when life is too busy to pick the beans...

...the beans get really big.

It's been a week of really big beans around here.  With a busy holiday weekend spent with the best of friends and the start of the fall semester, there has hardly been time to sit down, let alone pick the beans!  And because of that, I just washed and froze a quart of rather large beans.  They won't taste the best and the texture may be a bit strange, but they will still nourish our bodies in the middle of winter and that's what's really important.  

So, with the summer behind us and the fall in full swing, I wish you all the best as you find yourself with maybe a little less time than you had a week or two ago.  There is something about fall that brings more regular commitments to the table, which can be lovely and bring such a good rhythm to our lives, but it can also mean that some things, like the beans, get a bit overlooked in the hustle and bustle.  So, as you fill your days with things, I hope you are still able to find ways to nourish your bodies and souls, even if it's with slightly overgrown and less than perfect beans.  

Cheers to fall!  And cheers to you, my dear readers.  

from the garden, from the market, to the shelf

My days over the past few weeks (when not traveling, that is) have been filled with food preservation.  The shelves are slowly, but steadily filling with jars of tomatoes, corn, pickles, and soup.  And the freezer has been filling with green beans and cherry tomatoes.  It feels so great to make so much progress in putting up the food that will nourish us throughout the coming year.  It's so very satisfying.  A lot of what I preserve I buy at the farmer's market.  While our garden produces quite a bit of food for fresh eating, as of now it doesn't produce quite enough for much preserving.  The few things that I do preserve from our own plot of land are tomato sauce from my six sauce tomato plants, cherry tomatoes when we can't keep up eating them (I roast them in the oven with herbs and olive oil for a bit and then freeze them), green beans (which I freeze as they come in to the kitchen), fermented jalapeños, and a couple jars of pickled mixed veggies to be used in Bloody Mary's (yum!).  Everything else is from the farmer's market such as the quartered tomatoes, the dill pickles (both vinegar-based and fermented), the corn, and the tomato soup (recipe to follow soon!).  I am hoping to make carrot tomato soup in the next few weeks with ingredients from my garden, but we'll see if the warm temps hold out long enough to get me a good amount of tomatoes in a relatively short amount of time...we'll see...fall has definitely been in the air off and on over the past couple weeks in these parts.  

With all of the farmer's market buying that I've been doing, I've learned a few tips.  First, get to know the people who run the different stands.  I've found some who will happily throw in extra of this and that if you buy a bunch of something from them, and I've found others who won't.  Second, it's a lot easier to barter if you are buying more than one item, if you are down to your last couple dollars, or if you are buying a large quantity of something.  Don't be afraid to ask!  I'm amazed at how often I can buy something for less just because I ask!  Third, there are certain vegetables that don't have to look perfect for preserving.  For example, cucumbers should all be firm and freshly picked if you are going to pickle them.  However, tomatoes can have many imperfections and still make great soups, sauces, and even diced/quartered tomatoes.  Just cut off the bad parts and keep the good!  

I do so love the task of preserving and all that goes into it.  Even though it makes for very long days in a warm kitchen, I find the gathering of produce and the filling of shelves so very satisfying in the end.  

How about you??  What delicious things from summer have you been tucking away for winter??

basil pesto

Herbs have been making their way into the kitchen in fistfuls and basketfuls over the past several weeks.  My first batch of oregano has been dried, crushed, and stored away for the months ahead.  A small batch of thyme is now ready to crush and put in a jar and a bit of peppermint is now hanging in the kitchen window.  Finally my basil plants were ready this week to cut back for my first batch of pesto.  I love to make pesto a few times during the summer, freeze it in ice cube trays, and then move it into containers in the freezer.  I've found that ice cube-sized pesto is the perfect amount to add to any recipe.  It's just the right amount for my favorite grilled pesto, provolone, and red pepper sandwich and just a few cubes are needed for a batch of pasta or gnocchi for a dinner for two.  

