Vaster than empires, and all at once

by Doctor Science

I haven't posted in a while because it's harvest season for my vegetable loves. Today was Green Bean Day:

The "family share" at our CSA was 4 quarts of PYO beans, which translates to "as many as you can stand to pick". I ended up with about 6 pounds' worth, which I was able to pick in about 20-30 minutes.

When I started picking, I was careful to only pick the best beans, the ones that haven't matured so much that they're a little woody. After a bit I said to heck with that, and just -- picked.

At home, we sorted them into "perfect" and "mature", and I prepped only the perfect ones for freezing -- they're in the bags in this picture. The mature ones, the heap on the right, have been blanched for about 3 minutes, but I'm not going to freeze them, we (and the people we split our share with) will just eat them over the next few days.

Instructions, for reference: pick over the beans and trim them, but leave them whole. Set up your workspace to have the clean, trimmed beans next to a scale, next to the stove with the steamer. In the sink have a pot with ice water. On the counter, spread clean kitchen towels.

Weigh a pound of beans and put them in the steamer. Put on the lid, and set the timer for 4 minutes. Weigh out another pound of beans. At the ding! dump the beans from the steamer into the ice water, then dump the next pound of beans into the steamer and set the timer. When the timer has less than a minute to go, take the beans out of the ice water (I scoop with my hands) and spread them on the towels to dry. Dump in the next batch of beans, and add more ice if necessary, and keep going. Take the dried (well, less wet) beans and pack them neatly, one batch at a time, into 1-quart ziplock freezer bags. Mark the date, squeeze out the air, and put the bags in the freezer. They keep for 6 months at least.

This year's crop of green beans is the best I can recall. Surprisingly, even though this is the end of the season I didn't see *any* Mexican bean beetles. I don't know if the farmer has come up with some kind of new, organic magic, or if the lower-than-normal rainfall in September drove them off. I may even go back tomorrow for more -- which theoretically would be more than our share, but those are only vague guidelines for the PYO crops. Except strawberries -- that's the only PYO crop where the share limits are now strictly controlled, after some pretty nasty confrontations in the strawberry patch. No-one cares that deeply about beans, so the work of picking them is enough of a filter.

This being NJ, the share size for PYO sauce tomatoes was 8 quarts, which translates to "as much as you can carry, omg". The kitchen and dining room are basically covered with them right now.

Here's a sample of what I've been doing, besides freezing green beans:

I turn most of the plum tomatoes into Tomato Confit, which is a fabulous appetizer for the long, tomato-less months ahead. I use this recipe, except I squelch out most of the seeds (and associated water) from the tomatoes before I put them in the pan, and I don't take off the skins before I freeze them because I think skins are tasty. That 2-cup freezer container holds confit from about 3 lbs tomatoes -- I can do 2 such batches at once in my largest turkey-roasting pan.

The pickled ginger is new this year -- about half of it is baby ginger, grown right here at the farm in NJ! It was so delectable I decided to pickle it, Japanese style. The recipe calls for "several thin slices of raw beet", but that actually way too much -- as you can see, even though I took the beet out after a couple of days there's a LOT of pink.

The stock is my usual recipe (which I don't seem to have posted, I'll do that some other time), but double-concentrated because I need the freezer space. This is the first time I've been able to make enough tomatillo salsa that my husband D won't eat it all before I get to freeze it; I'll also post about that later -- spoilers: roasted poblano puree and cilantro pesto are involved. And the red pepper puree is because we've got such a bumper crop this year I plan to make red pepper mustard, which makes a great gift if you can bear to give it away (which D mostly can't, and I don't blame him -- it's staggeringly delicious, especially with cheese).

But I really identify with this WWII Victory Garden poster:

-- especially the crazed look in her eyes.

Comments

[cleek]

our little garden was exceptionally weak this year. we had so much rain that the cucumbers were all bitter, and the chard never really came in, and the peppers didn't grow very much (though the shishitos eventually did well in September).

canning is the furthest thing from our mind. 'can we collect enough for a serving' is where we're at.

[cleek]

apparently my comment about peppers has offended the ObWi gods

[H.E. Wolf]

Great post title, and great WWII poster! I also love this poster from WWI: "Can Vegetables, Fruit, and the Kaiser too"

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3g10671/?co=wwipos

[Ugh]

could someone release cleek's comments from the spam trap?

[liberal japonicus]

just saw it now, sorry about the delay

[cleek]

tanks!