Something Lurks or Storage Crops

Onions on the living room floor

Yesterday I brought the onions inside to finish drying as it's been so humid I was afraid they would rot.  This year I had the idea of drying them under the shed using a wire cage.  This worked fabulously, the tops of the onions strung through the wire to hang down the middle with the onion bulbs outside to cure.  

The drying rack

Some years I have braided them for storage, but the tops seemed too mildewy from the recent moisture so I opted to cut them off and will store the onions in net bags once they dry a little more in the living room.  It will be a miracle if we eat all of these before they start to sprout, but we will give it our best try.  This years haul was about 60 pounds.

The down side to growing a surplus of veggies, even those that store well such as onions, is not really having a very good place to keep them.  I long for a root cellar or something like it where crops would be safe from critters, cool and dark enough to prevent sprouting or rotting, just moist enough to keep things fresh.  Alas, we have no such place in our house.  There is a crawl space underneath, but the mustiness and presence of crickets and mice make me leery of putting anything down there for long.  So we just try to grow enough, but not too much, and eat things up while they are fresh.

But we often face this sort of situation:

 Last years sweet potatoes; the too big, too small, too ugly 

These never got cooked and are sprouting in the closet.  I will see if they are still worth eating in the next week or so, but they might end up on the compost pile, all their goodness gone into those two foot tall sprouts. And there are more in the ground now, growing for the fall harvest.

 In the bedroom

Always looking for a good spot to store things or at least get them cured, I've discovered under the bed is a good spot for the taters, dry but dark.  I still have one of those beautiful Long Island Cheese squashes from last fall sitting in the kitchen, it seems to be holding up well, but I'm sure its lost its goodness from sitting in the house for 8 months.  They are so big each one made lots of cooked squash and confession- there is still cooked pureed squash in the freezer too. As I've mentioned in a previous post, won't grow that one again, we are back to butternuts, sweeter and smaller.

I hate to waste things and have started making a regular donation to our local women's shelter from our surplus, but I get greedy, so much effort in the growing that I want to eat everything up or preserve it some how.  So I inevitably end up with things like those crazy sweet potatoes, too far gone to give away.  It's a constant crap shoot trying to figure how much of everything to plant, some years the harvest is poor so you plant more, then you get a whopper harvest and can't eat it all.  Ah well, such is life.  

The freezer is groaning, its 25 years old and needs to be replaced with a larger model, I hope we organize that before the old one dies...

Turn on that oven and bake!

With the drop in temperature the interest in cooking has been renewed with verve. Building on the fact that I had a dairy extravaganza last week, precipitated by an over accumulation of cream in the freezer.   I made two pounds of butter which also yielded about 2 quarts of buttermilk and some creme fresh.  I also made yogurt and yogurt cheese.  Next came two buttermilk apple crumb cakes and last night a bodacious buttermilk spoon bread.  Spoon bread is an interesting cross between cornbread and polenta or mush.  Last night I added fresh corn, pasilla chiles, and chopped green onions, the resulting dish was hearty, creamy, sweet, (though I added no sugar) and quite satisfying. Recipe below.

I was surprised in the garden yesterday to see the sweet potatoes blooming.  A pretty flower, like a morning glory, which is in the same plant family.  There has been a battle of sorts going on for the past couple of months between the sweet potatoes which always grow rampant and run over everything around them and the Long Island Cheese squash.

Sweet potatoes are one of the happiest crops in our climate.  There is a reason North Carolina is the largest producer of sweet potatoes in the country raising close to 40% of all the sweet potatoes grown in the US, they grow VERY happily here.  Lately, eating the greens seems to be the rage, everyone is talking about it, and the way they grow, its worth trying.  So last night we did.  Just the tender tips and youngest leaves, washed and sauteed like spinach in olive oil with a little garlic, S&P, they were quite tasty.  I've heard they are also super nutritious.  Researching a bit I see its recommended that they are blanched in boiling water for a couple of minutes before stir-frying them, but we did not do that and they were still good.

The Long Island Cheese squashes huge pizza sized leaves rambled down through the sweet potato patch and even up into the pepper cages. They have traveled easily 40 feet down the row and back again.

One squash hangs down between a couple of pepper plants, another is over in the asparagus patch.  I had tried this squash once before but unsuccessfully.  They are a type of butternut but not as dense or sweet, the flesh is slightly more stringy, a little like a spaghetti squash, light and good flavored. This year we put the seeds in the ground and just got out of the way!  The result; four good sized squashes from two plants. I think pound for pound the sweet potatoes will win out but everyone seems to have come to an amicable sharing of space.

This one here is the biggest and best. 12.5 Pounds 

I can just see Cinderella riding off to the ball in this dude

So for the spoon bread, here's the recipe which is a doubling of the original from the Joy of Cooking, plus my embellishments, always embellishing...

Buttermilk Spoon Bread 6-8 servings

Pour 3 cups boiling water over 2 cups yellow cornmeal, mix well and let cool
Meanwhile:
beat together 2 eggs, 2 T melted butter, 2 cups buttermilk, 2 t baking soda and 1.5 t salt
Scrape the kernels from two ears of corn (or open a can or use frozen, about 1 cup of kernels)
Roast, skin, seed and chop 2 pasilla, poblano or other mild green chiles
Chop a cup of green onions
Mix it all together and pour into a buttered dish to bake at 350 for about an hour or until set.
I used a deeper corning ware dish , if you used a flatter baking dish, like a 9x12 it will probably bake faster and be drier.  I think sprinkling some grated cheese over top, cheddar or jack or a combo would be a good addition too.

Coffee Cake, Plums, Sweeties and Turnips!!

It's Sunday and I didn't have to work at either of my jobs as I did the past three Sundays, so it was a treat to sleep in a bit, make a couple of apple crumb coffee cakes, and go for a jog while they baked so I could come back and eat a quarter of one guilt free.

We then planted the two plums pictured above.  I 've always wanted plum trees, they are one of the few stone fruits that seem to do well in our climate.  We do have one of those saturn peaches that are shaped kind of like a donut, and 5 apple trees, the blueberries, strawberries, brambles and fig, but I still wanted plums.  Now I've got them.  Both are Japanese, one called Methley, which is purple inside and out and  Ozark Premier, that will be yellow fleshed.  It'll be a few years before they bear many fruit but the roots looked good and so did the trees.

After getting the trees watered and mulched we headed out to the veg patch to dig the sweet potatoes.  They were smaller than we had hoped and led us to believe we did not plant them early enough, next year, we'll start them a bit sooner and plant them in a slightly sunnier spot I think.  You can see from the photo, the smaller tray holds a lot of fingerlings, hopefully they can be roasted and maybe eaten with skins on?  Not sure, we'll find out.  We won't be wanting for sweet potatoes all the same, and there are all those winter squash...

Which brings me to the final activity of the day, making an awesome dinner with all kinds of garden goodies.

Roasted butternut squash with tiny beets, rosemary, garlic and olive oil*.  Turnip and mizuna greens simmered together with onion*, red pepper flake and a touch of bacon grease*. And the main course; turnip, radish and potato gratin (yes- I had some huge radishes so cooked them up with the turnips and they were lovely). The roots were combined with our neighbors sweet milk and cream, red pepper, dill, onion*,  diced ham*, and topped with swiss*.  Wow was that a tasty repast and almost all from right here.  Only items with an * were not home grown.  Life is good.