Black Bean & Corn Salsa with Golden Cherry Tomatoes

We don't normally advocate food out of a can, especially at the peak of produce season. But beans are one thing that emerge from a tin perfectly edible, and I have no problem recommending canned black beans for this quick garden salsa. (Then again, if you want to cook your own black beans, by all means do so.)

This mix of black beans and fresh corn is familiar enough, especially with a Southwestern seasoning of cumin and cilantro. I've dressed it up a little with our own Dr. Carolyn golden cherry tomatoes. I can hardly think of a better place to show them off, in this case to go alongside some homemade crab cakes destined for a client. You could just as easily serve it next to flank steak, grilled fish or your favorite tacos.

This takes very little time, but do go to the trouble of using a freshly shucked ear of corn. Cook it in a pot of salted water, then remove the kernels from the cob. (My favorite method for this is to set a ceramic bowl, inverted, in the bottom of a large mixing bowl, then stand the corn cob on top of the bowl to cut away the kernels with a bread knife.) Mix the corn with a 14-ounce can of black beans, well rinsed, plus about 1/3 cup diced red onion. Mix in a tablespoon or two of extra-virgin olive oil, a generous splash of sherry vinegar (or lime juice), coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Add about 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin and 1/4 teaspoon ground coriander, or to taste. At the end, toss in a dozen cherry tomatoes, halved, and a small handful of cilantro, chopped.

This will keep very well overnight in the fridge.

Black Radish Kimchi

Cleaning out a garden bed recently I discovered these four black radishes. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the three largest are all about the size of a fast-pitch softball. I have never seen radishes like this before (this is our first year for black radishes) and what is most amazing of all is they are still edible. For some reason, no matter how big they get, and at a point when most radishes are bursting out in flower and turning into wood, these black radishes are still soft and creamy.

Okay, so I'll find some way to eat them, I thought. And it just so happened I was already making cabbage kimchi and right next door to the recipe for cabbage kimchi was one for radish kimchi.

That would be on page 49 of Sandor Elix Katz's "Wild Fermentation." I improvised a little, using my black radishes instead of daikon radish, omitting the burdock and using some of my own turnips. This kimchi also includes horseradish to punch up the flavor.

Peel the radishes and cut them into wedges. Slice the wedges thinly. Do the same with two large turnips. Toss with two large carrots, also sliced thinly on an angle.

Place the vegetables in a large bowl or bucket, cover with water to a depth of about 1 inch, then remove the water, measure it and create a brine according to this formula: 3 tablespoons pickling or additive-free sea salt for each quart of water. Add the brine back to the vegetables, cover and allow to sit 24 hours.

After 24 hours, drain the vegetables, reserving the brine.

Meanwhile, make a past or slurry by finely chopping 6 peeled garlic cloves in a food processor. Add six red hot chilies (such a jalapeno)--seeded and deveined-- and chop fine. Add two large onions and process these until a slurry is achieved. Add about 1 cup freshly grated horseradish and 1/2 cup grated ginger.

Mix the slurry with the root vegetables and place in a crock or non-reactive bucket (I use a heavy-guage plastic bucket). Press the vegetables firmly with your balled-up fist until a brine rises to the top. If there isn't enough brine, add some of the reserved soaking brine. Cover with a ceramic plate, again pressing down firmly until the brine rises over the plated. The vegetables must be completely submerged to ferment and avoid spoilage. Weigh the plate down with a large plastic container filled with water.


Cover the crock or bucket with a tea towel to keep out dust and place in a cool, dark place to ferment. Taste the vegetables occasionally until they have fermented to your taste, then refrigerate, either packing the kimchi into jars or placing the whole crock or bucket in the refrigerator. The kimchi should keep for months.

I made this kimchi about a week ago and already it is starting to taste like the real deal.

Green Beans with Sauteed Cherry Tomatoes

This is a great match: our meaty, full-flavored Romanette green beans with sweet Dr. Carolyn cherry tomatoes.

We think these golden cherry tomatoes are the best ever, with an assertive sweetness and round flavor. I was happy to see our opinion confirmed in the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange catalogue. "The most flavorful yellow cherry tomato we have grown," they write. "It has an excellent balance of sugar, tartness and depth of flavor."

In case you are wondering where "Dr. Carolyn" comes from, the tomato is named for Dr. Carolyn Male, one of the country's foremost tomato experts and the author of "100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden." In fact, it was from that book that I first thought to purchase some Dr. Carolyn seeds.

