Weekly Local Booty 8/24-8/30-2008

We ended up getting quite a load of peppers from our container garden this week, and the Roma tomato plant produced like crazy. We think it's probably getting really close to the end of our "community garden season", the Roma doesn't appear to be starting any more tomatoes and the squash, well, they don't look that great and they just aren't producing much of anything. The Better Boy might surprise us with a few more tomatoes, but we aren't expecting many more large loads in our back packs from there this year.

The farmer's market is overflowing with goodies it being "bounty season" around here - granted, the weather this summer has done a lot for the variety and abundance of some of the crops, but there are still tons of yummy delights waiting to be found.

Here is what we got from our container and community gardens this week:















A couple of small bell peppers.















A petite bell pepper and a jalapeno.















Another small bell pepper. I apologize for the errant pictures of just one and two peppers, but the plants don't produce all at once (thankfully!).















Sorry for the poor quality picture here, the camera was being funky. We've got lots of Roma tomatoes that are continuing to ripen in our windowsill, some banana peppers from the community garden, and a small yellow straightneck squash. Brett went ahead and picked this little guy since he was "technically" large enough to be worth taking, but with the squash bugs being so prevalent, we didn't want to take the chance that they would get it while we waited for it to get larger.















Lots of ripe cayennes (!!!!) and a petite bell pepper.















Hot Hungarian Wax peppers.

Here is the CSA for this week (can you believe we have been getting our CSA for 16 weeks?!):















We've got: 2 long yellow hot peppers of some sort (I didn't know there were peppers in the bag until I got home or else I would have asked them what kind they were, if I can remember, I'll ask him next Saturday), 2 cucumbers, 2 zucchini, one (odd, eh?) green onion, some basil, and lots of Roma tomatoes.

This week's farmers market booty - this haul cost $27:















Starting from the right we have: 2 Herbal Oats granola bars (we got the "energy" kind this week), 2 red onions, a ripe Black Hungarian Pepper (for it's seeds, the purveyor gave it to us for free since we only wanted one and planned on saving the seeds!), 6 small tomatoes, lots of jalapenos, lots of poblano peppers, an eggplant, eggs, basil, a cantaloupe, and a small bag of "ciabattini" (mini loaves of ciabatta) from the local bakery Uprise, and 4 bulbs of garlic.

This week's food preservation activities included:

• My first attempt at canning salsa.
• Freezing hot Hungarian and hot banana peppers.
• Freezing jalapenos.
• Re-making the ristra.

For my first attempt at canning salsa I decided to make a half batch (supposedly 3 pints) of the Spicy Tomato Salsa recipe from the Ball Blue Book of Preserving. This was the first time that I peeled and de-seeded tomatoes, and let me tell you, there has to be an easier way of doing it than I did. Not only was it a pain in the ass, it took forever! But once I got done with that, the rest of the task was a breeze. I halved this recipe, which originally yielded 6 pints, so a half batch should yield 3 right? That's what I thought. I used a food scale, I measure all my ingredients, and I ended up with 2 1/2 pints. That's right, 2 1/2. What the hell?!?! Is it possible that my tomatoes were "seedier" than the ones the Ball Book was accounting for?

At any rate, we processed the two full pints and stuck that half pint in the fridge to eat.

Check out my first canned salsa!















I was really excited when, after a few minutes of being finished "processing", the lids popped! Wahoo!

We tried the salsa out a couple hours after I made it, and it was really good. Really good, Brett said it was the closest thing to a "restaurant style" salsa he had ever had, well, outside of a restaurant.

I don't think I would agree with their terminology of "spicy", this is an incredibly mild salsa, but it's really good. Next time though, I am going to substitute a hotter pepper for the jalapenos. If you are gonna call something spicy, it should be spicy.

Freezing the peppers, was, as always, really easy. I just washed 'em, cut the stems off, packed 'em in freezer bags, and had Brett use a straw to suck all the air out of 'em. He has "iron lungs".

Since we got all those ripe cayennes off the plant, I decided to remake our "ristra", which was more like small clumps of peppers drying in various places around our apartment because I never got around to tying them all together. So I just made a new one today, and here is a picture of it hanging from a hook on our ceiling. The picture isn't all that great (all my excuses for always taking bad pictures!), but it was blowing around and hard to photograph.















Pretty neat.

Needless to say, I'm a bit worn out now. This doesn't look like much, but after lugging home a huge load of food from the market and grocery store (we always run across the street to the grocery store after we go to the market to pick up anything we couldn't find at market), preparing all this food (and I'm slow with these things), and doing the dishes, my day was filled.

Well, I'm off to make a simple (and hopefully good) new meal Brett came up with and to find out how Mizzou did in their first football game against Illinois. Let the border wars begin! I missed football...

'Til next time.