Port Potager

We made our garden plan back in February, but I forgot to document it. I was reminded of this when we pulled out the plan to actually start planting. It hasn’t been warm — it’s snowing as I write this — but the ground has thawed and we can get started with our hardiest cool-weather plants. The leeks we ordered came in the mail, so we had to get them in the ground. We bought transplants instead of doing them from seed this year, and they are about as big around as a pencil — much bigger than the tiny strings we’ve managed to get starting them on our own. These are much easier to work with, and I’m certain they’ll have a better survival rate than our tiny seedlings, so this looks to be a good investment. Behind the cold frame you can see a few of last year’s leeks — these are the stragglers we haven’t harvested yet. Usually when we plant in March, we’re out of luck when it comes to compost. That’s because the City Yard doesn’t open until April and our pile is usually frozen....

Zucchini is almost always a sure-fire garden vegetable, often to the point of ridiculous returns on the investment of a few seeds. We even planted ours in semi-shade this year to slow it down, and we’ve still managed to pick more than we can typically eat as a side dish. In addition to baking and freezing our favorite zucchini bread for the winter, we’ve had plenty of zucchini pizzas on the grill , along with zucchini salads and sides.  There’s still always more to eat, so Kirk dug into one of our favorite summer reference books, the  Moosewood Cookbook . This is full of excellent vegetarian recipes, and Kirk decided to try making a zucchini-crusted pizza. This is basically a grated zucchini fritter held together with egg and cheese, but you make it big enough to use as the crust of a pizza. You can find the recipe here . Kirk tweaked the recipe by making it on a flat pizza pan with browning holes instead of in a pie plate, which made it much crispier.  Instead...

Working our way around the garden, we come to the workshop quadrant. I guess we could also call this the office quadrant, since it forms the bulk my view during the day. Here’s what I’ll be gazing out at when I’m procrastinating: In the center C are celery and parsley, zucchini, cantaloupe, and a Sungold tomato plant. The Sungold, celery, and parsley are partially shaded, which should be fine. It should help slow the ultra-prolific Sungold down to a manageable harvest level, and celery and parsley will do well with some shade in the summer anyway. Across the top, as always, are our perennial grapes and herbs. In the upper portion of the right side is a succession planting of dill. This is the shadiest section of the garden, but dill is basically a weed and will do fine here. Below that is a semi-shaded section that will lie fallow for most of the season until we plant next winter’s spinach and mache in a cold frame. Across the bottom is a long trellis of peas and a r...

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 . ...

It's the time of year again: zucchini is back in force! This one had a particular joie de vivre and would not be dragged down. It was growing straight up – something I hadn't seen before. I figured it would fall back to earth as it got too heavy, but no. This one was aiming for the heavens until we cut it. It was tasty, too. When zucchini is still small and tender (if you can manage to stay on top of it), you can totally eat it raw. We had this one in a shaved zucchini and fennel salad: Kirk just uses a sharp vegetable peeler to make long, thin strips. It's dressed simply with lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. There's also some thin bits of fennel bulb thinnings and some fennel fronds as well. This was a rare occasion in which we cooked together. The other part of last night's dinner was an omelet I made with (obviously) eggs, baby broccoli (the side shoots are even better than the big heads !), tarragon, chives, scallions, and a mild...

This past weekend we spent some time on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, in a small town called Uvita. When we weren't busy ziplining through the jungle or diving into waterfall pools, we enjoyed lots of local dishes in the town's sodas , or diners.    The most common dish in Costa Rica is the casado , or "marriage." The marriage is of rice and beans, which are always served together. Along with this base comes a piece of meat (or fish on the coast), some fried plantain, a salad, and a picadillo , which is a vegetable side cut into small pieces. It's a full plate of food, and one in which the meat is only a small portion of the well-balanced plate. Kirk's casado  in the photo above has, clockwise from the top, sweet fried plantain, fried fish, mixed salad (which is somewhat less common than the typical cabbage slaw), red beans, white rice, and pieces of ayote , a summer squash similar to zucchini.  Costa Rican cuisine is typically not spicy, alth...

