ElainaA

I wait until the pods are getting quite dry. You can harvest earlier but then you will need a place for them to dry out longer. I always dry mine for a couple of weeks anyway - if any beans are still moist when you package them they can mildew. I use a window screen on a table inside. I pull the entire plant then shuck the pods. Err on the side of 'not quite dry' rather than over dry - or the pods may open in the garden - you don't want to lose any beans! What varieties did you grow?

I harvested the coco noir and tongue of fire beans a couple of weeks ago. Most of them were pretty well dried already but I spread them on screens to be sure. Now they're ready to pack away - and eat. Tongue of Fire is a type of borlotti. We'll have some of them for dinner tonight.

Tuesday: Grilled kielbasa, potato salad and red cabbage and grated apples braised in apple juice with some caraway and allspice. Yesterday: Tomato soup, using up some of the plethora of tomatoes from my garden and a salad plate with steak, some red and golden beets (also from the garden) and the requisite cukes and cherry tomatoes. I liked the soup a lot - I'll be making a couple more batches to freeze.

I fully agree with @Okanagancook 's comment above. If you want to be really safe you can acidify the herbs as described here: http://extension.uidaho.edu/owyhee/files/2013/10/PNW664-Making-Garlic-and-Herb-Infused-Oils-at-Home.pdf

I've been taking pictures but not finding time to post so here are this week's meals: Pasta with sausage and leeks. The garden leeks are just getting large enough to use. And a plate of tomatoes and cukes - this was a tasting plate including some of each of the full size tomato varieties that I grew. We mainly eat the cherry tomatoes and I process the large ones. I wanted a taste test to decide which ones will repeat next year. Chicken breast baked with onions and mojito marinade from the Dinosaur Barbecue cookbook. I am afraid to think of what they are feeding these chickens - these breasts would make Dolly Parton feel inferior. With plain rice, some of the last of the local corn sauteed with shallots, seasoned with a little vinegar and a lot of basil and a tomato and cucumber salad. Steak with grilled vegetables (zucchini, tomato,onion, red pepper) and oven fries. Pasta with tomato/roasted garlic/roasted pepper sauce. Besides last night dinner, there are 4 quarts of this in the freezer to enjoy this winter. Or sooner. There was a salad to go with.

I meant to summarize tomatomania to date: 42 quarts of canned tomatoes, 4 quarts of tomato puree, frozen, 4 quarts of roasted garlic/roasted pepper/tomato sauce, frozen, the tomato chutney shown above and 6 quarts of imitation V8 juice, also in the freezer. And a bushel of tomatoes picked this morning waiting in the garage. And lots more in the greenhouse. Lots more processing to come. (And don't even try to estimate how many tomatoes we have eaten.....)

I took a break from tomatomania to make some jam: The jars in back are tomato chutney. Not the recipe that many here seem to use but one passed around in my family. It is originally from Madhur Jaffrey's An Invitation to Indian Cooking. My copy is in a sister's handwriting. She said hers was written out by one of our brothers.

Re: the mystery item. Something used in making butter? Holding a container and rocking the cream somehow?

I have been known to leave bags of zucchini hanging on the door knobs of neighbors who do not have gardens. Only when they are not home, of course. Recently a friend called to ask "Did you leave these squash here?" I hadn't. So I guess I'm not alone.

Marcella can always come to the rescue. She is my Yoda.

My husband is an excellent cook, however our taste preferences are quite different. So if he were to design a special dinner for my birthday it might well be a perfectly prepared dish - that I would never have chosen for myself . The solution was really simple - establish a tradition of lobster and champagne. Not much can go wrong there. And, in my opinion, when you have lobster you only pretend to eat other parts of the meal. (Somewhat off topic - The same thing frequently happens with fresh, local sweet corn. A problem in come of the lobster shacks I ate in when I lived in Maine that served both excellent local corn and wonderful lobster together.) I have never been a big fan of birthday cakes. As a child, my daughter always wanted the works - a layer cake, frosted, with frosting roses and "Happy Birthday Micaela" and I produced one, every year. Actually she wanted one for each birthday - not only hers but also my husband's and mine. That tailed off around age 12 or so when she fell in love with pumpkin pie and that became the birthday ritual. I like that much better. (We did put candles in the pie.)

Do you grow fennel mainly for it's seeds? It must be a different variety from what I grow, which primarily is for the bulbs and also for the fronds. Mine never seems to set seed - the fronds simply turn brown and dry up. These bulbs should have been harvested awhile ago - they are starting to bolt. (If anyone needs some bulb-type fennel, please just stop by.)

