Yet another tomato and zucchini recipe. This one piqued my interest because it was such a wonderfully simple dish that used fresh tomatoes and zucchini from the garden, fresh basil, and some dill that I’d grown indoors over the winter and dehydrated.
I’ve never made sauce from scratch before, so I thought I’d try with a pasta recipe before I whip up a whole batch to can. This one turned out rather funky colored because I used water rather than the called for wine, but the taste was wonderful. My other changes were to use all fresh tomatoes with some extra water and leave out the olives….gross.
One of my chat friends threw out this idea for a way to use tomatoes and zucchini, which I have in serious abundance right now. It’s just a raw salad of thinly sliced zucchini, tomatoes, and onions. The dressing was oil and balsamic vinegar. While it wasn’t a 5 star recipe, it was a nice change of pace and hit the spot on a hot day.
The tomatoes have been rolling in so I’m ready to try new recipes. Surprisingly enough, I have never made my own tomato soup before. I used this recipe from Frugal Homesteads.
Mine just looks a little funny because I thought I’d make it with water instead of milk, but it just didn’t taste quite right. So I added powdered milk at the end.
3 cups tomatoes
1 onion
1 clove garlic
1 tsp salt
1 TBSP sugar
1/4 tsp pepper
3 TBSP flour
2 TBSP butter
1 quart milk
Blanch tomatoes for one minute. Remove from water and peel skins. Add tomatoes, onion, and garlic to blender and blend until smooth.
In soup pot, melt butter and mix in flour. Stir in one cup milk. Add remaining ingredients and tomato mixture. Heat through and serve. I added cooked rice to mine.
I came down with a cold this week and am just getting over the last sniffles now. I spent two days of my usual sick routine: laying around with blankies, feeling sorry for myself, and sleeping a lot. Needless to say it wasn’t one of my most productive weeks.
I did clean and re-arrange the bunny room. It’s been sunny for almost 2 weeks straight here, which is unprescidented. It also means the sunroom has been heating up to about 80 by late afternoon. So I moved the cages to the North wall to make sure they were out of the light. My next task will be to put some of the screens in so the poor girls don’t over heat in there. What a wonderful problem at this time of the year though…overheating! I’ve been seeing some sun delays on the freeway too…spring is coming slowly but surely!
I started some new indoor veggies this week. I filled the half barrel planter with carrot seed and left it out in the sunroom. Indoors I started a fresh batch of green onion bulbs and a pot of lettuce. I think these two are my favorites to grow indoors because they grow so fast. The green onions grow visibly each day and are wonderful to have on the kitchen counter to snip fresh scallions right into my dishes. The lettuce pot is already full of inch tall seedlings.
I did my 1 3/8 ounce cucumber harvest yesterday, and have 1 1/8 ounces of herbs from the Aerogardens in the dehydrator now. That brings my yearly harvest total up to .59 pounds of winter harvest. It looks like there will be heavier fruit coming soon, as I also had the pleasure of finding the first itty bitty tomato on the cascading tomato today 
I thought I’d do an update in the indoor gardening experiment. Things are going well and I’m excited about plans to expand the growing area for next year. My brother even volunteered to help me put shelves in the closet and hang the shop lights in there. Hopefully we can find a weekend to get together to work on that this month. It’ll come in handy for seed starting too.
The tomatoes are starting to get pretty big and need to be watered every couple days now. They are a cascading variety so they are growing out in every which direction too. Last night when I went to check on them I found the first flowers open
And in other indoor gardening news, the white cukes are starting to fill in. I haven’t been great about pollinating, so you can see some sad shriveled ones that didn’t get enough attention. RIP lil guys.
And finally I did my 3rd Aerogarden pruning. With the elliptical inside for the winter this corner is a bit over used, but certainly productive. My herb harvest more than doubled to 1.75 ounces. That brings my yearly harvest total to .19 pounds. I’ve added a harvest challenge section to my sidebar and will be keeping the total up to date. The numbers will move a lot faster as the year progresses and I have more than lightweight herbs to gather!
These are the cascading tomatoes I decided to go with for my indoor gardening project. I started them right in the hanging basket that will be their home and they are growing real well considering they are living in a closet to be safe from kitties.
I have quite a few green tomatoes to deal with right now. This is my first year growing tomatoes, so I’m not sure if this is normal or just because it was a cool year. We have frost in the forecast for tonight, so I picked them all off the plants and spent some time deciding what to do with them. I’ll let some sit to color up, but I liked the idea of trying to cook with some of the green ones.
So, here is my first attempt at cooking with green tomatoes: Green Tomato Pie. I got the idea while reading The Shunning
I had never made pie crust before, and was way too hungry to let it chill…so that part wasn’t the greatest. But the overall effect was rather like a toned down apple pie. It wouldn’t pass as apple to someone who didn’t know what it was, but the texture is good and the tomatoes are so mildly flavored that they didn’t add the tang I had expected from tomato.
One thing I learned recently is that tomatoes can be cloned via cuttings. So before my outdoor tomatoes were finished, I snipped off a couple tops (you can snap off suckers for this if you still have some), removed any flowers and baby tomatoes, and put them in a glass of water to root. When they had a good number of roots sticking out I potted them up. They seem to be doing pretty well. The tallest is now 8 inches.
My problem is these nasty little green bugs. I had noticed some on the plants when I potted them, so I had rinsed them off well and rubbed down all the leaves to make sure I got them all off…but I obviously missed some. I’m not sure what they are but they have 6 legs, don’t fly, and shed gross little white skins all over. The advice I’ve gotten is to pick up some Sevin Dust to treat them with. It’s used to treat fleas on animals so it should be safe enough around the kitties. (Who love messing with the plants…if you look at the first pic you can see she managed to splash water out of the self-watering hole by the time I’d come back with my camera)
2010 Harvest: 169.34 pounds
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