What to do with the cherry tomatoes

You know that scene in The Return of the King where Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn are in the cave with the ghost army, and all the millions of skulls coming tumbling down?

Now think cherry tomatoes instead of skulls. That's what I feel like.

One of the things that can catch inexperienced gardeners unaware is the bounty. Everyone's heard the apocryphal stories of the sneak zucchini attack-- some hapless gardener plants 10 zucchinis in a fit of madness and can't get rid of them, so they leave them on some unsuspecting neighbor's porch in the middle of the night.

This year, as part of the Eat Real Food challenge at Not Dabbling in Normal, I decided to see if I could preserve enough food to make it into January before resorting to store bought (since I'm trying to stay local and seasonal). I planted twice as many tomatoes as usual, plus 6 cherry tomatoes, thinking I'd eat the cherries and preserve the full size.

And like the newbie that I'm not, I got caught unaware-- I've got cherries out the wazzoo. About 4-5 quarts so far, with double that ripening as I write. They make great snacks, and a friend is taking 2 quarts (plus some corn, and though she doesn't know it yet, refrigerator pickles, not to mention, ahem, zucchini) in payment for a design job, bless her, but what to do with the rest?

Cherry Tomato Eggplant Bruschetta
1 quart Cherry Tomatoes (about 60-80 tomatoes, depending on the size)
1 eggplant
garlic to taste (let's say 3 large cloves)
2+ T olive oil plus 1 T olive oil
Fresh herbs (basil is nice, also parsley, also oregano)
Salt and pepper

Adjust quantities if you have 80 pounds of cherry tomatoes, like I appear to.

Peel and dice eggplant and dredge it with salt. Let it sit for 30 minutes to an hour, until some liquid has accumulated. Rinse, pat dry, and macerate in 2 tablespoons olive oil until thoroughly absorbed. Quarter or dice the tomatoes, chop the herbs very fine, press the garlic. Mix it all together with the remaining olive oil. At this point you can either roast it in a cool oven (300-325F/150-160C) for 45-55 minutes, or cook it in a skillet at high heat for about 5 minutes. Cool and eat right away, or spoon the hot bruschetta into hot jars and heat preserve. For a sweet garlic taste, roast a head of garlic whole first, then whip that with the olive oil before mixing it all together.

Cherry Tomato Salsa
Use any basic salsa recipe, just with quartered cherry tomatoes instead of diced full-sized tomatoes. Here's one from mykitchenaddiction.com:

1 pint cherry tomatoes, quartered
1 red onion, finely diced
1 jalapeño, minced
Juice from 1/2 of a lemon (I'd rather use lime, but she uses lemon)
1/4 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
Kosher salt

Toss the cherry tomatoes, red onion, and jalapeño together in a small mixing bowl. Squeeze the lemon (um, lime?) juice over the mixture, and stir in the fresh cilantro. Season to taste with salt. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes prior to serving.

Cherry Tomato Paste
You need at least 3 quarts of cherry tomatoes to end up with a pint of paste, or a quart of sauce. Put the tomatoes into a sauce pan with a little water (maybe a quarter cup, just to keep them from burning until they start to release their own liquid). Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until all the tomatoes have lost their shape. Run through progressively finer sieves in a food mill, until the seeds and skin are separated. Compost the seeds and skin, or use them as the base for stock. (Then compost them.) Return the tomato-y liquid to the pan and cook down by half (i.e. keep cooking and stirring until half or more of the water has simmered off.) Spoon hot paste into hot jars (1 cup for paste, larger for a thinner paste, larger still for a sauce consistency) and heat seal. Since cherry tomatoes have a high sugar content, for extra insurance against spoiling add a little lemon juice, citric acid or vinegar. (Do this to taste. You don't want your tomato paste to be sour. For additional insurance, store these cold.) If you like, you can add salt, spices, garlic or onion to this, but I like the flexibility of a pure paste.

Dried Cherry tomatoes
Cut your tomatoes in half and lay between two clean screens. Set out in the sun for 2-3 days; bringing them in overnight. (from the gardener behind Read Between the Limes). Colleen Vanderlinden, the organic gardening guru at About.com, says she does this with her grape tomatoes especially.

