Gazpacho Recipe

With not quite enough tomatoes and peppers to start canning up jars of salsa or tomato sauce, but enough that I needed to do something ... a batch of gazpacho seemed the perfect solution!

This makes two full litres.  It is wonderful served with some crusty bread on the side. I had some leftover which served as the sauce base for a lasagna dish later in the week.

Ingredients:
1 english cucumber
2 red peppers
1 hungarian hot wax (or other mildly hot pepper) - optional
3 lbs tomatoes
1 small red onion
2 garlic cloves
1/4 cup white wine vinegar
1/4 cup good olive oil
salt and pepper

Method:

Everything goes in a blender or food processor to be pureed.  But I split up the ingredients to keep more texture with some.

1) Roughly chop the cucumber (with skin on), peppers and tomatoes.  Pulse in a blender until mostly smooth but retain a bit of texture instead of completely smooth.  Remove to a large bowl.

2) Chop onion and garlic and pulse in blender until fully smooth.  This is why I do it in separate batches as I do want the onion and garlic to be fully smooth.  Add this to the tomato mixture.

3) Pour in most of the white wine vinegar and olive oil but not all in case you want to adjust the taste.  I used a nice aged variety I had on hand) along with a good extra virgin olive oil.  Season with salt.  Give it a taste and adjust if needed.  Or wait until after it has chilled.

Chill for at least two hours.  I ended up adding a bit more vinegar and olive oil after the flavours had better set from the chilling.

Update on Hay Bale Squashes

I had planned on posting monthly updates on the squash plants I am growing in hay bales this year, but I am just a bit behind following the July 9th update.  And what a difference!  Here is a wider viewer not shown in the July post for comparison to the one above taken earlier this evening:

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This is a new location in an attempt to hide from the squash bugs.  Not so lucky, but I've managed them ... so far!  I dealt with cucumber beetles since early in the season and, in the past month, have started to deal with the squash bugs (not to be confused with a stink bug, just squash bug).  I kept up with them for a while, but had some days where I wasn't able to get to the plants, and, more recently, the vines are such that I'm having a hard time getting into the centrally-located leaves without stepping on the plants.  So I'm not quite as diligent and they are spreading. 

Between the bugs destroying the leaves and me pulling off entire leaves to drown the attached bugs, some of the vines are starting to lose some foliage.  And I definitely have at least a few weeks before any of the squash are fully mature.  But not too bad for other vines that are stretching out ...

So here are some of the squash/pumpkins I have so far - not great considering the size of the plants, but I've never had great yield before and refuse to be disappointed by anything I get considering the bugs I've had to deal with.

2 Marina di Chioggia, two others not as mature

I think Cinderella pumpkin?

Waltham Butternut, 1 of only 3 or 4

Sweet Dumpling, 1 of a few

A single Dickinson pumpkin (but a big one)

1 of 3 too small Long Island Cheese

1 of just a few Spaghetti Squash

Unless I'm confusing the few butternuts I have, I see no sign of the Japanese Pie that I planted.  That was a heritage variety I chose for it's supposed ability to better withstand bug attacks.  And same for the two Tromboncino squash plants - the singular variety of summer squash I had planted as it was known for its vigorous growth which can help when bugs get in the way.  Very disappointing as I've had no summer squash to eat while others are inundated!!  And my old standby, Table Queen Acorn ... also nowhere to be seen.

And here's a victim of something ... did it rot first and then attacked by bugs, or the other way around?

And a final question to anyone reading this - does everyone have as hard a time as I do killing off things that grow in the compost?  Every year, I plan to have the best composting year ever with constant turning over of the pile for aeration, etc.  And well ... every year something pops out that I don't want to disturb.  Like this squash plant.  No idea what it is (yet) but if it doesn't form a fruit soon, I will pull it simply because it won't have time to mature.  But in the meantime, I keep a watch because I'm oh so curious what it might be!!

Harvest Monday: August 15, 2016

The long-awaited rain in our area finally arrived the last few days, very much welcomed.  For some crops, though, it was not ideal ... namely the bush beans.  I have several varieties of beans this year for drying, with some already falling over and laying on the soil.  Although some were not quite mature enough, I decided to pull all of the beans to avoid further damage.  I will let them dry out for a week in their pods and then shell them for storage.  The baskets above include black turtle beans, Vermont Cranberry, Jacob's Cattle and Canadian Wild Goose (although how much of each I'm not sure as they got all mixed together during the harvest).

With rain in the forecast, I also decided to pull the onions.  I had decided not to grow any this year as I don't seem to have much success generally, but somehow ended up planting some anyway.  Although they aren't particularly large, I am actually pretty satisfied with what I got this year (but will remind myself not to grow them again next year!).

Most of them are between golf ball and baseball size, but are delicious and will be useful when salsa making time starts in a few weeks.

And these peppers will be useful in many ways!  These are Xanthia, but I also harvested about the same amount of other varieties including jalapeno and some other sweet bell pepper types.  Some of the pepper harvest came from this broken limb of King of the North peppers ... the plant had fallen over from the weight of the fruit and I did a terrible job staking it and the branch broke off.

I've still only had a handful of tomatoes but was not expecting a lot this year anyway (and have not bothered to take pictures).  But I am still getting lots of great greens including more of the Croatian Chard (delicious, and tastes more like spinach than Swiss Chard), Tuscan Kale, Swiss Chard and the frilly looking green on the left is Fizz Kale.

While cleaning out the main bed with the bean plants, I realized that several of the potato plants nearby had been overgrown with weeds.  Oh well ... potatoes are one of those plants I don't spend a lot of time on.  I have volunteer potato plants popping up elsewhere so I'm not too upset.  But I will dig them up soon and see if there is anything under the weeds.  In the meantime, I had a potato bag that also wasn't overly successful with only a single plant (out of three planted in the bag) that produced and here are the results (along with some chocolate cherry tomatoes):

This is my submission to Harvest Monday hosted by Our Happy Acres.  Please check it out to see what other gardeners are doing this week.