In A Pickle

So why haven't I posted on my garden and food blog for a full year? Because I've been too busy gardening and preserving. We expanded our vegetable garden last year (to about 2,000 SF) and it has now become a major time hog. With weeding, soil preparation, planting (amid the weather mishaps of the early part of the year) and then staking, spraying (although I limit that to what is absolutely necessary) and compost mulching, the garden can soak up days at a time.

But then the hardest part of all - the harvesting. Surely this ought to be the payoff and time for celebration. But it can lead to a sort of exhaustion, as piles of what a fellow gardener and blogger calls "obligatory vegetables" take over the kitchen and demand to be processed.

Thus it was in July when I came to resent my cucumbers for being so relentlessly productive. I had a disappointing crop in 2009 (an all-around poor summer for gardening) and was unable to make our favorite bread-and-butter pickles. So this year I planted 4 hills of pickling cucumbers, including two of Ferry-Morse's "Sumter". The other two hills were from old seed, including "Homemade Pickles" from Cook's. ("Amour", last year's choice from Johnny's, was discarded - it has awful prickly spines.) The two from old seed had a modest production, but Sumter exploded.

So of course I made a big batch of the bread-and-butter pickles, but Sumter wasn't done with me. Despair set in as I went out to the garden every other day to find another full flush of fruit ready to pick.


Fortunately I had collected several books on pickling, including the excellent The Joy of Pickling by Linda Ziedrich. Although I had never made dill pickles before, I tried her Short-brined Dill Pickles. Like most pickles, they had to cure on the shelf for a while. But I might have made a second batch if I had tasted them right away. They are wonderful - spicy (contain garlic, hot pepper and peppercorns in addition to dill) and not flabby, though I didn't include grape or cherry leaves. We'll have no trouble eating them up this winter.

Then it seemed that my moment had arrived to try traditional fermented dill pickles (called "half-sours" by Ziedrich). I didn't use her recipe but rather one from Ohio State extension. Those did turn a bit flabby and though they are tasty enough, I won't try that again. They filled up my Gartopf fermenting crock and left an odor that was difficult to clean off.

Since I had already made another pickle (a family favorite, green tomato relish), it was time to stop. Fortunately pickling cucumbers are fine in salad, cold cucumber soup, etc. And less than a month after they began to fruit, I pulled the vines out. They were being afflicted by bacterial wilt disease.

Here is our own recipe for bread-and-butter pickles. Quantities of vegetables are approximate depending on what is available.

Bread and Butter Pickles

1 gallon (10 lbs) pickling cucumbers
5 medium onions
2 red bell peppers

Slice (a food processor works well for this) and layer in a 3-gallon pickling crock with 1 cup total of pickling salt. Cover with a weighted plate for about an hour till brine forms (a quart jar filled with water will work). Refrigerate for about 6 hours.

Drain and rinse the vegetables and place into a large pot that contains this pickling mixture:

6 cups (1 quart plus 1 pint) apple cider vinegar
6 cups white sugar
2 whole cloves
1 1/2 t ground turmeric
1/4 c mustard seed
1 T celery seed
(spices may be placed loose into the mixture)
Heat briefly to mix before adding vegetables.


Note: if the vegetables are not rinsed, the pickles will be salty. A couple of washes is enough. Use a colander.

Heat the mixture (but do not boil) until the vegetables turn translucent. Pack into pint jars and process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes. Allow the pickles to cure for a month before using. This recipe makes approximately 16 pints.

An Early Frost

Fall is a bit of a melancholy time in the garden, especially after the first frost when it is time to take out dead plants. I don't know what our "standard" first frost date is around here but to my memory we have usually had a couple more weeks before it got to be a real problem. This year it was before mid-October.

Of course, there is frost and then there is frost. I have found that there are approximately three types of response of plants to dropping temperatures. First are the ones that turn up their toes and die the first time the thermometer gets to 32° F. These include squash, tomatoes, and nasturtiums. Then some others can take a brief dip to around 32°. These include peppers and eggplants, and probably beans. Others do just fine, thank you, with repeated low-thirties temperatures. The cabbage family and many herbs (but not basil!) are in this class. According to my plant physiology studies, the magic temperature for failure of many of the protections that these plants have against frost damage is 28° F. So these days I'm keeping a wary eye on the weather forecasts. Meanwhile, my remaining cabbage, some late-planted lettuce and self-sown dill and cilantro are fine, as are the scallions. I just had to pull out frost-damaged green beans, with pods still on them (I wasn't fast enough), and most of the peppers and eggplant are gone now too after we hit around 30°. I've constructed a tent around the remaining green peppers in hopes of letting some of them ripen.

Meanwhile, there is the garlic to get planted. It is going into the new bed so I'm off to dig in compost.

The Terror of Tomatoes: So Much of a Good Thing

It's fortunate that we choose not to remember unpleasant things and that we compartmentalize memories. Otherwise, we might never order so many garden seeds. We'd look at those lovely pictures and think, "Oh, no - the harvest!!".