We have just one plant in our garden this year, but it is covered with golden tomatoes--more than enough for us. Plus, the plant seems utterly resistant to the fungal diseases that otherwise ravage less sturdy tomato varieties in our hot, humid District of Columbia climate.

We are also in love with these Romanette beans, an Italian variety of flat bean that grows profusely on compact bush plants. So easy to grow, and so productive. They make a perfect side dish simply cooked in salted water, then dressed with olive oil and grated Parmesan cheese. But combining them with the Dr. Carolyn tomatoes results in an ecstatic mingling of late-summer flavors.

Simply get a non-stick saute pan very hot on the stove, coat the bottom with extra-virgin olive oil and drop in a small bowl full of halved cherry tomatoes. While they sizzle, season with coarse salt. Toss one or two times until the tomatoes are showing the faintest hint of brown and are beginning to melt. Then toss in cooked green beans, season with a little more salt and freshly ground black pepper. Drop in a few basil leaves cut into a chiffonade and a splash of sherry vinegar. Toss a couple of times until the beans are heated through.

The final result isn't exactly pretty, but you'll be eating it right out of the pan.

Out With The Cukes

Today was time to say goodbye to our cucumber plants. They've been great producers, making hundreds of pickles. Pulling them out of the ground isn't easy after watching them daily since they were first planted on May 25. I gather one last bowl of cukes. You can see how the plants as they age begin making cucumbers of unusual shape and color.

This is what they looked like, on the right, only a couple of weeks ago. We planted two varieties of pickling cucumbers, Cross Country and Rhinish. They eagerly climbed a trellis made by hanging string from PVC pipe. Filling out the bed were several Italian zucchini plants and, at the far end, two Tuscan kales.

This is the same bed this morning, after the cucumbers were torn from the trellis and the squash plants pulled from the ground. It's time to get this area ready for a new crop. We want to try a second planting of potatoes. Potatoes are normally planted around St. Patrick's Day, but we have some seed potatoes from our farmer friend Mike, who thinks at a minimum we should be able to harvest a nice batch of "new" potatoes before the first hard frost.

The cucumber plants, meanwhile, were carried to the compost heap and chopped into smaller pieces. Their destiny now is to feed next year's crops. They have our thanks.

Kohlrabi Gratin

I have a secret love for kohlrabi. Kohlrabi has a wonderful, sweet flavor somewhere between turnip and broccoli. But you so rarely see it for sale anywhere that we mostly just dream about it. That's why we planted it in the garden this year--to satisfy our craving for kohlrabi anytime we like.

Our friend Larry calls kohlrabi "a little sputnik" because of its globe shape sprouting long leaf stems. It's not a root vegetable, but a swollen stem. Until recently, it never occurred to me that the leaves might be edible. That's something we'll have to try. Meanwhile, I usually prepare kohlrabi as simply as possible, just cutting it into large matchsticks, cooking it in salted water and tossing it with melted butter. But I wanted to do something that would really make kohlrabi shine. I thought it would be a perfect candidate for a gratin.

I make a delicious rutabaga gratin, and a dynamite sweet potato gratin stuffed with wilted greens. A classic potato gratin has fans who are very particular about the way it is cooked in the oven. So I consulted Madeleine Kamman--who is just about the most finicky cookbook author I know, and a damned good instructor--to see what she had to say about the classic gratin method.

There's nothing particularly difficult about the method Kamman describes. In fact, it could hardly be simpler: use lots of heavy cream and let is bake a long time. As the cream browns, scrape it from around the edges of the casserole and push it from the surface under the cream underneath. Continue doing this until there is hardly any cream left, and what cream there is is studded with brown bits.

For a kohlrabi gratin:

1 clove garlic, crushed

1 tablespoon butter

1 lb kohlrabi, trimmed and peeled (I used a serrated knife to remove the peel)

coarse salt

1 1/2 cups heavy cream

2/3 cup grated cheese (combine Parmesan with Emmentaler)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees

Rub the inside of a small, shallow ceramic casserole with the garlic. Grease it with the butter. Meanwhile, slice the kohlrabi very thinly. You may want to first cut it in half from end to end. Lay the kohlrabi slices in the casserole overlapping like shingles, seasoning them with salt as you go. You may make two or three layers. Cover with the cream and shake the casserole a little to distribute the salt.

