Archive for August 31, 2008

31 Aug 2008
Appetizer • Cookery • locavore log • Vegetable recipe

Tomato Tatin

For the last few weeks, I have been making lots of Savory Oven Tomato Preserve (or is that Savory Oven-preserved Tomatoes?). After cooking for several hours in a very slow oven, the tomatoes acquire a very intense flavor that’s quite addictive. We’ve been eating them mostly on sandwiches and adding them to already cooked rice for a quick mock-risotto. I have also frozen some. The tomatoes are not truly preserved for long term storage so they keep only a couple of weeks in the fridge and must be used fairly quickly. As the San Marzano tomatoes (which are ideal for this dish) keep coming, I keep making the preserve. So, I needed other ways to use them.

Tomato Tatin (Upside Down Tomato Tart) works very well. I know, I know… that’s another recipe name with which I am taking liberties, but it perfectly conveys what the dish is in one remarkably economical word: upside down tart of slow precooked fruit with a golden crust. After all, technically, i.e. botanically speaking, tomato is a fruit (actually, a berry, if we want to be 100% accurate), even though in 1893 the U.S. Supreme Court declared it a vegetable! Less you start to wonder if the Supreme Court was reordering the Linnaeus classification, rest easy: it was done all to avoid paying tariff taxes under the Tariff Act of March 3, 1883, and for no other purposes. The Justices came to that rationale because the tomatoes is generally served with dinner and not eaten as dessert. Want to read more about that? Wikipedia has an entry on it in the Nix v. Hedden case!

As far as the “Tatin”, it is more correctly known as Tarte des Demoiselles Tatin (The Misses Tatin’s Apple Tart) – but often shortened as Tarte Tatin. This upside-down apple tart, with its caramelized apples and golden pastry, was named after the Tatin sisters who ran a restaurant in the early 1900′s in Sologne (in the Orleans/ Loire River region), an area of France known – even today – for its good hunting grounds especially for ducks and other fowls and its dreamy landscapes of low forests, marshes and abundant waters.

So Tomato Tatin it is!

By using the Savory Oven Preserve Tomatoes, there’ll won’t be quantities of tomato juice released during the cooking and the pastry will not become soggy.

First, line up your preserved tomatoes in a pretty pattern at the bottom of a pie dish, cut side up. Pack them, laying them quite close to one another.

Tomato Tatin Step 1

Read more

sylvie | 6 comments | Tags: , , , ,
28 Aug 2008
fruit • Kitchen Garden • locavore log • vegetable

Garden of the Americas

The Day\'s HarvestIn several of the old European traditions, August was the first month of autumn, the harvest season. And this year, with the especially cool summer weather, it certainly feels like it’s fall already. And harvesting, we are. Some crops have been incredibly successful, some less so and some were total failures. It makes me reflect upon the times before refrigeration when a family needed to produce enough in a few months and preserve the harvest to last for the other 8 months of the year.

Although we are trying to be produce a lot of our food at Laughing Duck Gardens – we certainly don’t produce it all – and should a harvest fail, we know we can fall back on buying from a neighbor, farm stands, farmers’ markets, country stores and even the supermarket.

In the spring, when we decided we need more growing space, I decided to make the newer garden “The Garden of the Americas”. Every plant in there originates in the Americas: North, Central or South. All those plants where unknown in Europe before the 16th century. Read more

sylvie | One comment | Tags: ,
25 Aug 2008
Cookery • locavore log • Vegetable recipe

San Marzano and Homemade Tomato Paste

Back in April March (issue #110), Saveur Magazine had a recipe on Homemade Tomato Paste. In the last few issues, Saveur has nicely covered a number of basic kitchen skills, such as making butter, making cheese, canning tuna etc – the types of things I like learning about and I like making myself; the type of things that are not difficult to make but are almost becoming a lost art, mostly become they are often judged “too time consuming”; the type of things that are just about sublime when done carefully well – and dare I say, lovingly?

Homemade Tomato Paste

What sounded really attractive was cooking the paste in the oven, as opposed to stove-top which is what other recipes said to do. So, back in March, I marked that recipe:I was planning a large tomato garden, and was hoping to have tomatoes for paste.

Now, the large tomato garden is indeed producing: it’s not unusual to pick up 5 pounds of Viva Italia Roma tomatoes or San Marzano a day – several days in a row. It was time to try to make tomato paste.

A good tomato paste will help make a good pizza a great pizza, will bring body and depth of flavor to a tomato sauce that’s a little weak (and for good reason, since they are 4 or 5 pounds of tomatoes in one cup of paste!), and will really enhance that lasagna or that that Bolognese sauce!

