dilly dalley doolittle gardening

Processing tomatoes

In previous posts about growing tomatoes, I promised that I'd try and get around to showing you what we do with our bumper crop. As you know, I plant around 30 tomato plants. At this stage, in Canberra, the tomato season is done and done. The last of our crop was pretty much knocked over by the frost a couple of weeks ago.  These photos were taken early April, which was probably the last of our tomato processing for the 2011-2012 cycle. I received this tomato processor for my April birthday (perhaps around 2007?) and it was purchased at Butts n Brew in Kaleen. They have great supplies for anyone interested in home preserving, making beer or killing yourself slowly with butts (not recommended ... far better to stick with the organic tomatoes!).

Anyway, to show you what we do many times during the summer cropping season -

First, we put the tomatoes in a big pan and heat them to just below boiling. We grew a lot of cherry tomatoes this year (more by accident than design).

We attach the Italian tomato processor to the kitchen table with some bits of wood to protect the table because it does require that the device is clamped to the table. We then set up a large bowl below the device to collect the tomato puree.

 

The warmed and softened tomatoes are put in the top part of processor, in the big stainless steel bowl.

Tim then turns the handle which drives a big screw inside the device. This manages to separate the peels and seeds from the lovely tomato puree.

So tomato seeds and tomato peel are pushed out into a waste bowl. Note the steam rising from the black bowl holding the puree.

Here's the top of the processor, where the whole softened tomatoes sit. You can just get a glimpse of the screw (looks yellowish)

Tim uses a large spoon to push the tomatoes through the hole, as he turns the handle.

Seen below is one of the reasons we like cherry tomatoes. They fit very nicely down the hole and are easily squashed by the screw. Larger tomatoes sometimes need to be cut to encourage them to squeeze through the hole.

As the tomato is pushed through by the screw, there is a fine metal mesh that allows the puree and the juice to pass through but doesn't allow the seeds or skins to pass through.

When the tomato puree is all collected, we then put it back on the stove and boil it for some unspecified but 'just feels right' amount of time. This helps concentrate the puree. We don't bother putting any spices or flavourings in and we don't bother about boiling it down to a thick consistency. We just take off some of the excess moisture to concentrate the tomato puree into a 'passata like' consistency.

Seen in the cupboard is the last of our unfilled vacolas (8 of them). This processing we did in early April pretty much filled these bottles so that was enough for us this year. I didn't count but it was about the same as last year. If you don't already do this, and you'd like to try...it really is simple and rewarding.

Shelling peas - Summer 2011

I don't know why I keep forgetting to take my camera down to the garden. But I do. It looks quite different to when I last photographed it, so I'll try and remember to take it down tomorrow morning - in the new year. 2012.

I started at the Charnwood Community Garden in April 2004. At some stage, we kept chickens and I needed to develop a really complex 8-year bed rotation plan to accommodate the usual 4-year rotation plus moving the chook house. Anyway, I typed in dates into my excel spreadsheet that had unfathomable numbers - 2012. I don't seem to quite get the passage of time. In 2004, I had a 2-year-old and a child in the second year of school. I had just returned back to my part-time job after 14 months maternity leave. I cried all the way down Southern Cross Drive, wiped my tears, walked in through the front door and began for the second time, that awkward balancing act that is the privilege of working mothers. A few months after returning to work, I answered an advert on the social club database for plots at a local community garden. A small act of escape. Now, in December 2011, I sit listening to Jazz renditions of Christmas Carols, while my 14-year-old first born writes out his novel by hand. We have no conversation because he's busy imagining and writing and I'm busy shelling, listening and reflecting on a year past and a new year to begin.

Hopes and dreams. Responsibilities and escapes. Small acts of courage. Small acts of rebellion. The unknown. A year just gone, grieving for lives that are over, for my father, for my mentor, Geraldine. Trying to accept myself. Doing and being for my children, for my partner. Sometimes well, sometimes not well enough. Far enough through this life to get a sense of time but still, time doesn't make much sense. I heard Professor Stanley, a renowned medical scientist whose field is brain development, particularly in early childhood, say that you could think of a person as a boat, and over the course of a lifetime the boat is rebuilt many times, but that person always remains recognisable as a distinct boat. Our brain cells, our skin cells, our hair and nails, our thoughts, feelings, memories live and die year-by-year but somehow we remain constant. And yet, I often think the boat could look quite different by the end of its life. Maybe it started as a light water craft and ended as a tug boat. Maybe it started as river barge and ended as tall ship. Hopes and dreams.

A New Year Tomorrow. 2012.