Lay the casserole on a baking sheet and place in the oven. As the cream browns, break it up and push it under the cream underneath, scraping any brown bits from the side of the casserole and incorporating those as well. Continue doing this for about 1 1/2 hours, or until the kohlrabi is perfectly tender and the cream has been almost completely absorbed. Sprinkle the cheese over the gratin and continue baking until the cheese is completely melted and lightly browned. Serve hot.

We had this last night with a wonderful salad of fresh tomatoes from the garden with fresh mozzarella cheese and basil. This is not something we would eat on a daily basis. But for now, my craving for kohlrabi is completely and utterly indulged.

Crock Pickles

Cucumber season is nearing an end for us but we are still working our way through the pickle lexicon. Here's one called "Gram's Crock Pickles" that I like for a semi-sweet tang. I also like that you can use somewhat larger than usual cucumbers for these pickles and remove the seeds. Somehow a few cukes manage to avoid detection and grow bigger than we would like. Use them here.

This is another recipe from "Pickled" by Lucy Norris. These are similar to the mustard pickles we wrote about earlier, a recipe some people objected to because it calls for artificial sweetener. Note the cloudiness of the brine from powdered mustard. These pickles are a bit less sweet and more full flavored, owing to a generous use of cider vinegar.

To make 3 quarts:

3 pounds pickling cucumbers
4 cups cider vinegar
1/4 cup pickling salt (or sea salt without additives)
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup powdered mustard

Trim both ends from cucumbers. Cut cucumbers into quarters (spears) and scoop out seeds. Tightly pack cucumbers into clean quart jars.

In a non-reactive bowl, mix vinegar, salt, sugar and powdered mustard. Pour brine over cucumbers to cover and screw on lids. Let pickles rest for at least 2 days, or until the cucumbers turn from green to brown. Store in refrigerator.

The pickles will be ready to eat after a few days. Don't be afraid to test one as your appetite mounts. According to Norris, they will stay crisp for a month, but will remain edible for six months. If you were careful to remove the blossom end of the cucumbers they will stay crisp longer. The blossom end contains an enzyme that likes to turn pickles soft.

Brain Freeze

Sunflowers, cosmos, zinnia--all are standing tall and proud, giving the garden an air of youth and vigor. Everyone comments on how good the garden looks at the moment. But I know better.

The squash and cucumber plants need to be pulled to make way for an attempt at fall potatoes. The turnips are beyond ready for harvest. The kohlrabi are giving up the ghost. I've planted a few seed trays of fall crops--cabbages, kale, lettuce, broccoli. But I haven't managed them very well. Half won't make it. Meanwhile, there are so many other things to plant that I haven't even begun to think of. And before I can get to that, a big bowl of cucumbers waiting to be pickled stares at me from the kitchen counter. I am staying up past my bedtime to can a bumper crop of Roma tomatoes.

I should be mowing the grass (we've had a drought, so not too much growth there) and beds are long past due for a good weeding. I am not so much avoiding all this work as just plodding along, somewhat stunned by the turning of the seasons and with it a long list of new things to do. It seems like deja vu all over again.

Even in our kitchen garden one mile from the White House in the District of Columbia, the toil never ends. If you start as we did back in February, the life of the garden seems interminable. I am developing a greater appreciation for all the work our forefathers faced just getting by from one day to the next. We are greatly satisfied to be feeding ourselves from our own small plot of land. But you know what? It's a lot of work....

More Okra

If the only kind of okra you know is what you see in the supermarket, it may be you've never been inspired to eat it. What passes for okra in the store is typically awful looking. Even in our local Whole Foods the okra looks to be weeks old--all shriveled and covered with brown blotches. I don't know how the produce manager can sleep at night.

Okra should be firm and bright green (there is also a burgundy okra) without any blemishes. This is the kind of okra we are harvesting in our garden right now. The pods seem to grow overnight--we can hardly keep up.

There are so many things to like about okra it's hard to know where to start. The plant is related to the hibiscus. It makes beautiful flowers on thick, upright stalks. But it also has a strange, almost prehistoric aspect to it. The pods grow long and pointy (they're called "lady fingers" in parts of Asia) with distinctive ridges. Inside the pods, the seeds are perfectly round and eventually large and black like buckshot. The leaves are very large and elaborately notched. As the plant grows, pods form in the crooks between branches and main stem. Pick a pod and the plant keeps growing taller, forming more branches and more pods.

