Winter Sewn Garden, Dried Tomatoes, Soap Paste. Now with Tutus!

So I know there are all these people out there who have six children and are pregnant with twins and still find time to make cheese and card wool.  I know it because they also seem to find time to blog about it and post adorable pictures of their kids in hand-smocked blouses.  Me, with two kids?  All I can seem to do is keep the kids from maiming each other (mostly) and the house from burning down.

In between administering first aid and putting out fires, I've managed to fit a few projects that I feel inordinately proud about:

-- Winter sowing lettuces, herbs and garlic has got to be the most rewarding gardening for the least effort in Central Texas.  Because we get erratic freezes and our garden well does not have any of the infrastructure to for a freeze, I have to drain the well (it's a tiny little tank, but still) and the hoses after just about each use.  So instead I've just not watered the garden.  Not even once.  Which in these parts is usually just a guarantee that lots of insects will feast on toasty, dry, unsprouted seeds.  But we've had enough rain that everything germinated and took off.  Plus, two of my friends brought three different varieties of garlic out and we drank wine while we planted it. (Or maybe that last part was just me.)

-- I've been experimenting with some awesome soap paste, made out of my homemade bar soap, essential oils, and glycerin.  I use it to wash dishes and it makes suds, cuts grease, and rinses cleaner than regular homemade soap.  I continue the experiment and shall post about it when I feel it's good enough to share.

-- Making lots of quick sauces from last summer's dehydrated tomatoes.  Seriously, why did I ever bother to can tomatoes?  You can do just about anything with dried.

-- Planted a hillside with Winter Rye for my kids to roll down.  Just for the fun of the technicolor green in the middle of dull green and brown winter landscape.  That stuff does not even look real.

That's what comes to mind right now.  I'll leave you with this parting image.  It's two o'clock Central Standard Time and we are inside because it's raining.  My son and daughter are wearing tutus and diapers.  I am wearing flannel pajamas.

They were wearing pajamas as well until my three year old daughter stripped hers off to put on a bright green and blue tutu.  Then my two year old son tackled her and said, "Want! Want!"

I said, "Hey, don't fight.  There are tutus for everybody."

And I went and found him a pink and purple tutu.

Then my daughter said, "No, pink is for girls!"

So they switched tutus and now my son is wearing a blue tutu and my daughter is wearing a pink one.  Seriously, where do they pick up this sexist stuff?

Advantages of Dehydrating Foods for Short or Long Term Storage, with Instructions

This is the time of the season when fruits and vegetables are really ramping up production and we have more than we can eat but not enough to justify getting out all the canning apparatus.  You know, ten tomatoes a day, a quart or two of figs, six or seven cucumbers, an armful of basil, a half bushel of squash.

In past years I’ve tried freezing these small bits and although it's quick and easy, it degrades the flavor of some things, like tomatoes.   Freezing also requires a lot of apparatus:  freezer bags are usually single use; plastic containers are, well, plastic, and jars take a lot of space.  Obviously, you'll need a freezer big enough to hold what you freeze and electricity to keep it going.  Sad and busy is the day when electricity goes out for more than a short while (as it does occaisonally in our neck of the woods) because then you've got to try to find ways to use or alternatively preserve all that hard won garden produce.

Canning requires a lot of apparatus and time. Jars need to be sterilized, water boiled, syrups made, processing tended.  Especially if you have small children running around underfoot, it can be hard to carve out a chunk of time  when everyone will be safe from boiling liquids.

Dehydration has a number of advantages as compared to freezing and canning:

1.  Dehydration can be done in absentia.  Just wash, slice, pop in the dehydtor and go about other business.
2.  Dehydration often improves the flavors of foods.  Tomatoes become richer and more intense.
3.  Dehydrated foods store compactly.  A bushel of dehydrated tomatoes can be stored in a couple of canning jars.
4.  Dehydrated foods are easy to use.  Ever tried to make tomato paste from canned tomatoes?  Prepare to be at the stove all day as they cook down.  Ever tried to make tomato paste from dehydrated tomatoes?  Soak in water, then blend.  That's all.

By the way, the instruction part of the title of this post is a little joke.  There’s really nothing to know, no real instructions needed to dehydrate fruits or veggies.  Just wash and cut produce in more or less even pieces and then dry until you’re satisfied.  The drier the food, the longer it lasts.  But don’t overdry herbs. 

Easy Homemade Laundry Soap

The simplest, most effective, least costly soap I know of.  It takes a minute or two to make, works in any type of washer, is safe for all washable clothes, is non-toxic, and stores indefinitely.

