Fall Kitchen and Garden Projects & Recipes

Most of the flat surfaces in our little house are covered with various fall garden and kitchen projects -- soaking spinach seeds, drying harvested beans and sunflower seeds, processing vegetables for salsa, pickles, and other preserving projects, and too many other large and small projects to list. I love the end of the summer growing season--putting the garden to bed and putting food away for the cold months, planting fall greens, saving seeds, pickling things.

I've posted a few pictures of some of these projects, followed by two October-appropriate recipes.

Above: The kitchen table covered with projects in process--peppers for sweet pepper hash (recipe below); green tomatoes for brine-pickling (recipe below); zinnia, marigold, and sunflower seeds for planting next year; winter squash curing; tomatoes and peppers for salsa; love-lies-bleeding amaranth seed heads to be threshed for eating and replanting


Left: Christopher shelling dry black beans with moral support from Frankie















Left: Prepping a bed for fall planting, after pulling summer bean and squash plants














Left: Fall lettuce starts in the garden










Below: "Red Zinger" hibiscus and climbing nasturtium seed pods drying...most of the hibiscus will be for tea and the rest will be for planting next year














Fall Recipes:

Brine-Pickled Green Tomatoes
This is a great way to use tomatoes that you have to pick green as cold weather ends the tomato season. My recipe is loosely based on one from Marilyn Kluger's classic book "Preserving Summer's Bounty."

Ingredients:
Unripe tomatoes to fill a jar or ceramic crock
Pickling spices to taste
Fresh or dried dill to taste
10-20 cloves garlic, peeled
Apple cider vinegar
High-quality salt (I use coarse celtic sea salt)
Water

• Wash and clean tomatoes -- make sure not to use any tomatoes with cracks, mold, or rotted spots
• Layer the bottom of a ceramic crock or large glass jar (such as a cookie jar) with spices and dill. I use various combinations of dill, whole black pepper corns, celery seed, caraway seed, and whole mustard seed.
• Fill the crock or jar with tomatoes and garlic
• Mix your brine solution using the following proportions: for every gallon of water, use 1 cup of vinegar and 2/3 cup salt
• Pour the brine over the tomatoes and garlic to cover, with at least an inch of brine above the top layer.
• Place a glass or china plate on top of the tomatoes to keep them submerged, and weigh down by sitting a jar filled with water on top of the plate.
• Cover with a clean cloth and wait!
• Don't stir, but do remove any scum or mold that may form.
• After 3 weeks or so of fermentation, pack into jars and either heat process (which will kill the beneficial live cultures) or just refrigerate (keeping in mind that the pickles will not keep as long without heat processing). I never heat process brined pickles because I want to keep the food alive after fermentation.
  

Sweet Pepper Hash
I learned this recipe from my friend Melissa years ago when we lived together. It is so ridiculously delicious that I've made it every year since when local peppers are ripe. You can find a version of this in "Preserving Summer's Bounty" too, but mine omits green peppers, which are not ripe and so not nearly as sweet as red, yellow, and orange ones, and uses honey instead of sugar. I think honey tastes much better in this recipe, and makes for a nice syrupy texture--plus, honey is better for you and is available locally (unlike cane sugar). You can also add a hot pepper or two to make a spicier hash.

At left: the hash before cooking and canning


This recipe makes about 3 pints. We usually at least double it. Opening up a jar in mid-winter is like a taste of summer -- a blast of bright, sunshiny, summer sweetness. Use it as a condiment, or mix in with soups or baked beans -- it's so addictive that we've been known to eat it straight by the spoonful.

Ingredients:

12 small onions
24 ripe sweet peppers of various varieties
2 cups honey
2 cups apple cider vinegar
2 Tbs Salt

• Peel the onions and remove the seeds from the peppers.
  
• Chop the vegetables by hand or use a food processor to chop into relatively small pieces.
• Put your chopped onions and peppers in a big bowl and sprinkle with the salt.
• Pour boiling water over the vegetables and let stand for 15 minutes.
• Combine the honey and vinegar in a large pot and bring to a boil.
• Drain the peppers and onions and add to the boiling syrup.
  
