Surprises In The Winter Garden

Who is this hitchhiker on my surprise rogue beet that I discovered in the garden yesterday? Is it a baby earthworm or something more dangerous to my garden health? Look how big this little beet is to this fellow. Microcosms are fascinating. I am getting itchy to get out there in my garden and do stuff. There's still so much I need to get done inside to help my house run more smoothly. I have tons of stuff to go through and get rid of, space to make. I have shelves to organize.

Speaking of getting rid of stuff, no one has an answer for me on this one, but I keep avoiding getting rid of stuff because I always feel obligated to try and make a little money by having a garage sale or list things on e-bay but whenever I have done things like this I am the one person who does not make three hundred dollars. I make nothing because I am THMR*. So, do I finally embrace this fact and give my things away in charitable fashion? Or do I bang my head against a fine hard brick wall until I bleed out some sense? And then I still have all my store stock. I have had sales and not sold it, I have tried selling it on my web store, and lastly I tried selling it at seriously reduced prices at the holiday market and sold none of it. There are some things that are useful that I will keep: a lifetime supply of Mrs. Meyer's cleaning products, dishtowels, and body soap. But what to do with the books? The kid's tees? The hats?

What I was thinking of doing is seeing how much of the stuff I have would be useful to the women's shelter here. Some of the body products might be a welcome bit of luxury to battered women and their children. Same with the tee shirts. I don't know. Most of what I carried was for people nesting, not people fleeing serious problems. Is it an insult to give battered women pretty sun hats?

Anyway... I have to figure this out because I feel the weight of all this stuff pressing in on me. It needs to be dealt with. I need to get rid of my storage space. I need to make more room in my house. Clean out time!

What ultimately feels right is to donate everything I don't want. Yes, I could use some extra money. But somehow it never does work that way for me. So it feels more natural and gentle to accept the messages from the great beyond: "Hey Dufus! Don't try to make any money!"

I'm still fighting quite a lot of inertia so a lot of this talk about getting stuff done is kind of academic anyway.

Back to the garden...yesterday I bought ten gorgeous asparagus crowns. I have bought a lot of asparagus crowns in my gardening life with very little success (mostly trying to plant them where they don't thrive-like in solid clay soil) so I know what to expect: shriveled up alien looking bundles of dry root matter that you usually have to soak before planting. The ones I got at the farm store yesterday were plump and HUGE and healthy and did I say HUMONGOUS already? I only bought ten of them because I needed to read up on the other variety they carry to figure out if I really want it.

So today I will be planting asparagus in two of my eight raised beds. If anyone in my area is reading this who is planning on planting asparagus? Get it from Wilco, but do it soon because I hear they sell out fast. They are $1.49 per crown which is not as cheap as you can get them some places, but I think they are very much worth it.

It's also time to plant favas and peas. I haven't figured out where I'm going to plant them. I think in the raised beds is the best plan. I could do that today. If I could muster up the energy. Here's what I accomplished yesterday: washed (but did not fold) one load of laundry, made pita pizzas. That's it. OK, I also did some dishes. So do you think I can get more done today?

About the pickled eggplant...I ate some. I'm not dead yet. Ha ha. It wasn't as good as I hoped. It had a nice tanginess to it but the only flavoring that was added to it were coriander seeds which have no flavor unless you chew on them. I have a thing about chewing on whole spice seeds: I don't do it. On it's own eggplant is somewhat bland. Also, the eggplants I used had already developed lots of seeds and the seedy centers aren't particularly pleasant to eat. So I may not eat all of those eggplants but I did spy some very promising looking recipes in my new book for pickled eggplant and I intend to try some recipes with different seasonings.

Uh oh, it appears to be raining. Not good to work soil when raining. Perhaps today is the day to make my second duvet?

Time and coffee will tell.


*C'mon, you know what this is by now, right?

Pickled Eggplant
(aka: Rebel Food)

These jars of pickled eggplant just may be the prettiest items in my pantry. You should know right off the bat that this recipe is by a British author named Nora Carey from her book called "Perfect Preserves". I love this book. I love Nora. I think she'd be startled to know that. There are interesting preserves, the most inspiring kitchen garden pictures, and recipes that call for the preserves in the book so that you know what the hell to do with them once you've made them all. It is my favorite preserving book. However, the methods used in it are distinctly British in that jams are not zapped into flavorless anonymity by over-processing. In fact, most jams aren't processed at all.

It's not just distinctly British to stick to traditional methods of canning and preserving, it's very European to not ditch Grandma's pickled eggplant because a government agency is worried about lawsuits. What I'm trying to tell you is that this recipe for pickled eggplant is

UNSANCTIONED BY THE USDA.

