Ahhh, I don’t often drink red wine, due to its headache potential, and I certainly don’t claim to know anything about it, being a beer drinker, but damn, this Round Peaks Cabernet Franc is smooth. I’m kicking back because I have been working my behind off in the kitchen all weekend, but it should be worth it!

Yesterday - jeez, what did I do yesterday? Oh yeah, yesterday I froze the peaches-and-cream corn off-the-cob. I sorted through all the tomatoes to get ready to can, cleaned them, and threw a bunch of them out. I shelled and snapped beans. I made a squash casserole with broccoli and corn, and for dinner I broiled marinated salmon and corn-on-the-cob and served it with sliced tomatoes and basil and cucumber-garlic-dill-yogurt sauce. When I realized that Sandy had given my Brandywines away I lost my heart for dealing with canning last night. He obviously is very sorry, though, and I know he meant well. But out of the hundreds of tomatoes on the counter, he picked THOSE TWO? Ay chihuahua.

Today, I got out in the back yard early with my mosquito gear on and clipped vines and mimosa and mulberry and pulled up pokeweed and motherwort and grass and baby grapevines. When the mosquitoes set up a landing field on my sweating forehead, I gave up. But it looks much better and I retrieved the pea vines that were making a break for it across the fence in the neighbor’s yard.

Then, with the promise of a backrub tonight, which sustained me all day but I am sorry to say that it’s probably not going to happen (:-(, I dealt with tomatoes. I will say right now that dealing with the tomatoes is not such a horrendous chore - it is a labor of love. However, my back does not enjoy standing in front of the sink or the stove all day. I need a bar stool so I can sit at the counter for some of the prep work.

I did a small batch of the tomato sauce that I used for this dish. Then I picked out the best of the botched tomatoes, peeled them, cut out any questionable parts, cooked them, and put them through the food mill. The food mill doesn’t do what I thought it would do. It’s great for juice, though, and I put about a half-gallon of tomato juice in the freezer along with a much smaller bag than expected of tomato sauce!

Then I got really serious and finally cooked enough of the best tomatoes to fill up my canner with seven pints and a quart more for the refrigerator this week. It took 60 medium size (Romas, mainly) tomatoes for this much. I chopped up about a cup of basil, parsley and thyme and added to them. I was organized and focused, and it paid off because I just heard seven six clicks from the kitchen, which is the joyful noise of jars sealing.

What I have learned is that it takes a lot more tomatoes that you expect to make a large batch for canning. And it’s not a good task to tackle when you are tired.

Believe or not, I did an approximate count, and I still have about 150 tomatoes on the counter, not counting the yellow pear and cherry tomatoes. But the best and ripest ones have been eaten or processed for future eating! Woo-hoo! Want to do the next Eat Local Challenge in January?

Here’s an all-local meal I made tonight. Chicken Cacciatore over Cheese Grits. If it makes you feel better, you can call it polenta. There’s a chicken breast under that sauce somewhere. The sauce is delicious over the grits and would have made a nice vegetarian meal.

Pretty much anything I cook right now is going to involve tomatoes, since I harvested over 300 this week. I didn’t measure much in this meal, but here’s the basic breakdown of the whole thing:

Tomato Sauce:
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 cloves minced garlic
1 cup diced onion
1 cup diced green peppers
Shredded and chopped fresh basil, parsley, and thyme
1 quart diced tomatoes
1 Tbsp sugar
Salt and pepper to taste

Cook the garlic, onion, and peppers in the olive oil just until soft. Add the herbs and cook for another minute. Add the tomatoes and sugar. Simmer for 45 minutes to an hour, depending on how watery your tomatoes are. I ended up spooning out some of the juice, because I was ready to eat.

Brown the chicken breasts lightly in oil or bacon fat. (I had bacon fat from the BLTs we ate yesterday.) Pour sauce over and add a goodly pinch or two of ground nutmeg, a big splash of red wine, and 2 bay leaves. Simmer for 40 minutes or so on low heat.

Cheese grits:
3 cups water
1 cup yellow grits
1 tsp salt
About 1 cup extra-sharp cheddar cheese, shredded
Garlic powder, or you could saute some extra garlic and save it for this.

Boil the water, add the grits, cover and cook until done, about 10-15 minutes, stirring from time to time. Add the salt, cheese, and garlic powder and mix in. That’s it.

Serve chicken and sauce over grits, kick back with the rest of the wine, and finish off the weekend with a satisfied smile on your face.