• Reduce heat and cook slowly for 15 minutes.
• Meanwhile, sterilize jars and lids in a boiling water bath
  
• Pack into sterilized jars, leaving 1/4 inch head space.
• Adjust lids and process for 5-10 minutes in a boiling water bath.
  

Hymn to Hibiscus

Earlier this summer, Dana-Dee posted a call for information about hibiscus on her highly entertaining and informative blog. What with the abundance of hibiscus blooms in my garden right now, it seemed like a good time to answer the call and sing the praises of this family of plants. So here you go, Dana, and anyone else who's interested.

First let me say that hibiscus is SO worth growing. It's beautiful, and at least in my garden has always been pest-free. As you will read below, there are edible and medicinal varieties of hibiscus, but I must admit that the main reason I grow it is for pure prettiness.

Here are some photos of various hibiscus plants in our garden, blooming right now.

The first is a hearty native hibiscus (above and at left). I bought this plant at my favorite local nursery, Reems Creek in Weaverville. Incidentally, they are also the only local garden center where you can buy all of the ingredients for the soil mix that I blogged about last month for starting seeds.

In any case, this hibiscus is my favorite in the garden. It's just a low-profile plant with gorgeous, subtle, funky buds (at left) that suddenly erupt into bloom right about now. Plus, it's a native perennial. I'm curious if anyone knows if this variety is edible/suitable for tea.

The next garden shot is of the "red zinger" hibiscus, Hibiscus sabdariffa, also known as red sorrel (below).

I found a great article on the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's website about this fabulous variety. The article is written not by a Brooklynite but by someone who lives the island of St. Croix, where apparently this hibiscus is widely cultivated and consumed.

According to the author of the Brooklyn Botanic article, red sorrel hibiscus was once a popular edible garden plant in the US too. It's easy to see why:

"Along with the fruit, calyces, and flowers, the leaves of red sorrel are also edible. They have a rhubarblike taste and are served in salads and curries. The seeds likewise may be eaten; they are best roasted or ground to make flour for baking. In the Sudan, the seeds are fermented into a meat substitute called "furundu." Red sorrel has a lot of nutritional value. The calyces, for example, are high in calcium, niacin, riboflavin, and iron."

If you are interested in this variety of edible hibiscus, I highly recommend the article snipped-from above, which includes a recipe, seed source information, and lots of interesting history and cultural notes.

I bought one plant of this variety on impulse at the farmers market one day in the spring, from a grower who only had 3 tiny starts, and 2 were already reserved by other customers. I paid $2 which is a bargain considering all I have gained from this plant--education, edibility, and beautification!

I'm saving some of the seed pods of Hibiscus sabdariffa for hibiscus tea, which will be a welcome burst of summer color and flavor some wintery day, I'm sure.

To return to the ornamental aspect of hibiscus for a moment, I must include a photo of the gigantic red variety in our garden (left), described by one garden visitor as "that giant red thing that looks like a pot plant." It sports highly ornamental red buds, and just keeps expanding its beet-red self all over the place.

I've enjoyed its presence, but I doubt it will return in the spring -- I think it's a tropical variety, alas.

The last hibiscus photo I'm including is of a flower on one of the varieties of okra we're growing this year. Okra is so ornamental, it really could be grown just for the flowers! But it's also such a heavy producer that it's a great plant for growing a lot of food in a small space. I've brine-pickled a bunch of okra already this summer, given lots away, and plan to make some classic Southern-style okra-n-tomatoes for my Dad this weekend.

To close with a final hibiscus tidbit: my friend Sandi Ford, a super-knowledgeable plantswoman and herbalist extraordinaire, came over for dinner tonight and answered some of my most pressing botanical questions, such as "is chinese cabbage a brassica" and "are marshmallows in the hibiscus family." While we were on the subject of hibiscus, she told me that hibiscus flowers are androgynous or hermaphroditic -- each individual flower contains all of the female and male reproductive parts needed for the plant to propagate itself. This kind of flower is also referred to as "perfect" or "bisexual." More here.

So to recap: delicious, hermaphroditic, beautiful.

There's my Hymn to Hibiscus.