There are so very many pesto recipes out there, and mine is nothing new or revolutionary.  However, I do like to use walnuts instead of pine nuts in my version.  I like the darker nutty flavor that walnuts give the pesto and they are also cheaper, which is a great bonus.  I also usually have walnuts on hand, whereas pine nuts I do not.  So, if you're looking for a new recipe to try...here you go!  Most pesto recipes call for parmesan, but since I freeze mine, I don't add any parmesan to the pesto.  Instead, I usually add parmesan, or another type of cheese, to the dish that I'm adding the pesto to.  I find that this just works better for the way I cook and simplifies what's needed to make the pesto, which I'm all about.  

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Basil Pesto 

1/2 cup walnuts

1/2 cup olive oil

2 cloves garlic

2 cups packed fresh basil leaves

1 teaspoon lemon juice (fresh or bottled, but fresh is preferred)

1/2 teaspoon salt

Add the walnuts and olive oil to a blender or food processor and blend until mostly smooth.  Add the garlic and blend until smooth.  Add the basil leaves, small amounts may be necessary depending on your blender/food processor.  Add the lemon juice and salt.  Processor until it reaches your preferred consistency.  I tend to leave mine a bit chunky.  Fill an ice cube tray with the pesto.  One batch should fill one ice cube tray (in the picture above I reserved a bit for my dinner that night so it didn't quite fill a tray).  Freeze until solid and then transfer into a freezer container or bag.  Keep in your freezer for up to a year and use as you need it!

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How about you?? Do you have a favorite basil pesto or other herb pestos that you love??  I'd love to hear about them! 

garden notes :: 8.12.15

Wow!  Has it really been a week since I posted last??  Yikes!  The time has flown.  We spent last Thursday-Sunday at a music festival in Appleton, Wisconsin called Mile of Music.  We had a great time and Dan's sets went swimmingly!  I then flew home from Milwaukee on Monday morning and proceeded to rest and recoup for the rest of the day.  Yesterday was then spent catching up on a few things around the house and in the garden.  And speaking of the garden...

It has become quite the jungle out there!  The tomatoes are going wild!  I've picked fruit off of 8 of the 12 plants so far and I think the others will follow soon.  This year I'm striving to take better notes (well, just taking notes in general) on what varieties perform the best and taste the best.  I've already ruled out the Italian Heirloom as one I will probably not grow again next year.  It produces huge bright red tomatoes, but they are rather mealy and not very juicy.  We'll see how it continues on for the rest of the summer.  If it's a a consistent producer, it may be a good one to make soups with, but it's definitely not my favorite for fresh eating.  The Fred Limbaugh, on the other hand, is a fabulous fresh eater!  It has a slightly pinkish color to it and it is juicy and perfect. Yum!  I have a huge African Queen tomato that I've been eagerly waiting to try as well.  The first and only fruit I've picked from it so far is over a pound and has a lovely shape and color.  Yes, the tomato season is going well here!

The tomatillo is also doing very well!  It is full of fruit and continues to produce more and more flowers!  Now...I just have to figure out when to harvest the fruit and what to do with it...any suggestions, my dear readers??

We have little red lunch box peppers!!  Hooray!  They are so yummy for fresh eating!  I was a bit surprised to see the red ones ripen first, but happy to bring them into the kitchen.  We've had a few green peppers as well, but those don't seem to be doing as well this year.

The cucumbers have also started producing!!  I've got a few normal looking ones and a few weird ones, probably due to inconsistent watering.  However, this year's crop is looking better than any others have in the past, so I'll take it! 

The herbs are also doing well.  I made a batch of basil pesto yesterday and brought in some mint to dry.  I do so love using herbs from my garden all winter long! 

I so love this time of year when meal prep is so very easy and so very fresh.  But it also means that these next several weeks in the kitchen will be busy (and hot!) as I begin stockpiling summer's goodness for winter.  