Chopping the bar soap before adding it to the food processor

Ingredients

You’ll need some kind of bar soap.  I prefer my own homemade soap, but just about any kind will work.  Fels Naptha and Zote are especially nice because they were designed for laundry (Zote is also hot pink and makes a very pretty laundry detergent J), but I’ve also used Ivory, and once in a pinch, I used a handful of tiny hotel soaps.

 You’ll also need washing soda and either borax or baking soda.  I prefer baking soda because it’s non-toxic and does a nice job deodorizing.

A note about the ingredients:

Washing soda or sodium carbonate: It removes dirt and deodorizes.   I’ve found it in the laundry isle of my grocery store and also at Ace Hardware.

Baking soda or sodium bicarbonate:  It also removes odors. 

Borax:  Also a deodorizer but a whitener as well.  It’s a great ingredient but I don’t use it anymore since I had kids.  It’s a little more toxic than I like to have around my kids.

Finished Laundry Soap

The Recipe

 Actually, it’s so simple it can hardly be called a recipe.  First grate the soap. (I chop it roughly first and then finish the grating in a food processor.  You can also use a cheese grater.)  Then mix one part soap, one part washing soda, and one part baking soda (or borax).  Store in a container with a lid and it lasts indefinitely.  Use about 1-2 teaspoons per load of laundry.  Yes, that’s right: 1-2 teaspoons.  This soap has no fillers or liquids and you don’t need very much.

Why go to the trouble of making your own soap?

1) So, so much cheaper. By my rough calculations, this recipe comes out to about a penny a load.  Seriously, a penny.  Even the cheapest commercial soap costs far far more.

2) Less waste: no enormous plastic containers to end up in landfill.  No filler ingredients had to be manufactured either.

3) Easier.  Takes about a minute to make enough to last a month or more.  No toting heavy containers from the store.

4) Non-toxic ingredients.  I feel better about using it for my own laundry, my children’s laundry, and my pets’ bedding.  I’m not worried about the fumes created when it is dissolved in hot water, nor about storing it in my household.

The most common questions about this recipe are: Is it safe for HE  or front loading washers? And, does it work? Well,  I’ve been using it in my own HE washer for over five years with no problems. And I have two kids, two dogs, and a messy, messy life.  It works as well as any other laundry soap or detergent I've ever used.

A Central Texas Plant Heritage

This bearded iris is planted near an oak tree at the entrance to our driveway.  We never water or pay much attention to it, but it gives us flowers anyway.  Irises are one of those plants that get divided and passed down between friends and family.  This one came from a patch near the front door of my current house.  I planted that patch from some divisions I took when we moved from our last house.  And that patch came from some divisions from my good friend Lori's yard.

Next weekend I plan to go out to my dad's farm and while I'm there I'll dig up some rhizomes from a patch of white irises, the kind I've heard called German Settler, and take them back to my house to plant.  I don't know who planted those white irises.  They were there when my parents bought the land more than sixty years ago.  Dad speculates that there was another house, in another site, that had long since burned down or tumbled to dust.  The previous owners didn't know, and there are no records to show another house was ever there.  But near my parents' house is a fine spot for a house, with a pretty view and a patch of irises, and another patch of horehound.  We do know that the early settlers to the area tended to plant both irises and horehound.

It would have been a woman who made these plantings, from divisions, given to to her by a friend or a sister or a mother.  She would have been looking to take care of her family, to provide medicine, in the form of horehound, and beauty, in the form of irises.

Everyday Emergencies

For the last week my husband and children have had a stomach flu and all I’ve been doing is wiping whatnots and cleaning up unspeakables.  And just when my husband and daughter are able to mostly control their bodily functions, it has somehow transmogrified into a respiratory infection.  My poor little boy gets both problems at once.

This is our first round of simultaneous illnesses with the kids and we’re lucky that I didn’t get sick too. Yet. So I’ve been learning what everyone who has small children knows: at a time like this there are two many temperatures to take, tummies to tend, brows to cool, cries to comfort, and messes to clean up, for anything like normal life to carry on.  That means laundry doesn’t get done, bread doesn’t get baked, yogurt doesn’t get fermented, gardens don’t get weeded, jam doesn’t get made, and so on.  Certainly errands and appointments have to wait.  These are the kinds of ordinary, everyday code reds that I realize now I was unprepared for.

