Brussels Sprouts & Jerusalem Artichokes

Finally! We got some more-or-less edible Brussels sprouts from the garden. Gosh, they are hard to grow. Ours are very loose and also, er, highly organic or is the phrase high in protein? At any rate I gave them a good soak in very salty cold water before I cooked them. Now if we can just figure out how to get them to form denser heads next time.

I hoped this combo would be good and I have to say, it really was. I'll be making this again, for sure.

30 minutes - 20 minutes prep time


Prepare the Vegetables:
12 to 16 Brussels sprouts
8 to 10 Jerusalem artichokes
4 large shallots

Wash and trim the Brussels sprouts, and cut an "x" in the bottom of each if they are large. Peel the Jerusalem artichokes, and slice them in fairly large slices. Put them in a dish of cold water as you go. Peel the shallots, and cut them in halves or quarters lengthwise.

Finish the Dish:
1 tablespoon mild vegetable oil
1 or 2 tablespoons soy sauce, low sodium is fine
1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

Heat the oil in a large skillet. Add the Brussels sprouts, with a few tablespoons of water, and cook over medium heat until they turn a bright green and the water evaporates. Add the shallots and the Jerusalem artichokes, and continue cooking until the shallots are browned in spots and look cooked through. Season with the soy sauce and sesame oil, and as soon as they seem to be absorbed by the vegetables, remove them to their serving dish.




Last year at this time I made Swiss Chard Rolls.

Winding Down the Garden

The weather has been holding up amazingly well. We had a week or so of cool, grey weather, but not so cool as to make working in the garden unpleasant. Now we seem to be having more sunny weather, but we still have had only 3 frosts so far, only the one last night being a hard one. This has been great for us because we have been very behind in getting the garden ready for winter and this has allowed us to get much of it done.

The bed above is where we grew our potatoes in boxes. We dug up the second half, which was planted with German Butterball potatoes and got 88 pounds. A good, but not spectacular harvest. We were expecting more, and are going to have to assess whether we want to go to all the trouble of planting potatoes in a box next year. On the other hand, we have the soil and we have the wood so we might. We'll see how ambitious we feel next spring.

Those little green fruits sitting on the dirt are berries from the German Butterball. I've never grown a potato that set so many. I might try saving some seed and planting them next spring, and seeing what I get.



The garden as a whole is looking very different than it did just a week or so ago. The biggest change is in the fruit beds. Melon and cucumber trellises down, tomato trellises down, and all the dead and dying plants removed. Garlic is planted, and we are clean and ready to go next spring, when this section will be planted with root vegetables. We have put up a record number of hoop-houses, 6 in all planning to have lots of spinach next spring to sell.


In the root section, winter radishes still look very lush, with carrots behind them. This late summer planting is doing very well.



The leafy greens, mostly brassicas, are in the other beds that are still in use. Cabbages need to be picked and stored, as do Brussels Sprouts. I'll cut the chard down this week and freeze it. The beds where we grew corn have already been cleared and replanted with spinach, lettuce and mixed greens for the spring.



We planted peas in midsummer hoping for a late harvest. They did not do well. We did not keep up on top of the weeds, and they were probably planted about 2 weeks later than ideal. We'll just get a handful of peas and snow peas.


The beans have died down. As soon as this photo was taken, I cut down the vines and strings so Mr. Ferdzy could take down the trellises. In fact, I have already started, you can see the pile in the right hand lower corner of the picture.

Our sturdier trellises had some mixed results. The plants stayed better within their beds, but the whole trellis was inclined to sway when the wind blew, and they ended up pretty crooked.



The hoop-houses have been great for allowing us to extend seasons and overwinter greens, so I thought I would show some detail about how we make them. We are bracing them more this winter than we did last year, when one of the 2 we put up collapsed under the weight of the snow. Mr. Ferdzy put in rough-cut spruce (construction strapping) along the top and bottom in the middle of each bed. This is the cheapest new wood you can buy, about $3 for a 4" x 1" x 16' piece. Our beds are 24' long so we needed a total of 3 pieces per bed, plus scraps to brace them.

First, we lay out the bottom pieces. Then Mr. Ferdzy takes the piece and a half for the top, and drills holes where the electical conduit used for the hoops goes through.