How about you??  What's coming out of your gardens right now?  What things are you tucking away for the colder months ahead?

fermented cucumbers and jalapeños

You know that team building game that people sometimes play where you have to choose what two foods you would want to live on for the rest of your life if you were stranded on a deserted island??  Well...one of my two foods has always been pickles.  I mean, really, if you're stranded on an island what better food to have with you!  They are shelf stable, they are a vegetable, and they are always delicious.  Yum.  My mouth waters every time I think about those sour crispy delectables.   

For the past few summers I've made a couple batches of traditional vinegar dill pickles--and I love them and wouldn't go without them.  But last year I also tried my hand at fermented dill pickles.  It was an experiment--as I've found all fermenting to be.  It's not an exact science the way that hot water or pressure canning is.  With canning you have to have just the right amount of food in the jars, the jars have to be closed just right, the temperature and/or pressure has to be just right, and you have to do it for just the right amount of time, but with fermenting it's totally different.  Your jar of cucumbers can be half full, you can have several different sizes of jars with different types of lids, you can ferment something for a week, two, five, twelve.  Every ferment is different and each one is a bit of an experiment with far too many variables to make it scientific---it's awesome!  Those are my favorite kinds of experiments.  It's like when you make a really delicious meal and your husband says, "Wow! This is amazing!  Can you make this more often?"  And you respond with, "Um...this exact thing?? Probably not.  I made it up."  That's kind of how fermenting works, at least for me.  

Another thing about fermented pickles is that they taste a bit different from their vinegary counterparts.  They are more sour and they are kind of bubbly.  They can make your face pucker and they can be incredibly addicting...but I do think they are a bit of an acquired taste.  If you've never made or really eaten homemade vinegar pickles, then tasting your first fermented pickle may be quite a shocker.  They are very different from the jars of pickles that line the grocery store isles.  However, if you are a homemade pickle lover, then I encourage you to try fermenting a batch.  The best part is that you can start with a little pint jar and if they don't turn out or you hate them, you can compost those babies without it being a big deal at all.  

The basics of fermenting cucumbers include packing pickling cucumbers (I get my mine at the farmers market) into a jar with pickling spices, garlic, and fresh dill, and then filling the jar with a brine of salt water.  You then tightly cover them and leave them in a warm place for a bit.  If your kitchen is warm (mine was in the 70's and 80's this week), then it may take just 5-7 days for the pickles to be ready.  If it's on the cooler side (consistently below 75) then it may take a few weeks for them to finish.  Once they have changed from bright cucumber green to dull pickle green and the liquid is bubbly and cloudy, then they are ready to taste.  When you bite into them, they should look pickled all the way through.  If they are still bright green in the middle--they are not done, or if they taste really salty they are not done.  When they get to the sour level of your liking and they are pickled all the way through---they are done!!  Hooray!  Then you can wipe down the jars (in case they've dripped a bit in the fermenting process) and move them into the refrigerator where they'll keep for 6 months to a year.  So easy and so good!

Also, adding traditional fermented foods to your diet can be so good for you!  Unfiltered and unpasteurized fermented foods are full probiotics that help to build a healthy gut flora.  Stop buying those expensive probiotic supplements and start eating fermented pickles and you'll be set!! I wrote a bit more about this in a post last summer, if you're wanting to find out more.  

If you are looking for a recipe to get you started with fermenting cucumbers, this Nourished Kitchen recipe looks like a good one.  The one I used this time around is from The New Midwestern Table by Amy Thielen.  It's a fabulous cookbook that includes so many great updated traditional midwestern recipes, which is great if you want to cook using local and season ingredients.  I fall more in love with that cookbook each time I use it.  

For my fermented jalapeños, I just added some garlic and used the same salt water brine that I used for the cucumbers.  They take a bit longer to ferment (you can see the changing green colors in the picture above; once they are all the duller green color, I'll start checking them), but I find that fermenting them is a great way to preserve the handfuls of jalapeños that come in from our garden as I can ferment them as soon as I have a pint jar full.  

