Swiss Chard and Green Tomatoes

At the end of August, before our vacation, Michael planted Rainbow Swiss Chard. Chard is popular in Mediterranean cooking and reputed to have high nutritional value. Still, it's a thick-leafed business, so I either need to cook it or.....my favorite: make it into pesto. Eh voila!


Rainbow Swiss Chard, preparing for a bath...
actually, this, ladies and gentleman, is bath 1 of 3.



....and into the collander for a nice drip-dry.

So, how do I make swiss chard pesto? I'm glad you asked. First, be sure to have a schnauzer nearby to get behind legs and between feet. This makes the process particularly exciting, notably when you're moving between cutting board and food processor. Be prepared to reprimand the young lad frequently and point to the kitchen door repeatedly, to little avail. Next, fill your food processor with olive oil (one glug), a fist full of almonds (right now they're the most reasonably priced nut available at Costco, two shakes of parmesean (from the pour-out side not the shake side), two cloves of garlic (peeled, crushed, and finely chopped), a squirt of lemon juice (for good luck...no, actually to keep the greenery from browning so dramatically), and  a teaspoon of salt. When all that is in the processor, add chopped swiss chard (chopped so that it actually processes, rather than only partially processing and leaving large shredded leaf pieces along the processing bowl sides...such sights cause Savannah to make a frowny face).  After you've done all that (I had so much chard, I did the above method three times), you have pesto to freeze the willies out of, like this:

And in it's final form: pesto!  It's in the freezer for a long winter's
nap. Well, I'll probably wake some of it up in a week or so.

Now, let's talk green tomatoes. I harvested a metric ton of them yesterday morning. It's supposed to frost this weekend, so I thought I'd better get them now. Unfortunately, the reporter here forgot to take a picture of all
the green tomatoes in the dish drainer (we put her on bathroom cleaning detail as punishment for her negligence) and I don't have a picture of that 'metric ton' of tomatoes, but I assure you there were many. My drainer fairly floweth over. So much so that after I cut up 3/4 of them, I filled up a 6-quart slow cooker bowl, and I still had some left over....like enough to crowd the countertop. I mean, holy bananas, right? Anyway, my Mum makes a really good green tomato sauce, much like marinara, that she serves over pasta. I asked her to email me the receipe, and this is what I made in the slow cooker, with a few of my own little tweaks. What you see below is (and I apologize for my rampant inexactitude, but I eyeball most of my ingredients when I'm not baking, so a lot of these measurements are very idiosyncratic, like the pesto receipe above...like a fist full of almonds, Savannah? Can you be a little more vague? You'll see that yes, yes I can be.):
>>Green tomatoes, quartered, and about 2" beaneath the rim of the 6-quart slow cooker bowl.
>>2 red onions
>>several cloves of garlic (to taste)...I start with 4, and any additional cloves obviate the need for concern about a) vampire attacks or b) general invasion of personal space by others (great for public transportation riders who hate crowding!)
>>2 glugs of oil
>>about a tablespoon of paprika (or, my method, two quick and forceful shakes from the bulk container)
>>2 teaspoons pepper
>>2 teaspoons salt

The beginnings of green tomato sauce (with a few red tomatoes in there
because we had them handy)

After it cooked for four hours (the funny lady here forgot that turning on the knob means nothing until the appliance is plugged in and that took an hour for her to realize...you know, I was looking at it going, 'why isn't it getting hot?'), I used my immersion blender and made it into a genuine, stick-to-the-pasta sauce. When I was boxing it up to put in the freezer, I sampled extensively. For all my ingredient-measuring inexactitude, it cooked up beautifully.
Meanwhile, on the pepper front, our dehydrator produced a lovely baggy of Hungarian Hots, Wax Hots, Habaneros, which all will, in time, be contributing their concentrated fire to chocolate chip cookies. Here they are in a rather un-glamorous shot. Like a bunch of mummy finger, they are:

Egyptian Mummy-fingers...*cough*
No, actually, they're dehydrated hot peppers.

Finally, like the program Sunday Morning, I'll leave you with a nature scene. Pleasant Valley in fall:

Moment with nature: the color of autumn in the valley. It gets more vibrant
every day.

Moment with nature: the color of autumn behind the farmhouse.

Monster Sweet Potatoes, Bean-shelling by Candlelight, and Other Stories...

Look at these monster sweet potatoes--they're the size of
a baby's head! This makes up for all the years of no
sweet 'taters at all.

Before going into the oven, I chopped and tossed them
in olive oil, pepper, a garlic seasoning mix, and salt.

...and here they are after 30 minutes in the oven, with a quick stir
at the 15 minute mark.

Now, pair them with fresh salad greens, Guz tomatoes, and ranch dressing.
Now that's what I call dinner.

Here, I've salted eggplant slices, and they're draining in a collander before
getting a rinse and spending 20 minutes in the oven.



We have had a banner bean year. And we've been shelling each night.
Pictured here are:
1) kidney beans
2) holstein beans
3) cow peas

 

All of Savannah's cookie sheets are in use around here lately. These
two have Christmas Beans and Cherokee Trail of Tears (a black bean).  

Our dehydrator is out and working, starting tonight.
On the top level are some gorgeous, bright orange habaneros.

The hot peppers, too, have been prolific. We have hot banana peppers,
habaneros, hot wax peppers, and jalapenos, among several other types.
Look! Savannah's piggies are also present.

...and in this box are sweet peppers of various kinds, mostly the bell
variety, but a few Hungarian wax peppers, too. Oh, and piggies. My feet look
different in photographs. Who knew? 

The power went out for about a half hour around 8:15, so Michael
and I shelled beans by candlelight. It was actually very romantic...well,
as romantic as bean shelling can get. Here, Bun is making a funny face
and spreading out paper to catch all the bean casings.

Fred is a bean freak. Usually, he hides beneath the coffee table
and emerges, blinded by the table cloth over his eyes, pushing
his muzzle up towards the place where my hands are shelling.
Sometimes I feed him a bean, but too many makes for...
well, let's say, "explosive loads in the tunnel", to quote a sign
I've seen near the tunnels in Pittsburgh.

Bean shelling with ambiance, no?

Beet Top Pesto and an Early July Harvest

Along with every red beet comes lovely garnet colored
tops. Last summer, I turned this into pesto. Here, I'm
doing it again. In the food processor: the beet tops,
homegrown garlic (four small cloves) and several tablespoons
of olive oil (enough to get the stems going
in the processor, since not enough liquid prevents
the stems from doing anything but clinging to the sides of
processing bowl)...

...next I added some walnuts (you can use these in lieu
of pine nuts), and some hot pepper salt for
seasoning....I eyeball all these ingredients.

Voila! Beet top pesto. Lovely on pasta, although it
doesn't always keep its beautiful purple color once it gets hot.

A lovely little harvest of hot peppers, cucumbers, beets,
onions, and carrots.

Our first watermelon...we'll open it to taste test....

Awww...it's not ripe yet.



Just a small portion of the green beans we harvested
tonight.