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@ElainaA, here's today's tomato harvest:

A somewhat orange lunch, but not bad for what I could catfish out of the fridge. Jail slaw, cucumber salad, Carolina gold tomatoes with cottage cheese, salt and pepper. Bowl of canteloupe for dessert. Good stuff.

Finally got around to using the stacked steamer/tiffin insert. I think I'm going to like this creature. Ingredients for butter chicken, in one pan, basmati rice in the other. Stacked and ready. I set these on a trivet, although their rack has little feet that would hold it up a bit. Comes almost to top of pot. Stacked and ready to go in the pot. After 10 minutes manual high pressure, 20 minutes NPR (because I was doing something else). Finished product. A tad too salty. Other than that, decent. Rice was just a teeny bit too al dente for my tastes, ditto chicken (it was frozen when I put it in). I might perhaps go 12 minutes next time. I'll cut the salt and finish the sauce with a bit of honey; I like that sweet taste like I get from the takeout place.

Do you have the Deep Run Roots cookbook? I bet you could use plums in place of blueberries in her blueberry barbecue sauce, which is about the best thing ever to hit a chicken or pork chop. It's just equal parts sugar and vinegar and fruit, some salt, a cinnamon stick and some red pepper flakes. Simmer, puree in blender, strain, cook some more to thicken. I've used plum sauces with chicken and pork with some success before; made up a chipotle plum sauce that was pretty fine on tenderloin. With vinegar in it, would be easy to can.

Post lots of pics! Travel safely, and have a great trip.

I love it from March/April until about early July. July and August are not quite so much fun. Fall is gorgeous, and winter is mild, which is key for me, as I do NOT do cold very well. We will have one decent snow every two or three years, and it only stays on the ground a couple of days before melting; maybe 10 days all told below freezing all winter, and those not all in a clump. There are, of course, exceptions to that average. In the southern part of Arkansas, all my herbs except for basil, tarragon and marjoram would overwinter. There were growers who used greenhouses who had salad greens (and provided them to all the good restaurants in the Little Rock area) all winter, and used only minimal heat during January and February. And the Amish growers who started their tomatoes in "hoop houses" (big plastic Quonset hut looking creatures) would have ripe tomatoes starting in February. Just moving half the depth of the state north made a big difference; I hated to leave those tomatoes.

Are the grapevines wild? If so, they're probably muscadines, which are wonderful and make the second-best jelly in the world, or, even better, scuppernongs, or white/gold muscadines, which make the BEST jelly in the world. When I was a little kid, my mother and I would go swimming in the nearby lake. One day she wandered off and found a patch of ripe scuppernongs. She went through the car looking for something to pick them in, found nothing. Not to be deterred (it was 10 miles, much of it on a gravel road, back home), she took off the capri pants she was wearing over her bathing suit, tied knots in the legs, and we picked them full. Best jelly ever. EVER.

@rotuts has called it -- the NYT, like all other newspapers, is facing major financial pressures, and they're identifying any sources of revenue they can. I can see how one would be the cooking site, for people for whom that is the ONLY feature of the newspaper they access. I have no doubt that for some people, it's worth it; right now, for me, it might not be, as the work pace has picked up to the point I have less time, by several orders of magnitude, to cook anything beyond a quick meal to stave off starvation. The other side of that coin is that I probably WOULD go ahead a pay the extra subscription, simply to support what is one of the few reliable sources of news we have left in the nation these days. My background is in journalism (my career for the first 20 years of my working life, until I switched), and I feel pretty strongly about the need for a good, unbiased news outlet. There are damn few of them left. After all, I did pay 30 or 40 bucks, a few years ago, for a hardback copy of The NYT's New Best Recipes. The cooking section is like a cookbook that keeps growing.

I'm a Times online subscriber. Have been for years. Will be until I can no longer afford $10 a month. Would happily pay an extra $5 a month for the Cooking site; grateful I don't have to.

In my back yard! Not getting a lot yet, but the cherries are always the first to ripen. We've had local tomatoes at the Farmers Market since early June. They were early this year.

Made a deep-dish pie plate full of this today.

Ah, capitalism. Exporting its most ubiquitous.

I adopted this recipe last year and used it with Romas for a big batch of tomato sauce that I canned. I've been using it all winter and spring in assorted applications -- pasta sauce, pizza sauce, in soups and stews, pureed as a sub for tomato sauce in any recipe. I love it and will assuredly make more this year. I may perhaps have gotten overenthusiastic in my measuring of garlic in it, but then again, I have had no vampire visitations....

Rule of thumb from canning with my mother as a child: water bath is fine for tomatoes, any kind of pickles, jams or jellies. Everything else needs the pressure canner. I have a recipe for canning green beans in a weak vinegar solution, and then you drain and rinse the beans before you use them, which allows water bath canning of green beans. They're OK.

I have joined the ranks of those with multiple freezers. I've been looking for a used upright freezer in the 20-something foot range for ages; no success. A friend offered me her small chest freezer, as she was no longer using it. I could have it, she said, because she knew I'd feed her from it along the way. My kids went and picked it up and brought it to me today; it is a twin for the one I have, meaning I have in the neighborhood of, well. 20 or so cubic feet (as I think these are both nine-footers, possibly 12). I'm going to defrost this one and clean it out (there are some bits and pieces that need to be picked out of the corners, etc.) and go purchase a significant number of plastic crates that will fit inside it, in the vain hope of keeping it moderately organized. Then I will move things like the Schwan's frozen seafoods (I have salmon, cod, halibut and tuna) and a few other of their dishes) into it, then organize the beef, pork and chicken into baskets and move that over. Then I'll defrost the other one. It can then be used for veggies (more crates!) and fruits from the garden and area farms. The extra refrigerator freezer can then be limited to stocks and frozen homemade TV dinners and entrees. And THEN I'll attack the side-by-size freezer section of the kitchen fridge, and rid myself of things that are old enough to draw Social Security; it can them be limited to stuff I use often (nuts, etc.), leftovers that need to be used by a specific date, and so on. And this is a regimen on which I expect to stay for, oh, about two weeks before everything is a hopeless mess! So, NYAH, @rotuts! I now have Freezers A, B, C and D!