Sources:

Just taking a short blogging break to get off my feet. I spent the first part of the morning working in the back forty in a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, and bandana around neck to ward off mosquitoes. I picked my first butterbeans, some green beans, several Fordhook Acorn squash and Sugar Pie pumpkins, a few cucumbers, broccoli, sweet and hot peppers, and the usual cherry and yellow pear tomatoes. And a couple of Early Egg eggplants from my eggplant container garden.

I have decided not to grow the Pomme d’Amour tomatoes again after this year. They are heirlooms from Monticello, but 95% of them have split so badly that they are pretty much a waste. They are a little bigger than cherry tomatoes, and the one or two I’ve tasted were very good.

Then I went to the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market as usual to do my grocery shopping. Since I have so much coming out of the garden right now, I didn’t need vegetables. I bought lowfat milk from Homeland Creamery, hamburger and stew beef from Rocking F Farm, a couple of ears of corn from Back Woods Family Farm, soap and shampoo bars from Mimi’s Soaps. Once the necessities were out of the way, I noticed that Ben had organic celery for sale. It’s the first time I’ve seen it at the market. I bought a small bunch that is mostly leaves - I always use celery leaves in cooking.

Then lo and behold, as I was leaving I saw that someone was selling peaches-and-cream corn. I didn’t buy them out, only because I know that I don’t have the room in my freezer for it. But man, if I had a chest freezer, those babies would have ALL been mine today. I bought a dozen ears and I’ll freeze some of it today.

Then I sweated it out at the community row, where I picked another 20 pounds of mostly split tomatoes and a few baby okra. I got only a couple of Brandywines that weren’t ruined - what a disappointment. (Update: Now I’m trying not to cry. Sandy gave away these two tomatoes to a stranger cutting a neighbor’s grass when I left the house for a few minutes. This after I patiently explained to him that I had no large tomatoes for him to give away to his friends. If you knew how much I was looking forward to these Brandywines that I grew from seed, you’d understand that I’m considering divorce.) But you can’t control the weather. I need to get out there again this weekend and do some serious clean-up and weeding in the paths. As I was leaving one of my neighbors showed up with a gas-powered weed-eater for that side, thank heaven! There are lots of volunteer zinnias and I have had pretty bouquets on my front porch all week.

I see what Jasmine is saying about the beans - the plants are rotting on the bottom and the bean pods that have dried seem moldy. I picked a few and brought them home to dry out inside. Maybe the ones that have climbed up the cages will be okay.

I asked one of the master gardeners about canning split tomatoes. I said that I’d like to donate my surplus but I didn’t think anyone wanted a bag of split tomatoes. She didn’t answer my question directly but said that she could get someone to pick them for me. I sensed some disapproval in her voice - as if the problem was my neglect, not the weather, so I didn’t carry on the conversation because I was not in the mood for that tone. Of course, I should have because now I’m replying in my head - I’m picking them, but they are splitting just as they become ripe - so getting somebody to pick them is NOT the answer to the splitting, unless you want green tomatoes! Argh. This week I’ve been picking the ones that are halfway ripe if they haven’t split, and leaving them to ripen on my counter.

So the rest of my day will be spent inside, cooking and canning and freezing. I’m going to keep the radio on, and listen to This American Life and some good jazz and bluegrass. I’m going to enjoy this day. It will be productive and satisfying and at the end of a lot of hard work I will be very proud.

The Dallas Morning News investigated USDA inspection and certification of organic standards and published this very informative article: Is organic food the real deal? Be sure to check out the video clip links on the right. The News and Record reprinted a large part of the article in today’s paper, but it’s worth it to read the entire thing.

Proving once again that until we totally re-organize the USDA and switch funding away from agribusiness to pay for inspections, enforcement, and sustainable agriculture, our only recourse is to protest, petition, research, and educate, and to buy your food from sources you trust. You cannot depend on the “USDA Organic” label any more. Even the USDA’s own auditors admit their problems with monitoring and enforcement of rules for genetically-engineered crops. It’s no surprise that they can’t handle the flood of organic foods coming onto the market.

“The Dallas Morning News reviewed hundreds of audits of certifiers that show many violations. Yet the USDA has never yanked or suspended a certifier’s accreditation, despite auditors’ recommendations to do so.

“Auditors, from a separate USDA branch, wrote that certifiers approved food producers despite evidence that banned chemicals were used. Some gave approval without conducting inspections.

“USDA officials would not discuss the individual audits. It’s unclear whether officials addressed problems auditors pointed out. But several audits note the same problems with the same certifiers year after year.”

