Port Potager

In addition to a strong harvest of chicken heart hot peppers , we’re also enjoying a bumper crop of poblanos: (This isn’t even all of them.) These did really well for us this year, and we’ve been using them instead of bell peppers in our recipes all summer and fall. We had to bring them all in this week since we had a frost warning, though, so now we have piles of peppers to use. They’ll last for a while at room temperature, since they’re fairly tough, but to make sure we don’t lose any, we’ll have to roast and freeze them: These have been roasted in the broiler to char the skins. (They probably could be even blacker next time.) Once charred, you let them steam in a bag and then peel off the skins. Once prepped in the way, we can stack them in a freezer box and use them all winter long in recipes.  I used these four to make chiles rellenos. Since I am lazy, I didn’t batter and fry them, though. Instead, I put the cheese-stuffed peppers in a baking dish...

This year we planted a different variety of hot pepper: hinkelhatz. Hinkelhatz is German for "chicken heart," which describes the approximate shape and size of these peppers when they are ripe. The plants are prolific, and last weekend I harvested plenty from our second round of picking: The hinkelhatz are the small ones on the left; the big ones on the right are poblanos, which also did extremely well for us this year.  The first round of hinkelhatz peppers were sliced and pickled like jalapeños , and we plan to enjoy them on nachos all winter long. (Hopefully they’re not too spicy for that application — these are supposed to be several times hotter than jalapeños, but we’ve had such extremely spicy jalapeños in the past that I think we can handle it.) Now that we have a second batch, I blitzed that whole basket of mixed hot peppers above to make a new batch of homemade sriracha . We did this for the first time back in 2013, and it lasted pretty much fo...

Our enormous Gala apple tree had another great year, and we are once again buried in apples . The tree is so tall that we can’t pick them all — even with a ladder! That leaves us plenty of apples to turn into wintertime treats. This year, I decided to make some apple butter. This is a common Pennsylvania Dutch treat that’s basically super-concentrated applesauce. You just keep cooking it, so that the sugars caramelize and the whole thing turns into a thick, brown spread. It’s excellent on toast, and you can also use it in other desserts . Making it is an all-day affair, even with the help of the  Crockpot . To start, I made the world’s laziest  schnitz, which should be cored, sliced and peeled apples.  As you can see, all I did was cut the apples into quarters (they’re small) and toss them into the Crockpot. I like the color that the red skins give to the apples as they cook down, and it’s much easier just to run the whole pile through a food mill once ...

This year, we used a little extra square footage of ground gained by eliminating the cranberries to plant some bottle gourds . These are purely decorative, and I didn’t have much of a plan in mind — other than to see if it could be done. This photo was taken near the end of September or the beginning of October — quickly, as the bottle gourd bed was right next to the yellow jacket nest . Though we had a bunch of baby gourds back in July, several shriveled and died back during the droughty summer.  We ended up harvesting two.  Though we have been threatened with a frost or freeze several times this fall, it hasn’t yet come to pass. Still, I brought in the last pumpkins, squash, and gourds about a week ago, and they are sitting in the dining room to cure by the heat register: This plan ordinarily works quite well, but our furnace is broken! We’ve been muddling through with long underwear, blankets, and a space heater until the repairman can make it here ...

Back in the summer I fell in love with a new drink that made quick work of a bottle of homemade limoncello I had received as a gift. Eager to continue enjoying my Sunshine Spritzers , I hit the liquor store for a bottle of limoncello — only to discover that the commercial stuff is pretty terrible. So, like most things in life, if you want it done right, you need to do it yourself (doubly true when your limoncello-making friend moves away). Luckily, it’s pretty easy to do : First, I had to zest 10 lemons, which is by far the hardest part of the job if you are elbow grease-averse. (I am not.) All the zest went into a big half-gallon Mason jar , along with a liter of vodka: I put on a lid and let it sit for a couple weeks in a fairly dark corner of the kitchen. In that time, all the essential oils from the lemon zest were infused into the alcohol. When I got around to the next step, I made a simple syrup of 3 cups sugar and 4 cups water (boiled for 15 minutes without ...

This year’s drought wreaked havoc on our usually very reliable Concord grapes:   As you can see, they shriveled and died on the vine. At least the birds are enjoying a feast of raisins. On the bright side, our Catawba vines had never given us more than just a few bunches in the past, but they seem to love the dry weather: There are still some green ones in the mix, but with temperatures cooling and daylight waning, we picked them at the bend in the road between September and October. After we cut the ripe bunches and left them available for eat out of hand for a week, I decided we needed to process them. The fruit fly situation gets out of hand quickly if you let it, and these are seeded grapes, so they’re not that fun to eat anyway.  So I pulled every last one off of their stems and made Catawba grape jelly. There was just shy of three pounds when that project was complete, so I raided the fridge for some  Himrod grapes from earlier in t...

