Patio Garden Up-Date...

Well, we've harvested about 56 pounds of yellow squash, zucchini and cucumbers between July 4 and today. Whew!

I've made a ton of zucchini bread (still have to make some more), several Yellow Squash/Zuke Casseroles (freezing two more tonight), made 10 pints of ys/zuke pickles and have had fresh steamed ys/zukes with butter/freshly-ground black pepper for supper several times.

We now have 17 pints of cucumber pickles (Sweet Bread 'n Butter type) and I may have to make more just so the cukes that are still coming don't go bad.

I've also given some of the veggies away.

Now, the tomatoes are finally coming in. The big ones very slowly, but, the miniatures are getting ahead of me. :) Have made one large Cuke/Tomato salad with diced onions and my home-made special dressing. It's not exaclty like the dressing on the salad I had at Moose's near Asheville three years ago, but, it's mighty close. That was the best cuke/tomato salad ever and I managed to almost get it to a "T" here at home with some experimenting. Canola oil, fresh dill weed, fresh lemon basil, fresh sweet basil, sugar, black pepper, apple cider vinegar and red wine vinegar. Yum!

The peppers are looking good, but, the ones that are supposed to be red, yellow and orange are all still green. Oh, well...we'll see if they ever change over. If they would, I'd start making and freezing Stewed Italian Tomatoes. It's a fantastic recipe and I make and freeze gallons of it. Then, I use it all winter long as a base for soups, chilis, stews, casseroles, etc. It's so good, that Lynn, who does not like straight tomato anything (he'll eat them in casseroles and salads, but, that's it) actually ate a couple of bowls of the stuff when I first made it all by itself. I almost fainted! Should have taken a picture. It helps to have about 11 or 12 varieties of tomatoes (large and miniature) to go in it, about 4 varieties of bell peppers and about 6-8 types of herbs, all home-grown. If the peppers and big tomatoes don't ripen soon, I'll just have to start the Italian Stewed Tomatoes anyway and use store-bought peppers and big tomatoes. We'll see.

The herbs are taking over now. They're bigger than I've ever had before...all of them. I've ordered a food dehydrator to try and make my own dried herbs (and, dried fruits, veggies and dried meats). I tried just hanging the herbs to dry in the past. No luck. They dried, but, not before getting musty and moldy. Sigh. I tried the oven. It just didn't do the trick quite right. I even tried the microwave and was having great luck with that until "the explosion." Yep. I was drying basil and something caused this loud "BOOM!" and a huge gout of flame shot up. It died down after about two seconds, but, scared me to death. I never did figure out what happened. There may have been too much natural oil in the leaves in that batch; or, what I really think happened, a bug may have gotten left on a leaf and exploded. But, I haven't tried that again. Too scary! So, I have great hopes for this food dehydrator that I have on order from Bed, Bath and Beyond. Will let ya'll know how that goes. Wonder if I can do dried cuke chips? It would be one way to use up the cucumbers. Hmmm... long red evening dress

I'm also blanching and freezing sweet corn for the winter and I want to also can about a dozen pints of sweet corn relish before corn season is over. We don't grow that, but, we get baker's dozens from our fave farm produce wagon. They also have SC/GA really fuzzy peaches (what I call REAL peaches) and I've done 4 quarts of real peach ice cream. The kind that has both pureed peaches in the blend and fresh peach chunks in there, too. And, enough heavy cream, half-and-half and milk and sugar and vanilla and eggs to sink a battleship! We love it! :)

Well, let me get back to the YS/Zuke Casseroles. And, the Zucchini Bread. Luckily, we love both, otherwise I'd be shipping all this "bounty" to ya'll. Whew!

~cj/~cv (the Julia Child of the Patio Garden Set)