Now is the season of desperate processing. Even with the depredations of a late-season tomato late blight infection, the tomatoes have advanced from one kitchen counter, to a second, to a table in the basement. I've pulled out the last of the vines but I'll have tomatoes ripening and asking to be processed for another week or two.

I grew three varieties this year. My old reliable for fresh eating and casual cooking is Carmello, which I've been buying from Renée's Garden. It is a tender-skinned variety bred for flavor that grows medium-sized red round tomatoes. This gets made into tabbouleh, gazpacho, fresh salsa, broiled tomatoes, and of course eaten as luxurious big fat red tomato slices.





I've usually grown an Italian plum-type tomato too, and lately it has been Pompeii, also from Reneé's Garden. They produced very well this year and made large long fruits.










This year I added Amish Paste from Cook's Garden. These are described as "acorn-shaped" and that works pretty well. They are supposed to be meaty and good for sauces. Some of these fruits were huge.

I can't compare flavor for these last two, because I combined them. I usually think of plum-type tomatoes as "paste" tomatoes. So I just quartered them and cooked them together in a couple of slow cookers, a.k.a. crock pots. I cover the pot until the tomatoes juice up and begin to cook, then remove the cover and let them cook down all day. Then I run them through a food mill to remove skins and seeds, and the result is a moderately thick purée which I freeze in jars.

What I do with the Carmello when it exceeds fresh eating requirements? I skin them (by placing briefly in a pan of boiling water and then pulling the skins off) cut them up, and cook them down. This goes into various dishes for freezing, like cabbage rolls and a huge batch of spaghetti sauce. But I also make a simple basil-tomato sauce for freezing. It can be used as is or as the base of other sauces and it is a good way to use the basil I grow every year.

Basil Tomato Sauce

For each large pot (about 6 quarts) of cooked tomatoes, cut up 1 medium onion and 6 garlic cloves. Cook them in about 1/4 cup of olive oil until translucent (don't let the garlic brown) and add the tomatoes and a plentiful quantity of fresh torn (not chopped) basil leaves. Simmer with stirring until thickened, 1-2 hours. Add ground black pepper and salt to taste (I often omit salt since tomatoes are fairly salty in themselves).

I've often used this from the freezer to make a more complex meaty spaghetti sauce. It can also be used to make a sauce with roasted red peppers.

Roasted Red Pepper Sauce

For each quart of Basil Tomato Sauce, roast and peel 1 ripe red bell pepper (or more). Put the pepper and the sauce into a blender and purée till smooth. Season with black pepper and 1/4 t each salt and sugar (or to taste).

I serve this with Eggplant Parmigiana. Both the prepared eggplant and the sauce freeze nicely for midwinter meals.

The Basil Tomato Sauce is just fine as is for dishes like traditional lasagna.

Mon Petit Chou

Not for nothing do the French use cabbage as a term of endearment. Cabbage is an enormously solid and reassuring vegetable that has provided good nutrition for the humanity of the world. It is productive, high in nutritional value, and best of all, stores well. I've written previously about its role as a storage vegetable and of course about its evocation as sauerkraut. I'm enormously vainglorious and possessive of my cabbages and delight in their translation from little plants in late April to amazingly huge heads by August.

This year I planted three varieties. Ruby Perfection (red cabbage), just a few. It stores well, we like the German red cabbage (Rötkohl), and I'm trying to learn other ways to use it. This year, a new variety planted specifically for sauerkraut. Kaitlin, a new F1 from Johnny's Selected Seeds, is supposed to be a late-season, good storage cabbage ideal for kraut. I'm hoping it will solve my problem with early splitting. So far it is not very big (I planted it last so maybe it got a slow start) but looks very healthy. But this post is devoted to Tendersweet, my darling little cabbage (mon petit chou).

Tendersweet (again, from Johnny's) was an experiment last year. I found that it was not ideal for kraut but was wonderful for fresh eating and cooking. As the name implies, it is a delicate, thin-leafed cabbage. The head is endearingly flat and the soft leaves peel away easily, which makes it perfect for cabbage rolls. (See the recipe in last year's post.) Last year I froze a number of these in meal-sized portions and we mournfully pulled the last from the freezer around January. More this year.

Because it is so mild and delicate, it doesn't need any of the fussing around that you sometimes read about with salting or brining. I just cut thin slivers across the head with my sharp knife and it can be used for slaw or even served with a simple vinaigrette. Even the midveins are not harsh and coarse as some cabbages can be.

It began splitting last week after a lot of rain, so I harvested a number of the larger heads for a small batch of sauerkraut, and stored some others for near-term eating. Happily there are still a few smaller heads out there waiting for later use.

A Bad Year for Garlic

Last year's harvest of garlic, my first, was very successful. We ate our homegrown garlic all winter, right up to mid-June, when I reluctantly bought one head of store-bought to see us through to harvest again. I was so pleased that I have ordered more than twice as much seed garlic to plant this fall.

But this year's crop seemed ill-fated. First, when I received the seed garlic from Johnny's, there was a note that they had detected some fungal infection on the New York White and let them know if any problems developed. Yet it was the German Extra-Hardy that had penicillium mold on them. I violated the first rule of gardening, which is Never plant bad seed. It was so late and the fall weather was so capricious (we did have a very early winter, with snow the week before Thanksgiving), that I just put everything into the ground, including some of my stored garlic.