Some people don't like okra because it has a mucilaginous quality, or slime. My okra doesn't seem to be particularly slimy. But even if it were, you'd hardly notice because my favorite way of cooking it is a sort of stew with Caribbean origins: sauteed onion and green bell pepper, okra, corn off the cob and diced tomato. I've been making huge quantities of it lately and assumed readers were tired of hearing about it. So this morning I went through my cookbook collection looking for an alternate preparation.

You may have surmised by now that I am a pretty lazy cook. Slow would be another way to put it. I prefer foods that don't require a lot of fuss and tend to cook themselves. It just so happens that these kinds of foods--cooking slowly all by themselves in a pot on the stove or in the oven--also tend to develop great flavor.

Okra is well suited to this kind of cooking. You'll find it in all sorts of soups and stews. I spent the better part of the morning conducting a survey of okra recipes from my cookbook library. The first thing you notice is how many of the world's best-known authors completely avoid the subject of okra. James Peterson, in "Vegetables," describes an interesting okra salad with soy and sesame seeds, and a miso soup with okra and shiitake mushrooms. (You need to blanch the okra before dressing it as a salad.) "Joy of Cooking" and "Fannie Farmer Cookbook" give classic recipes for okra stews, and of course okra gumbos are standard.

But you really need to dig into the ethnic cookbooks to discover the full range of okra uses. Paula Wolfort describes some delicious sounding lamb stews and tagines with okra. In one treatment, the okra pods are stitched together like a necklace so they can be easily removed at the appropriate moment to cook down the remaining stew ingredients. Jessica Harris delivers numerous recipes for okra stews and soups in her various Caribbean and Creole cookbooks. I noticed the use of greens, such as callaloo, root vegetables, curries and even coconut milk in some of these recipes. They reminded me of an Indian dish I made a while back where the okra was first fried, then tossed with yogurt and chickpea flour and toasted spices.

Still, of the dozens of recipes I looked at, nothing struck me as being exactly the dish I was searching for. Finally it dawned on me that I just might have to make up my own dish, using the ingredients right outside my front door. I had more okra to pick, potatoes already dug during a recent weeding adventure and two Tuscan kale plants that have been badly neglected. As I sliced onion and chopped garlic, a dish gradually came into focus.

Here is my version of stewed okra curry with tomatoes and coconut milk.

1 pound white or red boiling potatoes, cut into bite-size pieces

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 medium onion, diced medium

2 cloves garlic, chopped fine

1 teaspoon coarse salt

1 14-oz can diced tomatoes (or substitute fresh tomatoes)

1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes

large fistful kale leaves, washed, separated from stems and cut into chiffonade

1 pound okra pods, trimmed and cut on an angle into 1/2-inch pieces

1 cup coconut milk

1 teaspoon curry powder

Cook the potatoes until just tender in a large saucepan filled with salted water. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a heavy pot or Dutch oven and cook the onion and garlic, seasoned with salt, gently until the onion is soft, about 8 minutes. Add tomatoes with their juices, red pepper, kale, okra and the cooked potatoes, drained. Stir in coconut milk and curry powder. Bring pot to a simmer, cover and cook until okra and kale are tender, about 30 minutes. Adjust seasoning and serve, either as a side dish or over brown rice.

As an option, you can garnish the stew with chopped fresh tomatoes. For a more classic curry, you could also add toasted spices such as cumin and mustard seed. Since we keep coconut milk and curry powder in the pantry there was no need to go shopping at all. I deduct a couple of points for getting two pots dirty. Otherwise, this okra dish fits perfectly into our gardening scheme. It's a winner.

Breakfast II

A previous commenter suggested adding toast to fill out our breakfast. Well, we can do lots better than toast. We can add homemade corn bread.

This is the "Company Cornbread" from Bill Neal's classic tome, "Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie." I made it using stone-ground white cornmeal and buttermilk from our South Mountain Creamery delivery. I had also made a big pot of smothered okra the day before (the okra are going crazy producing new pods on a daily basis this time of year) and when breakfast time rolled around walked out out the front door and picked a big, ripe Mortgage Lifter tomato.

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Shopping: none

Breakfast

Sauteed beet greens and sliced tomato.

Preparation time: 15 minutes

Shopping: none

Our favorite part of harvesting beets from the garden is eating the beet tops. They must be fresh, fresh, fresh. Then simply give them a rinse and toss them wet into a hot saute pan with extra-virgin olive oil. Season with salt and pepper and maybe a splash of red wine vinegar. They are meaty and delicious. A big, fat Mortgage Lifter tomato seasoned with grated Parmesan makes a great side.

