Food
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Eggplants | Fruit & Vegetable Portraits
If there is one thing about eggplant, it is that you can easily have too many! We grew all of these varieties last year, actually another one that keeled over before harvest, but I concluded one or two plants will suffice next year. I saved seeds from I think most of them, either that or we had some leftover, but nonetheless eggplants in moderation. White Star Hybrid These were pretty neat in that you could really tell that they were ripe/overripe as they turned yellow or dark orange, in addition to becoming rock hard. Not an edible stage! Rosita This size eggplant worked great for eggplant parm sandwiches. Listada di…
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Chinese Mosaic Long Bean | Fruit & Vegetable Portraits
I think we got these seeds from Baker Creek last year and they preformed very well for us. The best part is that you can easily make more out of handful of beans by cutting them in half. We will definitely be growing them again next year.
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Taking Stock
Yesterday I decided to go through our pantry where the home canned foods are. This little built in unit came with the house and for the most part I like it. The second from top shelf houses all of the pickles, chow-chow, and some relish I made. We have a lot of this still and I doubt we will plant many cucumbers come spring. Maybe one or two plants. I should also mention that we have some Claussen pickles in the fridge in the man-cave that need to be eaten. Along with the pickles we have a lot of jams: mandarin, fig, grapefruit, and tomato. I guess I need to…
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A Green Tomato | Vegetable & Fruit Portraits
It’s been awhile since I did any of these portraits. I took a lot of photos like this of our harvest last spring and summer but then we moved to the house and life got a little bit hectic. Now I am taking this week to process a lot of older photos and get both this website and Wildscape Photo updated a bit. With the Wildscape update I’m going to include a garden section where you can see some of these fruit and vegetable portraits. Several months ago Chris pre-ordered some canvas—-can’t remember the company at the moment—with the intent of having some of these fruit and veggies on the…
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Fun with Fermentation | Round Two
So, last year I made my first batch of sauerkraut with some Chinese cabbage we grew in our plots at the community garden. This year we didn’t have an of our own cabbage as our vegetable garden at home hasn’t been built yet. Last year I tried to make a second batch of sauerkraut sometime in late spring but the humidity in our house caused a lot of mold to grow on the top of the liquid that I felt it uncontrollable and threw the batch out. I actually felt a little bad about that because once I had scraped the mold off the top the rest of the cabbage…
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Pecan….Butter
A couple of months ago I was looking through my parent’s second fridge in their garage. I noticed several large ziplocs full of pecans from their yard circa 2010. Yep, time to be used. I think that was also the last time they harvested a good crop. The last few years the squirrels have hoarded the pecans for themselves. Several years ago when I started reading about the do-it-yourself food movement I found out how to make your own nut butters. It is super simple and this time around I went with the same nut I tried last time…the pecan. It isn’t a nut butter you would normally see and…
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Tomato City
Last week I wrote about cucumbers and the insane amount we harvested throughout May. Oh, they still sent May off with a bang, giving us a reusable grocery bag full in the last two days of May. But, let’s talk tomatoes…. I’m beginning to run out of counter space. This isn’t a new thing, I’ve dealt with this before in Florida and our harvest there, but we had more counter space then. I’ve been picking them when they just turn pink on the bottom (unless I miss one and get one that is ripe), to keep the bugs and birds at bay. I’ve seen many birds flying into the tomatoes…
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Storing the Onions
If you follow over at Sprout Dispatch you may have seen my post about our onion harvest. For a week the onions sat in some deer feeder platforms in our computer room, fan on, door shut to keep the cats out. The room started reeking about a day into it but finally mellowed (or I got nasal fatigue) by the end of the week. Finally last Sunday I took them outside and cut the tops off, leaving a few inches, trimmed up the roots a bit and then stacked them in some storage crates I found at Walmart. Initially I was going to opt for laundry baskets but a few…
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Yellow Pear Tomato | Vegetable & Fruit Portraits
I have to say that these are going down as one of the most prolific tomatoes I have ever grown. They are giving my sungolds a run for their money on abundance. Last night I was picking the golden fruits off the vines in the last bits of light before dusk, I was reminded of black plum tomatoes that I grew in Florida. The shape is different but I was instantly missing my seeds and tomatoes from then. It really is interesting growing tomatoes in a different climate. If I were in Florida still, the vines would have been ripped up for about a month now, or at the very…
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In the Kitchen | Key Limes & Cucumbers
Back in March I saw a post on Food in Jars about salt preserved key limes. I bookmarked it and finally the other day I saw key limes for sale at the store. In Florida we had a small key lime tree I grew from seed—even managed to get a few fruits off one year—and while most ‘wild’ citrus was oranges or grapefruit, I once came across a key lime tree! That’s a good find! Staring at the photos on Food in Jars I was entranced and could just imagine sipping a homemade limeade from the juice I would ferment. Oh, it looked so good; I had to make it!…