So sad: tomato blight

Remember those beautiful, robust tomato plants I showed you a week ago, full of joy and excitement? Well, they are a thing of the past, ravaged by what you see here: late blight (not my photo–I didn’t have my camera). I’d noticed this devastation spreading in the community garden and a woman who I call Debbie Downer, who likes to visit my plot and tell me things won’t grow, had told Mr. Pea and I about while we weeded a couple of weeks ago. And today our poor plants had begun to croak. I had a feeling it was coming–late blight (the same disease that caused the Irish potato famine, isn’t that charming?) starts with brown spots on the stems, and I had spotted those a week or so ago. Today those spots were splitting and cracking, the leaves were blackening, what little fruit had grown (they’d just really started to set) were getting blotchy spots, which would ultimately rot the tomato and turn hard. I took what was growing and not blotchy off, pulled off the dead stuff, but I don’t think there’s much of a chance for the plants themselves.

Late blight is evidently not uncommon but typically comes later (thus the name), after harvesting. With all the rain we’ve had, and our unseasonably cool weather, it came faster. There have also been accusations levelled at big box stores such as home depot for the blight: evidently some of the plants they sold in the northeast were infected and then as they sat on shelves, the infected spread their spores to other plants, and then these plants were put in gardens, and, well, here we are.

Oh well. As Mr. Pea says, life doesn’t always go as planned, and really, they’re just plants. And as another gardener (who, incidentally, looked like Santa Claus and gave me a present of a zucchini from his garden–coincidence?) noted, at least we don’t depend on these tomatoes for our livlihoods or sustenance. That would be much worse, indeed.

No electricity, no bread.

Yesterday I made bread dough. I mixed it by hand, kneaded it for 15 minutes, set it to rise. Folded it. Let it rise. Formed into loaves. Let it rise. Here I made a fatal error and shoved it in the fridge about 2/3 of the way into the second rise so I could go get lunch. Took it out an hour later. Let it sit half an hour. I should have let it sit longer, but as you’ll see, it didn’t matter. Put it in the oven. Twenty minutes later, the power went out.

I have two dense bread-bricks, a product of both my desire for Mexican food (thus leaving the house) and the oven shutting off. No oven spring. I’m not even certain they’re cooked all the way through. I should find that out.

Oh well. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do! Had I let it rise longer, the bread still would have been a bust and overrisen, and ended up back in the fridge, as the power was out for 2 and a half hours.

Working with bits in the fridge: the stir-fry

Working with leftovers and odds and ends, as we discussed recently, is a nice skill to have. It keeps you from going hungry some nights of the week, and keeps you from tossing out otherwise usable food.  Today the Mr. and I went to a Mexican place in town for lunch (finally, some delicious, authentic Mexican food, just over the Hartford border) and we really weren’t terribly hungry for dinner.  Mr. Pea works on Tuesday evenings so if we make dinner, we have to have it on the table by 5.  We feel like old people.  He had a sandwich (something rare in our house, but his mom gave us some cold cuts over the holiday weekend) and ran out the door.  I dawdled for an hour, finally felt hungry, and then scratched my head in front of the fridge.  There was food, but most of it was intended for meals later in the week.  This left me with almost a full serving of cooked, cold quinoa; a little red onion; half a zucchini (meant for a meal, but I’m taking it, anyway, I figured), and garlic.  We’re pretty much out of oil and have no butter, so this was going to be interesting.

I started by chopping my veggies and warming my pan; I added what little canola oil was left (maybe a half-teaspoon), and added a touch of sesame oil.  I added the veggies and stirred them about.  Impatient, I added a little water and covered the pan.  A few minutes later my zucchini was softened and everything was ready.  There were eggs in the fridge, so I beat up one of those, squeaked a little more oil out of the canola bottle, and added both to the middle of the pan.  I cooked the egg, pushed it aside, and added the quinoa, a good splash of soy sauce, a grind of black pepper, and stirred it all about.  The end result was actually delicious.  I haven’t made quinoa in ages–those of you who have been reading this a long while might recall I cooked it a lot when I was actively losing weight–but it has a nubby texture and is high in protein and fiber.  All in all, it was a great dish made from fridge odds and ends–I saved some stuff from getting tossed in the garbage, and myself from going for take-out I’d regret later!

