Category Archives: food and cooking

Slow-roasting going on here.

food and cooking, my garden

In the last week I’ve had a few new adventures in the kitchen. What with the need to use the products of my garden yet-unharvested, I can’t stick around here very long, so I’ll be brief, and just now give you the link for the wonderful slow-roasted cherry tomatoes everyone seems to be talking about. You might have some little tomatoes around you could try this on. They are just as delectable as “everyone” says. If I had discovered them earlier in the summer….well, I didn’t. But next year!


I still have all three types and colors of cherry tomatoes, which is why my end result includes some very babyish ones. The smaller ones I took out of the oven after 3 1/2 hours, but the large red ones I left in all 4 hours.

The original recipe creator, I think it was, said that she likes a good amount of fennel in her seasoning, so I used 1/2 teaspoon of fennel seeds and 1 1/2 teaspoons of an “Italian seasoning” mix for my seasoning. The finished tomatoes were just perfect, so I’ll do the same thing again tomorrow with what I picked today.

I can see why households with children wouldn’t have any of these left over, but as there were only two of us, I put some in the freezer for later. If I hadn’t exercised such discipline, though, I’m sure they would have quickly disappeared.

Cherry Tomato Soup

food and cooking, my garden,


Mr. Glad and I have been eating bowls and bowls of cherry tomato salad, but are inundated with many more of the tiny love apples than we can consume fresh.

So I was quite pleased to read that another blogger had made soup from hers. Well, of course! I make soup from everything, so I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that myself.

 

 

I got right to work and sautéed one onion and several large cloves of garlic in about 1/4 cup of olive oil.

Then I added to the 6-quart pot this many tomatoes…hmm…would that be about 4 quarts? I cut the long, larger tomatoes in two. Chopped up a few sprigs of basil, added about a teaspoon of salt and a few grindings of black pepper.

Cooked it all very slowly with the lid on, and after 20 minutes my soup looked like this.
I thought it would be nice if it were mostly creamy, with a few chunks, so I transferred about two cupfuls to a bowl, and then puréed the rest in the blender and added it to the bowl as well.


My batch made nearly 3 quarts, I think. My original plan was that it would be a soup base, but I tasted it, and it is perfect the way it is! Very sweet and lots of tomato flavor. Still, I’m not promising I won’t add a little “good cream,” as M.F.K. Fisher would probably recommend. I’m putting it in the freezer for more wintry days.

As soon as I finished this easy project, I saw that yet another blogger was showing how to make slow-roasted cherry tomatoes. Now I know just what to do with tomorrow’s pickings.

Late September Garden

food and cooking, garden


I’ve been enjoying my own garden today, and took a few photos to document the changes going on.

The echinacea is still blooming, but you can see shoots of Dutch Iris coming up nearby. And beyond that, yarrow that never bloomed this year. That must mean this bed is shadier than ever.

We get pine needle drop at this time of year. What a mess, covering pots of succulents, campanula, sweet woodruff, and other things, and hanging from the branches of the rhododendron. If I had any grandchildren around I’d pay them to collect needles.

Here is some kind of salvia that is at the peak of bloom right now. It doesn’t mind some shade, and grows near columbines.

My Swiss chard is ready to pick. I’d like to make a tart with it, such as I ate once at an Italian restaurant. Has anyone a recipe for something like that?

This Night’s Heat

food and cooking, my garden, ,

What can one do when the garden produces only a few regular tomatoes and a thousand cherry tomatoes? It just this week occurred to me to make salsa with them.

The grocery store where I shop is a favorite of Hispanics, so it carries everything they could want, including many sorts of hot peppers. Nearly every time I go there I gaze at the boxes of peppers and lament that I don’t know which ones to buy for what.

Enough of that wimpiness–This time I took the plunge and bought Anaheims (in the picture above, next to the cilantro), which I am familiar with because we grew them in the past, and Serranos. The Serranos (dark green, at the bottom of the photo) were the experimental ones; I’ve never used them, but they don’t carry the most fiery connotation to my mind.

In the past I overdid the onion in my salsa creations, so this time I just used green onions. Also some sweet red bell pepper, garlic, and cilantro.

I’m sorry, I just had to show one more photo of my cherries before the summer is gone. Now that they have proven themselves, each with their own unique pros and cons, but mostly looking super together, I am thinking I want to plant all these varieties again next year!

Here are the approximate amounts of ingredients for this warming concoction:

September Salsa

4 Anaheim peppers
3 Serrano peppers
8 scallions
1/2 a large sweet red bell pepper
about a quart of cherry tomatoes, mixed varieties
2 cloves garlic
1 bunch cilantro
2 tablespoons lime juice
about 1 teaspoon saltIMG_6812

Chop everything as finely as you want or are able, and mix in a bowl.

Here is Mr. Glad getting ready to scoop a pile of the stuff on to his tortilla chip.

He thought it was a fantastic recipe. Also he said he was surprised at how mild the Serranos were. Meanwhile, I was enjoying the flavors, thinking it was the best salsa I’ve made yet, as my fingers were burning and beads of sweat were forming on my red face.