Pickled Beets and Eggs

Yesterday I was contemplating the heap of beets accumulating in the crisper drawer and wondering what I was going to do with all of them. As luck would have it, I had managed to harvest some of the Burpee's Golden when they were still small--just the right size for pickling. For some added interest, I decided to include a few hard-boiled eggs.


In the past I've pickled the typical red beets together with eggs. The color from the beets works its way into the egg white giving it a rosy pink color. While the color of the golden beets isn't as intense as the red ones, I'm hoping to end up with some golden eggs. They may not protect us from a failing economy, but they'll be fun to eat.


The recipe I used is the "Spicy Pickled Beets" in the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving, a book I highly recommend to anyone looking to try canning and pickling. As you can see in this shot of the finished product, I didn't use the recommended two-part lid canning jars. I'm treating this batch as refrigerator pickles that will be eaten up in a relatively short time. Now I just have to have the patience to wait a few days for the flavors to develop before I can taste the results!

Lima Beans

This year I grew lima beans. On purpose. They're also known as butter beans or butter peas.

I can't remember if they were seeds I purchased myself or got from my garden guru. They were called 'White Dixie Butter' and I find it hard to resist anything with butter in the name, especially a bean. I planted them fairly late compared to the other beans since I planned on picking them as shell beans and didn't worry too much about them reaching the dry stage. I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to them, just noticing that they'd bloomed and that pods were forming. Then a few days ago I finally looked up when they should be harvested. I read that they are good when the pods are fatter but not too yellow. Next time I was in the garden I pinched a few pods and could feel the little tell-tale bumps but they weren't what I would call fat. Then I noticed that some pods were dry and brown and a few had been chewed by pests. Popping open one of the fatter pods I was reminded that lima beans are flat compared to the other beans I grow. I looked over the small patch and decided rather than go over them every day or two looking for all the "just right" pods that enough were ripe or beyond. In cut all the plants at the base and brought them home. It was much more comfortable sitting on the deck stripping the pods off the plant than it would have been crouched in the garden.

The co-conspirator pitched in sorting the dry from the fresh pods--which included a number of under-ripe ones and we got to work shelling. In the end, knowing how many seeds I planted that actually grew into plants that produced beans and how much we ended up with I calculated a yield of nearly one hundred-twenty five times what was planted. Had I not wasted some that weren't ripe that number doubtless would have been higher! It occurred to me that the quick bean counting I did a while back was in error. I didn't account for the fact that not all the bush beans planted grew and produced. Beans are often touted as one of the most productive crops you can grow. I know I'm convinced.

"Pick 'em, hull 'em, put on the steam. That's how we fix butterbeans!"

Tomatoes Again

Got up and canned some tomato puree first thing this morning.

Curry and Connections

Tonight I made a decent Kerala style mushroom curry. I found the recipe via an online friend I first met via an orchid discussion forum. She lives in Mumbai and has an excellent blog of her own that you should check out some time. Something struck me about the fact that when I was looking for advice about authentic Indian cuisine, I was able to get authoritative input from someone I've talked with for years but have never met. Such is the power of the Internet.

Occasionally I'll step back from the keyboard and take a critical look at the role the Internet plays in my life. I recently returned from a wonderful camping vacation where I probably could have but didn't bother to access the Web, email, etc. I really didn't miss them. Sure, I was capturing images I may post on facebook at some point and, yes, I did manage to do one ambient sound recording that may find its way onto Freesound. (It stars a vireo with wolf backup, by the way.) I had plenty of treeware, an ereader and my precious notebooks to keep me busy and I knew I'd be back online soon after returning to civilization.

