Vegetables – Week Ten

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!

Vegetables – Week Nine

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.

Five Years!

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!

On the actual day of our anniversary, we went to the restaurant where we were right before we officially started dating. Awww! It’s the Bearno’s by UofL. That one is good. Our favorite meal there is to get a pair of house salads and an order of the garlic cheese bread. We asked for lots and lots of sauce, and they actually brought us enough. It’s been a great five years, and it keeps getting better!

How to Oven-Dry Tomatoes

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!

Vegetables – Week Eight

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.

Vegetables – Week Seven

Clockwise from the top: basil, garlic, beets, potatoes, a watermelon, tomatoes. We made pesto.

A History of Repeated Injuries and Usurpations

Injuries and Usurpations... You know, like calling “together Legislative Bodies at Places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the Depository of their public Records,” like affecting “to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power,” and like transporting folks “beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences.” You know, it’s what the Fourth of July is all about.

Also, it’s about apple-blueberry pie, fireworks and playing with glow sticks. Happy 234th to the United States of America!

Vegetables – Week Six

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.

Vegetables – Week Five

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.

What We Are Growing

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!

Vegetables – Week Four

Clockwise from the top: lettuce, squash and zucchini, savoy cabbage, green onions, Swiss chard and more garlic scapes!

Vegetables – Week Three

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.

A Graduation

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.

We Want a House by a Lake

To get the summer of 2010 officially started our friend David invited a bunch of friends to his family’s lake house. We spent Memorial Day in and on the water! This was Nolan Lake (or something like that). It’s one of those long and twisty man-made lakes that started as a river. It’s all operated by the Army Corps of Engineers (or whomever) and so there are a limited number of docks. We had to hike down a hill and cross through a little woods (very small) in order to get to the nearest one. All that is fine, but it’s carrying all the stuff you want (a book, a boat, sun block, something to drink, various floatation devices) that is the hard part.
Maya was brave enough to actually get in the water. Matt sat on the dock and watched the fun. Unlike our host and most of our friends being in the water just isn’t something he enjoys. The mood has to strike him just right. There was a paddle boat available as well so we took that out and about. Moving a paddle boat is hard work! It’s especially hard since this particular model was back heavy and the actual paddles tended to lift out of the water. It worked better for a third person to sit right on the front of the boat and weight it down a bit, though this was somewhat awkward. The canoe was better and we waited out turn for that too. We love canoeing! We can’t wait till we have a place to keep one because we will totally get one. Maya always has to steer. Matt is okay with this. We make a great team.
The fun ended when a light storm rolled in. Lightning and water and a metal canoe is just not an altogether safe combination. Well, the fun in the lake ended, but that was not the end of the fun. There was music to listen to, star charts to peruse, meat to grill, cheese balls and brownies to consume. It was a potluck supper. We contributed the salad: romaine, tomatoes, carrots, celery, nuts, gorgonzola, olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
After dinner, we played with sparklers on the deck. David took this really neat shot of Matt surrounded by fire. He took a shot of David “eating” fire, but it didn’t come out well. There were also satellites to notice in the night sky and lots of conversations to have. Maya and Matt went to bed at a decent time, but we gather the fun continued long into the night. In the morning (Memorial Day) David made blueberry pancakes. We all went back to the water. It was a bit more of a relaxing atmosphere, rather than a celebratory atmosphere. About noon we straightened up the house and rolled out. It was lest then 24 hours, but we managed to pack in a lot of enjoyment.
We discussed it with Sarah and Brandon and decided we need a family lake house. It would be nice to have a retreat for those long weekends; a base for exploration of the land, water and space; a place to keep our canoe. Thank you, David and family for sharing your house with us! It was good times.

Vegetables – Week Two

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.
As for the other things (from left to right along the bottom) we a have: field greens, strawberries, turnip greens, romaine, bok choy and broccoli. It was another week of salads and stir fry.