Tomato Season Really Begins

Starting to see a few more tomatoes ripen. The sun gold is really going at it.


The opalka produced its first tomato (albeit a small one!) and the mortgage lifter looks like it will have ripe tomatoes later this week!


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Location:San Diego Fwy,Los Angeles,United States

Peas and Beans

The peas are GONE. I yanked them out and hung the plants up to dry. In a few days I'll go out and remove the pods from the vines and shell the peas. I definitely did not get a lot of pounds out of my peas this year, but it was entirely because I wasn't out there picking them every couple days. I should have been snacking on peas at least once a day. Instead, the peas got too old and now they'll be dried peas that I can put into soups and what not.



In their place, I've planted beans. I was having trouble deciding what kind of beans to plant because I would like to grow a variety that I can use in soups and chilis and what not, in addition to the typical "green bean" varieties. I looked for awhile at buying several packages of bean seeds, but since I only wanted a few of each type of bean, I decided the best option was to just buy a bag of mixed soup beans from the store and grow those!

I soaked them for two nights, by which time they all had little roots sticking out of them. On Wednesday, I took them out and planted them right along the fence where the peas used to be, using 3" spacing and trying to mix up the varieties as much as possible. A couple beans are already starting to show some leaves. It will be very exciting to see how the variety looks as it grows!

Beet Ravioli

I've looked several times at beet ravioli pictures and recipes online, so when I found myself with a couple of beets and nothing in particular to do with them, I thought I'd try it out. I roughly followed Martha Stewart's Recipe and in hind sight I wish I had followed it more closely, because it turned out to be a complete failure.

Here's how it started: I had four beets, one of which was a Chioggia, which is shown below. (Btw I don't think I'll grow these next year...they aren't that fantastic looking and lose what color they have during cooking





I roasted all four beets, 350 F for a bit over an hour. I refrigerated them overnight, then the next day I peeled them and threw them into my mini food processor.


I then added two eggs to the food processor and blended it up.


This liquid went into a couple cups of flour (roughly half all purpose, half semolina)


I then rolled out the dough using my Kitchenaid and because the dough was so soft and kind of mushy, I decided to refrigerate that overnight. The consistancy of the dough should have been my first clue that I'd f***ed up, but instead I refrigerated the pasta sheets, which actually just made it crumbly and tough. Not helpful.

I mixed up a filling with herbed goat cheese, ricotta, and some shredded mozzerella and loaded it all up into my Kitchenaid ravioli maker. Here are most of the results:


Only a few raviolis ended up looking half decent.


However, because I hate to waste my own work and am somewhat clever, all was not lost. I froze the good looking raviolis for another night. With the demented raviolis and the leftover filling, I decided to put together a lasagna! I ran out to the garden and clipped some chard.


Then I layered that onto the ravioli mess.


Then the cheese filling.


And, somewhat to my horror, some Six Cheese Ragu. Don't get me wrong, I have a unreasonable LOVE for jars of store bought red sauce, but pouring it onto my homemade "ravioli", fresh cut chard, and a decadent goat cheese filling was decidedly sacreligious. BUT it was the only sauce I had on hand, so on it went.


I topped that with a bit more retarded ravioli and pasta scraps, another layer of sauce, and shredded mozzarella.





In the end, it actually was pretty delicious. The pasta texture was a little off, but was honestly quite tasty. I think I will probably even make the beet pasta again. Next time I think I'll follow the recipe a little closer, and will probably skip the ravioli making and go for another lasagna. It would be fun to make a lasagna with red pasta sheets and a white sauce, a reverse of the usual colors.

Stay tuned for a few days from now when I use the ravioli that weren't disasters.

Fava Fest

The fava bean plants are starting to look a little sad in this summer weather. I suspicion they lose their ability to fight off bugs and diseases in the heat, because their leaves are droopy and munched. Luckily, there was a pretty good crop of mature beans on them. I had been worried when I planted them that it was too late and I wouldn't get a harvest. I think the heat did cause some blossoms and small beans to drop, but those that were into their development already seem to still be maturing just fine.

I harvested about half of the beans that were on the plants. Any that looked like they could use a bit longer to mature stayed on the plants. I pulled about 3 & 3/4 pounds off the plants. My understanding (from an article about the Santa Monica Farmers Market) is that favas run for about $3/pound, so I definitely recouped my seed costs on this one, especially if a few more pounds are still out there growing.


The sad part about favas is the amount of effort that goes into making them edible. First, you have to shell the favas.


You might think these are edible, but in reality there is a thick, pale skin still on the beans. In order to peel this off, you have to boil them in salt water for ~1min. If you cook them any longer, the beans start to get mushy, so after their brief boil they get put right into an ice bath. This loosens the skin which you can then pierce with a fingernail and squeeze the bean out.


In the end, I ended up with about 1 & 1/4 pounds of edible favas. Boy are they delicious though! I put half into the freezer for later and half into the fridge (after I snacked on a few!) I'm hoping to make something with the ones in the fridge in the next few days.

Blackberry Heaven

I ate a blackberry today. It was right off the vine, and slightly warm on this summer day. It tasted like eating sunshine.

Then I begrudgingly gave one to Elliott. He didn't really want it, thinking it wouldn't taste like anything. But even he said it was excellent, and he isn't typically forthcoming with compliments, so it must have been excellent.

Then I ate one more, and blackberry season was done for us this year. With the summer heat, growth is at a standstill, and there aren't any more flowers or green berries left. My little blackberry vines are in their first year, and so I'm grateful for the three berries we did get. Most blackberry plants won't produce any in their first year. However, it does make me feel like I can't wait for NEXT summer.