Two days of sun makes for a happy garden

Our garden plot has been growing merrily along, despite the torrential rains we have been getting with frequency lately. New England was fortunate to have lots of sun on the 4th of July, and lots of sun on the 5th of July, and now it’s the 6th and it’s still bright….

This makes my garden very, very happy. Though part of it is still muddy (we’re at the bottom of a small slope and under a tree, so it takes a while to dry out), this has meant that we didn’t get super dry while we were away (some plots look a little baked). And because we grew most of our garden from seed or very small seedlings with no miracle gro or anything like that, our plants for whatever reason coped well with the water–I’ve seen rotted tomatoes; my parents’ garden has rotted squash, stuff that began to grow nice and early but croaked with the over-abundance of moisture. Our squash is just getting to the flower-bud stage, and while we might be the last to get zucchini, we’re not tossing any out now.

Here are some pictures from today’s visit:

Purple pepper.  It’s pretty cool.  Not organic or heirloom and grown from a transplant, but cool nonetheless.

 

Swiss chard finally growing larger.

 

This tomato plant, when we first planted it as a tiny transplant, was immediately chomped–from the top–by some critter.  It slowly grew and is now a massive bush, covered in flowers and a few tiny tomatoes.  It’s some kind of heirloom cherry variety, but I can’t remember which.

 

 

Two brandywine tomatoes, growing much larger.

New Look!

I finally found a wordpress theme for the free wordpress that let me change the header. Truth be told, I don’t think I looked terribly hard before. Unfortunately adding it has undone some formatting in the older posts. Sorry about that!

Community garden update

For those of you counting along, there are:

2 growing brandywine tomatoes
4 growing cherry tomatoes
9 huge tomato plants, including the one that got chomped right after planting
5 or 6 growing peppers
48…onions?  green onions?  One bolted and had to be harvested today–it didn’t form a bulb and was more like a green onion.  Weird.
LOTS of lettuce.  Constant salads!
Lots of growing spinach.  We put some on pizza this weekend.
Growing chard.
Growing carrots.  Does anyone know when I’m supposed to know/how I’m supposed to know
when to harvest them?
Three growing zucchini plants, finally getting some buds.  There were supposed to be four,
but chipmunks took the seeds.  Twice.  Little buggers.
Two growing winter squash.
5 happy hills of growing cucumbers.  
Zinnias and snapdragons.
And two broccoli.  

 

Pictures to come–I forgot the camera today!  Boy, four days of sun and things are just growing by leaps and bounds.

Breaking the Hostess Habit: hand pies

Back when we lived in Boston, the Mr. and I could walk to 7-11 in about 3 minutes. At our last place, CVS was a 5 minute shuffle. We developed a bit of what you might call a Hostess Habit: every so often, we’d have a terrible sweet tooth descend and off one of us would go to the store to get Hostess cupcakes (orange-yellow for me, chocolate with vanilla for him), Twinkies, and the most decadent of all, the Hostess Pie. Apple was our go-to flavor. None of these were especially tasty but they did the job when nothing else was around. The pies in particular were really not as good as I remember them being when I was a kid, which I’m sure is a trick in the old memory. Do you remember the pudding pies, too? They had some marketed as a tie-in for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don’t think they make pudding pies at all anymore.

