snow peas, turnips, cauliflower and garlic scapes. Like many people new to CSA we had never heard of scapes before. It’s the flowering stem of the garlic plant that is harvested before it flowers in order to promote bulb growth. It has a mild garlic flavor and you can use them where you might otherwise use green onions or garlic. We are instant converts to how great they are. Matt used some of the scapes and snow peas and made some of the best stir fry ever. The turnips ended up in pasties. The kale got cooked with garlic, sun dried tomatoes and white wine.
The last of our younger siblings is done with grade school. Maya’s sister, Neha, graduated on 2 June. That’s her in the photo above, taken from a long way off. That’s about as clear at it ever was. We are so glad to have no more graduations to attend. No matter how inspiring the invocation, not matter how sincere the representative of the Board of Education, no matter how “dignified” the audience, it’s still a long, long list of names of people you don’t know. Let us show you how we feel about graduations.
Of course, celebrating the achievement of four years of high school is nice. Family comes into town. There is cake. Special foods are made. And there are gifts to give and get excited about. Congratulations Neha! Now, comes the real fun.
The second week of our CSA introduced us to a new vegetable: garlic greens. That’s exactly what it sounds like, the greens from a bulb of garlic. The greens are at the top of the above picture. A lot of them went in some chili we made. We used them instead of onions. 
This year we bought a share in a CSA. That has nothing to do with the War Between the States. It’s Community Supported Agriculture. Specifically we joined Grasshoppers Distribution. We really miss all the farmers’ markets we could go to in California, but this might be even better. We picked up our first share (actually, we got a half share) on 19 May. We got (going clockwise from upper right) arugula, a baby bok choy, green onions, radishes, spinach, a bag of salad greens and a quart of strawberries! What a haul. The hardest thing about picking up a half bushel of vegetables every week is that you have to use them all before they go bad. Sometimes it’s a challenge. That first week we made:
So, jumping back into posting last September didn’t pan out… Since we have a friend whom recently had good things to say about blogging and a friend that has just starting up a blog, Matt is inspired to get ours rolling again. Here it goes!
Last month we went on a summer camp-out with a bunch of friends. It’s always nice to go out to the woods, or least to the edge to the woods. We camped at Clifty Falls State Park in Indiana. Matt camped there many times as a youth and it was where we went for our second (and so far last) annual just-the-two-of-us camping trip. We know the park well.
There is a nature center and a couple playgrounds and a “scenic” view of some smokestacks by the river, but the real jewel of Clifty is that it’s a great place for hiking. There are short and long and very long trails. There are moderate and rugged and very rugged trails. Some trails work their way between the various buildings of the camp and some go right off the edge of the river valley and plunge to the bed of Clifty Creek. It’s all rather invigorating. Oh, plus there are waterfalls.
