Busy but Bored

Sunless Dried Tomatoes

With all of the tomatoes that were picked before the first frost last fall, I decided to dry some. Kinda hard to 'sun dry' when a frost is coming. Luckily an oven makes for an awesome sun.

To dry smaller tomatoes, just cut in half, larger ones can be cut more. Place on a pan and drizzle with olive oil, or at least oil the pan to keep them from sticking. Next sprinkle with a good salt, preferably sea salt, and throw in some fresh herbs.....Oregano, Thyme, Rosemary, you know, the Italian stuff. Well ok , not sure about thyme being a top Italian herb, but I think it goes well with....well everything! Place in an oven at the lowest possible setting, and let the drying begin....and the wonderful smells...:)

Once they are dry, place in jars with more herbs, garlic of course, maybe a couple of peppers, and cover with GOOD olive oil.

 

 

My Slips are Showing.

Sweet potato slips that is. After a terrible experience with potatoes a couple of years ago, and good luck many years ago with sweet taters, we decided to try sweet again.

A really cool thing about sweet taters is how easy it is to make several new plants from one potato. Simply stick something through the potato so you can hang it in a glass of water. It will root in the water and send 'slips' out the top. The slip growth out the top can be removed after they are several inches long, and placed in water. Once in water they will root and become sweet tater plants that will produce a new batch of taters. The 'mother' potato will then produce more slips........ain't nature wonderful!!!!

Pizza Virgin

Can anybody be a pizza virgin? In one form or another, often called by different names, most people have had pizza. It is a wonderful thing, a kind of open faced sandwich, with oh so many possible toppings.

Of course there are many variations also. Thin crust, thick, deep dish, various regions of Italy using different base sauces and toppings........Different countries adding their own flavors and ingredients.

Anyway, this was my first attempt at making pizza dough. The pizza has a commercial pasta sauce, Pepperoni, Kalamata olives, onion, and Provolone, and Mozzarella cheese.

It was actually one of the better pies I have ever had!!!

While it's Fresh

Since I have tried to relive some of the cooking or preserving experiences on here.........well after the fact, I thought I would share to-nights supper. My original plan was to make pizza, but since we did not have any bread flour, and I did not want a chewy dough that would be produced by all-purpose flour, I stopped there. Yes my brother pointed out that we had Vital Wheat Gluten, but it was 4 years old, and had not been stored sans oxygen, so that was out. To clarify, a Tablespoon of Gluten, to a cup of flour will make bread flour!

As a second thought, I decided to make open faced sandwiches. Fried egg, hot link, onion, garlic, 2 cheese sandwiches at that! First I chopped up 2 cloves of garlic and sauteed in butter. Then I chopped a little bit of onion, and a hot link, this was cooked in the pan I sauteed onion, garlic, bell pepper, and hot link in last night.......NO it was not cleaned......;). I then fried 4 eggs in this pan, as I toasted sub rolls covered in the garlic butter....:P. The onion and hot link was placed on the toasted garlic sub rolls, followed by the fried eggs. This was topped with cumin Manchego , and Parmigiano Reggiano cheeses, and broiled shortly.

I guess all I can say is it was so good that I went to the computer and wrote this........

The Yearend Maters.

With a plathora of tomatoes that were harvested the night before the first freeze, there was  something to be done. The small cherry maters were to be dried, which is probably the next post, but there were bigger maters, and also green ones to be dealt with.

What we ended up with was a lot of small to larger maters that were red, pink, all the way to green at the point of last harvest. These were harvested, and cut up, then coated with good olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and herbs. Theses were roasted in the oven at around 425, until they were a melting, browning mass of love.

This concoction of goodness was put into jars with some more fresh herbs, and then topped off with good olive oil.

Want something to die for? make fresh pasta, top with this and some really good cheese....;)

 

Pre-Freeze

A few months later I am finally updating here. To start I will give the finish to one of the hardest gardening seasons ever. We had the hottest and driest summer ever recorded in the DFW metromess. It was horrible to say the least. Lake Lavon just down the road, and our water source, ended the year at 47.6% full. Thank goodness we have since risen to 80%, just before stage 4 water restriction were to go into affect.

The garden here at the house did not produce anything all summer, even after putting up 30% shade cloth over the tomatoes. Even the pepper plants would not produce in the inferno we were enduring. The garden at mom's produced a lot of gourds and Mellon's. Most of the melons went to the cows, they followed me around like crack whores, and were none to happy when there juicy sweet snacks were no more. There is a whole new set of cows to addict this year.....lol. We kept some of the original tomato plants, and started some new ones for fall. The new plants did well, the heat ravaged spring plants did manage to produce a little.

The following pictures are from the final harvest before the first freeze of the year. In following blogs I will show the rewards of the harvest, and the start of garden 2012.....the final garden, well if you believe the Mayan calendar crap!

 

Sportin' Hood

    Finally..........it has been SO long!!!!!!! Ok I sported hood a couple of weeks ago in Oklaheaven, but it was brief hoodage. The older I get, the more I wish I could sport hood a lot more often. If only they could invent a pill........a blue pill would seem most appropriate. Imagine being able to sport hood anytime you wanted, just take a pill and wait for that long lost feeling. Kicking back with a smile on your face and your manhood securely wrapped.....or womanhood, for those of the lovely fairer sex. Making a tent.....if your camping that is, or just watching the reaction of those around you that think the time is just not right to be walking around with hood.

