Garlic, Leeks and Onions

Our garlic was a total failure this year. Something just wasn't right and I am officially done looking at it. We were able to get some straw from a friend and so I am pulling it out, composting it and covering it with straw until planting time. Through the mercy of my dear friend Cheryl, I will get a fresh batch of hard neck garlic this fall along with our mutual new experiment of soft neck garlic! I am really excited about starting this again.

Our leeks are marvelous again this year! Oh how we enjoy leeks and how they seem to enjoy our soil. I guess I was made for root crops. Stealing an idea from a preserving book, we are bringing a bucket of sand into the basement this winter and will trim the roots off of the leeks and plant them in. Watering once, checking monthly, they will likely hold until spring onions are cropping out of the ground.

Given our utter frustration with green beans, I have finally convinced my husband that onions are something we really ought to grow instead. We found discounted ($.50 and $.10) 50 onion sets at the local gardening store and threw them into our patio garden as an experiment in late July. They will only ever amount to table onions but something is better than nothing and if we can keep the kids away from them, we will have some red and white scallions for soups and fall stews.

Kale is a new crop for us this year and as such was only given a small space. What a mistake! The stuff is awesome and thriving in our yard! Who knew?! Next year Kale will get a place of honor in our garden so that we can eat kale chips all fall.

Tomatoes and Peppers 2011

This year all of our peppers and tomatoes were from the UWGB Heirloom sale. We were incredibly happy with the peppers and mildly happy with the tomatoes.

For the peppers, we came home with King of the North, WI Lakes and Quadrato Asti Rossa. All 3 are setting large squat fruit. The WI Lakes are the first to turn red on August 21st. The Kings are setting huge, gorgeous fruit. The Quadrato are totally inconsistent. Some have set softball size fruit and some have their first flowers now. (Aug 21st).

The tomatoes are frustrating. We spread our plants out more this year than any other year and still they are 6' high and collapsing over everywhere. The federle are fascinating. Gorgeous fruit (about the size and shape of typical banana peppers) with yellow and orange stripes on red fruit. These are somewhat hollow and dry inside making them easy to slow roast or cut for salsa.

The Amish paste tomatoes are good producers, rich in deep red, black and dark green colors and very meaty inside making them ideal of canning. They are just slightly larger than golf balls on the small size and about the size of tennis balls on the large size. They are sweet and when roasted taste like candy.

The Martino Romas are a complete disappointment. Nearly all of them have persistent blossom end rot, they are small plants which are nearly swallowed up by the massive neighbors (the Ferderle and the Amish Paste). They are a sickly red color and utterly unimpressive.

One of the conclusions we have come to this year is that our tomatoes cannot be grown together. Our soil is rich with whatever it is that makes these plants into giants. Our plan for next year is to put 1 tomato plant on each corner and one or two on the long grassy edge with 1 or 2 basil plants bedded around each. We hope that by spreading them out, we will give them adequate air circulation. Perhaps using garlic to connect them. The garlic will do it's most important work while the tomato plants are young and tender. When the garlic scapes have been harvested, the tomato plants will start filling up the empty space.

Frozen Pizza Made Real

It's been a long time since I posted... we had a bad gardening season last year, a pregnancy and then a spring birth. With our newest addition about 8 weeks old and getting ready to be baptized, we are finally starting to look at the garden and our kitchen as somewhere fun to go again.

We love pizza in this house. It is the comfort food of choice. Frozen pizza is uber-convenient but tasteless. Fresh uncooked pizza from the local establishment is great but heavy and pricey. Fresh, homemade pizza is wonderful but time consuming. Ultimately, in deference to cheap, quick and tasty we usually default to "Movie Store Pizza" more commonly known as Little Ceasar's (it shares a parking lot with Family Video). Cheap, quick and tasty, however is not health friendly and maybe not even as cheap as homemade done right.

In our search for a solution, we came up with a simple answer - make ahead and freeze home made pizza. To get it right, we stole from a variety of sources that have provided us with a very tasty and reasonably healthy option.

Process:

1. Make dough
2. Line a sheet tray or pizza pan with parchment paper or cooking spray (NOT WAX paper - it will burn)
3. "Seal the dough" by baking it at 500 degrees for 5 minutes.
4. Allow dough to cool
5. Make sauce (or buy your favorite jar/can)
6. Spray the dough with an olive oil based cooking spray or butter or something similar
7. "Dress" the pizza with home made sauce, cheese and toppings.
8. Cover with plastic wrap and freeze on pans/trays overnight.
9. Remove from trays; discard parchment paper
10. Set on something firm (like cardboard) and wrap in plastic wrap several times.
11. Store for up to 3-6 mos.

Because it is a bit of a production, we found recipes that would yield 8 pizzas. Take a look:

Favorite pizza dough - Jamie Oliver
http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pizza-recipes/pizza-dough

Favorite pizza sauce recipe - from a blog called Annie's Eats
http://annies-eats.com/2009/07/23/pizza-sauce/

To bake the pizza, we put the frozen pizza in a cold oven. Turned on the heat to 400 and baked the pizza for 22-26 minutes until golden brown and crisp on the edges.

Deliciously easy!

