Salsa Verde

If you are lucky, you now have ripe tomatoes and tomatillos rolling in at a rapid rate. You probably also still have some green tomatoes on the plants, unless you have been hardhearted and practical enough to pull your tomatoes out and make room for your winter garden. Here in Portland, our warm fall days have been the only warm days we've had all summer, and tomatoes only just started to get ripe, so I have not had the heart to pull the plants out!

I would like to share with you my general recipe for tomatillo salsa. It is very general because the measurements depend entirely on what I have on hand. It works out every time for me and I believe that it will do the same for you.

You will need a grill (we have a little gas grill) and a blender for this recipe.

Ingredients:
1-2 pounds of fresh tomatillos, husked and rinsed
A few green tomatoes, if desired
1-2 ripe yellow tomatoes
Several mild green or red peppers, such as bell peppers, gypsy peppers, pasilla peppers, or Italian peppers
A few hotter chilies, such as jalapeno, serrano, or whatever you happen to have--or use a pinch of powdered hot chili
1 large or 2 small onions
1-2 cloves of fresh garlic, peeled
1 small bunch of cilantro, including tender stems
Lime to taste (usually I feel that it's not necessary so go easy)
Salt and pepper

Heat up the grill. Core the tomatoes and if they are large, cut them in half. Cut stems off of peppers, and take out the seeds. With the hot peppers, cut off the stems with a little bit of flesh attached and touch this little bit of stem-end pepper flesh to your tongue. You must check the hotness of each pepper to decide how many to put in. If they are milder, put in plenty, but if you get a really hot pepper, be careful! Even one little super-hot pepper can make the whole batch too spicy for some people (like me). Peel and thickly slice the onion. If desired, push some toothpicks through the side of the onion slices to keep the rings together on the grill.

Throw the whole tomatillos, halved tomatoes, peppers, and onion slices on the grill. Turn them every couple of minutes until they have grill marks and are getting soft--it is usually really fast, maybe 8 minutes total. As individual pieces of vegetable get done, throw them directly into the blender, until all the vegetables are in there. Turn off the grill. Toss the garlic into the blender too, and some salt. If the blender is more than half full, dump some of the vegetables into a bowl. Turn on the half-full blender (you should do the hot-stuff-in-the-blender protocol which is to take out the middle of the blender top to let hot air our and put a folded dishtowel on top of that to prevent a hot blender explosion) and whiz until smooth (salsa verde usually doesn't have chunks). Add more vegetables and blend. If the blender gets too full, pour some salsa into a bowl. Add the cilantro, including a few inches of tender stems, to the salsa in the blender and whiz again. Add the cilantro salsa to the salsa in the bowl and stir. Taste and add more salt and some lime to balance flavors to your liking.

This salsa is great with chips, in a quesadilla or burrito, or used as enchilada sauce. You can add a bunch to the broth for tortilla soup. It freezes well if you make more than you can use in a week!

Fall Preparation

School started again, so I, Gillian, have a good excuse as to why I haven't posted in a while. Everyone else is just slacking. Anyway, this morning we had such a good breakfast that it was gone before it could be photographed: giant popover with poached pear and quince. Mind your p's and q's! I used a recipe from Deborah Madison's Local Flavors, which seems to be my cookbook of the moment. I also failed to photograph last night's pot pie. It makes me very happy that pot pie season has arrived! But I did take a picture of this back-to-school feast that I made a week ago. The pear and quince frangipane tart was the star of the show, but we also deliciously used up a ton of kale in potato-kale soup and Jenn's famous massaged kale salad.


Theresa and I were motivated by rain-free but distinctly cool weather to move a couple of tomato plants into the greenhouse to see how long we can keep the tomatoes ripening. I dug out some potatoes that had been very ill-treated all season, from when I accidentally let them sprout in the cupboard, to throwing them out in a dark corner of the garden to fend for themselves, to deciding that even that location was destined for more glorious plants and planting tomatoes much too close to the potatoes. I got a whole big bowlful of potatoes from only two much-abused plants, which I think is pretty good! We also did our first planting of garlic--about 20 heads. I'd like to plant at least that much more, but we are out of garden space until we pull out the rest of our tomatoes, and they're still producing.

House Breakfast!

Hi, it's Gillian again. It's always a minor celebration when several of us are home in the morning to have breakfast together. Although I had already gotten up early and eaten this salad (yes, those are my very own tomatoes, although I had to pick them half ripe and let them ripen in the kitchen), I was still tempted when Alyssa offered me a freshly made decaf latte...


So for second breakfast I made waffles, at Alyssa's request. Our waffle iron makes heart-shaped waffles, so they're really cute. And I used freshly ground white wheat (from last year's Staple Crops CSA) so they had a great flavor and texture. And it didn't hurt that we had butter, apple butter, maple syrup, blackcurrant jam, and crabapple jelly to put on top! Those last two are specialties of Alyssa's dad, who is also famous for his pies. I hope we will have an opportunity to post pictures of one of his pies at Christmastime (also known as Alyssmas since Alyssa and the baby Jesus share a birthday).