More tweeted advice:
Canning

Freezing

Thanks to all my tweeps for the ideas!

I relish the summer!

No words of wisdom today, just a wonderful summer relish, and a really bad pun

Spicy Peach Relish
for every 4 medium peaches:

1 bell pepper (red is the best aesthetically, but any sweet bell will do)
1-2 hot pepper of choice (I used Shishito because that's what I have growing)
1 small sweet onion
1 medium cucumber
Zest from 2 limes

Brine:
1/4 cup peach preserves
1 T balsamic vinegar
Juice from 2 limes
2 tablespoons minced fresh mint or cilantro (flavor will be quite different depending which one you use)
1/4 teaspoon salt

Peel, seed and finely dice all fruits. For a hotter relish, don't seed the hot peppers. If you don't want your relish too hot, seed the peppers, or use only some of the seeds.

Heat the brine, pour over fruit mixture, put in fridge overnight. Ladle into sterilized jars and heat seal.

A tweep asks "okay to put in fridge overnight, rather than hot mix into hot jars?" Someone correct this if it's wrong-- do I need to reheat? Don't want to kill anyone! @Canvolution says "make it a fridge relish; can't tell how acid it is with all those veg!"

Serve with chicken or seafood, or over a leafy salad.

"What the hell" gardening

There are lots of gardeners with impressive, even terrifying, depth of knowledge. There are gardeners who can build any structure needed for any type of plant, and ones who know exactly how to build soil or which treatment to use for a sick plant, based on a glance. There are gardeners who not only know the names of, but plant dozens if not hundreds of tomato varieties, and also can tell you what they taste like, and whether they are "slicing" or "paste" tomatoes. (There's a difference? I think I've been doing it wrong.)

There are gardeners who know what to do with tomatillos.

I confess when I started getting active online I was extremely intimidated by gardeners who knew the difference between tagetes and calendula, which I always just called "marigold," (I sound like I have clue, yes? Don't be fooled). They have the scientific names for dozens of plants at the tips of their tongues, and always know which named variety of lily, or iris, was growing in their own backyards, not to mention yours.

And then there are the "what the hell" gardeners:

• The rabbits ate most of the climbing beans' stalks, and all the leaves, but they don't look so bad, so what the hell, I'll leave them.
• Damn, a squirrel took a bite out of that tomato, but it doesn't look so bad. What the hell, I'll pick it and just cut off the nommed bits.
• Whoah! Winter melon will climb up a bean trellis, who knew? What the hell, I'll just add some supports for it and see what happens.
• The potted peppers don't look so good. What the hell, I'll throw in some bean seeds; beans fix nitrogen, (or something) right? That should help.
• Hey- there are turnips coming up from last year. What the hell, let's see what happens if I just let them go to seed.
• Are Vermont cranberry beans dry beans or shell beans? What the hell, let's pick some and see how they taste.
• I think those are aphids at the top of the 12-foot-tall corn, where I can't reach. What the hell, let's try power spraying them off.
  

So what the hell have you done in your garden that you were clueless about, but, well, what the hell...

Zombie Corn, flavor, and Sungold sauce

The weird gray mass in my corn turns out to be Corn Smut, aka Ustilago maydis aka Huitlacoche (“wee-tlah-KOH-cheh”), and is apparently edible. Now, I’m a pretty adventurous eater, but frankly, I draw the line at Zombie Corn.

Also made an interesting discovery about the Bloody Butcher from Seed Savers Exchange— every husk has 2-3 ears growing in it, unfortunately at wildly different rates, and you can't harvest the oldest without also pulling the youngest, since they share a husk and a stem. So assuming I can keep ahead of the aphids, I’m going to try leaving these and see if I can get some of these multiple husks all to mature.

One of the interesting things about growing different corn varieties is that different types taste differently. The Bon Appetit is as sweet as candy, no joke. Eye poppingly sweet. The Bloody Butcher has a smoky deep flavor, it tastes roasted even when it’s braised. The Country Gentleman has the "corniest’ flavor so far, which is probably why it’s a popular backyard variety.

