ElainaA

It is clearly pickle time. I am at day 3 of 4 day sweet gherkins, The picture is from yesterday, day 2. I bought the cukes at a farm stand - i don't have enough plants to get this many small ones. These are bigger than I wanted but the smallest I could find.

A pretty generic pasta picture but it tasted good. Sautéed zucchini, onions, garlic, tomatoes and sausage over pasta. My husband loved it but then, I realize, he would love anything involving pasta, sausage, garlic and pretty much anything else. Well, maybe not peanut butter. With a salad.

@HungryChris Those fried zucchini slices look wonderful. Especially with the beer. (It's hot here today.) Like @kayb I really like zucchini fritters. I especially like a Greek version with feta, dill and lemon zest, topped with a dollop of yogurt. It's an old recipe from Epicurious and is on my list for dinner this week. Our basic fall back is diced zucchini sautéed with onions and garlic, chopped tomatoes and basil added and used as a pasta sauce. If you add sausage it gets even better. And I really think that this is the best zucchini bread I have ever tasted. I freeze multiple loaves during the zucchini boom for snacking all year. I've got 4 in the freezer so far this year. Mom’s Zucchini Bread.docx

So today is day 2 in my personal zucchini challenge. Cod over sliced zucchini and tomatoes with garlic, shallots and EVO in foil packets, grilled. With a salad of beans with pickled red onion and basil and red quinoa with onion, pine nuts and parsley. For me, the bean salad was the star. Beans, zucchini, basil and parsley from my garden.

@Okanagancook I've declared, for myself, a zucchini challenge this week - Can I serve zucchini every night withour getting bored and without my husband staging a rebellion? Day one is one the dinner thread. Day 2 is cooking as I type - i will post it on the dinner thread when it is done. ( Foil packets of fish, zucchini, tomatoes, garlic and onions on the grill.)

So my husband saw me coming in from the garden and said "I guess we are having zucchini every night this week." And I thought "OK". So my challenge for this week is to serve zucchini is some form every night without getting boring. (Note : "This week" means Monday through Thursday. There is a rule i our house that no one cooks on Friday. We go out or get take out.) Tonight: Corn, zucchini, and sweet onion sauté and bierocks. I had never heard of bierocks until @Shelby posted about them last fall. Something recently reminded me of them and I googled them and decided, ok, lets try this.. What I produced may be considered a travesty. The recipes I found gave only salt and pepper as seasoning for the filling. (Why didn't I pm Shelby? I don't know.) And I found that very bland. So I messed around and added ( to the ground beef, onions, cabbage, cayenne and garlic) some vinegar, raisins and cinnamon. (I was thinking of a cabbage recipe from Mark Biittman). I think that helped. The final result was still a bit bland for my taste. The corn and zucchini sauté was excellent.

I forgot to take the camera with me when we moved out to the gazebo tonight, Pasta with the peas that I picked yesterday, ricotta and bacon. And a salad.

Simple dinner: Grilled pork tenderloin with spicy tomato jam, local corn and salad. I stopped at a different corn stand and this corn was only ok. I should stick to the usual place. They have good corn. (Butter and sugar - as far as I know silver queen is not available anywhere around here.)

The night before my wedding my soon-to-be in-laws took my parents, me and my soon-to-be-husband out to dinner. I ordered lamb. My future MIL said "You're not really going to eat that are you?" I said "Well, yes." It sort of defined our future relationship.

Absolutely. I didn't can them for many years, Then 2 years ago, when I retired (well, semi-retired) I started again and remembered how much better they are than store-bought. My goad is to do enough to get through until the next crop ripens. This year I ran out in April although I still have a couple of quarts of puree in the freezer. The tomato marathon doesn't usually start here until September.

I was a psychology prof for most of my working life - the labels are a reflection of that. (I was NEVER a Freudian!)

Thanks, Shelby. For me, it is more fun than work. No matter how much I give away, we still have way more than we can eat here. Although I will say that after the fourth or fifth canner load of tomatoes I get a bit tired of it. And i do much less than you. I'd crown you the canning queen here.