Anyway, we both knew this little habit wasn’t terribly good for us. Even if we don’t think about the calories themselves, there were all those trans-fats, all that high fructose corn syrup, that lack of actual food, to think of. So that was one of the reasons why we made our own Twinkies last winter. And last night, after Mr. Pea had a particular craving for a pie which could not be sated (nowhere in walking distance to get them and I’m not driving to Stop and Shop for a fake pie) and ended up sleeping it off, I prowled the internet for information on making one’s own hand pies. Really, they are just glorified turnovers, and not hard to make at all. We now have a stash of pies in the freezer, ready to pop into the oven when needed, equally calorie-laden to their fake brothers but much, much tastier. Ours feature a buttery pie crust filled with cinnamon apples. You can’t beat that with anything wrapped in cellophane! Sure, they took more time than running to the store, but now that a store isn’t quickly reached, this just makes more sense.

My recipe featured a pie crust you can find here, only I swapped in regular butter for vegan butter: Pie Crust

I made a filling by peeling and chopping two red delicious apples (happened to be what we had on hand) and cooking them over medium-low heat for about ten minutes with a couple tablespoons of water, a good sprinkle of cinnamon, and a teaspoon or so of sugar. Because your pies won’t bake as long as a traditional one, you have to get the apples started ahead of time. You just want them to soften up a little and have a little bit of sauce.

I rolled out my dough in small portions. I had enough filling for eight pies, but I rolled my dough quite thin (1/16″ or so) and had enough for probably 12 or 14 crusts. Each one was cut about 6″ wide (I just used a lid to a tupperware container and traced around it with a sharp knife). You can adjust all of these measurements as needed. Place each crust on a cookie sheet and drop a little over a tablespoon of filling on one half. Again, how much depends on your crust size. Then fold other half over, roll up edges, and pinch closed. Repeat.

Brush each one with milk, dust with sugar, cut a couple steam vents, and pop into a 375 degree oven. I started checking them at 18 minutes and the ones that were not crowded on a pan (I had 2 on one, six on another) were about done then. The other sheet took about 10 more minutes to brown. In other words, just keep your eye on them. Allow to cool, eat one, and freeze the rest. I’m guessing they can be heated through in a 350 oven in about 20 minutes, again, depending on size. A toaster oven would be great for this, but I don’t have one, so the microwave and perhaps the broiler will have to do.

The possibilities here are endless, though I read that if you use something especially juicy, like berries, you should place some parchment beneath the pies so they don’t leak and become impossible to remove without destroying them.

Working with leftovers

As a rule I prefer to eat leftovers over sandwiches or anything else for lunch.  Sometimes, though, leftovers are kind of odds and ends–a bit of chicken, half a zucchini, whatever.  On Saturday night, rather than order pizza, we worked with what we had in the fridge and cabinets to make dinner.  This isn’t anywhere near ‘pantry eating’ as Molly at mommycoddle has done (that’s intense–a whole week without shopping), but it got us through the evening.  Course, then we spent all of Sunday visiting and had to order the pizza that night, but better that than take-out two nights in a row.

On this particular occasion, this is what we had handy:  half a cooked chicken breast from a previous night’s dinner; some carrots; onions and garlic; some leftover wine from dinner a few days before; half-and-half and butter; and the usual array of spices/oils.  Oh, and frozen peas.  Plus we had a quarter-box of spaghetti and a little less of linguine.  See where this went?  We boiled the water and cooked the pasta; in the meantime we sauteed half a thinly sliced onion in olive oil, adding some garlic, diced carrots, and eventually peas, adding wine to the pan and swirling in some cream (1/4 cup, I’d guess?), a sprinkle of dried basil, and salt and pepper.  The chicken was added, diced, near the end to just warm through.  Pasta was then tossed into the pot, tossed around.  Bowls were topped with plenty of grated parmesan.

Some people are terrified of this style of cooking, as I guess they lack the confidence to just pull stuff out of cabinets and call it dinner.  Some folks feel they need a recipe or risk messing up a pile of ingredients.  Working with what you have, though, is a skill worth cultivating and a confidence worth working on.  Once you have it, you eliminate the problem of throwing away a lot of leftover bits, can make dinner on the fly, and save money (I, being cheap, think that’s the best part).  Heck, if there had been more to work with I’d have done it again on Sunday.  The lesson, I guess, is that sometimes when you think you’re all out of food, if you look around, you’ll find out otherwise.