(Okay, I’ll say it - yes, the 2008 election of a Democrat might help a little. But the Democrats aren’t much better than the Republicans when it comes to understanding food issues - case in point: Sen. Patrick Leahy and NAIS.)

I sound like a broken record, but it bears repeating:

My meal for One Local Summer this week is the Squash Fritters with Tomato Topping that was served at the Slow Food Piedmont Triad booth at the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market in June. You can find the recipe at the new Recipes page on the Slow Food Piedmont Triad web site.

The fritters themselves were a little bit bland to me, but that topping, whew! It would make cardboard taste good. I used yellow summer squash, so they might be better with zucchini, and maybe I could have made them smaller and crispier. Some chopped onion would have been a good addition.

I was determined to follow this recipe exactly, other than cutting it in half, since Sandy wouldn’t touch a squash fritter with a ten-foot-pole. But I didn’t have feta cheese. I did have marinated goat cheese, and it was delicious, although it made it goopier than I expected.

Here’s my list of sources:
Yellow summer squash, Brandywine tomato, thyme, and tarragon: My back yard.
Marinated Chevre: Goat Lady Dairy
Garlic: Handance Farm
Eggs: Back Woods Family Farm
Flour: Old Mill of Guilford
Vinegar, oil, salt and pepper: Deep Roots Market
Blackberries: Cornerstone Garlic Farm

Guess what tonight’s low is expected to be?

I guess I should be thankful when the rest of the Northern hemisphere seems to be in meltdown. But a little variety would be nice. The back forty is totally soggy and weeds and grass are coming up in the pathways where the mulch washed away. The mosquitoes are quite happy though.

Click here to see what this area looked like in mid-April.

I turned off the central air for a couple of days, then I turned it back on. It’s not so much the temperature - it’s the heavy weight of the humidity. I walk to work, and even in the cool of the morning I have to towel myself off by the time I get there.

I’m taking a bit of a break today - started off as a sick day and now I’m okay. Tonight is my last class of the summer and I have to say that I’m quite happy about it. It was good to focus on a subject other than food (Louis Armstrong and the 20s), although I have to admit that at first I was searching for paper topics about farms or food out of sheer habit, or obsessiveness, whatever you want to call it. Couldn’t quite pull it off with this class, though!

So, thank God, I will have some more time to deal with the summer harvest. I have about thirty pounds of tomatoes on my kitchen counter, I estimate. About half of them have split. Last night I canned three pints of chopped tomatoes and two pints of sweet cucumber pickles. I won’t try this again at night after work, because I was too tired to concentrate well, and I think that’s why a couple of the jars didn’t seal. I think I forgot to wipe the rims on those. I was eager to get some of the riper tomatoes out of the way after bringing home SO MANY from the community row. And this is after I donated a bag to the “Plant a Row for the Hungry” program.

The cucumbers needed to be eaten or pickled. I didn’t have enough cucumbers to make a whole batch of pickles worthwhile, so I decided to put in a couple of jars in the boiling water bath with the tomatoes sort of at the last minute. This took some coordination that I don’t have at 10:00 p.m. The tomatoes needed to be in there 40 minutes, and the pickles 10 minutes. These are my first cucumber pickles so I hope they are good. I guess we’ll go ahead and eat the jar that didn’t seal. I was very satisfied with the “Straight-8″ variety, but I only got one lemon cucumber before the vine started to die. There were lots of little ones but they didn’t ripen.

Now my butterbeans and field peas are almost ready to pick, just in time as the okra is beginning to ripen at the community row. I’m so happy to have okra this year! Last year it was victim to the Critter, and would have been this year too if I hadn’t finally put plastic soft drink bottles with the bottoms cut out over where I planted the second batch of seeds.

The green beans are almost gone, and they have been tasty. I grew up growing bush beans, and I find that pole beans are SO much easier to pick. I might end up going vertical even more next year!

The community garden row is so full of bugs. In the Back Forty, I’ve never had many problems with bugs other than mosquitoes and cucumber beetles. But the community garden has bugs that I’ve never seen or know what to do about. I have to look them up. I think that it’s true that organic farmers and gardeners suffer by being near gardens that use pesticides. The good bugs get wiped out and the bad bugs move over to the organic area.

Anyway, I loaded up the food dehydrator again with yellow pear tomatoes and peaches. I have a lot of canning ahead of me, and I guess I’ll make a big batch of tomato sauce and salsa with these split tomatoes for us to eat in the next week and to freeze for the near future. Everything I read warns me to use only perfect tomatoes for canning, and I take botulism pretty seriously.

