September Salads
September Salads
A little extra leaf lettuce for when the weather turns hot, then cool, in a barrel so the critters can’t get it. I just planted the seeds on Sunday, they actually sprouted by Wednesday, this was taken today, Thursday. I had the seed packet tucked into the edge of the barrel, but apparently the cardinal didn’t like the way that looked and kept pulling it out and tossing it in the barrel. No matter, I can remember what’s planted there. Yum, can’t wait!
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Pomegranate Landscape
Pomegranate Landscape
If the days feel too dark and the nights too long, have a pomegranate.
Pomegranates are just so lovely. I peel them to see the little rubies inside, and pull out those sweet, juicy berries one by one. The sun came in the kitchen window and I knew I had to do my best to capture the essence of pomegranate.
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For a print of any photo, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms. For photos of lots of black cats and other cats—and even some birds as I first published this post there—visit The Creative Cat.
Sampler
Garden Sampler
A little of this and a little of that from the garden, broccoli, a sweet pepper, some tomatoes, ultimately they were marinated and grilled and tossed with pasta.
I was very closely supervised by a sleepy black cat while I harvested this basket.
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For a print of any photo, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms. For photos of lots of black cats and other cats—and even some birds as I first published this post there—visit The Creative Cat.
It’s What’s for Dinner
Broccoli
I almost feel bad about eating this broccoli tonight. We’ve been spending the past few weeks getting to know each other. But I treat my vegetables kindly, give them treats of composted manure and fishtank water, and talk to them and sing to them. Really, I do, I always have. I let each plant go to seed at the end of its season, and often I save and plant those seeds next year; they are open-pollinated, often heritage, varieties. Getting to know your food is an important thing to do.
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For a print of any photo, visit “purchasing” for availability and terms. For photos of lots of black cats and other cats, visit The Creative Cat.
First Harvest
Potatoes, it’s what’s for dinner.
Some very new potatoes dug up in the bed where I’d grown potatoes last year and from which I could swear I had dug up all the potatoes last fall. They are still covered with a little soil, best for keeping them moist, but the sun still shines into the white and yellow flesh as it seems to glow.
These are mostly Red Pontiac and Yukon Gold, and are the ones I missed last year which managed to live and grow in the soil below the frost line. The largest is about two inches at its largest dimension, and they make a wonderful side boiled with butter and olive oil, the first scallions or chives and parsley. Sometimes I have these and the first asparagus together, but this year the asparagus is late.
Gleanings
Gleanings
I turned the soil in my garden during a sunny afternoon yesterday. The first turn in the spring always assures a few root crops left behind the previous autumn, like the tiny carrots, above. I usually also find tiny potatoes, a turnip or parsnip or two, and a few things sprouting early with edible greens and even a few edible natives are sprouting and greening up. Often it’s enough to make a soup or stew or a side dish, but this year these carrots and a basket of turnip greens were all that were to be had.
It wasn’t so long ago when people gleaned the fields for such things, food stores were gone, and what they found was the only thing available to them to eat. I sometimes wonder how society advanced when simply not starving to death was a daily battle, and I wonder how many lives were lost because only a handful of baby carrots was available for food. I will not complain about how had life is—modern days have their travails, but I have a refrigerator with food, and a store just down the street. Many thanks to our ancestors who had the will to survive.
Pomegranate Landscape
Pomegranate Landscape
Pomegranates are just so lovely. I peel them to see the little rubies inside, and pull out those sweet, juicy berries one by one. The sun came in the kitchen window and I knew I had to do my best to capture the essence of pomegranate.
The Last Fruit
The Last Fruit
A ripe tomato surrounded by seed heads of grass , dried asters and goldenrod and her own shriveled foliage, doesn’t last in the November garden; her color is faded, and the warming sun has forced the frozen juices from her skin to form one hesitating, reflecting drop.
Hot Peppers on a Cold Day
Hot Peppers at the Market
Cold rain fell on the peppers but didn’t dull their colors, a warming sight for a cold day. I applied the “fresco” filter in Photoshop to this photo; the original is below. The red chiles were so intense in the cool light that I couldn’t get the color under control.
Hot Peppers at the Market, original photo.
Hot Peppers
Hot Peppers
My cayenne pepper plants are hanging with so many long slender peppers already, like ornaments on a Christmas tree, and still more flowers are blooming. It is all so green, but soon those peppers will turn red and warm many foods come winter.
Four Peppers, 2011
Four Peppers
These four colorful peppers in one end of my basket were eye-catchingly beautiful and mouth-wateringly tempting. They’re not absolutely uniform, perfectly formed, evenly colored and even have a little bit of soil still on them from a rain earlier in the day. They are good, honest farmer’s market peppers, picked that day, sorted, washed and packed, driven here and put on display by the person to whom I handed my money.
I chose this particular basket because of the arrangement of these four peppers. Then, when I got to my car and set it down to open the door, I looked down to see this perfect photo and took it right there in the parking lot of the farmer’s market, in the warm evening sun.
The little bit of mud-splash left on them from a storm earlier in the day just confirmed their freshness. These four have already been grilled along with a big red onion and thick-sliced tomato and placed atop pasta with some freshly-grated parmesan. A good bit of the joy of food for me is what it looks like.
You can purchase prints of this photo up to 24″ x 24″ at my Fine Art America site, Four Peppers.
