Cooking from the Garden

My first experiment with pickling! I made these pickled beets from beets we grew in our garden and I have to say, they turned out wonderfully! Even Dev, who doesn't usually like beets, liked these.  We've already eaten the entire first crop of beets but I'm starting a second round so we'll have more opportunities to experiment with pickling recipes in the fall. 

(This is the pickle recipe I used, and we also used some of the pickled beets to make the Pickled Beet and Arugula Salad mentioned on the same page.  Both are from The Art of Preserving, a cookbook I've been wanting to buy.)

I also turned six pounds of our tomatoes into pasta sauce using a combination of this recipe and this one.  Specifically,

Ingredients
Olive oil
6 pounds fresh tomatoes
3 heads garlic, peeled and minced
12 tablespoons salted butter
1 cup vermouth
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oven to 350°F and line a baking sheet with aluminum foil. Spray the baking dish with baking spray, or rub lightly with olive oil. (I used olive oil spray.)

Chop the tomatoes roughly but evenly. Spread them on the baking sheet. Top with minced garlic, a drizzle of olive oil, and some kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Cut the butter into small cubes and scatter evenly over the tomatoes.

Bake the tomatoes for 2 to 3 hours. (I baked mine about 2.5 hours but probably could have gone longer.)

Remove the tomatoes from the oven and process them through a food mill to remove seeds and skins. If you don't have a food mill, try pressing the tomatoes through a mesh sieve using a rubber spatula.  (I used the sieve technique and it worked very easily.)

Pour tomato pulp into a large saucepan and add vermouth, then add water to reach desired consistency.  Bring this to a boil, reduce to simmer, and cook for an hour.

The sauce turned out great but didn't make nearly as much as I'd envisioned it would - I had planned to freeze what was left over but it really only made enough for one meal.  I had been inspired by Mina canning 40 pounds (!) of tomatoes but unfortunately even though I can generate forty pounds of tomatoes over the course of the summer, I can't do so all at once, so 5-6 pound batches are about my limit.

I started out the summer with the laughable fear that I would have so many vegetables that I'd have to pickle them, can them, or give them away just to keep up, but the reality is a bit different. Some things, like tomatoes, are pretty abundant, and for other things, like zucchini, we were lucky to get a single serving's worth of produce. The garden is so much fun, but I don't think it will replace the grocery store any time soon.  Still, it's a great hobby and it's certainly been very educational for Beatrice to follow a tomato all the way from seed to spaghetti sauce.

Tomatoes, peppers, and okra from the garden (it's not as much as it looks)