Today's harvest: The fennel needed thinning so i pulled some small ones. The purple beans are pole beans that are doing very badly - I'm not sure why. And, clearly it is time to start pickling. I didn't bother take a picture of the inevitable zucchini - you all know what they look like! These are just about the last of the raspberries. I didn't think to take a picture when I picked most of them - 4-5 quarts. You can see the result in the background or on the preserving thread - raspberry jelly. I find it odd that the raspberries have done beautifully this year is spite of the drought - and i do not water them - while the blackberries are shriveled and dried up. The few you see in the picture may be all I get. Here's what the blackberry bushes look like:

Raspberry jelly. This is the only jelly/jam/preserve that I make using commercial pectin. I find it very difficult to get a set otherwise. But I forgot how MUCH more sugar it takes. Also some little jars of fruit paste (fruit cheese) - two of plum paste, one of peach. I love these with cheese and somehow, only just realized you could can them (duh!). I only canned a little because most of the rest went with us as part of a cheese plate to a gathering last night. They disappeared very quickly. This is the first time I have made the plum version.

I forgot about that! Only, as I remember, we made sandwiches, not pinwheels.

I haven't thought of this in years. My mother used to make potato candy for us when we were small. I have never heard of it anywhere else. It was simply left over mashed potatoes mixed with confectionary sugar, a little milk and, maybe vanilla (?) to make a dough the texture of soft clay. She would divide it into pieces and color each with food coloring. We would use it like clay to make shapes or letters or miniature fruit (We had all watch Mom make marzipan fruit). If we were feeling unusually patient we would let them dry before eating them. It was a rainy day activity - when you have 6 kids you need to be creative to prevent mayhem.

Lovely tomatoes! Would you identify your tomato varieties please? The small, purple one looks like indigo rose or another of the indigo series. There are so many striped varieties now that I hesitate to guess about that one. I have grown tigerella (much smaller) and am growing solar flare this year - but in both cases when they are fully ripe the stripes turn gold.

I have made Mum's chicken curry twice - we like it a lot. I made the papadum chat and naan to go with. I'd love to know what other recipes you (or anyone) has made from that book.

No pictures tonight - my daughter is briefly home and we are too busy talking to take pictures. Inspired by the mentions on the gardening thread (and all my zucchini) I looked at the recipe from Sara Moulton (linked to by blue_dolphin) and decided - ok, I'll do the entire dinner. And I did. The results were mixed. We basically all looked at each other and said "This doesn't work together." Each element was good but as my daughter said " The zucchini is fighting with the fish." And I agreed. Both preparations were good but both had a sharp element - spice in the fish and lemon in the squash - that did not complement each other. I would do either one again but not put them on a plate together. The potatoes were really good.

@ChocoMom That's a BIG garden! Can you get away with out a fence there? If I did that all I would grow would be food for the bunnies, woodchucks, coons and deer. Is the brown patch in the front solarized? I've thought of trying that but never have.

Stuffed zucchini - the stuffing is sausage, fresh corn, tomatoes, onions, chopped zucchini and breadcrumbs. Topped with fontina. One of the best uses for larger-than-ideal zucchini. With salad.

@Jacksoup @JoNorvelleWalker Blossom end rot is a physiological issue - it usually is related to issues with watering and a lack of calcium. The Cornell Ag. school site - vegetablemdonline.ppath.cornell.edu - has , as always, good information. The recommendations are ensuring steady levels of water, not cultivating so close to the plant that you damage roots and using a high superphosphate, low nitrogen fertilizer (such as 4-12-4). I hope this helps. It is alway painful to bring the plants along and then lose the fruit. I'm getting cat-facing in some of my tomatoes. Not much that can be done about that.

Shelby that's wonderful. I credit your green thumb waving over that garden.

I realize that in my above post I forgot to mention my husband's favorite reason for the above-the-stove faucet - if you swing it all the way to the right it is in the perfect position to fill the coffee maker that is placed next to the stove. (I am a tea drinker so i don't really appreciate this.)

Steelhead trout smoked on the grill with beet/horseradish salad (an attempt to duplicate a dish we had recently at Dano's on Seneca - but I had only golden beets ready in the garden) boiled potatoes, salad ( lettuce and other greens, radish and fennel from the garden - nothing else ready yet) and the very small amount of beet greens from the beets that went into the salad. No way we were throwing them out.