Notes from the Rainforest
(Climate • Garden)
Well, mostly pictures, really.
It’s good to step into September, especially after the hottest August since weather dweebs began keeping records, with an average temperature of 87.8 degrees.
Amazingly, the plant life here at the One Acre Ranch did not burnt to a crisp as a result.
Quite the opposite, thanks in part to more than 24 inches of rain over July and August here in the micro-climate of our back yard – even though the Richmond area as a whole recorded several inches less than that amount. So we’ve had more than half our usual annual 47 inches of average rainfall in the past two months alone, during the hottest temperatures ever.
The steamy rain made stuff grow tall and lush, especially the bananas. No fruit, mind you – last winter’s freezes saw to that. The rain also has caused the giant fig tree-bush in the back yard to merge with the Raja Puri bananas, closing off what used to be a main grass-mowing route. As if the Panama Canal were filled in with moss.
It’s caused the pecan leaf canopy to bulk up, casting deeper shade across much of the property and denying the back lawn the sun it’s used to. It’s caused water-loving plants that don’t often flower to bloom for a change, while plumeria and others that prefer more sun hours have grown more leaves and less blooms.
Click the little photos to get to the big ones.
Meanwhile, happy Labor Day to the workers who harvest our food, build our houses, mix our chemicals, refine our petroleum products, catch our fish, make our cars, serve our meals, pick up our trash, teach our children. And here’s a toast to all the people out there who would like to be laboring this Labor Day, but can’t find work this time around. May prosperity rub up against you before long.
→ B.Dunn, Sep 03, 2010, 06 19 PM
Dead Simple Pepper Sauce
(Food • Garden)
When it comes to making hot sauce, you can get as elaborate as you like. My own efforts pale, for example, next to those of a friend who grows his own tabasco peppers as a front-yard hedge, and ages the results of his exacting recipes in miniature oak casks.
On the other hand, if you have several plants squirting out serrano, jalapeno and mirasol chilies like a bad scene from the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, you might want to find a couple of quicker, easier methods of preserving all that culinary heat before it slips from the vine.
Here are a couple:
→ Flash-freezing. Wash and rinse as many hot peppers as you think you might like to use to spice up your cooking over the winter and spring, slice them in two, scrape out the seeds and chop them coarsely. Spread the pieces on a cookie sheet so they aren’t touching, and lay them in your freezer for two or three hours until they have “set” and look frosty, not moist. Then take them out and bag them up into individual serving-sized bags, and put the small bags inside a big freezer bag (and then, yup, store them in the freezer). Because you flashed ‘em separately, they won’t glob together and are thus more easily applied.
→ Hot Pepper Vinegar. You might like to try a pepper blend for this recipe; I like to make separate batches using all one kind of chilie. What can you do with the finished product? It’s almost easier to list what cannot be enhanced with hot pepper vinegar. Don’t sprinkle it on Cheerios, for instance. But do sprinkle it on almost anything else. Cooked vegetables, meat, eggs. You probably shouldn’t drink it straight out of the bottle.
Here’s how to make it:
First, I wash the peppers I’ve lined up for this task – only perfect, firm fruit, with all traces of the stems and stem caps removed – and slit each one with a sharp knife. Stuff them one by one into small, very clean jars.
Then I make a blend of vinegars in a stainless steel pan, using mostly white vinegar with cider or red wine or even a little balsamic vinegar blended in at maybe a 4-1 ratio, with white vinegar being the 4. I tend to make about a quart’s worth, which is more than I need, but I seldom seem to learn that lesson.
I begin boiling the vinegar mixture and add about four tablespoons of brown sugar, four tablespoons of kosher salt, a generous handful of black peppercorns and whatever other seasonings feel right that day. Then it’s time to stir vigorously to mix.
After the mixture has boiled for three or four minutes, turn off the heat and let it cool down just a little. Then, use a funnel and pour the hot vinegar carefully into the pepper jars. Fill it up near the top, because it will settle and absorb into the fruits after a few hours.
Cap the jars and let them sit on a kitchen shelf for at least two weeks before using. Once open, you can refrigerate. They’ll last for months.
Simple, huh?
→ B.Dunn, Aug 31, 2010, 06 14 AM
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Drying Figs: The Sequel
(Garden • Food)
Many of the recent visitors to this web site, so the stat files show, are searching for that burning question How do I dry figs?
Who am I to blow against demand? And so it is like this:
Drying figs, and slices of many other types of fruit, is an easy and inexpensive way to preserve excess harvest and give yourself a tasty and healthy treat to eat or cook with in the winter when there’s no garden-fresh fruit to be had.
You can make a solar dryer out of the stuff lying around your house, as attested from these photos, which show the high-tech dryer I made out of old picture frames and bird netting. (I must confess that, were I not a horrible carpenter, I would much prefer to have one of these bad boys.)
Anyhow, what you basically do is pick your figs at the peak of ripeness, rinse them well, then slice them thinly with a paring knife, and place the slices on the pre-cleaned surface of your dryer.
Last year I loaded my picture-frame solar fruit dryer into the back of my work van on weekends, and parked it in the sun. The results were quick and wonderful.
There’s no van this year so, as a consolation, I set my stacked picture frames on some overturned flower pots, covered all of it with window screening to keep out the bugs, and tucked the loose ends under the pots. You need to set your contraption in the sun, which I did, until it began raining this afternoon for the first time in about two weeks. Luckily my particular dryer is portable.
I’m guessing it’ll take two or three sunny days in our usual 99-degree heat in order for the drying to be accomplished. Then I’ll put the dried fig slices into labeled and dated plastic freezer bags, squeeze out the air, seal ‘em and freeze ‘em. The figs would last more than a year, but we like them too much to ever let that happen.
Here’s a good source for information on what you can do with dried figs beyond just popping them into your mouth.
→ B.Dunn, Aug 07, 2010, 03 12 PM
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What We're Shooting For Around Here Sometimes...
(Garden • Climate)
“I aim for the stars; sometimes I hit London.” – occasionally attributed to Warner von Braun
→ B.Dunn, Aug 05, 2010, 04 26 PM
