Shishito peppers in containers beat those in ground but have been regularly enjoying both lightly grilled

Cucumber salad and eggs with herbs for breakfast. Vegetable wraps for lunch to take along on a hike. Dinner will include salad and marinated eggplant and probably more cucumber.

Been eating tomato sandwiches all weekend, toasted pumpernickel, mayonnaise, sliced tomato (orange ones work the best IMO) and black pepper. One of my favorite garden-season lunches. Fried up a hot mushroom pepper and put it on my meatball sub last night, now I just have to figure out what do with the other 500...assuming they ever turn red.

So many melons!

With all the 2015 heat, it looks like my melon season may end, just about when it usually begins. We will see but there aren't many cantaloupe and galia amongst the vines now. There are some melon volunteers that I very nearly jerked out of the onions, months ago. Turns out, they are charentais from last year's hybrid! They should be able to ripen, too!

Vining on over to the far end of the garden ... we brought home two winter squash that sure look mature. Will have them for dinner, probably tonight. Fully ripe or otherwise, it isn't a bad way to enjoy winter squash ... I learned that eating the immatures as fall frosts shut down the gardening in seasons past.

Steve

I am coming close to a bumper winter squash crop - I have them growing vertically on a trellis, and this year, I caught the first indications of powdery mildew and sprayed the vines with sulfur, at 1 twice a week apart, which seems to have given me another 3 weeks. I also caught the vine beetles early enough, I hope, they only killed one plant. The fruit is maturing nicely - stems starting to tan and crack, with at least 3 weeks until frost.

We had our first enormous tomato salad yesterday - dice up lots of tomatoes, dice up lots of shallots, onions, and basil, add ground pepper, salt and olive oil, marinate a bit, make about a gallon, then eat with crusty bread to soak up the juice. In spite of all the warnings about cold tomatoes, this tastes pretty good on day two and three in the fridge, sort of like a gazpacho.

Hey! I happen to like refrigerated tomatoes! And I remember at Ft. Leonard Wood, the chow hall would serve what they called "German tomato salad" cut up tomatoes with bacon bits and some kind of white dressing (mayonnaise?) it was delicious, AND cold!

I have 2 summer squash, one yellow straight-neck and one zuke, that I will pick probably this weekend. It may be all we get, but, for a very late June (or was it early July?) planting, I didn't expect a bumper crop off of them. Next year I plan on trying Johnny's new Butterscotch PMR butternut, supposed to have short vines so I can actually fit it into the vegetable garden.

As always, jealous of melons, Steve! How lucky you are to be able to eat truly ripe melons off the vine...regularly!

Today we ate some eggplant in a stir fry I made and threw in a few Thai hot peppers and some Thai basil. It was pretty darn good!

We had visitors over the weekend, and put up a dinner with chopped up grilled sweet red peppers mixed with a whole bunch of fresh shallot bulbs done in aluminum foil packets with butter and salt, store-bought portobello mushrooms grilled with olive oil and blue cheese, and a big bowl of tomato basil salad doused with just salt and olive oil. Some good, this was.

That sounds wonderful, David.

Here for Contrast: I felt I had minimum amount of time to prepare my lunch, yesterday. I set some water boiling. Slid some angelhair pasta out of the box, broke it in half so I wouldn't make too much of a mess eating it, and tossed that in the water. It got a couple of stirs over its 4 minute cooking time.
Turning to my cutting board and a lovely, 10 ounce heirloom tomato! Chopped, mostly peeled, it went on top the cooked and drained pasta in a bowl. Into the microwave for 3 minutes at 40% power. While I'm nuking those two, I gathered the remaining ingredients.

Maggi sauce, garlic salt, shredded cheddar cheese, and catchup.

Teaspoon of Maggi, tablespoon of catchup, sprinkle of garlic salt ... toss and back in microwave for 30 seconds. Half a cup of cheddar, 30 seconds more, toss lightly ... another 30 seconds heating.

I've got a meal _ Under 10 minutes of cooking time ...

Steve

Angle hair pasta and a quick sauce from fresh tomatoes may well be lunch today.

Made some "yellow" salsa this evening with orange tomatoes, hot lemon (AKA aji limon) peppers, cilantro, and garlic and onions that I traded with the neighbor for. Also spent the day making jerky, got some bison "pemmican" in the dehydrator now.

Drug the garbage can out of the garage last night to set out on the road, today. ( Insert smiley with rolling eyes ...)

Despite an early start to this season, Labor Day is always the time for the heaviest kitchen trash -- all those corncobs!

Yesterday afternoon had a high temperature of only 54°. Picnickers should have a warmer day, today! Do you have sweetcorn for the grill??