The electrical conduit (3/4") goes through, and is anchored on each side in a 1' piece of ABS pipe (2") sunk into the ground. These are placed at 4' intervals all along the beds, and are also used to hold up the trellises.


In goes the other end, forming the hoop.



First we do the ends, then the middle, then we fill in the rest.


The electrical conduit is stiff enough to be a little hard to bend, but you want it to be fairly strong.


Once all the hoops are in, Mr. Ferdzy screws lengths of wood in every 8' (i.e. every second hoop) between the top and bottom pieces of board to brace the hoop-house. How well does this work? We don't know, I'll tell you in the spring.

At this point my battery ran out, so I don't have any more photos, but there isn't much more to the hoop-houses anyway. We buy 100' rolls of 6mil plastic (the kind used as vapour barrier over insulation in construction) and cut each one into 3 equal pieces. This is the right size to cover one of our beds. We place it over the hoops, and weight it down with paving stones, rocks and bricks. And there you have it, a hoop house. Including the taxes, it probably costs about $100 to make each hoop house and it is not really worth making fewer than 3 of them because that's the size of the roll of 6mil plastic. This also includes the ABS pipe, which remains as a permanent part of the bed. Not cheap, but we expect to get at least 5 years out of each one and hopefully more.

Hopefully we will have the garden cleaned up and ready for winter in another week or so. I admit I am happy to be done for the year. I will stop thinking about it for a month or so, then it will be time to start looking through seed catalogues and get revved up for another season, which will of course be so much better than this one!

Doe Hill Peppers & Jimmy Nardello Sweet Italian Frying Peppers

Last week we brought in the last of our peppers - and by the last, I mean most of the harvest we got this year; about a bushel in all. We kept our peppers going so long by covering them with a hoop-house once the weather got cool. Since it's starting to dip down below 5°C at night, we decided it was time to bring them in. They had reached a stage where they were keeping, but not growing or ripening any more.

Two of the peppers that did very well for us were Doe Hill, the little round yellow one, and Jimmy Nardello, the long red one in the picture above.


Doe Hill

Until a few years ago this pepper seemed practically unknown around here. It's an heirloom variety from the Doe Hill area of Virginia, grown there since before 1900. It looks like a small, squat yellow bell pepper, but it isn't. It's more in the family of tomato or apple peppers: small, thick-walled peppers named for their slightly flattened spherical shape. It tastes somewhat like a yellow bell pepper too, being sweet and mild yet with a rich strong flavour. That's when it's ripe. It can be eaten green, like a green bell pepper too. Everyone who tried this pepper this summer liked it very much. Me too! Since it isn't actually a bell pepper, I can eat it without getting the indigestion that bell peppers always give me. This is an exciting discovery for me!

Their one flaw, that I can see, is a tendency to go from golden perfection to a sack of mush overnight. Don't pick them until you need them, if you can help it, and watch them carefully if you can't.

The plants are quite compact, not getting much above 24" in height, and they produce a lot of peppers. They start early, about 60 to 65 days from planting out, and keep going all season, especially if you keep them picked. As all other peppers in this climate, they must be started indoors at the end of February or beginning of March, and planted out in late May once the soil warms up. They are said to be disease resistant. We had no disease problems this year, so I can't comment. I will definitely grow these again next year, and more of them!

Jimmy Nardello:

Like Doe Hill, Jimmy Nardello peppers are an heirloom variety, although better documented. Seeds were brought to Connecticut by Angela Nardiello in 1887 from the town of Ruoti, east of Naples in Italy. There's a very good article about their history here. Her son, Jimmy Nardello, eventually passed seed on to Seed Saver's Exchange. Like Doe Hill, they've been becoming more and more popular as they get saved and passed around.

In looks they could hardly be more different. They are a long, skinny pepper, turning from a medium green to a strong red when ripe. Their walls are thin, allowing them to dry easily and cook quickly. They are less sweet and more "peppery" than the Doe Hills, but they are in no way hot. If you read the history above, and the comments, you'll see mention that they can be fried directly from the dry state.