This year we had a really nice crop of butternut squash and pie pumpkins. We picked them all before the frost , and they have been curing for the last ten days or so by the heat:  This is a warm, dry spot, which helps the skins of the squash dry out so they are good and tough. Tough skins, in turn, will help them last through the winter in storage. Today we moved them down into the basement, which is cool and dark. We spread them out on a table, making sure they weren't touching each other. The space helps with air circulation and will slow the spread of any rot just in case one goes bad early. Not every one of our butternuts was storage-worthy, though. Four or five of them didn't have their stems intact, which means they are more susceptible to rot in storage because of the breach in the skin where the stem should be. The ones without stems stayed up in the kitchen, where we would be reminded to eat them up quickly. One super-easy way to prepare butternut squ...

In addition to all the regular red tomatoes we've grown in the past, this year we planted an heirloom Ukrainian yellow variety, the seeds of which we picked up at Strawbery Banke last fall . Although they took a while to fruit, they ended up being delicious — meaty, and not as acidic as tomatoes are apt to be. I think of it as a great tomato for people who think they don't like tomatoes. (Although I cannot personally understand such an aversion, I hear that it does indeed exist among some small, sad portion of the population.) They are also gorgeous: Most of our red tomatoes get sauced or salsa'd , so I thought I'd use some of the yellow ones for gazpacho to save the red for those other uses. Also involved are an onion, a clove of garlic, a small slicing cucumber, and a small green pepper. This is a traditional Spanish-type of gazpacho , meaning it is pureed and has bread, and is not a cucumber-y mild salsa (though those are nice, too). Since this one...

You know how traditionally women did certain household chores on certain days? Like washing on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays? If you think I'm making this up , you didn't read enough Little House in the Big Woods as a kid. Well, I kind of have that this summer. Harvest on Mondays and Thursdays, deal with said harvest on Tuesdays and Fridays.  So after yesterday's picking over of the garden and orchard, here's what I had: Another twenty or thirty pounds of peaches, plus all our red and yellow onions on the counter behind them. Here's a better view. The bags are full of drying herbs and last year's mustard seeds, which I still haven't completely threshed out yet because it's a giant pain. The onions are easy — they just need to sit out in the warm air to cure before we store them in the basement.  A refill on the fruit bowl, now with nectarines in addition to peaches. (Oh, and one windfallen-but-perfectly-ripe Gala apple t...

We're still working our way through the peach harvest . We're eating as many as we can fresh and giving some away, but we also have to process most of them. Peaches have a pretty short shelf life, so despite being in the midst of a big home renovation project — one that has a major impact on the kitchen, I might add — we had to get it done. I already made jam the other day , and tonight Kirk and I tag-teamed another 15-20 pounds of peaches in a pair of canning projects. First up, chutney: The recipe I am using is from River Cottage : Courgette and Peach Chutney . In case you're not fancy, "courgette" is British-talk for zucchini. A big recipe that burns through lots of peaches and a giant zucchini? Brilliant.  So in the pot above is the rough chop of zucchini, onion, and peach. These peaches were first blanched, peeled, and pitted by pulling them apart with my hands. That should give you an idea of how much they have softened over the past coupl...

We've already had our fill of zucchini bread , and have had zucchini pizza three times in the last two weeks. And still, three biggish zukes were left on the counter: My original plan was to shred and freeze for later, but when I was looking through the Ball Book  to see how to do it, I hit upon directions for drying zucchini instead. Their idea was to dehydrate slices to reconstitute later in soups, but we have plenty of winter soup veggies coming in the next few months. But we could just eat the slices as chips, right? I don't have a dehydrator, but we've use the oven in the past for herbs and tomatoes with no problems, so that's what I did here. Our lowest temperature is 170 degrees, and at that temperature it took about six hours to dry our zucchini chips. I made some with just salt (for Jonas) and others with a spice mix. Both turned out really yummy! Thai Zucchini Chips zucchini juice of 1 lime 1 tsp. kosher salt 1 tsp ground ginger 1/4 tsp...