I somehow managed to run out of yogurt and the small jar I usually set aside to start the next batch turned out to be a jar of home-rendered lard my sister had given me at Christmas.  Where did my starter jar end up?  I don’t know but I assume we ate it at some point.  And yogurt was the only thing my daughter wanted or could keep down.

We had no juice on hand, since we ordinarily don’t drink it, and my daughter was refusing regular water.  We had nothing like Pedialite or Gatorade either.  No soup ready-made.  No crackers.  A cold front came in and tore through some tender just-sprouting greens before I could get a chance to cover them.  Laundry is piled in mountains. 

By a cruel twist of fate, for the last few months I’ve been trying to use up last years home-canned, frozen, and dehydrated foods, the bulk-purchased flours and grains, honey, beef, chicken, and pork, all to make way for the next season.  So we were low on everything.  We didn’t actually run out of any of those things, but if we’d needed to go much longer without a trip to the store, we would have.

The kind of preparedness I’d been working on, the stockpiles I’ve built, the skills I’ve developed, are useful for many things, but not necessarily for the intensity of a bunch of sick people in the house.  So now I’m thinking through how to develop preparedness for the everyday emergencies of life.

1.  Have a week of easy meals at hand, canned or in the freezer.  There are times when scratch cooking just isn’t possible or practical.  I can’t tell you how much I would have appreciated some homemade chicken soup last week, but I could never find the time to make it. I actually did something like this when my family came to stay for Christmas.  I had many gallons of soup, stew, and beans along with a dozen loaves of bread waiting in the freezer.  It meant we had plenty of time to just enjoy each other.

2.  As much as I despise the stuff, I’m going to start keeping Pedialite, Gatorade, and frozen juice stocked in the house.  Depending on the day and the mood, the kids would refuse or prefer Pedialite, Gatorade, water, my homemade electrolyte solution, or juice.  And some days, even the time to mix up the electrolyte solution was too much.

3. I also need to plan a method for rotating stockpiles that doesn’t involve letting so many things run out at once.  I’ll be thinking this through more over the next few weeks.

I don’t want to make this sound more dire than it was.  It wasn’t dire at all, in fact.  Just inconvenient.  I could have run to the store or sent my retching husband.  At any point, I could have called a friend to fetch me some things.  We still had plenty of everything, including some stores of food designed to last thirty years or more, sent to us by my sweet in-laws.  But how nice some homemade chicken soup would have been, waiting in the freezer.

On Not Trying New Things

I started making this bread about twenty years ago, from a community cookbook that had been my mothers, and that she gave me when I left home.  It's just a simple sandwich bread, made from white flour, although over the years I started making it from mostly wheat.  

Then, after a trip to France, I fell in love with baguette style loaves, and because at that time we lived within walking distance of two very fine bakeries, I stopped baking althogether.  When we moved out to this rural area, I started trying to duplicate French style baguettes, with moderate success, using the no-knead bread recipes the New York Times went crazy over.  

Which us all well and good.  It's fun to experiment and learn new things.  But my husband really prefers sandwich bread so we ended up buying bread half the time and my trusty old recipe got mostly forgotten.  When my large family came to stay for Christmas, I pulled my old recipe out again, and discovered I was a pretty rusty sanndwich bread maker.  I wanted to have enough loaves baked and frozen so that everyone could help themselves to sandwiches for lunch.  That means I needed about a dozen loaves to get through the holidays, minimum.  The first few loaves came out kind of wonky.  I could no longer double and triple the recipe with ease.  I'd forgotten how much whole wheat I used to substitute for white, that I'd started using less yeast and letting it rise longer.  That sort of thing.  The sort of thing a cook knows how to do from years of practice or learns in the kitchen of another experienced cook.

I guess what I'm talking about is tradition.  I'm talking about the ordinary, every day traditions that we lose all too easily in a generation or so, if we're not careful.  My mother talked about my paternal grandmother's yeast biscuits, which to hear her tell it, were as big as a loaf of bread and as light as a wisp of smoke.  Maybe they were really that special or maybe they only became so in her memory but we'll never know because that recipe was lost when Grandmother left her mortal coil.  Now that my own mother is gone too, I find myself reaching for the phone sometimes still, to ask her how she made her oatmeal, and why mine never tastes the same.  My younger sister does the same thing and we both pine for that oatmeal, but too bad for us.  We waited too long to get her technique.

