green tomato bounty

September has snuck up on me and smacked me in the face with it's arrival. Tuesday, our boy starts back for his last year of preschool. A good thing. He's been a bit bored with daycare during August - he's missing his friends and needs some more structure and challenge to his days. And the earlier onset of darkness makes bedtime a bit less of a nightly tussle. But, my garden isn't ready for it to be September. Our late onset of summer has slowed things on the vegetable front. Everything has been slow and late this summer. By the end of July last year I was bringing handfuls of tomatoes in from the garden. This year my bush beans have just started to produce now. I have gobs of tomatoes but they are all still green with only a couple starting the slow colour change to red.

Being a relative newbie to gardening this has me worried. I thought it was me but lately conversations with other gardener's are all about green tomatoes. I printed out a few recipes the other day - for green tomato relish, fried green tomatoes and green tomato mincemeat. Just in case. My sister-in-law is talking to her tomatoes, begging them to change colour. Even the market vendors today were talking about green tomatoes. We are all hoping for a great September - so our green tomato bounty has a chance for red greatness. So this post by Willi made me laugh. But I'm going to be going back to check for recipes. In between going out into my garden, and whispering to my tomatoes - come on, turn.

black bean and sausage soup

Another market day and another market cooking competition. This time it was soup. When I told D about it a while ago, he told me I should make this soup - his favorite. So in the end I did. It's easy and quick and delicious if you like spicy. If you don't you can use a milder sausage and tame it down. But today it wasn't a winner. The winner was a potato and bacon soup. But my soup came in second so my boodle was a bag of dried shitake mushrooms, a bunch of chard, a zucchini and a cucumber and a bag of organic apples - so not bad! I had been the only entry until seconds before the official start of the competition - darn!

Black bean and chorizo soup with spinach (adapted from Six O'Clock Solutions by Eve Johnson and the Vancouver Sun Test Kitchen)


1 tbsp olive oil
3-4 small chorizo sausages cut into 1/2 inch pieces
1 medium onion
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 - 796 mL can on chopped coarse tomatoes
2 c chicken stock
1 - 540 mL can black beans, drained and rinsed
2 tbsp chopped, drained sun-dried tomatoes or 2 tbsp sun-dried tomato pesto
1 tbsp chopped fresh oregano (or 1 tsp dried oregano)
1 tsp chopped fresh thyme
1 bunch spinach, coarsely chopped
salt and pepper

In a large saucepan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add the sausages and saute for 5 minutes until cooked. Add onion and garlic to the saucepan and saute for about 3 minutes, until tender. Stir in tomatoes, stock, beans, sun-dried tomatoes, oregano, and thyme and bring to a boil. Add the spinach and cook until wilted. Add salt and pepper to taste.

market chard in a dish

I've been testing new recipes this week - with mixed results. It is mainly operator error - yesterday's zucchini feta bake suffered from a type of zucchini with a very thick skin which I didn't peel off and which resulted in a chewy supper and a mound of zucchini peels on the sides of our plates last night. Tonight's trial was more successful. I adapted a recipe for stuffed swiss chard gratin from Homemaker magazine.

Here is how I made it - Swiss Chard Gratin w leek and pancetta

2 bunches of swiss chard
1 large onion, thinly sliced
2 medium leeks, sliced into half moons
4 slices of pancetta, diced
2 tbsp olive oil
3 large baking potatoes, boiled and mashed
dash of cayenne
1 tbsp dijon mustard
2/3 c parmesan crumbles

1/4 c butter
1/4 c flour
2 1/4 c milk
pepper
grated fresh nutmeg
1/3 c parmesan crumbles

1/3 c grated gruyere cheese

Cut the stalks off the chard at the bottom of the leaves. In a pot of salted water, boil the stems for 8 minutes and remove with tongs and drain. Into the same water, cook the chard leaves for 2 minutes and then take off the heat and drain. Meantime heat the oil in a saute pan, add the onion, leek and pancetta and cook until soft. Add the chopped cooked stems and the mashed potatoes, pepper, cayenne, mustard and parmesan and mix well.
Make the bechamel sauce by adding the butter, flour and milk to a saucepan. Whisk together and heat until boiling. Turn the heat to medium and cook for 5 minutes. Add the nutmeg, pepper and parmesan.
Grease a 9x13 casserole and lay 1/2 the chard leaves on the bottom to cover the dish. Spread the potato mixture over the chard leaves evenly and cover with the rest of the chard leaves. Pour the sauce evenly over the top and sprinkle the grated gruyere over the top. Bake at 400 deg F for 40-45 minutes until bubbly and browned. Enjoy! We both found this delicious and it smells wonderful while baking (baking cheese always smells delicious!)

peach jam

I love peaches at their peak. So I loved this post from Tea and Cookies. So I unearthed the very old family canning pot from the garage, bought some peaches and some jam jars and waded in to making a batch of peach jam. I used 2 lbs of peaches (5),

1 lb of sugar (enthusiastically measured by T) and the juice of 1 lemon. I diced the peaches, added the sugar and lemon juice and left the mixture to sit while T and I went to the market.