Catching Up

We had great fun during our week off in Pentwater, Michigan. But the gardener has to ask himself whether he can really afford a summer vacation.

While we were away frolicking in the sun, our vegetables were working overtime. I returned home to a big bowl of Roma tomatoes. Another bowl of okra. Another bowl of cucumbers.

Granted, a bowl of this and a bowl of that doesn't amount to much in the grand scheme of things. But we are not about to waste food. There was nothing to do but put our heads down and start canning.

In the picture above, you see the Roma tomatoes after 15 seconds--in batches--in a boiling water bath, then stripped of their skins. After trimming the stem end, I chopped them all into medium dice, boiled them for five minutes then canned them in two quart jars with 45 minutes processing.

The okra also made two quarts of Texas-style pickles with garlic and fresh jalapeno pepper. The cucumbers made two quarts of "crock" pickles--quartered, seeded and put away in a brine of cider vinegar and powdered mustard.

The next task was start start weeding some of our overgrown beds. In the process, I collected close to 10 pounds of potatoes and enough beets to make a large quantity of our favorite garden salad: beets, tomatoes and red onion with a splash of red wine vinegar.

By this time, daughter was anxious to get in on the act. (We're into that dreaded zone of 10 days between camp and the re-start of school. What's an 8-year-old to do?) We used the forked spade to dig up carrots, and went on a tomato patrol. The Mortgage Lifters and Cherokee Purples are hitting their stride now, producing some giant-sized fruit that lines up on the kitchen counter for final ripening.

Finally, we have some panty hose to start putting our storage onions away. We need to figure a system for keeping potatoes in our space-challenged pantry. We are eating pickles like mad, but not fast enough to prevent a pileup of filled jars.

And it's almost time to make room for fall plantings. The fun just never ends.

Pickle Round-Up

All you skeptics out there should know that our Hungarian sun pickles, which sat outside our front door for four days in a two quart jar with a fat slice of rye bread, produced some of the best pickles we've ever tasted. These pickles are incredibly crisp, not too salty, with just enough flavor of dill and garlic and a faint, yeasty sweetness.

We don't exactly understand how this fermentation works, between the salt and the yeast, but this may be our new favorite pickle of all time. One reader calls them "penicillin pickles," yet they are incredibly easy to make. Unfortunately, they won't last forever, so we are eating some every day.

It's been a month now since we first started making our pickles. We've made quite a lot, and several different kinds. Here's a roundup:

Deli-style dills: We love these crisp, fermented half-sour pickles. It's the perfect pickle to eat with a corned beef sandwich. They are easy to make, the basic formula being two tablespoons of salt for every quart of water, then add dill weed, garlic cloves, peppercorns and oak leaves. Five or six days later, you should have a small bucket-full of pickles that will last a week or two.

Martha Stewart's Refrigerator Pickles: I wasn't expecting a lot from these pickles. They were a little bland at first, being preserved in white vinegar rather than fermented. But they have gained flavor over time and they are growing on me. Quick and easy, and they last a long time. I like nibbling on them with a piece of cheese.

Sweet & Sour Pickles: I wish these pickles were a little firmer. Perhaps I processed them a bit too long. But the combination of vinegar, sugar, cloves and celery seed provides a jolt of flavor. They are fun and addictive.

Bread & Butter Pickles: These also have to be near the very top of our list for most outstanding pickles. Don't spare any effort: get yourself some pickling lime for the long soak these pickles require to turn out firm and extra-crisp. These are a dense, full-flavored pickle with cider vinegar, sugar, cloves and ginger. Sit yourself down with some of these and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Oak Leaf Pickles: If you spend enough time in the pickle literature, you'll see all types of recipes calling for oak leaves, grape leaves, cherry leaves, currant leaves. The tannin in the leaves is supposed to help keep the pickles crisp. The original recipe for these pickles called for grape leaves, but the closest thing I have is the oak tree outside my front door. These are fermented pickles, similar to the deli-style dills described above, but fermented for two or three weeks until they are fully sour. They can then be processed for long-term storage. This is a full-flavored, classic dill pickle.

Mustard Pickle: I had my first taste of these this morning because they've been mellowing since I first made them two weeks ago. Again, I wasn't expecting much because they are so easy. But they are devilishly good, with plain white vinegar and a bit of mustard powder. Some readers objected to the tiny bit of artificial sweetener in the recipe. I'm sure you could leave it out. I could easily spend an hour or two with these pickles and a bowl of popcorn. Once processed, they should keep almost forever in the pantry.