Strawberry city!

Know what happens when you get nearly 7 pounds of strawberries? You have to come up with ways to use them–quickly. That day I sliced about a pound or so and sugared them, baked a shortcake, picked up some whipped cream, and we had strawberry shortcake for dessert after dinner with the neighbors.

As an aside, I want to tell you how wonderful it is to have nice neighbors with whom you can have dinner and dessert, rather than drug dealing who-knows-whats whom we recently enjoyed.

But that meant we still had about 5.5 pounds. I left them on the counter overnight, and lost probably a quarter-pound as some which were superripe molded. Then I knew I had to move. I had to make jam. Or try.

I’d hoped to make jam without extra sugar–you can buy certain kinds of pectin for that. But Stop and Shop, the only store in my area that carried pectin at all, didn’t have any, so I opted for the regular stuff. We made a half-batch, carefully following the recipe inside the Sure-Jell package, which used up a loosely-packed 5 cups of unprocessed berries, or about 2.5 cups of puree, made by mashing washed and hulled berries with a potato masher, a job Mr. Pea enjoyed thoroughly. The jam seems to have set ok–it’s still not as thick as store jam, but I’m ok with that. We ended up with three half-pints, three quarter-pints, and just some we put in the fridge.

Still, we had lots of berries left. Some we made up to make sure we ate the end of the shortcake, but today I turned about a pint–a cup, sliced–into Strawberry Bread. My recipe is a slightly modified one from a cooking blog–one that’s new to me–called eat!craft!live! Clearly these are my people.

The recipe there sounded fairly healthy, even, than others I’d seen–swapping some oil for applesauce, some white flour for wheat. My only change was to swap out some of the applesauce, which I didn’t have, for yogurt. I learned today that in place of oil, you can use 1/2 of the required amount plus 3/4 of the rest. So, if you had to swap out a half-cup of oil, you could use a quarter cup plus 3 T of plain yogurt. Or something like that. Since I made some yogurt last week that was still in the fridge, I put it to use.

Here is the recipe from eat!craft!live!, with my adjustment.

1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 pint strawberries, washed and sliced (about a cup)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup canola oil
2 T plus 2 t (approximately) plain yogurt

Mix dry ingredients, except sugar; blend wet ingredients, including sugar. Add wet to dry and scrape into a greased loaf pan. Bake at 350* for 45 minutes.

We were a little skeptical at first, having never had strawberry bread, but the aroma wafting from the oven was pretty fantastic, and the bread itself is quite divine. I had a tiny bit of the bottom stick, which was too bad, but meant that I had an excuse to eat those bits of berry and bread before I could wash the pan. I bet it’ll be even better tomorrow, with a cup of coffee.

Berries!

Finally New England got some sun today, for the whole day. We have had more rain than we need lately, and it will return for four days or so starting tomorrow, so we took advantage of today’s lovely weather and went berry picking at Dondero Orchard, a wonderful multi-fruit and veggie outpost! Not only can you pick your own strawberries, blueberries and raspberries but they also have peaches, plus a bakery. They make killer apple donuts. I’d eat another one now if I had it.

I haven’t picked strawberries in years, and nor had Mr. Pea. Really my only memory of strawberry picking was when I was a little kid and my brother even littler, and he put his hand in a berry plant that happened to also contain a bee’s nest. He was stung all over and puffed up like a balloon. We lived in the sticks and had one car, and his allergic reaction was the reason we ended up with two cars shortly thereafter. Sometimes one needs benadryl in a hurry.

We picked nearly 7 pounds of berries today. Already some are sliced in the fridge with sugar, getting ready for tonight’s shortcake. Some are sitting in a colander, drying, in order to be frozen. Then there are some 5 other pounds, sitting in their box, wondering what they’ll be. Some we’ll just eat in our granola. Many are going to end up (gulp) as jam. Wish me luck.

The Mr., picking berries