I haven’t written in a while, having taken some time to grieve , reflect, and celebrate the holidays over the past several weeks. We’re not at all sorry to kiss 2015 goodbye and are hoping for better in 2016.  One thing worth celebrating was our first honey harvest, which we only recently finished crushing, straining, and jarring up . In all, it was about 20 pounds of honey, all of it now in wide-mouth mason jars. Honey doesn’t ever go bad, so it’s very easy to store — we just poured it into clean jars and put a lid on it.  Because it lasts forever, honey also makes a nice gift. Back in December we had a little holiday workshop going in the dining room: I couldn’t share these before Christmas and risk ruining the surprise for the recipients, but now that it’s well and truly January, our holiday gifts looked like this:  The tag features Tiegan’s artwork; the cute silicone honey dippers are from the Stonewall Kitchen  downtown.  We sti...

Some time over the summer, before we tore apart the kitchen, I decided to try my hand at pickling okra. I know this because I found this photo lurking in an unpublished post:  Careful forensic evidence reveals that this photo was taken on the old kitchen counter, while the kitchen was still lime green in sections. I also recall being inspired by some pickled okra we had at Loretta’s Last Call (otherwise unmemorable except for the pitchers of sweet tea) before a game at Fenway on the Fourth of July. So I imagine I threw some early okra in a jar back when the okra was just starting and we couldn’t harvest enough to eat or freeze in a decent-sized batch yet.  I also found a cryptic note to myself reading " old horseradish brine, vinegar, water, dill, peppercorn, garlic” under the photo. So, to the best of my knowledge, here’s what happened. I used a jar that had recently been emptied of its horseradish pickles and tossed in three pods of okra, in what can only ...

This weekend, as always, we had a lot of picking to do. Our harvest is spreading across several tables and counters now. From the orchard we have lots of apples and pears: And from the kitchen garden we have an assortment of other (technical) fruits, including tomatoes, bell peppers. cucumbers, zucchini, and eggplant: The past two years we made and canned a delicious peach and zucchini chutney at the height of summer to preserve those outsized harvests. It's one of my all-time favorite foods, and I love it with some cheese, crackers, and pickles for a winter lunch.  This year we will not have any, so when our last jars are gone, we'll be out of that particular chutney for a few years, until a new peach tree begins to bear .  So we went back to the drawing board to find a new chutney recipe with ingredients that we actually have. Mid-September tomatoes and apples? Check. The Ball Book has a tomato apple chutney recipe , as does River Cottage . ...

When we have made enough sweet gherkins  for the year, it's time to switch to sour little cornichons:  These are far less involved than the gherkins because they're a refrigerator pickle. This recipe lasts pretty well forever (unless you lose power for several days and have to dump the contents of fridge, I guess). French cornichons are small and sour and totally delicious with cheese and other charcuterie-type delights.  The only tricky part about making them is remembering to pick the cucumbers when they're still tiny — the size of your pinkie finger is ideal. In the quart jar I have above, some are more the size I would use for gherkins. For whatever reason, all the really tiny ones are facing the wall in this photo.  Anyway, I think I've perfected my cornichon recipe, so give it a try if you're up to your ears in cucumbers: It's a great way to slow down your yields for a week or two since you won't have to harvest giant cukes later. ...

Not much gardening happening today, what with the 65 mph winds and 7-foot snow drifts: We're up to over 90 inches of snow on the season, and we've had two winter's worth of the white stuff fall in less than a month. Yeah, it's a lot. But all this enforced inside time does allow us to catch up on some chores that we might otherwise let slide. For example, we finally got around to shucking our strawberry popcorn. After harvesting it last September , we let it sit around to dry … for a really long time. Until today. With absolutely nothing better to do (we were not  going out to shovel in that wind), we got to work on rubbing the dried corn off the cob:  This was nowhere near as easy as it sounds. These are tiny kernels that end in a sharp point. We figured out that if you used your thumbnail to clear a little patch of kernels, then you could press the rest of them toward the open area and they would (mostly) come off easily. Still, after a couple ...

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone, and we are still eating our way out of several gigantic containers of leftovers. That is in no way a complaint, by the way--we're loving it. Perhaps one of the reasons we have so much food left over this year is because we filled up on appetizers throughout the afternoon. Here's our cocktail snack spread: That all looks perfectly reasonable, until you remember the 22-pound turkey and vat of mashed potatoes waiting in the kitchen. Any other day of the year, this would have been a light lunch.   In addition to a nice, cured salami and several cheeses, we had bites of red and blue tart , made from some of the last Chioggia beets of the year. Chioggia beets are my favorite because they are extra sweet and not so earthy. When raw they are red and white striped, but after you roast them the colors blend into the pink you see above. Kirk went fairly light on the blue cheese, which probably pleased our younger guests. Th...

About six weeks I ago I harvested some valerian root from the garden and set it out to dry: I had been warned by many sources that valerian smells terrible and only gets worse as it dries. I also heard that it attracts cats, but neither of these things have turned out to be true. Fletch has never even given it a sniff, despite it being at nose height for a couple of weeks. As for the smell, it does have an odor — I just don't happen to hate it. It's very hard to describe. It reminds everyone of something , but no one can seem to place it. There's definitely a camphor scent to it — kind of turpentine-y or Mentholatum-y — that lingers in the back of your sinuses. There's also an earthy, root-y smell to it, like a medicinal version of sarsaparilla . And, sometimes, there's a whiff of stinky socks involved, but that's not ever foremost in the bouquet for me, though apparently other people find it unbearable. Since I had two trays of roots, I deci...