Steve

I skipped growing corn this year, but a local farm in Brighton sells Peaches and Cream sweetcorn and it's wonderful. I've blanched and frozen 8 ears so far and 4 more are in the fridge for tonight's dinner to go along with some New York steaks. I'm heading out in a few to pick some Beefsteak and Red Siberian tomatoes. The Roma's and San Marzano's need more time. It was 85 here yesterday and it looks like the warm weather will stick around for a while. We built a campfire in the backyard last night and sat under the stars. I love this time of year, the 90 degree temps are gone, just warm days and cool nights!

http://i1010.photobucket.com/albums/af224/keen101/Garden%202015/20150905_183301_zpsfqlqplge.jpg

Finally, can ID all the tomatoes in the patch! Too many missteps on plant labels. Also, too many pink beefsteaks. Well, not too, too many ...

I can report on those 2 squash we had on the 24th, Keen'. They weren't much for flavor ... a little immature.

I picked up a Buttercup, today. It essentially fell off the vine.

We will try that and keep our fingers crossed ... oo, ouch! It's likely to be painful holding a fork that way!

Steve

This past week I have been pulling 3 carrots a day- they weren't thinned as I couldn't bend and pull for most of summer. Usually it is 2 & 1 broken one! Then I have my snack. Had a tomato sandwich 2 days ago with the 1 yellow Aschoyka that has ripened so far. Lots of green tomatoes. But I want ripe big tomatoes! Maybe they will under the bed this year.

Finally got a good tomato from my garden! It's a two-tone. I think Big Rainbow. I got it from Irish Home Farm. It was a slow-to-produce plant, but the tomatoes from it now are large, pretty, and incredibly sweet. I had it cut up cold with some olive oil, balsamic vinegar, pepper, parm cheese, and a bed of pasta.

Last night I had some Marconi peppers from the two plants that gardenchloe gave me. There were some that were red and some yellow. Thin strips, sauteed with olive oil, lots of garlic, onion and some sausages. Even my kid liked it.

Beautiful. Edit - today, Saturday, I snipped off the mature winter squash - those with the brown, cracked stems. I got 60 full-sized squash, 6-8 lbs each, the Cha Cha and Winter Sweet from Johnny's. There are probably 60 more out there that are not yet mature - fingers crossed, they may make it. Listening to the local low-watt FM radio station with their ag report, we now get 17 more frost free days than before. At the link is a short guide from Johnny's on squash selection and how the fruit matures on storage. I usually won't touch them until Thanksgiving.

I don't know, David, nbm1981's "one more week" on the vine sure seems less complicated than keeping track of winter squash fruit set and storage time, Dr. Brent Loy is talking about.

Still, it is the Brent Loy! The guy with all those UNH melons. I gotta pay attention to fruit set and storage time, now?? Storage time is easy. Maybe fruit set would make sense if I had any latitude for variety choice. Maybe I do, now. And, maybe that was the problem years ago when there were problems with the flavor of acorn squash. I blamed the soil ...

Good, credible flavor quality information ..!

Steve

This year, as soon as the powdery mildew showed up, I sprayed with sulphur - that gave me another 2-3 weeks.

We made a fresh tomato / red pepper sauce for angle hair pasta yesterday. It was pretty good. Thats one of the drawbacks with sweet peppers - I get 30 red ones pretty much all at once, and it's a challenge to eat them all at their peak. But we try.

David, I can't seem to get enough of the sweet peppers! I've had a few from my plant and purchased a bunch at the little produce market nearby that sells all locally grown produce.

I was just reading about a method for making roasted red peppers in the crockpot. They could be canned or frozen for use in the Winter. Yum!

(I'll edit in that Photobucket picture in a moment!!) This link work?

http://s60.photobucket.com/user/Digit_007/media/harvest016.jpg.html

This was from several years ago when the Marconi peppers had a very good year. (I suppose they are again in 2015 but customers seem to be benefiting at a good pace ...).

It is probably about the same as using a crock pot but they were cooked slowly on the stove. The sauce was simply peppers. A big spoon can scrape the frozen sauce out of the bag, straight from the freezer. That spoonful can go right into a tomato sauce for a little change over the pasta. (That year, having the tomato sauce by itself was a change - we had so much pepper sauce to use!)

Steve

Something ate from my garden the other day and it wasn't me! Does anyone else have squirrels? I truly dislike them. I found they had taken two of my beautiful tomatoes off the plant, one green one and one half-ripe one. They were huge tomatoes. The stupid beast, took one small bite from each and discarded them on the ground by the plant. Grrr. I got some of that bird netting. I hope it works. I'm so angry!

