Port Potager

Amid the failures of this weekend  (I haven't been able to bring myself to document all of them yet, but will soon) was one shining success:  Usually for Sunday dinner we have some really classic combination of a roast meat and several veggie side dishes. That sounds a lot like what we'll be preparing on Thursday, though, so this Sunday we went with a vegetarian option instead. Kirk made this Mushroom and Leek Galette with Gorgonzola from America's Test Kitchen , and it was fantastic (as are all recipes from America's Test Kitchen). But I bet even they don't know that the absolutely most perfect side dish for this is a serving of peaches.  Canned  peaches.  I was skeptical (or maybe just really tired) back in the summer when I was blanching and peeling and canning all of those peaches  that they would actually be all the great to eat in the winter. I mean, how could they ever compare with the delicious fresh ones from the summer? At...

A little over a week ago we had our first light frost, and I had to bring in all of our peppers . There were tons! (Okay, there were many pounds.) Instead of eating them green, we kept waiting for the them to ripen into their pretty colors. But when frost beat us to it, I had to bring in a lot all at once. Many of them have ripened to yellow and red on the counter, and we've been eating then just as fast as we can. Best use so far: Kirk made these excellent stuffed peppers in the crock pot. They are filled with rice, spicy Italian sausage, a bit of egg to hold it all together, and (of course) some more peppers. They were cooked in plain tomato sauce in the crock pot for several hours, and the result was really delicious. I think Kirk scooped up the remaining roasted pepper-flavored sauce to use later on some other Italian delight. Another major portion of the pepper harvest was our jalapeños and serranos: Kirk spent the evening last night slicing and dicing to...

Too much of a good thing? We can barely keep up with our cucumbers and tomatoes. I mean, you can only have so many meals built around them:  This is tabbouleh that Kirk made with some tomatoes and bulgur wheat (also a great way to use up lots of parsley) with a cucumber-red onion-feta salad on the side. That was very easy — slice it thin and put in the fridge with some white vinegar and it comes out cold and crispy for supper (add the feta just before serving). In addition to all the salsa (I think we're on our third gallon of it now, plus a half gallon in the freezer), we've been doing a lot of canning this month. A lot : As you can see on the left, we still have slicing cukes (in the front), rose tomatoes, and pickling cukes left over from our harvest session this past weekend, and I'm sure there will be a lot more when I got out to pick again tomorrow (I pick Thursdays and Sundays, plus whatever we grab on a daily basis for cooking, in case you wer...

Now we have everything, plus pickles. That's a saying at our house; a marriage idiom. It dates back to when we were first married, or maybe when we were living together in North Carolina. Either way, we were poor. We did the grocery shopping together, with a list and a calculator. When we hit the max on the weekly budget, we'd figure out what we could live without and put it back on the shelf. One day, though, we managed to get everything on our list, and were even able to pick up a jar of pickles as a bonus.  The phrase stuck, and it's grown to signify general contentment or delight in abundance. Today, it is literally as well as figuratively true, because last night we processed our first cucumber harvest: These are just the pickling cukes (which is why some of the them are such funny shapes). We trellised one 12-foot row of pickling cucumbers and another 12-foot row of slicers. The pickling ones are kicking butt, and last night we had enough to ...