Port Potager

It’s been slow going for our tomato plants this year. The cold, cloudy spring and dry summer have basically put our plants on pause. Still, they are growing — albeit at a glacial pace — and producing. They’re just several weeks behind schedule. When we lost most of our vining tomato seedlings, we replaced them with transplants. To cheer ourselves up, we took advantage of the opportunity to sample several new-to-us varieties. Here’s our first basket: Not pictured: our Amish paste and Paisano tomatoes, which are all still green on the vine. We also planted a new variety called “Mexico,” but the one reddish one wasn’t quite ready to be picked yet. Below is one of everything except Early Girl (the small red one in the 10 o’clock position above), which is a perfectly okay tomato if you like the grocery store kind. Above we have the more interesting ones for tasting. Top row, from the left: Black Krim, Rose, Red Brandywine. Bottom row: Yellow Pear, Sungold, Green Zebra....

What's the price of maple syrup? I'm not sure how much we're talking about in USD, since we haven't bought any in a few years , but we just traded some for four (!!) live lobsters (okay, so one was missing a claw, but still). One of the doctors Kirk works with has a boat, and this spring he took a pint of this year's maple syrup in trade for the promise of summer fish. We were hoping for some blue fish, but with the season coming to an end, he hadn't gotten much of anything. So a couple nights ago he came to the door with a cooler full of lobsters from his traps. We kept them in a bowl in the mini fridge on the porch (no need to terrify the children), and tonight Kirk steamed them up: I will admit that I have no interest in cracking open a lobster and fighting to dig out the meat, and Kirk did yeoman's work on picking all four of these. After putting the shells and legs into a pot with celery, carrots, onion and parsley to make some lobster stock ...

I never thought I'd say it, but I think we may have planted too many tomatoes.  For the record, this year we planted 48 tomato plants. This is down from 55 last year, but it still may be a wee bit more than we need. Ok, ok. I know that sounds like an absolutely insane amount of tomatoes. But remember, we don't buy any vegetables at the store. That means that we're planting a year's worth of tomatoes when we start those seeds in the middle of winter.  Although we only can eat them fresh for about two months of the year, we can sauce , dry them , and make some dishes to freeze to get us through the other ten months of the year. It can be a little hard to judge how much of something you're going to eat over such a big span of time, but going into our second winter of the No Buying Veggies Challenge lets us use what we learned last year. For example, last year we canned 20 quarts of tomato sauce, plus a few extra quarts of whole tomatoes.  Turns out ...

We busted our asses today to finish the walls of our renovation so that we can have our kitchen back as soon as possible. We should be able to clean everything up by tomorrow night and be back in business for pickling and otherwise preserving all the food that is currently just sitting on the dining room table. This is not to say that our project is done — ha! — but at least we'll be able to use the kitchen while we finish. In the meantime, though: no cooking. To get any food at all requires peeling back a bunch of dropcloths and digging around to find things we moved to another room. It's not that fun. Still, we managed a pretty great dinner anyway. It's simple but delicious, because it allows some fresh garden ingredients to shine without much preparation: Our first cantaloupe was ready today (you can tell they are ripe because they slip from the vine without any resistance), so we picked up some proscuitto to wrap around it — salty-sweet perfection! We ...

Yesterday I picked the biggest tomato I have ever seen! On the left is a perfectly average Moskvich tomato. On the right is a really, really big Rose tomato ( an heirloom variety ). Lots of our Rose tomatoes tended to be big this summer, but nothing like this. It weighed in at three pounds . This picture also shows pretty clearly where Rose gets its name — its color before it ripens is pink, and when ripe is a really clear red (unlike the typical orangey tomato red of the one next to it).  Anyway, Kirk made this into salsa, and just this one tomato gave us a full quart of salsa to freeze. That brings us to a gallon of red salsa in the freezer for winter, so I think we can stop now.

Among all the Romas we picked over the weekend were also some of the heirloom vining variety we planted this year. These are Rose tomatoes, a variety originally raised by the Amish: The two giant tomatoes are Rose. They weigh about a pound apiece! The Roma that I put next to them for scale is a totally average one — Rose tomatoes are huge! It's hard to tell in this photo, but they are more pink-red than the traditional orangey-red of most tomatoes. This is especially noticeable before they are fully ripe, as they turn from green to pink before they redden up.  They are also a vibrant pink-red when you cut them open:  As you can see, this tomato is almost all meat. This isn't even the best photo of that — there are lots of of times when we cut into it and see no seeds at all.  These tomatoes are delicious! They are less acidic (based on the fact they they don't sting my hands when I cut up a bunch), and sweet, and good. The only drawback is that they...