August is the month when the garden comes to fruition! Yesterday, the kitchen was hopping…and warm! Time to process the last of the beans and deal with the pile of tomatoes that are ready now.
Luckily, the carrots have just begun to fill out. We’ll munch on these for a while and let the rest get bigger.
Lavender
The lavender is finally flowering so I’ve begun cutting a few of the stems. A tray of lavender will be sitting around for the next few weeks as they dry. When dry, I’ll rub off the flower buds and let them dry some more. They’ll be useful when I make lavender-infused olive oil.
Dehydrating Beans
This was the last picking for this second planting of beans. We pulled the plants as we picked. I snapped the beans, blanched them and chilled them in ice water.
Then I laid them out on the dehydrator trays. They filled 4 trays.
And 10 hours later…
It always amazes me how little space dehydrated beans take up, compared to putting them in the freezer. Since I use them mostly in soups and stews it’s a very efficient way to store them.
Cooking Tomatoes
We have eaten the first tomatoes to ripen. This larger batch of tomatoes will be cooked enough to soften them but I won’t put them in the food processor to make them smooth. I’ll use these in vegetable soup.
The tomatoes are washed. I cut the tops off to get rid of any ugly stems. Then I turn each tomato over and cut an X on the bottom.
Next, I bring a pot of water to a boil and drop a few at a time into the boiling water. In less than 1 minute the peel starts to split and separate from the tomato.
Then, I quickly transfer them one at a time to a big bowl of cold water with ice cubes. That helps loosen the peel.
Then, I stack them gently into a bowl until I’ve done them all.
Now, I sit down at the kitchen table and take each tomato, remove the peel and cut the tomato into smaller pieces. These go into a pot that will go back on the stove to simmer until the mixture is soft and some of the water is boiled off. The time depends on if I’m going to run them in the food processor or not. I like a chunky mixture for my vegetable soup. If I’m making spaghetti sauce, I’ll cook them longer uncovered and let more water boil off.
This is how much I put in the freezer yesterday…and the tomatoes are just starting to ripen! It’s going to be a busy August!
More Beans?
The next planting of beans is still pretty small, but they look good. I’ll be watching the weather in early September to see if we get any beans before the first frost.
So that’s what’s happening in my kitchen the second week of August! I know I’ll appreciate it in the winter when I want to make soup! Enjoy!
Please comment or email me directly with questions at marykisner@comcast.net.