The heat has finally broken here in Mariposa County. I’ll be the first to admit that I had no understanding just how hot it was going to get here from early July until late August. It was the kind of heat where you wake up thinking it won’t be too bad but by 2 o’clock you just want to hide in the house.
(more…)Tag: organic
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DIY Sun-Dried Tomatoes
As I mentioned last week, our garden severely over-produced yellow cherry tomatoes, leading to the great tomato apocalpyse of 2010. With more than 5 lbs of tomatoes and no one willing to eat them in sight, we decided to get creative about preserving them.
Here’s how we made sun-dried tomatoes.
Step 1: Prepare the place
This is a pretty simple project. You’ll just need a clean workspace and a sharp knife. We also found a window screen in the garage, which we hosed off the night before to get it ready.
Step 2: Halve your tomatoes
If you are working with cherry tomatoes, cutting them in half worked just fine. If you are working with Roma or any other full sized tomato, I’d recommend cutting them into 1 inch wide chunks. (Keep them even, you’ll be cooking with these later, and even sizes will help.)
We had about 5 lbs to cut and it took us 10 minutes with 2 people. If you are using full-sized tomatoes go ahead and remove the seeds as they’ll just slow the drying process. But with smaller ones we didn’t bother and it didn’t seem to matter.
Step 3: Add seasoning
Dice up some fresh herbs, mix them in by hand, and let the mixture sit for about 20 minutes. (Set up step 4 while this all stews)
For our sun-dried tomatoes we added in some garden fresh rosemary and basil. This added a nice flavor and an incredible smell.
Step 4: Prepare your rack
Drying vegitables outside is an ancient food preservation technique. Chances are good that if you live in a sunny climate, you won’t have a problem drying fruits and vegitables out in the open. You can basically dry stuff anywhere that is hot and dry. So inside a car on a summer day works. As does your oven at 150 degrees for several hours. As does a food dehydrator.
We live in San Diego, it was especially sunny and hot, and the summer made for a long day of sunshine. So we opted to try the outdoor method. We placed an extra window screen we found in the garage on our garden table, propped up by 4 matching clay pots. It wasn’t fancy but it was free and best of all, it worked brilliantly!
Step 5: Spread out your tomatoes
Spread them out evenly on the screen. We found that it was useful to seperate them as much as possible so try to break up the little piles as best you can.
Step 6: Wait a couple hours
This isn’t a very exciting process. But every couple hours go out and check on them. It really does help them dry faster to flip them and bounce them around a little bit. They have a tendency to stick to the screen, so you’ll be pealing a flipping a bit the first few hours. I set a timer so I would only check on them hourly, taking pictures every time.
Note about flies: We were worried about our local hummingbird or other birds taking notice and feasting when we weren’t looking. That didn’t happen, but we did attract a few flies with the sweet, savory smell. For our purposes this didn’t matter because we knew we’d be cooking these. But if that bothers you then you’ll need to build some one to seal this process off from bugs.
Step 7: When are they done?
For us, by the time we came back from a family trip to the beach, the sun had gone down and they were done. In climates where it isn’t quite so warm you may need to store your rack inside overnight and leave them outside a second day.
They are done when they stop feeling sticky. Some of them we a bit crispy, but most of them were gummy but not overly sticky. If you do yellow tomatoes you’ll see that they darken significantly. If you are using red, you’ll see them get a very deep red when done.
Step 8: Storage
We emptied our drying rack and stored our bounty into several ziplock bags. 5 lbs of tomatoes made about 1.5 pounds of sun-dried tomatoes which we broke up into 5 bags. We put one in the fridge because we knew we’d use it right away and we froze the rest.
Step 9: Cook and enjoy!
The next day we enjoyed a delicious pasta dish with a sun-dried tomato and onion base.
Let us know how it went for you. And happy drying!
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Garden Awesomeness
Adolescent watermelon, originally uploaded by mclanea.
There’s lots of fun stuff happening in our garden. Watermelon are coming in strong. And we’re hoping to pick a big batch of jalapeño this weekend. Right behind that are a whole heap of eggplant.
Our little garden experiment is going quite well. Thanks to all who encourage us.
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What’s growing in the garden?
Our backyard organic garden experiment started about 6 months ago. Way back in January we had no idea that by July we would have a wide variety of vegetables. But the picture above shows what our normal biweekly harvest now looks like. On top of that, herbs, summer squash, eggplant, jalapeño, and the occasional strawberry.
Our 2010 goal is to allocate 20% of our food to come from local sources. I don’t know exactly how we are going to measure that! But between what we are growing in our yard and our CSA box from J.R. Organics we have pretty much eliminated the produce area of the grocery store. (Things like bananas and potatoes seem to be the hardest to replace locally.)
Lots of success, some failures
We’ve done pretty good for first year gardeners. But we have had some failures too. We planted the summer squash, acorn squash, and cucumbers way too close together. This caused the acorn squash to never fully develop and we had to pull that out last week. Our sweet corn was doing very well but suddenly stopped growing and produced only a few kernels on each ear. We planted garlic at the wrong time of year. So it’s still green but hasn’t done anything. We have one tomato plant which has taken over the tomato and strawberry area. It’s been fun to see the plant grow about 15 feet tall… but it’s also kept two other varieties of tomatoes from developing fully.