Best of all I had the opportunity to let my mind slow down and really evaluate how I spend my time, including my Internet usage, and I decided it's a valuable connection to the people and information that enrich my life. I think about the individual and joint projects I've got simmering right now and while it can seem overwhelming at times, they're things I truly enjoy or that I feel are important. While I was jotting down yet another URL in my notebook to check out when I got home I looked at my to-do list. It occurred to me that I really need a to-don't list. It doesn't even have one item on it yet, but I'm getting close to formulating the first one. It goes along the line of "Don't waste time/energy on things you don't really care about." Simple enough, but I have a feeling there's some power in it I haven't quite yet realized.

Meanwhile, the curry was good but it was also a learning experience--what experience isn't? The recipe I used was from one of the sites Sunita recommended, a blog called Vazhayila. I used a mixture of the oyster mushrooms from the almost-neighborhood farmers market and some regular button mushrooms. The onion, garlic, jalapeno and tomato came from our own garden. Spices were from our local Penzey's store. The co-conspirator told me--after the fact--that Penzey's chili powder is a bit on the strong side. That and the extra jalapeno I added were evident when we were sweating and sniffling our way through dinner. A few dollops of yogurt helped cool things down. Next time I'll remember to make a cucumber raita. Finally, local tortillas stood in for the chapatis since I thought we were out of whole wheat flour and I didn't want to venture out into traffic again.

Tomatoes

I've wanted to write about tomatoes for a while now, but I just couldn't figure out how to approach the subject. To me, tomatoes are one of, if not the best reason to have a garden of one's own.

This season I "undertook" growing tomatoes like never before. I decided to get into cultivating them, coaxing them toward maximum production, treating them like the special, Chosen plants they are. The results have been fairly satisfying.



Have you seen the movie "Ratatouille?" Do you remember the scene where Anton Ego takes a taste of the special ratatouille and is immediately transported in his mind to a childhood moment where taste and memory meet? Tomatoes do that for me.



I can munch (if I had to) on the pathetic, bland commercial tomatoes from the grocery store all year and not feel a thing. There's nothing to them. But when I get my first, real local.,home-grown tomato of the summer my eyes close and I'm taken back. I don't know when it is, but I can picture exactly where. I'm at the supper table with my family and there's a plate of thick slices of vine-ripened tomatoes. They were, and still are, the best thing I've ever tasted in my life. Hands down.



So far the tomatoes I've harvested this summer have become snax-off-the-vine while gardening, salad items, sandwich additions and tasty side dishes all on their own. I've also cooked them into thick sauce with and without spicy local Italian sausage. Today I oven-dried a big batch which, of course, became a little batch of concentrated savory/sweet flavor. They'll be stewn on pizzas and folded into pastas over the coming months and taking me back to this time when ripe tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes are easy to come by.

Onion Bandits!

The onions have grown, to put it mildly. It shouldn't be surprising, but I can't help marveling at the fact that the wilty, pencil-thick plants I stuck in the ground a while back have turned into the pungent orbs I regard as a vital kitchen staple. A few are larger than anything I'd pick up in the grocery store, as large as a softball, or so I'm told by certain women we know.


The onions have been pulled and were curing in the sun/shade on the deck before going into storage. Unfortunately, certain striped rodents decided they would try tasting the produce. In the end they were thwarted by none other than the softball-savvy women we're lucky to have in our home right now. Garden Justice prevails, and future meals will be a testament to their bravery.

Increase

Yesterday I picked the last of one varieties of beans I grew to dry this season. It's Jacob's Cattle Gasless. As luck would have it, I had a record of how much I planted. Compared to what I harvested, discounting the bad ones I threw away, I got out twenty-four times as much as I put in. The ounce of seed I planted yielded a pound and a half of dried beans. I'm curious now to see how that yield relates to other beans.



Were I to save all these beans, plant them next year and get a comparable harvest, I would be looking at a full thirty-six pounds of beans! My guess is that that is more beans than we eat in a year. We definitely wouldn't eat the 864 pounds we'd have the year after that if I did the same.

Update: As mention here, I completely forgot to account for the beans that were planted but for whatever reason failed to grow and produce. Beans are even more productive than I realized!