The Busy Gourmand

Italian Seed Packets

There has not been a lot of blogging as of late. In addition to my rather full plate of things to do I have added another business opportunity. This new opportunity seems to be eating up a lot of time while I climb the learning curve. This does not mean I have not been cooking. I have been making some old favorites while making changes along the way. I reinvented my cassoulet to include many more herbs and lamb. I am not a big fan of lamb but it seemed to give the cassoulet a different flavor dimension.

It looks like we are not going to get much of a winter here in North Texas. So it is time to start thinking about things to plant in the garden before the heat of the summer sets in. I usually just go to the specialty nursery and buy my plants. But I ran across some Italian seeds in beautiful packets. Leave it to the Italians to inspire me to try some seeds this year.

Of course I reached for things that remind me of Italy. San Marzano tomatoes (pomodoro alto San Marzano), bulb fennel (finocchio gigante di Napoli) which is impossible to find here in Texas, the spicy red Calabrese pepper (peperoncino Calabrese), and for good measure some arugula (rucola) and some chicory. The final two have been in the garden before. It is just that the packaging was so inspiring I had to buy them. We of course will add basil and eggplant later on.

I’ll keep you posted on the results. I have heard San Marzano tomatoes are hard to grow and the bulb fennel may not ever turn into a bulb. It never hurts to try new things.

Pepper Cornucopia

We are supposed to have our first frost this evening. This causes me to go out and harvest every last bit of life off the plants in the backyard. I was struck by the number of peppers we have been enjoying this fall when we hardly had any peppers to eat over the summer. I guess the peppers are sensitive to high temperatures. They do not seem to mind the cooler nights and shorter days. I have been especially surprised by the habanero peppers. We did not harvest one of them until late September. As you can see from the picture we will have enough habaneros to last us for a couple of years. We already have several containers of pickled habaneros from the garden. I suppose it will be a very spicy winter.

We were also excited about an heirloom pepper called a St. Nick. It is a sweet pepper shaped like a pumpkin. While the plants grew to an enormous size, we have only had one or two to enjoy until now. They take a long time to turn the red color that people prize them for in cooking. I guess we will be enjoying some semi-red peppers for the next week or so.

This will also be pesto-making night at our house. All the basil leaves will be stripped off the rather thick branches of the basil. We will turn it into pesto to be enjoyed during the winter months. I have used the same pesto recipe for years, although you skip the cheese part if you are going to freeze the pesto. I like it just fine tossed with a bit of pasta. We did give you some other ideas about using the pesto including chicken and pasta and a lasagna. I also like to mix it with mayonnaise and use it as a salad dressing or as a spread on a sandwich.

We also had a very unusual purple basil this year. Usually I do not buy this variety unless I plan to toss it with salad greens. This particular type of purple basil has an especially strong anise flavor. I think we will try it as a pesto this winter. I am keeping some of the seeds just in case the pesto works out.

And finally our winter/spring salad garden left us some seeds in the ground. This has given us a bit or early arugula and some very tasty mustard greens. We have been using all of this in salads and stir fries. I am not one to argue with a delicious fate.

Heirloom Tomatoes

Our flood of tomatoes continues unabated. It was great when we were getting about one or two tomatoes per day. Our affinity for salads could keep up. Lately we have been averaging six to eight tomatoes per day. I gave some thought to putting them in my yogurt in the morning. But I think I would miss my granola.

We already explored tomato tarts which use about four tomatoes each. I opted to do a decidedly un-Busy Gourmand kind of thing and make a tomato sauce from scratch. (So much for “good food, little time”) If it did not turn out at least I would have reduced the tomato stockpile by eight tomatoes buying us one more day before they could be replenished.

Once more my internet research yielded some very strange versions of a tomato sauce. Sugar seemed to be a primary ingredient in many of these recipes. I suppose if you are using tomatoes from the grocery store sugar might be needed. But the last thing my tomatoes needed was sugar. So I shut off my computer and went to my old go-to girlfriend Lidia Bastianich. As with most of her recipes I used them as a guideline. While she enjoys singing opera while gently pressing her tomatoes in a food mill, I took the more direct route of the food processor. This method is a little more aggressive but certainly a time saver.