Watering schedules and bugs are still ever-present issues. And our worm composting… still just going so-so. Weeds and snails were a problem in the Spring, but with the drying out of the climate both have stopped.
Out with the old
With Kristen and I leaving the country in 7 days, we’re going to do a little garden maintenance this weekend. We’ll pull out the sweet corn, trim the summer squash way back, and eliminate a couple herbs which aren’t doing so well. I’ll also spread some organic fertilizer. (Very expensive fish poop!)
The cool thing about San Diego is that our growing season essentially never stops. So we’ll pull out some of those things and head over to the nursery to scout out what will take its place. We’re hoping to get one more summer harvest in before we have to think about fall plantings.
We are encouraged. Heading into this I wasn’t sure that we could do it. And I really wasn’t sure we’d enjoy it. This year has proven that we really can do this and we really can have a good time doing it.
Children’s Garden
Megan and Paul have been involved since day 1. Each day, Megan and I take a garden tour where we carefully inspect the progress of every plant. As the months have passed we’ve started to talk about the kids taking ownership of an area of the garden. So we are trying to figure out how to make that happen.
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The harvest is coming!
Yesterday Paul and I were doing our daily look through the garden. He leaned in and yelled, “Daddy, check this out! We’ve got lots of tomatoes!”
In just a couple of weeks all of our summer garden plants will mature and start producing produce. We can’t wait!
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Our Garden on KPBS website
Our little backyard garden got some love from the KPBS website today. You know… we are garden celebrities now.
25% of our food in 2010 will come from our own garden or organically produced sources. That’s the goal. Anyone know where I can buy a Snickers tree?
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Going Green-ish
One of our family goals this year was to make some changes to how we consumed the world’s resources. Some of it is a desire to live more simply and some of it is just a realization that the stuff our little family does, when added up with millions of other families, really impacts our planet. So while we’ve been at it for a month, this is the first time I’ve talked about it on the blog. Simply put, I wanted to make sure we were actually doing stuff before I said we were going to be doing stuff!
Here are a few things we’re doing so far this year:
- 3 weekends ago we planted a little garden. We know it’ll take a couple seasons to truly get it productive, but we wanted to get something going. As the seasons go on we plan on expanding the garden. We definitely have the space in the yard. We just need to build up the beds.
- We joined a CSA to support locally grown, organic produce. We picked up our first box this week, this is big change in how we spend money on groceries.
- We are installing a drip system for watering outdoor plants. San Diego is a coastal desert. That means that we only get a little bit of rain each year and watering plants in the garden is a big deal. This will help us waste less water as well as hopefully make the garden grow a little better. The people from Drip Depot have some sweet stuff, can’t wait to see how it works.
- Get serious about waste! Kristen asked for, and got, a worm composting system for Christmas. While it isn’t a huge impact, we want to reduce our food waste that goes in the garbage by at least 25%. We’re also trying to be more conscious about buying things we can re-use and recycle.
- Still rocking the trolley when I can. We’re in a bit of a funk with this because of my travel schedule and the weather. But I’m doing my best to eliminate the need for a second car (we only have one) by taking the trolley to and from work. We eliminate the need for a second car by keeping our work schedules flexible as well as being quick to rent a car when needed.
We’ve tossed around, but not acted on, some other ideas. More on this as the year goes on.
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Youth Group vs. Youth Ministry
Last night I sat around a table with some people to talk about youth ministry in our church. As I’ve mentioned a number of times, our church is in a working class neighborhood of San Diego. We are a community of people with tangible needs. There is real poverty. Real educational problems. Real family trouble. Real gangs. Real violence. Not that life in the suburbs is all perfect, but the needs of students in City Heights are different from their peers just 6 miles to the East in La Mesa. It’s outside of my evangelical, middle class, white culture. And that’s what I like about it.
Thankfully, there was a ton of agreement around the table. We all can see that we need a ministry and not just another program. And we know that our little ministry has no hope if it isn’t holistic. This is an opportunity to live out more of the Gospel practically than we’ll teach formally.
I came home last night with one phrase: “We want to create a youth ministry, not a youth group.” As we defined that, we implied that youth group points inwardly and creates a cluster of kids around a common purpose. Not intrinsically bad, just not our target. Instead, we are trying to form a ministry that looks at the whole person and pushes those students out into the world, transformed to transform their world. While I have no doubt that we’ll do youth group-type things… retreats, events, Bible studies, and stuff like that. That won’t be our focus.
As I shared last week. I’m not in this to waste my time or keep busy. Not being on the church’s staff changes my perspective completely. Oddly enough, not being on paid staff emboldens me even more!
I’m interested in developing leaders for influence in their culture, I’m interested in upsetting Satan’s plans, I’m interested going where the kids are, and I’m interested in sharing leadership. I’m not interested in a group, to babysit and entertain the apathetic. It seems like those parameters are common with the others in the group of people trying to figure it out.
Shared values are a good place to start. Going to the next step, I feel pretty good about beginning something that is focused first on ministering to students.
Photo credit: Camaradas by Julián D Gaitán via Flickr (Creative Commons)