This is one of the most interesting things about growing your own food. You rediscover variety in places you've been trained not to expect variety. Different tomatoes have not only different shapes, but also different flavors, sometimes subtle but sometimes dramatic, like the three different corns. Eating three different varieties of cherry tomatoes in a row is as different as eating a bagel and then a cookie and then pasta. All the same basic ingredients, but wildly different flavors.

Sungold Pasta Sauce
1 quart mixed cherry tomatoes, primarily golden
1 bell pepper, red or green, seeded and diced
1 large clove garlic, crushed
large handful white mushrooms, diced

Blanche the tomatoes and pull off the skins. This is tedious, but worth it. I made this without peeling the tomatoes and found the skins to be tough and distracting in the sauce, although my husband didn't mind them. Set the peeled tomatoes aside.

Heat up a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, then add the mushrooms and garlic. Saute until the mushrooms have absorbed all the oil. If you want your sauce to have a mushroomy back taste, add about 1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice and saute until the mushrooms release liquid. Add the green peppers and saute until just going soft. Add the tomatoes and continue cooking until their structure breaks down. For additional texture and color, throw in some unpeeled small sweet red or black cherry tomatoes.

This sauce will have a golden/pale green color, very lovely and unusual.

Serve over your pasta of choice with grated parmesan or romano cheese and a nice woodsy white.

So many herbs, so little storage space

Four parsley plants. The oregano that ate Chicago. Two creeping thyme. Fourteen basil. Two rosemary. Five lavender. Don't even mention the sage.

Pesto.

Pesto.

Pesto.

Pesto.

Pesto.

Why people are afraid to cook

I love the web. Open up a search engine, type in "green beans, chard, beets, carrots" and out comes a recipe. Amazing.

Except when you try to make it.

"roast chard in oven until crispy, but not burnt" How long will that take? What will it look like? Should I do anything with it while it's in there?
"slowly drizzle in the oil to emulsify into vinaigrette" Do I just pour it, or do I have to mix it? How hard? How slow is a drizzle? How can I tell it's emulsified? What in the world does that even mean?
" Lay out prepped beets and carrots on a sheet pan and roast in same 400°F oven as the chard until nicely roasted" Again, how long? What constitutes "nicely roasted?"

So there we were with pan-fried mushrooms and green beans, steamed carrots and beets, and sorta kinda crispy chard. Annoyed with the recipe, we turned it into the Nelson Chin test kitchen and came up with:

Scalloped August veggies

2 large Carrots cut length-wise and then into wedges (I never peel carrots, but feel free)
5 Med.-Lrg. mixed Beets cut into wedges and peeled
Today's green bean harvest (we had about a pint), cleaned (i.e., cut the ends off)
1 large portobello mushroom, sliced
3 larges cloves of garlic, smashed and diced

30 large chard leaves, washed and stems removed
olive oil

Preheat oven to 400F/190C

Remove the stems, then clean and chop the chard. Toss in a large bowl with a couple tablespoons olive oil. Spread thinly on a baking sheet (one with raised edges works best) and roast about 25 minutes, or until it is crispy but not burnt (after 15 minutes, start checking it every 5 minutes). Remove from oven and set aside. Turn off oven and allow it to cool down a little.

Prepare a casserole with cooking spray. Scald 1 1/2 cups of milk (4-6 minutes on high in the microwave)

Steam, braise, or roast the beets and carrots until just tender. Saute the green beans, mushrooms and garlic in a little olive oil. Turn the oven back on, at 350F/175C. Put the two veggie mixes into the casserole in two layers. Each layer should be dotted with 1 tablespoon of butter, and dredged with 2 tablespoons of flour. Pour the hot milk over this, cover and bake for 30 minutes.

Serve over fettucini.

How a garden grows

For maybe the first decade that I gardened, I focused on the ornamental garden and did vegetables just in a small way— lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, herbs in the small plot off the garage (now the Garage Garden). Somewhere in the 90s I put in the Wagon Wheel, although the earliest paper journal, and earliest plan, I can find is dated 1999 . I think I had been building the garden for at least 10 years when the Wagon Wheel went in (so called because it was a half circle divided into spokes).

