This gorgeous garlic was grown by a friend of mine in northern Vermont. When broken open, this one head was seen to contain only four enormous cloves of some of the most amazing garlic I’ve had in a very long time. Peter G, what variety is this?  (Taken with instagram)

Autumn in Vermont is apple cider season, and that was this weekend’s main project. On Saturday we picked a nearly ridiculous quantity of apples. This effort was led by boys who are more accustomed to harvesting olives in Italy than apples in Vermont. Which explains the method used: strategically placing tarps on the ground beneath a tree, shaking the tree, collecting all the apples, and sorting fruit from leaves in the process. Our two hours of apple harvesting yielded four large contractor bags’ worth of apples.

On Sunday five people (Elizabeth, Jen, Russell, Matt, and Jeanna) and many apples (plus empty glass jugs, large tub for washing, funnel, etc) filled two cars and headed over to Ashley and Russ’ house in South Royalton. They’d borrowed a homemade cider press and motorized apple grinder from an uncle, so we set up and went to town. We backed up first one car and then the other to unload and wash apples. Once clean, they were fed through the grinder— belt-driven, motor housed within a plastic milk jug, screws for teeth— and into 5-gallon buckets. Those buckets of apple pieces were then poured into the press (after putting a layer of clean straw in the very bottom of the press to act as a filter). The lid was fitted atop the apples, shims were added on top of that like a puzzle, and then it was time for the actual pressing! Powered mostly by Elizabeth and Russell, the press had to be cranked downward by hand, using the handle from a car jack. The freshly-pressed apple cider came down the little shoot and was funneled into a 5-gallon glass jug. After each pressing, the apple mash was emptied out of the press and set aside to be fed to pigs and sheep, and the whole process was started again. At the end of the day we made about eight gallons of cider. This will be consumed as fresh cider, as well as turned into sorbet (me) and hard cider (Russell). 

Many cider presses use a corkscrew-style mechanism for the actual press. These are simple, beautiful, effective, and expensive. This one uses a jack. It was also simple and effective, but brought the cost of materials down significantly. That last bit was of extreme interest to Russell, who now wants to build a (much larger) press of his own. He was already talking about improvements he’d make, so I’m pretty sure it will happen. 

What a great Sunday. 

Cauliflower options at the co-op today. These colors are just three more reasons I love the array of local produce available around here. 

(Taken with instagram)

Remember those beautiful peppers I picked at the farm and said I wanted to pickle? Well, I went back, picked some more, and did just that. Since the peppers themselves have such a strong flavor (sweet and hot!) I kept things simple and added only a giant garlic clove and a few heads of dill seed to each jar. Because I love it so much, I used my usual brine recipe. And bam! pickled cheyenne cayenne peppers. One quart for me, one for the farm. 

When I first saw them growing in the hoop house and said I wanted to pickle them, it prompted the discussion of whether or not peppers should be pickled. The only logical progression from there, after asserting that nearly everything should be pickled, was straight to Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. 

Eggplant is a vegetable I’ve begun to eat only in the past few years. The majority of what people make with eggplant is unappealing to me, so it really wan’t until I found caponata that I learned to like it. And now caponata is one of my staples, something I always have in my fridge. It’s great on bread bruschetta-style, probably the most common way of eating it. But it really shines for me when I come home from a long, cold day on the mountain and want a nice dinner for myself (I live alone) without spending hours on it. I cook a little pot of quinoa, stir in a generous spoonful of caponata, wilt some kale on it, and add pickled vegetables, seeds, dried fruit, hardboiled egg, sometimes feta, and whatever else is in my fridge. Bam: nearly-instant dinner that is delicious and still made from recognizable ingredients. 

This is what I put in my caponata: eggplant, onion, garlic, tomato, sweet peppers, celery, olives, capers, raisins, olive oil, salt, black pepper, sugar, vinegar. It is traditionally made with pine nuts and without peppers, according to the Silver Spoon. I say go with what you like. 

The eggplant and peppers in this batch came from the farm, the tomatoes from my mother’s garden. 