Last summer I wrote a pair of posts in which I dubbed myself the human food processor (see Part 1 and Part 2 ). It's the pickling time again, and today I picked what we need for bread and butter pickles (which I talked about before here ): I love bread and butter pickles, but man oh man are they a pain to make. Thinly slice four pounds of cucumbers and two pounds of onions. It takes for-freaking-ever. And makes you cry a lot. To give you an idea, the picture above is only about 1/3 of the amount of vegetable matter required. That is why I am so excited about our anniversary gift from my in-laws: Woohoo! It's a great, big Cuisinart ! This made all the slicing and dicing go by at lightning speed (well, give or take 20 minutes to figure out how to use it without cutting myself).  So fast! So beautiful! So uniform! I was so impressed that I also used it to shred another giant zucchini for more zucchini bread : Maybe I got a little too exc...

We're still working our way through zucchini this week, so we built dinner around it. Big zukes are perfect for this recipe, so we chose our two biggest, cut them in half lengthwise, and scooped out the seedy centers: Kirk rubbed olive oil on both sides of the zucchini and lightly salted the cut side. Then he put them out on the grill face down for 3-5 minutes (this part is directly over the coals).  When he flipped them back over, he moved them off to the side so they would be getting indirect (and less) heat. You could stuff these with anything at all, but we thought we'd make them like pizzas. We made one plain (just sauce and mozzarella) for Jonas, and the rest we also covered with roasted red peppers, olives, pepperoni, basil, and parmesan. Kirk put the lid of the grill to let the cheese melt for a couple minutes, and then they were done: Super easy, and they taste just as good as they look. (The charring around the edges is a good thing!) And I gue...

All the heat of the past week brought us great, big okra, cukes , and zukes. I'm staying on top of the harvesting pretty well: These are only slightly oversized — the one on the bottom is about a normal-sized zucchini. (Not sure why the one on top looks like Bam-Bam's bat.) Considering how fast these guys grow when it's warm and sunny, this represents total success at keeping the zucchini from getting out of control. Except that we haven't been able to keep up with the actual eating  of zucchini, since this is the current state of the kitchen: We still have all the appliances and most of the cabinets on the wall behind me, so it's not impossible to cook. It's just incredibly unpleasant, especially in the heat and dust. So instead of coming up with creative zucchini dishes, we've been ordering pizza. Despite the heat and the mess, I did manage to use up one of those lovely summer squashes yesterday to make zucchini bread. Why not bake ...

We had a lot of catching up to do outside in the garden this weekend. It was hard to get motivated to get outside and pull weeds after a week of vacation, another week of intense work on renovating our screened-in porch, and a weekend of cloudy, rainy weather. It was also hard to get off of the couch where we have camped out to watch the Olympics. Still, Sunday night we got a late start in the afternoon harvesting cherry tomatoes, cabbage, zucchini, some more cucumbers, beans, and herbs. We also began some fall plantings of broccoli, kale, cabbage, and our last sowing of annual herbs like cilantro, basil, dill, and fennel. After all that, it was late, but we had a lot of good food on hand to make into a quick dinner. Kirk made a frittata filled with tomato, zucchini, and potato from the garden: All those things are so flavorful that the only other thing he added was salt and pepper. Here's the basic recipe , but we just changed the filling ingredients to the veggies we h...

Zucchini has arrived! The one on the left is a tad overgrown — a day earlier it looked perfect like the one on the right. This is hardly the biggest zuke we've ever harvested, though. A great way to use ones that might be a little tough because they got out of hand (or were hidden under a big leaf and went unnoticed) is to make zucchini pancakes: This is another one of Kirk's eyeballed recipes. You grate the zucchini (we used the big one), and you can add some grated carrot, onion and garlic (or any combination of those) to the zukes. Beat 2 eggs in a bowl. Add a heaping half cup of flour and 3/4 tsp. of baking soda. Pour that mixture into the zucchini; stir it all together. Then you scoop it into a frying pan with hot oil and fry them until they look crispy and brown on the outside.  You don't have  to top them with sour cream, but you'd be missing out. We ate ours with some green bean and feta salad  to celebrate our first green beans of the summe...