Too bad for the world too.  It's all too easy to lose touch with skills that were common just a generation or so ago: gardening, sewing, home repairs, animal husbandry, and so on.  In the world I grew up in,  cheap oil and the notion of an ever-expanding economy allowed us to believe we could, even should, let go of those traditional skills.  And we can't reclaim them overnight either.  It takes time to learn how to garden well, for example.  It takes season after season to learn about a particular climate and microclimate, to even begin to get a glimmer of understanding about how seasons work, how seeds like to sprout, what makes a tender plant thrive and what consigns it to failure.  It takes time to develop any skill and it's always best to learn from an experienced teacher, although books are a great source too.

So what I'm circling around to in this rambling post is that it's fun and instructive to try new things, like French style baguettes, but having a practiced, make-it-in-your-sleep skill, like I once had for sandwich bread as part of our every day repertoire cannot be neglected. 

The Huswife's Home Pharmacopea: Mullein

A few years ago I had the worst cold I’ve ever had in my life.  It might have been pnumonia but I was at a conference at an isolated resort and I never went to the doctor to find out.  My airways were severely constricted and when I coughed I wheezed like a newly landed fish. 

Fortunately, the resort spa sold tincture of mullein and it got me through the conference.  My airways opened up, coughing diminished, and all without that weird spacey feeling from  commercial decongestants. By the time I went home I was on the mend and comnpletely sold on mullein.  Since then I’ve kept it stocked in my medicine cabinet.  

A few years ago I was in Colorado and noticed it growing along the sides of the road.  I stopped and took a few stalks of seeds home and scattered them in a field, hoping to grow my own.  No luck.  Then I saw it in my brother-in-law’s yard in West Texas, took some seed home, and tried again.  Still no luck.  Fast forward six months:  I spot mullein growing along a road near my dad’s farm.  I took some seed home, scratched the earth, planted, watered, and watched.  No go.  I seemed cursed to buy tincture of mullein forever.  Six more months pass and what do I find growing along a small road near my house?  Right.  Mullein.  And lots of it.  It seems I can't make it grow where I will but it will grow where it wills. It just doesn't like the field where I was trying to grow it.  Around here, it prefers semi-shady, semi-cool, bottom land and thin, chalky soil, I think.  

So for now, I'll gather from the wild with a light hand and also try to find a spot on my land that's low and cool and chalky to scatter a little seed.  Because I definitely always, always want to have some on hand.  And I think you should too.

Uses:  Excellent for colds, coughs and any respiratory illness.  Honest, mullein is far superior to any over- the-counter or prescription cold medicine I've ever tried.  It is reputed to be good for skin rashes although I've no experience with this use.


Harvesting:  Leaves are the most practical part of the plant to harvest.  The flowers are useful as well, but they are tiny and must be harvested as they open.  Some folks also harvest the long taproot, but I never have.


To use:  Easiest is to make a tea from the leaves, either fresh or dried.  Be sure and strain the tea.  The leaves have little hairs that can tickle the throat if you ingest.  You can also make an alcohol-based tincture. 


If, like me, you don't have an immediate source for the plant,  you can buy the prepared tincture from most health food stores and Whole Foods.  I've also bought the dried leaves at our local farmer's market.

Perennial Artichokes

Pity my severely neglected garden.  Between Dad's illness and two new kids, I've barely paid it any attention. I planted about half of the things I intended to plant; everything has been planted a little bit late; weeds have taken over most of the beds; watering has been sporadic.

Fortunately, the weather has been just a about perfect this spring and summer -- lots of rain, sunny, no cruel heat waves just yet.  And our soil is in great shape from several years of turkey manure amendments and mountains of compost.  Best of all, the permaculture beds are pretty much taking care of themselves.  So far, I've found a few plants that are either more or less perennial or reliably reseed themselves in our climate:  cilantro, basil, kale, leeks, chard, and several lettuces.  It doesn't sound like much but add a few easy-to-grow varieties of squash, tomatoes, peppers, and such, and we've had a more than adequate harvest this summer, with hardly any attention to the garden.

It's only recently that I realized artichokes would love our climate.  And they do love it!  We had a couple of hard freezes last year that I thought had killed them off.  But the original two plants came right back, more vigorous than ever.  And those that I let go to seed sent their babies to the original bed and all over the surrounding field.  Where once we two artichokes are now about fifteen healthy plants.

Making Sauce From Frozen Tomatoes

Last summer I just plain could not keep up with the tomato canning and ended up doing something that frankly, made me shudder. I froze some tomatoes. I'd read that a lot of people do that when they run out of time. I never really trusted that frozen tomatoes would be any good, and so ended up buying some store bought tomatoes when my own canned ran out two months ago. Of course store bought tomatoes in winter are pretty sad things as well.

