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Refrigerator Pickles

My cucumbers turned out not to be cucumbers.  I think they are musk melons, but not sure yet.  What I planted were Soyo Long seeds.  Apparently, there were musk melon seeds in the compost and they germinated instead of the cucumber seeds.  Oh well, I can try again in the fall. 

My mother, on the other hand, who usually struggles with plants, has a fantastic garden this year.  Her cucumbers are epic.  So I am getting nine to twelve inch long cucumbers from her.  The first one I took home was so big, it was super bitter.  The only thing to do with a bitter cucumber, is make pickles.  We make dill pickles as well as sweet and sour pickles.  That one giant cucumber made three large jars of pickles.  Two dill one sweet and sour.  The Baby Manimal ate almost all of those pickles and left the brine in the refrigerator.  I have another long, but not bitter cucumber from mom's garden.  I had been eating on it (to big to eat in one setting), but it was starting to get a little soft.  I simply sliced it up and put it in the brine and put that back in the refrigerator.  In a day or two there will be pickles.  They won't last as long as pickles that are processed in a water bath.  That wont matter here, because they will be eaten long before they can go bad.

 
Mom and her J is for Jumbo cucumber :)

Pickled Onions

We began participating in a produce share group a few months ago.  The way it works is a friend, Michelle, and her husband, Paul, get up at some insane hour before dawn twice a month and go to The Dallas Farmers Market.  Before each shopping trip, Michelle speaks to some vendors about what is in season, fresh, and good.  They go to market, load up the fruits and veggies from the different vendors, take the haul home, and split it up.  A quick check on the produce groups' Facebook page shows 41 members.  Looks like about 15 families participate twice a month.  For $25 we get what feels like 40 pounds of produce every two weeks.  This is a really good deal.  Here is where it gets hinky, I still have my garden and it was onion pulling time a few weeks ago, which coincided with cheap, in season, local onion time.  Between the garden and my produce share, I have onions running out my ears.  I did make baked onion rings, which were very very good.  Recipe to follow. 

Today we went to Twisted Root in Dallas for yummy yummy burgers.  I have mine without the bun = "Burger in a Bowl" to accommodate my special diet needs.  Twisted Root is a really cool resteraunt.  They serve excellent food, have a staff with a great sense of humor, and they are green.  The following is lifted from their website " We r freak’n Green. Everything disposable is biodegradable. Even our cleaning products r Green!"  Check out their website here -> http://twistedrootburgerco.com/wordpress/menu/.   My burger/salad had some nice pickled onions on it.  Hello, I have onions running off of my table and across the kitchen floor.  I should make pickles out of them. 

The recipes I found online suggested using red wine vinegar with a some distilled white vinegar and a little sugar and salt.  I think no problem, I've got that.  Nope, I have several bottles of vinegar - not one of them red wine.  I do, however, have more than one bottle of balsamic vinegar.  Substitution?   The pickled onions I made are tasty, but they are not pretty.  Red wine vinegar made the pickled onions at Twisted Root a nice pink.  My pickled onions are sort of the color of coffee.  Next time, I will use red wine instead of balsamic. 

Recipes

Baked Onion Rings
Thick sliced white and yellow onions
Flour
Bowl of Water
Bowl of milk and egg (equal amounts egg and milk)
Bread Crumbs

Separate the onions into rings and put them in the bowl of water.  Dredge with flour (take them out of the water first ;), dip in egg mixture and then coat with bread crumbs.  Bake at 375 until crispy.  Next time I am going to spray them with a light coat of olive oil. 

Pickled Onions
Slice onions very thin.  (I used red onions)
Place them in a sauce pan and add equal parts red wine vinegar and white vinegar to cover. 
Add a little water
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar. 

Bring this to a boil and remove from heat.  Let sit until onions are soft.  Eat as soon as they are cool enough.  I am going to store them in a covered bowl and use them up fast.  I don't feel like this is a "safe" recipe for canning.  I plan to eat them in fewer than four days.

Winter Sprouts

I know it is winter, but I want to garden NOW.  There is a little bit of stuff out there including onions, garlic, cabbages and Brussels sprouts, but I want more.  My boss gave me a homemade seed sprouting set up for my birthday .  This includes a cool old Mason jar, the collar to the  Mason jar and a square of tulle.  She shared plain radish seeds and a salad mix of broccoli, radish and alfalfa seeds.  We have already started and finished on "crop" of radish sprouts and are now three days into another batch.  Since the middle Manimal (sorry they grew out of monkeyhood) will not stay out of them, I  started another jar this afternoon.     So now I have both plan radish sprouts and the salad mix growing in my cupboard.  Sweet right, gardening indoors and in the dark.