Cajun Pickles: You figure with a name like this, they have to be good and they are. They gain heat from ripe cherry peppers and jalapenos from the garden, along with lots of flavor from the many different herbs and spices in the brine. These are another variety of fermented pickle and I just wish the recipe came with a method for canning them so we could put a few quarts away in the pantry. I hate the idea of them going bad before we can eat them all. This is one of those pickles to give to a friend who likes something with a kick.

That wraps up our pickling marathon for now. Seems to me what's missing here is a simple dill pickle made with vinegar for easy canning and storage. With all the references in our cookbook library, we should be able to find one so none of our cucumbers go to waste.

Remember to check your cucumber plants often and well. And may the cucumber fairy bless you plenty.

Green Tomatoes

I have thirteen tomato plants growing in our garden, which means that a portion of my daily rounds entails admiring all the green tomatoes as they grow huge on the vine and anticipating what an avalanche of ripe red tomatoes we will soon have.

But then I think of some of our favorite tomato preparations such as green tomato and apple chutney and how we will be scrambling to find enough green tomatoes in October to make them and I think to myself, Why wait?

It probably should have dawned on me much sooner, but yesterday it hit me like a thunderclap that there was no reason at all to wait for the end of the season to start canning green tomatoes when so many of them are staring me in the face. So I turned my usual approach to tomatoes inside-out and just continued with my recent pickling operation, only switching briefly to green tomatoes to make a batch of our favorite chutney.

I can hardly think of a better use for green tomatoes, unless it is my wife's famous fried green tomato BLT sandwich, or perhaps her green tomato pizza. For months I have been missing something from the larder and that has been our green tomato and apple chutney, a wonderful condiment that of course fits marvelously well in an Indian meal, but also is fine next to a fatty pork roast, or slathered with goat cheese on a piece of toast or eaten right out of the jar with a spoon.

Since I've already written up the recipe, I won't repeat it. It's not difficult at all if you have a few basic pieces of equipment. And if you've been doing any pickling at all lately you probably have all the spices in your pantry already.

Spend an hour doing this and you will have the best chutney you've ever tasted for the rest of the year.

Garden Aerial

I've had requests for complete views of my garden so here are a few from the second-story windows. This bed is on the north side of the house and now is mostly obscured by two Roma tomato plants. At the far left of the picture you can make out the spreading sweet potato vines. In June I tried planting beets and carrots on the shady side of the tomato plants without much success.

You can hardly make out the paths between the vegetable beds this time of year. The far left is the northernmost point in the garden where we've been harvesting Romanette beans. I just planted another crop plus black-eyed peas and pole limas. One bed in from that are Mortgage Lifter and Green Zebra tomatoes (lots of fungus damage there) and our eggplant, jalapeno and basil. The middle bed is okra (very productive right now) and rhubarb (hating the heat). On the far right we have Cherokee Purple and Dr. Carolyn tomatoes. Dr. Carolyn is a profuse and flavorful heirloom yellow cherry tomato.

Here you get to see our famous cucumber plants. We're still getting nightly visits from the cucumber fairy, but production is finally slowing. In front of the cucumbers are our Italian zucchini and at the far end Tuscan kale. I have a hard time killing any plant, so I dug extra holes this year for the leftover tomato plants. And on the far right is our herb garden: rosemary, sage, thyme, lavender, sorrel and one rhubarb.

Here are the first beds we planted four years ago and still going strong, although I am detecting some want for nutrients. We're already into a second crop rotation with the cranberry beans (upper left) all harvested since I took this photo. The kohlrabi is ready to be eaten, as is the Swiss chard, the beats, the turnips on the far right. The carrots are still a bit on the small side, leading me to think we need to add a big dose of compost here. In the lower part of the picture are oregano and marjoram on the left, then potatoes (half harvested) and parsnips in the lower right-hand corner. They seem to be happiest of all with just one weeding.

Finally, seed flats with our seedling for fall: broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collards, Bibb lettuce, Romaine, etc.

It's been a good year. We've only watered three times all season.

Pasta with Kale

On a recent visit to One Star Farm in Baltimore County I picked up this suggestion from owner Joan Norman for using kale: cook the kale in the pasta pot with the pasta. When the pasta is done, Joan said, so is the kale.

We have a couple of gorgeous Tuscan kale plants in our garden begging to be used. The leaves have great flavor, but they do cook a while before they are tender. So I applied Joan's suggested method to whole wheat pasta and you see the results here: Tuscan kale with whole wheat rotini and fresh goat cheese.