    Being from Texas, it is rare to be able to sport hood all day long. We are much more known for our morning hood. We are also known to get hooded on a moments notice, and to be losing that hood very quickly. Sometimes I also sport a semi-hoody, especially after a hot shower in the winter.......That's my special hand made hoody!!!

    Anyway, I just love this time of year, and my closet full of hoodies, or hooded sweatshirts as they are often called. After the hottest summer ever recorded in this area, I hope to sport a lot of hood this winter!!!!

Red-Eye Gravy......W...W...W...What???

Since I brought this up in my Garden up-date, i.e. previous post.....you know, the one you have not read yet....I thought I would tell the story......Yeah before you knew there was a story. Maybe not so much a story as something I saw on t.v. a while back that I found quite funny, in an interesting more than funny kinda sort of way.

Eric Ripert is a famous French chef with restaurants all over the world. One of these is in the Ritz-Carlton in the Grand Caymen Islands. Every year he likes to invite several top chefs there to vacation, cook, learn, throw around ideas. During a show about one of these trips I saw an interesting scene where he was sitting around and talking to one of the most famous chefs in Dallas....Dean Fearing. While Dean was talking about how his southern country raising affected how he cooks, he mentioned making Red-eye gravy. Red-eye gravy is where after frying up a slice of good cured ham, (or crappy piece of ham, or bacon) you de-glaze the pan with black coffee. As soon as Eric heard this, he immediately pulled back while saying "W...W...W...What?" He then asked Dean if he had ever made this since his youth, and he replied "Yes it's on the lunch menu at my restaurant right now"!!

I found it funny that a world renowned chef had never heard of something so simple that people like me had grown up on. It also seemed funny that he seemed to think it was something that Dean would have just left behind.

In the next scene Dean was showing Eric and his sous-chefs how to make it, and they were falling over themselves to taste it. I have a feeling that it is now at least part of a dish in one of his restaurants!

 

Fall Garden Update

What a difference a few subtle changes can make. I really do not believe that we would have anything alive at all after the hottest summer ever recorded, if not for the shade cloth that we put up at the start of summer. With a summer like this, I think the 30% cloth could have easily been replaced by 40 or 50%. I guess the temperature being down 20 degrees is more than subtle, and it seems to be very welcome by the tomatoes and tomatillas.

Correction of a feeding problem has also been a boost to the plants. We have this horrible black gumbo clay soil, sticky as glue while being slicker than owl shit when wet, hard as cement and filled with sometimes massive cracks when dry. We have had extensive soil tests done in the past, and our high ph, and HUGE amounts of calcium are common knowledge around here. The biggest problem with growing tomatoes around here is fungal diseases, the usual varieties of wilts and blossom end rot. These keep the plants sick, looking dreadful, and ruins much of the fruit. After doing some research this year (24 years after college....the end of 17-18 years of non stop schooling, I have a real aversion to studying anything....and many reoccurring nightmares about college) I found that all of these diseases can be attributed to a LACK of calcium....w..w..w..what?(did I ever tell the red-eye gravy story?). Well it turns out that our type of soil has so much calcium because it holds it, as in does not release it in a form that plants can use. Add to that, magnesium makes this even worse.....did I ever mention the handful of epsom salts I plant with each tomato, so they will have plenty of magnesium????? From now on I will plant with a handful of powdered milk instead, as I did with the fall plants.

Lots of purple tomatillas are growing!!

Fall tomatoes doing so much better than the spring ones.

The peppers are still producing like crazy!!

The gourds are also back to producing a lot, not sure how long this will last. Of course the melons are not liking this time of year and are not setting anything new. This really sucks as I have created a HUGE problem with the 3 cows and calves that are expecting a treat every time I show up. I have a feeling I will be buying melons at the store this winter ............LOL

It’s been a long hot summer, not a drop of rain

Do you really think at this point of me not posting in months, and my awesome friendship with Robert Earle Keen, that I am worried about my gross plagerism. Did I say awesome?? I may have mis-spoken as I was saying non-existent awesome lack of friendship with Willie Nelson, and the Grapeseed  extract band.

Confused??? Yeah me too, whoever is writing this crap is seriously effed-up. So glad that I rang...or is it wrang??? my hands of this crap seconds ago!!  What exactly is a hand wrangler?, rangler? /%*&6?

Yeah, that's about the way my mind has not worked all summer.  We have had by far the hottest summer in recorded history, that goes back around 150 years here in the D-FW Metromess! We did miss the consecutive  record by a couple of days, but we did beat the most triple digit days with a freaky 107 at the end......on a cloudy day, go figure!. We really blew away the 'high' low temperatures this year. we sat records for the highest low ever, and the most lows in the 80's.

I have no doubt at all that the 'high' low temps come from the ever-expanding overpopulation that is spreading concrete everywhere while killing nature! Anyway, It;s Friday night, and .....