I made it anyway. The USDA is extremely skittish about preserving anything in olive oil. For the last few years the stance was "YOU WILL DIE IF YOU PRESERVE ANYTHING IN OLIVE OIL" They are now slightly backing down from that rather dire stance. Now they are allowing that maybe, maybe it's not so dangerous to store sun dried tomatoes in olive oil at room temperature provided there aren't any fresh herbs in it.

I have done a lot of reading about the reasons for different canning methods, about the science that backs up our belief that it isn't safe to preserve eggplant. I've read the USDA book of canning, I've called the canning hot-lines, and I've listened to some very heated discourse on the subject on a canning forum. It isn't easy to get at the science of it all because only the food scientists really know and they don't think us lay people can use that information safely. I think that's a form of oppression. Personally, I think that our fear of food-borne illness is threatening our rich and diverse catalog of family canning and preserving traditions.

Do I want to die of botulism? Of course not. However, I will use my brain in this matter, not a government agency, to make my own decisions. I have found at least three recipes for pickled eggplant, all of them calling for some form of vinegaring and spicing and then storing at room temperature in olive oil. All of those recipes were either European or Middle Eastern. These are traditional recipes. Here's something I've never heard about: lots of European and Middle Eastern home canners dying of botulism. Oh wait, I haven't heard of many American home canners dying of botulism either.

I am tired of food paranoia. This recipe seems pretty safe to me. First you cut the eggplant in 1/2" slices, toss them in a bowl with a lot of course sea salt (I think "tossing" is not really a good word here. Half inch slices of eggplant don't really "toss" easily.), and then layer them on either paper towels or kitchen towels and weight them with something heavy. I used a big wooden cutting board held down by a 24 lb box of apples. You let them sweat for at least an hour.

After that you brush them off and cook them for 5 minutes in white vinegar. What happens is that the vinegar then replaces any moisture in the slices making them less susceptible to rot or botulism, which doesn't happen to like vinegar. You pat them dry and then after letting them cool down you layer them in sterilized jars that you put a half inch of olive oil in before filling, and once your eggplant has reached the top, you cover completely with more olive oil and add a teaspoon of corriander seeds.

When you're processing anything in a boiling water bath canner for at least ten minutes it's not actually necessary to pre-sterilize your jars. The processing will kill off anything that might be on them or in them. For this recipe, however, it's vital to sterilize the jars for ten minutes in boiling water because they won't be processed further.

This is my one slice of eggplant that didn't make the cut. When the vinegar saturates the slices they turn slightly translucent. This piece was too thick for the vinegar to penetrate. So I tossed it out. It's beautiful though, isn't it?

I do take other people's safety in my kitchen pretty seriously and I don't plan to feed these to anyone without making them sign a waiver to sue me if anything happens. Because I'm American and that's the kind of thing we do. Jesus.

Max has just informed me that these jars look like cans of throw up and poop.

I really want to make some more of these. I'm afraid that the coriander seeds I bought are very old and not all that aromatic. One of the recipes that Nora includes for using these pickled eggplants is to put the slices on a home made pizza. Oh boy, that sounds so good. I'm excited by the combination of the earthiness of eggplant with the added zing of vinegar, and the richness of the oil. Not a diet food, of course. Nicole Montesano, a food writer for our local newspaper and another canning spaz like me (it must be said that like Lisa E., she is elegantly quiet in her spazziness), gave me a recipe she found for pickled eggplant that I may need to try as well. Now I'm not sure where I've put it, but while the eggplant is cheap at my favorite farm (Bernards), it seems a shame not to make some more.

On a side note, I left some tomatoes in a bucket for much too long and missed the fact that two of them were rotting and hatching a cloud of fruit flies. Fruit flies are a fixture in my kitchen during canning season. An unpleasant fact of life. It's what happens when large quantities of fruits continuously make their juicy way through my house. However, usually there's just a few and aren't much of a nuisance. Oy. I have about a hundred of them in my kitchen. So if anyone knows of any great traps for them, let me know. I have put out some fly paper, and while it's caught some of the slower more stupid ones, the others seem to know what it is and are not getting fooled. I still have a ton of fruit to process so it's not like I can just rid my kitchen of all fruit fly food right now.

So, in closing, I would like to say that if for some unfortunate reason my brave rebellion of the USDA's oppression turns sour on me and I die of botulism from eating my beautiful eggplants, this is what I want on my tombstone:

"Although she ordered the exact same meal at the Hotel Oregon EVERY SINGLE TIME SHE WENT, she was brave enough to eat pickled eggplant. Let it be duly noted: Angelina was not a total food coward"

Maybe that's too expensive. That's a lot of words and we don't have a lot of money. Maybe the community can collect some donations?

Fruit fly update: Between using Karmyn's method and standing patiently like a zen master in order to strike like lightening and kill them with the smack of bare hands I have reduced the fruit fly population almost to nothing. I've still got about five of them that I can't seem to get at. But five, I think you'll all agree, is so much less disturbing than over 100 of them.