An aside - it was Teddy Bear's picnic today at the market, so T brought along his zebra - he was 1 of 2 children brave enough to march in the parade around the market with their stuffie (although he hung onto me via my bag the whole time). After the parade, the kids got cookies and juice and there was a storytime session and then they could prowl for stuffies in the vendor stands - if they found a stuffie they got to keep it. T found lots - a pink whale, a small beanie giraffe, a panda, a bird, a hello kitty cat, a bear and a blue hedgehog. It has to be said that the vendors he plays peek-a-boo with every week did help him find some of the toys.

When we got home, T went to make a jungle for his stuffies and I turned my attention to the jam. I poured the peach mix into a large pot on low heat and stirred. I washed jars and put them in a low oven to sterilize and I tried to get some of the rust off the canning pot rack...without much success, so I'm going to rest the jars on caps. I found this post by tigress in a jam which helped. Tea's recipe said the stirring could take up to 4 hours, so I brought a chair in from outside and had my book and my tea while occasionally stirring the jam mixture. It smelt so divine. After about an hour and a half it was looking fairly jammy

and sure enough, when I tested it, it was jammy enough. I poured it into jars and ended up with 2 - 250 ml jars and 1 - 125 ml jar with a smidge left over which D inhaled as soon as he came in from work! I did the 2 250 ml jars in the canning bath for 10 minutes just to practise as based on D's reaction to the jam, they aren't going to last very long.

So back to the fruit stand tomorrow for me to buy more peaches.

roasted tomato and fresh mozarella pasta

I bought the latest Martha Stewart Living Magazine because on the cover it had a section for recipes for corn, zucchini and tomatoes.  And it had a recipe for fresh tomato and mozarella pasta.

But as I prefer roasted tomatoes I made my pasta with roasted tomatoes.

 To the cooked pasta I added some olive oil, torn up roasted tomatoes, torn up fresh mozarella and torn up fresh basil, with lots of pepper.  

D and I ageed that we like our pasta on the saucier side and thought it would be better for use to use a basil pesto base mixed with mashed roasted tomatoes and melted mozarella. Or maybe try Luisa's roasted tomato pasta.

goat cheese and roasted corn - two recipes

This year the corn has been so great - so the other week we seemed to eat it every night. With a lot of goat cheese. A delicious combination.

First came goat cheese and roasted corn quesadillas that was inspired by this corn related post.

Here is how I made them:
6 large flour tortillas (I ended up with a combination of sun-dried tomato, spinach and cheese ones)
130 g goat cheese
kernels cut from 2 ears of corn
1 c salsa verde

Saute the corn in a pan for 2-3 minutes until toasty. Combine the corn with the goat cheese and mix. Spread the bottom of three tortillas with this mix. Sprinkle a couple of large spoonfuls of salsa over each one and top with another tortilla. Heat the tortillas in a saute pan until slightly brown. Cut into quarters and serve with sour cream and salsa.

Those were so yummy I moved on to roasted corn and goat cheese pasta. It was slightly inspired by a recipe in last month's Martha Stewart Living magazine which used a corn pesto. For my pasta I made a loose basil pesto using just basil, garlic, pepper and olive oil. I cooked some scooby doo pasta (that is it's name here) and while that was cooking, I sauted the kernels from 2 ears of corn and some thinly sliced red onion. Just before adding the pasta I added some sliced goat cheese (it was half a round). I added in the cooked pasta and the pesto and then tossed in a couple of handfuls of roasted cashew nuts.

wildlife adventures

We had a couple of wildlife encounters here this week. First came the grasshopper. We found him clinging to the wall, halfway up the stairs last weekend. T expressed a desire to keep it so we found a container and D trapped him. We gave him some leaves to eat and some water and he/it seemed content to hang out as T's pal. The following day, another grasshopper appeared in the doorway to T's room. Initially I thought the original grasshopper had escaped from the container, but this was not the case. The second grasshopper moved in with the first and all was well for a couple of days. Yesterday, there was a big puddle of brown water at the bottom of the grasshopper habitat and no grasshoppers. T came to me with the container and I told him to go to D. So down he went. I heard D telling T - grasshoppers don't live very long - these ones have died so we'll go put this in the garden. T came back upstairs and reported to me "Daddy couldn't fix them". Oh dear.

Then the other night I woke up to a strange scraping noise coming from the back yard - with the heat all the windows have been wide open. I lay there in the darkness trying to identify the noise. Finally it came to me - racoons in the yard playing with T's water toys - scraping the plastic along the patio bricks. D realized it at the same time. Then we heard the squeak of the racoons getting in and out of the wading pool so we got up and went outside and shooed them away - 3 racoons peeking out at us from behind the wading pool at 3:46 AM. Back we went to bed. About 15 minutes later, they were back. Squeaking and splashing so D went down and shooed them off with a broom this time - this time they stayed away. I can live without middle of the night racoon pool parties...