Bottling the goodness

Jan gets very, very distressed when food goes to waste. Well, not enough so that he cleans out the refrigerator. But when Ella wastes food, or when garden produce goes bad. So this year, for the first time, he’s made a concerted effort to learn to preserve what I grow. ‘Cause, you know, that’s not my job. I just grow the stuff. What I grow is not nearly as important as my being outside nurturing plants.

His first foray into preserving was the pesto. That was a resounding success. So he bought a pressure cooker/canner, and set about making sauces from all of the tomatoes that I’m bringing in from the fields.

A red sauce for pizza, using herbs and garlic from the garden. A green sauce from the White Currant tomatoes, as a spread and special pizza or pasta sauce. A ranchero sauce using our tomatoes and peppers that we picked up at the Farmer’s Market. We’re in sauce heaven.

For practice, Jan also canned some cherries from Whole Foods.

It all seems to have gone very well. But you don’t really know, do you, until you open the jars several months down the line? And I’m having a heck of a time explaining the whole concept to Ella. She’s really not sure why in the world we would have yummy food in jars, and not crack them open and eat them!

Oven raising

The first post in this series, in which our heroes poured the slab, is here.

In this installment, the bread oven reaches skyward. Perhaps my favorite thing about this project so far is that it has drawn in so many contributors from the neighborhood. Frank found some free brick, Rick is driving his truck to pick up materials, and Ken is lending his brawn.

Ken was lured in at 8 AM, Friday morning. The walls were started with cinder blocks, then filled with rebar-reinforced concrete.

The sound of other people laboring brought Rick and Frank wandering over, to supervise, of course. (That’s Frank’s grandson with them.)

More blocks, more concrete, and a piece of metal across the span of the door to the wood-storage chamber, support the eventual structure above it.

Jan knocked and cut notches into the blocks to accommodate a piece of rebar laid around the perimeter of the top of the wall.

Then they filled all of the chambers of the blocks with concrete, tamping it down with a piece of rebar.

Around lunch time they filled the empty spaces completely, and smoothed the top.

Ella approves the final product, and Ken is released to his family at about 1 PM.

You thought that was it for the day, huh? But no. The masons reconvened after dinner, poured themselves some T&Ts, and grabbed the nail gun. That’s our boys.

I couldn’t really tell what they were doing, but they looked pretty cool doing it until the wee hour of 9:00 or so.

In the morning, I got a peek at the result of the carpenter’s elves. Apparently, they built a wooden structure to support the slab of the actual oven chamber.

The support is built in such a way that they can just knock the wood out from underneath the slab, once it’s poured and cured. (Insert smug smile on my husband’s face here.)

I have to say it. I’m impressed. I’ve already invited a couple from a few blocks away to come make pizza with us. That sounds gracious, but the reality is that they have the biggest, most gorgeous tomatoes in the neighborhood. I told them to show up with one big tomato in each hand.

Barquitos de calabacitas [UPDATED]

[Updated with pictures from the next time we made this dish.]

I hesitate to mention squash, because of all of the angst it causes me to ponder them. However, Jan made something so delicious last night, that I have to share. I bought yellow summer squash from a new organic farmer at the market last Saturday (I try to buy at least one thing from each organic vendor, so they keep coming to the market!).

First, Jan cut each squash lengthwise and scraped out the seeds.

Then he took garlic and onions from our garden, and sautéed them in olive oil until almost clear.

Then Ella insisted that a picture of her making a goofy face would be much more interesting than anything Jan might be doing.

To that, he added the squash seeds, and sautéed them until they softened a bit.

Then tomatoes from our garden, salt and pepper.

He spooned this mixture into the squash shells,

laid havarti cheese slices over the entire half-shell,

then broiled them until the cheese was nice and melted (a little brown around the edges of cheese – mmmm). (Sorry for the dark picture, but the flash kept glaring on the plate . . . )

They were divine. It only occurred to me to take pictures after I was already almost done. Sorry. I’ll try to catch myself if he makes them again.

Oh, and when Jan’s mother made these for Ella, she cut out a little paper triangle for a sail, and used a toothpick to make a mast, making a little boat (hence the name “barquito”).

Slab in mind; slab you’ll get

When Jan and I lived in Seattle, we had a great, close-knit group of friends (most of us single, and all of us child-less, so lots of time to bond). One day we were all at our friend Will’s house, brainstorming for a garden structure in the backyard of his new house. Will isn’t always precise with words (unless they’re related to software), and kept referring to the structure as a gazebo, just to have something to call the damn thing while we hashed it out. Our friend Chad, however, being a budding architect, and therefor very precise about such things (as architects are wont to be), was becoming increasingly agitated with Will for pigeon-holing what was surely destined to be Chad’s greatest design (or something like that; it wasn’t always easy to pin down the exact cause of Chad’s psychic pain). Anyway, Chad finally raised his voice and said, “Gazebo in mind; gazebo you’ll get!” At which point we all fell over guffawing. Jan and I still use that phrase.

I mentioned previously that Jan is building a bread oven in our backyard. I should also mention that this involves an entirely new set of skills for him (which is the best kind of project, no?). Mixing, pouring and shaping concrete, bricklaying, dome-building. So there is a certain amount of skepticism with which people view such a project, when the announcement is made. But I’ll tell you what, there’s nothing like getting up at the crack and knocking out a new concrete slab to make believers of your wife, friends, and neighbors.