Our Internet connection is buggy today and I’ve been trying to post this all day - probably due to the storm last night.

Today I am determined to finish my last paper for this class so that I can put it behind me. So, after my coffee and a leisurely perusal of the local newspaper, that’s the major plan for today. It might appear that I enjoy writing - this blog would be evidence - but I hate it when my writing will be judged in any way. I’ve been told that my writing is simple and folksy but is well-organized and has a good sense of what drives a story, but those qualities generally don’t translate well into an academic research paper. I don’t care much for formal writing. If I love the subject, I make As. If I don’t, it’s a real struggle and I’m lucky to get a B. Fortunately I don’t have to struggle much with grammar and spelling, since I used to be Miss Spelling Bee.

Yesterday I planned to do some writing, but I read some more material instead, hoping for that inspirational push to rev up the old engine. The paper is on the black community’s response to jazz in the 1920s, which is fairly broad and has given me the opportunity to read some interesting articles from the Harlem Renaissance writers and leaders, who were quite diverse in their opinions of jazz and blues. That’s the part I need to work on next, and it will probably go smoothly once I force myself to begin again.

So, I’m going to do a brain dump here and see if that helps.

Friday night Sandy and I went to Cafe Europa for a couple of drinks and then I made a lasagna with tomatoes from my garden. We rented a DVD of the Showtime series “Dead Like Me” and have been watching that off and on for the last several days. I seldom watch commercial TV any more - for one thing I don’t have time and for another I don’t want to see the political ads. We have one of the nastiest craziest would-be politicians on earth running in my district for Congress, unfortunately. I like this new system of hearing about a good TV show and renting it. Anyway, I recommend this one - it is twisted and funny and thoughtful and a bit gruesome.

Yesterday was a good day. It didn’t start out great, since I spent the first hour cleaning and disinfecting two litterboxes and the floor in the laundry room. Miss Jazz is quite sensitive to any messes and the two litterbox system is officially declared a failure, as far as I am concerned. It has to work like this: one box needs to be standing in the wings, clean as a whistle, waiting to be whisked in when the other one needs to be scrubbed out. Putting down two at a time makes the job doubly-messy and freaks out Miss Jazz when both need to go out the door for cleaning. Leaving one dirty one behind for her emergencies while the other is cleaned simply will not do, which means I come back inside to still another mess on the floor.

Thankfully, the other three cats are not like this.

Then I headed to the curb market, as usual, but I didn’t have a lot of food needs this weekend. I went on such a food-buying spree the weekend before that I was there this week mainly because I miss it when I don’t go. I did buy a loaf of garlic rosemary bread from Simple Kneads, some lettuce from Handance Farm, more peaches from Via’s Orchard, and a couple of ears of yellow corn from an unknown vendor. When I picked up an ear to look at it, he said with an apologetic tone, “It’s yellow.” “Great!” I said.

I’ve been on a quest for yellow or bicolor corn - I’m not that crazy about Silver Queen and that’s generally all you can find at the market. Wes (Back Woods Family Farm) is growing a second crop and if the deer don’t devour this one he’s going to bring me a dozen ears for freezing. It’s not that I don’t like sweet white corn, it’s just that sometimes I like a more corn-y taste. And yellow corn freezes better.

Then I went out to the community row and picked lots and lots of tomatoes. The blossom end rot is over, so I didn’t lose many to that. I do have a problem with splitting, since we are getting lots of big rain storms right now. The Brandywines are huge and would be beauts if it weren’t for that. The two I picked will probably be okay if we eat them today in sandwiches. The tomato above is an heirloom “Amish Paste” tomato - like a Roma but bigger. It’s on the Slow Food Ark of Taste list.

I peeled and chopped the ripest tomatoes and canned three pints. When I get ready for a break, or hopefully finish my paper, I’ll do about three more today and load the dehydrator with peach slices and more halved yellow pear tomatoes. This has been an excellent way to deal with my huge harvest of yellow pear tomatoes - easy and tasty. Many split, and I cut the split area away and put them through a food mill for juice. This proved harder than I expected so from now on I’ll cook them first.

Then I loaded up a stock pot with my veggie and herb trimmings from the freezer and a bag of “soup bones” from Back Woods Family Farm to make chicken stock. I let this simmer for a few hours, strained it, and put it in the refrigerator to chill. Today I’ll skim off the fat and measure it into 2- and 3-cup portions to freeze.