Squirrels, at least mine, will return to the same tomato again and again - so I lower the over all damage by just leaving the half-eaten ones out there on the vine.

Today I picked the rest of the peppers - two 3 gallon buckets of red ones and two buckets of green ones. I got my labels mixed up, couldn't tell the hot big ones from the not hot big ones, so I ended up food-processing all the red ones together along with the known-hot chili's and put the mash in the food dehydrator, just like Steve's picture. I'll just make some sort of hot pepper powder out of it all, I guess, or I might try that freezing idea. I'll roast and freeze the green ones.

I roast them on the grill until the skins mostly turn black, then peel and eat or put on sandwiches. Yum!

It has worked well to make that frozen mash with hot peppers.

I didn't cook them, just used a mortar and pestle and took my time.

Ya know, a person can get in trouble messing with hot peppers. Scraping the frozen mash has been fairly problem free. Usually, they have been dried. Even tho, I've had plenty of trouble from dried peppers.

Steve

Steve, I have found that when messing with hot peppers that gloves do not help so I quit useing them. What does work however is rinsing your hands with rubbing alcohol after you are done.

Roasted Marconi peppers from the seedlings given to me by Gardenchloe. These are so sweet and delicious! The only sad part is that it takes about 30 minutes to prepare them and about two minutes to eat them!

Those look more like big chili. The Marconi I have grown are long but more square on bottom.

Not a great year for watermelon, but partly because i did not plant in a good spot. Although it was a poor year for squash too, so perhaps weather contributed. Despite that i harvested a perfectly ripe watermelon today (because it split open) and a nearly ripe yellow watermelon yesterday (harvested because of slight bird damage).

Ate this beautiful tomato today. This plant did not produce a high yield but the tomatoes on it are stupendous, remarkable, delicious. In fact, adding anything to it ruins the flavor. I just eat them cut into chunks.

Color and flavor seem closely related in tomato varieties.

My squash had a bad season where Steve and the sprinkler failed in the hottest week of summer.

Couple of the plants died. More lost foliage. The sun wasn't finished with them and burned the fruits ...

Elsewhere, the squash and pumpkins were fine. A sprinkler could reach those plants. Melons were in that area, also. They were also fine.

Steve

Jacob's Cattle beans cooked in broth with garlic, served with sauteed Italian sweet peppers, grated cheese, and hot peppers.

An alternative would have been coarsely chopped pea tendrils with some other veggies in a stir-fry. Yes, I harvested some. Figured that more freezes will put a stop to pod formation and, I like 'em when the tendrils come with flowers. Tender!

Steve

By the way, I'm experimenting to see if that previously uploaded pepper and bean image of mine can be used in this post. If not by using its url ... there will be editing to get it in here ت.

Can you see that picture?

If so ..

. Shoot. All I did was highlight, copy and paste ... from that other RMG thread on peppers!

Easy Peasy!

Steve

Potato with celery root and leek soup ..!

ツ

Steve

I am picking, blanching and freezing my late bumper crop of roma tomatoes. I found 2 bags of unused tomatoes from last year's crop, dated 10/27/14. Wow, that was late! The tomatillos are going strong, too. I grew parsnips this year and need to find out when to dig them up. I'm trying to leave the late potatoes in pots alone till I see a freeze is coming.

A month ago, I'd have said this year was a bust, but plants are coming through at the end! One problem, I need to get the garlic planted and I haven't culled enough plants to make room for them. I'm going to have to pull some things this weekend and get the garlic in!

Parsnips, 'Barb? I read that as "how" to dig them ... When? -- Iowa State says cool weather converts starches to sugar. Utah State U says to harvest "when they reach full size."

Man! Parsnips are one sweet veggie! I guess it makes sense to keep them in the ground until there are some hard freezes but I suspect they sweeten in the fridge ...

I'll post a picture of an Andover parsnip. If this tastes good, I think I've really found my variety! It's 15" long and the tip broke! I only wanted 2 roots the other day, borrowed the neighbor's spading fork and was afraid I'd break it on that one ... went back and got it, risking my own spading fork.

Now that I've got 2, I'm going to try it in 2 ways. One, just like I usually do, sauteed in butter after slicing. However ... this time I'm going to do that in combination with carrots. I don't know why it has never occurred to me to do those in combination.

Everyone tells me to roast parsnips. Okay, I do that - with a beef roast. However ... this time I intend to cut it small with other root veggies, roast them and make soup! I'm a soup guy but I've never roasted the veggies prior to putting them in broth. I'm looking forward to these 2 simple recipes.

