The year that peas grew (finally!)

Living in our tiny little farm, I think about gardening a great deal. During our (usually) short and mild winters I peruse seed catalogs and long for the day of tomatoes and peppers. Last year was the first time that we grew things all the way through the winter months, which made me consider planting things that would be edible in the Spring.

I started it with a pack of seeds last year. We read all about planting peas, soaked them and prepared 4 large containers, and planted them on a nice day in March. Soon after a plaque of squirrels descended over our garden and unearthed all our peas. It took longer to plant them than for the little beasts to dig them up.

The following weekend, undeterred, we did it all over again. After carefully planting the seeds we asked Craig for some help and managed to cover our containers with chicken wire. We squealed with delight when the little plants poked their tendrils out of the earth. We built a nice trellis for them. And, soon after, we watched them wilt in the sun of one of the warmest Aprils ever. So much for peas.

This year we decided to be more aggresive. We had the peas in the ground by February 2, 2009. Two nights after planting the peas we had a hard frost. Since we didn't see any peas come up from that first planting, we assumed that the seedlings were killed by the frost. We replanted our pea beds on February 14th. We seeded Alaska peas from Ferry Morse that had been soaked overnight with a tablet of Vitamin C. The peas took a whole week to germinate, but they ended up coming up nicely. Since this year we had more rain and cold weather than ever I covered the pea beds with plastic everytime that there was frost in the forecast. Soon after planting the beds were filling up with plants and we built them a trellis from twigs, fashioned after a trellis that we saw at Colonial Williamsburg.

By May 14th we harvested our first peas. Our first day we picked up 6 oz of peas, which we proudly shelled and prepared with wilted lettuce. We have picked about 2 pounds of peas and served them as a side dish 4 times. Our peas are very sweet and very tender, and taste as good raw as they do when cooked.

The hot weather is getting to our pea plants, and the harvest may be coming to an end by next weekend. We will replant those beds with beans to have them growing this summer. I think the long, rainy spring had a lot to do with our success with the peas. It really has been fun to have them growing in the garden!

Here is a couple of ways that we prepared our peas this year:

My Mom's Peas and Potatoes

6-8 oz of peas, shelled
4 potatoes
4 strips of bacon
1/2 of a small onion
2 large cloves of garlic
olive oil, salt, and pepper

Peel the potatoes, cut them in quarters, and boil them in salted water for 10 min. Add the shelled peas to the boiling water and cook until the potatoes are done. Drain the water and put the peas and potatoes back in the pan.
Cut the bacon in small pieces, and fry it in a little olive oil with the chopped onion. When the onion gets lightly browned and the bacon is almost done, add the chopped garlic. As soon as the garlic starts to brown, season the peas and potatoes with salt and pepper and pour the bacon/onion/garlic mixture with the oil over them. Serve right away.

Sherry Castle's Tiny Green Peas
(I got this recipe at a cooking class with Sherry and changed it a bit to our taste)

2 cups shelled peas
1/2 cup chicken stock
2 tbsp butter
1 cup finely chopped lettuce
Salt and pepper

Blanch the peas in boiling water for 5 min. Drain. Cook the chicken stock in a saucepan until reduced by half. Add the peas and the butter. When the butter is melted, add the lettuce and stir until it wilts. Season with salt and pepper.

Victoria's Lemon Zest French toast

Ingredients:
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
about 1 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
1 1/2 tablespoons of butter
a lemon
either French bread or day old sandwich bread, either one works.

Instructions:
beat the eggs together in a large bowl
add the milk to the eggs and mix them together untill its blended evenly
add the sugar and the vanilla

heat up a nonstick pan or skillet on the stove and add the butter or a nonstick spray to keep the toast from sticking to the pan. when the butter has melted, lower the heat to medium.

once the pan is nice and hot, put a slice of the bread into the egg mixture. flip it over so that the bread soaks it up. place the bread on the skillet and cook for two minutes on both sides,or untill the toast is nicely browned, flipping with a large spatula. repeat this step with as many slices as you'd like.

once you have cooked a slice, place it on a large plate. sprinkle confectioners sugar over the top. take the zest from a lemon and zest it over the toast, this adds a really bright flavor to the toast so it doesnt taste so heavy.
enjoy! :)

Garlic 2.0

A lot of what happened in our garden last year started with the idea of growing our own garlic. At that time, we didn't know anybody who did, but it seemed like an interesting idea. We use garlic in the kitchen, but not huge quantities of it, so it seemed very possible to grow enough garlic for our household.

In the fall of 2007 I started to poke around the Internet looking for information, and ended up buying a starter package of garlic bulbs for planting from The Garlic Store. The sampler had 8 garlic varieties, and came all bundled together with a little leaflet explaining how to plant it and care for it.