I took my friend Cat to Saffron last night for her birthday, and it serves excellent Indian food. Cat had a vegan vindaloo dish and I had Scallops Mango. I love sweet and spicy food. Then I went to Harris Teeter, where I was to buy cat food and a few items at the request of Hubby dear (good news - they sell humanely-raised bacon at HT now! I’ll have to check into the certification claim, though.) and got caught in the most intense thunderstorm I’ve seen in a long time. It was a real decision to leave the store because I wanted to get home quite badly, but the rain was heavy and lightning was zotting down all around. Awesome strikes and scary. Would have loved it if I had been at home. I came home and the rain was coming through the exhaust fan in the bathroom. Oh boy.

So now it’s time for me to get on with my Sunday. I bought some seeds for my fall planting, but it is too soggy to plant. The moon isn’t right for most of them anyway - I bought three varieties of beans - Soldier, Jacob’s Cattle, and Black Valentine. Beans seem to do well in the Back Forty. The moon is perfect to plant the beet and turnip seeds I bought, but I’ll wait until next month on those.

Postscript: It’s afternoon now - and my paper is nearly done! Hooray!

I got up this morning in a refreshingly cool house. Yes, that’s right, we turned on the central air conditioning Friday night for the FIRST time this year! We’ve been making do with a window unit in the back bedroom to reduce our energy usage. But the fans in the rest of the house were beginning to just push the hot air around, and I have been spending more and more time in the bedroom. So when Sandy suggested that we really should turn on the central A.C. now and then to keep it in running order, it sounded like a good excuse to me.

Now the weather report says that tomorrow the high will be 94 and humid. Tuesday? High of 99 and humid. I’d say we made a good decision. It may be a while before we turn it off.

The A.C. has made cooking much more bearable. In honor of the new crispness in the air in the kitchen, I made two peach blueberry crisps - one for the Slow Food potluck at Old Salem, and another one for us to eat this week. I put the peach slices I had left in the food dehydrator, and cast my eyes about the kitchen for other things to put in there. Oh yeah, did I mention that I have about a million yellow pear tomatoes? I thought it might be a good idea to experiment with drying them. I’ll let you know about that.

Here’s the recipe for the Peach Blueberry Crisp. More about the Old Salem picnic later this week - I forgot my digital camera and had to buy a disposable one. There will be lots more recipes from the potluck on the Slow Food Piedmont Triad site too, hopefully by next weekend.

Peach Blueberry Crisp

Fruit Mixture
4 cups sliced peaches
2 cups blueberries
1/2 cup sugar
2 tbsp cornstarch
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Topping
1/2 cup oats
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/4 tsp cinnamon
2 tbsp honey
2 tbsp butter
¼ cup wheat germ
½ cup chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 375. Combine the fruit mixture in a bowl. Combine the topping ingredients in another bowl and cut together until it resembles coarse crumbs. Butter a casserole dish and pour in the fruit mixture. Cover fruit with the topping. Bake for 45 minutes.

Sources:
Peaches: Via’s Orchard and Kalawi Farm
Blueberries: Via’s Orchard
Oats and flour: Old Mill of Guilford
Honey: Quaker Acres Apiaries
Butter: Homeland Creamery
Pecans: Mama’s trees
Other Ingredients: Deep Roots Market and Earth Fare

Tonight we’re eating baked chicken breasts from Back Woods Family Farm, covered with Pee Dee River Swamp Sauce from Rockingham, North Carolina. Sides: Green beans from the garden, little new Yukon Gold potatoes from Weatherhand Farm. Dessert: Leftover Peach Blueberry Crisp - see the ingredient sources on that post.

This meal is part of the One Local Summer project - see Pocket Farm for details!

Oh, this is rich. When the plumber came today, he turned off the water at the street. No need to crawl under the house.

Remember, I did say that we have NO BUSINESS being owners of an old house. Actually, owners of any house at all.

The good news is that he got us back to our original drippy condition, which was annoying but livable.

The bad news is that our clawfoot tub fixtures are so old that the metal is worn and the business in town that specializes in old plumbing doesn’t even have the parts for a simple fix. So we have to replace the handles and spout, since they’re all one piece. I’ll get an estimate tomorrow but the cost looks like it may be hundreds of dollars.

Just to fix a friggin’ leak. Sheesh.

Tell your children to become plumbers. They’ll always have a job anywhere they go if they don’t mind getting dirty, and people will be grateful to see them at the door.