I made the Saveur magazine recipe. However, in my oven, it turned too dark, too fast. Also I learned that you must stir the paste often or IT WILL BURN. For example, do not go on a walk for 1 hour while the paste is baking: when you come back, all the edges and a good part of the pan will be carbonized! You’ll be able to salvage some… but how frus-tra-ting! and what a waste of perfectly good tomatoes. GGRRRRR!!!! So stick around for 3 hours so you can keep a keen eye on the paste and stir it often.

I made several batches of tomato paste (including the semi-carbonized one). I decided that I would rather have a less concentrated tomato paste and something a little less dark in color than the original Saveur recipe was calling for. It’s still plenty flavorful though! I played with the quantities a little and with the oven timing and temperature. I also tried it in the oven pan and in a LeCreuset pan. They both work, although the oven pan is not totally flat inside, so you have to pay more attention to the edges to ensure they do not burn. Finally if you are using two pans at once (because, after all, since you have the oven going, you may as well fill it, right?), then make sure to rotate the pans every hours. In the end, the Homemade Tomato Paste worked very nicely. Read more

sylvie | 7 comments | Tags: , , ,
20 Aug 2008
fruit • Kitchen Garden

Where are the Melons? part 2

Blacktail Watermelon cut-up

Verdict on my first Blacktail Mountain picked last night?

No maiden swooned.

No that there are many maidens around here…

It was good but not great. It could have used a few extra days of ripening: it was still growing (weighting at 5 pound 14 oz on the vine, 5 lb 15 oz off the vine), and the closest tendril really was not dried out.

Blacktail Watermelon

Patience is sometime not my forte…

As there are several other fruits out there, there is hope that I will pick one that is a “quintessential watermelon” and that I will learn when to pick them.

sylvie | No comments | Tags: , ,
19 Aug 2008
fruit • Kitchen Garden

Where Are The Melons?

Blacktail Mountain Watermelon growing in early AugustOn one hand, it’s been a wonderfully summer, temperature wise. We’ve been enjoying many days in the 80s F (27 to 32 C) which is right balmy for normally muggy Virginia when August days are often in the 90s F (33 to 37 F) – even reaching into the 100s last year (40 C). Even better, the nights have been pleasantly cool – the type of cool we often don’t see until late September, with temperatures in the 55-60 range (13 to 16 C). We have hardly turned the air-conditioner on. The peppers are loving it: it’s cool enough that they keep producing blooms and set fruit – yet warm enough that the fruit ripen. All we need is some rain now. We have not seen any on several weeks. Can a gardener ever be satisfied with the weather?

On the other hand, the melons are taking it a little too easy. I suppose they would have been a little more along if I had planted them earlier – under glass, I suppose, since spring was also on the cool side – and melons and watermelons like it hot.

This year, I decided I was going to get some watermelons – but not just any watermelon: I don’t want them too big (not 30 pounder please!), I want a story going with the melon, I want good disease resistance, and above all, I want flavor. So I ordered them – along with many other seeds – from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds who is known to carry many many kind of heirloom melons. Their 2008 catalog featured 45 American melons, 18 Asian & Eastern melons & 17 European melons – many French, including true Charentais melon – as well as 54 watermelons. Each description is of more enticing than the prior ones, which makes you buy many more seed packets than (1) you need, and (2) you have room to plant.

Read more

sylvie | 2 comments
16 Aug 2008
Garden Technique • Kitchen Garden • locavore log • Seed Starting • vegetable

Start Your Fall Kitchen Garden NOW

Radicchio in early December

Now is when you should start your fall and winter Kitchen Garden.

Truly, there are some things that should be planted in May or June for fall harvesting because those crops take a long time to mature (like celeriac, parsnip, the perennial sunchokes, winter cabbages, winter leeks, Brussels sprouts and a few other things). But they are so many vegetables that can be planted now (and over the next few weeks) for wonderful fresh eating in the fall & winter.

Yes, I know: it’s hot (although not so much here this year, we have not had 100 ° F weather like last year); the gnats are terrible; it’s dry and, yes, it IS (some) work. But what are you going to do in mid-October after you’ve been scrounging around for your last green tomatoes before frost spoils them, wondering if you’ll manage to ripen them inside (don’t you want to eat something else, by then, anyway?) and getting in the winter squashes (you planted winter squash – right?)… With the rapidly declining day length, the sharpening of the air that’s telling you that winter is coming, the birds going south and the cry of the geese overhead, with the nights in the low 40’s, the smell of smoke from the woodstove hanging in the moist air, everything green and fresh is going to be precious, whether a delicate lettuce for a quick salad lunch, or the more robust Lacinata kale – that darling of Tuscan white bean, sausage and kale soup – , or a young, fresh, crisp radish with a little salt & butter. Or a sweet baby carrot, or a bunch of little white turnips to sautée with some whole cumin seeds, or a bouquet of frost-sweetened arugula for the grilled pizza, or some young leeks for braising or… or.. or… you get the idea, I hope (I, on the other hand, am getting hungry – again.) Read more

sylvie | 3 comments | Tags: , ,
13 Aug 2008
Cookery • Kitchen Garden • locavore log • Vegetable recipe