Not everything came up in the spring. Further, when I first ventured out to the garden after the thaw, quite a few cloves had heaved out of the soil. I pushed them back in, but I don't think it worked. Probably mulching would have helped. Once the plants did come up, many of them were very small. Then we had unusually cool wet weather all June and into July. I harvested the garlic earlier than I wanted to, about mid-July, because the plants were flopping over and I didn't want the bulbs to rot in the ground. The harvested bulbs sat in my garden shed to cure for a couple of weeks before I sorted and cleaned them.

The yield was just under 9 pounds. I estimate that my home-grown garlic cost about $2.50 a pound (seed garlic is expensive). But worse, I saw symptoms of disease on them. I identified the likely cause as a Fusarium immediately because of the pinkish color. Sure enough, Fusarium rot is a known problem on garlic.

I think that most of affected bulbs were the softneck type, New York White. Luckily I didn't order that again this year. I noticed that even after a couple of weeks curing in the shed, the cut stem of the garlic was still moist, a bad idea.



According to an excellent source on garlic cultivation that I just found, stiffneck garlic is most successful in Northern home gardens. Apparently the softneck type (which I have never cared to braid) is easier for market gardeners to plant, but the stiffneck type is hardier.


A difference between stiffneck and softneck is that stiffneck must be pruned of its flower scape in June. Not a problem for me. These yield a delicious bonus - they are good in stir-fries and especially good in scrambled eggs.

The three varieties I've ordered for planting this fall, German Extra-Hardy, Russian Red, and Music, are all (by chance) stiff-neck. I've also found a new source that I might explore.

Meanwhile, I've cleaned the garlic from this year and put it into the driest spot I can find. I hope to beat the fungus to eating it.

Kohlrabi Final - Slaw Food

With maybe 15 pounds of kohlrabi still occupying my refrigerator, I did some browsing and found that a local food blogger (Shana of Gastronomical Three) had pulled together all the wisdom on using it for slaw and related recipes. One thing I didn't like about so many of the recipes was that they required the use of several different vegetables/fruits in addition to the kohlrabi, especially apples. While I like combined vegetable dishes, I also like to be able to make a simple dish for tonight's supper without assembling a long list of characters. So as a first pass, I simplified to this:

2 small kohlrabi, peeled and grated (used a food processor)
1 carrot, grated
About 3 tablespoons finely shredded sweet onion
About 2 tablespoons chopped parsley
2 mint leaves, chopped
Japanese seasoned rice vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
ground black pepper

The mint was Shana's idea but I didn't want it to dominate the salad, so used a very sparing amount. First I marinated the onion in the rice vinegar, then added the other ingredients. It was good, light and refreshing, lasted a couple of days in the refrigerator, and served well as an ad hoc addition to a sandwich (salami on marble bagel, if you must know). Notice, no added fat!

Pickled Kohlrabi Chinese Style

In my continuing quest for uses for kohlrabi, I tried the recipe for pickled kohlrabi in my Chinese cookbook. It worked.

First, a story. The first time I ever saw an actual living kohlrabi was when I visited the home of some colleagues, one of whom was Chinese. We were all young instructors at a small college in the Midwest, and Gene liked to cook. We were fortunate because he and his wife invited us over for some homemade Chinese food. (This is how I learned to stir-fry.)

They had recently bought their first house, a new house in a subdivision. They had a very small garden in the back. The only thing growing in it was kohlrabi. He didn't prepare it for us but I wondered for many years why, of all the possible vegetables, that was the one they grew. I am now convinced that it was so they could make this pickle.

Actually, it is not quite a pickle but the product of short fermentation, like sauerkraut but for a shorter period. The result is a pleasantly tangy product that is somewhat radish-like and somewhat reminiscent of kimchi. I think that it might be something one would serve alongside many dishes, and like kimchi, it could become a regular part of daily meals.

Kohlrabi Pickles (Pow Tsai: Szechuan)
slightly modified from
"An Encyclopedia of Chinese Food and Cooking"
by Chang, Chang, Kutscher and Kutscher,
Crown Publishers

For a 1 quart Mason-type canning jar, prepare a solution of 2 cups boiling water and 1 Tablespoon salt (not iodized). Allow to cool.

Peel 3-4 kohlrabi, depending on size (recipe says 1 pound) and cut into slivers.
Cut fresh ginger into slices. Use 4.
Peel 2 cloves garlic, slice.
Place all these vegetables into the jar.
Optional: also 1 "red-hot pepper", seeded and sliced.

Pour cooled salt solution over vegetables. Add one tablespoon wine (I used a dry white wine.) and screw down cap. Place on counter. After three days, refrigerate.

Notes: Carbon dioxide bubbles form by the next morning. It appears to be a classic lactic acid fermentation. Best not to screw down lid too tightly, since some pressure might build up.

I substituted a tablespoon of Sambal Oelek for the hot pepper. A little too hot for my taste. One could use a red dry "Japanese" pepper instead.