Birthday lunch celebration at a local restaurant today; the one I'd picked whose website said it was open for Sunday brunch was, in fact, not, so we crossed the street and went to another. I had crab cakes benedict, on a biscuit, and except for the preponderance of bell pepper in the crab cakes, it was quite excellent. Other chose chicken benedicts (what it sounds like, with a nicely breaded and fried chicken filet) and one with sausage, while the vegetarian in the group had a Florentine omelet. I had a couple of mimosas and I always find two leaves me wanting more. I had Prosecco, but no orange juice; however, I DID have pomegranate juice. So I am having a pomosa. Found it a bit too intense with just pom and champagne, so I added a bit of sparkling water. Worked. I may have two or three more for dinner.

@Shelby, your portion looks significantly more manageable than mine was. That was a longshoreman-sized breakfast, and I made but minimal inroads on it. @Smithy, we have only lately ended one of the longest and best strawberry seasons I can remember. They came in early and lasted a LONG time; I ate fresh local berries from early April until the second week of June. Almost unheard of to have them that late. And they were often my breakfast fruit of choice with my yogurt and granola.

After the farmers' market this morning, I treated myself to breakfast at a local diner. Decent corned beef hash (I suspect it may have come from a can, but was fried crispy and had a good flavor about it); over easy eggs, grits and toast. Coffee, OJ. For the princely sum of $12. My only quarrels with the place were that they use margarine instead of butter, and I really wanted one more refill on my coffee, but got tired of waiting for it. In their defense, the place was packed at 8:20 a.m. on a Saturday.

Pimiento cheese is one of the several foodstuffs that make me so VERY grateful I'm a Southerner. Every Southern cook has his or her own recipe (the stuff in the tubs from the supermarket is nasty). I love it on crackers, dipped on corn chips, on a sandwich by itself, with bacon jam, on a blt, and I've used it to pimp up some grits, along the lines of Deep Run Roots. If you want my recipe, I'll be happy to PM you. It's easy enough to make.

Re: fried zucchini on the sandwich -- blt's down here often have fried green tomatoes added. That, with a slathering of pimiento cheese, makes possibly the best sandwich ever made. Lettuce optional.

Good God. There are more cucumbers this morning. I can't imagine what it's going to be like when the zucchini take off. I'm thinking these latest ones will turn into sweet pickle relish, something i use a lot of when I make potato salad, etc., so I might as well make my own. If you're coming through northeastern Arkansas for anything, let me know and I'll load you down with cucumbers.

@rarerollingobject-- I am so very sorry to hear your sad news. May you and your family find comfort and peace.

I've always thought Southern cities could hold their own with major northern/coastal ones when it came to cooking. New Orleans, of course, is in a class all its own; Nashville, Birmingham, Atlanta all offer some culinary jewels (People swear Frank Stitt's Highlands Grill is the best restaurant in the South outside New Orleans, but I am hard-pressed to rank it ahead of Murphy's Wine Bar in Atlanta or its neighbor, the Hot and Hot Fish Club in Birmingham.) And now Food and Wine is moving to Birmingham. "Clickety." One wonders what seismic shift in the food world will occur next. Me, I'm pulling for an Eataly outpost. Birmingham's road-trip distance. And I could have tomato salad at Hot and Hot, which is the dish I would request for my final meal.

Been gone for a week. There were a few small cukes when I left, too small to pick. I got back to The Cucumbers That Ate The Back Yard, a dozen of them as long as my forearm and about that big around. They were firm and a good color, though, so I went on and brought them in, along with a half-dozen more reasonably sized ones, and made pickles (see preserving thread). Also on the pickage list today: a couple of small zucchini, one large yellow squash, and a few tomatoes. Killer cucumbers. Tomatoes and squash. These Sungold yellow/orange cherry tomatoes are the sweetest, best things I've ever tasted. I eat them like candy.

Today we pickled some more, because we took advantage of a break in the rain to dash out to the garden and see what had transpired in the week I had been gone. In addition to a good handful of tomatoes, two small zucchini, one oversized yellow crookneck, and two peppers, there were a dozen MASSIVE cucumbers (and four or five reasonably sized ones). The giant ones weren't soft, though, so I went ahead and brought them in. What to do? Pickles! I made six half-liters and a half-pint of bread and butter (as I had a big bag of Vidalia onions), and four pints and two quarts of a new recipe, sweet spicy hot pickles, along with a couple of half-liter jars of those for refrigerator pickling. Cucumbers on steroids. They were as long as my arm, and two inches in diameter. Bread and butter pickles. First water-bath effort in the Weck jars, as Kroger was out of lids for my wide-mouth pints. Sweet spicy hots. Brine is 4 cups cider vinegar, 4 cups water, 2 cups sugar, 3/4 cup salt. Jars are prepped with garlic cloves, peppercorns (I used a combo of red/green/black and red pepper flakes, and whole coriander. Weck jars are the refrigerator version; remainder are shelf-stable. Tomorrow: 50 ears of sweet corn to cut off and freeze, and a batch of blueberry barbecue sauce to make and can.