Spaghetti in Fresh Tomato Sauce

The results were delicious. We both sat back and said “just like Italy.” The sweet, mild, freshness of the tomatoes came through immediately. I was a bit generous with the basil which actually seemed to work well. I was worried that half the tomatoes were an heirloom plum variety and half were an heirloom called German stripe. It did not seem to make a big difference. And the color was so different from a canned tomato sauce; more toward the orange spectrum than the red. If you are up for a little bit of extra work the fresh tomato sauce seems to be worth the extra effort.

Russet Potatoes

We are getting back into the normal routine after the trip to Buenos Aires.  While we were away it seems like the garden doubled in volume with everything growing like mad in the hot Texas air.  Tomatoes seem to be coming in droves.  We harvested our first cucumber ever.  The squash seem to be coming in at a brisk pace.

Will wanted to try potatoes this year.  We had tried to plant them a couple of times before with a very limited harvest.  It is now harvest time as the temperature rises about 90 degrees most days.  First up were the russets.  It was a small harvest of about six potatoes, but that was for one plant.  The good news is that they were delicious.  Very mild in flavor compared to the ones that are stored and then trucked across the country. 

Another observation is that the largest part of the garden was planted with home made compost with about 20% of the garden planted using compost purchased at the garden center.  The plants growing in our home made compost are significantly bigger than the ones planted in the other compost.  The fruiting of the plants in the home made compost seems to be significantly greater than the ones growing in the other compost.  I have also noticed that the areas of the garden using the home made compost have very few weeds.  I think the garden center compost comes full of seeds from sitting out in the open air before bagging. This goes to prove, at least in our case, that composting your own stuff is more productive than buying from the garden center. 

Barrel Composter

And speaking of compost we harvested our first compost from the barrel composter we bought a few weeks back.  This method of composting requires the added step of removing the compost from the barrel and placing it in another compost pen for holding until next spring.  Interesting thing though, the compost was fully broken down and it smelled really nice.  There was none of the sometimes garbage smell you get when composting the kitchen scraps.  I do not  think we will mind the added step.

The First Tomato

We have just begun the tomato harvest. The first one came off the vine looking more like a deformed basketball than a tomato. But if I have learned anything over the past few years it is that the sweetness of the tomato is proportional to its ugliness. Heirloom tomatoes have become all the rage due in large part to their meaty succulence in spite of their often ugly appearance. And while our first tomato was a beefsteak hybrid, its deformities seemed to indicate something special about its flavor. It turned out to be a very meaty sweet tomato which we paired with some fresh mozzarella and some basil.

Mystery Squash

The rest of the garden is just getting to the point of rapid fruit production. We have had a couple of Japanese eggplants and a couple of summer squash. But there is enough miniature fruit in the process to keep us in vegetables for a few months. We also had some uninvited guests, not of the bug variety, but of the vegetable variety. It seems that some seeds were present in our compost when we spread it on the garden. As a result we have a couple of varieties of squash we cannot identify as well as one variety of cucumber which as of yet is still a mystery as to its species. We have never eaten any squash that looks like these. How they got in the compost we will never know. If you know what they are let me know!

A Hopeful Garden

As for the ugly tomatoes, we will be knee deep in them soon enough. I think our composting yielded enough material for them to thrive this year. After our disaster last year I was a bit leery of even trying them again. But those little bitty plants I showed you several weeks back have turned into a forest of beefsteak, plum, cherry, and grape tomatoes. Looks like some good cooking coming up.

Tomato Jungle

Tomato Garden

Now comes the time of the year when I spend most of my waking hours working in and thinking about the garden. I decided to get started early this year. Last year we started a bit late and our harvest of tomatoes was meager and the harvest of many other vegetables was nonexistent. I am hoping with a little bit better planning we will actually get to enjoy more things from the garden.

Last year we also began the process of trying to compost everything from the kitchen and the back yard. It was an ugly process to say the least. However it yielded enough compost to spread a layer a couple of inches deep over the large garden in the backyard. The result I hope will be a much healthier, longer lasting crop of veggies.

Barrel Composter

To make things easier we bought a barrel composter this year. It was nearly impossible to turn the compost in the large, square, ground-based bin. So the plan this year is to largely compost in the barrel composter and store the composted material in the large bin to use next year. It seems like a lot of work. But, I am guessing, we saved over 30 bags of yard waste from going into the landfill. And we put no kitchen waste in the trash for most of the year. It will also give me something else to obsess about during the gardening season

This also gives me the excuse to say that I was so busy getting things done in the garden I did not post any new recipes this week. I’ll get back at it in earnest in the next few days