Savory Oven Tomato Preserve

Jar of oven preserved tomatoes/ confit de tomates

It’s been dry here for the least few weeks so I have had to water the garden a little bit, something which I try to avoid. But with no noticeable rain for three of four weeks, I have to water especially those more sensitive plants (like melons or Swiss chard) – or frankly anything that started to droop – like the peppers. Most of the times, I have been able to use the water from our rain-catching “system” which has the capacity to capture and store 350 gallons of rain water. But yesterday, I had to use the well water – because our barrels were all empty..

Nonetheless, the tomatoes are coming – I am, at time, literally, with my elbows in tomatoes. Many end up in sauce, added to the pan that’s almost constantly simmering on the stove, cooled, pureed and refrigerated until the following Monday a.k.a. “canning day”.

Some tomatoes have been bred to process better: less seeds, meatier, hold their shape well. They are variously called “canning”, “processing” “Italian”, “paste” or “plum”. This year, I planted 2 kinds of canning tomatoes: Viva Italia and San Marzano sel. Redorta. I got the seeds for the San Marzano sel. Redorta from Seeds from Italy, a small company in New England, which I used the first time this year and that I am really liking. They are large plum tomatoes, that are vaguely pear-shape – definitively bigger tham the plum tomatoes I have grown so far. Yes, they are good for sauce but they are excellent in my Savory Oven Tomato Preserve (note for next year’s garden: more plum tomatoes!). The recipe is inspired by French “Confit”, a technique used to preserve meat (think Confit de Canard/ Duck Confit) using salt and fat (olive oil in Provence, goose or duck fat in Perigord and the French Southwest). Here the tomatoes are salted/sugared, drizzled with oil and baked for several hours in a very low oven. The roasting helps to dry the tomatoes – yet they don’t dry out because of the oil – and concentrates the flavors: the end product is like essence of tomatoes. Read more

sylvie | 4 comments
11 Aug 2008
Cookery • Fruit recipe • locavore log • Side Dish • Vegetable recipe

Peach Salsa

(no picture of the salsa…. I know, I know…)

Ripe Yellow Peaches

Tomatoes however are really wonderful this year. And so are peaches (albeit I don’t grow peaches, several orchards in Rappahannock County have been keeping me happy: I have bought 2 ½ bushels to date).

So as I am cooking for others (well, for me too, of course!), I try to emphasize the bounty and freshness of our wonderful local produce. For example, on Saturday, we cooked for a lovely little party (21 people + 6 kids) where the hostess was very happy that we incorporated many fresh local vegetables and fruit in the menu. She wanted something simple but elegant to celebrate the wedding of one of her children: since the family loves peaches and peaches are so good this year, I made several dishes incorporating peaches: a fresh peach ice-cream with peach sauce, a lovely peach and blackberry salad macerated with lemon-verbena syrup. And then I made a side dish that had both peach and tomato (the other garden winner for me): a peach salsa served with Lamb Kebabs that had been marinated with olive oil and spices and herbs of the Mediterranean basin (cumin, coriander, thyme etc). Read more

sylvie | 4 comments | Tags: , , ,
05 Aug 2008
Cookery • locavore log • Vegetable recipe

Some Like it Hotter

Canning season is officially upon us as the garden is now in full production gear – too much for just eating fresh - so I am freezing, drying, canning & pickling for use in the colder months. Although we grow some hardy greens in the garden in winter, we do not have yet an area big enough to put a lot of root crops that would feed us throughout the cold months. So between now and frost is the time to process all those summer crops for later – as an alternative to winter greens, carrots, pumpkins & winter squashes (and apples): peaches, nectarines, plums & berries; tomatoes, peppers, tomatoes, hot peppers, zucchinis, tomatoes…

Monday morning is now officially designed as “weekly canning morning”. Since I do not have a pressure cooker, I only can high acidity fruit (including tomatoes); other excess crops are frozen or pickled (and then canned): cucumbers, okra, beans, peppers. No sweet corn yet… but soooon…. real sooooon…. (that is if various critters don’t get to it before me!). Yesterday was the first tomato canning of the season, with 5 quarts and 7 pints of sauce made.

