Last night Pete and I pickled 4 Quarts of Dill Pickles.
We pickled three of them as spears and one as rounds. Sadly, we were running very, very low on dill (next year: Grow dill! Do you have any idea how expensive that stuff is in the grocery store? And that here we can’t even find it in our regular grocery stores so we have to go to the fancy ones. What a crock! Dill is so easy to grow and very prolific. We’ve learned our lesson here.) so we augmented the dill with some Parsley that we have growing on the back porch. Weird, I know…we’ll see how that goes. Maybe I’ve just discovered something fantastic. Or, more realistically, I just ruined four perfectly good quarts of pickles.
We did add a LOT of garlic, though, so that is a point in the “yummy” column. We’ll give them a try in a month or so. It was a new recipe I’ve never used, so I’m not going to post it until I can say if it was good or not. Be patient!
I also wanted to show you my single Brandywine tomato. Really…my only one off of the entire plant. This has been a terrible tomato year for me. I think my problem was trying to grow them in pots (and mostly far to small pots, at that!) and they just couldn’t get going. I eventually replanted them, but only one recovered. It was a big one, at least! It must have weighed about a pound.
(It probably wasn’t quite ready to pick, but it was getting that “I’m gonna split any day” look and feels soft, so I just went ahead and picked it.)
Tomatoes are pretty forgiving — we pick ours as they start turning pink, and put them on the windowsill (and countertop, and any other flat surface we can find when the 7 plants start going wild!) and they’ll eventually ripen to perfection and taste just as good as the ones we left on the vine until ripe. And given that there are supposedly a bunch of bugs & such that look for the color red to trigger their feeding frenzies, the faster you get that red off the plant, the safer your tomatoes. At the end of the season, if frost is predicted, pick all the healthiest tomatoes off the plant, red or green, and bring them in. Even the green ones will eventually ripen, if they’re whole and unblemished. My dad used to tell us to wrap the green ones in newspaper, but I never did figure out what that did for it (other than give you something more to have to clean up if the tomato went bad!)…
Nice Brandywine! We’ve planted Brandywines every year since we discovered them — they’re the best tasting beefsteak sized tomato we’ve found. Mmm! You’ll have to do a posting on “interesting veggie varieties” sometime around January when the seed catalogs start showing up in the mail…
[...] 15, 2008 by Taylor I forgot to mention that on Friday we ate that tomato. It was getting soft and I didn’t think it would last the weekend, so we sliced it and ate [...]