They are said to ripen in 75 to 85 days from planting out, but in my experience these are a fair bit later than the Doe Hills. The odd one will ripen earlier, but the majority of the peppers on the plant - and there will be lots - will not ripen until just before frost. I suspect that I'm at about the northern limit of their tolerance. Height of the plants is a little taller than the Doe Hills; somewhere between 24" and 30". Both of these varieties could reasonably be grown in large pots. I have had some difficulty in getting the Jimmy Nardello to germinate, using seed from 2 different sources. I now plant about twice as many as I want, on the assumption that many won't come up. They will also be pretty slow. The Doe Hill seem much more reliable, although my experience with them is more limited.

Ajvar

I had never made ajvar before, and I was pleased to realize it's really very easy. A little tedious to peel all the peppers, but no biggie. And since we decided to haul in all our peppers and eggplants last week, I needed something to do with some of them. I realize this is rather late in the season for making this, but bookmark it for next year. Now to figure out what to do with the other 7/8ths of a bushel of peppers sitting on my kitchen table. Not to mention probably a peck of eggplants.

Ajvar, in case you wanted to know, is simply a paste of roasted red peppers and eggplant, seasoned with lemon juice, salt and pepper, and usually smoothed with a little oil. The word is related, through the Turkish, to caviar. It hails from the Balkans, where they all fight about who invented it and how it should be made exactly. (You wondered what all that bickering was about over there. Now you know.) The Serbians seem to be carrying the day, but the Macedonians are neither down nor out. Recipes vary from all-eggplant to all-pepper, smooth or chunky, hot or mild, so take my version with a grain of salt. Also with some good sliced bread and a sprinkle of parsley, although I intend to use it on pizza, spread it on baked chicken, dip chips in it, and maybe toss it with some pasta or rice.

4 to 5 cups
2 hours or more- 1 hour prep time


Roast the Vegetables:
4 small eggplants (or 2 large ones; probably about 1 1/2 kilos or 3 pounds)
2 heads garlic, cleaned but unpeeled
6 to 12 thick-walled mild to slightly hot peppers, again about 1 1/2 kilos or 3 pounds

Preheat the oven to 475°F. Wash the veggies and cut off any bad spots. Arrange them in a single layer on trays, and bake them for about 30 minutes, until soft and blackened in spots. You may wish to turn a few of them half way through if they look like getting too black.

When they are done, set the garlic aside, and put the peppers and eggplant into a sealed container to steam as they cool. Let them cool for at least half an hour to several hours.

Finish the Ajvar:
3 or 4 cloves garlic
2 teaspoons pickling salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black peppercorns
the juice of 1 or 2 lemons
1/4 to 1/2 cup sunflower seed oil

Peel the cooled eggplant and peppers, discarding the skins, stems and seeds. Put them in a food processor with the peeled roasted garlic cloves and the peeled raw garlic, salt and pepper. Chop until it has reached a texture you like. Remove it to a bowl and mix in the lemon juice and the oil.

I packed mine in sterilized jars, because I hope to keep it in the fridge for a few weeks, but if you wish to can it for longer storage it must be pressure-canned. I would be more inclined to freeze it, myself.




Last year at this time I made Stir-Fried Broccoli with Red Peppers and Onions, and Smoked Fish Pie. Okay, I lied. My mom made the fish pie.

Sweet and Sour Cabbage #1

Well, back in the saddle I guess. We've been back home for a couple of days but scurrying around to get the garden ready for winter, which could come any time by the looks of things. I'm plenty ready for a break from it. Of course, now I have about a bushel of peppers sitting in the kitchen looking at me.

This is a pretty classic take on sweet and sour cabbage, easy and not too time consuming either. Just watch those onions; they should be nicely cooked but don't let them burn!

6 servings
20 minutes prep time


Prepare the Vegetables:
1 large onion
1 tablespoon bacon fat or mild vegetable oil
4 cups chopped cabbage

Peel and cut the onion in half vertically. Lay each half down and cut vertically again, then slice them horizontally to produce fairly long thin strips of onion.

Heat the fat or oil in a medium skillet over medium heat. Add the onions and cook for about 30 minutes, until evenly browned and cooked down.

Trim and chop the cabbage, and put it in a pot with water to come halfway up it. About 10 minutes before the onions will be done, bring it to a boil and simmer until tender, about 5 minutes. Drain well and return to the pot.