So here I am in February, finally using those frozen tomatoes. It turns out they're just fine. They work almost as well as home canned and are about a thousand times better than anything that can be bought out of season. I did fire roast about half of the tomatoes before I froze them and those are actually quite excellent. The other were frozen whole or quartered, without roasting or even blanching. Now I'm glad I didn't bother with blanching. Freezing serves the same purpose, which is to allow the skins to slip off.

I did remove the skins for the first few batches of sauce. Then I thought, why be so picky? You ate store bought tomatoes and didn't die. Surely you can eat the skins from your own homegrown, albeit previously frozen tomatoes. A Vitamix, or some other high speed blender, is key, I suspect, to the success of this venture. You can even blend the tomatoes without defrosting them first. You'll end up with a thick, chilly, bright pink tomato puree that can be cooked into any sauce at all, and those skins don't have to end up in the compost pile. Plus, you save the entire five seconds it would have taken to remove the skins from the tomatoes.

Wordless Wednesday: From the Pantry and Freezer

Planning the Tomato Crop

I can't think of any crop that's more important for happiness than home-grown tomatoes. They are one of the veggies that, in my opinion, money can't buy.

Last year I planted tomatoes three times. The first batch was killed by a surprise hail storm, the second by a series of late season freezes that even a couple of makeshift hoop houses couldn't withstand. The last batch made it through most of the season until we lost our agricultural water in July. Still, we ended up with enough tomatoes to supply our household for about 3/4 of the year. I say 3/4 but that's a guess. I still have some tomatoes in the freezer, and one jar in the cupboard as well, because I was so stingy with them throughout the year. Also, I bought fresh tomatoes from the store from time to time.

This year I want to go all the way. I want to grow enough to keep us up to our necks in preserved tomatoes for the entire year. And have enough to share. And enough green ones at the end of the season to store and use as they ripen. I'm not sure exactly how to calculate this amount except to well, just guess, and double the number of plants. I do know one thing. I'm going to keep better records this year, and actually measure output by variety if I can.

I'd love to hear how others plan their tomato crops.

Toad For Breakfast

Here's a happy collection: A few slices of leftover no-knead homemade bread; some fresh eggs from a friend's backyard chickens; butter I made several months ago, from local raw cream, and that had been hiding in a corner of the freezer. Quite naturally on a Sunday morning, my thoughts turned to toad-in-a-hole. Making it is simple. Use a biscuit or cookie cutter to make a hole in the middle of a piece of bread. Melt butter in a frying pan. Add eggs, cook, flip, cook some more. The best part is the little rim where the eggs meet the bread. And in my neck of the woods we eat this homemade salsa.

Using It Up

One of the prompts for Frugal February was a post I read somewhere, sometime, about the huge waste that is most people's experience with buying a chest freezer. That is, most folks fill it up, thinking they're being careful and frugal and all in all good planetary citizens. Then they lose track of what's the deep recesses of said freezer until too late -- all this fine food gets tossed away.

Last summer I canned and dehydrated and froze fruits and veggies from my garden. I purchased a quarter of beef from the finest grass feeding ranchers in the state, not to mention some similarly fine pork. I bought bulk grains, oils, and spices through my native nutrition community buying group. It was all in service of creating a functioning home economia, and the hope was that we would have the best foods, as local as possible, as organic as possible, bought and preserved or used in season. And I would get it all at the best price. Moreover, I hoped we would be less subject to the vagaries of a crazy economy and possible disruptions in food supply (whether from natural disaster, ordinary weather patterns, zombie invasion, or whatever).

But somewhere along the way I did a poor job of measuring. I think I simply stockpiled too much. I did not quite realize how much could be grown on a fraction of an acre in my climate, given good soil and lots of labor on my part. So I still have quarts and gallons and more quarts of frozen and canned fruits and veggies in store. Too much jam and jelly. Excessive amounts of beef. And there are other things that I've run out of all year long, things I've had to buy lower quality versions of because I didn't produce enough. So in the month of February, as I go through our cupboards and freezers, I hope to measure, plan, and reevaluate for the coming year.