Freezing Oven Roasted Tomatoes

After being inspired by gardening and canning friend Cheryl, we stole her slow oven roasted tomatoes technique (from a new book "Put 'Em Up") and compared it to the version in "The Everything Cookbook" by Mark Bittman and some other web sources.

Simple, delicious, oven roasted tomatoes that end up with a "sun dried tomatoes packed in oil" consistency and flavor.

We did this twice. Tweaking the cook times each time. Our final answer for the year:

30-50 roma tomatoes, cut in half, green core cut out
Enough extra virgin olive oil to drizzle
3 foil lined cookie sheets

Lay tomatoes, cut side up, tip to toe on the foil lined sheet. Drizzle with EVOO. Set in a 185 degree oven for 6 hours rotating pans every hour or two. After 6 hours, turn up the heat to 250 degrees for another 3-4 hours.

Remove from oven. Allow to cool. Eat. Freeze in a mason jar. They will keep for 6 months or more in the freezer. Apparently they will keep in the pantry for about 3 months, but I am not courageous enough to risk it. Too delicious to waste on an experiment gone wrong.

Canning Tomato Paste

We are woefully behind in updating our blog. I guess pregnancy, an unexpected basement renovation and an early harvest will do that. Regardless, tonight we canned tomato paste. Using the instructions on this link, we really enjoyed the making paste process.

http://www.pickyourown.org/canning_tomatopaste.htm

For our own records, we picked a crate full of tomatoes. We ran them through our Kitchen Aid Fruit/Vegetable Strainer which did the work of seeding, peeling and coring. What we were left with was pure tomato juice goodness.

Although the recipe calls for 8 qts of chopped, seeded tomatoes, we used 8 qts of our "juice". We did not add the bay leaves, salt or garlic because our intention for the paste is to use it as pizza sauce or spaghetti base, etc. and we wanted to control the flavor at the time of actual cooking.

We did the first reduction for 1 hour and then strained out the bell pepper chunks. We allowed it to simmer for the last 2 1/2 hours (give or take) in 2 pots to get a thick consistency.

We ended up with 6 1/2 pints of tomato paste. We would have loved to use really small jars but we just don't have many of those in our stash and ultimately will use large quantities of paste at a time.

It was still a long canning process, like anything. Being able to skip the blanching, peeling, trimming steps, however, was a real blessing. Our plan is to make any of UW tomatoes into paste in this fashion until the plants give up.

Charlotte Mason - The Preschool Years

I established my blog to serve as a journal of my gardening experiences. I had no idea that as my children grew and their love for gardening developed that I would get more and more jealous of the teachers that would steal my son from me during the day and educate him outside of my garden. Maybe it is just more of that old fashioned life that I am clinging to, but homeschooling became appealing first out of a selfish desire to not be done teaching him at our pace in our way. The more that I learn about homeschooling, however, the more I have found great educational, social and family value in it's mission. The Charlotte Mason style of learning found us and won us over.... and today, we "officially" begin.

What a difference a summer can make?!

When we started this summer, we had a couple of key projects we wanted to get done... first and foremost preserve our family time with trips to the zoo, a stay-cation and visits with family and friends we don't see much. Thankfully, all of that happened. After that, we wanted to build the kids a sandbox, build a compost system and re-do the playroom. Our sandbox and compost bins did get done as well! The playroom.... well that is another story. It is still a work in progress. This first trimester preggo with "helpful" toddlers underfoot is just not as productive as usual. We are chipping away at it and no longer just trying to "get it done!".

A couple of very interesting things happened along the journey. The more the playroom came together the more we began to see something in it we had never even thought of before - a classroom.... a real space for learning and creativity. The more we worked on it and talked out loud, the more we realized how anguished we felt about sending Michael to school. We had already decided that he would have his pre-school experience at home, but the idea of genuinely homeschooling him snuck up on us from behind and captured our hearts and imagination.

Some may wonder what in the world we are thinking. Some may wonder why in the world I would take on this stress. I know that some wonder if I could even do as good a job as a school could for my son. But here is my reality. God made me a voracious reader and researcher - he also made my husband and I teachers. God makes all of us the first and foremost teachers of our children anyway. Our fortune is that Michael is extremely extroverted and easily enjoys and interacts with his peers and others. Formal school for Michael would be more about socialization than anything else and we feel that that is something that we can easily supplement through VBS, playgroup, scouts, other home-school families, etc. For years I have owned a treasury of resources on the education of character, good literature and ways to teach your children to be curious and industrious. It has always broken my heart that I would send Michael to school and let someone else get the joy of opening his mind. I want to do it. I want to guide him and nurture him. I want to observe his interests and his growth and tailor his education to his needs and his natural inclinations. I want to guide him as he walks towards the calling that his Father in Heaven has for him. At least, I want to do it now. Maybe not forever. Maybe for just a few years, but each journey does begin with a single step and our first is to hang the black board. The next will be to try this on for size.

I have not felt so invigorated as a mom - ever. Leaving the classroom and coming home to be a stay at home mom always felt like the right decision - but an impossible one. Now, I feel like it is coming together. I feel as though this is why He designed me with such a love for education. I am humbled, scared but most exhilarated. This journey is going to be an interesting one.