Make the Sauce:
1 tablespoon arrowroot or corn starch
pinch of salt
1 teaspoon caraway seed
black pepper to taste
2 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons white vinegar
3 tablespoons water

Mix the above ingredients in a small bowl, until the arrowroot is smoothly dissolved. Set it aside until the onions and cabbage are cooked.

Drain the cabbage once it is cooked, and return it to the pot. Mix in the onions. Give the sauce a stir, and add it to the cabbage. Stir the cabbage and onions until well blended and the sauce thickens, just a minute or so. Serve at once.




Last year at this time I made Squash Gnocchi and Cranberry-Raisin Pie.

Miso-Tomato Soup

There are still a very few tomatoes around, and they are best for cooking at this point. Mind you, this works perfectly well with tinned tomatoes too. Very quick, easy and low calorie; we just won't talk about the salt content. Also good with a few greens thrown in if you have them: a couple of baby bok choy, or a handful of chopped cabbage for that matter.

Mr. Ferdzy came up with this soup a few years ago, although given the simplicity of the ingredients he was treading on a pretty well known path. I made it this week as it was good for stretching out a meal of mixed sauté of leftovers. We were cleaning out the fridge, as we will be away for about a week visiting relatives... see you next week.

4 to 6 servings
20 minutes prep time


2 medium shallots
1 clove of garlic
1 teaspoon mild vegetable oil
3 large tomatoes (4 cups chopped)
2 cups water
1/4 cup light (shiro) miso

Put a large pot of water on to boil.

Peel and chop the shallots. Peel and mince the garlic. Heat the oil in a small skillet, and cook the shallots until lightly browned. Add the garlic and cook for a minute longer, stirring constantly. Remove from the heat and let cool.

When the water boils, blanch the tomatoes for 1 minutes. Cool them under cold water, and peel them. Chop them finely.

Put the tomatoes into a pot with 1 1/2 cups of water. Bring to a boil, and simmer for 5 to 10 minutes. Meanwhile, mix the miso in the remaining 1/2 cup water until smooth.

Add the shallots and garlic to the tomatoes. Add the miso, and bring back up to a simmer. Serve at once.

FOODSTOCK

We arrived at Foodstock at about a quarter after eleven, just after it officially started. This is where we got a parking spot. You can see more-or-less where the entrance is, off to the right of the porta-potties in the distance. We took this for a good sign.


Foodstock, in case anyone has missed hearing about it, was an event put on by the Canadian Chef's Congress and the Stop the Quarry group, to raise funds to fight the proposed 2300 acre quarry in Melancthon township. They had asked for a $10 donation from attenders, and I would say they did well. I saw people passing in multiple envelopes - I think quite a few people gathered up donations from friends who couldn't come, and I heard someone comment that a number of people had come up to drop off donations without coming in.


The event itself was held in and about a large maple bush. Some straw had been put down to fight the mud - not enough, as it turned out, but it did help.


We started lining up to sample the offerings of the chefs. I'm a bad reporter; I didn't get the name of this restaurant (actually, I'm pretty sure it was a golf club) but the dish was rabbit and chicken stewed with chocolate, with cherry preserves and a profiterole. It was very rich, and very good.


On the other hand we knew these folks! They're from Simplicity Bistro in Thornbury, close to home. They made a lovely browned butter and Jerusalem artichoke soup.


The place was not too crowded yet, and so we could see that the woods was full of rather rustic and organic sculptures.


Oysters, from Oyster Boys, in Toronto.


A smoked fish paté on a kale leaf, with chips. A number of the chefs had made chips, as the threatened farmland is known for producing most of Ontario's potatoes.


Smoked fish on raw daikon, with raw garlic - much better than it sounds - from Sakura, in Toronto.


This was a welcome dish - a chopped salad from, I think, Bruce Wine Bar in Thornbury.


Janice Suarez, a pastry chef from Niagara on the Lake, served this deceptively plain looking apple-pumpkin loaf, which I thought was one of the best things I ate.


By now the place was filling up. It was a very large space, but there were plainly a lot of people there.


A display of some of the potatoes grown in the area.


A map shows the outline of the proposed quarry superimposed over a map of Toronto. Yes, it's truly huge. Worse, it's at the headwaters of 5 major southern Ontario rivers. As one of the people I chatted with in line said, this is all about the groundwater.


When we first arrived line-ups were not more than a minute or two long, but they soon got to be quite long! Fortunately most of them moved fairly briskly.