All in a Day's Work

I, Gillian, am spending a big portion of my school vacation filling our pantry with homemade canned goods. 23 jars of Green Tomato Chutney + 5 jars of Poached Quince Slices in Vanilla Syrup + 5 jars of Blackberry-Oregon Grape-Blue Elderberry Cordial = 1 whole day spent in the kitchen + 33 jars of success. I also made a byproduct that is more exciting than the products--a quart jar of gorgeous pink quince juice, sweetened with the leftover vanilla syrup, which I hope can keep me from getting sick this winter.

When I lived in Japan, one of my friends was Araki-sensei, a retired Home Ec teacher and a wonderful person who was involved in everything in our little town. She took me to restaurants, helped me buy brown rice directly from a friend of hers, taught me how to behave at the onsen, and took me with her to cooking lessons at the town community center. She also gave me some of her homemade preserves, which were usually medicinal. Preserved kinkan (kumquats) were for a sore throat (they made your mouth numb, so they worked!); karin hachimitsu (quince honey) was to prevent colds. As far as I could tell, it was sliced raw quince in honey, which then diluted the honey with quince juice, and then the resulting mixture fermented a bit. You were supposed to take an ounce or so in a glass of hot water every day. I got colds anyway, but it tasted good.

There's No Place Like Home

This is how State Fair, the massive Brandywine tomato, ended up--on toast with butter with coarse salt. I was too hungry to take many pictures before eating it so I apologize for the blurry photo...


After a week in Arizona, which to me seems as inhospitable as the moon, only much hotter and without that fun-looking low gravity, it is a relief to be back in cool, rainy Portland. The first thing I did upon getting back was to eat some good food at Pho Van. Then I ran around the garden seeing how things had developed while I was gone. Jenn and I picked four big Gold Rush squash and a bowlful of ripe tomatoes...and then picked twice as many tomatoes at Neighbor Dan's house. Of course, we had Alyssa's famous Zucchini-Tomato Gratin for dinner! The squash plants finally have powdery mildew so their season is just about over, but this summer I achieved my lifetime goal of growing more squash than I wanted...almost.


While I was away, the lettuces I planted a few weeks ago with typical despair ("it's already too late", "they'll never get big enough to eat before winter", "it's just a waste of seed because they're going to bolt right away if they don't just die in the heat") grew nice and big! Red mustard, mizuna, kale, carrots, radishes, and broccoli raab are also growing in a way that gives me hope. I was tempted to make a tiny salad last night, but I think they should grow just a little more before I start harvesting. Also typical--now I'm kicking myself for not succession planting lettuces every two weeks. I am transplanting some of these salad greens into the greenhouse where I hope they will grow all winter. Something to look forward to--homegrown salad in January!


A final story from the garden...Long Keeper tomatoes. I have just one plant of these and started harvesting them today. They never ripen on the vine, but when they reach full size you pick them and wrap them in paper and store them...and they ripen slowly over a period of many weeks. We grew these once before and had the last tomato ripen in January. That time we picked them too late though, after they had been out in the cold and lost some of their texture, and although they turned red, they were mealy. I'll let you know if we have better luck this year. Regardless of taste and texture, it's exciting to have a red, homegrown tomato in the middle of winter...but it would be even better if the tomato tasted good.

Pears with a View

I love going to Hood River for a lot of reasons, but a big one is how enormous Mount Hood looks from there. I think of it as the way the moon looks from orbit around Earth, that's how spectacular Mount Hood looks from Hood River. So I enjoyed myself very much picking 5,000 pounds of pears (with a group of about 40 volunteers) at a small pear orchard on Monday. It was a Portland Fruit Tree Project harvest party, so the pickers each got a portion of the fruit, and the rest is going to the Oregon Food Bank to be distributed all around the state.


So now, after giving some away and eating a few with this delicious blue cheese, I have around 30 pounds of pears left that I'm planning to can today. It may sound boring, but I truly love canned pear halves in light syrup, especially with cottage cheese. I might make some dried pears too...also boooo-ring! But I am open to other pear recipes. If you have a good one, please share it with me.

Thai Curry with Summer Vegetables

1 yellow summer squash, sliced into rounds
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons Thai green curry paste
2 medium potatoes halved lengthwise and cut crosswise into 1/4-inch-thick half-moons
3 carrots, sliced into rounds
1 small Japanese eggplant, sliced into rounds
1-2 cans unsweetened coconut milk (Gillian decided there wasn't enough and made some more with shredded coconut -- so you might want 2 cans)
1/2 cup water

Large handful green beans

Chopped fresh basil 

Sauté squash and onion in oil with salt and pepper to taste in a over medium high heat until edges of squash are golden, about 5 minutes. Stir in garlic and curry paste and cook, stirring, 1 minute. Add carrots, potatoes, eggplant, coconut milk, and water and simmer, covered, stirring occasionally, until potatoes are almost tender, about 3 minutes. Add green beans and simmer, uncovered, until sauce is slightly thickened. Stir in basil.

Read More http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Vegetable-Green-Curry-102573#ixzz0ynfLDVEU