Category Archives: Cooking

barbecue, Brandywines, canning, Cooking, recipes, tomatoes, too much produce

Tomato management

August 23, 2021 CocktailFarmers Leave a comment

Summer rolls on, and the tomatoes keep coming. We’ve done a pretty good job of managing the volume, having made an adjustment to a greater number of large tomato and fewer cherry tomato plants in the garden this year. It’s a major reason why we keep a journal, so we can improve upon each year based on previous years’ learned lessons. Having recently finished putting up our frozen tomatoes for soup and cooking, we moved onto one of our favorite condiments: barbeque sauce.

A couple of years ago J became interested in making homemade BBQ sauce from our tomatoes. We have no complaints with store-bought, but the problem with large gardens and good growing years is that production often outstrips consumption, even when being generous with the neighbors – and we’ve found absolutely no one who eats the same quantity of vegetables we do. Our sauce recipe was a bit of trial and error (this one is version number six of what we’ve tried) but it’s quickly become our favorite.

Cocktail Farmers Best BBQ Sauce

6 lbs tomatoes
2 cups chopped onion
4 garlic cloves
1 jalapeno (or other pepper with a kick)
2 cups cider vinegar
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup molasses
1 Tbs crushed pepper (black or red, depending on taste preference)
1 Tbs dry mustard
1 Tbs Kosher salt
1 Tbs smoked paprika

Smoke tomatoes, onion, and garlic on a smoker or charcoal grill for 1-2 hours, depending on the volume of vegetables.

This is actually 12 lbs of tomatoes, plus 4 cups of onion

Remove from heat, allow to cool slightly, and then mill with a fine screen:

Add spices to the tomato puree and boil until reduced by half.

That is an automatic pot stirrer – like that one coworker we all have, but significantly more helpful.

We made a double recipe over the weekend – we smoked twelve pounds of tomatoes + onion, milled and cooled it, and parked it in the fridge for the evening, then finished the sauce and canned it yesterday. All told, it took about 8 1/2 hours which I realize sounds slightly insane, but so are we. The reduction time for the sauce is really where the hours came in – it was almost 5 to get it down to the righ consistency, but we started with 2x the volume for this recipe, so it should be shorter if you go strictly by what I’ve written above.

Twelve pounds of tomatoes made 4 16 oz jars and 3 8 oz jars:

My house has smelled amazing for two days, and I can’t wait to do a brisket in a few weeks.

Brandywines, canning, Cooking, exhaustion, raised beds, success, sungolds, tomatoes, too much produce, zucchini

Now we’re cooking

August 18, 2014 CocktailFarmers Leave a comment

I can stop complaining about the lack of vegetables now:

This was a lot of stuff to come in all at once. It looks very impressive, posted on Facebook. I had several offers to, “….take some of that off your hands.” So kind of those folks! Where were they when I was on my hands & knees for four hours, weeding?

In the end, we put up 5 jars of pepperoncini peppers:

I found a great recipe for pickling them on Food.com. Our first batch tasted a little mushy, probably from the length of time they sat in the canner until I was able to finish stuffing all the jars and bring it to a boil. This time we stuffed the jars, filled the brine, removed the air and then put them all into the canner at once. We’re hoping this makes them crisper. The ones available commercially taste too bitter to me, so if they are just a little crunchier, they will be perfect.

We’ve got some beans coming, too:

Anellino di Trento and Royalty Purple bush beans

We grilled these with a little bit of olive oil, lemon juice and dill and they were fantastic. We’re enjoying the beans more than normal, given that just three weeks ago we thought they were a total loss. Something was getting over our fence and eating the bushes. We suspect a woodchuck, and so we set up the electric fence around the wire one. Problem solved.

After picking all those tomatoes, we parboiled, peeled, seeded and diced them into 2-cup quantities and froze them. We ended up with 2 bags of Krim, 3 bags of Kellogg, and a bag each of Brandywine and Roma. But we didn’t freeze all of them:

That is a Tomato Stack Salad with Corn & Avocado. It is delicious. We used Krim, Kellogg and Brandywine, plus corn, fresh chive and basil from the garden in the dressing. We have been waiting all season to make that stack of deliciousness. It was worth the wait.

In a fit of optimism, I planted 191 Knight peas in the back 40 yesterday. Average time to harvest? 56 days. That puts us somewhere around October 12, give or take depending on how warm fall is. I may have wasted $1.50 in seeds if we have an early frost. This is my idea of living dangerously.

canning, Cooking, end of season, exhaustion, experiments, lessons, success, tomatoes, unexpected outcomes

The end…..for now

November 8, 2013 CocktailFarmers Leave a comment

Today I ate the last dozen or so Sungold tomatoes. I would like to note that it is November, and this is amazing. I would have documented the occasion, but I was at work and forgot my camera. The garden kept going all the way through the second-to-last week of October, finally succumbing to a hard frost somewhere over the nights of October 23rd and 24th. It was a fantastic run. I can only tally what we canned or froze, but here’s where we stand in our first large-scale effort to preserve our harvest for later use:

22 jars dill pickles
5 jars bread and butter pickles
12 jars sweet banana peppers
4 jars green tomato chutney (hurrah! A use for unripe green tomatoes at the end of the season!)
56 cups of diced tomatoes
8 bags of beans
1 bag of peas
3 bags of corn
3 bags of peppers (jalapeno & Fooled You)

It was not a stellar year for either the peas or the corn – although we did eat some fresh – but it was an amazing year for tomatoes. We boiled, peeled, seeded & diced those suckers in 2-cup increments and froze them for use in cooking. We’ve already used about 9 bags so far, and the taste is so much better than even the canned organic tomatoes I normally buy. However, all these frozen vegetables take up a bit of room, as you can see:

There’s no way to really calculate what we harvested and ate fresh – over the long weekend of Columbus Day, J harvested about 15 of our Bride eggplants, fire roasted them, and turned them into eggplant dip. We ate one container, and froze the other two for future consumption as the recipe calls exclusively for Asian eggplants and we can’t get them around here unless we grow them. So we’ll defrost that container, maybe for New Year’s, and think longingly of fresh summer vegetables. It’s just about enough time to have forgotten how hot and backbreaking it is to weed in the middle of summer.

Until next year……

barbecue, Cooking, nothing to do with plants

Something to go with all those vegetables

June 14, 2013 CocktailFarmers 2 Comments

This is a drive-by post because we are not currently doing anything gardening related. We are currently here:

Doing this:

With this guy:

Steve Raichlen, author, television show host, nice guy

And Tuesday we made this:

Tandoori lamb ribs with three herb chutney

So we’ll have lots of ideas about what to serve with all those vegetables. I am going to be blogging about this over on My Family Table, but I can tell you that won’t be as good as the piece by the About.com guy in my class, or the writer for Cooking Light.

Now, we can’t take full credit for those ribs today; we worked with two other classmates to create that masterpiece. (It was tasty, too.) I don’t know about Charlie, but Rob blogs over at Countryside Food Rides . Go give him a read. He writes great stuff, and he’s recently signed up for a CSA and has been posting photos of what he cooks on there. I am fascinated by CSAs. People actually pay for extra vegetables, instead of pulling the shades and shushing the children when I turn up with the third ton of zucchini in a week? Amazing.

Adventures in aggressive suburban gardening