Haisai Restaurant and Bakery in Singhampton made what I thought was pizza, until I got right up to it. It turned out to be a grilled apple tart that was lovely, not too sweet and swimming in cinnamon.


Eiginsinn Farm had the next spot (they are both Michael Stadlander projects) and they were serving a vegetable soup with pickled squash on a raw cabbage leaf. I admit that so many chefs were serving rich meaty things on white bready things that I greeted that cabbage leaf with great enthusiasm. Soup wasn't half bad either.



And I believe that's chef Stadtlander there, hacking cabbage with the best of them. I also believe that Foodstock was originally his idea.



The folks from Lennox farm were there too, giving away bags of Brussels sprouts.


Another familiar face - Ruth Klahsen from Monforte Dairy.


Poutini's, serving poutine, naturally. I admit I didn't have any. I had pretty much reached the point of not being able to eat anything more at least half an hour previously.



Oh, and another familiar face! Chef Robin Pradhan from Rocky Raccoon in Owen Sound with a lovely vegetable curry that was a welcome change of pace from all the rich food.


No longer sure who this was or what they had, but the display was interesting... love the necklace.


Last call at Buca (Toronto). Like a lot of the chefs, they had brought thousands of portions, but still ran out in the face of the huge numbers of people attending.


Click on the above picture to see some of the cars parked at the sides of the roads all around, even though the space allotted to parking was huge.


Chefs and their tables filled the paths through the woods, and all around the outsides on three sides too.


There were a few people there with coffee - and on a cool, windy afternoon (with a few showers as time went on) it was gratefully received. Was this Alternative Grounds, from Toronto? I think so.


As the afternoon went on, music started up at the stage. I have to admit I didn't stay for the music or the speeches to follow - never my favourite part of political events. Yeah, I'm bad.


There were a number of artists and musicians who had spots throughout the site as well as the chefs.


But by 2:30, we were pretty pooped. We decided to head home. A number of other people were leaving, but more were still coming in. I asked on the way out, and they told me that the last count as of 2:00 pm was that 18,000 people had been there, so I'm sure they made the expected 20,000 easily before the day was done.

I haven't seen anything about this on the CBC site, or the Globe and Mail. There were a few photos (kind of hard to find) at the Star. NOTE: and an article too, but also hard to find. On the other hand, I hope and believe that this event raised a lot of money for the fight against the mega-quarry. And it's not too late to donate. This will be a long and protracted fight, so please consider what you can do to support it. There will be more info at Stop the Quarry.

(And if I've made any errors in identifying people in this post, I'm sorry - and happy to get corrections.) EDITED TO ADD: Final count apparently a bit over 28,000 people! WOW!

Vegan Stuffed Peppers

Although this is a little time-consuming to make, it is very easy. Yes, I know; more stuffed peppers. Hey! I like stuffed peppers and there are so many different ways to stuff them, and so many different peppers that there is no need to get bored by repetition.

For this recipe, I used a mixture of Alma Paprika peppers and Doe Hill peppers. Alma Paprika was my big pepper find last summer, and Doe Hill was this years' favourite new pepper. They are both what are called tomato or apple peppers; a description based on the general size and shape of a number of different varieties. These are often mild peppers, although I have found the Alma Paprika can occasionally be quite hot in spots! And while they are both mild, they are in no way lacking in flavour.

I didn't have quite as many peppers as the stuffing would have filled, so I just formed the last of it into balls and set them amongst the peppers to bake. The serving estimate is so variable as these would make a nice appetizer as a single pepper, or 2 or 3 peppers could be served as the main part of a meal, with a green vegetable and some bread being sufficient to round it out.

Makes 8 to 12 small stuffed peppers (4 to 12 servings)
2 hours (50 minutes prep time)


Cook the Grains:
1/2 cup quinoa
1/2 cup red lentils
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 2/3 cup water or broth

Rinse and drain the quinoa and lentils. Put them in a pot with the salt and water or broth, and cook until tender, about 20 minutes. They can also be cooked in a rice cooker.