Pickling green tomatoes: that’s how I spent the evening of what would have been my father’s fifty-ninth birthday. While I was at the farm yesterday, I picked up 9+ pounds of green Roma tomatoes. Then, when I stopped at her house to pick beets, carrots, basil, apples, etc, my mother gave me a bunch of green cherry tomatoes. So back to pickling I went. I made up a big batch of brine, so there would be some leftover to use in other projects. I cold-packed the tomatoes, adding one clove of garlic, one tiny-but-super-hot pepper, and some sprigs of dill seed to each jar. For spices I added another 1/2 t. dill seed, 1/2 t. mustard seed, and 1/4  t. celery seed to each jar. In all I made 10 pints of these tomatoes, three with the cherries, seven with Romas, but had only eight of the little peppers so the last two are not spicy. 

Since pickled green tomatoes are not my favorite delicacy, these will mostly be given as gifts. Which is fine— I enjoy the process of canning and get immense satisfaction from giving jars of things to other people. 

After being in Boston for over a week, I am finally back in Vermont. Today I spent about an hour helping out at the farm, ripping down old tomato plants in the greenhouse and harvesting vegetables for market. These beautiful red peppers are Cheyenne Cayennes, which are allegedly both sweet and hot. I’m thinking they’ll look amazing in jars, pickled. Obviously. 

Peppers and tomatoes, #nofilter (Taken with instagram)

During the post-Irene power outage, while I was hanging out at my mother’s house, I made these ridiculously beautiful hurricane pickles. They are a spicy beet trio, with beets, hot pepper, dill seeds from our garden, and garlic from nearby. Like most of my pickles, they are based on this recipe from Putting Food By, with the addition of mustard seeds, whole black peppercorns, and a slice of fresh hot pepper. Plus the obvious substitution of beets for green beans. 

You may notice that despite being in a different kitchen, the knives I’m using are nearly identical. This is because my father gave me that big Sabatier on the first night of our last Hanukkah. He liked it so much himself that my mother went and bought one for him. And last year for his birthday I gave my father the same little Victorinox paring knife that I’d bought myself, choosing a red handle for the kitchen that can sometimes swallow knives.

So. Many. Tomatoes. But I’m finally done! All one hundred pounds of tomatoes have been dealt with! After leaving about ten pounds with my mother, I diced and canned the rest. 

The final count: 35 pints, 23 quarts. 

And now that I’m done, I pretty much never want to see a tomato ever again. Just give me a day, I’ll be over it by then. 

Since my driveway is repaired enough that I can (as of yesterday afternoon) get my car to the road, I took a trip to Shoreham today, to Golden Russet Farm. This is the same amazing farm I got my cucumbers and green beans from last month. Today’s prize haul: tomatoes. I bought 100 lbs of organic tomatoes for $50. They will last me for an entire year, and each time I open a jar it will smell like September. This is the best thing ever come January.

After dropping off the 100 lbs of tomatoes I picked up for a friend, the onions and cantaloupe for my mother, and rescuing the basil, I came home and began the canning process.

Canning tomatoes is messy. Maybe it’s just me, but I doubt it.  I wind up getting tomato juice and seeds on most things within a 3’ radius of my workspace, and I just keep peeling, chopping, and packing until my fingers are nearly pruned from the tomato juice. I like to do all of my tomatoes diced, and cold-packed. It allows me to be extremely flexible when I’m cooking, using them for anything I happen to fancy. Tonight I finished maybe 2/3 of the first box, and it filled 8 quarts + 8 pints. If you were wondering what I’ll be doing this weekend, now you have your answer. And when I finish with the tomatoes, it’s time to start dealing with the basil. 

There are rumors of a possible frost tonight. So I picked as much basil as I could possibly carry at once and threw sheets over the rest of it. My mother’s bad dogs were not terribly impressed. 

Today I went to a meeting at the farm I’m signing up to do a winter CSA with. Instead of a cash buy-in, they’re asking for a commitment of two hours per week. In exchange, I’ll get fresh vegetables to eat all winter long. Um, yes please. When the meeting was over, I picked these plus three pounds of arugula, two of them for a bakery in my town. These eggplants and peppers will go into caponata, and I’m excited for that. 