Here are the steps.  It is beyond easy.  Get a clean canning jar with a collar and a piece of tulle.  If you can't find a canning jar a regular glass jar will work just use a rubber band instead of the collar.  Find some seeds to sprout.  We bought ours at a local natural food market.  I also have seeds I've saved from the garden including broccoli, collards and Chinese greens that I will sprout soon.  Put about a tablespoon or so of seeds in the bottom of the jar and let them soak in a little water for about an hour.  Cover the top of the jar with the tulle and secure it with the canning collar a sturdy rubber band.  Drain off the water pretty well and put the jar in a cool dark place like a cupboard.  Wait.  In a day they will be germinating.  In about four days you can eat them, although they will be a little crunchy, which I like.  In five to six days they are ready to go.  Don't save them for special, you want to eat them young and fresh.  .

Changes

Today was the second to last day of my short career at a local garden center.  Ron's Organics is a great place to work and I will miss it, however, a full-time job at the library opened up for me and I can't let that opportunity slip by.  Plus, I got a little overexcited about the fall seed order and I'm a little afraid they may call the mental health authorities.

Because I was working two jobs and mostly seven days a week during the busy season, my spring/summer garden suffered.  It did okay, but nothing to brag about.  I was gardening vicariously through the garden center customers and my friend, Brenda Gardner-Newby.  More about her later.  No, I didn't make up that name.  

Today I left the garden center a little early.  This gave me plenty of daylight to get some of the fall garden put in.  I planted broccoli, cabbage and Brussels sprout plants.  I started broccoli raab, an heirloom broccoli called Di Cicco, and collard green seeds.  These will be transplanted in about six weeks.

Over the weekend, I put in my garlic.  I also took another shot at artichokes and quinoa.  I had limited success with quinoa a few years ago.  I have managed to keep a relative of artichoke, cardoon, alive for many years.  I figure if I can't grow a thistle, I better get a new obsession hobby.

Tonight, I am going through my seed box and finding everything else I can grow in my garden this winter.  I intend to plant every inch of it.  I want to have enough to share with friends, family and maybe even a local food pantry.

Happy Fall Everyone.

Don't forget to grow your garlic.

Nasty Little @#$%^@#s

You may or may not know, North Texas is in the middle of a West Nile epidemic.  There have been 207 confirmed cases and ten deaths in Dallas County according to NBC Channel 5.  One of the fatalities was a gentleman who lived in my work-hometown.  The City of Dallas is planning an areal spray program.  I hate to think of all the poor innocent bugs that are going to get wiped out when that starts.  I am very concerned about honey bees.  We NEED our honey bees.

The way I handle the mosquito situation at Casa Debbi is mosquito dunks.  The dunks contain Bacillus thuringiensis subspecies israelensis.  Let's just call that BTi, mkay?  BTi is a bacteria that is toxic to mosquito and black fly larvae. You simply place a dunk in standing water, say your rain barrels, and the BTi takes care of the larvae.  So if you live in an area where West Nile virus is a problem or mosquitoes just make you mad, get some mosquito dunks and kill those wiggly little babies.

Read more on this at The Texas Triffid Ranch.

Gardening ADD

I'm pretty sure I have ADD. I've been wandering around outside in my garden and inside my home.  I started out trying to get a raised vegetable bed planted.  Then I needed compost.  In order to get compost, I had to hire help.  Help does not have ADD and the compost is coming along nicely.  Then I was going to make compost tea, but saw a caterpillar.  Of course I had to find my camera and post a picture of the caterpillar on Facebook.  Suddenly, I couldn't remember the task at hand.  Compost employee, a.k.a. Middle Monkey, gently reminds me I am supposed to be making compost tea.  He might have used the words scatter brains.  I make the compost tea and decide a friend really needs some rabbit poo.  Compost employee bags up the poo.  I take the poo inside, remember my glass of water and put the poo down.  Spend the next 10 minutes hunting for a bag of poo.  Decide that I need to spray some weeds (don't worry all I use is vinegar and orange oil) and make up spray.  Go spray 1/4 of the weeds, get bored and come back inside.  Waste 15 minutes on the Internet.  At that point, I actually weeded the raised bed.  It was a miracle. No, the raised bed is not planted yet.  I'm blaming the compost employee.