The hot pepper crop is also particularly abundant this year. Of course it helps that I planted 2 dozen hot pepper plants (DON’T ASK!). Well, to be fair, there are some anchos in there, and, really, I would hardly call those “hot” – but that’s how the seeds are classified. Nonetheless there is a fair amount of jalapenos and cayennes. Nothing too exotic or super hot: I did not plant scotch bonnets or habaneros … this year.

So what to do with all those hot peppers? Full of vitamins by the way. If you don’t believe me, check here for nutrition information. According to elook, 100g of raw Jalapeno peppers provides a lot more of several major vitamins than 100 g of Florida oranges: 73% of the average daily requirements for vitamin C (77% for orange), 25% of vitamin B6 (2% for orange), 16% vitamin K (0 %) and15% of vitamin A (4%). Of course, 100 g is about 3 ounces, so it’ll take a serious appreciation of all things spicy hot to eat that much in one seating!!!

My Dad always loved hot chili peppers, fresh, dried, pickled, cooked. And I mean hot. He was famous for it: for loving them and for making quantities of hot sauce. When I was in college and back home for the summer, my friend Marie-Laure would always ask for one of his hot sauce jars to take back to school. It was THAT good. (she always also begged my mom to make her octopus wine stew – but that’ll be a story for another day – maybe). Dad was enthralled when he came to visit us here in Virginia to find hot pepper jelly in the store – and now I am tasked to bring some each time we go visit him (that, and Jack Daniel!)

Ingredients for homemade hot sauce

A couple of years ago, I finally asked Dad for his “recipe”. He uses oil, so it should be refrigerated. Use whatever hot peppers you have or like; you can mix them, just make sure they are all of the same color, or the sauce will look “muddy”. I also make a very similar one but uses vinegar – your choice – and add some garlic, which results in a taste close to the Vietnamese –style hot sauce that you buy in the grocery store.

On to Gusto’s Hot Pepper Sauce (Sauce de Piment Confits de Gusto) Read more

sylvie | 7 comments
02 Aug 2008
Cookery • fruit • Fruit recipe • Garden • locavore log • vegetable • Wild Food

Peachy-Wild Berries Jubilee

A few weeks ago, I blogged about picking up berries in the hedge rows – free wild food… well.. free as in “spend no cash”, but after several hours in the delightful mugginess and bugginess characteristic of a Virginia summer, the numerous scratches that you have collected – not matter how careful or layered you were – and the (relatively) meager harvest, you understand why berries seem so expensive when you buy them. And those are the cultivated ones that grow meekly and obediently in rows and trellises. Wild berries are … well… wild in how they grow – and you do have to keep an eye out for snakes and bears. It’s always amazing the things some people will do for wild berries!

So I froze berries by the bag full and jubilantly made wild blackberry sorbet & wineberry sorbet.

Then I read about Sugar High Friday on FoodBlogga where bloggers and non-bloggers alike are invited to make a dessert featuring berries and send it to the organizer. The round-up is the brain child of Jennifer at the Domestic Goddess. I am very new to the blogosphere – having had high speed internet only very recently and just discovering all those neat food blogs out there. I am still struggling with a lot of the technical blog stuff, but I can cook (or so I’d like to think). While dessert is not necessarily my forte, I’ve got berries: besides the aforementioned wild blackberries and wineberries, the garden is currently producing a few late blueberries, day-neutral strawberries, the odd raspberries and alpine strawberries (neither of which by the way is a berry, botanically speaking; but that will be a post for another time). Mmm… I hope Jennifer meant “Berries” as cooks and gardeners would mean it – not as botanists…

[Update August 4, 2008: Stop by FoodBlogga where Susan posted today pictures and links to 82 desserts all featuring berries, some very simple and some quite elaborate - but all looking simply delicious.]

Anyway, why not try to make a dessert, a COOL dessert – as it’s way too hot to do any real baking around here – that I could send in? A dessert good enough for a festive occasion but simple enough to assemble on any week night – as all the components – except for the fresh berries – can be made days (or even weeks) in advance. It’ll give me a topic for a post and will make my friend Margaret happy since she asked me to post a sorbet recipe using berries. Voila! I love it when I can accomplish several things at once! (Margaret: do note, you are getting TWO new sorbet recipes, two herbal syrup recipes that may be used in ice-teas and cocktails AND the dessert is fat free if you omit the toasted almonds and the whipped cream)

Peachy-Wild Berries Jubilee

And so Peachy-Wild Berries Jubilee was born.(It did not stay alive very long: hands kept trying to grab it as as was trying to take “one more picture”… and if you can pronounce the name 3 times very fast, you get to eat the jubilee). Read more

sylvie | 4 comments
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