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We grew several different varieties of eggplant - the lovely plump black ones, the long, thin Japanese eggplant, and those lumpy purple and white ones across the top. (My husband is the one who orders most of the seeds and does the planting. I just take pictures and cook. Can you tell?)
I love the funny, bumpy purple and white eggplant. They just look so interesting.
We really had no idea if we'd get any peppers this year. Peppers don't always like our yard. Not sure why. We've thought maybe they weren't in sunny enough locations, so we've changed where we put the peppers over the years. Some years they do great, other years they don't, and it doesn't really seem to have anything to do with location. So we've given up trying to be smart about it and we just plant them and cross our fingers.
This year we didn't bother with bell peppers of any kind. We grew some sweet Italian peppers, though, and got a few of them. Mostly, though, we went with the hot peppers, because we'll definitely use them. We ended up with a good assortment of jalapeno, poblano and cayenne peppers, although not all of the cayennes turned red. Just not enough time and not enough warmth. Bill picked the last of them last weekend rather than leave them to duke it out with the colder weather.
Inspired by the peppers...and the tomatoes...I threw this mixture together:
A vast assortment of tomatoes, some poblanos, a jalapeno or two, a cayenne (it's underneath the other stuff) some smashed, peeled garlic, and a good drizzle of olive oil. I roasted all of that in a low oven for a couple of hours and ended up with this:
You can see the cayenne in that picture.
Anyway, I should have put this mixture through a food mill to keep the skins and seeds out, but I didn't. I was too imatient and too lazy (didn't want to have to wash the food mill), so I dumped it into the food processor instead.
The resulting mixture had great texture and a kind of smoky spicy flavor, thanks to the peppers, BUT. It was bitter. BIT TER. And just not as great as I'd hoped. I saved it, though, and maybe tonight I'll play with it some more and see if I can salvage it.
I love the cayenne peppers. We got a lot of them - really long ones this year. I don't know if Bill bought a different variety (he doesn't know, either), but for whatever reason, we've got a gorgeous supply.
Vegetables are beautiful.
Despite the cold, rainy (hey, just like today!) weather we had through just about all of June and well into July, our gardens produced plenty of great food for us. Over the last week or so, we've been picking the last of this and the last of that, which is just as well because we had a frost the other night and whatever's not hardy out there is going to turn black soon.
We were happy and amazed with the number of tomatoes, squash, eggplant and peppers we ended up harvesting, in addition to all the greens - several plantings of pak choi, arugula and lettuces, swiss chard and so on. We had one big head of cabbage - Bill made sauerkraut with that for our Oktoberfest meal. We also had a nice lot of scallions and shallots and garlic. Next year I'd like to plant potatoes. We'll see.
Anyway, when I picked the tomatoes last week, I picked all the red or nearly-red ones and I decided to pick all the green ones, too.
Might as well do something with them, right? I've made fried green tomatoes in the past, but no one in the house really, really likes them, so forget that. I thought I'd pickle some, but Bill has had pickled green tomatoes and wasn't nuts about them (I know, we suddenly sound so picky!) and I didn't think the kids would eat them, either, so I decided not to go there. Instead, I did the same thing I've been doing with my red tomatoes: cut them into chunks, put them in pyrex baking dishes, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and roast in a 300 - 325 degree oven until they were looking shrivelly.
I tasted a couple of the roasted green tomatoes, and they have a tangy, tart fruit flavor very different from the warm, earthy red tomatoes. Kind of like tomatillos. I figured I can make salsas and chili sauces with the green tomatoes, and my usual spaghetti sauces with the red.
Yeah. When I say I picked all the tomatoes, I meant ALL of them. Even tiny little babies like this guy.
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