Ratatouille, RatItalian Style
RatItalian Style, italian version of Ratatouille
Ratatoulle, RatItalian-Style
Ratatouille, RatItalian-Style
When I saw that Smitten Kitchen recreated the ratatouille recipe from Pixar's animated film of the same name, I couldn't resist making it. But there's one caveat: I don't care for peppers, which traditionally show up in this dish. So I changed it up a bit, substituted tomatoes for peppers and Voila! (or rather, Eccola!) it's now an Italian recipe. Now, if you're a Francophile, don't hate me. I've actually eaten ratatouille in a restaurant that was made with tomatoes…
Invasive fruit flies plotting their attack
Homemade Fruit Fly Traps
They're everywhere! Tiny, annoying fruit flies, that is. They're trying to get into our tomatoes, peaches, nectarines, and plums. They're even breeding in our compost bucket. What to do? Break out the big guns. The lowly fruit fly has a very short reproductive cycle. The female Drosophila melanogaster (common fruit or vinegar fly) lays eggs about 5 at a time, which hatch and become adults in 4-19 days depending on the ambient temperature. Adults can live for up to 3…
Keep the Garden Going
Use French Intensive methods to keep garden beds going through the Summer
San Marzano tomatoes, fresh parsley, fresh oregano, and homegrown garlic and onions.
Recipe: Homemade Tomato Sauce
Italians believe that San Marzano tomatoes are the only tomatoes for making sauce. I'm Italian, and I've made sauce with just about any tomato I can get my hands on, but this year we grew San Marzano tomatoes for the first time. So there will be sauce. I grew up watching my mother make my grandmother's recipe for tomato sauce. It took no less than 3-5 hours. She often used canned tomatoes, one of the few canned products we bought.…
Nature gives us answers if you know where to look.
Harvesting Onions
Onions take a long time to grow, but when it comes time for harvesting onions, it's incredibly satisfying, and worth the wait. Here in Southern California we plant onions by seed in the fall, or by "sets" in spring. By the middle of summer, those sets and seeds have turned into full-blown onions that actually resemble something you'd buy in the supermarket. It's amazing! In late March, someone gifted us with their leftover onion sets. These are not the tiny…
Kelloggs Breakfast
Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes
It's harvest time for tomatoes, whether they be determinate or indeterminate. These orbs of delight are the quintessential summer fruit and we're picking them daily. We planted early this year (quite possibly a mistake since we now have blight...but then again, we get blight every year, so I give up). We grew 18 different varieties this year, all heirlooms, all gorgeous. Here's a little tomato parade for 2014: Our first time growing these successfully. Can't wait to make sauce. Jaune…
Black Dakota Popping Corn
Harvesting Black Dakota Popping Corn
This spring we experimented with growing heirloom Black Dakota popping corn. It's a beautiful, deep red, pointy popping corn that pops white. We couldn't resist the opportunity to plant this ancestral corn and load up on one of our favorite snacks. Growing popcorn is easy because you don't have to time it out to pick it during the milk stage. You just grow it and let it dry on the stalk. That's it. To learn more details about growing popcorn…
Start with fresh fruit
Recipe: Garden-Fresh Fruit Leather
Preserving the harvest was never so fun as when making fruit leather. It's simple and easy and is far better for you than the sugar-laden stuff you get from the store. Kids love it, and grown ups do it. Here's our first attempt at making two different kinds. We use our solar food dryer as much as possible during the summer, and this was the perfect experiment to try outdoors. If you don't have one, you can make fruit leather…