Stats  : 445g of shelled peas. Sugar Snaps and some rather fat snow peas left unpodded. I love sugar snaps. I ate quite a few while shelling - just to test that they were actually sugar snaps and so the pods could be left on. Yup. That one's definitely a sugar snap, so I don't need to shell it. Yup - so's that one. Yup - n'other one. You can tell from the outside because the pod is sort of waxy and fleshy looking. But just to be sure, better pop it into your mouth. It would be dull to throw a normal pea pod into a stir fry. No one would thank me for that. Better test this one too. Yup. The whole pod is crunchy and sweet and juicy. Sugar Snap.

I am such an unruly planter and picker - all the different peas all jumbled up together.

But this is why I garden - fresh peas. You have to grow them. Woolies doesn't sell pods of peas in big metal bowls. And it was time to sit quietly and reflect. I needed a bowl of peas to pod. Perfect end of the year activity, to sit quietly with my hopes and dreams alongside my son with his hopes and dreams. Peace be with you all.

Preserving the Italian Way - new book for my library

I can't recall how I found this book but I think my fingers hit "add to cart" before my brain could even form up the idea that maybe this was something I wanted. I've referred once before to the Italians in my genetic line.

From that post on the Epiphany....

My grandfather was born in Sicily and immigrated to America, via Ellis Island, on what the family affectionately called a "banana boat". I'm not sure of the origin of that expression, nor why we felt affectionate about it, but certainly my grandfather was very proud of becoming an American and never taught his children to speak Italian. It was from my grandfather, Epiphani Siciliano that I first identified my love of growing vegetables. He had a huge vegetable patch and orchard at his home in rural Massachusettes and I remember as a young girl (primary school, we immigrated to Australia when I was in Grade 5 so it was sometime around 8, 9 years old) thinking his garden was fantastic. I probably wasn't old enough to think "I want to have a garden like that" but somehow it doesn't surprise me that I now do (though his was way bigger than mine and he owned the land...but still...no point spoiling a good reminisce).

In the basement of my grandparent's house in Leominster, Massachusettes was a cupboard with jars and jars of preserved fruits and vegetables. When we visited we were allowed to go downstairs and choose a jar of fruit for breakfast or to eat with ice cream. My grandfather loved ice cream. Perhaps we even had it for breakfast!

This decorative lady from the past in no way resembles anyone living or dead in my family. She is purely a work of fiction and imagination. The preserves though were real. My grandmother's cupboards looked exactly like this in my memory. All these years later, I have a new (and by my standards) big pantry but it is nothing on the scale of my grandmother's wonderful basement.

Still, I have laid down some preserves from last summer. And maybe this coming season I can use this book to add to my repetoire. The author is a chap from Melbourne who has a website and it's worth having a bit of a peak, if you're interested. The book is fantastic. It covers a wide range of topics from the standard preserving-the-tomato-harvest, to some rarer items - like olives and fish and cheese and salami. Its a treasure trove of Italian eating.

There's even instructions on how to build a pizza oven! Go on. You know you want one.

But seriously, you have to read the bit about how to deal with the 'evil eye'. Who knew that so much ill fortune could be explained and solved by olive oil, garlic, prayers, salt and other bits of Southern Italian advice. So from the book..."When you hear that someone has said something envious of you, you can make 'Le Corna' ('the Devil's horns'), with your index and little fingers. Note: this is not an excuse for anyone to make the other sort of Corna, unfaithfulness to your partner". There you are. Food for the body and the soul - Italian traditions, as recorded by a contemporary Melbourne doctor. The story of the great waves of immigration continue and echo around the globe.

Preserving - a bit of an update

One of the jobs I completed recently was to bring all our preserves up from the garage and store them in our new pantry. Our garage is downstairs, under the house. I have a big wooden cupboard down there where I used to store our preserves but frankly it was a pain to have to trek up and down the outside stairs with jars and all the bottling equipment. Bring on the kitchen renovation, the new big pantry and an afternoon's organisation.

For reference, what you see before you is all of our vacola jars, minus 4 of the tall ones, which are currently clean and sitting in the cupboard. They had been full of last summer's tomato passata but are now empty and available. We also use recycled glass jars, but mostly buy new lids to put on the jars. We get the lids from Green living Australia.

So the inventory below is:

• 3 jars olives,
• 15 jars of apple butter
• 2 jars plums
• 1 jar spiced pears
• 12 small jars tomato passata
• 20 large jars tomato passata
• 6 jars chicken stock
• 1 jar of slow cooked biodynamic lamb stew 

We've had the fowler's vacola for about 16 years, the tomato passata maker since my birthday in 2005, and now the pressure cooker canner since June 2011. In order to store stock, stews, and soups you do need to have a pressure cooker as the hot water bath method doesn't kill enough germs in the low acid foods.

Tim's got a birthday coming up and he asked for more trays for the dehydrator. What a laugh we are. Still..we are enjoying having easy access to our preserving equipment in the new big kitchen. May as well enjoy it before the bloom wears off.

Some years we do lots of preserving (like above). Some years, not so much, like below, from the 2008 harvest.