The vegetable started small and safe. As late as 2004 most of the gardening work was still ornamental as I added beds and switched from annuals to perennials learning as I went what worked and what didn’t. There’s a lotta plants in plant heaven because of my ignorance. It was putting in the Knot garden in 2005 (now the Serpentine) that jump-started the veggies.

Once you switch to perennials, the ornamental beds start to take care of themselves. I still divide plants of course, and move them around (kind of like moving furniture, and one of my favorite garden tasks). And I have my first new ornamental bed in years—the Woodland—which is still a few years from figuring itself out. I’m thinking it will eventually be a tiny prairie meadow.

I’ve tried something new every year, although I’m kind of running out of space, and have managed to avoid intriguing plants that I know we won’t eat, like kohlrabi and hot peppers, and high maintenance ones that I know I won’t take care of, like roses and exotics. I dug out my old paper journals, and here’s what I’ve managed to trace, of edible plants that I added, and then kept year after year:

• Somewhere in the dim mists of time: raspberries and the garage garden
• 1999- the basic vegetable garden takes shape in the Wagon Wheel (the bed itself was built I think mid 90s, because the kids remember it from grade school): snow peas, lettuce, broccoli (don’t remember doing broccoli that far back, but it's in the journals!), carrots, onions, tomatoes, peppers.
• 2000- fennel for the first time (stuck with it for 8 years before finally giving up)
• 2001- first pumpkin
• 2002-3- can’t find the journals, but cucumbers and zucchini snuck in here somewhere, although I did zucchini again this year for the first time in ages.
• 2004- first actual reference I can find to cukes, but I’m pretty sure I had done them before
• 2005-6 (shared journal between 2 years, and cleverly did not differentiate the years) the Knot garden goes in as an herb garden, with 10 types of herbs. Also put in beets for the first time.
• 2007- first (unsuccessful) attempt at squash, and discovery of on-line gardening blogs, where I lurked for a couple of years, especially Mr. Brown Thumb and You Grow Girl.
• 2008- first eggplant, turnips, chard, despite this being the year I broke my ankle right after the main planting; I also experimented with attempting a full second crop of summer vegetables, with mixed success.
• 2009- corn, brussels sprouts, cabbage, and wintersowing, strawberries (from seed)
• 2010- climbing beans (always did bush beans before and in future always will again. Hate the climbers), and took a leap of faith by planting asparagus from seed.

Which brings us to today, harvesting corn and cukes, beans and cherry tomatoes, dill and parsley. I can't believe I've never posted this recipe before, as it is my all-time favorite summer soup.

Cream of Cucumber Soup
4-5 large cucumbers
1 large onion
1 T dill seeds
2 cloves garlic
1 T chopped fresh parsley
2 T butter

1 tablespoon cornstarch (optional; for thickening. This recipe is from my MIL, who puts cornstarch in everything)
1 quart stock (chicken or vegetable; make sure it's a "white" stock or the soup will be ugly!)
>1 cup milk
2 cups half-half
2 yolks eggs (I got a double yoke one when making this just now!)
pepper and salt to taste

Different colored cherry tomatoes

Peel, seed and dice the largest cucumbers, leaving one for garnish. Dice onions and garlic (or use a garlic press) and saute in butter with the parsley and dill seeds in the soup pot about 5 minutes (the cukes will turn a bright light green). Add water or stock, simmer 20 minutes. Mix cornstarch with milk, stir into the soup and bring it to a light boil; allow it to boil about 10 minutes. Puree with an immersible mixer (or in a blender if you don't have a mixer; if you use a blender, let it cool a little before decanting it).

Lightly beat the half-half and egg yolks, pour a little boiling soup on to them, stirring at same time, then return it to the hot soup, stirring constantly; it must not boil again or it will curdle. Season to taste with white pepper and salt.

You can give this soup a nice green color (and add nutritional value) by making a "dye" with spinach: Wash and drain spinach, pound it in a mortar, roll it in cheesecloth and wring it into a large measuring cup. Pour into the soup and stir thoroughly.

Cut the cherry tomatoes into halves, and the remaining cucumber into discs. Garnish the soup with the cut vegetables and a sprig of parsley just before serving.