I pull huge amounts of purslane out of my garden weekly. I know that it is edible but have not brought myself to try it.(I know - I'm thinking inside the box of acceptable food.) I have read somewhere that the variety that grows upright is favored for eating rather than the variety that grows horizontally along the ground - which is what I have. If you need more, you are very welcome to come and help me weed harvest my garden. I have had a similar growing season here - very hot and dry through June and July, now some rain (though not really enough). Great for tomatoes (as long as I watered) since the endemic blights flourish in wet weather. My peppers did terribly however. The plants never seemed to take off so when they began producing peppers the plants were so short that the peppers all were against the ground and most rotted before they changed color. It was also a bad year for squash bugs and squash vine borers. But I have the most beautiful fennel I have ever grown and huge onions ready to be pulled. Every year is different - next year I expect tons of cucumbers and a horrible tomato crop to even things out.

What I think of as Kitchen Sink Salmon cakes - because they seem to have everything else in them - red and green peppers, red onion, scallions, jalapeno, bread crumbs, mayo, mustard, egg, basil - the list is very long. They are very good but I rarely make them except when there is local sweet corn because the accompaniment is a fresh corn relish - also with lots of ingredients - corn kernels, chopped onion and garlic briefly simmered in a vinegar and sugar mixture then cooled and mixed with chopped reed onion, green and red pepper, scallions and basil. This is from a torn out page from a 2002 Food and Wine (i think - the page doesn't name the magazine but i believe that is what I was getting then. Could be Bon Appetite.) Served with boiled small potatoes with parsley and butter and a salad.

Evidently quite a few people in my area. A Tim Horton opened up here (in Cortland - the nearest small city to Virgil) about 3 years ago - it lasted less than a year. I've never been in one so i have no personal opinion.

Thank you for taking us with you on this trip! This should be fun!

The tomatoes are coming in massively - I have canned 21 quarts so far and have enough to do another 7. Also 6 quarts of imitation V8 juice in the freezer. Tomorrow I plan on canning tomato chutney - and I'll pick more. I like to plant lots of different varieties - I have 16 different types this year (Yeah, I do go a bit overboard - seed catalogs are very dangerous here in February. ) So here is a sampler (slightly annotated) of what I have : Back row: Black from Tula (huge fruit but many are misshapen), German Johnson (a relative of Brandywine - all of mine have green shoulders that do no go away), Gallo de Summer, BHN 589 (a Johnny's Seeds variety chosen for blight resistance - large, nice flavored fruit.) Middle row: Plum Regal (a plum also chosen for blight resistance. I have lots of green fruit but only a couple ripe yet), BHN 871 (another Johnny's variety - I love both the color and taste of these so they are a regular) , Polebig (a reliable middle sized tomato), Solar Flare (these are so pretty - quite large and prolific), Big New Dwarf (these are my container experiment - not terribly successful perhaps because it was so hot and dry that even daily watering was not enough. Fruits are quite large but almost all are misshapen as this one is0 Front row: Defiant (another very reliable, blight resistant plant) White cherry (nice flavor bur very few fruit), Chocolate Sprinkles (my new favorite - pretty and delicious), Sun Lemon (very prolific), Gardener's Delight (a large cherry type), Orange Paruche (nice flavor but very soft and split easily) and Jaune Flamee (small orange fruit - also very soft - it makes me wonder if that is characteristic of orange tomatoes?) Some of these will definitely be back next year, some not. I love the mix of colors both in salads and in the canning jars. We have large bowls of multi-colored cherry tomaotes both for snacking and salads - and when we have eaten all we can and I have processed all i want to, bags go to Loaves and Fishes. I go just as far overboard with lettuce varieties - maybe next early summer I will do a sampler of them.

I've been too busy to post much recently but I did take pictures so here are a few meals. Chicken thigh pieces seasoned with garlic, parsley, cumin, paprika, crushed red peppers and salt - sat for a couple of hours in the refrigerator then skewered and grilled. There was a nice yogurt sauce with more garlic to go with. Also home made naan topped with yogurt with chopped cucumbers, mint, parsley, s&p and a little hot sauce, then a layer of chickpeas mashed with vinegar, onions,parsley and a little olive oil and finally topped with sliced tomatoes seasoned with sumac, cumin, coriander, chopped garlic, red pepper flakes and salt. Very good but a bit challenging to eat with out structural collapse. Veal braised with zucchini, grated tomatoes and onions in chicken stock with cinnamon and a risotto with dried porcini. Boneless chicken breast marinated in a lemon vinaigrette then grilled, small red potatoes parboiled then grilled, a few tomatoes and cukes in more of the vinaigrette and Deborah Madison's 5 minute beets with some of the golden beets from the garden.