Drying Autumn Fruit: Pears

We get a box of fruit delivered once a week from Aussie Farmers Direct. Our Milkman moved over to this service about a year ago and we went with him. I worked out that if we each ate 2 pieces of fruit a day, each week we'd consume the fruit in the box. However, I always find the fruit mounting up on tables, in boxes, in bowls. Hmm. So, I decided this week to juice the oranges and mandarins, make apple butter out of the apples and dry the pears. I'll show you the pear process.

I use this book for instructions - Mary Bell's Complete Dehydrator Cookbook - it is both a how-to-dehydrate fruits and vegetables and then how-to-cook with them. Mary Bell recommends soaking the pears in orange juice for 2 mins. I used freshly squeezed orange juice so, naturally enough, it was fairly pulpy. Which was fine by me.

Then they went into the dehydrator and stayed on for a little over 12 hours. The fan of the dehydrator is fairly innocuous. It has a kind of low, warm hum and the house filled up with nice peary-orangey smells. Not too bad.We got this dehydrator as a wedding present 15 years ago. They were reasonably expensive back then, not sure now. I have four trays, two solid inserts (helpful for leathers and purees) and two mesh inserts.

At the end of the 12 hours the pear slices that were uniformly about 1/4 of an inch (as recommended) dried really nicely into leathery slices. The too-fat slices were warm and soft and squidgy and got gobbled up straight away. They were too moist to put away in a glass jar. The orange helps stop the pear flesh from oxidising and also adds a nice, tangy flavour to the caramelized sugars of the dried pear.

I'm not sure how long these dried pears will last. It seems easy to eat fruit if someone prepares it for you!

 

Leek and potato soup

I grew these leeks from seed and here they are sitting in my kitchen, waiting patiently. If you recall, I suggested they were not yet leek and potato soup back here. Well now they are.

I used a recipe from Anna Thomas' beautiful soup cookbook, Love Soup. And while it calls for Yukon Gold potatoes, which I did not grow, I did use my own home grown potatoes...Nicola potatoes which have a yellowish flesh.

I love the colours of the leeks in the pot.

 

After sweating the leeks down slowly in some olive oil and butter, I added the cubed potatoes, some with skins left on. Then, I added a mix of vegetable stock (following the Love Soup stock recipe) and some water. Let it simmer gently for an unrecorded amount of time and then I blended and added just a smidgen of sour cream. Just enough to lighten it. It was very popular. On the nights when we have soup for dinner, I try and have some hot crusty bread, a salad and some kind of dessert - on this occasion we had a bread pudding which used up a decent number of duck's eggs.

Uses of silverbeet

We grow a lot of silverbeet, mostly just because it's easy. I actually prefer Kale as a green vegetable to accompany dinner. I've written about my love for Dwarf Green Kale. But, as silverbeet is so hardy, and self seeds, and is good for you, it's helpful to have uses for it.

We have recently taken to washing the silverbeet, steaming it lightly, chopping it up and then freezing it in ice cube trays. When frozen they come out of the ice cube trays and are stored in a box in the freezer. Perfect portions for breakfast.

We also keep ducks. At present we have two drakes (not a good idea) and 4 ducks. The duck in the banner photo we refer to as Mummy Duck. She's the one who manages to hatch out a brood every year - the others are not always so successful. In the past few years, we have had more failed nests than successful ones. This last season, the 2010-11 season, we had three nest attempts by two different ducks with only two ducklings hatched. Again, you've heard these tales.

At about this time of year, ducks are laying daily but are not hiding their eggs or trying to sit on them, so, we have loads of eggs. For breakfast, I use one of these egg steamer pans and cook a duck egg, a few cherry tomatoes and one ice-cube-tray-sized portion of silverbeet.

If you are familiar with these pans, you'll know that water goes in the bottom part. These black inserts are removable and a glass lid sits on top. Steam rises up through the holes in the tray and steams the egg and its companions.

 

Chilled cucumber and tomato soup

I grow the cucumbers for my daughter who loves them and being a small person doesn't love lots of green vegetables. She is away with grandparents at the moment so when I harvested two cucumbers and a plate full of tomatoes, I needed to think of a way of eating them.

Antonio Carluccio's vegetable cookbook came to the rescue. I love this cookbook. The recipes are grouped by vegetable, as if you had an abundance of something and wanted to know the 6-8 different ways to convert said vegetable into meals. I also like that the cookbook is ordered alphabetically by the Italian spelling of the vegetable. It makes me feel so cosmopolitan, even while I struggle to remember if an italian cucumber starts with the letter "c".


So here's my attempt at this recipe - which was stunningly beautiful on a hot, hot, hot Summer night.


Too easy. Cucumber, dill, olive oil, cream. Tomato, fresh basil, olive oil, garlic, vegie stock.

Bellisimo. (The apple effect was accidental and as I look at it now, mildly confusing -like a mixed metaphor).