Steve

Thanks, digit! How and when is very helpful! Bonnie and I talked about parsnips at the last swap at her house and then Skybird served some with dinner a while back. They were very good, so I thought I'd try growing a few this year. I'll have to check on the variety.

I'm not sure what full size looks like or if my soil would allow anything to grow 15" deep, that's impressive! With carrots, you can usually gage the size by looking at soil level, but I can't tell with the parsnips. I'll be careful when I dig them. I may try digging a few soon and leaving a few through a frost or two.

Both cooking methods sound wonderful!

Oops! I almost forgot to post a picture of the parsnip!

Here is the pic I was trying to avoid using:

Here

is about a third of it,

in a somewhat altered state:

I don't have a picture of my Sunday Portuguese kale soup. I'm so glad those plants came back with new leaves after our blazing hot summer.

Steve

The roasted vegetable soup was great. Quite sweet ...

But then, we went on to this:

I'm gonna have to tone down the "sweet!" Dinner included the Sugar Snap peas, stir-fried with beef and splashed with teriyaki sauce ...

I doubt that I'm getting the exercise to keep up with this diet.

Steve

DW got up early and began running things like chicken meat and carrots through the food processor.

I guess we are having cabbage rolls. She also shreds cabbage to go in her cabbage rolls.

I have been encouraging her to make salsa sauce and we have green onions and cilantro from the garden for that. I'm trying to keep an eye on her to be sure she doesn't use the nice ripe Porter tomatoes for tomato sauce over rolls. There is other tomato sauce for that.

Steve

I ought not have come in here, I'm starving lol, and I love cabbage rolls! I was practically raised on cabbage rolls, and bierocks (is it any wonder my great-grandmother's name was Jablonski)

It won't be "from the garden" but I think c-rolls are definately on the menu later this week.

The "giant" harvest from my container carrots just in time for the storm. After cleaning, it turned out to be about two servings.

A BLT sandwich. There won't be many more of those!

Another frost this morning. Tomorrow morning is supposed to be a little colder. Saturday morning, colder yet. The days have turned bright, sunny and still. There isn't much hurry for me to get the roots out of the gardens but even the few lettuce plants won't be able to take advantage of the nice afternoons with such cold mornings.

But then again, it's late October.

Steve

Chili.

Yeah, it froze this morning. Lovely blue skies now. Up early so it's lunchtime. Chili.

I know that the Rattlesnake beans are good. What I will be trying next are the Burgundy Bolitas with the same seasonings. I've tried them once just in beef broth. Only so many seeds - only so much room in the 2016 garden - do I want Burgundy Bolitas next year, or not? Time for me to figure that out!

This is so much fun. Yes, I know, dry beans are cheap. Got any of the aforementioned in your neighborhood supermarket? I . don't . think . so.

Is this anything special? Well, I don't know. Tell you what, this chili has carrots and celery root in it, besides the beef and veggies that went into the broth. Nalley top that for nutrition? I don't know but I'm ready to go out and dig dahlias! Catch ya later

Steve

http://www.mjandhungryman.com/vegetarian-pumpkin-and-kale-pasta-bake/

Half the recipe and I did some substitutions ...

Mexican cheeses instead of mozzarella and I spiced it up a bit. Okay, I'll admit it: used bok choy instead of kale.

Steve ت

Great link, digit. Thanks. I love pumpkin but only as an ingredient in savory foods, not sweet. This is right up my alley.

Popmama, you probably know that Williams-Sonoma sells a “pumpkin pasta sauce,” then. I'm not sure if the thought would have ever occurred to me!

I know, I've lived a sheltered life ...

Anyway, I think I completely snuck the pumpkin past DW. I don't believe she even knew that it was in there. Odd to have an ingredient that cannot be tasted but ... Okay, you want to have some richness to the flavor there, a nice C. maxima squash is called for! BTW, 1 3/4 cups = 1 can of Libby's pumpkin.

Steve ツ

Tomatoes! I just finished a big salad with a large Amana Orange and two smaller Beefsteak tomatoes from the garden--with lettuce, cuke, onion, black olives, and cold ham! Yum! REAL tomatoes in the Dark of Winter are so amazing! There's still a few left in the unheated bedrooms upstairs--I figure they'll probably last into February again this year. I hadn't thought about BLTs until I re-noticed your post above, Digit! Might need to do one of those before I run out!

Skybird

We still have a few cherry tomatoes we are eating - New Years Day we had a get-together and everyone had them in their salads, a nice conversation piece. Still have garlic and onions and butternuts, will have some onions for dinner.