How about you??  Have you tried your hand at fermenting??  If so, what are some of your favorite things to ferment?  

garden notes :: 7.28.15

The heat of summer is definitely here!!!  The tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and tomatillo are loving it, while the beans and cucumbers are tolerating it and wishing that I'd water them just a bit more frequently...sigh...I'm just wishing it would rain a bit more frequently...that would make everyone happier!  

We've started eating our sunsugar cherry tomatoes and they are mouthwateringly delicious! And many of our other tomato plants are starting to have ripening fruit on them as well!  We have a couple beefsteak and main crop tomato plants that have huge tomatoes on them!  I'm sooooooo excited to slice into those babies and put them on a BLT or just eat them on their own with a little salt.  Yum.  

Remember in my last garden update I said I was a bit worried that my tomatillo needed a mate in order to produce fruit....well, thankfully, that doesn't seem to be the case!  It's branches (which are huge!) are now filling with little tomatillo pods that will hopefully hold little tomatillos inside of them very soon!  Hooray!!

We have an eggplant, folks!  I'm so very excited to pick it...It may only last out there for another day or two.  I've also heard that they are better when they are on the younger side (which is good, since I'm still developing a love for eating eggplant...but they are so pretty and fun, aren't they?!?!)

The peppers are doing well!  I just picked a pint of jalapeños yesterday to ferment with a bit of garlic (which, I've found, is a great way for us to preserve their sporadic bounty!)  Dan has also been enjoying them fresh with his breakfast eggs.  We should have a green pepper or two in the next week and the sweet little lunch box peppers are looking good--now they just have to start turning into their beautiful shades of yellow, orange, and red! 

The bush beans have slowed with the heat, but the pole beans are beginning to flower and fill out!  Within a week or two I think they'll start to produce!!  August...every thing is always ready in August, isn't it?!

One thing that I was able to harvest from the garden this week was our first crop of garlic!  It was a very small crop, just 5 heads, but they look healthy and smell lovely! They are now curing in the garage for a bit.  I think this fall I may have to find many more little corners of the garden to tuck garlic bulbs into.  They are so easy to grow!!!

Another thing in the garden that I've been very pleased with has been the creeping thyme that grows between our stepping stones.  I planted wooly thyme last year, but it didn't seem to do much, but this year it has taken off!  It's now beginning to fill the spaces between the stepping stones!  This year I added a bit of lemon thyme to the mix and it is also doing really well!  I think this fall I'll be able to divide some of it and hopefully by next summer it will start to really fill out the walkway---making a lush green carpet without weeds!!!  Hooray!!!

How about you?? How does your garden grow??

garden notes :: 7.10.15

The garden is thriving!!!  Such a wonderful thing to come home two after two weeks away during our prime growing season!  The tomatoes grew a couple feet while we were away and all needed a bit more staking.  They also all have green fruit on them and I'm hoping our cherry and grape tomatoes will start to ripen in the next couple weeks! The tomatillo is also looking hearty!  However, someone told me recently that you need two plants in order to produce fruit...and I just have one...so if anyone has had a successful experience with just growing one tomatillo, I'd love to hear about it!  Our eggplant is also flowering and growing, which makes me rather excited!  I'm not even sure how much I like eggplant, but growing something purple is just plain exciting. 

We have lots of little jalapeños, baby green peppers, and sweet lunch box peppers hanging from those pepper branches!  There is nothing quite like a homegrown pepper...so watery and crisp...yum!

The beans are doing well!  The bush beans got a bit pulverized by Monday's storms, but I should have a few beans ready to be eaten in the next day or two.  The pole beans are also starting to climb.  While we were away, though, they all decided to climb on some of the same strings, so I need to try to spread them out over the next few weeks so that I don't end up with overly crowded and not-very-productive pole beans.  Silly beans...

We have three hardy and happy cucumber mounds and I'm so very happy!  As I've mentioned before, I have not had much luck with cucumbers in the past, but I feel my luck changing this year as I watch these little guys flower and flower.  Hopefully we'll start to see fruit in the next week!