Frugal February

I really should have made this post on February 1 but what's new about me running behind on every single thing in my life? February has always been a funny month for me, and for central Texas also. It's really the end of our short winter and I think it catches a lot of folks by surprise. We're worn out from Christmas, January just flew by. It's cold and gray; it's wet; it's icy; from time to time it's cold, wet, grey, and icy all at the same time. Just the perfect time to let myself slip into a funk of guilt and self-recrimination. Why did I spend so much at Christmas? How could I have eaten all that? Why is the house so cluttered? More generally it's also a time when central Texans actually start complaining about things like rain and cool weather. I mean, really, these are things we cry and gasp for in the dog days of summer and now we complain about them. Such ungrateful behavior and yet another reason to slip into a pattern of guilt and self-recrimination.

Last February I managed these gray days by declaring Frugal February and I'm doing it again this year. It seems like a good month to use up the stores I have on hand, to boycott shopping, to reset my spending patterns -- kind of like the way Ayurveda has you go on a fast to reset your taste buds to purer foods and rest the digestive system. Only I can promise, I shall not be going on a fast. Here are the contours of Frugal February: no shopping at all for the entire month. That's it.

OK, that's not quite it. An exception has been made, and I won't say who in my household has made this exception, except to say it wasn't me. Bananas will continue to be purchased during Frugal February.

But other than that exception, no shopping. Believe me, this will not be onerous. I keep such a huge store of emergency foods here that I suspect we could go six months without buying groceries. And as for non-food shopping like clothes, we could go far longer yet. What I hope to accomplish is to just rest my system, enjoy the freedom of bowing out of the spend/consume cycles for a while, and take stock of what we have. I hope to discover how well we're planned out little home oeconomia here. We'll see how well the winter greens and herbs from the garden hold out, and use up the last of my canned, frozen, and dehydrated garden foods from last summer. We'll see if monotony sets in. As I recall from last year, I came away feeling very refreshed and ready for the fine, fine spring ahead.

The Jig's Up, Spaghetti Squash

I first encountered spaghetti squash when a friend of mine was doing Weight Watchers, in the 90's, when the low fat craze was in full swing. She cut the poor squash in half, microwaved it, shredded its innards with a fork, and then served it with fat free marinara sauce from a jar. Is it any wonder I've had a hard time loving spaghetti squash?

But it turns out there is much to love about this squash. It's easy to grow, drought and insect tolerant, and most of all, stores forever on a counter top. Last summer I planted a single hill from some seeds I'd saved from a supermarket squash. Then I forgot all about that hill, moved some of my beds around, and rearranged my watering system. Somehow the spaghetti squash got left out in the cold, metaphorically. More literally, it got left in a spot that I completely forgot to water and often tromped across, dragged a hose over, and snapped of bits of vine.

Still, I ended up with dozens of squash. Dozens and dozens. I gave some away. We ate a few. And I filled a huge basket with about twenty of them back in July. We're down to four, after eating two of them last night as a main course, with garlic, butter, and parmesan. Which brings me to what I consider the primary virtue of spaghetti squash. Because they store forever, without canning or freezing, you can have fresh summer squash in February. That's right -- fresh, not frozen or canned, summer squash. Not winter squash.

It wasn't until I realized this that I started to really, really love spaghetti squash. You see, this squash had been sold to me under false pretenses. It was supposed to be like spaghetti. In fact, except that you can shred it with a fork and make something vaguely spaghetti shaped, there is no similarity.

Which is why I am announcing to all spaghetti squash everywhere that the jig is up. You are not spaghetti. You are squash. Stop pretending. Be proud of your vegetable nature. You are delicious, just like you are.

End of the Spring Garden Whirlwind

After a day spent in town, running errands and teaching a class, I got home with just a few hours of daylight left. It was enough to harvest a surprising number of lemon cucumbers, along with another two or three gallons of tomatoes and assorted squash as well as a few ears of corn. Poor, poor peppers are looking pretty wilted, so it won't be much of a harvest, I suspect.



The busy day left me too tired to cook. Widget man was in no mood either, so it was melon for supper and then some soaking in the solar tub.

But there was energy for thinking and planning. I'm thinking the best idea is to freeze all or most of those tomatoes. Really, it's just crazy to heat up the house right now.
I'm happy to hear that spagetti squash last a good while without needing additional preservation. For now, they'll just live in a basket on my counter in the kitchen. Through a combination of obsessive opening and closing of windows, a series of solar screens, heat chimneys, and ceiling fans, as well as running the AC a few hours a day, we keep the house right around 80 degrees, which I'm told is a good temperature to store these thick-skinned squash.