Including in the sampler were (according to their website):

Elephant Garlic Clove - The giant clove will grow out to massive bulb, the best for roasting garlic
Polish White - The large, round bulbs have a cream colored wrapper with a real punchy taste.
Brown Tempest- If eaten raw, the cloves have a fiery flavor, but that mellows to a pleasing aftertaste
Susanville- a beautiful artichoke variety, with large cream/pink bulbs, similar to Inchelium; has a compelling raw flavor, one of the most popular, and a long storage life
Red Janice - very hard to find; from Nmarazeni, Republic of Georgia; a turban with puplish stripes and a taste that is almost sweet and spicy
Inchelium Red - our biggest selling softneck; a Rodale kitchen taste test winner; gorgeous cream/pink wrappers
Applegate - a softneck artichoke-type from the Pacific Northwest
Bronock Red - a small-ish red garlic that they have since stopped selling.

Most of these grew beautifully in our garden. Every single clove of garlic that we planted sprouted and produced a head of garlic. Some were much better than others. Without a question, our favorite was Polish White, which has a lovely flavor when roasted, very easy to recognize.

We started harvesting garlic in July (Inchellium was our first garlic to be ready) and we didn't buy any garlic until December, even though we cooked almost every day this year. We also harvested garlic scapes (edible garlic flowers, delicious in stews). Our garlic harvest was a big success.

In the Fall of 2008 we planted the remainder of our garlic crop. 90 cloves of smaller garlics were planted in square foot beds, along with 4 large Elephant garlic cloves. Within 10 days all had sprouted and were growing beautifully. Even after a long, cold winter all the garlic is looking verdant and green.

I can't wait for this year's crop. Garlic independence might seem like a trivial thing, but it makes us really happy to know that we're growing our very own garlic and we don't have to purchase any of it!

I'll post this year (or else)

As far as journals go, mine sucks. I had such great dreams for this blog, such illusions of grandeur, that I became paralyzed with fear. If I didn't have the greatest stories, and the greatest pictures to go with it, I might as well not post. If I couldn't reach far and wide with my witty prose, then I might as well never come back to post a thing to this blog. If I couldn't be happy and upbeat and chipper, then I might as well shut up.

And so, I did shut up.

My mother passed away, after a long and sad battle with bladder cancer, on September 15, 2008. Any happiness that she may have experienced in her last year came from going outside to our garden to pick up fresh veggies, or to watch the grandchildren do it. I now realize that I had planted that big garden for her, and I am so glad that I did. As far as children go, I don't think I was the best one that my mother could have, but at least I can grow things in the garden...and she liked that about me.

I haven't been too happy or too chipper this past year, but things are getting better. I don't think that my writing has improved, or that I have gotten any better at posting pictures, but I feel that I need to write things down as imperfect as they might be, so here I am. I am posting, even if it's only a short post to write about something I saw or something I cooked.

Which brings me to my first post of the year: Making marmalade.

We went to visit Craig's family in Florida and brought home a couple big bags of citrus. Oranges, Meyer lemons, and Ponderosa lemons (the biggest lemons I have ever seen) as fresh and fragrant as only fresh fruit could be. I made marmalade with some of the oranges and the Meyer lemons, and then made even more marmalade using a very large Ponderosa lemon. I have never seen lemon marmalade before, but I figured that I would give it a try. It is very tart, and different from orange marmalade, but so good on crackers with Brie cheese! I am so glad that I made it. I used the recipe that comes with the Sure-Jell powdered pectin, but since that recipe is for oranges, I changed it up a bit.

Here is my recipe:

1 large Ponderosa lemon (I used a ripe one, most of the peel had turned yellow)
3 cups of sugar
1/2 envelope of powdered Sure-Jell pectin
1/16 tsp of baking soda
1/2 cup of water
1/4 tbsp butter

Using a vegetable peeler, peel just the zest off the lemon (without any of the white part) and them cut the peels into small strips. Put the peel in a sauce pan with the water and the baking soda and simmer for 20 minutes.
In the meantime, peel the lemon and remove all the white parts and seeds. With a large lemon, you will get about 2 cups of lemon pieces.
When the peels are cooked, add the lemon and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring once or twice so it doesn't scorch.
After the 10 minutes are over, add the pectin, mix well and bring the mixture to a rolling boil. Boil for exactly one minute.
Add the butter (to reduce foaming) and the sugar, mix very well and boil for another minute.

Pour the finished marmalade into small canning jars and process in a boiling water canner for 10 minutes.

This makes a marmalade that has a wonderful yellow color, lovely consistency, and spreads very well.