All-Day Vegetable Soup, 2010
All-day vegetable soup
I run this each year around Labor Day, as I note below, but today was a great day for a trip to the farmer’s market to get what’s not growing in my garden. At the height of the growing season, visiting the farmer’s market with all its shapes and colors and people and languages and sounds and smells, and gathering herbs and vegetables in the quiet of my own garden, then the afternoon of organizing the ingredients, cleaning and trimming and chopping, stirring things in the big pot, the slightly steamy windows and the scents filling every area of the house seems to set the tone for autumn.
I long ago finished the last container from the freezer from this very pot of soup made last year. I’m looking forward to taking out a container of harvest freshness in the dark of the coming winter.
This was my “labor” on Labor Day!
I make All-day Vegetable Soup on the first cool day in the fall with the freshest vegetables from my garden or the farmer’s market if I’m out of something. A big pot of soup simmered all day tastes different from a small pot of soup cooked just an hour or two. The cooking is gentler so the goodness is coaxed out of the vegetables into the broth, and each vegetable manages to maintain its flavor and texture with the long, slow pressure of gentle heat.
It’s also a great day to make bread because it will rise beautifully with the steam and warmth from a big pot of soup.
Use the big canning pot that holds five gallons of liquid, add two gallons of stock you’ve made over the summer from simmering vegetables, or just use plain water.
Add, to taste:
- garlic (I use a whole clove)
- onion, white or yellow, one or two large ones
- six stalks chopped celery, reserve tops for later
- 3 lbs. chopped tomatoes
- four cups chopped carrots
- four cups chopped potatoes
- four cups green and/or yellow beans snapped in 1-inch sections
- whole small head of cabbage or half large, chopped
- four cups slice zucchini
- fresh corn kernels from four ears of corn
- four cups fresh peas
- four cups chopped broccoli
- four cups chopped cauliflower
- anything else you have on hand: turnips, parsnips or other root crops, brussels sprouts, collard greens, kale, mustard or other greens whatever you want in your soup
- two cups of dried beans, can be all the same but I use a little of each kind of dried bean I have in the kitchen: kidney, pink, great northern, navy, lima, etc.
- chopped fresh herbs like parsley, tarragon, thyme
Boil stock.
Reduce to simmer. Add dry beans.
Add chopped vegetables one by one, beginning with the firmest, like carrots, and ending with the greens.
Simmer at least two hours past the last vegetable added.
Add chopped fresh herbs, simmer one half hour more.
Let sit, covered, for about an hour.
Eat several bowls.
Let cool completely, which can take hours depending on how much you made.
Can in pressure canner or freeze in freezer containers.
Open a jar in January and remember summer.
Coffee With Cream
Coffee with cream.
Just half n half swirling around in hot coffee. For some reason it was totally mesmerizing, but I think I needed the cup of coffee at that point and anything would have been mesmerizing.
Red Raspberries
Red Raspberries
They speak for themselves. Having a berry hangover from yesterday, especially seeing these berries at the market.
A Berry Good Time
Black raspberries in a vintage cup.
Breakfast on a lazy Sunday morning? Berries are so June! Berries are everywhere, especially red and black raspberries. I have a few black raspberries in my yard which the birds generously planted, and a couple of years ago I took photos of the berries I harvested and used as models, then ate for breakfast, plus a few other berries in the yard. Just for good measure, here’s another one, and don’t forget to click the link at the bottom to see the slideshow of more berries.
More black raspberries in a vintage cup.
Happy Summer Solstice!
Point of Origin
Point of Origin
To my surprise, the seeds I planted last Saturday began sprouting this morning! I’ve gotten a late start on my garden and had a good bit of cleanup to do, and even had older seeds; I wasn’t even sure they’d sprout. But I turned the soil and added compost and grass clippings and turned other plants under, raked and smoothed the soil, and planted two different kinds of green beans and two different kinds of yellow beans, peas, corn and a variety of other plants and seeds.
I watered deeply on Sunday, but this week was long and excessively hot; I watered deeply again on Wednesday and wandered the garden early each morning but not really hoping to see a sprout in less than seven days, likely ten days. Usually, the seeds will wait for a nourishing rain, but the moon and sun must have been in the right places because the first beans must have sprouted with the sunrise—by the time I got out there just a short time after that a half dozen were up in one variety and the soil was lifted and split open in other places.
So of course I had to keep wandering outside to check and see how many more; two of the beds had shown no sign of sprouting but by later in the day they were up, as you see in these photos. We had a nice soft rain later in the morning, then a sunny afternoon and later I noticed a few other things were sprouting as well.
I practically watched the bean seen above split open this morning. Still covered with the soil of its birth, standing tall and leaning toward the source of its nourishment, the sun, the seed is slightly split and inside are the furled leaves, ready to begin the true process of its growth. What a glorious event, the beginning of life, even if it’s only a green bean plant.
And these aren’t only ornamentals, these are, in part, my sustenance, my fall crop of green beans that will grow up to the first frost, the ones I’ll blanch and put in the freezer to eat through winter, or add to soups, or pickle for snacks. I love these beans from their first moment, and treasure this little relationship with my food; the more I love and nourish it, the more it will love and nourish me.
The bean seeds put on a wonderful show when they sprout: first one lone bean pushes a curve of a stem up through the soil much earlier than everyone else, then a day or two later the soil begins to erupt, bumps and ridges forming and growing, and through that day and the next and the next the beans push aside the soil, split their seeds, stand up tall and eager, reaching for the sun. I’ve always wanted to get a time-lapse camera just to be able to photograph the progress.
All the parts of tending a garden a full of images and enjoyment, and watching seeds sprout, or plants grow and flower, has always been such a source of wonder to me. This is my cathedral, where I’ve always found my creator.
The bean seeds were so inspiring; please enjoy the slideshow below.
Today 