As for the eggplant, well, let's just hope preserving them is something I get to worry about. As of this evening, some insect is enjoying gnawing on their leaves very, very much.

Recipe for a Zucchini Explosion: Spicy Migas with Zucchini

Migas are a traditional Mexican dish, and a fine way to use up leftover corn tortillas. They are, in the simplest form, simply torn or cut corn tortillas, cooked in a little oil, and then scrambled with eggs. Common variations include adding cheese, tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, salsa, or chorizo (spicy Mexican sausage).

Around here, this dish is ubiquitous and you don't need to go to a Mexican restaurant to have it served up for breakfast. It's as commonly as bacon and eggs or pancakes. And it's a favorite Sunday brunch item.

My favorite variation includes zucchini, especially at this time of year when those green squash are coming out of the garden in truckloads, and if you're not careful, the size of baseball bats.

Spicy Migas with Zucchini
2 medium zucchini, cubed
4 corn tortillas, cut evenly into strips or squares
3 eggs, beaten
olive oil
comino (cumin)
dried ancho chile powder
dried chipotle chile powder
salt
shredded Oaxacan string cheese

1. Saute cubed zucchini in a very hot skillet, with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt, comino, and chile powders. I usually use about a tsp of comino and ancho and just a pinch of chipotle. Chipotle is the hottest of the two chiles, so adjust according to taste. You want the zucchini to end up slightly crisp on the outside, lightly coated with the spices, and creamy on the inside, so don't toss too much while it's cooking. Allow the squash to brown instead.

2. When the squash is brown, add tortilla pieces. There are two schools of thought about how tortillas should be cooked for migas -- some like them crisp, like a chip; others like them soft and chewy. I'm from the soft and chewy school myself.

3. Add eggs and scramble lightly.

4. Top with shredded cheese. Take pan off the heat and allow the residual heat of the dish to melt the cheese.

5. Serve drizzled with your favorite salsa.

A word about the spices: Comino is the most important spice in many Mexican dishes. Ancho and Chipotle just happen to be two of my favorites and are always at hand. By all means, adjust the spices to your taste and to what you have available.

Also posted at Food Renegade's Fight Back Fridays!

Solar Powered Outdoor Bathing and Soaking Grotto

I learned to love outdoor bathing during the year Widget Man and I spent in Mexico. For a month we lived on an isolated beach in the Yucatan, in a bamboo palapa with an outdoor shower. There was something so amazing about washing my hair every morning in the middle of a white sand beach, watching waves break on the coral reefs.

When we go camping, we try to reproduce the experience with a Sun Shower, which is just a plastic bladder with a show nozzle attached, that we hitch up to a tree limb. It holds five gallons of water and heats up amazingly fast if there's any sun around. What really amazes me is that we can both shower with a shared five gallons of water, once we learned not to dilly-dally.

We have low-flow showers in our house, but I can guarantee we use far more than two and half gallons of water, even when we try to move fast. I also love soaking in a hot tub of water at the end of the day. I hate to even think about how many gallons of water that uses.

So even though we don't live in a palapa anymore, and we don't have a white sand beach or an ocean to gaze at, we are setting up an outdoor bathing and soaking space, in the interests of water conservation and for the pure pleasure of bathing outside, in nature, under the sky.

It's solar heated and pumped, with a UV filter. If there's anything we have plenty of in Texas, it's sun, so the water gets as hot as we want it to. The barrel is from Snorkel Tubs and the solar pump and various components are from a dozen different solar power vendors.

Our plan is to add an outdoor shower, also with hot water from the solar panels, so that we can have a Japanese-style bathing and soaking grotto.

The tub is surrounded by grape vines, cedar, oaks, and a huge fig tree, on a terrace below our house, so it's completely private.

More Questions Than Answers, or: How to Preserve a Harvest

This morning's garden haul yielded five spaghetti squash, five zucchini, five yellow squash, a few cucumbers, one watermelon, and about fifteen pounds of tomatoes. I ran out of time before I could make it to the peppers and tomatillos but the plants are hanging heavy with fruit. The yellow, zucchini, and French varietal squash are at the end of their cycles, the slicer cucumbers and cantaloupe plants have given up the ghost but the lemon cucumbers have surprised me by putting out a whole new generation of babies.