How are your gardens growing in this warm summer heat??

garden notes :: 6.23.15

I love how much the garden can change in just two weeks, especially in the month of June!  We've had perfect garden weather with days and nights of long steady rain, followed by days of hot sunshine and humidity.  Everything is thriving, especially the tomatoes, peppers, and tomatillo.  This past week I staked and tied the tomatoes and started a trellis for the pole beans.  The garlic has also been doing well and just last night I trimmed off the scapes and we grilled them with some asparagus for dinner.  They were pretty good!  The oregano and rhubarb are also enjoying this summer in the garden.  I'm excited for next year when the real rhubarb picking can begin!  (After transplanting/dividing rhubarb, you shouldn't really harvest much of anything until the third year.)  As for my garden flowers, I now have a few other things blooming!!  I love the continuous blooms that have been happening this year on that side of the garden.  The constant color is perfectly wonderful.  

We're headed out of town for a few weeks and I must say that it is hard to leave my growing garden and growing chickens!  However, I know they'll be in good hands and by the time we come home, we may have bush beans ready for picking and definitely tons of greens and herbs on our hands! 

How about you, friends, what's happening in your gardens these days??

free-range...for a few minutes

As I've mentioned before, this summer we are doing things a bit differently with the chickens when it comes to their time free-ranging in the yard.  In a perfect urban homesteading world, our chickens could freely wander around our yard and gardens at their leisure, enjoying grass, bugs, sunshine, and shade whenever their little hearts so desired. However, we do not live in a perfect urban homesteading world.  Rather, at our urban homestead, the chickens eat my carrot tops, trample and scratch up the rhubarb and hostas, kick mulch everywhere, poop on our deck, pathway, yard, pretty much everywhere, and eat my kale.  No, it is definitely not a perfect world over here.  So, this year, we're doing things differently and it means a lot less grass-time for these ladies of ours.  I read a book on my long Texas road trip a few weeks back called Free-Range Chicken Gardens and it gave me a lot more confidence in our decision to give the ladies a more controlled environment.  The reason for this is that in order to have a successful free-range chicken garden, your yard and gardens need to be ready to house chickens!  The plants need to be chicken resistant and the plants need to be arranged in a way that allows the hardier plants to protect and shelter the more vulnerable ones.  There are also times when it's necessary to protect tender seedlings or ripening fruits and veggies from curious chickens.  All of these things confirmed our decision to keep our chickens out of the yard and gardens for a bit.  With our landscaping only being a few years old, a lot of our perennials are young and in need of protecting until their roots grow deep and their stems and branches strong.  And with our relatively short vegetable garden season, it's important to keep the ladies out of there during pivotal points of the season, such as when tender seedlings are sprouting or when tomatoes are ripening.  So, for this year, our chickens are getting to free-range for a just a few minutes at a time, and under very supervised conditions.  So far, it seems to be working well and everyone seems to be happy!  (The cat has also been enjoying his free-range moments!)

My hope is that in the years to come, free-range time will become easier and easier, especially in the middle of the summer when the plants are thriving and strong.  Until then, our limited "free-ranging" is working just fine.  

workday at the gilbertson ranch

Last year we started a tradition for Father's Day and my dad's birthday of celebrating with an annual workday at the Gilbertson Ranch (a.k.a my dad and stepmom's house, which is not really a ranch at all, rather it's a big house with some land, a river, and a lot of plants...).  In lieu of gifts, we all get together for a day and give my dad something that means much more to him than presents--we give him our hard work (with many snack and beer breaks included) and our time all hanging out together.  It's a ton of fun and since there are so many of us, we get a ton done!  This year was no exception.  While the boys hauled mulch and wood, the girls weeded, pulled moss, and painted.  We then ended the day relaxing on the deck with good food and more time together.  

I love that we get to celebrate my dad in this way.  He's such an amazing dad.  Throughout my entire life he's been working so hard to provide for us and to make our lives better.  Even now that most of us are out of the house and on our own, he's still working to provide us with a wonderful place to relax and spend time together.  I love my dad.  He's the best.