He dug out the footprint of the foundation, then built a 2×4 frame, and laid rebar and mesh in the hole:

Next, he pressed our neighbor Rick into service by dragging him to pick up the pallet of dry concrete. Apparently, they tried lowering the entire pallet into the bed of the truck. The truck kept settling, and settling, and settling under the weight, until the tires looked like they would pop. So they lifted it back out and loaded half of the bags into the truck, leaving the other half for a second trip:

Jan unloaded the truck, while Rick heckled him from the sidelines. Rick lost a fight with a sidewalk curb in the middle of the night several months ago, and now has a metal plate in his wrist. He thinks that’s a good excuse to supervise the neighborhood projects for a while.

Lizzi needs no excuse to sit in the shade and supervise (by smell):

Everything to this point was completed by the day before. Jan also rented a cement mixer, which greatly sped the job. When the appointed morning arrived, the manual labor began:

Over the course of about 4.5 hours, the slab took shape:

And was full:

At this point, he let the slab sit for about two hours, then came back to round the edges with a simple metal tool (I’m just the reporter; I don’t know the technical names for these things). In hindsight, it should have been done after only one hour. It had hardened a bit too much to shape easily. Fortunately, two heads are better than one, and our friend Ken just happened to pop over to borrow some sugar. Now, you may remember Ken from my previous entry. He’s Jan’s bread-baking buddy, and has more than a passing interest in this little project. Anyway, he suggested that they spray the slab down to soften it up for shaping, and took a go of it himself:

Ken is the perfect edge-finisher-person. He’s downright meticulous.

Here’s a close-up of the edge. I have to say, they did a fantastic job:

So the slab is curing for several days, putting off lots of heat, on top of our high 90s temperatures. We’ve been watering it down several times a day.

After this, Jan will buy bricks and start building up. I think Ken put it best when he stood staring at the slab and said, “Wow. It’s really happening.”

Pesto a-go-go

As I mentioned previously, I just grow the stuff. Jan cooks it. Sitting on the kitchen counter right now (and suffocating anyone who dares enter the house) is a HUGE container of basil. Jan’s actually cursing me for harvesting too much. Hey, what can I say? Can I help that the earth responds to me like to that kid in Twilight Zone: The Movie.

I was going to be cute and go out to harvest from our four basil plants with my little woven basket. Cute little me, with my cute little clippers, and my cute little basil. Right. A couple of snips and I had to go back into the house and dump my industrial rotary fabric cutter out of a plastic bin and come back outside prepared for some more serious harvesting.

This is our second harvest of basil from these four plants. With the first batch, Jan made pesto with our fresh garlic. Then he froze the pesto into ice trays, and we’ve been eating that about once a week or so. One cube per person is just perfect.

This time, I remembered that my dad brought pecans from his backyard in Austin, when he was here for Thanksgiving. So this batch will have our basil and garlic, and my dad’s pecans (toasted before use). Now we just need an olive tree and a cow!

We would have made this pesto sooner, but shelling those pecans is slow goin’. I actually had a full bowl by last Sunday morning. Then Ella brought a neighbor girl over to the house and I hear this sweet little voice say, “Pecans! I love pecans!” (sigh) What can I do. They proceeded to decimate the entire bowl. This kid gets points in my book, though, because her favorite drink is water, she doesn’t really like meat, and she loves veggies. Huh? We’re thinking of adopting her.

Here’s a recipe that Jan found online, for reference: basil pesto recipe.

You may also notice the tomatoes thrown in the bin. We’re now harvesting three types:
Jolly Elf
Early Cherry
White Currant (our new diminutive favorite)

I make a pass through twice a day now and grab any tomatoes that are almost fully red. I can’t leave them on the vine to ripen because we’re competing with the mockingbirds. As Jan says, “‘Organic’ means sharing with our little friends.” They could be more polite about it, though. They usually just peck holes in the tomatoes. They should at least finish the whole thing.

The other half of the kitchen garden

No kitchen garden would be complete without someone waiting in the kitchen to receive the goods. That’s Jan.

Not only is he a good cook, but he’s ambitious. Which is why he’s building a bread oven in our back yard. Oh yes. Roughly three thousand pounds of baking love, right behind our little cottage.

“Where in the world did he get such an idea?”, you might ask. I’m going to suggest that there’s something akin to double-dog-daring going on here. Jan and our friend Ken, also from the hood, both love to bake bread. They share books, compare notes, and chatter like hens when we get together. (They’ll love that description.) Ken now mills his own wheat berries. No, really. I mean, how can you top that kind of devotion to the craft? With a bread oven, apparently.

OK, I’m kidding. It really doesn’t take any sort of rivalry for either one of these men to take things so far. But it sure doesn’t hurt to have someone as nuts as you to come and help mix cement, hm?

It has finally begun, and I’ll be sharing the play-by-play, for your reading enjoyment.

The first step is to dig down a few inches for the foundation slab.

Jan called the city, to ask if there were any zoning issues with building a bread oven in our backyard. Being in a historic district, you never know. They had no idea what he was talking about. “Gas?” None. “Electricity?” Nope. “You’re fine.” They forgot to ask: “Rebar?” “Massive quantities of cement?” “Pallets of bricks?”

Lest you think I’m ungrateful, I am really, really looking forward to the fruits of this labor. Pizza, bread, even Thanksgiving turkeys. Honestly, I can’t wait.

The book he’s been working from is The Bread Builders. He’s been visiting some websites, too, which I’ll share in a later post.