I watch amazed as the single spaghetti squash hill I planted on impulse, from some carelessly saved seed gathered from a grocery store squash, puts out dozens of fruits. The eggplant that I planted right before a gullywasher of a storm came through and washed away half the seed grows all over my garden -- in the hills where I planted them, next to the grape vines, among the corn and squash, and even unprotected in the neighboring, unfenced, unirrigated field. At least fifty funny slipper-shaped fruits are starting to darken and I hope that they'll mature before whatever is chewing so vigorously on the leaves kills the plants.

Herbs are wild and huge, corn and sweet potatoes are almost ready, calabaza and pumpkin will mature soon, chard and French sorrel never seem to stop, artichokes keep on coming, and half the red potatoes are still in the ground.

Soon it will time to start the seeds for the fall garden.

This was my first full-on spring garden out here in the hills of Central Texas and every day has been a surprise -- things that I thought would grow didn't; things that I didn't think would grow took off in some kind of vegetable explosion.

I've learned a few things, I guess, but mostly I'm amazed at how much is out of my hands, how much depends on the weather, birds, insects, raccoons, and anyone else who likes my veggies as much as I do.

Now I'm trying to find the time to preserve as much as I can, and I have even more to wonder about.

For example

-- How long do spaghetti squash last? Will I need to parboil and freeze or can I just store them, a least for a while, like a winter squash.

-- Can you really freeze tomatoes? I keep reading that some people do, but I find it hard to believe that a lot is not lost, in terms of flavor and texture.

-- My Ball canning book says to add citric acid to tomatoes when canning. Do I really have to do this? I never have before and I know my mom never did. Have I been playing tomato-botulism-Russian-roulette all this time?

-- What's the best way to preserve eggplant?

How do you keep up with your harvests? What shortcuts have you found? I'd love to hear anything anyone knows about preserving.

Mouthwatering Black Bean Chocolate Cake. Yes, Really.

A friend of mine, who grew up in China, shudders at the way we eat beans here -- salted, with bacon, in chili con carne. In short, we eat beans as a savory dish. To her, they are a dessert. She likes them made sweet, in puddings, cakes, and as a pastry filling.

When you think about, beans really are a neutral tasting vegetable, and depend a lot on how we season them. So when I was looking for a way to make a gluten free cake, I wondered about beans as a flour substitute. Beans have a few distinct advantages over white flour:

-- they're a high protein, whole food.
-- they're high in a kind of soluble fiber that helps stabilize blood sugars. This is great for everybody but especially for diabetics and pre-diabetics.
-- in my area, they are grown locally, while wheat is not. So since I try to eat locally and in season, I'm trying to cut down, and perhaps eliminate, flour products.
-- they're great for people with gluten intolerance.

I've made this cake three times and even served it to company. It's dense, moist, and rich with no hint of "beaniness" at all. There are no weird, non-food, chemical ingredients -- all simple, whole foods. And it is extremely easy and fast to make.

Mouthwatering Black Bean Chocolate Cake

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

To prepare the cake pan:
Grease a 9" cake pan with butter, then dust with cocoa powder. Line pan with parchment paper cut to fit bottom of pan.

To prepare the batter:
In a blender, combine 1 and 1 quarter cup rinsed black beans, 3 eggs, 1 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp salt, 6 tablespoons cocoa powder, 1 tsp baking powder, and 1/2 tsp baking soda. Blend until there are absolutely no lumps.

In a bowl, whip until smooth, by hand or with electric beater, 1/2 c honey and 7 tablespoons butter. Add 2 eggs and whip until smooth.

Pour butter mixture into blender with bean mixture and blend until incorporated.

At this point, the batter should look glossy and smooth and very much like any traditional chocolate cake batter.

Pour batter into pan. Thump pan on the counter several times to smooth batter and dissipate air bubbles. Bake for about 45 minutes.

Allow the cake to cool in the pan for ten minutes, invert onto a plate, and then turn over again onto a cooling rack.
Allow the cake to finish cooling completely on the rack -- the longer it cools, the better the texture will be. I usually cool mine overnight.

The cake is great on its own, but I my family likes it best with honey sweetened whipped cream and a sprinkling of pecans. And, I confess, I've also iced it with traditional powdered sugar chocolate icing -- not all that healthy, I know, but company was coming and I panicked.

One more note: I've recently been seeing recipes using beans as a flour substitute all over the internet. Many, if not most, use some form of artificial sweetener instead of honey, and many also use oil instead of butter. Other use no fat at all. I suppose this is an attempt to reduce calories or carbs, but because I'm not crazy about fat free recipes, and because I'm not crazy about artificial sweetener, I haven't tried any of these versions.

**Also posted at Real Food Wednesday**