What did You Eat from the Garden?

[digitS']

I have been interested in soup recipes the last few years and really did a good job of keeping up with extra tomatoes for lunch during the late summer and fall. Fresh tomatoes for soup might not have been something I was thinking of until fairly recently. So much better than the ones I have to keep on the counter to ripen.

There is pasta sauce in the freezer but I had a couple of cans of chopped tomatoes that went in some sweetcorn and all those dry beans I grew in 2015, not 2016! I think that I can do that just about one more time before I will begin to deplete one or another variety of bean seed on the shelf. It's nice to have a mix of beans and just do the soak overnight, change water, cook, pour off extra water, add broth routine . The corn and tomatoes can go in about a 1:1:1 ratio with the beans and take a short while to cook. It all gets better with the addition of some nice seasonings. What would we call something like this? Maybe it is just a simple soup but I wouldn't have to add meat or pasta to it if I called it slumgullion, would I ?

Here's almost an actual recipe! I really like this and have made it a couple of times - had no idea that carrot and ginger flavor would go together so nicely! I think I got the idea from a Food Network recipe, I know I looked at that one before my own liberal tendencies took over and ♪ ♫ I Did It Myyy Way!

olive oil
onions and celery, chopped
ginger, grated
garlic, grated
salt and pepper
2 or 3 cups carrots, chopped
water
chicken broth

1 cup Greek yogurt
sour cream

The oil goes in a skillet and the onions, celery and ginger are sautéed together. The carrots are cooked separately in the water. Most of that is poured off and the chicken stock is added along with the sautéed veggies. It all goes in a blender and is poured back in the pan with the yogurt. The soup is heated thoroughly and I had the sour cream for the last pot and added that before serving. Really tasty!

So, simple and a good use for the carrots that have now migrated out of the cooler that I was moving in and out from the utility room to the deck, depending on outdoor temperatures. Yeah, we are now down to them taking up on crisper drawer in the fridge .

Storage veggies? How have you been using them?

Steve

 

[ducks4you]

I can as many tomatoes as is humanly possible every year bc we cook with them, especially since DH has to watch salt intake. There is hidden salt on all sort of grocery store sold processed foods. Eating what I can eliminates that. I just made my 3rd batch of bread and butter pickles yesterday. The first batch watch completely from my garden, except the garlic, so I will need to grow some of that this year. I always can from my Montmorency tart cherry trees every June, and I make pies from that. I keep canning my grapes, but I'm gonna need to rop my DD into helping me to learn to use my wine making kit. In hopes to make cidar, I also can apple juice, made buy slicing the apples into quarters and cooking them down with sugar and cinnamon sticks, then straining, then canning.
On occasion I buy a watermelon and make pickles from the rind. I do have a pressure canner, but I am fearful of using it on my glass stovetop, so I HOPE to try it outside on the portable grill that runs on propane. I'll try something like carrots, and if THAT works I will be canning beets without vinegar, which is the way I currently can my beet crop, by pickling. We go through the pickled beets, too.
If I have a good year, we will be eating sweet peppers. A few years ago I was harvesting by the bucketful. 2016...2 peppers, total.

 

[ninnymary]

ducks, you just made bread and butter pickles? Where did you find the cucumber?

Mary

 

[ducks4you]

Bought it, of course. I made the FIRST batch from my garden.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Not exactly where I thought you were going with this from the title, Steve.

We're not buying any vegetables to put on the table except potatoes, I just can't store those for long. We've still got green beans, beets, and corn that I canned, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, green peas, kale, and black eyed peas that I froze, lots of dried beans, and plenty of good sweet potatoes left.

Our standard meal Thursday night is one of my chickens that I usually bake. Then Saturday night we have leftover chicken with soup that I can, along with cheese and crackers. What an easy meal. During the season I freeze green beans, corn, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, kale, chard, peas, and probably some things I can't think of right now specially to make soup. I also add dried beans. Until my potatoes go bad I use those but now I have to buy potatoes. I add oregano and basil that I grow for seasoning. My wife can't east tomatoes so those don't go in. I use my own chicken broth for the liquid. Other than salt and sometimes potatoes I grow everything that goes into that soup.

I checked yesterday, I have five quarts of canned soup left. I'll need to can another seven quarts in a couple of weeks.

 

[digitS']

You do an excellent job at "keeping it local," @Ridgerunner - especially for someone with a global perspective on life!

I've had the carrot and ginger soup again, I think twice, since I posted. It is easy to get too much of my homegrown ginger in it but it still tastes great! There are more carrots in the fridge altho DW made chicken soup herself yesterday with some of the carrots. They are sprouting in there and selection is based on that ... fortunately or otherwise, there are quite a few more to go. At least, I'm not out digging around in the snow for them this winter. The coolers on the deck helped with that a good deal. There was more in those coolers than just carrots but those days are past.

Lots of sweetcorn in the freezer, yet! I could have used some of it for cornbread today but DW made yeast rolls yesterday. Her cooking initiative keeps me from stirring up some cornbread but I've gotta stay at corn utilization! I've done the corn, tomatoes, 2015 dry beans, and onions in the slow cooker several times. That's just a vegetable dish but provides some variation to just plunking a big spoonful of corn down on the plate with a pat of butter on it! Shoot. I just sent off a seed order for the 2017 corn, today! Not much left from the 2016 garden and we are making regular transits through the produce aisles right now.

Oh Hey! Quite a lot of bok choy has come out of the greenhouse lately! It has to be so because I've gotta get the benches back in there in about 2 weeks but there needs to be sunshine! And before that bench goes in - the furnace guy has to find out why there were heater failures last spring! I wonder if that is gonna cost the price of a new gas furnace. Owww!

Steve

 

[ducks4you]

Also, roosters from "Freezer camp."

 

[lcertuche]

Our garden harvest was dismal to say the least. Mostly squash and peppers, with a few eggplant. Our church got a truckload of tomatoes and red potatoes, 2400 pounds so I got over 100 pounds of both. I didn't have my canner yet so I ended up freezing the extra. This year I'm hoping to get more by putting up a fence (rabbits and deer) and buying a tiller. This will work out good if we don't have to move. I told DH we might need to put it all into containers just in case.

 

[so lucky]

@ducks4you, I use my pressure canner on my glass stovetop. Biggest issue is keeping the pressure regulated due to the #$%^ pulsing action of the heat. But no problems with the glass not being able to take the weight.

 

[catjac1975]

I took out frozen tomatoes and made pasta sauce. I trimmed back my onion seedlings in the greenhouse which seems to male the plants much stronger. I used the tender tops in my sauce along with the trimmings from my basil seedlings. Tasted fresh out of the garden. Getting low on frozen tomatoes.-Yikes!