This next part is mostly unrelated to beautiful vegetables. A few years ago, I gave up on trying to keep track of what my favorite bands and musicians have been doing lately. It hasn’t been a big deal— I have an enormous collection of music. But oh man, I really owe my friend Camille a huge thank you. She posted a photo of Wild Flag earlier today, and I immediately recognized Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney. I found the album on Spotify and listened to it while cleaning mint leaves to use in gelato base tonight. It was an all-around win. And because sharing is caring, here is Romance. 

My edible vision for today was a barley salad with tomatoes, corn, tons of basil, and red onion. Everything that I cut up to go in there came from our garden. To that I added the juice of one lime, apple cider vinegar, sea salt, lots of course freshly ground black pepper, and a splash of maple syrup. And then I put almost the entire thing away in the fridge.

Why? Because despite it being delicious (and it is) I ate a ridiculous quantity of cheese and crackers at my mother’s house. We sat on her porch and read New Yorkers from 1990 (her) and 1989 (me). She recently moved her collection of 30 years’ worth of New Yorkers from one room to another, and the only logical thing to do now is begin re-reading them. And oh man, they are amazing. The New Yorker is still great, but it used to be hilarious— snide, sarcastic, and spot-on. It had sports listings, including horse races. The current cinema reviews included Batman, Honey I Shrunk the Kids!, When Harry Met Sally, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Drugstore Cowboy. The ads alone are worth looking at. The articles are longer, because attention spans were. There were so many more cartoons, the reason I first started looking at the magazine as a kid.

And I’m sorry, but TIT for TAT is great. 

There are many food preferences that I can deal with without any grumbling or judgements, but I just do not understand people who don’t like Pie. During a drive from the Thousand Islands region back to Brooklyn a couple years ago, I delivered a diatribe that lasted for probably twenty minutes about Pie. It may have featured my belief that baking a cake is all well and good, but if you want to tell someone you love them, you make Pie. Even if the situation isn’t as extreme as that, Pie is still more meaningful. Pie is sincere, heartfelt, comforting, unpretentious, and delicious. Pie is the best dessert treatment for most seasonal fruit. Pie makes people happy. My father called my mother the Pie Queen, possibly his highest compliment. This is a man who never gave false praise, especially when it came to food. 

Today marks six months since my father died. It is cold and rainy and my driveway is still not usable. I’ve spent hours listening to Ray Charles and then switched to Richard Thompson, all while wearing my apron and doing the one thing that is most likely to make me feel better: baking. 

These apples may not be the prettiest and most perfect, but they are fresh and real, grown without anything strange ever done to them: I picked them at my mother’s house. And when I was done picking apples, I walked behind the barn and harvested elderberries. 

The apples and elderberries together made an amazing color— the berries started to stain the apple slices almost immediately, and this intensified after I added the sugar and stirred up the filling. Because this filling is a mix of apples and berries, I used a combination of cornstarch and tapioca granules as thickeners. The only other ingredients in the filling are the juice of one lemon and some cinnamon. 

This is not an I Love You Pie, it is a Thank You Pie. Yesterday morning a friend went to Whole Foods in Boston with a list, then drove to Vermont and delivered groceries to me. He was coming up anyway, but his grocery shopping for me was a huge help. He even bought parrot food for my mother. Beginning to restock my fridge after having to throw out so much food because of losing power for days feels great. I once again have dairy, which means I can make some gelato base and begin to build up my inventory.

So here I am, in the woods, on a cold, rainy, and sad day. But I have pie. It’s a start. 

Today’s hurricanning project: corn relish. The corn came from my neighbors up the road, the same people I get my eggs from. The rest of the vegetables are from our garden. I looked through Putting Food By and Pickles & Relishes and came up with my plan. I cut the kernels off of 18 ears of corn, and chopped up everything else into fairly small pieces. Into a pot went: 3 c. apple cider vinegar, 1 1/2 c. sugar, 3 T. pickling salt. I tossed the (raw) vegetables with 1 T. celery seed and 3 T. whole mustard seed (a mix of yellow and brown, which is what I used for pretty much everything), then poured the hot liquid in and mixed it all up. I tasted the relish, deemed it delicious, filled and lidded my sterilized jars, and processed them for 15+ minutes. 

Some of these are intended for specific people already, a bunch will go into my cupboard. My cupboards, by the way, are getting mighty full… I’m pretty stoked about that.