Prepare the kale as usual, stripping the leafy part away from the stem. Roll the leaves together and chop into a chiffonade. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and add the pasta (1 pound for six large adult servings) plus chiffonade from several kale leaves. When the pasta is done, drain, plate and garnish with goat cheese and freshly ground black pepper.

(The other side in the photo is our go-to smothered okra. We are harvesting lots of okra these days and making lots of smothered okra.)

Something's In My Compost

We do our best to keep seeds out of the compost pile but something's always sprouting. Usually it's some kind of weed. We often see tomatoes. You can't hardly kill a tomato seed. But recently I noticed a melon vining it's way over the wire enclosure. Where did it come from? It must have been something we ate. But was it a farmers market melon, or a store-bought melon?

I was curious to see if it would set any fruit. So far we've seen plenty of blossoms and the vines are multiplying, spreading all over the yard. But nothing resembling a melon. I'm about ready to declare that this is simply one of those vampire melons, sucking all the nitrogen out of our compost heap and giving nothing in return.

Show us a melon, or it's into the compost with you!

Yogurt Success

As long as we're getting deliveries of fresh, whole milk and cream, I thought we should start making our own yogurt on a regular basis.

On my first attempt, I made the mistake of following instructions from a dairy cookbook, heating our unhomogenized whole milk to just 115 degrees (Fahrenheit) before inoculating is with some store-bought yogurt. I left it to incubate overnight in a cooler packed with jars of hot water. What I got was a runny, fermented sort of yogurt wanna-be. Why hadn't it firmed up?

Then I recalled our yogurt lessons from "food appreciation" classes when we had cooked the milk at 185 degrees. I went back and read the pertinent section in Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" and kicked myself for failing to remember that it isn't the bacteria that make the yogurt thick, it's the temperature.

Bacteria ferment the milk by noshing on lactose and making acid. That gives yogurt it's pleasant tang. The thickness occurs when the proteins in the milk are heated to a fairly high temperature. Heat concentrates the proteins and forces them to gather in thick chains. Commercial yogurt makers often add powdered milk and gelatin to achieve the thickness consumers are used to.

For this most recent batch, I mixed 3 1/2 cups whole, unhomogenized milk with 1/2 cup heavy cream and heated it slowly in a heavy saucepan to 195 degrees. I maintained that temperature for 10 minutes (according to McGee's instructions) before moving the pan to a cold water bath and lowering the temperature to 115 degrees, at which point I mixed in 3 tablespoons of our favorite commercial yogurt from Seven Stars Farm. I poured the mix into a warm quart jar and placed the jar in a cooler with a heavy pot full of hot water.

I placed an instant-read thermometer in the cooler, aiming to maintain a temperature of about 115 degrees. Turned out I didn't need to do anything further. The yogurt had firmed up after just a few hours, but I left it in the cooler overnight. The next morning it was thick and delicious. I couldn't wait to slice up a peach and smoother it in our fresh, whole-milk (with some cream) yogurt.

Without a doubt, this is the best yogurt I have ever tasted.

Note: take care not to boil or burn your milk. Use a very heavy saucepan and don't try to rush the milk to 195 degrees. Be gentle with the heat and stir frequently with a wooden spoon or heat-proof spatula to prevent the milk at the bottom of the pan from scalding.

Hungarian Sun Pickles

Hungarian sun pickles turns out to be cucumbers fermented in a salt brine with flour and a slice of bread. And, yes, they do spend a good amount of time sitting in the sun.

That according to Lucy Norris in her book, "Pickled." Not having grown up with a tradition of Hungarian pickles, I can't dispute Ms. Norris. But I'm still a bit stumped. I didn't do as well as I had hoped in my college microbiology class. Still, I'm pretty sure that the usual salt fermentation process involves a succession of bacteria, whereas bread and flour involve yeast. But Norris insists that "the yeast in (the bread) makes the fermentation process work."

Well, that's why I wanted to try this recipe: to see what happens. (Note: the amount of salt in this brine is much less than what I normally would use for lacto-fermented pickles.)

I ran into the usual problems of trying to match the volume of cucumbers I have on hand with the brining formula presented in the recipe. So I did it backwards. Instead of measuring out ingredients for the brine, I stuffed my container (a 2-quart jar) with cucumbers (2 1/4 pounds) , sliced in half lengthwise. I covered everything with water, then poured the water into a measuring cup to see how much I had.