@Smithy I rely on various state's extension services for information on food safety. I looked at several before i made this recipe the first time and all said the same thing: "When raw or cooked vegetables or raw herbs are stored in oil, Clostridium botulinum bacteria can grow. These mixtures must be refrigerated to slow bacterial growth. A national research study (which included Oregon households) has shown, however, that home refrigerators are often not cold enough to safely store hazardous food such as vegetables and herbs in oil for long periods. Because harmful bacteria can grow faster at higher refrigerator temperatures, the length of refrigerated storage must be limited for safety. According to conclusions drawn in an analysis of handling procedures (Nummer et al., 2011), vegetables and herbs in oil mixtures should not be refrigerated longer than 4 days before using, discarding, or freezing. " http://extension.oregonstate.edu/fch/sites/default/files/documents/sp_50_701_herbsandvegetablesinoil.pdf They agree that the risk factor is the oil. One olive oil industry site recommends pressure canning - I've never seen that anywhere else and canning with oil, except as a floating top layer, is usually discouraged. Since the eggplant is drained after being cooked in the vinegar the acidification is minimized somewhat. Many people feel that some of the federal food safety guidelines are overly strict. And I am sure that many, many people can keep foods like this in the refrigerators for weeks and eat them without harm. But there is a real risk. Here is another discussion of this: Many of the contributors to the GardenWeb Harvest site are certified Master Preservers - i rely on their advice often. They are definitely on the side of caution. A statistic they quoted (however, without citing a source so take it as you will) was that over a 5 year period 65% of cases of botulism poisoning in Italy were caused by home canned vegetables in oil. http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/1932545/marinated-eggplantis-it-safe?n=7 My conclusion is that most of the time you are probably safe keeping the eggplant in the refrigerator a couple of weeks - but there is always a chance -probably small but real - that it won't be safe.

@sartoric That looks just wonderful. I'm putting a few of those items - especially the split pea fritters and the ginger and cabbage salad on my "must make" list.

The cherry tomatoes are ripe so it is time for slow roasted tomato sauce with garlic and basil. I guess i could make this with supermarket cherry tomatoes at any time of year but somehow that just seems wrong. It's a seasonal dish for me, made only when my tomatoes are ready. Ans sooooo good. Served with salad and garlic toasts. Whenever I make these bruschetta I think of Marcella Hazan's story from Marcella's Italian Kitchen: "When many years ago and recently arrived in America, I was asked at the table of friends if I would like some Italian garlic bread. I thought, as I accepted, how nice, they know about bruschetta. After a while a steaming bundle in a napkin was brought to the table and unwrapped to disclose a steaming loaf of bread, split in two, its redolently garlicky inside drenched in butter. I rethought, no, they don't know about bruschetta." (And I also do like the American version of garlic bread.)

From Wikipedia (and therefore of course not 100% reliable): "The seeds of many species of morning glory contain ergoline alkaloids such as the psychedelic ergonovine and ergine (LSA). Seeds of Ipomoea tricolor and Turbina corymbosa (syn. R. corymbosa) are used as psychedelics. The seeds of morning glory can produce a similar effect to LSD when taken in large doses." Is this the "edible" you were referring to? I assume you were really referring to the varieties also called 'water spinach' - banned in most of the US as a 'noxious weed'. There are many different varieties of morning glory - I'm not really sure what mine is after all these years.

From my point of view, you should not worry - nothing you said is offensive. I agree with @Thanks for the Crepes that you are making some interesting and valuable contributions to egullet. Don't worry if a person does not respond to your posts quickly - or even at all. Some of us are on line a lot and some of us only at intervals. Please keep posting.

Apricot and Nectarine jam with fresh and candied ginger: Six almost-quarts of faux V8 juice ready to go into the freezer. I don't have a pressure canner and this recipe is not safe for water bath canning. In reality, this is V5 juice - tomatoes, parsley, carrots, bell peppers (one red, one green) and onions.

It was the Canadian Living one - I had all the ingredients for that (and I don't grow cauliflower). Having no experience with Bick's relish I can't compare - but this one is definitely a keeper. And I now realize I have to thank you for the Summer Squash and Potato torte recipe also!