The Urban Farmer's Almanac

My brother Alex told me that the hops would be ready when the tips started turning brown, so I guess it’s go time. I planted them with a long rope to climb all the way up to my office window on the top floor, and they didn’t make it last year, but this year they did, and how. I pulled one off the vine and it smells delicious. Some people would say BO, I say IPA. It’s time to drop the rope and pull all the hop blossoms (flowers, blooms, what are they called anyway?) and get them dried. Or better yet call up Alex and set up a fresh hop ale brew day.

Get to know your Urban Farmer’s Almanac history and read about the history of these hops here.

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A couple of years ago Dan’s parent gave us some cuttings from their grape vines.  Let me start by saying these grapes are amazing.  They are small champagne grapes and are so sweet and delicious with a flavor like none I’ve found at the store.  They are perfect for kids to watch grow and eat – even our littlest one.  The first year the cuttings were literally just sticks in the ground.  The following year they had grown enough to call it a vine and had sprouted leaves.  Last year I think we may have gotten a couple of grapes even, but this year is the year they really began to bear fruit.

I would love to experiment with grape juice and jelly and I know Dan would love to try his hand at wine, but they get eaten up so quickly there is never enough to preserve.  Our littlest one (who is almost one) does not crawl yet, but scoots around on his bottom.  Whenever he sees someone come in with grapes in their hand goes crazy and scoots over faster than I would think is possible.  We dried one clump in the dehydrator just to see what these taste like as raisins and to be honest I think they lose too much flavor that way.  They are definitely preferable fresh.

The bummer about these vines is that our long term plan for the garden includes a replacement retaining wall and new (non-chain link) fence.  This winter we may try to remove the vines from the fence and create an  arbor that they can live on permanently.

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More canning… I really don’t know how this all fits in with everything being so busy these days. We brought back a box of beans from Yakima and pickled them. My grandma made these and I loved them as a kid, both the regular dill ones, and the spicy ones with red pepper flakes in the bottom. My mouth is watering just thinking about them now.

I’ve been doing a little bit of design work for Panacea, an awesome dinner delivery service here in Seattle. I am all for getting paid in food, especially when it’s this tasty. They did house-roasted beef sandwiches earlier this summer, and it came with a really good Tomato Jam, with big slices of ginger in there. I used the leftovers on egg sandwiches, a burger, and shamefully, straight from the spoon. So I took a shot at approximating it with the Tomato Preserves recipe in my trusty Ball Home Preserving bible. It’s close enough and will have to do… until I can get them to pass along the secret recipe.

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Every August we spend a weekend in Yakima picking up (and u-picking) produce to preserve for the coming year. The first year we went may have been pre-children, and I think a couple other times we managed to leave them with the grandparents, but by now it’s become a full-blown family vacation. There is the hotel with a pool, Mexican food for dinner, the quirky winery we go tasting at, and of course our favorite places to buy produce.

This year we made quick work of the tomato fields, picking 140 pounds in 20 minutes or so. Even when the tomatoes are 35 cents a pound, they end up costing quite a bit when you get 4 huge boxes full. When we got home and realized what we’d done to ourselves… the project was pretty daunting. The first half of the batch we peeled, pureed, and cooked down to a really tasty pizza / pasta sauce (the recipe in the photos is what we added to each stockpot of sauce after it had reduced by about half.

The second half of the batch we peeled, chopped, boiled, and canned as stewed tomatoes; it was a lot less work and we put those away as quarts rather than pints. All told, we ended up with about 25 pints of pizza sauce and 25 quarts of stewed tomatoes. The best part was getting that bucket of tomatoes out of our fridge.

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I am done with yellow squash.  In the last three weeks I have made
Squash pancakes
Squash muffins
Squash cookies
Squash quick bread
Squash risotto
Stuffed squash
Squash chips
Squash fritters
Squash sandwiches
BBQ’d squash
Grilled squash

Basically almost every meal has had  squash component and I don’t particularly like yellow squash.  I am declaring myself done with squash for awhile.  I have started handing out squash to any and all visitors to our house.  Yesterday a friend left town for a week and gave us the rest of their only lightly used CSA box.  Wouldn’t you know … there was plenty of yellow squash in it.

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