The original recipe called for 25 to 30 cucumbers 5 inches long (no weight given) and 1 gallon of water to make 1 gallon of pickles. Again I ask, if you are filling a gallon container with a gallon's worth of brine, where's the room for the pickles? Once filled with cucumbers, my 2-quart jar needed just three cups of water. I rounded it off to an even quart to make the rest of the measurements easier.

Pack the cucumbers into the 2-quart jar along with a fist-full of dill weed with seed heads and three cloves of garlic.

Now, for the fun part. The following instructions are designed to allow hot brine to be poured into the pickle jar without cracking the glass.

Stand the filled container in a tall pot with some sort of rack at the bottom (I used my pasta pot with the strainer insert). Fill the pot with warm water to surround the pickling jar (my jar was somewhat taller that my pot, so the jar was not entirely submerged). Gently bring everything up to steaming over moderate heat on the stove. Meanwhile, pour 1 quart cold water into a saucepan and add 1 1/2 tablespoons pickling salt or additive-free sea salt. Heat that until it's steaming as well, the salt completely dissolved. Pour the brine into the pickling jar until the cucumbers are covered by an inch or more.

Use canning tongs or a couple of hot pads to remove the hot jar from the pot. Place it on the counter and sprinkle 1/2 teaspoon flour onto the surface of the brine (no need to stir). Now push a thick slice of yeasty bread, such as sourdough or Jewish rye, onto the top of the brine. (I got a loaf of rye at Whole Foods. I thought that sounded more Hungarian.)

Screw the lid onto the jar and place the jar in a sunny spot outside. You can bring the jar inside at night, but keep putting it out in the sun for four or five days until the cucumbers have fermented to your liking, adding water if needed so the bread doesn't dry out.

When the pickles have fermented, remove the bread and the pickles from the jar and strain the brine through a fine seive. Return the pickles, the dill and the garlic to the jar and cover with the strained brine. Refrigerate. According to Norris, these pickles should last about one week in the refrigerator. My hunch is they will last longer than that. I'm anxious to find out.

Black Radish

At the end of a row of radishes I planted a variety that's new for me this year: black radish. I had no idea what to expect. Would they really turn out black?

I never eat as many radishes as I plant. Many of them just keep growing until they are sprouting flowers. I usually just leave them be. The blue, four-petaled flowers brighten up the garden and give the pollinators something to feed on. When the radishes are completely spent, they just go into the compost pile.

That seemed to be the fate of these black radishes. Except when I pulled one up, it wasn't the gnarly, misshapen, woody radish I've come to expect. No, these were almost perfectly round. Not black, exactly, but a dark brown. And when I tried one, it wasn't woody or hollow or any of those things. It was dense and creamy and delicious, with a pleasant bite--not like that scorching heat you often get from an old radish.

The black radishes grow to the size of a tennis ball and almost perfectly round. I pick one, wash it with the hose and bring it inside where I cut it into wedges, like an apple. I then carve the skin away with a peeling knife and dip the wedge into my salt cellar. This comes very close to a zero maintenance radish. And in the middle of summer!

French breakfast radishes are a delight to look at and eat when they are monitored and picked in their prime. But this fall I'll be planting more black radishes as well.

First Okra

In case there was any doubt that vegetables fresh out of the garden beat the pants off the store-bought kind, we harvested our first okra the other day and made a big batch of smothered okra. This is our go-to recipe for okra flavor and simplicity. I don't know how you improve upon it: sauteed onions and green bell pepper, sliced okra, fresh white corn off the cob and diced tomatoes. Season with coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper. Who thought of it, where all the flavor comes from, I'm not sure, but this dish is pure magic. A wedge of fresh buttermilk corn bread would be the perfect accompaniment--and a complete meal. (If you are a meat eater, you might add a spoonful of bacon grease to the skillet to pick the flavor up a notch, but it is completely unnecessary.)

With its long, pointy ridged pods, okra is one of the stranger vegetables in the garden. It's in the mallow family, related to cotton and hibiscus. Completely separate from the pods and broad, notched leaves, okra produces these beautiful yellow flowers that open in the morning and close again at night.

I often find myself crawling around on all fours in the garden--weeding, trimming edges, harvesting. A good place to pause is next to the okra bed where you can sit in the cool of the morning and contemplate an okra flower. Often there's a bee or wasp climbing inside, looking for breakfast. And who wouldn't? It looks like the perfect place to hang out.