Make the Filling:
1/2 cup green pumpkin seeds
1 or 2 small stalks of celery
1 medium carrot
1 or 2 shallots
2 teaspoons mild vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon dill seed
1/2 teaspoon fennel seed
1/2 teaspoon cumin seed
1/2 teaspoon coriander seed
1/2 teaspoon celery seed
2/3 cup dried cranberries

While the quinoa and lentils cook, toast the pumpkin seeds in a dry skillet over medium-high heat until lightly browned. Turn them out onto a plate to cool.

Wash, trim and chop the celery finely. Peel and grate the carrot finely. Peel and chop the shallots finely. Heat the oil in a skillet, and cook the celery, carrot and shallots until soft. Set aside to cool.

Grind the spices.

Mix the cooked quinoa and lentils with the cooked vegetables, the spices, the pumpkin seeds and the cranberries.

Stuff & Bake the Peppers:
8 to 12 medium "apple" or "tomato" peppers
1/2 cup water

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Wash the peppers, and cut the cores out, leaving a fairly large opening at the top of each pepper. Use a thin-edged spoon to scoop out any seeds or membrane remaining inside them. Stuff the peppers with the filling, and arrange them in a snug baking dish. Pour the water around them, and bake them for 1 hour.




Last year at this time I made Parsnips with Leeks and Traditional Pickled Beets.

We Dig Potatoes! And a Few Other Things

The long-awaited day arrived yesterday, when we pulled the first half of the potatoes we planted in a large box, back at the end of May. We would have let them sit a little longer, to let both sides die down, but it was clear that some mice or voles had taken up residence in the bed. Hope I don't have the same problem that we had last time we evicted mice! The half we dug up were the Russet Burbanks; the German Butterballs seem to still be growing, and to be mouse-free, as far as we can tell.



As Mr. Ferdzy unscrewed the boards that formed one side of the box, I pulled them out and took them away. You can see how deep the bed of potatoes was; probably about 16".


Then we started digging. It was quickly clear that we needed to dig by hand as of course the first thing we did was slice a couple potatoes in half. Most of the potatoes were very large. Real lunkers.


We found a few that had been much eaten by the mice or voles, but fortunately most of them were still fine. I think it was good we dug them up when we did though, or there would no doubt have been much more damage.


Here we are about three-quarters of the way through the digging process. All extra soil was hauled away and is sitting in a pile again. We will have a grass-free area over 2/3 of what will become a blueberry bed next spring. That's a nice head start!



We got 96 pounds of Russet Burbanks which filled 2 bushel boxes. Taking into account the mouse damage, I'm sure there was just over 100 pounds of potatoes. I'm trying to remember what we originally planted... was it 4 pounds? It might have been, but we didn't keep good records. We planted the same amount, whatever it was, in one of our regular beds and that yielded 40 pounds of Russet Burbanks. Which was one of our best harvests of potatoes in the regular beds yet.


Last week we dug up the sweet potatoes. I'm afraid they were a very disappointing harvest. We got 9 pounds of Frazier White and 11 pounds of Georgia Jet. I would say that growing them through tomato cages was a good plan, and we will do that again. It definitely prevented them from rooting all over the place, which is what they will do if allowed to sprawl. And if they do that you will get a lot of sweeet potatoes, but very tiny.

The problem, I believe, was that they basically did nothing for the entire month of June. June was perfectly grim, as far as the heat-loving vegetables like peppers, tomatoes, peanuts, melons and lima beans were concerned. It was cold and rainy, and the poor little slips just sat there and sulked. Essentially, they were a month behind when we dug them up, and since most of the root formation takes place at the end of the season, that was a month that really, really counted.

We also pulled our peanuts yesterday. Again, there were a lot of partially formed ones, and if they had done better in June I think our harvest would have doubled. On the other hand, this was still our best peanut harvest in the three years we have been growing them. We are developing peanuts suited to our soil and climate by selecting the best each year to be replanted. I also think our first planting did so poorly because the seeds were sold with the shells off, and I suspect many of them had had their growing tips damaged.

From a 5' by 5' area, we got 4 litres of shell-on peanuts. For the first time, we are going to actually eat some. (But yes, we have already sorted out about 80 of the best, largest peanuts for next years seed, including making a point to take many of them from the plants that produced the most peanuts.)


We also got some trees planted in the afternoon, most notably a couple of paw-paw trees we grew from seed this year. They join two that we bought as young plants last spring. I've never had a paw-paw. I hope we like them. We won't know for some years!