Well, I am going to go for the garden update for now, as well as the cool cooking tip I read recently. (Surprise! That wasn't one of the things I had promised last week!)
The other day my new Cuisine At Home showed up in the mailbox. In it was a tip for using a small foam paint roller instead of a pastry brush when dealing with filo dough. The tip said that it goes faster, doesn't leave bristles behind, and doesn't tear the dough. 
So, since I had already been planning on making Baklava this week, I decided to give it a try. This is a seriously awesome way to deal with getting butter onto the filo with little mess and tearing. Easy clan-up too; just put it into a zip-lock baggie and toss it into the freezer until the next time you need to use it!If you were hanging around here at Casa Coffee Yarn last year, you may remember our tomato debacle. Well, the garden report for this year is entirely different. There were some tomatoes harvested before the great out-migration, but more were harvested after they all left.
I brought in this bucketful-plus on August 30Th, 
and made sure nothing was getting smashed. 
Of course, all those tomatoes meant Hubband and I got to have fresh tomato and onion casserole, BLTs, broiled cheese and tomato sandwiches,
and tomato, basil, and fresh mozzarella salad a time or several for dinner before he left for China!
About a week after that, I got another bucketful, and then around the 11Th of September I brought in these! Some of the cages were being pulled over by tomatoes, so I needed to rescue them. This basketful weighed in at fifty pounds and I have more to harvest tomorrow or the next day. We have had more of all the previously mentioned dishes, plus fresh salsa and tomato-cheese pie, and of course the eating of tomatoes like apples! I am going to make more salsa and try to get some canned for the daughter-units, and may wind up making some Green Tomato Mince (non-meat). My favorite thing about having a garden? Home-grown tomatoes
Home grown tomatoes, home grown tomatoes
What'd life be without home grown tomatoes
There's only two things that money can't buy
That's true love and home grown tomatoes
(Just in case you were wanting to see the finished Baklava.)
Ohh! If one day's harvest (that basket) was over 50#, you'll have 100s of pounds by frost. Any chance enough will be canned that the daughter units will have more than enough, and there will be a few jars left over for the brother units?
ReplyDeleteLast year I was visiting my friend Ed in Tucson. He volunteers at an experimental station at the Agricultural Extension of the University of Arizona, where he was helping with some sort of hydroponic thing which involved tomatoes. Here was this little 3" x 3" x 3" styrofoam cube with a tomato plant growing out of it, and a drip irrigation tube going into it. (Different plants were getting different kinds of food.) Each plant was more than 40 feet long, multi-trunked, and had hundreds and hundreds of tomatoes on it. He gave me a big bag of them to take home (after carefully weigning them and recording the weight), and they were truely awesomely delicious.
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't actually like tomatoes; Wife said they were awesome.
Looks Yummy!!!Hugs Darcy
ReplyDeleteStill here and still reading! lol :-) I can't believe all the tomatoes you've harvested! And I'll pass along the foam roller trick to the hubby.
ReplyDeleteMmmmm....'maters! Lucky girl! Bambi ate all mine.
ReplyDeleteI hope the brother units include me. All that sounds yummy. Now that I have a pizza stone and at least one recipe for pizza dough, I can make fresh pizza (with toms - I have a few left, fresh basil, etc etc). And the roller trick with Phyllo is neat! is the butter soft or melted?
ReplyDelete